Call and Response with Krishna Das

Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 81 | Not Getting What you Want

“If you don’t allow yourself to feel that terrible disappointment and the pain of not getting what you want, you’re never going to move through it to get what you really want. You know, we can’t pretend that we don’t hurt. All of us hurt, that’s the deal. And we have to allow that to be in our lives. It’s a big part of being human, to allow that all the different kinds of suffering and pain, to allow ourselves to feel that. It makes us human and it bonds us with every other being on the planet, because we all suffer.” – Krishna Das

Q: Yes.

KD: Yes. Sir.

Q: Every morning I met, in the place that I go, I have five cats, seven peacocks, several dogs, several other animals, and they all have expectation that they’ll be fed. I try to temper my expectation. What do you say to that? Should I? Or should I expect what they always expect? Not necessarily to be fed kibble or whatever they get, meow mix, whatever, but should I always expect that things that I want to have or think about or whatever, is not expecting something a way to expect it?

KD: You mean, can you fool yourself? No.

Q: Yeah. In some ways…

KD: We can’t. We can’t really fool ourselves. Sometimes you just have to live with the fact that a particular thing you want, you won’t get. You know? Like, I wanted to be 6’8” 240 lbs power forward on a basketball team. But I was 6’1” 185, and that guy used to beat the shit out of me. So, I’m never going to be 6 ‘8” 240, no matter what I do. I had to live with that. And, in fact, you know, in my life, I really wanted to play basketball and I went to, I had a basketball scholarship to Brandeis and before my senior year, I ripped up my leg, ligaments in my right leg, and I didn’t get into shape in time and they took the scholarship back. I was destroyed. That was the only thing I wanted. I mean, I was playing music. I loved doing all that, but I was a basketball maniac and I was destroyed by that. My whole life changed that day that I ripped up my ankle, my leg. It was amazing And it was very painful. So, my friend and I were going to build a Harley. Back in the old days in the comic books, there was a little ad, you know, “Build a Harley Motorcycle.” So, we were going to get this kit for like $10, build a motorcycle and drive out to the West Coast and be lumberjacks. And the basketball coach for Stony Brook called me. It was his first year. His name was Herb Brown, Larry Brown’s brother. He called me, he said, “Hi, Jeff, whatchya doing?” I said, “Well, I’m going to go be a lumberjack.” He said, “Oh, don’t you want to play ball?” Yeah.  So, I went to Stony Brook, which was great, because it turned out to be the drug and music capital of the East Coast. I played more games on LSD than any other drug. It was unbelievable. The coach used to have me come sit next to him in the front of the bus and he’d put his arm around me and he’d say, “It’ll be ok, it’ll be ok.” And I’d be, “Ok, ok.” It was amazing. So, you know, you have to live with it, you know. But if you don’t allow yourself to feel that terrible disappointment and the pain of not getting what you want, you’re never going to move through it to get what you really want. You know, we can’t pretend that we don’t hurt. All of us hurt, that’s the deal. You know. And we have to allow that to be in our lives. It’s a big part of being human is to allow that all the different kinds of suffering and pain, to allow ourselves to feel that. It makes us human and it bonds us with every other being on the planet, because we all suffer. And so, it makes you more human, you know? And then you look at other people and you see what they feel, and you can feel that. You can relate. And you know what a person’s going through and that makes you compassionate, without even pretending to be compassionate. You just automatically understand what that person in the street is feeling. And you see somebody yelling at somebody else with terrible anger and you know what that feels like, not only to the person they’re angry at, but what it feels like to be owned by that fierce passionate anger in your own heart that’s burning you alive. That’s just a part of being human.

KD: Hello.

Q: Hi. I wanted to ask you a question, since you lived in India. What is the difference between kirtans and bhajans?

KD: Well, you know, bhajans is usually a story, a song about a story, like something happened in the Ramayana or Krishna’s play, just like gospel songs, but kirtan is the repetition of the Name, only. I mean, more or less. You know, it’s India so anything is good. No problem. But, technically, one thing is one thing and another thing is another thing, you know? But yeah. So.

KD: HI.

Q: Hello. My name is Maura.

KD: Oh, really.

Q: How are you? I saw you the other night.

KD: I know, I’ve got you down.

Q: We were talking. We’ve been talking. I just was, you said the other night when you played with David, you know, you’re just two old Jewish guys playing in a band and I was curious how you feel or felt or where does your Judaism come into play for you.

KD: I’m about as Jewish as the pope.

Q: Ok. So, there is none.

KD: I also, I usually joke, I say, “I’m Jewish on my parents’ side.” I mean, culturally, I’m Jewish. I grew up in that culture to some degree, but you know, I mean, nobody in my family believed in God, believed that there really is something to find in the world other than fighting over the pope’s nose. Anybody know what the pope’s nose is? It’s the part of the chicken that goes over the fence last. That’s what they… at the table they would fight over that. You know, it was…

Q: You’ve sat with rabbis, I’m sure.

KD: You know, my grandparents were so good to me on both sides. Without them, I would be dead, you know. And I realized later that every other weekend, when I was sent to my grandparents’ house, that’s when my parents went to therapy.  You know? So, I got all that wonderful love and caring and affection from my grandparents. Not that my parents weren’t loving, but my grandparents really… so culturally, there was, but you know, the other thing, they never talked about the holocaust. I never heard about it. And all of those people I grew up with, they had relatives there they never mentioned. So, it was interesting. But yeah, you know, and then, of course, my bar mitzvah. I was bar mitzvah’d, you know? So, we had the celebration at this place called the Club Jericho on Jericho Turnpike in Long Island. Really fancy. And by the end of the day, I had like $1,000 in checks in my pocket, people, all my relatives, gave me.  My father comes up to me and says, “Give me the checks.” What?  “Give me the checks. I have to pay for this.”  That’s when Judaism went out the fucking window. Not one minute after that did I ever think I would want anything to do with this ever again. I was thinking of all the porn I could buy. I was 13 and I’d just became a man, so, what else do you do? No, you know, but, later on I came to appreciate it a lot more. I read a bunch of books about the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov was, I believe, was 16th century. He was an incredible saint. And you know what it means, Baal Shem Tov? It means, “The Master of the Good Name.” Hello? The Name. I don’t know, maybe he sang Sri Ram Jai Ram when nobody was looking. The Name, the Name. So, he was incredible. So, I had come to appreciate a lot of that mystical, but you know, I’m a one trick pony. I woke up in India. I always… this is what I do. This is what I am. You know? I can’t do anything else except some things.

Q: Hi. Can you hear me.

KD: Yeah.

Q: Ok. Thank you. I, maybe this is a little bit of a, you know, a for me question, but hopefully other people will appreciate it, too.

KD: Don’t have hope.

Q: I just want to acknowledge that we’re here in this space, like you had mentioned earlier, we’re here at Dharma’s place and I’ve seen you here before over the years, and I’m wondering maybe, if you could speak a little about your relationship with our teacher and if you want to share a story. Because I don’t really know much about it.

KD: Dharma and I have spent very little time together physically, really. We love each other very much but we don’t, it’s never been, we’ve never had a lot of time to spend together. He would invite me to come sing to the teacher trainees at the old place and I would love to do that. It’s just kind of, we kind of know each other and love each other but we just haven’t spent a lot of physical time together. And of course, all the yogic teachers that I know, the older generation, they all used to come to Dharma for teaching. They all learn so much from him. He’s not just a yoga teacher. He’s a yogi. There’s a difference. And he’s a wonderful being. Yeah. Good. Good Being. It’s really not easy to be that. You have to really be that to be that.

Ok. More?

Or we can sing a little bit.

Ok, yeah good. No, no. This is important. I don’t care if you don’t like it. It’s important to me. I go all around the world and I do this people all around the world and I want to tell you, they ask, it’s the same thing every time. Everybody wants the same thing. Everybody has the same issues, the same problems, a slightly different way of… the only place, two places… once, the first time I did a workshop in Zurich, they sat there like this for three hours. When the gong rang at three hours, they rushed me, and they all had questions. I said, “What’s been? For three hours, what have you been doing?” The other time was in Norway, ok. So, everybody, we had great singing, everybody was talking, there was one guy sitting like where you’re sitting, like this, the whole time. He didn’t move for three hours. And I thought, this guy’s a serial killer. What am I going to do with this guy? I’ve got to get out of here the minute I stop singing. So, I tried to get out, but everybody rushed the stage and they were waiting in line to talk to me and I saw he was like, in the line, so I was like smiling, “Hi, thank you, thank you so much.” And then the next one and all of a sudden, he’s there and he goes, “This was great!”  All the sweat that I sweated for the first three hours was ridiculous. The guy, he was scary looking. This is why, we live in our own worlds, we’re projecting all the time on everybody else, you know. I don’t know who any of you are. A couple of you I might have some ideas. But basically, when I see you, you know, you’re playing your part in my dream, so I’m really playing your part in my world. Isn’t that incredible. So, when we talk like this we kind of bring the inside out and everybody can share so much of the same stuff. We’re all in the same place. We all want the same thing and we have all the same issues. So, I think this is great. And you came, so screw it, you’re dead. Where was it? Over there, yeah hi.

Q: Hi, I have a practical question.

KD: You’re asking me practical something?

Q: I probably should just email somebody, but it was exciting to ask you directly, and then I have a spiritual question if I get two for one.

KD: I’ll see if I can tell the difference.

Q: I sing with a few people in Knoxville, Tennessee. And it’s mostly bhajans for Ammachi, the Hugging Saint.

KD: Sure.

Q: And some Sai Baba bhajans, but I’ve been doing some Krishna Das in the mix and I always feel really guilty because I always think “Oh, you know, should I be paying somebody some royalties, like, if we perform?”

KD: 50 cents a mantra.

Q: Does it matter if it’s donation? Does it matter if there’s a fee?

KD: Nah. Come on. It’s all free. You just, when you buy a cd, you know, then I can pay my rent, other than that there’s nothing you have to do. Yeah, no problem.

Q: Thank you.

KD: They don’t punish you for singing my stuff in there?

Q: Everybody told me not to worry about it, but I’ve got a guilty conscience.

KD: I used to sing a lot for Ammachi here in New York when she came but I came once and there was a battle going on for stage time. There were like, a lot of people wanted to sing, and they were like, fighting with each other. I just took my harmonium and went home. I was just like, fine let them have it. What do I care? It’s crazy. The kirtan wallah wars I call them. One in World War Two, Kirtan Wallah War Two. Ok, go ahead. Now, your spiritual question. This is going to be great.

Q: It’s probably pretty standard. You tell a great story about willpower and when you learned about the need and purpose of it and I get that, and then there’s also an element of like, about surrender and I feel like I get that, as well, and what I have trouble with is when to do which and the balance between the two.

KD: Well, it’s not quite like that, at least as far as I can see. Surrender, real surrender means dropping the separate self, the sense of a separate self, the sense, the belief that you’re you and not that you’re, that you’re actually who you think you are. So, that surrender, being able to drop that and being able to merge into the oneness, and without willpower, there’s not the slightest possibility in hell that will happen. You just don’t drop it. You have to transmute it. You have to let it go. You have to give it away. You have to move it over. You have to look to see through it. You have to analyze it. You have to understand it. You have to see your motivations. You have to be good to people. You have to care about yourself and others. It’s really, it’s the whole path. Surrender is the goal. It doesn’t mean giving up your will to somebody else. It means dropping your separate self and merging with the whole universe. Dropping it, just letting it go. You think you can do that without willpower? No possibility. But we don’t even use our will well. You know? She’s referring to a story I told. What happened to me once, I was in the jungle with this very very old yogi. He was 163 years old. This was back in the 80s. He’s still alive, I hear. I haven’t seen Him for many years. So, we were sitting together, and he looked at me and he goes, and he said, “You have to develop,” he said in Hindi, “Iccha-shakti”. Iccha is desire, shakti is power. Icchashakti is willpower or the power to get what you want. And my thought was, “What do I need that for?” And then he went like, “oh,” and then he did something. He could read your thoughts. It was ridiculous, so then he did something inside of me. He showed me, inside of me, what he saw, and I went, “Oh.” I didn’t see that. And I saw myself. I was doing nothing. Nothing. I was floating. I wasn’t doing anything to help myself be happy, even. I was just, I wasn’t doing anything. It was a really dark time in my life. It was in the 80s. And I saw that I had chains around my own ankles and I wouldn’t let myself go after the things I wanted in life for so many stupid reasons, you know? Oh, I might not get it. What’ll they think. All that stuff. It was amazing what he showed me. And from that moment was life changing in many ways, and it kind of led, it was one step on the, on the path of getting, becoming, starting to sing with people. It was one move in the right direction. Our wills are really compromised by all the conflicting emotions that we have and all the conflicting desires and all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves that we don’t like. So, we don’t, even when we use our will, our strength to go after something, the motivation for going after that particular thing is very confused. Very confused and it really doesn’t ever give us what we want, what we really want. And then, I saw, wherever that was, over there somewhere, I saw that there wasn’t worldly life and spiritual life. There was just me and my life and I was crippling myself in my daily life, my so-called worldly life. The life of my desires. How was I going to do something in the so-called spiritual realm? With no will, how am I going to calm my mind? It was the same will. There’s not two of me. There’s one of me. And if I wasn’t doing it over here, it wasn’t going to work over there, so it was very interesting. I had to start paying attention to myself in a different way. And you know, I think one has to find out that what one wants isn’t really what one wants, to some degree. You know, you have to live. You have to go for it. Even if it winds up that you just bash your head against the wall again at 100 miles an hour, because there’s no other way to learn. There’s no other way to find out that what you want, other than getting what you thought you want and finding out it wasn’t enough, or that it doesn’t last, or it’s not really what you want. It’s experiential. You can’t do it in your head. Maharajji sent me, after two and a half years, He looked at me one day, out of the blue as far as I was concerned and said, “Ok, go back to New York. You have attachment there.” What? What are you talking about? Forever I was going to live in India, you know? I had no plan to go back in my head, and now all of a sudden, I’m going back. He said, “You have attachment there.” I didn’t know what He was talking about. Hello. How are you, Mr. Attachment? Everything that happened to me, from that moment to this moment, is what He was talking about. I could not work through my stuff in India, in the way I was living in India at that time. And also, He was getting ready to leave as well. So that would have been very difficult to be there. So, He was telling me, I had to come back to America and deal with my stuff. It’s the only way to become free is to deal with it. There’s no fast track around it. It just doesn’t work that way. We misinterpret a lot of those things that we, oh, hello,

Where were we?

Willpower.

Yeah, yeah, so you know, He sent me back. I would have, first of all, I was so sick. I had every disease you could get. I had it. Hepatitis. All kinds of parasites. Every kind. I wouldn’t have lasted long in India and, but there was no possibility of me working through my stuff in India. It just wasn’t going to happen. So, He sent me back. And I guess I’m ok with it. Eventually, I’ll probably get with the program. I don’t know. You know, He knew what was best for me and He knows what’s best for me and I try to listen to my own heart because that’s how He speaks to me. He didn’t tell me to go back to America and sing with people. He never told me to do that. I had to recognize that this was what I needed to do for me. And this is what’s happened, you know? I didn’t plan this. It just happened. So, it must be ok. But willpower is a very interesting thing. One can use it for so many different reasons, but if it’s the ability to keep yourself moving in the direction you want to move, ultimately.

The post Call and Response Podcast Ep. 81 | Not Getting What you Want appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Podcast Special Edition with Krishna Das | April 8, 2021

“Shame is a trip we’re doing to ourselves. Forget about whether we’ve actually hurt somebody or not. The feeling of shame, that’s different than remorse, by the way. Remorse is truly recognizing that we’ve hurt someone, wishing that we had not created that suffering and hoping that we don’t create it again, and not just hoping, but doing what’s necessary that we don’t create more suffering again for others and ourselves. But shame, that’s a different thing. Remorse is useful. Remorse of spirit, that leads to, in Christianity they talk about confession. That’s ultimately what confession is supposed to be, giving up the feelings that of shame and stuff like that and starting again. You can’t forget what you’ve done. But what you have done in the past can stop bullying you in this moment if we truly have remorse.” – Krishna Das

Namaste, everybody. Welcome to earth.

Nice to be here. As you can see, I’m not exactly where I was last time I was somewhere. Now I’m here and through the graces of the Integral Yoga Institute in the Holy city of San Francisco, we come to you semi-live.

I had to come out to the west coast for something, and befI had to change my plans before I could get home to do the Thursday night chanting, and so luckily our friends here at IYI manifested this whole thing, just like that. So, many thanks to them. They’re already asleep here, but that’s okay. It just looks like sleep. It’s actually the natural state.

We did 53 straight weeks from home, except actually one, when I was recording the audio book for “Chants of a Lifetime.” 53 weeks. And then I got on a plane, and I don’t think I’ll know that I’m actually still alive till I get back home, but I’m doing the best I can.

So, some of you may have heard this story before, but imagine how many times I’ve heard it. It was in the temple. It was in the days that we were coming back and forth from Nainital, which was the town nearby and coming to Kainchi, to the temple, Maharajji’s temple there. So, we came one day and as we were sitting there, these two old sadhus walked into the temple, and they were wandering sadhus, monks maybe. And they came into the temple and they asked Maharajji if they could stay for a while, and he said, “Yeah, you can stay. But every day I want you to sit out in front of the Hanuman temple and sing ‘Sita Ram.’ Just ‘Sita Ram.’” For three hours in the morning.

Okay. Not bad rent to pay.

So, the next day we arrived, and they were out there singing, the two of them, sitting opposite each other in front of the temple. They didn’t have any shakers or bangers or clangers or drums or anything. They were just singing. One of the guys would go, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Jai Sita Ram.”

And the other guy would answer, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Jai Sita Ram.”

“Sita Ram, Sita Ram…”

Back and forth, back and forth. So, we were just sitting, waiting for Maharajji to come out, and this chanting was going on in the background. We heard it. And all of a sudden, I don’t know, something happened, maybe they got bored, so one guy goes, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram Jaya Lakshaman.”

Oh. Jazz.

So, the other guy goes, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Lakshaman Jai Hanuman.”

And before you know it, they’re going, “Rama Lakshaman Janaki…” having a great time.

So, all of a sudden, from inside his room, inside a room, you hear Maharajji’s voice yell “Sita Ram!”

That moment when Maharajji yelled… I saw the whole thing. I’d heard it, but I hadn’t focused on it. So, they had drifted off. They had just gone with the… Maharajji said, “Sita Ram” only.

He said that.  They had just gone off on their thing, probably getting bored with just the good old “Sita Ram.” So, he pulled them back and then they followed with that. And for me, that was a really big lesson of coming back. Because what makes this a spiritual practice is that no matter what, our job, so to speak, is to listen, to repeat the name, in this case we’re singing out loud, and hear it at the same time, not just so mechanically that we’re not even paying attention, which is what happens most of the time if we really look, and then when somebody else is answering the call with a response, we’re hearing it again. And the hearing is different than just listening. It’s an inner recognition. We’re hearing it from the inside, so to speak. And as time goes on, we begin to, through the repetition of the name, we begin to spend more time at home inside here.And when we go off in dreams and thoughts and fantasies and emotions and the past, the future, all that stuff, we spend less time in those states.

Just take this morning. So, I got up. I got ready to leave to come to IYI here. And I looked around and I did not see my shoulder bag. My shoulder bag had my wallet in it. And I looked all around once. I looked around 20 times, the room. I looked everywhere. It was just not there. So, the adrenaline starts to pump and the panic starts to set in. “Where is it? What am I gonna do? I don’t even have a record of all those credit cards and what should I do? And my vaccine, my two shot vaccine stamp is in there.What will I do? And I won’t be able to get on the plane to go home without my driver’s license.”

So, on a scale of one to 10 in terms of from “okay” to “complete panic,” I was at about at 12, but I wasn’t there for long. I calmed my ass down and I thought, “Okay, so where could it be?” I called Whole Foods where I had gone the night before to get some stuff. They didn’t see the bag. Okay. That was one option. But I noticed I didn’t, I wasn’t as gone as long and as deeply as I could have been. It was interesting to me at the time. So, then it turned out I had left it in the car when I went to park and that’s a whole story in itself.

So, I ran down to the parking garage and I found the bag in there, but I saw the whole arc of the situation, from the moment I noticed that the bag was gone to the moment I saw it there under the seat, and I saw that really, it wasn’t as crazy as it used to be, you know? Not from my own effort, because when you’re gone, you can’t make that effort to remember. It is very hard, which is why they always say, do practice when you can, because there will be times that you will not be able to even remember what practice is about or what remembering is about.

So that’s why we put the time in, even we don’t feel like it, because why would we pay attention to what we feel like? We’re supposed to be listening to the name, or whatever practice you do. So, for me, that was a very interesting moment. And of course it was much more fun that I didn’t lose my wallet.  Then, I don’t know how we be right now with all of you. I would be smiling and thinking, “Where’s my fucking wallet…”

Whenever we it comes over us that we’re really allowed to come home, that we really can come back to that place inside of us that is love, it is home, it’s just so powerful. Because we’re gone so much. So much of the time we’re lost in our stuff. And adding a practice to our life is what allows us, what creates the openness to return home.

The sound of the name is the name of our own true nature, the love that lives within us is who we truly are. It’s the name of that love which lives in each of us, always all the time. Life after life after life, it’s the same.

There you see Swami Shivananda, the Guru of this lineage, and behind me, unfortunately. He doesn’t want to be seen right now, Swami Satchidananda. And Maharajji loved Swami Shivananda very much. They were very close. They visited often. They knew each other very well. He came. Maharajji showed up at Shivannda Ashram in Rishikesh quite often, apparently, and it was Maharajji who, you can’t really say “forced,” but encouraged very strongly, Swami Chidhananda to accept the leadership of the Divine Life Society after Swami Shivananda left. Maharajji loved Swami Chidhananda very much.

And in fact, a funny story is that one time maybe in ‘68, Could have been ’69, I’m not sure, Swami Satchidananda was giving a retreat at Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York. And I had heard Swami Satchidananda speak a few times in the city, so I went up for the day, and we were sitting out on the lawn, and next to Swami Satchidananda was this, another Sannyasin, another Baba. Very gaunt. And to me, he looked very fierce at the time and he was just sitting there like this, and Swami Satchidananda gave the talk and after his talks, or in the beginning, he would always go, “Hari Om,” in this beautiful voice. Right?

So, he finished the talk and I had my eyes closed, and I was waiting for the “Hari Om.” Instead of the “Hari Om,” there was this, “Sri Ram Jaya Ram Jaya Jaya Ram,”like this, and my whole body exploded. Every nerve went into overdrive, and I was just sitting there like this. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know who this guy was. I had heard “Sri Ram Jai Ram” before. I think I had met Ram Dass maybe once or something by now, maybe not. And then I left and I never knew who that Swami was, but that moment did something.

Okay. So, 1, 2, 3, maybe four years later, three years later, not sure. Three. I am living at the temple in Kainchi with Maharajji in India, and one day a car pulls up and a group of Swamis came out of the car like bowling balls into the temple, over the bridge, right into Maharajji’s room. And I was standing outside. I noticed this, and then all of a sudden, what did I hear?

“Sri Ram Jaya Ram Jaya Jaya Ram…”

The same Sri Ram. I went, “What is that?”

It was Swami Chidhananda, who came with some Swamis from Rishikesh. They were on tour, and apparently he knew Maharajji very well. He used to come quite often to see Him, and Maharajji would always ask him to sing and actually Swami has written about this particular day. There was some miracle about the number of oranges there that day. The swamis brought five oranges or something like that, and put them on the table in a little bowl for Maharajji near his Tucket. And there were like 20 people in the room and Maharajji started throwing the oranges to people and everybody got an orange, and Swami Chidhananda wrote about that. But the thing that got me, what I realized later, Swami had sung that “Sri Ram Jai Ram” to Maharaji before I met Swami Chidhananda that first time at Monroe. So “Sri Ram Jai Ram” was Maharajji’s joy. The name of “Ram” is what he always repeated. “Sri Ram Jai Ram” was very dear to his heart. So that connection, it was a transmission almost of also Maharajji at the time.

And here’s another little story about how much, also, Maharajji loved Swami Shivananda. At one point, one of the very, very original old Swamis with Swami Shivananda, one of his original disciples, I don’t remember, it could have been Swami Krishnananda. It might have been Swami Nirmalananda. I can’t remember which one. He was off, He went, he left Rishikesh to do pilgrimage in the Himalayas, and on his way up to the deeper Himalayas, he stopped at Kainchi, and he went to see Maharajji. He had met him before, and Maharajji looked at him and he said, “Your Guru is sporting like Krishna, but how long can this last? Go right back to Rishikesh now.”  He told him to go back to the Ashram.

And so that Swami, Nirmalalanda or Swami Krishnananda, I’m not sure, He didn’t really take it to heart. “Oh yeah. Okay. Maybe after,” but he went back down to get his supplies to go up to the high Himalayas, and when he was at that house where he left him in Haldwani, that’s when he heard that Swami Shivananda had fallen ill. So, he finally rushed back to the Ashram, and as a result, he was able to see his guru before he left the body.

But the way Mahrarajji said it: “Your guru is sporting like Krishna, playing like Krishna now, but how long can this last?”

Because they say there’s a state of consciousness that only Shiva and Krishna can be in without having to leave the body. Only those two beings can hold the intensity of that state of… whatever. Believe me, I don’t know what it is, but I’m telling you about it. So, they say anybody who enters into that state, if they stay in that state too long, the body drops. And apparently, Maharajji knew that it was time for Swami Shivananda to go, so he entered  into that state and the body finally dropped off.

These guys. This is the major leagues. This is big time stuff. We’re still in little league here.

All right, some questions.

“Can you speak about surrender? I’m a first responder and I see all that stuff. I want to stay steady.”

So, surrender. Surrender is not an act of will, of our will. Surrender comes from grace. We aspire to drop the ego, drop our identification with that. But like Ramana Maharshi says, “If you ask the mind or the ego to kill the ego or the mind, it’s like asking the thief to be the policeman. There’ll be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.”

So, asking yourself, saying to yourself, “I’m going to surrender.” This is not going to happen. Because the “I” does not want to surrender, the “me.” It likes to act like it will, but that’s just its way of staying alive longer. So that’s why practice is so important, and practice doesn’t mean, you know, when you’re sitting cross-legged on a pillow pretending to meditate. Practice means, first of all, being present with everyone as best we can, that we meet, and bearing witness to their suffering and “the suffering,” our own and theirs, and bearing witness means to be with it without projecting your own stuff onto it. “Oh, I’m so sad. This is so terrible.”

