“When the
student is ready, the teacher shall appear.” – The Buddha.
A conversation
over coffee yesterday veered around the subject of gurus. Do we really need a guru? Does someone else’s guru have to appeal to you? How do we
choose a guru?
These are very
pertinent and normal questions that arise in a seeker. But before attempting to
answer them, we must demystify the word guru itself. In Sanskrit, ‘gu’ means ‘the darkness of ignorance’
and ‘ru’ means ‘the one who removes’.
So, anyone, absolutely, anyone who makes you become more aware, who dispels the
ignorance in you, is your guru. For
instance, my daughter’s friend, Aneesh, is the one I turn to for all geeky
queries. I just send him a WhatsApp message and pat comes the reply. In every
sense, he’s my guru when it comes to
tech issues. Or for all matters pertaining to law and legal strategy, we turn
to our friend and mentor of several years, S.Vijayaraghavan – he’s our guru there. Or for anything related to
music and sound engineering, we lean on a young composer and studio owner,
Kumar Narayanan; he is always helping us learn something new every single time.
So, in essence, this whole belief that a guru
is a saint, a religious figure, matted hair, orange robes and such is, to put
it bluntly, all rubbish.
Fundamentally,
if you have the readiness and willingness to learn, your guru will appear before you. There is no need to search for one.
Seek. Just seek within. And you will be connected to someone who can, at that
moment, clarify, educate and make you more aware. There’s a difference between
seeking and searching. There is always a frantic quality to a search. But
seeking is subliminal. There is a yearning. There’s a pining. Not in a painful
way. But with the curiosity of child, the thirst of a desert-weary traveler.
I have always
found that when you seek deeply, within, with all honesty, someone comes to
help you along. Always.
I remember, a
few years ago, when things were horribly, horribly bad, on the financial, legal
and business front, we were in our hotel room in Navi Mumbai. I had a series of
workshops to run that week. But I had no energy, no inclination, to do
anything. I was seeking a way to understand myself better, I wanted to know how
to cope. That’s when one of the managers from the company that we were working
with came up to our room and told me and Vaani the story of how he had survived
95+ % burns in a ghastly fire accident. He said, “You simply have to believe.
Non-believing is not a choice. When you believe, you are at peace. When you are
at peace, you can think with clarity. With clarity anything is possible. With
confusion, and depression, and despondency, nothing is.” So, to me, to Vaani,
that day, this manager was our guru.
He removed the darkness of ignorance. He made us aware what believing really
meant.
This is who a guru is. A genuine guru has no pretensions, peddles no methods and makes no promises. It
is just someone who makes you aware of whatever you must know. But for a
guru to appear, you must first be a seeker – ready and willing!
