(July 19,2013) God Himself is the Guru

God Himself is the Guru

Divine Life Society Publication: The Spiritual Teacher by Swami Krishnananda

(Spoken on Guru Poornima)

The Guru is one who dispels ignorance. One who dispels the darkness of ignorance and stands before us as a luminous sun of knowledge is Guru, and it is God Himself, finally, that appears before us as a human Guru. As a Guru, God shall teach us the necessary spiritual lessons as and when they are needed for our higher evolution, and He may take any form that He requires. God takes infinite forms, and the infinite forms may be our Gurus. This fact is very beautifully portrayed in that immortal anecdote of the conversation between sage Dattatreya and King Yadu, as delineated in the scripture, Srimad Bhagavata.

The great Dattatreya recounts several Gurus of his. He does not say that any particular human being alone is his Guru. He went on recounting and came to 24 Gurus in number. He said, "All these are my Gurus", and all Gurus were not necessarily human. That was the special feature which Dattatreya emphasised in his teachings to King Yadu. There were even animals; there was even a bee; there were inanimate things like earth, water, fire, air and so on. In short, everything was a Guru to sage Dattatreya.

It does not mean that Dattatreya required any Guru. He himself was the Guru of all Gurus, but his teachings were meant for humanity as a whole. They were not meant merely to King Yadu, even as the Bhagavadgita was not given merely to Arjuna. We all, as human beings and seekers, stand in the position of Arjuna and in the position of King Yadu.

Dattatreya's teaching goes deep into the problem of the relation of a disciple to the Guru and lays out before us the tremendous fact that Brahma, Vishunu and Rudra, the Trimurtis, and Ishvara Himself are our Gurus. Ishvara is the Guru, and the Guru is Ishvara. There is no difference between Guru and Ishvara. God and the preceptor become one to the student, and in this inner mystic spiritual relation between the Guru and the disciple the personalities are overcome. The bodily relations are slowly transcended and the disciple never feels that he loses his Guru at any time. There is no such thing as losing a Guru. He never becomes lost. Only he changes his form and he changes also the mode of his working. He works in different manners under different circumstances and at different levels of the students' consciousness. Sometimes he may be visibly working. Sometimes he may be invisibly working.

There is a very beautiful work called Guru Gita, and another called the Ribhu Gita, which give us a detailed account of the inner way in which the Guru works for the benefit of the disciple, and the unimaginable manners and the methods which the Guru employs for the good of the disciple. The Guru's work and duty is to bring about the ultimate good of the disciple, and not necessarily what is pleasant to the disciple. Most of the Gurus were hard taskmasters, even as God Himself is. We say Bhagavan is Karuna-Sagara, Kripa-Murti and so on. He is the ocean of compassion. He is more tender than a mother. But when necessity arises, He is hard like a diamond. The saints are like that. They are harder than a diamond and more tender than a lotus-petal. When necessity arises they are law, and when another necessity arises they are love. Law and love work simultaneously in this creation of God, and to us the Guru is a representative of God on earth. He is Guru Deva, the visible manifestation of God. Just as Surya is Pratyaksha Devata, so also we may say Guru is Pratyaksha Devata, from the point of view of our spiritual aspirations.

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God Himself is the Guru – The Spiritual Teacher by Swami Krishnananda

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