My Guru and His Disciple
While teaching at a small college in St. Louis in the early 1980’s, I met my guru, Gururaj Ananda Yogi.
Now that I am much older, I realize what a miracle it is to have met the Guru in a human form. My wife and I attended many weeklong retreats in the early to mid-eighties with Gururaj and the chelas of the American Meditation Society, or AMS. I was initiated in 1983. I am a Full Teacher within AMS, and have remained a part of this sangha in one way or another for almost forty years.
My relationship with Gururaj is hard to describe because my feelings for him are so complex. In his words, the Guru-Chela relationship is a love affair – and this is true.
As he himself emphasized, he was not a monk, and he didn’t teach from a historic lineage. Gururaj was a realized master in the great traditions of Indian Advaita practice and philosophy, but he himself did not emphasize a particularly Indian approach. He liked to say he was a universalist who taught spiritual truths common to all the great traditions. Calling himself a teacher for householders, he did not teach deity worship, complex spiritual practices, or elaborate rituals. His satsangs, in which he mingled the profound and the ordinary, were brilliant and spontaneous. His humor was full of enlightenment energy.
When I read over my journals from that period and remember my experiences while attending those courses, I am astonished at all that happened.
Although I listened to dozens of satsangs during the courses and later on tape, I had only a few private interviews with him. Each encounter was extremely memorable. In these early days with Gururaj, I read the Ramakrishna accounts. I read the well-known teachers of Advaita Vedanta. I read the Christian gospels intensely. At his encouragement, I began to learn about Buddhism. In my life subsequently, I have been part of several Vedanta societies, spent twelve years practicing within the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, worked closely with a number of contemporary master teachers of the Advaita, Shaivite, and Dzogchen traditions, and have done a lot of daily meditation and spiritual practice. It has taken me all of these years to begin to really appreciate what Gururaj told his chelas, or disciples, in those wild, early days on retreat. But I begin to understand.
During these retreats, Gururaj would deliver several daily satsangs.
There are literally hundreds of these satsangs, most now transcribed from audiotapes. A selection of these satsangs forms the content of this book. They represent only a fraction of the number of talks he gave. His satsangs were given spontaneously and without notes or preparations, in response to questions we asked. He interspersed his satsangs with many jokes and puns. In my editing of the verbatim transcripts, I have only clarified some of his slightly eccentric use of grammar and construction and eliminated some of the sweet but distracting puns and jokes that were told us in order to enliven the exchange. The content and sequence of paragraphs have not been substantially altered. After all these years, and after having listened to dozens of spiritual teachers, these satsangs by Gururaj impress me anew with their wit, profundity, and deep awareness. They are inspired talks; enlightenment energy; the embodiment of spiritual truth.
During his teaching mission of a dozen or so years, Gururaj founded a number of organizations in countries around the world, which in America, emerged as the American Meditation Society, or AMS.
AMS teaches a mantra-based set of practices. At the group retreats, then and now, we participate in long sessions of group meditation and chanting, various initiations and group practices, a Communion practice similar to the darshan practice in the Indian devotional traditions, and lots of laughter and joking around. Gururaj was a great “funster” as he put it. Many silly or outrageous things went on during these retreats, and at times we could overlook the depth of his teachings. But in long hindsight, these spiritual talks bloom and shine in their wisdom.
Gururaj always insisted that the goal of human life was self-realization; the integration of body, mind, and spirit, in the awareness that we are divinity itself.
We are IT. This IT has been called God, Goddess, Consciousness, Awareness, Brahman, Satchitananda, Buddha-Mind, Christ Consciousness and many other things, but it’s all the same. As Gururaj said over and over and over again, it is One consciousness, and Tat Tvam Asi: Thou Art That. Gururaj also insisted on the vital importance of the Guru-chela relationship. Almost without exception, the Guru is an essential part of this process of Self-Realization. But Gururaj taught that this is not devotion to a particular human being, but rather, it was to what the teacher embodied: an eternal, transpersonal truth, the truth of Divinity.
The Guru is a very important and somewhat controversial component in spiritual practice.
Many have come to distrust and discredit gurus, embracing the idea is that you can figure it out from books, teachers, classes and on your own. I’m not so sure. The forces of our delusion and our ignorance are very deep and strong, and we need a force, a guru, to help awaken us to our true nature.
What is the Guru?
