Why NOT to have a GURU …

Again a terrible start to the weekend, got into some discussion with Amee (my mom) which reached a destination of quarrels, quarrels originated, participated and ended by myself. I was just discussing a good gazal with amee which had a line which meant something like having a lot and being at the top makes you alone.


To this Amee just started the year old story, see this is what my satsang tells, you should join that satsang as you like such songs. I was struck by 2 contradictory feeling at the same time, first frustrated on how on earth amee can think this, and second impressed … impressed on the quality of women … especially moms to link two topic, as different and contradicting as heaven and hell,  in such a way that its seems one is incomplete without the other. But this time my former feeling took over and I was hell mad with this statement. I analyzed my anger to this specific line and blurted out a 20 minute speech on “Why NOT to have a spiritual guru”. 

Normally Amee takes an easier approach of keeping quite when I try n engage her in some debate, but this time it was personal and she had no mood of letting this debate get over quietly. This resulted in an article which I thought of publishing, to get some attention of the people who agree with me and to get more foul words from the people who think I write nonsense.

I have been attending some of the satsangs my parents have followed … in fact I should say they have followed it to the highest level of dedication. If there would be a committee to decide the commitment of an individual towards a thing, Amee would seriously be in the board of directors :D. Anyways, there is some common preaching delivered by all the gurus I have listened to; of course they have a personalized package of their own while delivering speeches. The bottom line which I can deduce after peeling off the speeches is “this world is not a permanent place and you are here for a short stay”. So what they say, which is of course correct, that you won’t live forever. Now some of the gurus choose the hard way and preach that one should leave every materialistic thing and live somewhere in Himalayas. Others preach that one should be live amongst the materialistic things but should raise oneself from this Maya. 

First of all, what is a spiritual guru? As far as I can define, he/she is a person, like you and me, who put he views before a handful of people. Thoughts like materialistic happiness is not real, you will get something great after death if you leave all the worldly pleasures and many more. But this is not the complete definition of a spiritual guru. It’s not these teachings which are the prime reason to make a person spiritual guru and appreciable to masses. The later part of the definition has the root reason for the same; the complete definition of a guru is …. A person, like you and me, who put he views before a handful of people, and those handful of people ACCEPTED what the orator was communicating. These listeners accepted what the person had to communicate and propagated the same to others which progressively resulted into millions and billions of followers, who are nothing but mere listeners of what has become a myth by now.

Having said that spiritual gurus are just people communicating what they think, I am not at all underestimating the power and stature of some of the big names in this field of spirituality. Of course they have a talent to make people believe what they are trying to communicate; people in the quantity of millions and the duration of convincing people to follow them in decades. But my point is, let’s assume, that in those times when these gurus where newcomers in this field and they had some handful of audience very free and without work to listen to what they intended to speak, say I was one of such upcoming talented orator (as I said, let’s ASSUME). I too had a theory of my own, and the times which I am referring to are the times when no one was preached by anyone, it was the start. Let’s say my theory didn’t have after life pleasure or meeting the divine power after death as the core. My theories revolved around the fact that materialized happiness like money is the ultimate truth of life. On top of this if I would have said yes there is life after death but the amount of satisfaction you will attain there is directly proportional to how materialistic you are in your human life. Adding to the irony, I too get lucky to have a selected group of people who are convinced with this theory of mine. Now if we follow the algorithm of formation of a famous guru, even in my case I would have landed up having an army of dedicated people who would have been my followers and would be following my preaching of being materialistic. THUS, just by having a guy like me in those times who has some deviating approach towards life and a great convincing power would have changed the very core believes we are following strongly today.

So, the first point I am trying to explain to justify my article is, to follow a guru means to follow some personal ideology what he/she thinks is correct and not discovering your original definition of life.

Second reason of not having a Guru is each of the Guru’s I have heard has one preaching in common, “All the materialistic love is fake and you shouldn’t be engrossed in it as it’s not permanent and GOD is all powerful and you need to get close to HIM”. I totally disagree with the first part of the sentence and the other part is a great example of wide spread hypocrisy which I will explain in following part.

 “So you are saying that materialistic happiness and affection is the only true feeling” my amee said with great deal of agitation after listening to me. Very emotionally she said “So the affection and love we two share is also materialistic, and it also falls in the same category”. Now this was interesting, usually almost all, including me, declare cease fire after facing this emotional attack. I always found it ill logical to accept my defeat on this point but I had to just because I didn’t have any point to counter these emotional attacks which I find convincing. But today all the doors to ultimate logical reasoning seem to be wide open giving me seamless theories which I completely agreed with. 

Unlike the expectation of amee, my answer to her question “whether our love is materialistic?” was a loud YES, and this time I had something to defend to this YES of mine.

I never understood which supernatural thing gave us the authority to consider ourselves higher than all the materials we see around us. Whenever the question arises, there is a very common and mugged up answer for this, “we humans have the rare ability of thinking and logical reasoning”. OK, accepted, but a 1000 rupee note has the ability to lure any human possessing the so called logical reasoning and force him/her to at least give a glance to the same. What will you say on the ability a chocolate cake to make an obese guy like me do anything to eat it, or the ability of a beautiful diamond necklace of making a lady go mad? Now people would be eagerly waiting to say, all these things are human creations, so obviously the creator is always at a higher stature than the creation. My point is hidden in the last 2 statements. If these all things are created by humans and humans itself tend to become salves of their own creation, then on what basis we humans are considering ourselves superior, when we can’t even handle our own creations.

