If you want to climb a hill, you have to plod on yourself, but you also need the help of someone who knows the path, and who can lead you to the summit through the safest route. Similar is the role of the guru, the spiritual guide. Life abounds with numerous teachers. Every object, every occurrence, everything has a lesson to teach. But there is also the basic need for a personal guide, with whom one could forge a sense of belonging, repose absolute trust and confidence, and hold him in high veneration, so as to prepare oneself psychologically to reap maximum benefit from his spiritual guidance.
Expansion is the sign of life.
In nature there is nothing static. Everything in this universe is set on a pattern that conditions the evolutionary process, until a cycle of creation is completed and returns to the creator. Human life is a means through which numerous souls in bondage can find release, and return to their original source the supreme reality. The law of Karma or action and reaction sets in as soon as the soul finds a human form, for it is only man who is endowed with the faculty of reasoning between right action and wrong action, and, therefore, is held responsible for his fate. Then onward the momentum of man's individual evolutionary process is in his hands.