By SADHGURU, Isha Foundation
If you really want to make use of a Guru’s Presence, you must be willing to allow that Presence to overwhelm you, to overpower you, to destroy you in one way. At least for those few moments that you are with him, you should no longer be yourself. What you consider yourself to be, should be absent in his Presence.
So, one aspect is the Presence of the Guru and the quality of who he is, does things to you. Another aspect is, the moment you create a situation that you are not bothered about what is going to happen to you, that itself is transformation. On the spiritual path, when people spoke about trust, what they meant was that you allow someone else to enter you. If you have to allow someone else to enter you, you have to become vulnerable. Once he enters you, you are subject to anything. The very reason why you have built walls is, somewhere when you made yourself vulnerable, someone did something which was not within your expectations. So you got terrified and built walls around yourself. Now, when you say, ‘I trust you,’ you are willing to pull that wall down, which means that the other person does not have to live within the framework of your expectations.
If your Guru can be contained within your limitations, then you better not go anywhere near that man because he will be of no help to you. He will solace you, he will comfort you, but this man is bondage. This man is not liberation. Trust is different. Trust is your quality. It is not subject to anything else, it is simply there. When you say ‘I trust,’ it means, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, I trust.’ That is not falling into the framework of your limitations.
A Guru creates his personality in such a way that people don’t know whether to love it or to hate it. He carefully crafts a personality where one moment you think, ‘Yeah, I’m really in love with this man.’ Next moment, you may feel completely different about him. And both of these emotions are not allowed to cross certain lines. Within those lines, you are constantly being thrashed around so that after some time you will know, this is not a person. This is not a human being. Either he is a devil or he must be Divine.
That which is not in your experience cannot be taught to you intellectually. To take a person from one dimension of experience to another, you need a device which is of a higher level of intensity and energy. That device is what we call as Guru. The Guru-shishya relationship is on an energy basis. A Guru is touching you in a dimension where no one else can touch you. There are many ways to move your energies to Ajna. But from Ajna to Sahasrar, there is no particular way to do anything. it is just a jump. It is because of this that the Guru-shishya relationship has been held as the most sacred relationship in this culture. If you have to take this jump, you need deep trust – otherwise, it is not possible.