John Sherman Interview

John Sherman Transcript: Just One Look, Fear of Life, and the End of Separation

Key Takeaways

• The search for justice can also be a search to save oneself from fear and meaninglessness.
• Prison became a setting for serious spiritual inquiry and exposure to many traditions.
• A powerful nondual experience can collapse and leave even deeper pain and doubt.
• Disillusionment can become a turning point when one stops expecting any solution at all.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can a person move from political activism into a spiritual search?
• What happens when a spiritual awakening collapses and leaves someone in despair?
• How can deep disillusionment become part of the spiritual path?

Full transcript, edited for readability

Introduction and practical announcements

And did some pretty things that are not commonplace and that are out of the ordinary for people to do in their lives like, oh, I don’t know, like trying to overthrow capitalism and robbing banks and doing property damage to capitalist enterprises and escaping from prison and being in gunfights and getting shot and ending up on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is John Sherman. And before we introduce John more extensively or let him introduce himself more extensively, I want to make just a few quick practical announcements. One is that if you’re watching this as a video as opposed to listening to the audio, someone pointed out to me that I should maybe remind people that these are generally recorded at a higher resolution than the default one in YouTube. So if it says 360 down the bottom of your screen in YouTube, bump it up to 480 or 720p, whichever is the highest, and then you click this little arrow thing that goes in both directions and it zooms it out to full screen. So if you’re going to watch the video, you might as well watch it in high resolution, full screen. Second thing is that I have a page on the site called Upcoming Guests, and if you go there, you’ll see who’s scheduled to be interviewed. And I want to invite people to recommend anyone that they would like to see interviewed because that helps me to determine how to prioritize people. If people get more recommendations, it’s like a vote and I bump them up in the pecking order. And also on the upper right-hand corner of the site, you’ll notice there’s a Donate button. It’s obvious what that’s for. There’s a Facebook thing, and it helps if more Facebook “likes,” as I call them, makes the site more of a broader appeal. It comes to more people’s attention. And also beneath that, there’s a little +1 button, which is a new thing that Google has introduced that’s kind of like the Facebook “like” thing. And the more people that click that, it’s like a recommendation to your friends that you like the site, and it’ll come up more prominently in the search results and so on. So anyway, that’s that. So, sorry about all that practical stuff, John, but I just wanted to get that out of the way and enable people to watch this in higher resolution if they can. So again, welcome and thank you for this opportunity.

John: You’re very welcome. Thank you for this opportunity.

Rick: Good. I usually like to let guests introduce themselves because they sort of know themselves better than I do. So why don’t you give us a quick sketch of who you are, both in the ordinary sense and what your spiritual odyssey has been.

John: That’s crazy.

Rick: Well, it doesn’t have to be a quick sketch. We can spend plenty of time on it.

John: In the ordinary sense of things, I’m a 68-year-old man living in Ojai with my wife Carla and my cat Switters, happy as a clam. I have in my past, I was, well, I don’t know. I spent an awful lot of my life stupid.

Rick: Hear, hear. Didn’t we all.

John: And did some pretty things that are not commonplace and that are out of the ordinary for people to do in their lives like, oh, I don’t know, like trying to overthrow capitalism and robbing banks and doing property damage to capitalist enterprises and escaping from prison and being in gunfights and getting shot and ending up on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list.

Rick: Were you part of the Weathermen or something?

John: No, we were, I was part of a small group of a strange mixture of people who, the group was begun by a friend of mine from a long time ago in my first stint in a federal penitentiary. And we called ourselves the George Jackson Brigade. And so anyway, that was then, this is now.

Rick: Yeah, it’s God trying to entertain himself in extreme ways through the person of John Sherman. It’s interesting that you mention all that because I heard you mention on audios that I was listening to that you had been in prison and you mentioned bank robbery, but I kind of was thinking to myself, I bet you there was some sort of social, altruistic, however warped, motivation behind his doing that. I bet you he wasn’t just in it to rob banks to get money in his pocket. I bet you he was trying to bring down the state or some such thing, and sure enough, that’s what you just said.

John: Sure enough. There was a lot of that going on in those days. That was a wild time.

Rick: Yeah, Symbionese Liberation Army and all those things. Okay, so you spent 16 years in prison and …

John: Actually, 18.

Rick: 18, okay. And obviously, as we just said, however warped it may have been, there was some sort of higher motive for you doing those things. But when did you actually get an inkling of the spiritual dimension of things, as opposed to just smashing the political system?

John: Well, first of all, I’d like to clarify something. It’s easy to think of what I was doing as being motivated by some higher motive.

Rick: Well, higher, you know, broadly defined, you know.

John: But actually, no, it was higher in a … I thought that … I was very much persuaded that what I was doing was necessary. Maybe not sufficient, but necessary to do something about the state of the world.

Rick: Yeah.

John: But that whole relationship with the state of the world and my response to it was, as it always is, entirely in order to save myself.

Rick: Aha.

John: In order to do the right thing, to find the right thing to be, to somehow become the right thing to be, so that I would not get swallowed up by this life, really.

Rick: The Beatles song “Revolution” comes to mind.

John: Yeah.

Rick: You know?

John: So, it’s not … it’s tempting for me to let slide the idea that I was more highly motivated, but it was just the same kind of neurotic, fearful, confused, and miserable motivation that drives most of us, no matter how extreme or ordinary our strategies become.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard it said that everybody’s doing the best they can, and everybody’s doing what they think is, you know, the best thing that can be done, you know? But obviously, it gets very warped.

John: Everybody is doing the best they can. That’s very …

Rick: Yeah.

John: Yeah.

Rick: So, obviously, being in prison must have given you time for reflection.

John: I gave me time … yeah, well, there’s time for reflection there. There’s a lot of things that happen, you know, you have to understand it. The first time they managed to capture me, which was during a bank robbery when I was shot, I escaped pretty quickly after that, I think about six weeks later, in a gunfight. And the second time they managed to get a hold of me and sent me to the penitentiary, I managed to escape from there a couple of months after, maybe six months after I arrived. And that’s when I was added to the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List.

Rick: I don’t want to divert this conversation too much, but how did you manage to escape from a federal penitentiary? I mean, it sounds like Shawshank Redemption or something.

John: It’s kind of a funny story. I was … me and one of my co-defendants were tried in quite a large media trial in Seattle for, oh, I forget how many counts, a whole bunch of counts of different things that, taken together, would have … everyone expected that the sentence would be like ten amounts of life, you know, and I’ve stacked up consecutive sentences to put me away for good. During the course of that trial, I had the opportunity to … I actually defended myself, and I had the opportunity to speak to the jury, and the outcome was actually much different than people expected. But I had attorney advisors there, and during the trial I had a … I got a young woman from … among the people that I knew on the streets to be appointed as a court-appointed assistant. I wanted people to … I wanted her to be able to go out and make crime scene drawings and things of that nature because we never tried to pretend that we were not guilty of the crimes. We wanted to bring to the jury the reasons that we did those and so forth and so on. In any event, that woman who was appointed as a court-appointed investigator for the defense, we were married in the courthouse after the trial and after the sentencing, and she went to Lompoc with me. She moved to Lompoc, and all the time it was our intention that I would escape from Lompoc. And we, after some failed investigations into possibilities, we discovered that I could, if I made my eye look sufficiently injured, I could have myself taken down to downtown Lompoc to the ophthalmologist there. And after a number of trips there on what was to be the last trip, a woman brought a gun to the ophthalmologist’s office and put it in the bathroom. And I got the gun and used it to persuade those guards to let me go. That’s how it was.

Rick: How long did it take them to catch you after that?

John: Two and a half years.

Rick: Wow, that’s amazing.

John: I was working at the time in Golden, Colorado, and I was working at Sunstrand, which is a big aerospace company. I have a background in machining. And I actually became involved in an extremely dramatic effort to unionize that company and to prevent them from running away to Iowa. In those days, running away was going to a right-to-work state, not going to China or India. I was fired and ended up with a pretty large award by the National Labor Relations Board where I had to go periodically to attend hearings and so forth, which was, of course, in the same building as the FBI.

Rick: You just couldn’t leave well enough alone, huh?

John: But then they caught me. And that was the last time. I went ahead and spent another 17 or so years in federal prisons here and there around the country. And here I am now.

Rick: So when did you finally get out?

John: In ’98. I was sent to the halfway house in spring of ’98.

Rick: Okay, so about 12, 13 years ago. And I understand that while in prison, you kind of got bitten by the non-duality bug and started reading a lot of books and stuff like that.

🕊️ Early spiritual inclinations and prison philosophy

So, it’s not … it’s tempting for me to let slide the idea that I was more highly motivated, but it was just the same kind of neurotic, fearful, confused, and miserable motivation that drives most of us, no matter how extreme or ordinary our strategies become.

John: I did. I actually, you know, as a child I was brought up by my grandmother, who was a Holy Ghost Pentecostal Christian. And from the beginning, my inclination had been pretty consistently towards some religious or spiritual solution to things, which was somewhat sidetracked when I discovered the magnificent presentation of Marx and Engels and Lenin. But I had always had a deep sense that, like, I wasn’t smart enough to know even what it is I thought would happen as a result of it, that there was something in the realm of outside of the ordinary experience of life that was important and that I wanted to gain access to. In prison, and I also, kind of strangely, in the same vein, I also was very much interested in philosophy, which is a similar approach to the problem of being human as other spiritual approaches. When I was in prison, the nagging sense that there was something somewhere to be found that would solve this strange case of being a human being, and the fact that being a human being was so sucky, it just does not work, it is not satisfactory when it seems like it promises so much.

Rick: Yeah, like the saying goes, you know, “Life sucks, then you die.”

John: Yeah, that’s it. And in the course of that, and in the course of studying some more philosophy, at one point I actually converted to Roman Catholicism while I was in prison. I was a complete sucker for anything. What attracted me in Roman Catholicism was the deep mysticism of the whole thing. There was this mysteriousness to it that isn’t present so much in the Protestant Christianity. And then, I suppose you’d like me to tell you how this all came about.

Rick: Sure, go ahead.

John: I’ve told this story like a gazillion times.

Rick: A lot of people listening to this won’t have heard it.

John: In 1994, when you’re in the federal prison system, especially if you’re a notorious escape risk such as myself, they move you from prison to prison for the entire time you’re there.

Rick: So you don’t learn the tricks of how to get out of a particular one?

John: And you don’t get to make contacts and establish relationships with the staff and things of that nature. So the longest I stayed in any one prison during that period was three years, and often it was two years. In ’94, I ended up in Englewood, Colorado, in a federal prison there. Actually, it’s in Littleton. It’s called Englewood, but it’s in Littleton, Colorado. And in ’94, by the time ’94 had come around, I had pretty much rid myself of the interest in spiritual solutions and religious solutions and philosophical solutions and had settled down just to jail and to be comfortable as I could.

Rick: Were you feeling frustrated and miserable in there, or were you in the present just going with it every day?

John: Well, by the time in ’94, I was happy enough. I had established, I had become very proficient with computers, which that was in the early days of computers. And in so doing, I made myself valuable to the people who ran what’s called the facility departments, which are the departments that take care of the maintenance of the institution, the plumbing and all that stuff. So I was pretty comfortable. I was not too unhappy. I was playing tennis a lot, enjoying myself. And then one day this friend of mine who was taken by the Eastern ancient wisdom teachings himself, there’s in prison you find a lot of interest in religion and spiritual teachings. It’s a natural fit. And he came to me and told me, asked me if I wanted to come and see Gangaji.

