I was listening to Gangaji this morning.
A man approached her on the stage there, and commented how the mind is always trying to capture what it is she is pointing to.
And she asks him, what else?
And he says, “I’m feeling very happy to be here.”
And she asks, “Is there a separation between ‘I’ and ‘happy’?”
He thinks for a moment, and says, “Not really, it is just there.”
And in beckoning him to look further, she speaks to how easy it is to associate with some feelings, like happiness, peace, and joy, and how much we don’t want to associate with other feelings, like doubt, despair, hopelessness and confusion.
And she asks him, “What could I say that would make you feel un-peaceful?”
He starts laughing and then really has to think about it because he’s feeling so high in the presence of this Master.
Finally he responds, “Well, you could tell me I’m unenlightened, I suppose.”
“Alright,” she says, “you are unenlightened.”
And I’m standing here, in our round little yurt, washing the dishes as the clouds pass over the sun making all kinds of spring-infused shadow magic and the wind is howling like a hundred thousand coyotes, and I hear her say this, and I just start cracking up, rolling on the floor, wheezing like a hyena.
I don’t know why it’s so funny.
She goes on to describe how experience, all experience, has a beginning, a middle and an end, including the experience of “I am enlightened” and “I am unenlightened.”
And how in wanting some experiences and not wanting others, we are effectively not accepting “the totality of ourselves.”
She pauses.
“It’s fascist, actually.”
The audience laughs.
“It is,” she continues, “it’s a kind of spiritual fascism, where the ugly feelings are to be sent off into some camp or death march, never to return. Only the pure feelings will be here, only the radiant feelings. That’s what Hitler was saying. That’s what Hitler was doing, bringing in the ‘new age’ and ‘purifying’. And all the other great fascists... But that fascism lives in the human mind.”
It is in our willingness to accept all the feels, the hated, the ugly, the “unenlightened”, that we begin to actually enter true Satsang.
You can learn more about Gangaji here.
weeds
a poem
my hands, trembling
coated in clay
and dust,
grateful to be
just
pulling weeds.
beneath the plum blossoms,
mallow, alfalfa and
thistle
grow in their
infinite
reclamation
of this old
stone pathway
slowly
forever
emerging
from the dark
revealing
infinity's mastery
carved in leaf, stem and thorn
each, in turn
trembling
by the winds
of this storm
May we make peace with both the flowers and weeds this season brings.
In the words of Annamalai Swami, “Everywhere is Swami.”
This is a new concept to me. It's just within the past few months that this has started to make sense. So grateful to shed my Western, perfectionist programming little by little.