Excerpt from a conversation with OM C. Parkin on 6 January 2023 at Gut Saunstorf Monastery

The question “Who is the Guru?” has moved me for a very long time. I found a quote in the Guru Gita about the Guru principle: “The Guru principle is moving as well as not moving. It is as far away as it is close. It is on the inside as well as on the outside of all things.” Who is the Guru, OM?

OM: The Guru is an impersonal principle, beyond personal identity and beyond the horizon of the thinking mind. It is an intermediary between humanity and God, between the relative and the Absolute. It is a representation of the highest, the spiritual sphere, and it embodies the knowledge of what holds the world together at its very core. This principle exists through the human form but also through other manifestations. For example, the Guru principle spoke to Ramana Maharshi through a mountain – a process that is inconceivable for a rational mind. That the Guru principle can appear through the human form is a completely unknown phenomenon in Western society. When the Guru principle speaks through a human form, people think that “someone” is speaking because they consider themselves to be the doer. Thus, they project the doer onto the Guru’s form as well, believing it to be an individual actor. The Guru principle, however, speaks, teaches, and exists impersonally out of the Great Stillness.

In Christian and Western societies, there are hardly any living Gurus, whereas in India, the Guru represents the form of the highest. In Christian culture, there is only the idea of a single living Guru: Jesus Christ.

OM: It’s not that the Guru is unappreciated in Western society. It’s neither appreciated nor unappreciated. The Guru simply does not exist; it’s not present at the horizon of the Western mind. There are several reasons for this. One essential reason, which I have also described in my writings, is the one you mentioned: Over the centuries, the Christian tradition and essentially the Catholic Church have done everything to annihilate the living Guru. As soon as one appeared, such as in the form of the few mystics, the institution fought them. If they were representatives of the Church, such as Meister Eckhart, sooner or later canonical proceedings ensued, often resulting in ostracism, torture, or violent death. The living Guru represented a blasphemous potential, and the Church showed neither any interest nor understanding for the possibility that the Guru could incarnate. Canonization, which in the Church’s history resembles a kind of acknowledgment of the Guru principle, occurred posthumously and never during the living incarnation.
Another major reason is that the cultures that underwent the culture of Enlightenment – along with the increasing secularization of society and thus of the collective mind – eradicated not only the superstition of faith-based religions but also spirituality itself, because the Enlightenment never had the intelligence to distinguish between pre-rational and trans-rational spirituality. From the perspective of the Enlightenment, every form of spirituality is pre-rational. Thus, secularization took its course, and entire regions became increasingly de-spiritualised – a trend that continues. Authority neurosis is widespread in the West and was fuelled by the Enlightenment as its shadow. Authority neurosis means there is very little discernment between false, pretentious personal authority and an authority of impersonal nature. The Enlightenment considers the autonomous mind to be the highest instance, subordinating every form of spirituality to this supposedly highest instance. The fact that there are forms of spirituality – or any other spheres of intelligence and knowledge – beyond the autonomous mind was never taught during the Enlightenment. It is as inaccessible to the layperson as it is to academics, scientists, psychologists, or other leading figures of this society. It is something that cannot be accepted by faith but only revealed through a real process of transformation in a person’s consciousness. One cannot approach the Guru intellectually; the Guru can only be revealed. Whether someone believes in the Guru’s existence or not is irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant whether someone believes that there is a God or not.

That the Guru principle cannot be grasped simply with the mind is especially significant to me right now. I imagine it’s like a code we must crack, and it only becomes accessible through direct experience. Could you speak about the task and responsibility of a Guru, or how you experience it?

OM: A Guru has neither a specific task nor a specific responsibility. There are Gurus who teach and others who do not. Strictly speaking, the mere existence of the Guru is, of course, a form of teaching and reaches those in their proximity through words, actions, or simply by being. The highest Guru principle has taken no vow. Even the notion that a Guru’s task is to liberate others is just a limiting idea of a morally thinking mind. The Guru, by their very existence, will naturally have a liberating nature, doing things – or refraining from doing things – that serve people’s liberation. But there are no specific actions that must be taken or avoided. The Guru principle follows no concept defined or comprehensible by the thinking mind. It is free, spontaneous, unpredictable, and subject to no law other than what I might call the cosmic law, as it is not separate from the natural laws of the cosmos, life, and death. The Guru is both, life and death, an eternal principle. It is the experiential principle beyond impermanence, beyond that which appears and fades away.

There it is again, that it can be experienced, that it is taught through direct experience.

OM: There’s a third point that must be mentioned about why people in the West cannot perceive the Guru. Spiritually speaking, Western cultures are in a rather backward state. The First World is, spiritually, actually the Third World – meaning Western cultures are spiritually underdeveloped. This also means that people’s perceptions are still heavily dominated by physical eyes and senses. Materialistic societies are not only societies, which are oriented toward the principle of matter; their very condition also comes with certain limited qualities of perception. The Guru cannot be seen with physical eyes or even with the mind’s eye. The Guru can only be seen with the eye of contemplation. The state of contemplation in a person describes a condition of deep immersion, intense introspection, a departure from the flattened state of consciousness in which the majority of people exist. This inability to see the Guru even applies to many spiritual seekers and, indeed, to some of my own students. But there is such a thing as a heart opening in a person, and into this heart opening divine love flows. A natural expansion of consciousness occurs within the disciple, creating a deeper connection on the level of the heart – a deeper knowledge, a heart-knowledge – even if the individual does not yet fully understand or see it. This heart-knowledge is already of a higher nature than intellectual knowledge, though it is not yet true, final, Advaitic knowledge.