Once upon a time, one of the disciples asked, "How can I see you as you really are?"
"As you will see the constant happening into the nothingness, same way you can see me as I really am," replied the guru.
The disciple wasn’t perplexed by the answer. He felt exalted because that’s how he had been seeing during his meditative sittings, in bits and pieces, but he was looking for confirmation or corroboration as to whether his seeing was hallucinatory or really moving in the right direction.
Therefore, when he listened to his guru’s words, he felt ecstatic. He pleaded, "And how do I stay put in the same way of seeing you as I really see you and as you really are?" "By practicing that which you should practice in your life for the rest of the duration when you are not sitting in meditation," replied his guru.
The seeker in the disciple didn’t inquire about anything further. This small piece of conversation gives us a clear picture of where and why we, the ones who are looking at life only intellectually, fail to see life as it really is, and how and who amongst us evolves to see reality as it really is. In the aforementioned dialogue, the disciple didn’t ask anything further because he had been receiving solutions to his problems and not merely the answers to his questions.
And, by focusing on the path during his inner journey so far while walking the path shown by the guru, he achieved the finer level of discernment through his personal experiences that allowed him to distinguish between an intellectual answer and a real solution.
He knew how intellectualising the conversation reduces it to a dry exercise and how deflection begins to occur in the inner journey, and he also knew how keeping the communication real paves the path towards self-realisation.
It is rare to find the guru despite his being all-pervasive, but rarest of the rare is to find the disciple who realises or mirrors the guru's all-pervasiveness. Self-realisation needs a mirror. And it is not an optional requirement.
Whatever is optional is never a real need. Those who look at self-realisation as an option never opt for it; only the ones who see it as a need go for it. This mirror is the only one in which we (seekers) see ourselves as we truly are. Seeing ourselves as we really are brings about the incidence/happening of liberation.