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Date Posted: 08:21
Author: Mike - 7 April 2002
Subject: Gurus R' Us-Interesting Post


The guru model works its spell on an immature mind not a seasoned
one. Yes, we will still follow gurus, teachers, prophets, masters
long into the future (it is an epigenetic predisposition), but
hopefully with one important caveat: the gurus are NOT perfect. We
finally realized that lesson during the Protestant Reformation
(remember the Pope is not infallible!) when it came to Christianity
and guessed what blossomed because of it? SCIENCE.

Now the guru world must undergo its purge, its protest movement, its
Lutheran revelations. And when the dust settles, mysticism can be
divorced from myth, masters acknowledged as mortal, and enlightenment
understood as progressive (not permanent) insight. Until that is done
we live in a truly CON-fused time, where rationality flirts with
silliness and sincere devotion with gross gullibility. The Guru is
DEAD. And, to echo Nietzsche, we have killed him. We killed him by
taking his turban off, by shaving his beard, by seeing him naked. And
what did we find? Ourselves.

The guru is a poser and, as along as we make pretenses about who and
what we are, we will hide behind these projected "masks," these
guises in which we cloak our weaknesses and our fears. The guru is
dead and we killed him.

But fear not, we will invent another guru in his absence, just as
Voltaire warned that man would invent religion even if none existed.
Why? Because we have to. We cannot stand the silence of our own being
when confronted with the silence of the universe screaming back at
us. Lonely creatures looking for a way out, for a meaning, for a
purpose, for a father.... And the guru is merely us projecting all
that we wish and desire upon another. God forbid we do cast such
projetiles upon our own being. We couldn't withstand the intensity;
we couldn't withstand the responsibility.

But what we couldn't withstand the most would be our severe
disappointment. Because no matter what, our "image" would be less
than our "reality." Far easier to shatter the image of another than
to shatter the image of ourselves. And in pieces and in ruins we will
find our fallen gurus and like shattered shards from a reflecting
glass we will once again see our own face, our own psyche, our own
soul. And in those broken pieces the abyss awaits us--infinite,
eternal, unknowing.

The guru is a temporary fix, but based upon an eternal need. For that
reason, dead gurus don't decompose. They resurrect in new forms: from
Zorasterianism to Judaism to Christianity to Mormonism to Scientology
to Eckankar to Radhasoami.

The killer of the guru kills his idealized self and along with it any
hopes of a dreamy paradise. There is only one solution to all of this
yin and yang dread, but the honest guru (oxymoron alert) is rare. How
many gurus would commit the image suicide that is necessary to
liberate the disciple from his "idea fixe"?

It is a riddle of course. Because any guru that would allow such an
image in the first place has already betrayed the disciple.

The guru image is suicide, a cutting off of one's own integrity,
one's own power, one's own responsiblity.

And, yet, the guru image is nowhere outside. It is part and parcel of
our own neurological make-up.

We are both the disciple and the guru and until we stop
distinguishing the two we will languish in the half-way house for the
devotionally mad. And in that madness we will split the universe into
two and our own psyche into compartments.

Why?

Because our very need to understand, to grasp, to model is itself a
communicative lie.

A bubble's efforts will always be exploded when it tries to encompass
the ocean.

Pop! Burst! Break!

Broken

from a post by Dave Lane

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