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GOD AND GURU
Guru is Brahma,
Guru is Vishnu, Guru is God Shiva,
Guru verily is
the Supreme Brahman; to that Guru I bow.
GANDHI’S MORNING
CHANT
The Guru is God Himself manifesting in a personal form to
guide the aspirant. Grace of God takes the form of the Guru.
To see the Guru is to see God. The Guru is united with God.
He inspires devotion in others. His presence purifies
all.
Swami
Sivananda
Guru as
Divine From
Week 11 – The
the Life of Understanding a
12 week course Adi Da taught in January of 1973
Tonight I want to talk to you about
the last essay in the Wisdom of Understanding. It goes from
page 266 to 268.
As we went over last week dealt with
the Guru as the spiritual master, about the true function of
Satsang as the mere presence of the Guru as the principle of
Satsang or spiritual life. This week we talk about the
Guru’s the divine form. Guru as God is not the human
individual, ego, magnifying itself dramatically to itself
and thinking it is God exclusively over everyone else and
having all kinds of qualities that it sort of owns.
That sort of
divinity confession of is insanity.
You find all kinds of people in mental institutions who
think in these terms.
Guru as God is not some ego who has
begun to think he has all kinds of divine attributes.
Guru is a
function, where this
individual who is manifesting the function of Guru in the
world, when the ego has died, when the separative principle
has died in this individual when the contraction has fallen
away utterly, only the divine exists. That’s all that
appears, and he ecstatically knows himself to be the divine
form, because he has died, because that limitation is gone,
only the divine exists. So he’s no longer talking about
himself as a separate entity who is divine, he is speaking
ecstatically outside of his ordinariness.
So the Guru is God, God is the Guru.
It’s not that the human Guru thinks he is God. The human
Guru has become God by virtue of his spiritual death. And
it’s only in this sense that the Guru exists as the divine
form, only the divine form is the divine form and it’s
simply that the Guru is one in whom this limiting principle
has died. So that in him only the divine form is conscious.
No longer is this separate entity the principle of his
existence.
That’s what I was saying earlier
about this name Dyanananda being my name, because it is not
a personal name. When I am speaking I am not speaking about
Franklin, this limited individual as being some super
exclusive divine entity. It’s just that this process has
occurred. Only the divine is visible, only that is apparent.
So the Guru’s speech is ecstatic speech, not just self
absorbed intoxicated speech. So this brief couple of pages
here is this ecstatic speech, it is the word of one who in
the midst of ego death, sees that only the divine form
exists and he is that divine form. Only that form is
manifest, only that form is obvious. Only that form is his
form, only that function is his function.
So such a one is both Guru in the
world and God or the divine. At the same time he lives to as
Guru to others and realizes himself to be only the divine
form or in the divine form, he knows his very nature as well
which is the self. So perfect realization, perfect spiritual
death manifests as Guru, Self and God. These three
transcendent qualities. And these three are the three forms
of realization. These three are the three forms of spiritual
experience.
So the “I” almost every line in this
section begins with “I”. This “I” is not the limited “I” and
it’s a paradoxical “I”. It’s not a limited self. It’s the
speech or the word of the divine. So this is the point of
view of this couple of pages. It’s not the point of view of
some human individual making great claims. It is the
spontaneous speech of that form itself. The first few lines
describe the Guru or the divine form in terms of the three
ordinary qualities or states.
So the first “I am not the one who
finding himself awake does not know who he is”. This is the
ordinary waking state. Men ordinarily are born, they live,
they are awake in the world, but they haven’t the slightest
idea what it is. Who knows what this is. It goes on and on,
they look at the news everything’s so glib and right out
there, but nobody has any idea what this is or what they
are. Nobody has any idea. But everybody goes along through
this mystery as if there weren’t any mystery, as if it were
all very obvious. They forget the fact that there is a
profound mystery of unconsciousness fitted to their waking
state. They do not know what this is and what they are.
