| Article by John Sherman | 0 comments |
 1 Jul 2005 @ 21:02, by Raymond Powers "STOP" -- By John Sherman Let me give you the short version of my story, and what brings me here in this meeting with you this evening. I come to you in a life of abject failure and foolishness. I failed as a child; I was a miserable, self-centered, greedy, grasping, spoiled child. I failed as a student in school; I was thrown out of school in the tenth grade. I failed as a soldier and then as a machinist. I failed as a gambler, as a fraudulent credit card manipulator, as a check writer, as a revolutionary. And, finally, I failed at failure. In this life I have spent eighteen and a half years in federal prison. I have been in gun fights, bank robberies, property bombings, escapes - a couple of years on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list - and then, in 1994, when I had been in prison for about fourteen and a half years, I failed again. By that time I had gotten kind of accustomed to the fact that I had a failure as a life, and it was okay. I think I had come to terms with the fact that my life was a failure, and that there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. And then, in the most unbelievable, most amazing, most miraculous stroke of luck that is imaginable, Gangaji appeared in the prison in which I was spending time. And I failed at failure. In the meeting with Gangaji, the whole life was revealed to be redeemed. Now, for a while, I have been traveling around wherever people will sit still long enough to hear me, and speaking to them from my experience in this meeting with Gangaji. Everything I speak of is what I have discovered in this meeting with her. What I have discovered in listening to her, and following her guidance and instruction. Sometimes the things that I speak about are unrecognizable as having come from her, but that's mostly because it comes through this strange, bizarre and crooked form. What I have discovered in this meeting with Gangaji is that you are perfect. You are absolutely free. Now, in this moment, you are without problems. You are without suffering, without ignorance and without clarity. You are perfect, empty, openhearted consciousness, aware of itself as you. And everything whatsoever that we do with the purpose of finding fulfillment and satisfaction in these lives only postpones the moment when we can discover that there's absolutely nothing to get. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nothing to understand. Everything whatsoever that you have ever wanted, no matter what you might think you have wanted, you already have. Actually, it's less than that. You already are. It's so much closer than having. And all of the practices, all the philosophies, all of the teachings that we fall in love with and imagine will give us what we're looking for have no meaning. You are free. You are absolute, openhearted consciousness itself playing as you. Any discussion that we have as to what might be done to resolve whatever issues or problems or short-comings that you might imagine to be present, any discussion that we have to that end, also is an absolute waste of time. There's nothing for you to do. It really is this simple. There's nothing to get. There's nothing to understand. Therefore, stop trying. All of the great teachers, all of them, have told us the same thing. They have told us we are what we seek. And for the most part, what we say is something on the order of "Oh, I get it. It's you." And then we get busy trying to be what we imagine "you" to be like. This is so simple. Ramana made this startling assertion that I first read, and puzzled over, and was perplexed about, when I was in prison. Ramana said, "The only thing standing between you and Self-realization is the belief that you are not already fully realized." Now, just as you are. Nothing changed. Nothing fixed. Nothing straightened out. Nothing made to go away. Nothing made to come or stay. Just as you are. Unconditionally realized, perfection itself. Just as you are. And this is where it gets to the "tricky" part. Because we say, and I say, "Stop." Stop doing whatever you're doing to get what you think you need. And the tricky part is that there is absolutely no way to tell that any stopping has taken place. The activity goes on just as it always has. You didn't start it, you can't bring it to an end. The mind in its madness, in its conversation with itself, in its monitoring of its behavior, that too can very well continue. Playing. Meaning nothing. You didn't start that, you can't stop that. The negative emotions, the greediness, the lust, the grasping, the wanting…That too may never stop. It may play for the rest of this life. You didn't start that; you can't bring it to an end. The truth is, so far as I can tell, we didn't have anything to do with "leela," none of this play, none of this amazing manifestation. So far as I can tell, we arrive in these lives like plopped down into a virtual reality video game. We don't know what the rules are; we don't know who or what we are; we don't know what the object is; we don't know what pitfalls and obscurations may lay in our path. We have only this impetus, this energy to move, to do, to become, to figure it out, knowing all the time that there's something missing, something wrong. That there is some purpose for me being here, some object to this game. Click her to read Little by little as we go through life, we acquire a whole bunch of rules. Ideas as to what it's about, ideas as to what we should be, ideas as to what will bring us salvation. And we follow them, for good or ill, still not knowing even so much as who or what we are. The search is the suffering. The effort to get, the effort to understand, the effort to find what will fulfill us is the suffering. The movement is the misery. So stop. It's so simple. Stop. Whatever you're doing to get what