We don’t know. We don’t know why things happen. We don’t why they don’t happen. All we know is what we feel in the moment. So, to bear witness is a big thing, and of course, Bernie Glassman, the great Zen master and my very dearest friend, used to speak of this quite often. In fact, this was his, one of his main teachings was to bear witness to the joy and the suffering. Because beings suffer. And when we bear witness, we are with them and that lessens their isolation, that lessens, takes some of the sting away of the pain. We can’t take their pain away, but we can be with them. So, the aspiration to surrender, that’s good, but don’t think that you can do it. When the mirror of the heart is clean of our greed, our shame, our selfishness, all our stuff, when the mirror of the heart is clean of that dust, then the reflection is true and accurate, and at that moment, surrender happens. We may get little hits on the way, of course, of what it might feel like to be less deluded, but surrender is the goal, and the path of devotion is the path of remembering over and over again, remembering “thy will, not mine.”

That’s hard, because when we see people suffer, especially for us, the people who are closer to us, it hurts and we want that suffering to be taken away. But if we look at that, we want them not to hurt, so we won’t hurt so much by seeing it. So, there’s a selfishness involved in that, and we can’t accept things the way they are. We want to change them so we don’t hurt. Now that’s a motive that is actually not truly useful. It’s a perversion of real compassion.

With real true compassion, Bodhi Chitta, we are not thinking about ourselves at all, but for most of us, what we call compassion is, “Oh, I wish you weren’t suffering so much so it wouldn’t be so hard for me to be with you.”

That’s selfish. So, we have to see that stuff and let go and let go and let go, and then… because yes, that’s what we have to do.

“How long does one need to chant before he can see God?”

How the hell do I know? I’ll let you know. You know? What time is it? You know? Come on, gimme a break here.

Maharajji used to say, “Go on, sing your fake lying ‘Ram Ram.’ Go on, keep doing. One of these days, the real Ram will show up and boom, that’s it. But until that time, keep faking it because you have to.”

You have to. If we truly said the name, repeated the name fully with full devotion, a hundred percent awareness and concentration and paying attention. Boom. We’d see. We’d experience what and who Ram is, but we’re lying, but we’re faking it, because we can’t do that, but through practice and training the mind,  training ourselves to keep coming back to the sound of the name and letting go of whatever we’re lost in again and again… should I go on? There’s not enough time to go on in the universe….  again and again and again, little by little we stay home for longer and we don’t go so far away, and sooner or later, the real Ram comes.

And Maharajji said, “Go on doing this practice, even when you don’t feel spiritual, even when you’re tired, even when you’re angry, even when you’re sad, even when you’re grieving…” everything.  Go on. Because if you don’t? Then what? One has to plant those seeds of remembering. If one does not plant seeds, nothing will grow.

“Do you have any advice for overcoming shame for past negative actions towards ourselves, slash, others from many years ago?”

Shame is a trip we’re doing to ourselves. Forget about whether we’ve actually hurt somebody or not. The feeling of shame, that’s different than remorse, by the way. Remorse is truly recognizing that we’ve hurt someone, wishing that we had not created that suffering and hoping that we don’t create it again, and not just hoping, but doing what’s necessary that we don’t create more suffering again for others and ourselves. But shame, that’s a different thing. Remorse is useful. Remorse of spirit, that leads to, in Christianity they talk about confession. That’s ultimately what confession is supposed to be, giving up the feelings that of shame and stuff like that and starting again. You can’t forget what you’ve done. But what you have done in the past can stop bullying you in this moment if we truly have remorse.

I was at a teaching once with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It was a three day teaching about Bodhi Chitta, which is compassion and kindness, caring for others and one’s self. Day after day, he talked about this and the last session he took questions from the audience and questions were written on a paper and sent in, and the translator picked the question and read it.

So, one question said, “Your holiness, I hurt somebody once and I apologized and they would not accept the apology. Year after year, I’ve apologized for three years, but they won’t accept the apology. What should I do?”

So, His Holiness said, “You keep apologizing, one year, two years, three years. If after four years, they don’t accept the apology, tell them to ‘go to hell.’”

I was shocked because the Dali Lama was talking Tibetan. This was through a translator. And I thought, “His Holiness the Dalai Lama does not tell someone to go to hell because if he does, they will. And that’s not what he usually does.”

So, Bob Thurman was there, my friend, Bob, who speaks perfect Tibetan and is also very close to His Holiness. I called him over. I said, “Bob, what did he really say?”

The Dalai Lama said, “One year, two years, three years, you keep apologizing. Four years come and they don’t accept? Tell them to eat shit.”

That is what he said. Because in Tibet, they’re very spiritual country. They would not say “go to hell,” but the way they say what we say, “go to hell” is “eat shit.” But the translator, knowing what Americans think, didn’t say, “eat shit.” He said, “go to hell.”

Anyway, that’s the idea. You do what you can. If someone doesn’t want to accept the apology, what can you do? As long as you’re sincere and you understand what you’ve done, and you wish you hadn’t done it, and you’re sorry, you did it. It isn’t about whether somebody accepts that apology or not. That’s up to them. That’s their trip. They can choose to hang onto the anger or not. There’s nothing you can do about that. So, one has to be honor one’s own heart and work with one own one’s own stuff. One can’t do anything for somebody else.

“How do I deal with aging? Is it a challenge?”

No. I lost.

“Even when you’re on the path, seeing your youth and beauty fading way slowly, we are not this body. I know, but we deal with it.”

Yeah. I’m this body. I don’t know about you, and this body’s… I’m in an ashram here… I won’t use my usual words… screwed up. Shit just stops working. You wake up one morning and something that’s worked your whole life and all of a sudden it doesn’t work, and it didn’t ask you if it was okay to take the rest of your life off. it just stops working. You don’t get a vote. That’s aging.

However, this body is what we have right now. This body is what we are living in. In this body, we are doing practice. In this body, we are trying to find truth and love and God and whatever. So, we have to take care of this body as best we can. There’s no guarantees on how long this body’s going to last, but while we’re here, this is the car we’re driving in. You don’t drive a car with flat tires. You put on new tires, if possible. Yeah. You pull out your gallbladder if it’s screwing you up, and you put in the best gas in that you can, and you try to get where you’re going. All we can do is the best we can do. So, you just do your best to take care of yourself so that you can do the practice that’s going to bring youto freedom. And it just happens.

Being with Ram Dass, you know, Ram Dass and I were together for 50 years, but the last 19, 20 years after the stroke were very powerful. He had a catastrophic stroke and he was in a wheelchair. His right side was paralyzed. He was a lefty, and he had diabetes problems, neuropathy. He had so much going on. I’m not even gonna go into it, and he couldn’t do anything for himself. Everything had to be done for him. By the last years, He couldn’t even turn himself in bed because he had torn rotator cuffs from falling and he couldn’t turn himself. So, someone had to turn him. But he overcame pride. He overcame anger. He overcame all these things, and he had to accept help from others, and he really conquered pride. This is a huge thing. And it was so beautiful to watch how he accepted help from others. And they wrote a book once early on called “How Can I Help?” And he used to say, “If I wrote that book now, I would write, ‘How Can You Help Me?’”

So, he always had a sense of humor, even in the most intense situations. He went through so much pain and suffering and he never complained. Almost never. It was amazing to be around. If I stub my toe in the morning, the rest of the day is completely ruined. So, I’ve got a long way to go.

“How to let the chant enter the heart?”

First of all, let’s not pretend that we really know what the heart is. Okay? We might have some concept in our minds about what that heart is, but we don’t really know. What we do know is that through the repetition of the name, gradually but inevitably that presence within us, that heart, that essence within us is uncovered. We can’t really see it right now. Clearly. It’s always with us. It’s actually who we are. But right now, our awareness is totally involved with the sense input and the thoughts going, receiving information from what we say is the outside.

So. we are not tuned in and aware of the heart, so to speak, in a deep way. So, it’s through the repetition of the name that happens, and of course other practices, but this we’re talking about this. You simply repeat the name, and when you notice that you have not been paying attention, you come back, actually. You’re repeating the name and then you’re thinking about something. You’re dreaming about something. And then, oh, you realize that you haven’t been paying attention. How did that moment happen? You were dreaming. You were gone or you were remembering something or you were planning something, and you’re sitting with a thousand people chanting and you are chanting, but you’re not even there. How did that moment happen that you, “oh”? I don’t know. That’s grace. That is your heart pulling you back. You didn’t make that happen. You didn’t wake yourself up when you were gone, when you were dreaming, when you were thinking about the girl next to you, or you were thinking about getting home to the old lady. Or thinking about going and smoking a cigarette afterwards, or going to a movie later that day. You were not here. You were lost, dreaming that stuff.

How did it happen that you recognized that? And all of a sudden you were back. Your heart woke you up. Your true nature is awake all the time. And the more we come home to the sound of the name, the Name is the name of that place. So, we’re constantly evoking and invoking that presence and then we’re pulled away again and then, “Oh, okay.”

It wasn’t your personal will that brought you back from dreamland. It was the seeds you planted in your heart, in your Being, through the repetition of the name, that brought you back. Because when you’re asleep, even at night, when you’re asleep, you don’t wake yourself up. You set an alarm. Your heart is that alarm that’s always going off, but we don’t hear it. More and more, the more practice we do, the more we get comfortable letting go and getting at ease with what that sense of letting go means. That’s when we hear that alarm, which is actually, which is  like, “Ah.” It’s, “Hi honey. Hi, sweetie pie. Welcome back. Love you. Okay. Here, have a banana. Okay.”

“Is this my first time out of New York?”

You betcha. 53 weeks at home except one week doing the audio book. It’s a trip. I’ll tell you. I can’t wait to get back home to close the door.

“Hello. If faced with a significant decision or choice, but it does not seem clear which way to go, do you, me, have a full proof discernment process?”

Yeah, I do. I do what I want. I do what I want to do. Sometimes it’s hard to know what you want to do, because you want to do 40 different things, but Maharajji’s last instruction to me when I was, when he was sending me back to America after two and a half years in India with him, I said, “Baba, what should I do in America?”

I’d been wandering around India in a red dress, barefoot, stepping in cow poop, very happy, and now I was going back to New York. I didn’t think that was gonna fly in the city. I said, “How can I, what am I gonna do there? What am I do?”

He said, “Do what you want.”

Nobody in my life ever told me that. Certainly not the way he meant it.

“Do what you want.”

So, that put the onus on me to find out what I wanted. And I fought with terrible negative destructive stuff inside of me that wouldn’t even let me do what I really wanted to do, which was to sing to Him. I had a lot of really heavy, negative stuff that was just pushing me around for years and years, and in fact, I did not start singing to him this way until 21 years had passed after he left the body. 21 years. Am I stubborn? What do you think? Yeah, I was not a happy camper and I had to find what I wanted, because when you do something that you want to do, not because you’re told to do it. He never, he didn’t tell people what to do except “go away,” of course, you had to find your own thing, your own way. You had to find it yourself, and then it’s so much more powerful because you have listened to your heart and you’ve done what you felt you should do and want to do. If it works out, that’s good. If it doesn’t work out, there’s nobody to blame. You can’t be a victim. It’s your own stuff.

So, for me to get to the point where I could actually sit down and sing with people, it took me 21 years, but I’m very grateful that I finally managed to do it. And every day, every time I sing it brings me home. It brings me back. It puts things into perspective. It’s practice every time. It’s different every time. Just hearing the name, repeating the name, not thinking about it, not anything. “Wow, this was really good.” “Oh, this was really bad.” The Name doesn’t care. And our job is to listen and hear the sound of the Name. And in this case, sing it.

Okay. Just one more, maybe one.

“I’ve lost all interest. I’ve lost interest in all the things I used to love. All I want to do is sit, listen to satsang or walk in nature. I have to force myself to do all the worldly things. I’m scared of what this means. What does this mean and what do I do?”

Why do you think I know?

However, since you asked, you think practice is one thing that it isn’t. The practice is what gives us the strength to treat other people the way we want to be treated. You don’t have to hide yourself from the world in order to do that, and in fact, the so-called world is very happy to show you how much work you have to do in order to become a good human being. What you’re talking about is, you’re attached to what you think you should be feeling and not feeling from so-called spiritual life. You think it’s all gonna be blissful. Well, let me tell you, good luck. It isn’t.

Everything in your life is your karma. There’s nowhere you’re gonna go where this stuff is not gonna be. So, you’re making a dichotomy between what’s holy and what’s not holy, and your evaluative mind that’s screwing everything up for you.

If you were meant to be in a cave, you’d already be there. So, calm yourself down. Stop judging other people. Stop judging the so-called world. There is no world out there. There’s only what you see, and your subjectivity is creating this problem for you. Nothing else.

So, you wanna go away? Run away. It won’t work. Maybe it will. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s up to you to figure out what to do. I’m just sharing my experiences. Because I thought I would be a monk living in India for the rest of my life. Here I am, not in India and not a monk. So, we have all kinds of ideas about what we think we need to be in order to be something holy or good or something. It’s not like that. So, just calm down and listen very deeply to yourself, and then follow your heart. See where it takes you. That’s how you learn. Those 21 years I spent in inner darkness taught me a lot. Believe me. Taught me a tremendous amount. And do I regret it? Well,  if it was 20 years, that might have been better instead of 21, but it was what it was so there’s nothing to do about it now.

So, I think that’s it.

Next week, I hope I’ll be home. Take good care. Ram Ram.

The post Call and Response Podcast Special Edition | April 8, 2021 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 80 | He Knew Everything. There’s Only One Life

“There’s nowhere to go where you’re not going to be. And there’s nothing that you’re going to be doing that’s somebody else is doing. You’re doing everything. So, all you need to add, all we need to add to our lives is paying a little attention to ourselves and why we do what we do and keep trying to clean up our act. That’s all. It’s not, there’s not two things going on. There’s only you and your life and your desires are beautiful. They will never give you what you really want, but that doesn’t mean you have to try to kill them, pretend they’re not there.” – Krishna Das

Q: You’ve described to us, what it was like for you and your devotees to be in the presence of Maharajji. If you could just maybe let us have some insight into what was your sense of Maharajji’s, did He understand the depth of the effect He was having on His devotees?

KD: He knew everything, you know? Everything.

Who was that? Where was the question from?

Ok.

Yeah, no, He knew everything. Past, present, future. He knew everything you were thinking, everything you were feeling. It was hard to get used to, living in the presence of somebody who knew everything about you, every miserable thought, thing you’ve ever done, and He loved you more than you could ever even imagine loving yourself, or be loved by anybody? That was really intense. And when we could open to it, it was fantastic. But the other times, we just couldn’t bear it, it was like trying to look at the soon.  You know, we were just like, whoa, you know? It was interesting. Opening, closing, opening, closing, and then He would look at us and giggle and we’d be open again. Because He didn’t care about our stuff at all. Not at all. He literally didn’t judge us. He knew everything, but He didn’t judge.

Q: So, He just loved you?

KD: He, well, no. He didn’t just love us. He loved us more than, loves us more than anything and He also was a siddha, is a siddha. A siddha is a being that has the ability to change the situation from the inside. He can ripen your karmas, He can change the way your life is going to unfold, and He did that for everybody that He, with whom He had work to do. And I have no idea how many people that was. It could have been millions and millions of people. You know, we were sitting with Him, I was sitting with Him and like, I was looking at Him and He went like this. So, He’s talking to people and all of a sudden, He goes like this and He saw me looking and He went, “The mind can go a million miles in the blink of an eye.” He just went… and I realized He had just gone somewhere and come back. It’s very extraordinary. It’s, I mean the closest we get to this stuff is kind of science fiction and comic books, you know. It’s just like, we don’t grow up with the capacity, almost, to feel something. It’s like, how many colors are there? Red, orange, green, blue? ROYGBIV, I learned that in High School. Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Indigo, Violet. Seven colors? Am I right? But it’s like there’s an eighth color that’s visible to those who can see it. But our eyes, our senses only can see, only can see those seven colors and every combination of that. But there’s an eighth color that’s here all the time but we don’t see it. And that’s interesting because we don’t see it, so we don’t believe it. And you should not believe anything you don’t experience yourself, by the way. Just because we’re talking about this stuff, don’t think you need to believe it. That’s not important. We need to believe ourselves and in ourselves and we need to deal with our lives as they are. Not to fantasize that there’s some other way of being. We have to deal with our shit as it is and learn to let go of it and learn to accept ourselves for who we are as we are and allow ourselves to breathe, really breath and just be in this world. It’s not necessary to believe any of this stuff about India or any of this stuff. It’s not necessary. I’ve been in India more than half my life, more than half, Jesus. Five-Sevenths of my life. And I can’t, I don’t necessarily believe that that stone sculpture in a temple is alive and real, but they do. You know? And nobody ever required me to believe that. Maharajji didn’t make us, He loved us, loves us as we are. He didn’t make us Hindus. He didn’t make us this or that. He helped us become human. That’s amazing. Human. With other humans. Wow. People everywhere. And it’s ok. When we asked Him, “How do we find God?” He said, “Serve people.” What?  “What about, how do you raise kundalini, you know?” He said, “Feed people.” Feed people? What is He talking about? What is this? We just weren’t, we couldn’t handle it. It was too subtle. He was telling us not to think about ourselves all the time. Think about others. If we don’t think about ourselves, we won’t be unhappy. Because we won’t be thinking about ourselves. How simple is that? But how hard is it not to think about ourselves, right? It takes practice. So, He said, “Serve people. Feed people and remember God. Repeat the Names of God.” He was very big on that. And He said, over and over again, “From going on repeating these Names of God, everything is accomplished.”  He said it. Ok, maybe five percent. Maybe, after 50 years. So, it’s not easy. But that’s what He said. “From remembering these Names, from repeating these Names, everything is accomplished. Everything is brought to fulness and completion.” Period. Amen. That’s the deal.  Ok. Let’s get with the program.

“I think I want to watch the Giants game.” It’s not so easy. The vasanas of our, of our mind and our own karmas keep propelling us into limited programmed reactive ways of thinking and being in the world everyday. We just can’t stop the flow. There’s no button to push. Nowhere. So, we have to do something. We have to start paying a little bit of attention, add a little bit of practice into our daily lives, start trying to figure out what it is we want. How do we want to feel? What do we want to do? When I started singing with people, nobody else was doing this, really, the way this is. So, I had nobody to follow or to ask, how do you do this? I had to listen to my heart. I had to do what I wanted to do. That’s what I’m still doing. I actually, I can’t believe I can actually live, I can do what I like to do in my life most of the time. How amazing is that? That’s not, you know. I grew up on Long Island, what were the odds of that happening. Right? Not much. So, it’s extraordinary. So, everybody has to find that. And you do it right where you are as your life is, right this moment. Everything in our lives is there. This is our karmic predicament at this moment. Now what? So, there’s no eraser, there’s no spray eraser. You can do like this one, erase him from our life, now that one. No. We have to find a way to deal with this stuff and still learn to listen to our own hearts and what’s good for us, what we need to do. Sometimes we have to do what we have to do and then you’re doing what you want to do because taking care of business is good. And there’s all kinds of business in our lives.

Q: Thank you. I do want to thank you for all that you do. You, Nina and everyone, all that you do in giving us, I want to thank you.

KD: Ok.

Q: I would like to know, in your experience, understanding that Hanumanji is immortal, if you have ever experienced in your relationship with the Chalisa, that He has physically come to sit by you in your chanting, over your 50 years.

KD: First of all, about “immortal”: I don’t even know what it’s like to be alive, temporarily. So, immortal is kind of out of the question. I have no idea what that means. However, as far as Hanumanji coming and sitting by me, that would mean that, I don’t see Him that way. I feel a presence and I want to enter into that presence of Love when I sing. That’s my Guru, for me. He hasn’t come like a person or a thing as far as I can tell. That’s not the way I see it. Some people do see those things. They’re open in different ways. I totally honor that. It’s just not my deal. But when I sing, I feel it. That’s why I sing, is that the rest of the day sucks. The only time I’m really happy these days is when I’m singing, you know? But you would think I sang more, but I don’t. Like, I’m sure, you might think, “Wow, Krishna Das, He gets up in the morning, He takes a cold shower, then He eats some vegetables, then He puts on His dhoti and His holy clothes and He sits by the harmonium and goes into bliss.” That’s a nice fantasy. Maybe someday. Probably not this life. I’m doing the best I can. That’s all I can do. What else am I going to do? I try not to give myself too hard a time. But I’m not sure how successful I am most of the time. Ok?

Boy, I’m really good at avoiding questions today.

Q: Hi. Two quick things. They maybe slightly, they might be slightly different than my colleagues here, but, first of all, did you remember to record the UCONN women’s game before?

KD: I did.

Q: Good man. Good man. Secondly, it means a lot to all of us that come here and have practiced in this space with Dharma to have you here as the closing act, as it were.

KD: Oh, yeah. It’s next week. They’re moving out of here. Let’s stay! We won’t let them move us.

Q: I wanted to ask you, very selfishly, as someone who subscribes to the Sirius and listens to your channel often, if you might consider honoring Dharma’s kirtan band with a little more air time?

KD: You know, one of the first things I learned to say in Hindi, was “Dekhenge”, which means, “We’ll see.” Is that two question? Oh, yeah, it was.  I’m still avoiding them. Good. Keep going.

Somebody over here? There. Ok. Good.

Hi.

Q: Hey, KD. Thanks for coming.

KD: Yeah.

Q: I’ve heard you talk about there not being a divider barrier between the spiritual life and every day life. Can you talk a little bit about how you build up strength to bring those together?

KD: they were always together. There’s not two lives. Are you, like, do you roll out of bed on both sides in the morning? What? There’s only your life. And everything’s a part of it, you know. There’s nowhere to go where you’re not going to be. And there’s nothing that you’re going to be doing that’s somebody else is doing. You’re doing everything. So, all you need to add, all we need to add to our lives is paying a little attention to ourselves and why we do what we do and keep trying to clean up our act. That’s all. It’s not, there’s not two things going on. There’s only you and your life and your desires are beautiful. They will never give you what you really want, but that doesn’t mean you have to try to kill them, pretend they’re not there. That’s what they do. You know, that’s not a good idea, as we know from all the problems with the priests and all the different organized religions, the problem that they never deal with the sexual energy, wind up being destroyed by it. So, it’s just a question of being alive and being true to yourself and learning how to do that, finding out who you are and what you want. That’s spiritual. There’s no “worldly” or “spiritual” as far as I’m concerned, you know. And Maharajji was totally in the world. He was totally available all the time and yet He was also totally present all the time. He never, everything was within that, you know? It’s not like there’s, nothing’s ultimately all good or all bad. It’s always a mixture of stuff. The point is, Buddha was very clear about this when He came out of the jungle. He said, “Oh, monks. Shit don’t work.” “Stuff does not work. Happiness will never come from stuff.” There’s always some dissatisfaction with objects. They never give us what we think they will give us. What we hope they will give us. You can’t squeeze water from a stone. It’s not meant to happen. But if you keep trying to do it, you suffer. Once you give up that activity that causes suffering, then there’s no suffering. If you don’t expect, when you sit down to a big meal, you eat, you eat, you eat, you understand without saying that, tomorrow you’ll probably have to eat again. Probably every day you’ll need to eat again. That doesn’t bother you because you don’t think ultimate final satisfaction will come from that meal. You know, and that’s the way it is with desire. It always has to be one more. More, more, more. Ultimately, we recognize how to live with that by seeing it clearly for what it is. At some point, you might decide to take some time off from your desires and see how that works. Usually, it doesn’t work very well. But, it’s useful to play with that and see how you are. But then you can, you know, you have to look at yourself. Is it because I’m afraid? Am I afraid of my desires? And if I am, why am I afraid? What’s, what is it? What is that fear? You know, you have to see yourself. You can’t, it’s up to each one of us to move through those places. It takes tremendous courage. It really does. There’s no two ways about that. It really takes courage to face ourselves and the incredible level of bullshit that we tell ourselves all day long. It’s very very very fierce. One time, I was in Mumbai with Maharajji. We had trailed Him. Long story, but we found Him in Mumbai and so, we were in this, every day we’d go to this apartment building, this beautiful new building and He was hanging out there. It was the son of a devotee. So, one day I was sitting, He was up on the bed lying down and I’m sitting, doing my spiritual practice, which was…He would sit this way, then He would sit up, then He would lie down this way. And then all of a sudden, after hours, He sits up like this and He looks at me and He goes, “Courage is a really big thing.” What’s going to happen? So, the Indian guy there said, “Oh, but Baba, God takes care of His devotees.’ Maharajji shot Him a look that could have destroyed a tank or something, and He said to me, “Courage is a really big thing.” Then He laid down and went to sleep again. There have been times in my life that I just had this very vague memory of those words and it was enough to save me from falling off a cliff or jumping off a cliff. It takes tremendous courage to really look at ourselves and see how conflicted we are about letting ourselves be happy. How hard it is to overcome the programs and all the betrayals and all the broken hearts. It’s really hard. But what else are we going to do. Eventually, you just say, “All right, I’m going to deal with this,” and you try to find a way to be more kind to ourselves. Buddha said that you could search the whole universe and never find a being more worthy of kindness and caring than yourself. So. Is that how we feel about ourselves? I don’t know. Only each one of us has the answer to that question. So, the chanting is a way of letting go of the programs for a little while and planting seeds of something else in our being. So, like I said, with Ramakrishna, I didn’t really finish that whole thing. So, the seeds of the repetition of the Name start growing at some point when the causes and conditions are good and then they destroy that house and He said, that house is who we think we are, right? So, when we’re no longer thinking that, so a house is a temporary structure and it’s built for a reason and when the walls and the roof are gone, the space was inside the house is just becomes the space that was outside the house. The division is gone. The difference between me and you and me and all the other “me’s” that bounce off each other all life long. That’s gone, and you live in the oneness of it all. You can still see other people. And you can see, and you can react and act with them and interact with them, but you know yourself to be the living inner presence of all beings. You don’t lose anything by not believing you’re who you think you are anymore. You gain everything. So, and you notice what Ramakrishna didn’t say. He didn’t say it’ll feel like this or it’ll feel like that and then you’ll have this. Because it isn’t about that. People ask me, “what do I experience when I sing?” And I say, “How do I know?” I sing. And anything that comes up, I let go and I sing. I don’t write it down. “Oh, then he thought about this.” Why would I? That’s not the deal. The deal is to sing. One hundred percent. At least 100 percent of my usual three percent. I’m not interested. I have no idea what happens. I sing. That’s it. Next. Then I go home. But if you’re doing spiritual practice and you’re like, evaluating the whole way down, “Yeah, this is a really good meditation, this is fantastic, I haven’t had a thought in maybe four seconds. Wait a second, that was a thought, wasn’t it, wow that’s amazing. There’s no way out of this, is there?” Let go. Come back to the breath. That’s all you have to do. It’s not about, how do I feel now? That’s more bullshit. Who cares how you feel? I don’t care. And when you don’t care, you’ll be happy. That’s the funny thing. When you don’t think about yourself, you’re ridiculously happy. When I was going to kill myself, you know, I was going to. There’s a river out behind the temple and I was going to jump in the river. It was only six inches deep, but I figured I could get my head under a rock maybe, you know. So, Maharajji called me. He said, “What are you going to do, jump in the river?” “He’s not taking this very seriously.” He said, “You can’t die. You can’t die. Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.”

