Swami Shivapadananda on attachment to the Guru

SWAMI SHIVAPADANANDA

DAILY READINGS

Taken from Mother Radha’s
notes, written at Swamiji’s feet.

Day 305

(Apologies for the limited formatting. TypePad.com have still not debugged their new changes.)

 

As a chela
[disciple or devotee], only your attachment to the guru [Spiritual Preceptor] is
important. The chela must have faith in the guru, love for the guru, and
discrimination. He must think, ‘God. Not the world.’ He must have love for the
lotus feet of the guru, not attachment for the guru.

Only the guru can help
you, only the guru can take you. When the guru and the chela meet there is an
instant attraction on both sides. There is no choice at all. Is this free will?
No. It is God’s will. This can change all your karma. This is freedom and it
cannot be taken from you.

In meditation use
the guru mantra first and then the other mantras and prayers. If another mantra
springs to mind, it means the guru mantra has opened that door for you. So use
it. The guru mantra is the seed [bija] from which others flow.

Devotee: I woke up
feeling very disturbed . . . . Swamiji: Either it is the company you keep, or
someone thinking of you or concentrating on you at that time. Take a holy book
and read it before meditating and hear your guru’s voice reading to you. If you
think one person can disturb you, imagine how it is when you have thousands of
chelas.

People complain, ‘I
have come here for twenty years and you did not initiate me. But he came
yesterday and you initiated him. Why?’ You cannot tell the growth of an
aspirant in years.

The guru is the greatest thing, you cannot conceive how great, but what
he does is his business. Guru is Brahma [creator], Vishnu [preserver] and Mahesh [Maheshvara/Maheshwara or Shiva – destroyer].

Devotee: In the Bible it says: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they
shall be called the children of God.’ 
Swamiji: Yes, they call sannyasis [monastic renunciates/Swamis] the children of God too.

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1) Care should be taken by the reader to understand and take Swamiji’s
words in these postings, in context. Every teaching or instruction that he gave
was specific to the people who were with Swamiji at the time.