The Breath of God

KABIR

PREFACE

Picture yourself walking through a dense forest as night is starting to fall. You have walked in the forest for the entire day and in the last few hours have begun to lose your way. You are not sure you’ve lost your way—you see traces of the trail you started out on, you know there is a lake not far away, and you can hear, off and on, the sound of water over stones. But nightfall brings a spookiness you cannot shake, and as the day finally folds in upon itself and nothing is left but dark, you are afraid.

Now, in a simple way, imagine that from nowhere, someone appears to help you. He brings a light, some food, and tools. And while for you it is a dramatic moment, it seems for him to be a quiet, almost ordinary rendezvous. He is not surprised you are lost, nor is he indifferent to the work that lies ahead for both of you to return to safety. Yet he has an ease in the tangled environment that you can only marvel at. There is still no clear-cut trail, his tools seem simple and unsophisticated, and the predicament is no different than when you were alone. Still, none of it disturbs him, and from his ingenuous confidence, you also feel at peace.

This is a little what it is like to find an authentic spiritual teacher when you are searching, perhaps unknowingly, for spiritual growth. Someone comes with no agenda other than to be of service. He or she understands the enormous challenge of self-transformation, and does not shy away from it. He has tools, sharpened from his own years of use, which he readily makes available. He is discriminating, but without judgment. And you feel that nothing you go through is foreign to him, or beyond the breadth of his compassion.

This has been my experience of Swami Chetanananda.

There is a Tibetan Buddhist practice called Chöd. The Tibetan word Chöd literally means cutting through. The Chöd practice entails elaborate visualizations and prayers, but at its heart, it is about cutting through our delusions. It is about seeing the entanglements we have wandered into in the forests of our lives, and slicing through them to clear a pathway and let in the light.

Swami Chetanananda is a master of this cutting through. And though he introduced the Chöd practice to his students at The Movement Center in Portland, Oregon, only in the late 1990s, he has been practicing cutting through for his entire spiritual training. He translates one of the most sophisticated of Indian traditions, Kashmir Shaivism, into words and practical images that anyone can understand. He stays true to the tradition, but cuts through the esotericism. That is not an easy task—it comes from lived-through experience and devoted study, not simply scholarly observation. You cannot cut through to the heart of an understanding before you have traveled to that heart in your own life.

I will say also that one of the gifts of being in the presence of Swami Chetanananda is to experience his mastery of cutting through on an energetic level. You will find this in true teachers—there is nowhere to hide in their presence; their energy slices right through the protection we carefully craft and connects to our highest essence, which is, of course, love. And while it is a book that you are holding here, some of that laser-like power flows through its pages, which makes The Breath of God one of the finest articulations of Swami Chetanananda’s teaching. Each passage is direct and simple, self-contained and nourishing. Flip now to any passage and start in on it, and tell me this isn’t so. It is as though, thank God, someone has finally spoken the truth and we can let our guard down and acknowledge what we’ve known all along. It is a relief to read. It gives you peace. And the greatest justice any preface can do is to be brief enough to let you get on with it and join the company of this remarkable person and his extraordinary understanding. So, I leave you to it.

Rachel Gaffney

ALL THINGS ARE NOTHING MORE

All things are nothing more than condensations of the creative energy of Life.

AS AN ICEBERG FLOATING IN THE OCEAN

God and the Self are one. If you think about God as separate from the Self, then the problem is this: you tend to think, I’m small and God is great. This means that I’m locked into my own smallness. Something must be missing in me.

This is a source of great misunderstanding. God dwells within you always. Furthermore, if you look carefully within yourself at the in-dwelling Lord, you’ll discover that you are nothing but that—that your body is nothing but a coalescing of that divine, creative power. It’s like ice and water. Ice is water in which the heat is reduced, the vibration of the molecules diminishes, and the molecules themselves take on a solid, crystallized form.

As an iceberg floating in the ocean is separated only by degrees of vibration from its fundamental reality, so are you only a crystallization of the Divine. The iceberg floating on the ocean might think of itself as separate, but in reality it has come from the ocean, and to the ocean it will return. When that inner energy is re-awakened and its entire vibration changed, then the ice melts, and the divine essence that you are becomes apparent.

Assume that it’s all there within you, and that you’re within it all. ls this so hard to understand? Go to the ocean, take a bucket of water from the shore, and pour it back into the ocean. Then, find that bucket of water once more. Where did it go? Show me which is separate—find even a single drop of it. You don’t talk about waves as being separate from the ocean. It is simply the nature of the ocean to have them. Nor do you give each of them a name. Waves arise and subside faster than you can say Chetanananda. So it is with you. You arise and subside quickly—just like that—out of, and back into, the Divine.

When you stop praying for what you think is missing, and simply attune yourself to the extraordinary richness, the quality, and the love that are at the core of your heart, then the ocean itself becomes apparent, and all the rest is just the debris that floats on the surface. Like all debris, it is dead. The ocean is what is alive.

