How To Find A Guru

Inspired in equal parts by the book Eat, Pray, Love and the new Mike Myers' movie "The Love Guru," a writer from the New York Post set out to find her own spiritual guide, and shares a few of the things she learned along the way.

Lesson No. 1: Get over your stupid conceptions. "It's not about being super new age-y," explains a friend, who is Indian and regards the idea that this could be considered a "trend" the way someone might view taking a college class from a professor as a fad. "A guru serves as your guide."

Lesson No. 2: Find an Indian friend who won't roll her eyes at you when you say, "I want to find a guru." Thankfully, mine is being very patient with my millions of questions. Should I have to pay for a guru? No. Do people "worship" or "believe" in a guru the way they do, say, Jesus or Buddha? No. Can anyone, regardless of religion, have a guru? Yes. Do you have to actually meet the guru to call him or her your own guru? No. Does the guru even still have to be alive? No. Should I just Google the word "guru"? For the love of Jesus and Buddha, no.

Lesson No. 3: It's kind of like finding an amazing hairdresser - you have to trust the source. For the past two months I've asked every yoga teacher, acupuncturist and Indian friend I have to give me their best recommendations. From this list of dozens of names (everyone from the little-publicized "Eat, Pray, Love" guru Gurumayi Chidvilasanada to Sathya Sai Baba), I decide to investigate three as possibilities: Amma (amma.org), Dada Vaswani (sadhuvaswani.org) and Swami Parthasarathy (vedantaworld.org).

Lesson No. 4: Best to have a thick skin. "We cannot set out in search of a guru," chides Vaswani. Transfixing in his eloquence, he lists marks of a true guru (read the entire interview at nypost.com), but what captures my attention the most is his philosophy regarding life. "He wants nothing for himself," he says of spiritual enlightenment. I try, just for the hell of it, wanting nothing. Suddenly, my frantic headache is gone. So far, Dada is ahead.

Keep reading the NY Post article for more tips.

Or read Deepak Chopra's defense of "The Love Guru":

The best-selling author and spiritual teacher is defending The Love Guru, a comedy in which Myers plays an aspiring self-help guru who aims to achieve Chopra's level of popularity. Chopra posted an essay online in response to those in the Hindu community who say The Love Guru is offensive and mocks important tenets of their faith.

"The premature outcry against the movie is itself religious propaganda," Chopra writes, noting that the protesters based their views on the film's 2 1/2-minute trailer. "As viewers will find out when the movie is released this summer, no one is more thoroughly skewered in it than I am -- you could even say that I am made to seem preposterous."

Keep reading the Time magazine story on "The Love Guru".

Or watch "The Love Guru" trailer here:

Do you have a guru? How did you find him or her? And if not, do you want one?

Comments

[cg3]

This is just sad. You don't need to be led to learn to think. Or, I guess, maybe you do.

[axt113]

As an indian, the key is knowing when to go off on your own, taking what you have learned and adapting and studying and learning on your own, a teacher is merely there to start you on your path

[twohearts]

I do have a guru. I wasn't looking for one when his photo on a book he'd written jumped out and said "read me." That was about 30 years ago, when I was in college in Boston.
The book was "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahansa Yogananda. His organization is called SRF and has temples in both India and the US - and now in countries around the world.
This path as helped me immeasurably. I know that Yogananda is not a phony, nor is our current president. No one forces you to learn about it, or to ignore it. and it is definitely not a controlling "cult."

[Theda]

Yogananda was a good man.....but what does that have to do with our current phoney and war-mongering President?
We each have to be our own "guru." Spirituality is an inside job.

[Jonahson]

Sheeps need leaders.
Human need teachers.

[KoolBreez]

The Guru will find you when you are ready..

[CrazyCanuck07]

The only true Guru is the one within yourself.

The real spiritual Gurus are like your Kindergarten teacher ... they help you to learn how to seek your inner Guru without enslaving you for life.

All these false Gurus, who brainwash their students to worship them as reincarnations of God, are impediments to spiritual growth. They keep their devotees in bondage.

This type of Guru is as useful to you as a crutch is to an able bodied person.

Cast them away and strive to walk, uninhibited ... that is the meaning of enlightenment.

Namaste

[Arithrianos]

The true guru is not only within oneself, it is also within all sentint beings. That to me is the meaning of Namaste, I bow to Ati/God/Whatever in you as Ati/God/Whatever in me. But you are right to say walk on. But there is a stage for most people who can only see other beings as Ati/God/Whatever before they can see themselves as they are. It is best not to denigrate any of the paths, even the paths of those who will take a long time to figure it out. They are Ati just as much as anyone.

[JustObserving]

I would suggest Eckhart Tolle (Vancouver) and Adyashanti (San Francisco) as gurus as they are self-realized.

If you will be satisfied with a "dead guru" ( a guru is never born and never dies), may I suggest Ramana Maharishi or Nisargadatta.

Of course, you always have the sadguru (or satguru) or the guru within. So an external guru is not necessary.

http://www.eckharttolle.com/
http://www.adyashanti.org/

http://www.sriramanamaharshi.org/teachings.html
http://www.nisargadatta.net/

[Theda]

There's nothing original or "self-realized" about Eckhart Tolle. He steals ideas and concepts from other books and tries to pass them off as his own.
His current book is God-awful and incredibly boring.
He's a FAD right now because Oprah Winfrey is endorsing him.

[RobinSeattle]

Look, the whole celebrity freaky religion/spirituality thing is played. Celebrities who engage in that are considered pains in the ass (I mean, don't you groan every time you hear the name of a Tinseltown Scientologist or see another article about Kabbala?) and those who decide to check into that crap because some walking silver screen commercial for the cosmetic surgery industry is into it looks like a weak minded camp follower.

[gablemancer]

I really disliked this article, it seemed to make the important things about a guru seem trivial. The quest for a guru is simple. Now I don't remember who said this but paraphrased. "You can search for your guru, but when you find yourself tired of searching and ready to give up your guru will appear." Each persons individual guru will appear with time. When I found my guru I wasn't looking for one.

Om Namah Shivaya

[wmbear]

HEY, MIKE MYERS WORKS FOR ME...

International Man of Mysticism....

[wondering]

What year is this? I coulda swore it was 2008, but maybe it's 1970.

Go ahead and find a guru. Just make sure he's not named Charles Manson or Jim Jones.

[Theda]

Yeah, 900 people died when their "guru"...aka swami....told them to drink the poisonous kool-aid.
That was....wow....over 30 years ago!
And remember those nuts who ate poisoned pudding and died because their guru told them they were going to be sitting on the end of the Haley-Bopp comet?

[Ajita]

"Lesson No. 2: Find an Indian friend who won't roll her eyes at you when you say, "I want to find a guru." "

Eye-rolling Indian here. I guess there are those whose lives are so meaningless as to require this mumbo-jumbo. What I resent is the constant barrage of opinion here that Indians have a monopoly on this BS.

[wm1066]

Only one of my Guru's was a Baba from India.
My chinese tai chi master escaped from China during the great leap forward.
My yoga teacher was a gypsy liberated from a Nazi death camp.
My homeopathic/ naturalpathic instructor was a doctor in Dresdan during the firebombing in WW2.
Its just that America has seen its fare share of "Fakirs" from India.

[devadasi]

Indians do have a monopoly. The most intelligent people I know have given up their judeo-christian upbringing and went to to India in search of a guru. India is the land of gurus, just as America is the land of economic opportunity for new comers.