Call and Response with Krishna Das

Ep. 18 ~ How To Develop Faith

Tell me a little bit about how your faith… and trust in the universe that happened over time… how did it develop for you? How do you develop faith?

“The mind can’t conceive of what’s not a thought. Emotions can’t feel anything that’s not a feeling, an emotional feeling. The body and the senses can’t receive anything that’s not a sense input. Faith and grace, they have nothing to do with the body and the mind or the emotions. It’s a blessing that comes to us due to a combination of our good karmas, the work that we’ve already done in our life and in our lives before if you believe in that, and the kindness of the Saints who have realized what this is all about and we’ve all, if we’re interested in this nonsense at all, it’s because we have a connection with some lineage at some time with our own past already. It’s not an accident.”- Krishna Das

Q: Hey KD, how do you…. You tell me a little bit about about faith, how you… because I know about your, I’ve seen your movies and stuff and you followed Ram Das and then went to India but, and certainly the miracles, but tell me a little bit about how your faith, you know, and trust in the universe that happened over time… how did it develop for you? How do you develop faith?

Your support via direct donations go toward offerings such as this series, new teaching materials,  as well as the the compilation of all of KD’s work on the Path, for the purpose of sharing it with everyone in a variety of media. Kirtan Wallah Foundation is also be able to offer assistance to organizations around the world, whose efforts are in alignment with the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. For more information about the work of the foundation you can visit our blog for recent updates as well as sign up for our foundation news letter.

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Ep. 17 ~ Grace in The West

How do we, in the West live the way you speak of? The way we all want to in our hearts? We need money in this culture… We can’t walk around, as you said, with a wraparound, shoeless and in the East you can.  So…. it’s so difficult, how do we compromise in the West? Or, how do we recover peace in the West when we strive for the Eastern culture?

“Once, I was having a dream, I had this dream where I was being reincarnated, I was coming back to a body and I was heading right for India, right for India, and at the last minute I made a left turn and wound up in New York. But, I was impelled by my karmas. This was the place where I would be able to fulfill the things I needed to do. The hungers that I was, in another culture, I might not have been able to get what I needed to have in order to complete certain karmic desires. So, it’s not a mistake that we’re here. But it would be a mistake to try to do it like the Indians do it. We can’t, we’re not born that way. We have a different psychological shape. Very different. But we’re still, we’re no different from anybody on the planet anywhere, inside. So that’s all the same, it’s just the outer shell is different. We have to find a way to look at that and see what that is. Work with it.” – Krishna Das

Q: Hi. Being in the Western Culture, being brought up here, and the Eastern Culture, how do we, in the West live the way you speak of? The way we all want to in our hearts? We need money in this culture to pay bridge, go over the bridge, to get on a bus, so it’s, it is a lot of monetarily, a lot of monetary things that we have to provide for. We can’t walk around, as you said, with a wrap around, shoeless and in the East you can.  So, how, it’s so difficult, how do we compromise in the West? Or, how do we recover peace in the West when we strive for the Eastern culture?

KD: Well, first of all, we’re doing it. This is it.

I once asked Siddhi Ma, “Ma should I meditate?” Because I was doing a lot of these meditation courses with Tibetans and learning all these practices and enjoying it quite a bit. I said, “Ma should I meditate?” She said, “In 40 years with Maharajji, not once did He ask me to meditate.” And then I said, “Well, should I meditate or should I sing?” And She said, “Well, what do you like to do?” It never occurred to me that what I liked to do might be good for me. That’s not what my mama told me. But you see how subtle it is? You know? In her mind, chanting, meditation, no problem, same. In my mind, it was different because it was hard and must be good for me, and chanting was easy and must not be good for me. I was doing that to myself. Then She said, “Maharajji said that, ‘the more subtle states of consciousness, we can’t do that ourselves. We can’t make that happen with our own personal will, with our own personal effort. You can’t do that, you can’t push a button and enter into the deeper states.’” Like, “Ok, I’m going to do it now.” It doesn’t work that way. But She said, He told Her to continue to Her japa, repetition of the Name, that the Name, repetition of the Name would ripen Her. Ripen us to be ready to, for those things to naturally occur. The Name is a big thing. It just sounds like another whatever, but it’s a really Big Thing. I don’t even pretend to have a clue what it’s about but you read these books, you know, and you read some of these things They say about the practice of the repetition of the Name, some of them say it’s the only way for human beings to actually accomplish anything in one lifetime at this time, in this age because you’re planting seeds and the seeds stay with us. So, I don’t know, it’s kind of like what they tell you in Catholic school. You don’t have to take it on faith. You should never take anything on blind faith, just because somebody says so, try something and see what it feels like to you. That’s how you find out. If it doesn’t work, fine, do something else. Anybody tells you it’s the only way, look for the closest door and get the fuck out of there because, you know, anybody says it’s the only way, they’re just selling something. There’s no only way. And there is an only way. The only way is to go into your own heart and see what’s there and throw out the garbage and leave what’s pure and beautiful, which is our true nature. How are you going to do that? There’s a million ways to do that, but chanting is the only way.

Your support via direct donations go toward offerings such as this series, new teaching materials,  as well as the the compilation of all of KD’s work on the Path, for the purpose of sharing it with everyone in a variety of media. Kirtan Wallah Foundation is also be able to offer assistance to organizations around the world, whose efforts are in alignment with the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. For more information about the work of the foundation you can visit our blog for recent updates as well as sign up for our foundation news letter.

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The post Ep. 17 | Grace in The West appeared first on Krishna Das.

How do we live a spiritual life in today’s political climate?

“When Maharajji was around physically…  something was going on, some upheaval, political problems, and one of His devotees came to Him and said, “Oh, if there was only a king like King Janaka”, who, in the history of India, was an enlightened King, you know? “If there was only someone like Janaka to fix up all this political stuff.” Maharajji said, “there’s a King greater than Janaka now who is taking care of all this.” There is somebody running the show. “And if it has to go this way now, let it go.” That doesn’t mean we don’t do everything we have to do in regard to this, but the most important thing is to remember that, when you take your last breath, whatever karmas you have, whatever programs are still running in there, are going to keep running into your next incarnation. So you do your best work right now…” – Krishna Das

Q: When Maharajji was around physically, one of His, something was going on, some upheaval, political problems and one of His devotees came to Him and said, “Oh, if there was only a king like King Janaka”, who, in the history of India, was an enlightened King, you know? “If there was only someone like Janaka to fix up all this political stuff.” Maharajji said, “there’s a King greater than Janaka now who is taking care of all this.” There is somebody running the show. “And if it has to go this way now, let it go.” That doesn’t mean we don’t do everything we have to do in regards to this, but the most important thing is to remember that, when you take your last breath, whatever karmas you have, whatever programs are still running in there, are going to keep running into your next incarnation. So you do your best work right now and difficult times, it shows us a lot, but it’s very difficult. You don’t have to solve the whole thing, but just be aware that there’s an inner and an outer and what you can have some say about, on one hand, is your inner and whatever you can control on the outer, you can do, too. But if you do it with anger, like I always hated John Lennon, “Give Peace A Chance.” He was just an angry motherfucker. He was an angry cranky drug addict motherfucker and he would sing, “Give Peace a Chance,”damn.  You know he was arguing with you. I’m telling you, “Give Peace a chance, goddammit.” That’s what it sounded like to me and you know, there’s no peace in that. It was a nice, “give peace a chance and let me shoot up later, ok?” “And if I can’t get my stuff, I’m gonna kill you.” It’s not real. That whole gloss of culture is just completely bullshit, you know? People cover up their stuff and they act like this, but that’s not really helping anybody. He didn’t deal with his demons until much later. Let’s deal with our demons now. And luckily, we’re getting a lot of help with that. So, who knows what’s going to happen. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. It’s horrible. Most people I hang out with agree, it’s not very pleasant, but there a lot of people who are just as happy as pigs in shit. This is what they wanted. They finally got it. It’s kind of humbling, you know, to recognize that so much of America wanted this. Enough to make it happen. So, we’ll do what we can to try to get it back to, or get it forward to another way that we think is better for us and everybody. We’ll do that but at the same time, we can’t lose sight that every minute is right here. If we’re lost in blind reaction to this stuff, we’re just creating more suffering for ourselves and others. Period. You know? I sneak little peaks at things and I go, “Aw, shit.” So, I don’t bring politics into this stuff because I think, this is what I do, right? And everybody’s welcome. If I say, I’m for this one or that one, that’s just my own personal thing, but this is not personal. Everybody should feel welcome to come sing and that’s, I feel very strongly about that. I’m not, it’s pretty easy which side of the line I’m on, but still, everybody’s welcome, that’s the way I want it to be. Maybe I’m not very successful at that, but that’s what I feel. And people are just people. Remember how easy it was to hate George Bush? G.W.? Don’t you wish he was back?  So things change. He turned out to be the Dalai Lama’s best buddy. Who knew?  He was probably a Buddhist monk last time and wanted to be president. Ok? “You can have America.” So, we only see the most superficial level of stuff. And it should, but it needs to be dealt with the best way we can. There’s no escaping it. You can’t run through a cave. You’ll be bringing it with you. So, in order to do the best we can on that level, we have to be as conscious and as caring and as kind and as open as we can be inside. And, just to try to generate that wish that all beings be free of suffering. Just generating that wish is a very powerful thing. I mean, it doesn’t maybe seem that way, when it’s late at night and you’re getting those flashes from the New York Times or Facebook and every one is like a slap in the face. It may not seem like that, but just generating, to understand that everybody wants to be happy and look at these people who, by everything they do, create more suffering for themselves as well as everybody else. They have to pay for that. You have to live through everything. That’s the sad part. When people don’t understand the real results of their own actions. Then, you begin, compassion just arises because you’ve seen, we can see in ourselves how we do that and we can see it in others, that their own actions are creating more and more suffering for themselves, their loved ones, their close people they’re supposedly trying to protect. They’re creating hell worlds for themselves. You know, it’s kind of a question of, how much are you really going to buy into with this stuff, you know? Unfortunately, I’ve been in India so long, I’ve actually, most of my Long Island programming is gone. You know, I’ve been going so long. I’ve been so involved in this stuff, reincarnation seems perfectly reasonable to me. For most people, it’s not perfectly reasonable, it’s kind of a little bit out there. But that doesn’t mean I believe it 100%, it just seems like, hm, yeah, could be. And if it is then you have to start, the next thing is, you know, our actions, what do our actions do and what are the results of our own actions? You start to look at yourself and your stuff. Karma is something, they say, that no one but a perfectly enlightened Being could understand. It’s so complex. But it is basically a cause and effect situation. Our intentions, when we act, are the most important thing. And so, if we’re lost in all this emotion and all this negativity that’s surrounding us at this point, it seems, then we’re not capable of really having good intentions about ourselves and others, you know? Because we want to escape from the pain of that. There’s no escape from the pain, other than creating and cultivating compassion for ourselves and others. Like, Tulku was saying this morning, you know, sometimes, when that Being shows up that’s really difficult, you can say, take that Being as your guru, as your teacher. Because he’s showing you, showing  you where you’re really at. And there’s this great Lama who went on a long pilgrimage. And He took this attendant with him who was a complete fuck up. I mean, a complete… and one of His disciples said, “Lama, why are you taking this guy, you know what’s going to happen.” He said, “Oh yes. That’s why I’m taking Him. How will I learn patience, if not for Him.” See, we’re not really dedicated. We’re kind of, we’re not into getting free. We still want to be comfortable. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But ultimately, it’s not possible. It’s not possible to be comfortable for more than a minute. Sooner or later, something’s going to happen. And hey, I remember when I was young, 65, and I thought, “Hey, this is a piece of cake.” Then, 66 came around. So, shit’s going to happen. How are we going to deal with it? Right? We have to get real. We have to recognize, we’ve been dropped in a pot of boiling oil. We’ve got to find our way out of here. There’s no sense pretending just learning how to swim is going to be enough. We’ll be cooked. I wish there was another way, but there isn’t. That’s the good news and the bad news. There is no other way. We’re doing what we can do. We’re doing the best we can. So, and these guys, these great beings know what’s going on, I mean, at one point after Indian Independence, Pandit Nehru became the President of India, the Prime Minister or the President, and as he got older, he got a little bit crazy, and if someone would criticize him from a crowd, sometimes he would jump into the crowd and try to get to the person. He wanted to fight with him, and his people were very concerned about him, because they thought, something’s going to happen to him, so they secretly came to Maharajji, and they said, “We’re very worried about Nehru and we think somebody might, something bad’s going to happen,” and Maharajji said, “No one, for five years, not a hair on his head will be touched…” never could be touched, right? So they went away feeling very happy and in fact, nothing, for five years, everything was fine. Then he died. Five years. So there are Beings that know what’s going on and they have the power to change it but they don’t change it necessarily because we have our karmas to live through. We have to change it inside of ourselves. And if we’re looking outside, if we think that, you know, we have to start paying more attention to what’s going on. Not outside, but inside. And then whatever we do in the world, the quality of it will change. Peace comes from within and if we want peace outside, we have to really be at peace inside. Or at least be working on it in a certain kind of way. In an honest, sincere way. It’s messy in there. You know? It’s messy. But the more acquainted we are with ourselves and all that mess, the easier it is to deal with the stuff that comes out. And the strength to deal with it comes from these letting go practices. The ability to let go of, first very simple thoughts, eventally you can let go of big emotions. By letting go, I mean, you don’t take them in. Like, you’re just about to get angry, and then you release it. And it just passes by. And then all those things that you were going to do when you were angry and that you would do, which would create such intense causes of more suffering, just don’t happen. But that’s not easy. You’ve gotta start where we are. We have to start where we are. Which is just singing. And coming back and getting the feeling, what that feels like to just be involved in that. And then you, your heart recognizes that and it pulls you to that more. Even if you’re busy wanting to watch the rest of Fringe. Your heart wants you to go sing kirtan. So, you go sing for 10 minutes and then you watch Fringe.

