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Also Featured at the Patheos Book Club
Freedom and Resolve
Finding Your True Home in the Universe
By Gangaji

Book Excerpt

The choice is yours.

After aeons of choosing to tell a story of separation from God, the story seems choiceless. It seems choiceless, but it is not. You have simply been continuing to choose the story that was passed on to you by your ancestors, by your past lives, by your past mistakes, by your past desires. What is choiceless is the truth of who you are.

Choice lies in the mind's ability to either deny that truth or to embrace it. That choice is free will—the freedom of choice. You have no free will regarding who you are. You are that fully and completely. But you do have free will regarding the powers of mind and imagination. You can play as if you are not who you are. You can play as if you almost are, but still not quite. You can play any number of variations and permutations of choosing or denying who you are.

You have played like this for aeons. Eventually, a weariness arises in the play because the play is limited. For all of its display, for all of its beauty, for all of its pain, the play is limited because it is based on the assumption that you are somehow separate from truth, from understanding, from love, from God. The whole play is based on the assumption of separation, and the assumption hardly ever gets investigated. The assumption is believed to be real, and from this belief the play gets very complicated.

I am inviting you to see who is really playing. Taking for granted the truth that you are consciousness, that you are one with God, that you are truth, then this taking for granted is a kind of trance or sleep state, where you will one day imagine that you are separate, that you are lost, and then the search begins again.

In the invitation that is extended from Ramana, the invitation of direct self-inquiry, you have the opportunity to turn your attention to who is lost, who is separate. You will find no one. There is no one lost. The lost one was fabricated in the mind to begin the play. If your resolve is to investigate intensely, freshly, completely, to not fall asleep by continuing to practice the belief based on the assumption of separation, then you will meet yourself as that very consciousness in which player, seeker, separation, and union appear and disappear.

You are naturally consciousness. What we name God is supreme consciousness. You are naturally one with God. You are naturally truth. All the rest is unnatural. It may be normal, but it is not natural. It may be usual, but it is not natural. The play even has its purpose because with the belief in the play and the unnatural normality of it, there is an opportunity to imagine yourself as lost, to experience the pain and the suffering of being lost, of being cast out, of being separate from God. Then this imagination, this play with all of its pain, can give rise to the yearning for reunion of truth in all of its glory.