What Surrender to a Guru Means in Practice

To make progress in the spiritual field, there must be a surrender of your ego to your personal guru. Ego means notions of “I” and “mine.” You should surrender these to your guru. But what do these words mean in operation?

You normally have certain ideas about what is right and what is wrong. These ideas have been molded into you by your environment, and by the culture in which you took birth and grew up. And most often, these notions or values—so deeply embedded in your psyche—are based upon selfishness. They are values that pro- mote your or your family’s welfare but ignore the welfare of anything beyond that.

When you go to your guru, the instruction you usually get is that you must love even your enemy. You go to your guru, perhaps, with the idea of somehow getting revenge on your enemies—and here you are taught to love them. You go in search of riches—and you are taught to give them up. You wish to complicate your life—and you are taught to simplify it. You are told to welcome misery and happiness with equanimity, when you have an inbuilt bias against misery. Your tendency is to seek happiness—but when you actually get it, you feel you do not deserve it and so you reject it. You reject success. You are told not to feel shame or elation when someone scolds or praises you—but that is against your nature, too: you feel.

The trouble is always that you want your guru to tell you what you want to hear. And if the guru makes the mistake of telling you something that goes against your values, their fate as a guru is sealed in your mind. That’s the end of the guru-disciple relationship, which could have flowered into a total identity with universality.

When communications break down, the danger is the disciple going ahead on a path that he or she believes to be that of the guru but is not. If the guru’s name is also used, the dangers compound.

When you go to a guru, you must put aside the doubting mind, and put into practice what is taught. It ma —it will—go against your usual notions; but still, you must accept it. If the guru is confined to teaching you only what you want to know or already know, you will not grow.

You wish to be an angel. You believe that you are a devil. In fact, you are an angel. You are rejecting your true nature to yourself. It is the avowed purpose of all gurus to help you realize who you really are: that you are divine. Even in the lowliest thoughts and pollution, even in abject misery, in destruction, there is divinity if you look for it. The ability to look beyond what is obvious must be learned.