Being Human: The John Sherman Podcast

Recovering from Fear In today's episode, John Sherman speaks about what you can do to make the period of recovery from the fear disease easier and shorter.

There is a fundamental difference in outlook and approach between what we offer and what you have been mostly told you need in the realm of spiritual aspiration. The fundamental difference is that what we offer is a simple act that makes everybody capable of finding what's true from themselves. We don't tell you what's true about the nature of reality, about the nature of existence, about what how you should be and what your real being is. We offer you a simple act that will make you self-reliant and able to investigate and explore for yourself what's true, what's real.

There is really no need to reconcile the looking with any other approach to human suffering. The looking is most effective when standing on the bare simplicity of the act itself without the complication of comparison. No harm can come from declining to complicate it. - John Sherman Excerpt from of a Meeting with John Sherman on December 13, 2014.

"If you do what I ask you to do, you will experience an end to the mental misery that is the common human condition. And freedom from that misery will not look like anything you may have expected." John Sherman Complete recording of a Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on September 20, 2014. Length: 1 h 7 min File size: 15.96 MB

"It's foolish to try to protect ourselves from the rest of the human community. We humans need a continuous relationship with one another. It is this give and take that strengthens and deepens our ability to live life consciously and skillfully." John Sherman Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on September 10, 2014. Length: 40 min File size: 9.56 MB

"The most accurate description of what has happened to me since I looked at myself about 20 years ago is that now I fully inhabit my life, as it unfolds. There is no distance between me and my life." John Sherman Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 23, 2014. Length: 36 min File size: 8.77 MB

"If you take a close, objective look at the behavior of human beings, you will find it hard not to conclude that humanity is -- that is to say, we are -- for the most part, insane. Sane human beings do not rape, murder, and torture each other; sane human beings do not devastate the habitat, seek wealth without regard for the common good, or seek to dominate or demonize other human beings." John Sherman Complete recording of an Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 19, 2014. Length: 1 h 9 min File size: 16.61 MB

"The purpose of moving attention away from an unpleasant sensation (and the thoughts about it) and focusing it on your breath is not to find a way to go into denial and relieve yourself of the unpleasantness of it. The appearance of that sensation--and the fact that attention has moved to it--is an opportunity for you to continue to develop the ability to decide consciously what you pay attention to." John Sherman Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 9, 2014. Length: 30 min File size: 13.8 MB

"Having looked at yourself, the best thing to do is to begin to strengthen your capacity to decide consciously where you put your attention." John Sherman Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on June 18, 2014. Length: 31 min File size: 7.41 MB

"Those who have stumbled upon freedom during spiritual activity often assume that it was their spiritual work that freed them, and have no reason to suggest otherwise to those who come to them for help. I say this not to denigrate them or their efforts, but merely to call attention to the possibility that even the greatest among them can suffer from confusion and an inability to see and communicate the actual cause of their awakening, which results in their passing that confusion on to those who come to them for help." John Sherman. Complete recording of a Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on June 14, 2014. Length: 1 h 7 min File size: 16.1 MB

"The effort to direct attention to the faint sense of "me", without regard to its philosophical incongruity and whether you think you succeeded at doing it or not, immediately destroys the context in which the mind was formed. The success is instantaneous. What follows is a period of recovery, in which the diseased psychological structures are replaced by saner ones. That process is pretty much automatic." John Sherman Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on June 4, 2014. Length: 39 min File size: 9.35 MB

"There is a certain confusion that sometimes arises from the underlying assumption that what we're doing here has something to do with the spiritual/metaphysical project. What we do here is not spiritual. The spiritual project is ill-suited to put an end to human misery, and not the best framework to deal with a problem that is really mundane and not metaphysical at all. What we offer here is a brand new paradigm from which to understand and heal the human mind." John Sherman Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on May 21, 2014. Length: 47 min File size: 11.31 MB

"The looking destroys the sense of separation between me and my life and restores the natural state of intimacy with life that the fear of life had destroyed." John Sherman Complete recording of a Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on May 17, 2014. Length: 1 h 16 min File size: 18.12 MB

"The main purpose of moving attention away from a thought that it's being called to and focusing it on the sensation of breathing is not to reveal the irrelevance of the thought. It's actually to strengthen your ability to control where you put your attention." John Sherman

"Our job is NOT to bring you new, fresh understanding about reality, to awaken you to the wonder of being, or to give you the experience of peace. It's NOT our job to teach you about the nature of being. Our sole job is to show you how easy it is to cure the disease that is at the root of all your misery and discontent with life." John Sherman Complete recording of a Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on April 26, 2014. Length: 1h 12 min File size: 34.67 MB

"No understanding of the root cause of human dissatisfaction with life will eliminate it. Only the direct contact of your attention with the reality of you will do. Once that happens, a process of regeneration of the mind begins." John Sherman Complete recording of a Meeting in Ojai, California with John Sherman on April 12, 2014. Length: 1h 39 min File size: 23.83 MB

"People are starting to return, after a period in the confusion of the recovery, and they are coming to the forums to let people know what's happened to them and to provide some encouragement to those of us who are still struggling." John Sherman Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman on April 2, 2014. Length: 33 min File size: 7.96 MB

"If you come here to this land of looking at yourself from the realm of spiritual aspiration and awakened teachers, you may harbor a number of expectations about Carla, and me, and the act itself that are simply not pertinent here. One of these could be a silent expectation that I should be infallible in what I say, and that it's your job to puzzle things out and figure out what I mean when I make no sense to you. I advise you to abandon all ideas to the effect that I know everything about anything, including the act of looking at yourself and its results and consequences." John Sherman Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman on March 12, 2014. Length: 30 min File size: 7.02 MB

"Although OCD can be treated and its effects minimized, it cannot be cured. The reason for this is that OCD is not a disease, it's a symptom. We see it to be a symptom of the generalized fear of being alive disease that afflicts most of us, and that disease can be cured by the simple act of looking at yourself in the manner we speak of. When you do that, the underlying disease is cured, and its symptoms, including OCD, disintegrate, although there is no telling how long it will take in each particular case." John Sherman Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman on March 5, 2014. Length: 47 min File size: 11.31 MB

"If you are a human being, there is a very good chance that you suffer from one or more of the hundreds of psychological disorders defined in the professional literature." John Sherman Complete recording of an Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman on February 22, 2014. Length: 35 min File size: 8.4 MB