Swami Chetanananda
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A Talk by SWAMI CHETANANANDA
A New Starting Place
Nityananda Institute, Portland, OregonMost of us go through life conditioned to relate to the world around us on the lowest level available to us:
We react to the tension in our environment by getting tense ourselves. For example, when the level of tension in a situation rises, we react by getting angry or more intense. We look for some way to defend our own interests and prove how we are right. Yet however justified we may think we are, these reactions are only ways of becoming closed. Then we end up being people who are closed to Life.
Coming to a different understanding of love involves changing this conditioning and learning to respond from a new starting point. In the most general sense this means that, as a situation gets more tense, we learn to respond not with tension of our own, but with openness. We train ourselves to stay deeply open to every situation, no matter how difficult it may be to do so. When we can do this, we find that our own openness has the effect of transforming these situations in ways we never could have imagined.
Staying open is what I call a counter-intuitive response. It means that we learn to go against our initial gut feeling of how we should address a situation - a feeling which usually seems utterly natural and true. So going beyond it is not all that easy, because most of us have learned to rely on these gut feelings, or intuitions.
What we usually think of as intuition, however, is often nothing more than conditioning. It consists of the patterns we have developed as ways of relating to the tensions and pressures to which we have been exposed in our lives. Most of us have learned to trust these feelings. After all, if we can't trust our intuition, then what can we trust?
Yet just because these gut feelings seem like something that is intimately our own does not make them particularly conscious or intelligent. The problem with following these feelings is that we stand on our few successes to justify our many less fortunate efforts, skating over all the times that intuition doesn't really pay off.
When we operate according to a counter-intuitive logic, we start out by letting go of our initial impulse. If, for example, our response is to become tense, we first step back. Any tension is really nothing but creative energy that has become contracted. So we look for ways to respond to the situation as a form of creative energy.
A counter-intuitive response, for example, would be to let go, pull back, and start over, looking for a different point from which to proceed. If someone has said something you find unreasonable, you could step back and ask in an open way, "So what do you think would be fair? And why do you think that?" Then you listen, in order to re-establish a real communication and flow between the two of you. In that environment, you have a better chance of conveying what is important to you as well.
This is really a matter of taking poison and turning it into love. A real human being takes in every kind of tension - difficulty, frustration, anger, even hatred - transforms it back into creative energy, and returns it as love. This means that when something looks terrible, we don't have to jump down in there with it. We don't have to allow ourselves to be reduced to the lowest possible level within ourselves. Rather we aspire to the highest possibility for all concerned.
Notice, however, that what has to happen first is a stepping back and letting go within ourselves. Counter-intuitive logic comes directly out of letting go - not the other way around. In fact, it is an indication that we have let go of some tension within ourselves. This process is not about struggle; it is about learning to become open to Life Itself in all its manifestations and about working to become the best people we can possibly be. This is the spirit of surrender.
[ Reprinted from Open Heart, Open Mind: Practical Lessons in Loving Your Life, by Swami Chetanananda, Rudra Press, 1998 ]
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