Conversations With Ananda — Ch. 53, Nayaswami Chidambar

Nayaswami Chidambar smiles in the Ananda Community office in Mountain View, California.

 

Chidambar and David James co-manage the Mountain View Ananda Community. (Photo: 2019 – Chidambar hard at work in the Ananda Community office in Mountain View, California.)

Q: People come to Ananda for a variety of reasons. They come to Sunday service because they enjoy the music and fellowship, or they take a class series. And then sometimes they don’t feel a need to take the further step of serving the work. Perhaps it’s because service, membership, and commitment were defined in earlier times by religious institutions that wanted to take control of what their members believed, and people now find that approach off-putting. And perhaps it’s not surprising if they reject elements of Ananda that they mistakenly see as hangovers from the older ways.

Chidambar: It’s a tough sell. It takes a while for people to understand what service is, and to experience the spiritual benefits. Gary McSweeney told me that he didn’t initially grasp the need for service until the community hosted a get-together, and afterward someone asked him to help tear down.

As Gary began helping, he thought, “Oh, I get Ananda now.” He had an opportunity to experience what it felt like to serve, and he found that he enjoyed it.

Service opens your heart. When you’re purely serving, there is no longer the thought “I’ll give God this much, and I’ll get so-and-so much in return.” In our culture we’re always exchanging goods and services for money, and I find that it gets tedious. Service frees you from that grasping attitude, and I enjoy that. To be able to give freely, and have the feeling that people would give freely to you, was a great awakening for me.

I learned about Ananda in 1973 or 1974, at a lecture that Swami Kriyananda gave in San Francisco, but I wasn’t much interested in exploring it further. Then my sister wanted to see Ananda Village, and we drove up together and spent a weekend. We were the only people in the class that we’d signed up for, and we got to spend a lot of time with Asha, who was the teacher.

It was only when I started spending more time at Ananda that I began to see how service works. I realized that the people at Ananda weren’t trying to get anything out of me, because they were genuine, and they were there to help.

Q: In what ways do you serve now?

Chidambar: I give Sunday service occasionally, and I sing in the choir. On Thursdays I lead an all-comers meditation at the church. I basically do anything that’s needed.

Q: Have you observed that service helps people?

Chidambar: I’ve seen that the folks who serve willingly quickly begin to understand the spiritual path, but the ones who don’t serve sooner or later will spin off. Unless God’s energy is flowing through you, you tend to get stuck in “me” and “What am I getting out of it?” It’s immature, and it works against your spiritual progress. And until you can break out of that phase, where your first thought is always “me,” you can’t make much progress on the path.

If you watch Swami Kriyananda, you see that he’s constantly serving. It’s as if there’s no Kriyananda there at all, and it’s just service. It’s Master’s work going on through him all the time, and he’s setting the example for what will help us grow into the bliss that he enjoys continuously.

Chidambar sings with the choir at Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto, California during a performance of the oratorio "Christ Lives" composed by Swami Kriyananda.
Chidambar sings with the choir at Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto, California during a performance of the oratorio “Christ Lives” composed by Swami Kriyananda.

I’ve seen that people who don’t serve never seem to be as happy. The world is still “happening to them” and they aren’t creating and moving forward. Service can look like a very simple concept, but it’s profoundly life-changing. It is, in a very real sense, the lifesaver for your spiritual path.

Q: Do you find that people’s meditations improve when they serve?

Chidambar: I would say so. Until you open up by serving, the most blissful inner spiritual experiences cannot come to you, because you’re closing your heart to what God wants to give you, and you need to expand your heart to receive it. And nothing does that as well as service.

The spiritual path is a continual process of giving. Until you can give up “me,” you find that you reach a certain level in your meditations and you can’t go any further.

Q: Do you think the word “service” looms larger in people’s minds than what it actually is?

Chidambar: That’s true. People worry that they’ll be taken advantage of, and that they’ll lose something. The culture all around us is so thoroughly oriented toward the give-and-take merchant attitude – “I’ll give so much, but only if I’ll get that exact amount back.” In India it’s called the vaishya mentality – the shopkeeper level of awareness, where there’s always a concern that someone will take something from you, and you’re always trying to be sure it’s an equal exchange.

Q: Do people magnify the word “service”? Do they tend to overlook that even small service can be rewarding?

Chidambar: Some people feel that their service has to be big and important before they’re really serving. But I think the best thing is to do anything at all. I’ve seen very competent people do the dishes after an event at the Sangha, and I’ve seen that they’re soaring in joy. They’re fully absorbed in the moment, doing the dishes, and they’re getting higher and higher, to where they’re just floating. But it’s something you have to experience. You can talk about it forever, but until you pitch in and experience it, you won’t know how satisfying it is.

It’s heart-opening. If you do it for God and for joy, you’re taken care of. You’re floating. You’re just taking off.

