Call and Response Podcast Special Edition with Krishna Das | April 1, 2021

“Empathy is not exactly compassion, but it’s a good beginning when you start to be aware of what other people are feeling and how they might be hurting and how their pain is causing them to act in certain ways, even ways that might be difficult for you to deal with. So, the development of compassion is to see all that and wish them well and really feel for them, and see clearly that their own issues are causing them to act this way, which is causing them tremendous suffering.” – Krishna Das

I lost it there for a minute. it reminded me of what something that happened when we were on tour. I was in Australia many years ago. Ty was still playing with me then. We had started in Melbourne and gone all through Australia, many places, but so many people came in Melbourne that we agreed to come back and do another kirtan at the end of the tour, and by that point, it was really hot. I don’t know. We went in the summer. That was the last time we ever went in the summer to Australia because everybody’s on the beach usually. But it was so hot. We got to the hall and there was no time to do a sound check, and I mean, it was a really fast sound check and I was sweating and there was no air conditioning. I was really cranky. Very cranky. So, I was just really pissed off and just in a bad mood and we started playing, everybody’s singing along, and at some point, in my mind, I just said to Maharajji, I said, “What would it be like if I could really sing to you?”

And immediately this wave came over me and I just started going…  And Ty was sitting, playing tabla and he was looking over at me like…Trying to follow me. I didn’t know. I was just like, “Ah, Sita Ram…” It was too funny. And finally, I came back to earth and it was just hilarious. I can still remember, the look on his face was like…

All right. Let’s do some questions and stuff.

Okay. So the question is, “I am in a very weird point. It’s so hard to choose if I want to surrender to Krishna, or if I want to choose the way of the Buddha. Please help me.”

Well, ultimately, all ways lead to the same place: our true being; our true nature. I certainly don’t have any answers for you. I do whatever makes me, whatever I feel like doing, and I don’t even know why you think you have to choose right now. Just do something. Maybe it’s just a way of your mind keeping you from doing anything. just do something. And ultimately, little by little, maybe you’ll feel more comfortable in something and that’s what it is. That’s what it’ll be. It’s not such a big deal. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Just go with it.

Actually the whole idea of trying to work through this situation is part of your path anyway. So no one can tell you what to do.

I do it all. I don’t care what it is. If it makes me feel good or helps me when I feel bad, that’s what I do. Singing to Krishna, singing to Tara, chanting “Om Mani Padme Hum,” which is to Avalokiteshvara Chenrezig, they’re all the same, ultimately. The paths may be taught differently.

Of course, if you’ve taken or if you’re going to decide to take a transmission or lineage and join a particular group, well then go for it. Once you join a group, you should stay with it as best you can, unless you find that it’s just, after years, it’s just not working for you. Then I would talk to your teacher and tell him your problems or your situation, but this whole egoistic nonsense of thinking you have… First of all, you can’t surrender to Krishna,anyway. Who do you think you are? Krishna surrenders you when he wants you, not before, and same with the Buddha. You think you’re doing something in Buddhist teaching, supposedly. You think it’s up to you to do the practice. The way of surrender is a very different way of thinking about things, but the path is actually not any different. I mean, the actual results of the path.

Yes. Some teachers would say, some teachers of this, Krishna, would say, “Oh no, this is the way.” And some teachers of the Buddhist path would say, “No, they’re not all the same. You have to do it this way.” Maybe they know. I certainly don’t, but I could see that you’re stuck in this point and this is all egoistic nonsense and just, relax. Take it easy. Enjoy life and do what you feel like. You don’t have to make a decision.

