Words

Introduction

by Swami Chetanananda

A spiritual teacher exists to challenge and disturb the boundaries of our identity. That is his or her real purpose. The point of disturbing the balance and structure of our identity is to cause us to look more deeply within ourselves and to examine the nature of our own source. Over time, we begin to recognize the universal, infinite nature of our individualized consciousness.

Swami Rudrananda – or Rudi, as he was known – was my teacher. He was a student first of the Shankaracharya of Puri and then of Bhagawan Nityananda, a great saint of South India. When Rudi met Nityananda, the tremendous power of the saint’s presence changed Rudi’s entire life. While Rudi had always pursued spiritual growth, he became even more dedicated to his spiritual work and returned to the States to teach a small group of students of his own in New York.

After Nityananda passed away in 1961, Rudi traveled regularly to Ganeshpuri to visit Nityananda’s shrine and to study with Swami Muktananda. In 1966, Swami Muktananda initiated Rudi as a swami, naming him Rudrananda, which means the bliss of Rudra. Rudra is a fiery aspect of the Hindu god Shiva. The significance of the event was that the old Rudi, born Albert Rudolph in Brooklyn, New York, was now dead to the world. Rudi continued to teach in the United States, and over time started some ten ashrams across the country and in Europe. At the same time, he maintained a business, providing work for his mother and younger brother.

When I met Rudi in 1971, he had been teaching in New York City for some years. I had gone to New York to meet him at the suggestion of an acquaintance. When I walked into his store, I took one look at him and my heart broke. I am not ordinarily an emotional person, but my knees turned to jelly and I started to cry. It took me no more than five seconds to recognize that his presence in my own life was the most important thing that would ever happen to me. Indeed, in Rudi, I found the fulfillment of my life.

Rudi often described the relationship, or the flow, between the teacher and the student as spiritual nourishment. This flow is a giving on the part of the teacher who, in turn, takes on the tensions and restrictions of the student in order to digest and dissolve them. Furthermore, the teacher is committed to standing in harmony with the student until this process of transmitting the energy has matured and the student is fully established in the recognition of his or her own highest consciousness.

This installation might take thirty-six years to complete, depending upon the intensity of the contact and the discipline and determination of the student. It could also take less than three. This depends more on the student than on the teacher. Rudi described the process as nourishment because he wanted to engender in his students a sense of responsibility. We ourselves had to reach for the teaching. We had to internalize, absorb, and digest it. It was up to us to make it a part of our own system. When we can do this, then the nourishment itself renews our vitality and energy. It washes away tensions and brings about within us a sense of fulfillment and well-being.

The contact between student and teacher is not something that we can understand from an intellectual point of view. Every student is different, every teacher is different, and the creative contact between the two is always a unique and extraordinary moment – a universe within itself. This universe is the main thing that the teacher wants the student to examine. To recognize what this contact really is, and to live from that recognition – this is the highest realization.

It is the recognition that the power of Life Itself, the consciousness of the teacher, and our own individual consciousness are all one. From that moment of realization onward, we turn our attention not outward toward any other person, but inside ourselves. We remain focused on that infinite moment of contact between our mind, our heart, and our highest Self. That moment of contact encompasses every individual that we encounter. Regardless of the specific relationship we may have with them, we encounter an inherent balance and equality.

This equality exists in the student-teacher relationship as well. The respect that the student demonstrates toward the teacher is the respect one extends to someone who has given their life to mastering an understanding and to sharing it with others. With respect of this kind, there is no issue of dominant-subordinate or superior-inferior. We continue to cultivate the relationship while, at the same time, we recognize the infinite moment of contact to be nothing but pure, universal consciousness. We are That, the teacher is That, and there is no differentiation or break between the two. This is what we experienced in Rudi.

Rudi lived a simple life. Each day he got up and prepared breakfast for the few students who lived with him in his brownstone in Manhattan’s East Village. Then he went to work at his oriental art store just around the corner. He always wore the same thing – a plain orange T-shirt, khaki pants, and sandals. In the winter, he wore socks.

Rudi was a deeply quiet being whose attention was turned within, and who was dedicated to sharing his own inner work with whoever approached him. People came into his store from many different places and for many different reasons. Rabbis, Catholic priests and nuns, Buddhist and Hindu monks, art dealers from Thailand and Japan, museum curators, famous actors and politicians, browsing customers, and disturbed street people all entered his store at one point or another. Rudi was the same with every one of them. He handled each person with grace, charm, dignity, humor, and a loving simplicity that was both touching and powerful.

