July/August 2004 Spirituality
Interview with Gangaji and Eli Jaxon Bear

The retreats that you hold together are termed "Uncovering Self-Betrayal"; when you speak about self-betrayal, what do you mean?

Eli and Gangaji: By self-betrayal, we mean betraying your true self by serving the false self. The false self is who you think yourself to be, either grand or low. The true self is a limitless expanse of conscious intelligence. The false self, which calls itself "myself," is based in ignorance, fear, and greed. As long as you are serving egoic selfishness in the name of security, comfort, or pleasure, you are betraying the pure loving intelligence that is the true self. As long as you are following particular thoughts in your mind instead of love, as long as you believe the voices in your head instead of the clarity of open consciousness, you are betraying yourself.

You call your body and your body’s name your true self. This denial of your true self generates betrayal of everyone else as well. If you are true to the loving intelligence that you are, you will not betray your fellow beings.

If you believe yourself to be just a human being, you excuse your betrayals and continue to act out selfish desires and fantasies. Selfish desires and fantasies cause suffering. We can surely see how this gets played out on the world stage as well as in our individual relationships.

To directly address the patterns of the suffering seems like a new approach to what you share. What is the reason for this shift?

Eli and Gangaji: To be established in the truth of yourself, you must be willing to see the lies and false identity that have been running your whole life. By seeing the ways that you betray yourself, you expose the magician’s (ego’s) tricks. Through exposure of the tricks of the mind, the chicanery of conditioned mind loses its power. In this way, you take direct responsibility for your own situation in every moment of your life. You needn’t wait around for next week’s satsang teacher to come to town.

In our Uncovering Self-Betrayal retreats, we point not only to the eternal silent truth of oneself, but also to the traps and subconscious tendencies of mind that pull one back into misidentification.

What are the roots of all this madness in Iraq and the Middle East?

Eli and Gangaji: The root cause of all suffering is ignorance. Ignorance gives rise to fear, greed, and aggression in the human psyche. All the horrors we see in the world today stem from ignorance, which gives rise to selfishness, which in turn appears as fear, greed, and aggression.

"Ignorance" means to ignore the truth of the situation. When things are ignored, they tend to run subconsciously, or just below the surface of awareness. Let us examine what is being ignored. The human animal is anatomically a flesh-eating primate. As with any primates at the top of the feeding chain, there is a deep-seated drive for territoriality as a survival mechanism. Aggression and dominance are successful survival strategies for many species at a certain stage of evolution. We see some species where the male marks its territory by urinating on it. Unfortunately, at this stage homo sapiens are not acting that much differently.

In the distant past, survival demanded aggression, violence, and living in groups for protection from danger. Predatory behavior, and banding together in larger and larger units for territorial survival, was an important survival strategy for the human family. Our deep-seated biological wiring has not yet received the signal that what was once functional is now dangerously dysfunctional.

At a relatively recent stage in human evolution, it became clear that if you believed there was a god looking out for you, who took care of you in the afterlife, you would be a better fighter for the tribe than the heathens who had no god. However this filtered through the gene pool quickly, and pretty soon everyone had a god, thus eliminating the survival advantage of having one. Then the ancient Hebrews trumped the world by declaring that there is only ONE God, and the Hebrew tribes are his chosen people! Thus started another round of escalation in the survival wars of primates, until most of the world claimed that there is only one God protecting them against the enemy.

It is amazing that in our time most of the world still believes in the primitive view of God as an entity somewhere, who is on their side, and cares about the outcome of their battles. This fundamentalist view of religious cults, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, obviously is the cause of great suffering.

In the present context, fundamentalist terrorists have taken over the government of the United States. They fervently believe that God is on their side, as George Bush called for a new crusade after the tragedy of September 11th. They believe that they are the Good fighting Evil, just as the fundamentalist terrorists and mad dictators that they oppose are also certain that God is on their side.

The ego, which is selfish, greedy, needy, fearful, and aggressive, justifies itself with religious conviction, thus sealing itself off from honest self-examination. Every leader of every war and environmental degradation is certain that he is right. This is the disease of the human family

What is our part in this and what are our possibilities?

Since in truth there is only one mind, we are all guilty of the sin of human ignorance. We all share the burden of being born into a world of ignorance and suffering. To open our eyes and our hearts, to feel the horror of what we as humans have done, seems so overwhelming, that most would rather live with their eyes shut.

But each one of us has a great responsibility and a great opportunity. Each and every human has in essence the same mind and the same heart as the Buddha, as the Christ, as all the saints and enlightened beings that have appeared in the human family.

The only way that we can see for the madness to end is for each of us to refuse to participate. In the deepest sense, this means to face the horror inside of ourselves. Each of us needs to experience the ignorance, to find the place of fundamentalist certainty, fear, aggression, and animal territoriality, and to discover what is deeper. What is deeper is the next stage in the evolution of the human. It is the transcendental realization that you are not limited to human animal-ness. I do not mean merely to understand this, or to believe this, or to hope this is so, but to directly realize it for oneself. This requires the willingness to turn one’s back on personal identity as a male or female human animal. It feels like a death, and you must be willing to face death, to lose everything that you thought you were. In your willingness to go beyond personal identity, human consciousness takes an evolutionary leap.

When you know who you truly are, you are not trapped in identifying yourself as a limited entity that can be coerced by the ideas of religion, state, family, or friends. You stand alone, yet paradoxically you discover you are one with everything.

Eli and his wife, Gangaji, will be returning to the Portland area in July of 2004. Their schedule begins with two public meetings on July 28 & 29, at 7:30pm, at Reed College, Kaul Auditorium, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, followed by a weekend intensive, July 31 & August 1, at the same location. Eli and Gangaji will then travel to Ashland, OR, for a public meeting on August 4, and a 5-day retreat, August 6-10, entitled "Uncovering Self-Betrayal." For more information, or to register for the Portland intensive or Ashland retreat, contact the Leela Foundation, 1-800-879-4221, or visit www.leela.org.