Your support via direct donations go toward offerings such as this series, new teaching materials,  as well as the the compilation of all of KD’s work on the Path, for the purpose of sharing it with everyone in a variety of media. Kirtan Wallah Foundation is also be able to offer assistance to organizations around the world, whose efforts are in alignment with the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. For more information about the work of the foundation you can visit our blog for recent updates as well as sign up for our foundation news letter.

A note about your donation:

The post Ep. 16 | Spiritual Practice and the State of the World appeared first on Krishna Das.

Ep. 15 ~ Our State of Mind Is Everything

How does one’s state of mind color one’s world view?

“I remember the first rainy season. Oh, everything was wet. The bed is wet. The hair was wet. The clothes were wet. You sat down, it was wet. You stood up, it was wet. You got on the bus, wet came down on you. There was no place it wasn’t wet. For three months, I was like…

We used to sit in front of Maharajji and nothing would happen. You know, we saw people who went to these Gurus down south who could bounce around the room and squawk like chickens and stuff like that. But nothing would ever happen. I kept wanting something to happen. And even though nothing was happening, there was still no place in the whole world I wanted to be other than sitting right there because it was home. And you know, we used to say to Him, you know, “How do we find God?” We figured He knew, He would tell us. He seemed to like us. At least, He let us hang around. “How do we find God?” He said, “Serve people.” You know, what? Serve people? Well, ok. How do you raise Kundalini? “Feed people.” What? Serve everyone. Feed everyone. And then He used to say, “From going on repeating these names,” these Names of God as they call them in India, “Everything is made full and complete. Everything is brought to completion. Everything is made full.”

He said it 100 times and it’s been about how many years? 43 years since He left the body. I still don’t believe it. And I heard Him say it. I mean, I figure, it possibly could be true. Maybe. Ok. I know that He’s telling the truth but I don’t know what He’s talking about. But little by little, the guy who can’t understand what He’s talking about is being worn away. Disappearing. Becoming more transparent. So all those thoughts about like, what the fuck does He mean? Are disappearing. They’re not arising. So when those thoughts don’t arise, you don’t feel a certain way, right? But what you do with thoughts, you can’t stop those thoughts. You can’t stop thoughts. Because all we do is think all day long. All we do. Think think think. Think about this, think about that. Think about me me me me me. So that’s what that means. By cultivating these, opening up these passageways, training the mind to remember to do something else other than think about yourself all the time, little by little, even when those thoughts arise, even when those stories arise, even when we notice that we’re really involved in something, they don’t get us the same way. They don’t grab us the same way. They don’t grab us for so long. And there’s no timeline on this. It’s not written out anyplace we can see it as when we’ll finally figure it out or wake up. You don’t ever figure it out. We’re asleep. One of these days, we’ll wake up. That’s it. But while we’re asleep, in our sleep, there are things we can do, like chanting, meditation, different types of practices. These are the things that slowly move us closer to the edge of the bed, then we fall off and wake up when we hit the ground. So, when we chant, just chant. When you notice that you’re not paying attention, just chant. Let it go. Come back to the chanting. It’s not rocket science. There’s nothing to figure out. Sing. When you notice you’re not singing, sing. That’s it. At least for today, these few hours, and time we’re chanting, that’s the deal. Nothing’s gonna happen. I guarantee you, when you leave here you’ll be the same person you were when you walked in. But maybe, you won’t care so much. At least for a few minutes. Because we’re kind of stepping out of the traffic here for a minute by releasing those thoughts. Practicing releasing the thoughts. It’s not a negative thing. When you release the thoughts, feelings arise that are very beautiful, little by little.  A little piece of mind, a little less anxious about things. A little bit less involved in the story line. It’s little by little, spontaneous enlightenment takes millions of births to develop. So I figure I’m about my third birth. I might as well relax, it’s a long way to go. No sense hurrying. Suzuki Roshi once said, “Come take a walk with me in the rain. Don’t hurry. Don’t run. It’s raining everywhere.” So, this is it. We’re in the rain. So we might as well just relax. There’s no place that it’s not raining. Get used to it. And the more you get used to it, it’s like when I was in India the first, I was there for three years, the first time I went. Three complete cycles of the seasons. I remember the first rainy season. Oh, everything was wet. The bed is wet. The hair was wet. The clothes were wet. You sat down, it was wet. You stood up, it was wet. You got on the bus, wet came down on you. There was no place it wasn’t wet. For three months, I was like…

And then, I remember like the second year, wet. By the third year, wet. Nothing. It didn’t, I hardly noticed. It was strange. I go to India now, it’s so hot. I lived there in those days. There was no air conditioning. There was nothing. It was 120 degrees and I don’t remember being hot. Now, it’s like oof. So, it’s, state of mind is everything. Everything. Everything.

Your support via direct donations go toward offerings such as this series, new teaching materials,  as well as the the compilation of all of KD’s work on the Path, for the purpose of sharing it with everyone in a variety of media. Kirtan Wallah Foundation is also be able to offer assistance to organizations around the world, whose efforts are in alignment with the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. For more information about the work of the foundation you can visit our blog for recent updates as well as sign up for our foundation news letter.

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The post Ep. 15 | Our State of Mind Is Everything appeared first on Krishna Das.

Robert A.F. Thurman recently retired as Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in theDepartment of Religion atColumbia University,President of theTibet House U.S., a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization,Time magazine chose Professor Thurman as one of its 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, from Asia to America.” The New York Times recently said Thurman “is considered the leading American expert onTibetan Buddhism.Inspired by his good friend the Dalai Lama, Thurman stands on Buddhism’s open reality, and thence takes us along with him into an expanded vision of the world, whether the sweep of history, the subtleties of the inner science of the psyche, or the wonders of the life of the heart.He always shares the sense of refuge in the Dharma, which unfailingly helps us clear away the shrouds of fear and confusion, sustains us with the cheerfulness of an enriched present, and opens a door to a path of realistic hope for a peaceful future.“There’s two ways of looking at the sublime continuum, which is to say the Buddha Nature.There’s one way where the Buddha says, ‘Buddha nature is something we teach to reassure people who are frightened when we say ‘selfless’ and they think there’s no soul.’ So BuddhaNature sort of substitutes for soul. But that’s a lower way of looking at it. A higher way of looking at Buddha Nature is, it is Reality Itself in the form of the fact that enlightened Beings,Beings who are truly enlightened, which doesn’t mean every kind of deity, but some of them, maybe, but enlightened Beings feel, they viscerally feel themselves to be everybody else. So, for example, any Buddha, and there are millions of them, but particularly the one who worries most about us at the moment is Shakyamuni, you know, Siddhartha’s last Shakyamuni, He is you, Krishna Das, and Me, from His perspective. He’s us. He actually enjoys being us. He does.”–Robert Thurman

Your support via direct donations go toward offerings such as this series, new teaching materials,  as well as the the compilation of all of KD’s work on the Path, for the purpose of sharing it with everyone in a variety of media. Kirtan Wallah Foundation is also be able to offer assistance to organizations around the world, whose efforts are in alignment with the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. For more information about the work of the foundation you can visit our blog for recent updates as well as sign up for our foundation news letter.

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The post Ep. 14 | KD Chats with Bob Thurman appeared first on Krishna Das.