What the fuck is He talking about?

Why did He die? Why did He die? Because He never thought of Himself. That Being, there was no planet of “Me” in that Being. For the thoughts of “me, me, me” to revolve around, orbit around. That Being was liberated. There was no “me” left. Like any true saint, there’s no “me” there. There’s only presence, being, bliss, happiness, a sense of well-being and even in the face of suffering, that well-being, that core of ok-ness is not lost. It’s not lost. So, plant the seeds of the things you want to grow. Period. That’s it. Plant the seeds of what you want to grow. If you keep planting selfishness and shame and fear and greed and anger and all that stuff, that’s what’s going to grow. We do that, we can’t stop, so we have to plant, when we can, plant the seeds of the good stuff that we want to have in our lives. It’ll make a little less room for the weeds as time goes on. Nobody can do it except us. That’s the good news and the bad news.

The post Call and Response Podcast Ep. 80 | He Knew Everything. There’s Only One Life appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response with Krishna Das Ep 79 | Why We Chant and Why We Chant The Chalisa

“When we do the Chalisa, when we sing the Chalisa, we’re attempting to activate that kind of inner strength that can overcome any obstacle. Hanuman is called Sankata Mochan. Sankata Harana. Karuna Sagara. Ocean of compassion. Destroyer of suffering. Remover of calamities. This is what it is.” – Krishna Das

Q: First I would like, we would like to thank you and the team and Krishna Das for your voice and your chanting. Your chanting echoes in our house for 12 months now, every day, all day. My wife here, she’s “Stop with this Om Namah Shivaya, right?” So, thank you very much for that.

KD: You’re welcome.

Q: I think all of us thank you for that. It’s amazing. I have two questions, if I may. One, I listen to Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, Jai Jai Ram, for 15 minutes, 18 minutes every day as I walk to work, all day. And I’m asking myself, “Why do I listen to it?”

KD: What?

Q: Sorry, why do I listen to these four words that you repeat over and over? I feel something. I feel something very strong from these words and I can not explain it in English or in anything. What’s actually so powerful in these words? So, first question, please, why these repeated words are so powerful and makes me listen to it all day every day?

KD: Why?

Q: I do not understand why Shiva, Ram and Jai Ram… I understand there are some Indian Gods, right? And second question, if I may, will you remember the first?

KD: Probably not.

Q: So, second question, please, Om Namah Shivaya, our number one track at home, that I listen to and I love, and I don’t understand why it’s so powerful, again, Om Namah Shivaya, which I understood, is the equivalent to the Hebrew thing for… no? Ram Das said something in the book…

KD: It’s not “Om Namah Shimay… “ It’s “Om Namah Shivaya. Little different. The answer is, I don’t know. You’re asking me why you’re attracted to the Name of God? That’s a good question. I have no idea.

Q: Or why I can listen for 15 minutes to Hare Krishna Hare Rama, Jai Jai Ram?

KD: Only 15 minutes?  What’s wrong?

Q: No and then it’s on the repeat. Because it’s a 15-minute track. That’s what you did. And then it goes back again and again and again and again, but it’s a bit, if somebody doesn’t know us, we are like a bit, I don’t know, if they would say, hey, crazy, the people from that street.

KD: Don’t play it loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

Q: I do. I do. I do.

KD: They’re going to come take you away. I had a friend who wrote to me once and she said, she and her husband were getting divorced. And I said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Why?” She said, “Well, you know, I play your music in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bathroom, in the bedrooms, all around the house and he doesn’t like it.” I said, “Turn it off!” They’re still together. That’s the marriage counseling I do. Turn it off!  So, are you really asking that question? I mean, really? Think about it for a second. Amazing. That’s wonderful. Why do you want to think about it and ruin it?

These Names are called the Names of God. God lives within us as who and what we really are. So, when we chant these names, when we think of these names, when we repeat these names, we’re invoking that place within us that’s just fine, that’s ok, that is the ultimate reality that lives within us. And the Names have a magnetism. They do. They have shakti. And each repetition of a Name, one of these Names, is a seed that we plant in our own Being and as time goes on, those seeds grow according to whatever conditions allow them to grow and I’ve told this story many times but I’ll tell it again, in the 1800s there was a very great saint called Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and He described the way this practice of the repetition of the Name works, ok? So, the first thing is, every repetition, every single repetition of one of these names is a seed that gets planted in us. We plant that. Second, as time goes on, these seeds grow, and He said that these seeds grow, and they get caught by the wind, so to speak, and they land on the roof of an old house in the jungle and they get stuck between the tiles on the roof of that house, right? And over time and seasons and wind and rain and whatever, those tiles begin to break down and they start getting soft and then, the seeds of the repetition of the Name start to grow and the roots start to grow, and they destroy the tiles and they destroy the roof of the house. They keep growing and they destroy the walls of the house. Ramakrishna said that house is who we think we are. So, imagine if you didn’t think you are who you think you are. Like, I had this experience once in India where I saw that, I looked up in the sky and I saw this whirling kind of, way up in the sky, and I laughed and I said, “Ha, that’s Krishna Das-ness” and I saw it was thoughts and when I thought “I am Krishna Das” then I thought I was Krishna Das. But when I didn’t, when that thought, “I am Krishna Das” didn’t arise in me, I’m just here, open, at ease. And when I did think I was Krishna Das, I acted like Krishna Das. But when that thought didn’t arise, I was just at peace, open, very very at ease, wonderful, feeling wonderful and then whoop, again. So, I noticed that even when I think I’m me, which is 122 percent of the time. Even when I think I’m me, it doesn’t affect this place of Being. Of openness. It doesn’t affect that. So, I realized, it was ok to be stupid because it didn’t matter. It was just me thinking. Of course, it mattered to me, because I think all kinds of things about myself and some of them hurt, some of them don’t, but it didn’t affect this presence, the space in which we all live, which is alive and full and very beautiful. But you can’t stop your thoughts. Where are you going to, what are you going to do? Get a gun and shoot them? Where are they? I don’t know. So, all you can do is add a practice to your life that allows you to come back again and again and again and eventually, that feeling of being back, of being present, gets deeper and deeper and as you go through your day, you’re pulled into it more easily. You live in it more aware, without effort. So, for instance, there is a place within us that these mantras are going on all the time by themselves and when we remember them, we actually move ourselves into that place for a second and then, of course, our thoughts pull us right out. But we’re actually here all the time. Even though, most of the time, we don’t know it. It’s amazing. We go, you know, most people get born, graduate high school, drink some beer and die and that’s it. They were never here for a moment. Not for one moment were they really present and alive. They were on automatic their whole lives. One thing after the other. One reaction after the other. Bouncing off of this one, bouncing off of that one and then, gone. So, if we’re interested in this stuff at all, it means that we have a longing already. We know we want something. We have a hunger, a longing and that’s enough. Believe it or not. Without that, we have no sense of direction. So, it’s really, if you want to get esoteric about it, which I’m sure he does, is the Name repeating us. You think you’re doing it because you think you are who you think you are, but it’s not that at all. The Name is repeating itself and making you aware of it. So, that’s a great blessing. But we take all that stuff like, you know, “yeah, yeah, sure, what’s on tv?”

Next victim.

You don’t have to stand. This is not Sunday school. Wait a minute, it is. This is Sunday. What’s up?

Q: So, what you just said, I think leads into my question. I want to thank you, first of all, for introducing me to the Hanuman Chalisa because that is so meaningful to me and I heard you say once…

KD: Uh-oh

Q: I know, uh-oh, right? I heard you say once that we say the Hanuman Chalisa not for ourselves but to remind Hanuman who He is. So, can you explain that to me?

KD: No, I can’t. I have no idea what that means. One time, I was coming back, I was in the temple in India and I was getting ready to leave for America and this really, really old devotee, Papa, we called him Papa, I went to say goodbye to him. So, I was in his room with him and he said, “So, do you do a Hanuman Chalisa?” I said, “Yeah, sure. Sure.” “Why?” “I don’t know.” He said, “We do Hanuman Chalisa to remind Hanuman of His strength and to ask Him to come and help us.” So, in the story of the Ramayana, which is where Hanuman comes from, that story, Hanuman is actually a form of Shiva, believe it or not. And Shiva emanated, sent His energy through the wind God. I know you all believe in the wind God. See, when you talk about this shit, it’s completely nuts because nobody knows what the fuck we’re talking about, but we all sit there like, “Oh, yeah, wow, ok.”  I’m included. I don’t know who the fuck any of these people are. “Wind god. Whoa.”

I love when people really talk like they know what they’re saying, you know? “Oh, yes, then the sun of the wind…” Yeah, who’s that? The sun of the wind? Ok. Praise the Lord. Anyway, so in the story, Rama, Vishnu, is going to take an avatar form on the earth to destroy the demons, the negativity. So, Shiva hears about this. He probably saw it on facebook. And He decided, He couldn’t incarnate Himself, so He sent His energy through the wind god. The wind god came and impregnated Anjani, who was a Vanar, which is like a half-monkey, half-human and so, Hanuman was born pretty much immediately, and He carried that energy of Shiva, so He had unlimited powers. Now, can you imagine a baby with unlimited powers? Right. Throwing your mother up and juggling your father and mother like this, you know, I mean, He could do anything. So, one of the things, since He was innately spiritual, He used to love to go to he jungle with the Rishis, where the Rishis were doing their ceremonies, and He loved them so much, He would like, throw them up and down and play with them, and they couldn’t do anything because He had ultimate power. He could do anything as a baby. So, they cursed Him that He would only remember His power when He was reminded. So, right after that, He became a good little boy.

And so, when we do the Chalisa, when we sing the Chalisa, we’re attempting to activate that kind of inner strength that can overcome any obstacle. Hanuman is called Sankatamochan. Sankataharana. Karunasagara. Ocean of compassion. Destroyer of suffering. Remover of calamities. This is what it is. Now, look, do I know what I’m talking about? I don’t know. Yeah, that’s why I get the big bucks. But, intuitively, I feel it. Up here, it makes no sense at all, obviously. Flying monkeys? What is this shit? But in here, having been in India and having the blessings to be with some very very very great Saints and wonderful people who really completely immersed in this understanding of the spiritual path, this particular path, I kind of caught it like a bad cold or something like that. So, and of course, being with Maharajji, who we saw Him as Hanuman Himself, I don’t even know how to explain that to you, except that when we’re with Him and when we think of Him, when we are with Him, even inside of ourselves, there’s a depth of feeling and a depth of presence that changes the perspective on what’s going on in the outside world. And the results of that shift in perception is that everything looks different. Everything, things that are negative aren’t as necessarily aimed at me and things that are positive don’t necessarily make me stupidly happy, but it’s a way of being in the world without being completely reactive to the stuff that happens every day. There’s a presence or a space around it all. Just like this room, right? Each one of us are in our own little bubble. There’s a physical bubble, there’s a mental bubble, an emotional bubble. We’re all like, in that bubble, and we’re sitting next to all these other bubbles. But if you just kind of move back this way a little bit, you see all of these bubbles are held in this space, even of this room, and then you think, ok, well, this building is even held in the space of the sky and inside of the sky, everything in this ether, in this space, everything just inside of this space, so, it’s just, loosens up the knots in our hearts. What did you ask me?

There He is out there. He’s roaring out there.

That’s Hanuman farting.

He’s big.

Oh, boy. So, anyhow, that’s the deal. You know, there’s a macrocosm and a microcosm. There’s the stories. We could think, oh maybe this happened or maybe it’s just mythology but actually within us, the same forces exist, the same energies exist within us. And Ayurveda is all about that inner universe, which mirrors the external universe as well. So, there’s some way of understanding all this stuff. But, so you can say, Hanuman gives us the strength to overcome obstacles. But where is that strength? It’s already within us. So, it’s an idea of opening up to that within us, which we don’t really feel most of the time. We feel pretty much imprisoned by our stuff. So that’s why we do these practices. Ganesh is very similar to Hanuman in that way. Remover of obstacles. But that’s mostly in South India. Since I’m from the North, Hanuman’s a lot in the North.

The post Call and Response Podcast Ep. 79 | Why We Chant appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Podcast Special Edition with Krishna Das | April 1, 2021

“Empathy is not exactly compassion, but it’s a good beginning when you start to be aware of what other people are feeling and how they might be hurting and how their pain is causing them to act in certain ways, even ways that might be difficult for you to deal with. So, the development of compassion is to see all that and wish them well and really feel for them, and see clearly that their own issues are causing them to act this way, which is causing them tremendous suffering.” – Krishna Das

I lost it there for a minute. it reminded me of what something that happened when we were on tour. I was in Australia many years ago. Ty was still playing with me then. We had started in Melbourne and gone all through Australia, many places, but so many people came in Melbourne that we agreed to come back and do another kirtan at the end of the tour, and by that point, it was really hot. I don’t know. We went in the summer. That was the last time we ever went in the summer to Australia because everybody’s on the beach usually. But it was so hot. We got to the hall and there was no time to do a sound check, and I mean, it was a really fast sound check and I was sweating and there was no air conditioning. I was really cranky. Very cranky. So, I was just really pissed off and just in a bad mood and we started playing, everybody’s singing along, and at some point, in my mind, I just said to Maharajji, I said, “What would it be like if I could really sing to you?”

And immediately this wave came over me and I just started going…  And Ty was sitting, playing tabla and he was looking over at me like…Trying to follow me. I didn’t know. I was just like, “Ah, Sita Ram…” It was too funny. And finally, I came back to earth and it was just hilarious. I can still remember, the look on his face was like…

All right. Let’s do some questions and stuff.

Okay. So the question is, “I am in a very weird point. It’s so hard to choose if I want to surrender to Krishna, or if I want to choose the way of the Buddha. Please help me.”

Well, ultimately, all ways lead to the same place: our true being; our true nature. I certainly don’t have any answers for you. I do whatever makes me, whatever I feel like doing, and I don’t even know why you think you have to choose right now. Just do something. Maybe it’s just a way of your mind keeping you from doing anything. just do something. And ultimately, little by little, maybe you’ll feel more comfortable in something and that’s what it is. That’s what it’ll be. It’s not such a big deal. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Just go with it.

Actually the whole idea of trying to work through this situation is part of your path anyway. So no one can tell you what to do.

I do it all. I don’t care what it is. If it makes me feel good or helps me when I feel bad, that’s what I do. Singing to Krishna, singing to Tara, chanting “Om Mani Padme Hum,” which is to Avalokiteshvara Chenrezig, they’re all the same, ultimately. The paths may be taught differently.

Of course, if you’ve taken or if you’re going to decide to take a transmission or lineage and join a particular group, well then go for it. Once you join a group, you should stay with it as best you can, unless you find that it’s just, after years, it’s just not working for you. Then I would talk to your teacher and tell him your problems or your situation, but this whole egoistic nonsense of thinking you have… First of all, you can’t surrender to Krishna,anyway. Who do you think you are? Krishna surrenders you when he wants you, not before, and same with the Buddha. You think you’re doing something in Buddhist teaching, supposedly. You think it’s up to you to do the practice. The way of surrender is a very different way of thinking about things, but the path is actually not any different. I mean, the actual results of the path.

Yes. Some teachers would say, some teachers of this, Krishna, would say, “Oh no, this is the way.” And some teachers of the Buddhist path would say, “No, they’re not all the same. You have to do it this way.” Maybe they know. I certainly don’t, but I could see that you’re stuck in this point and this is all egoistic nonsense and just, relax. Take it easy. Enjoy life and do what you feel like. You don’t have to make a decision.

Surrender happens. It’s not something you do. Your mind, your ego will never surrender. Never. When the grace is there, surrender happens. So, prepare for grace. Purify your heart. Prepare for grace. That’s that path. The other path is a little different, but it depends which type of Buddhism you’re talking about. In Theravada Buddhism, it’s very cut and dry. You do this, you concentrate. This is what you do. This is what you do. In Mahayana Buddhism, you cultivate compassion and the goal is to develop what they call Bodhi Chitta, which is well, there are two types of Bodhi Chitta, but simply, feeling of one with all beings, kindness and compassion and caring for all. And in Vajrayana, it’s also again different. The first basic step in Vajrayana is to unite your mind with the mind of your guru. That’s devotion. So then from there you get, you get the sense of direction and then teachings can be given to you, different types of teachings.

So, yada, yada, yada. Just enjoy the fact that you’re totally fucked up and what are you gonna do?

A lot of these questions are about, “What should I do if this is happening in my life?”

Chant. That’s my answer. I’m not Dr. Ruth. I can’t give you advice, what to do in your life. You have to figure that out. What I can offer you is my practice, which helps me figure out what to do. So, if you do your practice, that’ll help you figure out what to do, hopefully.

So, we all have problems in life, and we have to deal with them. And it’s very hard to see them clearly, sometimes, and it’s very hard to know what the best thing is to do, but we don’t have to know what the best thing is to do. We just have to do the best we can and try to work through these issues. That’s the whole path. It’s not like, “Okay, I’m gonna fix my life. Then I can get spiritual.” Whatever that means.

No. This is the karmic situation. Find a way to deal with it in the best way you can, and by not hurting others and not hurting yourself. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to distinguish the difference between those two sometimes. And it’s very hard to know what to do, but there’s no playbook here. There’s no book that gives all the answers. There is, but that’s inside your own heart. So, calm yourself down. Chant. Do some practice. Try to become a good human being. And what does that mean to you? Okay?

Oh boy, this is a good one. Do we really want to go there?

“Why is sexuality such a challenge on the path?”

Hare Ram.

Well, it’s interesting. A few years ago, I was on tour in Southeast Asia and we were in Hong Kong and I took this shuttle train way up, that goes straight up this big mountain, and then you walk around the mountain, and from the top of the mountain, I looked down on Hong Kong and all these huge skyscrapers were squeezed together, and there were ships in the Harbor and there was more construction going on and it was, you could feel the energy of this place, and I thought, “This is so weird. This, how did this happen?”

All we have to do is eat, sleep shit, fuck. And that’s the deal. Where did this come from? How did this happen? That everybody gathers together and business is done and money… I mean, it just looks like… I was astounded by it. It was amazing.

So, you know, we’re in human bodies and the body itself has different hungers, not just for food, but it has hungers for sex, for procreation of the race, of the human race, and pleasure, and anything can be a, what’s the word you use? a “challenge,” so to speak, or you can embrace it and try to see what it is.

My guru was married and had three children. We didn’t know that when we met him, actually. We only learned that after he left the body, which was very far out, but we’ve, since then we’ve met his children, and so obviously for him, sex was not a challenge. It didn’t seem to interfere with his becoming enlightened.

So, we each have karmas to work through. We each have hungers, and it’s, I think, from my experience in my life and the people that I know, you have to eat. You don’t have to overeat, but you do have to feed certain things.

And once again, Hanuman, the path of Rama, this type of devotion is not a path of renunciation. I’ve read that sloka many times, that Hanuman not only bestows liberation upon people, but he makes it possible for them to satisfy the desires that will be helpful for them to have to satisfy.

So, a lot of times sexuality can be very painful and unsatisfying and scary, and the energy of that can also be very difficult to understand and feel at ease with, but that’s mostly psychological stuff. Animals don’t seem to have a problem jumping on each other at the right times, but human beings have confused pleasure with happiness. And that’s the real crux of the problem. It’s not just sex. It’s food. It’s listening to things. It’s craving pleasure from the outside world. And then of course it changes. It doesn’t last.

So that’s one of the real issues. Anyway, good luck.

Someone was asking me, the whole time that I knew Ram Dass, “Were there any teachings of his you can think of that didn’t age well or you disagreed with?”

I never listened to him about relationships. Never. I barely ever spoke to him about relationships because everything he said just meant no sense to me. It was not something I could work with. And he had issues with his own relationships too, earlier in life, his romantic relationships, sexual relationships. So, it’s something that was… I never spoke to him hardly ever about my relationships.

“How does one transition from the body when it’s time? How to let go when the ego is clinging?”

That’s a good question. What they say is that the only thing you take with you when you leave your body is your state of mind, and obviously most people in this world don’t work on developing a harmonious state of mind, a wisdom mind, and a mind that understands or feels things in a certain way, in a spiritual way. So, there’s a lot of fear, a lot of clinging when the body is being dropped.

The point is basically that, if you don’t practice now, if you don’t develop insight now and understanding now, and don’t develop the ability to let go of negative states of mind now, then you won’t be able to, when the body is dissolving, when your attachment, the connection to the body is dissolving, it’ll be very difficult and maybe painful and maybe scary. So, that’s the idea. One has to work on it now, because certainly, absolutely certainly the time will come when the breath that we take will be the last and how we meet that moment has a lot to do with how we live. You can’t expect to be angry and greedy and nasty to people your whole life, and then be smiling when you leave the body. It’s unreasonable to expect that to go through life, not caring about yourself or others and not working on your issues and just being an emotional mess your whole life, that it’s going to be easy to leave the body in a good way. And the problem is most people don’t really feel, in the west they don’t really believe in rebirth, so called “reincarnation,” rebirth, so there’s no reason to do anything.

“I’ll be gone. Who cares?”

That’s unfortunately, most likely a mistake, but that’s also karma.

And one can always turn within. There is nothing, when it comes to turning within that, and when you really want to do practice and understand the need for it, nothing can stop you from doing that, no matter what’s going on in the outside world. You can always, every moment, be practicing, to just use a phrase.

There’s a lot of books on this stuff. Andrew Holecek wrote books. There’s a book, “Living is Dying.” He talks a lot about the Tibetan tradition of hearing in the in-between, which is called the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or liberation in the Bardo, liberation in the in-between states, between death and rebirth. They seem to know what’s going on there.

But for most of us let’s become good human beings now. Let’s work with our fear, our selfishness, our greed, our manipulative stuff, and let’s try to expand our hearts now, and that will help us when it’s time to leave.

“Do I feel that my bond with Maharajji was particularly special in comparison to other devotees?”

Absolutely not. Maharajji made everybody feel that they were special, because they were. They are. That was the amazing thing. Larry Brilliant said, “It wasn’t just that I loved him when I was with him. It was like, I loved everybody.”

And conversely, you felt loved in a way, but so did everybody else, mostly, everybody who was attracted to him in a certain kind of way. We all felt that it was special. Every single one of us all sitting around, because he spoke, he would say something to somebody, but another person would get the message. He might tell a story to somebody or say something, and then somebody remembers “I had that dream last night and it was just about that.”

And he was doing that. That was happening, let’s put it that way, all the time. So, we all felt special, and that’s not, I don’t think that’s wrong. We don’t think “special.” Like it’s mine and nobody else has it. It’s like we felt loved. Everybody felt loved in a way that we had never felt loved before.

So, “How to let go? how to know when to let go and let God? And when to apply, ‘God helps those who help themselves?’”

I don’t know. You can let go and let God, and still do what you have to do, and give up the attachment to the results. That’s one thing.

But that’s a good quandary to work through in your life. And the more practice you do, the more deeply you move along the path into the heart, those kinds of issues just get resolved themselves. Nor did they really have to be resolved up here. They just dissolve in the heart. So, there’s no quick answer to that, but I just gave one.

“How to make Maharajji, Neem Karoli Baba, my guru when he is not physically anymore with us?”

It’s not up to us to make him our guru. If you feel attracted to him, it’s because he’s present with you. Why would you feel attracted to him? There’s so many other things to do in life. There’s so many other Babas out there. There’s so many great saints and Siddhas and Devis and Maas and everything out there. If you’re attracted to him, that’s the pull. That’s him pulling you to some degree you might say. You’re not gonna get a certificate of acceptance as a devotee. He doesn’t do that. It’s up to the devotee to follow his heart. And then eventually, you realize, you’ve been thinking you are following your heart, but actually you’re being pulled into your heart by the inner guru.

“Do you ever have workshops or courses to teach people to sing or lead kirtan?”

No, I don’t.

Just sing. Nobody has to teach you. And leading kirtan is not a job. It’s spiritual practice. And I didn’t learn how to do it as much as I just absorbed by singing with people in India. That’s where I was immersed in this stuff for the first time.

But Jai Uttal gives kirtan workshops. What does he call them? Something. Where he teaches people how to lead and sing Kirtan. So, if you want to do that, you can do that, but I don’t do it because I just sing, and then you just sing. It’s about love. How do you teach someone how to love?

You don’t have to lead kirtan. You don’t have to be a Kirtan leader. If it’s your karma to do that, if it turns out to be good for you, you’ll do it, but it might turn out to be a problem. There’s a lot of egoistic stuff that can go on when you start to feel important and that you know more than other people. It’s an interesting situation.

“Was I on the bus with Ram Dass when they found Maharajji at the Kumbha Mela grounds and went to Dada’s house?”

Yes, I was on the bus. Absolutely. That was the bus from Bodhgaya on our way to Delhi. So, the bus got to the Mela grounds, and like I said before, it was absolutely deserted. Where there had been 12, 15 million people a week before, there was no one. And the bus made this long slow turn, because we were just gonna turn around and go, and as we were making this turn, in the other direction, there’s Maharajji walking, and he just kept walking. He didn’t even look up. If we hadn’t seen him… He didn’t go, “Hey, I’m here.” He just kept walking.

And Rameshwar Das was the one who saw him. And as the bus approached, he just looked at Dada. He just said to Dada, the man who was with him, he said, “They’ve come.”

