This is a transcript from our podcast episode with Gangaji about meditation and inquiry.

Axel Wennhall
Welcome to the Swedish podcast “Meditera Mera”, which in direct translation means “meditate more”, with me, Axel Wennhall, who asks the questions, and sound producer Gustav Nord. This is a podcast made by the Swedish meditation app Mindfully. I am currently sitting at home in Stockholm, Sweden, and I am excited to call our next guest, the spiritual teacher Gangaji. Gangaji, born Toni Robertson, grew up in Mississippi. Like many of her contemporaries, she searched for fulfillment through relationships, career, motherhood, political activism and spiritual practice. In 1990, her search ended when she met Papa Yi, a student of Ramana Maharshi. Since then, Gangaji has been a teacher, and she has been offering her teachers invitation to fully recognize the absolute freedom and unchanging peace that is the truth of one’s being. She holds gatherings and retreats all over the world with spiritual seekers of all faiths. Gangaji is also the author of several books, such as “The Diamond in Your Pocket” and “Freedom and Resolve”, “Finding Your True Home in the Universe”. In our conversation, we will explore the topic of self-inquiry. How can we use self-inquiry to explore our own being? What is spiritual maturity? What do we really want in life? And where are we searching for it? And many, many other powerful questions for all of us who want to live an awake and compassionate life. Hello.

Gangaji
Hi.

Axel Wennhall
So, really nice to meet you. And I’ve listened to you in one podcast episode, I think. And then a couple of months ago, I came over your book, The Diamond in Your Pocket. And it was absolutely fantastic. A lovely book. And I think when I wrote to you and your team, I kind of felt that it would be nice to talk about letting go. And I think that’s something I would like to address with you. But after finishing the book and like going through it again, and then I really felt like, well, what I felt was most profound for myself was the questions you asked, the self-inquiry questions. So I think that might be the topic for our conversation.

Gangaji
That’s great. I mean, that’s letting go. That’s a smaller or deeper version of letting go. It’s a how specifically do we let go? And that’s what inquiry is designed to reveal. Yeah.

Axel Wennhall
So, for those of you who haven’t read your book or listened to your talks and are new to you and your teaching, could you please give them a background to your own, perhaps your own awakening?

Gangaji
Well, I’ll give you a capsule view. I wanted to be happy. Before I had any concept of spirituality, I simply wanted to be happy. And I felt like I wasn’t happy. And so I started doing things that I thought would make me happy, that the culture taught me would make me happy. And they did make me relatively happy compared to when I was miserable. But I kept having to do more because, okay, I’m happier than I was, but I would like to be still more happy. And so somehow, years and years, 20 years from that moment, I ended up in California and in California at a certain time when there was an explosion of consciousness in the late 60s and early 70s. And I recognized that what I meant by I want to be happy was I want to be free. I want to know myself. I want to recognize what a true life is. What is this life? How is it to be lived? And so that got me on a spiritual search. I identified as spiritual. I think it’s all a spiritual search. And I experienced different teachings. There was a lot going on in San Francisco in those days, and I experienced Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism and different teachers who made their way through the San Francisco Bay Area. And I was profoundly affected by any number of teachings and teachers. But I always would return to suffering. Somehow I identified myself as suffering. And so I would have to do a lot of things to not suffer, to not be myself. I’d have to learn new skills, practice things. And that was a moment of disillusionment. And this was years after I had begun my spiritual search. And I recognized there’s something I don’t know, that I really don’t know, and I need a teacher for that. My husband, Eli, also was recognizing that. And as much as we had accumulated and recognized, and as many beautiful and true, authentic experiences we had had, there was something that was still identified with suffering. And so I prayed for a teacher. I never wanted a teacher before. I could see the corruption around teachers. I felt superior to someone who needed a teacher. But I recognized, well, actually I need a teacher because there’s something I’m not getting, something I’m not seeing. So within six months of that, I met my teacher. I met Papaji in India. Also, I’d never had a desire to travel to India to look for a guru.

Axel Wennhall
Could you please explain for the listeners also who Papaji was?

