Call and Response with 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.

Call and Response Special Edition Conversations with KD June 25 2020

“There’s a way that even through this camera and the computer and the internet, we actually are connecting in a very deep place, and so little by little one learns to be more aware of the places that we are connected and the way we are connected, and those emotions, which once seemed so huge, don’t seem so huge anymore.” – Krishna Das

I’m going to read you something. As you know, this practice that we’re doing is called “The repetition of the divine name or names.” In India, in the east, they understand that the Supreme being is beyond all form, but actually embraces all form as well. So, they said, there’s an unlimited amount, number of names of God, and that every being has divinity within them, their soul, the soul, that reflection. That ray of light that lights up every being is the same in all of us. Each one of us has that same ray of light.

So, a great Saint named Sri Anandamayi Ma, wrote this:

“At all times the repetition of the Lord’s name should be kept up. Through the practice of the Name, enjoyment, liberation, peace, all these will blossom forth. Invoke him by the name that appeals to you most for as much time as you can. The longer, the better. In this way you will, at some auspicious moment, discover the rosary of the mind, the Mala of the mind, the beads of the mind, and then you will continually hear within yourself the praises of the great master, the Lord of creation, like the never ceasing music of the boundless ocean. You will hear the land and the sea, the air in the heavens reverberate with the song of his glory. This is called ‘The all-pervading presence of the name.’”

That’s why I always say, just do the practice and live your life. It’s not up to us to make something happen. All we’re doing is trying to tune into that place where it’s already happening within us.

Remember, try not to attract, don’t get caught in trying to manipulate yourself into one particular type of experience that you feel might be blissful, et cetera, et cetera. Through the practice of the repetition of the name, the presence within us is uncovered. That presence is always here, but we’re not looking. We are not paying attention. Through this practice of the repetition of the name, we’re continually invoking that place within us.

Q: It’s wonderful chanting with you this way, but I find myself missing the ecstatic moments of chant together in person when the energy and excitement really heat up. Do I miss that?

I miss chanting with people, but probably not for that reason. It’s a wonderful experience to be in a room full of people, everybody chanting, and to feel, hear the name, and to feel the presence more deeply.

When you chant, the idea is to focus on the name itself. The name is the name of your true nature, of the place within you that is joy, happiness, peace, bliss, the kind of bliss that doesn’t come and go. It’s the kind of bliss that you are. One can’t see it from here. It’s covered up.

So, if you’re desiring a certain type of experience while you’re chanting, then you’re looking for that experience and you’re not looking at the name itself. The name is a door. We’re in a room full of stuff. We’ve been playing with stuff our whole lives, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, too much of this, less of that. I’ll take this. I’ll throw that away, playing with ways to feed our senses and feed ourselves pleasurable experiences.

The name is a door out of that room into real love, love that doesn’t come and go, love you don’t have to buy with affection or attention, the love that is who you are, and it’s vast and huge and includes everything and everyone. So, if you’re not paying attention to the name, you’re not aiming for the door, so to speak. That’s okay. We’re all doing the best we can and we are planting seeds within ourselves of the name, just like I read from Anandamayi, just now.

“Through the practice of the name, enjoyment, liberation, peace, all these will blossom forth.”

She’s not talking about everyday stuff. She’s talking about a much deeper level of experience, an experience of reality, of truth, of being, an experience of that place within us, that flame within us that cannot be extinguished ever, no matter what is happening in the outside world. That’s what we’re here for, to enter into that presence within us.

So, please pay attention and notice how you feel if you’re not getting what you think you wanted, and then let go of that feeling. You  keep letting go and coming back to the name until only the name exists, and that name is who you are. It is not something else or someone else or somewhere else.

Q: Did I meet Mingyur Rinpoche before or after his four-year going forth into homelessness retreat?

I met him before, some years before, and I’ve met him since, and he was wonderful before, and is if it’s possible, even more wonderful now. An extraordinary being, Mingyur Rinpoche, Tibetan Lama.

Q: Is there anything called “Shambala” in reality?

Shambala is supposed to be a kingdom or a world, a place of where great, perfect, where perfection, everything is perfect. Everything is the Dharma.  Everything there is dharma, is dharmic and it’s supposed to be, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be, if it’s supposed to be eternal or not, but it’s supposed to be a place that’s essentially beyond this world.

So, the question, “Is it real?” Well, I don’t know, are you real?

You know, it’s probably more real than you and I, but other than that, I don’t know what to say.

In Hinduism, it’s called “Siddhapur.” Shambala, the kingdom of Shambala is a Buddhist way of talking about it, and in the Indian Hindu tradition, it’s called “Siddhapur” and they are analogous. It’s just a different lens. They’re looking at the same thing.

Q: Did you compose the music and song for “God is Real?”

Well, “God is Real” is a gospel song that I learned when I was growing up. My father had these records of Mahalia Jackson who was great gospel singer, one of the greatest ever, and she sang a song, “God is Real.”

The way I sing it, it’s essentially a different melody, different music and she certainly didn’t sing “Hare Ram,” that’s for sure. So, it’s kind of my own perverted version of that song.

