You are pure, uninterrupted consciousness, already whole, already free.
Somehow, in the play of yourself, of consciousness itself, a veiling of the inherent truth of freedom occurs. Consciousness somehow hides from itself and pretends it is lost. In a certain moment in the play, there arises the desire to end the game of hiding and begin being eternally found. The desire to be found is the desire to awaken in the dream.
I am not here to teach altered states or yogic powers, or even to teach techniques to overcome fear and despair. I am simply here as your own self to point to that which is found in the core of all being.
It is such a self-destructive, violent, greedy world that we live in. My question is, How do you live in this kind of world and not feel separate from it? How do you keep an inner balance, an inner peace?
The only way possible is to awaken to what is untouched by the world.
I’m trying, but it’s hard.
If you are overly concerned with the world and its craziness “out there,” you are overlooking the craziness, violence, suffering, separation, and absurdity within your own mind. It is easy to target “world” and its faults and its madness. In judging “world” to be separate from your own mind, there is massive denial.
Where is the horror within you? The willingness to stop looking outward is the willingness to awaken in the midst of a nightmare. Don’t dissociate from the nightmare; awaken in it. Have you ever had the experience, while in the sleeping state, of awakening in a dream, in a nightmare?
Yes.
Excellent. Then you know the answer. Awaken in the nightmare in which you tell yourself about a world that is doing something to you, a world that is disturbing your peace.
Once you awaken, what’s the next step after that?
Awaken and tell me. What good does it do for me to tell you the next step?
Your preoccupation is with the nightmare and how to escape from it. I am asking you to put aside all attempts to escape from the nightmare, and to awaken in it now. What you awaken to is that which has never been asleep.
You are exhausted from your attempt to flee the world. Your exhaustion is the signal that it is time to awaken. Awaken in this nightmare of demons who seem to be chasing you. Let the demons be liberated.
If you have the courage to turn and face the demons who seem about to get you, what a revelation! When you finally face your demons, you discover who they are, and you discover who you are.
There is much communication these days about the dimensional shifting of Earth, planetary ascension, and things like that. Are there some things you’d like to say about that?
In this time of enormous change, a great opportunity is available to all. I have traveled the world over, speaking to people in many countries, and in every place I’ve been, I have seen a kindling of the desire to realize truth.
I don’t pretend to know the outcome of humanity, but I can tell you there is a great quickening, and you are not separate from that quickening.
A particular mindset that is an enormous obstacle to realizing truth is the belief that realization is either something that happened to someone else in the past, or something that may happen to you some time in the future. If you give up both past and future as separate from right now, you can see what is possible in this moment.
I am not pointing you toward conceptual understanding. What is available is deeper than intellectual knowledge, and it is yours by birthright. It is yours because you are called to it, and that call has invited satsang into your consciousness.
Don’t miss this opportunity. What great luck! In your lifetime, in this year, in this moment, you have the absolute potential and the capacity to realize who you are.
Don’t waste time. Get to the core questions. Expose any latent beliefs in separation between you and God, you and true self.
You have a great role to play. It is time you play your role and stop rehearsing. Stop imagining what the lines are. Stop waiting for something in the future. The future is here now. This is your cue. You’re on.
I’m sitting at your feet today because I need your help. I’m willing to let this fire consume me completely.
Spiritual fire is your own true self, consuming the illusion of I as some thing separate from anything else. Just be as you are. There is no end to being who you are. There is no end to the depth of it and no end to the revelation of it. To simply, fully be is not learned or attained. All teachings and attainments come from the revelation of that which you are in truth.
What is so beautiful is that this process of revelation happens whether I call myself asleep or awake.
So don’t call yourself either. Don’t call yourself anything. As long as you call yourself asleep or awake, you are playing shallowly within the realms of the mind. Extremely shallow is I am asleep. Then you may drop into a more profound realm where a revelation occurs, I am awake, but pretty quickly you see the limit of any naming of I.
