This is an interesting interpretation. While I would agree with Sadhu Om’s contention that the gods do not have the same power to bestow liberation as the Sadguru does, in Tamil ‘the three worlds’ generally refers to the present world and the ones that are above and below it (a heaven and a hell) rather than specific abodes of the three gods.
Many respected teachers of advaita have said that the Guru is in a higher state, and has more power and authority, than the gods themselves. As Sadhu Om’s commentary suggests, the gods can create, preserve and destroy, but they do not have the ultimate power of destroying the egos of devotees. Some teachers have even maintained that the gods must eventually incarnate on earth and come to an earthly Sadguru in order to attain liberation. These gods cannot grant liberation since they themselves are not liberated. This position, of course, would probably be vigorously challenged by devotees of these particular deities.
Bhagavan seemed to endorse the supremacy of the Sadguru in these matters. Verse 800 of Guru Vachaka Kovai reads:
If a person offends against God, it is possible to rectify the matter through the grace of the Guru, but it is impossible even for God to nullify an offence committed against the Guru. This is what the declarations of the great ones assert.
Muuganar’s comment on this verse is ‘Devotion to the Guru is therefore more powerful than devotion to God’.
Bhagavan’s Guru Vachaka Kovai verse is probably his summary of two famous verses in the Guru Gita:
79 If Siva is angry, the Guru will protect you, but if the Guru is angry, no one can save you. Therefore, with all your efforts, take refuge in him.
106 Even gods and sages cannot save one who has been cursed by the Guru. Such a wretch soon perishes, without the least shadow of doubt.
The Guru Gita is a portion of the Skanda Purana.
Lakshman Sarma has noted that there is another important reason why one should revere the Guru as a living manifestation of the Self, and as an embodiment of the divine power that can bestow liberation.
Only that devotion to the Guru is good which is rendered to a sage-Guru, and which regards him as identical with God. Only by such devotion does one attain freedom from delusion. Truly the sage is not other than God.
[Also] there is the text of the Upanishads, that one who wants deliverance must worship the knower of the Self. If he thinks of him [the sage, who is the Guru] as other than God, that thought will obstruct his path. (Sri Ramana Paravidyopanishad, verses 25 and 237)
In a comment on one of these two verses Lakshman Sarma wrote: ‘The sage who is accepted as one’s Guru must not be regarded as just a human being, a person, but as an incarnation of God Himself, because that is the truth of the sage, and because, if the Guru be so regarded, the goal will be reached soon.’
The point of the second half of the Anubandham verse thus becomes clear. One goes to a Guru for liberation – something that is unattainable even from the gods – but if one has the belief or attitude that he is one’s equal, or just an ordinary person, one is unlikely to receive it.
Having a strong conviction that one’s Guru is God Himself can help one to retain, as well as gain, an experience of the Self. This was brought home to me a few years ago when I interviewed Sharad Tiwari, a devotee of Papaji who had had an experience of the Self within a few days of meeting him in the 1970s. When I spoke to him in the mid-90s, about twenty years after the experience had happened, he told me that the experience had never left him. I have met many people who claim to have had a direct experience of the Self in Papaji’s presence, but the vast majority of them seem to lose the experience later. When I interviewed him in 1996, I asked Sharad why other people were losing the experience whereas he had managed to keep it.
Papaji
David: Papaji shows people who they are. Sometimes, though, he says that it is up to the person concerned to recognise it and not throw it away. From what you have told me, in your case the experience never went away. Why do some people like you stay in that state while others appear to go back to their limited viewpoint again?
Sharad: Anyone who recognises Papaji as God and who never wavers in his conviction that Papaji is God will keep the experience naturally and effortlessly. That is my firm conviction.
When the glimpse comes, it is God revealing Himself as God within you. If you treat Papaji as God, and if you treat the experience he has given you as an experience of His divine nature, it will never go away. If you allow the ego to arise again and cover up the experience, it means that you have thrown away your previous knowledge that Papaji is God, along with your belief that the experience he gave you is God Himself shining within you. It all comes down to having the right attitude.
David: How do you yourself hold onto the absolute conviction that Papaji is God? Is it through awareness of his form, his formlessness, or a combination of both?
Sharad: There is no difference between form and the formless. Form itself is formless and the formless is the form. To know Papaji as God is to know that there is no difference between the two. (Nothing Ever Happened, volume three, pp. 127-8)
Later in the interview Sharad, who is something of a mystic visionary, told me, ‘Quite often I see the gods dancing around him in mid-air, paying obeisance to him. When I see the gods themselves bowing before him with my own eyes, how can I doubt that I am in the presence of the Supreme Lord?’
