My Guru Is Better Than Your Guru
Spiritual egotism can seize hold of anyone, but you are more vulnerable to succumbing to it when you begin to have some spiritual experiences, or find a guru who you think, or are duped into believing, is a higher guru than all other gurus. Sometimes flawed Spiritual Masters inject this falsehood into the unquestioning minds of wide-eyed students. Like an insidious drug can obliterate a person’s conscience, it obscures their humility as they lecture less fortunate non-devotees about the “only true way”, or the only true Spiritual Master (often claimed to be God in flesh).You see this after someone has a burst of prana, or some other speck of spiritual experience and thinks he/she is suddenly something akin to a Paramahamsa, above the less enlightened beings who do not practice his/her superior techniques. Unwittingly such people run the risk of becoming insufferably arrogant and making fools of themselves by trying to tell seasoned seekers that they have the answers—not realizing or even remotely being able to comprehend that these long-term seekers have heard this time and time again, often seeing the spiritual organization or guru fall into disgrace.
I can remember somewhere in the mid 1970s when I was walking down a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts—which was a mecca of spiritual teachings back then—with Kundalini energy pouring out of my head, like a river rushing up and outward, and feeling like I was some kind of Divinity. At that moment a friend said to me, do you ever feel sorry for people who don’t have what we have with TM? Do you think there is any hope for them?
I had only been meditating for about 6 years at that point, and due to the mind-numbing dogma that had been crammed into my then impressionable brain along with about 4 years of Kundalini, I felt sorry for those people. I knew they were lost unlike my friend and I who were superior old-souls rapidly evolving to cosmic consciousness while most of the world was asleep and hadn’t hitched their wagons to the stellar path to enlightenment. I knew, too, that those of us within the TM organization were wiser then the rest of humanity in finding the ultimate guru and the surest and highest technique that ever issued forth from the Absolute—not to mention being the very technique that was whispered into the ears of the original Rishis at the dawn of Hindu spirituality.
When I became more seasoned and saw the foolishness in this thinking along with all the perfect gurus and paths that fell short of all the claims and promises, I realized that true spiritual growth involves humility, love, and compassion. I realized that no one has the only ture guru or the only way to Liberation, no matter how brainwashed they have become or how brain-dead to reason they have allowed themselves to be—I have heard to date close to a hundred plus individuals tell me they had a better way, the only way, or the perfect Master. Not one of them had a monopoly on the truth; not one of there spiritual paths was any better than the time tested spiritual paths you can read about in the books of the great spiritual traditions of the world. Most of these gurus and spiritual organizations proclaiming perfection will not even be a memory within a decade or so—many of them, as has already happened, will fall into disgrace and scandal while the tried and true traditions dating back thousands of years will continue on in the spirit of humility, compassion and love.
Bob Boyd
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