Ep.05~ Judging and Acting

“You don’t have to judge. Judging means you’re seeing that person as evil. Or bad. And you’re not seeing that that person, just like you, is a result of many different things in that person’s life. Most people who abuse, have been abused. Right? Does that make them bad? It just makes them victims. Victims become victimizers. Not 100% but to a large degree. Most of what we’re taught about ourselves through our earlier life and our parents, we then absorb and we teach it to anybody around us. So, people who abuse are often abusing out of their own pain. That doesn’t excuse them. You wouldn’t let them hurt somebody if you were there. But you wouldn’t necessarily have to hate them to stop them. The not hating is the inner work. The preventing suffering on the outside is the outer result of that work”– Krishna Das

Transcription:

Q:  The woman behind me had asked essentially, about taking direct action versus looking inward and doing the spiritual practice. And I’ve run into that myself.

KD: I don’t know if that’s what she asked exactly but, I don’t know, there is no “versus”, you know? There are not two different things.

Q: Well, that is my question because I have begun to try to look inward and try to develop a spiritual practice, an interest thing has happened, which is, I have become a more passionate, a compassionate person.

KD: You ever hear of a Freudian slip?

Q: Probably that, too actually.

KD: That’s good for you, too. No problem there. Money and sex, who can do without it? Some people think they can.

Q: And so the harshness of the world outside us is there.

KD: Sure.

Q: And it seems to me that direct action is often required or I feel that need to take direct action and we do need to in this world. If somebody came in here, a cruise ship drunkard, we would have to physically remove them.

KD: Maybe.

Q: And so how do we balance looking inward, developing a spiritual practice with also going out in the world and making a difference in the world. That’ my question.

KD: It’s really easy. You do the best, don’t take it away from him, I didn’t forget the word you used. “Challenge.” No, it’s really easy. You do the best you can. That’s it. Now think about that. Just think about it for a second. You do the best you can. What would you like to… how would you modify that statement?

Q: I guess what I’m hearing, sometimes, is don’t take direct action.

KD: You never heard it from me.

Q: Ok, that’s where I got confused, because she was saying these other people that are doing horrible things. Then what I’m hearing is, who are we to judge? And sometimes we have to judge.

KD: No. You don’t have to judge. Judging means you’re seeing that person as evil. Or bad. And you’re not seeing that that person, just like you, is a result of many different things in that person’s life. Most people who abuse, have been abused. Right? Does that make them bad? It just makes them victims. Victims become victimizers. Not 100% but to a large degree. Most of what we’re taught about ourselves through our earlier life and our parents, we then absorb and we teach it to anybody around us. So, people who abuse are often abusing out of their own pain. That doesn’t excuse them. You wouldn’t let them hurt somebody if you were there. But you wouldn’t necessarily have to hate them to stop them. The not hating is the inner work. The preventing suffering on the outside is the outer result of that work. If you hate that person, you’ve created a whole drama for yourself. Who knows what you’re going to do out of? Who knows? You might take that to excess. You might kill the person. And you know what they say in the East? They say, if you kill somebody, you give that person the right to kill you for a hundred lifetimes. Karma. You can’t. When you start talking about these things, you can either say, ok there’s no such thing as karma,

Ep.04 ~ Desire and Willfulness

“Most of everything we do in life is designed to shine us up a little bit, so people will like us and look at us and appreciate us more and we get some attention, some affection. You know? But we don’t have to shine. We really don’t have to. So, if you’re noticing all the ways you’re trying to shine, that’s good. Otherwise how can you let go of that stuff if you don’t notice? Right? It’s not going to help you get happy. You’re just going to spend a lot of time shining yourself up. Then you fall apart.” – Krishna Das

Transcription:

Q: I’m wondering if you can speak to the differentiation between going after what you want, desire and like a willfulness.

KD: You need will, you know? Will is what moves you. It directs your energy. Without will, you know, where does it go? What do you do? Whether it’s, you’re trying to direct your attention, that’s also your will. I remember, I’ve told this many times, but when I was in the jungle with this old Baba who was 163 at the time, he said to me one day, he looked at me and said, “Hm. You have to develop willpower.” And my first thought was, “Willpower? What do I need that for?” And then he kind of went like, like he saw my thought, so He did something and He showed me inside of myself, what He was seeing and it was pretty intense. I saw that I was not, I was putting chains around my ankles, you know? I was not going after the things I wanted in life, and I was all justifying it with, “well, I don’t need that. I don’t need this.”  You know, all this kind of stuff. But I really wanted things that I wasn’t going after.  Things I wanted. And I saw that I had this kind of funny thing like that there was spiritual life and worldly life and that you could live a spiritual life and you didn’t have to, you know. But I was in the world. There was only one life, mine, right? And if I wasn’t going to live it, who was going to live it? I was not going after the things I wanted. I wasn’t living fully. And that was a big moment for me. Willfulness, by that I mean, I take it to mean inappropriate selfish craving of something. But not, go ahead

Q: Yeah perhaps, but do you think it’s possible to experience that kind of want and desire in a positive way and at the same time have that craving and wanting. So there’s two things happening.

