Guru Tattva Yoga

By Alison Berker (premavratini@yahoo.com)

Once one gets a taste of God, there will be a burning fire under the ass to realize Him totally. Nothing else will ever compare. The rate at which that fire turns a limited human personality into Divited by Saturn.

Guru means, among other things, teacher. Some texts state that "gu" means "darkness" and "ru" means "light," making the "guru" the "dispeller of darkness," darkness being spiritual ignorance. A tattva is a pervasive essence or element. In the West, people are most familiar with the term "tattva" in its application to the pancha mahabhutas or five elements - space, air, fire, water and earth - tattva representing a state of limited being, not a particular thing. For example, fire includes all metabolic processes and other processes of transformation. However, the pancha tattva are only the densest of the tattvas. Advaita Vedanta describes 25 tattvas and Kashmir Shaivism describes 36.

From densest to subtlest these are:

Pancha mahabhutas: Five Great Elements

prithvi - earth
jala - water
tejas - fire
vaayu - wind
aakaasha - ether

Pancha tanmaatras - Five Subtle Elements

gandha - smell
rasa - taste
ruupa - form
sparsha - touch
shabda - sound

Pancha karmendriyas - Five Organs of Action

upastha - creative
paayu - elimination
paada - foot
paani - hand
vaak - speech

Pancha jnaanendriyas - Five Organs of Cognition

ghraana - nose, organ of smelling
rasanaa - tongue, organ of tasting
cakshu - eye, organ of seeing
tvak - skin, organ of touching
shrotra - ear, organ of hearing

Antahkaranas - Three Inner Instruments

manas - emotional mind
buddhi - intellect
ahamkaara - ego connected with objectivity

prakriti - nature
purusha - ego connected with subjectivity

In Advaita Vedanta, the tattvas end at purusha. Kashmir Shaivism describes 11 more. They are:

Sat kancukas - Six Coverings

niyati - limitation of place
kaala - limitation of time
raaga - limitation of attachment
vidyaa - limitation of knowledge
kalaa - limitation of creativity
maayaa - limitation of individuality

Shuddha tattvas - Pure Elements

shuddha vidya - Iness in Iness, Thisness in Thisness
iishvara - Thisness in Iness
sadaashiva - Iness in Thisness
shakti - Iness
shiva - Being

There are some philosophical differences between Advaita Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism which the enunciation of additional tattvas help to illuminate, but their differences are not the focus of this writing. I am only listing the tattvas to help the reader grasp the concept. Kashmir Shaivism does not take its list of tattvas as absolute, emphasizing that tattvas can be further enunciated or shrunk. Rather, they are a meditational tool for understanding the manifest. They can be shrunk to as little as three, Shiva - the Absolute, Nara(man) - Duality, Shakti - the fulcrum between duality and non-duality.

A tattva can be understood as an essential element of the manifest universe. The guru tattva could best be described as the tendency of God to Self-liberate. Just as the manifest universe becomes more dense as it comes into being, ending with earth, the densest state of matter, there is an opposite tendency as well, the tendency of that which has been separated to rise and return. The guru tattva is everything that encourages this process of rising and returning to God. It reaches its pinnacle in the Sat Guru - the being who will grant you "final liberation." However, before you meet the Sat Guru, you will meet many gurus who are useful on the path to ultimate liberation.

In Kali Yuga in the West, much confusion persists over what the nature of, and relationship to, guru ought to be. People yearn to do the right thing and go by proper procedure, but under-informed in the philosophies, the texts and the mores of the culture to which they are appealing, they go astray willy nilly. They are convinced they need to locate their sat guru before they have even learned to sit in a proper meditational asana for the needed length of time, or they abjectly surrender to the first person labeled "guru" that comes along and then blindly closing their eyes to any further information that might be helpful in advancing them spiritually. Fortunately, God is able to use even these mistakes to encourage the process of liberation in sincere individuals, although it doesn't usually end looking anything like the imagination declares it to look like.

