I occasionally encounter the concept of testing a prospective guru before accepting his authority. It sounds a lot like the idea of testing a used car before buying it; basically, you need to know what you’re committing to, lest you get screwed. But the idea is so fucking ridiculous in this context, that even entertaining it is a disqualification. Let me tell you why.

First of all, the fake gurus have been reading the same manuals for recognizing the true gurus as you have. They are familiar with the criteria, and they are great actors. Whatever you can think of, they already rehearsed to perfection. Essentially, it’s like trying to figure out a conman. If a conman is easily recognizable as such, he’s not really much of a conman in the first place, because he sucks at his job. A good conman looks more like the real thing than the real thing. Every criterion you can test him by, he already tested himself to see if it’s perfect. So you can’t go by appearance, you need to go by substance, which requires you to know what you’re doing, essentially you need to be very qualified at the subject matter; essentially, in order to qualify as a Jedi apprentice you need to be a powerful Force-sensitive, and it’s not that you’re going to test a Jedi Master to see if he’s qualified, he’s going to test you to see if you’re qualified.

And that’s the crux of the matter. You’re not going to test shit. You’re going to be evolving a long time before you’re qualified, and when you are, a real guru will test you to see if you have any brains in your head. You’ll need to see through appearances and superficiality, you’ll need to be able to react to high spiritual energies favorably, and you need to be intellectually competent. Basically, the guru is in charge, not you, and he’s in charge simply due to the fact that he’s a spiritual superpower, so the entire concept of testing something… well, if you think you have to test someone to know whether he’s a guru, either you’re not qualified to be a student or he’s not qualified to be a guru, because in the real spiritual relationships of that kind the concept doesn’t even appear, it’s an automatic thing, a key/lock click.

Another issue with the concept is the expectation that enlightened people don’t have anything better to do than teach kindergarten here, basically that they want to accept students. I certainly don’t, and neither do any incarnated Gods that I know of. Their missions are usually related to other things. Also, the Hindu guru model is the vast minority of what actually takes place in real life. In real life, spiritual relationships more often follow a husband-wife model, or something along that line. The expectation that a guru will accept students who are significantly below his own spiritual status are unwarranted; basically, he’ll look for someone very similar to himself, and won’t really care for a great number of such people, and since such things are negotiated in advance, prior to incarnation, you can see why a husband-wife model is more attractive than the guru-student model. It simply solves all problems. Sure, the guru-disciple model isn’t really incompatible with that, but more often than not, if you want to find a guru’s most advanced student, look for his wife. According to the apocryphal gospels, “the disciple Jesus loved the most” was his wife, whose name was later replaced with a generic “John”. Ramakrishna’s most respected disciple was his wife. Lahiri Mahasaya’s wife was an enlightened saint, according to Yogananda. Mirabai’s husband was enlightened. Marpa’s wife was a very advanced saint. As I said, it’s not really a rule because there are many exceptions, but it’s more of a pattern than not. Just ask yourself, if you were some kind of a God who planned to incarnate here, and you wanted to teach one advanced student, what would be the best way to arrange that? Sure, as long as you’re here you might as well teach others, but it might be only an afterthought. Teaching might not really be anywhere near the real reason why you are here. The true reason might be closer along the lines of cosmic politics, as in the case of Krishna’s incarnation. Sure, he had advanced saints as wives, and sure, he had a demigod friend-disciple Arjuna, but the real reason why he was here was to deal with the problem of too many fucking idiots incarnated in the warrior caste, giving the world a hard time.

So, testing Krishna to see if he’s a worthy enough guru to teach your highness? He’d intentionally fail all your tests just for shits and giggles. If you have to test him, it means you are not qualified. The ones who are qualified instinctively and immediately recognize him as the Lord and organize their entire lives around him. So, you can see why I find the concept ridiculous.

But of course, the vast majority of situations where you learn from some spiritually advanced person doesn’t follow the model of a life-long profound personal relationship. Most often, you can be spiritually influenced by several sources, each of them giving you a small nudge in the right direction. It can be music, someone’s photo, a sentence, a spiritual darshan. Reducing spiritual learning to the Hindu guru-chela model is too simplistic to reflect anything real, at least to the vast majority of people involved.