Meet the Guru

The Guru is very difficult to approach and is often quite cranky. I should be able to post other exchanges here in the near future if I can get him to talk to me.

The Guru: You have come here to ask me questions that you already have the answers to.
The Seeker: I have come here to find out why I exist. I don’t think I know the answer to that.
The Guru: Go from here to a very quite place, or a very noisy place for that matter, and focus on your distorted thoughts and spiritual ambition. Above all do not come back here.
The Seeker: Do you mean meditation?
The Guru: There is no word that can describe it. Now please go. Believe me when I tell you that I cannot help you find what you want.
The Seeker: Why not? You know everything.
The Guru: I know nothing.
The Seeker: I just want to know if I should be looking inside myself or outside. Am I the world, or is the world inside me.
The Guru: You have become confused. Within or without, call it what you like, the distinction is meaningless. Your mind’s concepts of inside and outside, up and down, here and there, all of it is meaningless. Nothing that the mind believes has a direct relationship with what you are, because everything it believes in rooted in memory.
The Seeker: Don’t my memories tell me who I am? My actions over time, my experiences, tell the story of me.
The Guru: You actions over time tell the story of a human machine caught in the machinery of the world. You have nothing to do with either.
The Seeker: So at the end of all my experiences and deeds, at the end of all that, nothing really matters because it had no relationship to me?
The Guru: How do you decide if something matters to you? I’ll tell you. You put a value on it. You determine if it has had a net pleasurable or painful benefit on your life. Has this experience built or diminished my character, you ask. You wonder if you are more admirable or less admirable as a result of it. That is called accounting. That has nothing to do with you.
The Seeker: Then how do I come to know myself if I can’t form an opinion of myself?
The Guru: Do you need an opinion of yourself?
The Seeker: I watch myself and I develop an understanding of who I am, who I want to be. What is so wrong with that?
The Guru: The understanding you talk about is rooted in memory, habit, compulsion, fear and ego unless you are able to observe yourself completely without distortion, to watch your mind and observe its panic and disorder, its constant judging and need to get a leg up on anything it perceives as remotely threatening, without even understanding why it has made it into a threat in the first place. You cannot come to know yourself when you identify with a mind like that. Any so-called opinions that such a mind forms will serve only the mind itself, and not even that well.
The Seeker: So how do I stop doing all those things...the fear, the judging, all that?
The Guru: Do you want to stop doing all that?
The Seeker: If it will help me see myself for what I am.
The Guru: There can be no if. No either/or. That is a thought chain, already sabotaged with ulterior motives. The motive must be free of mind, clean.
The Seeker: So how do I get the motive then?
The Guru: You see why I can’t help you? This is just going around in circles.
The Seeker: Is there a way to clean up my motive?
The Guru: That’s enough for today. You are making me very tired.