Bharatham : Uthishtatha-Jagratha : (wef-05/11/2012. )

Part-7. He must be the man who has opened my inner eyes. In his presence it is like the sun. In his presence the inner darkness must go. If it does not go he is not my Guru, he is a teacher. I learn from him. In the Bhagavad Gita this becomes very clear and beautiful. In the first chapter, the person who later became a disciple, Arjuna, literally and actually teaches Krishna. He says, "I know what is right, what is wrong, and I am telling you that this is not right. What you are asking me to do is not right. I want to stop this whole game." Then early in the second chapter Arjuna says: sisyas teham sadhi mam tvam prapannam.(II. 7) "I am your disciple, please instruct me." Not: "You are my Guru." The expression ‘Guru’ comes later, when in the eleventh chapter Krishna reveals the cosmic form to him. Then he says: "Jagat Guru, Hey Bhagavan. You are not only my Guru, you are the Guru of the whole universe." Sri Swami Ven...

Part-6. I keep these three quotations in three different pockets and pull each one out where it is applicable. When I look at you as my Guru, I pull out the quotation that says a Guru is necessary. When I am endeavouring to obey you, I pull the one out that says. I must obey the Guru implicitly. But when the third period comes along and I am given some instructions which I cannot obey, I pull the third one out and say: "I am sorry, I didn’t examine my Guru properly. Now that I have examined him thoroughly I dismiss him." The whole thing is ridiculous. Sri Swami Venkatesananda To be continued  ....

Part-5. The whole thing was a hoax right from the start. You are not a proper disciple and the other person is not a qualified Guru. These two people enter into a funny relationship which is based on falsehood, on untruth. Then begins the tug-of-war. I will obey my Guru as long as he tells me what pleases me. If he says something that doesn’t please me, then I begin to doubt. Probably he is not the right type of Guru. Then perhaps you pick up one of Swami Sivananda’s books and quote from somewhere where it says : "Be careful in your choice of a Guru and accept him only after testing him severely and finding out that he is the proper one to be your Guru." First he says that you cannot become a Guru without attaining self-realisation, secondly he says you must obey your Guru implicitly, and thirdly he says that you must examine your Guru before accepting him. Sri Swami Venkatesananda To be continued  ....

Part-4. One lady said to me in Sydney : "I would like to be your disciple because I think I can work in harmony with you. It is easy to work with you, so I would like to be your disciple." This is a very clever way of looking at it. The other people are hard task masters but you seem to be an easy man, cheap, so I would like to be your disciple. I told her  : "I am only a disciple myself, I am still trying to be a disciple to my Guru. I don’t know what it is to be a Guru." Why do you appoint the other man as your Guru? Because you think he is easy to please, or he is cheap, inexpensive. Sri Swami Venkatesananda To be continued  ....

Part-3. Why am I labouring this point about the Guru? If we don’t understand this, the relationship becomes terribly perverse. It starts when you say : "He is my Guru." Why is he your Guru? God alone knows for nothing has happened to you. A Swami said once that a stone lies at the bottom of a lake. You take it out, put it in the sun and it dries immediately because it hasn’t been influenced by the water. So it is possible that your heart is like the stone. It doesn’t respond to this Guru, and yet, because you have decided that he is your Guru, you have forged this kind of relationship. You are convinced that you are the proper seeker. Then you find some kind of Swami and decide that he is your Guru. Sri Swami Venkatesananda To be continued  ....

Part-2. There is a beautiful story in the eleventh section of the ‘Srimad Bhagavatam’, where a king encounters a naked ascetic and he says : "You appear to be a vagrant, a mendicant, a madman, but the radiance of your face belies all this. You have found something, what is that? If you are an enlightened person, tell me, who was your Guru?" The naked ascetic says, "Gurus, I have many. I have twenty-four Gurus. So I learn from everybody and everything." When can that happen? When I am a good disciple. You must seek wisdom from several Gurus, only then is the knowledge complete. Who is a Guru? What is a Guru? A Guru is one who removes the darkness of ignorance. Ignorance refers to ignorance of God or ignorance of the self. Has anyone done that to you? If not, you have not met a Guru. You might have met a dozen of Swamis but that is of no consequence whatsoever. If he has not touched your heart, sorry, leave him alone. Of course ...