It’s extraordinary.

“How can we practice empathy and dispassion?”

Well, one thing that is not useful is to try to stop your feelings. Feelings arise in the dispassion part. You can’t crush your feelings. Empathy is not exactly compassion, but it’s a good beginning when you start to be aware of what other people are feeling and how they might be hurting and why, how their pain is causing them to act in certain ways, even ways that might be difficult for you to deal with. So, the development of compassion is to see all that and wish them well and really feel for them, and see clearly that their own issues are causing them to act this way, which is causing them tremendous suffering. There are many books about this.

We said, “Maharajji, how do you find God?”

He said, “Serve people. Love everyone. Serve everyone.”

That’s empathy. That’s empathy. And compassion and dispassion, I’m not even sure what that means, but if it means to you that you have to close off your feelings to protect yourself, that’s not correct. That’s not useful.

So somebody wants help to pronounce the line in the Hanuman Chalisa, “Haata bajra aura dwajaa biraajai”

ha the bud hot means hand, “Bajra” is the Thunderbolt or means that’s the is the cord, the sacred thread. Haata bajra aura dwajaa biraajai”

“In your hands shine a mace.” The vajra is, in this case, is a mace, and you have a banner. “Biraajai.” You’re wearing a banner. I don’t even know what that is. a banner must be some like a little shawl or something. “Haata bajra aura dwajaa biraajai.”

There you go.

“Can I tell about my dark nights and how I moved through them?”

No. Too much. Too many dark nights. But chanting and my connection with Maharajji and his grace and my longing to be in that love and my inability to function in the world when I don’t feel that love, that’s what pushed me through all those dark nights. And still to this day, that’s what helps me every day, the practice, developing a regular practice of turning within, one way or another, whatever that means to you.

And if you want to read about it, the book I wrote, “Chants of a Lifetime,” describes so much darkness. You’ll be too happy. And there’s also an audio book of that now. Okay? So, that’s my plug of the day.

Good to be with you again. May we all remain together in this heart space. Now and for all time. Namaste.

The post Call and Response Podcast Special Edition | April 1, 2021 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response with Krishna Das Ep 78 | Real Happiness and Becoming a Good Human

“So, the cards are stacked against us in terms of finding any kind of peace of mind. But that’s just the way it is. That’s this world at this time. That doesn’t mean we can’t find it, but it means one has to start paying attention. One has to start looking at one’s self and trying to figure out what you want, what we want. What do we really want? And on one hand, in some way, finding out what we really want is our spiritual practice. It’s not just when we sit down to meditate or calm ourselves down or do some asana or whatever we do. That’s part of it. That’s a method. Why do we do those methods? So, we can have a good life. And so, we can have the strength to become a good human being.” – Krishna Das

There’s a place in our hearts, in our Being, it’s not in our Heart, it’s like, not here or here or here or here or there, where it’s ok. Where everything’s fine. Where it’s all right. Where there’s a core of a feeling of wellbeing. It’s ok right now. Not later. Not when your hair looks better. Right now. And we’ve lost that connection to that place. So, we’re, everything we do is, we’re trying to find that feeling. But it’s not out there. It’s not in anything you can get or hold onto or let go of. It’s who we are. But maybe you notice, we think a lot. Have you noticed that? No? Oh. Ok. Let me say something else then. I wonder if the Giants won today. What do you think? Or are you a Jets fan? Who’s a… they both suck. Give them some time. And then when they win, I’ll be all right. What if they play each other, like today, will I be all right or not all right? You know, there’s never going to be a time when you get it all up here. We’re never going to figure it out. It’s not figure-out-able. Finally, you just stop trying to figure it out and you get tired of trying to make it all right and then, guess what? Then, you notice that it’s all right, but you know, you have to be really obsessively crazy out of your mind trying to make it all right for a long time. Which most of us qualify for. And you know, I’m not making this up. This is what I experienced directly when I was with these great beings in India. They weren’t trying to make it all right. It was just all right. As we are. That’s really hard. Because nobody told us that, you know? Not our parents, not our teachers, not our friends. Nobody told us it was all right. One time, I was sitting in the back of the temple with Siddhi Ma, who was Maharajji’s great disciple, and the eldest son, no, the eldest grandson of a family, the Tiwari family, a very close family of devotees of Maharajji, the eldest grandson was getting married. He was the first one of the generation to get married. So, all the cousins and brothers and cousin brothers and cousin-sisters and sister-cousins, if you know India, some of them don’t even know each other, they all came to get blessings for the marriage, and I was sitting back there and all like, 15 or 20 of these younger people were there and I was just sitting there and I was watching them. There was so much love and affection between these relatives. I don’t know about you, need I talk about my relatives? Anywhow, and I was astounded, I mean, I just, I was just like, I couldn’t believe how much sweetness and joy there was with these kids and Siddhi Ma saw me and She said, “See, Krishna Das? You see? You see what you missed by being born in America?” Ain’t it the truth.

I mean, really, you know.  All of Western culture is basically dedicated to fucking us up. That’s what it’s here for. And we’re doing that. Our, all of us, collectively, all of our karmas, debts, this is what we created. The world we create every day over and over. Dedicated to keeping us asleep and unhappy and unfulfilled, because we’ve been trained, and we’ve been taught to believe that we’re going to find that thing outside of our self, whatever shape or form it is, animate or inanimate, a real person or whether it runs on batteries. We’ll find it, and it will make it all right.

Gonna be a fun day.

And, it never makes it all right. It gives us a little pleasure, which releases a little tension, and that’s nice, but that passes, right? Pleasure and happiness are two different things. If you have pleasure, there’s always an opposite of pain. Either the pleasurable experience goes away, or a painful experience goes away and then becomes pleasurable. So, if the pleasurable experience goes away then there’s dissatisfaction. It’s called, “The Pairs of Opposites.” And if you look at life, you can see that. If there’s fame, there’s always shame. If there’s loss, there’s always gain. There’s always two things like that. But happiness, happiness is in that feeling of ok-ness, lives inside of us already. It might be in here. Let me see. Is this going to give me eternal ok-ness? Depends on how high a dose it is. Nice. Temporary pleasure. So, yeah. So, then, you know, if you’re doing some spiritual, so-called “spiritual practice”, look at your motivation. Why are you doing it? One time, I was living in San Francisco and I had this little closet, it was a house with other people, I had a big closet where I could go in and sit down and meditate and I wouldn’t be bothered by anybody. So, I went in, closed the door, lit the candle, lit the incense and then I sat down. Before my ass hit the cushion, I went, “Oh shit.” Because I saw my motivation for meditating. I recognized it was to create a “me” that I could like. Right? Somebody I wouldn’t give such a hard time to like I do all the time to myself. So, then I said, “Shit,” and I left the closet. Now, if I’d stayed in that closet… but I didn’t. But I saw my motivation was self-hatred. So, what can come from self-hatred. Just more nonsense. So, when we sit, when we sing, when we do asana, when we do any kind of, whatever spiritual practice means to you, don’t try too hard. Be with it, you know? Just be with it. You’re not going to be able to take your mind and hold it on one thought. That ain’t going to happen. Not living in New York City or anywhere else on this planet. Very difficult to do that. It takes a lot of serious effort to concentrate the mind that way and it takes a lot of willpower and it’s probably beyond most of us to do that. It’s certainly beyond me to do that. But when I sit, or when I sing, I can notice when I’m, it allows me to notice when I’m gone. And then I just come back. Then I’m actually already back. So, you’re sitting or you’re singing. “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram,” and you wonder if you set the recorder to get the Giants game, so you can watch it when you get home. “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram” “Shit did I do that, I don’t know, man, I’m so stupid, I couldn’t do that. Oh. Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram.” That’s what it’s like and that’s what it’s going to be like. There’s no button to find that’s going to make that go away. Little by little, actually, we can calm our asses down, but it takes some regular intention and some regular practice to do that and we’re really busy.  All of us. We have busy lives full of all kinds of stuff. So much input from so many directions. So, the cards are stacked against us in terms of finding any kind of peace of mind. But that’s just the way it is. That’s this world at this time. That doesn’t mean we can’t find it, but it means one has to start paying attention. One has to start looking at one’s self and trying to figure out what you want, what we want. What do we really want. And on one hand, in some way, finding out what we really want is our spiritual practice. It’s not just when we sit down to meditate or calm ourselves down or do some asana or whatever we do. That’s part of it. That’s a method. Why do we do those methods? So, we can have a good life. And so, we can have the strength to become a good human being. I’m sorry.

Didn’t anybody tell you, you were human beings? That’s what this is about.

What are you, trying to become a good Martian? You’re not from Mars. Human. Earth. That’s it. That’s the deal. You’re gonna go somewhere else? Where? How? Or you think you’re going to go to some nice blissful heaven world? Forget about it. It doesn’t last either. The only thing that lasts is what and who we really are. And that’s already here. That’s inside of us. That’s looking out of our eyes right now. We don’t see what’s looking out of our eyes. We only see what we see. We don’t see the consciousness, the being, the awareness that is doing the seeing. We’re surging out of our senses towards objects and all we see are the objects, the stuff. And our thoughts are stuff, too. We don’t see who we are. So, as we do these practices, as we start to overcome some of our crazy neurotic programs, we start to calm down a little bit and we stop giving ourselves such a hard time. If we weren’t giving ourselves such a hard time, like if I wasn’t having a thought, “Krishna Das, you’re such a piece of shit, you can’t do anything.” If I wasn’t having that thought, where would that thought be? In the whole universe, it wouldn’t be there. So, if we weren’t constantly telling ourselves, “We’re not enough,” or “We’re too much,” or “We’re this” or “we’re that,” those thoughts wouldn’t be anywhere We wouldn’t be a prisoner of that thought. So, practice means learning to let go of that stuff. Training to let go. Now, it’s not easy to just let go without finding, without bringing in another object that you begin to orbit around. So, maybe you watch your breath. You know, you’re going to be breathing no matter what else you’re doing, so, it’s always there to watch and it’s always there to come back to. So, that’s a great thing. That’s why it’s such a fantastic practice, just being with the breath. You don’t have to make yourself breath. “Ok, now what do I do? No what? Oh.” It just happens. So, you can just be with it. You don’t have to manipulate it. You don’t have to do anything, It’s a wonderful thing to come back to. So, now you’re watching your breath and you, after 20 minutes, you notice you haven’t been aware of one breath. You’ve been thinking about all kinds of other stuff, so you simply come back. Every time you come back, every single time you remember, they say, it creates a deeper neural pathway in the brain. It actually changes the shape of the brain. They’ve proven that now. And so, it makes it easier on the next time, the next time you remember.

Bollywood.  Where is that coming from? Outside? Oh. Very nice.

So, anyhow, where were we? We don’t know.

Our minds got, you know, ripped off again. “Ok. Breath. Ok, we’ve gotta come back to the breath. Oh, time to go to work, see ya later.” Boom. That’s how it is. We don’t have, you know, we have to make a little bit of time in our lives just to not do anything. Not even to do meditation. We need to make a little bit of time just to slow, you know, there used to be, they used to have standard transmissions, which are now not standard, where you push the clutch in. You’ve got to push that clutch in every once in a while, and just let the stuff… and be with it and then get busy again when you finish but it’s going to take regular paying attention to begin to become aware of the beauty and the love that lives within us as who we already are. It’s going to take a little paying attention. Nobody can do it for you. Nobody can give you that, because you already have it. There’s no room for anybody else to give it to you. Some great Beings can temporarily point you in the right direction, but you have to take the steps. And so, that’s the deal.

So, I asked Siddhi Ma, after She said that, I said, “Ma, what is it with Westerners? Why can’t we love? We can’t we let ourselves be loved?” And She said something to me. I’m going to tell you what She said. “Well, Krishna Das,” She said, “What were your parents thinking when you were conceived?” Ok, we’ll just leave it there. And then, She said, “What were they eating when you were conceived?” You know, “What was their diet?” You know? Well, you know, meat eaters, of course. That seems to have some effect on the consciousness. And then, She said, “Affection was used to control you as a child.” You know, when you were crying and nasty, they didn’t even want to see you. But you know, you had to be picked up. So, you very quickly learned that to get the attention and the affection you needed, the way you needed it, you had to kind of give them what they wanted. So, affection became a business deal at a very early age and it hasn’t changed. We’re still doing business. What do you think relationships are? Business. “You give me a little bit of that, I’ll give you a little bit of this.” Ok. “You’re not giving it to me? What’s wrong? Oh, you have a headache. Ok. I thought it was me. I was about to go jump of the cliff, but you have a headache. I understand.” See, we can’t navigate this shit. It’s too difficult. So, relationships are business.

So, once I was very in love with someone and I was with my Indian father, Mr. Tiwari, who was a great yogi. I mean, He was totally in the world, He was the headmaster of a big school. He had a large family. But he’d been with Maharajji for 40 years and he was just amazing. So, I was telling him how much I loved this woman and when I finally finished he said, “My boy.” He said, “Relationships are business. Do your business. Enjoy.” He actually told me, “Do my business.” Somebody finally telling me I could be stupid. Gave me permission to be stupid. How great. “Do your business. Enjoy. But love?” He said, “Love lasts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” We don’t get it from somebody. We don’t give love. Where is it that you give it? You can give affection, kindness, caring, but love is who we are. Love is in there as we are. But we’ve covered it up. We’re so busy, we can’t look. We don’t know where to look or how to look. And you know, there’s some confusion about the so-called “spiritual path.” We think we have to renounce or deny ourselves our desires. But on this lineage that I’m a part of, Hanuman, there’s a sloka in Sanskrit that says, I don’t remember the Sanskrit right now but it says, “Hanuman gives not only liberation but allows you to satisfy the desires that are useful for you to have.”

It’s not a renunciate path.

The only thing to renounce, ultimately, is selfishness and self-centered seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain. That’s the only thing we have to renounce. The rest of it, we need. When you’re hungry, you eat. The body has lots of hungers. You have to eat, you have to have certain things. Why not? Who told you, you can’t? You know? Besides my mother? So, we’ve got to get over that. It’s ok to be a human being in a human body because that’s where we are. But that doesn’t mean we have to be selfish and greedy. That doesn’t mean our fears and shame have to control us 24 hours a day. We can come out from all of that. We can come through all of that. But it takes a little paying attention. It takes a little practice. And it takes, also kind of really getting comfortable with the idea that we’re beings-in-progress. We’re working on it.

The post Call and Response Podcast Ep. 78 | Real Happiness and Becoming a Good Human appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 77 | KD and Surya Das on Mantra, Bernie and Hungry Hearts

“There’s no possibility of being truly happy until everybody is happy and these great beings called Bodhisattvas, they are almost, essentially fully enlightened, but they make a vow, they take a vow to stay here in this realm or in a realm that we can access at least for our sake because we don’t know what it’s like, what real love means, so the beings who have recognized what that is, they hang around so we can get a taste of it, otherwise we don’t know.” – Krishna Das

SURYA DAS: We’ve been chanting the six-syllable mantra of Tibet, “Om Mane Padme Hung,” the Dalai Lama’s mantra, the mantra of the Buddha, of Great Compassion, Avalokita, Chenrezig, Kuan Yin. “Om Mani Padme Hung”, the Jewel in the Lotus where the Buddha is within our own spiritual blossoming mantra. And cultivating boundless heartitudes or attitudes of noble heart, loving kindness, compassion, joy, equal to all, forgiveness and mercy. I love chanting.

Chanting is a big part of the lightening path or the dharmic path of Vajrayana, like so many traditions, like the bhakti tradition and others. It really gets me out of my head, my New York motor mind, motor mouth, into my heart and into my gut and Hara, and Root Chakra, and healing, it’s really healing, the split between body and mind, heart and soul, self and other, heaven and earth, as you become just breath. Inspiration, expiration, the divine sound, shabda, and offer or surrender our bodies and mouths and lungs and throats and breath and energy to that which can come through us and through all together, like co-meditating, inter-meditating, inter-being together, and raise the spirit.

KRISHNA DAS: So there’s a part of the practice, a very big part of the practice in Tibetan Buddhism and Buddhism in general, is the offering of the merits of our individual practice for the sake of all others, all beings in the universe, and in fact, it’s taught that the real, the purest motivation that we could have for doing our practice is not just to end our own personal suffering, but also to include, trying to relieve the suffering of all Beings. That means your mother and your father and your sisters and brothers and all the people who beat you up in elementary school. It’s a very, it’s not, it’s a very subtle and beautiful understanding of the way things really work. I think a lot of people in the yoga community and the so-called Bhakti community tend to think that they’re doing their practice for their own sake and that they’re trying to get something that, number one, they don’t have and number two, when they get it, they’re going to hold onto it and squeeze it to death and this is a self-defeating way of going about it.  There’s no possibility of being truly happy until everybody is happy and these great beings called Bodhisattvas, they are almost, essentially fully enlightened, but they make a vow, they take a vow to stay here in this realm or in a realm that we can access at least for our sake because we don’t know what it’s like, what real love means, so the beings who have recognized what that is, they hang around so we can get a taste of it, otherwise we don’t know. I mean, I grew up on Long Island. Jesus. You know, there was nothing. Nothing and no one that I met in my life that had a clue. Really. It was extraordinary. He grew up on Long Island.

SURYA DAS: I grew up on Long Island. What am I, chicken liver? Chopped liver?

KRISHNA DAS: You were on the south shore. They didn’t let us go to the south shore.

SURYA DAS: No, I didn’t have a clue, either. I had no interest in these things.

KRISHNA DAS: No interest at all.

SURYA DAS: And no inspiration to be interested.

KRISHNA DAS: We had interest in the sense that we had longing, but we didn’t know what it was for, what we were longing for, because no one around us was manifesting that. We didn’t see it. And I remember, one of the first things that hit me was, I used to be on the track team. I used to throw the discus, you know, this thing would swirl around, so, but I was also smoking a lot of dope and thought I was really cool, so I used to bring this book on Buddhism to the track meets, and in between my discus throwing, I’d read a few lines of this book. And I remember, I opened up this book, I don’t remember which one it was and one of the first things it said is, “In Buddhism, it’s believed that your enlightenment is up to you.”

And I read that and was like, when you’re sixteen, nothing is up to you and this book said that the whole thing was up to me. That really lit me up, you know? It’s up to me? Because nothing was up to me, you know? I had to be home by eleven o’clock. I couldn’t drive the car without my mother, you know. I had a junior license or whatever, it was a learner’s permit. Nothing was up to me. And this was up to me, so that was big news, you know, so…

But one has to recognize that whatever state one is in, it influences everybody that you meet, everybody in your life and also we are influenced by everybody else in our life, too. So if we’re in reaction mode all the time then we’re always bouncing off of other people like pool balls, like pool, you know, just like bang bang bang and we never get a break from those reactions, so as we deal, as we start to relax our hearts and try to calm our minds a little bit, calm ourselves down, we begin to see how much we’re the slaves of these knee jerk reactions we have to the people in our lives and the events that happen to us all day long and then that’s when, when we notice that, then we start to try to do something about it.

Bernie Glassman was a very close friend of mine and he was a Zen Roshi. He held the lineage of an ancient, a very ancient lineage from Japan and he was a recognized master and when his teacher finally died, Bernie took his robes off. He had, previous to this, he would be in the Zen center, and he’d be leading these intense meditation retreats, and people would have all these incredible experiences and you know, Satori experiences they call them, all these amazing experiences, and then they’d leave. And he was doing this. He was facilitating this. But, he had come to realize and to recognize that the only thing that, the only thing that keeps us locked up inside of our, all our emotional programs is our fears, the things we’re afraid of. So he decided to let go of his robes. He took his robes off. He grew his beard. He started dressing like a mensch from Brooklyn and he started going to the places that were the most fearful for us as human beings, the places where incredible suffering had happened, like Auschwitz, like Rawanda, like in Ireland and the terrible times in Ireland. And he would go and he would sit there and he would deal with his fears and he would be with his fear and he would bear witness to the suffering that was going on, that had gone on there and to be around somebody who’s not afraid of their fear is quite extraordinary because we all, we all, we kind of like, we signed a little thing and we won’t deal with it, you know? We’ll be together but we’re not going to really deal with our shit. We’re just going to try to get a little high and have a good time and go home, but that’s no going to work in the long run. Unless we face our fears and, or find a way to witness them within ourselves and outside of ourselves, we will always keep building that wall to protect ourselves from other people. So, in vadryana buddhism, in Mahayana buddhism, the very first thing is offering all the practice we do for the sake of all beings because it’s other beings who we’re afraid of, we think. First of all, we think there are other beings, which is pretty interesting, a nice illusion, so we try to deal with those fears. That’s one of the ways that we kind of can calm that kind of fear down, when we connect with other people from our hearts.

SURYA DAS: Sometimes, I feel like

KRISHNA DAS: A motherless child.

SURYA DAS: Or a mother with child. That our dharma movement in the West, of meditation and yoga and tai chi and chi gong and many things, could easily get overburdened with just, falling into the self help bag and thinking about ourselves and self-development and self-actualization and self-realization, and self-help, but really the dharma is what heals us on outer physical and inner emotional and psychic and energy and really subtlest and mystical levels and liberation enlightenment, awake-ness, oneness with god, whatever you call it, inconceivable transcendental wisdom is possible within that in this life and I think it’s important and I feel, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I wrote a book about it, “Make Me One With Everything”, about moving from “me” to “we” and not just seeking self improvement, self help, self realization, but universal awakening. Awakening together. And I think that’s very important for us today, especially in these partisan times. So fractured. So fractious and violent. So I’m making a call or a plea or a calling us out like Rabbi Hillel of old. if not us, who? And if not now, when? The Bodhisattva, be altruistic, compassion, compassionate warrior, the really peaceful warrior code. If not you, who? If not now, when? And each of us has our part to play, large or small is irrelevant. It’s just a judgement. And coming together like this, I believe, has a great and profound effect on quelling a lot of the agitation in the force and on balancing the military activities right across the river and also helping us to not build walls around our hearts. Not just around our country, which I trust will never happen, but not build walls and moats around our hearts out of fear. And if Buddhism, Buddhist thought things or seems to say that there is no self, what it really means is there’s no separate independent, permanent self or identity. Everything is interconnected and changing. We could look into that. I think it could help us release the tight fist, the tight fisted grasping, the grab that things have on us because we grab it. Help us release all these fleeting things that are in any case passing through our fingers so we don’t get rope burn from holding on too tight. That’s the meaning of letting go. It means letting things come and go. Letting be. In fact, I just had a loss recently and my wife passed two weeks ago, Debby. It was a story I wanted to, it reminded me, it was two or three months ago I was across the river at His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche’s Center, and there was a cremation there of Shenpen Dawa Rinpoche, his lineage successor. And I saw one of my old Lamas from Nepal, [       ] that I hadn’t seen in two or three years. Because I’d been here and staying here and taking care of Debby and things and not going to the East or France where he sometimes is. And I said to him in English, He speaks English, He’s about 60 years old, “Rinpoche, how are you keeping?” which is how people speak English in British-ified India. Not, “How are you?” Not “How are you doing?” like in Brooklyn. Not “Whassup,” or whatever it is now. “What’s shaking?” I said, “Rinpoche, how are you keeping?” This is not a translation, so you can hear it directly, and Rinpoche said, this wonderful, “Not keeping anything, Surya.” I was like, “Whoa… I was just asking ‘how are you?’” Oh, and then He went further and He said, “I’m not Rinpoche anymore. I’m not Tulku anymore. I’m just Pema Wangyal.” He just said His personal name.  And then later, one of my students who was there, Drew, he said to me, “Whoa, I talked to Tulka Pema Wangyal, did you?” And I said, “Yeah.”  And he said, this is Drew speaking, “Tulka Wangyal said to me, ‘I’m not a Lama anymore. I’m a siddha.’” So he gave me, like, the lesson in humility I needed and he gave my student the lesson in awesome, like, divine pride, transcendental authenticity that he needed. “Not keeping anything, Surya.” That was the message for me a few months before my wife died and other things. So that helped a lot for me to remember that the only true refuge is beyond all these comings and goings, the safe port that we can find under Maharajji’s blanket, in God’s arms, in Siddhi Ma’s arms. I was just looking at that picture over there and getting so much light and love from that picture of our Siddhi Ma, Maharajji’s disciple, and from all of you. We’re all in this together. No one can do it alone. Even the Dalai Lama, lifelong monk, says this, “No one can do it alone.” Because we need to develop empathic and warm, heartfelt compassion as well as transcendental wisdom and awareness and that’s why I love coming here to Garrison, because that’s what goes on here much of the time. And I love chanting with Krishna Das and all of you. It remembers me of when I learned to sing at Maharajji’s ashram. Before that, growing up on Long Island, unlike Krishna Das, who I think dreamt of being a rock start, I dreamt of pitching in Yankee Stadium in the World Series.

KRISHNA DAS: Different sport.

SURYA DAS: And, I learned to sing in front of Maharajji and learned that no one was listening and I could just really let it go and kind of, it opened my throat chakra, because I let go of my fear, you know, I didn’t really think this… I was 21 years old, I didn’t know anything. But the fears let go of me, in a sense that no one was listening and judging.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS:  Well, maybe Danny or somebody. But mostly not.

KRISHNA DAS: The other devotees were judging. Don’t worry.

SURYA DAS: But I was singing to Maharajji and God and they were just nipping at my heels at dinner, or with my own mind’s judgements. But the Big Love doesn’t judge. Non-judgemental Day has already come in the Big Love.

KRISHNA DAS: yeah. Yeah to be with somebody who not only knew everything about you, everything, everything, and loved you more than you could possibly love yourself was ridiculous, just ridiculous. Even now, I can’t believe it, you know?

And there was no time in that Being, you know? When we were with Maharajji physically, that was the physical plane, but the experience we would have, had at the time, was Being Here, right now. It was no different. It’s hard to explain because people come to me and they, “Oh you were so lucky. You saw Maharajji, you were with a Being like that.” And I said, “Yeah, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” Because half the time it was the most extraordinary blissful wonderful experience. The other half of the time was being in the bottomless pit of hell and one of the qualities of hell is that it’s endless, which is why it’s so bad. When you’re in it, it’s always going to be like that and half the time we were with Him, it was like that, until He threw an apple at you or something, or laughed and then you were released from the hell of your personal darkness, which is where most of us live most of the time. And then you go back into it because, “Great, I’m from Long Island. That’s where I live.” In that darkness and then He’d, you know, He’d let us out, and then we’d go back. He’d let us out. We’d go back. He’d help us out. We’d go back. That’s how He taught. He didn’t teach with words. He didn’t write books. He didn’t initiate people. But He shined like the sun and He burnt through our own clouds, you know? And then, then they would come back. And He’d burn through them again. But the quality of those moments was here and now and forever. It wasn’t… when I think of Him now, it’s not now as opposed to then, it’s always here. He’s here. Always here. Which is the only place He could be, by the way.

