Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 86 |Faith & Courage

“I think of spiritual life as a ripening process more than anything else. You plant the seeds and as time goes on, they grow, and they literally change you from the inside. They change your experience. They change how you see yourself. They change how you go through your day. As these seeds that we ourselves plant along, with the grace to plant them in the first place, they change the way we navigate our lives. They change how we see other people. It’s like you’re born and there’s no sun and you grow up and it’s dark all the time, and you think this is the way it is because it’s always been that way. This is the way it is. And then, the sun starts to rise, and a little light comes into the world and all of a sudden everything looks different.” – Krishna Das

Any questions or anything?

Anybody but Robert. I’m not qualified to answer his questions.

Okay. I’ll be brave. Give him the mic. Give him the mic. I’ll be brave. Robert had a question. Let me take a deep breath here.

RS: It’s a very simple question.

KD: I’ll give you a very simple answer.

RS: (Someone I know) is in India right now, and he texted me a photo of the Hanumanji at the Lucknow Neem Karoli Baba Temple.

Ha.

RS: So, I wondered, and he was saying that Babaji had spent some time in Lucknow. I knew he spent time in Allahabad, , I knew he spent time in Brindavan, but I didn’t know about Lucknow.

KD: Oh sure.

RS: If you could tell me about Lucknow. Is that an easy enough question?

KD: I think that’s okay. I think I handle that. Maharajji spent a lot of time in up UP, Uttar Pradesh, it was called, at and now it’s also, called Uttaranchal, the mountains.

He was mostly, most of the life that we saw of him was in UP, Lucknow, Khanpoor, Aligarh, He was everywhere it seems. There’s a very old temple, a Hanuman temple in Lucknow, in Aminabad, a very ancient Hanumanji temple, and he used to spend a lot of time there. It used to be outside of town and now it’s… but Tiwari told me an interesting story.

He said before this temple was built, there was an old Hanuman temple right by the river near this, the new temple, and he and Maharajji were walking by there, and Maharajji said to Tiwari, “Okay, do your puja here, your Shiva puja, right now.”

Now, this means like three and a half, four hours of puja, and he had no book. He had to do it all by…

But Tiwari said, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

“I said, ‘Do it! You do it, what I say.”

“I don’t care what you say, I’m not going to do it.”

“Why?”

He said, “Because the minute I sit down, you are going to run away. And you run away. You’ll leave me sitting here, and once I start my puja, I must finish. So, I’ll be sitting here for four hours by myself.”

“Nay nay. I won’t run away.”

“Yes, you will.”

“I won’t.”

“Yes, you will. Okay, promise me.”

He held his ears like this. This is like cross my heart and help to die in India. And they sat down, and Tiwari started the puja and Maharajji sat down, and He sat there the whole time right next to him and Tiwari’s doing the puja.

The other thing about it, Tiwari’s puja guru was also a very great saint, and he told Tiwari that when he did pu    ja, he had to do it at the top of his lungs. And his voice was something like a chainsaw. Oh God, it was incredible, but like a chainsaw. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Okay. But anyhow, so, this was right by the end, the last minute, the last “Om,” and Maharajji lept up, and said, “You miserable shit. You made me stay here and I have to have so much to do!” And he ran away.

And that was right down below where the temple is now. There was an old Hanumanji there. He had so many devotees from Lucknow and all those places. Kanpur…

The man who was the manager after the temple was built, the first manager of the temple, had been the head jailer of Central jail in Agra. His name was Mahotra, and whenever somebody needed to be kind of, reigned in, Maharajji said, “I’m sending you to Central jail.” And he would send him to the Lucknow Temple, to this guy.

Maharajji had his own room in Central jail in Agra, his own cell that was kept empty for him. And he used to just go in there and they’d lock him in, but they’d find him walking around all night, and one time there was this, he had a devotee who was a really big dacoit, a bad guy, a criminal, and who had two guns, one registered with the government and one unregistered, which was for killing people. But he could sing the Ramayana, the Ramacharitamanasa very beautifully. And he had his own village in the jungle. It was like, he was like a king in his own village, and so he finally got caught and he was in central jail.

So, Maharajji went there, and He said to him, He goes up to his cell and he says, “I know you’re planning to escape. Don’t do it. Because if you escape my other devotee, who’s the head of the jail, will lose his job, and who’s going to support his family? Don’t do it.”

So, the guy literally didn’t escape, and one year later he was pardoned, and he was released forever.

That’s faith. Because he could escape. He could. He was a really powerful bandit, a big guy.

