We should seek guru only within ourself
A friend recently wrote to me asking: My question is about the role of the teacher. When you read about spiritual practice it seems to me that most writers consider the intimate contact with a living (enlightened) teacher to be necessary. Since I don’t have a teacher and I can’t see how to meet one anytime soon (living in a small town far away from anyone in the least interested in atma-vichara) these writers create a nagging doubt in me. Am I just fooling myself? Should I just give up and live my life to the best of my ability and try to be ‘normal’? In reply to this I wrote as follows: People who talk of the need for a ‘living’ guru have clearly failed to understand the true nature of guru , and when they have failed to understand this they also fail to understand the true role of guru . As Sri Sadhu Om used to say, guru alone is living, and we are all dead. That is, guru is the one ever-living reality, and we who have forgotten this reality are in effect dead, because we take thi