Hello everybody, this is John.
I am, as always, really grateful for your presence here.
So, welcome!
I have a couple of things I'd like to talk to you about today
that have to do with our journey over the years, with you.
Carla and I have spent the first 18 years of our marriage
in a long Odyssey from spiritual teachers of self-inquiry
to the discovery of Just One Look, which takes us to the actual heart of self-inquiry
and beyond, to the actual heart and self-reliant human life
free of all false fear.
Carla and I met in Boulder, Colorado in April of 1998
and married in San Rafael, California in June of 1999.
We were at the time both students of an American non-dual spiritual teacher
and we were both independently drawn to the teachings of Ramana Maharshi
and the practice of self-inquiry.
We had both followed Ramana's instruction
and we were both certain that we had succeeded in recognizing
the true feel of our actual presence in our own minds
and therefore we were convinced that we had succeeded in Ramana's movement of self-inquiry.
We also both suffered together through prolonged and difficult recoveries lasting many years.
Following our success with Ramana's method, we've spent the last 18 years
working to understand how it could be that such a simple and, for us, effective tool
as Ramana's self-inquiry has brought so little hope to people who need it most.
Ramana himself often remarked on the fact
that so few found actual help from him.
So we both are among those fortunate few and the results have, over time,
simplified and clarified our lives and brought us home to our own minds safe and sound.
This was long before we came to see the actual cause of human psychological misery
to be best understood as a kind of psychological autoimmune disease,
no different in kind of the need for recovery from any other autoimmune disease.
Our discovery of the fear of life to be the root cause of the disease
and of all purely psychological misery arising from it,
along with the practice of self-directed attention as the solution
not only to the long and lingering fear-driven confusion that follows the cure,
that took some years to find, understand, and put to use.
We cannot stress enough...
I cannot stress enough the value of the work of the hundreds of people in the forums
who have come together seeking understanding and help with their own cure and recovery from fear.
It is certain that without their questions and open conversation
among themselves and with us, many more years would have passed
before we could have come even close to the clarity and confidence they have given us.
Our only wish now is to find a way to bring just the simple suggestion to look at themselves
to all human beings who would be willing to look with their mind's eye
for the feel of your presence and, after having done that,
would be willing to begin gaining intelligent self-control over their own attention.
I want to make clear that you understand what I'm saying.
The work of understanding this great gift that has come to us,
the deep understanding of it, is pretty much over.
There certainly will be many things that we all learn together,
as the days, and months, and years pass along,
but the essential nature of our work is clear, and understandable, and true.
This has got to be brought to the world.
You know, Carla and I often notice
circumstances that come to us without
any reasonable understanding of how they do.
Things come to us, ideas come to us, help comes to us.
When we are really broke and desperate for money, money comes to us.
And we have come to the conviction that the world really wants this.
There's something about what we, together with you, have found here
that is missing the world of human endeavor; in the world of human misery;
in the world of human understanding of human being.
It would be so easy.
It would be really easy to do this,
to bring this to everybody. It's simple, it doesn't take any understanding at all,
except the understanding of what we are talking about when we ask them to look at themselves.
And if we had the money, and the volunteers,
especially volunteers skilled in web design, accounting, and mass media
who would be willing to work with us to find money, work with us to find ways of reaching a larger audience
with events and things of that nature...
If we had that, if we had that money, if we had those volunteers,
if we had the time, just the time, this could sweep throughout the world.
Truly, it's so obvious to us. Truly.
If you consider your own experience with this work, you will see for yourself
that once that first look was taken, whether you argued with it, believed in it, disbelieve in it,
no matter what your relationship was with it, you must know that once that was done,
things changed for you, without you having to understand what was happening at all.
The nature of your mind changed in you without you having to lift a finger to do anything about it.
Some of the things that occur in the outcome of this are difficult.
They're difficult, the recovery from this terrible disease that afflicts us all.
I mean, there might be a handful of people throughout the seven billion of us
that were lucky enough not to be infected by this disease, but most everybody in the world
has this same disease: the good ones, the bad ones, the politicians, the rich, the poor,
the murderers, the murdered, all working and relating to their own lives
from the unseen sense that life is dangerous.
That I have to find a way to protect myself.
That the most important thing is for me to find a way to get it
so that this terrible thing that I fear will not come to me.
All the murderers, all the torturers, all the horrible things that human beings managed to do to each other,
that we, human beings, have managed to do to each other...
All of these things are predicated on the sense that life is here that life is fearful,
that life is untrustworthy, that there's nothing I can do.
Most of the time when I have spoken to people, I have spoken to you in these meetings,
I have spoken about the ins and outs,
the ways in which to do things to help yourself.
Most of the things that I have talked about over the years have been singular.
Talking to you, just to you.
You should take this step; you should look at yourself; you should get control over your own mind,
get control over your own attention.
But we got to find a way to do this not one person at a time, but a bunch of people at a time.
That's our focus now.
So, give us some ideas; tell us how we can make this happen.
If you're skilled the skills that we need in order to be helpful, volunteer for that.
Be real, a real volunteer that works directly with us,
that works to help us and to...
And if you have money, if you are a rich person, or have plenty of money to spare,
give some of it to us. We are not going to spend it on stupid stuff.
We are not going to spend the money that you give to us on stuff that enhances our own experience of life.
We are accustomed now, after many, many, many years of basically poverty,
we're accustomed to living simply and without the need for a lot of personal money.
So, whatever you give us, it's going to go to where it needs to go.
Whatever work that you can provide us with is going to go to where it needs to go.
We have nothing else in our lives,
except the deep certainty that what we have stumbled upon here needs to get to the world.
So, that's most of what I had to say today.
We are done with the need for an understanding of the whole of what we're doing here.
We've got that, we understand now.
We see why the self-inquiry of Ramana Maharshi did not produce results
for most of the people who came to him.
We see now very clearly why all of the ancient spiritual teachings that are now blanketing
at least the country in which we live, America, the United States,
blanketing the world with
ideas that are not helpful.
ideas that are dependent upon miracles to happen.
No miracle is going to save anyone from the misery of fear.
There's no miracle that's going to come down and wipe fear off of anybody's mind.
The only way to get rid of the fear that is now driving the human species into...
God knows what terrible miseries are in on our doorstep now.
And the solution is in our hands.
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