A Spiritual Guru and the Disciple’s Self-Effort

Self-effort is 50% of the equation and the spiritual Guru’s guidance and inspiration makes up the remaining 50%. Without self-effort, the Guru’s guidance and inspiration is meaningless. Like they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink—self-effort is needed to drink the water.

Essentially you can put the different types of spiritual self-effort into one word: sacrifice. It is very similar to the Sanskrit word tapas – to achieve results through austere practices, through hardship and sacrifice.

Without hardship and sacrifice, who can achieve anything? Let’s forget about the goal of enlightenment for a moment. Let’s just talk about the effort needed to provide food and shelter for one’s children. For a mother or father to provide food and shelter for their child, effort and sacrifice is needed. If they sit around doing nothing, they will not be able to provide for their child.

The parent has to spend time away from the child working, working, saving up money to pay for the child’s education, to provide food and to rent or buy a house. The parent makes some sacrifice there.

How would it be if the parent just let things happen as they happen, without that effort to make sacrifices for their child? The person would do nothing. They would not go out and work hard to save up money for the child’s food and shelter.

If a parent makes no sacrifices, they will do nothing, but anybody who loves their child would not do that. They’d make the sacrifice.

One ultimate sacrifice on the spiritual path is when a disciple or student moves away and lives with their Guru. This doesn’t apply in all situations but it is very common, and there are several sacrifices in this.

The first sacrifice is that the student can’t stay at home and look after their parents. For example, when I was a seeker, I left Australia to spend time with my Guru overseas and I had to leave my father behind. He was an elderly man, and his wife does a very good job, but it would have been nice for him if I spent time with him. I could help him mow his lawn, I could whipper snip the edges of his yard for him, so he doesn’t have to do it himself. But I couldn’t because I wasn’t there.

So that’s the first sacrifice—that you’re not able to help out your family like this.

The next sacrifice for someone who goes to live with a spiritual Guru is that they start to serve the Guru wholeheartedly. This means they can’t do whatever they want. They can’t just go for a swim at the beach, or to the movie theatre, whenever they like. And they can’t go to play a game of tennis for a few hours in the afternoon, or join the local social tennis club. They don’t do any of that.

For those that decide to be a monk or a nun, they also renounce relationships, so they sacrifice the experience of having a relationship, a partner.

Another sacrifice is that they wake up early in the morning to do their spiritual practices. Everybody prefers to wake up at 9am, so there’s sacrifice there too.

And when one meditates for long hours and the legs are sore, one pushes one’s self longer. More, more, more, longer, longer. The knees hurt, the legs hurt, the bottom hurts. So you’re sacrificing your comfort.

In the book, ‘The Life Of Milarepa’, it tells how he meditated for so long that when he stood up he felt like his legs were not part of his body. Obviously that’s not comfortable is it?

So, sacrifice is needed.

Sacrifice is also needed when somebody is rude to you. Anybody can get angry and be disturbed with that situation. But it takes some sort of sacrifice to spend all your heart and energy to restrain your explosive anger, to tame the lion, calm it down. It takes massive effort, so this is like a sacrifice—to direct your energy into not reacting.

So all the effort needed on the spiritual path really comes back down to sacrifice. And Tapas, the Sanskrit word, is referring to this sacrifice.

Nobody can make any sacrifice unless it’s love-sponsored. So, on the spiritual path, there must be a love of the goal. In other words, there must be a love of freedom, or of realising your True Self, or a love to experience and taste Divine Love.

There must be something love-sponsored—that’s what motivates a person to do something. Why does a person keep on working, working, working? Because they love their children, they love their family, and want to provide for them.

You need all the effort that a human being is capable of. In other words, you need your every heartbeat, your every breath, every fibre of your being, every ounce of your willpower, the highest love you ever had for anything. The energy of that love will go towards enlightenment.

It’s the hardest thing that a human being can achieve in a lifetime, and that’s why a lot of people don’t achieve it.

The reason it’s not easy is because you’re trying to conquer thoughts, which are invisible. It’s nearly impossible. You can’t use normal weapons, you can’t use military force. Trying to conquer your thoughts is like trying to capture a ghost. Where’s the ghost? It’s invisible. Who can catch a ghost? Therefore, it’s not easy.

It’s like having a boxing match with an opponent but your opponent is invisible. It’s like playing chess against somebody and you’re blindfolded. They can see your moves but you can’t see them. What’s the likelihood of you winning? It’s not easy.

