The Real Guru

The guru you are looking for is inside of you.

This is the central teaching of Sri Kumaré. He is the subject of a recent documentary that I watched a few weeks ago. He is also a complete fraud, sort of.

Kumaré's real name is Vikram Gandhi, a filmmaker who grew up in New Jersey in a devout Hindu family, but who had long struggled with faith. Skeptical of the sincerity of the gurus stoking America's infatuation with Indian spirituality, especially yoga, Gandhi set off with a camera to find out "if these spiritual leaders were for real or just full of it." He found only the latter, which inspired a new direction for his project. Gandhi himself would become a guru, the ultimate proof that "spiritual leaders are just illusions."

And so Kumaré is born, along with a collection of non-sensical sayings, symbols, yoga poses, and meditations. Devoted disciples soon follow. On the surface, it seems like an exercise in humiliation and mockery. As the experiment progresses, however, it becomes clear that Gandhi-Kumaré has actual truth to teach.

The guru you are looking for is inside of you.

"Do not listen to the preachers and prophets because they tell you that you should. Do not follow a teacher because you are afraid to be on your own. If you believe the message to be true in your heart, then listen to the messenger. If not, reject him, whomever or whatever he may be. Trust yourself. Trust your heart. She will not fail you. Believe in your own goodness, in your own loveliness. For that is what you are. Love and goodness brought to life. Turn your eyes inward, and you will see it is true."

God dwells within each of us. Some may be more aware of this reality than others, but that is not a sign of superior knowledge, just the randomness of grace. And while we can and should learn from such people, there is only one true teacher. Whatever the title, whether ordained or self-appointed, everyone else is a mere messenger.

God dwells within each of us. We already possess all the wisdom we will ever need. The messenger is simply there to remind us of that wisdom and to urge us to use it. Lust or pride may drive some to seek more power. Laziness or insecurity may prompt us to give it to them. But none of that changes the basic truth.

God dwells within each of us. Or "the guru you are looking for is inside of you."

And here is where we get to laugh at the divine joke. God chose the skeptic, the fraud, the phony guru to be their truest messenger, to remind us that we are all kumaré.

"Fearless" (1993)

Most people think of mystical experiences as the province of monks or gurus, people who spend countless hours in prayer and meditation. They are wrong. Each of us is meant to experience God, in the minutiae of life, as well as its grandest events. And contrary to popular opinion, God is not a carnival barker. The truly mystical are not freak supernatural occurrences like burning bushes, angels, or booming voices from the clouds, but rather the most sublimely ordinary of things.

"It’s that little piece of you that gets caught up in the drama of life, the drama of nature, the drama of history. That feeling in the back of your throat that you are part of something that you can’t quite grasp and yet you know is there. That just makes you want to cry because it’s so big and bold and beautiful. That makes you want to scream out in joy and ecstasy, thanksgiving and praise for being a part of it. In that moment, in that very moment, whether it lasts a second or a lifetime, you know that you have touched the face of the divine."

"It feels like you’re standing still and the whole world is rushing by at mach one. Your adrenaline is pumping so hard you have to scream out for joy and laugh hysterically like an insane person. It’s a feeling of such intensity, that it seems like you have an orchestra in your head, building up to a grand crescendo, then crashing down like a tsunami, washing away every impurity in your soul and leaving you awestruck as if seeing for the first time."

The movie "Fearless" is the best representation of a mystical experience that I know of. Jeff Bridges plays Max, an airplane crash survivor who has discovered "the taste and touch and beauty of life," but struggles to make sense of that vision in the context of everyday living. He seems crazy to those around him, but how do you incorporate an experience of the divine into life in the "real" world? Once you see the face of God, the superficiality of modern society becomes unbearable, and the beauty of what lies beneath is overwhelming. How exactly do you deal with that?

The final sequence, showing the actual crash, is the most beautiful piece of cinema that I have ever watched. Those five minutes seem to encapsulate the taste, touch, and beauty of life, death, family, God, and love. Max walks down the center aisle of the plane to sit with a boy traveling by himself. As they brace for impact, he tells the boy, "close your eyes ... it'll be over soon ... everything's wonderful." His eyes make the meaning of his words clear: whether they live or die, in that moment everything truly is wonderful. That is mysticism in its rawest form.

Check out this movie on IMDb, Wikipedia, or YouTube.

Faith & Reason

In last week's post, I mentioned taking time recently to watch several documentaries. Two more among these were the PBS Frontline series "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians" and Bill Maher's "Religulous".

Despite their obvious differences, both of these works touched on the larger question of the rationality of faith. Human beings have always struggled with spiritual beliefs, as the gospel episode of "Doubting Thomas" makes clear. Our analytical minds want to know and understand the mysteries of the universe. The problem is that the mysteries of ultimate truth do not lie in the realm of rationality. Logic can take you to the edge of the chasm of belief, but cannot build a bridge across it. The leap of faith is an act of mystical courage. You either make that leap or you don't.

Unfortunately, mysticism is something we have a hard time dealing with. It is chaotic, paradoxical, and just plain messy. While we strive for knowledge, it call upon us to recognize. When we want to understand, it tells us to experience. We want clarity; mysticism looks like pure and deliberate confusion. The truth we hide from is that God, life, and love are exactly like that: gloriously and beautifully confusing.

Acknowledging this reality does not mean abandoning the pursuit of knowledge. Faith is not about settling for something of lesser intelligence. It is about acknowledging that truth is not the same as scientific or historical fact. Faith is an act of humility.

"We know you must approach us with logic, but do not get carried away by your ego ... I am not saying that you should turn off your brain. Your mind is our mind. Just see and accept your limits. Delight in them, they will teach you great things."

Faith also demands trust, something that pushes all the skeptical buttons of modern American society. We do not trust institutional authority, so why should we listen to organized religion? We cannot help but see the death, destruction, and evil that has come from corporate religion. Surely that must indicate that anything religion says is illegitimate? If that is our standard, however, what ideology or belief system would ever pass muster? Our failure to live out faith properly speaks to human imperfection, not the falseness of the faith itself.

Faith cannot be proven true or false, as much as we might want it to be. Intuition is the key. As I said last week, intuition is the voice of God within us. It speaks of what is right or wrong about a particular belief system, of what is true and trustworthy. It tells us where to find God. No amount of evidence can ever replace our intuition.

"Trust yourself. Trust your heart. She will not fail you. Believe in your own goodness, in your own loveliness. For that is what you are. Love and goodness brought to life. Turn your eyes inward, and you will see it is true."

Perhaps it is inevitable that our society views faith and reason as opposing sides in the Great American Culture Wars. There are plenty of individuals and groups happy to exploit this faux conflict for power and profit. We have allowed ourselves to be tricked into believing that easy formulas illuminate truth, when in fact they are nothing more than security blankets. It is time to wake up.

"We were created to give witness to the paradox ... to celebrate [it], to cherish it. Yet you run from your destiny. You hide in the worlds you create for yourselves. You demand truth along your lines, your logic. Truth does not exist for you. You exist for it. Stop your arrogance and embrace the paradox of love."