Years ago, we had a series of programs called “Yogananda for the World.” Swami Kriyananda came to speak, and there were hundreds of people in the audience. We rented a church, because we didn’t have enough space, and before the program started I wandered into the kitchen and saw that it was a big mess because we didn’t have enough cleaners. We had to be out of the church by midnight according to the terms of our rental contract, and I looked at the mess and thought, “There’s no way we’ll get out on time.”

So I started cleaning. Swamiji was talking in the temple and I was cleaning, but the longer I cleaned, the happier I got, and pretty soon I was in joy. I was having more fun than I could imagine, even if I’d been sitting in the audience with Swami. I thought, “I hope everyone is having as much fun as I am.” [Laughs] And we did get out on time.

It was a great lesson for me. It helped me understand that, in life and on the spiritual path, when you give you get exactly what you need. You never lose anything. I’ve come to see that it’s neurotic to fear that something will be taken away from you if you serve. You’re there, and this is what’s going on, and this is exactly what you need to be doing at this moment. As soon as you accept it and say “yes,” your life is perfect.

Q: Swami Kriyananda talks about how the Divine Mother plays a game with us, where She’ll ask us to do something that looks like the worst thing imaginable.

Chidambar: You’re tempted to fight it, until the point in your spiritual growth comes where you known how to laugh and say “Okay, I give up – whatever You want is fine!”

I had a job in the community that I didn’t enjoy at all. I was really struggling with it, and it went on for almost a year. Then, at some point, I said, “Oh well, this is what I have to do. I don’t have a choice, because I’m not going to quit and go somewhere else.” And as soon as I made that decision, the job disappeared. It was gone – someone else took it over and it was out of my hair within a week. [Laughs]

The great secret is to learn “What is.” Had I learned the lesson a year earlier, I wouldn’t have had to endure so much grief.

Because I’m trained in accounting, the community manager said, “Here, you can do the books.” But I wanted to be outside working on the lawn and trees. I felt I wasn’t being paid to do the books, and I had the feeling “I’m being ripped off.”

And then for months the books wouldn’t balance – this mindlessly easy set of books. And then I realized that the problem was my attitude, and as soon as I changed my attitude and started doing a good job on the books, they were perfect. They took care of themselves, and I got them done in a third of the time I’d been spending. It’s as if God was saying “Wake up! Do what’s in front of you. Everything’s fine! It’s only yourself that you’re running into.”

Q: Do you find that when God asks you to do a job, you somehow have the resources to do it?

Chidambar: There are lots of situations that will come up in the community office where I have no idea what to do, and over time I’ve realized that if I give it to God, He will give me the answers I need. I’ve got Yogananda’s picture here on the wall and Swami Kriyananda over there. Someone will come in, and they’ll be upset, maybe in tears – they’ll have some big, huge issue, and I’ll have absolutely no idea how to answer. I’ll say, “Okay, boys, I need a little help,” and I’ll sit and wait, and I’ll say what comes. I won’t have thought it out, I’ll just open up and say, “All right, I need help.” And then generally what’s said is what’s needed.

It’s something you have to practice a bit, but we do have the answers, if we’ll just ask for help.

Q: It sounds as if you’re saying that service helps us make a relationship with God.

Chidambar: It does. It would be wonderful if we could help more people experience it so that they could realize for themselves that they aren’t losing anything, but they’re gaining so much. The people I see serving are the happiest. It takes your life away from the exchange of energy for money. As soon as your heart opens, you’re happier.

People can serve in their own way. For some, they’ll never be moving chairs, but maybe they can sing, or they know how to help in the office, and they can serve just as worthily in their own way.

The ideal would be to serve wherever you’re asked. Because it’s not like “someone” is asking you. God is asking you, and if you realize that, then what you’re being asked to do doesn’t really matter.

I often wonder how we can invite people to serve so they can have those experiences of Master’s inward presence and joy. How can we offer people more options to serve? It’s very important for Ananda to help people in that way, because as soon as they begin serving they start to feel what Ananda is really about.

Q: Is there a need on Ananda’s part for service?

Chidambar: Only that if you let people serve, they can feel a part of what’s going on. If you’re always serving them, then they’ll just always be guests and they’ll never own it. But when they begin to serve, there’s ownership, and without that sense of ownership they’ll never truly feel part of Ananda.

The Sangha needs all the help it can get. It’s less obvious here in the community, but that’s changing. Over the last ten or twelve years, the focus has shifted from the community to the Sangha, because the church is the outreach aspect of our service. But we’re starting to have more community events, so we’re having more opportunities to serve.

Q: Do people need to move into service at their own pace?

Chidambar: It’s a heart connection. That’s how I started serving in the late 1980s. I saw that Asha and David were always serving, and I liked them, and I wanted to be doing something with them, so I started serving, and as I began serving I realized that service has intrinsic value. Once you’ve tasted the joy in service, it opens up a world for you.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.