The Disappearing Guru

The Disappearing Guru and the Master’s Conundrum

by Vito Mucci

There are quite a few jobs that self-destruct when completed. Jobs that are created to solve a problem should at some point be relegated to reserve status. While some jobs are fixable, job by job, like a bridge repairman or a wedding planner, some jobs that are coming into popularity are confusing because they seem to offer an odd relation to the idea of supply and demand.

Psychologist, addiction counselor, life coach, and personal guru are my favorites of these. These are all lovely career focus choices, but they aren’t for everyone. This doesn’t mean that they should be only for certain types of people, but that the knowledge contained in all of these, when applied to one’s life, should mean that there is one less person in the world that needs to be taught (theoretically, the more supply of healers, the less the demand for healing). Whether that ends up being the case or not is a case by case issue. The truth is that while there are 7 billion possible clients, the more we raise the amount of people treating the human condition, the less clientele we should be dealing with.

 
The Disappearing Guru

All of these careers should self-annihilate to one extent or another. That should be the goal. Unfortunately, that goal means that should we be successful as a group of counselors dealing with the problems of life, we should also be out of a job. Most people who get into this work as a career do not want to shorten or nullify their job, whether or not they have realized what an undermining reality that creates for their purpose.

One of the ways of looking at this is looking at psychologists, addiction counselors, and life coaches as “People who are helping someone learn to do ____.” That helps their efficacy and the demand for their services even after certain large scale problems have been dealt with. That brings us to the personal guru. After dealing with life’s purpose and how to go about living in harmony with that have been hashed out, he disappears. Why has the need for a personal guru not disappeared? As a society, we have not learned how to go about asking those questions and answering them for ourselves. That is the job of the guru; not to answer the questions, but to teach us how to find and answer the questions we have, so that we may engage and address our reality on our own, according to personally set standards that we have trust and confidence in.