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12 / 3 / 2011
Swamiji loved to walk in his garden of roses and shout :
"I am the supreme energy"
then to carry on his walk peacefully.
Some people thought he was really mad.
12 / 10 / 2011
"To climb a mountain, you need legs."
Swami Girdanandaji
And to go down, you just need to let it go.
12 / 12 / 2011
"Don't choose !
You will get the best."
Swami Girdanandaji told me that for no particular reason before I went to the market. I did my shopping and before to come back, I stopped at a sweet shop. There, standing in front of the stall, eyes opened and my mind probably somewhere else, the seller was waiting that I choose. Then after a while, he got impatient and pointed with the finger to some sweets which looked like dog poop covered of white little balls that I didn't dare to try yet. It was like a slap in the face. And the sweets were exceptionally delicious that day.
"Swamiji, I love you."
That's the only Bhakti I could practice.
And as a matter of fact, I don't.
It's just there.
Sometimes, I remember.
2 / 23 / 2012
"Meditation is good for the mind, but you are not the mind.
Asanas are good for the body, but you are not the body."
Swami Girdanandaji
It's with this kind of absurdities that the Guru destroys the mind before to reach the ego.
6 / 25 / 2012
Spirituality is not about God.
You are the target!
The less a Guru speaks, the more his words are shockingly true.
The more they are shocking, the more they make you mad
because he's only speaking about you and the petty world you live in.
9 / 27 / 2012
The disciple looks for his or her Guru, but it's the Guru who finds the disciple.
You look for your Guru by practicing a spiritual discipline everyday and studying very often sacred scriptures and not in attending to Satsang every weekend to meet friends. There is nothing wrong with Satsang even with dubious gurus. It's just not enough to find your Guru. "Your Guru" means that this Guru was already yours in former lives. It's a long long story!
11 / 2 / 2012
Realization beyond experience
The one who lives the experience of non-duality and pure consciousness, that is to say the Self, knows the supreme purpose of his life. And finally, he discovers that anyhow life doesn’t have any other purpose than to be lived. So was this experience really necessary?
If it was an experience of the Self, pure consciousness and non-duality, he knows that somewhere the Self is still there, and he knows now that his quest for Self-realization can truly begin. But the one who realizes the Self knows it as himself because he understands that pure consciousness is the true nature of the being he incarnates. Thus we can say that this person abides in Brahman (Brahmanishta). Self-realization is an experience of the Self from which one doesn't come back. So such a person deserves the name of Guru.
The center is not different of the circumference
For the sage, the presence of consciousness is the only point truly interesting.
Anything else revolves around and inside it.
Guru and tourist guide
There are 2 kinds of Guru :
the one who asks you to follow him and
the other who points to the final destination.
1 / 29 / 2013
A reference and an example
Discover the life and teaching of Ramana Maharshi,
then you will know what is a sage, a true Guru.
Western Gurus should think about
According to Hindu tradition, anyone seeking liberation must do so under the guidance of a Guru.
The Guru must have the following qualities :
Śrotriya : must be learned in the Vedic scriptures.
Brahmanisthā : literally meaning 'established in Brahman'. He or she must have realized the Self, the absence of difference between Brahman or consciousness and himself or herself.
Being Brahman, that is to say in a state of permanent bliss, it’s obvious that desire and ownership of material goods don’t concern him or her. So a Guru is a Sanyasin too, someone who is absolutely not concerned by any material things, and first of course his or her body. The true Guru is the Self and not a person.
And according many Hindus I met during the twelve years I spent in India, a Jiva Mukti, a liberated soul, never travels. He or she doesn't need to go anywhere with his or her body because he or she is omnipresent and beyond any kind of desire, including the desire to convert others to his or her "religion" or spirituality.
2 / 11 / 2013
Does one become a scientist by looking through a microscope?
If you want to become a Guru, don’t content yourself with just a spiritual experience. Study a traditional teaching. They have been passed on through the ages for you to make them known and not for people to know you in your delirium of liberated Guru..., liberated of many moral rules for sure, but not of your lies and illusions.
2 / 14 / 2013
The true Guru is God.
Life is also a true Guru.
Death is perhaps the most powerful of every Gurus.
3 / 4 / 2013
Is it or isn’t it?
If you have a complete trust in this person and you are absolutely convinced that he or she is liberated, be sure that this is your Guru. If not, don’t lose your time with someone who doesn’t truly know what he or she’s speaking about. And if you put your trust in a charlatan, it's your problem, a serious problem because he or she's going to create a bigger mess in your mind that before you met this so-called guru. Anyhow, it happens because it was your Karma and one day, you will understand that this unfortunate meeting was necessary to open your eyes. Life is the best teaching!
Difficult to swallow in our culture
Hindus say that the Guru is God. It’s of course a figure of speech, but it’s also the truth.
They also say that 'God is Love' (and it’s not about love for money, power and sex).
3 / 21 / 2013
Everything has been said a very long time ago. If you really want to know what spirituality and non-duality are all about, study the classics and make up your mind by yourself. The role of the Guru is to help you better understand them and sometimes to experience their deepest meaning. But the classics remain the only true reference. No one can go beyond what has been said in the sacred scriptures.
5 / 12 / 2013
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
The role of the Guru is not to entertain people during Satsang.
5 / 31 / 2013
Stop dreaming
You can see much farther than others because you are standing on the shoulders of a giant,
not because you are taller than everyone else.