A further investigation reveals several things about guru. While it is declared that a guru is absolutely essential along the path, what form or forms guru takes will vary from person to person. If a person is desirous of liberation and unable to locate a guru, one very valuable suggestion is to take Lord Shiva as one's Guru and then trust that whatever shows up is an emanation of Him. Lord Shiva is the Adi-Guru, the root guru of all gurus. If you self-initiate in this way and sincerely envisages whoever shows up as an emanation of Lord Shiva, you are very likely to be protected even if the being that shows up still has substantial limitations. Those very limitations may, in fact, inform and aid your enlightenment process.

Gurus can come in many forms. Dattatreya, the father of Aghora, who was supposed to be a triple incarnation of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva had 24 gurus, none of whom even knew that they functioned as his guru. Just so, a person may receive spiritual help and guidance from many different beings. Sincerity is all that is required and God will locate the ways and means for transcendence to take place. A guru may come to teach you for a while and then be on its way, or you may be on your way. As one of my teachers used to say, "You don't need to defecate in the living room to have a reason to get up and go to the kitchen." Your further evolution may take you away from a guru that helped you. Nonetheless, you can remain grateful even if their limitations drove you away.

It is not necessary to get in a big entanglement over loyalty issues, because everything proceeds from the One and returns to it. It is true that at a certain point on the path, it may become necessary to limit incoming data since it may only confuse the dedicated mind, but this should be after adequate understanding is obtained, not before. Otherwise, one runs the risk of developing a needless fanaticism and of propagating a dogmatic conviction that may be very limiting for other beings. In general, any system that is unwilling to embrace the validity of other systems, is probably limited. As the saying goes, "It" takes one to know one."

In the final analysis, surrendering to guru is absolutely essential in order to achieve liberation, because how can you let go of you? Like Chinese handcuffs, in which the process of trying to extricate yourself binds you more tightly in the handcuffs, there comes a point on the spiritual path where all effort amounts to a further exercise in Chinese handcuffs and surrender is essential. However, such surrender will only work when it is appropriate. Such a surrender is both monumental and utterly natural and arrangement for its occurrence will be handled by Nature in the due course of time. In the meantime, in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, "do what you can with what you have where you are." It is sure to be enough.

Relationship to guru can be analyzed by looking at the ninth house and lord, the fifth house and lord (ninth from the ninth) and Jupiter, although you may have to do a broader analysis of the chart to determine whether there is enough spiritual inclination for the person to have an active path.

Here are some examples.

See the charts below or visit: http://jyotish.ws/materials/chartad.html

	Anandamayi Ma Anandamayi Ma was born illumined. She was conscious of, and had accurate recall of, her entire life even her birth and infancy. She was prone to falling into trance states. In her twenties, she gave her own self mantra diksha and repeated the mantra. She also went through a period of self directed sadhana that lasted a couple of years. She described it as jnana masquerading as ajnana - one day it came to her what it would be like to be a sadhaka and she began to perform sadhana. Her lagna lord is Jupiter who is exalted in the fifth house suggesting her ability to function as her own guru. Her ninth lord Mars is in the twelfth house with Rahu indicating how unconventional she was. It is unconventional to self-initiate but also she initiated female devotees into the Gayatri mantra and into the sacred thread ceremony amongst many other unconventional acts. Victory to the Saint, Anandamayi Ma
	Swami Niranjan - Bihar School of Yoga Swami Niranjan, who inherited the Bihar School of Yoga from his guru, Swami Satyananda, demanded that his parents take him to the ashram when he was four years old, where he has lived ever since, except for traveling to teach. His ninth lord is Sun, in the third, aspecting back into the ninth which contains the full moon. Jupiter is in the lagna in its own sign with Saturn, Venus and Mars forming a pravrajya yoga. His entire life so far has been spent with his guru.
	KN Rao Professor KN Rao KN Rao is a very famous Indian astrologer. He took formal initiation with a guru. He also had a jyotish guru and was privileged to meet many very great yogis in India. His ninth lord is Mercury exalted in the 12th with Ketu and the Sun. This is a very good spiritual combination. His Jupiter is exalted in the tenth as well. Because both the ninth lord and Jupiter are exalted, he has had many tremendously good experiences with the yogis of India.

From the October/November, 2011 issue of Michael Laughrin's North American Jyotish Newsletter. The newsletter is administered through Yahoo Groups at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jyotish_ws/ - click to subscribe to this free Jyotish newsletter.