THE ESSENCE OF ALL LIFE IS ONE THING

The most important thing for you to understand is that, despite the appearance of multiplicity, the essence of all Life is really only one thing. If you think about this, then whenever you get in a tight spot, you’re not going to fight it. You’re going to surrender. Surrender, in this case, doesn’t mean that you’re going to give up. Rather, it means that first you’re going to relax. Then, the inner flow of Life Itself is going to rise up, poke you on the shoulder, and say, Here I am. And you’ll say, There you are. From that point, all difficulties can be overcome. It’s the thought of Oh, I’m all alone. I’m separate and isolated in this world, and I have to struggle against other people for everything I want, that causes great misunderstanding. That’s the beginning of the downward path.

The direct experience of the unity of all things is available to each and every human being. You need only look into your own heart. Of course, if you do so after not having looked for a long time, then your heart may not be all that open, and you may not sense the experience of unity for a while. If I were your friend, and you hadn’t called me in six months, do you think I would be immediately cheery and responsive when I first heard from you? I’d probably say, Where have you been?

It’s really quite extraordinary to see the degree to which what happens in the heart governs your entire experience of the world. When the heart is open, you feel wonderful, you’re kind to people, and good things happen. When it’s closed, whatever happens seems awful. This means that the heart dominates your whole experience.

You have to spend some time with your own heart. Every day, preserve some spot in the day just to sit or lie down. Start out by feeling your heart beating. Then, breathe into that area, and feel the breath going into your heart. Every breath you take will dissolve another layer of tension, and reveal another layer of the beauty that is in you all the time. If you think about that every day and spend a little time with it, then it will always be there for you. You may forget it when you’re busy moving around, but it will always be there for you to build on. With practice, it will continue to open and reveal to you all that you are. This brings not only the understanding, but also the experience that all life is really only one thing.

OPENING THE HEART

Change is based upon the depth of contact you have with your total environment. When I use the term opening the heart, this is simply a way of talking about the degree to which you participate in this total environment. It is also a way of talking about the amount of energy you’re absorbing, as well as the amount of change you’re facilitating within yourself and, consequently, within the environment itself. It is a reciprocal event. What is outside of you comes in, and what is inside of you comes out.

This is a dynamic process. The more you’re aware of it and the less you resist it, the more you grow. The degree to which you resist it is the degree to which you are certain to have emotional and, ultimately, serious physical impediments. It’s not necessary, in the long term, to identify the source or the cause of your resistance. On the one hand, there can be any number of causes that will look like a hundred thousand different things, and you can call them anything you want. On the other hand, you don’t have to name them at all. In fact, the minute you name them, you limit your ability to respond to them. It’s only important to note that resistance exists, and to begin to deal with it directly.

EVEN PAIN IS NOT A PROBLEM

When you come into this world, you have no problems. The initial purity, which gave rise to your life in the first place, simply is. Moreover, that same purity sustains you throughout your life. Never is it gone, nor does it ever abandon you. It’s only that you forget about it and then, at that point, the idea of problems arises.

This means that there’s really no such thing as problems. Even pain is not a problem. (You will realize this when you reach the point of being able to accept the pain in your life.) What’s more amazing than that is that the abundance of power which created the whole universe is the same power which gives you life. Only because of notions such as problems and pain do you deny the experience of the purity and power unfolding within yourself.

The abundance of that purity and power is beyond anything you can imagine. Therefore, to think that there is an absence of anything in your life—and so, some problem—becomes ridiculous. If the same resource that created the whole universe is within you, then how can anything be missing? The way we say it is that the Self has no problems.

TENSION

The science of kundalini yoga is a twofold science: it is a science of the structure of the energy within you, as well as a science of the structure and flow of the energy around you. These two sides—inner and outer—are intimately, reciprocally linked. They feed each other, and only when you master both sides do you have a complete understanding of the oneness of Life Itself.

In the exploration of this science, the fundamental skill you must develop is that of dealing with tension. What is tension? Tension is powerful energy. It, too, has an internal and an external component, both of which are intimately related. There is never a time when the tensions outside you aren’t connected to tensions inside you—even when you aren’t aware of feeling tense.

When you encounter tensions outside, there is never a time that you can’t stop and ask yourself, What did I do to cause this?

I’m certain that you can recall experiences of tension that you have handled successfully. In such cases, the energy of that moment becomes part of the whole energy field that you are. This then increases the entire level of your own energy and of your power, if you want to put it that way. I’m sure that you also have less pleasant recollections of times when you mishandled the tensions you encountered and, as a result, landed sitting down. Such experiences severely reduce your energy level.

There are two critical skills to learn when handling tension, and the main one of these is learning to be open. As tensions arise or as you encounter them, you must have the control within yourself not to get entangled in them. Instead of becoming polarized by the situation, you must have the self-mastery to open, and to feel the flow of energy within yourself. As you do this, you must draw in the tension, absorb it, and digest it. This is because tension is nothing but energy that has become crystallized. Your openness dissolves that crystallization, allowing the energy to become part of the total flow of energy that you are. As you open and absorb this different kind of chemistry, a shift happens.

This brings us to the second skill. It is out of the shift which occurs that you speak. You must learn to speak carefully, in a way that allows this flow of energy—this tension which you have incorporated as energy into your own field—to become integrated into your approach to the situation. The alternative is to regurgitate all the stupidities that kept a stupid situation rolling on in a stupid way in the first place.

Instead, you must take the energy you’ve absorbed and channeled, and re-express it in a way that uplifts the situation. Then, the change that has happened in you allows for a change in the total energy field that surrounds you and