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- Abstract and Book Review
Will I Be the Hero
of My Own Life?
by Swami Chetanananda
Rudra Press, 1984
by Reg Harris
- (Copyright 2001 by Reg Harris.
All rights reserved. This material may not be copied in any form without
prior, written permission of the author. Thank you for respecting my
work.)
Abstract
Swami Chetanananda writes "The vital force of
Life Itself has two states: crystallization and flow." Evoking our
individual heroic nature is a process of allowing this vital force to
flow through us. Crystallization occurs when this creative process is
blocked by tensions that arise when we act with a purpose. Purpose generates
worry that life will not conform to our desires and expectations. When
we attach our actions to a purpose, we block growth by limiting ourselves
to our current level of imagination, understanding and awareness, to what
we already know. We must surrender these attachments and open ourselves
to whatever direction the energy within a situation chooses to take. In
this way, we can "live in the middle," able to see all options because
we are not limited by preconceived outcomes. This allows us to take in
every experience as nourishment. This process requires the heroic act
of surrendering our ego and sense of control. We can then devote our lives
to service and to cultivating an inner stillness, an environment through
which the Live Energy can flow.
Review
In the western culture, we operate on the premise
that if we don't "do" a thing, that thing won't happen. This attitude
is an outgrowth of our mechanistic, technological heritage, which has
taught us that we can understand and control virtually all aspects of
our lives. Schools, for example, have reduced human growth to a series
of quantifiable steps that can be planned, controlled, monitored and tested.
This obsession with predictability and control is especially evident in
our goal-oriented, outcome-driven approach to work. We are taught to define
and work toward goals. We seek security and knowledge as if they would
inoculate us against life�s vicissitudes, fulfill our deepest needs and
make us happy. Our heroes today are people who succeed at their work,
who accomplish their goals through brute force, who overcome odds to succeed,
who set their vision on a target and persevere until they hit it.
In Will I Be the Hero of My Own Life?
Swami Chetanananda challenges this view of life and work. Real heroes,
he says, are people who learn to release their egos and live without purpose
or certainty. "Heroes are people who, in a real way, have confronted and
changed their identities [by undergoing] some kind of intense difficulty�In
the process, they find within themselves a sense of strength that allows
them to shed who and what they were, thereby becoming a completely different
kind of person."
Chetanananda, who was born Michael Shoemaker,
believes that to evoke our individual heroic natures and open ourselves
to spiritual transformation, we must surrender our attachment to outcomes
and open a path for Life's Force to flow through us spontaneously and
creatively. This attitude is particularly difficult in our work world,
where our efforts are quantified and measured against pre-determined,
arbitrary targets.
But transformation is not easy. "Everything costs,"
he writes. "This includes growing as a person�. Indeed, it will cost us
our lives. It will also give them back to us over and over again."
The potential for change is inherent in virtually
all situations and challenges. According to Chetanananda, any external
challenge can either lift us up or throw us down. The same blocked energy,
which chrystallizes as tension, pain and suffering, can be released to
carry us to an expanded awareness. The only difference between an experience
that expands and an experience that crushes is our understanding of and
our capacity to deal with it. In other words, whether it is creative or
destructive is determined by our awareness and perspective.
According to Chetanananda, the key to using an
experience for growth, an opportunity to be a hero in our life, is to
avoid classifying (making judgments). Classifying also means attempting
to understand things intellectually. When we classify experience, we force
it into a pattern we already know, which means we deal with what we think
of it rather than what it is. This removes the vitality and potential
for growth from the challenge.
Classifying and "understanding" creates a gap
between us and experience. This gap causes tension, and tension blocks
creativity and prevents us from seeing clearly and responding genuinely.
When we stop classifying, stop trying to understand, this tension dissolves.
Creativity grows, and the boundaries of our lives dissolve into one process
of "Self-discovery."
This process requires that we release our desire
for security. Security is "knowing," which means building boundaries to
enclose what we think we know. When things don't go the way we expect
or hope, we try to "get things under control," and we sacrifice the vitality
in our lives for the illusion of comfort and security. Releasing also
means that we stop focusing on goals. Focusing on goals makes us act out
of our attachments (to preconceived ideas) and prevents us from experiencing
what is implicit in the moment.
What we must do, says Chetanananda, is to learn
to surrender our sense of self, renounce the need to know, our individuality,
and respond from our center so that we are totally free to participate
in our own lives. "Only when we let go of all worries and fears about
our lives and begin instead to trust in our infinite inner Self is it
possible for that inner Self to unfold."
Renunciation doesn't mean renouncing things or
relationships, just our attachments to them. By releasing attachments,
we release expectations. "We can engage�things differently. We don't participate
out of fear or greed because there is nothing to want and nothing not
to want�. There is only the endless awareness of and wonder in the extraordinary
power of life � a creative mystery continuously unfolding itself." We
release our finite individual life and liberate the essential vital force
of our lives, discover the infinite potential inherent in every action.
Chetanananda also makes the point that our lives
must be a process of integration. Our lives, he says, consist of contradictions:
what we think we are and what we are, what we say we want and what we
really want, and then what we are doing about it. The process of integrating
these different aspects of our personality is brings us to our simplest
and most basic awareness. As we integrate these different aspects, we
release the energy we have been using to sustain our multiple selves.
Our lives become more efficient, more in line with the Taoist concepts
of Te (suchness or integrity) and wu-wei (unforced action).
Chetanananda emphasizes that we must not run
away from our challenges and fears, for these are the very experiences
that offer us the opportunity for growth. "Engaging things that frighten
us as pure experience has the potential to take us into a state of profound
well-being and an unshakable transcendent awareness�. Instead, in what
is called 'the great banquet,' our aim is to consume all forms of experience
as nourishment so that we reside in the heart of our hearts."
We act without attachment and allow the results
to take care of themselves. We concentrate on the quality of our work
and trust that the energy, the flow of that work, will attract its own
audience or result, much like the Chinese concept of mutually-arising
order, where things arise naturally, together, without our forcing.
"If we do our own work, the opportunities we
require for creative expression will appear�. appear when we are able
to see them. In fact, the truth is that they are there right now. When
we let go of our preconceived ideas of how things should turn out, we
suddenly see these avenues stretching clearly before us."
Such trust in our nature and in the nature of
the universe is difficult for those of us brought up in the cause-effect,
outcome-oriented Western culture. However, it is an organic view of life,
a view which is more in harmony with the way things are and with our own
better nature. This is the great challenge for us: to trust ourselves
and the universe itself enough to free ourselves from our goals, our biases,
and our fears to allow our own creative nature to unfold. It is this freeing
of and trust in our own creative nature which makes us a hero in our own
lives.
Will I Be the hero of My Own Life? was
written nearly 20 years ago, but it is perhaps more timely today than
ever. With our culture speeding along toward some unknown end and we mere
humans struggling to hold on to our humanity and freedom in the process,
Chetanananda's book provides an organic and calming alternative to the
goal-oriented, consumption-driven, bottom-line world we face now.
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