Everything depends on the disciple. When a mother has a baby, her baby is beautiful, ugly, healthy or paralyzed. Is the baby bad for the mother? Whatever may be the state of the baby, the mother has only one attitude for it: love, affection, care. She does not base her affection on the actual condition of the child. It is the same way with the guru and disciple relationship.
Many times disciples project themselves onto the guru and then the guru is full of mistakes. There are many gurus who behave in a peculiar way, especially with the disciples who live with them. They are never kind to the disciples. They are never straight with the disciples. They keep the disciple always under disturbance. That is the training, isn’t it? If the guru is kind, affectionate and always lenient, how can the disciple improve?
For example, how do you make a table? The carpenter cuts the wood, bit by bit. It is a painful process for the wood. Ultimately you have nice furniture. How do you make a shirt? You have to cut the material with scissors. If only the piece of cloth could feel, it would cry at every cut of the scissors.
Reorientation of a personality can never take place unless there is a process of medication: sometimes affection, sometimes harsh words, sometimes love, sometimes contentment, sometimes praise and sometimes insults. This is how to train the undeveloped mind of a disciple. It is not only the guru who does it; you find the same thing in the world. This is the law of nature. If everybody only loves you, praises you, gives you affection and protection, you will never grow. You will not become intelligent. If sometimes you get love, at other times somebody hates you, somebody frightens you, somebody protects you, the mind will undergo a state of fluctuation. Awareness becomes broad. This is the law of nature and this is the law of a guru.
When there is love, there is no mistake. I believe in this. You see the mistake when love ceases to exist. For an intelligent disciple, there is no mistake in the guru. When the disciple is wavering and dwindling in his awareness, he can even see a mistake when his guru is snoring in sleep.
11 September 1980, Zinal, Switzerland