But one who speaks from the point of
view of Truth, that very One dissociates himself from that
limitation. So he is not one who finding himself awake does
not know who he is. This is not his quality. The ordinary
waking state is not his limitation. So he goes on “I am not
the one who finding himself in dreams and visions thinks he
has returned to his deeper self. The dreamer, and not just
the one who at night goes to bed and has dreams, but the
quality of dreaming, the functioning, the function of
consciousness that is dreams, visions, illusions, the fluid
formulation of consciousness. Well in here the Guru is
dissociating himself from that limitation. He is not the one
who when he’s dreaming, having visions, involved in subtle
experiences in other words, thinks that this is his true
self, his true nature, his real state. And this is the
illusion of a yogi, the usual yogi, the seeker for subtler
forms of consciousness.
As soon as he has a good dream or a
really good astral experience or a fine vision of some sort
or other, he thinks that this is the very profundity that is
the core of his existence. But from the point of view of
Truth this is not so. This is only another form of the
mystery, another form of illusion or distraction. So the
Guru dissociates himself from that limitation. He doesn’t
think when such things arise that this is his deeper self.
He is not confused or limited or distracted by it. So he
goes on, “I am not the one who enjoying the bliss of deep
sleep and meditating thinks he has become free and should
not move to any other state.” Again he expands the concept
of this state. It’s not simply the state of deep sleep in
which there is no reflected awareness, no thinking, no
visions, no subtle consciousness. Deep sleep in this sense
and profound meditation in the sense of going deeper beyond
the forms that arise in consciousness, this is another form
of distraction.
This is itself another form of
mystery of non-comprehension. Whereas the meditator thinks
that as soon as there is no thought, that this no
thoughtness is his true state, that this bliss of being free
of forms in consciousness is his true nature. So such a one
who becomes attached to this level of consciousness wants
always to be unconscious, wants always to be asleep, wants
always to be rigidly and exclusively confined to a
no-thought, no-form, no-world condition.
But the Guru, one who lives from the
point of view of truth dissociates himself from that
limitation, both from the demand for this state itself, or
the illusion of it, the distraction by it, and also the
illusion that it creates, that this is the fundamental
state. And this next line also refers to the waking state.
“I am not the one who having slept, awakes.” The very first
line, “I am not the one who finding himself awake does not
know who he is”, speaking purely in terms of the mystery of
the waking state itself. Here he speaks in terms of being
awake but he speaks of it in reference to sleep.
So in deep sleep there is this
formless consciousness and one who wakes from deep sleep
into the ordinary waking state, in that transition
identifies with the mystery of that state in which there is
no identification absolutely with waking consciousness, but
there is a transitional state between formlessness and form
with which we can identity. But it too is only a mystery. It
is another form of non comprehension, of unconsciousness.
All of the three ordinary states as
well as the transitions between them are forms of quality,
of distraction, of non-comprehension, of unconsciousness, of
mystery, in every state, in every one of the three ordinary
states, we do not know what it is. One who is awake in the
world, one who is having a vision, one who is experiencing
mindless meditation or deep sleep, in each of these states
he is essentially in the same condition.
He is in mystery, he does not know
what it is. He does not know who he is. So all of the three
states are forms of non comprehension. But certain
individuals would have you believe that, yes the waking
state is untrue but your subtle, internal life is what you
truly are, so they would turn you toward that, distract you
with that. Or another might say, oh the waking state is an
illusion and so is all of these phenomena of consciousness,
this whole subtle and visionary life.
But beneath that is another form of
consciousness in which there is no form, no quality, and
that is your true state. But from the point of view of truth
none of the ordinary states or qualities is the truth. They
are all forms of distraction, of non-comprehension, of
mystery. Because one who is having any one of the three
ordinary qualities is simply distracted. He does not know
what it is. So up until this point the Guru has been saying
what he is not, he has been dissociating himself from the
three ordinary forms of limitation, the three ordinary
states, waking, sleeping and dreaming, and their
counterparts in subtle. life, in formless conscious life or
meditation. Now he begins to say what he is. I am this, I
am that. I am the one who is with you now, I am that One. In
other words he is not elsewhere, he is not hidden within his
present appearance, he is not somehow mysteriously contained
and behind it. He is that one, that very nature who is
present, is what he is, and he is that, and he absolutely is
that without any qualification. There’s nothing mysterious
about him.
He doesn’t refer to some special
quality, subtler than the present one as his true nature,
nor to some quality of his appearance as his true nature.
But his very presence is his nature and he is that presence,
that very consciousness, and that very consciousness or
presence is not to be of identified with any of the three
ordinary qualities.
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