I once played a game of Chinese chess against a guy who was blindfolded, and he beat me. It’s not easy, but he could do it because he was such a good chess player.

You need all the effort you can imagine. But every human being has the capacity to achieve the goal of enlightenment.

As you’re advancing forward, it does get easier and easier because your skill at controlling your thoughts becomes better and better. The more you come close to the goal, the more power and vitality you have, because you’re coming closer to the Source. And when you’ve got more vitality, then you want to practice more, you want to be yourself more.

As you’re getting close to the Source, you become more wise. You have more insight, you have more wisdom, you have a more surrendering nature, and you have more awareness.

So all those things make it easier and easier to knock over the ego, the false self, the bag of thoughts that is your mind.

That’s right, that’s right. It’s like a dancer who’s performing a Gymnastics routine for the Olympics. There’s effort and training needed, before the moment of performing on the floor at the Olympics. They train for years before the Olympics. And there is also effort to perform on the day of the Olympics. There’s effort and concentration needed to get it perfect in the moment.

One cannot say that there’s no effort there, because when we watch the Olympics we can see they’re very focused, we can feel the effort in the person’s demeanour. They take a breath as they start their routine, and you can see their effort on that day.

In the same way, there’s effort on the days when we face challenges in life and there’s also effort to train ourselves to prepare for those days. There’s effort required to remain peaceful and calm when these Olympic-level challenges in life are hitting us. And there’s also the effort to practice to remain peaceful and calm before the bounces of life are coming at us. So we practice before it comes and we practice when it’s hitting us. Both require effort and both are needed.

On the spiritual path, you need effort to practice while there’s no disturbance and you need to practice also while there are challenges and disturbance coming at you from outside. You need to practice both to attain enlightenment.

The role of the spiritual Guru is twofold. The first role is to make sure that the disciple or the seeker doesn’t make repeated mistakes that waste a lot of time.

For example, if you’re building a house the correct way, maybe it will take one year to build. But if you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re just putting wood together with nails and a hammer, it might take you a very long time to build a house, and that house might not stand up for very long. With the Guru’s guidance, you don’t make mistakes that waste time.

So the Guru’s first role is to guide the disciples on the fastest way, so that the disciples don’t get lost. Because when one gets lost you can waste so much time and energy just going in circles, circles, circles.

The Guru can guide disciples to show them the way, to make it clear—“Take that motorway, and don’t go through the city because there are a lot of traffic jams there. Go this way, go that way…” The Guru can show the way like that because the Guru knows every way, knows the motorway inside and out, knows the fastest routes inside and out.

The Guru is like a spiritual GPS, only better, because the GPS makes mistakes whereas the Guru will never make a mistake. So the first role is to help the disciples avoid making mistakes which wastes time.

We’re assuming that we don’t want to take a million years to attain freedom, in the same way we don’t want to take fifty years to build a house. So if that’s the case, then the spiritual Guru can save the disciple wasting so much time and energy in experimenting with things that don’t work.

The Guru will guide the disciples and show them ways to get results, because the Guru actually represents the result itself. The spiritual Guru represents the goal, because the Guru embodies the state that the disciples are seeking.

The second role of the Guru is to bring out the seed of greatness in the disciple, so the disciple can go the extra mile, can give it 100%. Because even 99% will not work. You need every effort, everything you’ve got, to reach this goal. It’s not easy.

The spiritual Guru knows how to bring out the roar of a lion in a disciple. The Guru knows how to bring out the heart of the disciple, so the disciple can battle against his or her negativity with that big heart.

In summary, you can say the Guru’s second role is to bring out the best in the disciple because only the best in this case will do, nothing else. Even 1% less than the best won’t work, will lead to failure. It needs everything the disciple has, and the Guru will bring that out in them.

It’s almost impossible for the disciple to bring out the best in themselves. If a person is able to bring out the best in themselves, then the person doesn’t need a spiritual Guru. But from my experience and my understanding of how life works, nobody achieves anything without some sort of inspiration from somebody. So when you look at it like that, something is needed to bring this lion out of the disciple.

There is a saying that is always true— ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’ When the disciple is ready, the Guru will appear. Without a doubt. And if the Guru doesn’t appear, the teacher doesn’t appear, then based on that saying the student is not ready. That’s how it is.

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