Why Does One Need A Guru?

By Sadhguru

Life is constantly aspiring to become free. The very spirit of any creature – not just a human being – even an ant, if you just try to hold it, he wants to escape out of the boundary. He wants to go where he wants to go. So freedom is the basis of any creature’s existence but particularly a human being’s. This is why we talk about mukti. Not because it is some kind of ideology invented by some guru, but because whether you understand this or not, that is your basic aspiration of life.

Everybody is seeking mukti. A few seek it consciously, but the rest are seeking it unconsciously. So a guru’s work is just this – to make whatever is an unconscious process within you into a conscious process. He is not changing the track of your life or trying to take you to his destination. He wants you to get to your destination quick. He is just providing you with the necessary tools for this fundamental aspiration within you to become free from everything, including the very process of life and death. He structures a tool, a method with which you can work.

So a guru is not a teacher or a philosopher or a scholar, a guru is a live road map who gives you a simple way to get to where you are aspiring to go. If you want to go to a new place, it is sensible to use a road map, isn’t it? “Can’t I do without a road map?” You can if you are the adventurous kind, but to find a place which is just next door, you may go around the world and come back and still not find it.

A guru’s work is not to inspire because there is not much difference between inspiring and brainwashing somebody. As long as it works in your favour you will call it inspiration. If somebody else does it, you will call it brainwashing. So motivation, inspiration, all these things are just manipulation. They can be on today and off tomorrow.

So this is not about inspiring. A guru tries to infuse something in you that is so undeniably there. If you want to use a negative term, he infects you with something. If you get a fever, it is not because of inspiration, it is because there is something working within you. This is just like that. There is something within you which works. It is not an infection, there is an infusion. It works from within.

Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan”, India’s highest annual civilian award, by the Government of India in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.