It is important to have the experience I am awake, but as it comes, let it go. This experience is just the springboard. I am awake is just the other side of I am asleep, I am ignorant.
Who is awake? Who is asleep?
This question plunges you into the depth of being where awake and asleep are left far behind. Don’t play only in the shallows. The depth of being is calling you.
Sri Ramana said, “It is not the self that becomes realized. The self has always been realized.” Realize the self is realized, and then self-exploration begins.
For someone who has relied on the workings of the intellect, to see deeper than intellect can be a great challenge. Many fears can arise: the fear of being stupid, the fear of going blank, the fear of being nothing, the fear of not existing.
Yes, don’t exist. I recommend that you give up, if only for an instant, the struggle to exist.
I want to awaken, I want to realize myself, yet it seems there is a game plan here to survive, and if I’m going to survive, I have to play the game. Finding the time and the quiet to really do the internal work on myself is difficult.
Retreat from everything for five seconds. Close your eyes for five seconds. Drop everything, and just relax. Just be. Simply be.
Do not try to get something or get rid of something. Do not try to accomplish anything.
Just be immense simplicity.
If you are attracted to this simplicity, if simplicity reveals something that you have been searching for in either acquiring or accomplishing, then take the next step.
Discover where—in any moment—this that is revealed in these five seconds goes. What are its limits? What are its boundaries?
There are none.
Excellent.
That’s not safe somehow.
Not safe? Do you imagine there is safety in doing what your culture says you should do, or in rebelling against cultural injunctions? There is safety only in boundless truth of being, because in this, there is no need of safety. This is foreground, background, above ground, below ground. This is the ground that is groundlessness.
We know that in the past, certain realized beings would shout the truth and then be shot down or burned at the stake. Yes, this can always happen. So what? You have tried to keep away from truth, to deny truth, and what are you left with? You may even have memories of being shot down or burned for daring to speak the truth, but look, you are still here. You are still here! Truth remains! Bodies can be shot or burned. Truth prevails.
Only your body needs safety, and of course there is finally no safety for any body. Eventually every body will be finished. Before your body is finished, recognize the truth of who you are. Then there is no need of safety.
Who you are has no need of anything. You are the fulfillment of all needs. Not your image of who you are, or your sense of who you are, or your feeling of who you are, or any idea of who you are. Those are all objects in the mind. You are the awareness that those mental objects appear in.
How did you find that realization?
I found that by looking into my teacher’s eyes. I was attracted to truth, and I recognized I had done as much as I could do with my own ideas of how to find truth. I looked into his eyes, and in that meeting, the whole cosmos was revealed.
He stopped me in my tracks, and stopping me is his gift to you. He named me for the river Ganga because I met him on the banks of the holy Ganga. When he named me he said, “The Ganga must flow in the West.” Now his body is too old to travel as much as he would like, so he uses the Ganga to flood the West.
I’m very moved. I feel like I want to be in satsang every night.
Yes. Very good. Not just every night, though—every moment! Never leave satsang. Satsang is the truth of your being. It is always with you.
You are saying, “I don’t ever want to be separate from who I am.” You are not ever separate from who you are.
In the first satsang we had here, you asked me why I was here. I thought, This is real. This is not some new adventure. It is real.
In that first satsang, you heard from the depth of your being. Hearing occurs when all inner dialogue stops. By stopping all commentary and simply being here, you hear what could never have been heard before, no matter how many times certain words have been spoken.
Do you hear? If you do, you hear the heart speaking to itself purely and simply, penetrating all supposed barriers with its willingness.
If there is something at stake, some fear or belief that something has to be maintained, you will be too busy attending to that fear or belief to hear, too busy to recognize what is beyond fear or beliefs, too busy to realize what needs no maintenance to be.
You must have just said something important, because my heart’s beating so strongly right now.
It is in what you heard.
Yes, but I don’t know what.
Knowing cannot capture it.
I feel myself holding back.
Recognize where there is no holding back. Let the body get even tenser, and then in the midst of tension, recognize what is untouched by tension.
