I don’t have a guru yet to call my own.
But if I were to claim someone as my non-guru to shadow guide me in my abysmal seeking process, then the south-Indian sage Ramana Maharshi would be the one for the title. Here’s the short but true story as to why that is:
It was David Godman’s YouTube videos that got me interested in Ramana Maharshi. There was something about this great sage’s Self-propelled life story and unpretentious air that made me want to circumvent the six degrees of separation and make a direct association with him. So soon after getting hooked to the series, I placed an order for one of his books, The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi particularly because it had his benefic face on the cover. In hindsight, I realize that this visual validation was my way of staking a claim to the great teacher’s presence in my life. But unfortunately, I had somehow misplaced the book and was unable to find it for the longest time. So I went back and bought another book, Who Am I? The Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, which too, as fate would have it, has now gone missing mysteriously. I understand that the teacher appears only when the student is ready. But since this teacher keeps deliberately disappearing on me, I wonder if it would only be fitting for me to call him my non-guru.
But if this disappearance is any indication of his reluctance to commit to me even in the form of a book, then I am blithely oblivious to it because the more I keep reading up on him, the more I realize that this vanishing act is an expression of a non-ness that is his true self.
The Non-Teacher
Ramana Maharshi never proclaimed himself as a teacher or give spiritual discourses to mass audience. His teachings that we have today are simple, one-on-one exchange that he had with his devotees who came with specific questions, including his well-known self-inquiry, turning the attention inward to the I-thought and asking ‘Who am I’ as the path to liberation.
“Grace is the beginning, middle and end. Grace is the Self. Because of the false identification of the Self with the body the Guru is considered to be a body. But from the Guru’s outlook the Guru is only the Self. The Self is one only and the Guru tells you that the Self alone is. Is not then the Self your Guru?”
Ramana Maharshi
The Non-Teaching
“Instead of giving out verbal instructions on how to control the mind, he effortlessly emitted a silent power which automatically quietened the minds of everyone in his vicinity. The people who were attuned to this force report that they experienced it as a state of inner peace and well-being; in some advanced devotees it even precipitated a direct experience of the Self.” – David Godman about Ramana Maharshi
Ramana Maharshi was a man of solitude, who had remained in silence for many years until eager devotees started flocking around him, eventually causing an ashram to sprout at the foothills of Thiruvannamalai. Even though he did give spiritual instructions that were non-emphatic in nature to devotees who insisted on being instructed, his preferred form of instruction was sitting in silence with his devotees, which he stated was the highest and direct form of teaching.
“Again, how does speech arise? First there is abstract knowledge. Out of this arises the ego, which in turn gives rise to thought, and thought to the spoken word. So the word is the great- grandson of the original source. If the word can produce an effect, judge for yourself, how much more powerful must be the preaching through silence.”
Ramana Maharshi
The Non-Message
Of all the devotees who came to Ramana Maharshi during the initial years only a few had the good fortune of striking a verbal interaction with him, which became his teachings, while many had to go back with only the grace of his presence and his profound silence for an answer. It is said that he never answered every question posed to him, but instead responded to only those questions that he knew would be of utmost significance to the questioner. The lesser questions were discouraged.
So the non-message that I suppose my non-guru implies here is that not all questions are important. Not all questions have an answer and even if there are answers, not all answers can be received with the same level of maturity by everyone. Some of us amateur seekers would rather chew off our legs than go without questioning about existence, universe, God, and truth at every step of the way, but we need to remember that sometimes it is necessary to ignore those questions that tend to stall us on our path.
If Ramana Maharshi’s non-message is too subtle to grasp, then we have another teacher making the same point but with a little bit of a bite –
“You are asking ‘What is the nature of my existence’, but you are asking it too casually because you still do not know the pain of ignorance. You still believe ignorance is bliss. You are not being torn apart by the pain of ignorance. If such a thing was happening then I would answer this in a different way. But now you are so clearly articulating the question, you do not know the depth of the question that you are asking yet.”
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev
A bit of digress, but you get the point.
There are questions and then there are lesser questions, which even though are greater in their magnitude, are still lesser in their purpose for a seeker. So the trick for such a floundering seeker is to put off these questions and follow the non-guru into the abyss of his all-encompassing silence. Because when we start to listen to this loudest silence, this hum of the breathing universe, eventually one of the two things will happen – we would find the answers or we would reach a point where the questions won’t matter anymore.
Either way, it’s a win-win.