Surrender happens. It’s not something you do. Your mind, your ego will never surrender. Never. When the grace is there, surrender happens. So, prepare for grace. Purify your heart. Prepare for grace. That’s that path. The other path is a little different, but it depends which type of Buddhism you’re talking about. In Theravada Buddhism, it’s very cut and dry. You do this, you concentrate. This is what you do. This is what you do. In Mahayana Buddhism, you cultivate compassion and the goal is to develop what they call Bodhi Chitta, which is well, there are two types of Bodhi Chitta, but simply, feeling of one with all beings, kindness and compassion and caring for all. And in Vajrayana, it’s also again different. The first basic step in Vajrayana is to unite your mind with the mind of your guru. That’s devotion. So then from there you get, you get the sense of direction and then teachings can be given to you, different types of teachings.

So, yada, yada, yada. Just enjoy the fact that you’re totally fucked up and what are you gonna do?

A lot of these questions are about, “What should I do if this is happening in my life?”

Chant. That’s my answer. I’m not Dr. Ruth. I can’t give you advice, what to do in your life. You have to figure that out. What I can offer you is my practice, which helps me figure out what to do. So, if you do your practice, that’ll help you figure out what to do, hopefully.

So, we all have problems in life, and we have to deal with them. And it’s very hard to see them clearly, sometimes, and it’s very hard to know what the best thing is to do, but we don’t have to know what the best thing is to do. We just have to do the best we can and try to work through these issues. That’s the whole path. It’s not like, “Okay, I’m gonna fix my life. Then I can get spiritual.” Whatever that means.

No. This is the karmic situation. Find a way to deal with it in the best way you can, and by not hurting others and not hurting yourself. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to distinguish the difference between those two sometimes. And it’s very hard to know what to do, but there’s no playbook here. There’s no book that gives all the answers. There is, but that’s inside your own heart. So, calm yourself down. Chant. Do some practice. Try to become a good human being. And what does that mean to you? Okay?

Oh boy, this is a good one. Do we really want to go there?

“Why is sexuality such a challenge on the path?”

Hare Ram.

Well, it’s interesting. A few years ago, I was on tour in Southeast Asia and we were in Hong Kong and I took this shuttle train way up, that goes straight up this big mountain, and then you walk around the mountain, and from the top of the mountain, I looked down on Hong Kong and all these huge skyscrapers were squeezed together, and there were ships in the Harbor and there was more construction going on and it was, you could feel the energy of this place, and I thought, “This is so weird. This, how did this happen?”

All we have to do is eat, sleep shit, fuck. And that’s the deal. Where did this come from? How did this happen? That everybody gathers together and business is done and money… I mean, it just looks like… I was astounded by it. It was amazing.

So, you know, we’re in human bodies and the body itself has different hungers, not just for food, but it has hungers for sex, for procreation of the race, of the human race, and pleasure, and anything can be a, what’s the word you use? a “challenge,” so to speak, or you can embrace it and try to see what it is.

My guru was married and had three children. We didn’t know that when we met him, actually. We only learned that after he left the body, which was very far out, but we’ve, since then we’ve met his children, and so obviously for him, sex was not a challenge. It didn’t seem to interfere with his becoming enlightened.

So, we each have karmas to work through. We each have hungers, and it’s, I think, from my experience in my life and the people that I know, you have to eat. You don’t have to overeat, but you do have to feed certain things.

And once again, Hanuman, the path of Rama, this type of devotion is not a path of renunciation. I’ve read that sloka many times, that Hanuman not only bestows liberation upon people, but he makes it possible for them to satisfy the desires that will be helpful for them to have to satisfy.

So, a lot of times sexuality can be very painful and unsatisfying and scary, and the energy of that can also be very difficult to understand and feel at ease with, but that’s mostly psychological stuff. Animals don’t seem to have a problem jumping on each other at the right times, but human beings have confused pleasure with happiness. And that’s the real crux of the problem. It’s not just sex. It’s food. It’s listening to things. It’s craving pleasure from the outside world. And then of course it changes. It doesn’t last.

So that’s one of the real issues. Anyway, good luck.

Someone was asking me, the whole time that I knew Ram Dass, “Were there any teachings of his you can think of that didn’t age well or you disagreed with?”

I never listened to him about relationships. Never. I barely ever spoke to him about relationships because everything he said just meant no sense to me. It was not something I could work with. And he had issues with his own relationships too, earlier in life, his romantic relationships, sexual relationships. So, it’s something that was… I never spoke to him hardly ever about my relationships.

“How does one transition from the body when it’s time? How to let go when the ego is clinging?”

That’s a good question. What they say is that the only thing you take with you when you leave your body is your state of mind, and obviously most people in this world don’t work on developing a harmonious state of mind, a wisdom mind, and a mind that understands or feels things in a certain way, in a spiritual way. So, there’s a lot of fear, a lot of clinging when the body is being dropped.

The point is basically that, if you don’t practice now, if you don’t develop insight now and understanding now, and don’t develop the ability to let go of negative states of mind now, then you won’t be able to, when the body is dissolving, when your attachment, the connection to the body is dissolving, it’ll be very difficult and maybe painful and maybe scary. So, that’s the idea. One has to work on it now, because certainly, absolutely certainly the time will come when the breath that we take will be the last and how we meet that moment has a lot to do with how we live. You can’t expect to be angry and greedy and nasty to people your whole life, and then be smiling when you leave the body. It’s unreasonable to expect that to go through life, not caring about yourself or others and not working on your issues and just being an emotional mess your whole life, that it’s going to be easy to leave the body in a good way. And the problem is most people don’t really feel, in the west they don’t really believe in rebirth, so called “reincarnation,” rebirth, so there’s no reason to do anything.

“I’ll be gone. Who cares?”

That’s unfortunately, most likely a mistake, but that’s also karma.

And one can always turn within. There is nothing, when it comes to turning within that, and when you really want to do practice and understand the need for it, nothing can stop you from doing that, no matter what’s going on in the outside world. You can always, every moment, be practicing, to just use a phrase.

There’s a lot of books on this stuff. Andrew Holecek wrote books. There’s a book, “Living is Dying.” He talks a lot about the Tibetan tradition of hearing in the in-between, which is called the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or liberation in the Bardo, liberation in the in-between states, between death and rebirth. They seem to know what’s going on there.

But for most of us let’s become good human beings now. Let’s work with our fear, our selfishness, our greed, our manipulative stuff, and let’s try to expand our hearts now, and that will help us when it’s time to leave.

“Do I feel that my bond with Maharajji was particularly special in comparison to other devotees?”

Absolutely not. Maharajji made everybody feel that they were special, because they were. They are. That was the amazing thing. Larry Brilliant said, “It wasn’t just that I loved him when I was with him. It was like, I loved everybody.”

And conversely, you felt loved in a way, but so did everybody else, mostly, everybody who was attracted to him in a certain kind of way. We all felt that it was special. Every single one of us all sitting around, because he spoke, he would say something to somebody, but another person would get the message. He might tell a story to somebody or say something, and then somebody remembers “I had that dream last night and it was just about that.”

And he was doing that. That was happening, let’s put it that way, all the time. So, we all felt special, and that’s not, I don’t think that’s wrong. We don’t think “special.” Like it’s mine and nobody else has it. It’s like we felt loved. Everybody felt loved in a way that we had never felt loved before.

So, “How to let go? how to know when to let go and let God? And when to apply, ‘God helps those who help themselves?’”

I don’t know. You can let go and let God, and still do what you have to do, and give up the attachment to the results. That’s one thing.

But that’s a good quandary to work through in your life. And the more practice you do, the more deeply you move along the path into the heart, those kinds of issues just get resolved themselves. Nor did they really have to be resolved up here. They just dissolve in the heart. So, there’s no quick answer to that, but I just gave one.

“How to make Maharajji, Neem Karoli Baba, my guru when he is not physically anymore with us?”

