What A Guru Takes Away

I was in the third standard and the word was biscuit. Spelling bee, the whole class watching, and biscuit was the one word that had been defeating me for weeks. B-I-S-C-U-I-T. Or B-I-S-C-I-U-T. I could never hold it steady in my head.

Then, standing there and sweating, I noticed the calendar on the classroom wall. An advertisement for Parle biscuits. The word was sitting there in fat printed letters about four feet from my face. I copied it. Full marks. Mrs Maggie Fernandez gave me the gold badge she kept for children who got everything right.

The badge went into my pocket and it was much heavier than a small piece of metal has any business being. I knew why. Today is the full moon of Ashadha, celebrated across the country as Guru Purnima, and of all the people I could be thinking about, I am thinking about a lady who taught spelling to eight year olds in Bombay. I have been through IIT since then. I have taught in more than forty countries. I can still produce her full name on demand.

What she did with what I told her

I stood up and confessed. I said I had seen the word on the calendar, that I had no idea whether I would have written cu or ci on my own, and that the gold badge was not really mine.

She took it back. No hesitation at all. She agreed that I had cheated and gave me a silver star instead.

Then she said I had been rather smart to spot that word on the wall when nobody else in the room had, and smarter still to own up when I could have kept quiet and kept the badge. So the silver star would not be the end of it. She gave me two gold badges.

Something came loose in my chest that afternoon and it has never gone back. She gave me no lecture on honesty. She reached in and removed a small hard lump of guilt I was carrying, and she did it so cleanly that I walked out of that room lighter than I walked in.

Gu and ru

Gu is the darkness. Ru is the one who removes it. The word has been repeated so often it has gone soft with use.

An ordinary teacher, even one with a triple doctorate and a real flair for teaching adds to your life and that is important. A Guru takes away. He thins and removes the veil of ignorance that has been forever stopping you. You finally get to see. You get to be you

Sometimes that removal could be uncomfortable, because the darkness being removed could be something you may be attached to.

An excuse that has served you beautifully for fifteen years. A story about why your father was wrong, polished so often that it shines. A grudge you feed on schedule, like a pet. None of that feels like darkness from the inside. It feels like your personality.

A Guru comes and starts taking. Some people run because Tof the very real possibility that something you have held for years will be prised gently out of your fingers and you will have to find out who you are without it.

But if you stick around and let that Shakti do it’s job, one fine day you wake up and feel lighter and happier than you have ever felt. Perhaps in lifetimes.

The costume problem

When an Indian hears the word Guru today, a picture arrives before any thought does. Flowing robes, white or saffron. A stage, garlands, an ashram with a gate, all the paraphernalia. And right behind that picture comes the WhatsApp forward of the court case, the person with a fleet of cars and a few convictions.

Robes are cheap. Ashrams can be built by anyone with land and a decent chartered accountant. A real Guru is far beyond the costume.

Guru is a Shakti. In the presence of that Shakti, you feel lighter and somehow more able to handle your own life, and know that something real just happened.

The traditional line puts it in bigger terms. Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Devo Maheshwara. The Brahma part is the creative flash, the aha you did not work for. The Vishnu part keeps that flash alive.. Then there is the Shiva part, which breaks things apart, so actual transformation can dawn.

The people who never applied for the job

What I find beautiful about the Guru principle is that it arrives through people who have no interest whatsoever in the title.

Mrs Fernandez was not running a spiritual organisation. She was marking spelling tests. For somebody else it is a maths professor who refuses to hand over the answer and lets you sit with it for three weeks until you find it yourself. For somebody else it is the cook at home, who has read nothing about anything, and who says one sentence about your temper that you are still thinking about twenty years later. For a great many people it is a blunt friend who names the thing everyone else has been politely not naming, and a decade of self deception dissolves in about nine seconds.

So name yours. Who was the first person, or the first book, that cracked something open and left you seeing your own life more clearly than you had that morning?

The greatest of teachers show you one small part of your life with total clarity. The Guru principle shows you the whole of it.

Finding a Guru

My time at IIT was funny. Everyone I knew thought I had it sorted. I had a brilliant future ahead of me. I was studying at one of the best institutes in the country. I had gone to IIT expecting something quite different from what IIT happened to be. I wanted challenges, discussion, deep learning. What I got 90% of the time was the same as it had been in school and graduate college. Copy the stuff the prof wrote on the board and vomit that out on your answer sheet to get your grades. I was angry, tired and frustrated. I wanted to be anywhere than here. Do anything but this. But I had no idea what to do and where to go.

I had simply run out of answers at IIT and I was available, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

I came to the Art of Living because a friend telephoned and said there was a course on breathing and I had to come. She was a large lady. She said that if I did not come she would come home and sit on me. That was my entire spiritual search. I did not know the name of the course. I had not heard of Gurudev. But I was available and to my credit I listened to my friend.

Stop hunting for a Guru. Hunting means reading twenty five books about Gurus, thirty more written by Gurus, attending every “spiritual discourse” in the city and then trying evaluate which one would be the one for you. All the time you are evaluating, you are outside the thing you are evaluating. And you defeat the very purpose of the Guru Shakti.

Stop looking. Be available. Guru will find you.

##A Full Moon

Once in Melbourne, Gurudev finished a talk and a very deep meditation, and a man in the corridor told him it had been such a thought provoking evening. Gurudev turned around at once and softly said - My talks are not thought provoking. They are thought silencing.

You go in loaded. Come out emptied. Yet full.

That is the whole business.

Today, sit and meditate. Ask for nothing. Just be,

The full moon has no light of it’s own. All it does is face in the right direction. Then, it holds still and reflects. And the whole sky lights up.

Happy Guru Purnima!