Gangaji
Papaji, yes, was, I didn’t know much about him at that time. Papaji was, died in 1987, and he was, he was Papaji. His name was H.W.L. Poonja. He lived at that time in Lucknow, India, and spent time in Hardwar in the hot months of India, and had been a teacher for many years, but had been sort of a wandering teacher. He never wanted to accumulate any number of students. He was a very active big man, and he was a devotee of Ramana Maharshi, who is a revered saint from the south of India. And so Papaji would make his trips to the ashram there, and then Ramana actually sent him back into the heart of India, into Lucknow, to save his family. who were all in Pakistan when the partition was made, when India became independent from England. And so he never, he spent time, real time at the ashram after that, and people collected around him, and then they would disperse, and. I’d never heard his name. He wasn’t a famous teacher at that time. But one of his students was speaking in the Bay Area, and I was quite struck by how. how relevant the teaching was. The teaching being inquiry. And I had, you know, chanted and practiced, but it had usually been in either Sanskrit or Tibetan. And even when it was in English, it was a translated form of English that was very stilted. It was not the vernacular. And this student of Papaji’s was speaking the vernacular, and so. English vernacular, so there was an immediacy there. And that’s what got me recognizing, Oh, I have to get there. I have to meet this teacher who There were only four or five people there at the maximum when I met him. My husband, Eli, went to India and found him and was writing letters back to me that were just electrified. The letter, even before I opened it, was electrified, and he said, You’ve got to come here. This is the real thing. This is finally it. We both had great teachers that I still respect. But, as I said, there was something missing, and he assured me that this is what was had been missing, this teacher, Poonjaji. We started calling him Papaji because his grandchildren called him Papaji, and that just seemed like a better, better name. We didn’t want to call him Babaji. Anyway, he was a miraculous teacher. His teachings are still alive. Finally, many, many people came to him. When Osho died, a lot of the Osho devotees came to Papaji because many of them were in India, and they came from the south to the north. And his teachings now have spread. He has lots of his prior students who are teaching people. Mooji was a student of his, and there are different teachers around. And I was one of those. He asked me to take his teaching to the west. He said, You must go door to door. Because he saw with certain Americans specifically, because that’s who I was assigned to speak to, that there was a profound misunderstanding about spirituality. And his invitation and his telling me what I should offer to people was to stop, to be still, to stop seeking, actually. It was terrifying at the time, but that’s the essence of the teaching. For Ramana also, Ramana’s teaching was essentially, Be still and recognize who you are. Hmm. So I use a lot of words to get there because our minds are so busy, and we are so afraid of stillness. I was afraid of stillness. We think we will die if we’re still, or we will regress, or we will fail. So I’ll just count on you to bring forth what’s needed.

Axel Wennhall
In that first meeting with Papaji, when he told you to stop, what did you encounter? And you were also speaking about that you felt that there was something missing. And then of course, the question comes up, What did you find?

Gangaji
Well, it was terrifying to me to stop. When I really recognized, he didn’t mean just sit there in a pose of stopping, in a meditation pose, to really stop. And I felt terrified. I felt that I would regress back to that person I identified myself as when I was at my worst in the suffering, that I would lose everything I had gained, which is true. I did. But I thought that that meant I would be thrown into the depths of hell. I would suffer with no possibility of coming out. And so, I recognized, though, that I was with a teacher, my teacher, and I had recognized him as my teacher. And so, I knew that he was offering me something huge. And so there was this support, this internal support to actually lose everything, if that’s what it took to know the truth of myself. That took some moments or minutes or hours, and then it was a moment where I was like, Oh, is it like meeting death? I know many people have been around other people who are dying, and there’s usually a struggle in the years or months or days or moments before death. But quite often at the moment of death, there’s surrender. And in that surrender, there’s grace and beauty and release. And so what Papaji was directing me to was that surrender. Because stop feels like death. Because our whole system is wired to go, to hide, to get, to protect, to fight, whatever it may be, but it’s an activity. And this was just stop, just be still. So simple, but really radical. And it was difficult at first for me.

Axel Wennhall
When I hear you talk, it feels to me that you were very ready for this, that you were in a point in your life where this was truly, truly what you wanted.

Gangaji
Yes. I think that’s the condition that’s needed. I had to be. I had been disillusioned with my chanting, with my experiences. I recognized that I wanted something that I hadn’t been able to grasp or keep. I had experiences. But this desire for a teacher was really a desire for someone to point me in a direction that I had not seen or known existed. And that direction was here, being here, absolutely still.

