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tested his guru almost till the end. But then, those are special plays of special souls. But, a good gurushould not be angry or upset if an intelligent sishya questions or tests.Though many people go searching for a guru, it is not necessary. A good guru will find the sishyas he/sheis supposed to guide and approach them. Or at least a good guru should know how to make the sishyacome to him/her.For some people, a guru may have already entered their life and started influencing them and yet theymay not know it! Guru does not necessarily mean one who sits on a high pedestal with you sitting at hisfeet and teaching you things. Guru does not mean one with certain robes or certain hair etc. Guru does notmean one with a "Swami" prefix in the name. Guru does not mean one who has a certain age or a certainlook. Guru is one who removes darkness within you. A person you have never met consciously may havedecided to influence your thinking and slowly remove your darkness from a distance. You may nevermeet and the person may have transformed.A guru who is unable to transform you is worthless. A guru's job is to transform a person. Similarly, asadhana you are doing that is unable to transform you in some way or the other is useless. The goal of allsadhana is to transform yourself.On a *personal note*, I did not realize it when I was approached by my spiritual guru. I was actually quiteput off by him. I thought he was a wacko - a crazy man - talking about useless and impure things. Hewould talk about tantra, aghora, Kaali, Taaraa, shakti chalana, kundalini, darshana of devatas and stufflike that. He sent me a rudraksha mala he specially made for me and asked me to use it to meditate onGayatri mantra 216 times a day. The only rules were to stay as still as I could, with an erect back andclosed eyes and not let any strange experiences or visions distract me and keep the focus on the mantra.The other rule was brahmacharya. I did nothing about it for a long time. He would patiently call me nowand then and chat about various things related to spirituality. Though I did not like him at first, I slowlystarted realizing his purity and simplicity. He never put any pressure and let things take their course.About one year from the time he contacted me first, on a Vaisakha Pournima day, after my monthly FullMoon Satya Narayana vratam, I suddenly got the inspiration that I should follow his advice. He may be atantrika, a Kaali worshipper, a corrupt soul and what not (yes, that is how I thought then!), but all heasked me to do was Gayatri mantra, a veda mantra, with a Rudraksha maalaa and keep brahmacharya.What he asked me seemed "saattwik enough". So I decided in an impulse and started. Some thingshappened. After 18 days, something dramatic happened that changed my thinking and life completely.Abstract concepts and bookish knowledge are one thing and direct experience is another. It is ok to harpon the transientness of the so-called "concrete" reality that our senses keep perceiving and hypothesizethat there is a far higher reality that one can merge one's consciousness in, but one's conviction especially that of a highly logical person like me - will not be complete until one actually sees it. In fact,one's conviction will be quite shaky until then.Even after this, my ego was still there. I was a young achiever. I had BA degrees in Sanskrit at the age of10 and wrote metered poetry in Sanskrit like ancients, at 11. I was a highly intelligent young achieverwith a lot of pride over my intelligence and scholarship. Thus, accepting one who was 6 months youngerand one whose Sanskrit knowledge and Sanskrit pronunciation seemed quite inferior to mine as my guruwas too much. As if sensing it, the first thing he told me when we met face to face a few months later12

was: "I am not your guru. Never be under the illusion that I am your guru. We are sishyas of the sameguru and our guru is not here now. I started first in this life and hence I am guiding you. I will dowhatever I can for you, but I am not your guru". I was "relieved".Slowly, the change triggered earlier started accelerating. My mind became clearer about what is what.When I saw myself as a completely transformed person with much clearer vision and realized that thechange was brought by Manish, I told him that I now thought of him as my guru. He said fine. Basically,he had accepted me as a sishya long back and waited till I accepted him as my guru (though he keptplaying that role even without my acceptance). Basically, the names used for the relationship did notmatter to him and he did what thought he needed to do. Simple!!Later, the homam movement started. I started doing homam everyday. I experimented with many andsettled down on daily Chandi homam. Once I looked at Manish with suspicion because he was a Kaaliworshipper. Now, I was doing Chandi homam myself! I saw my prejudices for what they were. I becamevery clear in my mind about so many things. Many things that seemed conflicting and contradictory fellin place smoothly now. Some of that clarity of knowledge translates into my writings, but some of it isdifficult to translate into the physical plane.What a good guru does is precisely this - to transform you from something to something else, preferablysomething better!If you want to find the right guru who can make this human life worthwhile, you should not be in a hurryat all. Be patient and keep praying. While you wait, you can use whatever knowledge, teachings and toolsare available to purify and transform yourself and remove some of the darkness yourself. In the process,you may end up finding your guru!More on GuruQuite seriously, please do not address me as a guru. Guru is a very heavy word. It means the remover ofthe darkness of ignorance. I am NOT a guru.If She wants to answer something, She can pick someone and answer through them. The person inquestion is just a nimitta.Actually, Vasishtha teaches that even a guru is a nimitta! Then what about someone like me? Everythinghere is just a coincidence. She is the master planner. If She wants something to be given to someone, shewill select somebody else as a nimitta for it and make the second person give that thing to the first person.She is the energy that moves the entire universe. She is the ichcha sakti (desire), kriya sakti (action) andjnaana sakti (knowledge) of each being in this creation. It is amazing how She plans the whole thing.She is like a master film director who is making a secretive magnum opus. Imagine a director who has areally complicated script and shoots one scene with one set of actors and another scene with another set ofactors etc. Each actor only knows the scenes (s)he is in. No actor can figure out the complete story fromthe few scenes that (s)he knows. The Mother is like that. She has a beautiful screenplay and we are allactors playing out roles. We only know a little bit of the story.13

