Ep. 51 | Guru

Call and Response Ep. 51 Guru

“Any yogi or yogini who develops ability to concentrate and become mindful, pushing that mindfulness to deeper and deeper levels, discovers the Realm of Infinite Love, the Realm of Infinite or Immense Love, Immense Compassion, Immense Joy and Immense Equanimity within themselves. So, they have all the heavens in themselves.” – Robert Thurman

Bob: I was just kind of thinking of like, “Where’s my Guru?” You know? “I need a Guru. I want to get serious now, so I want a Guru.” So, people feel that way.

KD: Yeah.

Bob: And that’s good that they feel that way because, in one sense, it is a good thing to think that there’s some way of being that is higher than the way one habitually is and that someone exemplifies that and that person can maybe help one develop dimensions in themself, that there are, that will be new for them, that will be greater how they habitually think of themself as. So, you know, when you said, apart from yourself, but then what you found through the inspiration of your teacher was dimensions in yourself that you didn’t know that were there because your habitual thing was to think of yourself as not having those dimensions. Right? Like, you know, someone asked me earlier about the four immeasurables, as they’re called, which I decided to translate now as “immensities.”

KD: Immensities?

Bob: Yeah, because “immense” means “immeasurable” you know, but it’s a more nice word, you know? “Immeasurable” sounds kind of like, “Oh gosh, I couldn’t swallow it,” or something whereas an immensity is an immensity. So, immense love, immense compassion, immense joy and immense equanimity and those are in Indian cosmology, they are four ways of carving up the layers of the heaven of the pure form. And the Gods Brahma and others dwell in the highest level of equanimity, one, which can also be subdivided into sixteen different levels of heavens and the highest one is called Akanishta.

KD: Akanishta.

Bob: “Not smaller than anything else.” That literally means, “Akanishta.” “Not lesser than anything.” And, that’s where Brahma hangs and the big deities there, all those deities in the form realm have no gender differentiation. They’re all, they’re not exactly hermaphroditic, but they have male and female elements and they don’t have, you know, differentiated genitalia, for example. They don’t have ordinary like desire realm bodies. That’s why it’s called the Realm of Pure Form. And then it’s taught to people in terms of like, cosmology, like, there’s these heavens there. But any yogi or yogini who develops ability to concentrate and become mindful, pushing that mindfulness to deeper and deeper levels, discovers the Realm of Infinite Love, the Realm of Infinite or Immense Love, Immense Compassion, Immense Joy and Immense Equanimity within themselves. So, they have all the heavens in themselves. Not necessarily, it’s not like chakras. It’s like mental mind states and especially if they are, you know, not grasping at the pleasure of those Realms, because when you feel immense love, you feel blissful yourself, of course. You wouldn’t have immense love if you didn’t feel already blissful that you want, that the bliss wants to overflow, where you want to love everybody, you’re capable of loving everybody because you’re feeling so filled with bliss. So, the bliss itself isn’t you, but by letting go of it you want to send it to everyone. Right? So, you find all those heavenly planes in yourself. The Being that is unfortunate in that view is the one who wants to stay and grasp that state and then they become reborn as a deity of that realm, actually. They leave their meat puppet body. They get stuck in some heavenly plane or another. And then once you’re in a heavenly plane then you’re sort of complaining about the other immigrants to your heavenly plane. And you’re like, “Oh, there’s some yogis came from America, and all those American yogis are so annoying.