Q: I saw Ram Dass and Baba Neem Karoli in my dream last night. I can’t figure out if they wanted to give me Darshan or it was psychological subconscious, as I keep reading about them.

I don’t care what it is. I’ll take it. They say that we can’t create the forms of a higher being with our minds and that if we see them in dreams or in visions, they have actually come to see us. So, there you go.

Q: I recently started working through the Bhagavad Gita. I’m struck by the incredible wisdom that can be interpreted through this story. Is there any part of this story in particular, that sticks out to you?

The story.  Now the Bhagavad Gita is one chapter of the Mahabharata. So, the story is of this great war between the so-called “bad guys” and the so-called “good guys.” It’s an incredible story. It’s a phenomenal story. It’s one of the great Indian scriptures. So, I’m not sure if you’re talking exactly about the Gita itself, which is not so much a story as it’s Krishna… “Gita” means “song,” and this is Sri Krishna showing Arjuna the way things really are,  because Arjuna was essentially the great warrior on the side of good and he was about to have to fight this battle, and before the battle, Krishna was going to act as his charioteer, because Krishna wouldn’t fight. He agreed to help both sides. So, but anyway, he acted as Arjuna’s charioteer.

So, before the war, Arjuna asked Krishna to drive them up to this hill between the battlefield, looking out over the battlefield, and they get up there and Arjuna looks out at this, these two armies arrayed, ready for battle, and on both sides are his relatives. On both sides are his teachers, his gurus, his archery guru. The elder of the whole clan is actually on the side of the bad guys. It’s a very complex, subtle story.

So, Arjuna looks out over this, at what he’s being asked to do, to slaughter his relatives, and he drops his bow. His bow falls from his hand and he says, “I will not fight.”

You know, it’s such a big moment. How many times have we been in situations in our lives where we’ve been forced to disappoint, and hurt in some ways, people we were involved with in order to save our own lives or in order to do the same, the right thing for ourselves and others. These situations are very complex, psychologically and karmically. So, that moment is really a great, an incredible moment.

And what does Krishna say to Arjuna? The first thing he says, he says, “These words you speak appear to be wise, but are they really?”

And then Krishna begins to unravel and expose and reveal the truth of the situation to Arjun, and show him that, why he has to fight, why it’s the right thing for everyone involved. It’s an extraordinary, extraordinary thing, and of course there’s an internal and an external Mahabharata, and there’s a way of seeing the whole story as an internal drama between our own energies inside… and what’s the best way to deal with this? and how to fight? and what to do? and how to live in the world in the right way, in a good way? Extraordinary stuff.

Q: What is my interpretation of Rama sending Sita into exile after they come home for 14 years?

Well, this is, first of all, let me say that the Ramayana, which is the story of Rama, it’s what’s called “Leela.” “Leela” means “play” or “drama,” and in this case, the Leela is a divine Leela. It it’s created by the divine in order to relieve the world of suffering.

This big demon named Rovena had conquered the world, had conquered the gods and he was creating terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible things, and so Vishnu incarnated on earth as rRam and Vishnu’s shakti, Lakshmi incarnated as Sita.

First of all, one must understand, first thing; one can not really understand the Leela, the play of God from our limited viewpoint. At times you just have to suspend disbelief, because there’s no way we can understand the scope of a drama like this. It’s very complex. Very subtle.  And many times I hear people very concerned about the way they feel Ram had treated Sita, but you have to understand one thing; Ram and Sita are not two different things. They are two sides of one coin. Without one side of a coin, there is no coin. So, everything that happens, everything that happens in the story is designed to establish Dharma. Everything that happens in the story is designed and created to establish Dharma.

We don’t know what dharma is. We’re trying to find out.

So, so the first thing is that Sita, as you know the story, she is she’s kidnapped by this very demon, and then she spends a certain amount of time as his prisoner and then the armies fight, and Rama’s army wins and then Sita comes and she’s made to go into the fire before he would accept her. That’s what the story says, but the story also says, which most people don’t know that, just before Ravana came and and kidnapped Sita, Rama says to Sita, “Sweetheart, we’re about to do a big Leela here, so you have to disappear to stay safe.”

So, at that point, Sita leaves and just leaves behind a shell of herself. It’s not her real self. She’s gone. She went off and went somewhere else in some other world to relax for a while, and then it was that shell, and she was replaced, apparently, by a heavenly apsara who had been cursed that she had to take birth on earth. So, there was a switch, and towards the end of the story, when Sita is asked, Ram says He can’t accept her unless she proves her purity by entering the fire, when she enters the fire, the real Sita comes back through the fire and the apsara  goes back to heaven. She finished her job, and then Sita comes out. So that’s one thing that people don’t understand right off the bat.

As far as why she was banished to the jungle, I can’t really say that I know the deeper meaning of that, other than there were people who doubted her purity because she was in another person’s home, in the home of this demon for so long, and Rama felt that in order to, in order for society to function in the right frame of mind, he couldn’t have Sita with him. He had to deny himself even, her company. So, for the next like 10,000 years, He lived with the statute of Sita and he never mated with anybody else ever in his life. But he felt for the sake of the Dharma and the kingdom that he was supposed to run as a king, he had to ask her to leave, and he lived the rest of his life essentially with a broken heart and with a statue of her next to him.

