Gurugita Discourse Nine

Gurucharanam saranam

Japastapo Vritam Teertham Yajno Daanam Tathaiva Cha
Guru-tatwam-avijnaaya Sarvam Vyartham Bhavet Priye!

O Dear One! Japa (the recitation of mantra) Tapa (spiritual austerities) Vritam (Vows), Teertham (Visiting of Holy Places) and also the path of Jnaana (Knowledge) and Daana (Charities) come to naught if one does not know the truth of Guru.


Majority of us are engaged in one or other form of spiritual practices. In fact atheists are an insignificant minority in the world. Even atheists have god, their conscience. What is our concept of God? No one could claim to have a clue about god for god is incomprehensible to human intelligence and sensory perception. However all of us still keep an image or idea about god and do certain practices, observe rituals and follow some ideologies, gurus or prophets which give us varying degrees of moral and mental satisfaction. But stil we feell some emptiness, of having not fully realized life. We know that we are bound and caged in a limited space. We have not yet reached that shore beyond, that of unshackled Freedom, Light and Knowledge.

‘It is true that what really exists is the formless Truth, beyond all conceptions, like the limitless sky’. Navajyoti Sri Karunkara Guru said.

The actual spiritual truth exists well beyond the mind boggling multiplicities of forms and ideologies that trouble human mind perpetually. The spiritual truth is an experience beyond, in the quietened state of the soul. We experience different states of consciousness, sometime tied to the physical, mental, intellectual or the soul. There is a painful gravitational struggle in life when the soul tries to traverse these consciousness borders, lifting us to the subtler and subtler existential truth. Similarly, a struggle of grave nature awaits a truth seeker while passing through the strata of spiritual evolution before realizing the Ultimate Reality – God. But the seekers of truth get stuck at various borderlines of spirituality, unable to raise themselves beyond. Here our attachment to symbols and rituals or spiritual and cultural conditionings would not help. What helps us in this dilemma is the supreme grace of Guru, who can lift us up from there.

‘If there is a formless nature to Truth, in what all (consciousness) states they exist? This should be shown by guru. There are many who have seen (experienced) the Truth. But Guru is not who has seen it, but who imparts it (this experience) to others’ (Navajyoti Sri Karunakara Guru).

Many are the ideologies and practices, one or the other of which we fanatically or ignorantly follow, while disputing and disliking the others. Surely we are in a domain of ignorance. Navajyoti Sri Karunakara Guru never denied the truth in others. What He said was that we should evolve to the formless nature of Truth, which is possible only by getting rid of soul’s karmic and spiritual liabilities accrued during the course of many births and deaths. In this effort, only the grace of Guru helps. The Guru meant here is not a Guru in lower spiritual zones, but a Guru who takes us across the borderless spiritual experience as expected of this age by godly Will. Alas, today the spiritual fraternity is groping in the dark in search of that Light.



Mukundan