The way these people, I mean, this is how we learned about him. We watched how the Indian people, we observed, how they interacted with him, how they saw him. The reason we have the Hanuman Chalisa is because we saw they saw him as Hanuman. They Worshipped Maharajji as Hanuman himself.

And look, I’ve said before. We used to come to the temple every day. And they would give us this little yellow booklet with a picture of a flying monkey on it. I had like at least a hundred of these booklets in my room when finally, one day I said, “What is this?”

Right? And they said, “Oh, it’s a hymn to Hanuman.”

Oh. So, I thought, wow, if we learn this, we could sing it to Maharajji. We knew he wanted to spend more time with us, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. And we thought, okay, if we learn this, we’ll be able to sing to him and he’ll like that. And that’s exactly what happened. And here we are. We’re doing it now.

It all came from that little yellow booklet and that one little thought that he finally got into my thick skull.

But his old devotees, the Pukka devotees, the older ones, they worshipped him as Shiva. There was one guy, a very poor man who came from Aligarh. His name was Vishwambhar. I will never forget this guy. He used to come with a basket full of Puja articles, the trays and the plates and the lamps and the things in the ghee and everything. And he’d come outside Maharajji’s door and he’d prepare everything and he’d just stand there and wait. And Maharajji would be inside. He’d be saying, “Oh, he’s here and he’s got this and that. And he brought this and that. And he brought this kind of Prasad and that kind of Prasad.” He said, “Oh, I won’t go out. Okay, I’ll go out. No, I won’t go out. Okay, I’ll go.”

So, he’d come out, and this guy, he would do his puja and he’d be weeping, right? I mean, it was such an extraordinary sight. And he’d be doing his puja and chanting these mantras and weeping. Weeping. And finally at the end, he’d start doing the Arati and he’d, he would just go into Samadhi, and he’d just be standing there like that. And then he’d be kind of crazy. He came up to the westerners and say, “Who are you people? Are you the gods who have taken forms to be with Maharajji? Who are you?”

And Tiwari was like that, my Indian father was like that. He’d been with Maharajji for 40 years. The first time he met him, he was a school kid, maybe about eight years old. Maharajji had started coming, showing up in the hills, but he was kind of hanging out in the jungle, and he wouldn’t be with any adults, but he would come to see the school kids and he would do acrobatics for them and they would give him their lunches and stuff like that so he’d get something to eat. But he used to be able to put his arms on the ground like this and do a full somersault without picking his arms up, like whoop. And the kids, so, the kids would give him stuff to eat.

That’s nothing. Sai Baba used to take his intestines out and wash them and put ’em back in. Shirdi Sai Baba. He’d take his arms off and put them back on.

I mean, if it’s a dream, you can do whatever you want in your dream. It’s a dream for them.

Q: You’ve been talking about the faith that you witnessed around you there.

Yeah.

Q: But could you talk about the evolution of your own faith? Because when you first arrived, you couldn’t have had much faith and then somehow you got to a point where you would do what He told you to do. Could you talk about that evolution?

Let me think about it. It’s interesting. I was just on Maui, where Ram Dass lived the last 20 plus years of his life, and we were very close for many years, over 50 years. I first met Ram Dass in the winter of ’68-‘69. He was living at his father’s place in New Hampshire, and I heard about him from my friends, and I went to see him. And I walked into the room where he was sitting. He was sitting on the bed, and the bed was on the floor, and he had his eyes closed. He was leaning against the wall, and I walked in the room and without a word being spoken, without eye contact, the minute I walked into that room, something happened inside me, and at that moment I knew that whatever it was I was looking for was real. It was in the world and you could find it.

That was the beginning of the rest of my life.

And I was just on Maui, and I went to the house, Ram Dass’s house. It’s still there. There’s some people living there, keeping it together. And I went up to his room where we used to sit for hours, and I sat in the chair that I used to sit in, right next to his chair where he would spend a lot of time because he, after the stroke, he couldn’t walk. And I closed my eyes, and I was just sitting there and I thought, “Wait a minute. This is no different than the way we used to sit together.”

And it was so strong, the presence, the feeling, that I opened my eyes to see if was there, because he was so there, that what I felt was so, strong. And that feeling that I had at that moment was exactly the same feeling that I had in 1968 when I walked in that room. That presence which I felt for the first time in that room with Ram Dass, the first time, which I felt in India with Maharajji and after he left the body, whenever I was not too stupid and busy to pay attention, it was there.