6 / 16 / 2013
Life is a great Guru
Every times we think to be important, it backfires.
8 / 30 / 2013
Life
As long as you don’t forget that life is one of the most important Gurus, everything in your spiritual quest will be fine because if you forget, life will always be there to remind it to you and not always in a pleasant way.
12 / 19 / 2013
Integration
Life is the greatest spiritual master that has ever been.
To live is to practice.
Spiritual practice and knowledge are useful to help us to live
correctly.
12 / 23 / 2013
Ordinary egomaniac
A Guru should be an exemplar because his teaching is what he truly embodies and lives. Words are only words and quite often pretty easy as everybody knows.
"Do what I tell you to do and don’t do what I do" is not a teaching. This is the most ordinary life of an ordinary egomaniac who needs to give lessons to everybody in order to think that he’s not ordinary.
"You couldn't be ordinary if you tried"
in the movie "American beauty" of Sam Mendes.
Another space
To meet the Guru is to meet another dimension
and of course, to find yourself in this dimension,
then to become this dimension.
Time and space are still present,
but they are not anymore what they were in the past
because there is no past anymore.
1 / 5 / 2014
Go
Go to the source.
Don’t lose your time with middlemen
who didn’t do more than to go to the source.
You know this source as well as them,
but you didn’t take time to understand.
That’s the only difference between you and them.
6 / 23 / 2014
Fish for free
The true purpose of spirituality is to inspire.
What else a Guru could really do?
How could you help people if not by becoming a source of inspiration to them?
A very old story explains that it’s always better to teach people how to fish than to give them fish for free.
7 / 13 / 2014
The true Guru is a mirror
A seeker of truth is obviously true, true to himself or herself and the others. How indeed could we seek the truth while persisting knowingly in lies? It’s so obvious that it needs no comment. An impostor on the other hand can pretend to embody the truth that he or she would have realized during a spiritual experience, but this is another topic that only concerns self-proclaimed gurus who don’t even explain why and how they suddenly became an authority on spiritual matter. If only a spiritual experience now is enough, why not also to take as guru everyone who took LSD or other psychedelic drogues? There are millions of them. Great! The market of gurus is going to be incredibly cheap in the West. Soon they will pay us to come to their Satsang.
Know that a true Guru will never ask you anything, much less obedience or money for any reason whatsoever. They will let you free and never try to manipulate you in any way. Why would they do something so ridiculous? The path of power is not their preoccupation and they have nothing to prove to others, not even to justify themselves for what they represent personally because their own image just doesn’t concern them anymore. They no longer plays with images as children love to do it and they absolutely don’t care of what others may think of them because the thoughts of these nice people are their right, their freedom and, sooner or later as they will discover by practicing spirituality, their problem too. Living beyond any desire, true Gurus have nothing to teach and the creation of an Ashram is the least of their worries. They reveal the truth as it is by simply answering questions. That's all and it's more than enough for truth seekers to tread their paths at their own pace.
And moreover, who needs a Guru in order to sincerely practice spirituality, to meditate, study, be right and correct, cultivate kindness and compassion, or in other words to be one with the Dharma, all those little things which really makes what spirituality is and that you already know very well for a long time ... if of course you are honest with yourself, that is to say if you are really looking for the truth because there cannot be any difference between truth and spirituality.
The true Guru doesn’t practice for the others. Nobody will. The true Guru is a mirror and it reflects just what we don’t want to see, what we are in all our pettiness and the absolute.
9 / 6 / 2014
Value
So many gurus nowadays that it must a very good business !
Or at the very least, improving the image of oneself.
The so-called Neo gurus can go back where they came from
And leave their awakened make up at the cloakroom.
Every century, there are only very few liberated Masters worthy of this name.
10 / 9 / 2014
Have a cup of tea !
One day a seeker of truth came to the Ashram in order to get the secret of enlightenment. The Guru asked him whether he had been here before. The answer was "no". The Guru said : "Have a cup of tea !", then he left. Later, another man who already had been here before came to see the Guru for the same reason, how to achieve enlightenment. Again the answer was : "Have a cup of tea !" Thereupon a disciple called Ananda asked the Guru : "How is it that you give the same answer to these two men regardless of differing circumstances ? For the one who has been here and the one who has not been here, your answer always is "Have a cup of tea !". The master immediately says "Ananda, have a cup of tea !", then he left.
Paradox in the relation Guru / disciple
The disciple wants his Guru to be out of the ordinary
The Guru repeats him they are identical.
The disciple sees the illusions he projects on the other.
The Guru contemplates consciousness he witnesses everywhere.
12 / 3 / 2014
Obvious
Let’s be honest !
Why would we come in this world if we were perfect ?
To teach to others how to become perfect ?
Sorry, I can only smile.
Not many have the privilege of doing it and not feeling guilty.
5 / 1 / 2014
Nothing for sale
To stay out of the business of spirituality
is the only true path of enlightenment worth to tread.
If you have to pay any fee for a spiritual teaching,
you’re losing your time and money.
True spiritual guides have nothing for sale.
Good luck to find one because there are not many of them !
Free teaching demonstrates honesty and integrity…
Pretty unusual nowadays !
But that’s the most effective way to discard every charlatan.
And of course, a free teaching won’t probably be what you think or wish for.
To be one’s own master… until
When someone is ready, the master appears.
And as long as the master doesn’t appear, one is obviously not ready.
Tread the path without worry trusting the Dharma
and especially with a lot of common sense !