This opening is not physical, although there may be an enormous physical release as a byproduct. Recognize what is always open.
It’s laughing and crying and ... everything.
Yes. It is finally discovered in everything. It is in laughing, crying, joy, grief, ecstasy, sadness, emptiness, fullness, you, me, this, and that. It is even in past, present, and future.
When that which has never been contracted is recognized, an enormous physical, emotional, and mental release occurs. If you attempt to cling to any physical, emotional, or mental release, you once again overlook what is always open.
In the usual mode of conditioned identification, thoughts, feelings, and experiences are referenced for self-definition. These are traps.
You are the indefinable source of all feeling, all thought, and all experience.
Yes, the heart beats very rapidly in this revelation.
What you are talking about right now, I’ve heard and I’ve read about many times. But as you were talking, I felt as if my whole body was burning.
Good! Until you burst into flames, you have not really heard. You may intellectually hear, but when you are really hearing, your mind catches fire. True hearing penetrates to the core.
Gangaji, I really want to awaken, and I go in and out of how strong my desire is. Sometimes it’s my total prayer, and then I become scared to do what I think I must do to awaken.
What must you do to awaken?
I don’t really know. I know I’ve got a lot of ideas of what I think I have to do.
You need do nothing to awaken. Nothing! This is the last thing you expected! Spiritual seekers everywhere are scurrying to do something to get awakeness. Seekers are reading, efforting, and practicing to awaken. If it is as complicated as doing anything, then the implication is that you are separate from that which is eternally awake.
Don’t do anything. Don’t even not do anything. Be absolutely still. Let the activity of the mind retreat to the core of stillness. In being absolutely still, recognize what is absolutely still.
In stillness, there is no movement of the mind. In no movement of the mind, there is no mind. There is only that who you truly are.
When there is no movement of the mind, there is no trickery possible.
I know I can’t continue in the same way I have, that it’s nonsense. My barrier seems to be the fear that I ultimately have to give up “I.”
You do!
I know that, and my question is, Do I just sit with that?
Run headlong into that I that must be given up. Find it. Quickly. Where is it?
It’s in my head.
Where in your head? In what part of your head is it hiding? Report from there immediately.
Can you find it? This I that has to be given up. Is it there?
Quickly!
I don’t know. It’s a bunch of thoughts. (laughter)
This is the joke! If all you can find is the thought of I, where is this I that must be given up?
I don’t know. I’ve formulated it. I’ve—
In this instant, allow any one of those formulations to sink back into its place of origin.
What is lost?
Nothing is lost.
When a formulation arises, what is gained?
Nothing really.
Excellent.
I know that, and the mind still tries to formulate who I am.
The formulation I know has arisen. A knower has arisen as a formulation. Allow that formulation to dissolve back into its unformulated state. In ending the formulation I know, where is the “knower”?
It doesn’t exist.
Has anything been lost in the dissolution of the thought of “knower”?
There’s nothing lost.
There is nothing to lose. What is fear now?
Right now, nothing.
Be still then. Be quiet. Every time a formulation arises, even the concept that you have to get rid of the last formulation, recognize it as mind activity, as noise. Rather than embellish upon the previous formulation, let all mental activity cease.
Living life through formulation doesn’t work, does it? You have tried endless amounts of formulas, but finally, you reach a certain point where you realize there is nothing to be gained by any formula of who you are. At that point, the grasping tendency of mind is naturally quieted. Mind can open; mind can rest.
Open mind is no different from pure consciousness. At the instant of opening, the truth of limitless consciousness is not veiled by mental formulation.
What is revealed?
Joy! Peace.
I feel the stillness, but I still feel the tension, and I still don’t feel awake.
Where do you check to see if you are awake?
Do you know somewhere? Oh, that would be great!
You are checking in sense impressions. You are checking in thoughts based on past conclusions. You are checking what changes to find what is changeless.
