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Being Yourself

Invitation to the Open Door
November 18, 2022,
Episode 52

“If your attention is on the story of how you do not deserve what is being offered, this is the continuation of self-denial.  There is an open door in this jail, in this prison.”

When we seek freedom on the spiritual path, it is often freedom from our mind or mental activity. In this podcast, we focus how we can lock ourselves up inside a mental prison, not recognizing the door that is always open.

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“Do you put more value on your doubting mind than you do on the reality of what is always present?” 


In this episode, Gangaji speaks about “the wheel of doubt”—addressing the way the mind generates doubt from the "fear of being open, or being still, and not knowing.”  While doubt has a very legitimate purpose in our lives, when we are caught up in a pointed search for certainty, it can become a life-long source of suffering. The invitation she offers is to recognize the activity of the mind and to recognize what is always here regardless of what thoughts are passing through our minds. 





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“Who I am doesn’t need to be thought. It’s here. It’s already free of thought.”

In You Cannot Think Your Way Home, Gangaji invites us to stop following the next thought and fall into the living silence that is the truth of who we are. When our search for home through thoughts, experiences, and attainments truly comes to an end, we discover that we never left home—we are home itself.



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I was in that place of "I give up. I don't know." And that's a very open place, actually.

On this month’s episode of Being Yourself: Self-Inquiry with Gangaji, we are honored to share Episode 4 of Finding Home, the six-part audio documentary series that traces Gangaji's spiritual journey. 

In the fourth episode, From Disillusionment to Awakening, Gangaji reflects on the disappointments, failures, and unexpected turns that led her to India and her life-changing meeting with Papaji. What appeared to be the end of a path became the doorway to a profound awakening. 

This intimate conversation is both a personal story and a listening journey—an invitation to discover that beneath uncertainty, disappointment, and disillusionment lies the possibility of discovering—home is here. 



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“I encourage you to let your heart be broken. Waking up to yourself has nothing to do with forgetting the suffering of others as if it never existed.”

How do we reconcile the recognition of truth and peace with the suffering, cruelty, and devastating loss we see around us or even in our own lives? How do we face real heartbreak, given this paradox can’t be reconciled in our minds?

Rather than turning away from outrage or despair, Gangaji invites a direct meeting with them—and points to the possibility that even outrage and despair can become a doorway to truth



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“It’s in fully seeing it all…that there is this undeniable yes in the core.”


“It’s in fully seeing it all…that there is this undeniable yes in the core.”


“The real healing of trauma is bringing your love and consciousness to it.”


“The real healing of trauma is bringing your love and consciousness to it.”


“If you are really, hopelessly lost, instantly you are found.”


“If you are really, hopelessly lost, instantly you are found.”


“Can you find a problem when the desire to attain anything is given up?”


“Can you find a problem when the desire to attain anything is given up?”


“There is conditioning in our mind streams, but what we are drawn by, what has brought us here, is closer and deeper than any conditioning.”











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“The real challenge is to include all, every aspect of yourself. Even the aspect that hates can be loved.”











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“We have overlooked what was actually innocent and was called stupid. We lost our stupidity and in that we lost our heart. Yet, we are haunted by the fear that we are still actually stupid.”


We fear being stupid or foolish and try to be brilliant and clever. It is an aspect of our human drive for survival. In this episode of Being Yourself, Gangaji speaks to the unnecessary suffering that can be created through the mind’s power to distinguish, delineate, and classify with ever greater subtlety. Without making that power wrong or bad, what if for just one moment, we give up that power and embrace our stupidity? What might be discovered?

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“You cannot learn the Self, you cannot learn Consciousness, you cannot learn Love, you cannot learn Trust, but you can learn how you deny that.”



After an essential experience of self-realization, we can re-identify with the definitions and concepts we hold about ourselves in our mind. How do we resolve the paradox of recognizing oneself as pure consciousness and being human, living an ordinary life? In this lively exchange, Gangaji speaks about the ways we fall back into patterns of egoic identification after an essential experience of self-realization.
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