SURYA DAS: The problem is we’re not always here. We’re not always totally here for that.

KRISHNA DAS: I’m hardly here at all. You kidding? But once a year, I might wake up for three seconds and be here and that’s when He’s here.

SURYA DAS: So, I’m getting tired of hearing this narrative that “I’m from Long Island.” I don’t feel like I’m from Long Island anymore. Do you really feel like you’re from Long Island?

SURYA DAS: I’m not going to one-up you and say “I feel like I’m from God” or “from the mystery.” But I’m from this, I’m from this group like all of you.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: That’s a narrative that I like to remember.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. I don’t relate to…

SURYA DAS: I know you like to say it and we have a good schtick about it. You know, the Das Brothers and we’re all Jewish on our parent’s side and we’re Hindjews and… but deep down we know that we’re just screwing with you all, that we’re really living the darkness…

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah we’re just visiting.

SURYA DAS: No, but even the shadows are nothing but light if we look deeply. Maharajji showed us that. Even in the ashes, we find God, or in Auschwitz, Bernie Roshi showed us. Bernie Roshi didn’t just go to Auschwitz, or Ireland and the other place that he mentioned, Calcutta, he went to the Bowery and slept and lived on the Bowery with his Buddhist friends and whoever else was living and sleeping on the Bowery. He called it a street retreat. If 2,500 years Bernie Roshi, Bernie Glassman, Jewish Roshi, Zen Master, invented a new kind of retreat, the street retreat. It was very impressive. He asked me to come once and I said, “No thanks, Bernie, I’m afraid.”

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: I lived in India but I don’t want to be sleeping in the Bowery.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. I’ve been in India. I’ve been in the streets in India. Not New York. Yeah, I know, I was, I avoided going to Auschwitz for years.

SURYA DAS: Did you go?

KRISHNA DAS: Well, then one day he asked me to drive him back home so we were somewhere, I drove him home. And he said, “Why don’t you come in?” So I came into the house, we sat in the back yard for awhile, we smoked a cigar. About half way through the cigar, he said, “I think you should come to Auschwithz.” “Ok.” So that’s how I wound up going. And it was fantastic. It was a really extraordinary experience on so many levels. So many levels. Because we went there to bear witness to the suffering that happened there, to the souls who suffered there, the Beings who suffered there. We went there to be with that, not to judge, not to run away, not to impose our view of it, not to project our own feelings onto it. But to bear witness for their sake. To be with them. So in order to be with somebody, you can’t, you have to drop your trip. You can’t bring your trip, otherwise you’re not with somebody. You have to be with somebody to listen, to see, you have to look and see. You can’t be judging and and laying your trip on them, so, on the course of this four or five days we spent inside Auschwitz, you know, in order to open to that kind of suffering, I remember the first few days I was furious. I walked around because it was Fall and the trees were all golden, red and yellow. It was just amazing. And the grass was green and the sun was shining. And I said, I looked up at the sun, I said, “How fucking dare you shine on this place?” “How dare you?” And I walked around for two days like that, flipped out of my bird, you know? “How can you shine on this place? What happened here… “ And then, like, it was just building up and building up and building up and one day, I just looked up at the sun and I went, “oh. I get it. You’re the sun. You shine. That’s what you do. You shine on the good. You shine on the evil. You shine on the high and the low. You just shine. You don’t pick and choose.” And that lifted me out of my mind. And out of my emotions. And it brought me into a place where I recognized the bigger picture, so to speak and that, what unconditional love is and what, what that could feel like. Because one of the next thoughts I had was that, if I had been born in Germany at that time and raised by a family of Nazis, why would I be any different than anyone of those guards? Right? I couldn’t prove it to myself that I would be any… because how I know myself is, where I grew up, what my parents were like, what I was led to believe in this life by my experiences. So if I had been born in Germany at that time, my experiences would have told me that this was perfectly ok and there would be nothing. It’s not like I’m better than anybody else, that I wouldn’t have been, I wouldn’t have been that way. I couldn’t prove it to myself. That was very humbling and liberating at the same time because I saw that there was no innate evil. You were born in certain places, and due to your karmas, you were programmed in a certain way, but that’s not who you are. That’s not who I am, and it wasn’t who they are. Like Ram Das talks about the difference between the role and the soul. What a person does and what we really are inside.  And what we’re forced to do by our experience.  We may not even, most of us, we don’t recognize that, that we’re all like on a runaway train where there’s nobody driving. It’s just one experience after the other and we get very little vote. In fact, we get no vote about what actually happens. The only vote we could get is how we meet each moment as it arises. How we meet each experience as it it comes to us. Usually, it’s just a knee jerk reaction. Anger. Fear. Shame. Guilt. All those things. So, going to Auschwitz and facing my own fears about what’s going to happen to me there, how am I going to deal with this, etcetera etcetera, and going through that whole process was very, very, very powerful. And Bernie, because Bernie was there, it created that space of letting go. It became possible to let go into that bigger picture, so to speak. Because he was… that’s where he lives. And since he was there, everything that bounced off of him was kind of liberated, so to speak, into that more open space.

But we don’t get that mostly going through our daily lives. We don’t get, we don’t meet the cashier at the stop and shop doesn’t liberated us the same way. But also, we’re not looking, you know? We’re just, we go through our days on automatic.

SURYA DAS: When you guys were at Auschwitz, and gals, did you, did Bernie, being a Zen Roshi, did he lead prayers? Chants? Meditate? Or just be and walk around as is?

KRISHNA DAS: All of the above, yeah. There was chanting. There were ceremonies. There were Christian ceremonies. There were Jewish ceremonies. There were Buddhist ceremonies. And the main ceremony was the, what did they call it… the offering ceremony, which I’ll sing this prayer for you in a couple of minutes. One of Bernie’s deepest experiences happened in the back of a car on the way to work, which, by the way, is where most of your experiences are going to happen. Forget about that. They happen when you’re not paying attention, then “Oh.” So, he’s on his way to work and he experienced the Oneness of Creation in the back of the car and he saw all beings were totally connected and totally interdependent on each other and his heart opened to such an extent that he offered his heart or his Bodhi Mind, the Bodhi Enlightened Mind, Enlightened Heart, he offered the heart to all beings who were suffering. And this prayer is part of the Japanese Buddhist Prayers. It’s called the Gates of Sweet Nectar. And one enters through the Gates of Sweet Nectar by offering your heart to all Beings who are suffering or lost or afraid. So, about oh, 15-16 years ago, he sent me eight lines. Like, this little piece of a prayer, and he said, “Can you do something with this?” So I said, “Like what?” He just sent me an email, “Can you do something with this?” “Like what?” He said, “Well, we Buddhists aren’t that good with melody, maybe you could come up with a nice melody for this prayer and then we could sing it at our Zen Peacemaker Community Gatherings.” So, I carried it around with me for about, and I said, “When is that?” He said, “About eleven months from now.” “Oh, good. Ok.” I carried it around the world with me for about eight or nine months and I wrote back to him, I said, “Bernie, can I mess with the words a little bit?” So he, a one word email comes back. “Mess.” Very Zen. So, I kind of messed with the words a little bit, then they kind of worked together in a different way and then a melody came for the prayer. So I said, “Ok, I’ve got this melody now.” He said, “Good, now you can start working on the rest of the prayer, which is like, 40 pages.” And I said, “Bernie, that’s going to take 3 lifetimes.” I get a one word email back. “Two.”

So let me sing you the prayer that he asked me to come up with a melody for. And I think you’ll get a feel for what we’re talking about. I’ll sing it three times. So this is part of a longer ceremony that they do in his tradition, but it’s part of the prayer…

Calling out to hungry hearts…

KRISHNA DAS:  Which one of us isn’t lost? Isn’t left behind? All of us. Funny thing, the original prayer says, “All of your sorrow, I make it mine.” You’re taking on the sorrow of all those who are lost and afraid. So, when I had finished the prayer, I handed it to Bernie and he looked at it and he saw the last line, he said, “All of your sorrow? What about your joy? I want your joy, too.” So I had to change it to “your joy and your sorrow.”

SURYA DAS: We miss Bernie. But he still inspires us all.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: Wonderful.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: I didn’t know that he had that big awakening in the back of the car on the way to work.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah.

SURYA DAS: In case you’re wondering what American Zen Masters like Bernie did for work, or even unknowing that they had to work… hmm, I can’t remember, what did he used to do in LA before he led the LA Zen Center, what was it?

KRISHNA DAS: Actually, it was like a, like a nuclear engineer of some kind. Some kind of, I forget the word…

SURYA DAS: It’s like in astrophysics or something like that.

KRISHNA DAS: Astrophyics, something like that.

SURYA DAS: He was… he covered the whole spectrum.

KRISHNA DAS: First he figured it out one way, then he figured it out the other way.  It’s so amazing, being with somebody who’s just not afraid, you know? Not afraid and not afraid of their own fear, either. You know, that’s another thing. Walking around the city with him was ridiculous. Just too sweet. Everybody was his friend. Everybody, you know… people were critical of him, too. “This isn’t Zen,” they’d say. “This is not Zen. He’s left the path.” That’s what they said about Buddha. Buddha’s original disciples were sitting next to Him by the tree waiting for him to be enlightened so they can get some of it, and there He was, essentially, doing these very difficult austere practices, maybe breathing three or four times a day, eating nothing, almost nothing, and they said you could see through Him. He had become like translucent. His skin was wrapped around His bones and it’s like, and so…they were just waiting for Him to get enlightenment, meanwhile Buddha’s sitting there thinking like, “This shit ain’t working. What am I going to do? This is not working,” you know? “I don’t know what to do.” And He was in terrible despair and then He had a memory came to Him of when He was a boy, sitting under a tree, watching his father work in the distance in this field and He experienced what He had experienced as a boy, which is this extraordinary joy and happiness. Now, He was practicing these austerities and happiness was not something He was accustomed to. He was starving Himself to death and doing all these practices, trying to achieve something. So when He had this feeling, this memory, He got scared actually and He said, “What is this?” Well, let me look at this feeling. Being Buddha, He said, “Let me look at this.” And He saw that this feeling of ok-ness that He was experiencing had no cause.  In other words, it didn’t come from the joining of the senses or the mind with a pleasurable object, nor did it come from the separation of the senses or the mind with it, and what do you call it… a not nice object… so, it didn’t have a cause and He said, “If it has no cause, it must be natural. It must be natural.” And then He thought, “Maybe through this feeling of ok-ness, maybe this is the way to enlightenment.” And just then a woman comes by with some yogurt, some dahi, and He said, “Maybe I should eat something.” He puts His hands out, and she pours some food into His and eats and then those five disciples looked at each other, “Oh, Gautama has left the way, let’s get out of here.” And they took off and they left Him there. Disciples, you know? Yuck.

You hate disciples.

Devotees and disciples, they should all be shot.

SURYA DAS: Darkness.

KRISHNA DAS: They’ll kill each other, so it’s ok. Anyhow, so then He just kind of, that’s when He got up and He wandered some more and then He sat down under this other tree, which He sat down and said, “I’ve got it now. Not getting up til this is over.” So the idea is that the feeling of ok-ness, the something we’ve not lost touch with, we’ve lost touch with that feeling of basic all right-ness. Whatever reason, for whatever reason, the culture we’re born in, what our parents believed, how they lived, how they saw themselves, what our classmates were like, what our teachers are like, we were never allowed, we never had the chance to stay in touch with that place. You know, as kids, we had that, but then it disappears. We lose the connection to that and that’s where it all is, by the way, in that basic feeling of all right-ness. That’s the feeling of real love, the real heart. You think?

SURYA DAS: I love thinking about our friends and how they each, through their own personality, it manifested their true heart. Like Bernie, for example, the astrophysicist went into Zen. After his teacher, as Baba, Krishna Das was saying, then he took off his zen robes and he took off his shaved head and started to wear hair and a beard again, and not only that, I don’t know if you remember, so for six months, he went to clown school because he’s a funny guy and he became more funny and then he did something else outrageous but I can’t remember what it was… flower arranging or calligraphy or something… and he was a strong, robust guy but then I was in India with him after that at an international Buddhist congress or something and all the muckybucks were there, the Karmapa and the Dalai Lama and the head monks and nuns of Burma, Thailand, Korea and Japan, all this, and Bernie, when it was his turn to speak, he said, “It’s very nice to see all of you gentlemen, a few women and not one untouchable from a hundred million untouchables in this country who are Buddhists,” and everybody went… because it was so true and it was so in our face. That was Bernie. And not one untouchable among the hundred million untouchables in this country, who were Buddhists. Maybe he didn’t say a hundred million, maybe he said 50 million, but the truth is, again, we’re afraid of what’s different and what’s unknown and we still have our class and our caste systems, even in our spiritual movement where we think about universal love and compassion. So again, I am calling out for moving from “me” to “we” and obviously inclusiveness and tolerance and acceptance and Krisha Das said it great and I want to highlight and underline it, especially in these partisan days where we all have a boogey man or boogey woman that we can’t stand when they come on tv, to give some kind of some kind of talk or something or whatever they do. Maybe we should put their picture on our altar like Ram Das used to do. Try to even out our feelings towards the saints and to them. It’s an austere practice and remember what Krishna Das was saying, he learned at Auschwitz,  it’s a Buddhist practice of exchanging self in others, learning to see through the others’ eyes like the native americans say, “If you want to know where a person is coming from, walk a mile in their moccasins. Remember what Krishna Das learned at Auschwitz and we might check it out and come to our own conclusions but I’ve learned this, too, from living in a monastery with a bunch of people I would not have necessarily chosen to be married to for three and a half years as it were, that if I was brought up in their situation by those parents, with those genes, I would have been, you know, like I was on Little League in Long Island, I probably would have been Hitler Youth instead of the Cub Scouts. And that’s a hard thing to accept about one’s self, but I think it’s true.

So when I see how the people from the other side, the other side of the aisle in politics, or the other religions, some of whom want to go back to the 14th Century ways, I think, “Well, if I grew up in a Madrass and was 15 years old and it was the only education I had in the middle east, I’d probably be thinking about being a martyr or some kind of, you know, terrorist, too. Because the peer pressure and cultural conditioning and parental guidance and it’s not that I condone that but I do have more sympathy for having seen that in the world and in myself.

KRISHNA DAS: And the other side of that is let’s look at who we are now. We are not, most of us, contemplating those things, and most of us are not in the situation where we have no choices. We are finding ourselves with a longing to unravel the knots in our own hearts and find real love and real happiness in this world now. And that’s also the result of our own karmas and our own actions in the past. So, let’s take advantage of that situation as best we can because we can make choices and our choices will lead to making other choices and the quieter, the more open our hearts are, the choices we make will change and they’ll lead us further and further on the path to what, to finding out who and what we really are. So we have that opportunity and that possibility. Otherwise, what are we doing here? You know? So, let’s give ourselves credit for that, too. It’s both things. It’s not one or the other. It’s the whole thing. As they say in Tibet, the whole schmear.

SURYA DAS: I think that’s in Brooklyn.

KRISHNA DAS: Oh.

SURYA DAS: But that’s what it means. But we call it the “middle way” of balance and inclusiveness.

KRISHNA DAS: Ocean Parkway? Middle Way.

SURYA DAS: Thank God for the dharma, that’s what I always say. Thank God for Buddhism, which is a non-theistic religion. That’s my little joke to myself.

KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. There’s only one thing going on here, you know? All these different paths are different ways of looking at the same thing. Different ways of reaching towards the same thing and walking… all the paths converge at some point, depending on what your emotional, psychological, religious preferences are you follow the path that you feel works for you. It’s all you. It’s all us anyway, so…

SURYA DAS: So Sab Ek.

KRISHNA DAS: Maharajji used to say, “Sab Ek.” It’s all one. All One. All One. One time, I was sitting with Maharajji and He grabbed my notebook where I had all these prayers written out, you know, like, hundreds of prayers from all different traditions and He’s going through it, going through it, and He stopped on this one page and said, “What’s this?” And I looked at and I went, “Uh-oh.” I said, “It’s Buddhist.” I thought, “Oh shit, I’m in Hanuman temple with My Guru and He’s looking at my Buddhist stuff. I’m going to get it, right?” And He said, “Translate some of it.” So I couldn’t because it was… but there was an Indian guy there who translated a few verses. And then He goes, “Thik, correct. Very good. “ And I went, “Really?” He keeps going through the book and He comes across a little picture. We used to have these postage stamps made up of just Him, a little picture of Him. He said, “Who’s that?” I said, “Maharajji, it’s You.” “Nay. Buddha.”

There you go.

Ok. It’s ten o’clock. We were going to sing some more but it’s too late. So you’ll have to sing your own lullabye’s tonight and tomorrow.

SURYA DAS: We should sing one more.

KRISHNA DAS: Why don’t we sing Tara Mantra, but I can’t play your melody and I can only sing my melody.

SURYA DAS: I’ll follow you.  Even though disciples get shot around here.

KRISHNA DAS: He said as he waved from the edge of enlightenment, “I’ll follow you.”

SURYA DAS: And leading from behind is called…

KRISHNA DAS: Leading from behind, yeah… talking from below. Nobody got that, that’s ok.

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The post Ep. 77 | KD and Surya Das on Mantra, Bernie and Hungry Hearts appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep.76 Judaism, Christ and Namdev 

“So, Maharajji, it seemed like He started to say something and then His eyes, He just stopped and His eyes closed and He just sat in front of us, perfectly still. We had not seen Him sit still for more than two seconds. It was always fruit in all directions, laughing, joking, barking orders to the people at the temple, talking to this one then all of a sudden, boom. I remember thinking we’d killed Him. He just sat there and it was, the feeling was like the whole world stopped turning. And then two tears came down His cheek. Then He kind of shook Himself. He opened His eyes. He said, ‘He lost Himself in love. That’s how He meditated. He lost Himself in Love. He’s one with the whole universe. He never died. No one understands. No one understands. He lost Himself in Love.’ He immersed Himself in Love.” – Krishna Das

Q: Hi, KD. Hello.

KD: Hi.

Q: How are you? Thank you for being here today. Ok, I was just wondering, you being Jewish, I’m Jewish as well.

KD: I’m Jewish on my parents’ side.

Q: On your parents’ side? You don’t really practice anymore do you? Any of the Judaic traditions?

KD: Anymore?

Q: yeah. Or did you back as a child?

KD: You know, my family’s about as Jewish as the Pope’s family, that’s all I can tell you.

Q: I was reading the Yoga Sutras and they were talking about praying to God, and we were talking about “What does ‘God’ mean to you?” And it was interesting to see how people were like corrupted by religion and how they grew up, and you know, like, originally nobody really mentioned the nature of the “one-ness.”

KD: I’m sorry

Q: Of their one-ness and what Christ teaches us. But I was wondering, when you came into realization of that and who taught you that and what you thought of before, before like the little bit of your changing “awakening” to realize that and how that helped you.

KD: You know, a woman once said to me at a workshop, she said, “Last weekend I was at a Jewish weekend and they say you can’t say the Name of God.” And I said, “Absolutely right. You can’t.” Maharajji used to say, “Go on, sing your lying Ram Ram. One of these days you’ll say it right once. Boom. You’re out of here. The real Ram will come.” So we’re practicing.  You can’t say the name of God because God is beyond Name and Form. It’s beyond any concept and anything that comes out of our mouths is a concept of some kind. So, it can’t be God. So, that being said, I remember I actually was bar mitzvah’d and I went to Hebrew school to learn the Haftorah, they call it, and my Hebrew school teacher used to bang his head on the blackboard and said, “If I didn’t see this class, I would not believe it.” And bang his head. Great memories. Yeah, you know, nobody in my family believed in God. Or forget God, nobody believed that they could even be happy. There was no idea of a path. All they did was complain. You know? We had one saint in the family and her qualification was that she did not complain. That was literally, I was told. I said “Why is Bubby a saint?” “Because she never complains about anything.” That was the qualification, you know? You know the Jewish lady sitting around, “Oh, how are you doing, is there anything all right?” You know the joke the old Jewish guy driving, driving though the mountains through a storm and the wind’s blowing and the snow and everything and he drives off the cliff and the car goes down down down, spinning, spinning, spinning and lands like upside down on the branch of a huge tree. So, the highway patrol guy comes up on his motorcycle and he runs down the mountain, he finds the guy, he’s hanging upside down in the car, right? He said, “Sir, sir, are you comfortable?” And the guy goes, “Eh, I’m making a living.” Oh, you know, I’m married to a Brazilian. She does not understand one joke I tell her. It’s torture. Not one. All the years I practiced abuse, being abused by all this Jewish humor I can’t share with her. It’s terrible. So. That’s about how Jewish I am. I don’t know. But like I said, Jesus was Jewish by the way. Did you know that? People seem to forget that, you know; painting Him like a white man with like long, straight hair, blonde. Forget it. He’s about as blonde as Bob Marley. It’s, you know, forget it. That’s not it. You know? And people, He wasn’t a Christian. He was a Jewish guy. They called Him “Rabbi”. For what, you think He was like, the Pope? He was a Rabbi. He just happened to, you know, find Reality somewhere along the line. He wanted to clean up. Just like Buddha did with the Hindu religion, you know. The priests had become all powerful and anybody who wanted to get good karmas had to pay the priests to do pujas for them or ceremonies or teachings. It was the same, all the money changes in the temple, you know the whole story. So, somebody said, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be” and tried to change it and you know. In India, they don’t hang people up quite as easily as they did in those days. Maharajji talked about Jesus, it was so powerful. I mean, He talked about Hanuman, of course, Ram and Krishna and Kali and Durga, but when He talked about Jesus it was, I can’t, I can’t, it was so powerful. Really. I mean, you must have heard me tell this story but I’ll tell you again. So, a Canadian guy came to the temple for the first time and he didn’t know anything about Maharajji, how He was, you know. He didn’t give lectures. He didn’t teach. He didn’t write books. He didn’t initiate people. He just hung around. So, Maharajji says to Him, “Why did you come? What do you want?” So, the guy thought he should give like a you know, spiritual answer, he said, “Well, could you teach me how to meditate?” “Get out of here. Go in the back with the crazy people, the Westerners.  Go on. Go.” And as he’s walking away, He said, “Just meditate like Christ. Go on. Get out of here.” So, the guy comes in the back and we, you know, we debriefed anyone who spent two seconds with Maharajji. What’d he say? Then what’d He say? Then what’d you say? And then what’d He say? What did He do? Did He give you fruit? How many pieces? You know. What can I tell you. So, the guy said, “Well, you told me to meditate like Christ.”  What? You know? So later on, we’re sitting in the back and Maharajji came to spend some time with us and Ram Das was there and Ram Das said, “Baba, you said we should meditate like Christ. How did He meditate?” So, Maharajji, it seemed like He started to say something and then His eyes, He just stopped and His eyes closed and He just sat in front of us, perfectly still. We had not seen Him sit still for more than two seconds. It was always fruit in all directions, laughing, joking, barking orders to the people at the temple, talking to this one then all of a sudden, boom. I remember thinking we’d killed Him. He just sat there and it was, the feeling was like the whole world stopped turning. And then two tears came down His cheek. Then He kind of shook Himself. He opened His eyes. He said, “He lost Himself in love. That’s how He meditated. He lost Himself in Love. He’s one with the whole universe. He never died. No one understands. No one understands. He lost Himself in Love.” He immersed Himself in Love. That wasn’t my idea of what meditation was, you know? I thought you had to sit down, fight with yourself and beat yourself up and pretend you were meditating. He lost Himself in love. I mean, what else do we want, right? Wouldn’t we like to live there no matter what else was going on? Wouldn’t you like to be in that space where you are open and flowing and connected with everything and at ease of heart with whatever arises in your life? You know? And you weren’t a prisoner of your own reactions and your own knee-jerk reactions and your own programming from the trauma we’ve had in our lives and the pain and the broken hearts. Wouldn’t we like to be free of that? That’s what that is, when we can immerse ourselves in that love that lives within us as who and what we already really are. It’s not something else. It’s really, it’s not something else. It’s who we are. Right now. So, I’m just going to read you this quick little poem I thought of today. It’s from a Saint in India named Namdev.

“I have delved into the four vedas”- You know what the vedas are? The ancient teachings.

“And I’ve drawn forth their hidden meaning.

I’ve churned the six philosophies”- the different dualism, non-dualism, semi-dualism, UCONN basketball, you know, the six philosophies.

“I’ve churned the six philosophies and I’ve extracted their essence

And I’ve learned the ultimate goal of yogis and ascetics

I’ve known the joy of merging in Brahma, the formless Lord

Oh, My friend,” says Namdev, “I’ve transcended all this through the grace of the Saints. Realize, realize my mind that the secret is the Lord’s love. The secret is the Love.” That’s the secret. Everything we think we want, everything we’re looking for, the secret essence is the Love. We all want to get back home. Now. He’s a devotee so He, He expresses it in that way, that the grace of the Saints, but a non-dual person would say, “This is your own true nature. This is your essence, is this state of grace and that’s always pulling us home.”  It’s like gravity for the heart. The secret is the love and the chanting, all these Names are the Names of that place. So we’re constantly evoking, invoking and evoking that place which is the Love. These are the Names of that place within us that is the Love. It’s not in India. It’s not somewhere else. It’s everywhere. So, anybody have anything they want to say important? Otherwise we’ll sing.

Yeah? Ok. Give her the mic.

Q:  Hi.  You talk about the practice helping to move us closer to our true Selves and you’ve brought up trauma. When you’re triggered by that trauma, I guess I’m talking about me, when I’m triggered by that trauma, I experience a paralyzing fear in my heart and I’m just curious if it’s been your experience that the practice will help to ease that fear eventually.