It’s not up to us to make him our guru. If you feel attracted to him, it’s because he’s present with you. Why would you feel attracted to him? There’s so many other things to do in life. There’s so many other Babas out there. There’s so many great saints and Siddhas and Devis and Maas and everything out there. If you’re attracted to him, that’s the pull. That’s him pulling you to some degree you might say. You’re not gonna get a certificate of acceptance as a devotee. He doesn’t do that. It’s up to the devotee to follow his heart. And then eventually, you realize, you’ve been thinking you are following your heart, but actually you’re being pulled into your heart by the inner guru.

“Do you ever have workshops or courses to teach people to sing or lead kirtan?”

No, I don’t.

Just sing. Nobody has to teach you. And leading kirtan is not a job. It’s spiritual practice. And I didn’t learn how to do it as much as I just absorbed by singing with people in India. That’s where I was immersed in this stuff for the first time.

But Jai Uttal gives kirtan workshops. What does he call them? Something. Where he teaches people how to lead and sing Kirtan. So, if you want to do that, you can do that, but I don’t do it because I just sing, and then you just sing. It’s about love. How do you teach someone how to love?

You don’t have to lead kirtan. You don’t have to be a Kirtan leader. If it’s your karma to do that, if it turns out to be good for you, you’ll do it, but it might turn out to be a problem. There’s a lot of egoistic stuff that can go on when you start to feel important and that you know more than other people. It’s an interesting situation.

“Was I on the bus with Ram Dass when they found Maharajji at the Kumbha Mela grounds and went to Dada’s house?”

Yes, I was on the bus. Absolutely. That was the bus from Bodhgaya on our way to Delhi. So, the bus got to the Mela grounds, and like I said before, it was absolutely deserted. Where there had been 12, 15 million people a week before, there was no one. And the bus made this long slow turn, because we were just gonna turn around and go, and as we were making this turn, in the other direction, there’s Maharajji walking, and he just kept walking. He didn’t even look up. If we hadn’t seen him… He didn’t go, “Hey, I’m here.” He just kept walking.

And Rameshwar Das was the one who saw him. And as the bus approached, he just looked at Dada. He just said to Dada, the man who was with him, he said, “They’ve come.”

It’s extraordinary.

“How can we practice empathy and dispassion?”

Well, one thing that is not useful is to try to stop your feelings. Feelings arise in the dispassion part. You can’t crush your feelings. Empathy is not exactly compassion, but it’s a good beginning when you start to be aware of what other people are feeling and how they might be hurting and why, how their pain is causing them to act in certain ways, even ways that might be difficult for you to deal with. So, the development of compassion is to see all that and wish them well and really feel for them, and see clearly that their own issues are causing them to act this way, which is causing them tremendous suffering. There are many books about this.

We said, “Maharajji, how do you find God?”

He said, “Serve people. Love everyone. Serve everyone.”

That’s empathy. That’s empathy. And compassion and dispassion, I’m not even sure what that means, but if it means to you that you have to close off your feelings to protect yourself, that’s not correct. That’s not useful.

So somebody wants help to pronounce the line in the Hanuman Chalisa, “Haata bajra aura dwajaa biraajai”

ha the bud hot means hand, “Bajra” is the Thunderbolt or means that’s the is the cord, the sacred thread. Haata bajra aura dwajaa biraajai”

“In your hands shine a mace.” The vajra is, in this case, is a mace, and you have a banner. “Biraajai.” You’re wearing a banner. I don’t even know what that is. a banner must be some like a little shawl or something. “Haata bajra aura dwajaa biraajai.”

There you go.

“Can I tell about my dark nights and how I moved through them?”

No. Too much. Too many dark nights. But chanting and my connection with Maharajji and his grace and my longing to be in that love and my inability to function in the world when I don’t feel that love, that’s what pushed me through all those dark nights. And still to this day, that’s what helps me every day, the practice, developing a regular practice of turning within, one way or another, whatever that means to you.

And if you want to read about it, the book I wrote, “Chants of a Lifetime,” describes so much darkness. You’ll be too happy. And there’s also an audio book of that now. Okay? So, that’s my plug of the day.

Good to be with you again. May we all remain together in this heart space. Now and for all time. Namaste.

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