So, it’s a very complex situation and, even though it seems like we have a lot of feelings about it that, we feel that those feelings are justified, you have to remember this is divine Leela.

Now Krishna did all kinds of things. He got it on with hundreds of Gopis at the same time. Why doesn’t that bother people? And those women left their husbands at home and snuck out at night to play with Krishna, and Krishna did all kinds of things. He picked up a mountain and held it on a finger. Nobody worries about that stuff, but Rama having to ask his other half, for the sake of the kingdom, to leave, that’s difficult to understand.

It’s all difficult to understand. That’s my point. Until we become truly divine, we’ll never really be able to understand at all. So, the best is to recognize that it, it seems to be something that is horrible, but believe me, there’s more to it than that. And I’m sure there’s books written about it, explaining it to some degree, but really it’s those things that, it’s very hard to understand these things. Very hard

Q: Along with the Hanuman Chalisa, I’ve been learning the Aditya Hridayam. We honor Ram in the song, but I don’t know where that story fits. Is at the Bhagavad Gita or is it a Aditya or Surya?

It doesn’t honor Ram. It’s a mantra to the sun God, Aditya. That mantra was given to Ram on the battlefield by Agastya Muni, who was a great Siddha, a great Rishi. Given to him. So, when he was confused about how to fight, how to fight Rovana, so Agastya gave him this mantra, the Aditya Hridayam mantra, and it’s a mantra that destroys negativity.  By keeping the sun in one’s heart, all negativity or demons are destroyed.

So, it’s from the Valmiki Ramayana. I don’t know that it’s in the Tulasi Das Ramayana, but it’s from the story of Ram.

Q: Please give advice to memorize the Hanuman Chalisa.  How, how did I do it? How long did it take me? Thank you.

So, you don’t have to memorize it. You can just repeat it. You can read it. There’s no reason to torture yourself to remember something. If it comes to you over time, fine, but it’s not a test. Nobody’s watching except your own true self.

So, the thing is when you do it to have some feeling in it, to do it wholeheartedly with some sincerity and understand that you’re, you’re offering these phrases to the guru or to Hanuman. It’s an offering. It’s a mantra. It’s not necessary to memorize it. If you want to, you can, but you shouldn’t feel bad if it’s difficult. After you do it 30 or 40 million times, you’ll probably remember it, you know, so don’t worry about it.

Q: How important is the role of dreams where one sees an ascended master or siddha who is guiding in some way or merely in silence? Is this still a cue that the guru is alive in consciousness minus physical?

Of course, the guru is alive. We’re the ones who aren’t alive. The guru is awake. We are the ones who are not awake. The guru’s here. We’re the ones who aren’t here. Of course. And when you have, that presence comes to you in a dream and a form like that, that’s a great blessing, and when you remember the guru, or God, or the deity, or your true soul, anytime during the day, that’s a great blessing. It’s all good.

And as far as what you hear in the dream in terms of guidance? It’s very hard to remember accurately because we’re in, even in a dream, we’re interpreting the energy in a certain kind of way. I think it’s best to just feel that you received the blessing and allow your heart to open and recognize that those beings came to see you to give you a blessing. Any directions they give in the dream… I don’t know. I don’t, you’d have to see how you feel. If they tell you to, in the dream, to jump off a cliff, I think you tell them, “Well, come back and tell me a few other times. I’m not jumping off any cliffs because of a dream.”

Because in the dream, many things are, the energy that you receive in a dream can be re-interpreted, interpreted, through the emotions in different ways. So, not always a good idea to believe everything you hear in a dream.

Q: If all is truly one, why would God oppress himself, torture himself, rape himself, murder himself, et cetera?

Well, first of all, when we say, “All is one,” at best, that’s wishful thinking, because we don’t experience that ourselves, and the reason we don’t experience that is because you and I, and most other sentient beings are suffering from delusion and ignorance and shame and grief and fear and selfishness and anger, et cetera. This is our reality.

The “all one” reality is called “ultimate reality.” This is the way things are. Now, here on this plane, in the human world, or in this world, humans and animals, et cetera, we make lots of choices and we’ve made lots of choices that don’t enforce the, don’t reinforce the recognition of oneness, and being born into this world, we’ve also been programmed by the world and our parents and their parents and our teachers and our friends, to believe certain things about ourselves, and based on those beliefs, we act. We’re not acting out of oneness. So, to say, “God is raping himself” is not really accurate.

For instance, when Ram Dass had the stroke, he had a catastrophic stroke, as you know about, as you must know, and he was in the wheelchair for the last 20 plus years of his life, and he almost died from the stroke, and for some years he was, he believed that Maharajji his guru, had given him that stroke as a teaching, had “stroked him,” he used to say. He thought that was cute, “had stroked him.”