Part-1. "I always bow to the Guru who is bliss incarnate, who bestows happiness, whose face is radiant with joy. His essential nature is knowledge. He is aware of his true self. He is the Lord of yogis, he is adorable, he is the physician who cures the disease of birth and death." Sri Guru Gita—verse 93. Who is a Guru? Or what is a Guru? There is a beautiful text called the ‘Guru Gita’. If you read it, you will probably dismiss all these Gurus as non-Gurus. What you and I often refer to as Guru is in fact a teacher. There are millions of teachers in the world. There are academicians, professors, school masters. Then there are your own parents, they teach you something or the other. But Gurus? No. They are not found in such profusion as we pretend they A Guru is a very rare phenomenon. On the other hand I may contradict myself by saying that if the disciple is ready, it is possible he finds the Guru, not in the conventional sense, but in a differe...

7. Aspects of Mind : 3. It is on such an occasion that he has to examine the reaction, and, from the reaction, judge about his past life. If the reaction is to grab, he can come to the conclusion that he has been a greedy person in his previous life, and it is this tendency to be greedy that shows itself in the present life also. It becomes all the more necessary, therefore, for him to see that he does not allow this impulse to predominate, and he should make the best effort he can by the exercise of his intellect and will-power to wipe out that tendency to be greedy. If he does that, he acts in such a way as would give the greatest satisfaction to God. That is God’s Will, and that is the way in which he can perform a duty which is in harmony with God’s Will. Therefore, the solution to the question of knowing God’s Will consists in this. Analyse your own impulses. If they happen to be bad impulses, involving injury to others, untruthfulness, incontinence, avarice and...

7. Aspects of Mind : 2. Even after this, man finds it necessary to exercise his will, which is another aspect of his mind, to act according to the decision arrived at by the intellectual aspect of his mind. When he does that he may be said to have used all the powers of his mind for doing any particular act. There is no further responsibility for him. He has done his best because he has exercised both his intellect and his will for the avoidance of the evil thought and the promotion of the good thought. Ultimately, therefore, it is the feeling aspect of the mind that has to undergo proper scrutiny. When we examine the feeling, as and when it arises in the mind, we get the clue to what we have been accustomed for a very long time to do, either in our past life or in this life itself. Suppose a person finds a 100-rupee note lying on the road without anybody apparently observing it, what will be the reaction in his mind? If he has been accustomed to grab things, with ...

7. Aspects of Mind : 1. We will notice that anything that we do has to be previously thought about. Thinking is the function of the mind. In the mind arise ideas. Ideas express either something relating to knowledge, or to feeling, or to willpower. Every one of us is guided by one’s feeling. The feeling might be good or bad. The man who wants to avoid the bad and allow only good ideas to arise in his mind exercises that part of his mind which is called intellect. He decides by right thinking that bad feeling should not be allowed to predominate and that only good feelings ought to be allowed to rule over oneself. Sri Swami Sadananda To be continued  ....

 6. Cosmic Will - It is, indeed, very difficult to find out what Cosmic Will means. There is the Cosmos worked by God according to His Will. Therefore, God’s Will is Cosmic Will. Otherwise, since cosmos is only a practically dead thing without intelligence in it, it will be difficult to understand how it can have a will of its own. Without belief in God, belief in Cosmic Will or Cosmic Momentum becomes superfluous. One can be in harmony with God’s Will only if one knows what it is. The question, therefore, arises whether it is possible at all to know the Will of God. To know anything we must have some kind of relationship between the object and ourselves; especially in the case of God’s Will or the mind there must be a kind of sameness between our will or mind and God’s Will or God’s Mind. Is there anything like that? The Upanishads declare that we are only part and parcel of the Ultimate Reality, or God. That is the reason why it is possible for us to ...