worm and the elephant - Me, My guru

....contd....

“So, what do you think?” I asked him sheepishly.

“About what?” he asked surprised.

“About all this. Did i really see and hear all that? What does it mean? If it was real, how is it possible? Then, what about what those worms said? Were they really better off than the elephant? Oh God! I’ve like thousand questions pounding my little brain. Can’t you please simply explain what’s just happened with me?” I pleaded him literally.

Rahul gave his classic smile and took his last sip of tea. He was still holding his cup as he was staring into distance. Having nothing else to do, I simply sat with him, head down silent. Tea seller came and took the cup. It was later that Rahul opened his mouth to explain “from what I learnt from our Guru, I can tell this. Don’t rake your brain wanting to know or questioning if what happened was for real or figment of imagination. No sense bothering about the classic question “why it happened ONLY TO ME?”. She simply would’ve brushed aside these and such related questions.

Now coming to your experience, what do you make out of it? What did you observe and learn? Where are you going to apply it? Now these would be her questions?” he turned to me as he completed explaining.

I took sometime to go through my experience again mentally and I understood and saw the redundancy of knowing the validity of my experience clearly. Yes, what he said about that was so true! So, I moved to the next part of his explanation. I was stuck there for sometime and not being any more ‘enlightened’ than before this episode sought Rahul’s help again in understanding what it was all about.

“I will share my angle for perception and later you can do yours” he said “Look, for me the elephant being the biggest animal on land represents our Guruji – not in size but in stature. Yes, i see a Guru as the biggest or mightiest expression of human life. And worm here represents such of people who are at the lowest levels of spiritual journey working very hard to be ‘transformed’ into beautiful butterflies. Guru has all the power and capacity to use it but doesn’t exhibit, talk or use it just to show-off his ‘powers’. He just ‘stands’ there silently many times appearing as doing nothing and hence coming across as a person who is lazy or one who is not changing over the period too!

But these ‘worm’ people i.e., us come to our Guru or in the path of healing and drop couple of negativities like fault finding, getting angry for silly reasons, stop drinking (alcohol) or smoking and at the same time pick up couple of good habits too like doing some charity, getting connected to family or others, doing pooja/japam or some sadhan. These changes make us feel like we have metamorphosized into beautiful butterflies from being ugly worms. Our journey and transformation looks both exhaustive and tremendous. No doubt, we feel we’ve achieved so much and then our Guru standing there being just the same the day we first met her and today and feel that she doesn’t deserve all the respect and love that she receives. It’s then we start looking for ‘frivolous flaws’ in her character, attitude, life, her conduct and the way she behaves and moves with us. Not being able to stand up to ‘her stature’ we decide to ‘bring it down’. No doubt, we are unhappy from so many angels" he seemed lost as he ended this sentence.

...contd....