KD: Well, there’s no question about that in my mind. However, the issue is, if we do the practice only to lessen the intensity of the effects of the trauma, will it work also? And it will. But, but as you focus, as you focus on other things in your life, those moments, when the trauma arises become and less and less. As you focus on other things. If you focus only on the trauma and you, and you’re, and you do the practice to cure yourself from the trauma, it’s, yeah, sure, of course, there will be an effect but they have this thing, nishkama karma. Nishkama, desireless action or desireless practice, so, not desireless but so, like I said, Maharajji said, “You want to find God. Serve people. Don’t think about yourself.” You know? Right? So, if you’re not thinking about yourself and you start noticing other people more and seeing other people and becoming more sensitive to their needs and who they are and where they’re coming from, you’re just automatically developing a whole other way of going through your day, which precludes that trauma. It might still be there, but it’s not going to get triggered the same way as often because you’re, because even with that, in the presence of that, those issues, you’re expanding in many other directions at the same time and you stop caring so much about that. Right now, we tend to identify very strongly with that and for good reason, you know. It’s powerful issues in our lives. But when you start developing loving kindness, and I know this sounds wimpy. Shit. But loving kindness and caring about other people and thinking about others rather than yourself, you’re just creating a whole new way of going through the day that doesn’t leave space for that. You’re not having to push that away. You’re not having to deal with it directly. Like, I’m taking this medicine for this disease. That doesn’t really have to work exactly like that. And in fact, even if you started with that in mind, which is not bad, I mean, fine, perfect. Over time, the effects, you’ll be thinking about yourself less. And when you’re thinking about yourself less, you know, there’s no room for that to arise. Now, it might arise in certain situations. But there’ll be so much more space around it in a sense, because you’re not, you haven’t been holding onto it with such intensity. You know, you know, so it’s kind of like that. But it’s all good. There’s no, for instance, with the practice of the repetition of the Name, these are mantras. There are many types of mantras. There’s mantras to find buried treasure. There’s mantras to rob banks. There’s mantras to get people to fall in love with you. There’s mantras to become president of the united states. I wish somebody didn’t know that one. But anyhow, the repetition of the Name is good for none of that. It’s only good for one thing. It has absolutely no, it’s only good for love. For finding out who you are. It’s not good for anything else. Those other mantras, you find somebody to initiate you in them and then god bless you, you’ll get it. Then you’ll have to deal with it. So, but this is not good for anything other than opening the heart and purifying the heart and opening it up and giving us more space in our life to be ourselves. Yeah. Good. Nice. Thanks for asking that.

Q: Thank you and thank you for sharing your experience and for being so genuine.

KD: Yeah. There’s a new movie coming out called “Cracked Up” by a friend of mine and it’s about this comedian, Darrell Hammond, who was on Saturday Night Live, and it’s a documentary about his journey through the trauma that he had and discovering it and how you work with it and how he overcame so much of it and how it ruled his life for so many years and forced him into so many negative and hurtful behaviors and alcoholism and drug addiction, all that stuff. So, it’s really juicy. And it should be, it’s being released next week. So, “Cracked Up,” if you hear about it, go see it.

See, in India they don’t talk about this stuff like this. They need some cultural appropriation, I think. They say “Ram Ram Ram” and then they go steal from their neighbor, you know? It doesn’t work.

We’re all kind of in the same boat, you know. Maharajji had a great devotee named Dada. Dada means “elder brother.” And Maharajji was, his name was Sudir Mukerjee. He was a communist economics professor who became a devotee of Maharajji and Maharajji would call Him “Dada” which means elder brother, which he certainly wasn’t, of Maharajji’s. But Maharajji told his wife, Dada’s wife, to call him Dada, too. And she said, “He’s not my Dada, he’s my husband.” Maharajji said, “If he’s my Dada, he’s your Dada.” So she had to call him Dada, too. This book, you could read some of these books. They’re out, and stories about Maharajji, and get a feel for how He went through His day, how He lived and how the devotees, how they were affected by Him, how their lives opened up and changed. For instance, this guy Dada, he was, like I said, he was a completely non-religious. He was interested in nothing like that. Totally into his professorship and all that stuff. One day, his wife and his mother, who lived with them, they were going out, and Dada said, “Where are you going?” They said, “Well, there’s a little house across the street and we heard that there’s this saint that comes there every once in a while and we’ve been waiting to hear when he came back so we could go see Him. And we heard He’s there today. So we’re going to see Him.” “Ok, go. Go.” So, they left, but they came right back. And Dada said, “What’s wrong? Didn’t you go?” “Well, yes we went and just as I entered the room, the Saint looked at me, called me by my name and told me to go. But I didn’t go. I sat down and then He looked at me again in a few minutes and called me again by my first name. ‘Kamala, go. Your husband’s friends are waiting for their tea. Go, go. Come tomorrow.’” So, this got Dada curious, right? So the next day, he walks over with his wife and they walk into the room and this Saint gets up, takes Dada’s hand and starts walking out the door and says, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.” Now, think about your drive up to the Stop and Shop, you know, and you get out of your car and some homeless guy comes up and takes your hand and says, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.” I don’t think so. But India is another universe. So, Maharajji, you know, this was Maharajji. Long story. But anyway, it’s in the books. Really good stuff. Reading about the Saints, reading about the really, the realized Beings and seeing how they interacted with people and seeing how they lived in the world and what they did and it’s life changing. Really, it is. It’s a spiritual practice in itself.

The post Ep. 76 | Judaism, Christ and Namdev appeared first on Krishna Das.

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

“Practice is so important because we plant those seeds of what we want to grow with our practice. It doesn’t mean just meditation practice or chanting practice. It means caring about people, caring about ourselves, caring about the world and offering kindness and compassion to everyone that comes into our lives. But if we don’t plant those seeds, in those moments that get very difficult, like this moment in the world, there’s very little we can do.” – Krishna Das

Maharajji said, “Courage is a very important thing, a very big thing. It takes a lot of courage to let go. It takes a lot of courage to do practice, because we don’t know where we’re going, and we don’t know what we’ll find. All we know is that we’re inundated by our stuff, 24 hours a day. In the Gita, Krishna says, “Even the littlest bit of this Dharma, the tiniest bit of turning against the flow of that river of immersion in external sense objects and awareness, sense awareness, just the slightest bit of turning away and back to the source is a huge thing, and only we can do that. No one can do it for us.

So, depending on what we really want for ourselves and our loved ones and the planet and the world, that’s what will dictate what practices we do, how we turn within and how much we dedicate to that, how much of our hearts we dedicate to that.

You can’t fool yourself, really, because we’re always here, and there’s a part of us that is always knows what’s going on. Even if we refuse to see it, there’s a deeper part of us, that knows everything that needs to be known, but we’re locked out of that place at this point in our karmic predicament. It’s like we have a big, beautiful house, but we’re sleeping on the lawn of the house. We don’t realize that the house is our true home. So we’re living on the lawn. We get a little port-a-potty out on the lawn, a little garden hose to wash our faces. The house is right there. We just don’t realize it. Then when we do realize it, we have to find the key to the door, but at least we’ll be looking at that point. If we don’t look, we don’t find.

Okay.

Hi. How you doing?

I’ve had better years.

And worse, I’m sure.

Yeah. Well, not a lot worse, actually. I guess the last time I was on was in August, so, it’s been awhile. The way I’m going to phrase this question is going to sound really really dramatic because it sort of feels that way, but hopefully it won’t seem weird.

In Christianity, there’s a condition or a state of mind called the Dark Night of the Soul.

Yeah.

Are you familiar with it?

Very familiar.

And you know, I feel like I’ve gotten there. Even when I sit in my meditation room, I feel just totally disconnected, and the phrase over the doors of hell in Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” is sort of what I feel like my life is doing right now. The outcome is likely to be that because of things that are going on with my grandsons, of ages 13 and 14, and my daughter, and also just not being able to see my friends in person is really, it doesn’t help at all. So, here I am just to find out what your thinking is about that state, and if there’s a similar state in the Hindu tradition. You know, I just read something about it saying it just has to do with ego transformation, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels really ego-taking-apart, in a way. So anyway, I appreciate your thinking on that.

Have you seen the movie, the short film that was made about Ram Dass? There was a longer film made about Ram Dass by this guy, this English guy that we know, and most of it was clips of earlier talks that he gave way before the stroke, back in the eighties, nineties, early nineties, and we watched it together, me and Ram Dass and a few of the other people who were at the house in Maui at the time, and everybody said, oh, they liked it so much. And I was trying to hide, you know. Then they asked me what I thought and I said, ” Truthfully, I didn’t like it.”

And the other thing was, it was kind of weird, kind of creepy, and Ram Dass said, “What do you mean?”

I said to him, “Look, you’re giving lectures about suffering and dealing with pain and suffering and all these things, and you’re about to hit the wall at a thousand miles an hour, and you don’t know it.”

He’s giving these talks, these lectures, you know. Brilliant. Intellectually brilliant. They’re wonderful. But the guy was about to be smashed against the fucking wall, and I said, “It’s creepy because you can tell you don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

Anyway. Yeah. Right. And this is it. This is the stuff. This is what we have to deal with. There’s no way around it. So we keep looking for a cure for it, and that makes it just hurt more. It hurts. It really hurts, especially when those people that we’re very close with bound, by blood and karma, are suffering, and it’s just terrible. But there’s nothing you can do about it.

That’s the hard part to accept, and I know you said that to me and other people many times, but I can’t find the key to surrender. If I sit there and I say, “Okay, I have to surrender now. I have to find a way to just give it up, but it doesn’t happen. And you can’t make yourself do that.

No, you can’t. So when I hurt my knee in India you must have heard this story, maybe everybody didn’t. So I’ll just tell it briefly I stepped in a hole in the road, snapped my leg, and I woke up the next morning and my knee was out to here. It was all swollen, and I couldn’t hardly walk.

So, we were not, supposed to come to the temple to see Maharajji until the afternoon, till about four, but this was first thing in the morning and I thought, “Well, you know, I have to get to the doctor. Otherwise this is really bad. I don’t know what this is.”

So, my friend Raghu helped me walk to the temple. I had to lean on him the whole way. I could hardly walk. We get into the temple and I limp up to where Maharajji’s sitting in this middle of this empty courtyard, on his cot, on his little bed. I sit down and I put my leg out underneath the cot because I can’t bend me knee, and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say, “What are you doing here? Why’d you come so early? Why? What’s wrong with you? Why did you hurt yourself?”

He didn’t say anything. He just sat there for a couple of minutes, and I said to myself, “Well, I’m not going anywhere. I’m having Darshan. Let them cut the leg off. I don’t give a shit. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

So then he gets up and he starts walking to the back of the temple and he took the hand of the Indian devotee that was there with him. It was the only other person there. And they’re walking away from where we’re sitting, and the further away he got, the more, he was kind of leaning on the guy, and leaning on him, and it was like he couldn’t walk, and I thought to myself, “He’s taking on the karma of my knee.”

You know? At that minute I had that thought, he turned around and basically ran back to the tucket. He plops down and he looks at me and he said, “You thought I was in pain? You wanted to help me?” And he pats me on the head. “Good boy.”

Meanwhile, I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, “What is this? What’s going on here?” You know, “What did I do? Why did this happen?”

All the time I’m sitting there with him. Later in the day, other Westerners started to show up and at one point, he reaches down into the shoulder bag of this woman, one of the Westerners, and he pulls out a Bible. We started carrying Bibles around because he was always talking about Jesus. So we started reading the Bible. So, he pulls out the Bible. Now he’s not supposed to be able to read English and supposedly he doesn’t speak English, supposedly he doesn’t understand English. So he picks out the book, opens it up like this and holds it up for me and says, “Read this.” And he points to this like that, just like that.

So, it was from Saint Paul, Corinthians and it said, ” In order to protect me from the abundance of revelations,” from getting a big head, “it was given to me a thorn in the side, and I beseeched 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 weakness.'”

Well Ram Dass and I have been talking about this for 50 years, and at one point, he said, “Well, we’re proof of that.”

So I had t-shirts made up, one for him and one for me that said “proof.” And the point is this, when we recognize our inability to really do anything, to save our own asses, that’s when the reality of grace shows up for us, not the grace itself, cause that’s always there, but we recognize that power of grace. “My grace is sufficient for thee.” It’s enough, no matter what’s happening to you, and you recognize that by seeing that grace is made perfect in your weakness.

You can’t change this. You can’t even change your mind. You can’t let go. You can’t surrender. Recognize that’s surrender and don’t fight against it. And you can’t even stop thinking about it. “Well, that’s not surrender. I haven’t given up. I’m still thinking about it.” Right?

That’s because you can’t. “My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect.” And the fact that you can’t do a fucking thing to help yourself except bow again and again.

How long do you want me to go on? With you I might have to go on for 30,000 lifetimes,.

Right. That’s what it feels, like again and again, and it ain’t happening.

Yeah. And then you judge yourself, “Oh, I’m still doing this and it’s not working.” Again and again. That’s the recognition of your weakness. And that’s what the Lord said is the way it is. “My strength is made perfect in your weakness.”

But do you ever come out the other side of this? I mean, is this this going to be forever?

That’s not up to you. Why do you even think about that? It’s not your problem. You’re unable to do anything about it. Just stop thinking about it. You’re just obsessing. This is the program that’s running your whole life, beating the shit out of yourself every fucking moment, and I’ve known you long enough to say that. That’s what you can’t let go of ,beating the shit out of yourself. Stop that first, or keep recognizing that and let go of that. ” There I go again, again and again.”

Yeah. But you know, what makes that really hard is that, the fact that I am inadequate is being reinforced by so many other people and circumstances.

It has nothing to do with other people. Nobody said you’re inadequate. The Lord doesn’t say you’re inadequate.

Well, that was a euphemism for what I really feel like.

That was a what?

A euphemism for what I really feel like. What I feel like is that I’m useless.

Label it, “self evaluation.”

Yeah.

Again and again, and you’ll see all day long, that’s all you do to yourself is judge yourself harshly. Now that’s a program that’s running. That’s not you. That’s your training. That’s what you’ve been trained in, and that’s where you’ve lived most of your life, judging yourself harshly.

Is there really anything wrong with you? Are you really bad? No, you’re not bad. Like everybody else, you’re fucked up. Everybody’s fucked up. That’s what samsara is. That’s where they put us. That’s the prison they put us in here. We’re all fucked up. We’re all hating ourselves, hating others, using others, manipulating ourselves, manipulating others, grabbing onto this, pushing this away, afraid of this, wanting this, ashamed of this, blah-blah-blah. This is the world. This is the world we live in. Everybody’s doing this.

Yeah. But you know, it’s my inability to get to that good place that you’re talking about.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Stuff.

But the thing is…

That’s just judgment. Hello? Hello. Hello. Listen to yourself. You’re just fucking repeating the same shit over again. Different words. Same shit.

But it affects other people. It affects two kids.

Fuck other people change yourself first and everything will happen for other people. If you can’t change yourself, what chance do you think they can change themselves? Can anybody do this for you? No, you have to do it. You can’t do it for somebody else. Once you accept yourself, the vibe will change, totally. But you can’t fake it. It’s not something you can fake.

So how many times am I going to have to talk to you about this before it finally happens?

I don’t know. As soon as you’re finished, whenever you’re ready.

Okay.

Just keep noticing. If it’s hard for you to notice, why don’t you get a brick, and every time you notice that you’re beating yourself up mentally, drop that brick on your foot. And maybe you’ll notice it.. Maybe eventually you’ll, ” Okay. It’s enough.” But see, you don’t get enough torture in your mind. It’s never enough for you, but if you actually bang your head on the wall every time you caught yourself judging yourself, you would stop, because the minute you start judging, “That means I’m going to have to bang my head on the wall. I can’t do that. It hurts too much.”

So that’ll stop you. Put your hand on the flame, on the stove. Every time you find yourself judging, you’ll stop judging quick enough. You’ll notice it immediately. But right? It’s just too comfortable for you now. This is where you’ve lived your whole life. It’s so comfy. “Oh, I’m such a fuck up. And everybody look what I’ve done. My daughter and my grandson. It’s all my fault. I’m so fucked up.”

Listen, girl, somebody did it to you as well. You’re no worse or no better than anybody else. And they have their own karmas. If you want to help them, help yourself first, and then everything will change in your dynamic with them as you change how you treat yourself.

But you just don’t notice how hard, even now when we’re talking, you’re still thinking about, “How am I going to figure this out? I can’t do this.”

It’s going on in your head and you can’t stop. That’s what I’m saying, wake up. Drop a brick on your foot. After a couple of times, you’ll start to notice.

It doesn’t hurt enough. It’s too comfortable. You’re so identified with it. It’s so much Homebase for you. That’s why it’s so hard to stop. All of us. You’re not different than anybody else, and no worse and no better. We’re all in the same stew here. And this is the work we have to do.

I didn’t mean to take up so much time. I just realized that I’d take up a lot of time. Other people might have questions.

Fuck other people. They’re listening. They’re getting out of this too. This is more judging yourself. Oh, I’m not worthy. I took up too much time. Get over it. If I’m in charge here, if I didn’t want to talk to you, I’d just say, “Fuck off, go somewhere else. I’m finished with you.”

Did I say that? No.

Not yet.

Okay. So, fuck off. We’re finished. Really. You’re so hard on yourself. It’s really heartbreaking. And it breaks your own heart, too.

Yeah.

There’s a lot of pain in there, you know? And that pain is not yours. That was given to you by the world and by your upbringing and by your karmic predicament, and you, like the people before you just transmitted that. You had no choice. Now you have a choice. Now you have a choice. Now you can do something to lessen the energy that that program rips off from you all the time. But you’re too hard on yourself. You sit for two seconds, “Ah, this is not working, you know, I’ve been doing this for more than 50 years and nothing’s happened.” You know, it just goes on and on, and every time you do it, you actually believe that.

Maybe start to think of it as somebody else talking to you. What would you tell that person? You say, “Excuse me? Get the fuck outta here. Who do you think you’re talking to?” But no, because you just believe it. You accept it as if it’s true. It’s not true. It’s a program. It’s a reaction to the way the life you’re in the way you see it. You can change the way you see it, but not easy, but you can, and the longing to change is so strong in you, but the self hatred is just as strong.

And I always say this, that the way our parents saw themselves is very much the way we learn to see ourselves, not how they saw us so much, but how they saw themselves. We absorbed that view of that way of seeing ourselves the way they saw themselves. And so you absorbed that. They absorbed that. Their parents absorbed that. It goes back to, you know, whatever, back to whatever, there wasn’t a beginning.

So now just wake up. This is it. That’s a dream and it’s painful. It’s really painful. And it really, I’m not saying it’s not painful. It is painful. But yeah, the only thing you can do is to work on yourself and treat others as well as you can at this point in life. What’s done is done and what’s going to happen, hasn’t happened yet. So this is it, now.

Intellectually. I understand all this. It’s just.

Yeah. So now apply the understanding to actual practice and try to notice when you’re doing it to yourself again. I mean, you walk around all day long and you do it to yourself, and you don’t even notice that you’re spending all your time beating yourself up. And of course, these times make everything worse. There’s no question about it. It’s like injecting steroids into it. It’s just ridiculous. It makes everything so much harder to bear, so much more despair, but that’s also not you. That’s the whole world. The whole world is suffering like this. So, we’re absorbing that as well. Every time we look at the newspaper, every time we talk to somebody we’re getting the bad news. So it’s everywhere. It’s in the atmosphere. We’re breathing in and out.

Yeah, that doesn’t help because not only do I feel like I’m coming apart, but I feel like the whole country, at least is coming apart. Maybe the whole world is coming apart.

The whole world. Yes. It’s the whole world, the whole planet, and every level, socially, politically climate wise, everything falling apart. Everything. Right now, right here is all we’ve got. To do the best for other people, we have to be able to do the best for ourselves, too. And that would be in your case, trying to give yourself a break. It’s not easy.

Yeah.

Set a little alarm in the house. Every 20 minutes when it goes off, “Oh.” That will just get you out of your thought flow, which you’re completely immersed in all the time. That alarm goes off, it’s oh, so for 10 seconds you won’t be thinking about yourself. You set it again, and then for 20 minutes, you’ll be gone again till it rings. At least it’ll bring you back for a second. ” Oh, okay.” Don’t forget to hit the alarm and set it again, though.

Yeah. I mean, I spend most of my time actually worrying about the other people in my life, more than I spend beating myself up, although there’s plenty of that.

What does that help? What does that accomplish then? So why do it? It’s a habit and it’s another way of beating yourself up and making yourself feel bad. Concern can certainly be there because people are suffering. People are hurting and it breaks our hearts and it really hurts. And we don’t want it to be that way, but it is that way. So what can we do? We can release and let ourselves breathe and just let that stuff drip off of us, just drip out of us, just drain out of us. Whenever we remember, let it drain away. Just come back to your breath and let your body breathe, and relax and let that stuff drain away, and then you’ll forget, and then it will be built up again. Then as soon as you remember, just let it drain away. That’s huge. Don’t try to solve everything. Just let it drain off of you, drain out of you, and then you’ll do it again. No problem. But every time you allow that leaf to settle a little bit, just like a leaf falls from a tree, you know, so every time you go with that, it makes it easier and easier as time goes on.

Once in a while, you’ll laugh at yourself. “Am I doing this again? Am I still doing this to myself?”

At some point it looks so ridiculous. You can’t believe that you spend your whole life like this. That’s our situation. That’s what we do most of the time.

So, your practice can only be one thing, just letting go. And you can pray if you feel like praying. “Can’t you do something, God damn it?”

 I’ve tried that.

But you didn’t try it enough because they didn’t do anything. By grace, we’re saved. Faith. Isn’t something you manipulate yourself into. It’s something you recognize, you experience directly, and then it becomes real, and that happens by grace. And grace is always here, but we’re not tuned to it. You’re too busy, beating yourself up to even look for it. And when you do look it, you look for it with a chip on your shoulder. “Come on, where the fuck are you?”

What do you expect? You’ve got to let go. And it hurts. I know it hurts. It really does. But what are the options? Going on like this? That’s not an option.

Okay. You’re right.

Recognize the severity of the situation and the importance of this moment. This is the only time that you have to make a stand against these programs that have been running your life. This is it. When you take your last breath, you don’t want to be thinking, “Oh, if I only paid more attention, if I only let go. Why didn’t I let go?”

You don’t want to have that thought. So do it now while you can, because you can. It doesn’t mean doing more practice. It means being with what’s going on in a less obsessive, compulsive way, noticing how this is always going on. This can keep going. You don’t have to listen to it after a while. Eventually it just goes through. It doesn’t even grab you. You can’t stop thoughts.

Sometimes I notice that there’s a certain attachment to that feeling and that makes it hard to let it go.

To w hat feeling?

To the feelings of worry and…

Oh, absolutely. Totally. You’re totally identified. Not totally, but you’re mostly identified with all those thoughts and feelings. You actually believe them, and you feel them, and you think, “This is me. And this is the way I feel,” and you don’t recognize that the feelings are constantly changing, going and coming, rearranging. First it’s guilt. Then it’s fear. Then it’s anger. Then there’s despair. There’s not just one thing all the time, but for you, it’s just a big dark cloud, and you’re in it. You’re dancing around and you think this is the way it’s always going to be. But the cloud is not you, period. It’s just not. It’s an object of awareness. It’s an object of your consciousness. You’re aware of those feelings. That means there’s you. And there’s the feelings. But you’re like this with them right now. You think you are and so you are, but you’re not, really. But you think you are. And so that’s how you act. You identify with them. They are attached to those thoughts. You’re glued to them.

But if you look closely, you’ll see it’s something outside of you, these feelings. But the main thing is to just let go. Notice that you’re caught. That’s already letting go. It’s not, ” Okay,, I’m going to take it. I’m going to let go.” No, just noticing that you’re doing it to yourself again, means, at that instant, you’re not. You’re noticing that you are and that’s different, but you can’t hold on to that noticing. You can only re-notice, because by the time you’ve noticed that you’ve noticed, you’re not noticing anymore. You’re tripping out on the fact that you noticed and you’re trying to hold on. “Yes. I just noticed.” But it’s already back and doing it to you again. So, you have to keep noticing and at the same time, one thing I would do is, as many times as in the day that you remember, just sit down and allow the breath to settle. You can’t settle the breath. I’m not asking you to slow your breath down. I’m asking you to sit down and allow the breath to settle. Allow your body to relax. That’s all. And then get up and be stupid again. It doesn’t matter, but do that 50 times a day, a hundred times a day. Do it for just two minutes. Don’t try to hold on to it because you won’t be able to, and then you’ll be beating yourself up again, and that will go on forever again until it stops.

So, as many times as you feel, as you remember to do it, stop. Sit down and settle. “I can’t settle. This is stupid. I can’t do this. I’m not going to do this.”

Yeah. Just allow it to settle again and again, and those thoughts will just float off into space, which is where they are anyway.

And love means letting people be who they are. Our children and our grandchildren took these bodies. They brought their own karmas to those bodies. Those bodies themselves, are the creation of their karmas, and then with, and we were hosting them, and all we can do is the best we can do. There’s no more we can do, especially when we recognize how our weakness, our inability to do anything really. So, all we can do is the best we can do and pray for grace.

But you still have to clean out the vessel to hold the grace. That’s the slowing down. The dirt is your thoughts. The sludge is our thoughts and emotions and the grace can’t come into a cup that’s filled with that stuff. So slow down, let it go and allow yourself to feel okay sometimes. You’re allowed. There’s no law written. “Everybody except Diane can feel okay in the world. She is not allowed to do that.” That’s something that you were taught about yourself, way early. Could be even in the womb. You just don’t know. We absorb a lot of stuff even before we’re born from our parents. Because we’re there while they’re yelling and screaming at each other. We’re there while they’re depressed, while they’re drinking, while they’re fucked up. We’re in that. Our consciousness is there and we feel all that stuff.

So it’s not something you did. It’s just life. And so the more you learn how to give yourself a break, the more you have a possibility of allowing other people to do that for themselves as well. That’s about as much as we can do at this point.

Thank you.

Yeah. Good to see you. How’s the judge?

She’s good. She’s good. She’s painting all the time now, right? Yeah. She loves the solitude. I don’t do so well in solitude.

Well, that’s what you say, but you don’t know. It brings all this up and it’s a great time to do the work that you have to do.

Yeah.

Because tomorrow might be too late. Now. Today.

Yeah. And at this point in my life, I’m really aware of it. Tomorrow might be too late.

Well, don’t worry. You’ll have another chance, but now is now.

Okay. All right.

Take care.

