Divine Life lived on earth by the illumined human being is not an isolated miracle but represents what we can be.

Part 3:  Guidance from Soul Masters

Guidance from the illumined soul master, the rebbe or tzaddik, is considered essential in the Hasidic Way.  While repeating all life is God’s Life,  we could drown in our own selfish tendencies.  The spiritual guide must show us how to swim through the powerful waves of Divine Life, stripping away our secret fears and obsessions, allowing us to discover our own natural buoyancy or ecstasy.  The tzaddik, such as Zusia’s feeing of the birds shows his disciples how to live and move in God’s life, providing a teaching deeper than words can convey.  Writes Elie Wiesel:  Leib, son of Sarah…proclaimed to anyone willing to listen:  I came to the Maggid not to listen to discourses…I came to watch him tie his shoelaces.”   These illumined beings are the living Torah, God’s invitation to humanity to awaken into Divine Life.  Wiesel describes the tzaddik:   He is what we can be, want to be.  He is the chosen one who is refused nothing, in heaven or on earth.  God is angry?  He can make God smile.  This intimacy of the tzaddik with the Divine amounts to a sharing of God’s own nature.  And this Divine Life lived on earth by the illumined human being is not an isolated miracle but represents, as Wiesel suggests, what we can be.

Each disciple of the tzaddik aspires to live God’s Life, but the process of discipleship is long and arduous, involving total trust in the illumined teacher.  Continues Wiesel:  His followers owe him blind and unconditional allegiance…To question the Rebbe is worse than sin; it is absurd, for it destroys the very relationship that binds you to him. This veneration of the spiritual teacher releases one from the sense of personal control.  In the path of ecstasy, one does not take the ultimate responsibility to establish what is coherent and what is not, but plunges into Divine Presence.  It is absurd, in Wiesel’s terms, for the disciple to question the authentic tzaddik, or Enlightened soul master, as it is superfluous for the ecstatic to question Divine Presence, simply because there can exist no duality of questioner and questioned when God’s Life alone is being lived.  The master becomes for the disciple an actual revelation of Divine Presence.

One cannot rationally evaluate the Divine, which is pure mystery.  As Wiesel continues:  If the Rebbe’s behavior appears bizarre, it means that the Hasid does not possess the required powers of understanding…A superior, almost a perfect being…he uses his mysterious powers to redeem the sins of  his generation.  The Enlightened being, or tzaddik, is a redeemer, a full reflection on the earthly plane of the Divine.  Yet the tzaddik possesses a complete human nature, which, though released or transcended, is warmly and expressively present.  The presence in the illumined being of a full human nature is the vehicle for God’s redeeming power, which must be focused fully through our earthly life in order to transfigure it.  Wiesel remarks about the tzaddik:  His suffering confers a meaning upon all suffering; and when he eats, he cleanses the very act of nourishing the body.  Human nature is thus cleansed or freed to be a perfect natural channel for the expression of God’s Life.

The Hasidic soul master uses clairvoyance and other powers which we encounter in the lives of shamans and saints from all cultures.  Wiesel tells of the clairvoyant guidance offered by the Baal Shem to a boy of eleven:  The Baal Shem looked at the boy searchingly and began to tell him a story that some of those present forgot immediately and whose hidden meaning eluded the others; only he, little Menahem-Mendl, remembered the tale in all its details and understood its significance: it was his life’s story, from its first to its last day…Later, whenever his health worried his friends, he would reassure them:  “I still have one half, or one quarter of the way to go.”  The Baal Shem perceived in accurate detail the entire spiritual unfoldment of this boy.  This is why obedience to the guru, or tzaddik, of this stature is not an abdication of responsibility but an opening into a deeper sense of coherence.