KD: Ok, let’s do this again. So, you have a desire for something and, which is called craving. Desire is craving. The issue is it going to hurt you or somebody else. That’s the only real issue I can see. If it’s a desire to drink a bottle of poison because it might taste good, I don’t think that’s good.

Q: I think, can I elaborate?

KD: Please.

Q: So, like, if I want something in my life, if I have a goal or an aspiration for something that’s important, but then when I find that I’m pursuing it, that I get caught up in wanting it to turn out a certain way or I get caught up in what people think of me or how good I am in the face of someone else.

KD: Well, first of all, one thing is why do you want it? Do you want people to think a certain way about you? You’re trying to get something so that people will appreciate and look at you a certain kind of way? If that’s your motivation, hm, that’s what’ll happen. But the other part of it is that you know, as far as the fruits of our actions, we have no control over that, all we can do is do what we do, and whatever comes to us, comes to us. We can’t guarantee success in anything and we can’t guarantee failure. Well, we can guarantee failure by not going after what we want. So it was my fear of failure that was keeping me from going after the things I wanted. And when I noticed that, I was able to overcome that to some degree. But yeah that’s good, being aware of all that stuff that happens to you on the way to getting something is very good. Is that a reason to not go after it anymore? Not necessarily. It’s like it’s doing good,

Ep.03 ~ Bearing Witness

Unconditional love, it’s a word, it’s a phrase, it’s hard to connect with that. Unconditional love. Just think about the sun. It shines evenly all the time on everything. On the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the high, the low. It shines on those miserable people who kill people and murder people and treat people like shit and it shines on the people who care for people and do charity and help people every chance they get. The sun shines equally on everything and everyone. That’s what it is. That’s unconditional.”- Krishna Das

An explanation of bearing witness to suffering without judgement.

So, I said nothing was happening when we were sitting with Maharajji, that’s not exactly true. I don’t want to mislead you. So much nothing was happening, that it was like, the whole universe was happening. We were being loved in a way that we had never been loved before. Period. End of story. When I think about that, just imagine what it would be like to be loved in just the way you want to be loved, just the way you would imagine, “If I could only be loved that way, I would feel this way.” That’s what it is. That’s what it felt like at that time. That’s what real love is. It didn’t involve another person. Maharajji wasn’t a person although it appeared to us that there was this body sitting there throwing fruit at us, laughing. But that wasn’t exactly the point. Nothing, He didn’t seem to be doing anything except shining like the sun. Unconditional love, it’s a word, it’s a phrase, it’s hard to connect with that. Unconditional love. Just think about the sun. It shines evenly all the time on everything. On the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the high, the low. It shines on those miserable people who kill people and murder people and treat people like shit and it shines on the people who care for people and do charity and help people every chance they get. The sun shines equally on everything and everyone. That’s what it is. That’s unconditional. When I was in Auschwitz with Bernie Glassman, we got there, I think it was early November, and there was green fields and the trees were autumn, were just alive, blossoming colors, exploding with all the colors, all the leaves, right? It was so beautiful. And the first thing the polish woman said, who was our guide, she said, “You see all this green and these colors? There was nothing except mud and dirt because the prisoners ate everything they could eat. They ate the bark off the trees. The ate the grass. They ate the dead leaves. Anything they could put in their mouth, they ate.” Oh. And so then we were taken around the camp and were given, pointed out things, what happened here, what happened there. You know. And every day I would come to that camp and I would look up at the sun and I’d say, “How dare you shine on this place? How can you shine on this place?” Really, my heart was exploding in anger. “How can you shine on this place? What’s wrong with you?” he said. Well, we were there for a particular purpose. The reason Bernie takes people there is to bear witness to the suffering that happened there. To bear witness to the Beings and the Souls who suffered there and he feels their presence there and he feels by coming there to bear witness to their suffering, we dissolve the isolation and the loneliness that they must feel and in so doing, remove some of the suffering. It lightens the load of suffering by bearing witness. Bearing witness is an interesting concept. Witness. It’s not judging. The witness tells what they see. It’s the judge who gives the sentence. The witness simply witnesses. But I wasn’t able to do that. Every day I went there and I said, “How can you shine on this place?” And I would walk around and I was really, it was a heavy dark place until one day I looked up at the sun and I recognized, that’s what the sun does. It shines everywhere on everything. It shines on the inside and the outside.

