The Guru Model
From a post by David Lane of the neural surfer website, now posted here in the Adi Da Archives. Professor Lane has been a critic of Adi Da over the years, and in particular a critic of Ken Wilber's hyperbole in relation to Adi Da and Ken's failure to simply and plainly admit he made a mistake in assessing Adi Da.
The guru
model works its spell on an immature mind not a seasoned one. Yes, we will still
follow gurus, teachers, prophets, masters long into the future (it is an
epigenetic predisposition), but hopefully with one important caveat: the gurus
are NOT perfect. We
finally realized that lesson during the Protestant Reformation (remember the
Pope is not infallible!) when it came to Christianity and guessed what blossomed
because of it? SCIENCE.
Now the guru world must undergo its purge, its protest movement, its Lutheran
revelations. And when the dust settles, mysticism can be divorced from myth,
masters acknowledged as mortal, and enlightenment understood as progressive (not
permanent) insight.
Until that
is done we live in a truly CON-fused time, where rationality flirts with
silliness and sincere devotion with gross gullibility. The Guru is DEAD. And, to
echo Nietzsche, we have killed him. We killed him by taking his turban off, by
shaving his beard, by seeing him naked. And what did we find? Ourselves.
The guru is a poser and, as as long as we make pretenses about who and what we
are, we will hide behind these projected "masks," these guises in which we cloak
our weaknesses and our fears. The guru is dead and we killed him.
But fear not, we will invent another guru in his absence, just as Voltaire
warned that man would invent religion even if none existed. Why? Because we have
to. We cannot stand the silence of our own being when confronted with the
silence of the universe screaming back at us. Lonely creatures looking for a way
out, for a meaning, for a
purpose, for a father.... And the guru is merely us projecting all that we wish
and desire upon another. God forbid we do cast such projectiles upon our own
being. We couldn't withstand the intensity; we couldn't withstand the
responsibility.
But what we couldn't withstand the most would be our severe disappointment.
Because no matter what, our "image" would be less than our "reality." Far easier
to shatter the image of another than to shatter the image of ourselves. And in
pieces and in ruins we will find our fallen gurus and like shattered shards from
a reflecting glass we will once again see our own face, our own psyche, our own
soul. And in those broken pieces the abyss awaits us--infinite, eternal,
unknowing.
The guru is a temporary fix, but based upon an eternal need. For that reason,
dead gurus don't decompose. They resurrect in new forms: from Zorasterianism to
Judaism to Christianity to Mormonism to Scientology to Eckankar to Radhasoami.
The killer of the guru kills his idealized self and along with it any hopes of a
dreamy paradise. There is only one solution to all of this yin and yang dread,
but the honest guru (oxymoron alert) is rare. How many gurus would commit the
image suicide that is necessary to liberate the disciple from his "idea fixe"?
It is a riddle of course. Because any guru that would allow such an image in the
first place has already betrayed the disciple.
The guru image is suicide, a cutting off of one's own integrity, one's own
power, one's own responsibility.
And, yet, the guru image is nowhere outside. It is part and parcel of our own
neurological make-up.
We are both the disciple and the guru and until we stop distinguishing the two
we will languish in the half-way house for the devotionally mad. And in that
madness we will split the universe into two and our own psyche into
compartments.
Why?
Because our very need to understand, to grasp, to model is itself a
communicative lie.
A bubble's efforts will always be exploded when it tries to encompass the ocean.
Pop! Burst! Break!
Broken