"The Guru is Dead", an essay by Professor Dr. David. C. Lane - originally posted here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/radhasoamistudies/message/42219
	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 along 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 projetiles 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 responsiblity. 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 Next Back to Frontpage