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    Pradakshina: Circumambulations around the Satguru’s path
    Pradakshina: Circumambulations around the Satguru’s path
    Pradakshina: Circumambulations around the Satguru’s path
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Pradakshina: Circumambulations around the Satguru’s path

    By Jitendra Pant

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    About this ebook

    The Guru-disciple relationship is the bedrock of spirituality. For the disciple there is no one higher than the Guru. His attunement with his spiritual mentor is a pressing need; a seamless communion with the Guru the ladder on which he climbs up the path to deeper self-investigation. This connection has to be tenacious as well as flexible, ardent as well as judicious, vibrant but relaxed, pure yet easy. The Guru and disciple are after all one and the same: The entirety of spirituality lies in this realization.

    Though the teachings of Guruji, the Satguru of the author, this book shows how a disciple may commence laying the foundation of this supreme tie and go about the spiritual journey. The teachings, given out through the shabads, are universal yet unique. They are this-worldly yet capable of ushering the sincere practitioner to the arms of the beloved infinite. They establish the grounds of humanity and of its dharma. They show that the Satguru is alone real, the pole star of the disciple, the husbandman and protector of his soul, the truth that the earnest disciple and a misguided humanity seek in varied ways.

    This book is a pilgrimage into the sacred territory of the Satguru’s Word, a fulfilment in part of Guruji’s instruction to his disciple. Guruji’s words here are a great benediction, mapping our way to a common realm of love and light. They are the Word made vatic and sacrosanct, empowered by the truth-charge of his great being.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJitendra Pant
    Release dateJan 2, 2017
    ISBN9789385902499
    Pradakshina: Circumambulations around the Satguru’s path

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      Book preview

      Pradakshina - Jitendra Pant

      PREFACE

      missing image

      Ido not recollect when precisely I met Guruji. Suffice it to say that I was a young man who had recently got his first job.

      We clicked inexpressibly. I’d go to him as often as possible to find a security that was then alien to me. I was able to forget the demands of the day and the emotional toil they took of me. I also received, without expectation of any return, the best food in the world, darshan, peace, the teachings of the shabads and the Guru’s grace.

      Ever since, Guruji’s grace has latched on to me, a person whose mental landscape blurs and changes with time and fancy. Incredible stories can be told of his superhuman powers and my life bears witness to a few of them. Yet that is not what is at the core of our relationship, and what I write here is an attempt to disentangle the substantial from the superficial, to arrive at what our relationship means, what the disciple’s journey means, and how it goes forward.

      Guruji is fully love, love incarnate yet quiet, still and inexpressible. This kind of love inheres inside the heart and is activated by the Guru. It is mysterious and unknowable not only because it is different from the everyday ken of experience but also because it is so innate to us that it is difficult for us to see and acknowledge it - like the fish not being cognisant of water. The reservoir of affection that flows from God to Guru to us allows us to deliver its sweet waters through many tributaries to others. Yet in our affections we forget the granter of this repository of love - God alone.

      We do not love our Guru with our ever-vacillating mind, but with our heart. Even the greatest gyani will find his mind a shallow vehicle to be the receptacle of a Guru’s tireless love. What Guruji does is to bring out the love that is deep inside our heart. He coaxes this love out, purifies it, moves it, nourishes it, performs miracles and wonders, but finally he brings it out. The Guru is thus an operational agent of love, even as he is love himself. The love between Guruji and his disciples is very human - at least for me. It is love anchored in reality, expressed in Truth, yet affectionately natural.

      It is easy to demean this love by placing demands upon it; a mistake I have often made, taking for granted both Guruji’s love and his grace. I can’t imagine how it would have turned out had it not been for him and his forgiveness.

      Some time before Guruji gave up his mortal form, he told me that I had to write a few books. I hope this one goes some way at least in fulfilling his command, which has also been my cherished desire. It required some probationary work and would not have been possible without his grace. He is the great archer bending the bow of truth, and these words are his arrows of grace, love, and sweet benediction. They will find their mark!

      ONE

      Sharan: Finding refuge

      It was a large, expectant hall. Earlier it had been hushed in semi-darkness; now the lights were blazing. A stilled sense of awe and hope, a dam of energy was poised between silence and restiveness. Then people were getting up and he was walking through the centre of the hall. It was not ‘graceful’ walk. It was the ascent of fleet lightning to its rightful chair. (One remembers how he walked: quickly, apt to change direction suddenly at times.)

      I was in a line - measured by my longing to reach him, immeasurably long - of those going up to pay obeisance. Hopeful and filled with trepidation, I moved along. My mind seemed to go into its own space, exfoliating memories. Whom had I injured and why? Who had injured me? On the confusing legs of duality - with the fear of the unknown and the hope of receiving love, foreboding at being reprimanded and the expectation of being forgiven, with old guilt and courage newly surfaced - I walked up to where he sat with folded hands. I bent down and touched his feet.

      I looked up - and his hands were folded, too. The image sticks to my mind nearly 18 years after. Perhaps that was my first lesson: humility. Yet how many times (and still) was I to forget it. At that moment, he made it seem that the blessing- givers and the blessed are both complementary. And through the years I saw him, he never stuck a pose. He was never anything but simply himself, anchored in this role that he had chosen of being ‘Guruji’.

      What he was, of course, is the question. It’s like asking what air is. Where is its source? Does it come from a geometrical point or from a vortex of energy? How is it made? Who moves it? Like the air, he was with us all the time, enveloping us. Yet we knew him not. But that wasn’t ever the only question. For if we probed him with our minds, the force of our query turned upon ourselves. And we struggled to understand, we tried to love, or we trusted him with our hearts. It was a great churning- a manthan - and will always be so.

      The pressing queue allowed only for the feather of a moment at his feet. I sat down or stood at the edge of the exit from the hall, gazing at him. My looking at him hasn’t changed over the years and neither has how he looked. There is no change; no depredation of time has come between us or is likely to. He is the same and I am the same. It is only when I shift, when I become aware of the adjacencies of my existence, that our gaze is broken. I know that we will irrevocably reach where we have to. It is not a question of time; it is a point wholly beyond time and its dominion. It is a place of eternal refuge. Meanwhile, the heart rolls on.

      Watching him thus from afar, for years,

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