You are the stillness that is eternally awake. Stillness is full, alive, limitless silence, true emptiness, boundless pure intelligence. You are describing a sense of separation from that. There is a you, and there is the stillness. Dive into that stillness and tell me, where are you and where is the stillness?
I definitely feel separate. I feel like there is the mind, and then there is the heart.
Yes, you feel separate. Let’s examine your idea of what the mind is and the reality of your feeling.
When you say “the mind,” what do you mean?
It feels like tension.
If it feels like tension, relax. Now where is the mind? Is it there or is it gone? Is there a mind there unless you say there is?
I don’t feel like I can consciously let go. It’s like I have to do it by accident.
What you can consciously do is to notice how you are holding on. Relax. Unclench your mind. If you are waiting for an accident, well, yes, you will relax when your body dies. The exciting prospect is that you can relax now. You don’t have to postpone it. You don’t have to wait for the great accident.
The thoughts I feel this or that, and this or that therefore means ... are not reality. If you don’t follow those thoughts as if they were reality, where is their power? When I speak of “mind,” I mean all sensory experience that ends in interpretation and conclusions.
It seems like there are two things going on right now. The mind is going to town wanting to understand, yet I can feel in my being that there is no way the mind will understand.
Once you know in your being that there is no way the mind will understand, then you are at the gate of surrender. At that gate, you can stop following the impulse to understand with the mind. If you let the struggle go, it is really over.
It just feels like an energy that’s tensing.
Relax. Mentally relax. Tension arises in the attempt to cling to that energy as if the energy were who you are.
Now I am feeling it relax. The tension that I had when we started is gone.
Yes, but have you gone anywhere? Are you aware of the awareness of feeling? Is awareness of feeling changed by whatever quality of feeling?
Tension comes and goes. Awareness is permanent. Recognition of permanence heals the suffering of misidentification.
Who you truly are never moves. Therefore, it cannot be lost. You cannot lose yourself. You can experience the loss of yourself if you conceptualize yourself as an “it.” Regardless of the experience of feeling, you are here always. Stop looking for an “it.” Stop trying to find yourself in a particular feeling, and see what has never moved.
See that whoever you imagine yourself to be changes, comes and goes. Who you are is the permanence.
What a burden released! When this burden is released, your intellect, your memory, and your individual intelligence are used by truth in unknown and unexpected ways.
Is awakening a gradual kind of deepening and returning to that place?
It has been gradual, hasn’t it? How many moments of awakening have there been in your lifetime? So many precious moments in all kinds of circumstances.
There is an instant like a lightning bolt when what is realized, is realized to have always been present. This lightning bolt, this realization of what is and always has been, reveals what does not pass.
Ecstasy, laughter, and tears are all byproducts of that realization. If you try to cling to any byproduct, you will once again experience the cycle of loss and then search for release. Yet regardless of experience, what is always present is always present.
Is that realization with you around the clock?
Yes. It is myself. How could I not be with myself?
In your eyes, was it a gradual awakening?
In the moment that truth revealed itself, I realized it has always been.
If realization were of something new, then it would be subject to getting old. Something that is not here in one time must be subject to not being here in another time.
I realized that, in looking for true self, I had been overlooking true self. From that out-of-time realization, certain experiences occurred. Experiences occurred that I had never had before, and never could have imagined having. But realization is deeper than any experience. True self is the discovery of what is and has always been.
There are experiences of sadness, happiness, ignorance, and enlightenment. These experiences are all secondary to the truth of who you are. Throughout these experiences is underlying, abiding truth.
In your attachment to keeping certain experiences and getting rid of other experiences, you have simply overlooked abiding presence. In overlooking truth, there is suffering.
There is enormous pleasure in life, and there is enormous pain in life. In focusing on either the pleasure or the pain, what is overlooked is what is untouched by either pleasure or pain.
You can be happy, and you can be sad. You can be right, and you can be wrong. But without beingness itself, none of these can exist. First, primarily, foremost, and finally, there is beingness—before human being, before animal being, before plant being, before mineral being, before cosmic being—beingness has never gone anywhere.
