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

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.

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/.