He left his store at six o’clock every evening and returned home to lead a kundalini yoga class. The class, to which he refers in this book, was an exchange that prompted our ability to experience the inner state in which he himself was immersed. Afterwards he would talk for a while about some aspect of our spiritual work. By ten or ten-thirty, Rudi and those of us who lived in his house would go to bed.

Rudi came from humble surroundings. He had a difficult upbringing and, unlike his counterparts in India, did not have easy access to a great spiritual culture. He was a man who, through his own dedication and great faith in God, overcame every obstacle and limitation in his path and grew to become a spiritual giant.

Despite having been initiated into the role, Rudi was not a swami in the traditional sense of the word. He was a monk, in that he lived a deeply simple life. At the same time, he was not a monk, insofar as he supported himself and lived among his family. He defied stereotypes. He felt that part of our spiritual work involves the full acceptance of who and what we are. His own life demonstrated the freedom that we all have to be ourselves while working to attain our liberation.

Furthermore, Rudi had strong opinions about what was spiritual and what was not. He did not approve of much of what often goes on under the name of spirituality. He talked, instead, about growing – about the flow of energy within us and the release of tensions. He talked about transcending ourselves and about how this process entails an endless amount of work.

He challenged the tendency to engage in one from or another of spiritual materialism through the pursuit of phenomena such as astral travel, past lives, visions, or miracles. This, he said, is nothing more than the need for external validation of our inner work. If we can levitate for ten minutes, we think we are closer to God. This is a false sign of growth. Rudi taught us instead to focus on our inner work. The work itself and the transformation that it brings about – these are the real miracles.

Rudi gave us an exercise intended to purify our bodies, remove the blocks and tensions we brought with us, and enable us to feel the flow of energy within us. This was an exercise involving control of the breath. This practice has a depth to it that is not immediately apparent. For a beginning student, it involves control of the physical breath. At another level, we are cultivating our awareness of the pulsation of energy within us. We tune into and are simply aware of the fluctuation of the various levels of this pulsation. Thus, it is a practice with many dimensions. But at the beginning level, it is a means by which we learn to release tensions and allow the creative energy within us to flow.

In teaching us, Rudi was a hard-nosed trainer and one who was demanding of his students. He insisted that we rise above our own level of work to participate at his, so that we could maintain an ongoing, living relationship with him. He would do as much as he could for whoever came to him but, fundamentally, he did not want to be attached to people or to have anyone become attached to him. He was not interested in having a following or in setting up a personality cult. He never allowed any of us to get tangled up in him. He wanted to be free himself and did not want people to become bound to him. So, as we developed, he pushed us away from him and forced us to become stronger still.

Rudi believed in discipline. He was dedicated to his own inner work and he did not appreciate anything but dedication in others. He was not tolerant of dilettantism among his students, just as he was not tolerant of laziness or of the confusion that comes from an unwillingness to do one’s own work. For him the process of growing spiritually was a simple thing: either you were doing it or you were not. There was no need for confusion about that.

He felt that once we make the fundamental decision to undertake spiritual work and devote ourselves to it, then it is either happening or it is not. There are no complex emotional questions to be dealt with, no dilemmas or dichotomies to untwine. People are either working inside to allow the tensions of their lives to unravel, or they are struggling in what he would call stupidity and tension. He had no value for that kind of complexity. Indeed, he used to say that life is profound only in its simplicity.

He was serious about only one thing, and he was intensely serious about that. He devoted himself to sharing with people the experience of the specialness that exists deeply within the heart and soul. He was interested in transmitting to people the tools and the skills by which they could come to understand this specialness, cultivate and live from it, and eventually allow it to permeate the entire field of this everyday experience.

Furthermore, Rudi was not idealistic. He was profoundly pragmatic, and was interested only in what works. The idea of work permeates everything he said and did. But with this emphasis, he was also exercising a subtle understanding. If our inner energy is a seed, it is true that we do need to cultivate it. Nevertheless, it is the seed itself that unfolds and flowers. We may plant and water it, we may make sure it has sunlight, but then it does the actual work. Our ability to focus our attention on growing and then get out of our own way is what Rudi meant by surrender.

A tribute to the vitality of Rudi’s work was the fact that he left us with a living tradition. At the same time, Rudi was particular that the people who carried on this tradition have his direct blessing or, in his absence, the permission of one of his chosen successors. Although there are several people around the country who claim to have Rudi’s permission to teach, the only ones still teaching who had his blessing to do so are