To complete part one of the course we offer you this guided inquiry from Gangaji. You can listen now or download on your computer.
This completes Part I of Ending Patterns of Unnecessary Suffering.
“Investigating deeply into what you really want opens the door to discovering the truth of who you really are.”
Question: Am I really stopping? Or is it counterfeit stopping? I don't know what to do. Answer: Stop! There is nothing to do.
I am here, in your consciousness, for your freedom and lasting fulfillment. I know it is possible for you to discover the source of freedom and lasting fulfillment, and then to spend the rest of your life being true to that, allowing that to inform your work, your words, and your life.
The word “inquiry” can sound academic, flat, or abstract. But true self-inquiry is alive and vibrant. It is not limited to the fixed question, Who am I? It is a way of being, a way of living. Inquiry results in the restless mind being turned back toward its source. It is the capacity of your individual mind to open and discover its source.
I am here to support your inquiry. In this moment, you have the capacity to have no belief, no memory, no future, no past, no parents, no gender, no agenda. To discover that what remains when there is no thought narrative needs no belief. What is free of time is present regardless of time and belief. It is the ground that all belief springs from and all belief dies back into.
There are no particular requirements for true inquiry. Rich or poor, in or out of prison, with plenty of leisure time or none at all, all people in all kinds of circumstances have the capacity to honestly inquire. No one is ahead of anyone else here. Everyone has the same capacity to tell the truth.
Trusting yourself without memories or images of yourself opens the mind. We are trained to close our minds based on definitions of who or what we think we and others are. Right now, let’s spend this time not knowing, but instead opening and discovering. I am inviting you to be awake and present and not know, and ask yourself, “Who am I when I don’t know who I am?”
Watch these three essential teaching videos about what self-inquiry is, and what it is not. Gangaji reminds us that self-inquiry is not about fixing ourselves. It is not about personal processing. It involves no thought. It is about “discovering what it is you don’t know, even if you don’t know that you don’t know it.”
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There are several ways that you can come closer and stay connected to Gangaji and the worldwide community. Check out Gangaji's Calendar of Online Events, or learn more about her Monthly Online Meetings and Forum. Also, you can explore more free videos, podcasts, and read Gangaji's blog.
Right now we would like to invite you to be a part of a global group that meets each month for a Community Video Screening. We come together on Zoom to watch a 30 to 40 minute video, and then have the opportunity to break into smaller groups for conversation. If you would like to receive information about community video screenings, click below.
Our next Community Video Screening is on:
Sunday, July 27th, 2025 11:01 AM <|gfc_form ~args~ id="99" form_name="tag-the-user" rep1="~title~=yes, count me in" rep2="~confirmation~=Thank you. You have been added to the list. You will receive an email before the next Community Video Screening with links and instructions on how to join." rep3="~the_tag~=CommVid-Invite"|>
We hope this course has served you. Thank you for your attention and your commitment to the truth of yourself.
Please take a moment to share your experiences with us and give us any feedback you may have. We thank you for your support and inspiration in helping us create future courses.
At the bottom of the page be sure to let us know you have completed the course to fulfill a prerequisite.
When you finish this page your comments will be sent to the Gangaji Foundation. Thank you!
<|gfc_form ~args~ id="1" friendly_id="What was Your experience with the course?" form_name="text_area" rep1="~instruction~=What was your experience with the course? What did you realize?"|><|gfc_form ~args~ id="2" friendly_id="Any other feedback?" form_name="text_area" rep1="~instruction~=Any other feedback on the course"|><|gfc_form ~args~ id="3" friendly_id="Any suggestions for future courses?" form_name="text_area" rep1='~instruction~=Do you have any suggestions for topics for future courses?"'|>By completing this course you will have fulfilled a prerequisite to attend one of Gangaji’s Small Group Retreats or Small Group Meetings. Click the button below to mark this course as completed. Please go to the final page to join our community.
I COMPLETED THE COURSE
To open your mind to the silence that is the source of your mind is to open to yourself. That conscious silence is already open. You are already open. Allow your mind to stop gathering information, to stop imagining the future, and to stop strategizing for survival. Let your mind simply be held by its source. Recognize that the capacity to open to the truth of your being is always here.
Whatever questions have arisen for you in this course, the most immediate answer to those questions is simply to open. You do not need to understand the words. Just open your mind to where the words are pointing. The open mind reveals the open heart.
If you find opening difficult, you can examine whatever “story” makes vulnerability seem difficult. It’s possible that there is a story you believe about how you cannot or should not open. The truth is that nothing is easier than opening. This may sound simplistic or abstract, but it can be concretely actualized every moment of your life.
In the instant of simply opening, you experience that whatever you were struggling with is no longer there. True openness reveals that the struggle—the problem, the bogeyman, the demon, the wound—is actually non-existent. The story is not transformed by openness; it is revealed to be actually non-existent. The only thing that holds the story in place is the resistance to opening. What remains, when what was feared or fought with disappears, is the openness of existence itself—the truth in the core of your own heart.
