Swami Chetanananda

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Questions and Answers with SWAMI CHETANANANDA

Question: What about judgments of yourself and others?

Swami Chetanananda: Judgments are a kind of conditioning that you're carrying with you into every new and creative activity. They're simply a limitation that you place on yourself and a limitation that you place on others. Most of our judgments about other people are completely wrong. They also completely obstruct our capacity to connect to and participate in the life that is around us. And the very act of judging other people is a denial of ourselves. It's our competitive nature to want to make judgments of other people-to get the angle on the person-and that defines the limits of our interactions with them. And that's sad, because there's always so much more that's possible.

If we meet the circumstances of our life with an open heart and an open mind, then we have the possibility of becoming increasingly enriched-and also enriching others. What we should try to do, with every single person we meet, is to discover them, and in the process of discovering them, to discover something new about ourselves.

Question: Can you talk about free will and our ability to make choices?

Swami Chetanananda: We all have the power to choose, but because of our karmas we have certain inclinations. Because of the vibration that we carry within ourselves, we are magnetized to see the world in a certain way, to see ourselves in a particular limited way, and to act out these limitations in the field of experience. But we always have the freedom to choose-always.

One of the most basic choices that we have is the power within ourselves at any time to change our state. In recognizing that power and being thoughtful enough, self-aware enough to change our state when it is appropriate to do so-when you find yourself getting smaller and smaller and smaller around anything-then that's when a whole array of possibilities start to present themselves within yourself. A perfect example is that as you become increasingly skillful in your work, there are suddenly possibilities available to you which you never could have appreciated starting out.

After having the ability to recognize your own contraction, then you need to have the discrimination to know what choices will allow you to expand and awaken for you an ever-increasing range of motion, an ever-increasing array of possibilities. So there's free will, and you express it on a moment-by-moment basis by first changing yourself and then conscientiously expressing that change within yourself throughout your whole environment.

Question: How do we make good choices?

Swami Chetanananda: Making good choices is mostly a matter of luck. What you have to do is have some good discipline. You have to be disciplined in your daily life. That can never do you wrong. And you just have to be quiet and go with your instincts, because the minute you get too cerebral about making choices, than all of the spontaneity and creativity is gone out of it, and you end up making some decision based on tension or fear or insecurity rather than being forward-looking and trying to relate to something beyond the shift that you're making. Keep your eyes on where you're going and keep your discipline in your day and stay loose.

You don't actually have to think about choices, but you may have to try to feel them out a little bit. When you're faced with a decision, you can try to envision how things play out from it. You can just walk through it, see how it feels, try to feel out the obstructions that are there. You don't calculate any of the angles. You just look and see how it feels and what problems are in it that you might anticipate.

You keep it really simple. It's a process that you do in a state of deep relaxation that's completely free-floating and open. Just try to feel into the choices and see what feels right. After you've worked that way for a while, you get good at it. I wouldn't get overly cerebral about the process, because you just make yourself crazy, and then when the time comes for the shift and all the stress of whatever movement is thrown on top of it, inevitably you will make bad choices and fail. Just go do it, and go do good work every day, and keep your sight fixed on why you're making this change in the first place, and things will tend to work out okay.

Question: What do you do if you're angry or frustrated or disappointed?

Swami Chetanananda: I suggest you sit down and just allow yourself to feel it, and then let go of it. We have the idea that all great saints were beyond any kind of pain, and they lived in some blissful state all the time, and that just isn't true.

One of the important first steps in achieving liberation is allowing yourself to feel all of your frustrations and your disappointment and your anger and whatever else, but not to express it. You can feel it, but as much as you can, you simply continue to digest that strong energy, you draw it increasingly deeper inside you, and in the process, you practice loving your life-as it is. One of the reasons so many great saints went to the mountains, forests, cremation places, etc. was to be rid of all of the circumstances that cause anger and frustration and disappointment, so that they could be by themselves. And they found that there's nothing to blame it on.