Rick: This wasn’t Kenny Johnson by any chance, was it?

John: No, it was not. It was a guy named Alan, who later was transferred and so forth. But anyway, he came to me and asked me if I would like to come and see Gangaji. And I had no idea who Gangaji was. I probably couldn’t have pronounced it correctly even. And he told me that she was this kind of gorgeous blonde southern woman with an esoteric teaching from India. And what could be bad about that, right? So I decided, I said, “Yes, I’ll go.” As it happened in the time that I was supposed to go, I got a little sick and I decided not to go and just blew the whole thing off. But then, having been exposed to that, I learned that the people, the guy who had invited me to it was part of a Buddhist group who people were coming in from Naropa, which is in Boulder, Colorado, which is the institute founded by Trungpa, our Rinpoche. And they were coming in from Boulder to teach Tibetan Buddhism to prisoners in England. And I started going to see them and I was really quite stunned to find that, and you know, like in Tibetan Buddhism, when the lay people are transmitting the teachings, what they basically do is read the teachings, like the 12 steps of conditional arising and this and that and the other thing. And I was shocked and really quite stunned to have the sense that I knew all of that, that everything they said was extremely familiar to me. It was like, “Wow, I knew that. That makes sense.” Now there’s some stuff that makes sense, that rings true to me. So I became quite taken by Tibetan Buddhism, particularly the flavor of Trungpa, our Rinpoche, which is a little different from most. He wasn’t as reverent and so forth as most spiritual people are.

Rick: Is he the one who died of alcoholism or some such thing?

John: Well, it’s hard to say what he died of. There’s a lot of rumors about it.

Rick: He was a character anyway.

John: Yes, he was a controversial character.

Rick: Right.

John: And so I started going to the Buddhists and they were very taken with me. They thought I was some kind of a previously unsuspected tulku or something, that they found in this prison. They brought in a Tibetan lama who gave me refuge in Bodhisattva vows. And I was persuaded. I was pretty much persuaded. I mean, you have to know that until very recently, actually, everything that I was persuaded to, I was persuaded to with a certain skepticism, a certain background of skepticism, a willingness to see that this too was all fraudulent and fake, like everything else was that I had tried.

Rick: Yeah.

John: But still, I was quite taken and I was really interested in it and it drew my interest into other spiritual teachings and their writings and so forth. So that Gangaji then returned to the prison in June of ’94. The first visit was in September of ’93, the one that I didn’t go to. She returned in June of ’94 and by that time I was kind of the guy that took care of the exotic Eastern spiritual types, like the guy was who initially invited me to meet her. So I was responsible for getting that all together and for letting the prisoners who were interested know the date and time. And then I was responsible for setting up the chapel for her and meeting her and bringing her in and showing her what the arrangements were and so forth. I had, of course, contact with people throughout the time that I was a Buddhist who were in love with Gangaji and my role with them mostly was to tell them that they were crazy, that I don’t know what she’s up to but that’s not what it’s about. It’s not, there’s nothing for you to do, there’s nothing for you to get, and so forth and so on. This is a serious business and it takes commitment and long-time practice with conviction and commitment. And when Gangaji came I had a really powerful experience of stopping the endless story about things and what I’m doing and why I’m doing it and so forth.

Gangaji, non-dual bliss, and collapse

Exactly. So here we are. We are created by the biological processes, and then we spend all of our life in a womb, comfortable, at ease. Nothing happens. No cold, no hot, no hunger, no fear. Just the soothing rhythm of the mother’s heartbeat, the rocking in the amniotic fluid. Everything good, everything wonderful.

Rick: Did you go up on the stage and have a one-on-one with her like some people do in her things or were you just sitting in the audience?

John: No, this is when I met her at the door.

Rick: Oh, okay, just initially.

John: Right in that moment and my initial intention was to show her around and then go play tennis but that was blown away and I became, I fell in love with her and I embarked upon a year and a half of deep love of Gangaji and of the teaching that she espoused then.

Rick: Do they let you bring in all kinds of books and videos and stuff like that to watch in prison?

John: Books can come in, videos and so forth can be watched in the chapel and things of that nature. But during that period I became really quite familiar with the ancient wisdom teachings from India. Of all of them I was hungry to understand, to get the sense of what all this was about and in ways that now seem a little mysterious, books that would be unexpected to ever find in a prison environment came to me and books on Dzogchen, books on the Upanishads, books on all of that wild stuff. So I became quite well informed and quite deeply invested in that particular path. I spent a year of what I have come to call enlightenment, just as a catchphrase, I spent a year in a state of clarity and non-dual consciousness and bliss.

“I spent a year in a state of clarity and non-dual consciousness and bliss.”

Rick: I heard you mention that in one of your recordings. Did that just sort of come upon you suddenly one day?

John: Well, it came upon me, what I thought at the time, it came upon me suddenly in the moment that I met Gangaji.

Rick: Oh, just that moment. So from the moment you met her you were in this sort of non-dual blissful state?

John: Yes, that’s right.

Rick: And you’ve been doing a kind of meditation practice as a part of the Naropa teachers, right?

John: Yes, that’s right. And we started writing to each other and I wrote her pretty much every day and she wrote back almost every day. We had quite an intense and energetic and wonderful relationship in that way.

Rick: That’s great.

John: And it went on for a year or so and then my so-called enlightenment collapsed.

Rick: Just out of the blue, one day you’re brushing your teeth or something and all of a sudden, boom, it’s gone.

John: Well, no, not quite like that. It was more the fact that I became … It turned out that it wasn’t true that there was nothing I wanted. It turned out that that was actually something that I had just made up. And that was revealed itself when I met a woman who was close to Gangaji who got on my visitors list. She started coming in to visit me and we became involved in a romantic relationship.

Rick: You can do that in prison?

John: You can do it anywhere in the world. It’s all in the mind, right?

Rick: Oh, okay. So yeah, the hearts kind of woke up there.

John: We visited quite often, probably at least once a week and talked on the phone all the time. And she was very close to Gangaji. And at one point she went to Gangaji and told her what had happened. Now, this woman was married.

Rick: Oh, I see.

John: And Gangaji became infuriated and wrote me a letter that was full of fury and anger.

Rick: Right, yeah.

John: And everything just turned to rottenness.

Rick: That’s interesting. It caused your whole non-dual thing to just collapse.

John: That’s right.

Rick: Gangaji has had her own share of marital difficulties in recent years. Yeah, it’s not relevant.

John: The pain and the confusion and the pain that commenced when that occurred was worse than anything I’d ever experienced. The psychological pain that attended that, attended the loss of the enlightenment, what I felt was the refutation of the whole non-dual aspiration. The pain of it was terrible, it was horrible.

Rick: Did you lose faith in Gangaji, or was it more like your experience collapsed, and so that made you feel…

John: I lost faith in me. I had some, you know, there was an inclination to project some of that on Gangaji, but mostly I just lost faith in me. It just was like I was wrong again. I’ve been down that road before, I’ve gone down that road again, and here I am in an even worse place at the end of this one than I have ever been in my life.

Rick: Now certainly in your reading, you must have run across the idea that awakenings can be intermittent before they eventually become permanent. I mean, a lot of people say that.

John: Yes, but of course that rational understanding of those things is secondary, and of no importance, has no mitigating effect whatsoever on the psychological and that whole pain.

Rick: Yes, not much solace under the circumstances.

John: There’s no solace in that.

Rick: Right.

John: There was no solace in any of that stuff. It was all revealed to me in those times to be just a false trail. But, so I was left still, now I was left without any sense that there was any hope at all, anywhere to be found. But still, with that deep desire to find a solution to this unsatisfactoriness of being a human being. A deep, deep yearning that had always been present, and now was kind of ripped open, and worse than it had ever been.

“There was no solace in any of that stuff.”

Rick: Wow, that’s a quandary. I mean, no hope, and yet a yearning to sort it out.

John: And that yearning I think is pretty universal. It may be overlooked and dampened down, you know, in most of us for most of our lives. Otherwise, we couldn’t get by, right?

Rick: Yeah.

John: But I decided that in the wake of that destruction of everything that seemed worthwhile at all, I decided that what I had to get rid of, what really had to happen, was not to find some new solution to the problem, but to get rid of the idea that there was any solution to the problem. Get rid of this yearning, this hopeless, stupid yearning for some solution to the problem. So I thought, “Well, if I can find some recommended thing to do, and do it, and get no result, no satisfactory result from it, then that will put an end to this yearning.”

Rick: Huh. Well, you were already pretty disillusioned, but what you’re saying is you wanted to add another layer of disillusionment, and you thought that would finish you off?

John: I wanted to add a fundamental disillusionment, right. I wanted to find something that made sense to me, that was different from the rest of it, but that somehow was connected to the rest of it, made sense to me, and gave me something to do. Not just something to understand, or to feel, or to, you know, any of that, but something to do, so that in the doing of it I could prove to myself that there’s nothing here at all. There’s no hope anywhere to be found.

Rick: So fully expecting your hopes to be dashed once again, you sought for some new thing.

John: And I turned to, actually, and this is kind of strange a little bit, but I turned to Ramana Maharshi.

Rick: Whom you had already been reading.

John: Who I had read and kind of discarded as too simple. I didn’t know what he was about. I know he was like the god of Gangaji and Papaji.

Rick: Right, he’s the grandfather of the whole modern non-dual thing.

John: I couldn’t see much to him. I mean, who am I? What is that? That’s nothing. So long before I ever actually got into trying to study or to actually deeply investigate what it is that Ramana was saying or suggesting to us, I dismissed it and went on to, you know, bigger things like Yoga Vasistha and the Upanishads and all of that. And I came back to Ramana then because he was different than anybody else. He really was. He had no teacher. He was not spiritual. The thing that he did, as best as he could describe it as a 16-year-old boy, was to pretend to be dead. And yet, despite his idiosyncratic nature, he was revered as Bhagavan, as God in form.

✨ Ramana Maharshi and self-inquiry

That’s a special sort of affliction. And then all of a sudden, without warning, we’ve been that way our whole lives. There’s never been a time when we have not been just at peace and warm and happy and comfortable. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes this explosion of horrifying, violent, wild experience. We are expelled from the womb. God knows what that feels like, the actual expulsion itself.

Rick: Yeah. And I recall that story about him pretending to be dead. It was not sort of like, you know, one day he’s out playing cricket and he decides, “I think I’ll go in and pretend to be dead,” but he felt this sort of death coming upon him, did he not? And it was some sort of ego death that was starting to percolate, and he just, rather than fighting it, he surrendered to it.

John: No, it’s actually much more commonplace than that. His father died suddenly, unexpectedly, at the age of 42, the year before. Now, here is a 16-year-old boy, an adolescent boy, whose father has just died without warning, just dropped dead a year before.

Rick: So that shook him up.

John: And his actual account of it, well, I’m speaking from his accounts of it, it was that that produced in him this kind of lingering involvement with the idea of death. And it was in the course of that, which was not spiritual, had nothing to do with ego whatsoever or anything of the kind. It was the ordinary thing that one might expect an adolescent boy, whose father had died suddenly and unexpectedly, to go through. It really enhanced uncertainty about his own existence. And what he did was he lay down, because of that fear of death, because it became so big in him, he decided to try to do something about it by pretending to be dead. He laid down, he pretended that the body was dying. He actually went to the extreme of pretending to have rigor mortis set in, stiffened his body. He imagined the body being carried to the burning ghat to be cremated. And in the aftermath of that experience, what he said was that the only thing that remained was the force of personality. This is a shocking thing for most people in the Advaitic community to hear. The only thing that remained, Ramana tells us, is the force of personality. R What did he mean by that?