Roshi Bernie Glassman, an American Zen Master affectionately referred to as “Bernie,” was a vibrant character who had a significant influence on American dharma. Along with being a Zen master, was also an aeronautical engineer, a social entrepreneur, an interfaith activist, and a clown.  Bernie left his body in late 2018.  In this episode, KD shares his recollections on his great friend. At 11:42 KD sings “Hungry Hearts” chant. This chant was recently recorded for

“He was pulled to relieve the suffering, to confront the fear around those situations, to melt and vaporize the arrows of anger and shame and greed and fear that are release in all directions by our egoistic self-serving desires, self-protection, walls we put up, laws we make to limit people’s freedoms, everything that causes suffering was what Bernie wanted to relieve.“ ~ Krishna Das  {photo: Peter Cunningham, 2001}

Transcription:

I’m here at the Sivananda ashram in the Bahamas where I first met Bernie Glassman on the eve of the millennium. I arrived here for the first and he had already been here for a few days. I knew about him. I had seen his picture and I’d heard about these Homeless Street Retreats that he took people on. And I looked at his picture and I was scared shitless. There was no way I was going to meet him or go on these retreats, but when I ran into him here at the ashram in the Bahamas, he came up to me, and he said, “You’re Krishna Das?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I’ve been listening to you every day since my wife died.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “I’ve been listening. I put the headphones on and play ‘Namah Shivaya’ over and over and I just do my work on the computer.” And that was it. I fell in love with him and it was love at first sight.  He so sweet to me, so kind. And in that closeness that I felt to him, I never felt any awe. It was always perfect at-easement and loving friendship.

Now that he has left the body, even though I miss him so much, mostly I feel awe. He seems to fill the universe. Because there was nowhere he wouldn’t go. There was nothing he wouldn’t face. There was no fear that he wouldn’t confront with love and kindness and caring. Everybody was a part of his family. He greeted everyone equally. He didn’t carry signs and badges to advertise how great a being he was, and the real sign of greatness. My guru, Neem Karoli Baba, looked like somebody’s grandfather. And in fact, one time, He said, “I could have been a really big Saint. I could have been a really big Saint, but I had one fault.” And his devotee said, “Baba, what was that?” He said, “Too much compassion.”

And that was Bernie.

Too much compassion to take anything for himself.

Too much compassion to advertise himself.

Too much compassion to be a great Zen Master.

He cared too much about people.

He wanted to meet everyone exactly where they are.

And that’s the mark of a real Great Being.

Shortly after I met him, I got an email from him with eight lines of a prayer called “The Gates of Sweet Nectar” from the Japanese prayer book, “The Kan Ro Mon”, the Japanese liturgy and apparently this was Bernie’s favorite and most powerful prayer. He had had an extraordinary experience riding in the back of a car once and he experienced the interconnectedness of All Beings in the Universe; Human, Animal and Beyond. All Beings. And this prayer is an offering to All Beings to come for a meal and the meal that is offered is the Enlightened Heart, the Enlightened Mind, the True Nature of all of us. So the prayer had eight lines and he wrote, at the end of the eight lines he said, “Could you do something with this?” So I wrote back, “Like what?” And I got another email saying, “Well, you know, we Buddhists aren’t that good with melody. Maybe you could come up with a nice melody and then we could sing this at the Zen Peacemaker meetings.” The Zen Peacemakers Organization was one of the organizations Bernie started to confront suffering and bear witness to suffering anywhere in the world that it was happening. And that led to him going to Auschwitz and Ireland and Rwanda and Palestine, Israel, many places that most of us are scared to go to. He was just pulled right there to be there and bear witness to the pain and the suffering and liberate it into caring and kindness.

So I carried those lines around with me, around the world, for about 11 months, and then I wrote back, I said, “Bernie,” you know, “Can I mess with the lines a little?” And then I get a one world email back, “Mess.”

So I started reworking the words just a little bit and then a melody came to me and it fit very nicely with those, with that prayer so I told Bernie, that you know, I’ve got it now. And he said, “Good, now you can sing it at the meeting next month with the peacemakers.”

“Oh ok.”

And then he said, “Now you can start working on the rest of the prayer, which I don’t know, is like 40 pages or something like that. So, I wrote back, I wrote to him, I said, “Bernie, that will take three lifetimes.” I get an email back, “Two.”

So, the prayer goes “Calling out to hungry hearts everywhere through endless time. You who wander, you who thirst, I offer you this Bodhi mind. Calling out to hungry spirits, all the lost and the left behind. Gather round and share this meal, your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine.”

Now, the actual last line of the prayer is, “Gather round and share this meal, all of your sorrow, I make it mine.” However, when I first showed it to Bernie just before the meeting with the peacemakers, he looked at me and said, “Oh, I don’t only want your sorrow. I want your joy, too.” So, I had to change the last line to “your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine.”

This was Bernie.

At ease in the world.

Totally motivated to relieve suffering wherever it arose, wherever it entered into his consciousness in any way. He was pulled to relieve the suffering, to confront the fear around those situations, to melt and vaporize the arrows of anger and shame and greed and fear that are release in all directions by our egoistic self-serving desires, self-protection, walls we put up, laws we make to limit people’s freedoms, everything that causes suffering was what Bernie wanted to relieve.

Now that he’s not in the body, I’m in complete awe of the things he accomplished in this world, the energy he put into helping people, in creating situations that allowed them to grow and to find happiness in life and accomplish things that were previously impossible for them. I’m blessed to have called him a friend.

Your support via direct donations go toward offerings such as this series, new teaching materials,  as well as the the compilation of all of KD’s work on the Path, for the purpose of sharing it with everyone in a variety of media. Kirtan Wallah Foundation is also be able to offer assistance to organizations around the world, whose efforts are in alignment with the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. For more information about the work of the foundation you can visit our blog for recent updates as well as sign up for our foundation news letter.

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The post Ep.13 | Remembering Bernie Glassman appeared first on Krishna Das.

Krishna Das chats with Lama Surya Das, one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars, and a long-time friend. In this interview, the conversation between KD and Lama Surya Das touches on the subjects of spiritual practice, retreat, death, mindfulness, compassion and more.

“You know, one time, Maharajji said, ‘I hold the keys to the mind,’ …  and then He teased us and said, ‘I can turn your minds against me.’ ‘No Baba, don’t do that.’ And He’d laugh, you know? So I said to Siddhi Ma, I said, “Ma, Maharajji says He holds the keys to the mind, which means to me that I am exactly where He wants me to be at all times, otherwise I’d be somewhere else, mentally, I mean like, spiritually, internally. My experience would be different. So, I’m where He wants me to be. So where does personal effort come in? Is it all grace? Or is it personal effort’” She says, ‘It’s all grace, but you have to act like it isn’t.’”– Krishna Das

Transcription:

SURYA DAS: Talking, shouting at Krishna Das… Badmash… Aap Jao

SURYA DAS: Ok.

Nina: Maharajji called him Surdas?

SURYA DAS: Surdas, the blind poet devotee of Baby Krishna.

KRISHNA DAS: Baby Krishna, yeah. And you know, they say, the devotion to Baby Krishna is the most complete because there’s no, it’s completely pure with a baby, you know?

KRISHNA DAS: There’s no interpersonal, there’s no anything. There’s no story line. It’s just that love. And Surdas, who was blind, used to see the Leela’s and just describe them.

SURYA DAS: I have a poster of Him, you know, it’s a famous poster.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: And Baby Krishna’s like, in front of Him, looking up at Him.

SURYA DAS: Well, there’s more than that. Hundreds of thousands of different mantras.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: The purification mantra and the guru yoga mantras and other things.

KRISHNA DAS: All of it in that practice while you were doing it?

SURYA DAS: In Ngondro. The Foundation practices of Vajrayana Buddhism.

KRISHNA DAS: I’m interested, personally, I’ve never done that kind of personal intense mantra practice. I mean, so I mean, I’ve done a lot, but not that kind of formal…

SURYA DAS: Then half your life is wasted, as they say…

KRISHNA DAS: Yes that’s true. Very nice. I’ve already wasted more than half my life. I’m hoping to waste this next half.

SURYA DAS: No, but you often talk about taking the name, and the name of a God, and repeating the names, and what kind of practice that is. And you know, whether you use words like japa or yoga or mantra yoga or what we call mantrayana and other things, but you do the Name, so if you were counting, you’d probably, you know, you’d do 100 thousands of Ram Nam or Hare Krishna. Especially Ram Nam, you do a lot. Hundreds of thousands of… there’s really no need to count, that’s just a way of… you can do Ngondro, these foundation practices, by number, which is easy, like saying 21 Hail Marys and then you’re done, or you can do by time, like a one-month retreat or a three-month retreat and then you move on to the next practice that you do by time. Or you can do it by the third thing, which is the hardest, so we avoid that, is you do it by getting the signs of accomplishment.

KRISHNA DAS: Oh, right.

SURYA DAS: So numbers is better. You can finish those and move on. No signs. No dreams. Go back to square one. Start again.

KRISHNA DAS: I don’t know if you want to answer this but it’s more of a personal question, but you can answer it in a general way if you like

SURYA DAS: No but since we’re alone here, what happens here, stays here in our podcast. But to answer you very intimately…

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah, but you know what I’m thinking is, what were you experiencing on the very relative level as you were doing these intense mantra practices and other practices, as you were going through this transformation? Let me put it this way, did you feel, was it a transformational practice for you?

SURYA DAS: Yeah sure. You know, practices go up and down like your life journey.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: So you have your ups and downs and good days and bad days or concentrated days or distracted days or sick days and you know, but over time, from doing long retreats or just year by year daily practice, you get sort of, in the best case, better at it or skilled at it or you learn the craft and then comes the art and the freedom and the creativity. You know, you master the skill, you progress on the path, these words are used.

It’s hard to define. But so, it’s definitely transformative, and it’s also, you know, first is purification mantras and things like that and then there’s concentration mantras and then there’s loving kindness and compassion, forgiveness mantras, including self-compassion and self-love as well as others, and then there’s wisdom mantras and there’s like power or self-empowering, empowering yourself mantras and then there’s cutting through obstacle mantras and then there’s long mantras, like 100 syllable mantra, purification, a Vajrasattva thousand syllable mantra, which really we call Dharani in Sanskrit. Like the Hanuman Chalisa’s almost a long mantra.

KRISHNA DAS: Well it is, Maharajji said it was.

SURYA DAS: It’s a poem of 40 verses with four lines in each or whatever. 40 Praise the Lord Hanuman, right? So that would be a Dharani in Buddhism, like that it would have, you know, a thousand-line mantra.

KRISHNA DAS: Dharani, yeah.

SURYA DAS: And with stanzas perhaps. It would be a Dharani because it goes around and around. That’s what “Dharani” means. So, the mantra goes around and around like your breath goes around and around, like your mind goes around and around, so being present, you get more being where you are, rather than spinning around in the big wheel of samsara like a chicken without a head going around the rounds of rebirth, or your mind imagining many things, you get more and more just, around here and around here and more centered. Like centering a pot on a spinning wheel when you’re building a pot in a pottery shed.

