No commitment is truly unbreakable other than the commitment to the realization of our essential freedom: svatantrya. Any commitments made for emotional reasons, such as fear, are never 100%. And a commitment that is less than 100% is no commitment at all.Clinging attachments that cause us to profess undying love or never-ending loyalty to a person or cause only serve to reinforce binding tensions a.k.a. karma.

There is only one reason to do or not do anything, and that is to realize freedom. Anything else is just a fart blowing in the wind.

Geez. What am I talking about?

I’m talking about why most of us have no idea how to relate to a Guru even if we should be so lucky as to find one.

If you are still reading this and didn’t move onto a sexier Tantrik website as soon as you realized your mistake, you very likely have at least intermittent memories of the freedom of essence, of Siva nature.

In the book Tantric Quest (see link under “Recommended Reads”), Devi, a Tantric yogini and Guru, tells her new student that she cannot teach him anything if he doesn’t have a memory of freedom. The student is shocked as he believes he is coming to the teacher to learn freedom. Why does he have to remember it first?

All of Tantric sadhana is about remembering, about returning to the source, to the base, to Siva nature. Siva nature is the pervasive potential to create with absolute freedom and to express that freedom in the becoming and unbecoming of the creation.

The freedom of Siva nature is expressed by this game of forgetting and remembering. We have all witnessed the delight of a small child playing peek-a-boo. Why does this simple game of veiling and unveiling engender such ecstasy? Because the child is participating in the game of the entire cosmic process: the cosmos manifests beings born with their hands over their eyes, metaphorically speaking, and then experiences the joy of its own self-unveiling.

If we had no memory of our original, unveiled face, we would not seek anything. The game would come to a screeching halt.

Even cooler than this is that our desire to remember our essential freedom is Siva desiring to remember. Literally. Our desire for self-realization is Siva’s desire. Yep, we’re all just different versions of the One Siva desire game.

A Guru helps us remember. That’s it. And that’s a lot.

We need help remembering because we are made that way. Gurus are manifestations of Siva nature that help us remember. Gurus are grace in human form. Everything is grace, but Gurus are grace that even us dodos can recognize.

Recognition is the key. Our memory of essential freedom must be called to greater awareness by the Guru and amplified. A Guru is Siva nature amplified so that we have a beacon, a heading to follow toward ourselves. A Guru must know how to keep steering us toward a greater and greater remembrance of freedom and steer us clear of more unfreedom. This process of being guided to fully realize our essential freedom is what we call sadhana. So, if you do not see your own freedom shining, or at least winking, back at you from your teacher, then there may be much to learn from that person, but she or he is not your Guru.

Don’t fret if, like the young student in Tantric Quest, you believe you have no memory of Siva nature. If you meet someone who is a Guru for you, the memory will be awoken.

However, simply seeing Siva nature expressing openly in another person does not automatically make that person your Guru. Some months ago, I went to a training by a well-known Tibetan Buddhist Lama: Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. This Rinpoche is the person I have encountered in my life thus far who has most clearly shown me Siva nature: the unlimited potential of my own freedom. Simply listening to him give a list of instructions to an assistant was a transmission of essence. He is someone whose impact on me has been profound, but he is not my Guru.

So, there is some other ingredient, and this ingredient is karma: the cosmic “situation” of the relationship of one expression of Siva essence to another.

I attended a picnic yesterday. Lots of budding Tantrikas were in attendance. A young woman spoke of her feelings about taking initiation with a Guru. She expressed the sentiment that “everyone has one Guru,” and that your Guru is “the One.”

This is a savior fantasy, and a savior fantasy that is often put into play by American students. It also contains a kernel of truth.

The kernel of truth is this: most of us only have one Guru because that’s what the universe dishes up to us. It’s a matter of karma. It’s pragmatic. The one Guru thing works. But it’s not the same for everyone. A few of us meet more than one person in our life who we recognize as Guru. A very few meet many. In any single slice of earth-time, most meet none.

So, while many of us will have one Guru, if we are lucky, it is dangerous to our sadhana to work ourselves into a lather of idealization about The One True Guru. Why do we do this? So that we can feel safer. So that we can feel Grand. So that we then justify our commitment to that One Guru, a commitment that will never be a real commitment, but only a fart blowing in the wind.

Real commitment is commitment to what a teacher shows us: our own essence. When we bow to a teacher, we bow to essence. The highest devotion is not to an idealized fantasy of The One True blah blah blah, but to essence. And remember, “essence” is not some purified, rarified nugget of goody goodness. The recognition of essence, of our essential Siva nature, eventually leads us to consciously become Siva: the host of everything, without judgement.

We may, and should if we are maturing spiritually, feel enormous love for and gratitude toward a human being who spends every waking and even sleeping minute desiring our freedom, but the ultimate gratitude is to Siva nature. Siva nature alone creates disciples and Gurus. Siva nature alone creates the possibility of this extraordinary relationship.

Ultimate freedom means recognizing the entire world as Guru, as Siva nature, including oneself. Despite the claims of many new agers that they don’t need a Guru because the true Guru is within, most of us have a long way to go before this ultimate freedom becomes our home base. This is why we must make the commitment to essence one day, and one Guru, at a time. Just make your commitment real, and not, well, you know…

OM Shanti, Shambhavi

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