Well, that’s something you can find out for yourself. That’s my point. And he went through a tear of anomaly. And this again is his own account of things. He went through a tear of anomaly because he couldn’t figure out what had happened to him. And he wanted to know, so he went through a tear of anomaly. He had heard of a tear of anomaly from an uncle as a place where you could do stuff like that. He went through a tear of anomaly in order to try to find out by reading the scriptures and the texts and the sutras and the shastras, to find out what had happened to him.

Rick: Yeah, so what had happened to him means that this statement that the only thing that remained was the force of personality, he had undergone a profound shift of some kind.

John: That’s right.

Rick: And in his words, the only thing left after that shift was the force of personality, whatever that means exactly.

John: Whatever that means, which is an interesting conundrum.

Rick: Yeah.

John: So, and he also tells us that he stopped speaking, but not, he told people or he indicated to people it was because of a vow of silence, which is called “mouna” in the practices. But really, he tells us that he took no such vow, he just didn’t want to talk to anybody.

Rick: Right.

John: So he just stopped talking for 12 years. He had a close friend who would bring him books and so forth to the temple and tear of anomaly, so that he steeped himself in these teachings, which certainly formed, certainly shaped his capacity to understand what had happened to him. He took on board that entire body of work pertaining to what the nature of reality is and how this would impinge upon his experiences and so forth. Finally, they tracked him down and kind of took him captive and built an ashram around him. All the time he was complaining, not complaining, you know, terribly, but you know, just saying, “I don’t know what to do.” “I tell them I don’t want this and they do it anyway.” “You know, I tell them not to do this and they do it anyway. What is there to do?” Now, without going into a lot more detail about Ramana’s role and the things he did in the time that he was in the ashram there, I determined that Ramana, more than anybody else I knew, actually had tried to tell us something practical to do. Not something, you know, like by getting a transmission or by some new transcendent arrival of the state, but give us something practical to do, which he tried to communicate by this whole insistence on, “For whom?” “You are full of bliss? Who? For whom is this bliss? For whom is this sorrow? For whom is this and that and the other thing?” So I thought that that gave me a hint as to what I should do. I should find, “For whom is this?” I should actually try the practice of “Who am I?”

Rick: What is the word?

John: “Who am I?”

Rick: Oh, “Who am I?” Yes, yes, yes.

John: “Vichara.”

Rick: So the word “Vichara” means “Who am I?” or “Self-inquiry,” is that right?

John: It does, sort of. I mean, “Vichara” is actually quite an interesting word. It means there are several pages if you look on the web for a definition of “Vichara.” There are several pages of real potpourri of…

Rick: Subtle explanations, yes.

John: …that it chooses for an ordinary life, it chooses a spiritual life, and it seems to devolve down to the idea of investigation, some inquiry into the nature of something.

Rick: Good.

John: But trying to do that, I discovered, if I say, “Who am I?” If I am trying to find a way to actually do Ramana’s suggestion, it turns out to be not quite so easy as it sounds when you first hear it. I mean, yeah, right, what, what, where do I look? What am I…what? Where do I look? So, Ramana gave a couple of suggestions from time to time, right, none of which proved to be very helpful to me. But I was at the time, now I’m in prison, I really, now I have no job. I was actually finally, the federal prison system established a policy that no prisoner who knew anything about computers could be working on computers. And one thing led to another, and I ended up with forbidden to be within 50 yards of any computer. I never did anything wrong. I was always, you know, just doing my job, but against the rules. And I was, ended up with, I couldn’t be within 50 feet of a computer, which really narrowed my job opportunities within the prison, right? So that I ended up with a job where I was cleaning the bathroom in the staff lounge, which took about a half hour every morning. And the rest of my time was empty of any, I could do anything I want to within the confines of the rules of the prison. So I had a lot of time to fixate and get obsessed with this whole business of “Who am I?” And I did fixate and became obsessed with it. [Clears throat] Excuse me. [Clears throat] I would, I remember Ramana once said to someone, “You should,” and this was another thing that recommended him to me because it is so, what’s the word, heretical in the non-dual arena. He would say to people, “You should grab ego by the throat. You should get a hold of ego. Grab it by the throat. Hold on to it. Don’t let go.” And that was so out of, so radical that I tried to do that. I would sit and I would try to find some sensation within the body that seemed to be this infantile, ignorant child that wanted to be, wanted to have everything, and I would get my attention on it and hold it tight and I would chant kind of to it, “Die. Die. Die.” And I would try other things. All the time I’m trying to look in. I’m trying to get a glimpse of what it is he’s talking about. I’m trying to get an answer to the question, “Who am I?” No such answer ever presented itself to jump ahead. But different things happened. I had different experiences. There were experiences that were quite startling and quite sweet and so forth. And in the event, nothing happened, except that everything kind of got easier over time. I noticed that my relationship with my life was changing. I had no idea why that would be. I had no new transcendental experiences or transformational anything. Life was life, just as it always is. But my relationship to it had changed dramatically. I had no… whereas previously, and of course it’s in retrospect that I am describing this, at the time much of it was hidden to me, what was happening. But whereas before, I would hold my life at arm’s length. There was a sense of something out there that could be threatening to me, that could cause me great harm, at the same time as this yearning told me there was something out there that could give me what I’ve always wanted and clear everything up once and for all. That whole relationship with life went away. And the whole sense of being distant and a victim of my own life went away. And things calmed down over time. And eventually I was released from prison. And when I was released from prison, I was in Boulder, Colorado, and Gangaji hired me at the Gangaji Foundation, so that I would have a job to come out to when I went out of prison. Kenny Johnson, by the way, is a different story. So I worked for Gangaji for a while until…

Rick: So she forgave you for that affair?

John: Oh yeah, she forgave me. She’s a forgiving girl. And people started coming to me and wanting me to do satsang. And I didn’t want to do it. I mean, I did not have a way of exactly defining why it is that I didn’t want to do it, but I just didn’t want to do it.

Rick: Did you feel qualified? I mean, did you feel like you really had something to offer?

John: No, I didn’t. I felt like I couldn’t do anything more than everybody else in this realm was doing already.

Rick: Yeah, and why should you add your voice if there’s people like Gangaji sitting there who can maybe do it better, you know?

John: Right, right.

Rick: Probably what you thought.

John: Right. And I had lost, I actually had lost the sense that what happens in the realm of satsang was of any use to anybody. And I had no sense because of that, it was because of that that I had no feeling that I had anything to offer anybody.

Rick: I see.

John: Okay.

Rick: Didn’t it make your job kind of meaningless, working for Gangaji?

John: Yeah, but all jobs are kind of meaningless.

Rick: You needed a job, yeah.

John: I used to be a machinist. It was pretty meaningless.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, sure.

John: So, but people would want me to talk to them. And I would talk to people as best I could and always dissatisfied with the, I knew that whatever it was I was trying to say, I wasn’t saying, using the same vernacular that was used in the non-dual teachings. That somehow I could not say what I was trying to say using that vernacular, although I tried. Well, in ’99, in June of ’99, I married my wife Carla, who kind of saved my life in a very real way, and continues to do so, I might add. And we both, and then I was fired by the Gangaji Foundation because of the economic problems that they had. So now, and Carla, of course, is from Brazil, and I don’t know if you knew that or not, but she’s from Brazil.

Rick: I knew she was from, yeah, and she speaks a lot of languages, and she’s a good translator.

John: Yeah, and she, when we married, it was a couple of years before she got her citizenship. Now she’s a citizen, but when we married, she had a green card, and we were trying to find a way to make a living when Gangaji had fired us, right? Fired me, anyway. She didn’t work for Gangaji. We’re trying to find a way to make a living, and she is, as you point out, a translator with considerable experience and breadth of proficiency in that realm. And I, since I had some familiarity with computers and the whole thing, and even a little bit with the web, although not in prison, but after I got out, I thought that maybe I could do something. This was at the height, at the very crest of the dot-com boom, so I thought maybe we should start a business for making websites. We were not interested at all in making a living by doing Satsang, you see. So we started a company called North Bay Webs and made a few websites for people. We started a company called Sherman Translations, which is still in existence, and Carla did some magnificent translations and saved us from hunger and homelessness more than once. But we could not possibly make enough money to support ourselves in those endeavors. It just wasn’t happening. And people were still asking us to come and do Satsang. So I went to do Satsang. People wanted to hear me talk, and they donated money to us, and I didn’t do anything. I never deceived people. I never tried to get more money from them or anything else, but the trickle of money that came from the donations in Satsang, plus the trickle of money that came from translations and other things that we were trying to do, kept us afloat, so that we could pay our bills, pay the rent, feed ourselves, and so forth, and go to the next invitation to do Satsang. So we started doing Satsang as pretty much our primary means of making a living. And during that period of time, that period of time lasted at least until 2006, where I really didn’t feel I was doing anybody any good. And I really didn’t feel like I was ever saying. I felt like there was something there that I really wanted to convey to people, but I was convinced that I could not do so. I tried and couldn’t.

Rick: Did you tell them those things when you did Satsang? Did you say, “I’m not doing any good, and I can’t say what I want to say”?

John: I’m notorious for that. Actually, I did. I whined and complained about it constantly. So that went on, and all the time I was really trying, I had the sense that I had something that I wanted to say, that there was something that I could offer to people, but I couldn’t find a way to verbalize it, to make it into language, trapped as I seemed to be in the vernacular of spiritual, of non-dual understanding and spiritual aspiration and that whole realm of activity, which I could see did not convey what I was trying to say. And I could see it, because I could see people heard different things than what I was trying to say. So I tried. And I saw that period as a time when the responsibility I had to the people who were supporting us was to use that time as best I could to learn how to speak about what I really wanted to speak about by trying to do it in conversation with them. In 2006, we went on a trip to Chicago. On the way back from Chicago, we stopped in Boulder, which is where many of our friends still live, and people knew us and knew everything about us. We stopped in Boulder to do satsang, and we did a satsang which later we called “Escape from the Spiritual Ghetto.” And it was that time that I felt like something had broken loose, and that there was a possibility of me actually getting to the point where I could speak about what I wanted to speak about. In 2007, it became clear to me that that was going to happen. I still had no sense that I actually had gotten to the point where I was speaking clearly and directly enough to be of use to people, except some people were helped by it. Some people could hear it underneath the vocabulary that I didn’t know how to get rid of. And because of that, because we were convinced that we had finally shown ourselves that we actually were going to be able, in the end, to say what we wanted to say, we stopped charging fees for anything. For the first time, I felt like something was being communicated that actually was of help to people, although still encumbered by the language. And I thought, “Well, I want to be able to speak about this to everybody, whether they can or are willing to or not pay to hear.” So we stopped charging fees for retreats and some of the other things we used to charge fees for. So from that time, from 2007 on, beginning with the 2007 retreat– the 2007 retreat, by the way, is the basis for the book that we have out called “Look at Yourself.” That book is very skillfully and carefully edited and so forth. It consists in conversations that I had with people, but it’s very well edited and people have found great value in it, which always comes as a surprise to me. So it was the 2007 retreat. We do a retreat every year here in Ojai in November. The 2007 retreat finally became the book “Look at Yourself.” And we continued over the next several–however many years it’s been since 2007– trying to speak more clearly, trying to be more to the point, trying to get rid of the spiritual vocabulary, which is a hindrance. It’s really hard to speak about anything, especially to just ordinary people, within that vernacular. I don’t have anything against any of it. It’s just I couldn’t make it work.

