Guru is a principle—guru tattva. This principle is completely indistinguishable from nature. In nature we witness the processes of creation, preservation and destruction. Everything in nature moves through these modes in a natural, cyclical procession.
The word ‘evolution’ implies the process of continuous creation occurring within a single being, a single unit. Instead of stagnating and staying absolutely the same, an evolving being seems to become greater, more intelligent, more flexible, and more expansive with time.
However, this creative process of evolution is never without its opposite, yet also complementary, principle of destruction. In order to create, we must destroy. In order to conclude a new order of being, we must leave our old order of being behind. Preservation comes into the picture because, despite having various aspects of ourselves created and destroyed through time, we still feel as though we are the same being, the same unit, that is evolving through time.
All of these things happen naturally. Look out into the natural world and you will see these things happening all of the time. What we call ‘guru’ cannot be separated from the world of nature, the intelligence of nature. Guru is that which facilitates evolution. Evolution is always a combination of creation, preservation, and destruction. The guru tattva, being supremely intelligent, knows what to create, what to preserve, and what to destroy.
In our human framework of existence, the guru is that which facilitates the process of evolution within our own direct lived experience. So what facilitates this process? Here are a few things:
A) Our own inherent nature that pushes us to live in a certain way.
B) Situations that are out of our control, and that we must respond to.
C) Relationships. These are basically long-term situations between two beings that, because they involve another independent being, naturally generate unpredictable circumstances and situations that we must respond to
So, the guru tattva actually operates through all of these things. We may feel our inner nature pushing us in a certain direction in life. In order to move in that direction, we may need to dissolve some of the structures that we have previously formed in our lives.
Situations may provoke us to develop certain qualities that were lying previous dormant in us in order to basically survive and not be physical or emotionally broken by these situations.
Relationships also provoke us in many different ways whilst exposing our own unconscious patterns that secretly make us suffer.
So, to repeat, the guru principle operates through all of these things. The guru is also the thing within ourselves that is able to learn and develop through all of this.
However, despite all of this information, which is actually quite intuitive, many of us still tend to associate the word guru with another being, a wise human teacher. Is there really such a thing? How would someone become such a being?
Let us look again at what the principle of guru is. It is indistinguishable from nature. It is indistinguishable from the intelligence in nature that makes things grow, that makes things remain, and that makes things eventually wither away.
How can a person ever come to embody these principles? First of all, what we call a person is something that is continually at the mercy of these forces. A person is somebody who believes that they are a fixed body-mind unit. Therefore, when that body begins to age and eventually grows closer to clinical death, that person believes that they themselves are dying. Thus, they are at mercy of nature. Nature makes bodies appear, persevere for some time, and then disappear. By identifying ourselves fully with such bodies, we are clearly under the sway of natural forces.
However, it is also possible to become the master of these forces. This is how the people termed as gurus are born. In short, such beings manage to separate their essence, the fundamental core of existence, from the body-mind that it is temporarily animating. Thus, over time, in their lived experience, they are no longer possessed by the feeling that they are just a body and a body-inhabiting personality structure. By doing this, their identification moves from being a piece of nature, to being nature as a whole; from being a unit, to being a universe (as Mohanji says).
So, in reality, those beings that we can legitimately label as gurus are those who have ceased to experience themselves as a small piece of animated matter that lives and dies under the sway of nature’s whims. They have surpassed this experienced and have come to identify with the whole of nature, with the whole of life. They are now indistinguishable from that which we call as ‘God’—the supreme power of existence that makes everything move, that knows everything, that experiences itself everywhere and as everything.
The presence of such a force in its fully expanded mode within a human being is a remarkable cosmic event. The possibilities of such a being are infinite. We will only see of them what we are capable of seeing as per our perceptual level. Such a being can give everything to us, but, in reality, we will only be able to take as much as we are able to digest.
This is the reality of the immortal guru principle. This is the reality of embodied gurus.
I bow down to all such amazing, accomplished beings.
May they look favourably of all us beings who sincerely wish to merge with them
