The guru is an ambiguous figure

In the West today, the guru is an ambiguous, paradoxical figure who helps and inspires many and harms, exploits, and abuses many (while others go away neither helped nor harmed). They are a world away from the figure of the ideal sage such as Yajnavalkya, Gautama Buddha, Pythagoras, Lao-tze, Bodhidharma, Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi, or Sri Aurobindo. Faced with the guru who acts egotistically, or selfishly takes advantage of their disciples for financial gain, or abuses their position of trust by selects teens or twenty-something devotees for sex, or cruelly plays with their devotees feelings using the excuse of "braking down the ego", yet at the same time says things that are inspiring, what are we to do?

The common approach in the West, among those who are not locked in a sado-masochistic co-dependency relationship with an abusive guru, or who - if anything even more appalling - rationalise and justify their guru's abusive and selfish behaviour and attack or denigrate the victims, is to take the teachings for what they are worth and reject the teacher. My approach, ironically, is the exact inverse of this. It is not that one should adopt the teachings and reject the teacher. Rather one should adopt an authetic teacher (very rare and precious indeed!), and thus go beyond the mental limitations of the teachings. On the basis of my own experience with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and more recently with Gangaji (by no means a sadguru but still with a lot of decent qualities) and Ramana Maharshi (the real deal), I have to say that what the teacher says (the teaching) is of less importance than the Light and Presence of the Teacher.

Yes, even the profound and magnificent philosophical synthesis of Sri Aurobindo's written work, which have for more than 25 years guided and continue to guide my intellectual understanding of the world and of the spiritual path. The Presence of the authentic Teacher (whether it be Sri Aurobindo himself or someone else), on the transcendent (nondual) level, is even more important than that. This ultimately is what the Guru really represents, the role the authentic guru plays. The guru-disciple relationship is a form of bhakti yoga, in which the guru (as the enlightened or realised being) takes the form of the Supreme, and is seen as and believed to be the Divine (this is the whole idea of avatar, sadguru, etc), showers their grace, and in this way enables the disciple to attain that same state. Would you worship a deity who acted as capriciously and selfishly as many so-called gurus? posted by m alan kazlev at 3:54 PM Integral Transformation