Guru Purnima in the Age of Influencers

Every year, on Guru Purnima, millions bow to their teachers.

Flowers are offered, feet are touched, mantras are chanted. Gratitude is expressed to the lineage that carried wisdom across generations.

Yet I cannot help but wonder if Guru Purnima has become more relevant today than ever before, not because we have more gurus, but because we have never lived in a world with so many competing authorities of wisdom. An the media and the medium made as open scene for anyone who is ready to switch from regular clothes to a saffron robe, a white coat or maybe nothing at all.

Some wear saffron robes. Others wear tailored suits. Others appear on Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, television screens, university stages, political platforms, or in white medical coats. They promise health, success, longevity, productivity, wealth, happiness, spiritual awakening, optimization, certainty.

The faces change, the scenario too, the mechanism remains the same.

I also say we should take responsibility for our choices; of people we follow and the information we are expose to. Let’s grow us. Because is always easier to our responsibility on someone else for our own petty actions.

Let’s create agency..while looking at this myriad of experts, influencers and new ages spiritual guides.

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1. The Old Hunger, Wearing New Clothes

Human beings have always searched for someone who knows. Someone who can reassure us that life is understandable, that suffering has a map, that uncertainty can be conquered. The authority of the father would say Sigmund Freud. The emperor would say my tarot deck…

This longing for a teacher is deeply human…we have a learning process in order to survive takes longer than for any other creature on this planet. I mean, we take almost one year to learn how to walk , comparing to a few minutes for a quadruped.

A child survives because it trusts its parents. A student grows because of a teacher. We learn language, music, medicine, and yoga because someone walked before us. We inherit civilization through transmission.

The problem has never been guidance…our deepest humanity is based on it.

The problem begins when guidance quietly becomes dependence…or even worse ..abuse.

Modern life has multiplied expertise. Doctors understand what most of us never could. Scientists devote their lives to questions beyond our reach. Skilled therapists, engineers, historians, and teachers possess knowledge that deserves respect.

Expertise is not the enemy.

But there is a subtle danger hidden inside every system of authority: the more we outsource our judgment, the less we exercise it… Little by little, we lose confidence in our own capacity to observe, question, participate, and discern. Nothing grows in the shade of a big tree

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2. Viveka — the Swan’s Discernment

Perhaps this is why the Sanskrit tradition places such importance on Viveka — discernment.

Not Suspicion.

Not Cynicism.

Discernment. The ability to distinguish appearance from reality, certainty from wisdom, charisma from depth.

The title Paramahamsa means “the supreme swan.” According to the ancient metaphor, the swan possesses the capacity to separate milk from water. Whether taken literally or symbolically, the image points toward the essence of spiritual maturity: learning to distinguish the essential from the superficial, the eternal from the temporary, the real from the projected. The juice of your information; Especially in a world flooded with information, discernment is a skill to be nourished.

Perhaps this is the true function of the Guru.

Not to replace our intelligence.

To refine it, tease it , awaken it…

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3. The Guru Who Needs You Back

There is another paradox that fascinates me.

A guru cannot exist without disciples. Just as an influencer cannot exist without followers. A leader cannot exist without those willing to be led.

Hegel understood something profound in his master–slave dialectic: the master depends upon the recognition of the slave just as much as the slave depends upon the master. Identity is relational.

Maybe this applies to spiritual life as well.

The disciple projects certainty onto the guru. The immature guru begins to believe the projection. One seeks answers. The other begins to enjoy being the answer. Both become trapped.

The tragedy is not false gurus.

The tragedy is forgetting that we participate in creating them, we legitimate them and we feed them with our attention, acceptance and participation.

The deepest teachers have always known this. Their role is not to gather followers. Their role is to make themselves progressively unnecessary…and disappear.

A good doctor teaches you to care for your health.

A good therapist strengthens your capacity to understand yourself.

A good yoga teacher brings you back to your own body and empowers you.

A true guru returns you to your own direct relationship with Truth.

Not because you no longer need teachers, but because you no longer need to abandon yourself in front of them.

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4. Every Fake Guru Is Also Your Teacher

This is the provocation…

The fake guru teaches you where your hunger lives…which desire he will feed you till you cling on him..is it lust, greed, ego, solitude, self-hate, low self-esteem, spiritual infatuation, naivety, delusions…

The manipulator teaches you where your boundaries end. And your self-esteem.

The narcissist teaches you where you abandoned yourself…where your empathy becomes stupidity and self-abandonment.

If that is true, even deception becomes initiation…through suffering. That if you ever awake from your own stupidity 😊Matter of chance.

Every false teacher is, secretly, a diagnostic instrument. He does not create the hunger in you — he locates it. The promise of certainty, the promise of shortcut enlightenment, the promise that suffering has a formula, none of it would work on someone who wasn’t already starving for exactly that. This is uncomfortable to admit, because it moves the story. It is no longer only he deceived me. It becomes: he found the exact door I had left unlocked.

