Supplication to the guru ~ Poornananda Natha Saraswathi

Praying to the guru is not necessarily a matter of chanting mantras or reading a supplication composed by others. The real prayer, on the relative level, is just thinking of the guru — his form, his name, his activities, his color, his shape, even his movement.

If you forget to pray to the guru for a long time, he will not complain that you haven’t been offering enough prayers. But the moment you remember the guru, he is there; his compassion is there, and his blessing is there. The notion of the guru being there comes from remembering the guru. Remembering is the presence of the guru.

We can supplicate to the guru for mundane things like longevity, prosperity, good health, materializing Rwandan hunks. The main aim is to have compassion, motivation to free all being from the ocean of samsara, renunciation mind, and to experience the enthusiasm and joy of supplication itself so that we will have devotion. We supplicate to understand the meaning of non-duality, beginning with actualizing the non-duality of guru and student.

It helps to recite supplication prayers in a loud voice with all kinds of tunes, so as to penetrate your stubborn shell of impure perception.

I offer my prostrations to Guruji and Aiyah’s lotus feet. May they both always reside in the lotus of my heart.

Mixing Your Mind with Your Guru’s

I strongly recommend that you unite your mind with the mind of the guru again and again. Visualise your root Guru  as you chant the sri Vidya guru Paduka mantra, then, after every hundred mantras, dissolve your root Guru  into yourself.

The more often you go through this process, the better, so try effecting the dissolution every ten or twenty mantras, then just watch the inseparability. Needless to say, the experience will not leave your life unchanged.

The key to watching mind is to mix your mind with the guru’s, and it is a practise you can do in all sorts of ordinary situations. As you stand on an escalator on your way to catching a train, for example, or in a department store, or at a cinema, try mixing your minds together until you get off. It takes no time at all, and afterwards it is very easy to return to whatever it was you were doing, whether it was shopping or going to a movie or to a football match.

So, take a few moments every day to mix your mind with your guru’s and then watch the inseparability for a few moments. If you do, one of the blessings of the practise is that before long nothing that happens in your life will seem to be a big deal.

But don’t expect immediate results. Be patient and just practise. You have so many habitual patterns, hang-ups and distractions to work through that it may take a little time before you notice an effect.

And if it does, don’t complain! To complain would be like placing a raw egg on the table and then moaning when it fails to cook. An egg will only cook if you put it in a pan and heat it over a stove; if you fail even to put the egg in a pan, you have no grounds for complaint when it doesn’t cook, and if you do complain, it’s a sign that you have yet to understand cause, condition and effect. Most modern people fall into this trap.

In spite of extraordinary achievements in scientific discovery, like sending men to the moon or discovering that the world is round (there are People today who still think it’s flat), they continue to lack this fundamental understanding.

What if it does takes ten years of practise before you notice any change? Compared to the billions and billions of lifetimes you have lived through without even taking an egg out of an egg box, ten years is nothing!

At long last, you are making progress because you finally know that there is an egg and that the egg must be taken out of the box and put into the pan if it is ever to be cooked. That in itself is a vast improvement. You must have accumulated a great deal of merit just to know that much.

Poornananda Natha - The Sri Vidya Art Of Good Karma