In Guru, I Do Not Trust

Guru is the Self Ramana Maharishi

To be aware no Guru is necessary J. Krishnamurti

They look but do not see, wearing disguises to fill their bellies

Bhaja Govindam, Adi Shankara

?In an earlier post, I had said, ‘In God, I Trust’. I really do. It’s easier for me to trust something that doesn’t exist! I run for my life from the Guru (Guru, the Sanskrit word is both singular and plural) who are alive.

?I live in an environment that celebrates the Guru as one who awakens. The word means one who leads you from darkness to light. This is wonderful when you find a Guru who is awake. Most are asleep in darkness. Let me know when you do find one awake. I searched my entire life, thus far 75 years, and haven’t found one.

?I am not speaking about belief systems and faith. I am not speaking about metaphors and imagery. They don’t manipulate you. They are the background. The puppeteers who manipulate us use that backdrop we believe in, to make us dance. I spent many years of my life searching for a Guru, because I had been ?brainwashed to think that when I am ready that awakener will manifest as my guide. Whenever I convinced myself that I had found the right one, it was an illusion and a trauma.

?Shankara, Vivekananda, Ramana, JK and others tell us that the truth is important, not the teacher posing to explain us the truth. They also tell us that the truth lies within, and no search outside will help us find the truth. We are like the person looking for ring, which was lost inside the dark house, under the street light.

Zen says beautifully, 'don’t follow the finger pointing to the moon'. Rig Veda says in 1.164.46 , ‘the sages call the Truth, the One, by many names, as they speak of Agni, Yama, and Matarishvan’.

Not only did they call the One by many names, but they also found many pathways to reach that One. There was an awareness that faith as a formless truth or energy would be very difficult for human logic and emotion to comprehend, which would force us to invent other forms of belief systems. The tragedy is that we have lost sight of the ultimate eternal truth of Oneness in energy amongst us and with the universe. Instead, we believe the falsehood of humans controlling humans in the name of religions and gods. Over millennia, more lives have been lost in religious conflicts than any other cause.?

Whenever Ramana was asked about whether God is real he would say, ‘when you consider your body as real, how can you treat God as unreal? If you’re real, he too is.’ When asked if there was a personal God with eyes, nose, and ears, Ramana asked, ‘If you have them, why can’t he have them too?’ In the state of non-duality Ramana was in, God is Energy, World is his creation and Self is one of his creatures. On the other hand, when he was asked about the need for a Guru, he would speak of self-inquiry and the atma Guru, the teacher within. Ramana, and others before him spoke the truth of the Upanishad, ‘I am divine’.

The truth of the Upanishad, which is now the truth of Quantum Science, requires awareness of a high level, which the Mandukya Upanishad calls the Fourth State, Turiya. Perhaps there was a time when Guru were awakened, and could awaken others, mired in the illusion of worldly maya, to this Fourth State. Unfortunately, ones that come on television like the evangelists in North America, are out to fill their bellies as Shankara said.

Experiences

After years of struggle, I am finally comfortable with the polarities of my personal god, who is my security blanket and metaphor, providing me solace just by being there, along with that of the invisible energy being. I am not as evolved as Ramana. He disengaged from the concept of the imagery, and yet, did not deny it, accepting the hill Arunachala as Shiva, the center of the Universe.

God is, was and will be. Such a God cannot be captured and stored in a temple, church or mosque, owned by a religion. That God is universal, for all, everywhere, and eternal. That is what Ramana, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Kabir and others preached. Ramana also said the Guru is God, and that ultimately the only Guru is your Self, shorn of ego, within you..

Engaged in my past trauma, I still struggle unable to acknowledge many who have led me to my self-realisation. Instead of being grateful to these few, I am traumatised by a few bad experiences and resentful.?I believe that my hero Shankara did a great disfavour by initiating the dashnami system of sanyasa. Before that a sanyasi, a monk in the Vedic tradition, needed to go through the four life stages of asrama, as the brahmacharya learner till 21, grihasta householder till 42, vanaprastha retiree till 63, before he could be one. Shankara, the exceptional self-ordained monk at 8, decided to ordain others outside the asrama framework. This is why we see greed and lust filled men in ochre robes of a monk, calling themselves falsely celibates and realised.

I certainly have met a few truly evolved spirits. All except one were householders dressed like you and I, living the disengaged Turiya state. One who was the exception, a dashnami sanyasi, the noble Paramacharya of Kanchi, who I revere. The thought of him makes me tear. Ramana would have been another, though I never had the opportunity to meet him. There were others who led a married life and disengaged as examples of how to lead life with a still mind while moving all the time. Unfortunately, I have met dozens claiming to be evolved, while still living in darkness. These are the ones Shankara mocks; those who ‘look but do not see, wearing disguises to fill their bellies’.

My introduction to Ramana Maharishi was in my early twenties through Paul Brunton’s ‘A Search in Secret India.’ The trigger was the book’s reference to the Kanchi Paramacharya, Chandrasekara Saraswathi , who I used to visit along with my grandmother. I read Ramana voraciously, and yet did not understand him at all. It was much later in my fifties that Ramana made himself visible to me. On my first trip to his Tiruvannamalai ashram with my wife and friends, we visited his samadhi, where his body remains buried. I could not move once I sat down. I stayed there unmoving for a few hours. I dissolved in mind body, fully conscious of my energy, unlike Ramana’s own death experience, and with the same end result. Whatever I could not achieve with my limited wisdom from his self-inquiry process unfolded without effort in those few hours. That unfolding continues. Every time something disturbs me, the inquiry starts; where is this sensation, emotion, thought coming from? Layers swiftly peel. Mind stills.?

?Our experiences can cloud our vision. They also lead us to light. Our limited knowledge makes us myopic. Organized religion benefits from keeping us myopic and our vision clouded.?We need to reboot religion in the wisdom of the ancient to see the light. This rebooting often happens serendipitously. It happened to me first during my first Vipassana meditation experience on the 9th day as an awakening. It was anchored by the visit to Ramana’s samadhi through dissolution.

I glimpsed a state that transcended the mind body. I was energy. It took a while to anchor that glimpse, and fortunately I could return to it at will. I could accept that life and death continue as the cycle of samsara, that happiness coexists with unhappiness, that greed and fear are the source of unhappiness, that we all are energy beings, we can be grateful for what we are and be blissful. If I can, you can too.?

Reflect?

• How am I more than the sperm and egg that produced me??
• Who was I before my parents?
• Am I an accident on this earth, or an event?
• If an event, what is my purpose??
• How is my purpose related to the Source I come from??
• What happens at Death?
• Why am I afraid of Death?
• If Death is indeed a transition, what then??
• If Death is an end, so what??
• What is heaven and hell?
• What would make my life purposeful and worthwhile??
• What should I seek, if anything at all?

?Please do write in, resonant or dissonant. Let’s have a conversation.

Ram is co-founder and mentor at Coacharya?https://coacharya.com . Ram's focus is integration of Eastern wisdom with modern science, spiritually, systemically and sustainably.