light of dawn breaks he finally sees that the snake is in fact a coiled piece of rope. The false identification of the snake had to be abandoned before the truth could be known. Nothing new is created but what is there is finally, clearly seen. Ultimately only the light of truth can dispel falsehood. The mystery is where the light comes from. It takes time for the light of dawn to grow strong enough for us to see clearly. St Peter uses the same image of dawning light when he says that the clearing of mental obscurity requires the work of attention–a work in which the reading of Scripture is a powerful spiritual tool:
All this confirms for us the message of the prophets, to which you will do well to attend; it will go on shining like a lamp in a murky place, until day breaks and the morning star rises to illuminate your minds.11
The quest for self-knowledge entails the shedding of false personas. Listening to Jesus’ question leaves us in the end with no image of him at all, only real presence. All the false messiahs in our imagination, forms of projection, must be exposed and toppled before the truth of the messiah can be recognized. The Zen practitioner is told that if he meets the Buddha on the road he should kill him. When two disciples met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, after the Resurrection, they failed to recognise him until he broke bread with them. Then, in the Eucharist, their eyes were opened and they recognised him. So, meeting Jesus, the Christian disciple does not kill him. He has already been killed. Perhaps the equivalent to the Buddhist practice is to eat him. In any case, for the original to be recognised all images must go. St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fifth century warned that every image and concept of God becomes an idol.
Of course there are different kinds of recognition. All religions recognise Jesus as a universal teacher. Not everyone follows him as their personal guru. His greatness as a teacher, even for a Buddhist or a Hindu, is not only in his moral or religious wisdom but in his power to awaken in others the experience of reality. The East especially knows that a guru is more than an exemplar of moral or religious truth. A guru is one who has himself or herself become a bridge for the disciple to cross over from the land of illusion to the reality of the kingdom, of the Self.
For many people today of all traditions a particular Indian guru of modern times exemplifies this. He is one who has reminded many Christians of the directly human quality of their relationship with Jesus.
Ramana Maharshi, the sage of Arunachala in southern India, is one of the great spiritual teachers of the modern world. His influence is still felt fifty years after his death.12 Yet for most of his life he dwelt in silence and it was from silence that he radiated the experience of nonduality that dwelt in him.
When asked about the role of the guru, Ramana Maharshi would always insist on the absolute nonduality subsisting between the teacher and the disciple.
The guru is both ‘external’ and ‘internal’. From the ‘exterior’ he gives a push to the mind to turn inward: from the ‘interior’ he pulls the mind toward the Self and helps in the quieting of the mind . . . There is no difference between God, Guru and the Self.13
This is a language and understanding very different from traditional Western ideas about God, human teachers and disciples. Some Christians react to it as threateningly pantheistic (God is everything). Without seeing the option of panentheism (God is in everything), they are scared of sliding into the gnostic heresies (the word heresy literally means choice) that confronted the early church. Furthermore, as Westerners they balk at the apparent loss of personal identity suggested by Ramana’s words. But as Christians they might also recall those sayings of Jesus where he spoke–shockingly, too, for many of his listeners–of the oneness between himself and the Father: ‘My Father and your Father’; ‘to have seen me is to have seen the Father.’ Or of St Paul’s personal confession that he lived no longer but that Christ dwelt in him.
I have been crucified with Christ: the life I now live is not my life, but the life which Christ lives in me; and my present mortal life is lived by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.14
Ramana expressed his experience of the Self, the immanent and transcendent presence of the Divine Guru, in his own terms conditioned by his Hindu context. He constantly returns to the unity of nonduality (advaita) just as St Paul does to the indwelling Christ,
The guru never sees any difference between himself and others and is quite free of the idea that he is enlightened and those around him are not.
Seeing Jesus as guru serves to understand the New Testament titles used most frequently of Jesus, teacher and rabbi The signs of a true guru, as described by Ramana, are abundantly evident in the gospel picture of Jesus as a human being in communion with God (whom he called ‘Father’). But we see him also as a person of his own time and place with the natural limitations this implies. Ramana says a guru possesses the following qualities:
a steady abidance in the Self, looking at all with an equal eye, unshakable courage at all times, in all places and situations.
If Jesus is guru we are invited to see ourselves as disciples. Our ego may find that unacceptable or impossible. ‘I’ll listen, but I’m not bowing to anyone.’ But dedicated spiritual practice eventually makes disciples of us all. It is interesting then to know what Ramana saw as the qualities of a true disciple:
an intense longing for the removal of sorrow and the attainment of joy and an intense aversion for all kinds of mundane pleasure.
Perhaps the reason that our spiritual practice seems to ‘take so long’, as people often complain, might simply be that we do not intensely enough long for what we protest we want immediately!
The role of the guru in his exterior manifestation is to push the disciple inwards to the quest for the Self. When Ramana Maharshi was asked what method or discipline was best to follow he did not offer an array of meditation techniques. He pointed people to Self-inquiry. The constant thought ‘Who am I’, he said, destroys all other thoughts. Like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end be destroyed. Then Self-realization naturally arises.
Of all the thoughts that arise in the mind the I-thought is the first. It is only after the rise of this that the other thoughts arise. It is after the appearance of the first personal pronoun that the second and third personal pronouns appear.
According to Ramana the aim of all spiritual practice is to lead the mind to stillness. When the I-thought has been traced all the way back to its origin, it disappears in its ultimate source of all things, the Self. The radical simplicity of Sri Ramana’s teaching is the expression of a compassionate, decisive but noncondemnatory personality. This is reminiscent of the way Jesus himself treated sinners and outcasts. Ramana remarked to a Hindu visitor discouraged by his inveterate sinfulness:
Even if one be a great sinner one should not worry and weep, ‘O, I am a sinner how can I be saved!’ One should completely renounce the thought ‘I am a sinner’ and concentrate keenly on meditation on the Self. Then one will surely succeed.
Compare this with the parable of the Prodigal Son who returns home to his father’s unconditional, impartial forgiveness;15 or the story of the sinner and the religious official praying in the Temple and the way the former’s simple humility finds God’s favour rather than the Pharisee’s complacency.16 When he met with sinners and outcasts, Jesus loved. His anger was reserved for the rigidity of religious authority,
