Imagination is a great power. The guru has no power but
imagination is powerful. The power of the guru is nothing but the
power of your imagination, and the real guru will make you alert
about and aware of your own power.
The pseudo guru will pretend that it is his power; it is your
imagination, and you are free to give as much power to your guru as
you decide to do. If you want to you can give him all power; it is
your projection. But imagination is a powerful faculty, the most
powerful: reason is just impotent in comparison to imagination.
All that happens through imagination; nothing happens through
reason. First it happens through imagination; then reason comes in
and figures it out, that's okay. Reason comes only secondary: it
gives explanations, analysis, makes things clear, de-mystifies
things, but nothing ever happens through reason.
Just the other day I was reading about Albert Einstein. He says that
his theory of relativity didn't happen through reason. He relates a
very strange phenomenon. He says, 'It happened in my body... it was
kinesthetic.' He says, 'Obviously, naturally, I was very much
puzzled.' He could not figure out what was happening. It was
something of a bodily sensation and he could not even find where to
put it, how to pigeon-hole it, into what category, and what concepts
to use for it.
For months he remained dismayed but he continued to search and seek
to put it into rational terms. But this is very strange that he
says, 'It happened first in my body, a bodily sensation, and then
for months I had to find words and language and mathematical
formulae to put it in order.'
All that happens is intuitive. It is your power; please don't bring
that guru in! Nobody has power over you except yourself. You can
give this power to somebody, then he has power over you, but my work
here is really to make you free of all kinds of gurus.
I am not a guru, at the most a friend, and I would like you to be
unburdened of all the gurus... and I am included! If you start
giving power to me, I don't like it. It is your power. Because if I
accept - and it is very flattering... When you go and give some
power to somebody it is very flattering to him, he will not be able
to reject it. He will accept it with a smile. You are falling into
his trap on your own. Why should he say 'This is your power'? Gurus
have exploited people as much as leaders have... but these are not
really gurus.
In the East we have two words, 'guru' and 'satguru'. The guru is
just a teacher, the satguru is the master. The master is one who
makes you utterly free of all kinds of entanglements, who makes you
really free of all kinds of bondage. He will not allow you to put
any kind of projection on him; he will not function as a screen.
It is your imagination and that very imagination is telling you to
go away, to do this and that. That imagination will create many
troubles for you because the imagination is there, the power is
there, but you are not yet in a state of meditation. Imagination
becomes very destructive if there is no meditative quality around it
- then it can go berserk.
The same imagination can become madness. Madness is imagination gone
berserk, that's all. Mad people are very imaginative people: they
could have been great poets or painters or inventors or mystics.
Many mad people have the qualities of the mystics and all the
mystics have the qualities of mad people; it is the same
imagination.
Imagination alone is dangerous, imagination plus meditation, then
you are in a right balance. Then the meditation will never allow you
to go beyond the limit and it will use your power of imagination in
a creative way.