This talk was an outing for me, a coming out, so to speak where I put my Guru’s picture on the wall and say Live With It. The babble in my mind (Who do you think you are?…What will people think…Isn’t this rather conceited?…People will think you are in a cult.) Even my wife “puts up with me.” I have absolutely no one in my immediate world that understands what I’m doing. There is a tremendous gravitation that pulls us back into the known world, a world where people know you. We all go through this in one way or another.

To whom are we loyal? We have a choice. We are either loyal to the external world of society/friends/family and our own conditioning OR we are loyal to something unknown, loyal to our potential. We are either loyal to staying the same, and swimming in the quiet anxiety, or we are loyal to our true nature, and we don’t know what that is.

We confuse life with death. Life as we know it is death, not life; life as we don’t know it is death, our true life.

And so I put my Muktananda pictures on my wall. And I invite the living principle of life—that divine urge to give in to our potential—in the form of a picture of Muktananda back into my life. And so I give birth to myself, again, and again…because the pain of being unborn is too much to bare.

So here I am at 80. What is this frog voice crying in the gloom, What shall I be? I do not stop at the cemetery wall and the tombstone that reads what I have been. I am not done with this life and its adventure. Even though I am restricted to a small town in Virginia, my journey is within now. But not within as if there is some space within, but within through the mundane everyday life of a retired person whose big adventure is going to Walmart.

It is through this ground of the mundane, through this everyday mind that the adventure begins. Your adventure is not somewhere else, but in your everyday present moment, for it is there in the concrete existence of your body and immediate world that you must stand and from this diving board make your leap. You being your adventure by accepting with your heart where you are, and from that acceptance you will know what to do next. If you leave or if you stay does not matter as long as you make your move from wholeness.

We don’t understand Guru in the West because our reality map has no place for it. Guru doesn’t fit our perceived reality so we interpret Guru in terms of our material reality, so it must be suspect. The effect in people must be caused by something external and that is this guy who says he is a guru. To be the effect of an external cause is to be held hostage for some malevolent force. It just doesn’t fit out map, period.

And yet those who have experienced the effect of an enlightened being, spiritual master, guru, saint, Siddha yogi, whatever we call them in different cultures cannot be denied as fantasy or heretic or as some pathology. Our western psychology is hammer that sees everything as a nail Our psychology sees everything as a pathology that does not fit our map of “normal.” But what is our normal is a pathology? Ever think of that?

Guru is not a person, place or thing. Guru is an active creative principle, a Verb, a function that is a relationship designed for transcendence. When you enter into relationship with a teacher or model of your field, you are going to transcend you known boundaries. Guru is the model for the spiritual field and the transcendence of the physical field and our attachment to form, to death, for it is form that dies. When we attach to form, physical or mental, we attach ourselves to death and we feel anxious. Dread haunts us.

A guru or master is a person who had done the work of giving up attachment to form, and so when you meet such a person you have the feeling that he is inside of you as well as outside. There is no boundary. He is pure action, and that action is always in relationship to you. Whatever he does is appropriate to you, to what you can handle. Guru is your potential in flesh and blood. This Guru Principle takes whatever form you need to break out.