Spiritual Realization Requires a Spiritual Master


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The need for a living Spiritual Master


Here is the final point we'll make about the need for the Spiritual Master to Realize something great Spiritually: even with the accurate, detailed road map of a genuine Spiritual Teacher's Written Teaching; even with the seeming "gap" between God and man being bridged by a Transmission Master of the ultimate degree; and even with that Master being in like human form, perfectly tuned to Transmit God to similarly structured beings — even with all these gifts, the ego, simply through sheer force of habit, will tend to throw the gifts down the toilet. It is extraordinary — extraordinarily sad, in fact — but true.

 

Sri Ramakrishna

 
Sri Ramakrishna

As the great Indian Saint, Sri Ramakrishna (1836 - 1886), put it: what is required is a Spiritual Master who, once you hire Him (or Her) to "cure" you, will grab you by the neck and force the medicine down your throat, no matter how much kicking or screaming you do. You wouldn't want a doctor to do otherwise if your life was at stake! (And our Spiritual lives are at stake, with timing running out.) Who wants a surgeon who is afraid of blood, whose qualms about cutting into the human body, or whose “empathy” for the patient makes his or her hand tremble? Who wants a doctor who is afraid to slap a patient's face, apply electric shock to his chest, or shout in his ears for him to wake up or open his eyes, if that is what is required to keep him from "shuffling off this mortal coil" in the next instant?

And in fact, most of us are in a Spiritual coma of sorts, and we do need "Spiritual shock treatment". To extend the electrical metaphor further, imagine if the house had the ability to disconnect itself from its electrical source, and had a terribly bad (and completely unconscious) habit of doing so chronically! The mediating substation would not only have to perform its function of stepping down the transmission, but would also have to be constantly on top of the house, demanding that it plug itself back in, again and again! And, like it or not, that is exactly what we need.



 

Avatar Adi Da SamrajTrue spiritual life is a demand, it is a confrontation, it is a relationship. It is not a method you apply to yourself. Your "self" is this contraction, and this contraction is what must be undermined in spiritual life. Therefore, the Guru comes in human form, in living form, to confront you and take you by the neck. The Guru doesn't merely send down a grinning symbol, to be reproduced with a few fairy comments for everybody to believe. The traditional images and records of the past help serve very little. At best they may help a person move into a position where he or she can actually begin spiritual life. But Truth must come in a living form, absolutely. Truth must confront you, live you, and meditate you. It is not your meditation that matters. Truth must meditate you. And that is the Siddhi, or marvelous process of Satsang [the relationship with the Spiritual Master]. Even while Truth is meditating you in Satsang, you are busy doing more of the usual to yourself, waking yourself up, putting yourself to sleep, reacting in every possible and unconscious manner to the force of Satsang — but [all the while] you are being meditated.

You cannot be "meditated" by one who is not alive. Even if you believe in one who is no longer alive in human form, you cannot provide the necessary, living means for this meditation. Truth must come in living form, usually in the human vehicle of the Guru. Spiritual life involves this marvelous process, this Siddhi, this Satsang. If this Siddhi, or living spiritual process, is not activated, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what exotic or humble spiritual methods you apply to yourself, for they will always be of the same nature. They will always amount to a form of this contraction. All your remedial methods, all your beliefs, all remedial paths, all conventional and consoling religions, all merely strategic religious and spiritual methods, are extensions of this contraction. Truth Itself must become the process of life. Truth must communicate Itself. Truth must generate conditions in life, make demands, restoring the conscious participation of the individual.

Dead Gurus can't kick ass!

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, The Method of the Siddhas

  




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All excerpts from the works of Avatar Adi Da Samraj and and pictures of Avatar Adi Da Samraj © 2003 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed.