Osho Quotes on Guru
- The guru is more mysterious than God. God is simple. Man is simple. The guru is very mysterious — because paradoxes meet in him, contradictions meet in him. The guru is a meeting place of man and God, a crossroads, a SANGAMA, a meeting of the two rivers, of two different dimensions. The seeker is ignorance; God is knowing, wisdom. The seeker is darkness; God is light. The guru is a twilight.
- The word ‘guru’ is untranslatable. Neither does the word ‘teacher’ nor the word ‘Master’ have that beauty. In fact, the phenomenon of the guru is so deeply Indian that no other language of any country is capable of translating it. It is something intrinsically Eastern. The word ‘guru’ is made of two words, ‘gu’ and ‘ru’. ‘Gu’ means darkness, ‘ru’ means one who dispels it. Guru literally means ‘the light’. And you have the light within you, yes! If you come across a Buddha or a Jesus or a Krishna or a Mahavir, it will be of tremendous help to you in finding your inner guru, because seeing Buddha, suddenly a great enthusiasm and hope will arise in you: “If it can happen to Buddha” — who is just like you, the same body, the same blood, bone, marrow — “if it can happen to this man, why not to me?” The hope is the beginning. Meeting with the Master on the outside is the beginning of a great hope, a great aspiration.
- The word “guru.” Guru means one who has gravitation, around whom you suddenly feel as if you are being pulled. The guru is a tremendous magnet, with only one’ difference. There is a man who has charisma — you are pulled, ut you are pulled towards him. That is the man of charisma. He may become a great leader, a great politician. Adolf Hitler has that charisma; millions of people are pulled towards him. Then what is the difference between a charismatic leader and a guru? The difference is tremendous. The difference is: when you are pulled towards a guru you suddenly feel that you are being pulled inwards, not outwards. When you are pulled towards Kabir, Nanak, Buddha, you have a strange feeling. The feeling is that you are being pulled towards them and at the same time you are being pulled inwards — a very strange paradoxical phenomenon at the closer you come to your guru, the closer you come yourself. The more you become attracted towards the guru, the more you become independent. The more you become surrendered to the guru, the more you feel that you ave freedom you never had before.
- If you find a man and you feel that you have found your Master, that simply shows that in his voice, in his being, there is a reflection of that still, small voice of God. The guru outside you is but a mirror. He reflects you, reflects God. And the real Master will throw you back to yourself. The real guru will not bind you to himself, because the real guru is life itself, the real guru is God himself.
- If you are Pulled towards a man and that pull creates a slavery, that an is not the guru. That man may have charisma, may have magnetic power — maybe his great intelligence, his physical beauty, or his sheer vitality pulls you — but you will be going away from yourself. It will be an infatuation. You will be obsessed with this man, and you will be off your center. Avoid such people; these are the greatest mischief-mongers in the world. Adolf Hitler, Napoleon, Alexander — these are the people who have created great havoc, because people feel tremendously attracted and people feel like surrendering.
- The guru is one who pulls you towards himself just to throw you back into your own being. He functions as a mediator; via the guru, you arrive at your own self. Because you cannot go directly, he helps you via him. But his whole effort is to make you yourself. A true guru will never impose himself upon you. He will never impose his life-style on you. He will never give you any rigid discipline. He will not enforce anything on you, regiment you. He will not try to create soldiers of you. No, he will help you to become yourself. He will help you to be yourself, whatsoever that is. He will help to give you more and more understanding about yourself. You will become more and more centered, rooted, near him. More and more you will feel he has given you back to yourself — that which was lost or forgotten, he has made you aware of it.
- The answer is in you, it is nowhere else. So if you want to follow a man, follow the man who throws you back to yourself — because the answer is in you. The outer guru’s function is to help you to find your inner guru. If the outer guru wants you to cling to him and hang around him and if he wants you to remain always dependent on him, then he is dangerous. Avoid him. Then he is not a Master. Then he has need of followers but he is not a Master. Then through followers he is fulfilling his own ego.
- The guru is human, and yet divine. The guru is like us, and yet not like us. He is a bridge between man and God; he is just at the middle point. Exactly, the guru balances existence. The disciple is man; the God is not man; the guru is both. On one side, he belongs to humanity; on another side, he belongs to God. One of his hands is with the humanity; his other hand is in the hands of God. He becomes the bridge. That’s why we call the guru a god-man or a man-god. That’s why Jesus goes on saying, again and again, “I am the son of God, and I am the son of man.” He is a guru, he is a Master.
- A master cannot give you emancipation, but he can bring you to the very brink of it. He cannot give you the emancipation; that has to be achieved by you, because a thing given by someone can be taken by someone else. Only that which is yours can be yours. A master cannot give you, he can only bless you — but his blessing is a vital phenomenon. Through him you can look into your own future. Through him you can be aware of your own destiny. Through him the farthest peaks come nearer, closer. Through him you start coming up, like a seed trying to sprout towards the sky. His blessing can water your seed.
