Why there is a need of a Guru गुरु

The word Guru comes from “Gur” which in Hindi, means a person who masters an art. Guru thus means one who is proud of it and wants to use it. Most Gurus use the latest technology to influence people and make them disciples.

Now a day to have a Guru is a status symbol. When your Guru गुरु comes to your house in your big Car, you invite all the bigwigs in the neighbourhood. Your popularity index shoots up.

In the material World, we are well aware of the rat race. When we get tired of it, we turned to spirituality; but here too, we end up doing something similar. We start running the ‘seeking race’. So we move from one Guru to another. We shop for one cult or another. From Osho, we move to Radhaswamy राधास्वामी, Nirankari निरंकारी, Asharam आश्रम, then to Ramdev रामदेव and then to another, many such Guru are available on Astha आस्था, Sanshkar संस्कार, TV Channels. Promotional material, CD’s and books of various Gurus start piling up on our table. We seek the truth with the philosophies of these Gurus till someone comes along and tells us that another Guru is much better and that the Guru we are following is fake.

We pick up our bags and run to the next Guru गुरु shop. Once again, we do spiritual shopping and then again and yet again...the peace we were searching is completely lost. We run after Buddha बुद्धा and start chanting; we run to a Krishna कृष्णा cult and start dancing, sometime we even change our religion. Six months down the line, we are the same---depressed, lost and without hope, nothing seems to live up to its promise. We enrol the expensive course. We go through ‘clever’ workshops, which demonstrate their effectiveness with brilliant examples.

We, actually, feel the change for a few days and then it’s back to square one.

It is the approach that has gone wrong. Instead of internalising spirituality, we have externalised it. We look for magical solutions and like typically successful marketers, specialist guru-marketing, organisations makes a fool of us. They sell us empty concepts at huge prices, because they have no real content; they are ineffective. A Guru marketing organisation cannot have a true Guru गुरु at its heart that is for certain.

There are seekers who have been seeking for years and who take pride in announcing that you are studying since decades and have reached nowhere even you are in your 80’s and dying ?

Our spiritual journey begins when we stop seeking and start meditating, using the technique taught by our Guru. The Guru is a master and knows best. A Guru गुरु is one who helps you become your own Guru and make you independent. You shed your ego and your bad habits.

So stop Guru shopping, start meditating and begin your spiritual journey. God is in you. Brahma ब्रह्मा, Vishnu विष्णु, Mahesh महेश, Saswati सरस्वती, Laxmi लक्ष्मी, Durga दुर्गा and all Devi Devta देवी देवता are inside you. Only you have to invoke them.