вторник, 19 сентября 2017 г.

What is the Guru’s Grace?


Pandit Sundaresha Iyer: What is the Guru’s Grace? Well, this is exactly the word that awakens us from this dream life of ours, to which we cling so hard until the tiger of death pounces on us and proves that it is ephemeral, unreal. What is this wonderful power the True Guru holds?

Man is accustomed to dope himself in sorrow with more and more palliatives; so he finds the more he tries to escape from the quagmire, the deeper into it he is drawn. Out of sheer despair, he goes to some Enlightened Man and asks for help. The Master says: “You feel unhappy because you do not know your Self ”. “How strange!” thinks the bewildered soul. “Do I not know myself? Here I am, and yet I am in sorrow!” “But sorrow and wandering is not your real nature,” the Illuminate replies, “really you are Being and Blissfulness.” “How so?” asks the yet more bewildered soul. With one meaningful look the Master sees deep into the soul of the enquirer.

And lo! What a trance of joy, what  a  blissful  existence,  and  what  a  calm  this  is!  The agitated  soul  is  stilled,  silent;  he  sits  and  sits  and  sits. Gazing  at  the  Master  before  him  the  minutes  and  hours are  hardly  noticed  gliding  softly  away.  In  this  way  days and months are condensed into a few moments of blissful life. The wanderer has found his harbour; he is all new life and light, so he swears, “For eternity I shall not part from my  Master,  who  is  my  All!”

Well, for a time he keeps to his resolve. But then the “I”  followed  by  the  thought  of  “mine”,  the  remnants  of his  petty  being,  the  past  accumulation  of  tendencies (vasanas),  all  pull  him  back  with  all  their  force  and  tear him  from  his  Master’s  bosom.

He slides back again into the very dream of life which he had come to abhor. Now he is neither of the world, nor of eternity. Being entrapped by the world’s forces, yet unable to  be  in  harmony  with  them  he  returns  to  his  Master  for proper guidance in his conduct of worldly affairs. The Master is only too pleased to give him all the help he needs in order to  free  himself  from  the  meshes  that  have  once  again entangled  him.  The  poor  man  finds  that  he  has  to  fondle and  hug  once  again  the  very  dolls  he  formerly  abhorred.

But  the  more  he  does  so,  the  more  they  burn  him,  make him  a  prisoner;  he  can  neither  give  them  up,  nor  escape from their clutches. It is like the proverbial monkey with a cobra in its hand, or the ant between two fires. He is only waiting  for  the  least  opportunity  to  wind  up  his  business here and slip away into oblivion, so that he may once and for  ever  return  to  the  calm  of  his  Master’s  presence.

He has indeed come there; but now he finds himself utterly unfit to receive that soothing solace from the Master which  was  formerly  his.  The  mind  and  the  senses,  by their recent association in the things of the world, have so completely  exteriorised  him  that  ‘diving  in’  has  become for  him  a  matter  of  the  past,  he  can  do  it  no  more.  So much is this so, that he has now to sell himself, so that in the  proximity  of  the  Divine  and  through  It’s  Grace,  the rebellious and discordant elements of his being may all be harmonised, life that was formerly so dear to him becoming worthless  if  not  for  surrender  to  the  Master  in  absolute self-abnegation.

Now the Master speaks: “People think the Master is confined in a human frame, but it is not so; His existence and presence are universal, cosmic, because He is the True Guru  (sad-guru)  and  Truth  (sat)  as  such  is  not  a  newly discoverable  entity.  He  has  always  been  there  with  you even while you were undergoing all the pangs of existence. In  fact,  I  am  the  ‘I’  in  you;  you  and  I  have  never  been apart, nor ever can be. But you, with your separate ‘I’ and its  exclusive  and  warring  interests,  could  not  know  Me, much less feel Me. Now that that ‘I’ in you has dropped away, I alone live in you.” This is the meaning of  Tattvamasi (“That thou art”), and this is the meaning and the function of the Guru’s Grace.

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