“God, Guru and the Self are identical. A spiritually-minded person thinks that God is all pervading and takes God for their Guru. Later, God brings them in contact with a personal Guru and the person recognizes them as all in all. Lastly the same person is made by the grace of the master to feel that their Self is the reality and nothing else. Thus they find that the Self is the master…”
~ Ramana Maharshi
All the voluminous possible subjects to contemplate and I ran across this Ramana Maharshi quote that struck a chord in me.
I’ve read numerous books from many diverse spiritual masters in India and think this ‘self/Self’ concept is one of the most important for western minds to truly comprehend, and yet one of the harder concepts for us to digest.
In essence we must consider how does the small ‘self’—meaning our egos, relate to the large ‘Self’—the ALLness—GOD—the Great Everything?
Most spiritual seekers spend a lifetime questing for closer association to GOD only to eventually realize that GOD was always present within him/her—never outside the person—never an external goal or a destination or a longed-for connection. We are already connected and always have been connected to God because we are tangential extensions of that ALLness all interacting with other tangential extensions of that same ALLness.
We are like fingers and toes of the Great Everything all wriggling about trying to recognize our relationship to the vastness of all possibility. And as finger and toe extensions of the ALL, we have the ability to create the world around us as we choose to envision it because Godforce energy flows through us to do so.
Depending on our upbringing, most of us in the west were taught that God was this paternalistic, omniscient, all powerful force that ruled our lives—but that God was separate from us and we had to behave appropriately to please God for our lives to flow beneficially in all ways. Meaning: God was NOT us; and we were NOT God. That was blasphemy to think that we and God were one and the same.
So many people went in search of a spiritual teacher—a guru of some sort, to guide them in becoming closer to God and to learn how best to communicate with that all-powerful Master of our existence. As Ramana Maharshi mentions, they felt that God first put them on the path to finding that particular teacher so then they must follow that guru with religious devotion because the guru knew the true path to God.
But eventually the seeker realizes that the guru is not the actual Master to follow so devotedly for their spiritual enlightenment, but that Guru is only the guide showing the seeker HOW to connect directly to God for herself because THAT is the ‘key knowledge’ currently lacking in her life: How to directly connect into the Great Everything and feel that overwhelming Oneness with the ALL.
Once the personal connection to ALLness is reestablished, then the seeker realizes that the ‘Master’ is not the Guru in some human form, but Spirit itself is the Master and is the true ‘Godforce connection’ that she was always capable of achieving for herself, but that she had mistakenly failed to recognize it as such and had failed to cultivate her personal Godforce connection to fruition.
“God, Guru and the Self are identical. A spiritually-minded person thinks that God is all pervading and takes God for their Guru. Later, God brings them in contact with a personal Guru and the person recognizes them as all in all. Lastly the same person is made by the grace of the master to feel that their Self is the reality and nothing else. Thus they find that the Self is the master…”
“…Thus they find that the Self is the master…” means it isn’t the ‘ego-self’ he’s referring to with that statement—it is the ALLness Self that flows through us at all times—our own Godforce connection; and that WE (each of us) have the ability to use that Godforce to create the world we choose and the life we want, because we are simply fingers and toes expressing the Great Everything in whatever we do.
We are the Creator’s creations creating the world around us in our own personal images with every choice that we make because “God, Guru, and Self are identical…,” and we are all of them—as appendages of the Greatness allowing the Godforce to flow effortlessly through our lives.
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FINDING YOUR TRUTH 