Finding a fresh language

No, you’re not wishing ill, but what you’re saying is that it’s a state and that they may have a rude awakening one day where they no longer have that sense of no self, as you did.

Rick: It wasn’t your terminology. You needed terminology that was sort of fresh.

John: I needed to speak directly from my own experience to people, not through a detour.

Rick: Yeah, that’s really laudable. I mean, there’s a lot of people that are good at parroting the terminology, but you wonder whether it jibes with their own experience.

John: And then finally, now bringing us back to the present, in the retreat last year, November of 2010, everything kind of broke loose. All of the remaining detritus of my vast spiritual understanding kind of broke loose and became flotsam and jetsam and still circles around a little bit but causes no trouble. So that now, and now what we have–the state of our work now is summed up in those two documents, “The Fear of Life” and “The Simple Act of Inward Looking that Snuffs It Out,” in which I set out what I am convinced is the actual cause of the misery of being human, the actual cause. And the second document is “The Way Forward,” in which we set out our determination to find a way to bring this simple suggestion to look at you, just to look at yourself, to bring this simple suggestion to the ears of a large enough body of human beings to tip the balance from our endless rush toward insanity back to a road that leads to sanity, more sanity rather than more insanity. We don’t need any more insanity.

Rick: Now, got enough. Alright, well now I’ve read both those documents but most of our listeners will not have, and so let’s delve into what they say. I have a lot of questions I think, and you’ve got a lot to say, so I suppose you want to start with the first one about what this looking at yourself is, and then we can talk about the implications of having it go global on a larger scale. Incidentally, you talk a lot about fear, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but there’s a line in the Upanishads which says, “Certainly all fear is born of duality.” I don’t know the Sanskrit for it, but maybe that could be a springboard.

🕊️ Fear, duality, and the problem with spiritual language

You can never change. You can’t be less you, you can’t be more you, there’s no enhancement that you can bring to you. What you can do is rid yourself of that which stands in your way of enjoying, of being filled with the wonder and magnificence of this incomprehensible arising of existence.

John: This is a really interesting point, I haven’t heard that. This is a really interesting point here because actually I hear that and that’s the truth. That really is the truth. All suffering is born of fear, which is born of duality. But to say that conveys something entirely different than the reality that it is trying to communicate. It conveys something that says, “Duality is the problem. What needs to happen here is to rid ourselves of the sense of separation, of the sense of being separate individuals in an ocean of other separate individuals and other things.” That that’s the problem. In fact, that is explicitly stated in most of the kind of advanced wisdom teachings to be the case, that the sense of separation, but then it morphs into not the sense of separation, but the sense of being a separate individual is the problem. So that what we are seeking to do is to eliminate that sense that I am a separate individual. But if I eliminate the sense that I am a separate individual, then there is no one here truly to receive anything, experience anything, want anything, not want anything, be satisfied with anything, understand anything, be confused by anything, be attracted and enchanted by anything. That whole array of human experience is anathema.

Rick: And a lot of teachers will say something just like that. They’ll say, “Well, I may appear to be wanting and needing and experiencing and doing this and doing that, but there actually is no one here to whom that is happening. It’s just happening without there being a subject to whom it’s happening.” I’m sure you’ve heard that kind of talk, I’m sure, ad infinitum.

John: I probably have even regurgitated that kind of talk in the past.

Rick: Yourself, yeah.

John: And I’m not – understand something. I am not – the work that I am doing here and Carla and I are doing here is not in opposition to spiritual teachers. We’re not trying to dissuade people from their love for and their involvement with spiritual teachings, ancient wisdom teachings, non-dual teachings, anything of the kind. And the reason for that is because that’s not the problem. The problem is not – like what I say to be the case is that we have been on the wrong trail and that there have been a handful of people over the 5,000, 6,000 years since we as a species first started turning inward trying to find a way to make human life palatable. There have been a mere handful, a smattering of people. There have been some, really, truly, who authentically have stumbled upon what Ramana calls the natural state, which is the state of being human.

Rick: Stumbled upon it quite accidentally almost.

John: Accidentally in the course of other practices and so forth and so on, and without knowing exactly what happened to them. They just were in the midst of doing what they were doing. Maybe they were in the midst of an intense spiritual practice, maybe not, but they were in the midst of doing what they were doing, and the problem went away.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve interviewed people like that who had no prior interest in any of this, and woke up one morning and everything was different. Obviously, Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle are examples of that.

John: Yes, that’s right. So, not knowing in any way exactly what had happened to them, and being either at the time or subsequently as a result, being involved in the ancient wisdom teachings, just like Ramana, the only vocabulary vernacular that they could find, which seemed to be to the point of what had happened to them, was that vocabulary vernacular of the ancient non-dual wisdom teachings present in the Upanishads and the developments from the Upanishads.

Rick: Yeah, and a lot of the guys who wrote those didn’t necessarily stumble upon it accidentally. They may have studied under a guru and gone through a rigorous discipline, a formal discipline of some sort, and arrived at some realization.

John: Right, but once again, accidentally, not as a result of the formal spiritual disciplines.

Rick: Well, that’s a whole topic of our discussion.

John: What I’m suggesting is that that’s as likely an explanation as the other explanation, that both of those things, either one of those things could be true about the origin of the Upanishads. That’s all I’m saying.

Rick: Okay.

John: So, for all those thousands of years, we have a handful of people who have somehow stumbled upon reality, somehow, God knows.

Rick: Yeah, a handful relative to the total population. Relative to the total population of 106 billion people that have walked the face of the earth.

Right, right.

John: There might be a million of them still.

Rick: Drop in the bucket, yeah.

John: Drop in the bucket. And they are consistent in trying, it seems to me, mostly as the way in which they try to be helpful to the rest of us, there is a desire to be helpful.

Rick: Sure, natural.

John: That desire arises from the natural uncovering of the phenomenon of compassion, which is the awareness of suffering in everybody. It’s not like we have twisted compassion into something we do, or something we feel, but it’s really just the constant presence of the misery of human consciousness, is what compassion is. And it produces the natural inclination to want to be helpful, to want to help people, and so forth. So, since they did not exactly know what had happened to them, what they had done, what they have mostly done for us over these millennia is describe to us what it’s like to be free of whatever it is that causes this trouble.

“The problem is separation from my own life.”

Rick: I agree with that. Let me just interject quickly. There is a lot of that going on, historically and contemporaneously. There is a lot of people just sort of describing their state and offering that description as a prescription, presumably. But there are also people who have been pretty good at actually providing instructions, “Do this, do this, do this,” and it will kind of make you more … Suzuki Roshi said, “Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone.” There have been some pretty good instructions to make people accident-prone over the course of history.

John: Perhaps so, except not so much, Rick, because when you look at the actual numbers of the people who have benefited from that, we see that those instructions actually haven’t had much widespread effect.

Rick: Again, relative to the total population.

John: Relative to the total population.

Rick: Yeah, it’s always been a handful who have been interested in this kind of thing, even.

John: Right.

Rick: Yeah, at least on this planet.

John: So, what we hear, whatever the … and I am totally convinced that all of these people are authentic and sincere and probably are themselves aware of their shortcomings in being able to be helpful to people.

Rick: Yeah.

John: But what we hear is what we should be. We should be not resistant. We should get rid of resistance. We should not be reactive. We should not believe our thoughts. These are the things that, the characteristics that we should seek in order to be free of the problem of being human.

Rick: It’s the man on the mountaintop describing his perspective from that vantage point, shouting it down to people who aren’t on the mountaintop.

John: All well intended.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

John: Right? And it’s not like they got to choose, “Oh, I can tell them something really straight and plain,” or, “I can tell them this flowery stuff that doesn’t do them any good.” Just like with me, I couldn’t find any way to speak in that vernacular that said anything useful to anybody at all. But that’s the only vernacular I had at my disposal.

Rick: Right.

John: Okay. So, what brought me on that?

Rick: Well, you were talking about the small percentage of people throughout history who’ve even stumbled upon this, and how their tendency has been to describe the state they’re in, and how that is of dubious value for those who would aspire to be in the same state.

John: So, they’re on the right track. And the whole thing about the Upanishad that you quoted about duality being the cause of the fear, and so forth, that’s on the right track. Even the idea that separation is the problem is on the right track. But the problem is that when we hear this business about separation, we go straight to “no me.” But the problem is me. It’s me being a separate individual. If I were not a separate individual, everything would be right. If the whole crazy, failed experiment of self-consciousness were to disappear, everything would be good. Well, I think the problem is separation, too. But I don’t think the problem is the actual nature of life itself, which is the arising of this parade of phenomena, this ocean of phenomena, that is existence itself expressing itself.

Rick: If that’s a problem, we’re in trouble, because try stopping that, you know?

John: That’s right. If that’s a problem, we’re in deep trouble. And the problem is not that I perceive that as one of a separate thing within this ocean of separate things. That’s not the problem. That’s the gift. To me, that’s the awakening. The arrival of the vivid, vigorous sense of self-consciousness in the human creature is the awakening. It’s the awakening to this magnificent display of existence, which is impossible if I am not conscious of being, or at least have the experience of being a separate arising within this ocean of separate arising.

Rick: Yeah. So let me just clarify what you’re saying here. Are you saying that perhaps dogs, for instance, don’t have a real self-conscious awareness of being a separate entity, but at the level of human consciousness, we’ve sort of individuated more consciously, and we are aware of our separate nature as individuals, but that sort of leaves us in a state of fear, because we’re somehow estranged from our fundamental unity with the source of everything. Does that at all…? Go ahead.

John: Not exactly.

Rick: Okay. Just taking a stab at it.

John: Yeah, I think what happens is this, and I suppose that I will adjust this over time to reflect a deeper understanding of what it is that I’m actually trying to say. But here’s what I actually think happens. I think that human beings are uniquely self-conscious within our world, in our planet. There are other creatures that have degrees of this sense of awareness of themselves, but it’s nowhere near the sharpness and vividness and vigorousness that the human self-consciousness is.

Rick: Right, by virtue of the sophistication and complexity of our nervous system.

John: Yeah, right. Exactly.

Rick: The brain and so on.

John: Exactly. So here we are. We are created by the biological processes, and then we spend all of our life in a womb, comfortable, at ease. Nothing happens. No cold, no hot, no hunger, no fear. Just the soothing rhythm of the mother’s heartbeat, the rocking in the amniotic fluid. Everything good, everything wonderful.

Rick: Unless our mother happens to be a meth addict or something.

John: That’s a special sort of affliction. And then all of a sudden, without warning, we’ve been that way our whole lives. There’s never been a time when we have not been just at peace and warm and happy and comfortable. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes this explosion of horrifying, violent, wild experience. We are expelled from the womb. God knows what that feels like, the actual expulsion itself.

Rick: I was born by cesarean myself, so I kind of missed out on that part of it.

John: But there’s that. We’re expelled from the womb into a world of cold and hot and lights and screaming and yelling.

Rick: Spanking.

John: Yeah, all that. Spanking and cutting. And it must be that in that instant, the automatic movement of the newborn brain is shrinking, is contracting, is saying, “Whoa, hold it, stop, hold all this stuff off.”

