by Moorthy

Why does Krishnamurti say a guru is unnecessary, while Ramana Maharshi says association with a sage is essential? The soc.religion.eastern community wrestled with this question through the summer of 1991. Moorthy, an engineer at Bellcore in Piscataway, New Jersey, offered this personal reflection as an attempt to dissolve the apparent contradiction — not through doctrine, but through experience.

I see recently a trend in this newsgroup comparing different masters and arguing that one is better than the other. I thought of sharing the following thoughts, which are based on my experience.

When one is blessed with a direct experience of God, that person will understand that what all great spiritual leaders were talking about are different aspects of the same thing. In other words, every teaching one came across, every master one met with, and every life experience one went through will fall into place automatically, without the mind trying to unify them. One master is better than another, and one system is better than another, only with respect to an individual at a particular point of evolution.

When one experiences the grand Unity, that person will realize through direct experience — without the mind trying to find the unity by itself — that all masters are that person, and all the teachings received from the masters came from that person. What is important is that we evolve spiritually using whatever teaching appeals to us at a point in our life. Of course it makes sense for an individual to say that a particular master did or did not appeal to them at a stage in life. It is not the same thing to declare that one master is enlightened and another is not, or that one is more enlightened than the other. A person who has unified with all beings will never compare oneself with another, because that person knows by experience that they are not different from other beings.

I would like to suggest that we avoid arguing whether a guru is necessary or not. It depends on an individual and their current stage of spiritual evolution. There are three categories of spiritual evolution. This classification is not meant to say one category is at a higher level than the others.

The first category: One is freeing oneself from the body and mind. At the end of this evolution, one sees an infinite light and merges with it. At this point one loses consciousness — in other words, one meets a blankness. In general one needs a guru during this category of spiritual evolution. Most of us are in this category.

The second category: One is able to raise one's purified mind beyond the blankness encountered at the end of the previous category. During this evolution one becomes one with the trinity: Shiva (the Holy Spirit), Vishnu (the Son), and Brahma (the Father). Such people are rare and do not in general need a guru. At the end of this evolution, the individual mind becomes one with the one universal mind.

It is with this last stage that J. Krishnamurti was primarily concerned in his talks. That is why his consciousness was asserting that a guru is unnecessary. That is why he was saying you are the world — there is nothing like an individual mind; there is only one universal mind. This is the state of the transcendental person. Krishnamurti, being at the last stage of the second category of evolution, did not require a guru. He did not perhaps realize that he was talking mainly to people in the first category of evolution. Jesus Christ seems to have been in this category.

People in this second category learn mostly everything by direct experience and need to refer to scriptures and other books in order to describe to others what they know by direct experience.

The third category: These people rarely come down to the physical level. They display one or more of the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent aspects of God.

I would like to suggest that you neither believe nor disbelieve what I have said here, but verify it by direct experience. Till then, it is better to say: I do not know. I am not asserting that this is the only way to classify spiritual evolution. Nevertheless, it seems to me that this explains why some teachers say a guru is necessary and others do not.

If your master says there is nothing like the Trinity, do not borrow that and argue with others that there is nothing like the Trinity. It is true with respect to your master because they have unified the trinities and gone beyond it. It may not be true with respect to your stage of evolution. Similarly, knowing by reading about transcendental states is not the same as knowing by direct experience.

Posted to soc.religion.eastern on 14 June 1991. Author: Moorthy, Bellcore, Piscataway, New Jersey. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

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