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| Full spectrum: Guruji Amritananda in the 1980s — formidable, focused, and intense; later years — warmer, more grandfatherly, disarmingly approachable. Same transmission, different function. |
Sweetness as a Function
In a previous reflection, One Path, Many Functions (https://www.vira-chandra.com/2025/12/one-path-many-functions.html), I described how spiritual life unfolds through different operations rather than through fixed stages or superior states. A function appears when certain work is required, performs that work, and then withdraws. Confusion begins when a function is mistaken for a destination.
This text looks at one particular case where that confusion is especially common: sweetness.
Tenderness, warmth, and the presence of a benevolent Guru or Devi are not mistakes. They are not illusions. They serve a real and necessary function. Early on, sweetness regulates what is otherwise unbearable. It repairs trust where it was broken. It calms the nervous system enough for surrender to even become possible. Without some experience of being held, forgiven, or met without demand, many people would never approach practice at all.
In this sense, the “sweet” register is legitimate medicine.
The difficulty begins when this medicine is treated as the goal.
At a certain point, sweetness is no longer something that arrives when needed; it becomes something that must be preserved. Its withdrawal is no longer tolerated as a natural shift, but experienced as loss, error, or betrayal. Dryness feels wrong. Silence feels dangerous. Impersonal clarity feels cold. The absence of affect is interpreted as spiritual failure.
What has changed is not the quality of devotion, but its orientation.
Sweetness stops functioning as support and begins to function as regulation. It becomes the condition under which practice is allowed to continue at all. The practitioner no longer listens for what is required now, but unconsciously organizes life to maintain a particular feeling of warmth, reassurance, or emotional availability.
This is not corruption. It is mis-timing.
A developmental support has been retained beyond the phase it was meant to serve. What once enabled growth now prevents it — not through excess intensity or fanaticism, but through comfort that refuses to end.
There is nothing wrong with sweetness.
The error appears only when it is asked to remain.
When Sweetness Becomes Dependency
The transition is rarely dramatic. Nothing visibly breaks.
Sweetness simply stops leaving.
What was once an arriving support becomes a background requirement. Practice begins to depend on a certain emotional tone: warmth, reassurance, affirmation, gentleness. When that tone fades, something feels wrong — not merely uncomfortable, but illegitimate.
Dryness is interpreted as a mistake.
Silence feels like abandonment.
Impersonal clarity is read as coldness.
Withdrawal of affect is experienced as loss.
At this point, devotion quietly reorganizes itself around regulation.
The practitioner may still pray, chant, or serve, but attention is no longer oriented toward what is actually present. It is oriented toward maintaining a state. Sweetness becomes the condition under which spiritual life is allowed to continue.
This is how dependency forms without conscious intent.
The Guru is no longer encountered as someone who responds to what is needed now, but as someone expected to remain endlessly warm, emotionally available, and reassuring. Devi is no longer allowed to withdraw, sharpen, or fall silent without being accused — inwardly or outwardly — of cruelty, distance, or failure.
Love is redefined as perpetual affective supply.
This is the subtle inversion:
what once made surrender possible now prevents it.
The nervous system learns that only certain registers are safe. Anything that strips comfort is resisted, reinterpreted, or explained away. Growth that requires dryness, impersonality, or loss is postponed indefinitely — not through rebellion, but through attachment to care.
Dependency does not announce itself as fear.
It presents itself as devotion.
But its mark is simple and unmistakable:
the inability to remain present when sweetness withdraws.
Where presence collapses in the absence of reassurance, fixation has already formed. What was once medicine has become a regulator. The path has not derailed — it has stalled.
And this kind of stalling is not short-lived. It is not uncommon for practitioners to remain oriented around the same affective register for decades, long after it has ceased to do any real work.
Fetish: When Support Refuses to Withdraw
A fetish is not defined by excess or perversion.
It is defined by mis-timing.
Structurally, a fetish forms when a support that once served development is retained beyond the phase it was meant to sustain. Regulation is mistaken for truth. Comfort is mistaken for depth. What was once appropriate becomes compulsory.
Diapers are not pathological.
Needing them indefinitely is.
What belongs to infancy becomes disturbing when it is eroticized or absolutized in adulthood — not because care is wrong, but because growth has stopped. The problem is not tenderness. It is fixation.
The same pattern appears in spiritual life.
Sweetness becomes a regulatory object rather than a passing support.
The Guru becomes an affect supplier rather than a guide through loss.
Love is equated with continuous reassurance.
Devotion quietly becomes fear of withdrawal.
Nothing here is corrupt.
Nothing here is false.
This is not degeneration.
It is development that refused to continue.
The practitioner does not fall backward. They remain stabilized at a stage that once saved them. What was meant to be outgrown is preserved, defended, and protected from disappearance.
At that point, sweetness no longer serves movement.
It serves avoidance.
And avoidance, even when wrapped in love, is still avoidance.
Letting Sweetness Withdraw
Fixation does not dissolve through argument or insight.
It loosens through toleration.
What is required here is not rejection of sweetness, but the capacity to remain present when it is absent. This sounds simple, but it is not. For many practitioners, the first encounter with the withdrawal of warmth feels less like neutrality and more like threat.
The work begins exactly there.
Rather than restoring sweetness, the task is to stay. To notice what arises when reassurance is not available. To feel the impulse to seek comfort — and not immediately act on it. Not to suppress it, not to judge it, but to allow it to be seen clearly.
At first, what appears is often fear: a sense that something essential has been lost, that practice is failing, that one is doing something wrong. Beneath that fear there is usually grief — not grief for the Guru or the Divine, but for the end of a particular way of being held.
This grief is rarely acknowledged, and when it is bypassed, fixation persists.
Allowing sweetness to withdraw means allowing that grief to be felt without rushing to repair it. It means staying with dryness without trying to spiritualize it. It means letting silence be silent, without demanding that it comfort.
Over time, something shifts.
The nervous system learns that absence is not annihilation. The body discovers that presence does not depend on reassurance. Attention stabilizes without warmth as its anchor. Sweetness is no longer needed to authorize being here.
This is not harshness.
It is recalibration.
At this point, tenderness can return without danger. It no longer regulates safety; it simply appears. When it leaves again, nothing collapses. There is no urgency to recover it, no sense of failure, no interpretation required.
What has changed is not the quality of experience, but the relationship to it.
Sweetness is allowed to come and go.
And when it can go without protest, it has finally completed its work.
Sweetness After Freedom
When fixation dissolves, sweetness does not disappear.
It simply loses its claim.
Tenderness can still arise, but it no longer regulates identity. Warmth can still be felt, but it is not required for legitimacy. Love can still be present, but it does not need to stay. Its withdrawal no longer signals danger, loss, or failure.
Sweetness becomes one movement among others, not the condition under which practice is allowed to continue.
What changes is not affect, but ownership.
After fixation ends, the practitioner can remain present through dryness, silence, impersonality, or absence without interpreting them as problems to be solved. Sweetness may return, but it is no longer demanded. It is received and released like any other function.
This is why maturity does not look like harshness.
It looks like tolerance of loss.
Nothing has to be destroyed.
Nothing has to be defended.
When sweetness is free to leave, it is also free to return. And when it returns, it no longer freezes development. It no longer substitutes for movement. It no longer asks to be preserved.
What remains is availability — not to a state, but to what is required now.
That availability is not cold.
It is honest.
And honesty, in the end, is what allows love to move.
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