And I saw that had been with me, unchanging, all these years. It had never changed. It was perfect as it is, and it never came and went. It was always here. I never thought of it as faith. That word kind of makes Westerners nauseous, but, the trust that I have, that the presence is with me all the time, even when I forget, is probably the biggest gift that I got from him.

One time I was sitting with him in a Parsi apartment building in Mumbai, in Christmas, 1972, and he was sitting on the bed and he would sit up, he’d lie down, he’d sit up, he’d lie down, turn this way and turn that way. I was just sitting on the floor doing my practice, which was like…

All I did was want to stare at him, because all the beauty of the universe was wrapped up in that blanket. It was like, my eyes did not, they wouldn’t go anywhere else. They just wanted to be right there. At one point, he sits up like this and he looks at me and he says, “Courage is a really big thing.”

And there was an Indian guy there. He said, “Oh, Baba, God takes care of his devotees.”

“Courage is a really big thing.”

And he laid down and went back to sleep.

I was like, “What’s going to happen?”

But there have been times in my life that all I had was the vaguest, most distant memory of that moment, and it was just enough to kind of make it to the next moment. The faith thing, it’s my experience that no matter how close I’ve gotten to being destroyed by one thing or another, every time I would fall off the cliff, he’d move the cliff and I’d fall on my face, instead of 10,000 feet to my death. That just happened so many times.

But a funny thing happened when I first met him physically. It was confusing because I was feeling him everywhere all the time after that first meeting with Ram Dass and then after traveling around with Ram Dass in the States for a year and a half before going to India. He was huge.

And then I saw this little guy in a blanket, and I thought like, “Wait a minute, how does all that fit into that blanket?”

I don’t know. It was like, how does this work? I got really confused. But I got over it. I got over it and I got completely attached to the body and I forgot about the space. So, that took a lot of getting over.

I don’t know. It’s not much of an answer, but when you go, the more you go through and survive, you can start to trust that you’re going to make it, regardless of how you feel. Sometimes it feels like you’re not going to make it, but we’ve all survived so many difficult situations in our lives and we’re still here. Maybe we could relax a little? I don’t know. What do you think?

Fear is a big thing. Fear is very crippling. But fear itself never hurt anybody. It’s a feeling that comes and goes. There’s reasons it arises in us for sure, but the more we get used to letting go of whatever pulls us away from whatever we are thinking about or concentrating on, every time you come back, it’s training, it’s mind training, and you get more used to what it feels like not to be lost in dreamland, or absorbed in thoughts, or thinking or planning, or the past.

I mean, every moment is either that everything, it’s either that you’re thinking about the past or imagining the future or judging how you are now. So, it gets easier and easier to notice the more you, the more practice you do, to notice when you’re gone. Of course, when you’re really gone, you don’t notice until you’re back.

But how does that happen? Shri, Ram, Jai, Ram, and you’re thinking about, “Oh man, what’s on Netflix tonight? Yeah, right. Okay.” Oh.

How did that happen that you notice you weren’t paying attention? That’s a great moment. Because we’re not doing that. We’re gone. And yet, oh, we woke up.

So, if you understand a little bit about cause and effect, nothing can happen without a cause. What could the cause be of waking up? We must have planted seeds of waking up already or we’d never wake up.

So, that’s the work we’ve already done, coming into fruition and waking us up, bringing us home. But don’t think about it too much. But it’s there. You notice, you come back.

I mean, I remember once I got asked to sing at this teacher training for this yoga studio. So, I showed up and the teacher who was going to train these poor people started haranguing them. And there were pictures of all the deities on the wall, and this person was going, “If you don’t know what all these, every one of these beings are, you’ll never be a good yoga teacher.”

I wanted to commit Hara Kiri. I just wanted to get out there. I couldn’t, but there was nothing I could do.

Man, the deities is who we are. It’s our true nature, home base. And we’re always home, but we’re not paying attention. So, all we have to do is train ourselves to let go of what’s taken us away, and come back. Let go, come back, let go. When you let go, you are back. You don’t have to then find back. You notice, you’re gone, you’re home. And then you try to stay with the sound of the name if that’s what you’re doing, or with the flow of the breath or whatever, but you can’t. The personal will can’t do that. You’re gone again, then you wake up, then you’re back, and you stay with the sound, but you’re gone. You just watch it happen again and again, over and over. And little by little you, you’re not gone so, long. That’s over time. One of the definitions of meditation is becoming familiar with getting used to being here.

Someone asked Ramana Maharshi, what’s the result of Raama Japa, the repetition of Raam’s name? He said, Raa is reality. Ma is the mind. Their union is the fruit of Raam. Japa, utterance of words is not enough. The elimination of thoughts is wisdom. So, the reality, when the mind merges with that reality… mind is an interesting word.

