John Sherman is Dead
A reflection on John Sherman’s death, his legacy, and the self-reliance at the heart of the Just One Look Method.
Read article →The Natural State Blog
Reflections on the natural state, free of fear.
Just to Say Hello
It has been a long time since the last newsletter. I am writing to say hello, and to let you know I am still here. And I have a couple of projects in the works for Just One Look. One of them is an Italian translation of The Just One Look Method e-book that I hope to make
Read article →What Do You Really Want?
Have you ever noticed that whatever you think might give you peace and satisfaction fails to do so when you get it?
Read article →The Power of Attention, Part Six
You can learn to use your mind as it is supposed to be used: as an ally. The greatest gift of being alive as a human being is the full use of our mind. The mind is not our enemy; it is not something to be silenced by force.
Read article →The Power of Attention, Part Five
The Just One Look Method gives you an understanding of why your mind behaves the way it behaves. It reveals what has caused your mind to develop the way it did.
Read article →The Power of Attention, Part Four
Gaining control over your attention is the hardest thing you will ever do in your lifetime. After all, you are turning it forcefully in the opposite direction it is accustomed to going.
Read article →The Power of Attention, Part Three
During the recovery period, certain situations will trigger the appearance of fear-generated thoughts in the mind. Old patterns of reaction to circumstances may reappear and catch you by surprise. You must not be discouraged.
Read article →The Power of Attention, Part Two
The practice of Self-Directed Attention allows you to develop control over your attention and choose what you pay attention to. Over time, you increase your ability to decline to attend to thought forms that are harmful or simply irrelevant in the moment.
Read article →The Power of Attention, Part One
When you look at yourself directly with the firm intention of getting a taste (a feel, a whiff) of what it feels like to be you, before any names, definitions, understandings, and or emotional states–just the raw, almost imperceptible sense of me–the invisible and unconscious ground of fear on which your mind developed over your lifetime dissipates.
Read article →Enlightenment Is Not Worth Striving For
The idea of enlightenment as a magical event that makes everything perfect is a fairy tale, a misunderstanding of what it really means to be free. If you have been on a spiritual path for any length of time, this may be a hard pill to swallow. We know. We walked a spiritual path for
Read article →A World Gone Mad
We live in dire times. Children are being gunned down in their own classrooms and countries with thermonuclear weaponry are threatening to use them for fear that others might use them first. It is true that many non-profit organizations are making admirable efforts to solve localized problems around the world but they stop short. Their
Read article →Mindfulness
Self-Directed Attention is very, very hard in the beginning. It can seem almost impossible to do. If Self-Directed Attention is causing you too much distress, try doing the following meditation for a while instead.
Read article →About Expectations
A few weeks ago we went to see an acupuncturist in a Los Angeles neighborhood that was completely unfamiliar to us. John dropped me off at the office and went to park the van. When we left the office, he could not remember where he had parked the van. He had been in such a
Read article →Naked and Afraid
The baby, too, just like a sailor tossed By cruel waves, lies naked on the ground, Poor child, bereft of every means of life, As soon as it has left its mother’s womb In throes of birth, and fills the room with squalls, As is but meet for one who has to pass Such ills
Read article →What Makes our Work Different
Someone recently sent us an email with a question that we found very useful. First of all, I would like to say “Thank you” with great sincerity and deep gratitude. I enjoy listening to your talks due to your sincerity, honesty and, above all, your simplicity. I would like to ask you one question and
Read article →NEW BOOK: The Just One Look Method
The Just One Look Method is an extremely simple approach to mental misery unlike anything you have ever tried. It will rid you of the root cause of your dissatisfaction with life and the painful yearning for peace and fulfillment that seems never to be fully satisfied. The Just One Look Method is the result
Read article →Everybody Is Just Like You
Everybody is driven by the same underlying fear of life that caused you so much difficulty in your own life prior to looking at yourself. Your response to it was most likely different from that of the villains of history, but it was also shaped by the idiosyncratic way in which your particular psychology developed
Read article →Expectations
Expectations come in at least two flavors. The first flavor is a reasonable expectation as to what might happen in the course of our day-to-day life. For example, if I plant a garden, I will have the reasonable expectation that, barring bad weather or unforeseen damage by pests, in due time I will have the
Read article →What Do You Really Want?
