The Spiritual Master and God-Realisation
A real spiritual Master is one who has attained God-realisation.
Everyone is one with God, but the real spiritual Master has established
his conscious oneness with God. At any moment he can enter into a
higher consciousness and bring down messages from God to those
disciples who have faith in him. The Master, if he is genuine,
represents God on earth for those seekers who have real aspiration and
faith in him. He has been authorised or commissioned by God to help
them. The real Teacher, the real Guru, is God Himself. But on earth He
will often operate in and through a spiritual Master. The Master
energises the seeker with inspiration and, in the course of time,
through the infinite Grace of the Supreme, offers the seeker
illumination.
You make a mistake when you take the
Master as only a person, as the human body. You have to feel that the
real Master is inside the physical. Why have my disciples come to me?
It is because their real Master, the Supreme, is inside me. The Supreme
is also inside them, but in them He is still sleeping whereas in me He
is fully awake. The Master and the disciple are like two friends who
have the same capacity, but one is sleeping and needs help in getting
up before he can manifest his capacity. The Guru is somebody who will
come and touch his brother’s feet and caress his head and say, “Please
get up. It is time for us to work for our Father.”
When a Master accepts someone as a disciple, he accepts that person as part of himself. If the disciple is imperfect, then the Master also remains imperfect. In the disciple’s perfection lies the Master’s perfection. I always say that I have no individuality, no personality. It is my disciples’ achievements that will take me either to Heaven or to hell. I have the capacity to remain all the time in Heaven, but they can easily drag me to hell at every moment because I have accepted them as my own. ~Sri Chinmoy