So, what we usually call mind is just thoughts. The mind is like the sky and the thoughts are like birds flying through the sky. The birds are not the sky. The mind is the awareness in which all of that happens, in which we’re always present, inside of that space.

There’s no place we could ever be except here, but our stuff pulls us away all the time, all day long, all life long, and then… next life.

Q: Thank you, KD.

Q: Thank you, first of all, and Nina and Robert, everyone for being here. You mentioned how in that experience with Ram Dass, you saw or felt what was real, and that was that everything you wanted could exist. And like beings like Maharajji, Neem Karoli Baba are love, I’ve heard you say. And they remove the dirt from your eyes so you can see your true self. And these things are, in my experience, easier around beings like yourself and Nina and Robert, and so on. And you mentioned how quickly we forget and fall off this mountain, and Grace will, you fall on your face instead of to a horrifying death. What can we do to maybe fall off that mountain less often? Like, this is easy because I can walk down the road and Krishna Das is live in front of me and chanting in a room with people. But by the time you leave, I’m picking up a six-pack, and hitting the weed showcase in Woodstock sounds good. Why is it so easily that we forget and like neglect things that feel so, in harmony and like chakras balanced, good. Just keep doing this and then before I’m out the door, I forget everything you said.

KD: That’s just who we are and there’s nothing to do about it. You have to be you. Inside of that, you are waking up slowly at your own speed. You can’t go faster, and you can’t slow down either. It’s happening at its own speed. It is a question of what you want. If we really wanted to be awake and present, really wanted, we would be, but we’re very conflicted. We have all kinds of things we want, so many programs running. You want this, you want that. But yeah, you take a little bit of that on the side, too. You’ve got to be you, but you’ve got to learn to love that, too and accept that’s who you are and just not fight it. No sense fighting who you are. But when you cultivate a practice, if we don’t plant the seeds of the things you want, we won’t get them. They don’t, the seeds don’t come from Outer space. They come from within us. The seeds of paying attention, the seeds of the repetition in the name, the seeds of coming back to the breath, the seeds of the mantras.

This is what we can do to help ourselves. All those practices, all those things. Reading the books about the saints, how they lived, what they did, getting that kind of inspiration in our lives. There’s so many videos about so many Great Saints, but I watch Korean serial killer movies. Hello? I could be watching a video about the 16th Karmapa, but I’m watching a Korean serial killer movie. That’s me. What can I do about it? Well, when it’s over, when this 49 episode thing is finally over, I’ll never watch another one. I’ve said that a few times. It’s just who I am. It’s okay.

But inside of that, at the same time I’m still doing a little bit of practice once in a while, and inherent in everything you said is a lot of self-judgment. And as long as you believe everything you think, you’re fucked. Just like the rest of us, we believe everything we think. Excuse me, why? Well, we do.

And the thoughts, they’re showing up in this moment from the past or from, they’re like waves coming off a big storm in the far-off ocean of time, and now they arrive here and we think we’re thinking, and then we think we’re not thinking. So, we’re just becoming aware of the thought in this moment.

And you go, “I’m thinking.”

No, you’re not. You’re just glued to that thing, identified with it temporarily until it dissolves. But those programs, those repetitive thoughts and unconscious ways that we limit ourselves and judge ourselves and criticize ourselves and all that stuff, we’ve really been trained well to do that. So, it takes time to unwind that stuff. It just does.

And really, I think of spiritual life as a ripening process more than anything else. You plant the seeds and as time goes on, they grow, and they literally change you from the inside. They change your experience. They change how you see yourself. They change how you go through your day. As these seeds that we ourselves plant along, with the grace to plant them in the first place, they change the way we navigate our lives. They change how we see other people. It’s like you’re born and there’s no sun and you grow up and it’s dark all the time, and you think this is the way it is because it’s always been that way. This is the way it is. And then, the sun starts to rise, and a little light comes into the world and all of a sudden everything looks different.

That’s what happens on the inside. Everything starts to look different, naturally, as we release our stuff because it is different. It’s not how we think it is. We are completely involved, more or less, with our subjective version of ourselves, and life, and people around us, and our judgments, the likes and dislikes.

The third patriarch of Zen said, “The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences.”

Okay, well next. So, yeah. So, anyhow, that’s the deal. So, you just have to chill. Everything that you think about yourself is something you think about yourself, but you do, and you believe it. We all do. That’s what makes us, that’s where we share the same kind of bandwidth, mostly. We can drive on the same roads and stop at the red and go on the green. We share a bandwidth, and as time goes on, it does change.

