Guru Purnima
A day to honor those beings willing to take on the weight of everyone's misdeeds
Don’t fall in love. Rise in love! - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Gurudev
Today under this full moon is Guru Purnima — a day to celebrate those beings who are here to hold the weight of the world; those beings who live only the messages of the Divine.
Today, I honor my Guru, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and all the other saints and bodhisattvas who are here simply to show us the way.
Welcome to the story of me searching for my Guru only to find him exactly where I began.
A little backstory
I started yearning for a Guru when I was about 20 years old. I had just read the famous Ram Dass book, “Be Here Now,” in which he writes extensively about meeting his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, whom he and everyone else mostly referred to as Maharaji. He wrote about how his guru would look at him, and tell him exactly what he had been thinking about the night before; he wrote about the experience of having his mind and heart blown wide open, and he introduced the entire Western World to what Maharaji said anytime anyone asked how to become enlightened: “Love everyone. Serve everyone. Remember God.”
He described how being in his presence felt like being wrapped in love.
The way he wrote about this experience and how it affected him and the trajectory of his life made me feel like if I didn’t find my guru in this life, I wouldn’t reach enlightenment, and at that time I was naively convinced that my job in this life was to become enlightened.
Ram Dass, as well as other spiritual teachers, taught that each moment of life is the guru because every lesson you need for your own awakening is always what is right in front of you. Enlightenment cannot exist for a person anywhere other than where they are. They also taught that the ultimate guru was the piece of God that rests as an unwavering flame in our own hearts. Not everyone may receive an embodied guru in their lifetime, but everyone has the guru of life and their own highest knowing.
They also taught the lesson, which is somewhat of a cliché, that when the student is ready, the guru will come.
So I got ready.
And I got ready.
And I got ready.
Sometimes I forgot.
Then I got ready and ready and ready again.
A couple years ago, after about 14 years of being pretty obsessed with this desire, I finally started working on letting it go.
I had fallen in love with my partner, and through this I realized that taking the more ascetic path to Self-Realization – which I had contemplated on and off for many many years – was not my path, and that I was meant for the road of the “house-holder.” Meaning, there was no way I was giving up my romantic relationship, or the life we wanted to live together to live in a traditional ashram.
But, the longing for a guru remained.
Grasping for a guru
For a long time I thought that perhaps Ram Dass was my guru because of how deeply his work and words affected me. I felt close to him – almost a familial bond. Sometimes he would even visit me in my dreams.
When he died, I berated myself over and over for never making it to the yearly retreat that he led in Hawaii. I had had such a strong feeling that I had to go that particular year because I so badly wanted to meet him in person before he passed.
I missed my chance.
The day he passed, I was driving in my car after having heard the news, and I was heartbroken. All of a sudden, and with such immense clarity, I felt his presence in the passenger seat next to me, and I heard him say, “It’s all right. Next time.”
I wish I could impart how real this experience felt – how materially real. Like he really was in the car with me telling me everything would be ok. It felt so real, in fact, that since that day I have not had any sadness about not having met him in this life.
After his passing, I also realized that he was a guru of sorts for me – he helped me move through a lot of internal darkness – but he was not my guru.
The real meaning of the title “Guru”
I want to take a moment here to clarify what a “guru” actually is because it seems that the word is thrown around quite a bit – Wellness Guru, Financial Guru, etc – and because the West has started using this word prolifically without even knowing what it means, it almost has no value. Without understanding its true meaning, we have also found ourselves in a situation where everyone and their mothers are proclaiming that “the age of the guru is dead.”
I have a major problem with that.
The age of the Guru is not dead, and I hope it won’t be until all beings everywhere are happy and free.
Hopefully, the age of the false Guru is dead.
It is true that one part of the definition of Guru is someone who dispels darkness, and so in this way it makes sense that we’ve given the word to people who have illuminated certain things for us in our lives. There is a second part, however, that has been cast aside but is the most important part: guru means “weighty,” as in they are heavy with all the suffering they are willing to take for their devotees.
I want us to really understand this point. A true Guru understands the nature of the Universe so well that they are willing to take people’s hardest karma with the knowledge that they will not feel the difficult effects of it in the same way we unenlightened people do.
“Give me your karma,” they say. “Lay it down at my feet.”
This is an insanely incredible commitment and gift to anyone who chooses to be a true devotee.
A true guru will say, “You do not need to worry. I will take care of everything.”
These are the people who deserve the title “Guru” – the ones with the Boddhisattva’s soul.
I know this is true from all my years of study, but I also now know this is true from having the experience myself.