you think you need…stop. Just as an experiment. Stop. Now. Right now. And see what's really needed. And that's pretty much all I ever have to say. You are free. You have always been free. You have always been at peace. And peace, and freedom, and love, are unconditional. And if they are unconditional, as we have been told, then anything we do to try to get them, to try to make ourselves acceptable to them, is foolishness. It's a frittering away of these really precious lives, a squandering of our attention on matters that have no meaning - which is everything whatsoever. So stop. Relax. Allow attention to fall back into its Source. And see, truly. What's needed here? What's needed now? What's missing? What do I have to get to be what I want to be? Am I willing in this moment to stop trying, to give it up? No escape. No possibility of getting anything. Then what? We embark on a spiritual path and this is actually a good thing, a good sign. A good development. Finally the search takes on its explicit object, which is freedom. Utter freedom, not phony freedom. Not freedom that feels like freedom, but FREEDOM. In a sense all the searches are spiritual searches, and when we enter the spiritual path, the search becomes overt, explicit. And the amazing thing about the spiritual path is that it explicitly and without any hesitation tells us that the purpose of the spiritual path is to be finished with the spiritual path. Everything we do in spiritual practice is to be finished with spiritual practice. That's the goal. Gangaji's invitation is to stop now. Why wait? What are you waiting for? What's not here now? . . . Ramana was very clear that what he offers is practical. It is not abstract, it is not some spiritual mumbo jumbo; it is the immediate, instantly available understanding by the mind, and by understanding I mean the realization, of who you are. It is your Self. And the purpose of this is not to answer it; the purpose of this investigation is merely to stop the mind's natural tendency to be outgoing and grasping, to be running around, whoring around among the objects that appear in consciousness, which is everything whatsoever, looking for some solution to the problem. It is to arrest that tendency by the mind and by whatever effort needed, by whatever effort possible, to turn the mind inward, into its Source. And to hold it there. . . . Truly, these lives live themselves. This is my experience. They live themselves with ease and spontaneity, an appropriateness that is very sweet. Our relationship to the way the life lives itself is all that causes the problem. The idea that appears that something is at stake in these lives is false. And it's possible, really possible, to stop in this instant, in this moment, to stop paying attention to thought and its content. To stop paying attention to matters that have no meaning. It's not possible to stop thought, it's not possible to stop the arising of emotion, good and bad, it's not possible to alter the course of the life in any major way, but it is possible to not attend to it. . . . There is nothing whatsoever that you can believe that will bring you peace or happiness. There is no belief structure, there is no teaching, there is no philosophy, there's nothing whatsoever that you can gain that will give you happiness, and satisfaction and peace. So what I have to offer doesn't have anything to do with some new explanation for the world, or some new idea of something you can believe, in order to get yourself out of whatever mess the life is now. The offering that I come to bring is the invitation to see for yourself what is always here. To see for yourself what is permanently present and needs nothing. And that is you. That's your Self, just as you are. There's nothing about you that needs fixing, there's nothing about you that can be fixed. There's nothing about you that needs changing, there's nothing about you that needs to be kept from changing. This recognition is truly an astonishing appearance in the world. This life has been passionately involved in trying to fix things, in trying to make things better, in trying to make a better person of myself. My teacher told me to stop. Not to stop thinking, not to stop the activities of the life, not to stop emotion, not to stop pain, not to stop pleasure, but just to stop caring about any of it. And in that, I discovered what I had always known. And what, so far as I can tell, everybody always knows. That is that peace is here. Unconditional peace, peace that doesn't require anything to be changed, or anything to be kept from changing. That freedom is your Self. Freedom that has absolutely nothing to do with your circumstances, absolutely nothing to do with prison bars, or wide-open spaces. It has nothing to do with the experience of freedom. Experience comes and goes in you. You never move. You have never changed. And you know this. There's nothing about you at the core - that which you refer to as "I" - that is any different in this moment than it was as a child. Or before childhood even. And you know this. You are absolutely untouched and unaffected by all the storms of the world, by all the storms of the neurotic conditioning of mind and the negative and positive emotions that come and go. You are free. And the only thing that stands in the way of the permanent recognition of that freedom is everything whatsoever that you do in order to know that you're free. The only thing that stands in the way of the recognition of the perfect peace that is your absolute nature is everything whatsoever that you do in order to gain peace. The only thing that stands in the way of your complete and absolute recognition of your eternal absolute, clear nature is everything you do in the name of coming to recognize your eternal nature. All that has to happen ever, in any life, is for all of that to stop. Just to stop. Just to be quiet. |