Sudden Awakening: Stop Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Discover Your True Nature

by Eli Jaxon-Bear, Gangaji (Foreword by)

Overview

Everybody wants to be happy. Unfortunately, relatively few achieve bliss. Eli Jaxon-Bear explores how it is possible to achieve lives filled with gratitude and love. True happiness and meaning are achieved, he asserts, when we wake up, stop our minds, and open our hearts. It is then that we discover our true selves; our core identity that is part of the ultimate living intelligence of the universe; our true source.

Like Gangaji, Jaxon-Bear uses a method of self-investigation called "self-inquiry." In the light of direct self-inquiry, limitations that once seemed to define ourselves are discovered to be more like transparent lines drawn on water. They exist only on the surface of consciousness in one's imagination. When these illusions of mind are clearly exposed, true limitless being reveals itself.

This is a book that will appeal to those who are fans of Gangaji, Byron Katie, and Eckart Tolle. It is an articulate and helpful expression of a path to fulfillment for those wrestling with questions of identity and meaning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571747273
Publisher:	Red Wheel/Weiser
Publication date:	08/01/2015
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Eli Jaxon-Bear has worked as a mailboy, dishwasher, steel-worker, teacher, and organic farmer. He was a community organizer with VISTA in Chicago and Detroit before entering a doctorate program at the Graduate School of International Studies in Denver, Colorado. He has been living with his partner and wife Gangaji since 1976. They currently reside in Ashland, Oregon. Eli meets people and teaches through the Leela Foundation: www.leela.org.

Born in Texas in 1942, Gangaji grew up in Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1964, she married and had a daughter. In 1972, she moved to San Francisco where she began exploring deeper levels of her being. Today, Gangaji offers Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Poonjaji's radical invitation to stop the search for fulfillment and enlightenment and to fully recognize the truth of one's being, which is already completely whole and permanently at peace. She lives in Ashland, Oregon. Her website: www.gangaji.org/.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Foreword xi

Preface to the Second Edition xv

Preface to the First Edition xix

A Note on Language xxiii

Part 1 The Way to Freedom

1 Welcome Home 3

2 What Do You Really Want? 9

Part 2 The Nature of Reality

3 Metaphors for the Human Condition 21

4 Out of Nothing 27

5 Maya's Veils: The Trance of Mind 35

Part 3 Soul and Ego

6 The Call of the Soul 57

7 Stages of Ego Development 61

8 The Structure of the Ego 69

9 Treatment and Healing 77

10 The Gatekeepers: Fear and Doubt 85

Part 4 Awakening

11 Grace, Awakening, and Silence 99

12 Transmission: The Gift of the Teacher 109

13 Who You Really Are 119

14 The Roar of Awakening 129

15 Ten Years after Meeting Papaji 139

Part 5 Ten Years Later

16 Cancer 145

17 Songs of Freedom 151

About the Author 179

Editorial Reviews

"This is a book for awakening...for all of us to meet our true self. The first part of the book is like the finger pointing to the moon. The second is the light of the moon itself." —Nancy Baker, dharma successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman and professor of philosophy at Sara Lawrence College

Reviews

"This is a book for awakening...for all of us to meet our true self. The first part of the book is like the finger pointing to the moon. The second is the light of the moon itself." --Nancy Baker, dharma successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman and professor of philosophy at Sara Lawrence College

"Sudden Awakening is the real thing. It is not only a description of the moment of true spiritual awakening but is also an aid in the invariable obstacles barring that moment. This is not only a spot on study of the process leading to realization; it is a ringing manifesto of liberation. It is highly personal but also universal. I found it almost impossible to put down. I call it the real thing because there isn't even a moment of dogma or bias. Sudden Awakening went straight to my heart." --Dr. Murray Korngold, founder, Los Angeles Society of Clinical Psychologists

"Eli's beautiful book evokes the timeless truth freshly and profoundly, calling a thrilling response from what is deepest and most authentic in the reader." --Gangaji

From the Publisher