Axel Wennhall
Because that is one of the inquiries I brought with me from reading your book, The Inquiry, to look into oneself and really ask the question, what do I really want? And one thing that came to me is that an awakening experience, which many people who listen to this episode will have or have had, is an experience of, it comes with a feeling of peace, perhaps joy or bliss, love, just this feeling of relaxation and contentment. So when we have that kind of experience, it kind of seems that it’s so easy for us to, as you mentioned in the beginning, you wanted to be happy. And that feeling, that taste of freedom or whatever you want to call it, that kind of feeling can so easily become something you look for or kind of try to get back. But if I understand you and your teachings correctly, you mean that that’s not the desire we need to have in order to be free. We can’t sort of focus on the byproducts of freedom. Would you like to elaborate?

Gangaji
I think that’s really important. You know, we want certain things. And I was saying, I want to be free. But really it was, what did I think freedom would give me? I still wanted something. And so what I thought freedom would give me was really happiness. I was still this pre-adolescent person looking for happiness, and I had looked everywhere and had found happiness, but I hadn’t found lasting happiness. So I didn’t, I wouldn’t have known to phrase it in this way, but I was really looking for what is permanent. Really, Papaji would say, You have to find out what is always here, because that’s what’s real. Something that comes and goes is not real. And so meditation is really to discover what comes and goes. And I could see that my emotions would come and go. Sometimes I was in bliss, sometimes I was in misery. The weather comes and goes. The condition of my body comes and goes. People come and go. We could even say love experiences come and go. But what is it that doesn’t come and go? And so that was the. I had the moment of being with him and experiencing that and stopping. But because of the way we’re made, the mind gets busy after that. And so my mind got busy with, How do I keep this? How do I stay in this bliss or peace always? And that’s when he said, You have to discover what doesn’t come and go. And in that, first tell the truth about what does come and go. So I knew from my experiences that all my states of enlightenment come and go. Hmm. And all my states of unenlightenment come and go. So there was something closer than either enlightenment the way I was naming enlightenment or defining enlightenment or unenlightenment. And in that recognition, that’s the recognition of oneself. And that’s what he was pointing me to and that’s what he asked me to come and point others to. And it sounds like what you discovered in the book, that there is something that when you recognize that, it’s not that it’s new, but you recognize it freshly. It is your own self and it has always been here.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah. The kind of feeling or perhaps the word that comes to my mind, feeling into that, this home in a way, it feels like.

Gangaji
It’s beautiful. Yes, truly home.

Okänd
Yeah.

Gangaji
Truly what we’ve been searching for.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah. And there’s this other beautiful question that you have in the book in terms of discovering what we really want is also to see where do I seek for what I want? Because that can. Yeah. Because that kind of also highlights, okay, well, am I, am I seeking for happiness outside myself, outside things that, that it’s not in my control or where, where am I trying to locate this, this happiness? And I think that’s one of the big insights I had in, in one of my first awakening was that I’ve been striving for all these external factors that helped me, helped me be present and enjoy life. But then I started to kind of realize, but wait a minute, do I really need the external factors? They are helpful for sure. And I love, and I, and I love, for example, skiing or playing with my daughter, but it, it kind of just dropping that question, are they needed or is it possible without them? And what does that mean? So, um, one, one of the other things I, I, I would like to discuss with you is about spiritual maturity. What do you mean by that?

