By Barbara Waldorf
Walking down the road in Stockbridge MA, my head is buzzing after talking with everyone. Something is burning through my nervous system, wanting to come through. Something is emerging that has its own life and force. This emergence happens in apparent spaces between us that don’t really exist: in the living paradox of autonomy and communion and a palpable energetic field that can only be Love. It is a Love stripped bare of romantic components; it has no face but the other, no urge but for union, no reason except to merge into itself and multiply. This Love only sees the Beloved, which is not another individual but a particular awareness and vibration. It is the setting for the story and the story itself; the play and the players, as well as the audience and the theatre. It wants itself, multiplied exponentially. It wants to live together, to talk, and to breathe in each other’s company. More and more and more and more endlessly. It doesn’t want to leave or sleep or deal with any practical reality. It just wants to go, go, go, onward and upward.
This force has gotten us all into major trouble, by identifying with it, by confusing it with the thrust of ego. It takes so much to face it with maturity and be able to ride this wild horse without falling off or running all over the country, unhinged. What has set this in motion is the force of the Guru Principle. It was meeting Andrew that awakened this in many of us or put that which we had been seeking for years into context and form. Most of us are post-modern boomers, from Western Europe and America, living the most privileged existence on earth of any time. And we ran smack bang into the most eternal and ancient method of spiritual evolution and transformation: the Guru.
What makes it different this time is that it was not only an individual who had taken the expression of this on as himself; but someone who has the understanding of evolution and a deep interest in what was emerging between us. It took some time for Andrew to understand what was going on. It has taken much longer for some to live it. But we are all connected by that initial recognition and Awakening, the shared consciousness that imprinted all of us in those early days.
Transforming human beings is an outrageously difficult and messy business. To get us to honor that which is not us, but comes through us, and not take it for ourselves but only give to it; it is like turning straw into gold. Andrew only wanted us to make this our own, to submit ourselves to a higher reality so that we would express only That. He wanted companions on the journey and did everything he could to get us to evolve, mature and transform, so that we could carry the gift that we had been given.
As far as I can see, the Guru Principle can move us out of the post-modern predicament of the intensity of narcissism. By bowing to a higher principle and allowing it to work through us, it is possible to go beyond the cynicism and arrogance of 21st century ego structures. Everyone who was with Andrew in the early days got a very big taste of that possibility for free. There was no price to be paid it seemed, we just let it happen. The morning after I met Andrew, my mind was like the sky; clear, empty, vast and limitless. This experience corresponded to all the Tibetan texts I had ever read. But I had no idea what was being asked of me in order to be true to that experience; the renunciation of mind, ego, position, cultural identity, gender identity, power etc, etc… None of us knew what a struggle it was going to be to live this fully. The biggest sacrifice is the price for this extraordinary gift of transformation.
Barbara Waldorf can be reached at barbara@guru-talk.com
