"Guru is not the body" - (By Neelima)

Dear Ones, How long will I live! These are the words uttered by Sri Nannagaru during the discourse held at his house, Jinnuru. Hearing these words, devotees around him were shocked with despair. None of the devotees were ready to hear such a statement from Nannagaru and me being one among the crowd developed inexplicable pain and sorrow in the heart which continued for hours even after the discourse.

I have locked down myself in a private room after returning to my hometown which is nearby from Jinnuru. The pain in my heart started melting into endless sorrow for several hours of that night and had burst into tears like gushes in the river. Due to my longing towards him and the attachment I had with him, I wasn't ready to accept such words and bear the burden of this separation.

I started conversing in my heart with him again and again that night in half sleep -

“Oh Nannagaru! please don’t leave me and go, what shall I do on this earth without you? Please take me away with you, when you leave your body I cannot stay here without you. Then my soul started pouring questions on him for his words of departure. You have incapacitated me in the nest of your overwhelming love and joy, now is it justifiable leaving me alone in this world? I am reaching Jinnuru tomorrow, you are answerable to this dreadful separation"

The next day when I sat before him along with other devotees at his house in Jinnuru, he gasped at me as if he listened to what all happened in my heart the other day and said thus -

"Guru is not the body. If you treat Guru as the body, then you are disrespecting him. He continued saying, devotee has to grow like a ripen fruit that falls on it’s own from the tree, then only Guru gives him liberation."

I've understood that I still have to be ripened in order to be fully collected by him

Due to his selfless love we often get into the trap to have him with the body forever and enjoy his presence being with him, but Guru is omnipresent and not limited to the body. In order to transcend the physical attachment to mental sphere he voices out often times in me that - "He is not the body and he is hearing all of my thoughts from heart of the hearts"

This is one of my experience in the journey of awakening imparted to me by Sri Nannagaru.