THE GURU IS REALLY NECESSARY?

THE GURU IS REALLY NECESSARY? - by Huberto Rohden

 

 

 

The classical Yoga-Sutra considers the guru as a spiritual teacher and relative and provisional guide, supposed that the master has achieved a high degree of self-realization, so that he can act on his chela (disciple) with the power of his inner being and not just with the light of wisdom that he received, his external acts and what he says. What must occur between master and disciple is a kind of osmosis, whose action goes from the stronger element (master), to the less intense element (disciple) until saturation is due - that is, the "master of grace" involving and permeating the soul of the receptive disciple. And in this case when the disciple becomes receptive is that we can use the statement of the Bhagavad Gita that says: "when the disciple is ready, the master appears."

 

 

The purpose of the guru is not to take with him, indefinitely, the disciple, but to give him full autonomy and autocracy, so that one day the disciple can go his way with perfect clarity and absolute security, without the master. And then the external master became a internal master, inherent to the disciple. The greatest triumph of a true master is to become superfluous, because the master who never becomes superfluous did not fulfil his mission.

 

 

Certain misleading forms of yoga speak of bhakti that one must pay to the guru, as a god, however, there lies a big mistake because where the emotional element dominates, the reason succumbs.

 

 

True yoga, or mystics, is supreme rationality.

 

 

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PAUL BRUNTON

PAUL BRUNTON – excerpts from the book A Message from Arunachala, about religion.

 

 

                                    

Our disillusioned century has made the unpleasant discovery that its spiritual guides are not necessarily spiritual; that when they bless opposing armies or propound contradictory policies with equal vehemence, they merely reveal themselves as ordinary blind men who hold opinions, just as you and I and other lesser mortals hold them. And that it is also true that the custodians of sectarian religion in every land were among the first to attack true Religion when the latter publicly appeared and was voiced by the great Prophets. As they drew their stipends for supporting a mixture of lingering obsolescent superstitions and hardy truths, it was hardly to be expected that they would support undiluted Truth.

 

 

When a religion suffers from spiritual decay, the people become too dependent upon half-frozen forms and a far-off Deity through the offices of an unilluminated priesthood. The backs of the latter become loaded with theological lumber, and the backs of the former with antiquated futilities. That which should have been as a divine voice to the living, grows dreary and dull, unable to meet actual needs and constantly harking back to the death past. Can we blame young men who hesitate to entrust their spiritual destiny to those who utter dreary platitudes about divinity, but show so little of it themselves?

 

 

Priests whose dogmas are as iron-clad and as intolerant as they can make them; preachers who are more concerned about pew-rents that about spiritualizing their own selves; clergymen who are prisoners of disproved doctrines which belong to their cloth; gaitered bishops who make the mistake of imagining that a religious organization must be propped up by the State, backed by its power and fed by its finances, instead of the Church being inspired enough and vital enough to back up the State with its spiritual energy; clerics who pour out insufferable cant and sanctified tomfoolery, their hollow words re-echoed back by the walls of half-empty churches; persecutors who have failed to grasp the first letter of the alphabet of true Religion, thus meriting Montesquieu's sagely cynical sentence where he begged them "if they could not behave as Christians, to behave at least as men!" - all these sightless servitors of an unreal God should not deplore the shortcomings of our generation but attend to their own.

 

 

 

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