Someone posted this to the Amma chat. Very nice: I've read today some beautiful words of Krishna Das, writing about his experiences with his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, and I hope no one minds if I share them here, because there is something universal in them about the guru's grace that I feel we can all appreciate:
"He didn't teach, he didn't tell people what to do, in the sense of spiritual practices. I was doing a lot of stuff when I went to India. I thought I was a good yogi, and I was meditating. All I can tell you is, when I got there and took one look at him, I couldn't even remember my name. You know? I never sat again. I never did another asana (yoga posture). All that stuff fell away because I was seeing Love. I was in the presence of Love that I'd never imagined I could feel. I knew that what I was feeling was special. That it was a gift, that it was Grace. I knew that nothing I could ever do could earn that Love, or could win that Love, or create that Love. It was so transcendent because it was so intimate. Everybody there felt the same way. Every single devotee of Maharaj-ji had their own relationship with him, completely their own relationship. They had their Maharaj-ji. My Maharaj-ji is what I'm talking about, but somebody else will tell you a whole other story. But it will always come back to this Love and sweetness. "He didn't want anything; he wasn't selling anything. If you want to come, you come; if you want to go, you go; you want to come back, you come back. He wasn't doing "business". You couldn't buy his attention either, if he didn't want anything. It was only when you were real, when you were in touch with that longing, that you could really connect with him. That was the way he taught. You know, half the time we were with him it was heaven on earth, but the other time we were ready to jump in the river behind the temple, and it was only three inches deep. If he didn't look at you for a couple of days, forget it. Hara-kiri, where's my sword? If he didn't throw a banana to you-because people were always bringing fruit and fruit was always flying in all directions-if you didn't get your banana that day, you'd start to shake. You twitch, you know? "I remember the first time I went to the temple by myself without anybody else, Maharaj-ji was sitting out on the cot and I was sitting on the other side of the courtyard all by myself because Ram Dass always kept a distance, he didn't want to crowd Maharaj-ji. That was the way he thought about it. I'm looking around, it's just me and him, and I'm sitting across the courtyard. And I'm thinking, what's wrong with this picture? So I very tentatively got up, kind of pretended I wasn't really walking across the courtyard. I just sat down in front of him. He looked down at me. Tik. Okay. And then went on with whatever he was doing. And I went: all right, I made it, yeah! All right! Flexing my muscles, sitting up a little straighter. Right? And that was the beginning of developing my own relationship with Maharaj-ji, according to my own dim lights. Just whoever I was, that's what my relationship with him was. That's what it became. From that point on I became more close to him in my own heart, in my own mind. I allowed myself to love him in a simple, emotional way. I just let myself get into it because that's who I was, and he responded to that. He allowed me to be who I was in relation to him, and he just kept playing with me. It allowed me to feel close enough to him for that to happen. Something that was causing me to self-destruct was allowed to start to blossom, only to be uprooted by his Grace. You can see how he precipitated the whole thing; the teasing, freaking me out, making me nuts, making me paranoid, trying to get rid of me, send me back to America. Finally I just started to disintegrate and the thing came back from those old days. And then once it was up and running, he just pulled it out and threw it away. Pulled that weed out. This is how he taught. He didn't teach, he did. He does... "A Guru will not rest until we know what he knows, or she knows, and until we become the same as they are: somebody who knows love and feels love for all beings. Sitting with him in the body was indescribably delicious. But I couldn't digest it and that was what I had to learn to do. We become free by interacting with beings who are already free. A true Guru knows himself to be no different than who we really are. By approaching him with love, we wind up being led deeper within our own hearts. I was able to sing because I knew that it wasn't me at all. It was okay for it to look like me. I saw the way people looked at me, but I knew they weren't seeing me at all. I was seeing who they thought I was, and I was able to give them what they really wanted, which was love. I didn't even have to give but the natural response was love. No matter which way they approached me, with which part of their body, whatever part of their mind-that was just the seduction. What they wanted was love. Maharaj-ji had taken me into his heart. He had shown me that, without any action on his part, he was pulling all the strings. He was the great puppeteer. And the part of me that thought I was real was the puppet. It's not a bad puppet, no reason to hate it, it's just a puppet. "I knew I would always be in that Presence and that that Presence is who I really am. He had freed me from a whole bunch of trouble; it was okay for me to go on and sing. I had to surrender first, that was the only thing I had to do. On the path of devotion, surrender is the movement. Every time you surrender, you fall back into yourself. Learning to accept life as your Guru, learning to accept everything that happens to us in life as our teachers- that's surrender. We give up thinking we know the way it's supposed to be. We open our eyes and we learn to accept it the way it is. We learn to see through God's eyes, through the eyes of the Self of the Soul. The path of devotion is the path of the heart, of love. What the heart loves, that's what the mind will think about. When we can love everyone, we are in love all the time. The more you long for this love, the less you can stand being closed and the more it hurts to be closed off. So we try to find a way to pry our hearts open. "This is the path of love. Nothing can keep us closed if we long for love. It isn't spiritual, it isn't holy, it's just what it IS. It's human beings trying to learn how to live. It's not special; everyone is the same. By surrender we get ourselves, we don't lose ourselves. By surrender we find strength-strength to be in the moment; strength to face the things that need to be faced; strength to trust our own hearts. It's the path from the outside into the inside. We must learn to trust our hearts, and the way we learn that is by betraying ourselves over and over and over, by settling for less. Finally we reach a place where we can't do that any more, no matter what. That's when we learn to trust own our own hearts, to trust ourselves. There's no path outside of us. We are the path; our lives are the path. Being open doesn't mean to be vulnerable. When you're open, nothing can hurt you. But we're afraid to be open and so we're hurt all the time; we're hurting ourselves. "Grace is understanding that everything happens by the will of God in our own best interests. We may not see that hand, but we feel the effect. Why it comes, when it comes, no one knows. But without Grace, we'd never see the distance; we'd have no idea the direction to walk. Grace is the unseen hand helping us on the path that we think we're walking. But what is leading our hearts in this direction? Did I find Maharaj-ji or did Maharaj-ji find me?" --- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "neemkaroli11" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM LOVE EVERYONE, SERVE EVERYONE, REMEMBER GOD RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/JjtolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