But when he went to India the only time after this stroke, Siddhi Ma, Maharajji’s great disciple said, “Ram Dass, you say Maharajji gave you that stroke? That is not true. The stroke is your karma. Maharajji’s grace has given you the strength to learn from that karma and be with that karma and transcend the karma of the stroke and use that to advance on the path.”

So, our karmas create these actions and the divine is what gives us the strength to overcome the effects of these negative actions and negative emotions that we carry around with us.

We have to be clear about ultimate reality and relative reality. Ultimate reality is the whole story and relative reality is inside that.

Ultimate reality: no one ever came, no one ever goes, there is no one, that’s all done, there’s no time, nothing. Relative reality: If you don’t stop at the red light, you get hit by a car. Ultimate reality: there’s no one to be hit by a car nor is there a car.

So, you can’t think ultimate reality. You can’t create that in your mind. You can’t up-level yourself into that. It has to be a direct experience that comes from within, based on the ripening of those karmas that you brought into this life and the practice that you do to uncover that place within you. So, don’t get confused between karma and ultimate reality, the world of our actions and our reactions where we keep recreating suffering for ourselves. Two different things. Well, not exactly, but that’s very subtle stuff that I don’t understand either.

Q:  Can I say something about loneliness?

I’m sorry that you feel lonely. I’m sorry that anybody feels lonely.

There is a difference between loneliness and aloneness, being alone.

I find, when I’m alone, I actually feel more connected to the universe. When I’m surrounded by people, I get involved with acting, reacting, relating all of that stuff, and I lose some awareness in those situations, which is why this, this forest retreat, because of the pandemic, has been for me, so far, a very rejuvenating and a wonderful opportunity for me to deepen the way I go through a day and help myself to remember more, remember the name, to remember the presence and feel more connected.

So, when you’re chanting, when you notice the feeling of loneliness, you let go. You simply come back to the name. That emotion of loneliness is a cloud that’s passing through your life at this moment. It might be a really big cloud, but it’s moving through, even though it seems like it’s right here, will always be here. It won’t always be here and you don’t feel lonely all the time, but when you do feel lonely, it feels huge. So, if you’re chanting or if you start to chant or are doing japa, the repetition of the name, or meditating, you notice that feeling of loneliness. Who’s noticing the feeling? You are. So, you are obviously not that feeling. That feeling is something you are, that you feel glued to, to some degree.

That’s why you keep coming back to the practice. Every time you come back to the practice, you’ve released some of that glue. This is how we work with any emotion. They are not real. They’re as real as we think we are, but they’re not ultimately real. They come and they go, and we experienced them, and they, they hurt us. We hurt ourselves, believing these feelings and identifying with these feelings. We’ve been trained to do that. Our whole lives, we’ve been trained to live in our emotions and react with our emotions.

When you’re chanting or doing some practice, you are asking yourself to pay attention, to be present with whatever arises. So, you’re doing Sri Ram Jai Ram, but you’re feeling this loneliness… Sri Ram Jai Ram… feeling the loneliness… Sri Ram Jai Ram… You keep coming back to the mantra, not pushing, you can’t push the thing away, but you can come back to the mantra for a second because it’ll grab you again. We are so glued to these emotions that we identify with. There’s just no one button to push that’s going to make them all go away.

So, little by little, as we get used to releasing the hold of these negative emotions, the hold that they have over us, we also are training ourselves not to identify so quickly and get glued to them so quickly as they come and go. It takes time and you can’t, the evaluator within us can’t really see the level that any real progress is made. What happens over time is that you wind up spending less time in these negative states of mind. That’s all. Less time. Which is really good.

But you don’t get to do a trip I’m on, “Wow, I’m spending less time…” because it’s the evaluator within you, the judger that’s being thinned out, the one who thinks about themselves, “How am I doing now? How am I doing now?” all the time, all the time, all the time, that’s being thinned out.

So, keep doing some practice. Get more comfortable in what this path is about. And, I mean, at this point where there’s not much we can do about changing the physicality of aloneness without a mask and social distancing and all that, it’s not so easy, it can be done, but, I mean, we’re connecting right now, and you’re connecting with a whole group of people who are here right now in an internal space, a psychic space we’re all sharing through the internet.

And it’s not nothing. I mean, many of the teachers that I know, the Tibetans, they all say, “It’s okay, this is good. We’re here together, and if I give you a teaching now, that teaching is, you’re getting that. It’s not, just because we’re not in person doesn’t mean you’re not getting it.”

So, there’s a real, there’s a way that even through this camera and the computer and the internet, we actually are connecting in a very deep place, and so little by little one learns to be more aware of the places that we are connected and the way we are connected and those emotions, which once seemed so huge, don’t seem so huge anymore. So good luck with that and good luck for all of us.

All the best.

The post Call and Response Special Edition Conversations with KD June 25 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 58 Life On The Road, Everyone is Your Teacher

Q: Do you use people, just in general that come up in your life, as your teacher?

