The Guru

 

The first in this list is the figure of the Indian guru – a name that is rarely used without irony in the contemporary Western context, as if one wanted to denote a person who gives their followers opportunity to overestimate them, and presumably not without succumbing to self-overestimation first. Naturally this habitual irony tells us absolutely nothing about Indian conditions, but a great deal about the anti-authoritarian change of mentality among Westerners in general, and about the decline in the standing of their teaching professions in particular. It reveals the scepticism that has been epidemic in the Old World for some time towards the notion that any mortal could have more insight than another into the basic conditions of the world and life – not merely in the sense of a coincidentally greater knowledge based on longer experience, but thanks to a deeper penetration of the concealed structures of existence. Just as the concept of the master is ruined in Europe – the maestro in musical life being the one exception – so the idea of any higher teaching licence in existential matters has practically lost all credit. When Martin Heidegger occasionally used the expression ‘master of reading and living’ to describe Meister Eckhart, the archaic tone was already unmistakable at the time. In doing so, he was going very palpably against the newer consensus that the discipline of life is under no circumstances open to mastery.

The scandal of the guru function is easy to pinpoint: it implies a mode of teaching and learning based on an initiation, and thus a crossing-over to the sphere of sacred or non-public knowledge – it is precisely this aspect that makes the guru-centred study model of ancient India unacceptable for the modern learning culture of the Occident. We have introductions to this or that area of knowledge to offer, but do not allow any initiations – quite aside from the fact that enlightenment is not envisaged as the conclusion to a course of study. We also presuppose among our students the continuity of person from school enrolment to matriculation to graduation, while learning with a guru entails two discontinuous aspects: one at the initiation into the modus essendi of the pupil, which implies a form of symbolic death, and the other upon the prospective attainment of the highest goal, which Indian convention describes as the insight – gained psychosomatically and via certain states – into the identity of the individual soul and the world soul. This shows how the dramaturgical form of initiatic learning, beyond its trimming through the narrative form of a step-based life, is nested in a schema of rebirth – which is why its goal must be sought not so much in a qualification as in a transformation.

For Western sensibilities, the convivial or virtually promiscuous constitution of the Indian master–pupil relationship is even more scandalous than the initiatic alliance that accompanies it. As a rule, devotion to a master in a stationary Brahmanic context implied joining his household, usually for a period that could scarcely be shorter than twelve years – this was usually the time required merely to memorize the Vedic texts whose internalization was expected of adepts, regardless of which practical exercises (asanas) were used to carry out the psychophysical work of transformation. This household element of the master–pupil relationship implied an openly psychofeudal dependency. Here the pupil not only had to receive knowledge from the master, but also to fulfil various servant duties – hence the Sanskrit name antevasin: ‘the one who accompanies the guru and waits upon him’. More often, the pupil is referred to as a shisia or chela, which denotes one who ‘sits at the feet of the master’ – a word that calls to mind the memory of a lost world before the invention of the universal anthropotechnic device of the Modern Age, namely the school desk. From an attitude-historical perspective, incidentally, modernity is synonymous with a dependence on chairs or other seating furniture, and eo ipso the dying-out of the ability to sit on the floor without feeling burdened by one’s own body.93The true meaning of the guru-centred learning model, admittedly, does not consist in the cosy homely aspects, which from a distance recall the life forms of medieval craftsmen’s households in Europe. Hence also the threat of terrible consequences for any pupil who dared embark on an affair with the master’s wife – although this does not seem entirely outlandish given the informal situation of courtly love: a noble lady and a lowly aspirant in the closest proximity, separated by a strong taboo and with the attention of each drawn to the other. Its purpose only reveals itself when one takes into consideration the psychodynamic aspect of the master–pupil relationship: this is, after all, no less than a contract for the regulation of a hyperbolic transaction. As soon as the guru takes an antevasin or chela into his following, he has implicitly made a form of perfecting contract with him. This means a simultaneously metaphysical and pragmatic alliance with the goal of advancing at least a few steps along the path to actually existing impossibility, or even of realizing the magnum opus as such: deification in one’s lifetime and transformation into the jivanmukti, the one who is saved here and now. The guru and his student thus enter an alliance perhaps not of life and death, but certainly of life and hyper-life.

