Ep. 39 | Bad Aim and the Importance of Spiritual Practice

Call and Response Ep. 39 Bad Aim and the Importance of Spiritual Practice

“The key to doing a spiritual practice is actually doing it. Every day whether you feel like it or not. Because if you only go with your, “You know, I’m tired today, I think I’ll skip it”, then the habits that are already pushing us around just get stronger and stronger. We have to create new habits that turn us within, that make us more available to our own inner self.”   – Krishna Das

KD: Well, so, what are we doing? Why do sing, “Sri Ram Jai Ram”? Why do we do these practices at all? And, ultimately, the reason is that we’re not happy as we want to be. We have suffering in our lives. We have, we don’t know how to get what we want. We don’t know how to get rid of what we don’t want. And the reason for that is that we believe what we think. Very simple. Right now, you believe that you’re hearing what I’m saying, which is pretty interesting.  But we believe what we think and we believe how we interpret what our senses, the information our, we, our senses bring in to us through the course of the day, the course of our life. So essentially, we’re living in a prison with one little window way up high, which we can’t see out of. But we can hear and we get some idea of what’s out there but we don’t really see what’s really out there. But we want to. And the prison we live in is the prison made of thought, our thoughts, all of our thoughts, and the way we believe our thoughts and you can’t think yourself out of a prison that’s made of your thoughts and your beliefs, our beliefs. Believe me, I include me in “us.” There’s no way out of it through thinking or emotional manipulation or trying to, you know that joke about not wanting to join any club that would actually let you join? That’s what it’s like. We have some version in our minds of what it’ll be like when and if we feel the way we want to feel and have the experiences we want to have of freedom or God or nirvana or happiness, whatever you want to call it, love, real love. But because we don’t know what that is, conceptually, we all share one major problem: bad aim. That’s the deal. Bad aim. You think it’s over there but you wind up over there. How did I get over here? Bad aim. We go after what we think we want and it’s not what we want when we get it for more than, you know, ok, sixty seconds if you’re really good. So, why, what do these practices do? Well, it’s very simple. You don’t know, I don’t know what who Ram is or what Ram is. But they say that through the repetition of the Names, gradually but inevitably, now that’s the deal. “Inevitably” is the kicker here. Inevitably, what lives within us, our own true nature, who we really are underneath all the things we think and feel and believe, gradually but inevitably, through the practice of the repetition of the Names, that’s uncovered. You can’t know what it is before it’s uncovered. We’re digging. But you don’t know what it is until you hit something. And even then, you just get a little glimpse. You think, it’s like digging out a corpse from underneath the ground. You hit the foot. “Oh, that’s what it is.” No. That’s just a part of it.

That was kind of a gross… I’m sorry.

I can’t help myself.

So, that’s it. So, the idea is you sing and because it’s a spiritual practice, that means that we have one job only, that’s to pay attention. That’s the beginning. Without some attention, there’s no possibility of ever being here or ever recognizing our true nature or ever finding real love or merging with the divine, because it’s all here and we’re not.

We’re lost in our thoughts. We’re lost in our day dreams. We’re lost in our knee-jerk reactions to things. All day long, all life long, boom, then we’re dead.

And we have to do it again in another body. It’s a pain in the ass. And you’ve got to deal with your parents all over again, a whole new set of bullshit, you know? First, you have a Jewish mother,