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as a teacher. I said that your private live is none of his business and his private life is none of yours, and that to judge somebody else by if they do or do not do humanitarian activities THAT WE KNOW ABOUT is presumptuous. Yet your question is a valid one. I think each person must find that for themselves; it seems to me that the answer would be that person's reason to appreciate thirst for the infinite, and would be completely beyond being able to be conceptually bound. But I'll try and put part of my heart's answer into words. I told Parlokanand, who was my instructor, shortly before he initiated me, that I wasn't sure about this Guru thing. I'd been pursuing mahamantra for years. I had studied various martial arts for about 7 years total, and had been an assistant instructor in 1 class. I'd done hatha yoga, and prana yama, as well as jappa (a mantra practice). I'd studied psychology, reading the seminal works of Jung, Freud, Adler, Maslow and Pearls. I'd gone heavily into drugs, and somewhat into ESP raising disciplines. But no teacher had done it for me. P told me it was OK, to just give K a test, and if I tried it in earnest I would find who and what M was by what he revealed to me. That until I knew, it was fine if I didn't want to pranam. That I would have to agree not to reveal the kryas (forgive me; I'm old fashioned and like the Hindi term for the techniques). So I felt OK to continue. I was amazed, when I came out of the room where he showed them to me. I'd been shown them before, you see, 3 times. But they'd never done much before. No light except flashes from keeping the eyes still. No music. No awareness of what was pushing my breath out and pulling it in, tho I'd sometimes before been able to feel the point in my breathing cycle where whatever that is attaches. Now all of these things were happening, so alive and resonant, so powerful and pure. Even the nectar technique; tho I didn't experience a taste, or feel a liquid, my mind stabilized and my heart filled with joy. So, for me, it was not a test so much as his Knowledge unfolding itself to me, and my seeing that he had empowered the kryas as no one else had been able to do for me. And that was the first time. I didn't get good at going inside and letting go for over a year. And I never really built up momentum, except for the year I was in the ashram I founded, until I'd been clean and sober for a few years. Now I walk in Music most of my day. I see Light, sometimes, merely by closing my eyes when I can feel that gentleness within calling to me. And Nam lifts each breath, and I catch her at it on many, many of them. I still have decades of practice to go before I come to the state he described once as ' All you can see is Light, all you can hear is Music, all you can feel is Nam and all you can taste is Nectar', but my daily experience confirms that he knew of what he spoke. Don't mistake me. I am no saint, nor lay any claim to such thing. I don't know if there is one soul and many bodies, or one God and many Aspects of God, each as Immortal as the Godhead Himself. But I know that the deepest part of me, and of you, and of him, is the Immortal. And I know that because I have drunk of it enough that it shows me, clearly and simply, what its nature is. And he is the teacher without whom this would not, for me., have been. That is my test of him as a teacher. And he passes it with flying colors. |