“The more at ease you are with yourself, the more you’re willing and able to be at ease with anything that comes to you because it doesn’t force you, it doesn’t push a button that closes you down. So, that’s hard work. That’s how life is our teacher. Are we closing down? Are we protecting ourselves? Or distancing ourselves? Are we judging? And we do all the time. It’s natural. It’s human.” – Krishna Das

KD: Yeah.

Q: I was just wondering what your preference of music is other than singing kirtan. Do you like rock and roll or country music?

KD: I’m an old fart, you know? Steely Dan, Ray Charles, Van Morrison. I like Eminem. I don’t know. I like a lot of stuff. I like jazz. I like rock. I like classical. I like a lot of stuff. I don’t listen to much music, because when there’s finally a moment when nobody’s calling on the phone or trying to get me to do something that I’m actually… it’s just such a blessing.

Q: Thank you.

KD: You’re welcome. There’s a lot of good music out there, but I don’t know what it is.

Q: Hi.

KD: Hey.

Q: I’m from Long Island, too.

KD: Congratulations.

Q: Thanks.

KD: Your next birth will be better.

Q: Thank you. My question is, I saw your tour schedule for the next, I don’t know, six months. I’m looking at you up there and over there…

KD: Oh, I’m up there, too?

Q: Yeah you’re right there.

KD: I’m everywhere. It’s amazing.

Q: I just wanted to know, my son is actually on the road touring with a band right now and he’s having a lot of trouble figuring out how to balance taking care of himself and being on the road and I’m actually asking you how you do that when you’re on the road. Because you have a such a huge schedule coming up.

KD: You know, me being on the road is like being in an ashram, for me. You get up, have some breakfast, go to soundcheck. You sing. Go back to the hotel. Snack a little. Go to sleep. Get up. Pack your bags, get on the plane, get to the hotel. Go to sleep. It’s either eating, singing, traveling or sleeping. It’s like an ashram. That’s it except for the traveling. You know? When I get back to my room and I close the door and there’s nobody there, praise the Lord. That’s just so great, you know? But when you’re young, you don’t get back to the room before you take a few hits or a few drinks or you know, you go down to the bar to see who you can meet. You’re creating your own stuff and it’s difficult. It’s very difficult. You have, we don’t, we’re not trained, taught how to take care of ourselves, so when you’re on the road and you’re touring like that it can be really crazy. But, if you’re asking me, it’s not like that anymore. So, your son is in a band, you say he’s traveling?

Q: yes, but he did pack his yoga mat.

KD: That’s good. He can kind of use it as a pillow.

Q: Hi.

KD: Where are you? Hi.

Q: Hi. I listened to some of your other, oh, it’s really weird hearing myself in this… anyway, I’ve heard a lot of your other teachings, like, via Spotify…

KD: Could you not say “teachings” please? It just freaks me the hell out…

Q: Ok. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

KD: Just say, “stuff” or something like that.

Q: Your stuff that you talk about, when you talk about relationships

KD: Oh, here we go.

Q: I know, I’m like the one that’s going to say it. So, like, there’s something you said, like, “Relationships are like, you do your business and I do mine.”

KD: That’s a quote. I didn’t say it.

Q: That’s a quote. Well, it’s a quote you said. And I just find that, like with, like relationship with like a man or a relationship with your mom, or a relationship with you know, whoever you have in your life and some people are, you know, like really searching for, you know, maybe they have more pain that they’re going through and then other people just like have zero awareness at this point. How do you, like, navigate, like through relationship with them.

KD: I’m not sure what you mean. Relationship with who?

Q: Like, with pretty much anybody that’s like close to you that doesn’t have, like, an awareness of a path.

KD: I beat them up. I torture them until they wake up to God.

Q: I mean I guess like, what I’m hearing…

KD: They’re people, right? I just say, “Hey what’s up?” You know? “How you doing?” I’m not… first of all, the implication is that I have some awareness. That’s very nice of you but I’m just a guy like anybody else. I treat people the best I can and it’s not up to me to judge people and to… “Oh, this person doesn’t know shit, I’m not going to talk to them.”

Q: No, I don’t think that you’re… I’m not using it as like, a negative term, I’m using it as like, maybe as like using them as like, the live Guru of some sort. You know, to use them… or do you use people just in general that come up in your life, as like your teacher? Is that something that like..

KD: Sure. Well, everybody is, in a way, your teacher. Your whole life is your teacher. In relationships you see, you know, there are people that you feel comfortable with, a few you feel uncomfortable, a few people you don’t like. You can look at that and see what it is about that, what that person makes you feel and then you try to see why that person makes you feel that way and you keep trying to let go of that and you can also see how self-centered that kind of thinking is. “That person makes me feel bad so I don’t want to be around that person.” See, it’s all about “me” in that case. We’re not concerned… why does that person, how is that person feeling? Why does that person look like he doesn’t feel so good? What is that person’s life like? It’s not all about how that person affects me, right? So, you try to kind of feel where a person’s at, you know, what they’re feeling and why they are acting a certain way. When people are not nice, they’re usually acting out of their own pain, you know, and their own closed-down-ness and then eventually what arises in you is compassion for that person and caring. Not that you can, you know, you go and scream “Sri Ram Jai Ram” in their ear, but you just don’t close down to them. You don’t get negative in your own head about those people. You don’t have to protect yourself so you’re including them in your space without judging so it’s a bit of a practice and it’s not easy to do.

