GURUDEV 6

The Guru has a personal side to him and an impersonal side too. As personality he is identified with God and as the impersonal being he is the absolute principle. It is difficult to repose faith in a human Guru and look upon him as God but that is the spiritual condition laid on the relation between the preceptor and the disciple that it should be so for the effective and rapid spiritual evolution of the latter. No less an authority than Sri Ramakrishna has enjoined upon the spiritual aspirant to behold his spiritual master as God incarnate and there can be no dispute about that, therefore, to my reckoning, although rationalisation on the Ramakrishna viewpoint can easily be adequately done to validate the argument. This then is how the Guru stands in the estimation of the true disciple and in the absence of such veneration it may only be said that the disciple's hour of spiritual reckoning has not yet arrived and it will be some meandering that he will be subject to before he finds his bearings along the royal avenue of God.

The sensory experiences not having been gone through sufficiently for comprehending their inadequacy in fulfilling the aspirant's cravings of the soul, the tortuous paths of Maya bewitch the disciple yet again even as the upward tug towards the supreme spiritual goal eggs him on. In this battle of the opposite modes of Nature the befuddled soul forgets its moorings sometimes and hesitates to follow the Guru implicitly. He, thus, delays his spiritual progress and of his own volition brings unnecessary hardship along the way which it takes the grace of the Guru to overcome against the current of the disciple's desirous mind. But however the disciple may rebel along his way to the goal, his initiation into the spiritual fold inevitably brings him to the blessed feet of the Guru in the fullness of time when he realises the enormous patience, acceptance and grace of his Guru and succumbs to his divine love. Then the twain are united in a renewal of the journey along the royal avenue of godhead and the summit arises before their vision which the disciple will scale by the grace of his Master. Jai Gurudev !