Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD June 18 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 June 18 2020

“My understanding is that everything in our life is a result of karma, and it’s like waves coming in off the ocean and they crash over us. If we fight with those waves, we create more karma. We are reacting against them. If we allow them to just crash over us, the energy dissipates. So, the way to meet the way we live every day is what’s important, the way we meet every day and every moment that arrives.” – Krishna Das

Namaste. Hi everybody. Welcome back, even though we didn’t go anywhere. I hope everybody’s doing well and holding up in these times, very intense times. This is when the practice that we do and have done comes to our rescue and lessens the intensity of the negative emotions and panic and anxiety and fear.  It gives us an opportunity to be more aware and to release that stuff again and again, so it doesn’t push us around too much.  And of course, for me, the chanting is the main practice that I do.

Just looking for a poem I wanted them to read to you. I don’t have it with me, but is it’s a Rumi poem. Rumi was an incredible Sufi Saint. He wrote extraordinary poetry, unbelievable, ecstatic poetry, loving poetry.

This one poem goes, so this guy was praying and his lips grew sweet with the praising of the Lord, “Allah, Allah.” Then a cynic comes by and says to the guy, “Why are you praying? Have you ever gotten an answer?”

And the guy thought, “No, I never got an answer.”

So, he quit praying. That night he fell into a deep confused sleep, and in the dream, he saw the guide of souls surrounded by a green foliage.

“Why did you stop praying?”

The guy says, “Because I never got an answer.”

And the guide says, “The calling out is the answer. You hear the whining of that dog in the distance, crying for its master? That’s the connection. The crying out is the connection.” And he says, “There are love dogs that no one knows of. Give your life to become one of them.”

Give your life to cry out so deeply for the love and for the praise and for the love of the Lord, in that ecstasy of oneness. The calling out is the answer, the response.

That switches it around, doesn’t it? We think we’re doing this because we want something, but actually, we’re being pulled within and our response to the pull, our hearts turn within. That’s the calling out. That’s the chanting. That’s the praising. That’s the prayer.

In the 1800s in India, there was a great Saint named Rama Krishna Paramahansa. You might’ve heard of the book that was written about him called, “The gospel of Ramakrishna.” That was one of the first books that I read about this stuff and it blew my mind. In the book, well, I don’t even know if it’s in that book, but I saw a quote from him about the practice of the repetition of the name, which is what my Guru, Neem Karoli Baba, always encouraged us to do. Love everyone, serve everyone, and repeat the name. Remember God.

So, Rama Krishna said that every repetition of one of these names is a seed and, you know, the seed of an Oak tree is very, very small, but inside of that seed, there is extraordinary potential. So, inside these seeds that we plant of the repetition of the name is extraordinary potential, and he says that, the seeds of the repetition of the name may get caught by the wind and blown around, and they may get caught on the roof, land on the roof of an old house, in the middle of the jungle. And in those days, the roofs were made sometimes from clay tiles that were baked in the sun,