Gangaji: Freedom and Resolve
Finding Your True Home in the Universe

For Beyond 50's "Spirituality" talks, listen to an interview with Gangaji.  She will invite you to radically choose to wake up from the trance of who you think you are and experience the truth of who you really are.  The invitation is to self-inquiry, the willingness to ask the questions: Who am I?  What is here? - to directly experience what follows these and similar questions.  The resolve is to not go back into the trance by turning away from that essential experience, but to freshly inquire anew as thoughts or feelings of separation arise. We are encouraged not to judge them, rather to use them as pointers toward experiencing fully the emotions they lead to, divorced from the circumstances and thoughts, which gave rise to them.

Spiritual Teachers

Gangaji's message of Freedom and Resolve is rooted in the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri H.W.L. Poonjaji (Papaji), which is to recognize the truth of one's being, which is already completely whole, totally, free and permanently at peace.  This can be realized through deep self-inquiry and telling the truth.

Who Am I?

Gangaji has come to realize that our real selves is simply Consciousness, an eternal Self that is One with God. 

"Your beingness is awareness itself...Your true identity is the sky of being...You recognize yourself as that no-thing," she wrote in "Freedom and Resolve."

Anything less than that is an illusion - a play of the mind that leaves us in a trance state to mistakenly believe we are lost, cast out, and separate from God.

Through self-inquiry, Gangaji recommends that you ask yourself, Who is lost? Who is separate?  You will find no one.

Your whole life then is a story, based on a point of view that's a dream woven from sensations and experiences.  Again a lie.  You can now wake up in this dream by letting go of your story.

What Is Here?

Through surrendering by letting go of what you've clung to, you can experience what is already here, which is truth and silence.  

"The deepest, most profound challenge is to surrender to what is untouched by any idea, evaluation, or conclusion past, present or future," taught Gangaji.

Our mind chatter can veil us from reality.  She goes further to explain that "thought is consciousness at play with itself.  But in this play, consciousness somehow thinks itself lost, and that thought generates other thoughts about how to find itself - what is needed, what was done wrong...You are here before all thought...Before this body, after this body, and during this body - you are,"

By investigating thought, what you'll find is emptiness, which is the same as thought. 

"It is finally to simply see that thought is thought," and what is not thought, what cannot be thought, is who you are," added Gangaji.

Ego is a thought from the mind.  It's likened to a garment or mask that is inanimate.  By identifying with this garment, it only perpetuates the illusions of desire and pleasure thrown up by the ego.

In conclusion, wrote Gangaji, "I invite you to discover that source and to be true to it.  If you have not discovered it, be true to it anyway and let it discover you."

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