Recognize yourself as the consciousness that pervades everything as beingness. What a treasure is revealed!
There is no grasping in this recognition. What could be grasped? You are overflowing. You have always been overflowing as the truth of universal beingness.
You may see what looks like people, trees, flowers, insects, angels, or demons, but in self-recognition, what is seen at the core of all these appearances is your own true self. What a meeting this is! Self to self.
I’ve heard you speak before of “demons” that may arise as one begins to awaken. Can you explain what you mean by that?
As one begins to awaken out of the deep trance of misidentification, surrender to what is prior to all thought, feeling, emotion, and behavior is possible. By opening the gate of surrender, the suppressed subconscious beliefs, the demons that have been denied for aeons, often appear.
The ego is formulated by past thought. Its existence is predicated on a past. As you begin to awaken and relax and surrender into the truth of now, having nothing to do with the past, subconscious thought may appear.
My teacher, Sri Poonjaji, speaking in Hindu terms, said, “When you begin to awaken, all the gods and demons of your past come to reclaim you.” If you recognize these gods and demons to be mind-created, what power can they have? Let them come. Latent tendencies arise to be burned up in the light of truth.
These tendencies, I notice, are so set from early childhood. Is it worthwhile to go into therapy to have a real look at why these wounds are there?
Whys are resolved through insight when you surrender to that which has no tendencies.
Therapeutic modalities can be helpful in bringing the mind to the gate of surrender if the therapist has directly experienced surrender. The appearance of previously denied or suppressed experiences and states is the opportunity to open to a greater depth of being. Insights as to why or when or how naturally follow true opening.
When you are willing to directly experience woundedness, with no idea of why or when or how, miraculously, you will discover that you are not wounded.
If the experience of the wound arises, do you dive into this wound?
Yes! Dive. Not into the story of the wound, but into the experience of woundedness. Let go of the story. The story is what keeps you feeling bound by experiences of being wounded.
I’ve been so curious about the story because I seem to find insight there. Is that the trap?
Direct experience brings enormous insight. Allow insights to come.
The secret is to not cling to any state. Let all states pass through you. States you have feared and states you have desired will pass through you. Don’t attempt to cling to or reject any state, and in that, directly discover what they pass through.
So it’s automatic that the insights are going to come?
The insights come with release. Insights within insights will come.
All is in your imagination!
Now isn’t that a burden released?
Why do I keep waiting for the right moment, the right circumstance?
The right moment is this moment, wherever it reveals itself. Just in this moment, now, recognize I with no appendages, no predicates, no qualification, no measurement, and no particular location.
I see my resolve rise and fall and ebb and flow, and I wonder whether resolve matters at all, as it relates to waking up.
Here is a story Papaji told:
An Indian princess was very interested in awakening, and every night she would slip away to visit her guru in his hut to hear divine teachings. Afterward, she would have to slip back into the palace because it was not allowed for women to go out alone at night, much less to meet with a guru for the purpose of awakening. It could cause a lot of trouble.
One day someone came to her brother and said, “I must tell you that your sister is dishonoring the family. She is having a love affair, and each night she slips out of the palace and goes to meet her lover.”
The brother was incensed. So that night, he took his bow and arrow and followed her. He was going to kill her and her lover.
As he looked into the window of the guru’s hut, the guru was saying to the princess, “Come very close to me. I’m going to whisper to you the very word that will finally dispel all illusion.”
She went very near to him. The brother pulled the bow back and took careful aim. Just at that moment, the guru spoke the word and the brother awakened.
He had had no resolve to awaken. His resolve was actually negative and destructive. He was lucky beyond luck to be in the right place at the right time, even if for the wrong reasons.
At this moment, you are in the right place at the right time. Take aim with your attention, whatever your reasons for being here. Resolve is even more reliable than being in the right place at the right time. If you truly have total resolve, every place is the right place. Every word points to the secret word.