Gangaji
Well, I don’t know what I mean. I discovered it. Somehow it was present in me and in that visit with Papaji. There was a moment in that visit where we were going for a walk and he was walking ahead of me and I felt this very old condition, Christian conditioning come up. Something like, he has many gods and there’s only one god and you will suffer and go to hell for following him. And it was like, what? I hadn’t, I hadn’t believed anything like that in decades. And I had never been a devout Christian really. And this was just some programming from some religious class that I had that somehow arose because it was stimulated. And I recognized in that moment there was a choice I had. I could, could maybe fall into that old programming, even though it seemed absurd, it had a certain power. Like I would die or I would suffer because I’m following this being who has many gods, because he was raised Hindu. That’s not even a good description of Papaji. But my programming was very primitive then and in that moment. And so I had to just stop and see, discover what is my choice. I can fall into this programming and this was obvious programming. Of course we have much more subtle programming. Or I can trust my experience. And I chose to trust my experience of this man, this teacher, and trust my own intelligence that if he was a corrupt guru or if he was teaching some doctrine that was going to lead me into suffering, that I would recognize that. I would recognize it by my suffering or by my intelligence. And I think that was the maturity that manifested for me in that moment. That I, I was there to trust my experience and to tell the truth about my experience. And so that actually took a lot of the work from him back onto myself. I assumed the role of, really, student. I was always his student, I am his student, but not a needy childish student. I was a mature student. And so when he would say something to me, I would take it in, maturely, and be willing to. to examine it, inquire into it, into the deepest way that I could. So that’s my experience of maturity. But I know when I meet people, I recognize there are different levels of maturity and there’s really nothing I can do about that. I can offer what I’ve realized and meet with people in a way that hopefully helps them discover and grow and mature even more. But it’s an unknown. I don’t see that it has anything to do with religious training or even practice or beliefs. It’s a capacity for inquiry, a capacity that you can’t know you have. You can discover you have a capacity. And in that willingness to inquire or willingness to experience, then the maturity grows. I’m so happy you used the word maturity because I think that that’s an essential word. Finally, that’s what we’re talking about. Are you willing to be mature enough to be still, to stop?

Axel Wennhall
Because the other things that both from reading your book, but also thinking about the topic of spiritual maturities that as you mentioned now, the willingness to be completely honest, it seems that within spirituality, it’s so easy to get trapped in different fantasies and stories and escapes. Trying to kind of pass by life’s hard parts. So I think also maturity for me is the willingness and the understanding that life and especially love hurts and be willing to meet that and be with that. So that was also one of the inquiries that I brought with from your book. And that was, what hurt am I unwilling to experience? It’s a really profound question because it shows you, if you can stay with it and be honest with it, it shows where you need to mature.

Gangaji
In a way. Yeah. So beautiful. It shows where we’re closed. Or protected. Because we don’t feel that we can bear that. And the ultimate that we don’t feel we can bear, just as organisms, is death. So, of course, a hard death or a horrible death or loss of love or however that death may be framed in different circumstances, it’s losing everything. And so the willingness, that’s really what stopping is in a moment to lose everything, everything you’ve gained, everything you know, everything you want to keep or everything you want to keep away.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah. Because that’s, for me, that’s been such an important part of this journey to kind of be in contact with that truth. Because when you say we will lose everything, it can so easy to slide by because it’s a bit like, yeah, yeah, sure, we’ll lose everything. Of course, everybody dies. But when you kind of dig into that and feel it and like, oh shit, I will actually lose everything. Everything that I cherish, that I love or that I value in my life, I will lose it. And just that inquiry, because I read it the other day and I was putting my daughter to bed and she was sleeping next to me. And just to hear her fall asleep and breathing next to me, it was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. And I’ve been hearing her for 16 months. And of course, I’ve been having times when I felt an awe or a kind of big, big compassion or love for her. But as soon as I kind of just remind myself, okay, but I won’t have her for eternity, I will lose her. Then this moment becomes so precious.

Gangaji
Yes. That’s the, that’s revealed, you know, we can hear that. But in your direct experience of that, actually, as you spoke about it, you were transmitting it. So that you brought all of us to that moment because that was a true moment. That was not on the surface. That was in the depths of recognizing how precious this moment is, this life.

Axel Wennhall
What does that.

Gangaji
How fleeting.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah. What does that truth evoke in you?

Gangaji
You mean at that moment with Papaji or just in general?

Axel Wennhall
Just in general, like how close to heart do you keep that truth?

Gangaji
It’s, you know, there’s a moment, as you know, where there’s a certainty that life is who I am. I am this life form, this preciousness that is subject to birth and death. But life is my true identity because it doesn’t come and go. And I’m not just talking about the carbon molecule or our biosphere, but cosmic life, the cosmic presence of being. What in Sanskrit they call sat-chit-ananda, the consciousness that I am, then is located in this particular precious body that’s subject to life and death. But it’s also located there because it’s life is infusing these particular cells. But it’s life that doesn’t die when I die or when I lose what is most precious to me. This is not lost. So there’s grief when we lose what we love, of course. There’s pain. There’s pain just in living, in all creatures. But there’s also an unnecessary pain that we add to things before we have been willing to stop, before we have been willing to meet death, before you’ve been willing to recognize the preciousness of your alive daughter in your arms and how fleeting that is. That capacity is. Well, it’s back to maturity. And that’s sort of a mystery, you know, who will be willing to actually tell the truth in a moment of tenderness or a moment of starkness, a moment of losing or a moment of gaining. Tell the truth and then the willingness to let that truth actually mature your brain cells or whatever it is needs maturing so that our inquiries can get deeper and closer. And then finally just an expression of life, a temporary expression of life everlasting.