I once heard a first-hand account of this guiding and redeeming power which is focused through illumined human beings in every culture.  Swami Satprakashananda told me of being a young boy when the famous monk Vivekananda visited East Bengal in 1901.  At the arrival ceremony, there were thousands crowded around Vivekananda, who was so garlanded that the boy could glimpse only the top of his head from a distance.  But this twelve-year-old child’s longing to meet the great saint face to face was fulfilled in a remarkable way some days later, when he went to the riverbank to see the country boat in which Vivekananda had taken a short cruise.  Much to the boy’s amazement, he saw the famous disciple of Ramakrishna pacing back and forth in the cabin of the boat, which was surrounded by windows.  There was no one with him.  The child sat on the sloping mud bank of the river, at eye level with the cabin, and watched Vivekananda moving like a lion, a three-day growth of beard enhancing the intensity of his expression.  Suddenly the saint stopped and walked to the open window nearest the boy. Emphatically and purposefully, Vivekananda placed his elbow on the window sill and his chin on his palm.  He stared at the boy for perhaps two minutes and then returned to pacing.  The boy never met Vivekananda again but eventually became a monk in the order founded by Vivekananda, and an illumined scholar of the Advaita Vedanta philosophy, which was Vivekananda’s own Special focus.  This is the power of the tzaddik:  One gaze confirmed and energized the entire spiritual unfoldment of that boy of twelve.  In the presence of such a person, our presuppositions are dissolve.  There is no need for an effort at surrender, nor are there pressing doubts about the teacher’s authenticity.  This is the transmission from the Divine through the tzaddik.

The ultimate manifestation of the Divine through the human is the Messiah.  The followers of the Hasidic Way are always expecting the appearance of the Messiah.  This poignant expectancy is an intense spiritual practice that purifies the entire daily consciousness, transforming conventional or mundane thinking into an ecstatic waiting in Divine Presence.  Since the coming of the Messiah is regarded as imminent, this practice generates a spiritual mood that resembles the inwardness and expectancy of a pregnant woman.  Carrying the image further, we are all pregnant with the Messiah.  As our spiritual life ripens, we can feel the Messiah Nature moving within us.  The tzaddik has actually given mystical birth to this inner Messiah, whose Presence now radiates through the illumined master in a way that is intuitively perceptible by the sensitive Hasid or disciple.

To the tzaddik, the Messiah nature manifests fully, though secretly, in the present while still offering the promise of universal manifestation in the future.  Having committed oneself to the purifying practice of waiting for the Messiah as a future manifestation, one is gradually transformed by the realization that the Messiah has secretly come, not simply through each authentic soul master but also through every person who is faithfully waiting.  This realization of the Messiah Nature mystically present at the core of our human nature is what actually constitutes the tzaddik.  Knowing that Divine Presence is perfectly, though secretly, expressed through humanity, the soul master can heal and sanctify simply by envisioning our intrinsic wholeness and sanctity.

The manifestation of the Messiah Nature through the tzaddik is subtle, recognized only by ecstatic lovers of God.  Disguised from the world, appearing even as a tramp or a madcap, the tzaddik carries on the mystical function of the Messiah, the regathering or reawakening into conscious Godhead of the sparks of Divine Nature that are scattered as creation and remain unconscious or dreaming.... 

Simultaneously with the mystical appreciation of the Messiah Nature transmitted through the tzaddik, there continues to exist the expectation of the powerful, kingly Messiah.  When he appears, the entire planet will be transformed in a flash of illumination, not just inwardly, as is already occurring, but outwardly and openly.  No matter how many centuries pass according to human reckoning, this universal revelation remains always an imminent future.  The Hasid lives with this future Event so intimately that it pervades the present.  Wiesel describes Rebbe Menahem-Mendl:  Like all Hasidic Masters, he lived wholly in his expectation of the Messiah’s coming.  Mornings he would go to the window, look outside and sadly remark:  “He has not yet come, for the world is still the same.”   The secret inner Messiah Nature which awakens in the illumined tzaddik sleeps within all living beings or sparks of the Divine.  When Menahem-Mendl remarks of the Messiah,  He has not yet come, for the world is still the same, this does not mean that the tzaddik fails to experience the inward presence of the Messiah Nature.  It simply means that the awakened rebbe realistically perceives human beings still living in their conventional, unillumined consciousness, although the Messiah Nature is secretly irradiating all beings, ready to manifest to individuals the moment they open in holy ecstasy.

There are two aspects of the Enlightened soul master, as there are for all human beings:  Messiah Nature and human nature.  For those who have not yet experienced deep spiritual awakening, the Messiah Nature is to one degree or another obscured by the human nature.  When the illumined person becomes aware of the Divine Presence as the core of human nature, he or she does not transcend the human context, which involves unavoidable limits of perspective, both cultural and personal.  Regardless of these limits, however, the Enlightened, or God-realized, person is genuinely one with the Divine, as a particular tongue of flame is not separate from the fire.

See Also:
Part 1: Holy Ecstasy
Part 2: Understanding Suffering
Part 4: Awakening to our divine nature
Part 5: Spiritual Life on an Earthly Plane