Ep.02 ~ How Does love Relate to Life 

That’s the other thing that happens, you also start to accept all the parts of your life a lot more easily. All the shadows. You know, the shadows, if we don’t see them, they just keep pushing us around and they don’t go away by themselves. They must be looked at, they must be released, consciously released to some degree. So, when Maharajji sent me back to America after two and a half years, he said, “You go back to America. You have attachment there.” So, this is, this is what’s left after 50 years of dealing with attachment. Just, me and my main squeeze here. And my life, you know? But I think one of the things you’re asking, I’m not looking for that love in anybody anymore, in a person, in a human being – Krishna Das

Transcription:

Q:  So you mention about having a void and seeking to fill that void and so having had the experience with Maharajji, to piggyback on this gentleman’s question, how did that experience then translate back into, and this doesn’t have to be personal to you, per se, but in your experience, how does it all translate back into the romantic relationship, in your opinion.

KD: Well, what about just any relationship? What about, how does it translate at all to life, you know? It changes everything on one hand but it didn’t eradicate the karmas that I had already, you know, that were still to work themselves out. They still were coming. You know, looking back, you know, at that time, it changed a lot. First of all, I knew that there really is something to find that is real. And all I had to do is clean my heart and calm my mind, right? So, I’m still waiting. I think tomorrow I’ll start meditating. Maybe the day after. I’m busy tomorrow.

But on the other hand, on one hand, like I said, it changed everything because now there was a context for being alive, whereas before there wasn’t. I mean, I was hoping there was, but I didn’t really know that. But then after that, being there in India and those years and everything, you know, was different. My whole way of living in the world changed to some degree. But it didn’t obliterate a lot of the heavy darkness in my heart.  And that darkness manifested very fiercely over the years and it took me down a lot of places, you know, I would have never thought I would have gone. After being with Maharajji. Most people get fucked up before. But I was too scared to do that. I had to wait til afterwards to get screwed up. And I did. Royally.

So, but then there’s, as bad as it gets, most of the time you know that, you have a sense that these are your karmas manifesting and the more you deal with them, the better it is. The more ways you find to deal with them and be present with it as much as you can, the easier it gets but that’s not easy.  Give him the mic, he wants to say more.

Q: I almost feel as if this could be a conversation actually?

KD: what else is it? Isn’t this my living room?

Q: So be it.

KD: Or your living room?

Q: So it sounds like life only began at that point, per se?

KD: no, it sounds like the lights went on for a minute and then they went off again. You know? But once they’ve gone on, you see what’s in the room, to some degree. And then it’s not so, it changes a lot. First of all, you know there’s a door over there. You just have to get to the door to get out. Before you didn’t know what was there. So, you’re bumping around trying to find a way out but you don’t even know if there is a way out, so you might give up very easily, which most people do.

Q; So on that note, then, in terms of your relationship with life in general, just as opposed to just, a romantic side of things.

KD: Ok, what do you mean by? You’ve said that twice. What do you mean by romantic?

Q: Well, actually, just based on his question, so you know, in life one of the things that we seem to accomplish, let’s say for me,

Ep.01 ~ Talk on the Hanuman Chalisa 

Maharajji, Hanuman and The Flow of Grace Towards Love

 This is the way Mahrajji was. Everything that came towards Him got something burnt away, because you couldn’t come close to that fire with all your shit. You had to drop it or you couldn’t get there. Just coming towards that love burns stuff off of you in the first place. And that’s Hanuman.  Hanuman is that love that’s always turned towards Ram, towards God, and anything that approaches Hanuman gets into that flow of Grace towards love. But in order to enter into that flow, you have to leave some of that luggage behind. You have to. It’s not always pleasant and it’s not, it doesn’t always feel good but you want the love more than you want all that luggage and so you will let go of that given the opportunity. – Krishna Das

Transcription:

Q: Thank you so much, I had a question about the hanuman chalisa and anything you could say about your journey with that, what your teacher said about it and how your experiences have gone of chanting Hanuman’s name?

KD: Well, Maharajji said that every word of the Hanuman Chalisa is Mahamantra. So, the whole thing is the Name, repetitions of the Names, which He considered to be the practice that we were qualified to do.

When we asked Him, “How do we find God?” he said, “Serve people.” “How do we raise Kundalini?” He said, “Feed people.”

“Love everyone, Serve everyone and Remember God.” That was basically what He told us. What He told other people, we have no idea, but that’s what he told us. But pretty much it was like that, He was mostly with householders that we know.  And He was part of every family and He was involved in all the decisions in the family and the children, angry at their parents, and the parents fighting. You know, all things, He was just involved in all of it all the time. And he helped these people live good lives and he blessed them and many times He helped them overcome tremendous obstacles and healed them and healed the sick and raised the dead. The whole schpeel. That’s what He did. Very much in the world.

