My Guru & His Disciple Read Free

Nature, of which everybody and everything is a part.
    During the past few years, I had kept declaring that I knew religion was a lie, because I knew that I hadn’t got an eternal soul. Now, after talking to Gerald, it became obvious to me that I had been misusing the word “soul” to mean my ego-personality. I had merely been saying (quite correctly) that my ego-personality, Christopher, was subject to change, like my body, and therefore couldn’t be eternal. If I did have a soul, it could only be “this thing,” seen in relation to Christopher. I might call it “mine” for convenience when thinking about it, but I must remind myself that Christopher could never possess it. If the two were ever to become united, Christopher would cease to exist as an individual. He would be merged in “this thing”; not vice versa.
    The question remained: Why should I believe in “this thing” at all?
    Among the various areas of knowledge that Gerald was opening up to me was the history of mysticism. For the first time, I was learning that there had been thousands of men and women, in many different countries and cultures throughout recorded history, who had claimed to have experienced union with what is eternal within oneself. That their accounts of this experience were essentially similar was certainly impressive, but it didn’t prove anything, as far as I was concerned. Even when these people belonged to the modern world, they seemed utterly remote from me. Mightn’t they all have been self-deluded, however sincere?
    Gerald countered my objections with a compliment. My attitude showed, he said, that I was approaching the problem in exactly the right spirit. Credulity was the greatest obstacle to spiritual progress; blind faith was just blindness. He quoted Tennyson’s line about “honest doubt” and told me that Ramakrishna (whoever that was) had urged his disciples to keep testing him, as a moneychanger rings coins to hear if they are false. It was no use just passively accepting the dogmas of the Church or the words of the Scriptures: I knew, of course, what Vivekananda (whoever that was) had said: “Every man in Christian countries has a huge cathedral on his head and on top of that a book.” No—the only way to begin the search for “this thing” was to say to oneself: “I’ll keep an open mind and I’ll try to follow the instructions in meditation which my teacher gives me. If, after six months of honest effort, I’ve had absolutely no results, then I’ll drop it and tell everybody that it’s a sham.”
    This sounded fair enough. And I was impressed by Gerald’s restraint. He didn’t urge me to start meditating then and there. He didn’t tempt me by describing the benefits he got from his own meditation—quite the opposite; he spoke of it in the same tone I would have used when complaining of my struggles to get a book written: it was a lot of hard work and most of the time it was frustrating. “When one comes to this late in life, one’s mind’s already so wretchedly out of condition.”
    Oh yes, Gerald impressed me enormously. Already I believed that he, at least, believed he was making some progress in contacting “this thing” inside himself. He couldn’t be lying to me; he hadn’t any motive for doing so. He couldn’t be shutting himself up for six hours a day in his room and pretending to meditate merely in order to impress Chris Wood. I didn’t deny that Gerald was a playactor, with an Irish delight in melodrama and arresting phrases. Indeed, I believed in him because he was theatrical, because he costumed himself as a ragged hobo, because his beard was Christlike but trimmed, because some of his lamentations over the human lot had a hint of glee in them and some of his scientific analogies a touch of poetic exaggeration. I should have been much more suspicious