Osho on Guru – Guru literally means ‘the light’

Osho – Kabir says: The only thing worth doing is to wake up my mind. The God, the REAL guru, is inside.

The word ‘guru’ is untranslatable. Neither does the word ‘teacher’ nor the word ‘Master’ have that beauty. In fact, the phenomenon of the guru is so deeply Indian that no other language of any country is capable of translating it. It is something intrinsically Eastern. The word ‘guru’ is made of two words, ‘gu’ and ‘ru’. ‘Gu’ means darkness, ‘ru’ means one who dispels it. Guru literally means ‘the light’. And you have the light within you, yes! If you come across a Buddha or a Jesus or a Krishna or a Mahavir, it will be of tremendous help to you in finding your inner guru, because seeing Buddha, suddenly a great enthusiasm and hope will arise in you: “If it can happen to Buddha” — who is just like you, the same body, the same blood, bone, marrow — “if it can happen to this man, why not to me?” The hope is the beginning. Meeting with the Master on the outside is the beginning of a great hope, a great aspiration.

And this can happen only if you meet a living Master. It cannot happen just by reading about Buddha, because who knows whether this man was really historical or not? And the way the story is being; told is such that nobody can believe that he was historical.

The followers always go on creating more and more unnecessary stories about their Masters. Maybe they do it with good intentions, but even good intentions coming out of unconscious people are of no use; they are harmful. Maybe they want to impress people so people can become more attracted, but what really happens is just the opposite.

Now the Buddhist story is that when Buddha was born, the mother was standing, was walking in a garden. Buddha was born while the mother was walking. And not only that, the first thing that he did was that he himself walked seven steps. The first thing the child did — he walked seven steps! Not only that, the second thing that he did after the seventh step was that he declared, looking at the sky, “I am the awakened one, I am the great Buddha! Nobody has ever been like me and nobody will ever be like me.”

Now these stupid stories naturally make intelligent people suspicious. And one thing is absolutely certain: that Buddha is not like us, so maybe, perhaps, he became enlightened, but he gives no hope to us. Jesus is born of a virgin mother — nonsense, patent nonsense! But how can you become enlightened? You are not born of a virgin mother. Krishna is born as God, he is an incarnation of God; YOU are not an incarnation of God.

Rather than these stories creating a hope in you, they create a kind of hopelessness. You need living Masters who have not yet become myths. You need living Masters who are just like you and yet different, just like you but with something plus, something mysterious surrounding them in every other way the same as you, but only in one respect different: they have a certain understanding which is missing in you, they have a certain luminosity which is missing in you, they have a certain grace, a certain climate which is missing with you. But in every other way they are exactly like you: they fall ill, they need food, they become thirsty, they are tired, they have to go to sleep; they are just exactly like you in every possible way. Then great hope arises: maybe the ‘one plus’ thing that has happened to them is also latent in you and can become manifest.

The outer Master is simply a mirror so that you can see your face, so that you can see that you also have-the same face, the same possibility, the same potential. And once this has settled in your heart, that “I have also the same potential, the same seed”, a great journey has started. You will never be the same again. Looking into the eyes of a living Master, something synchronizes in you, something is triggered in your being, a process has already started.

Source – Osho Book “The Guest”