Viewed by the light of recent occidental psychological knowledge, this singular relationship is a magnetopathic or psychoanalytical rapport – that is to say a stabilized state of emergency in the soul field where the master makes himself available for the most intense idealizations on the part of the pupil. In contrast to the magnetistic or psychoanalytical situation, however, where, in accordance with the prevailing norms of sobriety, the long-term goal is the dissolution of an idealizing transference, the guru–antevasin relationship aims not for the end, but rather for the clarifying amplification of that idealization – and at once an identificatory intensification that, if carried out in an orthodox and proper fashion, should be driven forwards into the supra-pictorial, pre-objective and pre-personal register. From the guru’s point of view, the pupil’s idealizing anticipations are not wrong because they aim too high; rather, the pupil is only condemned to a form of indispensable error in the sense that he cannot yet know how much higher the real goal is located than his dreamy anticipations are capable of imagining. Nonetheless, identification is the most important affective resource that is available for use in transformative work – which is why one part of the craft of guru pedagogy is to keep the fire of the beginner’s illusion burning for as long as possible. That an institutionalized art of the impossible cannot be judged by the standards of Western trivial ontology, with the corresponding psychological constructs of normality, is understandable enough.

Such references to the hyperbolic dimension in the transformation contract between masters and pupils cannot, of course, refute scepticism towards the guru-centred form of studying. It is therefore anything but coincidental that a large part of Western writings, but also of the growing native literature on the guru phenomenon – not infrequently penned by disconcerted psychiatrists, committed social psychologists and nervous sect advisers94 – is devoted to the problem of false masters and the psychological abuse of those dependent on them. The authors consistently postulate the reinforcement of quality control for products on the religious markets. They usually view the situation as if the process of globalization had also cast the spiritual world market into a state of upheaval. Just as some dangerous pathogens today profit from the facilitation of worldwide travel, the memes of the ‘God delusion’ can also spread more easily beyond the borders of their source regions. Even more disturbing is the impression that psychosis has got carried away, and is now aiming to change its status from a classified illness to a misunderstood form of fitness. Most provocative of all, admittedly, is the epidemic of mystical amoralism which, thanks to the missionary successes of Hinduizing masters, began to spread through the overly receptive Western hemisphere. The virus, which has nestled in correspondingly arranged classes since then, consists in the dangerous realization that lack of conscience and illumination are, from a certain point of view, identical.

The truth is most probably that the world of enlightenment games too has been affected by mediatization, and the appearance of performance talents among the teachers of well-tempered impossibility was only a matter of time. No guru’s life from the last decades demonstrates this shift more clearly than that of the Indian enlightenment preacher and sect founder Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931–90), alias Osho, who, despite his controversial status, constitutes – along with Ramana Maharshi, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Sri Aurobindo Gosh – the fourth figure of Indian spirituality in the twentieth century whose aura emanated across the world. His exceptional standing is clearest in the adoption of Western performance techniques among the forms of spiritual instruction, which were otherwise steeped in pious routine. Like a Duchamp of the spiritual field, he transformed all the relevant traditions into religious playthings and mystical ready-mades. It was not least a testament to his lucidity that, at the pinnacle of his success, he turned himself into a ready-made and, showing a clear awareness of the change in the zeitgeist, distanced himself from his Hinduizing past. As he recognized just in time, this past was tied too strongly to the mentality wave of Euro-American post-1968 romanticism. In assuming the Japanese-tinged name Osho in 1989 – ‘the joke is over’ – he quick-wittedly connected to the recently developed neo-liberal, Buddhophile mood in the West and invented a label for himself with a promising future. This gesture announced that in the field of gurucentred anthropotechnics too, the age of re-branding had begun. 

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics 

PETER SLOTERDIJK