Lead us from the unreal to the Real,
Lead us from darkness to the light,
Lead us from death towards immortality
This ancient Upanishad prayer was taught to me by my teacher. It is an address towards the divine but could be easily translated to the guru. The guru meaning one who removes the darkness from your life, removes the gu is traditionally considered to embody the ultimate reality.
When we stand before a guru we may see a body, a person standing in front of us but in traditional times the guru was much more a sad guru, a teacher of the true, ultimate reality.
Many teachers in modern day yoga consider themselves guru, but it takes a realised sage to truly embody the principal. A student cannot be enlightened without the guru in their life but we can observe the enlightenment principal in everyone we meet. Our parents, our friends, our boss at work, the person we don’t get on with ,these are all teachers to us guiding lights on our path.
Wisdom denotes that a guru can only take you as far as they have travelled themselves. We may have many teachers in our life but our gurus will guide us towards enlightenment. A well known saying say,
“When the student is ready the teacher will appear”
Copyright © 2012 Santosha Yoga