A Guru is in Town!

It’s that time of the year: some months preceding the day of Guru Purnima. In spiritual circles, there is “talk” in the air… To Go or Not to Go, that seems to be the question:

Do I take some time off and physically go to the place the Guru is at or is it ok to just attend virtually via Zoom or Webcast or such?

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Over the years, many have asked me: “Why do you go to Guru Purnima every year?”

In the interest of full disclosure, I have had the good fortune to be able to physically attend Guru Purnima celebrations in North America at one of the Art of Living Ashrams, every year, since 2003! And each year, there is the usual push-pull struggle: To Go or Not to Go

I eventually end up going. Go wins over Not. And the why of it is simply a feeling. I have attempted to rationalize it and yet, as of today, I can’t explain what that feeling is.

It’s just a feeling you say! At one level, yes, it’s just a feeling. On another level though, unless there is something to feel, there will be no feeling. Only change can be felt and eventually quantified / measured if we are smart enough.

One of the greatest triumph of the human mind came from a feeling! It all started when the supremely gifted Professor Albert Einstein felt the rise of an Elevator.

Let’s start at the beginning. Many years ago, circa 1687 Isaac Newton formulated his universal law of Gravitation, which, in today’s language can be stated as, every point mass attracts every other point mass by a force acting along the line intersecting the two points and the force is proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them:

Newton’s was also a feeling. He felt that there was something there… in the detailed data of planetary motion, the three laws of Kepler, the motion of an apple falling, something connected them all. Following up on his feeling, he stuck with it and came up with his most brilliant insight: The force of Gravitation.

[Aside: Many others used exactly Newton’s force to quantify the effect felt by charged particles, the Coulomb Force, the rate of which a disturbance is felt by other particles, the Maxwell Equations and so on… Newton started it all.]

What exactly this force was remained unknown, till the supremely gifted Relativistic Genius, Albert Einstein came along.

The feeling that Einstein experienced in the Elevator was that of a force which, his keen mind quickly grasped was somehow indistinguishable from the Force of Gravity which has remained mysterious for 100s of years after Newton first proposed it. Einstein’s insight was that an observer in an accelerated frame of reference would not be able to distinguish between that feeling and Gravity. It took from 1687 to 1915 to evolve from Newton to Einstein.

The feeling of force that Einstein felt, led his brilliant mind to formalize it into one of the two crowning glories of 20th century Physics: The Theory of General Relativity:

Einstein’s breakthrough was to realize that there is no force! We feel the force because the presence of a massive object warps the fabric of spacetime. When a mass rolls along this curved spacetime fabric, it rolls along the shortest possible path between two points along a curved surface (aka geodesic) and that is what we term as Gravitational Force.

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The essential, oversimplified summary resulting from Einstein’s feeling of the Elevator was that:

A Massive Object Warps Spacetime

The presence of a mass results in warping of spacetime which results in a gravitational field which can be felt.

The question now is:

Does a settled Mind result in warping of a yet unknown field which can be felt by another mind causing it to also Settle?

I have in my mind a model; some field that affects the state of agitation of mind. The feeling of my mind settling down in the physical presence of a Guru is real. Whether or not there is a meditation field (for lack of a better word), I cannot say.

It took Physics from 1687 till 1915 to “understand” the geometrical interpretation of Gravity.

Physics has explored several orders of magnitude of Length Scales (in meters) — From the extremely small: 10 to the power of -35, the so-called Planck Length; to the extremely large: 10 to the power of +26, the distance light has traveled to the most distant observed object. At all these scales, we have yet to find consciousness & thought.

It may take Physics another 100 or possibly more years to “explain” thought and consciousness but the feeling is real today.

The ancient Rishis spoke of the so called Guru Tattva. Loosely translated, Tattva is Principle. A Guru is a manifestation of an underlying Principle.

I have a feeling that to understand the Guru Tattva, it will take us some new Physics of at length scales well below the Planck scale limit of today.

For now, all we have is the experience & feeling of it. The Guru Tattva is here now for us to experience. The physical presence of a Guru is critical to the warping that leads to the mind settling & the Tattva to be experienced!

It is a shame to miss these unique experiences in the physical presence of a Guru! I don’t. Why would you?

PS: A Right Brained version of this is here. Some may need that view as well!