July 10, 2024
When a disciple sits near the master and asks the right question or listens with intense receptivity, what takes place between them is Upanishad. The truth however is not in the master's pocket - it is in you! The answer is in you, but because you are unable to discover it for yourself you go to a spiritual teacher.
What is the problem that the student should experience within himself to qualify him to go to the master? Why should a man go to any spiritual master at all? The spiritual teacher can do nothing if one is satisfied with the type of life one is leading. Only when one's present life itself poses a problem, when one finds no satisfaction in it or in the world, can one meaningfully enter into a dialogue with a spiritual teacher. Understanding of this distinction is called viveka.
My guru Swami Sivananda said: "There are many spiritual teachers in this world, but there are not many disciples." A disciple becomes fit to approach a master only when this dissatisfaction has arisen in him; it is then that he really turns away from worldly pleasures and ambitions i.e. there is vairagya or dispassion in him. But first comes viveka, dissatisfaction, questioning: "Is this real? What is life? What am I doing here?"
What can really make me question this world? Almost nothing! One can suffer in this world, one can have all sorts of misfortunes, but there is no guarantee that they will inevitably give rise to viveka.
Only the right understanding of the impermanence of all that we seek in this world and intuitive faith concerning the existence of something beyond this can really and truly produce virtue. When the student endowed with all this goes to the master, he possesses virtue, self-control, control over the mind. This virtue is natural to him.
Virtue must be born of right understanding, of a right sense of values. All these are based on what is known as mumukshutva or an intense longing for liberation. That aspiration is there only when one knows that somehow one is caught and that this bondage is intolerable; then the disciple goes to the master and asks him: "Please tell me where and how I am caught and how I can find release?"