(from "The Goddess and Guru"):
Despite his many successes, however—and probably, to a large extent, because of them—one of Guruji’s greatest unfulfilled wishes was to find a little more downtime, a little more space in which to be alone with his thoughts and meditations.
“When you’re in meditation you are yourself; nobody disturbs you,” he explained. “But people do disturb me. They don’t give me the time to sit and meditate. Once you become a guru, it’s very tough to get time for yourself. People intrude on you. They make you do things you don’t want to do. They put you on a pedestal and start carrying on…” He shrugged. “It’s not me.”
So why stay around and put up with all the fuss?
“I could have stepped away, yes, but I didn’t see the point of it,” he said. “It’s a challenge, and challenges are necessary for creativity. Problems force the mind to find solutions. Ultimately, it’s all a game.”
Lalitā’s game, to be precise—the Playful One’s play, unfolding across the cosmos in an infinite multitude of dramas and narratives, experienced through endless segments of space and time. Some of these dramas are vast and violent, galactic spectacles spanning light-years and eons. Others are minute, unimaginably intense exchanges of matter and energy at atomic and subatomic scales, playing out in fractions of nanoseconds.
But most of the dramas—at least in the sphere of Guruji’s everyday work—were thoroughly human: love and marriage, birth and schooling, wealth and poverty, jobs gained and lost, ideas conceived and abandoned, dreams realized or shattered, first meetings and final separations, loyalties and betrayals, youthful fervor, midlife crises, the wisdom of age, illness, loss, and death. Billions of individual stories, continually unfolding on the fragile timescale of human lives.
The role of the guru, he said, is not to escape this game but to teach people how to play it well—how to understand its visible and invisible rules, its goals and traps, its rhythms of ascent and collapse. How to handle disappointment without bitterness, success without arrogance. How to live joyfully, regardless of circumstance. And above all, how not to forget who and what one truly is.
“Spirituality and society are at war, and people get caught in the middle,” Guruji explained. “Society demands obedience; it thrives on obedience. But inquisitiveness, curiosity, wonder, creativity—these thrive in freedom.” He paused, closing his fist tightly. “That is society.” Then he opened his palm wide. “And this is freedom.”
“This dichotomy creates stress,” he continued. “Between spirit and science. Between structure and openness. And because of that, people need guidance—someone who is looking out for their deeper interests, not just their social roles.”
The guru’s task, as he saw it, was disarmingly simple and impossibly difficult at the same time: to remind people that they are already whole.
“The role of the guru is to tell you that you are perfect the way you are,” he said. “To love you so that you can learn to love yourself. When everyone is in perfect health, no one needs a doctor. When everyone is a saint, no one needs a priest. But there is a need—because everyday reality is always pulling us downward, grounding us. And yet there is another part of us that longs to soar.”
“Meditation,” Guruji said quietly, “is the place where we can soar.”
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