SURYA DAS: And the more it spins and the more you center it, the better, it’s beautiful, it rises, otherwise the mud flies all over the walls. So, you can also turn the mantra around in your heart in a visualization, which is common to Hindu and Buddhist Yogis and Tantra from the ancient Siddhas of India. So the outer visualization is one thing, but the outer mantra with your breath and your sound and your tongue and your vocal chords is the outer mantra, but the inner mantra is visualizing the mantra in your heart chakra or whatever chakra you’re working on. Like on the six pedaled lotus of your heart would have one of the six syllables, “Om Mani Pedmé Hung” of compassion on them and by spinning it in your mind, it concentrates you and it sheds light and bliss and permeates and radiates outward and you breathe it out to all beings and you absorb it in to your heart and then you’re doing sort of simultaneous pulsing, not just sequentially breathing out and in but pulsing like from the heart, like subtle energy, prana, and the mantras turning and light and bliss and then even on a deeper level, the secret mantra is the natural flow of awareness.

KRISHNA DAS: Right.

SURYA DAS: You could call it going around and around but not going in circles. Khyentse Rinpoche called it the wheel of luminosity that turns day and night. That’s like your innate mantra or sacred sound. Or inner sound without auditory vibrations but awareness at its subtlest levels like light moves and has vibrations, not sound, but light. So it’s not like getting lost or circling around in samsara. It is the wheel of luminosity that turns day and night. It’s just the constant flow of awareness or the great Dao. So then that’s, you get to a stage beyond practice, where you don’t, there’s some stories of great Lama Siddhas, where after doing billions of mantras and counting them and all the practice, they throw their mala on the altar, even in the forest, and they leave the community and just walk about.  It’s become one with their nature. Because the wheel of luminosity is turning day and night, so they don’t have to go to church on Sunday because every day is the holy day.

KRISHNA DAS: Every day is Sunday.

SURYA DAS: And the sun is the wheel of luminosity, it turns day and night. It never sets. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called it the great Eastern Sun. It’s in many of his books and poems which means, the sun of awareness that’s always rising, not that it comes up in the morning and sets at night. Even while we’re asleep you can be awake in lucid dreaming, so awareness is there. Even though you might not be conscious, you might be semi-conscious or unconscious but you could lucid dream and know you’re dreaming and still be asleep. So this luminosity turns day and night. So that’s like the innermost, an innermost level of mantra. Maybe even more deep than that, you could say just oneness is the ultimate mantra. Like “Om.” Which is a mantra but isn’t. It’s really a seed syllable. It’s a seed and in its potential has all sounds and mantras.

KRISHNA DAS: Right.

SURYA DAS: So the mantra “Om,” is like an example of like, a seed syllable. A seed is fertile if it’s put in the hot, sort of blind, unknowing but fertile earth.

KRISHNA DAS: Right.

SURYA DAS: And then anything can spring from it. So, I felt it was very transformative and also, in tantra, sometimes you spin the mantra right or left, clockwise around your heart center if you’re doing male deity yoga, sometimes you spin it counterclockwise if you’re doing female deity yoga, like Tara or Vajra Yogini or these kind of female Buddhas and, this is about feminine and masculine energy, not just masculine and female, not just male and female gender.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: Gender, male or female, but energy, masculine and feminine, like yin and yang, so sometimes we’re practicing visualizing ourself as a Dakini and praying to the guru, guru Rinpoche, or the higher power, for blessings and then merging like as lovers, so as a guy, doing that, seemed a little fabricated to me at first, over the years. But then by spinning the mantra the other way, it was almost like going against the current, sitting near my meditation seat, I felt like there was resistance, like I’m used to going the other way, clockwise, but imagining the visualized mantra in your heart chakra petals spinning counterclockwise, I felt like my feminine-ness of being and embracing and receiving, rather than my masculine-ness of driving, erect, or creating a tower of enlightenment, I got into the womb of being. So you think it’s fabricated but when you actually find out as you get to the substratum, where things are taking form and being created by, let’s say your mind, how you interpret it, by your subjectivity, so you start to see how you can recondition and decondition that by visualizing the energy moving the other way and then it starts moving the other way, so it opened up my right side of my brain that is a more feminine energy, intuitive, being, rather than the left side, rational side. So, these mantras and you know, chakras and channels go together and it’s a combined body and soul, heart and mind energy and psyche kind of a practice. Like, just even chanting. It’s a heart and soul, healing, harmonizing, deepening and concentrating practice.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: So that was like a little transformation.

KRISHNA DAS: For sure.

SURYA DAS: That I could even see while I was in retreat, not afterwards. Opening my feminine energy or receptivity or vulnerability and not just being an alpha achieving male, finding a new goal now called enlightenment to drive towards instead of to go lying on the football field or on a rocket ship, climbing a mountain, you know, these kind of alpha achieving activities. There’s a purification part, too, where you really chant your brains out and get the cobwebs out of your head and out of your lungs and forget yourself and experience your true being, like your higher self. Like in the kirtan, by chanting for an hour, I felt like everybody was pretty much interbeing and forgot our own narrative or story or who was next to us or what we sounded like.

And that’s transformative.

KRISHNA DAS: So, let’s, let me ask you know. So you have this base, this solid, not solid but this deep foundation of practice.

SURYA DAS: Stable is the word we use.

KRISHNA DAS: Stable practice for many many years and then you were in retreat for many many years in a row and then you came out of retreat. How, how did that, how did, what was your experience of that, what stayed with you, in a sense, as you became engaged with the outer world in a much more intense way?

SURYA DAS: Well, it was gradual. First it was a bit like culture shock, like the first time I came back from India in I don’t know, my first India trip in 1972 or 3 and I landed in Kennedy in New York and I don’t know, I might have even been with you, maybe my parents picked us up and took you to Long Island and me to their house in Long Island and it was such a culture shock. I mean, India is very noisy and chaotic and has buses and trains and planes, you know all that, but it was such a culture shock. There’s a lot of things it didn’t have in the 70s, like telephones, televisions, hygiene and other things. So there was a big culture shock.  And coming out of retreat was like that, too. It was like coming back into another world.

In the Tibetan tradition, the Lama training is a cloistered three year three month three day retreat, so our first one that I did with some dharma friends under some great Lamas, Khyentse Rinpoche and Dudjom Rinpoche, etcetera and Nyoshol Khenpo Rinpoche, then it took three years and eight months. Not three months and and three months. Because we were waiting for Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche to come back from Nepal, where he lived, to teach the final teachings and open the gates. So, it was three months, eight months, what’s the difference? At that time you’re already dead. When I went to three year retreat, I really sold everything,  I mean my car, my guitar, you know?

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah, like when I went to India.

SURYA DAS: And I didn’t really see the end of three and a half years, like, what am I going to do later? It was like dying, you know? Like when you go to college, you don’t really think about what you’re going to do afterwards. Even if you think you’re going to be a doctor, you know, you’re such a kid, you don’t really think about, in four years I’m going to go somewhere else and I don’t know, it just seems so long to a kid, four years. So, I came out of the retreat and we did it ritually, in a sacred way, slowly, then went back in, then the next day we came out, and people were more integrated, and so some of their friends and family and a few people threw up when they first rode in a car and smelled gasoline. Because for three and a half years, we had not been with cars. We were in the woods, in a cloistered retreat center with a courtyard out in the middle. And I realized I hadn’t worn shoes in three years. I was wearing slippers or flip flops or barefoot for three and a half years. I hadn’t touched money. So, culture shock when you come out of retreat and like, even at this level. You’ll laugh. I didn’t have, in the retreat, I didn’t use a wallet, money or keys, or the things you carry around in your pockets or your shoulderbags these days, or briefcases, so we were wearing monks and nuns robes in the three and a half years, we had shaved heads. So life was very simple and every day was the same, the schedule. And we had pens and paper and stuff. There were no computers at that time, personal computers. And I remember, within two or three days, I had a hard time figuring out where I, how do I keep track of all this stuff? Car keys? Wallet? And you know, mala, like, do I even have three pockets? And I’m going to go out for a few hours. How do I keep… it’s like when you first start driving your car, how do I move my feet and my hands and look in the rearview mirror and out the front window at the same time? It seems like a hundred operations to do. But once you learn to drive, you just do it all the time and then you do other things too, right? Like drink your cappuchino.

KRISHNA DAS: Listen to Krishna Das.

SURYA DAS: Surf the radio, looking for Krishna Das’s kirtan and things like that. So it was kind of like that, it was a culture shock, like coming back from India, and especially, I couldn’t get used to, I had been gone basically eight or ten years in that retreat center with a little visit to the parents in the middle. A lot of things had changed. Like, I never saw a video store, then all of a sudden there were all these video stores full of videos. Before it was a book store, now it’s a video store. We didn’t have videos in the 1960s. There were reel to reel movies. And cars, they didn’t have roll up window things. I couldn’t find the thing to roll down the window. Because it was all recessed in like a button. Automatic. Just multiply that by a little of everything. There were fax machines. I said, “Ok, see you can fax this like, letter, or this translation text? Ok. But what if I draw something? Can you fax that? How does the picture go that I’m drawing now, you know?” But just multiply.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah, boy.

SURYA DAS: So it was a bit of a culture shock. But like everything else, you get used to it. I remember when I first came back from India, I couldn’t get used to the fact that people would say, I think I was in Woodstock New York trying to start a Tibetan monastery there, it’s now Karmapa’s monastery. People would say, the regular bus to and from New York comes every morning up and goes every morning down and also at night or something at a certain time, let’s say eight AM. And I said, “Really?” And they said, “Yeah, if you’re there at eight AM, you get on the bus and there’s no stops to New York City.” And I said, “Well, it’s really cold out. What if they don’t come for an hour.” Because I’d been in India. And they said, “The bus comes every day within a minute.” Otherwise all the other stops and things, the trains, would be screwed up. I just couldn’t conceive of it because I’d been away from it. But those are little things and after awhile you just, you know, now you look online on your handheld, yourself, you find the whole plane schedule, and you punch a few buttons and you get a ticket and you count on it being there and the money gets exchanged through paypal. But in those days, things were a little more tangible. So, it took awhile to get used to that after being in a retreat and cloistered for a long time. But you can get used to anything. And people do. As you know. And you can train for it, the hard things, or you can train emotionally to be prepared for difficult things, you know, like dealing with loss and grief or death, whatever you have to do you can train your body.  I heard people were even training their eyes now so they don’t have to wear glasses and so on, with different visual and neuroscience techniques, low-tech, not implants. So training and practice, we call it practice. And then it gets easier.

KRISHNA DAS: So when you were on retreat, your practice, there was a certain quality to your days and to your practice.

SURYA DAS: well there’s a whole schedule of hour and two hour sessions.

KRISHNA DAS: You were, like, inside of that whole thing, but once you come, when you take that out into the world, how did that change for you? How did that interface go?

SURYA DAS: Well, that’s the challenge.

KRISHNA DAS: The actual practice time.

SURYA DAS: At first it seems, like hard to go to a retreat, but if you’re into it, if it’s the right thing for you then you kind of don’t want to leave. It’s like, what else do I want to do? Do I really want to go back to working to make a living to buy clothes and have transportation to come to work every day? And you know, like you would treat, everybody looked the same, there was no big deal about the hair and the clothes. That was like, a relief that nobody told me about, to expect.