Some people become too attached to the play and start wondering what the complete story is. They wastetheir time and energy wondering what the complete story is or what the next scene is. This does notimprove their performance in their own scenes even one bit. On the contrary, this guesswork sometimesbiases them and they end up messing up their own scenes due to the mistaken biases.Now take an actor who leaves it completely to the director, resigns to the mastery of the director and justdoes what (s)he is told to do. Such an actor gives a perfect performance and does not waste any time orenergy in unnecessary activities. Similarly, one who realizes Her mastery and realizes that She is the doerof everything and considers oneself a pawn in the hand of a master chess player does not over-analyzeeverything and leads a blissful and fruitful life and serves Her agenda perfectly.Testing GuruQ. I had read some books on Thakur in Bengali and in one there was the description of anincident. Once Swamiji wanted to test Thakur. Since Thakur used to say that he could nothandle money (as it represented something grossly material), Swamiji deliberately put anote under Taker’s pillow when Thakur was not in the room. Later when Thakur come tosleep in the bed, he instantly got up as if in pain and said something is very wrong in here,Hriday, who was used to be there, searched the bed and found that money under his pillow.But Thakur never got offended with these things. In fact, in one instance, when one of hisdisciples had come to him for the first time, Thakur asked him to stay over atDakshineshwar. At night the disciple woke up and saw that Thakur was leaving the room.A doubt entered the disciples mind, he thought maybe Thakur is going towards theNahabat house where Sri Sarada Ma used to stay. So he quietly decided to follow Thakurand see where he is going, after all it maybe that Thakur used to visit the Nahabat secretlyetc etc. he was genuinely suspicious. Then as he left the room following Thakur at adistance, he saw Thakur going to the Panchvati and sitting down for meditation and therehe sat for two hours. Later when Thakur came back, he told that person, who later becamehis disciple, that he had done very good to test Thakur. Further Thakur said, no one shouldaccept a Guru without testing. And to see and judge a person's spirituality he has to beobserved when he is public and when he is alone. There should be no difference in hiswords and actions. Etc etc. Every incident in Thakur's life is like an illustration of a deeperpoint for ordinary people like us.A. For those who do not realize it, the word "Swamiji" in the first episode with a rupee note under thepillow refers to Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath Datta then).The person in the second episode below is Swami Yogananda (Jogindra Nath Roy Chaudhury). However,this incident did not happen the first time Jogin met Ramakrishna. The first time Jogin met Ramakrishna,he left quickly but decided to meet again. After meeting Ramakrishna several times, Jogin decided tospend a night with him and serve if needed. So he stayed over one night. That is when the incidenthappened.14

Jogin was a light sleeper and woke up in the middle of the night. He found Ramakrishna missing in hisbed. He went and checked at the water pot and looked outside to see if Ramakrishna was walking outside.When he did not find, then he suspected "maybe he teaches us about brahmacharya (celibacy), but goes tohis wife secretly in the night". He positioned himself outside the nahabat (where Sarada Mata lived) andwatched the door carefully. Later he heard the chattering of slippers from Panchavati on the other side andfound Ramakrishna approaching him. Ramakrishna first asked "what are you doing here". When Joginwas silent and had an expression of shame on his face, Ramakrishna calmly said "well, you are right totest me. You should test a saint by the day and night before believing in him." Of course, Jogin wasashamed and did not sleep the whole night.I too suspected my guru a few times like Jogin and questioned him. He too never took offense. I willdescribe one such incident.Once he told me that he "saw" me earlier in the day when he was driving on a highway in UK. Heapparently "saw" me doing homam at my house in US. He said he lifted his hand while driving, as ifblessing me. His wife sitting next to him asked what he was do

vedic-wisdom yahoo group. In the past we have compiled couple of books on similar occasion to share and provide an easy access to the Jyotish knowledge that Sri. P.V.R.Narasimha Rao imparts to us. Sri. Narasimha Rao started the yahoo group under the name “vedic-wisdom” and posts answers