Rick: Stop the world, I want to get off.

John: That’s right.

Rick: I’ll play by that title.

John: That’s right. It can’t be other than that for the child, for the infant, for the newborn. Well, what I think happens is in that instant, our point of view toward life is fixed. As a point of view that sees life to be dangerous, threatening, incomprehensible, and something that needs to constantly be watched. Now, what I mean by life here is the mind. The mind is life, the endless rising and falling of phenomena within the mind and thoughts and emotions and experiences and so forth and so on. That’s life. So now, here I am, and I have to hold that whole array of stuff at arm’s length. I have to keep it separate from me. I have to keep my life separate from me, lest it swallow me up. Now, of course, all of this is automatic and has no content of, no verbal content to it or conceptual content to it, whatever.

Rick: And some people say it takes years of maturation before that separation really calcifies, because babies are still very wide open and so on. But all the continuous bombardment of sensory input and learning to distinguish between themself and the mother, and all those Piaget developmental stages and all that, it takes a while for us to really get sort of anchored.

John: Oh yeah, but our stance is set in a way that the apparatus of personality…

Rick: We’ll get to that on that course.

John: That’s right. Our stance is set. Our stance sees life as being threatening and fearful, as something that has to be either conquered or defended against or ignored. That’s the three things that we watch for. So, and that sense of being separate from my own life is misery itself. And all of the development that you refer to is development that seeks to explain it, understand it, get better, more skillful at handling my relationship with my mother or my relationship with the world or my relationship with my life. That all proceeds as it does throughout the life, actually, but certainly through puberty and adolescence and that when it gets really crazy. But that’s the problem. It seems so obvious and self-evident to me that that’s the problem. The problem is separation from my life, that there is this gap between me and my life that requires me to see my life as unsatisfactory. It’s just a requirement. It’s not satisfactory. There’s something wrong here. Something has to be gotten. Something has to be gotten rid of. Something has to be understood. Something has to be, some understanding has to be jettisoned. Something has to be done about the content of my life or else it will always be this unsatisfactory, unsatisfying misery that it is for pretty much all of humanity. We evolve a number of strategies for dealing with that. Denial is probably the most common, but we develop a number of strategies for dealing with that, but all along none of them erases that fundamental problem, which is the sense of separation from my own life. That’s the problem.

Rick: I would suggest that, well first of all if you believe in reincarnation, this is something we go through over and over again, that’s a whole topic, but then I would suggest that that Upanishadic verse that I quoted pertains to something even more fundamental, which is that there is a sort of an initial, you know, in the process of manifestation, there is a separation that takes place between perceiver and perceived, self and non-self. There is a sort of a bifurcation, a diversification that occurs, and once that has happened, we are out in the world of diversity. So there is this kind of course that we are on, and this whole awakening thing is a matter of coming back to that source, and as T.S. Eliot put it, finding it for the first time. But I don’t mean to put, I don’t mean to sort of, I just want to throw that into the mix and have you comment on it in the course of your unfoldment of this. It occurred to me a lot when I was thinking of your, listening to your audios over the past week, I just wanted to throw that point out. So I’m sorry for the interruption, but maybe…

John: Oh, it’s okay. I’m happy to be interrupted. So in other words, I’m just trying to say, you know, it may seem metaphysical, but I think it might be helpful not to view this solely in the context of one life and what we go through in this one life. It’s sort of a… there is a larger context which has to do with the very kind of manifestation of the universe, and if there weren’t a diversification or a sort of a loss of that, you know, some kind of fundamental loss of self-referral, there probably wouldn’t be a universe. On some kind of cosmic scale, there has to be this sort of lost hide-and-seek game that God is playing with Himself in order for manifestation to occur.

Let’s see, I think that’s just an interpretation. What’s the case? What is the case?

Rick: It comes down to how the rubber meets the road as a human being.

John: What is the case is that the world consists in an endless array of rising and falling phenomena, separate phenomena.

Rick: That’s our experience.

John: That’s the case.

Rick: Yes.

John: Now, all of the advice that’s been given to us about how we should see that or understand that has done us no good. In the end, the case is that all of those approaches have failed to do the job of bringing an end to human insanity.

Rick: At least for the whole world they have, but for individual participants they may have succeeded.

John: They may have led them on a path, as I was led on a path, that eventually allowed them to stumble upon what reality is, but those understandings don’t do that. Those understandings are all part of the content and are all colored and shaped by this unseen and unacknowledged sense that my life is out to get me. Everything whatsoever that comes into the mind, all of the ways that we receive things, interpret them, understand them, and so forth, are skewed and distorted because of the fact that they are being accessed. I hate to say that word. It’s not a verb. Because they are being perceived within a structure that is the sole purpose of which, the fundamental purpose of which, is to protect me against this storm of experience, which itself is, to my mind, is not exactly–I wouldn’t say it’s God playing jokes on us, but it certainly is the energy of existence that has, for what, 14 billion years now, been steadfastly in the direction of moving outward, of becoming more separate, of becoming more distinguishable and distinct and so forth and so on, greater detail of separation and expression and the like. And it’s certainly the case, and I see this to be true, that the evolution of the human creature has brought the human creature, and maybe not only this human creature because all we have to work with is this little neck of the woods that we inhabit, but that has certainly brought the human creature to the capacity of being able to enjoy the endless display of separation that constitutes existence itself. And I don’t think that’s so different from what you were just speaking of. But I just don’t see that that understanding, if it is an understanding, and it’s certainly not complete, no understanding is complete, but I don’t see how that understanding is of any practical use to the ordinary human beings who don’t even get caught up into the spiritual realm, but just live their lives of misery day by day, lives of quiet desperation, as someone else had said, day by day until they fall under the grave.

Rick: Yeah, it’s pretty abstract and metaphysical and interesting to speculate about, but it’s not going to help the man in the street too much. He needs something practical.

John: Something practical, something to the point, something that can be understood, and something that works above all else.

Rick: Totally agreed.

John: Now there’s a lot of things within the spiritual practices and even within the psychological practices and philosophical practices, there’s a lot of things that we can make good use of. But we can’t make good use of them when the use we are making of them is to try to protect us or get rid of the fundamental problem of being human, which is the sense that my life is out to get me. When they are put to that task, to change the content of the life, to make me understand something that I don’t understand, or to have an insight that I have not had, or have a state of being that is unfamiliar to me, if they are operating on the content of the life, then they cannot help, because the content of the life is entirely contained and our understanding of it is entirely shaped by this apparatus that has come into being to protect us from the life. Not to give us the life, but to protect us from the life. So, and what I speak of, I’m going to say this before you point it out to me, what I speak of seems to be within the rubric of self-inquiry, the overall rubric within that realm of self-inquiry.

🧘 What the practice actually is

Rick: Yeah, and when you say what you speak of, you are referring to the core teaching that you have, which is to just look at yourself. It sounds like something Ramana advised or something. And it’s very difficult for people to, spiritual people, have a hard time. They will hear what I say often, and quietly, silently, maybe even to themselves, interpret it as something having to do with true self, or awareness, or consciousness, or some such thing.

Okay, and what you’re saying is that it’s not that, it’s something different.

John: It’s not. It’s not along with all of that, but this is not it.

Rick: Okay, so we want to get 100% clear on what it is you actually are saying.

John: 100% clear on what I’m actually saying, and 100% clear on what I’m not saying.

Rick: Good, let’s do that.

John: I have nothing against any spiritual teacher, personally. I’m not saying that. I don’t think that anything whatsoever that has to do with the content of the life, which includes the spiritual teachings that we fall in love with, everything we do in life, right? Nothing whatsoever that has anything to do with the content of the life is the problem. No solution is to be found by, for example, saying, “The spiritual teachings are the problem. If you get rid of those, you’ll be okay.” Or, “Understanding is the problem. If you get rid of that, you’re okay.”

Rick: Right, so you’re not saying either of those.

John: No, those things are all normal activities within human life that can be useful or not useful depending on the idiosyncratic nature of the human being that takes them up and so forth. But they are no different from any other domain within the human experience in which humans interact and try to find pleasure or satisfaction or whatever they try to find.

Rick: Right, in other words, they have their value in their own realm of sphere of influence.

John: Right, their own realm. Now, and it’s the same with everything else. I don’t think that the problem is the insane political situation in the world. I think all of these things, all of them, are symptoms of the actual cause of the problem, the actual problem, which is the separation from life, the sense of separation from my own life.

Rick: Yeah, that sounds good. So in other words, you’re saying that all the various problems, whatever they may be, ultimately could be boiled down to this one essential problem, if you want to call it that, which is separation from one’s own life.

John: One of the things that makes this insight powerful is the fact that it actually does pretty much explain everything. It really does. So what to do about that? Okay, well, what I have found, what Carla and I have discovered, and quite to our surprise, actually, as I tried to indicate in the beginning of this, we really didn’t think there was anything going to come of any of this. We were trying to do the best we could, just like everybody else, we were doing the best we could. We were doing what came to hand and trying to do it, to do as little damage as we possibly could, and actually try to get to a point where we were useful to people. But I don’t think either one of us ever really thought that what would happen would be what has actually happened, which is that we have actually discovered an astonishing actuality.

Rick: Okay.

John: Actual actuality.

Rick: Astonishing thing.

John: That I could probably come up with suggestions as to why it works and so forth. I have theories about it, but they’re beside the point. There are no consequences. We have discovered that, and this is now borne out by the experience of many people, to our surprise, we have discovered that if anyone, so far as we can tell, will just make an actual, concerted, sincere effort to get the direct experience of the reality of their nature. And what I mean by that, and as I say that phrase, it triggers a whole spiritual thing there.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, I think, okay, one’s ultimate pure consciousness, you know, that kind of thing.

John: That’s what I’m talking about.

Rick: Because ultimately, my upbringing is that’s the reality of our nature ultimately. I mean, there are many layers of more manifest aspects of our personality, but when you get right down to the essence of it, that’s what we all are. At least that’s the way, you know, but I’m open to whatever it is you have to say that may differ from that.

John: And what I mean when I say make an honest, just one honest, concerted effort to get that actual taste of the reality of their nature, is to get the actual taste of what it feels like to be you, which is not the same thing. I’m asking everybody to see if they cannot…

Rick: Not the same thing as what?

John: As the reality of your nature.

Rick: Okay.

John: It is more in keeping with Ramana’s report of the first force of personality.

Rick: So you’re not speaking of the reality of one’s nature in a transcendental sense, you’re speaking of it more in terms of just nitty-gritty, visceral, right now, what it feels like to be you.

John: To be me, right. And I further try to make clear what I’m talking about by calling it by such things as the personhood of you.

Rick: Right.

John: What a person feels like. What does it feel like, person? What does it feel like to be you?

Rick: Now, are you alluding to something a little deeper though, than just like, you know, I mean the reality of what it feels like to be you when you have the flu is going to be different than what it feels like when you’re healthy. No, no, that’s not what I’m talking about.

Okay, what are you talking about?

John: I’m talking about you are here. There’s no question about that.

Rick: Right. You have always been here, so far as you can tell. There has never been a time in your life when you have been absent, never. You are here.

Well, unless I was asleep or something, right?

John: Well, that’s debatable.

Rick: But when I wake up, there I am again.

John: There you are again, right. And there is, by the way, even in deep sleep, there is a sense when you’re awake that time has passed.

Rick: Right.