Before looking at myself, I would have had no idea how to answer such a question. Maybe money and power, so I could do what I really wanted to do? But what then? And what exactly was it that I would really want to do? And what would I get from doing it? Enlightenment maybe,
Read article →Understanding the Fear of Life
The fear of life is the first cause of all our psychological troubles. The fear of life is a silent and false assumption that life is untrustworthy and dangerous that runs in the background of all experience. Now, strictly speaking, there is no requirement that you understand the cause of your mental misery before you
Read article →The Search for Identity Is a Call for Self-Inquiry
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
Read article →First Do No Harm
If you have done the Looking, mastered Self-Directed Attention, and have begun to see the value of Just One Look in your own life, there is often a natural impulse to describe to your friends what you have found. If that’s the case with you, STOP! I beg you to stop because, unless you fully
Read article →What Is Self-Directed Attention?
There has been considerable confusion arising in our community lately about the nature and purpose of the simple exercise with attention that we call Self-Directed Attention. That’s my fault. Let’s see if I can clear away the confusion.
Read article →Spiritual Understanding
Carla and I have come to an understanding that the non-dual spiritual teachings that seem to be everywhere in one form or another in these times are worthless at best. There are millions of us who have believed in them and trusted them to ease the misery of worry and fear that is the lot
Read article →The State of the World
We cannot help but pay attention to the sorry state of human affairs in our time. And there is no reason to turn away from the facts of the world’s current descent into madness, murder, and torture. This is, after all, the world we live in. But there is no reason to allow our attention
Read article →Why Practice Self-Directed Attention?
The Just One Look Method is a two-part process. Those two parts are the act of Looking at Yourself and the Self-Directed Attention Exercise. The act of Looking at Yourself resets the mind and triggers a period of recovery in which the mind restructures itself, in a context that is no longer based on the fear
Read article →These Times
I will not pussyfoot around the situation facing humanity today. I am seventy-four years old and I have seen a lot of drama in my own life and in the lives of humans everywhere. In the 70s, I robbed banks and destroyed the means whereby working people were being made poorer every day. In the
Read article →The Difference Between Self-Directed Attention and Mindfulness Meditation
Today I’m going to make one more attempt to answer questions about the similarity between what we call Self-Directed Attention and Buddhist Mindfulness Meditation. I can understand why there would be some confusion about the apparent similarity of the two practices, but they are actually diametrically opposite to each other. When I speak of Mindfulness
Read article →Just One Look Is All It Takes
If you really understand that what you are trying to do is to get a taste of what it feels like to be you, whether you have a conscious experience of having touched yourself with your attention or not, you cannot fail. It’s the conscious movement of attention toward the feeling of ‘me’ that counts.
Read article →The Nature of Belief
Through no fault of our own, most humans—that is to say most of us—have minds that have come into being shaped by a context of fear and distrust of life itself. We didn’t cause that to happen, and we can’t even know directly that that is the case, any more than we can know directly
Read article →A Liberating Insight
With very few exceptions, pretty much everybody on earth—butcher, baker, candlestick maker, rich, poor, beggar, and thief—each and every human being on the planet is at least as confused, fearful, miserable and afflicted as you are now or have been at some point. Everybody on earth is at least as blameless as you are and
Read article →Who’s To Blame?
One morning last August I was reading an article in an old Harper’s magazine about the origins of the First World War. The article explained what was happening in the world at the time, and it described the feeling of being alive then as an all-pervasive state of hopelessness, denial, despair, boredom, and malaise; a
Read article →Misidentification
According to Buddhist texts and most of the wisdom teachings, misidentification is the sole cause of human psychological misery. Those teachings tell us that all personal identification whatsoever is misidentification, and they therefore advise us to seek a state that is clear of all limiting ideas about our true nature. This is a perfectly understandable
Read article →The Period of Recovery
The root cause of most human psychological misery is the fear of life. This fear of life is a psychological autoimmune disease that arises in reaction to fearful experience very early in life, long before we learn that we have a mind–long before we are even conscious of ourselves as individual persons. The fear of
Read article →The Mind
My understanding of the mind and its role in human life may strike you as strange, but I promise that it is entirely consistent with everything I have seen in the current scientific literature on these matters. So please focus first on understanding fully what I am saying before trying to decide whether you agree
Read article →The Power of Attention
Last weekend we conducted a webinar on the practice of self-directed attention which we teach to provide critical support when the results of the act of the inward looking begin to unfold in your mind. In the opening of that webinar, I tried to convey insights and understandings that I felt would be useful. I
Read article →Coming Clean
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
Read article →Look at Yourself: Just One Look Is All It Takes
Learn a simple act that will rid you once and for all of the incessant background murmur of anxiety that ruins life for most of us. If you were inspired by this post, please make a donation to support our work.
Read article →A Gift from Ramana Maharshi
John Sherman describes how Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry shaped his work and his practical understanding of looking at yourself.
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