So, before we get there, Sri Ramakrishna, who was a very great saint in the 1800s, he talked about how the repetition of the name works. He said every repetition of the name is a seed, and just like a tiny seed can have a huge tree in it. So, does every repetition of the name have reality in it. And he said, the seeds of the repetition of the name are caught by the wind and they’re blown around. And some of those seeds land on the roof of an old house in the jungle somewhere. Right? And they get stuck between the clay tiles on the roof, and then time, seasons, snow, rain, sun, everything. Years go by, and the tiles begin to soften a little bit as time goes on. And when they get soft, the seeds start to grow, and the roots of the seeds start to grow. The seeds of the repetition of the name, they start to grow, and they destroy the roof of the house, and they keep growing, and they destroy the walls of the house.

He says, that house is who we think we are, our version of ourselves, our subjective, delusionary, separate self, and that separate self was created by Karmas. The house was built for certain reasons, but when the walls of the house are gone, there’s only open space. Nothing is lost. You recognize your oneness with the whole universe. You’re no longer limited to the house, which is who we think we are in this, that house.

But you notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, you’ll feel like this, or you’ll feel like that, or it’ll be blissful or anything like that, because it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point of it. The “what it feels like,” the experiences that might come as the house is being dissolved and broken down, and at the end there’s no walls. There’s no version of a “me” anywhere left. You’ve recognized reality.

So, that’s why you simply plant the seeds. You do your practice, and you live your life in the best way you can. And we try to treat other people the way we would like to be treated. That’s one thing, one possible thought to keep in mind as we go through our day, in terms of how we meet each moment, how we meet each person that arrives in our lives.

Because if we could treat other people the way we would like to be treated, the world would be a different place immediately. But it takes tremendous awareness and strength to be able to do that. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of work on oneself to release oneself from the grip of likes and dislikes and wants and all that stuff, to be freed from that so that you can be present. It’s something that takes time and dedication.

When singing the divine name becomes continuous, all other thoughts cease and one is in one’s real nature, which is invocation or absorption. We turn our minds outwards to things of the world and are therefore not aware that our real nature is always invocation. That’s from Ramana Maharshi, also. “Invocation” really means clinging to one thought, to the exclusion of all others. That’s the purpose of it. It leads to absorption, which ends in self-realization or to surrender.

Coming to America and the Vindhyavasini

Q: I was curious about what your re-entry was like for you, when you came back from India to the United States?

KD: Last year you said? You mean the first time?

Q: And how you kind of found your…

Well, my philosophy at that time… “Well, he’s sending me back, all right, fuck it, I’ll party.”

My idea was to get as far out on the limb as I could, and just before it broke, to come back to him. So, I got out on the limb as far as I could go, and just before it broke, He left the body. Talk about fucked. I was fucked forever. And I spent the next 21 years hating myself.

That’s how I came back.

It took a long time to get over that, because he actually wrote to me, He had somebody…

One day, He looked around, he said, “Where’s Krishna? Das?” The guy who knows everything.

They said, “Baba, You send him to America.”

“Nay. Tell him to come back. I want to see him. I want to hear him sing. Tell him to come back now.”

So, I got a letter. It’s a long story, but I didn’t go.

I betrayed… just like that, like nothing. I betrayed the love of my life as if it was nothing. I was so lost and so immersed in my own shit that I didn’t even know what I was doing, but just like that.

“I love him. I’m such a great devotee. I sing to Him,” and in a split second, I betrayed it as if it was nothing, and I had to live with that for a long time.

Just part of the show.

Anybody?  Oh, hi.

Q: So, part of my rehabilitation from being strictly raised Irish Catholic has been following the teachings of Ram Dass, particularly his teachings about unworthiness and worthiness, and through my kind of contemplation about this, I’ve discovered it really shows up as self-hatred and self-loathing, and how this is stemming from the kind of indoctrination of fear by, really, the western religions, in my case, Catholicism. And in kind of investigating this, I found that the Eastern religions don’t, or just Eastern cultures, don’t really experience this phenomenon of self-hatred. There’s this story that Sharon Salzberg tells that she had an opportunity to ask His Holiness a question. And so, she asked him, what do you think of self-hatred?

And his Holiness answered, “What’s that?”

