No One Can Turn to the Guru

QUESTIONER: In the Dawn Horse
Testament it says, “The sixth gift of the Way of the Heart
is Sat-Guru-Kripa” and so everyone just says, “Turn
to the Guru, “Guru-kripa” and the Power of the Guru or
Shaktipat Diksha, spiritual initiation, transmission will
occur.

ADI DA: It is not so much
that you turn to the Guru. The Guru turns to you. By the
time you realize that you have turned, you have become
nothing. It is not really the drama of turning to the Guru,
it is the drama of living under the pressure of the Guru’s
having turned to you. A piece at a time, you begin to feel
like you have done some turning. That may be the way it
seems to you, but that is really not the way it
is.

It is true. Under the pressure of
the Guru’s turning to you, you only feel the absence of your
turning, the absence of your submission, the absence of your
sacrifice in total. The sensation of that self-knowing, that
understanding, that insight, serves the crisis that the Guru
is producing in relationship with you. So you are indeed
under an obligation to turn perfectly, but that demand
is paradoxical.

It is nothing that you can fulfill.
It is something that you must fulfill. So it is sadhana, it
is heat, it is tapas, not perfection. It is not you that
becomes perfect. God is already perfect, and God absorbs
you. You become perfect by becoming nothing, by absorption
in the Divine. Nobody does that. How could you possibly do
that? How offensive to think that you could possibly do
that.

QUESTIONER: As the Guru sheds
the physical body, is it the Divine Force that becomes alive
in the disciples and other people who live in relationship
to the Guru?

ADI DA: Sure. Then the
devotees of such a one become the functional means for the
presentation of that Force in the world. They have that
living relationship with the Guru, who is now gone in his
ordinary human form. Their relationship is unbroken, so the
activity, the Divine Siddhi that was the Guru continues to
manifest through them as a community.

It stands present in the community,
not necessarily in the form of another individual who does
this, or has the same responsibility. In some cases a Guru
leaves behind a devotee who has the same function and
extends it. But the purpose of all such Gurus, even if they
do follow one after another, is to create a community in
which the Siddhi is alive, in which it is the living
presence, the living condition.

The only problem is that these
communities tend to become not communities, but cults. They
tend to be centered in the personality of a Guru, directed
to that Guru as a form of fascination.

It is the community re-enacting the
ritual of the ego that people all enact individually. So
they never become a community, and they never turn outward
and become functional and truly live this Siddhi. They
remain inward directed, always concentrating on this one who
is gone. I have told you that the Guru comes to manifest
that Satsang that existed prior to his physical birth.
People don’t relate to that. After the Guru’s death they try
to relate to that Satsang that he apparently generated
during his lifetime.

So they go around trying to remember
what he looked like and carrying that whole cult of his
personality, instead of truly living the Divine Satsang that
he was here to communicate while he was alive.

---

“We are never at any moment in the
dilemma we fear ourselves to be. Only this radical
understanding in the heart of life is the ground of real
peace and joy. All else is seeking and strife and
fear.

Therefore, it is not a matter that
concerns us exclusively, apart from anything else. It is not
an alternative to any experience. It is always already the
case. This radical understanding is the only real
liberation, and it alone is the truth and realization of
this moment. Every motive is seeking. Every turning
away is avoidance. Every turning upwards is
avoidance. Every turning downwards is avoidance.
Every turning towards is avoidance. All these things
are seeking, for they are not abiding now in the form of
reality. Thus, to turn at all is to act. And every
turning will awaken the reaction of turning the opposite
way in time.

The truth is radical non-avoidance
moment to moment. It is to live this moment, this event
without conflict, directly. Where there is understanding
there is no turning, and every action turns no
way at all, for there is only radical consciousness
behind it, turning no way, knowing only great
bliss.”