There’s a beautiful story about, one day He was walking down the street in Vrindavan in the middle of the summer.  It was like 120 degrees in the middle of the day and coming in the other direction was this sadhu, you know, with the hair and the ashes and they saw each other and they ran, jumped around, and they hugged and they jumped around and danced and they were just like, completely, they were so happy to see each other and this sadhu says, “Baba, I can’t believe we’re meeting after 40 years. I haven’t seen You since we were in the mountains together.” And everybody was so happy. They were so happy. And they hung around for a few minutes and then Maharajji says, “Ok, brother, I have to go now. So, you go and I’ll go this way. You go that way.” And the sadhu says, “I’m not leaving you, after all this time I’ve found You. I can’t go now.” He said, “No, no. You don’t understand. You don’t want to hang out with Me. I’m always around householders. I’m with worldly people all the time. It’s not good for you.  It’s not good for you. You don’t even know Me. Don’t come with Me.” He said, “There’s no way I’m leaving you, Baba.” And they argued about it. Finally, Mahrajji says, “Ok.” And they took off and they started walking to Mathura, which is 18 kilometers away in the middle of the day. In those days there was just a desert between Vrindavan and Mathura. So, they were literally dying of thirst and in the distance, they saw a well and they start running to this well, right? And Mahrajji gets there first and there’s a woman getting water from the well, whatever you call that, with a bucket. And Maharajji runs up and He puts His hands out like this, and He says, “Ma, pour water for me to drink.” Right? So she pours water and He’s drinking like this and now the sadhu arrives and he puts out his gourd cup and the woman pours water and...

Ep. 00 ~ Keeping up with daily sadhana and practice

In this episode Krishna Das discusses keeping up with our daily practices (sadhana) despite distractions and hurry in our daily lives.

Transcription:

Q: Thank you so much, I had a question about the hanuman chalisa and anything you could say about your journey with that, what your teacher said about it and how your experiences have gone of chanting Hanuman’s name?

KD: Well, Maharajji said that every word of the Hanuman Chalisa is Mahamantra. So, the whole thing is the Name, repetitions of the Names, which He considered to be the practice that we were qualified to do.

When we asked Him, “How do we find God?” he said, “Serve people.” “How do we raise Kundalini?” He said, “Feed people.”

“Love everyone, Serve everyone and Remember God.” That was basically what He told us. What He told other people, we have no idea, but that’s what he told us. But pretty much it was like that, He was mostly with householders that we know.  And He was part of every family and He was involved in all the decisions in the family and the children, angry at their parents, and the parents fighting. You know, all things, He was just involved in all of it all the time. And he helped these people live good lives and he blessed them and many times He helped them overcome tremendous obstacles and healed them and healed the sick and raised the dead. The whole schpeel. That’s what He did. Very much in the world.

There’s a beautiful story about, one day He was walking down the street in Vrindavan in the middle of the summer.  It was like 120 degrees in the middle of the day and coming in the other direction was this sadhu, you know, with the hair and the ashes and they saw each other and they ran, jumped around, and they hugged and they jumped around and danced and they were just like, completely, they were so happy to see each other and this sadhu says, “Baba, I can’t believe we’re meeting after 40 years. I haven’t seen You since we were in the mountains together.” And everybody was so happy. They were so happy. And they hung around for a few minutes and then Maharajji says, “Ok, brother, I have to go now. So, you go and I’ll go this way. You go that way.” And the sadhu says, “I’m not leaving you, after all this time I’ve found You. I can’t go now.” He said, “No, no. You don’t understand. You don’t want to hang out with Me. I’m always around householders. I’m with worldly people all the time. It’s not good for you.  It’s not good for you. You don’t even know Me. Don’t come with Me.” He said, “There’s no way I’m leaving you, Baba.” And they argued about it. Finally, Mahrajji says, “Ok.” And they took off and they started walking to Mathura, which is 18 kilometers away in the middle of the day. In those days there was just a desert between Vrindavan and Mathura. So, they were literally dying of thirst and in the distance, they saw a well and they start running to this well, right? And Mahrajji gets there first and there’s a woman getting water from the well, whatever you call that, with a bucket. And Maharajji runs up and He puts His hands out like this, and He says, “Ma, pour water for me to drink.” Right? So she pours water and He’s drinking like this and now the sadhu arrives and he puts out his gourd cup and the woman pours water and starts to pour water in it and while she’s pouring water, Maharajji starts chatting her up because He chatted everybody up 24-7 365 and He says, “Where are you from, Ma? What’s your village? What’s your caste?” Turns out she’s an untouchable. When the sadhu heard that, he completely flipped out. He takes his gourd and he furiously smashes it down on the ground and he starts screaming to Maharajji, “What have you done? Look what you’ve done? You’ve gotten me into this and this and this was my only thing, I needed this for everything and now it’s become impure and I can’t use it anymore. How could you do this?