John: Which indicates to me that you are there. Otherwise, you would be like a fast cut in a movie. Right. So, the you I speak of has always been here, never absent. It feels like you. It doesn’t feel like anything else. It feels like you. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t come and go. It’s you. And I know that those terms all have been diverted into other philosophical and spiritual things.

Rick: I think that maybe that’s the same thing that they’re talking about. You’re just using different words for it.

John: I think they’re talking about the same thing. But I think that there is a vast separation between the abstract, conceptualized idea of something that is never moving, always present, unchanging, and the natural devolving of that into the thing that you were talking about earlier.

Rick: Right.

John: There’s a vast difference between that, and I don’t think that the understanding of the people who talk in those terms has seen the fact that what they’re talking about is their own personness, their own person. What they’re talking about, I think, because I used to talk the same way, what they’re talking about, I think, is all of the acquired understandings pertaining to that experience of you.

Rick: So you’re saying there’s a vast separation between that as a concept, which one could prattle on about endlessly, and the direct living experience of it, or reality of it, now. Well, I think whether or not there’s a separation depends upon the state of that person’s experience. I think for some people it is totally conceptual, and for others they’re speaking from what they’re experiencing, what they’re living. Don’t you think?

John: I want to apologize for saying that I think I know what other people are saying, because I really don’t know what other people are saying. What I know is the effect of those sayings on the people that they speak to. And I know from my own experience as being one of them, as well as my continuing experience with people who report back to me about these things, that that’s the way they’re received. That is the way they are received, as a concept, as something that is not me, something that I have to find, something I have to understand, that has nothing whatsoever to do with me, and in fact, the likelihood is the existence of the me-ness of me is in the way of that.

Rick: So are you saying that, for instance, somebody like Eckhart Tolle, who’s a popular person, everybody knows him, everyone’s read his books, he is speaking in concepts, which is the only way we can speak, I mean, you and I are speaking in concepts right now, but he’s speaking on the basis of a genuine realization or awakening that he’s had, and he’s trying to convey a sense of that to his listeners. And what you’re saying is, you’re doing more than just speaking in concepts and describing a state of some sort, you’re saying, “Here’s a nuts and bolts practical thing you can do, whoever you are, to actually have this become experiential rather than conceptual.” Is that a fair assessment?

John: Close. What I’m saying is that… That’s close enough. What I’m saying is that there is an act that you can perform.

Rick: Yes, yes, a technique as it were.

John: This is a simple act, one act. It’s not like a conglomeration of actions and so forth, and understanding of them, it’s one act that anybody can perform, and what I am claiming, and I will claim it to you, is that anybody who performs, who takes on the task of trying to perform this act, will, so far as I can tell so far, pretty much without exception, rid themselves of the cause of the misery in their life.

Rick: Yeah, and that one act is seeing what it is to be you. You say it better.

John: It is to get a direct taste of what it feels like to be you.

Rick: Right.

John: Now maybe I can get it a little clearer about what I’m talking about there by saying some of the ways in which that act can be performed, in which it can be developed and performed.

Rick: Yeah, good.

John: For example, you are here, you know that, right?

Rick: Yes.

John: There is no question about that. There is never any question about that.

Rick: Right.

John: Never. And it has nothing to do with the fact of your body. You could be in Gitmo somewhere, and being hallucinogenic drugs and so forth, and none of this is actually happening in the venue that you think it’s happening in. But, so that you are certain of your existence, in a way that you are certain of nothing else. You are certain of your existence in a way that you are not certain of your body, not certain of your position, not certain of your human body, human species even. You are certain that you exist in a way that you are certain of nothing else.

Rick: Yeah, and that existence is sort of rock-solid continuum, and you know, despite whatever changes may be taking place.

John: Right, but we don’t have to go there, right?

Rick: No, but that’s the experience.

John: Yes, that’s right. That’s you. That certainty is you.

Rick: Right.

John: So if you get a taste of what that certainty feels like, before the discussion of it and so forth, you are in direct, immediate contact with the reality of your own nature.

Rick: Yeah.

John: Okay, that’s one thing. Another thing is to just see what it feels like to be here. What is here? What does here refer to? It refers to you. So that if you seek the direct experience of here, you will find you, whether you know it’s you or not. And this is the really interesting part. I’ll get to that in a minute. Another thing that I’ve found that quite a few people have actually reported back, we have a lot of, we have forums on our website where people report the things that are happening to them, and they are just now becoming quite active. It’s only since November that I really have gone all out to try to communicate this to people, because it’s only since November that I really have rid myself of a lot of the stuff that got in the way.

Rick: Okay.

John: But one of the things that people have found useful is that if you can, and this is a strange thing, if you can call to mind some experience in your past, maybe in your childhood, it doesn’t have to be anything big or important, or in fact it’s probably best if it’s not, just some actual memory of you doing something as a child. Like I call people’s attention to something that was like that for me when I came out of a movie in the afternoon when I was about eight years old, out of the absorption into a movie called Winchester ’73, into the bright sunshine of the ordinary day. I remember what it felt like then. I remember that experience. And if you could do that, you’ll find that if you just look for a moment, you will see what it felt like to be you then, not the stuff that was happening, but the actual feeling of you then.

Rick: Yeah.

John: The same as you now.

Rick: I’ve actually done that. Even before I heard you say that, I’ve often done that, where I’ve remembered something that happened decades ago, and there’s a you-ness there.

John: Yes, right. It’s the same as it is now.

Rick: Which is the same you-ness as now.

John: Right. Now, so if you do that, and it seems also that intent has a lot to do with it, that to do that with the intent of actually getting a taste of the you-ness of you is the critical element. Also, it’s important to see that that taste is not the solution. It’s not like, “Oh, now I know what I am, and everything’s cleared up.” It’s not that at all.

Rick: Yeah, all done. Right.

John: That taste is not the solution to the problem. The problem is a sense of separation from life. But that taste will, if it’s done with the intent of having that taste, will, so far without fail, snuff out the fear of life.

Rick: Over time.

John: It’s hard to say.

Rick: I mean, you’re saying it sort of grows or matures or something.

John: You have to see something here, and that is that the fear of life in us as adults is not a big thing. We have a lot of experience with the fact that we are not snuffed out every time we think we’re going to be snuffed out, so we’ve become a little bit blasé about it. It’s a small little murmur that isn’t always even noticeable. See, it’s not the fear of life that’s the problem. That’s a small little–you can notice it sometimes. You’ll feel a little anxious or some kind of existential angst and things of that nature. But most of the time it goes unnoticed. So it’s not the fear of life that’s the problem, except that it is the energy that drives the problem. It is the sense of separation from life that that produced in the moment of your birth. So the first thing is to rid ourselves of that false fear, and that’s done simply by looking at you. That happens. Whether it happens immediate or not immediate, I have no way of knowing. I know that I used to tell people, and still do, that you should do this whenever it occurs to you to do so. You shouldn’t try to make a career out of it. You shouldn’t abandon all your other stuff. Just whenever it occurs to you to do so, see if you can, turn the beam of your attention inward and get a taste of what you feel like.

Rick: I’ve had people sometimes say, with things like this, like if you’re in a job where you have to make a lot of phone calls, every time you have to make one, just for a moment before you dial the phone, do that, and then make your call. Or every time you brush your teeth, or every time you do some routine thing, build it into your schedule.

John: Exactly. I thought so at the time, and I’ve since pretty much come to the conclusion that the first look is what counts, and that the first look causes, and people report back, “Oh, now I find myself doing it in traffic. I find myself…” It only takes that.

Rick: It becomes a habit, sort of.

John: A tenth of a second. I think that the first look is what counts, and that it triggers that returning, that continual returning to that taste over time.

Rick: Yeah. You know, another thing I found is that sometimes certain traumatic experiences or challenging experiences throw that into contrast more. Like, you know, falling off my bicycle one time about ten years ago, and it was kind of almost with bemusement that I noticed that that continuum of me was just silently there while hitting my head on the pavement and skinning my arm, and all, or running through a busy airport with all the noise and craziness, and yet there’s that silent foundation just kind of like not being changed or challenged by all the chaos of the airport. Things like that. It comes more into contrast than I’m just sitting…

John: And it feels like you.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. It’s not maybe not so noticeable sometimes if I’m just sitting in front of my computer for hours on end doing something, but when there’s something a bit more contrasting then more obvious.

John: And another thing about it is, and first I want to stress the intentional part.

Rick: Intentional? Intention.

John: Yes, yes. Intention seems to be critical. The other thing that people have consistently confirmed, and that is useful to know just because it might ease the mind somewhat, is that you can’t stay there. The actual contact with that, even for some people you might not even have a recognizable experience of having had the direct contact with the reality of your nature. You know, it’s too uninteresting to attention. There’s nothing about you that calls attention to yourself. Nothing. You don’t do anything. You don’t change. You’re the background of everything.

Rick: Well, it’s not really the purpose or function of attention to keep itself on that, is it? I mean, it’s the purpose of attention to engage in speech and eat food and all the other things we attend to.

John: And keep an eye on this life, lest it swallow me up.

Rick: But I mean, that’s what attention is designed to do.

John: That’s right.

Rick: And that’s what the senses are designed to do.

John: Exactly. So it’s an unnatural act. It really is. I say that a lot. This is an unnatural act. It’s not something that comes naturally, except sometimes it does. And you may not even know that you’ve accomplished it. If you keep doing it, then you’ve accomplished it. That’s the sense that that’s how you know that it’s happened.

Rick: Yeah.

John: Now, I think that the fear of life probably goes pretty quickly, because it’s not a big thing anyway now. It was big when it set the stage, but it’s not big now. I think it probably goes pretty quickly. What takes time, which is what I’m calling the course of recovery from this disease, it’s like an autoimmune disease, that what takes time is the restructuring, the reconfiguration of the apparatus of persona, the apparatus of personality, the whole set of assumptions and understandings and relationships and so forth that have built up over your entire life. It takes time for that to reconstruct itself.

Rick: Yeah, and probably also the neurophysiological component of that.

John: Probably so, yeah. And that period can be long or short. I’ve known it. For some people, it doesn’t take very long. For some people, it takes a long time and is actually fraught with quite unpleasantness. Like, there can be a period where the craziness gets worse.

Rick: Yeah.

John: And I think it’s just because things are deconstructing.

Rick: Yeah, there’s sort of a purging taking place.

John: Right, exactly.

Rick: Yeah, or reshuffling.

John: But then, whether it takes a day or a year or like that, I think my experience probably was the longest, but two or three years for some. No matter how long it takes, the end is certain. And in the end, what happens is quite simple, is that you just notice the fact that you are engaged and intimately involved with your life in a way that was previously unknown and impossible. That there actually is no gap whatsoever between you and your life. Your life being this entire magnificent display of existence that is coming and going and being understood or not understood and so forth and so on. It’s not that the life then gets transcended or transformed or cleaned of all ignorance. It’s that the life with all of its wonder, its wildness, which is the life is exactly the endless unfolding and evolution of existence itself. The life is no longer threatening to you.

“The life is no longer threatening to you.”

Rick: Right.

John: It is an adventure and a wonder. It’s not a threat in any way, shape or form.

Rick: And that sounds like non-duality to me, at least a good definition of it, which harkens back to that Upanishad quote of “Certainly all fear is born of duality.” I mean, if you and your life are no longer at odds with one another, if there is a harmony or a unity between them, then duality has been overcome and fear has been eliminated.