The manipulator is a cruder teacher, but no less precise. He does not need charisma or scripture. He only needs to press, gently, until he finds the place where you say yes when you mean no. He does not invent that place. He inherits it — the way water finds the crack already present in the stone.

The narcissist is the hardest one. He does not simply take. He offers something first — a mirror that reflects you back as more fascinating than you have ever felt. And somewhere in the exchange, you begin editing yourself to keep the reflection flattering. That is not new behavior. It is old behavior, activated — a transaction you learned to make long before he arrived. He is not the wound. He is the finger that finds it.

The lasting work was never found in exposing him. It is found in mapping where your own hunger first learned its shape…and sit with the truth.

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5. Not Two: The Master Who Disappears

Osho pushed this same thought all the way to its edge.

In his telling, a disciple, in the truest sense, has no relationship with the master at all — because relationship requires two, and the disciple has become one with him. The reverse is just as strange: the master has no relationship with the disciple either, because the master, as a person, is no longer there to have one. That absence, Osho says, is the entire definition of mastery — not someone who has arrived at a title, but someone who has disappeared into presence…(le petit a de Lacan).

A person can be related to. A presence cannot. There is no longer a second point for the line to run between.

What looks, from outside, like a relationship is not togetherness in his language at all. It is not two people meeting in union. It is unity — the quiet collapse of the boundary that made “two” possible in the first place.

He goes further still, elsewhere: the master is not trying to be a master. He is working, patiently, to help the disciple stop being a disciple. Not to deepen the bond between them, but to dissolve it — until nothing is left standing on either side. Only presence, meeting itself.

Krishnamurti arrived at almost the same conclusion (even though he and Osho were not at all on the same philosophical debate, rather they deeply despised each other), from a completely different direction — not through mysticism, but through refusal.

As a young man he had been groomed for the role since childhood, discovered by the Theosophical Society, raised and trained to become the vehicle for what they called the coming World Teacher. An entire organization, the Order of the Star in the East, existed for the sole purpose of preparing thousands of followers to receive him. Devotion was already arranged. The disciples were already waiting.

In 1929, standing in front of three thousand of them at the yearly gathering built around his arrival, he dissolved the whole structure himself. No path, he told them, could lead to truth — not his, not any organizations, not any teacher’s. Followers could not be led there. They could only stop waiting to be led.

It is easy to read this as modesty. It was closer to precision. Krishnamurti was not declining the role of master because he felt unworthy of it. He was declining it because he understood, the way Osho understood, that the moment a structure of following exists, truth has already been replaced by belonging. An organization can hold a crowd together. It cannot hold two people in unity. Those are different kinds of contact entirely. He preached REBELLION.

Wherever a relationship still needs maintaining, a self is still being maintained on both sides of it.

This is why the guru who lingers, who curates the devotion, who needs the bowing to continue, was never finished teaching. And it is why the guru who disappears — not through absence, but through the collapse of the very distance a relationship requires — is the only kind whose teaching was ever real.

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6. The Inner Guru Laughs

Everyone imagines enlightenment as a summit. A place you finally reach, after enough discipline, enough teachers, enough surrendered years — and once there, you plant a flag: I have arrived.

Then one day the climber disappears.

Not dramatically. Not through some final teaching or transmission. The one who was climbing simply stops being findable. There is no one left standing at the top holding the flag, because the achievement required someone to receive it, and that someone has quietly gone missing.

The mountain laughs.

You laugh.

There was nowhere to arrive. There was no one who needed to.

The true Guru — inside or outside — was never in the business of handing out answers. That was only ever the disciple’s request, echoing back, mistaken for wisdom.

The true Guru’s real work is quieter and far less flattering:

He does not answer the question. He removes the one who kept asking it.

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Perhaps Guru Purnima is not merely a celebration of those who taught us.

Perhaps it is also a reminder to reclaim the part of ourselves that no teacher, no institution, no algorithm, no influencer, no ideology can ever replace.

Our capacity to see. To deeply look inside and outside…and notice..like in a a verry beautifull attuned piano..all the notes are becoming alive..

Our responsibility to discern, to have a critical thinking,

Our willingness to participate fully in the mystery of being alive from within.

The highest teacher does not ask us to remain at his feet. He reminds us that the light we recognize in him was never his possession. It was always waiting to be recognized within ourselves.

“We’re all just walking each other home” said Ramm Dass.. so why wouldn’t us just recognize the Guru in each other, the dynamic of teacher and the disciple living in all in our human relationships; And mostly the Relationship itself as the teacher, because ‘only in duality we find unity’ ..said Madeleine.