Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD May 28, 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 May 28, 2020

“Any mantra will work for you if you do it, and any mantra you do will work for you, but we bring so much to the practice, our hopes and fears, our anguish, our desires, all our emotions. We bring our fractured will and a million little pieces. We can’t even do one round of mantra without, you know, thinking about 4 million other things. So, it’s not the mantra’s fault. It’s our fault. It’s our situation. Let’s not blame ourselves because we are who we are, but it’s our situation. It’s very hard to do practice.” – Krishna Das

Welcome back or forward or upside or downside.  We’re here again. And, we get a chance to hang out together. If you’ve sung with me before, you know that I always start with a prayer that I introduce as an invocation to the love that lives within us, as who and what we truly are. And, what I’m going to do today is I’m going to tell you the translation of that prayer and tell you what it’s about. It is a prayer to Hanuman, and in India, Hanuman is considered to be the perfect servant of God, of Ram He has no agenda of his own, only to serve Ram’s agenda, which is also very simple, which is compassion for us. To help us overcome our suffering, our negativity, and of course, in the story of the Ramayana, Hanumanji helps Ram win the war against Ravana and his demon hordes, the personification of evil and negativity and selfishness, and if you don’t know the story of the Ramayana, it’s a very wonderful story,  and, one of the, one of the two great Indian, well, I don’t want to call it a myth because it’s supposed to be real… It happened at some point many, many thousands of years ago. So, Hanuman is, you know, Maharajji used to say to us, “Who is Hanuman?”

And we would give him all the pat answers, you know, “The perfect servant,” this and that.

And then He would say, “Nay, Hanuman is the breath of Ram, the breath of Ram, the breath of God.”

The breath is very powerful.  You know, in the Greek rendering of the gospels, the new Testament, which was written a hundred years after Jesus left the body, it was one of the first times that it had been written down what is now and later was translated as “holy spirit,” in the Greek, it’s “holy breath.” And the breath connects us to life. It connects our bodies to life. Without breath, we have no life. Without prana, we have no life. And the life of our soul is connected to the Paramatman, the Supreme Being, the Supreme Soul through the breath of God, which is Hanuman. And as that breath moves through us, it cleans our hearts, it removes obstacles from our path. It destroys our suffering and mitigates all kinds of calamities and stuff like that.

So, I’m going to read you the translation of this prayer. Much of it has to do with the stories of Hanumanji from the Ramayana, and much of it is description of his qualities, which on the deepest, deepest, deepest level are our own qualities, are the qualities of our real, our warrior hearts to overcome all limitation and merge with love, fully.

This is called the Hanumat, the Sri Hanumat Stavan.

I bow to the son of the wind, which is the name of Hanuman, a fire to consume the forest of evildoers, destroyer of the darkness of ignorance and whose heart resides Sri Ram, the holder of the bow and arrows. I bought to the son of the wind, the abode of immeasurable strength, possessing a body’s shining like a mountain of gold, a fire to consume the forest of the demon race. The foremost among the wise, abode of all virtues, chief of monkeys and the most,