Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD December 5 2020

Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond.

Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD Dec 5 2020

Hi everybody. It’s nice to see some of the same faces, week after week or whatever it is. Somebody wrote to me and said, “Such a nice community has grown up.” Really? You know? Amazing. I never thought of that, but it’s true. It’s true.

One time Sharon and I were doing a workshop weekend maybe, or maybe just one day together in LA and it was such a nice afternoon. It was really great. You know? So, at the end I said, “Oh, this is so great. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all find someplace and be together and we could just be together our whole lives?” And then I said, “Oh, we did that. Earth.”

David Nichtern, my friend, our friend David, he said he was riding on the subway one day and he looked around and he thought to himself, ” What if I had to spend the rest of my life in this subway car, this train car, with these people?”

In New York, you don’t look at anybody, because you look at anybody, they immediately look at you, “Yeah? What do you want?”

But imagine, you know, if you were in a car with 30 people from all over, all different shapes and sizes, and these were the people you were going to spend the rest of your life with, you would need to, and you would want to connect eventually. You would have to connect. So this is where we are on this, as Jimmy Hendrix called it, “this third stone from the sun,” this planet. We’re all together here passing through. Passing through.

Hi.

Hi. Namaste. Ram Ram.

Same to you.

I just wanted to ask a question in regards to, back to when KK told you to give up smoking ganja. I’ve been listening to, over and over again, when you were still smoking weed and then KK Shah said you must give it up.

Actually, it was Maharajji. Actually, it was hash in India and I wasn’t smoking much at all, every once in a long time, but we were standing outside his door, outside Maharajji’s window, and somebody asked him about I guess, about smoking hash, and he said, “It’s not good for you. It destroys your body over time. If it was good for you if it would bring us to God, I’d get a room built and we’d fill it with hash and we’d all go in together and smoke it.”

The reason I ask is, because I’m trying really hard to give it up as a coping mechanism and it’s really hard to surrender into that.

Why do you want to give it up?

Because I have this ridiculous thing in my mind that, to be a good devotee, you have to do all these things.

You have it in your mind that you’re supposed to give up all these things? Is that what you said? Forget about it. Smoke your ass off until you get sick of it and then you’ll just give it up. You won’t like it. Go somewhere where nobody’s going to bother you for the weekend. Get like about a half a pound of the shit and smoke your brains out. That’s why we do it. We’re looking for bliss. You see? We’re looking to be freed of our suffering and our fear and we can’t deal with our shit. So we try to numb ourselves. All that does, is it numbs us. And what, the other thing it does, it actually, over time, it destroys our will. It destroys our ability to actually take care of ourselves and gets us really confused about what we want and what’s good for us. It’s a very confusing situation. You know, there was a great Lama named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche who said, “What most people call bliss is just a little less pain.”

So,