SURYA DAS: You know, like in India, everybody’s covered up and you don’t even look. So it made it easier and simpler and less judgement and less grasping and partiality. And more welcoming whatever comes and letting it go.

KRISHNA DAS: and also on retreat, theoretically, you’re not there to follow your projections and grab on to them with other people. You’re there to observe and let go.

SURYA DAS: But that’s where you find out, because you build a cloister, or you go into retreat even by yourself, you know somebody follows you in there, which is the main culprit in the whole scenario which is your ego and your conditioning. It’s like, who brought this can of worms? Oh, it’s my can.

KRISHNA DAS: It’s me.

SURYA DAS: These are familiar worms. I’m anxious here, too. Or greedy. Or lazy. So, again, reconditioning, doing practices to make better habits or loosen that and awaken your mind and open your heart and be more embodied and different kinds of practices with body, like bows and yoga and speech, you know, walking meditation and with speech, mantra and chanting and devotional chanting and other kinds and breathing exercises, that’s part of speech and throat chakra, and then with mind, heart, mind, with meditation and light and radiating and reabsorbing and loving kindness and compassion and awareness and cutting through, seeing through. So you go through the progress of the nine vehicles of Tibetan Buddhist practice.

KRISHNA DAS: It must be wonderful to, and I’m sure it is, to have, to be in that kind of retreat where you’re getting those teachings and you’re getting, there’s a path laid out for you which you can, you know, move into.

SURYA DAS: You could surrender to and then you know, the bell rings, like Pavlov’s dogs, you salivate. So when the gong rings, you meditate and then when the gong rings, you get up and go to the dining room, which was silent. And sometimes people read to us, like Christian monks, while we’re eating, otherwise we’re just silent, because it’s a silent retreat and we each had our own monk’s cell or room. But yeah, some of the people were my friends, you know, it’s friendly and I mean, the real battlefield is men’s souls, women’s souls, as Dostoevsky said, so you have your own room, you know, it’s like, there’s no one to fight with about the side of the bed or the clicker, what we’re gonna watch, but the real battlefield is the inner battlefield of the soul, so that’s, you have to, you know, if you feel called to work on, so that’s what you work on and you get to know yourself better and you start to find out things like, whether you let go or hold on, things pass, so you can relax your grip a little bit. You can’t hold on to anything forever. Everything’s impermanent. So, even the three years and eight months went by and then I was out again. A pedestrian pounding the streets. So I went and did another three year retreat. That was my solution to how to practice after a three and a half year retreat. A recidivist.

SURYA DAS: Yeah we started a third one, then his holiness Dudjom Rinpoche, the head of our Dzogchen lineage and Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, died there in Dordogne. So, we got involved with taking care of Him and his body relic and the prayers and pujas, as Lamas did, and after a year, took His body to be interred in a stupa in a memorial monument, the stupa built for this purpose in Nepal at his monastery there.

KRISHNA DAS: Dudjom Rinpoche left his body in France? I didn’t know that.

SURYA DAS: Yeah and he sat up for a few days in meditation and we saw in that state which is rare.

KRISHNA DAS: Wow.

SURYA DAS: It was like a rainbow. I mean, I could see him, but it was more like transparent.

KRISHNA DAS: So you had a lot of time with him? You spent a lot of time with him. Wonderful.

SURYA DAS: But for most people, the question is, not just how do you come out of a retreat, but like, you have your yoga class or your meditation class or your Sunday prayer or bible study. Whatever. Your formal practice. Or in, like in the best case, every morning or evening, you have some formal spiritual exercise or practice that you do and then when you get up off the cushion or there chair or the yoga mat, then what? How do you carry this and integrate into daily life? Where there are other people and there is talking and there is competition and there is arguing and maybe you have a job to do, maybe there’s disturbance in the field that you’re in, in the family or in the workplace or in the city or in the continent and in the world. So that’s where practice really helps. What’s your quote? Integrated or internalized in your quote, inner life, you might lose your concentration but the insights or the experience, the wisdom side remains as you go out into life so it helps be more patient and accepting of what happens, you know, at the office and you don’t suffer so much from thinking, thinking way too much, “It should be the way I think it should be” when you realize, “Oh guess what, I’m not in control of the world and I’m not God and being a control freak is not in my higher self interest or any of my family’s or friend’s either, self interest.” So you more flow with things and dance with life instead of being so hard headed and hard nosed and you come from the heart as well as use your head and keep your feet on the ground and your head in heaven or in the air, as they say. Not up your butt.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: And not hide out in spiritual practice like avoidance behavior.

SURYA DAS: Flow and dancing with life and different gears is a good metaphor. And in Tibetan Buddhist meditation, songs and texts, it says something like, in meditation, we emphasize, meaning like in formal sitting, doesn’t have to be sitting, but in formal meditation, lets say sitting, we emphasize the empty or intangible ungraspable nature of things, letting things come and go just in the field of awareness. So that’s like, the emptiness or the subjective side and then in life, in post meditation, we emphasize karma and cause and effect. So that we have our hands on the steering wheel and we have some choice with attention and intention. So, in meditation, seeing through things, in post meditation, see how things work so you react differently to red and green if it’s a light system. In meditation if you see red, yellow or green, you don’t react differently, because you’re seeing through it as mere imagination, but in post meditation, you know, there’s a driving karma, you react differently based on karma, cause and effect, in the relative world.

KRISHNA DAS: Situational awareness.

SURYA DAS: Situational. And you try to cultivate positive qualities while in the meditation you might be more, just letting everything go, not praying for peace in the world. That would be more like, for others, or after meditation or at the end of your meditation. So balancing being and meditation with doing in the world and carrying that awareness with you but not being so concentrated when you are multitasking at work, for example, and you have to multitask. Even to drive a car you have to multitask. Even to drive a car you have to multitask. You say, I’m not doing anything but driving but you’re doing multitasking when you’re driving. So in that way you balance heaven and earth or the absolute and the relative by seeing through things but also being able to see what they are and how it works, the karma, cause and effect. What goes around, comes around. You should make new habits, you get new results. If you have unhealthy habits, guess what, you become unhealthy. There’s no one to blame. And that’s the basic principle, I think, of Eastern thought or Buddhism at least. There’s no one to blame except the selfish egotistic clinging or ignorance. Like Buddha said, “No one can make me angry. I have the seeds of anger in myself and I react that way.” Like they can push your buttons but that doesn’t mean you have to be wired to the response of anger, or fight or flight

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. You can be wired for compassion.

SURYA DAS: They can push your buttons and you can laugh like you’re being tickled. I know this is idealistic, but that’s the idea. It’s not what happens to us, but what we make of it that makes all the difference.

KRISHNA DAS: Exactly.

SURYA DAS: That’s a very important principle of self mastery and freedom.

KRISHNA DAS: And it’s the time that we put in in practice, you could say, that carries over into the way react and live in our lives.

SURYA DAS: Right.

KRISHNA DAS: How we inhabit our lives. It’s not like, it’s not like you push a button in practice and then everything changes in life, but it’s the time that you spend in practice that gradually changes the quality of your life. How you live in it.

SURYA DAS: The way I feel it is like, if I meditate in the morning, as I do, then it informs the rest of the day.

KRISHNA DAS: Right.

SURYA DAS: And then whenever I see water I naturally meditate. Or the sky. Or nature. Or a child. Or you know, it just becomes more integrated into everything. So it’s like natural awakefulness rather than trying to meditate.

KRISHNA DAS: Right.

SURYA DAS: Sit cross legged on your desk at work. No. Not. But be aware when they anger rises when you’re driving your car and somebody cuts you off so you naturally practice mindful anger management. You think before you react. You’re mindful of the anger coming up and you don’t…

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah, that would be good.

SURYA DAS: Honk, flip the bird and jam your foot on the accelerator and ram him. So anger is just an energy but it can devolve into violence, so how we respond makes a big difference. That’s where mindful awareness can free us. Or just being grateful, you know, if you’re in a theistic tradition, like mystics have always said, you say thank you for everything, not pick and choose. Like, you know better than God what should be coming.

SURYA DAS: Gratitude is the heart of prayer, Brother David Steindl-Rast says.

SURYA DAS: And I love that. We could all be a little more grateful, especially in the first world and America, you know, is our subject, generally, we take so much for granted and we worry and complain about such little things where in half of the world or a third of the world goes to bed hungry at night and the other third has unbelievable infant mortality rates or oppression or inequality of various kinds and we’re complaining if Trader Joe’s doesn’t always have the same stuff every week and we have to go across the street to Whole Foods because they always have the same stuff every week. That’s like a real first world problem. My therapist friends call it, some of them have real intense practices with people who have, you know, big pathological problems. But some of them, they, especially as they get older, some of them, they want to take it easier, they have practices of the easy people like, they call them the “worried well.”

SURYA DAS: The worried well who come to therapy to tell them about their problems. Like they don’t want to be a doctor anymore because the HMO’s are making them crazy with billing. They’re going to go to music school or law school at age 50. That’s a first world problem. The worried well.

KRISHNA DAS: First world problem. Yeah.

SURYA DAS: So I’ve been saying thank you a lot. Especially since I just lost my wife and I’m realizing also how much I have and, you know, she doesn’t feel gone. And I think practice and my spiritual path and Gurus blessings over the decades have made a big difference about how that sits with me and how taking care of her for a year or two while she was succumbing to lung cancer, and to going to the hospital or hospice sits with me and how it made us feel closer and closer in the spirit and death pares away a lot, most everything, what matters or the most basic things which is like, who you spend your time with and how not what’s in the bank or your reputation or what you have parked in the parking lot but how we are together.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: So that’s been very interesting about day by day and hour by hour and minute by minute, for me, without making plans while she’s been deteriorating and getting treatments which sometimes seem worse than the disease and going through all that, it’s heartbreaking. And I wish I could have helped her more and eased her path more but I also have to accept that that’s a balance. You do all you can and you let go and whatever happens, happens. You do the best you can, thoroughly and you have to let go and whatever happens, happens.

SURYA DAS: And there are other factors…

KRISHNA DAS: We just do the best we can. You can’t worry about it. You never know the effect that one person has on another person, what it means to them from the inside, we can only see it from the outside.

SURYA DAS: Also, especially if we’re in the helping professions or  have a bodhi sattva vow or you try to be an altruistic compassionate, you know, person, seva, karma yoga, social conscience, it’s easy to fall into a feeling of indispensability, like, they really need me and I can’t, I don’t have time to take care of myself, you know how many health care people and service oriented people burn out and are weak on self care. It’s all about other care. So it gets out of balance. So nobody’s indispensable and, you know, I’m glad that I could be there with Debby, and I’d planned to be there when she died and I was, so for that I’m very grateful. But if I hadn’t been, not the end of the world. She would have died and I would have been there in an hour or two or three and no one’s indispensable.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah, I mean, rather than saying no one’s indispensable, you could say we’re all interchangeable. It’s like, it’s either you or somebody else will be there.

