ARTICLES | THE HEART OF THE MATTER


By Swami Chetanananda
(from a talk given January 22, 2008, Portland)

I always appreciated that Rudi dealt with the whole mind issue very simply, by saying “Open your heart.”  In opening your heart, you are cutting right through all the issues straight to the heart of the matter, the heart of ourselves and the heart of our life.

Cutting straight to the chase to the reason why we are alive. The mind is really a catalogue of an almost infinite amount of insults, and the confusion that those insults give us.  In being caught up in our mind, we are only continually reanimating or revisiting those insults and perpetuating a certain level of confusion about ourselves in this life. That confusion denies us any contact with the heart of the matter,  our own heart and the love and joy and beauty and the sweetness that is ever present in our hearts. Caught up in our minds and the infinite amount of issues that exist there, we deny ourselves the opportunity to really live. We deny ourselves access to the inspiration that is ever present within our own creative energy. We deny ourselves access to our strength and our clarity and our capacity to express and live truth. 

So here we tend to not spend a whole lot of time dealing with mind issues. In a way, the whole category of mind can be dealt with by one word, which is “surrender.”  Surrender means just let it go, whatever it is--whatever it is that comes up between you and your heart, whatever issues that pop up in your brain and in your days.  There are only about a billion of them and they are all equally meaningless. Let go of it and make contact with the heart of the matter, which is the heart of this matter in your heart, which is the heart of your life.  If you are not making contact and living from the heart of your life, what the heck is your life about?

There are two important points in our life, two important periods. There is being born and there is dying. In the middle somewhere, hopefully there is another point. For a lot of people it never happens, but there is another point and that point is the day that we make a commitment to live from our hearts. That day is memorialized in lots of different traditional cultures in a number of different ways, a ceremony, like a bar mitzvah, or some initiation.  Today, for the most part, the meaning of those ceremonies is all but completely forgotten. Now people rush their children to it very quickly as if to say that “My kid is smarter than all the other kids.”

The fact is that the day we make a commitment to live from our hearts is the day that we begin to be reborn as a real human being.  It is the day that we rise above all the confusion and the endless innumerable insults that are present in our life. Those insults are the inevitable suffering which is life.  The day we rise above the confusion and insults and begin to live a real life from a true and clear place within ourselves, we can begin to express from that place  something profound and beautiful and true and uplifting to ourselves and everybody who our life touches.

As we go through our day, rather than getting tangled up in our minds and end up feeling shredded, lets start to make contact with the heart of the matter. Let’s just let all issues go. Let it go. It is really almost impossible to understand or have any conception of most things with which we’re struggling with. It is pretty much completely irrelevant what we are struggling with and it blocks us from appreciating and dealing with the really important stuff. We shouldn’t be struggling with the important stuff, because when you let it go you can slowly digest all those patterns of tensions which sustain the patterns of issues in our life. Digesting those patterns of tension, which is sometime called ego, we come to a place of profound simplicity—the heart of the matter.  It is in that place, from that place that joy and spiritual love springs eternal, overflow, and nourish and renew us, and nourish and renew our creative capacity, our ability to relate to the endless screwiness of this world peacefully and compassionately with some enthusiasm.

Some people think it is very important to deal with the whole category of mind issues, but we prefer to deal simply with the whole issue of mind simply by making contact with what is really important to us and cutting through the confusion and the doubt and the fear, cutting through to the heart of the matter.

In a way it is the simplest thing that you could possibly do. This isn’t rocket science. It’s unbelievably simple, and it’s also incredibly profound.  If you can remember to cut through to the heart, to open your heart every day, and begin to live from a different place from within yourself, make contact with and live from a different place from within yourself, a finer place within yourself, the whole landscape of your life will become completely transformed. How cool is that?  How amazing it is to recognize that we have the capacity to choose. We can live in the insults and all the confusion, or we can cut through to the heart of the matter.

In the heart of the matter there is an unimaginable possibility that is present and opening our heart causes it to grow and reveal itself as a miracle of its presence in this world.  That’s true of every person, yet it’s rarely done. It’s rarely done because its so simple. It’s too simple for our minds.

Opening our hearts every day is an activity which encompasses and embraces all of the different meditation and practice traditions. It is the simple message of every great religious teaching that has ever been on the face of the earth. It is the simplest and most profound endeavor that a human being can undertake. I hope you know that in that endeavor, I sincerely wish you well.

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