Hi. I’m from London. Thank you, Krishna Das, for taking my question. Actually you’ve sort of answered a lot of it, really, with the lady just then. Well, first of all I found you by accident and I’ve been sort of following you now for the past, I don’t know, few months now, and I’ve started chanting and I realized there’s something coming from you, and I don’t know what it is. When I start singing, listening to your melodies, I start crying you know, and I’m not depressed or anything like that, but I just feel like this release, and even as you’re talking now, I know it’s not about you, it’s about the universe. I know. I feel like this sensations in my hands, a lot of vibration inside me you know. And I think I’m making progress. I’ve come from a very abusive background, you know, as a child, and I’ve done a lot of shit things really when I reflect back. But I was really tested by the universe on Thursday, and somebody cheated me out of 50 quid, which is about one $70 as well as, which not a lot of money, but then murderous rage I got towards this person. I’ve never, and I’m not a murderer, by the way, and I’ve never hurt anybody, but I can be really nasty with my tongue, you know.

I’ll keep that in mind.

Yeah no, but I just I have this really murderous rage, like inside of me.

Yeah.

And then I thought, “Okay just go with the feeling. Go with the feeling.” Exactly what you’re advising the last lady. And it did. It sort of by it went, you know, the intensity did go then the following day, but that day, you know. It’s just like telephone scam, it was, I got ripped off on that. You know, and then I don’t usually fall for that kind of stuff, but I did on this occasion, but it’s the reaction really. And it frightens me sometimes because they diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder about 10 years ago. And I just, you know, I have got into rages of people in the supermarket sometimes, and so I’ve never hurt anybody, but it can result to me calling somebody an “F-ing…” you know. I think I’m following a spiritual practice, but I’m not doing very well. I’m not doing very well here. Anyway, I’ve shared with my flatmate who lives with me here. And he’s so honest. And I said to him about this. He says, “Oh, I just choose light. I just choose love.” So he’s following Louise Hay. And I agree with that. But when that fucking intensity of the murderous horrible rage comes in, I cannot focus on light. And I’ve listened to Ram Dass, and Maharajji when he was sort of telling the story of “Love everybody and tell the truth.” if I had to be honest, I don’t hate everybody, but I hate the unjust people. I really have hatred towards them, but I know it’s not them. I know they’re just acting out of ego just as much as I am, but I think the answer is going to be the same as you gave to the last lady, really, but I really struggle with it and I sometimes worry, am I going to really lash out at somebody? I think there’s like a schizophrenia in me. I’m either, I can be a best friend or I can be your worst enemy, and I’ll be the worst enemy to the person I perceive to be unjust. And that’s it really thank you.

Well, you’re 51, but there’s still time, don’t worry.

Yeah.

To be an asshole. I mean, you know,. Yeah, we all have that stuff. Your flatmate: you step on his foot and see how much light and love he can find at that point. That’s bullshit. That’s just bullshit. You’re a thousand times more real than somebody who’s kidding themselves like that. You can’t talk yourself into this stuff. That’s not what it’s about. Be who you are.

So, a good practice for you, really would be to remember to treat other people the way you would like to be treated. So, even when you hate somebody, when somebody has been such a fucking asshole and they ripped you off, just switch places with them for a second, and you see, well, you know, “I wouldn’t want to be treated the way I’m thinking about treating this person. You know, and you’re not going to be able to do that, but just trying to remember to see it that way is really big thing. If we could do that, if we could treat other people the way we would like to be treated, this world would be a different place immediately. Right?

And all that anger, this comes from, you know, pain, being hurt. We’ve all been so hurt. All of our hearts. We’ve been so betrayed and we’ve been treated so badly by life that we really, that rage is our, it’s really our way of protecting ourselves from feeling how hurt we are. You know?

So, when you hear that chanting and stuff and those tears come, they’re coming out of love. They’re coming out of the feeling that “Yeah, I’m letting go. I can let go. I can just be me.” You know? And that’s a wonderful thing. Don’t think about whether you’re unhappy or you’re sad. What else can you do when you come home? Right? You finally recognize there is a home to come back to. The tears always come. That’s a good thing. And let yourself cry. Let them come. It’s pure. That cleans the mirror of your heart. It’s a beautiful thing. Really.

Just remember. And forget supermarkets. Supermarkets are where most people want to kill everybody else, anyway. That’s the craziest thing. It’s unbelievable. So, Yeah, just keep that in your thoughts. You know, keep the idea of treating, and the other thing is this, listen, don’t expect other people to respond to you that way. You’re not doing that in order to get other people to respond. You’re doing that because this is what you need to do, to treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Whether they respond and see you or not, that is not the deal. That’s not what it’s about. So don’t get upset when the world starts, all of a sudden, doesn’t put you on a pedestal and pour golden water all over you and lights come and everything. That’s not going to happen tomorrow. A little later, maybe. So just be you, man.

And so that’s it. First of all, there’s nothing else you can be. There’s no one else you can be. So let’s make this the best you that you can be, which is fine because that’s already in there and it’s buried under all this stuff. And when we open up like that, when the chant, we hear the chant or something, it washes our souls. It washes our hearts. That’s a good thing.

Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming today. I’ll speak to you soon.

Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. Be well.

Hi. I’ve talked to you about this a little bit before, and you touched on this a lot earlier, but specifically what I wanted to talk to you about was my brother. He’s been going through a dark night of the soul since about the time he was 20 years old and he’s been on and off the street with schizophrenia and this year with COVID, we didn’t know where he was a lot of the time and it was extra scary at times, of course. And you know, I just really, I was really focused on opening my heart and praying for him, and in July he emerged and we were able to get him into a supportive housing situation, but time and time again, that only lasts for so long, and then he’s off running again. And the past few years it’s fallen to me to really oversee his care when he does emerge and try to help him. And I feel okay. I know there’s only so much I can do, and chanting and all these practices have been really beautiful and helpful in helping me, you know, remind me that, do what you can do and then let it go. Do what you can do for the day, if you’re in contact with him, and let it go.

You talked in the beginning about being out on the lawn and not being able to find the door or find the key. And so I think I have these moments of intense sadness when I think that, because of his karmic situation and having grown up with him and seeing what a good little boy was, and how sweet, and just knowing that he may never even have the knowledge of rightful action or the sense, I guess you could say, to have that opportunity to practice. I don’t know if Maharajji ever spoke specifically about the mentally ill and the fact that they can’t, there’s not that availability of choice, you know, to them the way it is to maybe, to other people. So I just felt like I kind of wanted to ask you about that a little bit. You know?

You know, why things are the way they are, we don’t know. Why some people suffer the way they suffer, we could never understand why that happens that way, why a child gets sick and dies. What did they do? You know? Why did that happen? It’s above our pay grade and we just can’t see it and understand it. So that leaves us with ourselves, and what can we do in the moment to lessen the suffering?

Every relationship has two or more people. So, there’s your brother and you, and every time you interact with your brother, he’s being himself and you’re being yourself. So all your feelings are interacting with his feelings. So, the best thing you can do is to stay as open, as loving, and as present with him as possible in those moments. And some part of him will feel that. And that’s a wonderful thing you can do. You can’t make him take his meds. You can’t make him go to the doctors. Those are the things you just can’t do. But what you can do is hold him in your heart in a certain way, and love him as he is, as he really is. Love his soul, so to speak. And see him that way. Hold him that way in your heart. And then your interactions with him have the possibility, maybe in some way, of helping him inside. But more than that, you can’t do. And you should try not to be destroyed by your own sadness about the situation, because you’re sending that to him too, in your relationship.

You can’t fake it. Okay? I’m not saying that you should fake it and you know, “Just don’t show that you’re sad.” No, this is your work every day, your spiritual practice is to hold him in your heart, and when you notice that you’re feeling sad or wishing it wasn’t like this, and “wish we could do that,” let go and love him as he is. There’s a soul in there that’s perfect, but it’s surrounded encased in suffering. So, the more you see him as a soul, then you’re not identifying with the suffering part of him and maybe that’s going to help him a little bit. It’s certainly going to help you, because you don’t want to carry this burden. It’s not your burden to carry like that. But you want to carry him in love and you have to let yourself feel that, too, and the sadness. This is what you can do, I guess. I mean, it’s very hard. You have to let people be who they are. There’s nothing you can do.

Yeah. I have so much love for him that I feel like it’s part of, like I’m partnering with him. I don’t know. I mean, he is my sibling. He’s my younger brother. So it’s hard not to feel like that intensely about it.

Yeah. All feelings are okay. It’s all okay. All the feelings you have are okay.

Thank you for reminding me of some of those things.

Yeah, just hold him in your heart and send him love and be with him. Hold him. You know, be with him in your own heart, soul to soul, not “stuff to stuff.” Okay?

Yeah.

Practice is so important because we plant those seeds of what we want to grow with our practice, and I don’t mean, it doesn’t mean just meditation practice or chanting practice. It means caring about people, caring about ourselves, caring about the world and offering kindness and compassion to everyone that comes into our lives. But if we don’t plant those seeds, in those moments that get very difficult, like this moment in the world, there’s very little we can do. When you jump out of a window, you know, that’s it, until you hit the ground. When you trip, once you’re falling, you can’t stop yourself. You have to hit the ground. Then you can get up. I guess jumping out a window is a little bit different. Okay. We’re talking about tripping here. So now’s the time to plant the seeds of the kind of qualities that we want. We want to be kind and compassionate to people, but if we hate ourselves, what is that? How can we be kind? I mean, we can try, but it’s not real enough, you know? The more we’re in it with ourselves, that extends to other people.

So that’s why they always say, do practice while you can, because when the shit hits the fan, it’s very hard to do it. When that rage comes, there’s nothing you can do except let it pass through like a huge storm. You can’t stop it, but you can also hold on to a tree so you don’t get blown away, but you can’t stop it. But if you keep remembering to try to see people. In a certain way and to treat them in a simply good way, the way you would like to be treated, those storms will arise less and less, and when they do arise, they won’t be as strong as they usually are. Over time, they get less and less, but it takes patience.

Patience is one of the ways that we can be good to ourselves, be patient with ourselves. We don’t have it together. We know that, okay? We know that. So as time goes on, we’ll get together. So, patience with ourselves is a way of being kind to ourselves and that patience can extend to other people. “Don’t they fucking get it? Why are they acting like this?” You know? That’s not patience. That’s saying, “I guess they don’t fucking get it. Oh, well.” You know? And we can apply that to ourselves, too, when we’re really stuck in something.

So, you know, I’ve been doing this stuff for 50 years or more, and every day is part of the deal. I mean, there’s no time off, you know? This is our life. This is our taking our lives in our hand, the reins of our lives in our hands and trying to direct it in the direction we want to go, toward what we want, which is love now, love for everyone, love for ourselves all the time, 24, 7 from ever. Forever and always. That’s where love is, always. And that lives within us right now, but it’s covered up and we’re not looking. So when we try to hold others in our heart, we’re really learning where our heart is and how to do that. When we try to treat other people with kindness and respect, and we’re learning how to do that for ourselves too. And that’s really important, .

Hello.

 Thank you for taking my question. I’m feeling very shy, but mostly I just really wanted to express my gratitude for Thursday nights. My life circumstances found me kind of suddenly living alone in March. So it’s just been me, my cat and my ego for a lot of the time. And Thursday nights have been this refuge and I’ve shown up every Thursday. I don’t know why I just said that. Yeah. I’ve been noticing that my voice is getting stronger. Okay. That’s my cat.

Where’s your ego? Can I meet that one, too?

Yeah. My traps tend to be mental, so it’s easy to get kind of, into these ruts, but I find that on Thursday nights, it’s sometimes it’s the first time I’ve opened my mouth in two days. Yeah. I’ve had a pretty monastic year and my voice just comes out craggy and harsh and then after about a half hour, there’s no time and I can just go forever.

Yeah. Good. Very good.

Yeah. So thank you. Thank you.

Hi. Well, first of all, I just wanted to say that I see everybody and it’s really cool to just be in a space with so many other people. I know, I can’t see many people’s faces right at this moment, but that’s pretty cool. Okay. So the other day I was going to get something out of my closet and I I like, reached up and I was like, “Oh shit, I’m going to die,” like someday, not at this moment, but someday, and I had this experience that I’m kind of used to by now, but I, for some reason, it just shocks me every time, where I realize I’m going to die and I get really real weird, like I’m totally not in the normal realm of being, and I feel, you know, my mom came and was like, “Hey, like what the fuck is going on?”

And I was like, “Well, this is what happened.”

And she was like, you know, “You breathe through it and you’ll get through it and you’ll go past it.”

But sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t go past it and I should experience it. But I don’t know. I was just having that feeling that maybe I shouldn’t be like so afraid of feeling that way, because it’s just now that I began to really feel that way and not try to run away from it, at least.

Well, you know, one of the major, most important meditations in Buddhism is the the meditation on death, the awareness of the imminence of death. I hate to tell you this, but you are going to die. And all of these nice people you’re looking at. Computers might still be here, but there won’t be anybody looking into it.

Right.

Yeah. Everybody comes and goes. That’s the deal. So, really serious, heavy duty practitioners. There’s a whole meditation on the awareness of the imminent nature of death, because that makes you feel more alive and gives you, it changes your perspective on things. It wakes you up. How are you spending your time? You know? Moping around? Why not use the time better? Why not feel better? Then you develop these practices to try to release yourself from the dream that you live in most of the time.

And you’re kind of young. So having those experiences could easily be seen as the fruition of spiritual practice that you’ve done in a previous life and now that awareness is coming here in this life, because it’s some work you’ve already done and it’s going to change the way you go through your day. It’s going to make this life more precious and more real and you’ll be more present. If you know that everybody around you is going to die and you’re going to die and you see, why aren’t people happier? You know? Why are they wasting their time? Why are they getting busy getting more and more stuff when you can’t take it with you? They say, the only thing you can take with you when you leave the body is your state of mind. And so that’s the most important thing to work on, is one’s state of mind, how long it goes through one’s day.

And so, you’re a musician. You want to bring as much of your self into the music. So right now you’re learning techniques. Everybody needs techniques, whether it’s meditation techniques or music or scientific techniques, and once you learn those techniques, what you use them for, that’s what’s really interesting.

Right.

How do you use the techniques to transmit what you’ve learned about yourself?

So it’s like a learning tool.

For sure. It’s a waking up tool, an awareness tool. Yeah, absolutely. But you need to pay attention because of who you are in this life right now, that little bubble of awareness, that experience might trigger some emotional responses, too, which would be not so pleasant. That’s not the point of the meditation practice, right? In Buddhism, for instance, there’s compassion and there’s impermanence. Impermanence is the fact that everything’s always changing. Everybody’s going to die. Everything that’s lives will die. Everything’s changing, and compassion is cultivating kindness and love and caring.

So the Dalai Lama says to Westerners, especially, “Mostly spend time with the compassion, kindness practice, because if we spend too much time with the emptiness and impermanence practice, because we’re so emotionally out of balance all the time, we can get depressed and get stuck in a hard place.”

So it’s better not to dwell so much on that until you’ve developed the real, what they call Bodhi Chitta, which is this feeling of kindness and compassion for everyone and one’s self.

But still you’re having those experiences. They’re coming. You’re not asking for them. So be with them. Allow them to be there. Don’t be afraid. But if you notice that it’s making you depressed, then you need to try to counter that a little bit. The experience is not negative in any way, I don’t think.

Right.

But our egos, our emotional shape can be jarred by that, you know, and excited by that, and then we just get unhappier and that’s not the point of that.

Right.

Because it’s reality. Everyone who’s ever existed since the beginning of time has left the body at some point or other.

It can get worse

Okay. It can’t get worse. Everybody’s gone, but of course they come again, but that’s a whole other story. But allow that feeling to make you more compassionate for people who don’t know that. Right? Really. And you can cultivate that compassion and recognize, “Oh, there’s so many people don’t understand. They keep on just getting more and more stuff. And what good is it? It’ll never make them happy anyway.”

So just naturally, that feeling of caring about other people will arise from that experience, but because we are so emotional, don’t let it make you unhappy.

Right.

Don’t let it make you depressed, because there’s that possibility of that happening. If that happens, you’ve got to talk yourself down, you know. “Oh, wait a minute. This is not something to be depressed about. This is something that’s waking me up to be more kind and more open and more living right now in everything that I do.”

Yeah. I think that for a long time I felt like I had that feeling that I was going to die and like be dead, and then I built a lot of like, structure of emotion, like you were saying, around it. And then once I started, really when I started like doing some yoga, I would realize that all of a sudden, like the anxiety was less, like the excess was like going away, but I was reaching like maybe like the root feeling. And then I started having this feeling more often. It jumps up on me and I’m like, whoa.

Yeah. So let me ask you, so when you say, when you get that feeling that you’re going to die do you ,have fear at that moment? Is there some fear that comes up a little?

I think what happens, the first reaction is like an understanding, like the first thing is like a, whoa. Then of course, right after that, it’s just complete fear, and it’s like truest of fears for me.

Yeah. So that’s ego fear, right? Because no one dies. The soul is not born nor does it die. It doesn’t come and go. The soul is eternal, so to speak. Bodies come and go. But there’s no dead beings. There’s dead bodies, but beings don’t die. They just take off this set of clothes and they put on another set of clothes. When we really have that understanding. I mean, not just here, but if we know that then of course we don’t worry about it, but that feeling of the fear is, that’s ego. The ego is afraid of it’s possible not existing anymore, but it doesn’t even exist in the first place. It’s just a bunch of thoughts, but it thinks it’s real. But you’re always going to be here. Actually. There’s nowhere you can go. That’s why spiritual practice is so cool, because it brings us back, it pulls us out of the past, pulls us out of the future and brings us right here, which is where we’ll always be. Even if you left the body now, you would still be able to say to yourself, where am I? And the answer would be here. You’ll always be here. There’s nowhere you can go. Bodies come and go, but the soul, the awareness within us does not diminish nor does it get more. It’s always as it is. It’s perfect.

So when you have that fear, sit with it. Don’t push it away. Just like, “What is this? What is this fear? What am I afraid of? What am I afraid of?” You know? And then see what comes up. Don’t let it push you around if you can. So be aware of it, you know, but of course in those moments, it’s very hard, obviously, because once you say, “Whoa,” you know, you’re already in it, but then you’re still here, even though it’s happening. So you can always like, “Okay, what is this?”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, at the beginning of World War II, he said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Right.

When you’re in that fear, it’s really scary.

Yeah.

But it comes and goes. It’s nothing in itself. It’s just the feeling. So when you’re in that feeling, there’s very little, you can do except just be with it and watch it disappear, come and go.

Yeah, so write songs about it.

That’s what they all say.

Write songs about it.

Yeah.

Or poems to yourself. Not for other people necessarily. But just speaking about it to yourself will actually, you develop a relationship with it where it doesn’t overpower you all the time, that fear. But even so, it’s nothing to be afraid of. You don’t need to be afraid of fear. It’s just another feeling, although when you’re in it, it’s hard to think that.

Yeah. as Meher Baba, the great Saint, once said, “Don’t worry. Be happy.”

That’s what he said. Easy for him. But don’t worry. Be happy.

Well, I won’t. I decided now, I’m never going to worry again.

Don’t lie to me, but good luck. All right, sweetheart. Bye-bye.

So I had a question. I’m pretty new to these practices and this tradition, to some of the statues and some of the things that you put maybe on your altar and some of the practices, and so, I was in a training and it was suggested to put a picture of Neem Karoli Baba and others, and I kind of had a real resistance to this just because other than listening to you, Krishna Das, I don’t know him. I don’t have any experience with it. And so my response was, well, “Why would I put that on my altar? I don’t have any connection with that yet.” And…

Why would you even have an altar?

I like candles.

Put it on top of the TV and light a little candle there.

So I guess my question is, you know, how much of this can we just kind of make it up and what works for us and how much is, you know, tradition regarding specifically maybe a statue of Hanuman or a picture of this or a picture of that. And then how do we be true to ourselves in that, in terms of what really speaks to us?

No, listen, other people might tell you something else, but since you asked me, don’t, it’s not like, we’re not playing dollies here. You know, murtis are not dollies for us to play with. Pictures of the Saints are not like porn we’re supposed to use to get off. Do what feels right to you.

You have to develop your own path, your own relationship with yourself and whatever helps you overcome, do some practice and overcome your own, you know, obstacles and stuff in your own heart, that’s what you should do. Don’t listen to people. Don’t listen to anybody. Even me. Just listen to your own heart and what works for you. Don’t make anything up. Don’t try to manipulate yourself into feeling something. That’s crazy. Why would you do that? Just be you. That’s what it’s all about. And you’ll find out more about yourself and more about who you are, and you’ll eventually you’ll go deeper into yourself and things will start to feel natural that didn’t feel natural before. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need pictures. You don’t need murtis. You are the murti. Inside of you is the living god. Just as you are inside, is the living presence. Real love lives inside of you right now. All those other things are tools. They’re like mirrors to help us see a deeper part of ourselves. But if we think it’s just like a little Dolly, that’s not going to help. So forget it. But if you want to read more about Maharajji, there’s a number of books about him. So you get an idea of why people are attracted to him in the first place, because that’s the main thing.

So, there’s a list on my website somewhere of the books, about Maharajji and some other books that I like, and there’s available on krishnadasmusic.com, a link to a book of stories about Maharajji for free, a free download. That’s a lot of Indian stories, so there’s lot of Indian names. So if you’re not too familiar with names it might be hard. But they’re great stories and that’s free. So you can just take a look at that, and then Ram Dass wrote a book called “Miracle of Love” about Maharajji. So, there’s things out there, and that’s also spiritual practice. That is called satsang, hanging out with spiritual beings. When you read about these great beings and you see how they lived in the world or how they saw other people, what they did, and it starts to affect you very deeply. You see what might be possible in life, but it’s not about playing with dollies. Screw it. Forget that stuff, you know, until and unless it makes sense to you, then you do it. Otherwise, don’t feel manipulated by other people. You go through some training and they say, “Oh, you have to put this picture up and now light a candle.” Why the fuck would you light a candle? Go watch TV. Just be yourself. If you try to be something else, you’re not going to be successful. You have to be you. It has to be natural. It has to be what you want. That’s the deal, as far as I see it right now.

Thank you, and I have one follow-up question, if that’s okay. You know, we practice together. We’ll sing together. I’m not very good at singing, but he’s really great at singing, and that’s wonderful at times, and then at other times you know, I guess for myself, I like to sit by myself and do my own practice, and I don’t know if there’s anything, suggestions on doing practices together or separate, or if it matters at all.

It’s up to you, whatever works for you, but be honest with yourself and each other. Don’t do it with him because you think he needs you to, or he wants you to or you’ll hurt his feelings if you don’t. You have to be honest, you know, and that’s in your relationship and honest with yourself. If you’re trying to do something to please somebody else and it’s driving you crazy, what good is it? So be open about it. Talk about it all. If he can’t do it by himself, fuck him you know?

Yeah. And if you can’t do it by yourself, you have to learn. Ultimately we’re doing it by ourselves. Sometimes it helps in a group, because there’s more people doing it. You’re helping each other remember. When you are being quiet and distracted, he’s singing and so that might pull you back, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s all okay. Play with it. it’s not like Catholic school, for Christ’s sake. This is just real life. There’s no nuns going to hit you over the hand with a ruler if you don’t do it right. Just find your way. You have to. The whole thing is to find your own way.

Yeah, it’s all good. All right.

I don’t know if I have a question, but it’s not a specific question. It’s just reaffirming myself that, you know, like when I was little, I used to talk to Allah, as in God, and all of those, and then I grew up and then last summer I told you I was listening to Ram Dass, and then this is, this whole thing started, and I realized meditation is very important for me. And I started doing meditation and I’m reading books and all of those, and I know you said just before, like you actually almost answered my question when you were talking to the other person. You said it’s what you feel is right for you. I just want to know that, if there’s anything else, if you have any suggestion, you know, like I want to be a better person and live a conscious life and then just be in the best possible shape to help others. Do you think, is there anything else I can do to make sure that I am, I’m having good intentions and I’m doing what is supposed to be done?

Well, everything you said is a beautiful aspiration, you know, it’s a wonderful idea to be helping people, serving people. Maharajji never told us to meditate. He never told us to think about ourselves. He said, “Love everyone. Serve everyone. Remember God.”

So you do a little practice. You do a little japa. You repeat the name, but you think about other people. And if you weren’t thinking about yourself all the time, if we weren’t thinking about ourselves all the time, we wouldn’t be wondering whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing. We’d just be doing it. There is no right thing or wrong thing. And you will find your path as you take a step forward. The more steps you take, the more you find your path it’ll feel right or it won’t feel right. It’ll feel right for a while, then it won’t. So you change. That’s okay. It takes a little bit of courage, but it’s okay.

There’s no mistakes. You learn from things, always learning. That’s all. But your aspiration to help people is exactly what’s required. But how to do that? So you have to find out the best way you can do that. Now, you know, Mother Teresa, when she, a new person would come to work with her in Calcutta, and they worked in the slums with the poorest people, sickness, disease, death, she said, “If you don’t find joy here, you have to leave.” Joy in the service. Right? It’s not about sacrificing and “My broken heart. I give you everything to try to help.”.

You know, that’s just a load of shit.

Yeah.

You can feel joy in the service while you’re working with the most suffering. So that takes great strength and great inner wisdom. So as you move forward in your life on your path, you’ll see what keeps you centered, what allows you to be able to give yourself more fully, and you have to do those things in order to serve others. One has to be strong, also. We can’t be destroyed by the things we’re trying to serve. Otherwise. What good is it? Right? So it’s both things.

Right.

But yeah, like I say, Maharajji never encouraged us to think about ourselves. You know? Serve others. Think about others. That’s not so easy, but because we have these tendencies to deny our own goodness and not let ourselves feel okay, and that’s not good. That’s not healthy. We can feel okay even when we’re dealing with terrible suffering and disastrous situations. We can feel that we’re okay. We’re doing the best we can for whoever’s there, but don’t push yourself, okay? Just be you. Let it arise. Let it unfold. It’s it’s wonderful thing. Let it happen. Let life come to you. You don’t have to go out and look for it. You’re already in it.

It’s like Sharon Salzberg was saying, one of her teachers said, “Okay, I want you to close your eyes and sit there, and I want everybody to touch space.” Right? So everybody in the room will go like this, you know? And he laughed. He said, “You’re already touching space just being here.” You’re already touching. You’re in space. So you’re in your life already. It’s going on. So allow it to go on in the best way that you can, but it’s not about right and wrong and what’s the best thing. “What should I do? What should I do?”

