The Story of How I Met Gangaji, Became All Spiritual, and Happened Upon the Secret of Eternal Happiness

By John Sherman

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Your life, after all, is not the problem ...

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In 1993, I was in a federal prison in Englewood, Colorado, in the fifteenth year of my imprisonment for a number of politically motivated bank robberies and acts of sabotage I had done in the ’70s. At that time, I was utterly uninterested in anything spiritual. I had long since persuaded myself that all things spiritual were just stories we told ourselves to get us through the days without dying from despair at the obvious uselessness and hopelessness of our lives.

     Then a friend invited me to a meeting with a spiritual teacher who was coming to the prison. On the evening she was to come, I was walking to the chapel when I had what must have been a panic attack. I was paralyzed with terror, I could barely breathe. I thought I was going to die. So, instead of going to see this woman, I spent the entire time of her visit alone on a bench, waiting while this experience faded and passed away. When my friend came out of the chapel and asked what had happened, I said, “I had something better to do.”

     Shortly thereafter, I started attending meetings with Tibetan Buddhists who were coming into the prison from the Naropa Institute in Boulder. I was astonished to discover that everything they were speaking of I already knew. I started a Buddhist practice and proceeded very rapidly. The Buddhists seemed quite excited to have encountered me in the prison. After a while, they brought a Tibetan Lama in to give me “refuge” and bodhisattva vows.

     During that time, I was also going to weekly meetings with people who were bringing in videos of Gangaji’s satsangs. But I went to those meetings with a mission. I wanted to show the men that she was a liar and they should not listen to her. “The Buddhists have been at this for 2,500 years and they know what they are doing. Enlightenment requires hard work; it takes a disciplined meditation practice and maybe many lifetimes to attain liberation, and this woman tells you that you need do nothing. Stay away from her,” I warned them, “she is poison.”

When it was time for Gangaji to come back, in June of 1994, I was responsible for making the arrangements. I met her out on the sidewalk. She walked up to me, took my hand, and said, “You must be John.” As she spoke, everything stopped. The restless movement of attention from object to object stopped. The whole apparatus of thought and understanding, history, memory (everything that I believed myself to be), just vanished. And, in the absence of all that, I remained, and I knew it.

     I fell immediately in love with Gangaji. I spent the first year following our meeting in an extreme state of bliss and in the clear seeing of the true reality of the oneness of all being. I wrote to her just about every day and, wonder of wonders, she wrote back to me almost as often. She spoke about me everywhere she went. I was her pet, her star.

     But at the bottom of it all was the unseen belief that this newly arrived bliss was my actual nature. By then, I was reading every spiritual book I could get my hands on. I didn’t read Ramana Maharshi because I already “knew” what Ramana had to offer: all he had was the question, “Who am I?” and I already knew who I was. I was Conscious Awareness itself! I did not need Ramana, he was far too simple, way too elementary for me.

After a year or so, I found myself wanting more human things, like true love with a woman, or getting out of prison. I found myself wanting these things and not having them. So, the experience of paradise, and bliss, and “all is one” shredded in the face of the newly reborn belief that I needed (and was denied) certain important experiences. I fell into abject despair. Finally, in desperation, I started reading Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi.

     The only thing that Ramana interested himself in was the question, “Who?” He never deviated from that. Regarding ego, he encouraged people to forget all they might know about the supposed “inexistence of ego” and advised them to get a hold of ego, to “get it by the throat.” He spoke of the I-thought, and he told people to see from whence the I-thought arises.

     Ramana said that the only problem is a false belief about what I am, the only solution is the truth, and the truth is easy to discover. I was ready to try anything, so I started to look for what I am. I was not very good at it, but I started to look for the I-thought, to look for ego, for the subject of awareness. I started to look for what is permanent. Where does this “I” thought come from? I spent all my time reading Ramana, looking, and nothing else, completely obsessed with the need to find the truth of myself.

     Still I thought I knew what Ramana was talking about, even as he insisted that self-realization was not any state newly arrived at. I knew better. I knew that the “natural state” he spoke of would be a state undreamed of. I knew that “realization” meant an end to craving and resistance, a clearing of the jungle of intellect and sensation that is human life.

     How could I possibly imagine that clinging and resistance, confusion and ignorance needed nothing done about them? I thought the false belief caused these things, and in its absence, these things would disappear and clarity would prevail. I thought that ridding myself of these burdensome states was the goal of self-inquiry. Yet, despite my best efforts to sabotage Ramana's method, it did its job.

It is useful to think of self-inquiry as medicine. Self-inquiry is simply to look directly at the naked experience of being. This Being, this sense of presence, is the entire truth of you. It is permanent, unchanging, never absent. It has always been in the background of every moment of your life. It is the same in this moment as it was when you were thirteen, or three, or thirty. It is what makes it impossible for you to deny that you are. It is the only truth and looking at truth is the medicine that destroys the lie that “you are your life.”

     Do not expect any momentous shift in condition, since that is not what truth brings. Expect ego to continue, and with it, the drama of the story of your life, but it will lose the feel of desperate importance to you. Your life, after all, is not the problem; the problem is the false belief that you are your life. Remember always: you cannot do this wrong. All that is required is the firm intention to look at yourself directly whenever you can. All else will be taken care of.

     Once I turned to self-inquiry, everything I did brought me face-to-face with the direct experience of the truth. It was that, only that (never what I thought was going on), that in time eradicated the lie that “I am my life.” I continued the inquiry; it continues to this day, and I expect it to continue with my last breath. Over time, the belief that I am my story diminished, and seems now to have disappeared entirely. I cannot say that on one particular day I found liberation. In truth, there has never been a moment when I have not been what I am.

     What has most wondrously changed is that, in the absence of the belief that “I am my life,” the energy of aggression and hatred has vanished. Nothing is at stake in this life. Nothing that happens here touches me, takes anything from me, gives anything to me, or changes me in any way. That has always been so, and it was only the belief that “I am my life” that made it seem otherwise. That belief was always false, and truth has wiped it out.

     In the end, truth is all that matters and the truth of you is ever-present and instantly available to you in all times and circumstances. Just look at yourself in this moment and you will see.

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