Any one time on this earth, there may be numerous true Saints, true Gurus, but the one you accept as your Divine guide, that becomes your Guru. So there may be many Divinely realized Saints who are beyond maya and who are established in Divine bliss. They are mayateeth.
Another general understanding of what a Saint is or what a Guru is, is the one who is beyond maya. We are all mayadheen. We're under maya. And God is mayadhish. He's the ruler of maya. But when we attain God, when we reach God, we become mayateeth. We become beyond maya, or you can say we are all atma. We're all souls.
God is paramatma. He's the life giver of all the souls and resides within every soul. So He's called the supreme Soul. The atma who reaches paramatma becomes a Mahatma. Another term which is used very loosely nowadays. Anyone who's dressed like this is called a mahatma. But the true definition of a mahatma is the one who has attained God. So out of all the true mahatmas, out of all the true mayateeth Gurus, the one you accept as your Divine guide on the path to God is called your Guru.
Although all God realized Saints are qualified to be Gurus, yet they don't all give the exact same thing, because there are Gurus who have attained the Divine bliss of formless God and have attained the Divine bliss of Almighty God in His personal form. In other words, they have attained the bliss of Vaikunth abode of Maha Vishnu, God Shiv, Durga, and all of their affiliated Almighty forms. There are Gurus who have attained the Divine love of Bhagwan Ram of Saket lok. There are Gurus who have attained the Divine love of Dwarikadish Shri Krishna of Dwarika abode. There are those who have attained the Divine love of Radha Krishna of Golok and Vrindavan.
As you've learned in this intensive, these are all unlimited forms of the Divine bliss. Yet within the unlimitedness there is also a difference of experience where going from formless God to the experience of Almighty God to the experience, the intimate experience, of the love of Ram or Krishna where you actually get to interact with Them and take part in Their leelas. There is something more added. Roop Goswami says in his Bhakti-Rasamrita-Sindhu,
ब्रह्मानन्दो भवेद् एष चेत् परार्द्ध-गुणीकृतः ।
नैति भक्ति-सुखाम्भोधेः परमाणु-तुलाम् अपि ॥१.१.३८॥
Brahmānando bhaved eṣh chet parārddha-guṇīkṛitaḥ |
Naiti bhakti-sukhāmbhodheḥ paramāṇu-tulām api. (1.38)
He's comparing one to another. He's comparing brahmanand, the bliss of formless God, to the Divine love of Radha Krishna. He says that if you take whatever brahmanand, which is itself unlimited, and multiply it by one pararth, (a pararth is 155,520,000,000,000) you still don't (parmanu tulamapi) even have one paramanu. You don't even have a tiny fraction of a particle of the ocean of Divine love bliss, which is Radha Krishna.
So even though brahmanand is unlimited, yet Saints who understand this hierarchy of the Divine experiences say that there's no comparison between the bliss of formless God and the bliss of the leelas of Radha Krishna. So different Gurus give what they've attained. They show the path to that type of Divine bliss which they have attained. So the Guru you accept as your own will guide you to attain what they have attained, plain and simple.