This completes Part VII of Falling into Yourself: Self-Inquiry with Gangaji.
“The open mind reveals the open heart.”
Take 5 to 10 minutes to answer each of these questions. Don’t edit yourself or judge your responses.
This is just for you. No-one is reading your answers, and you don’t need to show them to anyone. Your responses will be saved for you when you go to the next page, or when you choose “save progress” below, so you can always come back and add to them or change them as your experience shifts. You will receive a copy of your replies via email. If you would rather take this offline, you can download a pdf.
<|gfc_form ~args~ id="1" friendly_id="What future can you stop imagining?" form_name="text_area" rep1="~instruction~=What future can you stop imagining?"|><|gfc_form ~args~ id="2" friendly_id="What information can you stop gathering?" form_name="text_area" rep1="~instruction~=What information can you stop gathering?"|><|gfc_form ~args~ id="3" friendly_id="What stories stop you from opening?" form_name="text_area" rep1="~instruction~=What stories stop you from opening?"|><|gfc_form ~args~ id="4" friendly_id="What strategies can you set aside for this moment?" form_name="text_area" rep1="~instruction~=What strategies can you set aside for this moment?"|>
When you believe you have escaped the mind, but you still need help because you fall back into it, ask yourself, "Who falls in?" "Who needs more help?"
In this video, Gangaji demonstrates how you can get under the thoughts and concepts that bind you, and turn your attention back into itself.
“To open your mind to the silence that is the source of your mind is to open to yourself.”
Opening to the truth of our own essential being is simply a matter of receiving. But because of our conditioning, this doesn’t seem like a simple matter. There are usually complications and fears surrounding simply receiving, simply opening. We are conditioned to fear the unknown depths of ourselves, suspecting the worst. There comes a time when we can and must meet this primal fear.
The capacity to receive is natural. When we are babies, we receive what is given. Unless there is some defect, this is the way the infant naturally forms and develops. Nourishment must be received for the organism to grow. Then, as we grow and our minds develop, there comes the revelation and the knowledge that receiving certain things actually causes harm: to receive food that is spoiled or poisoned is harmful to the body; to receive a parent’s lack of love is emotionally destructive; for the mind to receive any indoctrination that teaches hate is brainwashing. Gradually we gain the insight that it is not useful to receive everything that is offered; from that, discriminating wisdom is born.
In the world we live in, much of what is offered is not useful, and it is often potentially poisonous. As we recognize the possibility of harm, we can shut down our natural capacity to receive. With the eventual recognition that our parents were not the powerful, benevolent ones we envisioned them to be, comes a huge disillusionment regarding our capacity to open and trust.
As we grow up, we experience that even our friends can betray us, can lie to us. We experience in ourselves the capacity to lie to our friends, our husbands, our wives, our teachers, and our governments. We find that our own thoughts can deceive us or torture us; they aren’t trustworthy. Our own emotions can get out of control. Our bodies cannot be trusted: they stumble and fall, they get sick, they age, and they die. The message becomes not to trust, not to open; opening is dangerous; it can hurt. And with that conviction, a kind of hyper-vigilance of the mind develops to try and collect enough information so that if there is ever a time when it is safe to open, we will know when that time is. In service to this fear, most of our mental activity becomes about collecting. No matter how much is collected, there is still more to collect.
We go to teacher after teacher, training after training, book after book, tape after tape, in a frantic effort to collect the information we think we need to stay safe. Throughout it all, we have a profound yearning just to be open. This is often phrased as the yearning to “return home,” to return to the innocence of a child, to enter heaven. But by this time our mind is no longer a child’s mind. Our minds, our bodies, and our emotions have experienced some very rough events.
Maybe in a moment of grace you open to your wife or your husband, your child, your lover, or your teacher. But then the habit to close arises very quickly because memory, whether conscious or unconscious, reminds you that hurt can follow opening.
I am not suggesting that you try to open, or that you try to forget about the past, or that you try to receive. That will only create more struggle. What you can do is simply observe when your mind is open and when your mind is closed. You can observe when you are open to receive and when you are rejecting out of habit. Simply tell the truth—not as a means of gathering more information, but as a path of self-discovery.
Telling the truth about any feeling, thought, or circumstance lays the ground for the power of self-inquiry. Inquiry is like shining a light into a basement where a creaky old furnace that you never even knew existed is spewing noxious gases all through the house. Inquiry opens the door and shines a light in the basement, so you can see and realize, oh my God, no wonder I feel sick in body, mind, and spirit. In that recognition, without even thinking, the natural course is to turn the furnace off. That comes from your own innate intelligence. You also see that you have within you an endless capacity to open the window of your mind and receive the freshness of what is truly pure. Along the way is the recognition that even with the experience of wounding and damage, there remains a purity of being. The core of yourself is still whole no matter what fragmenting has gone on around it.
It is not that people won’t betray you. It is not that your heart won’t break again and again. Opening to whatever is present can be a heartbreaking business. But let the heart break, for your breaking heart only reveals a core of love unbroken.