So when I say materialistic happiness the eternal truth, that includes love towards materials like money as well as love towards materials like son, mother, etc. We are no better than any material we see, and by keeping inter human love and affection in the category of materialistic love I am neither doing any good nor raising any standard of materialistic happiness. Materialistic happiness is the same since it was discovered, but I just want to communicate to people that it’s very idiotic of us to categorize materialistic happiness and inter human affection separately. Both are a bit different breed of the same species. 

Now Amee was drifting sides and she was in a mood to get convinced, as a last attack she said “Then how would you define your love towards GOD”.
NOW, when people talk about GOD, not sure why, they tend to wrap the sentences with as many good words as possible. People are not satisfied by just saying “GOD is good” or “HE is a dude”. They have to add mammoth words like “Omnipresent”, “All-powerful”, “Master of Generosity”. 

I have never seen anybody, forget anybody else; I have never seen myself praying to GOD just to have a chat, just to discuss day to day things. I mean if I say I love GOD my aim of life is to be as close as possible to him, why don’t I have a talk to GOD on regular basis? Why do I start this practice of praying only when either I have done something wrong and I am sorry for it or when I need something desperately? When we say that we are constantly striving to attain GOD and GOD is all powerful and creator of all include us, why don’t we have trust on HIM that if we have done something wrong unintentionally and we are sorry for it or if we want something desperately, HE WILL UNDERSTAND and will work on these things for us. I am in I.T. engineer, I create software codes, and I never wait for my code to say sorry if a module doesn’t work and pray to me to fix it. I never wait for my code to come up to me with a wish list :D. I do monitor it as I am the creator and rectify the errors and fulfil the demands of my creation. If the a thing created is not behaving properly as it is intended to, one way or the other the creator is missed some points while creating the same and HE is bound to rectify. Why can’t we have this same thinking when we are the things created and GOD is the creator? Basic question here is, Why this hypocrisy of saying that GOD is all powerful and still doubting HIS ability to understand what you want without you asking HIM the same?

If the above mentioned point is the only reason we pray, then don’t we love GOD? We have self answered this question saying that I do the same with God as I do with my Dad …. I come up to Dad always with a list of things I want and I listen to him coz I am scared of him. My fear is not a fear of getting a beating, I fear that there shouldn’t be a situation when Dad is not happy with me and I shouldn’t be the reason of his sadness by any means. Same are the feeling for God, I pray to God coz I fear that it will hurt HIM if I don’t, so it’s OK to pray and listen to God with this fear. But I am strictly against the fraud nature of ours where we do justify our constant demands to GOD as chats with our DAD but we don’t do a normal demand-less conversation with GOD as I do with DAD on a regular basis.

I guess people of this era are not in love with GOD, they are scared of HIM. People pray just because they are scared that if they don’t pray, GOD will do something with them and they won’t live their life happily. What an irony, these people spent most of their time in following a guru and are in a never ending quest of leaving worldly pleasures and attain GOD, and they do it because they are scared of GOD and the reason of this fear if that GOD will do something bad and they won’t be able to live life better. I am confused by just reading this previous statement of mine, how can people live it. You are praying coz you are scared of losing all the worldly things but you centralized motto to pray is to attain GOD and lift yourself up from all the worldly pleasures. I can’t get a better example of double standards than this.

Now answering to my Amee’s hopefully the last question “Will you define your love towards GOD a materialistic one”. The answer is YES. This answer nearly made my amee’s eyes bigger by 200%.

Well why I can’t keep my love towards GOD in the category of materialistic love? Let’s define GOD now. When I ask this question to masses, till date I have got answers like “God is present in everything.”, “God is the light within us”. Now GOD is absolutely above each material we see or we have heard of, BUT we are so very use to these material that we have to take one of them into consideration while defining our ultimate soul mate, GOD. We say GOD is in everything, GOD is the light present in US. SO though I love GOD and though I am very much tending to say that my love towards HIM is above all materials, I can’t define GOD without mentioning one of these materials. So though I adore HIM, I can’t deny from the fact that I am a materialistic person and I am deeply in love with all these materials around me. 

Basically this ideology doesn’t harm me at all, I am a materialistic person but as I have kept humans in the category of materials and humans are one of the most loved materials in my list, automatically my love towards my amee is at the higher priority than money. But I not at all buy the idea of these spiritual Gurus not leave all these materialistic or money-orientated pleasures to attain GOD. I love my stay on earth with so called artificial things but I too have my love towards my parents and GOD intact, and this I can do just be not tagging myself as someone above rest of the things I see, I consider myself as one of them and I consider other humans as one of the millions and billions things I see. 

So the 2 main points I fell which strongly denies the ideology of having a Guru are

• Most of these Gurus teach you to leave all the worldly pleasures or Maya, which is highly not possible and more importantly not at all required. This idea won’t help you live this life and will surely not guarantee a good time after life.
  
• All these Gurus are nothing but some lucky guys having a good convincing power, and just because these people posses these qualities of luck and good speech, they shouldn’t be given the post of a person who teaches you how to live life and forces you to categorize things into good or bad as he thinks. If I was born in old times and if I would have been lucky, it’s quite very possible that you would be following me and would have categorize money, lust, etc. as GOOD and the idea of living a simple life as BAD, which is the reverse in present times.

So don’t depend on a guru to decide what is GOOD or BAD. Do give this post of the guru to the person whom you see in the mirror and listen to your brain, coz if your brain says that murdering a person is the right thing to do, it is how you are made and no guru can change you. If your brain says to consider things and ideologies which are at present defines as EVIL or WRONG as righteous and virtuous, follow it, coz if those ideologies you follow are actually wrong, you will face the consequences and nobody but you would be responsible for the same.