Imagine you’re in a room (physical or digital) with someone whose work changed the way you see. A long career behind them, books on shelves you’ve worn thin, ideas that rearranged something in you before you even knew what was happening. Their work told you that the way you’d been taught to see the world was one option among many, and not the best one. They gave shape to instincts you’d carried quietly for years. Because of them, you work differently. You make decisions differently. You imagine a different inheritance for the people who come after you.
You’re one of hundreds listening. And at some point, the floor opens up for questions.
An expert, or a guru?
Here’s what happens when people are given a microphone in front of someone like this. Lots of times they tell stories first. They might describe the moment they encountered the expert or the expert’s work as a moment that “opened a portal” in their life. They might say this person gave them “permission” to trust strange thoughts rumbling inside them, or to question a worldview they’d been raised inside without noticing. They might say they stand on the shoulders of this giant, that their entire professional life was made possible by a question this person validated decades ago. They call the expert a pathfinder, an elder, a teacher whose “stamp of approval” legitimized ideas the surrounding culture considered slightly crazy.
Before we even get to the questions, it’s clear how transformative the expert’s work is, how it impacted some person’s career, company, ability to act. People say with complete sincerity: thank you for existing, for helping bring meaning to my existence.
And that’s a guru. “Guru” is a Sanskrit term for a “mentor, guide, expert, or master” of certain knowledge or field. In its traditional sense, “guru” names a spiritual guide who helps the seeker discover potentialities the guru has already realized: an illuminator.
Sure, some “gurus” do turn out to be frauds or self-promoters or whatever. But here I am referring to an expert whose body of work has been so generative for so many people that they become a projector screen for other people’s unlived questions. And so instead of asking the expert a question they can actually answer, people turn to the stage and ask questions as if they were consulting an oracle.
What a guru can tell you
There are plenty of questions a guru can answer, and they’re worth asking. Some examples:
What moment or idea cracked your career open? What did you get wrong along the way, and how did you know? Who mentored you, and what did each one see in you before you saw it yourself? What are you certain about now, that you doubted for twenty years? What is worth preserving in your work when you’re gone, and what deserves to be discarded? Why did your particular life – the accidents, the luck, the timing, etc — produce this particular body of work?
These are questions about a lived path. They belong to the person who walked it. Ask them, and you’ll get something no one else can give you: the specific texture of a specific life spent creating the very brilliance that illuminated your life.
What a guru cannot tell you
Then there are the other questions. And no matter how humble and reverent a person is when they are asking, these questions have nothing to do with the guru at all.
Now, there are a hundreds of ways this could actually sound, based on the expert, the context, the person asking the question… but a lot of them kinda boil down to the same thing, which is basically, “You know my problem. How I should solve my problem?”
And no guru can ever truly satisfyingly answer a question like that, because the problems we perceive are ours to solve – that is part of why we perceive them in the first place. We may face similar challenges to our gurus, but when we ask about the challenges we face, and not the ones the guru faced, that is actually a “tell me about me” in disguise.
Your questions about you are yours to answer
In ancient spiritual traditions, the relationship between the guru and the disciple is initiatory, based in deep trust, through which the guru transmits an understanding they have already realized in their own life, and draws that same latent capacity out of the student. The guru’s role is more often described as removing ignorance rather than installing knowledge; paradoxically, to eventually render themselves unnecessary.
The critical distinction is that the guru’s wisdom does not replace the disciple’s journey. The guru reveals the door, but the disciple walks through, on their own path, with their own discoveries, and their own colors to weave into the tapestry of human existence. We all have our own gifts to give, alchemy to accomplish, wisdom to distill. Your guru knows what they know, and you are here to live something that is only yours.
When people treat a guru like an oracle, they give their power away to the oracle, to the external world, to whatever forces they perceive to stand in the way of what they want. And the very power being given away is usually exactly what people are learning to claim in their lives. No guru can make someone claim their power, life path, wisdom, agency – only we can do that for ourselves.
“How can I believe in what I am doing even if there is no evidence I can succeed?”
Okay so basically in context it sounds something like “your work, my work — bringing a different way of seeing into domains that resist it — do you believe we can win? Am I attempting the impossible?” Translation: “tell me it’s going to work so I can stop feeling scared.“
The question being asked is not “is the domain ready” where a guru can offer observations. The question is actually about the decision to act anyway, on the evidence of one’s own commitment alone. And a guru can’t give you that.
Even if someone blesses the attempt you are making in your life, that cannot help you meaningfully absorb the risk of your future disappointment. How will you grapple with the disappointment, if it comes to that? Do you trust what you are doing, regardless of what other people think or how it turns out? Can you feel the fear and do it anyways? That is just part of being alive and doing something that matters to you. That is the strength that is being cultivated here, and it belongs to the person asking the question.
