The Disappearing Guru
The Disappearing Guru and the Master’s Conundrum
by Vito Mucci
There are quite a few jobs that self-destruct when completed. Jobs that are created to solve a problem should at some point be relegated to reserve status. While some jobs are fixable, job by job, like a bridge repairman or a wedding planner, some jobs that are coming into popularity are confusing because they seem to offer an odd relation to the idea of supply and demand.
Psychologist, addiction counselor, life coach, and personal guru are my favorites of these. These are all lovely career focus choices, but they aren’t for everyone. This doesn’t mean that they should be only for certain types of people, but that the knowledge contained in all of these, when applied to one’s life, should mean that there is one less person in the world that needs to be taught (theoretically, the more supply of healers, the less the demand for healing). Whether that ends up being the case or not is a case by case issue. The truth is that while there are 7 billion possible clients, the more we raise the amount of people treating the human condition, the less clientele we should be dealing with.
The Disappearing Guru
All of these careers should self-annihilate to one extent or another. That should be the goal. Unfortunately, that goal means that should we be successful as a group of counselors dealing with the problems of life, we should also be out of a job. Most people who get into this work as a career do not want to shorten or nullify their job, whether or not they have realized what an undermining reality that creates for their purpose.
One of the ways of looking at this is looking at psychologists, addiction counselors, and life coaches as “People who are helping someone learn to do ____.” That helps their efficacy and the demand for their services even after certain large scale problems have been dealt with. That brings us to the personal guru. After dealing with life’s purpose and how to go about living in harmony with that have been hashed out, he disappears. Why has the need for a personal guru not disappeared? As a society, we have not learned how to go about asking those questions and answering them for ourselves. That is the job of the guru; not to answer the questions, but to teach us how to find and answer the questions we have, so that we may engage and address our reality on our own, according to personally set standards that we have trust and confidence in.
The Master’s Conundrum
This brings us to the master’s conundrum and the baiting of society for the sake of power. How we address the master’s conundrum shows exactly whether we are in the healthy role of parenting the world around us or the predatory role of master.
The master’s conundrum is housed in the fact that the more we teach another the tools we use to address common issues, the less we are needed to help that person with that issue. Teach a person to fish, we feed them for a lifetime, and they don’t need to buy our fish anymore. If our livelihood relies on repeat customers, it is never in our best interest to teach someone to fish. Consequently, our parenthood relies on how much our children end up not needing us. There lies the focus. We must be parents, not masters.
Parenthood does not ever end. We always engage in the bountiful glory of teaching, but the role’s success includes the dissolution of the need for parenting. Why is the personal guru a parent and not something else? His purpose is to lead you to a perpetual state of being, something that will be with you forever, and in doing so, he eliminates the need for his presence.
The Role of a Guru
The state of being that the guru invites you to and shows you how to operate comfortably within, is ‘inquiry.’ This is not doubt. Doubt is a state of desperation characterized by mental and emotional discomfort. Inquiry is a state of willingness and observation. It is much less about “questioning everything” and much more about “engaging in wonder at everything.”
A state of inquiry involves engaging the entire set of fixed ideas within oneself and slowly removing the fixedness without removing comfort or confidence. This has to be shown carefully.
No matter who we are; we all carry around some fixed ideas as we move from puberty into the quasi-adulthood of the early twenties that most don’t ever move through safely or recover from. These ideas are the first that any guru can go after to show the client/student how to engage the self respectfully. Life purpose, health, personal habits, motivation, desire–all of these carry the possibility for engaging and wondering upon. The goal of the guru of this age is to fully imprint the joy of uncovering and discovering desire and ideas through engaging in perspective shifting. Perspective shifting is the motion of the self from one point of view on a subject to many. This is performed in a myriad of ways, from creative empathic imagination, to engaged storytelling, to experimentation (trial and error). The idea is to create motion within a fixed conscious framework and imprint the habit of motion through the joy of discovery, and here’s where we should disappear.
Anyone who fully engages the deep joy, the satisfaction, and the growth, goes through an invisible rite of passage where personal expansion becomes a natural part of their desire matrix. People who fully engage the growth they achieve from pain, the joy from experimentation, and the richness of emotion from intimacy with people, places or ideas–these people have imprinted the habit of evolution within their bodies. In doing so, they become what all true blue gurus want, which is a self-sustaining flame of wonder and expansion that can self-motivate when it comes to growth, adjustment, and expansion.
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About the Author
Vito Mucci is a shaman and writer that specializes in the Psychology of Consciousness. His professional focus is on the creation of a society that embraces mind expansion. His first book is titled, Coffee for Consciousness 101.
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