How am I different from other gurus?

“Would you please speak on how your ‘pro­fes­sional, pastor-teacher rela­tion­ship with your stu­dents’ dif­fers from the tra­di­tional Guru/disciple rela­tion­ship as gen­er­ally seen in IGM and other tra­di­tional paths of Sanatan dharma?”

I see IGM like the Catholic Church and myself like Mar­tin Luther call­ing for a protes­tant ref­or­ma­tion. I am non-hierarchical and egal­i­tar­ian. I am one of the peo­ple who through prac­tice (sad­hana) has attained a cer­tain level of spir­i­tual wis­dom and real­iza­tion. I refuse to allow myself to be put on a pedestal or have gold stat­ues made of me. I walk the path of love with my stu­dents as a spir­i­tual guide and friend. Rather than spir­i­tual mas­ter, I pre­fer to think of myself as a spir­i­tual guide and teacher. I am mas­ter of no one but myself.

I do not ask to be wor­shiped, but sim­ply respected as a per­son who has devoted their life to the spir­i­tual path. I seek to empower my stu­dents to real­ize their full poten­tial as spir­i­tual lead­ers also. We are all to min­is­ter. Some of us do so pro­fes­sion­ally and oth­ers are lay fol­low­ers. All are devo­tees and dear to Radha and Krishna.

I have no dogma or creed. I ask my stu­dents to agree on basics and on other things they may dif­fer. They should accept the spirit of my teach­ings rather than the let­ter. I do not have a cookie cut­ter recipe for all to follow.

I am a fem­i­nist. I believe in ele­vat­ing the fem­i­nine, both in the form of Radha and women as well as those fem­i­nine aspects of all life and being. Patri­ar­chal val­ues have dom­i­nated for too long. A bal­ance must be achieved.

I espe­cially appeal to crit­i­cal thinkers (mad­hyam adhikaris) who do not want black and white answers when real­ity is more gray. I am not a lit­eral, fun­da­men­tal­ist. I encour­age ques­tion­ing what we believe. That way, we can come to more true belief. Truth is pro­gres­sive, dynamic and a process. It must be devel­oped and adapted by each gen­er­a­tion of seek­ers. In other words, my word is not final. I am a uni­ver­sal­is­tic essence seeker rather than a sec­tar­ian dogmatist.

I have been thor­oughly vet­ted for spir­i­tual, reli­gious lead­er­ship in grad­u­ate school and a four year ordi­na­tion process by a lead­ing Protes­tant denom­i­na­tion. I know of no other guru who is also an ordained Chris­t­ian trained in the min­istry stan­dards of the West which Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur accepted for West­ern­ers. I seek to be a bridge between East and West just as he was. I live a West­ern lifestyle and encour­age my dis­ci­ples to do the same. Arti­fi­cial renun­ci­a­tion is not help­ful. Enjoy the things of the world in appro­pri­ate ways and develop love at the same time. There are no rules for spon­ta­neous devo­tion (raganuga bhakti).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 12:59 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.