Gangaji
Submitted by Ravi on Mon, 09/15/2008 - 13:47.Tags:
Biography
Gangaji is an American spiritual author, speaker, sometimes considered a lay or spiritual counselor, teacher or "guru". Since 1990, she has met with people in the U.S., Europe, and Australia, sometimes appearing with her husband Eli Jaxon-Bear, in what she calls an invitation to "discover the possibility of living your life in the freedom and joy of simply being." She and her husband live in Ashland, Oregon.
Gangaji was born in 1942 in Texas (USA) as Merle Antoinette ("Toni") Roberson and lived in the state of Mississippi until 1972, when she moved to San Francisco and started exploring her true being.
She did a stint of personal development training with a group called Arica which included "mantras, physical exercises, group processing of emotions" as well as dancing naked in an old mansion on a hill, took Bodhisattva vows and a Tibetan name of "White Tara, the female embodiment of wisdom and compassion", switched to Zen, practiced peer counseling, took Erhard Seminars Training, studied Chinese herbal medicine, took T'ai Chi lessons, leaned toward a Taoist understanding, took lessons in Chinese, taught dance, became disenchanted with Zen and everything Japanese, became interested in Vipassana and practiced sitting still but felt a dissatisfaction with one of her teachers, and came to peace with her mother as she was dying.
She marched for civil rights, protested the Vietnam war, met her current husband in Berkeley, tended chickens and a goat, got arrested for protesting at a nuclear power plant, spent ten days in jail, lived off the sales of marijuana crops, married her current husband in Hawaii twice - once in a church and again in a cave.
And after all that, she still identified herself as a sufferer and had a sense of something unresolved, something longed for.
Then in 1990, while her second and current husband, Eli Jaxon-Bear, was traveling in India, she gave him the name Sri H.W.L. Poonja (Papaji) which she had found in a book. Upon finding and meeting with this man, her husband wrote to her from India with information about him. A month later, her husband returned to the U.S. with his accounts about Poonja. In April 1990, Gangaji and Eli traveled together to India to meet with Poonja. Gangaji states that Poonja gave her the name "Gangaji" after the river Ganga (Ganges), and that he asked her to go back to the West and share his message.
Today Gangaji is well known in several continents conducting Satsangs and retreats.
Teachings
Gangaji's philosophy is described as nondualism consistent with Advaita Vedanta.
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Books & Media
Just Like You: An Autobiography
(Paperback)
After a difficult childhood in the deep South and with her marriage failing, Toni Varner arrived in San Francisco looking for happiness. Joining the counterculture, she spent two decades on a spiritual search. Then, in 1990, she met Papaji, an awakened master in the lineage of Sri Ramana Maharshi. She had never wanted a guru, and she certainly hadn\'t wanted an Indian name. But when she met Papji, he stopped her in her tracks. In meeting him, she discovered the source of true fulfillment.
Since that time, Gangaji, a beloved spiritual teacher, has been holding public meetings and retreats across the United States and around the world. In her autobiography, written with Roslyn Moore, Gangaji tells her story. It is a candid, inspiring, and often humorous account. \"Just Like You\" includes dozens of pictures, a section of penetrating questions and answers, and an appendix with letters exchanged between Gangaji and her teacher.
Gangaji says she is just like you and me, that she would be happy to tell us if she weren\'t, but she is. By sharing the experience of her life she is offering herself as living proof that it is possible for anyone to stop telling their endless story of suffering, to wake up to what is, and to live life truly and freely.
(Hardcover)
The words themselves are charged with extraordinary aliveness and transformative power,\" Eckhart Tolle says about Gangaji\'s writing. \"This is because they have come out of a living realization of the truth, rather than the accumulated knowledge of the mind.\" The lives of thousands of people have been influenced through Gangaji\'s retreats and public events.