Ask yourself, What is it I want? What is it I really want? Recognize what is wanted, finally, when all is said and done. Be very truthful. At the point of asking yourself this question, don’t be willing to lie even the smallest bit.
If what you want is some other relationship or some more money or a better something else, then ask yourself, What will that give me? When you get an answer to that, ask again, And what will that give me? If self-questioning reveals that what you finally want is truth, or peace, or freedom, then point all your desires into that one desire. Cash in all your other accounts. Put everything on the table for truth, including your body, your history, and all your relationships.
This is resolve. Anything less than this and you are somehow hedging. It is important to see if you are hedging. Now see what it is you really want and what you are willing to give for it. I suggest you give everything. It all belongs to that which you finally want anyway.
Give up every concept of ownership—your house, your mate, your children, your body, your mind, your fear, your courage, your life. Put it all on the table and then see. In other words, make yourself irresistible.
It is important to see if there is a lack of resolve. It is important to see if there is even a hint of nihilistic cynicism or falling out of love with truth. Recognize if anything is being held back. Everything that can be given, give. Give it all, and then you are left naked. In nakedness, you are unborn.
I find that resolve withers in the fear of the unknown.
It is not the unknown that you fear. Your fear arises from your imagination of what is in the unknown. You have some subtle image of what might lurk in the unknown.
There is no-thing there. It is unknown. Unknown is unconceptualized, unborn. Truth is unknown, unseen, uncharted.
Give up the lie that you can conceptualize this moment. What an unnecessary burden this lie is. One day the body is finished. At that time, where is your accumulation of concepts?
When you recognize the unknown to be here right now, you recognize pure potential. Before that recognition, there is speculation about what you should do, or what you could do, and there is obsessive rumination about what you did do. Put it all on the table at least for one instant. Then the unknown face reveals itself. See if the known can hold a candle to that.
It’s been very confronting to look honestly and assess where I am.
Yes, where are you? This is the question. When you really look, what do you find?
Well, I feel myself in you, and in this body of people.
Yes, you are not limited to your body. Excellent.
Now tell me, right now, in your experience, can you find a place where you are not?
(hesitation) No...
Why do you hesitate to shout what is true and self-evident? What do you gain from keeping this declaration hidden?
Realize that you are that which is everywhere, and you realize that any boundary that appears to separate you from anything else is illusory. A feeling or a thought of separation is illusion. As illusion, thoughts and feelings arise and disappear. You are that which does not arise and does not disappear. You are present regardless of thoughts and feelings.
Even if you sense separation, this sense cannot be perceived without your presence. Eventually this sense will disappear, and another will appear to take its place. Then this other sense will also disappear, and on and on. You are what is present when senses appear and what is present when all senses disappear.
I feel like I know it, but I don’t feel like I’m able to live it.
You are absolutely able to live it. You are it. It may mean some discomfort, but so what? It may mean not always feeling a certain way, but so what? What is it you want, really want?
I would say I want a continuous state of grace and to extend love to all my brothers and sisters.
No state is continuous. If it is something that is not here now, it is already not continuous. If you are looking for that which is continuous, you have to see what has always been omnipresent, what is omni, eternal presence.
I welcome this.
“Welcome” means “Come in; the door is open.” Don’t close your door if a particular wind blows through that you don’t like.
Once clarity has been revealed, once the essence of being is revealed as no-body in particular but that which is eternal and omnipresent, there is no more excuse for chasing the tail of illusion.
When you discover yourself to be that which cannot be limited to or separate from any particular, peace radiates to all particulars.
Eternal truth is available to you. What animates this phenomenon speaking to you is no different from what animates the phenomenon called you.
Mine was not a particularly noble birth, and certainly not a particularly noble upbringing. Even though I am just like you, you can still, of course, imagine that I am different, that I am luckier, that I have better karma. I have had horrible karma, just like you. Yet I also have the wonderful karma to have satsang appear in my consciousness, just like you.
Don’t make any more flimsy excuses or postpone awakening to some time “when things are better.” It is here. It is now. It is you.