It's only our ego-clinging that binds us to anger and frustration and disappointment. Our spirit is always completely well. Our inner self has no problem. It has no deficiency; it has no need. Our inner self has everything. Instead of acting out our anger and frustration and disappointment in the form of reaching for achievement and material satisfaction, spiritual life is about being in touch with that dimension of you which is completely well, and allowing that dimension to express itself in your life.

 

Question: You've said we can deal with challenges and difficulties in our lives by following the energy of the situation. Can you explain that more?

Swami Chetanananda: First of all, you find the flow within yourself. You don't find it outside you. In every day of your life, lots of energy is going in different directions, but those energies operating in the field of your awareness find their balance point in you. So that's where you start. You find that balance point in stillness, and when you have found it, there will be a shift that happens within you. As that shift happens, a new energy arises within you. It represents the change in your own creative energy as everything in your whole field is brought into balance. It's that energy that you follow. You don't follow any external forces-you'll just get tangled up in that.

The stillness that I'm speaking of is found in the complete openness of your heart. It's a stillness that you have experienced in a moment of some extraordinary connection with someone or in an extraordinary moment when your heart is completely open and you are so joyous and clear and quiet at the same time that the pulse of time ceases to affect you. That stillness even stills the pulse of time. That's very big. It is a very intimate and profoundly transcendent, unbelievably joyous moment that exists within you always. So the work that's to be done is to come into contact with that, in some fashion. It's not the same from one time that you are aware of it to the next. It doesn't feel the same. You shouldn't look for the same feeling over and over again. But just to be there and to release yourself completely into that simplest and most special place within you releases a possibility in you that is an unending miracle.

Question: Are evil and suffering one end of the spectrum of what we experience as a result of the freedom we're given?

Swami Chetanananda: The "evil" thing is hard for me to buy into. I used to watch nature programs on TV, and I would see the cheetah pounce on the Thompson's Gazelle and eat it, and ask myself, "Is that evil?" Should we attribute to most of mankind a different kind of instinct or intelligence than that? If anything, people are more alienated in their environments. It's all about eating and being eaten. It's not evil, but it's sad because people do have such a deeper and more profound range of self-expression that's available to them.

The thing about suffering is that suffering is either completely pointless and has no meaning whatsoever, or it's about growing. The distinction is what you do about the suffering. You either become entombed in it, in the tension and self-rejection and hardness that suffering brings about in our whole energetic mechanism, or you have the great good fortune to somehow understand that there is a place in you deeper than suffering and you can go there and draw the energy of that suffering to that deeper place. And then suffering is about growth.

Look at an old tree. Look at its surface. It is cracked and torn, and yet completely alive and vital. On the surface we suffer, and we suffer for the chance to grow. That chance is one that so few people choose. Mostly we choose to become hard-hearted and closed and whatever follows from that. You cannot imagine the depth of potential that is within you and that is available if you choose it.

Don't get too wrapped up in evil and suffering, because they just happen. This is not to diminish other people's pain, but why get wrapped up in it? You will just sink like a stone, and you can't help anybody when you are swimming in the same sludge that they are. So be compassionate toward everyone and loving toward those that can accept and be responsible for it. Instead of looking at the suffering as we go through our day, do what you can to be in the rich place within yourself and to enrich the lives of the people whose lives your life touches.

Question: Can you talk about finding one's true best path?

Swami Chetanananda: That just comes from wanting to grow. Your true path is inside you. As soon as you decide that you've had enough of this garbage and that there has to be a better way and you have to find it, and you hold that strongly in your heart, then your path will start to appear. The fog separates and there it is right in front of your feet, and all you have to do is walk it, which unfortunately is something that many people are too fearful to do.

There is some work in it. You have to put forth some effort, but with that effort, from within yourself, a whole new life can come out of you. And it's really from within you that it comes out. No matter what it looks like, it's coming out from you. So sit down and do it.

Question: What do you mean by "spiritual"?