- Buddha is really a mahaguru. The word guru means heavy with heaven, heavy with joy, with ecstasy, heavy with svaha; heavy like a cloud full of rain, ready to shower on anybody who is thirsty, ready to share. Guru means heavy, heavy with heaven. Guru also means one who destroys the darkness of others. I’m not talking about so-called gurus who go on roaming around the world. They don’t destroy your darkness; they impose their darkness upon you, they impose their ignorance upon you. And these gurus are mushrooming like anything. You can find them everywhere: one Muktananda mushrooming here, another Maharishi Mahesh Yogi mushrooming there — they are mushrooming everywhere. A guru is one who makes you free. A guru is one who delivers you freedom. A guru is one who liberates you. Buddha is one of the mahagurus. His message is the greatest that has ever been delivered to man. And this sutra is one of the greatest expressions of Buddha. He has talked for forty-two years, and he has said many things, but nothing compared to this. This is unique. You are fortunate that you have been here to listen to it and to meditate upon it. Now be even more fortunate — become it.
- The master, the guru, is a person with whom you are in deep love and faith and reverence. It is not just a relationship; it is a deep creativity. He can create you, he can transform you, he can give you a new birth. But then, you will have to be ready to pass through many things. Many unknown paths will have to be travelled, many unknown doors will have to be passed, many unknown locks will have to be opened. If you are not in a deep surrender, you will not move into this unknown territory; you will resist. You need a deep trust so that when the master moves into the unknown you can follow him like a shadow. Surrender means a deep yes-attitude to the master — never say no. If you say no, you have taken yourself in your own hands. If you say yes, you are in his hands.
- Beware of the false gurus — they are many. The false guru will promise you things of this world; even if he is promising them in the other world he is promising the same things. He will promise you beautiful women in Paradise — firdaus. He will promise you streams of wine in paradise. But he is promising the same thing. He may promise you golden castles, palaces studded with diamonds in paradise, but diamonds and gold and silver and women and wine — they all belong to this world. He is simply titillating you; he is simply befooling you. The real Master only promises one thing: your death. So wherever you find death waiting for you, then gather courage. You have to disappear for God to be.
- The word guru has become almost condemnatory. The root meaning of the word is beautiful. The word originally means one who is more consolidated, crystallized, one who has more weight. In Hindi, gravitation is called guruthwa karshan. Just as the earth gravitates, the guru gravitates people towards himself — without doing anything. The earth is not doing anything while gravitating you; it is just the nature of the earth that anything that is within its area of two hundred miles will start being pulled towards it. Guru means one who is weight-full, centered, rooted, and has the quality of gravitation. But that original meaning has been lost, and particularly since Indian gurus started appearing in the West, it has become almost a dirty word. And it has to become so because the people who came to the West were not gurus at all. They came to the West to exploit people. They knew — at least they were knowledgeable — about many things of which the West was unaware. They were more philosophical, more theological, more argumentative. That has been a professional thing in India for centuries. So when they came to the West they immediately had a great impact. The Christian minister looked very poor. Even the best scholarly rabbi was no competition.
- Remember this. It is impossible to help others till you have obtained some certainty of your own. Resist the temptation to help others. It is evil unless you have obtained some certainty of your own. Don’t try to be a guru, don’t try to be a helper. because you will disturb; you will create more problems. Remember well that you cannot help. you cannot guide anyone. unless you have got the inner light. When the inner light is there, the help, the guidance, will flow from you.
- I am not the guru at all of anybody, poor or rich. I am just a friend who is available to help if you need the help. And that, too, is your freedom — to come with me or not to come with me. When you come, I welcome you; and when you depart, I give you a goodbye with the same love. There is no question of loyalty, no question of betrayal.
- That is the difference between a guru and a psychoanalyst: only a guru can really be a psychoanalyst, only a guru can really be a therapist. Only a person who has come to his wholeness can be of real help to others who are on the way, struggling, stumbling in the dark. Otherwise the blind man is leading another blind man — both are going to fall in some well.
- So remember, this has to be the criterion: if you feel that a certain guru is enjoying the idea of having so many disciples and is creating barriers for you to enter into your own being and is desirous that you should go on clinging to him and makes you more and more helpless and makes you more and more dependent, makes you more and more afraid and creates guilt in you, and goes on saying, ‘It is only through me that your salvation is possible,’ takes away your freedom, destroys you — then escape from that man, he is the devil incarnate. Avoid him.
- Search out somebody who is not in any need of having followers, who has no need of having a big crowd around him, who is utterly satisfied with himself even when he is alone, who is absolutely contented with his own self. Then he can be of tremendous help.
