Who Is Incomplete?

“I was a single mother on welfare. I was involved in political protesting and I went through a painful divorce. Eventually, I came out of those difficult times and pulled my life together with the help of friends.

    By the early 80s, I had become a successful acupuncturist operating a clinic in San Francisco and I was with my soul mate. My daughter had weathered the divorce and the hard times and she turned out okay. So I was in a place of relative peace and success compared to the whole rest of my life, yet this success didn't address a deeper discontent, a deeper yearning. Having a house, making mortgage payments, having a good relationship, having a good career and feeling satisfied with my life still didn't address this deeper yearning. It was a shock to see that. Like many people, I assumed that if I could just get my life together then I would be happy. I was relatively happy, but there was a deeper unhappiness, a suffering. This had to be addressed if I was to be honest with myself, and I was interested in being honest. 

       My husband and I felt a call to go into deep retreat. I closed down my practice as an acupuncturist. We sold our house and moved to Maui. While my husband continued teaching and leading groups, I withdrew from everything. I recognized that as successful as my practice was, and as good as it felt to be considered "a healer," there was still some lie in this that was making me sick. I was aware of the lie, but hadn't done anything to uncover it. For me the answer was to withdraw from all my successes and go out on a limb. 

     Eventually it became clear that I needed something--perhaps a teaching--to address this suffering I was experiencing. I wasn't looking for an eastern teacher or guru, in particular. I just needed someone or something to help me see what I couldn't see. 

      Within two years after that period of retreat, I met my teacher, Sri Poonjaji (also known as Papaji) who happened to be a man, who happened to be a guru, and happened to be an Indian--all the things I wouldn't have expected. What he actually was and is to me had nothing to do with being a guru or an Indian or a man. It had to do with that which is the same in him and is the same in me and in you and in everyone who reads this--this core of being. 

     Papaji was in that place of true being. Since he was able to recognize that in me, this evoked the realization of that which is always present, but goes overlooked. He had the force and depth of character to point to it to the degree that I could recognize, "Oh that! Of course, that is who I am!" Even though I had identified myself as woman or welfare mother or successful practitioner, as spiritual or as non-spiritual, as hedonistic or whatever--that presence of being had always been there. All the definitions of myself were overlaid on top of that. In this phase, my self-definition was as someone who is lacking something, even though she has a lot. His direct pointing led me to investigate, "Who is lacking?" 

     Asking that basic question changed the whole course of my life. For the first time, I questioned the questioner. Who is separate? Who is unhappy? Who is incomplete? Who needs something? This wasn't a mental questioning. I hadn't read the teachings of Vedanta. I didn't know the correct answer. It simply threw my mind back into the reality of the question. With the mind retreating back into the basic assumption of the suffering, I felt the layers of my identification falling off--woman falling off, person falling off, my name Toni falling off, acupuncturist, seeker, unhappy childhood, human being, all falling off. The question was going deeper than the layers of identification. We were going to a primal beingness. When the question, "Who is incomplete?" hit its mark, there was completeness and total fulfillment. There was no one that was incomplete. All the incompleteness had simply been built into the misidentification of myself as someone who was suffering. 

In my meeting with Papaji, primal beingness was and is my ongoing experience. It does not begin or end in time. My teacher has died, but the presence of his teaching has no end. This is what I have to point people to. It's not that I have anything to teach. I don't. Everybody has learned plenty. There are certainly wonderful teachings about codes of conduct, and right livelihood, and how to be a success, and how to not identify with success. What I offer is not a teaching. It is simply a confirmation of the truth of who one is--who everyone is. To the degree that there is an openness to receive it, it is received all the way. At the very least, if it is heard, it shakes something loose or at least begins the shaking. 

    My task is simple. It is a bridging--a returning to what is basically the same in all of us. I know we have heard that intellectually, but in the actual experience of it, one cannot continue the same level of warring against another because of perceived differences. I had great political differences from my teacher. Papaji was a very conservative Indian patriarch who had been in the Indian Army. So what? We are all free to disagree and we will disagree. That is the nature of opinions. But to disagree knowing that at the root and center of our being we are one and the same, this is very different from disagreeing with the evil "other"! 

The first time I was with Papaji lasted only six weeks. About the fifth week he told me to go back and share what I had realized. I said, "Oh my goodness, I have no idea how to do that." He said, "Good, I don't want you  to  know  how. Just speak  from  what  you have experienced. Don't speak theoretically. Don't speak what you think is correct. Just speak from your direct experience, and that will touch people in the way they need to be touched." 

   At that point I hadn't had any major realization. I had no idea what he meant, but I trusted him. I trusted that he knew more about these things than I did. He was eighty years old and he had some mileage. So I said ,"Okay, but how?" He said ,"Just wait and see. If somebody asks you questions, answer them. If they don't ask, then you can invite a few of your friends over for tea, and just see."

Then it happened that a woman was sitting next to me at Esalen, and she said, "I am experiencing some burning just sitting next to you. What could that be?" I said, "Well, I don't know, but it could be that this is what my teacher meant, so why don't you come up to my room and we can just talk." That started it. Then it grew from a living room gathering with a few people to hundreds of people who come from places all around the world. I still don't know what I'm going to say. Things come to me, but it's not that I plan or know. There is this sameness that I absolutely know. I am always only talking to myself. So there is a natural trust. You can trust yourself. Maybe you can't trust your thoughts or emotions or circumstances, what you have learned or what you believe, but you can trust yourself. Self is before all of that…”

~  "Gangaji was born Merle Antoinette Roberson (Toni) in Texas in 1942, and grew up in Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Mississippi she and her young family moved to San Francisco. After a divorce she sought to change her life via political activism and spiritual practice. She took buddhist Bodhisattva vows, practiced Zen and Vipassana meditation, helped in a Tibetan-style meditation center, and began a career as an acupuncturist in the San Francisco Bay area. Unfulfilled by her seemingly successful life, in 1989 she and Eli Jaxon-Bear moved to Hawaii.

At this time she met Andrew Cohen, a spiritual teacher and student of Sri H.W.L. Poonja, also known as Papaji. Impressed by Cohen’s "enormous confidence", she returned to California to sit with him for two months. In the meantime, Eli, who had become her second husband, met Papaji in India. Struck by the letters she received from Eli, Gangaji herself traveled to Lucknow, India to meet Papaji in 1990. In her autobiography Just Like You she wrote, “The extraordinary event in this life was that I met Papaji. Until then I looked everywhere for the transcendental or the extraordinary, but after meeting Papaji I began to find the extraordinary in every moment.” Papaji gave her the name Gangaji, and asked her to share what she had directly realized with others."
~ Wikipedia