All of us have probably seen many times over the bumper sticker that reads “Question authority.” It’s a simple phrase, but I’ve never been entirely comfortable with it. While it may be true up to a point, as a mantra of sorts it encourages us to glorify our own powers of discernment as separate, egocentric selves. After all, where is the line between questioning and disparaging, and what if the authority in question is actually tried and tested, and demonstrably more insightful than we are?
Spiritual practice—any spiritual practice worthy of the name—doesn’t indulge our belief in our individual discernment. It pitilessly picks it apart and reveals how delusional we are, how trapped we are in sheer selfishness. It’s a kind of surgery, the removal of ignorance, and patients can’t perform that operation on themselves. If we’re going to undertake spiritual practice, we need a masterful doctor. That doctor is the Guru.
This past Monday evening, Rohini spoke a bit about the difference between a teacher and the Guru. A teacher can convey information and impart skills; the Guru transforms us, awakening us to Reality and guiding us as we work to free ourselves from the unreal. In contemporary America, we tend not to see the difference—because we don’t want to see it. By blurring the distinction between a mere teacher and the Guru, we make spiritual practice safe for our shrunken selves—which is to say, we abandon spiritual practice. The Guru can’t be domesticated this way. That’s one reason so many tantric deities are often depicted in violent and destructive forms: the Guru, the destroyer of ignorance, is never safe for the shrunken self.
It’s hard for most of us to accept the principle of the Guru in its full Reality: the grace-bestowing power of God, especially as it functions through a human being who has inherited that role as part of a lineage of true Gurus, in a kind of apostolic succession. To our ruling notions of psychology and self-improvement, this understanding of the spiritual master, whose disciples must be completely obedient, seems extreme. But most spiritual traditions espouse it for people who genuinely want to go beyond a more or less ritualistic or intellectual spiritual life and seek the bedrock of existence. As many tantric texts, both Hindu and Buddhist, affirm, a Guru who can awaken us spiritually, who can perform shaktipat and guide us toward liberation, is unspeakably rare and worthy of complete devotion.
Rohini is not a teacher. She is a Guru, part of a living lineage, and she passes on in appropriate measure what was given to her.
If the Guru is too difficult a reality to accept, there are other ways, closer to our own culture, to talk about the same essential role. One comes from Orthodox Christianity, in which the spiritual father (starets in Russian, geron in Greek) is roughly analogous to the Guru in Indic traditions. From the Desert Fathers onward, the tradition of self-surrender and obedience to a spiritual father (or mother) has been understood as essential for any Christian taking the difficult road of spiritual practice. The spiritual father isn’t necessarily a priest or monk but someone in whom the Holy Spirit moves and through whom it operates in a particular way.
Whether Guru or spiritual father or mother, a spiritual guide is crucial. You can’t just get this stuff from secondhand sources. On one level, as Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware explains, “The starets adapts his guidance to the inward state of each; books offer the same advice to everyone” (The Inner Kingdom 147). But on a deeper level, a living spiritual practice must be passed on not simply by text—though texts are important—but by transmission from a person who has spiritual gifts.
Bishop Ware lists the three gifts that distinguish a spiritual father or mother. The first is diakrisis—unfailing discernment and intuitive insight, which allows a spiritual guide to perceive the deepest movements in another person’s psyche. As Ware points out, “the spiritual father does not merely wait for a person to reveal himself, but takes the initiative in revealing to the other many thoughts of which the other is not yet aware” (137). The second gift is Love, manifest most obviously in the ability and willingness to take on others’ pain and suffering. Finally, a spiritual father or mother has the power to transform the human environment, and the vision of other people.
Anyone with even the slightest receptivity who has worked with Rohini knows that she offers all three of these gifts every day. If we want to grow, to get closer to the Real, we need to follow her guidance. This isn’t some authoritarian power play; it’s the voluntary acceptance of a valid authority. When Rohini tells us what’s coming or what to do, her counsel isn’t that of “Rohini,” but of the impersonal Love and wisdom she carries within her. Again, Bishop Ware:
The task of the spiritual father is not to destroy our freedom, but to assist us to see the truth for ourselves; not to suppress our personality, but to enable us to discover our own true self, to grow to full maturity and to become what we really are. If on occasion the spiritual father requires an implicit and seemingly “blind” obedience from his disciple, this is never done as an end in itself, nor with a view to enslaving him. The purpose of this kind of “shock treatment” is simply to deliver the disciple from his false and illusory “self,” so that he may enter into true liberty; obedience is in this way the door to freedom. (145)
As the Kularnava Tantra says, “Difficult to find, O Goddess, is the guru who destroys the sufferings of the disciple”—or, in another manner of speaking, the spiritual mother who takes away others’ pain and shows them how to Love.
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