This site will support your faith . . .
GottaGettaGuru.com™ will support your faith, not supplant it or undermine it in any way. In fact, we hope you will LIVE your faith and TEACH it by example with the help and inspiration of a Guru from your own faith tradition!
So, why should you get a guru?
We hope to help you more ACTIVELY love, serve realize the Oneness of All – isn’t that the message of every major world religion?
At its heart, GottaGettaGuru.com™ strives to serve as a CELEBRATION of the ENLIGHTENED, of the many Gurus – literally: those who dispel the darkness of an ego/self-centered life – those who have graced the earth with their incarnations in order to be living lights that dispel the dark clouds of ignorance, pain, suffering and death.
Perhaps you already “know” which Guru calls to you?
Perhaps you will find your Guru here. (If your Guru is NOT here yet, please email our CEO at: RamGian@GottaGettaGuru.com and ask that your Guru be added!)
Either way, expect to be challenged, and to be called repeatedly to ACTION and to WORK. But the benefits will be immeasurable and eternal! When you are ready, check out the “Cirriculum” pages on our Teaching Site (on one of our Guru pages) and dig in!
How do GottaGettaGuru.com™ plush Gurus help?
For millennia, mankind has produced images and icons of aspects of God or gods in order to find a way “in” to the spiritual world. Put another way: to help us find our way to the place inside ourselves where God dwells, we sometimes need help. It can be an image or not. It can be a mandala, an icon or murti, a painting, a stained glass window, a song, a poem, a chant, a mantra, a prayer or a plush Guru!
Here it is important to emphatically state again: as used in this work, these potent spiritual images are fashioned to helps us conceptualize an aspect of the infinite, indefinable, and indescribable, and we fashion them because remembering this aspect or incarnation of an aspect of God is important and helps us.
Scientifically speaking, they help us achieve in our minds the proper attitude or frequency (vibration) of thought, of consciousness. By proper, here, we mean achieving the precise wavelength that stimulates our glandular and nervous systems and helps tune of our bodies, not just our physical bodies, but all our bodies (e.g.: astral, etc.), to the wavelengths of light and energy of our object of devotion or meditation. Thus, we become an instrument, one that resonates with the heaven within, one that may also “tune in” like a radio to the music of the spheres, the Great Consciousness of the One, of God.
Having an icon or murti near, meditating with it as an object of focus, praying – not “to” it, but to the aspect or manifestation of God it represents – may help us access the spiritual within ourselves and thereby help us also intellectually grasp an otherwise difficult, if not intellectually impenetrable concept.
In sum, there are many scientific tools that may help us take a step towards knowing something about some aspect of the Divine while we work to experience an actual communion with the Divine within ourselves and spiritual icons are among them.
But, didn’t God prohibit all ‘graven images’ in the Bible?
For those stuck on this question (and those who have crossed swords with those who are stuck on this question) and want a few good answers, we offer this: Have you ever been accused of being an idolater, one who worships idols?
I’ll bet you have: by your ‘self’ – your own mind!
Have you ever been drawn to a spiritual icon or image, but hesitated and decided NOT to bring it home because it was “foreign” – and not your favorite, or usual way to worship or practice. True, felt drawn to it, but you didn’t want your husband or wife or mother to say: “What’s wrong with you. That doesn’t belong to us. Not in this house!”
Your prejudice and theirs may have kept you from something very beautiful and fulfilling: an aspect of God you have never before known!
Don’t limit yourself to aspect of God or one icon or image of the whole if other aspects or “parts” speaks to or call to you. Doing so makes YOU an idolater, one who limits God to one aspect!
God is omni-present, everywhere, so why stay in your little corner, stuck on your one aspect and, worse, telling yourself and others their icon or aspect is going to send them to HELL!
In this work, we PROMOTE images of aspects of God and icons of manifestations or incarnations of God’s Divine Word or Spirit, and icons and images of Masters and Gurus, in order to help others bridge their self-created differences and in order to help some people find a way to get closer to the unknowable entire God found within. Yet, we realize God can never be properly represented or fully described in words or by icons.
Trying to understand and get closer to God by such means is NOT a sin in our view, nor do we believe God ever prohibited it. Words, after all, are descriptions of images and actions, too. So, why would it be okay to describe things so we can get a mental picture of them, but not okay to get an actual picture of them? That makes NO SENSE!
That said, however, we are well aware many have taught that any icon is a bad icon, no matter what good it does, not matter how much you want to give it a hug!
Ironically, in this work we feel it is those who have the gall to claim to speak for God to everyone else have made themselves God and by so doing and making judgments about others it is they who are violating universal spiritual law and limiting God to only their myopic view! Doing so may be good for them, but it is not good for the us or for the entire, true God.
They also violate this law: Judge NOT lest ye be judged. Again, they often tell others that they must frequent their ‘store’ to the exclusion of all others or be judged and damned to Hell. This self-elevation by separation is and has been responsible for countless wars and acts of terror in God’s name and the maiming and murder of millions of innocents.
However, let’s NOT judge them for so doing lest we be in the same boat!
Let’s just set the record straight, and let to cards fall where they may (to mix metaphors) and agree that by telling others what to think about God and insisting there is only ONE WAY to read the Bible or any of the great scriptures, or to worship, we risk depriving those others and ourselves of the splendor of a much bigger God and maybe of ever achieving world peace. Doing thus limits the unknowable divine to just one view of God, making of the indescribable, enigmatic, universal Lord a mere common thing, even if a very uncommonly powerful common thing, and not a thing for the common good.
If you are still concerned about the Biblical or any other religious prohibition concerning icons, just remember the following is prohibited by the Bible and all great spiritual teaching: The reduction of God to a thing, to another “being” existing apart from all creation and separate from it and separate from all things and non-things. This is not really so much prohibited as just plain wrong, as in a mistake – not “sin” in the modern, western sense, but in it’s original sense: it misses the mark. It makes God, for instance, a very powerful old man in heaven who likes to make toys, we and the universe we live in being among the playthings. Thus, doing so is the “making a graven image of God” with words. It happens when we take a metaphor (‘Our Father, who art in heaven’) literally, making God an old man in heaven and reduces the teaching or prayer to the literal: God is a limited “old man,” a being, in a literal heaven.
Think about it! How silly does that sound?
Our plush Murtis are Spiritual Icon and as such should be treated with respect, not for what they are, but for what they represent. Find them at: www.GottaGettaGuru.com/store