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.
This is more exposing to one’s dignity and aren’t to be tolerated. At least they have to make some rules.
What about exposing to a critic from person/principle evidently above in order to correct oneself?
That is useful to the guru in question but perfectly useless to the prospective disciples, because if x-th element in a sequence is questionable, x+1-th element is also questionable.
I’ll just rewrite my question in case it’s not clearly said ( i mentioned earlier my English as not fully productive): ”What about deliberately exposing yourself to a critic of a person/principle evidently on a higher level in order to correct oneself?”
Your first reply – i abandoned mentioned terms (love, unconditional love, positive thinking, energy,…ima toga još) some years ago. I noticed at the time that using them made me slitely nauseated, and i just quit. Still I manage just fine without. I see constructive critic (sometimes even a nonconstructive one) as very useful tool for selfcorrection.
And the second one – I admit, I have to reconsider this one! It may even take a while…..uf:)
I understand the second part with an x, but not the first part in a relation to the other one.
If a guru is questionable, his guru is also questionable. If you have an array of authorities, and a set of criteria gives you a problem on a position x in the array, it will give you the same problem on the position x+1. Basically, what this says is that if one has a problem with a guru because he dislikes his teaching because it requires too much of him, how would he benefit from God who would most likely require even more?
Another problem is that if one could just skip the guru or religion problem and go straight to God, the problem wouldn’t even exist in the first place, but going straight to God, or some vaguely defined unquestionable authority doesn’t solve anything if such authority is inaccessible. If it’s accessible, how do you assess its spiritual status? You essentially have recurrence of the guru problem, only a plane of existence removed.
To put it even more clearly, you can’t really say that “gurus are questionable, fallible, deluded and fraudulent so we should go directly to God”, when the same argument is often applied to God, ie. that the nature of the world is evidence that God is either powerless, indifferent or evil.
For each human who will say that some guru is fallible, you will find another who will say that God is fallible.
Or, to put it even more directly, for each motherfucker whom I’d called out on his bullshit and who replied with “who are you to judge me”, you have a motherfucker who’d say the same to God, like, who are you to judge me, you made a fucked up world.
Did I mention somewhere that the guru is questionable??
”What about deliberately exposing yourself (not reffering to YOU in person or a guru, but xy person in general, potencially including me) to a critic of a person/principle evidently on a higher level in order to correct oneself (that same xy person, pottencially including that same me)?” Ok, this is it for Saturday afternoon. Gotta go.
It’s the topic of the article and the concept is implicit.
To answer your question directly, here’s what would happen when a person, namely you, deliberately exposes herself to criticism of a person/principle evidently on a higher level, namely me, in order to correct herself.
She tries to impress by conventional quasi-intellectual posturing that apparently works on the comment sections of various portals. This doesn’t work because she quickly shows she’s out of depth by re-stating already answered questions to which she simply failed to understand answers, and then compensates by arrogant-sounding meaningless phrases common among the social networking like-whores.
So, what happens then? Do I endlessly answer her meaningless, trivial questions whose purpose is mere posturing and nothing else, or do I tell her to either get to the point or get the fuck out of here because she’s wasting my time?
The true question is, when such a person is confronted with her bullshit, does she respond with a predictable “hiss, sulk, whine”, or does she face the fact that shutting the fuck up and listening is often a better strategy than showing that you really don’t have anything meaningful to say?
So my advice would be: go to all those important things I’m keeping you from at this Saturday afternoon in your magnificently important life, because my writing is obviously unworthy of your precious time. Translated to a language you will more likely understand: go fuck yourself.
If you’re asking from a position where you replaced “guru” with “person/principle evidently above”, I don’t see how that changes matters. You still have a problem of figuring out what matches the definition, because from what I’ve seen, people are very imaginative when it comes to dismissing any kind authority that puts them into question or doesn’t confirm their values, ideas or worth. Basically, that’s why people love to say that God is love. Everybody likes love, love doesn’t criticise you. But if one said that God is conscience, that would be more difficult because conscience can make demands, it can criticise you, it can require that you change. It’s not unconditional. So yeah, it’s easy to submit to the authority of God who is unconditional love, but where is there the imperative or even the ability to correct oneself, if love accepts you as good enough?
What I want to say is, for most people it’s easier to say that God isn’t God, than to accept validity of criticism, be that God-person endlessly and obviously superior in every imaginable way. If it doesn’t love you unconditionally and if it requires that you get your shit together, it suddenly isn’t God and poof, you don’t have to change anything because a *true* God would see nothing wrong with you. I’ve seen that too many times.