KD:

Q: Yeah. And so, what I’ve noticed is that the Eastern traditions have a much deeper sense of honoring and regard for the sacred feminine, which the Western traditions do not, and there’s rampant denial and repression of the sacred feminine and of women in general. And so, as you just spoke about your own experience with self-hatred, I can assume that you’ve had some experience with overcoming it.

KD: I’m an expert.

Q: I’m just wondering how your, one, your relationship with the sacred feminine on the subtle plane evolved as you hopefully overcame your self-hatred, and two, how your relationship with women on the physical plane may have changed as you overcame self-hatred.

KD: That’s a big chunk.

Okay. One something at a time. First of all, there’s another story about His Holiness the Dalai. Lama. These Christian missionaries came to see him, and they said, your Holiness, what’s your idea of sin? And he thought for a minute, and he said, “That’s kind of a Christian thing, isn’t it?”

They don’t have that.

Paap. The word for sin usually is paap, which means to burn. Correct, Robert?

Robert Svaboda:   Not exactly.

KD: Not exactly. Tell…

Robert Svaboda: well, what you’re thinking of is paschat tapam, which means burning with regret. Paap is just a word that basically means karma that is unwisely performed.

KD: Yeah. Okay.  Which you suffer from.

Robert Svaboda: Which you suffer from.

KD: So, yeah, there’s no real concept like that, like original sin…

Robert Svaboda: I mean, there’s plenty of guilt in India, but there’s no word for guilt in India.

KD: A lot of times Indian people will come to talk to me and, oh boy, it is just how did, there’s a whole different family structure. The issues are not exactly the same as ours. But a lot of it has to do with our relationship with our physical mothers. Once a couple was having a problem and they came to Maharajji and he said to the guy, “Just see her as your mother.”

He said, “I hate my mother.”

He, “What? What did he say? What did he say?”

Westerners are really strange.

Early on, when I started getting interested in this stuff, I was very much into Kali. I really loved, I got very attracted to the idea of Kali and the Goddess and Durga, and Maharajji made me the pujari of the Durga temple also, for a while.

There was a new temple he had built in the courtyard to Durga, and they brought in a pujari, but they caught him stealing the money in the donation box. They sent him home and brought in a second guy. They caught him stealing the money. So, they brought a third guy. They caught him stealing the money.

So, the Temple Trust came to Maharajji and said, “Baba, we can’t find a priest or Pujari that won’t steal.”

“My priest won’t steal.”

“So, who’s that?”

“Krishna Das.”

So, that was my qualification. Guru is everything. Guru is male, female, and beyond all that. He could be the sweetest, sweeter than the sweetest mother. He was a mother to us and a father, and everything, even still, and then when he left the body, Siddhi Ma was there. She took care of us for so, many years and actually there’s a story.

Near Allahabad, there’s a place called Vindhyachal, the Hill, Vindhyah Hill, and on that hill, there’s an ancient temple to Vaishnavi Devi, Vindhyavasini, Durga Devi, the form of Vaishnavi Devi who lives on this hill, this very sacred place. So, one time, Maharajji and Siddhi Ma and others were in a car and they were on their way up there to do Puja at the temple. But it got late in the day. They started late, and so the temple was going to be closed by the time they got there. So, halfway up, Maharajji says, “Pull over.”

So, they pulled the car over and he gets out of the car and Ma was sitting in the back. He opens the door, he sits down on the ground, and he took all the utensils for the puja that they were going to do to the Murti on the hill. And he worshiped Siddhi Ma as Vindhyavasini Durga Devi. And the temple that he built in Kainchi, which is where Ma lived, is in Vindhyavasini,  Durgadevi. That’s one of her forms. So, living with Ma, being with Ma was extraordinary. This, it’s hard for me to talk about it, because for 30 years she didn’t want anybody talking about her, and now she can’t stop us. But still, it doesn’t come out easy. But she was so great with the Westerners. She never judged us. She always loved and supported us and helped us, and we were really stupid. I mean, the level of stupidity that we were functioning under was… is…  extraordinary. Forget “was.” But she never said a word, and she knew everything, and she just loved us. And that love, that love was more important than the blood in our veins.

But still, the programs are running, they don’t go away so fast. The glue that holds us to that stuff is super, super, duper glue.

But over time, it dissolves. And we no longer believe that shit about ourselves so much. In fact, I can actually tell that I mope around less than I used to. Really. I mean, I was born a moper. I spent my whole life moping around, but I hardly mope around now. I miss it. I really do. There’s something to moping around. Sometimes I do it just for fun, like, “fucking-a god damn piece of shit.”

I mean, it’s like a home base, but I don’t go there very much anymore.

