The guru is dead

How you can make Nietzsche proud by killing the guru

Everyone has heard it but few have penetrated its implications: “God is dead.” What a bizarre and outrageous thing to say. The ramblings of a philosopher untethered. Perhaps that’s all that it was: An outburst from an angry man overly given to solitude, lost within his own abstractions and therefore impulsively sacrilegious.

Although Nietzsche was perhaps mad, he was not a fool. He didn’t mean that God had suddenly fallen ill or that we had somehow gone to war and defeated our omnipotent master. He meant that God as he had been known, as the authoritative bestower of morality, value, and meaning, was perishing in the face of an emerging scientific and materialistic worldview.

Man and woman would need to hence forth define good and evil on their own terms, through their own striving. They would need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and be the creators of a new vision for life. This responsibility was destined to raise many quandaries for mere mortals who, unlike God, must rely on a finite mind, a finite understanding, and profound limitations in intelligence, love, and wisdom:

“How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?" - F.N.

Nietzsche lamented that when we pull out the moral framework of God it is like removing the ground from under our feat. We are aloft—floating; possibly sinking—in a sea of potential perspectives but without a compass; a boat with no rudder and no island in sight. Nietzsche foresaw a culturally and psychologically entropic moment, a time of tremendous transition and possibility that would cast some into the oblivion of nihilism and meaninglessness and yet inspire others to emerge victorious, God-like, in their ability to create new realities.

Can you see this demarcation in the world today? Often overnight, artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs transform our world and culture. Bombshells like artificial intelligence, neural implants, and internet money threaten institutional foundations, themselves lacking the underwriting of true values and morality that might hold them steady. And on the other side of this demarcation are those who have failed to find their purpose and thus flounder sketchily from one distraction to another, knowing no other driving force than Freud’s pleasure principle or the pursuit of status and paper.

As a society, we have lost our collective north star.

And yet there is one other group, a minority, who are always standing just outside dualities like these. They are those who have found freedom. Those who see the world for what it is and therefore are able to relax. They neither need distraction nor fame. They are not propelled by desire in the same way. They know what humans are really seeking is already there, right under their noses, and that this has incomparable value, infinite quality and meaning. They’re not under the spell of concepts or other people.

Those who are free have found true satisfaction in the way things are. Now. Now. And Now. They have also found that this discovery is not limiting, but liberating. Nothing of value is lost.

Some would say Nietzsche knew this freedom. I’m not so sure, but I do believe he had a sense for what was happening and the turmoil that lay in its wake. He saw that our lack of meaningful grounding as to our purpose would make us criminals of existence. We may even feel guilt for being here needing to justify the space, resources, and life energy that we take up. How dare we assert our fullness to the world when we are already such a burden!? It’s a sad fate for a species that never chose to be here. It’s like blaming a puppy for the food he requires to live.

What Nietzsche did not seem to foresee, however, are some of the clever ways that humans would seek out a new meaning-maker. Nietzsche did not realize that, at least in the West, a simple and lazy spiritual transference was about to take place. Those who saw the inaptitude of materialistic definitions of meaning, who saw that ‘things’ and ‘objects’ in the world could not possibly fulfil them—those with the seeds of wisdom—would replace God with something temptingly familiar to what they had always known. They would replace God with a human; a human who seemed to embody the God they had lost. They would project their longing for the God that had died into men and women that wore his mask.

For the Western world, the death of God meant the birth of the Guru. There were souls who recognised that nowhere in the Western drama was there a source of anything real. They could not bring themselves to believe, without direct experience, in the man in the sky. Nor could they find any lasting satisfaction in science and competitive cleverness. There was no place to rest their weary, desire-ridden minds, so they went off beyond their neon-lit borders and Coca-Cola oceans in search of something new.

Many household names abandoned their Western notions of status looking East for something satisfying. There, they discovered Yoga, Hinduism, Buddhism, Tantra, and gurus of all varieties. Perhaps some of these seekers even succeeded on their quest to freedom, but countless others were duped.

