Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Guru

From: Krishnananda


The reason why we have been told again and again that a Guru is necessary is this: we have to be deconditioned in our brains, or rather, I would say, we have to be dehypnotised. We are in a hypnotic condition today by the conditions imposed upon us due to the existence of racial factors embedded in our psyches and the impressions formed by experiences of our past through the various incarnations of our own individualities. We have not started life just now, a few years back when we came from our mother’s womb. Our life began, we do not know when. We have been living for centuries, for aeons. We have passed through many forms, entering new forms in our struggle to overcome this evil of an ‘other’ than God’s being. As a soldier may declare a temporary truce to regain his strength and take rest in his camp only to resume the battle the next morning, we are shedding this form of the present personality as soldiers in the battle of life and entering into a camp of unconsciousness for the time being, in order to resume the battle of the very same existence, the confrontation with evil, in another form which we have to assume whether we want it or not.

Thus, the impressions formed in our psyche, which pursue us wherever we go through the various incarnations, stand as obstacles for a totally reoriented form of thinking. The reason why we require a Guru or a teacher or a superior in this task is because we cannot enlighten ourselves qualitatively in a new manner as long as we are capable of thinking only in the old fashion, conditioned by the psyche which has been impressed with the various forms of experience through which it has passed in the earlier incarnations of life. Hence is the need for a Guru, to reiterate.

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