SURYA DAS: Well, I’m Jeff and you’re Jeff, so

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah, right, we’re indispensable. And unchangeable.

SURYA DAS: Non-refundable.

KRISHNA DAS: Non-refundable. Yeah.

SURYA DAS: We have a lifetime guarantee.

KRISHNA DAS: Lifetime warranty. You can return us at any time. For a full refund.

SURYA DAS: But I think God every day for the non-theistic Buddha Dharma. And really just for the Dharma. Otherwise, I’d probably be dead with my 60’s habits.

KRISHNA DAS: Well even with the little practice that I’ve done, you know, I told you this yesterday, but when I hurt my knee in India very badly, I could barely walk and I was sitting in front of Maharajji and I was just thinking, “What is this?” “Why did this happen? What could this be? What kind of bad karmas?” You know, my mind is spinning out. So, He reached over and He grabbed the bible out of this girl’s, Girija’s jhola, shoulder bag. He grabbed it and He opened it up and He pointed to this, “read this” this is in Hindi, because He supposedly didn’t speak or read English, right? “Open this up. Read this.” So, I opened it up and I read it out and it was from Saint John, Saint Paul, Corinthians, and it said, “In order to save me from this egoism about the abundance of revelations that have been given to me, it was given to me a thorn in the side. And I asked the Lord three times to take it from me and the Lord said, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect in your helplessness, in your weakness.’” So, that’s…

SURYA DAS: That’s profound.

KRISHNA DAS: This is what Maharajji said, the message He gave me was that, in the surrender to the higher power or the deeper place within us, that’s where that power is, it manifests itself in our surrender, in our recognition of, “it’s not about me”. What can I do? I just do the best I can to stay in the right place in my heart. Whatever happens, happens. It’s not my story. It’s not my responsibility. I do the best I can but that, the strength of the grace is made manifest in our surrender, in our understanding. There’s very little we can really do except to remember God. Except to live in that place as best we can.

SURYA DAS: This whole discussion and question that many of us have, about how to balance surrender with intention, how to balance surrender with intention, for example, or effort, and what’s right effort or balanced effort…

KRISHNA DAS: I once said to Siddhi Ma, you know, one time, Maharajji said, He said, ‘I hold the keys to the mind,’ He said, and then He teased us and said, ‘I can turn your minds against me.’ “No Baba, don’t do that.” And He’d laugh, you know? So, I said to Siddhi Ma, I said, “Ma, Maharajji says He holds the keys to the mind, which means to me that I am exactly where He wants me to be at all times, otherwise I’d be somewhere else, mentally, I mean like, spiritually, internally. My experience would be different. So, I’m where He wants me to be. So where does personal effort come in? Is it all grace? Or is it personal effort?” She says, “It’s all grace, but you have to act like it isn’t.” Which is very interesting, you know?

SURYA DAS: Don’t take it entirely seriously. That’s beautiful. It’s all grace but you have to act like it isn’t and do what seems to be needed.

KRISHNA DAS: But that doesn’t mean that you’re required to have angst, anxiety or aggressiveness or all those things about the outcome. You just act like, if you’re in the rain and you want to drink, you cup your hands. It’s not about anxiety or worry. It’s simply that you do the best you can. You do what you do as fully as you can. But like Krishna says in the Gita, “You do what you do, but you offer the fruits of your actions to me.” In other words, we do the best you can with Debby, but ultimately, it’s up to Him what her experience is. You may never know what her experience was but still you were a part of that as best you could have been.

SURYA DAS: No, it’s easy to say I may never know. But since we’re alone here and I know what I say here will stay here, I am finding out by getting messages from Debby after she’s gone, and you know me, Krishna Das, I rarely, if ever, unlike some teachers, tell miracle stories or, right? I’m more like, tell jokes, than miracle stories. But anyway, two days after Debby passed, I got a text from her from her phone.

KRISHNA DAS: Wow.

SURYA DAS: I was in her room. Our room. And lying in bed, pretending to hold her. I keep the candle on, on her altar, for the 49 Bardo rituals of our tradition. So, I was lying there and my phone beeped with the little signal for a text, so I ignored it. Then it beeped again and it beeped again, so finally I said, maybe something is going on so I’ll check. And it was a message from Debby, and it said, “We will soon again be togeth…” and it didn’t finish the word and there was no period.

KRISHNA DAS: Wow.

SURYA DAS: That’s the message I got two and a half days later. There’s an explanation, but I mean, just take that and, I was in our bed, lying the way we were when she died and holding her in my mind, and I get this message on my cellphone. So, being a hyper-rational guy, I figured there must be an explanation, it’s like, how did this just come out? And I called my niece, “Julia, where’s Debby’s cellphone?” And Julia says, “I have it. I just sent the message, Aunt Debby left it, she must have forgot to send it.” It was sitting, it was the last text she sent the night before. You know… so she didn’t even finish the sentence, so I don’t know if she fell asleep our what.  I love you, we’ll soon again be togeth… so two and a half days later, I get this… I could show it to you on my phone with the date and all, from Debby’s phone. So that’s kind of something. You don’t usually get a message from the beyond even with an explanation like that. So, then being, I don’t know, somehow, I’m like Forest Gump of the dharma, I was always there, by luck where things are happening. So, it happens that Debby’s sister in law is a Mongolian Buddhist immigrant who grew up in New Jersey.

KRISHNA DAS: Oh wow.

SURYA DAS: You know, like there are Tibetan immigrants from the Chinese invasion of Tibet? There are Mongolian Buddhists who are Tibetan Buddhists. Mongolian Buddhist immigrants in America also and a lot of them live in New Jersey. The Dalai Lama always goes there, Southern New Jersey. Washington, New Jersey. There’s Lama’s there, a lot of them are in the construction trade. There’s probably 500 Mongolian Buddhists there. So, Debby’s sister in law is this niece’s mother, that I was telling you about. So, she’s half Mongolian. So, they’re Buddhist. They’re more Buddhist than us. You know, like, the mother wears a gold prayer wheel around her neck that her grandmother gave her 60 or 70 years ago.

KRISHNA DAS: Oh wow.

SURYA DAS: I have like a one Rupee mala on my wrist. That’s my Buddhism. So anyway, so a couple days after Debby’s gone, I go over to my brother in law’s house to watch the Super Bowl because life must go on.

KRISHNA DAS: Life must go on. The super bowl must go on.

SURYA DAS: So we go to the Super Bowl with my buddies and you know, watch every year, and we’re in the basement in the man cave and there’s a few wives and kids, you know, grown, and my sister in law, this Mongolian Buddhist from New Jersey, pulls me aside and into the living room for a moment, so it’s like, what’s wrong or what’s happening or what does she have to tell me? What she wants something from Debby’s house? And she says, “Surya, I saw Debby.” So I said, “Oh.” And she says, “Yes, she had long beautiful blonde hair.” You know, Debby lost a lot of her hair in chemo and then she made her pink or blue. “She has long beautiful blonde hair and she’s happy and she was very well and pretty and she’s really well.” So, then I felt like I had to say something, so I said, “Where is she? Where did you see her?” Also, I wanted to hear her say, like, “I saw her in a dream. I saw her in a vision. I don’t know I saw her in heaven or the next life. Or I’m just making you up. My bad. Ha ha.” Which she’d do. So, she said, “Oh, no, just, Debby’s moving on” and she said, “It seemed kind of natural to me that the first thing Debby would do when she got to her new place would be, get a new hair-do.” So, in her world, it’s all mixed together, you know? Like, Debby would definitely do that if we moved to a new, you know, coast. So, in my sister in law’s mind, that’s the way it was working and like, archetypally, she’s having an experience of Debby’s in a good place and looking good and has redone her hair and is happy. So, we were happy.

KRISHNA DAS: Fantastic.

SURYA DAS: I don’t know. We can interpret it any way we want. I’m just telling you what happened. So, she’s telling me this. She also famously told Debby, 20 or 30 years ago, when Debby’s mother died, Rose of Long Island, of cancer, this same sister in law who was 20 or 30 years younger, after a few days, again, Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhist, you know, from Mongolia, it’s a little different than us meditator Buddhist, convert Buddhist, whatever we are, convert yogis. This sister in law called Debby. Debby was not into Buddhism, she did MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and meditated with me sometimes, but she’s not an Asiaphile like us, and she’s a crass person and manager of charities and things, business. This Mongolian sister in law called Debby and said, “Debby, I had a dream about your mother” and Debby was like, what do you say? And Lishma, it’s a Mongolian name, Lish says, “She was reborn as a spider,” and she says it like excitedly. And here’s Jewish Debby from Long Island, you know, thinking, you know, “what the heck? Why’s she telling me this? This doesn’t sound go.” And Lish says, “No it’s good it’s good because she’s already gone through the Bardo and is not like hanging around like a ghost and spiders are very short lived and then she’ll be reborn again in a better way. And Debby’s like listening. “Oh well, thank you very much for the news. See you soon.” So… one thing I’ve learned is that everything is subjective. That’s one of the meanings of the great Buddhist doctrines of emptiness. Things are not what they seem to be. Nor are they otherwise. You can’t say what it is with absolute assertion. You can say whatever you want, tentatively. But it’s not just a dream, it’s not even that. You know, that’s too reifying. It’s really a mystery and wonderment, I think is the appropriate response or the moment to moment awareness of like, wonder and freshness and what, inquiry or openness is an appropriate response. Not remembering all the things I studied or heard or read or, you know, so that brings it down to the joy of now and kind of the joy of meditation or like a buoyant spiritual outlook or something, regardless of what I’m doing, including taking care of my deteriorating wife who I love so much and is so wonderful and generous and helpful to everybody. Or trying to do something in the world in these really fractured and, you know, contentious times and everybody seems so divided. Trying to awaken together or even just help a little bit somewhere and mentor the young kids who resist the selfish narcissistic politics wherever you can.  And there’s joy in that. Then whatever happens, happens.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: Thich Naht Hanh is probably dying now. I think he’s on the cover of time magazine, I heard, somewhere, for being the father of mindfulness in the west. A Vietnamese master, Thich Naht Hanh  is on his last legs, you know, he’s very old. He was peace marching against the Vietnam war in Vietnam in the 70s and 60s and he’s still doing it. So that’s a Bodhi Sattva life. You don’t give up just because there’s no peace yet. He was Vietnamese and he, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King around that time. And he’s still peace marching, 60 years later, so I think that’s what, I think that’s our calling is, be peacemakers and lights in the world, not a blight on the landscape and I think that’s about awakening together and not just self-development, self-help and selfishness, as you know.

KRISHNA DAS: Beautiful.

SURYA DAS: So, our guru, Neem Karoli Maharaj always used to say, you know, what did you say? “Feed them. Love then and serve them”

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. Love everyone. Serve everyone. Remember God.

SURYA DAS: So, love and serve.

