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IFS Ashtavakra Gita Course: A Radical Teaching on Freedom That Was Never Lost



A free course inside the Everything IFS Academy





The Ashtavakra Gita is one of the most uncompromising spiritual texts ever written — and one of the least understood. It does not offer a path to enlightenment, a system of practice, or a ladder of spiritual progress. It does not soothe the ego or promise transformation through effort.


Instead, it speaks with startling clarity: freedom is not something to be achieved. It is something already true, obscured only by misunderstanding.


This free course explores the Ashtavakra Gita through close reading, philosophical context, and a lens thoughtfully informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS). It is not therapy, and it does not replace philosophy, non-dual tradition, or classical Advaita teaching. It is designed for readers who are willing to question the very structure of seeking and to encounter a teaching that dismantles bondage rather than managing it.


What This Course Offers

This course invites you to meet the Ashtavakra Gita not as a doctrine to adopt, but as a mirror that reveals how identification forms and how it loosens.

Inside the course, you’ll explore:

  • Bondage as misidentification rather than moral failure

  • The knotted self as history, not defect

  • Seeing without interference as the beginning of freedom

  • Effort, striving, and doership as subtle forms of bondage

  • Freedom as recognition, not attainment

Throughout the course, insights from Internal Family Systems (IFS) help illuminate inner experience how protection tightens, how identity organizes itself, how effort perpetuates tension, and how clarity emerges when attention stops pulling against itself.


This approach does not replace philosophy. It does not turn non-duality into psychology. It offers another lens for noticing what is already there.



Course Outline

Part I — The Dream of Bondage

  • The Knotted Self

  • The Birth of Bondage

  • The Spell of the Mind

  • Pleasure and Pain as Passing Winds

  • The Futility of Striving


Part II — The Sword of Seeing

  • Seeing Without Interference

  • Letting the World Be the World

  • Beyond Duty and Doership

  • The Ease of Knowing Who You Are

  • The Witness Beyond the Movie


Part III — The Freedom That Was Never Lost

  • You Are the Open Sky

  • The Radiance of Non-Attachment

  • The One Who Is Always Free

  • Resting in Natural Simplicity


Part IV — The End of the Seeker

  • The Wave Who Forgot the Ocean

  • The End of Spiritual Seeking

  • The Throne Was Always Yours


Benediction

  • You Were Never Two



How This Course Is Different

You won’t find:

  • A step-by-step path toward enlightenment

  • Techniques for improving or purifying the self

  • Spiritual hierarchies of advanced and unawakened

You will find:

  • Radical clarity that questions the structure of seeking itself

  • Space for confusion, resistance, and direct seeing

  • An emphasis on recognition over effort


Each lesson includes historical and philosophical notes along with optional reflective elements, encouraging slow, careful engagement and allowing insight to arise without force or progression.




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Internal Family Systems (IFS) 

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