Gurus

Tara on Tour

Gurus - that peculiarly Eastern term for a spiritual teacher. Literally meaning "dispeller of darkness". I'm in Oxford this week, staying with a close friend and someone who has played a very big role in my spiritual life: she taught me to meditate (apparently I sat and cried throughout the first 3 sessions until I was given a mantra to recite!! I do remember being rather scared and overwhelmed by the experience, but this is an embarrassing confession nonetheless).

Also here this week, visiting from India, is one of the teachers from the Kagyu lineage of Buddhism: Thrangu Rinpoche is a senior teacher (guru), a real scholar and the main teacher for the four regents of the lineage, including His Holiness the Karmapa. I haven't seen him yet but am looking forward to being reminded of the benefits of proper meditation practice!

Meanwhile, I've been reading the biography of one of India's most celebrated gurus: Sri Ramana Maharshi. Which has had/is having quite an impact. He was born in South India in the late 19th century and at a very young age left home and took himself off to live an austere and intense life of silence, meditation and solitude within the halls of a local temple. He renounced the world completely, shaving his hair, giving away the last of his very little money and donning a loincloth in place of ordinary clothing. He ate very little and ignored all attempts to be lured into conversation - he just sat and sat; moving occasionally if need be but so absorbed in meditation that he seemed largely unaware of the world around him.

He was eventually drawn to the mountain of Arunachala - considered to be a holy place, the abode of Siva, Hindu God of Light. There he remained for the rest of his life, gradually shedding the last remnants of his identity as an ordinary person and becoming, if such a person can really be described, a fully-embodied Divine Being. "Extraordinarily ordinary" at first glance, and yet so powerful was the energy emanating from him that people came from all over the world just to be close to him. To receive his grace - which was regarded as none other than the Grace of God. His teaching was very, very simple: he did not profess to belong to any religion, but thought all religions led to the same "place" - the experience of Oneness, where any vestige of ego was left behind and the mind was absorbed into the heart of its very source. Advaita. Non-duality. Here there is total silence - but not the silence of no noise, the silence of no thought.

This is an experience I have once had; in the house I lived in in Woodstock. All of a sudden every noise stopped dead - I remember asking "why have all the birds had stopped singing?" Then a kind of blank, but not a vacant blank, a buzzing alive blank. Pure peace. Absolute nothingness. It was heaven! Then a roaring sound, the word "advaita" appeared in my consciousness together with the distinct sense of that pure nothingness "falling" and becoming fragmented into discrete entities of thought, object, form.

This was, I think, a brief experience of the state of mind the great spiritual masters abide in.

Ramana Maharshi taught through silence. He gave very little teaching. Except to ask students (devotees as they're usually referred to) to contemplate the question "Who am I?" There is nothing more important than to trace this "I" back to its source and there to lose it!! The "I-thought" is the thought preceding all other thoughts and is therefore the root of our human condition. To transcend that, with all its attendant confusion and suffering, is to experience the truth of who we really are, is to know Heaven on Earth.

He believed that, at a certain point in our development, it is necessary to be with a Guru in order to be able to reach realisation.

Reading this has stirred that realisation within me too. I have often felt it, and in fact Akong Rinpoche, Lama Yeshe and Ringu Tulku fulfill that role for me. But there are times when the longing becomes very intense - such as it is now - and perhaps that's because I'm not physically close to any of them right now, perhaps it's because I've reached a point of being ready to be close again. "When the student is ready, the teacher will come".

So how does this relate to Tara? Well, I've been wondering that and meditating on that question. The deity is also the Guru, but it can be hard to have a very strong, clear connection with the deity: they are not in form, but are only visible in the mind's eye - which is obviously subject to all sorts of interference and interpretation by the rational mind.

It's interesting to have reached a point of apparent separation between Guru and deity. That's ignorance. But it's there!

I wonder if this will be healed a little through seeing Thrangu Rinpoche. Or perhaps more so through the visit of Amma to London in October: she is another Indian saint, said to be the incarnation of the Divine Mother and therefore would be regarded as an incarnation of Tara.

I'm working with two little Taras at the moment: Tara Protecting from Thieves, and Tara of Increasing Power. I feel it would be appropriate to take Tara of Increasing Power to Amma personally and to give her to Amma. But that's just a thought for now!