“How do I deal with the intense emotions of caring about things the world around me doesn’t yet seem to care about?”
This might sound something like… “I feel grief and loneliness because I care about something the world doesn’t seem to notice. You’ve gone against the status-quo for many years. What is your medicine?” In other words: “you went through this already, can you just give me your coping mechanism so I don’t have to find mine?”
Sure, a guru might have found the courage to grapple with intense loneliness or grief by doing this, that, or the other, but each individual has their own personal relationship with loneliness and grief – that is why it is called loneliness, and that is why grief is grief, i.e. the experience of loss and separation. The consolation this person needs exists, but it isn’t stored inside another person because it grows inside and extends outward… from their own inner practice and relationship with themselves, to the relationships they tend, to the communities they build.
There are lots of ways to be with those feelings, to understand them, to transform them, to befriend them. What is grief here to show you about your desires, your vision, your being? How does loneliness help you deepen your relationship to yourself? What brings you comfort and hope now, and how can you grow that? No guru can tell you the answers to those questions.
“What do we do, when the powerful people in the world are failing to lead?”
Maybe someone says… “The people in power have failed us. The leaders are absent. What should we do?” But what they are really saying is: “someone else should fix this, and they’re not fixing it, and that seems unfair.“
If the only people who can make any meaningful change are failures, well, isn’t that a pretty self-defeating way to look at the world? Sure, they got elected or whatever but why does that supersede the power of the individual, of the collective? Didn’t we give them the very powers they wield?
When all we can do is look outside and ask “who is driving the bus???” we completely miss the fact that we, also, have the ability to drive. So why not take the steering wheel?
The longing for a genius or a leader to rescue the situation is often the mind’s way of hiding from how heavy it feels to simply be one more person who has to act. But what about mutual aid and collaborative networks being the foundation of how life thrives? There is no overlord who can take that away, no matter how powerful they seem.
What is your responsibility? And what are you waiting for?
“What if I never see the outcomes of my actions in my lifetime?”
People be like: “Communicating a different way of seeing keeps failing. Why is it so hard and will we see the shift in our lifetimes?” It’s kinda similar to the first one, but with a slightly different flavor: reassure me my effort will be rewarded and witnessed before I die.
I wonder, why does one need that reassurance? What does it mean to be “successful” in the pursuits of changing the world, and what outcomes are we hoping to achieve before we die, especially when the fate of our species isn’t dictated by any single one of us? What if “success” is simply the pursuit of a better world? What if “success,” or life itself, is way bigger than one little human life? (Spoiler alert: it is.)
Of course, people want to see the world change, and fast. And maybe we will. But does it matter, really, at the end of the day whether or not it does? Like would you really stop what you were doing to make the world a better place if someone said you wouldn’t get to see how it pays off, or read the end of the story? Or is a better world worth working for, regardless?
You get to decide what is worth doing for you, and for future generations. No one can create that clarity for how to spend your time in this life except you. Because the fact is, we can’t be certain how the story ends. We are sweet little instruments in the grand orchestra of life, and it will keep playing long after we’re gone. But can you enjoy the music?
The guru is you-you 💖
If you ask a real guru these sorts of questions, what you’ll probably get is kindness and generality. “Connect with community.” “Slowly, we’re making progress.” Gentle deflections, universal truths… and maybe, if you’re lucky, some questions right back at you.
The guru can illuminate the path; they cannot walk it for you. And the delicious thing about these questions is that the answer is already baked inside them. If you’re asking “how do I believe in my work?” some part of you already knows your own belief, and yours alone, is necessary. If you ask “who will comfort me?” some part of you already knows comfort and how to grow it. If you’re wondering who will lead? — it’s probably you. And if you want to know, will I see the reward? — well, if you’re doing something that matters to you, you know the answer doesn’t actually change anything.
So, en somme: hi cutie, the guru is you! Now stop asking smart people questions they can’t answer and start being the oracle of your own darling life. It’s kinda fun!!!
Authors Note: This essay began as a personal reflection on a presentation I witnessed. A rough sketch based on my outline was developed with the help of AI tools (Lumo, Proton’s AI assistant), which contributed structuring suggestions, extracting the original questions and expanding the “questions underneath the questions” and drafting an initial guru definition using a transcript of the recording that inspired the essay. I then reworked, rewrote, and personalized the material substantially, ensuring the voice, the argument, and the interpretive choices are my own. I believe in transparent attribution when AI tools contribute to creative work, both to acknowledge the collaborative process and to recognize that AI systems are built upon the collective knowledge and labor of countless human contributors.
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