John: Well, except that, you see, and I don’t want to quibble about these things, but there’s some…

Rick: I’m not stating that as an absolute certainty. I’m just throwing it out as a way of saying it.

John: There are some distinctions that I think need to be made, because the fact is that the sense of separation doesn’t disappear. The sense of myself as a separate individual doesn’t disappear. If it disappeared, I would be going back to sleep. To me, the desire for an elimination of the sense of me as a separate individual is a desire to return to the womb. It’s a desire to go back to sleep. Awakeness is life fully experienced. So it’s not the… And whether, you know, the whole metaphysical discussion about the actual nature of existence and so forth can be taken up with great enjoyments and the like. But it’s not that this looking eliminates the sense of separation. It eliminates the sense of separation of me and my life. Just that one.

Rick: What about all the people who say that the sense of a separate individual has disappeared? I mean, what are they going through? What are they experiencing?

John: Well, I think they’re experiencing what I experienced during that year of enlightenment.

Rick: So you think they’re going to lose it?

John: It’s a state.

Rick: It’s a stage?

John: A state, yes.

Rick: A state? So all these people… I mean, didn’t even Ramana say that he didn’t have…

John: No, he never said that. He never, ever said that.

Rick: Papaji, Gangaji, any of these characters, I mean, do they talk that way?

John: Many people do. I don’t know. I’ll tell you, to me there’s two examples of teachers who have gotten really, really close to reality. And in both cases, they had no particular spiritual practice and didn’t have any real background of gaining understanding and expectations about what states would ensue as a result of success and things of that nature. And one is Ramana, which is obvious, and the other is Nisargadatta, whose teacher died. He told him to hold on to the “I am” and then died. And that was it.

Rick: He said, “I just believed my teacher and just did it, and in three years I was done.”

John: That’s right. And I think that it’s also possible for… I don’t know. I can’t speak about other people, but I do think that here’s the telling way to tell a state. If it was not here and it is here, it’s a state passing through. If there was a time when it wasn’t here… And by the way, this is also straight from Papaji. If there’s a time when it wasn’t here and now it is here, it’s a state, and it will depart. You are never absent. That’s the case. That’s simply the case. So, when I hear people proclaiming the fact that they have no sense of separate self, I just wish them well. And I don’t think they’re hurting anybody. I don’t think they’re hurting themselves, but I suspect that… I don’t want to wish ill on anybody.

Rick: No, you’re not wishing ill, but what you’re saying is that it’s a state and that they may have a rude awakening one day where they no longer have that sense of no self, as you did.

John: That’s right. And also, even those who have attained high states of spiritual accomplishment, even those who have attained those high states of spiritual accomplishment, since they are states and they have not gotten to the root of the problem, since that is the case, then the minds of those people are just as affected as the minds of anybody else in denying the fact that the state that previously held them in such thrall has now departed.

Rick: Well, I won’t try to argue on their behalf, although I imagine that a lively discussion will ensue on my site once this is posted. But, you know, I just have a little healthy skepticism about everything. And just because, to me, just because a person … and terminology is limited, but just because one has arrived at a point where there is pretty much no sense of a personal self, and it seems that everything is just going on by virtue of the “gunas” of nature, as the Gita puts it, and one was not always in that state of realization, doesn’t mean that it is necessarily a state which will come and go. I mean, whatever enlightenment may be, in terms of genuine enlightenment, not sort of states of experience, the flashy things that we gain and lose, traditionally it is something that one awakens to at some stage. The Buddha, for instance, under the Bodhi tree at some point, gained enlightenment. And just the fact that he hadn’t been in that state prior to that point doesn’t mean it was a state that he then lost five years later. There was a shift that took place which persisted.

John: See, I think that the reports about the Buddha, when I read about the Buddha, you know, for one thing you have to understand that nothing whatsoever was written about the Buddha until 500 years after he died.

Rick: Yeah, same with Christ, a couple hundred years.

John: There is no contemporary accounts whatsoever about the Buddha. That’s why all of the teachings within Buddhism begin with “Thus have I heard.” I heard from this guy that this is the case, and the guy before him says, “I heard from this guy that this is the case.”

Rick: Right, it’s like the old party game of, you know, whispering in somebody’s ear and it goes around the room and comes back to you totally different.

John: So I think that just from a practical standpoint, trying to find some confirmation or lack of confirmation in stories about the Buddha is not very helpful.

Rick: Well, we could take contemporary stories. I mean, there are contemporary teachers who have been at it for quite a while, some of whom speak in the ways we’ve just been alluding to, you know, having kind of lost the locked-in sense of personal identity that once dominated their life, and who seem to be cruising along and they haven’t lost it again. But you know, I will add one thing, which is that, maybe this helps to resolve the conundrum, and that is that, at least to me, it seems that there has to be at least some flavor of personal identity, otherwise you couldn’t function. That’s right. In Sanskrit they call it “leisha-vidya,” which means “faint remains of ignorance,” meaning there has to be some greasy surface on the palm of your hand after you’ve thrown off the butter ball that remains, that analogy is used. Otherwise you couldn’t walk through the door or distinguish your mouth from your forehead when you tried to eat.

John: That’s right, and of course, to me, I celebrate that. It’s not the greasy leftover residue, it’s the point of the whole thing.

Rick: Yeah, that’s where the joy is.

John: That’s where the joy is. Yes, exactly. That is the awakening, and we have misunderstood it. But here’s the main thing about all of that, is that I have no interest in dissuading people about other people’s teachings or other people’s states. I really don’t. I really don’t think that that’s of any value to anybody. It’s of no value to me to take on Eckhart Tolle and say, “Oh, I think this about Eckhart Tolle, I think that about Eckhart Tolle.” The truth is, I have no thoughts about Eckhart Tolle. That’s the truth.

Rick: I’m just using him as a case in point for this whole thing.

John: Right, right, but I don’t think about any of them anymore.

Rick: Okay.

John: Okay? So, and so that from my point of view, that is all beside the point. That’s just the case. Whatever the case is, we may not know what the case is, but whatever the case is, that’s just the case. And the case also is that none of that has been of very much help to anybody in the real world of being a human being, and getting from day to day as a human being. That’s the real case, too.

Rick: Yeah.

John: So, I do not ever want anybody to think that I am telling them that any other teacher is wrong, or right.

Rick: Not wrong, but you just said in the last sentence that none of it has ever been of any great help.

John: That’s true. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong. That doesn’t mean they’re ill-intended.

Rick: It makes it sound like they’re a waste of time, though.

John: They are a waste of time. But so is watching television.

Rick: Yeah.

John: You know, so is riding a bicycle. I mean, everything eats up time, and the way people choose to spend their time has nothing whatsoever to do with the source of their problem as a human being.

Rick: Well, there may be a lot of people listening to this who are thinking right now, “Wait, but wait a minute. You know, I’ve been doing X, Y, Z. I’ve been doing this meditation or that practice, or following this teacher, or whatever. It hasn’t been a waste of my time. My life has changed so much since then. I’m such a better person. I’m so much happier.” Yada, yada.

John: I picked up the “waste of time” from your phrase. What I mean is that everything uses time. That’s all we’ve got. Really, that’s our only asset here, is time, and it’s endlessly trickling away, and we expend it on whatever we expend it on. That’s perfectly okay.

Rick: And different things bear different fruits, or not.

John: Or not, yeah, but that’s perfectly okay. Some things I do, like Carla, for example, has become a genius at backyard gardening, and she invests a lot of time in taking care of the raised beds with the tomatoes and the corn. I mean, it’s really a magnificent thing that she’s doing out there. I can see it out there in my backyard.

Rick: I’m sure she loves it, and you like eating the tomatoes and the corn.

John: I do indeed, but she’s expending time on that, and the fruit of that for us is the satisfaction she gets from it, and also the food we get to eat from it. Other people spend their time on investigating spiritual texts and spiritual understandings and things of that nature. I’ve lost all interest in it, but that doesn’t mean everybody’s going to lose interest in it.

Rick: Nor should they. I mean, people do what they do.

John: Yeah, they should not do it, nor not do it. It’s just beside the point.

Rick: Yeah, well, as the Gita, I’m quoting the Gita a lot for some reason, it says, “Creatures follow their own nature. What can restraint accomplish?”

John: You know, the thing about the gunas and all of that, that’s all a quite clear explication of the way things seem to be. Things just are. They unfold in an ocean of cause and effect, the actual particulars of which are hidden from everything. Nobody can know how anything came to be. That’s really the case.

Rick: Karma is unfathomable.

John: Yes, it is. It’s the beauty of it. So, what I’m talking about here is not, “Oh, stop going to spiritual teachers,” or, “Don’t read a spiritual book,”

Rick: or, “Don’t meditate,” or, “Don’t do whatever you’re doing.” You’re just throwing something new into the mix, which you feel has been missing.

John: I’m asking you to perform this one act. It’s an act. It’s not an understanding, it’s not an insight, it’s an act.

The act of looking inward

Rick: How does this act of yours differ from meditation, let’s say, where you are intentionally sitting down and turning your attention inwards? How does it distinguish it from that?

John: When you turn your attention inward, what’s your purpose?

Rick: To get in touch with the Self, with who you are, essentially. To allow the clutter that tends to overshadow that.

John: But what’s the purpose of that? What do you get out of that?

Rick: Ultimately, the purpose is to realize that in a more permanent way, and to have your life enriched by that realization. At least, that’s how I would see it.

John: And see, that doesn’t make any sense to me, since the fact is that you are never not aware of yourself. That’s already the case.

Rick: But it’s a matter of degree, isn’t it? I mean, sometimes it could just be a tiny flickering flame, or it could be a roaring bonfire, depending upon how overshadowed it is, or how enlivened it is.

John: There’s nothing about you that resembles a roaring bonfire.

Rick: Well, metaphoric.

John: Right, because you see that the fact that you resort to metaphor, and to that metaphor is telling as to what you expect from what you’re doing within and without God.

Rick: Well, let me put it this way. Let me take an example. Let’s say a heroin addict. He’s been on a course of trying to blot out his awareness as much as possible, because life is painful to him or whatever, so he stays in a stupor as much as possible. Now compare the degree to which someone like that is aware of himself or aware of consciousness, or whatever term you want to use, to someone like Ramana, in whom it’s wide awake and very self-aware, very self-cognizant. Doesn’t that extreme example indicate that there is a whole spectrum of gradations of the degree to which one is aware of oneself, and that that awareness can be enhanced or heightened? And isn’t your very teaching that you’re teaching a method of trying to accomplish just that?

John: No, no, no, it’s not. I’m not trying to accomplish that at all. That is just the case. And the fact is that once the looking does its work, then the fact that you are always aware of yourself is obvious. It doesn’t have any special significance; it’s just the case. It’s like the white paper that this type is written on. We pay close attention to the letters and the meaning of the words that they form, and we are deeply interested in the content of it and what it says, but there could be no such thing as the meaning and content and so forth as the black text were it not on the white paper, and we never notice the white paper. We’re always aware of it.

Rick: But we never just brought our attention to it.

John: Right, but we never notice it. We’re not interested in it; it’s of no consequence to us. Well, it’s the same with the experience of me. I am not interested in the experience of me. The fact that I am aware always that the experience of me has actually done me no good in this whole life, it has no significance whatsoever that I am aware of me. The fact that after the looking has done its job and the course of recovery is finished, I am always aware of the fact that this white paper of the me here has no significance either. It doesn’t add or subtract anything to the text, to the text of existence that’s playing out on it.