KRISHNA DAS: Love serve remember.

SURYA DAS: Not just, try to calm your mind and relax and get your, you know, blood pressure down. That’s like, daily mental floss, but there’s more to life than that. A little mental hygiene in the morning is good but there’s another 23 hours to consider.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: Relational mindfulness and loving kindness in action, not just in the abstract. You know, prayer and action.

KRISHNA DAS: Absolutely.

SURYA DAS: So that’s what we call the Bodhi Sattva way. Or the way of the altruistic peaceful warrior. The Bodhi Sattva.

KRISHNA DAS: Wonderful.

SURYA DAS: The Buddhas to be. And seeing the Buddha and the light in everyone and everything, even one’s self. It ain’t easy sometimes.

KRISHNA DAS: Beautiful. Thank you so much. It’s wonderful sitting with you.

SURYA DAS: You’re welcome, KRISHNA DAS, my beloved brother.

KRISHNA DAS: Ram Ram.

Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. The Dalai Lama affectionately calls him “the American Lama”. He has spent over forty-five years studying Zen, Vipassana, Yoga, and is an authorized lama in Tibetan Buddhist order. He has studied with many of the great old masters of Asia, among them, some of the Dalai Lama’s own teachers. He is also a leading spokesperson for Buddhism and contemporary spirituality, a translator, poet, meditation master, chant master, and spiritual activist. Lama Surya Das is the author of the international bestselling book Awakening the Buddha Within. In 1991 he established the Dzogchen Foundation and today teaches and lectures around the world, conducting dozens of meditation retreats and workshops. Find out about is blog posts, podcasts, published books, and social media channels on his website surya.org.

KD has been asked time and time again to provide music for his chants! We are happy to finally offer you these mini video tutorials, straight from KD’s living room, to help you, the practitioner get that unique ‘Krishna Das’ sound. They are not so much how-to-play harmonium, but rather how to play Krishna Das chords if you have some familiarity with playing music. (These are not tutorials on how to play harmonium in general). Watch the preview video to get an idea of what it would be like to learn from these. There are a total of 33 + 1 introduction message from KD videos in total of the most frequently requested Krishna Das chants included in your one time purchase.  More in our ONLINE SHOP!

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“One time, an old lady came to Maharajji, and she said, “Baba, show me God. Show me God, Baba.” And she was all emotional. Baba said, “Ok, Ma. Not now. Go away.” So later, at the end of the day, see she had come from a local town, and at the end of the day, she had to catch the bus back to her family, so at the end of the evening, she comes back to pranam to say goodbye to Maharajji and catch the bus. So she bows down and Maharajji says, “Ok, Ma, come here. I’m going to show you God now.” “Not now Baba, I have to go home!”

Transcription:

Q: In difficult situations, whether we’re out and about or with our coworkers or families, how to, maybe it’s just a momentary thing, maybe, can you offer some suggestions to, like, to bring our mind back to peace other than being with you now, which, as you said, it almost, like when you’re with, in the right situation, it brings you home and there’s that safety there, but when you’re out in the world, what do you do when you’re in a crowded situation to bring yourself back to a better place?

KD: When are you not out in the world? Seriously. When? When you’re home? Our mind is working just the same. So, what I hear is there’s some judgement about you feel less connected to yourself when you’re out with other people and busy and reacting to their stuff. So what? It doesn’t matter. The point is you have to do practice. I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for myself. It’s very important to spend a little time, well, it’s important to recognize what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s a huge thing we’re trying to accomplish here. Look, we’re born, we pop out, we drink some milk, then we get to coffee, then we get to beer, then we die. And we never notice what’s going on. You know, that’s it. Next. So we’re trying to do something that most people in this world are not yet, don’t have the karmas and the situation to arise and the good, the positive karmas to try to find a good way to exist in life. It’s not just out there, it’s at home, too. You know? All the time. So, what’s required is some effort, I think, you know? Which comes from some recognition that we’re totally on automatic all the time. The recognition of that is a really big thing because when you recognize that you’re like, in a speed boat going 1000 MPH towards the waterfall, once you recognize that, then you might be able to take your foot off the accelerator, you know? Before you recognize it, there’s nothing you can do. So let’s imagine that, for the last 300 million births, we noticed that, but just too late, and woosh, over the waterfall, next life, and every life, we recognize it a few feet earlier, and one of these days we’ll recognize it soon enough that we’ll be liberated before the waterfall gets to us, before we go over the edge, before we take our last breath. So what we’re trying to do is a really big thing. A really big thing. And it’s not easy. But it starts with recognizing how out of control we are. And also recognizing everybody around us is out of control also. So, let’s not judge ourselves for that. There’s no reason to do that. We’re just human beings. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re human beings. Because we’re out of control and been out of control. So, once you know that, then you look around for a way to slow down, to calm yourself down. To slow down. To kind of rein in the stuff, to let it relax, let it, let it settle, let the leaves finally reach the ground, right? It takes awhile because there’s so much wind out there. So, there’s no quick answer. You’ll find your way to do it, the more you recognize that it’s your own, and our own inability to find what we want in life. That’s causing us pain. We’re not victims of anything outside of us. It’s our own stuff. And once we recognize that, that’s the good news and the bad news. If it’s our own stuff, then we can fix it. Nobody outside can fix it. Only we can fix it. And by fixing it, I mean, we just have to recognize more and more what we really want in life, the way we really want to feel every day, and then find the methods to use, the antidotes to use that are available, and there’s so many of them. So many. Once you start to look, you’ll find so much. You try this. See how it feels. Try that. See how it feels. Keep trying. And that’s it. That’s good. That’s all we can do.

One time, an old lady came to Maharajji, and she said, “Baba, show me God. Show me God, Baba.” And she was all emotional. Baba said, “Ok, Ma. Not now. Go away.” So later, at the end of the day, see she had come from a local town, and at the end of the day, she had to catch the bus back to her family, so at the end of the evening, she comes back to pranam to say goodbye to Maharajji and catch the bus. So she bows down and Maharajji says, “Ok, Ma, come here. I’m going to show you God now.” “Not now Baba, I have to go home!”

That’s where we are. You know? We want that, but not now, I’m too busy, I have a movie to go to. I have a date tonight, I can’t do that. So, just, you know, be good to yourself. Learn how to do that. Learn how to be good to yourself. You know, we have so many programs running about how not to be good to ourselves that we don’t even recognize how harsh we are with ourselves, how little we give to ourselves, how little we let ourselves breathe and be at ease and be happy, and have any kind of sense of wellbeing.

Well Being is a very interesting thing. A sense of wellbeing. That’s actually what’s in there. If we went in there deep enough, what we find is this wonderful sense of wellbeing. Just as we are. Even with all the nonsense. That’s who we are. And you know, there’s a great story about Buddha and Mark Epstein in his book, “Going on Being,” writes about, he said he was very familiar with all the Buddhist texts and one day he was rereading the story of Buddha’s enlightenment and he, what happened is that, according to the teachings that were available at the time of Buddha, he had done all these practices, he had gone to all the teachers who knew anything and within no time at all, he had recognized, realized what they knew and still he saw he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t, he hadn’t reached the state that he recognized intuitively was liberation. And so, he would leave that teacher and find another one, then after some time, he would realize those teachings, and see again that it wasn’t enough. So, he kept looking and finally said, it’s enough. And He goes to the jungle. He had these five guys hanging out with Him. Five disciples. And He went into the jungle and He sat down under this tree, and He continued to do the practices that He had been doing which involved extraordinary tapasya. Tapasya is a word that comes from, “to burn” and so He was doing, like, He was basically not eating. He was taking like three or four breaths a day. You know, because you can do that if you slow yourself down enough and if you have concentration power. You can slow everything way down. He wasn’t eating, He was hardly breathing and He himself described it in the sutras, He said, you know, “You could see the bones through my body.” He had almost become translucent, He was so thin. And He was in great despair after awhile, because He had done everything He could do. Absolutely done everything He could do according to what He’d been taught. According to the teachings that were available at that time in the world. And He wasn’t where He needed to be.  And He was in terrible despair. He didn’t know what to do. And then, one day, out of the blue, He had a memory come to Him and it was a memory of a time when He was a boy out in the fields with His father, who was a king, and His father was watching some people work in the field and the young Buddha, young Siddhartha, was sitting under a tree watching from the distance, kind of resting from the heat of the day in this tree, and He remembered what came over Him at that moment under this tree, was this feeling that He had experienced that day as a child, and it was a feeling of Wellbeing, of all is right in the world. Ok? All is right. And that brought a very sweet feeling to Him. Now this is a guy who had, has been crushing all these feelings and doing this fierce work and this feeling of sweetness that came over Him, He was shocked by it. But being the Buddha, he said, “ok, what is this?” So, He looked into this feeling that He experienced and He recognized two things. He recognized that this feeling had no cause. Ok. I go like this. It feels good. This is the cause of feeling good. Right? I go like that. It feels bad. That’s the cause of feeling bad. I don’t do that. That’s of cause of feeling good. I don’t do this. That’s the cause of not feeling better. Not feeling good. So, in other words, He saw this feeling that arose, that it didn’t come from connecting to pleasurable things, things of pleasure, right? Things we like. Good music. Good food. A couple other things. Nor did it arise from disconnecting from painful things. When we disconnect from painful things, we feel better. This feeling didn’t arise from that, either, so He said to Himself, “If this feeling of, this wonderful feeling that I have, it’s not coming from, it has no cause, it must be innate. It must be natural to my Being.” Do you understand this? This is a really big thing. We’re busy all day long trying to grab onto some pleasure and avoid pain. That’s what we do all day, every day. This feels good. That feels bad. This feels good. This feels bad. That’s what we do. That’s what humans do. That’s what everybody does. But he noticed that this feeling that he was now experiencing again as an adult had no cause. This feeling of Wellbeing, this feeling that, all is ok. I’m ok. All is right in the world. It had no cause. It had to be natural. It had to be His nature. So, He said, maybe this is the way to enlightenment. And He began to center Himself in this feeling of Wellbeing and that was the change that changed everything for Him. Then, he thought, maybe I should eat something? And just then, a woman came by with some milk thing and He put His hands out and she poured some stuff in there. He ate. First thing that happened, His five disciples left Him. Right? That’s why they’re disciples. They don’t understand fuck all. He ate. They left. Siddhartha, the ascetic, has left the path. Let’s go somewhere else. Fine. So he kept sitting there and He went in and in and in through this feeling of ok-ness. And ultimately recognized His true nature. Enlightenment. Freedom. Let’s just sit here for a second, ok? Close your eyes. Don’t get comfortable. I really don’t want you to get comfortable. Just be the way you were and think about this. What is it? What does wellbeing mean? What it would it mean if I felt ok about myself as I am, as screwed up as I am, as dependent as I am, as anxious as I am, as fearful as I am… What if that’s ok somehow? What if I just let it be? What if it’s ok? Take a deep breath, a sweet soft big breath. It’s ok. It’s ok just the way it is. I don’t like it but it’s ok. I wish I had more hair. Oh. It’s ok. It’s ok. You fill in your own blanks. Don’t try. Don’t try too hard. We’re not trying to get anything. Just think about ok-ness. What would it be like if I felt ok about me?

