Gangaji: Vigilance as Deep Surrender

“Vigilance is sacred, quiet, peaceful vigil at the flame of truth.” Gangaji

 This post previews, Vigilance: a call to deeper surrender, from Gangaji’s book Freedom and Resolve: The Living Edge of Surrender. The full book is available as a free PDF download. Learn much more about Gangaji on her StillnessSpeaks teacher’s page. And check out our previous posts You are Already Whole, part 1 and part 2 published earlier this year. Text from Gangaji’s book is italicized.

Touching into the immortal, eternal Self is a gift many have tasted. Gangaji says that this taste of immortality naturally leads to these questions…. What next? What should I do now? or What do I do with this?

“These questions indicate that deeper surrender is being called for… This surrender is vigilance.”

A critical and monitoring super-ego that showers you with thoughts like “I should have done that, or I shouldn’t have said this” is not vigilance. Rather….

“Vigilance comes from the word vigil, meaning to ‘keep vigil.’ Keeping vigil is a form of worship. Vigilance is sacred, quiet, peaceful vigil at the flame of truth”

Vigilance is like an engine that drives being’s intimacy with truth…

“If you are truly vigilant you will discover yourself as not separate from truth.”

Deep vigilance leads to the end of “your preoccupation with who you thought you were… body, thoughts…. emotions.”

Gangaji asks us to stop feeding our preoccupations, noting that we need to feed our body (with food to live) but feeding thoughts and emotions leads to a continuation and reinforcement of the false self.

Vigilance is not doing… “I am speaking of being vigilance…You are pure awareness. Awareness is naturally vigilant. It is vigilant to itself… is always in truth, aware of itself.”

Vigilance is awareness of the timeless…even when objects of all kind (exquisite, horrible or mundane) appear and disappear. Vigilance comes out of the eternal… and there is no one there doing it — it simply is vigilance.

“Pure vigilance must be an ease of recognition, otherwise there is doing vigilance, and this is … not vigilant. When you have this thought, ‘Now I am going to do vigilance,’ ask yourself who is it doing vigilance.”

Though vigilance is awareness, it is also a stance or an attitude that you hold and move with through-out life.

“Rest in vigilance and see. Just wait and see. See what the destiny of the body is. See what the momentum of the lifetime is. There will be objects passing by the altar of vigilance. Let them pass like clouds.”

Some consider vigilance to be burdensome, something you have to practice and effort at doing. Gangaji reminds us…. “The real burden is the denial of your beingness as awareness itself… I am talking about being vigilance. Be that now.… be vigilant to your true nature.”

Gangaji recommends that we wait and see, “trying to force life to be something based on a particular concept” causes suffering.

“Be vigilance. The deepest joy of the human experience is to be vigilant. It is not a task. It is bliss itself… awake and be vigilant to what never moves, to what is always present. Be that. Then you will see this entity called your lifetime unfold exquisitely, as a flower unfolds.”