Axel Wennhall
Perhaps it would be useful if you would like to talk through or guide people how you instruct people to inquiry. Because we are dropping these questions during our talk and I mean they can mean different things depending where we are. So what is a useful way to use self-inquiry?

Gangaji
I think they do mean different things in different states of being and that that’s all part of the maturing of the mind stream of our intelligence, our individual intelligence. But if we’re willing to let the drilling happen and we actually have a moment without clinging to that moment, then that moment is the activity of deeper self-inquiry. And, you know, even using these words is so limited because when I say deeper, it’s not deeper the way I thought of deeper until I had a deeper experience. It was deeper and more superficial too, where deep and superficial come together. And that’s really what, when Papaji said, Find out what doesn’t come and go, for that you have to be willing to find out what does come and go. As you so beautifully showed us with that moment with your daughter, it adds to the experience in the recognition of coming and going. We think it will be despair to recognize that we all die. Because there is a moment of despair, but in the full recognition of that, there is actually freedom and love for the experience of life in the particular life form or particular situation, as well as the everlasting life that enlivens everything. I’m not sure if that’s what you were asking.

Axel Wennhall
You know, yeah, but it is in a sense. And my experience of self-inquiry is that personally, it can be quite easy for me to try to get an answer right. Because we hear this inquiries, like, Who am I? And like, Yeah, who am I? Who am I? And or for me, it is always useful to be in silence and stillness first. And then getting into that childish curiosity. That kind of, instead of trying to know or understand more, yeah, it is the difference between searching and exploring for sure. I would say that it’s, I’ve seen that difference in myself and in others that when I explored the question, I went sort of like, it’s very open and it’s this, and perhaps when we can even shift the question to, for example, what is stillness? Is stillness available? Is stillness here? So it becomes more playful, it becomes more. But then, my own experience, and I don’t know how this relate to you and your teaching is that one of the obstacles is, in terms of speaking about spiritual maturity, is the trusting your own experience.

Gangaji
Yeah.

Axel Wennhall
Really trusting your own experience, rather than trying to find that mind’s answer coming up and going for that.

Gangaji
Well, that’s, you speak of so much that’s really important, you know, the way that our mind streams naturally corrupt knowledge, we own it. And that’s what I mean by corrupted. Then it, the knowledge, even in its biggest sense, is there to serve us as organisms, whereas the deepest knowledge comes when you are willing to not know, or you are willing to meet your death, or willing to be still, to be silent. But it is the tendency of the brain or the mind to categorize and to own certain things, and in that the fresh-ness is lost. So we have to, I guess as a mature practice, be willing, as Papaji initially said, to lose both our enlightenment and our unenlightenment. We have to lose whatever it is we think inquiry is, or we think the light is, or we think the truth is, or love is, and be willing to experience it from a space of unknowing. And that’s a space of innocence, and that’s the point of death, even being part of our conversation and the spiritual conversation, because the point of death is in fact a point of innocence for this life form, because it’s never died before. Of course, we do go through many deaths in a day, but the ultimate death, and so the ultimate silence for me is really not knowing. And so enlightenment has no meaning in that. And even inquiry has no meaning. Inquiry had meaning to push me to the edge of that. And then over the cliff, just floating down, there is not knowing, and as you say so beautifully about exploration. And then exploration is, that’s our nature. We are naturally curious. And so what is here? If we don’t know what should be here or what we want to be here or what we think is here or what we have named is here based on what was here, what is here? And what is here that is always here? Because we can name that, and we do name it eternity, the truth, God, whatever names we have thrown at it, but those names get polluted and stale. Papaji would say garbage. You say, Stop eating garbage. Throw the garbage away. Because our nature is fresh. That’s the amazing thing, regardless of our age or our experiences, that freshness is life.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah, there is this interesting experience that I think most, if not all people have, the daily grind, I think you say in English. Yeah. And that is, I mean, even thinking about it, like reflecting about it, like nothing is the same. Everything is fresh and new. So, and when you kind of deeply understand that, then the question more comes into, okay, well, can I live and experience that? And for me, that is also part of the spiritual journey to kind of integrate insights into daily life. And I think one of the perhaps hardest part for people who meditates or listen to perhaps your talks or read your books is that we might have this quite profound awakenings and experiences, but then the integration into daily life is harder. And I think one of the most challenging part of life is our relationships. And there was this inquiry also in the book that I also brought with me, and that is, what do I want from other people? That was a great one. What do I want from other people? And then you wrote, if you want something from others, you will suffer. But if you want to give it to others, you will be happy.

