Self is not liberated. It was never bound. What gets liberated are the demons as well as gods of your mind. Set them free. You are sick of playing with the game. Be willing to not play the game. This takes huge resolve.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of freeing oneself from mental constraints and embracing a deeper understanding of one's own mind.
Gangaji's quote highlights the idea that the true self is inherently free and unbound, while the challenges and conflicts we face come from our mental constructs. By releasing both the positive and negative aspects of our thoughts, we can transcend the 'game' of life that often traps us, revealing a deeper sense of freedom that requires significant inner strength and commitment to achieve.
In practice
This quote can inspire a workshop on personal development and mental freedom.
The most sublime truth of all has never been stated or written or sung. Not because it is far away and can not be reached, but because it is so intimately close, closer than anything that can be spoken. It is alive as the stillness in the core of your being, too close to be described, too close to be objectified, too close to be known in the usual way of knowledge. The truth of who you are is yours already. It is already present.
If you are willing to take an instant to withdraw attention from whatever your internal dialogue is, to withdraw energy from whatever the latest point of view about your suffering is, it is immediately obvious what is here: the fullness, the richness and the love of oneself as conscious life.
When you are willing to stop looking for something in thought, you find everything in silence.
Be still. it takes no effort to be still; it is utterly simple. When your mind is still, you have no name, you have no past, you have no relationships, you have no country, you have no spiritual attainment, you have no lack of spiritual attainment. There is just the presence of beingness with itself.
It is through the idealism of youth that man catches sight of truth, and in that idealism he possesses a wealth which he must never exchange for anything else.
The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
Reckon then that to acquire soul-winning power, you will have to go through mental torment and soul distress. You must go into the fire if you are going to pull others out of it, and you will have to dive into the floods if you are going to draw others out of the water. You cannot work a fire escape without feeling the scorch of the conflagration, nor man a lifeboat without being covered with the waves.
I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn't know it then.
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.
Additional problems are the offspring of poor solutions.
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