Jesus the Teacher Within. Laurence Freeman

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      Ramana Maharshi, the sage of Arunachala in southern India, is one of the great spiritual teachers of the modern world. His influence is still felt fifty years after his death.¹² Yet for most of his life he dwelt in silence and it was from silence that he radiated the experience of nonduality that dwelt in him.

      When asked about the role of the guru, Ramana Maharshi would always insist on the absolute nonduality subsisting between the teacher and the disciple.

      The guru is both ‘external’ and ‘internal’. From the ‘exterior’ he gives a push to the mind to turn inward: from the ‘interior’ he pulls the mind toward the Self and helps in the quieting of the mind . . . There is no difference between God, Guru and the Self.¹³

      This is a language and understanding very different from traditional Western ideas about God, human teachers and disciples. Some Christians react to it as threateningly pantheistic (God is everything). Without seeing the option of panentheism (God is in everything), they are scared of sliding into the gnostic heresies (the word heresy literally means choice) that confronted the early church. Furthermore, as Westerners they balk at the apparent loss of personal identity suggested by Ramana’s words. But as Christians they might also recall those sayings of Jesus where he spoke–shockingly, too, for many of his listeners–of the oneness between himself and the Father: ‘My Father and your Father’; ‘to have seen me is to have seen the Father.’ Or of St Paul’s personal confession that he lived no longer but that Christ dwelt in him.

      I have been crucified with Christ: the life I now live is not my life, but the life which Christ lives in me; and my present mortal life is lived by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.¹⁴

      Ramana expressed his experience of the Self, the immanent and transcendent presence of the Divine Guru, in his own terms conditioned by his Hindu context. He constantly returns to the unity of nonduality (advaita) just as St Paul does to the indwelling Christ,

      The guru never sees any difference between himself and others and is quite free of the idea that he is enlightened and those around him are not.

      Seeing Jesus as guru serves to understand the New Testament titles used most frequently of Jesus, teacher and rabbi The signs of a true guru, as described by Ramana, are abundantly evident in the gospel picture of Jesus as a human being in communion with God (whom he called ‘Father’). But we see him also as a person of his own time and place with the natural limitations this implies. Ramana says a guru possesses the following qualities:

      a steady abidance in the Self, looking at all with an equal eye, unshakable courage at all times, in all places and situations.

      If Jesus is guru we are invited to see ourselves as disciples. Our ego may find that unacceptable or impossible. ‘I’ll listen, but I’m not bowing to anyone.’ But dedicated spiritual practice eventually makes disciples of us all. It is interesting then to know what Ramana saw as the qualities of a true disciple:

      an intense longing for the removal of sorrow and the attainment of joy and an intense aversion for all kinds of mundane pleasure.

      Perhaps the reason that our spiritual practice seems to ‘take so long’, as people often complain, might simply be that we do not intensely enough long for what we protest we want immediately!

      The role of the guru in his exterior manifestation is to push the disciple inwards to the quest for the Self. When Ramana Maharshi was asked what method or discipline was best to follow he did not offer an array of meditation techniques. He pointed people to Self-inquiry. The constant thought ‘Who am I’, he said, destroys all other thoughts. Like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end be destroyed. Then Self-realization naturally arises.

      Of all the thoughts that arise in the mind the I-thought is the first. It is only after the rise of this that the other thoughts arise. It is after the appearance of the first personal pronoun that the second and third personal pronouns appear.