Q: Right.

KD: But the more at ease you are with yourself, the more you’re willing and able to be at ease with anything that comes to you because it doesn’t force you, it doesn’t push a button that closes you down. So, that’s hard work. That’s how life is our teacher. Are we closing down? Are we protecting ourselves? Or distancing ourselves? Are we judging? And we do all the time. It’s natural. It’s human. But it’s human nature, but at the same time we’re trying to be more inclusive of people, which happens naturally as you do more practice. As you are more at ease with, in your own self, then people coming, they can go through that, you know, they walk through that space and you don’t have to like, know. Of course, there are times when you recognize certain situations in yourself that you want to protect yourself from when a person who’s very negative might… and it’s like a drug addict comes into your life and you have addiction issues. You’re definitely going to notice and you’re definitely have to recognize the situation. You don’t have to push that person away. You don’t have to hate that person or hit them with a baseball bat. But then you have to notice and be clear that you’re not going to be pulled into their vortex. And that’s taking care of yourself. And that’s the same with anything. Any person who’s, with anybody. Everybody has their own vortex of stuff. And we’re surrounded by it all day long. Millions of people, television, phone, everything, all day long pulling us out of ourselves into, into stuff. So, as time goes on, as we mature, as we ripen, we’re not so vulnerable to getting lost in other people’s versions of life. We have a stronger, more open sense of ourselves which is not threatened by stuff. And ultimately can not be hurt by anything. I did say, “Ultimately.” So, is that anything like what you wanted to hear?

Q: I didn’t want to hear anything. I was just curious.

KD: Then why did I talk so goddamed long? You should have said that at the beginning.

Q: Thank you.

Q: Hi.

KD: Hi.

KD: Yeah, there’s been a few of those. Yeah. Next question.

Q: Can you go into detail? Because I guess I’m like, I think a lot of people are just like searching for that, you know and trusting that even if you’re not there yet that you’re on, that you’re where you’re supposed to be.

KD: Well, yeah. You are where you are. There’s nothing you can do about that except be there. So, inside of that moment, there’s a lot that can happen. But you can have moments and you do have moments where you recognize, “Yeah, this is ok. This feels right.” See the whole thing is getting more in touch with that place and knowing what feels right for you and what doesn’t. You know, you have to pay attention to yourself and you have to learn to trust that place in you, that, is this is ok? And even if the whole world is telling you, “This is what you need,” and it doesn’t feel right to you, just forget about it and do something else. Only you know. Nobody can tell you what to do. And if somebody does tell you what to do and it feels right, good. If it doesn’t, good. The only ultimate source of knowing is yourself. Now, if you trust another Being who you feel is advanced and is a really, you know, trustworthy and honest and a good Being and that person suggests something to you, even if you don’t know if it’s right or wrong, you might try it and see how it goes. Right? Based on your trust of that person. It could turn out that that person is not trustworthy. You know? Look around. Right? The newspaper’s full of this stuff now, so and you trusted that person and you were wrong to trust that person because it turns out that was just a show. Fine. You learned a good lesson. Nothing’s lost. You’re not permanently damaged. It may hurt but you’re not permanently hurt. So, you keep listening to yourself, that’s the thing. I remember one time, I got, I was in Sydney, Australia and just like a few days before the kirtan, some big Guru was exposed as a pedophile and the whole place was just destroyed. They were really, you know, everybody was flipped out. What do we do now? He had hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands of disciples. It was really a difficult situation. You know. But those things happen. Those things happen. We have to trust ourselves and also trust that we’ll get through anything that happens to us. We’ll make it through. And that’s, you have to have that kind of courage. One time I was with Maharajji in Mumbai. We had followed Him to Mumbai and we caught Him. And we were alone with Him, I was alone with Him one afternoon in, in an apartment building and He was lying on the bed in the bedroom. There was one Indian guy there. And for hours and hours, Maharajji was just like, lying like this, He’d sit up, He’d lie like that. This and that. Sit for awhile, lie down. And I was doing my sadhana, which was staring at Him like… like that. So all of a sudden, He sits up and He looks at me and He says, “Courage is a really big thing.” What’s going to happen? And then the Indian guy looks, He said, “Oh, but Baba, God takes care of His devotees.”

“Courage is a really big thing.”

Then He went back to sleep.

You know, there were times in my life that all I had was the vague memory of that moment. And that vague memory saved me from disaster. You know? A couple of… more than a couple of times in my life. I didn’t even have courage. I just had the vague, the faintest memory of that moment where He looked at me and He said, “Courage is a big thing. You know, He wasn’t warning me. He just was saying, you know. And then later on, many years later… So, courage is a big thing. Sometimes you really just have to say, “I’m going through this whatever. And I’ll be ok.” And you will.

Q: Thank you.

KD: That’s kind of you.