My mother came to India after I’d been there for two years. I was in the living in the temple with Maharajji, and one day He looks at me and said, “Is your mother coming to India?”

I said, “My mother? No.”

Right. Okay.

Later that day, a message arrives from town. Your mother called. She wants to talk to you. Oh, shit. So, I went to the town, and I called the local operator that called the town operator that called the county operator that called the national operator that called the international operator that booked the call. It took like 12 hours,

“Hi mom.”

“I want to come to India.”

I said something to my mother that, if my daughter said it to me, I would lock her in a room and give her food once a week. I said, “I have to ask my guru.”

“What? Why’d you say? What?”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

I said, “Maharajji. My mother wants to…”

“Let her come.”

So, she came. She had an idea. She’d seen pictures of Maharajji, because I sent some pictures back to my sister and everything. So, she had an idea that Maharajji’s nose was the same as her father’s nose, and she was going to come to India to see if that was true.

Yeah. So, the whole time she was in India, she looked like this. I had to leader around. It was amazing. So, but it was good for us. So, we spent like 10 days in the hills seeing Maharajji every couple of days, and then we had to go down to the plains, she wanted to see the Taj Mahal and a couple other places.

So, coming out of the temple. So, the temple is kind of below the road.  There’s the road and you go down these steps and a bridge across the river, and then you walk down into the temple. So, we said goodbye to Maharajji and we walked out up the steps, and we’re up on the road, and I opened the door to the car for her to get in, and she turns and she looks back down into the temple. And Maharajji was just sitting on the tucket and she completely, she burst out crying. She exploded in tears, and I had to catch her so she didn’t fall. And I had to like, pick her up and kind of get her into the car. She totally lost it. She just was weeping. She just broke in half, and she cried for like an hour as we were like, driving down. It was amazing. She never knew what that is, but she, at that point in her life, she was still drinking. She was an alcoholic. And I think she went through like three rehabs before she stopped drinking. And then, when I’d be singing in the city, sometimes people from Long Island would stop and pick her up and bring her into the city, and they would ask, they’d say, “You met Maharajji?”

And she’d start talking and she’d be like, but she couldn’t maintain that, but the hook went in, and that, that hook will never come out.

So, it, it was interesting. She wasn’t a happy camper. But by the end of her life we had pretty much worked most of this stuff out.

I told her to bring the best cashmere sweater she could find, right? So, she brought this beautiful sweater, and she brings it over, and Maharajji starts abusing the the Indians.

“You miserable shits. You never bring me anything. This woman’s come all the way from America. Look what she’s…”

He puts on the sweater, and they loved it. I mean, it’s teasing. Not really abuse, but you know, all the pictures of Him with the blue blanket. This is one of the most pictures that you see. There’s a red turtleneck, a maroon turtleneck he’s wearing. That’s my mother’s sweater. Is it there? No. I have no pictures of Him around here. Bob said he was going to put some pictures up.

Bob used to come by the temple because he had a Volkswagen bus. He had to drive people to the hospital in Nanital from Almora, and he drove by Kainchi a number of times while we were there, while Ram Dass was there, but he never came in because he was mad at Ram Dass, and so he never saw Maharajji.

Yeah. It’s a long story from the old acid Davis at Millbrook, and Ram Dass was… it’s a long story, but he was mad at Ram Dass, so he never stopped and went in the temple and he drove by it like this. Wow. Talk about regret. He regrets.

Q: Thank you. It’s interesting that you just mentioned Bob Thurman being in India, because I was just wondering, although it’s, you can see that your hearts are in the same place as if you discuss with one another, just your different approaches and of your sacred practices between Bhakti and Tibetan Analytical Buddhism.

KD: Was that a question?

Yeah. I was wondering if you discuss it with one another. I just haven’t heard you talk about a different angle.

KD:I take a lot of Buddhist teachings. A lot of Buddhist teachings. I go to a lot. I have, there are lamas I’ve been studying with for years.

Q: So, you’re still doing that? Okay. I didn’t realize that.

KD: Because, the Hindus or the Indians, they worship the car. You know, they do puja, they wash the car. The Buddhists, they tell you how it fucking works. When it breaks down, you can fix it. When the car breaks down in India, they just do some more puja and then it goes. But the Buddhists know how to fix the engine, the brakes, everything.

Q: I didn’t realize that. Okay.

KD: Well don’t take it to heart. One day Maharajji grabbed my book. Let me see what happened. Oh yeah. He grabbed my notebook. I had two notebooks, a diary, and then I had a notebook where we wrote out prayers and stuff from different traditions, so, he grabs it and he opens it up and he says, “What’s that?” He didn’t, supposedly he didn’t read English, right?

