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September/October 2001 Spirituality |
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| Paul Levy |
Guru is a Sanskrit word, one meaning of which is he or she who inspires; the Tibetan word for guru is "lama." Anyone who inspires in us a feeling of love and devotion is in a sense an expression, an emanation of our Guru. The ultimate meaning of the word Guru is the true enlightened nature of our own mind.
Guru Yoga is a skillful means to connect with our true nature; it is a way of consciously working with our projective tendencies so as to free ourselves from the apparently restrictive powers of our own mind. In the practice of Guru Yoga we actually learn to work with our sacred power of imagination; we could even say it is the yoga of imagination.
In Guru Yoga, we actually discover that our moment-by-moment experience is inseparable from our imagination. In other words, Guru Yoga is the very practice in which we can experientially realize that we simply do not exist in the habitual way that we've been imagining ourselves to. We begin to discover the malleability of our very experience of identity itself. Guru Yoga makes use of our God-given power of imagination in a way that is liberating and redeeming.
In Guru Yoga we literally evoke and merge with the state of being of the Guru, which is none other than our own true nature. Anything we are unconscious of we first have to project out or dream up so as to get into relationship to it. In Guru Yoga, we consciously imagine and conjure up on the screen of our consciousness our own enlightened nature, in the form of someone who we see as enlightened. We are instructed to imagine being in their presence, to imagine being blessed by them. But we are then told to recognize that the enlightenment that we are relating to in these inspiring beings is none other than a reflection of our own enlightened nature.
At a certain point in the practice of Guru Yoga, the boundary between the subject and the object, the observer and the observed collapses, and we are instructed to step into the image of the Guru, to imagine that we are that. We imagine ourselves to be in the same enlightened state as these inspiring beings to whom we relate as embodying enlightenment. This practice connects us to the realization that our moment-by-moment experience of ourselves is not separable from our imagination, is not other than a reflection, a projection of our mind. We discover that we can use our sacred power of imagination in a conscious way that serves our spiritual unfoldment.
At the end of the practice of Guru Yoga, we are instructed to dissolve even the imaginary identity that we are one with the Guru into emptiness, for even this identity state, if held onto, can become a form of ego. This dissolving, just like a rainbow dissolves into the voidness of its own nature, is the doorway into Dzogchen, the true nature state. In the Dzogchen state, we moment by moment rest in the primordially pure transcendent ground of our being. For the true nature of the real Guru is the part of all of us that is transcendent to all momentary phenomena, that is eternally and already free.
An artist and healer, Paul Levy is in private practice, helping others who are also spiritually awakening. A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, he is in the new book, Saints and Madmen: Psychiatry Opens its Doors to Religion. He is the coordinator of the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center. He can be reached at (503) 234-6480.