Feel the question. It doesn’t have to be a thought. Just feel the opening to the possibility of ok-ness. What would that feel like?

Your support via direct donations go toward offerings such as this series, new teaching materials,  as well as the the compilation of all of KD’s work on the Path, for the purpose of sharing it with everyone in a variety of media. Kirtan Wallah Foundation is also be able to offer assistance to organizations around the world, whose efforts are in alignment with the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. For more information about the work of the foundation you can visit our blog for recent updates as well as sign up for our foundation news letter.

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The post Ep.11 | Well Being appeared first on Krishna Das.

One time, Mr. Tiwari, my Indian father, was sitting with Maharajji. Maharajji said, “So, you’re a brahmin, you’re supposed to know everything. What does Krishna teach in the Gita?” So now everybody, if you ask that question, they basically say, “Selfless Service,” right? So, he knew it was a setup, but he said it anyway. “You miserable brahmins, misleading the people. Only God does Selfless Service.” Because God is the whole thing. There is no Self. You know? There’s only That. All of us are just doing the best we can and we’re working on thinning that, that barrier or shell that seems so solid of self.”- Krishna Das

Transcription:

Q: So, I once thanked you for sharing your practice with us and

KD: I belted you, right? Boom. Left hook.

Q: Yeah, and you didn’t appreciate that.

KD: Listen, this is proof that you can sing your ass off and still be an asshole.

Q: No, but this is my question for you, because I’ve actually thought about it a lot, I think that the whole concept of being really cognizant of your ego and letting your ego get fluffed up, for lack of a better word…

KD: Fluffed…

Q: Fluffed. Is, this is important, but at the same time, if what you’re doing is really just a practice to draw yourself closer to your Guru, to your God, to your Self, to your One, isn’t that, and you’ll really think I’m a brat, but isn’t that really in direct conflict with what the underlying message was of Maharajji, which was to serve others? And so, if what you’re doing is just your practice and, but, are you, do you feel like it’s in service of others? Or how do you wrap around, and I’m not trying to be difficult…

KD: You’re just good at it.

Your support via direct donations go toward offerings such as this series, new teaching materials,  as well as the the compilation of all of KD’s work on the Path, for the purpose of sharing it with everyone in a variety of media. Kirtan Wallah Foundation is also be able to offer assistance to organizations around the world, whose efforts are in alignment with the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. For more information about the work of the foundation you can visit our blog for recent updates as well as sign up for our foundation news letter.

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The post Ep.10 | Selfless Service appeared first on Krishna Das.

Surrender happens by grace. It’s not an act of personal will. That might be a hard thing to understand because we don’t, you know, grace is such a foreign concept to Westerners, but you know, Ramana Maharshi said, “If you ask the thief to be the policeman, there will be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.”  That’s the thing about surrender. If you ask your ego to surrender, it’ll make a good job of looking like it’s trying to do that, all the time it’s getting bigger and stronger.” – Krishna Das

Transcription:

Q. Could you talk just a little bit about, in regards to your own personal experience then in regards to how it would apply to the rest of us, the process of letting go?

KD. It might sound funny to point this out but whenever you’re, let’s say you’re sitting or chanting or doing some practice, or let’s say we’re chanting together, so you might feel something for a minute, it might come, it might go after something else. Where is this experience happening? I’ll answer. It’s happening in here. In each one of us. It’s not outside. It’s not somewhere else. It’s happening within each one of us. Having our own experience. Very different from the person next to you. And if you think about it, we go through our whole day, our whole life having our own experience. Each one of us. And that experience, what we experience, we, is and by our stuff, our, who we think we are, the stuff we like, the stuff we don’t like, the things that happen to us in life, the things that didn’t happen to us in life. Everything that makes us, everything that makes me, me, is what’s having these experiences, and that “me” is what spiritual practice begins to dissolve. So that gradually, the subjective bubble that we’re imprisoned in, and it is prison, the subjective buble that we’re imprisoned in begins to melt away. When Maharajji would say, “All one,” what he’s pointing to is that place when the bubble’s broken and there’s no, and you don’t think you’re that person anymore, you experience yourself in a different way. You don’t disappear, but you experience yourself in a much different way, you’re not limited or imprisoned or defined by your thoughts and emotions but you’re very much here, more here than you are when you’re thinking about shit all the time, Much more here. I mean, it’s inconceivable who much more it is, because it’s inconceivable by definition. You can’t conceive of it. It’s not a concept, it’s the experience of Being. And these Names that we sing, they’re calling us. We think we’re calling them out, but they’re actually pulling us into our Self. We’re being pulling pulled into ourself. Human beings experience being pulled within by your own Being as longing. Longing. That’s the killer. Longing is the killer. That’s what ruins your life. Wanting something we don’t, we think we don’t have. The longing for that, to be in that place, to be That. To feel That. That’s what drives us forward. That’s the saving grace, actually, is the longing. It’s a tough one. It’s very hard to just, to really surrender to That. Accept that. We still think we’re going to squeeze out a little bit of happiness. “I know, it’s just around the corner, I’ll grab it, you know, I can do it, yeah, this is ok, but I’ll get that.”  Good luck. Good luck.

I mean that. Good luck. I hope you do.

You’d be the first since time began. But you know, anything could happen.

Sir. Give him the mic.

Q: Could you talk just a little bit about, in regards to your own personal experience then in regards to how it would apply to the rest of us, the process of letting go?

KD: What does that mean? What does letting go mean? Or?

Q: I think we all can understand it in some, to some varying degree, the word “surrender” or at least the way you’ve been using it, and so, yes, what it is but also how to do it?

Many years ago, I was still in college or pretending I was in college. I had scored ten capsules of LSD. They were from Sandoz, Sandoz is the Swiss company that created the first LSD. These were from, it was still legal then, nobody had caught on yet. They didn’t know how much fun it was, so they didn’t make it illegal. So I had ten of these capsules and the first one I split with a friend of mine and we drove out to the beach and started jumping off these cliffs right? These sand cliffs, all day long, it was great, all night long. And then actually wandering through the suburbs of Long Island, we found the tree that Buddha was enlightened under. Who knew it was in Miller Place, right? Or was that Sound Beach? I don’t know, one of those.  It’s amazing, but we sat there for a few hours and said, “Well, I guess He’s not coming back, let’s do something else.” So, one weekend I, you know, I was home alone, so I did a whole capsule. 1000 micrograms, which is enough to put a horse on the moon. And I was, I didn’t know, I was in Playland for like 24 hours. I was out on the front lawn with the dog in the snow and rainbow lights, it was so great. So at one point, I found myself laying in my bed and I was just laying… and on the opposite wall there was a window, right? And I was just laying there and I felt something coming from like, through the window, way out, from the far distance away. What is that? And then I’d space out and it was still coming. Coming coming coming. And it came closer and closer and closer and just as it broke over me like a huge wave, I thought “Oh, no. It’s a thought!” Crash.  And then I was thinking. And I was thinking. And I was thinking. And then it was going away. “No, don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go!” No thinking. And then after some indeterminate period of time, “Oh, no. No no no.” Crash. And I was thinking again. And then, it started happening more quickly. The space between the thoughts got smaller and smaller. And then, here I am. It was interesting. So I’ve had similar, I’ve experienced similar things in meditation where thoughts don’t grab you. They just go through like birds and they don’t… but most of the time, we are completely immersed in our thinking. I mean, we get up in the morning and it’s just already going, “Ok, what am I gonna do? Let me check facebook” while you’re still laying in bed. We don’t ever get a break from it. So, the first thing that we need to do in spiritual life is to slow down. To pay some attention to letting those thoughts go. Find something to pay attention to like your breath or a mantra or the chanting, something, a visualization. And every time you realize you’re not there, you come back. A million times a minute if you’re really paying attention. And eventually, you develop a new neural pathway in the brain. They’ve proved this now. The brain is, there is neural plasticity. The brain changes shape through these practices. So we’re creating new pathways in our brain. And it makes it easier every time, the more practice we do makes it easier to release that stuff and just be in present, be present. Be in awareness. The surrender is not an emotional thing. You can’t surrender, just like you can’t pick yourself up like this, you know? It doesn’t matter how hard you try or how much you want to, surrender happens when we’re ripe and we ripen ourselves by practice and by developing an understanding about what this is all about and why we’re doing it. Maharajji said, over and over, “From repeating these Names, the repetition of these Names, everything is brought to completion and fulness.” “Everything.” What He’s saying is, this is all you have to do. Now, I was with Him from ’70-’73 and I heard Him say this. I still can’t through Fringe. I’m watching all five seasons instead of doing Ram Nam. So, I don’t expect that anybody is able to do this, you understand? I waste so much time doing all kinds of nonsense and I have this, it’s written right on my harmonium, right here.  From repeating these Names, it’s all you have to do. Do I do it? Yeah, when I remember. So, this is the same thing as when you’re practicing. You’re gone and all of a sudden you realize you’re gone, so you rededicate yourself to the practice. So when I remember, I do the practices as much as I can. How much time do I remember? How much time do you remember that you’re even alive? You know? Most of the time, it’s just going from one thing to the other all day long, all week long, all month long, all year long, all life long. Waking up is what we’re talking about. But not in a cold way, we wake up to this to understanding what the path is about. Surrender is graduation day. Meanwhile we have to work. I don’t think I’m even in nursery school yet. Surrender is graduation. Surrender is when you recognize that you never were separate in the first place. You never were cut off. You never were isolated. You never were who you think, who we think we are. But since we think we are somebody, then we’ve got to do something. This is not something that you only know here, like “Oh, yeah, I’m nobody.” That’s a pretty big nobody. This is something we experience directly within ourselves through practice and through wanting, that longing that pulls us to do these things. It can manifest in many ways. Maybe we just want to be better at what we do. We want to be able to pay better attention to what we’re doing, we want to be more successful, we want to be happier. Whatever we tell ourselves, the practice will ripen us. It’s a ripening process. It’s not a learning process. I am incapable of learning anything. He learned a lot. Like, he’s a lawyer from Montreal. Of course he learned things. I’m from Long Island. We don’t learn things but we sing our asses off. That’s all. That’s all I have to do. I don’t care.

Your support via direct donations go toward offerings such as this series, new teaching materials,  as well as the the compilation of all of KD’s work on the Path, for the purpose of sharing it with everyone in a variety of media. Kirtan Wallah Foundation is also be able to offer assistance to organizations around the world, whose efforts are in alignment with the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. For more information about the work of the foundation you can visit our blog for recent updates as well as sign up for our foundation news letter.

A note about your donation:

The post Ep.09 | Surrender appeared first on Krishna Das.