He says, he goes down, stops at this one page. “What’s that?”

And I looked. I said it was this Buddhist prayer. The song of Mahamudra. I          said, it’s Buddhist.

He said, “Translate some.”

So, I couldn’t. So, the Indian guy there, he translated.

He goes, “Teek. Correct. Very good.”

I went, “What? What? What’s he talking about?”

So, then he keeps going through the book and He, we had made these postage stamps, like a page of postage stamps of him, these little… he come across one of these stamps and he goes, “Who’s that?”

I said, “Baba, it’s you.”

“No! Buddha.”

Interesting. And so, so many of us have done Buddhist meditation courses and things.  And there’s another little story. So, the previous Karmapa, the 16th Karmapa, the head of the Kagyu sect, was an extraordinarily great Being. He was really special. And Maharajji had, there was a Westerner, Larry Brilliant, Dr. Larry Brilliant, who Maharajji sent forth to ultimately eradicate smallpox in India. They went all around India, inoculated everybody. It took years, but they, but it was Maharajji who got him doing that. So, at one point they had gone all through India and inoculated everybody. And now they were going around again to check and make sure there were no outbreaks of smallpox.

And they were in Sikkim and they went to visit the Karmapa. And Karmapa said, “What are you doing?” And Larry told them, and He said, “Oh, no problem. The king is my disciple. You’ll be able to go wherever to check everything.” And then he says to him, “What’s your spiritual thing? What do you do?”

We never knew what to say because all we did was sit around with Maharajji and eat and sing. It wasn’t like we did anything. So, how do you tell somebody that? So, he just, he took out a picture of Maharajji, and he hands it to the Karmapa. The Karmapa goes, “Oh, the teachings of all Bodhisattvas are the same, even if they appear different.” And then he points to his altar, and he says, “You see those statues? Mahasiddhas.”

He points to the Mahasiddhas, then points at the picture. “Mahasiddha.” And then couple of days later, he asked Larry and his wife if they wanted to take refuge. There’s a ceremony where you take refuge in the Triple Gem, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. It’s an initiation of sorts. So, they said, sure, yeah. But actually, on the day they went up on the roof and there was a whole Puja and an altar. Larry got nervous and he says to the Karmapa, he said “Your Holiness, do I have to give up my Guru?”

And he said, “No, I’m going to give you refuge in your Guru, the way I give refuge in the Buddha. I’m going to give you a refuge in your work, the way I give you refuge in the Dharma, etc.”

Like that. So, same. One thing.

There was also a Lama that Maharajji met who had escaped from Tibet after the Chinese, and he was just wandering around. And he took care of him for two years. He called him Tibeti Baba and he made sure he had a place to stay and everything. And one day, early in the morning, Maharajji is banging on his door. He opens the door. Maharajji said, “Don’t listen to them. Whatever they say, don’t listen to them.”

And then he went away. Lama doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Later in the day, the Lama’s guru’s brother arrives at this place to bring him back. His guru was now in Darjeeling, I think it was. And he wanted him to come back because he was his meditation master. He ran the retreats. So, the Lama comes to Maharajji and said, “Baba, they wanted me to come back.”

And Maharajji said, “Don’t go. We love each other so, much. Don’t go. We’ll stay together our whole lives.”

He said, “But Baba, he’s my guru.”

“You must go. If you don’t go, your sadhana won’t bring fruit.”

So, the Lama says, “But Baba, we’ll meet again.”

Maharajji says, “Yeah, we’ll meet again. But after you die.”

We’re so, hard on ourselves, we Westerners. We, whatever we are, we’re so, hard on ourselves. It’s not easy to let go of that. It’s so, ingrained in us, but we’re so busy being distracted and busy, and avoiding real love and not letting it, allowing it to show up in our lives. But through the repetition of the name, everything is accomplished. So, whatever else you do, try to remember that. Just like me in the middle of a serial killer movie, I remember that for 10 seconds or less. It’s a guarantee. Really, what else can I tell you? It’s a guarantee. He said that. He meant it. He knows what he’s talking about. Through the repetition of the Names, everything is accomplished. So, whatever else you do, what other practices you do, keep in mind that you can always do this practice. You don’t need to be initiated. You don’t have to wear holy clothes. You don’t have to stand on one leg. You don’t have to be vegetarian. You don’t have to give up serial killer movies. Nothing is required except the repetition of the Name. And then anything else you want to do is good.

And all the names are the names of the One.

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