Guru: Road map for life
Life is constantly aspiring to become free. The very spirit of a creature — not just a human being, but even an ant — wants to escape out of the boundary; it wants to go where it wants to go. So freedom is the basis of any creature’s existence. This is why we talk about mukti. Not because it is some kind of ideology invented by some guru but because whether you understand this or not, it’s your basic aspiration in life.
Everybody seeks mukti — a few seek it consciously but the rest are seeking it unconsciously. A guru’s work is to make whatever is an unconscious process within you into a conscious process. He’s not changing the track of your life or trying to take you to his destination. He wants you to get to your destination quick. For this, he provides you with the necessary tools, which are already within you, to become free from everything, including the very process of life and death. He structures a tool, a method with which you can work. So a guru is not a teacher or a philosopher or a scholar, a guru is a road map, a live road map, which gives you a simple way to get to where you are aspiring to go. If you want to go to a new place, it is sensible to use a road map, isn’t it? “Can’t I do without a road map?” You can if you are the adventurous kind, but to find a place which is just next door you may go around the world and come back and still not find it.
A guru’s work is not to inspire, because there is not much difference between inspiring and brainwashing. As long as it works in your favour you will call it
inspiration; if somebody else does it, you may call it brainwashing. So be it motivation or inspiration, in the end it’s just manipulation. And it can be on today, off tomorrow. So it is not about inspiring. A guru tries to infuse something in you that is undeniably there inside you. If you want to use a negative term, he infects you with something.
For example, if you have fever, it’s not because of any kind of “inspiration”, but because there is something negative working within you. Just like that, there is something positive working within you and a guru sees that and tries to infuse something in you.
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, an internationally renowned spiritual leader, is a visionary, a humanitarian, author, poet and speaker. He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org
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