This excerpt on the relationship of the guru and the chela is from a Summit University lecture by Elizabeth Clare Prophet delivered on January 8, 1979, at Camelot, Los Angeles County, California and published in the 2000 Pearls of Wisdom Vol. 43 No. 39.

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If I were to answer the question What is the greatest gift of the Ascended Masters? I would immediately reply that it is their gift of themselves, their person, the person of the Guru. The teaching is really not a teaching without the person.

What is the person? The person is the integration of the teaching, of the Trinity of God and of the Mother into a living, moving, breathing self-conscious awareness by the interaction of the person and the teaching.

This is the great gift of Jesus Christ—not that he was the Christ but that he was Jesus. He was the Christ before Abraham was, as the eternal Son of God. He, by free will, responded to the command of God and became the man Jesus. The Word was made flesh as he became a person, personifying a light that would be incomprehensible without the person.

The more you walk the path and pass through initiations that test the absolute capacity of your being, the more you are grateful for the person. In the midst of the darkest night you can always remember a person, but you can’t remember a vapor, an ether, some kind of ethereal, metaphysical concept of God. You can remember the smile of your teacher and you can remember that a person, the Guru, loved you personally.

The love of Guru is the love of God—infinite, beyond the capacity of any of us to comprehend, for we are totally, completely loved. We may read in a book that God loves us, but when you meet a person in the flesh who loves you totally, as you know God loves you and as Jesus said to his disciples, “that ye love one another as I have loved you”—then you are sure.