Words of Sri Swami Vishwananda

We have a difference between a Siksha Guru, which is a teacher from the school, and a spiritual teacher. They are two different types. The teacher from the school gives you a certain kind of knowledge, which will make you a better person, which will make you understand how to live here. But a spiritual teacher, a Guru, a Satguru, gives you not only the purpose of life, but also the purpose of direction in life: how and where one sets life. That’s the difference. We say, also, that the first Guru in one’s life is the mother; the second is the father. It is very true. The Vedas talk about the Guru being the mother and the father, but yet the Vedas proclaim that the mother and the father give only the physical to the child, so they give the body to the child. But the Guru gives spiritual life, which is a second birth. And how does this happen? If you remove certain qualities from humans, people who are not on the spiritual path, like pride if you remove the sense of living in the material world, if you remove wealth from them, you remove enjoyment from them – they are finished! They become zero! Whereas, from a spiritual person it is impossible to remove qualities, because spirituality is endless, knowledge is endless. You have knowledge, but knowledge should not just stay as knowledge. It should transcend to wisdom! All this happens through grace, actually, long before you incarnate on Earth. We can say that, yes, we can do certain things, but, long before you come here, it’s already said where you have to be, who will be your guide and when it will be that God makes everything possible for you to achieve Him. Actually, you can say it is you, but it is not you at all. It is only Him, because in the core of everything your Atma is only Him. So, in this process, we want to attain the grace of God, we want to attain the Love of God and we want to purify ourselves. For mankind to do this on its own is very difficult. It’s only when the urge of these spiritual qualities awakens inside of mankind that God will provide everything and prepare one to receive His Grace. It is like this: there is a Saint, a Sufi Saint, who said “When I was enlightened, I realised I had made three mistakes in life. The first mistake I made was that I always thought that I was making the first step towards God but, actually, after I had enlightenment, I realised that it was not me who had made the first step. God, long before I had made that first step, had already made more than one step towards me. The second mistake was that I had ever thought that I loved Him immensely. But, afterwards, I realised that when I thought that I loved Him immensely, my love was just a drop compared to His ocean of Love. And the third was when I attained Him and Realised Him, actually, it was He that had Realised Himself”. So, try to understand these three things. In these three it shows that all is the grace of God. And, of course, to attain this grace one can’t just sit around. You do your sadhana, you try to prove yourself, to make yourself ready. One may say “Well, I don’t need to have a teacher. I don’t need to have a Guru”. But you see one thing: you can receive knowledge in books, but you will not receive wisdom in books. The knowledge will transform itself into wisdom only when the Grace is flowing through the teacher to the disciple. So, when you are ready, you manifest yourself as a human being here. And, of course, just to stay a human being, a mere human being, is a bit boring, no? But how do you know it is boring? You don’t know more than that. You see, you do feel it, because you feel this dissatisfaction. Whatever you do, you don’t feel happy. So there is an urge of searching, an urge of looking for something that will make you really happy, not just a happiness like this, but pure happiness, shuddha happiness, inside of you. When this urge arises, of course, the Guru comes. And it can take lifetimes, you know, it is not only one life, it can take several, several lives. Don’t think that in every life one will have the same urge. It is not like that. It can take thousands of lives. It can take thousands of years.