Guru is not basically a teacher as we usually use the word – that is, a person who transmits knowledge to you from his mind. Knowledge can be found in books. Concepts can be understood in a single afternoon. The knowledge that a Guru has can neither be explained nor taught. It is merely transmitted, just as a flame imparts fire to an extinguished candle. The candle does not become a flame, rather it itself gets ignited from within by the same fire. This is Shaktipat.
Guru Remedy:-
Guru is the means. There is a special kind of darkness, which is not the absence of light, but the forgetting of the existence of light. You can live in this for years, even decades – moving through the world efficiently, intelligently, even happily for a few moments – and still carry a quiet, unspoken pain deep inside. A feeling that something essential is missing. That you are living in a superficial state of yourself. That the depth within you has never been touched. If you’re lucky, if someone in the universe turns to you with extraordinary grace, a person appears. Not always in clothes.
Not always with formality. Sometimes in the most ordinary of circumstances—in a chance meeting, in a sentence spoken at the right moment, in a book placed in your hands by someone who has said just that—read it. But something happens in that meeting, which is different from all the meetings you have had till now. There’s something about it that doesn’t just inform you, entertain you, or console you—it changes you. That person is the Guru. And this sutra – just two words – ‘guru upayaḥ’, declares what the rational mind finds almost too simple to take seriously – the guru is the means.
Not just a means. Not one of the many means of spiritual equipment. That means itself. The medium through which the sleeping soul awakens its true nature. Why is a Guru needed? There are many things in you that you cannot see yourself, but others can see clearly. The eye cannot see itself. The mind cannot see its shortcomings completely.
There is a special kind of knot in consciousness – that is the knot of the small ‘self’ that considers itself central, which is impossible to untie by the same hand that has tied it. You need a second hand. Not a hand that controls you. Not a hand that will belittle you. Rather, a hand that reaches into the darkness of your forgetfulness with so much stability, so much love and so much unwavering determination in the truth that in his presence that knot starts unraveling automatically. That hand is the Guru.
