Thread: gurus and ufos

Well, that's not entirely how I see it

Hindu gurus are a bit special. The hindu culture believes everyone is a manifesation of the godhead Brahma. This means everyone is already divine whether or not they realize it. Now naturally its hard for humans to accept they are actually gods. But the hindu culture has worked around this by role-playing. You can just imagine that you are, kinda like trying on the idea-until you can accept it.

There is actually a ritual or two floating around where a practitioner prepares themselves to be the embodiment of Shiva or one of the other major gods. Now it doesn't matter whether or not they believe they have become an avatar for a god. When the time comes they just imagine they are and go along with the flow. Its a way to realize and experience reality (differently).

To an outsider who doesn't understand they already believe everyone is divine - then it looks like a load of bs.

Now if you're talking about a buddhist guru pretending to be enlightened - now you've run into a problem. As that would be against the buddhist teaching.

I'm not sure it's appropriate for a guy named "Sageous" to post here, but:

I wanted to respond to the OP for a couple of days but was unable to do so -- during that time, two phrases kept rolling through my mind about it:

"I'd never join a club that would have me as a member."

"... Those who can't; teach."

Though I framed it in a different context than Groucho had originally intended, the first quote spoke the most truth to me: I truly believe that those enlightened individuals who have fully mastered their spiritual side, their higher Self, if you will, have little to no interest in sharing that wisdom with acolytes, and for that matter have no need for acolytes, or their material and reverential offerings, at all. Their spiritual attainment is based on a lifetime of personal introspection and focus aligned uniquely to their own spirit and being... much if not all of what they experienced in their enlightenment would be meaningless if they shared it with others, so why bother? Also, since enlightenment can only come to a soul who is ready on their own, no matter what they've been told or whose courses they bought, why bother sharing at all? It simply wouldn't make sense. In other words, I think "true" gurus would likely appear to be extremely selfish people with little interest in anyone else.

So anyone calling himself a guru very likely is not a guru, at least in the recent description of the term. This goes for non-spiritual things as well: that real-estate "guru" selling you his "guaranteed" plan for success at 3am is likely not a terribly successful real-estate trader (if he were, there would be no need to do these commercials).

The second phrase, spoken by annoyed students everywhere, signals my agreement with the OP, I think. Gurus need not only be charlatans (though I believe they often are); they may in fact also be well-intentioned people who want to make a difference, and they may even possess good working knowledge of their subject (or what it's believed to be, anyway), but in the end the best they can do is talk about enlightenment to people who want to hear about it. Unfortunately, this sort of arrangement is fraught with temptation, and many a guru forgets his core, begins to accept the fealty of his fawning students, and falls prey to believing his own lie.

I found Juroara's post interesting, in that it didn't so much disagree with the OP as describe the way that the Hindu wisely religion learned to deal, over the millennia no doubt, with charlatans: One man cannot proclaim himself better than anyone else if we've all got God within us, right? Institutionalizing such a concept was an excellent plan, I think. Christianity found a similar way to curb false gurus, BTW, though evangelists have done much to erase the effort in recent centuries.