Gangaji ~ The Diamond In Your Pocket ~ (Forward by Eckhart Tolle)

Forward of "The Diamond In Your Pocket - Discovering Your True Radiance" by Gangaji

"Know the truth and the truth shall set you free." These words spoken by Jesus refer not to some conceptual truth, but to the truth of who or what you are beyond name and form. They refer not to something that you need to know about yourself, but a deeper, yet extraordinarily simple knowing, in which the knower and the known merge into one. Now the egoic split is healed and you are made whole again. We could describe the nature of this knowing thus: suddenly, consciousness becomes conscious of itself. When this happens, you become aligned with the evolutionary impulse of the Universe, which is towards the emergence of consciousness into this world. No matter how much you have achieved here, unless you know this living truth you are like a seed that has not sprouted and you have missed the true purpose of human existence. And even if your life has been full of suffering and mistakes, it takes only this knowing to redeem it and retrospectively endow the seemingly meaningless with profound meaning. If all your mistakes have taken you to this point, this realization, how could they have been mistakes? "I am not what happens, but the space in which it happens." This knowing, this living truth, frees you from identification with form, from time as well as from a false, mind-made sense of self. What is that space in which everything happens? Consciousness prior to form.

Gangaji rightly says: "What I speak about has nothing to do with religion." Although at the heart of every religion lies "the jewel in the lotus," to use an ancient Tibetan Buddhist term, religion itself is not the truth but a story woven around the truth. Sometimes the story only veils the truth and it is still able to shine through it. At other times, it obscures and even usurps it. Whenever religion becomes divisive, as it frequently does, you know that the story has taken over. The essence that points to the underlying oneness of all life, has been lost. The story, of course, is thought, the conditioned, the timebound. The essence points to the unconditioned, timeless, formless, the realm of the sacred. "Be still and know that I am God."

For thousands of years, mythologies, that is to say stories, were carriers of spiritual truth. Almost nobody was able to recognize the truth when it was pointed to directly. Most spiritual teachers used stories as their main teaching device. "All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables, indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable." (Matthew 13:34)

For millions of humans alive today the age of collective mythologies has already come to an end. Some substitutes lacking any depth, such as communism, were tried but proved to be short-lived and were quickly recognized as an illusion. All that's left now is each individual's private mythology, "the story of me." Gangaji puts it: "Telling the personal story is the primary religion of most people on the planet." Where is the truth hiding in all those stories? When you wake up in the morning. You may remember your dream and realize: it was just a dream, it wasn't real. But there must be something real even in a dream, otherwise it could not be. What is it? It is that which enables the dream or the story, the thought or emotion, to be. This is the consciousness that you are.

Stories that contain spiritual truth will continue to be enjoyed in books and films even by those who no longer need them. They also still fulfill a vital function in initiating a first awakening in those who would not would not have been reached without the story and its ability to pass undetected through the ego's defenses. The ego doesn't realize until it is too late that every spiritual story is ultimately about you.

This book is meant for the rapidly growing number of spiritual seekers who are approaching the end of their seeking and who are ready for the undiluted truth. As Gangaji puts it: "At this point in our human history, what was once reserved for the most rare beings is available to ordinary people."

This book contains the living essence of Gangaji's work with countless individuals over a period of 15 years. Gangaji must have listened to-and cut through-thousands of personal mythologies (stories) during this time, but you won't find any of them here. Instead, you are given the means, through question and investigation, of cutting through your own story, the mental constructs that make up your conceptual reality.

Except for the brief account of Gangaji's own story and how it came to an end, and the story about the diamond that gives the book its title, this book contains no stories and has no need for them. The words themselves are charged with extraordinary aliveness and transformative power. This is because they have come out of a living realization of the truth, rather than the accumulated knowledge of the mind.

This book is not only about the transcendence of compulsive and unconscious thinking and the end human suffering. It is part of an evolutionary transformation of cosmic magnitude: the awakening of consciousness out of the dream of identification with form, the dream of separation. The fact that you are reading these words means that it is your destiny to be an essential part of this great adventure of collective awakening.

~ Eckhart Tolle