Gangaji
Well, you know, in that sense, when we suffer in relationship, that suffering then becomes our teacher. Yeah. Because we do want things from other people, you know, we want them to smile at us, to be happy with us, to love us like we love them. And that wanting that is actually, it’s painful. Because when we want that, we also are allowing that it’s possible that they won’t love us or they won’t smile at us or give back to us. So that’s the, like the cauldron, the fire and the possibility, as you were speaking about, in inquiry is to fall into that fire. I know that there are certain spiritual practices where people cut off all relationships or become hermits. And I can’t speak to that because that’s not my way and it’s never been even a choice in my life. There are choiceless lives that we live. And you are in relationship, I’m in relationship, many of your listeners are. And so relationship becomes the cauldron, it becomes the hermitage, it becomes the teacher, actually. And how beautiful. And when it’s based in love and it’s based in truth, then it’s certainly pleasurable, but it’s not based in pleasure. It’s based on something that pleasure is pointing to. So profound and deep, the possibility of living your life with other as yourself.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah, the word that comes to my mind is, it becomes very meaningful in a sense, relationship, yeah.

Gangaji
And fresh.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah. Yeah.

Gangaji
Even the old fights are fresh.

Axel Wennhall
So, one other thing that perhaps this is the last inquiry we can explore together is the inquiry of what do I need to be free? Because for that, that also points me to exploring how I want or need in my mind, need to change external circumstances in order to be happy, in order to be content. Then you write also that, what if the answer is nothing?

Okänd
Yeah.

Axel Wennhall
So, what’s your own experience of that inquiry?

Gangaji
Well, my experience is when I think I need something for my own freedom, I may want something that’s different. Like you may want your relationship to go a certain way or you may even want a particular meal or good weather, whatever it may be. But if you think you need it, that’s a deeper involvement and that’s saying that you need it to be who you are or you need it to be complete or you need it to be happy. We want the sun to come back. You were speaking about the dark days of November and early December. We want the sun, we love the sun, the sun nourishes us. But in the darkness, do we need the sun? Certainly our bodies need some sunlight eventually, but do we need it? Does the light that is consciousness, that is life itself, need anything for its being? So, that’s a deep inquiry because for that we have to have the wisdom to see the difference between want, desires and needs. You know, we need air, we need water, we need. We need actually what we already have. We are so lucky. I mean, those people listening to your podcast, you and I sitting here speaking across continents, we are so lucky in so many ways. And so if we are to make use of that luck, it’s really to recognize that we have the privilege and the space to actually inquire, What is my life for? Is my life going to be about more and more needs? And are they real needs? Or is my life about something that I can’t even articulate or define? And to really allow that to be what is both wanted and needed. To recognize that our life lived truly isn’t unknown. It can only be discovered and explored. And in that, it satisfies every need. And I don’t want to make light of needs. Of course, if you’re ill, you need medicine, you need care. If you’re a small child, you need protecting, you need teaching, you need growing. So, it’s not to discount all of those animal needs that we share, but to recognize that at a certain point in your life, you need the truth. And the truth is here for you.

Axel Wennhall
Coming from another angle of that question, is also the inquiry, who or what tells me that I’m not free? And when I read it, I was just, it also, I think a great inquiry, it’s one of those that makes you just, ah, change perspective or kind of like, yeah, who or what is telling me I’m not free? What is this thought stream telling me again and again and again? Because I am privileged in my life, so I don’t have anyone around me saying you’re not free. So, for me, it’s 100% internal. And I understand that people have external people, other people telling them they’re not free and listening to that or been having that in the past. But it’s, it kind of like, yeah, it tilted me in a way, in a very positive way, like, yeah, that’s, it’s my own thoughts telling me that.

