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March/April 2010 Spirituality
The Immediate Way Home

by Gangaji

I was talking to someone recently about the bounty of his life. He said, “It couldn’t have been imagined.” What a true statement. True bounty cannot be imagined. In fact, the only obstacle to true bounty is trying to imagine what it might be. Then we fixate on that imagining and don’t even notice what is here, what is passing us by, revealing itself to us.

I am inviting you to stop imagining what it is you need to get fixed, or what obstacle you need to get rid of, or how you need to get deeper or how you need to be awake 100 percent of the time. All of that is still within the realm of imagining a problem, imagining that there are certain benchmark measurements. Problems do appear in lives and there are measurements. But I am inviting you to engage in an experiment and investigation of really just immediately being at home.

Today that is heresy. It is called the “spiritual bypass,” and it is heresy. In our current secular/spiritual dogma, you are not allowed to take the bypass. You have to go into the garbage dump, and you have to dig through, to go through all the ancestry. But I am here to tell you that you are allowed to take the bypass. You are free to go digging wherever you would like to go, but you aren’t required to. You can go immediately home, because home is where you are. It is what is always here.

If what gets called the spiritual bypass in fact leads to an imitation of home, well that is an imitation. It is not home. It is not a spiritual bypass. That is faking it. You are allowed to fake it. I don’t recommend it, but you are allowed to. In other words, you are free, free to dig in your psychological process and free to be immediately at home.

Right now I invite you to be at home. If there is an obstacle that appears, I invite you to investigate, is it real … or is it imaginary? Is it something I have told myself and put myself into a kind of trance believing? If you investigate what is here, you will see that it is big enough to include all trances and it is free of all trances.

You do not need to learn how to fix something or how to overcome obstacles. You can discover what is always here — to discover yourself. There is in truth no obstacle between you and yourself. The obstacles are only in imagination, and imagination as we know is really powerful, terrifying and beautiful. But when we want the truth we have to be willing to not imagine anything. At least for investigation. Not as dogma, not because Ramana said it, or Papaji said it or Gangaji said it. That’s not it. It is for your own investigation.

You can discover what is here, at the root, unimaginably, unthinkably and undeniably. In order for your discovery to have the potency of truth it has to be undeniable, doubtless, obvious. Otherwise the tide and momentum of the imagination comes to reclaim it, to reformulate it, and rehash it as a past and a future.

There is nothing you have to do to be free. That is shocking if you let it in. All of our conditioning is that we have to do something to get something. To get relative political freedom, there is a lot that has to be done. But the freedom of yourself, of the truth … it’s already here.

Gangaji, author of The Diamond in Your Pocket, travels the world speaking to seekers from all walks of life. On March 18-20, she presents introductory meetings and “A Day of Inquiry” in the Portland area. Visit www.gangaji.org.