In the realm of thought, each text, each treatise that would have helped to shape and sharpen a person's intellectual growth is just taking him ahead by a few steps. and not necessarily upto the final destination, if at all there is one such point.
Gurus, Scripture, precedents... all these can lead us only to the extent they have covered the path themselves.. And in reality, no one has covered the complete ground, and if someone says that this or that Guru has reached the final stage, I would rather request him to define that ultimate.. and that question cannot be answered since nobody really knows what that ultimate is..
It is all like some blind persons defining an elephant's shape.
So trying to spell out words or dogmas assuming that the ideas given out by the external sources and records are final and unquestionable is a fallacy.. to which we tend to lull ourselves. It may be a comfort, but it militates against our progress towards free thoughts based on reason and truth alone..
For an uninitiated, even a sloka or a simple prayer may appear to be the final thing..
As he progresses, the thought processes also undergoes metamorphosis and he would find that what he perceived as the ultimate is really not so..
One progresses from a stage where one begs for physical comforts and even destruction of enemies through intervention of the divine, to more objective and reasonable stages, and then again he is supposed to enter the realms of sublimity in thoughts and action where the mundane, run of the mill affairs would appear to be of least significance..
And as one traverses through the stages, his mercenary or maniacal faith on any external source of knowledge or faith should disappear..
Yes, one just frees from the bondage of unquestioned dependence on anything, be it Vyasa, Prabhupada or any Vedic seer.. and pursues realization through his own mind and spirit..
True, the guru, scripture, precedents etc can be of the greatest help, and can act as source and motive forces for the progress in intellectual pursuit, but such vehicles fall short of utility at some stage or other..
One can use a car or train to travel on plain earth.. He can use airplanes to travel wherever air is available.. For further travels he has to use vehicles propelled by rocketry .. an so on..
At each stage, the vehicle suited for the earlier stage, and the vehicle so used, become redundant..
I do not say we should look down upon the redundant vehicle or spit on it as they cease to be useful, but it is not necessary, and it can be an impediment if we cling on to the vehicle of an earlier stage, as we jump to the next stage..
We see stages of the rocket being jettisoned as it carries the payload to its distant destination..
What I wanted to give as my humble view, is that a real thinker should never cling to or show excessive allegiance to anything just because it was valid or utilitarian at an earlier stage..
An infant can use a rubber sucker as a comforter but that is not useful even to a boy of one year.. and definitely silly for a grown up person..
To a person groomed in a fairly orthodox way, this view may look iconoclastic.. but there are no icons in the field of honest thought..
If one removes the religious frills, one would find that even Shankara could be called an iconoclast, if we watched the purity of his thought process, his complete lack of bias..