Swami Chetanananda: Spiritual is that part of us that is beyond our bodies and beyond our mind and is what I consider to be the energetic essence of a human being. Spiritual is the power that allows our mind to exist and animates our body. It is the power behind all our cognitive capacity. That is our spiritual dimension.

My own experience is that the energetic essence of a human being that I was speaking about is completely interdependent and it is one. What I mean to say is that there are not many souls in the world, there is only one soul, and that soul is the essence of Life itself. All of these different bodies manifest on the surface of that as the most superficial and gross manifestation of that one power of life, in very much the same way that the waves manifest on the surface of the ocean. Waves are coming and going, arising and subsiding constantly. Their shapes and sizes are different, and the frequency is different. There are many different forms, but there never is a wave that is in any way separate from the ocean on whose surface it manifests.

If that is true, then fear is really the issue that every human being confronts when we are having the experience of our separateness and the limitation of our resources available to us as a human being struggling in a world of limited resources. But if you have a different perspective, if you are able to have the experience of your spirit, that power which is within you, and you have the experience of its vastness, then the resource that is available to you is a very vast resource. The issue of dying almost doesn't exist anymore. If there is only one thing, and that one thing is Life Itself, then the arising and subsiding of your physical body is an effect of your existence and not the source of it.

So the purpose of a spiritual endeavor is to rise above your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions and detach yourself from whatever past experience you've had to look deeply, carefully into the present and the nature of your cognitive capacity, and the nature of both your personal experience and all experience. You come to have a sense of the spirit, and then the fear of death is something that dissolves, because you see that the one thing that is persistent in this world is life, and that death, rather than being an end to life, is an effect of life and a punctuation point in the paragraph of living.

Question: What is reincarnation? Does the essence of a person come back?

Swami Chetanananda: There was an article in the science section of the New York Times a while ago about the latest insights into memory and how memory is basically a protein that forms. The reason we go into deep sleep is that that's the time when the proteins form and are reorganizing themselves. Every time we have a new experience, the whole field of our memory is reorganized by its addition. In other words, we're not who we remember ourselves to be. We have this sense, but lots of people live in denial of it.

The article discussed these proteins and their formation and organization, and mentioned that some organizations within the government have been pursuing enzymes that specifically dissolve those proteins. Basically, they can take away your entire memory. Without our memory, the whole notion of a transmigratory soul starts to implode.

What we are-and I think this view is consistent with the view of the traditional medical systems of Asia-is an energy field. We are an energy field that has poles and circulation in it, just like any magnetic field does. The circulation within this magnetic field condenses as the energy channels in our body, which are the basis of the healing systems in India, China and Japan, and so on, and are the basis of acupuncture as well.

The Buddhists, the Hindus and the Taoists all embrace some idea of reincarnation, and while on a superficial level that notion of reincarnation is very comforting, I think the sophisticated people within these religious traditions understand that what transmigrates is not a memory but a vibration. The vibration that is this magnetic field is what differentiates us from each other in the larger field of life, and based on this vibration, our whole life comes to us. The cells organize themselves according to the structure of this magnetic field. They communicate with each other based on this magnetic field. That's how all differentiation evolves.

When we talk about spirit, it is that individuated energy field that still exists. It is condensed, like a wave is condensed on the surface of an ocean. It is the vibratory quality of that energy field that is the source of any transmigration so that a certain density of vibration, a cellular structure and physiology, continues to reassemble itself around these energy fields over and over again. And the memory is the sum of your life experience-how you feel about yourself is the ultimate memory. If you leave this world in a state of confusion, disappointment, despair or anything like that, then that is the vibration that carries forward.

The point of a spiritual practice and the discussion of liberation or enlightenment in Hinduism and Buddhism is that they believe that by working in this energetic field that we are, we can refine the system to the degree that the frequency is so refined that it does not support any cellular structure at all. At that point, that level of refinement, it expands into the very subtle background energy field from which all experience arises.

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