On Not Finding Your Guru

Journey of Awakening, Ram Dass

Seeking one’s guru is like going on pilgrimage.  It is a useful journey, but you don’t have to take it to finish the path.  There is a good possibility you will never meet your guru.  But because you do not meet your guru does not mean you do not have one.  Any person that reaches toward God, toward liberation, toward the spirit, is noticed, and a contact is made with the vehicle or form that will ultimately draw you home.  

You needn’t know your guru.  It is only necessary that your guru know you.  Only your need to maintain control compels you to try to know your guru.  Your journey is one of purification, and you can proceed whether you know your guru or not.  Don’t worry about it.  Your guru will become known to you, if and when necessary.  If the guru were to manifest too soon, you might get lost in an interpersonal devotion that would just be another trap for you.  You must trust that the process is benevolent.  When needed, the guru appears.  It’s a benign conspiracy.

I once asked my guru, “How do you know if a person is your guru?”  He answered that it is simply whether this person can take you all the way.  Taking you all the way does not mean that the guru does it for you.  Rather the guru is the way.  The guru’s very being creates a space that is the doorway to your freedom.

Along the way you may meet your guru and feel overwhelming love for him or her.  This makes you cling to the guru.  In the end you must go beyond the separateness of forms you have loved.  To go all the way is to go beyond the concept of guru.  Ramana Maharshi said it: God, Guru, Self - all the same thing.

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