Gangaji
And that’s so beautiful.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah, but it’s true. Yeah, but it’s also, yeah, I’m fascinated by the, by the mind’s, mind’s play and the, and the, how easy it is to believe in those thoughts, how real they feel.

Gangaji
And how you penetrated that with your mind too, with true, the mature aspect of your mind that has realized that, penetrated the old conditioning. I was reading an excerpt from a book that Frederick Douglass, who was a slave in the United States in the, oh, before the Civil War, who ended up escaping, and he was a very intelligent man and he, he became a writer and a speaker and he was, he became quite famous. But he wrote about the experience of being a slave and recognizing he was a slave. Because he was told he was a slave and he was owned by another man and could be loaned out to other men to work because he was big and strong. And he recognized, I am free. And so I’ve got to make my life free. That I am not a slave. The conditions of my life are slavery. And so that gave him this innate power and intelligence to break through, to escape slavery and then to eventually pay his master for himself so that he got a certificate saying that he was a free man. And he was a very influential speaker and mentor and just a force of intelligence in the abolitionist movement here in the United States. But he is still this light because here he was, a slave, who knew he was free. And somehow I think all of us have to find out where our lives are telling us that we’re enslaved. And how that, we have to stand up to that too, that we are free. Whether it’s in your relationship or if it’s in your workspace or your country, wherever it is, that there’s a way of living your life that’s total, that includes the internal and the external, the deep and the superficial.

Axel Wennhall
It would be beautiful if you would like to guide a short meditation in the end.

Gangaji
It’s like now, okay.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah. Would you, would you open to do that?

Gangaji
Sure. We’ll see. We’ll see what comes out.

Axel Wennhall
Yeah, that’s beautiful. So I’m handing over the microphone to you.

Gangaji
Okay, good. So wherever you are, well, if you’re driving, you want to pull over the side of the road, but wherever in your house or outside, inside, give yourself these next five minutes, this small part of the minutes in this day, to simply be here. You can be aware of your breath if that helps you settle into being here. Be aware of your body. Be aware of the sounds around you. Just letting everything be here, where it already is. And as you simply and easily sit here, just ask yourself the question, What do I want? There may be answers that you have learned that you should want, but this is just with yourself, so you can tell the absolute truth. What do I want? And if you have a long list of what you want, if you can only have one desire, one final desire, for your life, for the remainder of your life, what is that desire? You may or may not have a specific answer. And sometimes the answers come later. But in our inquiry here, asking, What do I want? , this inquiry can continue. And as you continue, in this moment or later in the day, if I get what I want, completely, absolutely, what will that give me? What will I have when I get what I want? And in answering this question, is it possible to recognize the very fact that you can answer it shows that it is here? That the answer is a reflection of your experience? That in the depths of your heart and your intelligence, you have what you want? You are what you want? And when you have and are what you want, how is your life lived? There is no answer to that. That’s the discovery. You will discover in this moment as our eyes open and we recognize everything around us and we discover the answer to that later in the day perhaps, in the week, and even years from now. How has my life reflected that? That’s what brings us together. That’s why we meet.

Axel Wennhall
Thank you for this beautiful talk and for the meditation with the self-inquiry. It’s been a pleasure connecting here over Zoom.

Gangaji
I feel the same. Thank you so much. Really happy for the life you’re leading. Happy for your precious home life and your precious life that you make public to people.

Axel Wennhall
Okay, so I wish you a good day.

Gangaji
Thank you. Thank you. You too. Light in the dark.

Axel Wennhall
That’s great. Thank you so much.

Gangaji
Thank you. Really so good. Really appreciate it.

Axel Wennhall
Bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Swedish podcast Meditera Mera. We hope you have been inspired by our conversation and by Gangaji’s meditation. This is a podcast from the Swedish meditation app Mindfully. And if you liked this episode, please share it to your friends so we can inspire even more people to meditate and to discover who they truly are. And if there’s something that we will bring with us from our conversation with Gangaji, is it to explore the question, what do I really want? Take care and be well.