I was asked a question by email. The question was: is Guru an incarnation of the Lord? A very good question. But we need to understand that each one of you seated here is an incarnation of the Lord. In Genesis it says that God created man in His image. So, because God created man in His image, all human beings are creations of God.But gurus are divine creations of God in the sense that they have the ability to connect with Him. Once the ability to connect with God is established, then you are referred to as a guru because you have the potential, the ability, to start leading from a state of no-knowledge to a state of knowledge. That is why gurus are referred to as divine incarnations of God. They can connect to God and pass on a message from God to you. None of the messages that gurus give are their own. Gurus are only messengers. So, yes, gurus are divine incarnations of God, and all of you are also incarnations of God.
But is every guru an incarnation of God? No. You get IT gurus, computer gurus, food gurus, wine gurus... The word 'guru' is a divine word but the way people have started to use it have made it a very loose word. As Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita: once you start to say the name of the Lord, you become one with the Lord. You must have a merger with Lord Shiva and dance in ecstasy with Shiva. Only when you can do that are you a guru. So only those gurus who have merged with God or Shiva are true gurus.
Another question I was asked: once a bond is created between guru and devotee, is that relationship a lifetime relationship? Not only is it a lifetime relationship, it is a perpetual relationship. The guru will see the same people lifetime after lifetime after lifetime. So don't feel smart. That means you didn't finish your job in your previous lifetime and you had to return. Eventually the guru doesn't reincarnate but you keep coming back. Krishna tells us not to get caught in the cycle of births and deaths.
So gurus come here just on that divine perception - God's created perception - that they need to take you to another level of existence. And that level of existence is called 'bhuva'. Once you reach that level of existence, called self-realization, then he takes you to 'swaha', which is God-realisation. Only a guru can do that. No book can do that. But all of us, as Swami Sivananda said, are governed by a one-eyed guru called the television. And we learn from that one-eyed guru. So we are caught in that trap and the only way we can get out of it is by following the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna tells us to recite the name of the Lord continuously.
So start to live in Chapter 2, verses 46-48 of the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna talks about evenness of mind. Once you have that you can live in both worlds - material and spiritual - simultaneously, without being affected by either. But we need to get to this. Make your change now before you go further. Read those verses and accept the truth for what it is, and once you do that you can have the experience of a merger with Shiva.
Your whole purpose here is to make that merger. But we do these things that are funny, that excite the physical only. We never do anything that excites the innermost altar of our being. And yet a total state of bliss is in that innermost altar of your being where you can dance the ecstasy of joy, the ecstasy of peace. You don't have to die to find peace in the body. Only the guru can teach you how to find that through a process of meditation.
Excerpt from Pournami Discourse
