stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

388 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Guru-devotion involves both your thoughts and actions. The
most important thing is to develop the total conviction that
your Guru is a Buddha.... If you doubt your Guru’s competence
and ability to guide you, your practices will be extremely
unstable and you will be unable to make any concrete
progress....
If your Guru acts in a seemingly unenlightened manner
and you feel it would be hypocritical to think him a Buddha,
you should remember that your own opinions are unreliable
and the apparent faults you see may only be a reflection of
your own deluded state of mind. Also you should think that if
your Guru acted in a completely perfect manner, he would be
inaccessible and you would be unable to relate to him. It is
therefore out of your Guru’s great compassion that he may
show apparent flaws. This is part of his use of skillful means
in order for him to be able to teach you. He is mirroring your
own faults (Beru Kyhentze Rinpoche, in [Berzin, 1978]; italics
added).
Once a person has been identified [in India] as a saint, a holy
man, nothing he does or does not do can change his title,
unless he is caught in flagrante, and several times, engaged
in disastrous things like sex or forbidden drink. But even in
such a case, once his charisma is firmly established, there is
a dialectic out of such dilemma: the emancipated person is
not bound by social rules, and there is enough scripture to
support it (Bharati, 1976).
All of that, of course, is simply manipulative, power-preserving
nonsense, presented in the guise of spirituality. And it all, as we
have seen, exists just as surely in the traditional, agrarian East as
in the postmodern West, by its own admission.
The indefensibly stupid notion that the “real difficulty of ‘the
strange case of Adi Da’ is that the guru principle is neither understood
nor accepted by our culture” is clearly part of the same dangerous
apologetic. For, it is again obvious that whenever “God” is
involved, there are no checks and balances: “God” can always do
whatever he wants, regardless of the surrounding culture or tradition.
In the face of such traditional instruction, points such as the
following, from the Dalai Lama no less, ring utterly hollow: