Can you be your own guru?

"Be Your Own Guru" is a mantra often repeated in modern spiritual circles, but let’s take a moment to examine the legitimacy of a statement which may very well lead us to our own self destruction.  Modern new age or alternative spirituality has become a minefield. Many are seeking answers, and as a result, we find ideas from one tradition mixed with prayers and mantras from another, combined with practices and cosmogonies from yet another, until we find ourselves able to order and consume any combination of belief systems from the menu of personal spiritual comfort.

We must at some point admit that spirituality itself is fragile, due to the tendency of the human mind to find truth in illusion and our natural predisposition to believe that our subjective point of view carries more reality than the next person’s. So where do we find spiritual truth if not within ourselves? How are we to trust any outside entity with the molding of our viewpoint, when we’ve already been so deceived and misled by the so-called higher institutions of this world?

Neb Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig with King Kupiendieli

This is where the traditional indigenous initiation comes in. In many cultures across the world, children would leave their homes and families at or around the age of seven to be initiated into the secrets, rituals, rites, and cosmogonies of their people, a coming of age and an envelopment in the knowledge of their forefathers. The importance of the teacher in the initiatic space cannot be underestimated. A teacher carries the knowledge, the wisdom of what has come before, from their teacher and their teacher’s teacher, and from generations of Ancestors before them.

Without a guide, the human journey can only lead you as far as your own nose can smell, and the path on which you find yourself may very well be one that’s already guided by the very institutions from which you are hoping to escape.

If we can step for a moment outside of our own desire to feel self-guided and self-made, we can see that having a teacher, especially one from a culture that has proven its own long-term survival, cannot be a bad thing if it leads us in the direction of our own enlightenment. In our eagerness to find the self-satisfaction of being our own gurus, we must be careful about sacrificing ancient wisdoms on the altar of individual achievement.