This injunction in the Anubandham verse – that of not displaying advaita towards the Guru – seems to apply even after full liberation, when both Guru and disciple, abiding in the natural state, effortlessly know and experience the truth of the non-dual Self. Bhagavan used a colourful but apt image to convey this. He said that even though a Hindu wife may have enjoyed sexual union with her husband, in public she will still show him deference and respect.
Formal respect is only for external show. When the husband and the wife are in bed, where is all this [formal respect]? (Sri Ramana Pada Malai, by Sivaprakasam Pillai, cited in The Power of the Presence, part one, p. 63)
The same idea can be found in Guru Vachaka Kovai:
If it is properly understood, the tradition of intimate and true disciples showing external deference to the Guru, who has accepted them as rightfully his, is similar to the respect shown by a wife to her husband, which is limited to outward behaviour only. (Guru Vachaka Kovai, v. 304)
Extending this analogy into the spiritual realm, the disciple may have attained oneness with his or her Guru, but the behaviour he or she exhibits is always reverent and deferential. This is what Sadhu Om has to say on this point in his commentary on this verse:
Sadhu Om (left) standing next to Muruganar
When the Sadguru has destroyed the ajnana that is his disciple’s individual consciousness; when he has graciously bestowed upon him the experience of non-duality; and when he has made him one with himself in the state where duality is no more; even then, such a disciple will always serve his Sadguru and show for him a fitting respect, and will continue to venerate his name and form. Although, in an inner sense, it is not possible to show a reverence that is dualistic in the state of oneness where duality is not present, still, that disciple will show respect outwardly, just as a wife acts respectfully toward her husband.
… as long as the Guru and disciple appear in the perceptions of others as separate individuals, possessing individual minds and bodies, it will always appear to others that they are, in reality, separate from each other. Therefore, even when this perfected disciple who knows reality attains the non-dual state in which, in his Heart, he and his Guru are one, he will always conduct himself in a subservient and deferential manner toward his Sadguru, such that other disciples, taking him as an example, will follow him and behave in a fitting manner. (Sri Ramanopadesa Nul Malai – Vilakkavurai, pp. 315, 1987 ed.)
Nisargadatta Maharaj next to the altar that contained the picture of his Guru
I have found this to be true with all the great teachers and enlightened beings I have been associated with. Nisargadatta Maharaj, for example, did an elaborate Guru puja every day of his life, long after he had realised the Self. One morning, just before he started, he paused to give an explanation of this daily ritual.
I don’t need to do this at all. There is nothing that I can gain from it because I know who and what I am, and what I am cannot be added to in any way. My Guru asked me to do bhajans and puja every day, and even though I no longer use them to attain a spiritual goal, I will continue to do them until the day I die because my Guru asked me to do them. In carrying out these orders I can show not only my respect for his words but also my continuous, undiminishing gratitude to the one who gave me the knowledge of who I really am.
Muruganar was also deeply deferential his his Guru, Sri Ramana, in public:
Muruganar wrote thousands of verses in which he thanked Bhagavan for bestowing the state of liberation on him, but he still did elaborate full-length prostrations whenever he came into Bhagavan’s presence. Sometimes he would remain lying on the floor after his namaskaram was completed and talk to Bhagavan while he was still prostrate at his feet. Viswanatha Swami used to make fun of Muruganar for this, calling the resulting conversations ‘lizard talk’. (Moments Remembered, pp. 56-7)
Once, while I was sitting with Papaji, I asked him if he had any regrets about his life. At first he answered ‘no,’ but after a few seconds’ reflection he added, ‘Actually, I do have one regret. Because my legs are now almost paralysed, I can no longer throw myself full length on the floor at the feet of my Master.’ In his later years he had to be content with a standing ‘namaste’ whenever he wanted to pay his respects to Bhagavan’s image.
And what about Bhagavan himself? His respect and veneration towards Arunachala, his Guru, were legendary. However, I will just mention one interesting point. When he composed his philosophical works such as Upadesa Undiyar and Ulladu Narpadu, his tone was non-dualistic. The verses were an uncompromising expression of what the Anubandham verse calls ‘advaita within the Heart’. However, when Bhagavan wrote about his Guru, Arunachala, in his devotional poems, he often adopted the pose of the loving, grateful devotee, a standpoint that enabled him show proper respect and veneration to the form and power of the mountain.
One final story about Bhagavan: when Arunachaleswara (the God Arunachala who is the principal deity in the Tiruvannamalai temple) was being taken in procession around the hill in the 1940s, it stopped outside the gate of Sri Ramanasramam. Bhagavan noticed it as he was taking a walk to the cowshed. He sat on a bench to watch, and when devotees brought him vibhuti as prasad, he applied it reverently to his forehead and remarked, ‘The son is beholden to the father’. (Letters from Sri Ramanasramam, 21st November, 1945)
