So pray to the Lord in the heart, you have to do it, even the finding of the Guru. Don’t wait for the Guru to come and lift you up, touch you and make your Kundalini rise or something like that. Don’t wait for that but pray to the Lord in your heart wherever you are. Prayer immediately brings the vision, the spiritual vision. Which means “yes the Lord is with me, I am Divine.” See that first statement of the Vedanta is the real crux of the whole spiritual life – that you are Divine. Have you thought of it? Have you contemplated it? How shall I do it? In the heart think of the Lord.
Now, the Lord to us is personal and impersonal and this has created quite a problem. To many “I want to think of the Lord, I want to pray to Him but is He personal? If He is personal, what is He? Is he Jesus Christ? Should I pray to Him? Should I pray to Ramakrishna? Should I pray to someone else who is an incarnation of God?
And the Vedanta is definite on that. Yes, if you start on spiritual life whatever may be your intellectual attitude please start by praying to the personal God. Then you are assured of spiritual progress. The person leads to the imperson. You will reach the imperson “you are That”. See, that is why we have the statement. With “That” means “Art That Thou.” What does it mean? That the incarnation, the one who is away from you, the Father in heaven, the Lord. I am not yet the Lord, I am This so That and This, the you. But you are That, That art Thou.
Which simply means through meditation, with the personal God as the object of meditation pray to Him, think of Him, He is with you and He will lead you to the union – the complete union, no more separation. But before the One can come we are Two, the Lord and Me. I am the Devotee, I pray, I make progress.
Finally I reach the Lord and unite with Him. And in the union what progress you were already with the Lord, all the time. But you did not know. At this point how can a Guru help the disciple? In cases where the disciple has accepted a Guru, is important most of us always want some expert to help us
in life and the Guru is nothing more than an expert in the job.
So, any science has theory and practice, theory is reading the books, practice is going to a workshop and work. Practical training. Then you come out with a degree in spiritual life. There is no coming out of the workshop. So what we want is the disciple should have certain basic qualities and he should be with the Guru – as close to him as possible for the rest of his life. Either his life or the Guru’s life, there is no separation between the Guru and the disciple. If you want spiritual progress never feel separate – He is always, always with you.
And why I’ll tell you. You see the Guru has three prominent attitudes towards the disciple which are important to the disciple in spiritual progress. Every serious type of Guru or spiritual teacher will have these three prominent attitudes which you can feel tangibly. You don’t know your thing about his own realizations, you don’t even ask him “have you seen God? Have you been to samadhi? And what type of samadhi?”