Guru-Bhakti yoga

BEWARE OF THE GOD The Pitbull of Gurus by Jim Chamberlain 1996

Guru yoga thus involves the integration of the positive qualities that have been projected onto a guru. The process by which this integration takes place is a form of the Jungian style meditation called active imagination. In active imagination one interacts with autonomous or archetypal figures arising from the unconscious, until the resultant relationship gives birth to a transcendent quality or an expansive shift in consciousness.

What Da describes as Guru-Bhakti involves first and foremost the finding of a guru figure upon whom one can project one’s wisest, most god-like, radiant, present, and beautiful self, the Self archetype. Then one either imagines, remembers, or contemplates an image or the literal person of this figure. And one then begins to allow this process of projection and identification to be felt throughout the body, inside and out, in every part and even down to the cellular level. The method involves bringing all of one’s sensory apparatus to a state of receptive focus on this singular symbol for the Self, the guru, through seeing, hearing, feeling, intuiting, and being in relationship.

To practice this technology of the body, mind, life force, and emotional being is to directly experience oneself as an interconnected part of everything instead of as Alan Watt’s “skin-encapsulated ego,” or Da’s self-contraction or ego - “I.” As a whole, human beings are only beginning to have access to this boudaryless experience of self, which makes it all the more mysterious, thrilling, and alluring.

• Who is the guru, anyway?
• Are gurus only projections of our own powerful and godlike Selves, or are gurus truly those who have fulfilled the highest potential of which human beings are capable, and who out of compassion teach others?
• Let’s turn to Sri Aurobindo for some answers: - The Synthesis of Yoga

“The spiritual progress of most human beings demands an extraneous support. It needs an external image of God; or it needs a human representative, - Incarnation, Prophet or Guru; or it demands both and receives them.”

“The Hindu discipline of spirituality provides for this need of the soul by the conceptions of the Ishta Devata, the Avatar and the Guru.”

“It is necessary for (man) to conceive God in his own image or in some form that is beyond himself but consonant with his highest tendencies and seizable by his feelings or ihs intelligence. Otherwise it would be difficult for him to come into contact and communion with the Divine”

“Even then his nature calls for a human intermediary so that he may feel the Divine in something entirely close to his own humanity and sensible in a human influence and example. This call is satisfied by the divine manifest in a human appearance, the Incarnation, the Avartar - Krisha, Christ, Buddha.”

The spiritual practicioner should not “forget the aim of these external aids which is to awaken his soul to the Divine within him. Nothing has been finally accomplished if that has not been accomplished. It is not sufficient to worship Krishna, Christ or Buddha without, if there is not the revealing and the formation of the Buddha, the Christ or Krishna in ourselves.”

“...the greatest Master is much less a Teacher than a Presence pouring the divine consciousness and its constituting light and power and purity and bliss in to all who are receptive around him.”

“And it shall also be a sign of the teahcer of the intergral Yoga that he does not arrogate to himself Guruhood in a humanly vain and self-exalting spirit. His work, if he has one, is a trust from above, he himself a channel, a vessel or a representative. He is a man helping his brothers, a child leading children, a Light kindling other lights, an awakened Soul awakening souls, at highest a Power or Presence of the Divine calling to him other powers of the Divine.”

In other words, many of us must first come into contact with the divine through a human intermediary, but the intermediary is not the point, the recognition and openness to the divine is the point. If such a human intermediary becomes inflated, he has broken his “trust from above.” posted by holotrope Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 12:52 PM