The post Ep. 58 | Life On The Road, Everyone is Your Teacher 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.

Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD June 18 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why did you stop praying?”

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

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

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

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

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

So, Rama Krishna said that every repetition of one of these names is a seed and, you know, the seed of an Oak tree is very, very small, but inside of that seed, there is extraordinary potential. So, inside these seeds that we plant of the repetition of the name is extraordinary potential, and he says that, the seeds of the repetition of the name may get caught by the wind and blown around, and they may get caught on the roof, land on the roof of an old house, in the middle of the jungle. And in those days, the roofs were made sometimes from clay tiles that were baked in the sun, and the seeds of the repetition of the names that we do get caught between those tiles, and then over time and seasons, rain, wind, snow, sun, those tiles begin to break down and they get soft, and at that point, the seeds of the repetition of the names start to take root, and the roots begin to grow, and they grow and they grow and they destroy the roof of this house, and they keep growing and they destroy the walls of the house.  Ramakrishna says, that old house is who we think we are, our  conventional sense of who we think we are, of our self, our ego, our small “s” self.

Now, that house was built for certain reasons, and one of the things that it does, having been built is, it separates the inside from the outside. There’s an outside and an inside. There’s me and there’s everything else. When those walls are broken down, there’s only presence and being, reality, truth, consciousness, bliss. There’s no longer the temporary ego, which was created out of desire and craving.

So, you notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “Well, when you’re repeating the name, it’ll feel like this, or it might feel like this, or this might happen, or that might happen.”

Why doesn’t he say that? Because it’s not about that. It does not matter what you experience.

Okay. You’re having a nice time. Good. Have a nice time. Oh, you’re having a bad time? Okay. Have a bad time. You’re repeating the name. You let go of whatever arises in your mind, whatever emotions come and go, whatever thoughts come, they go. You try to keep coming back to the name, again and again and again, and this practice is not so hard to do because there’s singing or vocalization and there’s breathing involved, and then hearing the name also at the same time. All that helps you to pay, helps us to pay some attention, and little by little, we get more comfortable sitting more deeply in ourselves, reacting less to external things, clinging to thoughts and emotions so strongly, glued to them less intensely, and as time goes on, that deepens. It’s a ripening process.

And that’s why people ask me, “What’s a good mantra for this?”

All mantras, all repetition of the name, those mantras are good for everything. They’re not, there’s no downside for those mantras, and for the repetition, and the “Names of God,” as they say. So, that’s why it’s such a wonderful practice to do. And Maharajji said, “From going on repeating these names, everything is accomplished.”

Everything is accomplished. Everything is made full and complete. Our path comes to the end and we recognize our true nature, and we dissolve into that and we become the whole universe. At least that’s what they say.  We’ll see.

Q: There’s a line in one of my songs that says, “I followed you through the flame. I follow you through the flame,” referring to my Guru. What did it mean to me?

You know, I don’t know. That particular song, I woke up with that one day in the middle of the night. I sat down at the harmonium. I sang it. I recorded it, and then I went back to sleep and in the morning, I didn’t even remember what I did. At some point in the day, I said, “Did I wake up last night?”

But be that as it may, what it means to me is that I just follow. My path in this life is to follow him right through the flame of this world, right through the burning that this world is.

You know, there’s a sermon of the Buddha. One of the first teachings he gave is called “The Fire Sermon.” And part of it goes, “Oh, Monks,” he said, “the eyes are on fire with seeing. The ears are on fire with hearing. The skin is on fire with touch. The tongue is on fire with taste.” What else is there? “And the nose is on fire with smell.”

So, we don’t experience our daily life as like we’re on being on fire, which, because our consciousness is so gross, so insensitive and dull, but as we calm down, as our consciousness purifies and opens, we will have that experience that these senses, this sense information is actually burning. It’s very gross stuff.

So, there’s that experience you can have, not that you would want it, but it happens, I guess. So, yeah, that’s what it means to me; that I just, my path is to follow his presence as much as I can in my life.

Q: My lesson has been patience, especially with my partners. 40 years later, when will learning patience be done? I’ve got it and want to move on to other lessons.

I don’t think you got it. If you’ve got it, you wouldn’t want to be moving anywhere. Patience means being with things as they, not trying to change them to please ourselves or others, necessarily. It sounds like you need to work on that patience a little bit, maybe another 40 years.

Q: Do you still get angry after all your years of practice?

No. I never get angry. Right.

Of course, I get angry.

And if so, how do you quiet that feeling?

Well, one thing that happens is, when I’m beginning to get angry, I notice it right away, like,  it’s so, because I spend…  as you move along on this path, you spend less and less time reacting. So, when a reaction arises, It doesn’t feel good. You notice it right away. So, I try to release it and I try to release all the thoughts about it.

“That son of a bitch, where did he say that for?” You know, “I’m going to get him.”

I just let them go as best I can. They may come back. My job is to keep letting go, but I notice, you know, if it’s a really painful one, if somebody really got me or has, who I feel, somebody’s done something that hurts me, it takes a while to let go of it because all that self-righteousness that comes up.