Rick: But the fear is gone, the suffering is gone.

John: The fear and the relationship to life of separation and anguish is gone.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s why you’re so enthusiastic about promoting this, because you want to help people rid themselves of that fear and anguish.

John: Yes, I do.

Rick: So are you saying that self-awareness is kind of like an on/off switch rather than a rheostat? In other words, either it’s there or it’s not, but it’s not ever there by degrees, more of it or less of it, it’s either it’s there or it’s not, on or off, black and white.

John: Yes, and that’s because you – and I really resist using the word “self” because it is so contaminated.

Rick: Okay, it’s like using “God” or something.

John: Yeah, right, exactly. You, the person you, are … you’re just here.

Rick: You are what you are, you’re not going to be more or less.

John: You can never change. You can’t be less you, you can’t be more you, there’s no enhancement that you can bring to you. What you can do is rid yourself of that which stands in your way of enjoying, of being filled with the wonder and magnificence of this incomprehensible arising of existence.

Rick: Well, I totally agree with that, but to my mind, that which stands in the way can be just standing in the way a teeny tiny bit, or it can be a big massive thing, a cloud that’s blocking the sun. And so, as you yourself said, you start this practice of being aware of you, and it may take years for it to all sort of work itself out, and as that working out takes place, isn’t there a sort of a progressive clarification or stability or something of that appreciation?

John: Oh, sure, life gets better, yeah, immediately begins to get better. Even though there are periods of feverishness and confusion, life immediately begins to get better, there’s no question about it. But that’s not due to the fact that you are aware of your presence here. That is not what makes life better. That’s always the case already.

Rick: You’re being aware of your presence.

John: Right. What is the cause of that growing satisfaction and contentment and sanity is the closing of the gap between you and your life, and the consequent restructuring of the apparatus by means of which you experience your life and express yourself in your life. That’s what the gradual thing is. The problem is that gap. The gap is closed, and since you have always – and you can see this to be the case – you have always been aware of your presence here. There’s not a moment that passes that you’re not aware of your presence here, you just don’t notice it. It cannot be that awareness that causes the shift, that causes the change in the relationship. One way of speaking about it, and I wouldn’t even call this a theory, I’d call it more of a hypothesis, is that that beam of attention, the thing by which you notice things, as you pointed out, that beam of attention has come into being with a specific purpose, and that is to look at things in the world as they come upon you, to identify the things that are good, to identify the things that are bad, to identify the things that you can be indifferent to, to identify the things you want, and all that. That’s what that beam of attention is for. Now, the fundamental point of view of that beam of attention is the point of view that sees life to be a threat. So, the fundamental purpose of that beam of attention in a life that is distorted by the fear of life, the fundamental purpose is to protect you from life and to look out for the things that will save you from life. When you turn it to touch, that which it is actually protecting, it seems to be just like a match coming to water, and the absolute absurdity of it, and not in a way that translates into an understanding in the conscious mind, but the patent absurdity of it just does away with it. You’ve brought the thing that is trying to protect you in contact with the reality that there is no need for any protection whatsoever.

Rick: Another verse from the Gita just came to mind, which is, “A little of this Dharma removes great fear.” And if we apply that to what you’re saying, you’re just saying, “Just one little taste of this 180 degree shift of attention to what it’s like to be you can work wonders, can really remove a lot of fear.”

John: Yes, and it actually seems to be pretty much infallible so far. You should see some of the reports of people, and these are not reports of people who have lost self-consciousness and are swimming in the ocean of bliss or clarity or anything of the kind. Life is just what it is. Life is confusing, contradictory, unreliable, filled with problems, filled with clarity and problems and confusion and satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Life remains as it is, endlessly changing, endlessly presenting these phenomenal arisings, but your relationship is no longer predicated on the idea that it’s the fact that it contains problems, the fact that it is incomprehensible, the fact that it’s unreliable, the fact that it is un-understandable, and so forth and so on. You’re no longer afflicted with the idea that that is a threat to you. That’s a feature, not a threat.

Rick: Yeah. I’m throwing out a lot of metaphors today, but another one comes to mind is in a pitch black room, even a little match that gets lit, or even a little candle lights up the room quite significantly, you know?

John: And you see, I can see too, and I’ve seen over time, although I don’t talk about it because I don’t find it helpful to people, I see too how the teachings themselves, the ancient wisdom teachings themselves, and not only those from India. You know that there was a period about 5,000 years ago when all over the world human beings began to look inward, looking for some kind of, what they called inward, it’s really the interior, but looking for some kind of solution. You know, in Greece and in China and pretty much all over the world that shift occurred at more or less the same time. But I see in all of them, all of them, that they resonate entirely with this that I am bringing to people.

Rick: Yeah.

John: It’s really clear to me. In religion also, you know, I have a guy who is involved with this now who has actually been through it all. He has been an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. He has taken, he has been a practitioner of mystical Sufi, mystical Islamic Sufism. He has been a direct disciple of the Dalai Lama, and a whole range, a really remarkable range of experience for anybody in the search for a solution to the fundamental problem of the life. And he has written to me, just recently wrote to me, about how he sees this to be the core, the heart, of all religious and spiritual teachings whatsoever. And I think that’s true.

Rick: Well I don’t disagree with that actually, based upon everything I’ve gleaned from listening to you, both today and over the past week. In fact, I was a little puzzled a bit, because on the one hand you seem to be kind of saying, “Well this is a breakthrough, this is a new thing.” On the other hand, I kind of kept feeling like, “Well this sounds very familiar, I mean it sounds like what they’ve all been saying forever.”

John: It is a breakthrough, but that doesn’t imply that we have not ever been on the right track. We’ve been on the right track all along, just in the wrong direction, just looking for the wrong thing. And it is the case that sincere and devoted and dedicated people throughout all of our history have found ways to perceive something true about the nature of reality and our relationship to it. And it is as we said in the beginning of this, there are a small handful of people over the thousands of years that we’ve been involved in this project, there are a small handful of people who clearly have authentically stumbled upon reality, really clearly. And it’s obvious not from the transmissibility of it, but it’s obvious to me because of the way in which they speak of it, now I see to be, you know when you see it from this side, when you see those teachings and so forth from this side, it’s a whole different thing. It’s not a big deal, it’s just the case that they’re talking about. And trying hard to talk about it in a way that will be helpful to us. So it’s not in any way that I am saying that this is a repudiation of all that’s gone before, it’s the fulfillment of what’s gone before.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s a fresh, you know, as they say, “Only a new seed can yield a new crop,” it’s sort of a fresh presentation of something that you feel has been missing from the spiritual marketplace, so to speak, and which you’re seeing in your direct experience is proving to be of great value for people who give it a try. Fair enough, right?

That’s fair enough, and even more than that, I see that to be the case so much that we have embarked upon a kind of a movement. This thing is so simple, you see. It’s my sense, and I have experience with this, it’s not just made up. It’s my sense that when someone hears it, if they can hear it cleanly, the suggestion cleanly, and I don’t mean spiritual people. In fact, spiritual people probably have more difficulty than, you know, Joe Sixpack on the street.

Yeah.

John: But if they can just hear this clearly enough, just one time, they can’t help but try it. I mean, it’s not hard, it’s not anything they have to pay for, they don’t have to become a monk, they don’t have to go into years of training and rigorous practice and so forth. All they have to do is look at themselves, just once.

Rick: Yeah.

John: And my sense is that anybody who hears that cleanly can’t help but try it, and if they try it, they will succeed.

Rick: Well, I hope you’ve … I’m sorry, go ahead.

John: And our intent now is to actually build a movement in which this simple suggestion can be brought to the ears of a large enough body of humanity. I’ve set the amount at 20%. A large enough body of humanity, just the suggestion, can be brought to the ears, just to the ears, of a large enough body of humanity to comprise a kind of critical mass.

Rick: Yeah.

John: That will have the effect of reversing the direction of the development of the human species from one into greater realms of insanity and perhaps extinction, to return to sanity. It’s not like overnight, but we’ve got to reverse the direction we’re going in, and so that’s what we’re doing now.

Rick: Good. Well, I hope that this interview has helped. I can’t even promise you an entire percentage point towards your goal, but it’ll be something in the bucket anyway. Do you feel like you’ve had adequate opportunity to explain clearly what it is you would like people to hear, or have my questions been disruptive at all?

John: Well, your questions have been the questions that people in the spiritual realm bring up, so they are actually quite useful.

Rick: Good.

John: I just want to say one more time, so that I do get this said.

Rick: Yes, please.

John: This doesn’t take two hours to say.

Rick: Right.

John: If you will, try with all your heart, make whatever effort is necessary to try to bring the beam of your attention in direct contact with what it actually feels like to be you, not self, not awareness, not emptiness, not God, you. If you will try to do that, the problem that afflicts you, the problem that makes you think that there’s something you need that you don’t have, something that you’re doing wrong that you should be doing right, or anything of the kind, will, without fail, go away.

“If you will try to do that, the problem that afflicts you … will, without fail, go away.”

🛤️ Questions, clarification, and practical application

Rick: Beautiful. Well, I don’t think it could be stated any more clearly than that, but if people need clarification, you’ve got a website, they can get in touch with you, you do retreats once a year at least, and I understand from listening to you that you’re quite accessible, you know, people can phone you or Skype you or whatever.

John: We have online worldwide meetings a couple times a month on Saturdays, which people from all over the world join, and we have an open house most Wednesdays. I spend an hour with people who come and we have…

Rick: You mean physically in Ojai?

John: No, no, no, no, online.

Rick: Oh, okay, online.

John: This is every Wednesday, well, not every Wednesday, but most Wednesdays. And I talk to people in private conversations whenever somebody wants to, and they make arrangements with Carla and we set up a schedule, I’ll talk to anybody who wants to talk to me. It’s all free, nothing is charged.

Rick: You’re going to be in trouble once we get up to 20% of the world’s population, but for now, you’re accessible.

John: And it’s all free, we don’t charge any fees whatsoever.

Rick: Right.

John: We are grateful for donations, but we charge no fees of any kind.

Rick: Okay, well, let’s conclude. I think we’ve been going on pretty long here, but I just want to conclude by thanking you, first of all, for this conversation. I could easily go on another hour, I’m really enjoying talking to you, but there’s a practical limit to how long we can make these interviews. My wife says lunch is cold. But anyway, I thank you very much for engaging in this conversation with me and for tolerating my persnickety questions.

John: Oh, it’s a great pleasure, really, Rick. I’m really happy that we had this chance. Are you going to have my websites available for us?

Rick: Yes, I was just going to say that. So, on batgap.com, for instance, a person might be listening to this on YouTube, or they might be listening on a podcast, or somebody may have sent them the MP3 file or something, and so they don’t…but if they go to batgap.com, they’ll have a whole little thing, they’ll see your photo and your bio and links to your websites, and they’ll also see all the other interviews I’ve done and will do, they could sign up for an email newsletter, sign up for the podcast, and so on and so forth. So that’s all there at batgap.com.

John: And they can find us, everything we have, at riverganga.org.

Rick: Riverganga.org. Good. Okay, well thanks, John. I’ve been speaking with John Sherman, who lives in Ojai, California, and has lived a very interesting life, and I hope continues to live one for many years to come, because he’s got a great gift to give to the world.

John: Thank you, Rick.

Thank you.

Rick: Okay.