A Meeting with John Sherman in Ojai, California on July 14, 2007.
The meditation that I speak of is the very simple meditation practice that I received from the Buddhists, I think it is called Shamata meditation. And it is just a matter of watching your breath. You sit comfortably, close your eyes, and watch your breath as it comes in and out of your nostrils. What you are after is to get a one-pointed, attentive experience of this physical sensation.
In this episode, we talk about how we developed The Just One Look Method, and we explain how you can use our method to gain control of your attention and develop self-reliance.
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Identity: (1) The character or personality of an individual: unity and continuity of personality; (2) one’s perception of the sameness and persistence of one’s own individual personality: sense of self. (Merriam-Webster)
Before you begin reading this post, please Google the phrase “the search for identity”. You will be shown links to almost 43 million pages that approach the issue.
It would seem that identity, and the search for it, is the heart and soul of being human. If that’s the case, how can it be that such a critical component of being human is considered to be such a mystery by so many? What is identity, after all? Where is it to be found?
In this episode, John Sherman reveals the actual nature of Ramana Maharshi’s Self-Inquiry, which is to get a taste of what it feels like to be you, and he explains what that inward movement of attention accomplishes.
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In this episode, John Sherman speaks about how the practice of Self-Inquiry, when engaged in from a spiritual or magical thinking foundation, is crippled. Therefore, the best course to self-reliant human life is to simply look at yourself, your presence here, in the manner of Just One Look and follow with the practice of Self-Directed Attention.
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In this episode, John Sherman speaks about how nothing compares to a mind that is freed of the context of fear and then gains the ability to decide for itself what to believe and what not to believe based not on fear but on self-reliant understanding.
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Coming clean: “To admit something to someone.” McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
The root cause of all human psychological misery is the fear of life itself that strikes most of us at or near birth, and sets the context in which our psychology develops over time. It is useful to speak of the fear and its effects as a kind of psychological autoimmune disease that is subject to therapeutic intervention. There is no one to blame for our misery, least of all ourselves.
The simple act of looking at yourself with your mind’s eye will reliably destroy that context of fearfulness and its diseased psychological mechanisms. We have seen for ourselves that when that happens, the mind naturally begins to restore itself from a foundation of sanity and self-reliance.