Lit Up and on Fire
Every Wednesday evening, a small group of friends meet at my house for “Popcorn, Wine and Meditation.” The name of our group is a way of saying that none of us take ourselves too seriously (we don’t actually drink wine, except me sometimes), but we all love popcorn. We sit and meditate for 25 minutes, watch videos of various spiritual teachers on YouTube (while eating popcorn), and then share our experience. Over the years we’ve become close friends, a true spiritual sangha, holding each other in love and respect.
Tonight we’re watching a recent interview on YouTube with an American spiritual teacher named Gangaji. Deep feelings well up in me as I remember my first meeting with Gangaji twenty-three years ago. I had come to Maui for a short visit with my wife Linda. All I wanted to do was swim in the ocean, make love, and have fancy dinners out, but a dear friend told us that we simply must go to a satsang being given by Gangaji. With some reluctance we went. That meeting irrevocably changed my life. The date was March 14, 1993. I had just emerged from ten years in a yoga community where I had absorbed a bucket load of spiritual beliefs. The primary one was that enlightenment was somewhere off in the distant future and could only be found after years, if not lifetimes, of spiritual practice. Gangaji blew all that away in one fell swoop.
Linda and I find our way along narrow, twisting back roads to where the meeting is to be held. To my surprise, we find ourselves in a beautiful retreat center, surrounded by jungle vegetation and the exotic sounds of chirping geckos and a loud, squawking parrot. There are about 200 people in the room, the usual colorful mix of Maui locals. When I first see Gangaji sitting on the dais, I am stunned. She’s an incredibly attractive woman in her forties, wearing a white dress, and a white silk scarf casually draped around her neck. She has distinctive white hair. When she calls on people in the audience to share, I raise my hand, she acknowledges me, and with heart pounding, I go up to sit next to her. Someone hands me a microphone. “For years I’ve longed for a dramatic, earth-shattering experience that will lead to spiritual awakening,” I say. “But it never seems to happen. It’s like a rocket that goes fizzle, fizzle.”
“Well, there must be some malfunction,” she says. Everyone laughs.
“I keep thinking that if I practice a little harder, I will have this great orgasmic union with the universe. But it never happens.”
“What you are searching for is right here, right now,” she says. “You must drop everything – every technique, every tool – to discover what needs no practice for the truth of its being.”
Twenty years of practice thrown out the window.
“Let yourself rest,” she says, her hands comfortably resting on her lap. “No effort is needed. There is nothing to do.”
Rest? Me rest? I ask myself. My entire life has been about effort. What just happened? It feels as if my world has been turned upside down.
She looks straight into my eyes as if seeing into my soul. For a brief instant my mind goes blank. There is no me, no Gangaji, just Self.
“I’m very happy to see you,” she says with a smile.
Following this encounter I was lit up and on fire. Over the next five years Linda and I went to countless retreats, meetings, and events with Gangaji, everywhere from Maui to Boulder to Santa Fe to Crestone to Omega to Ashland to Bali. When I founded the Ramana Retreat Center in New Mexico, I asked her to be the spiritual director. But then, as so often happens, my best laid plans crashed and burned. I ended up closing the retreat center, moving to Virginia, and buying a farm. I didn’t see her again for years, but she always remained in my heart.
And who is this person named Gangaji? At one point, long, long ago, her name was Toni Varner. She was born in Mississippi and was at one point a schoolteacher. In her twenties she moved to California and studied to be an acupuncturist. She began a spiritual search, exploring many traditions, including Buddhism. This culminated in a trip to India where she met the Indian sage H.W.L. Poonja, better known as Papaji. This was in 1990, a time when people from all over the world were coming to Lucknow to be in the presence of this extraordinary man. It was with Papaji that her mind “stopped” and she woke up. Papaji gave her the name Gangaji (after the river Ganga), and told her to go out and teach.
And now, twenty-three years later, I’m in my living room watching an interview with her talking about a meeting she will be holding in Vancouver. For all these years, she has been bringing her message of freedom to the world. She goes wherever she is invited, talking to thousands of people, holding meetings in prisons, writing books, and running the Gangaji Foundation. Her message is just as clear now as it was then, her wisdom still shining. As I look at her on the screen, tears come to my eyes. My love for her message of truth, my gratitude for her teachings, are just as alive now as they were on the day we met.
I realize that she is coming to Maui in a week to give a retreat with her husband Eli Jaxon-Bear, who I also studied with for years. Will I go? I don’t think so. No need.