You have written a book and want to publish it. What will you do? You take the manuscript to the editor or publisher, he will read it and cross out sentences, remove inappropriate or superfluous pages, and chapters are shuffled from here to there. After editing is done it goes for printing. The book you had written has been changed by the editor to make it better, more understandable, cohesive, logical, to create links between different events and chapters, to bring personalities and different events together. The book is published in your name.
Now transpose this. You have a book of life, and according to your understanding, it is going nicely, no problem at all – good job, good career, good family, good children, good house, good factory. Everything is fine. You think you have the perfect manuscript to publish. You take your book to the guru, he looks at the book and says that this chapter is superfluous and that sentence is not necessary. When you visit your guru, your book is in the process of editing, all the time. The guru will tell you to do this and not do that. You are all the time in the process of being edited as is the book of your life, and therefore no book is being published. Life is a book.
This is the reality and you have to understand it in that manner. When the guru sees the book of life then the karma changes; editing of the book takes place by the guru. In regard to guru seva, it is the fulfilment of the editing. When the guru says, “No don’t do this,” it is not that the guru does not trust you. It is not a question of trust; it is the editing process that is happening in the manuscript of your book. In this process the guru has become the editor of life.
8 March 2008, Nasik