You won’t know until you do it, if it’s right or wrong, if it works for you, and you’re the only one who’s going to know. Nobody can tell you unless you happen to run into a real Saint and they can tell you, and then you’ll know, but that’s not every day.

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you.

It might not even be every life. Okay?

Okay.

All right. Take care. I’ll speak to you soon. Bye.

 Hi Krishna Das, I’m glad to be here. Hi. I’ve been following you for about a year now, and I’ve done a lot of exploring, and for my question, I continually come up against this and I’m hoping you might be able to give me a little bit of insight, and that is in relation to, I don’t want to cry, I guess how it relates to karma. I kind of wrote it down a little bit. So for the most part, my life has been what most people would describe and what I would describe as pretty good, no real physical danger, no emotional traumas that I’m consciously aware of anyway, and then we see people that are just not so lucky and not privileged in this way.

I just wonder like, how can I process How can I process that? Like how can I not ask, “Why them? Why not me? How can I accept this entire premise of karma and its perceived unfairness, really? How can I trust it’s justness from a position of privilege, essentially?

Well, first things first, you can’t help anybody if you’re going to be destroyed by it, by other people’s suffering. You can’t carry water to somebody if you can’t walk.

And you mentioned that a little bit earlier, so I did catch that.

Yeah. So that’s where you should start, you know, these emotional reactions that you’re having, all they do is cripple you. Why you have them, why you were born where you were born to whom you were born and what situation you were born, and why other people were born in different situations, we don’t know, and we’ll never know, but if we’re going to help other people, we have to be strong. We have to have real strength, inner strength, and that means we can’t be destroyed by our own emotional issues. Your emotional issues are not other people’s emotional issues.

There’s a difference between compassion and emotion. Compassion brings strength. It brings will. It brings power. It brings help to other people. It brings everything.

But these kinds of emotions just cripple us and they cripple our will and we don’t do anything, and we can’t do anything because we’re wondering “Why is this like this? And I have this, and I’m ashamed that I have this and I have that.” This is just stuff you need to let go of if you’re going to ever be of any use to anybody else.

So, all those questions of why and what, and if, and who cares. They’re not questions for us to answer. If you want to help somebody, you have to develop the ability to do that. And that means working on yourself, because right now we’re so limited in what we can do for anybody, because we’re carrying such a heavy burden of our own stuff with us. We can’t carry anything else for anybody else. I think we should just stay with that part of it.

I remember when I first got to India and seeing the way people lived and seeing so much poverty and so much hunger, the thing that I was struck, more than anything else, is that those people were thousand times happier than I was and they had a million times less than I had, and that was a wake up call.

So I’m not saying that’s an excuse you can use to yourself, but, and of course it’s not always true and you don’t wish suffering on anyone, but you’re wishing suffering on yourself right now with all these emotional issues that you’re dealing with. And they’re preventing you from actually reaching out to the people who could use help.

Yeah, this is what we do to ourselves. We make up stories that cripple us, and then we moan and groan. You know, what else do we do? That’s what we do with our lives. We make up stories and beat the shit out of ourselves and we moan and groan and don’t do anything. So we got to get over that. So spiritual practice is required, calming the mind, practicing letting go of the stories when we notice that we’re doing that, developing some kind of practice, some ability to pay attention, some ability to calm down. That’s very important, to be where you are. This is very important. And to stop believing everything we think about it all. If you didn’t think these things, if you didn’t tell yourself this story about yourself and the world to yourself, where would it be? Nowhere. And neither would you be bound by it at that point. You’d be free and in that freedom, you’ll be able to do so much to help others.

And of course, these times, once again, it’s very true, these times are really hard, and each one of us is pressured and it’s like a weight that’s on us. We don’t even know what it is. It’s not ours. It’s the world. Everybody in the world is whoa. It’s really heavy. So it brings out the worst in us. It brings out this dark stuff that we don’t even know is there. We can’t even recognize it most of the time, but it brings it out. So on one hand, it’s a great time to practice, because it makes it so apparent what’s going on. So you don’t try to push these feelings away. You don’t try to kill them. You allow them to be, and you just keep letting, go letting it go, letting the breeze, letting the breath, just wash it away again and again. It comes back again and again. It comes back. This is the dedication we make to our own wellbeing, and since we are all one, part of one body, if we help ourselves, we help others, too, and we create those possibilities.

So, start where you are, but don’t push yourself, right? Just be where you are and let go of all this stuff, the stories, little by little, and see what happens, see how you feel.

Hi. You know, when you were just talking just now, you were talking about how there’s this weight that, you know, everybody is kind of experiencing right now, and my question, I guess, without getting too specific, is how do you deal with traumatic situations that may trigger your emotions? I mean, the problem for me is that I’m going through something right now that is really scary to me and I just keep getting caught in the fear, and I believe my fear, you know, and I can get into these moments where, if I’m chanting and I’m like, right before, you know, when you were talking, it just, I could feel it draining out of me, but I’m driving everybody in my family crazy because I keep going, what’s that?

It’s probably a very short drive.

Yeah. Maybe so. You know, because I’m constantly meditating and chanting, which has made me making everybody you know, not constantly cause I have to work and I do other things, but I think I’m obsessively chanting, maybe, and obsessively saying the Hanuman Chalisa and things like this to try to control my fear. I don’t know. I’m like, what do I do? It’s hard for me to drain the fear all the time because my mind is telling me something that I’m believing and there’s some reality in there, you know?

Let’s not overthink it.

Okay.

From what you say, it seems like the fear, whatever the cause of the fear is, I don’t know, but that the fear is actually, it’s pushing you to do all this practice and it’s making you very tense and there’s no space in it at all for you to be you. As far as practice goes, I think it would be better if you did one really good Chalisa where you really were present with it, one of them, rather than a 40 million where you’re like all scattered and running around the day, “I’m going to do a Chalisa between going to the bathroom and washing the dishes.” You know? Do one good one and that will carry you through a lot.

If there’s any way you can get some help with someone you could talk to about the issues you’re going through, the nuts and bolts of them, why not? And you can do that online with people. There are therapists and counselors available to talk with us 24 -7 these days, anytime of the day or night. I would look into that because it sounds like there’s something that’s being, you know, some button that’s been pushed and it got stuck in for some reason, and it’s not releasing. So, maybe would be helpful to talk about it. Couldn’t hurt.

It’s the fear that’s making you like, “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram, Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram. I’m not gonna allow myself to think think, cause I don’t want to do that.” That’s no use. So it’s better to watch TV, watch some good movies. Go back and watch Sesame Street again, you know, it’s probably been a few years. Do something nice. Do something fun. But there’s no way to fight with those emotions when they’re right on you. It’s, you’re surrounded by a cloud of it and you can’t really push it away nor can you get away. You know?

So it’s not easy to say, you know. Sit with the fear, you know, and look at it. It’s not like you have to, “Okay, I’m going to look at the fear. I’m too afraid to look at the fear.” But you just, “What is it? What am I afraid of? What is this? What’s going on?”

And then, like I said, really, counseling therapy is very useful in these situations. And again, in these times we’re so compressed, you know, and pressed down with the pressure of the fear in the world. That makes it really hard to let go and to relax. So try to find a way to be a little easier with yourself, you know. Just find a way to relax a little bit, you know. Go for a run. Go for a walk. Wear a mask. You know, find a way to release some of the pressure. You know, it’s like the pressures got stuck in there and you somehow have to release it. So constantly going around, like, “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram,” that’s not going to help. That just makes more pressure.

I know. I know you’re right.

Yeah. I may be. I may not be, but whatever. If it sounds good to you, I’ll take it. That’s enough. Yeah. But take it easy on yourself, and whatever the specific cause of your fear is, if there is a specific cause, that’s getting injections of steroids from the amount of fear in the world. So even though you think of it as “my fear,” it may not be, actually. It may just something you tripped and fell into. It could be somebody in your family has it, unspoken, unaware that you’re absorbing from them, but you wouldn’t absorb it unless you needed to, in a way, unless you had some of it yourself.

There’s so much things going on, whatever it is, who gives a shit, let it go. You know? And don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about your feelings. There are no wrong feelings. Okay? Every feeling has a cause. Whether you need to find out the exact cause of the feeling or not, who knows? You can also just release again and again, and that kind of breaks the cycle of the glue that holds us to those feelings, but it’s not instant. It’s something that develops over time.

Have you read the books about Maharajji or anything like that?

Yes, I love Maharajji. I read Miracle of Love and I’m reading The Near and the Dear right now, and I watched, you know, the Maharajji film, Windfall of Grace the other night. So I just love him.

Well, talk to him and ask him to get his shit together.

I do. I’m like, you know, I’m sure he’s “ Oh, it’s her again.”

Yeah, it’s her again and again and again.

Yeah, no. So I do get a lot of comfort in that way and yeah.

That’s good, well, talk to him. Tell him, “Baba, what’s going on here? You know, what is this? Can’t you do something about this? You know, what is this? Why do I have this?” Speak to him and then listen. What comes up from inside? And you’re not alone. You’re never alone. Believe me. Nobody’s alone.

Yeah. Thank you.

Be well. Okay, next victim.

So I think you’ve answered my question throughout the session. Thank you so much, but I’ll just give you some background. So I come from a tiny country called Lebanon. If you’ve heard of it, you might have heard that…

I think we’ve heard of it. Lebanese food is actually the best in the world. We ate at a Lebanese restaurant in Paris, and I would move. I would wash the floors of that place just to be able to eat there every day. The best.

Yeah. So I actually, you might have also heard of the Beirut explosion that killed many people.

Yes. Yes.

So I don’t live there now. I’ve been living in a different country for around six years now, but my country is now going through a very tough time. There’s an economic collapse and the aftermath of the explosion is just bad. It’s only my mom living there now. So honestly I have big plans for myself. Now I’m turning 30 soon. I have big plans for myself. I want to go back and try to fix my country. My country is basically drowning in corruption. I want to use my thirties to try to prepare myself as much as possible to go back and try to, you know, try to fix things as much as I can before I die. So I was wondering if you have any advice for someone who’s going to be 30 soon. And what would you advise me to focus on specifically? If you have any advice, please. Thank you.

Temper your exuberance with a little reality. The world’s pretty fucked up. Your country is arguably just, if not more fucked up at the moment, than a lot of other places, but the whole world’s going crazy right now. And this is probably not the best time to try to change things. I would definitely wait until the virus works its way through and it’s no longer the most, the one thing that you can’t get away from. You don’t want to die of COVID before you get home. So you want to take care of yourself also, and then whatever you can do to relieve suffering, you’ll be able to do.

But it’s hard times in the world. And I don’t know, you know, I don’t know anything about you, what capabilities you have, what connections you have. So I can’t, I wouldn’t talk to that, but whatever you want to do for others, you also have to do for yourself. You know? One time this group of politicians came to the temple and were talking to Maharajji about their green revolution, back in the early seventies. Maharajji said, “What green revolution? What are you talking about? You assholes. Do you make it rain?” You know? “Can you do that? Can you make it rain? What can you do? We’re human beings. Those things come from God.”

In the old days, traditionally they would do these fire ceremonies and make offerings to the devas in order to bring about rain and good sun and, you know, then good crops and stuff like that. So he says to them, “You’re not making any offerings. Where’s the rain going to come from?”

And many years ago, there was a very great Yogi who came to America. His name was Shiva Bala Yogi, and he was really big time, and he was in California and I was visiting there. And in those days in California, there was a terrible drought, right? Really bad. So this guy comes and says, you know, said, “Yogiji, Swamiji, you know, there’s such a terrible drought. What can we do about this?”

And he says, “Oh, simple.” He didn’t really know. He hadn’t been in America a long time. He said, “You know that drilling they’re doing out in the bay for oil? Well, they’re pissing off the Nagas, and that’s why you have this drought now. Just ask the government to stop drilling and then you’ll have all the rain you want.”

So I don’t know. You could be somebody who can talk to the gods and make those offerings, but more than likely, you’re just like the rest of us. So do what you can do. Take care of yourself too. That’s all. Be careful and remember that it’s not so easy to change the world.

You know, way back in seventies, somebody came to Maharajji and said, “Oh, Baba, you know, the world is in such bad shape.” In ’71? ’70? Really? “Such bad shape. I wish there was a king, like Janaka.” He was a great king in India and he was considered to be a Saint and a king, also. Like a realized being and as well as a king. So this guy says to Maharajji, “I wish there was a king like Janaka, you know, to run the world and make it work right.”

Maharajji said, “There’s a king much greater than Janaka. There is a king.”

Now, I don’t know. I’m just repeating the words. So if there is a king and things are the way they are, all we can do is the best we can do. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do, but don’t drive yourself crazy and destroy yourself trying to make something right that’s not yours to make right. Do what you can do, the best you can do. Right? Might be one soul at a time. Politics is really dangerous. And you know, politicians don’t really want the best for everybody. That’s not why they’re politicians. Mostly. There’s a few good ones. So don’t be naive and still do the best you can.

Thank you so much.

All right. And all the best.

Thanks.

I’m fairly new to chanting, but I feel like it’s been a lifetime of getting to this point and I’ve embraced it a hundred percent and I understand everything and I’m I just, yeah, I’m right there. So thank you so much for what you do and how you share that with people and the stories and everything, and it’s just, it’s touched my heart in such a way. I could go on, but anyway, listen, I have a question and it’s more of a concern, really. I was listening to a web cast the other night. You may know the guys, they are a couple of Swedish twins and they were talking about doing psychedelics a lot. And I grew up with Ram Dass and stuff. I don’t know all the details of his experience and I’m starting to sort of do some reading now and rekindle some of that stuff. And I’m not into psychedelics, but these two young guys were talking about taking, you know, lots of psychedelics and becoming spiritual and experiencing a spiritual awakening that one of them even went so far as to say that Maharajji appeared in the mirror and said, “Come with me. You know, I’ll teach you, come with me.” You know, and one of them freaked out and said, “No, I’m not ready to go yet.” And then explained later on that, that he knows that he can go back and become enlightened anytime he likes, because he’s had it and Maharajji was there. And I was like, actually I don’t get too caught up in other people’s trips, but I was a little bit annoyed about that. I was like, now come on, you know, it takes time to, to do this. You have to put in the work. You have to do some stuff. You can’t just say that you’ve seen the light and you’ve become a enlightened and you’ve talked to Maharajji and he’s, you know, tested you and all this sort of stuff. And I know I’m babbling on, but yeah, I came on. I just wanted to get your opinion on this because there seems to be a lot of young people out there and I mean, I’m kind of in the older age bracket, but this younger generation that, they’re really into these, how do you pronounce it? Ayahuasca and the mushrooms. And…

Ayahuasca?

Sorry that. Yeah, Ayahuasca and the mushrooms and they’re off to these festivals and they’re getting high and they’re like, om-ing, and everything, but they just seemed to be missing the hard work. It seems like some people just want a quick fix.

Let’s forget. Let’s forget about the hard work. Nobody wants to do hard work. I don’t want to do hard work. I just want to do the work I have to do. So, as far as psychedelics, Maharajji said the Yogi medicine, he called it, “the Yogi medicine,” brings you into the room with Christ, but you can’t stay. Yeah. So these people and myself, I was actually one of those young people, you know, a few years ago, I took some acid and I had great experiences. And without that, I don’t know if I would have been drawn to spiritual things at all, if I even would have known they existed. So I can’t put them down, but I will say, just to repeat again, Maharajji said, “It brings you into the room with Christ, but you can’t stay.” If you want to stay, the only way to stay is love.

And the deal is that people get attached to those experiences. There’s still someone experiencing those states. There’s someone separate experiencing. So that is not liberation. It is not freedom, but people get very into their stuff and, , you hope that they come out of it in a good way at sometime and actually get what they’re looking for. But the problem is you do get very attached to those psychedelic blissful states. And you just want more and more, and you lose the ability to put food in your mouth and stop at the red and go with the green. Your daily life starts to fall apart and you think, “Well, that’s not important. Who gives a shit about daily life.?” You know? But that’s not exactly true because when you destroy your body, you won’t have shit. So, it brings you into the room with Christ, but you can’t stay. The only way to stay is love. So let them be stupid. You be stupid in your way. I’ll be stupid in my way. And they’ll be stupid in their way. Yeah. What’s the problem? Don’t let it bother you. Why should it bother you? And if you take some acid, just don’t take too much.

Exactly. I said to my partner, KD is going to help me answer this question two ways. He’s either going to say, “What’s the problem? Don’t worry about it.” Or he’s going to say ” It’s, you know, BS on the other side.” So, I mean…

He said both things.

Yeah, I was just a little bit like, you know, you can’t. And actually the fact of saying, “Oh, look, I can come back to this any time I like.”

Yeah. Let’s ask them who’s saying that. Who’s saying that? The person who’s saying that isn’t going to go through the door.

No. And so, so my, I’m thinking, well, it must have been part of the trip. Maybe they’ve created this situation because…

Who gives a shit? Don’t think about it. Yeah. You’re overthinking it. And that tells me that you really secretly want to do a big dose yourself, but I’d be very careful.

I don’t need to.

Good. Very good. Okay.

Every once in a while I think about it, you know.

Well, I’ve never been down that road, but I found it a bit more concerning because of the amount of young people out there who seem to be grasping. And then they’re turning to psychedelics and stuff, which is great to expand the mind, but, and that’s what Ram Dass was doing. You see? But he asked that question, can we do this without the drugs.

But he did for a long time, he was a crazy acid freak. So he had a period when he did that, but then he wanted to find out, what really is this acid? What is it? I know what it did for me, but what really is it? And he couldn’t find anybody that knew. And then he then Maharajji took the acid and nothing happened to him. And he went, “Oh, he must be beyond it. There’s somebody who’s beyond that.” So that was a big thing. Yeah. So let people do what they do. It’s not our job to worry about it. You just wish them well. Okay.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Everybody, it’s over two and a half hours. Got to stop now. So take good care. Don’t be too hard on yourselves if you can help it, because you don’t have to be, and just practice, letting go. Whatever you’re stuck in, just a few times a day, just sit down for two minutes and just let yourself settle. And then you’re going to notice. Just settle. Just let it just wash off of you. And that will help break the cycle of the crazy obsessive thinking. Just a few times a day. You can do it 50 times a day, just for two minutes. Just sit, allow it to settle and develop that habit and that practice of letting go. You don’t have to think about what you’re letting go of. You just let go. Just breathe slowly. Let your breath calm down and that’s naturally just letting go. And then you get caught again. Fine. Fine. And then half an hour later, just sit down for two minutes comfortably. You don’t have to sit in lotus.You don’t have to stand on your head. You don’t have to put dollies up on your altar. Just sit down. You’re the dolly. You’re the murti. Worship yourself by calming down and releasing and letting go. Okay. That’s an order.

All right. See you all soon.

The post Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD January 16, 2021 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 75 | Humility 

Q: I just wanted to mention how 2019 was the year of practicing humbleness for me because it was how I understood love, how to get into somebody else’s shoes in order to understand where they’re coming from so that we can all be at peace. Can you speak about humbleness?

“Our inability to really do anything that’s for our own sake, that will be good for us, that would lead us to happiness, to openness, to being a good human being; our inability, so, the strength of God, of the Universe; it’s all from that place that all goodness comes. Of course, that place is within us.” – Krishna Das

KD: Yeah, hi.

Q: So, I have a hard time being in love and when you have, like, a neighbor that hates you or you hate them and trying to find that place of love

KD: You love hating that neighbor. It’s so wonderful, isn’t it?

Q: So, we play your music and the neighbor hates it.

KD: Ah, good. Excellent. Play it louder.

Q: We do. And so, we also have another neighbor that, her father passed away and she came over crying one day that, you know, “thank you for playing your music. So, it was totally contradictory to…”

KD: Well, put the speakers on that side of the lawn. So, you know, I have this friend who wrote to me and she said, you know, she’s breaking up with her husband and it’s so painful and she wishes it wasn’t happening. So, I said, “Well, what’s going on?” She said, “Well, you know, I love your chanting, so I play it in the kitchen. I play it in the living room. I play it in the bedroom upstairs. I play it in the guest room downstairs all the time.” I said, “Turn that music off and save your goddamned marriage.” So, put the speakers only so that one person can hear it. Leave that poor guy alone, you know?

Q: Well, with that in mind, I just wanted to mention how 2019 was the year of practicing humbleness for me because it was how I understood love, how to get into somebody else’s shoes in order to understand where they’re coming from so that we can all be at peace. Can you speak about humbleness?

KD: I don’t know, you know. I’m so humble, it’s hard to really talk about it. People say that to me all the time. “Oh, you’re so humble.” And I say, “Well, I know me.” But nobody gets it. They think I’m humble. It’s so weird. You know, real humility is the whole thing. Real humility is, you know, so I was in India and I was in a little town called Vrindavan and I was walking down the street and I stepped in a hole in the street and I snapped my leg, my knee, like this, and when I woke up in the morning my knee was like, swollen, like huge, right? So I figured I was going to have to go to the hospital. Now, Maharajji had forbidden us to come to the temple before four o’clock in the afternoon because the local Visa guy, Visa official, was harassing Him about the Westerners.  It was politics. He just wanted some money, you know. And Maharajji wasn’t going to give it to Him so He was giving Him a hard time, so but I woke up in the morning with this knee and I thought, “I have to go to the hospital down in Mathura which is the town about 20 miles away, but before I go I should tell Maharajji I was going.” So, with great difficulty, I walked to the temple, leaning on a friend of mine, you know and I limped in, you know, like this and He was sitting all alone on, sitting on His cot, a tucket, they call it, in the middle of the courtyard, a completely empty big courtyard and He was right in the middle of it and there was one Indian guy sitting with Him. So, I kind of limped up, you know, and I pranamed and bowed and I sat down but I couldn’t bend my knee so I had to put my leg out straight underneath the tucket, you know? In India, you don’t really do that. You don’t point your feet towards your teacher. So, He didn’t say anything, right? He just looked at me and then after a few minutes, He gets up and He walks towards the back of the temple and the Indian guy got up and walked with Him because He walked like a two year old, bong, bong, bong, and the people would take His hand and walk with Him, you know? So, He was walking like this and the further away He got from where I was sitting, He started leaning on the guy and worse, like this, you know? And I, it looked like He could hardly walk and I thought, “He’s taking on the karma of my knee.” You know? The minute I had that thought, He turned around and He ran back to the tucket and He plops down, He looks at me and said, “You thought I was in pain? You wanted to help me?” And He pats me on the head. So, He didn’t say anything about, like, “Why did you come? Why? I told you to come at four o’clock.” So, I thought, you know, I’m just sitting here. I’m getting darshan. I’m hanging out with Him. I don’t care, if you can cut the leg off over here it’s fine with me. So, we sat around for a while and I kept thinking, “What’s the karma?” You know, I used to think about these things. Like, “What’s the karma of this knee? I wonder what I’ve done in the past to step in a hole in Vrindavan, such a sacred city. How could this happen?” All day long, yada yada yada. So, gradually, other people showed up and so, there was this woman sitting there, and she had a bible with her because he used to talk to us about Jesus. There’s this little guy in a temple, He would talk to us about Jesus. It was like, what is going on here?  You know? It was quite interesting, but that’s another story, so anyway, so He grabs her bible, He opens it up and He points to this, just like this, “Read this.” So, I looked at it and I, it was from Saint Paul and it said, “In order to save me from the abundance of revelations, it was given to me a thorn in the side and I beseeched 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 weakness.’” So, Ram Das and I had t-shirts made up. I forget what, you know, like, right, we believe, because what that means, I’ve been thinking about this for 45 years and this is…

Our inability to really do anything that’s for our own sake, that will be good for us, that would lead us to happiness, to openness, to being a good human being; our inability, so, the strength of God, of the Universe; it’s all from that place that all goodness comes. Of course, that place is within us. It’s not out there up in the sky, standing around with a long beard and you know. That’s My strength. Capital “My”. That’s the strength of the Lord is within us, our true nature. And everything good that comes in our lives, everything we accomplish, every openness that comes, every compassionate thought, every helpful thought, every kind thought, it comes from that place. Once again, the ego will never do anything to diminish itself. It’s not what the ego does. It wants to live and it takes credit for all kinds of things but the Lord said, “My grace is sufficient, is enough for you.” You don’t need anything but this grace and your weakness, our inability to really do anything on the same level that our bullshit is, to help ourselves, that’s the proof of that. And the fact that we’re here is grace and it’s the grace pulling us into our self. Human beings experience being pulled within as longing. Yeah.

The t-shirt said, “Proof.”

Somebody’s blocking the flow. Somebody’s not feeling good…

So, the idea of grace, that’s a hard one for us, you know, we’re westerners, we don’t know what grace is. And even if we think about grace, we’re taught that grace comes from up in the sky somewhere, somewhere else, but grace is our natural state. It’s who we are. Underneath who we think we are, which is the whole, it’s where all the bullshit is, all the problems is who we think we are. Who we’ve been trained to believe we are by our life experiences, by our parents, by our school, by the students in the school, by the teachers, by the programs, by the place we happen to live, by the culture of that place. This formed us. This is the one lifetime manifestation or what’s the word, this is the karmas that we’re born into and that created who we think we are. But underneath that is the state of grace that we actually are. And once again, Maharajji said, “You can’t, the higher, more subtle states, the deeper states of awareness can’t be done by ‘me’. It’s only by removing the covering of that that that shines more brightly.” Our personal will, we can’t, “Ok, I’m going to go to that state of grace,” I, me, is never going there because me would dissolve in there and I don’t want to dissolve. Me is going to go anywhere else but there. But the longing in our hearts to be free of that me-ness, that prison of our thoughts. Every thought is a prison. Every thought is a prison and you can’t, you can’t think yourself out of a prison that’s made of thought. That’s personal “me” and the personal will, so but we do practice to release ourselves from that prison of thought, into the open space of our true nature, who we are. That’s before we were hurt. Before we were traumatized, before we were beaten up, before our hearts were broken. That place is always here and that’s where we want to be. That’s where we want to live. But ‘me’ is that place of trauma, of pain. To be released from that, some practice, whatever that means to you, whatever you do to help yourself is practice and one thing leads to another.

The post Ep. 75 | Humility appeared first on Krishna Das.