The Guru is both a human being of flesh and blood and at the same time, the embodiment of transpersonal, universal wisdom. He, She, or It is something that manifests in the individual mindstream of the spiritual seeker. You obtain a guru not through your own efforts, but as a miracle, an act of grace. The Guru is both highly personal and impersonal, intimate and public, inner and outer, particular and universal. The Guru is the Buddha, the Dharma, and the sangha all in one. Guru is the principle of illumination, that which dispels the darkness of ignorance. Guru is the savior; the liberator; that being or force that frees us from our limitations and our bondage.
Ultimately, the Guru is the voice of your true nature, the nature of the Self.
When it arises in the form of a human being, it is Bhagavan. If you are a Christian, it is Christ. When it arises in the subtle level of the mind, it is Ishta-devata, the personal deity or the chosen spiritual ideal. When it arises in the energy-body, it is mantra. And when it arises in the manifold appearances of this world, it is the lotus land of purity. To paraphrase from the Gospel of Thomas, it is the Kingdom of God that is spread out before us, though people do not see it. Gururaj said the goal of life is Self-Realization, which is true. He once said I don’t believe in God; I KNOW God. This is also true. Although his teaching shares many elements of classic Indian spirituality, he taught from personal, first-hand experience. No canned Vedanta lectures. No beards and Patanjali terminology. No ancient traditions with venerable teachers or Hindu deities. No heavy, profound texts to study. Just his voice, that laughter, and that mysterious presence.
He had actualized all of it, and he spoke from direct knowing.
With others, he could be a very controversial guru, and this troubled me. But to me, he was a kind and austere Godfather figure. Although many years have passed, and I enjoy the teachings of many wisdom traditions, he is still front and center on my altar and in my devotion. It doesn’t matter to me — or to him — that I mix and match Buddhist, Dzogchen, Advaita, and Tantric practice. As he would put it, it is all One Consciousness. A dear teacher once told me that all sadhana practices can be boiled down to two essences: Samskara Shuddhi and Guru Devotion. I think Gururaj would have agreed.
At the heart of any sincere spiritual practice is devotion and renunciation.
You have to die to one life and be reborn into another. This takes many years, or at least, it has been so for me. I find you can’t rush it. It is an illusion to think we are doing anything, anyways. My own path has consisted of almost forty years (in this life) of meditation, contemplation, and study. That, and intense devotion to the Guru and to the truth, as the truth, reveals itself slowly and incrementally, through grace. This path of concentration, contemplation and meditation has been for me most clearly articulated in the Buddhist, Dzogchen, Advaita Vedanta, Kashmiri Shaivism, and related non-dual wisdom traditions. Though these traditions are centuries old, they are being actively reinterpreted and reinvented by Gururaj Ananda Yogi and other contemporary masters for a modern, western audience. We are part of this reinvention, this introduction into Western culture of these ancient techniques for spiritual liberation and freedom.
I offer these satsangs of a great master of the spiritual journey with the hope that they may inspire you to explore your own path.
This is not a self-help course. It is not another set of instructions on how to meditate, or on specific spiritual disciplines. Nor is it a course about a particular faith or religion. You will find yours if you haven’t done so already. The path of spiritual unfoldment has many avenues to one great truth. In the words of my own guru, you should follow the path best suited to your nature. If these satsangs inspire you, then look into the American Meditation Society or one of its sister organizations around the world. Gururaj is on YouTube. Read these satsangs, listen to his teachings on YouTube, absorb them, and find inspiration and confirmation in your own meditation and spiritual practice. It all takes time – a long time – and there are many periods of doubt, mistakes, and false starts. God is not for the faint of heart. Each of us must do this journey on our own.
Be brave, as Gururaj liked to say, paraphrasing the great Vivekananda: be brave and do not stop until the goal is reached.
You are not seeking for a great realized master or for the one true religion or path. You are seeking for yourself — your true Self, beyond appearances and deeply held beliefs, and the illusion of the personality-body-mind complex that we so deeply identify with. Forget your ordinary life and your ordinary way of believing, doing, and pursuing what you think you want. Seek God, the truth, and your freedom. This is all that really matters, because it’s the only thing that truly lasts. But as anyone who has been devoted to spiritual practice for many years will recognize, it is all a complete, inexplicable, mysterious, supremely challenging miracle. It is all grace.