With You Are That!, Gangaji\'s classic teachings--first delivered more than a decade ago in two paperback volumes with limited distribution--are offered in a striking one-volume collector\'s edition. Updated to include a new introduction from Catherine Ingram, author of Passionate Presence, along with new photos and material from recent meetings, this exquisite gift edition offers exposure to a larger audience of spiritual seekers who can now realize the perennial insights of Gangaji. Eloquent and direct, Gangaji guides practitioners of all backgrounds through an inquiry into the self that often leads to unexpected glimpses at awakening. \"This is a moment of reckoning,\" she teaches. \"Do not take this moment casually or trivially. Recognize that for whatever reason, you are aware of the possibility of realizing the truth of yourself as limitless consciousness--you are that!\"
The Diamond in Your Pocket: Discovering Your True Radiance
(Paperback)
The Diamond in Your Pocket, the first major book release from Gangaji, describes our ever-ending search to find fulfillment, which, paradoxically, already exists if we will only stop long enough to discover its true source. Now, this modern-day classic is available in two new formats: paperback and a multi-CD audio recording in the author\'s own voice. \"I have discovered that it is actually impossible to find happiness,\" teaches Gangaji. \"As long as you are seeking to find happiness somewhere, you are overlooking where happiness is ... in your true nature.\" With The Diamond in Your Pocket, the American-born teacher who has influenced the lives of thousands through her retreats and public events helps us to reconcile the observations and questions that arise along the spiritual path. Like a precious gem, The Diamond in Your Pocket cuts through what is false, and illuminates what is true--a brilliant series of contemplations and insights you will want to hold dear and return to again and again. Gangaji shows us thought-by-thought how to stop the endless activity of our minds, and experience the brilliance and radiance of who we really are in every present moment.
(DVD)
\"The most sublime truth of all has never been stated, or written, or sung. Not because it is far away and cannot be reached but because it is so intimately close. It is too close to be described, objectified, or known, yet it is yours already. It is alive and present as the stillness that is the core of your being.\"
One’s own awareness is so ordinary and all pervasive it goes continually overlooked, yet ironically it offers the very freedom that is longed for. When attention is turned toward the essential experience of simply being, it is possible to discover that one is not a body identified with thoughts and feelings, but rather the limitless awareness aware of it all. Here Gangaji offers the opportunity to be aware of awareness itself rather than the often conflicting factions of mind and emotion; to give the whole of oneself to this that is already effortlessly present, alive as the inherently free awareness that one is.
Open, Unprotected and Free (Audio CD)
(Audio CD)
\"If you are willing to experience anything directly and immediately, whether good or bad, joyous or hateful, you will recognize that what you are running from does not exist, and what you are running toward is already here.\"??To live a life that is open, unprotected, and free is to stop avoiding what has been most feared. In this series of powerfully moving monologues and interactions, Gangaji speaks to the inherent openness of your being, an openness that can only be discovered in the meeting of whatever it is you are attempting to escape. She asks you to investigate how the preciousness of your life is deadened by the avoidance of negative emotions; to see that all of your efforts toward protection actually only augment your pain and turn it into suffering. Here is the invitation to stop turning from the truth of your own beingness and to discover the freedom of the all-inclusive heart.
(Audio CD)
Following the impulses and strategies of the mind to escape or deny uncomfortable emotions may seem to be choiceless. But there is, in fact, a moment of choice to not follow our habituated conditioning. This collection of conversations with Gangaji clearly illustrates how that moment of choice can be easily recognized in the willingness to consciously investigate our own tactics of avoidance. When any thought or emotion, however uncomfortable, is met in the light of conscious awareness, it immediately loses its authority over our happiness and well being. Rather than something to be run from it becomes a doorway to an ever-deepening discovery of one’s true self.
Who Are You?: The Path of Self-Inquiry
(Audio CD)
Who Are YOu Gangaji
Investigate the Infinite beyond Death - In the search for truth, there is only one question that needs to be answered: Who am I? This inquiry into the self is the core of advaita vedanta (radical non-dualism) – a timeless teaching for breaking free of mental bonds and reclaiming your true identity: the Infinite that is beyond death. On Who Are You? American-born spiritual teacher Gangaji spells out the bedrock principles of self-inquiry – a cluster of no-nonsense concepts that reveal how to effortlessly step outside limited psychological conditioning and mental constructs into the freedom, expansiveness, and peace of your own true nature.
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