Today, millions feel a similar call. Many of us cannot wholeheartedly embrace the man in the sky; nor are we spellbound by material fundamentalism. The call to return to a state of religious devotion out of fear strikes us as regressive. No less: Reducing our lives to neurons and atoms—to clever and useful ideas, just doesn’t seem to cut it.

Some of us look up at the sun and see something beyond all expression, something utterly unreachable by symbols, calling us towards it. Never before have so many people worldwide been drawn to inner practices that hold the promise of self-discovery. It’s a time of possibility but also great vulnerability.

The archetypal guru seemed to possess the meaning and transcendence we longed for. The gurus seemed to hold the answers. They seemed to bestow all that God had once bestowed. But it was a magician’s trick and we fell for it prayer bead, statue, and start-up.

We found an easy way out of Nietzsche’s devastating proclamation. Just as one might rebound from a lost lover and project the gap onto another willing figure of resemblance, we took the now missing notions of God and painted mortals in his image. And many have been willing to oblige our projections. Many have been willing to stand up and say, “yes, I am the, whom you have been searching for”.

Nietzsche’s challenge had been failed. The übermensch he longed for; individuals that could find the ground themselves; that could face the emptiness and delight in the groundlessness and create from its fertile soil, became instead followers, releasing their responsibility to actualize in favour of subservience and projected longings. They trapped themselves and they trapped the gurus too; for being a guru is itself a prison. So we have become stuck in an age of guruism where we’ve transferred our values and adoration from Gods to men.

There are lower and higher forms of guruism. Lower forms involve the pedestaling and admiration of social media personalities and pop stars. An obviously and profoundly misguided North Star for any person seeking a fulfilling and free life. Higher forms of guruism involve the imitation of those who present with some symptoms of wisdom: Spiritual leaders, artists, inventors, and in some cases scientists. But seeking to be someone else, or to be rescued by what they represent, can never bring about sincere actualization or freedom.

The guru comes in endless forms. Not only in spiritual robes but also wearing white lab coats, with feather hats carrying tribal concoctions, in orange robes and bald heads, muscle t-shirts and bikinis, on movie screens and grand stages, in self-help books and motivational speeches, as colourful images given digital existence. The guru also appears as concepts like consciousness, awareness, bliss, spirituality, money, technology, jhānas, and fancy cars. But no man nor his art—nor our forthcoming artificial brothers and sisters—can free us from getting stuck.

We have fallen for the spells of gurus everywhere and taken up their ideologies instead of being honest and looking for ourselves. Instead of turning towards truth itself, we have put our faith in some idea, some person, some convention, some particular version of life; and missed out on the joy of reality.

So what are we to do, oh “murders of all murders”? How do we deal with the gap—the absence—of something external to bring us what we need? What is it that can really kill the Guru, as the Zen masters proposed? Is the disillusionment with gurus of equivalent magnitude as the death of God? Will man find yet another easy way out from taking responsibility, running once again away from using her own eyes?

I don’t propose to resolve all of these riddles. That would be to take up the sinful position of a guru! But perhaps there is a way of looking at things that does not require a guru. It’s a way of looking—together—at our deepest nature that doesn’t ask of you to abandon your faculties or belittle you into a follower of some new religion. In the end, that is where all paths meet: The placeless place with nowhere to stand.

But it’s not a call to abandon teachers; only the teachers we carry around with us like a heavy backpack full of bricks—or tinted glasses—obscuring the teachers all around. It is a call towards an end to the many forms of internalised gurus and cults that we’re vulnerable to as we seek for ourselves. It’s a call to abandon the projection that someone else, or some ‘thing’, will resolve our groundlessness for us. It’s a call to stop seeking for deliverance and to discover your inborn freedom.

the rainbow of life
is self-spontaneous
the balanced mind
need not reach for it