“Who do they think they are? You know, where do they get off? After all I’ve done for them, they would do this to me?”

That kind of stuff, on and on and on. So don’t be in a hurry, have patience. It ain’t going to go away that fast.

The name of the Rumi poem is “Love Dogs,” and you can find it online, I’m sure.

Q: I feel I’m using chanting to hide from the world and people. How to chant in the right way?

Well, yeah, I mean, there is this thing that they call “spiritual bypassing,” where you’re trying to up-level everything. If people are angry, you say, “Oh, why are you angry? You shouldn’t be angry,” blah, blah, blah, that kind of bullshit.

So, you repeat the name and that’s what you do. Your job is to hear it, remember it, sing it, say it, think it, whatever, and the other job is to let go of whatever comes up. You should let go of this whole idea of what is the right way or the wrong way. There’s no right way or wrong way.

However, you’ve got to remember it isn’t about what you feel, especially when you’re chanting. If you think you’re trying to chant yourself into some blissful state, maybe you’ll do that, but you won’t be able to drive your car. You won’t be able to eat. You won’t be able to talk to people and you won’t be able to take care of yourself. You’ll be stuck in a pleasant state for a certain amount of time, and then it’ll go away.

So, it’s not worth it. But, you know, we want… we’re so needy. We want to feel good. We don’t want to feel bad. That’s not what this practice is about. This practice is about training ourselves to let go of the stuff within us that causes suffering for us and others.

So, yeah, whatever the rest of the question was. So, yeah, there is no right way as such, and if you are bypassing your emotions and trying to get around them by chanting, you’ll fail and it’ll hurt, but you’ll learn. So just keep going.

Q:  What is the reason for suffering in life? Is it due to our past karma? And how can we reduce suffering?

I don’t know what it’s due to. You can read a lot of books about that. Basically, they say suffering is due to some kind of craving, craving for pleasure, craving for fame, craving for money, craving for things, and because you crave them, you feel you don’t have them, and so you do all kinds of things. You use people to get them, you do whatever it takes to get them, depending on what state you’re in, and that causes suffering. And yes, there is the idea of karma, but you know, I’m not an expert on that stuff.

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

Basically, we have no vote. Something pushes a button, boom, we’re gone. And that button was karma and the reaction was karma, and we just added more energy to that particular button.

When somebody pushes a button, you go, “Oh, a button was just pushed. This feels really intense. What’s going on here?”

That’s a whole other way of being in the moment, but we don’t usually get that space. We’re not spacious enough to allow that to arise with us. So, the way you, since every action or every thought is karma, is a karmic seed, it also becomes a fruit, so how we react, how we live in this moment, becomes the fruits in the future, regardless of what’s coming into this moment. That’s done already. We can’t change it and all we have is this moment to meet whatever’s arriving in our consciousness, and through spiritual practice, we develop enough space within us to deal with those issues in a less reactive way.

Q: How do I notice my thoughts and release in my sleep? I notice stress and not breathing and getting upset in my sleep and I can’t release in my sleep.

Well, when you’re in deep sleep, you don’t, you’re not aware of anything. When you’re not in deep sleep, they say there’s different levels of consciousness in your, between deep sleep and awake, what we call “awake.” So, I don’t know what you’re experiencing, really. If you’re aware of what’s happening, you always have the option to let go.

It may not stop, but you stay with the awareness of what’s going on rather than get carried away with it, but that’s not easy. That’s why we say, “Practice when you can.”

When you practice in this state of consciousness in the physical world, it does carry over into the different states of awareness and sleep states, dream states. And of course, there’s many practices about developing conscious dreaming. So, you might want to look into that.

Tenzin… I’m sorry. His name just escaped me. He’s a wonderful Lama, a Tibetan Rinpoche. He teaches about dream yoga and he’s a wonderful Lama. Look it up. You can find it.

Q: My mom says I have a vote and that pushes my buttons. How do I react? I find that so difficult, especially when I see how we don’t sometimes…

You mean a vote? Well, I don’t know who your mom is. I don’t know why she says what she says, but if you’re reacting like that, you didn’t have much of a vote, the way we’re talking about a vote, which means you get a chance not to have a knee jerk reaction right away, a negative response to things.

So, I’m not really sure what your question means. So, if your mom says you have a vote and that pushes your buttons, then what kind of a vote did you have? Then you really don’t have a vote, but she’s, I don’t know if she understands or really doesn’t understand, but, maybe there’s no sense trying to reason with her at this point. And when you develop a vote, she’ll sense that you’re not reacting the way you used to, and that will be… she’ll like that whether she believed it… At first, it might threaten her.

Sometimes in a relationship, if a partner feels that they’re there, the other is, reacting less, they confuse that as the person doesn’t care and they’ll do things to make that person react, and they don’t care almost whether it’s positive or negative. They just want to see that they can still push that person around emotionally or affect that person emotionally, because they’re scared that, what they sense as non-reacting, is that the person is pulling away. That’s not real non-reacting. When you don’t react there’s closeness because you’re not reacting to the person’s stuff. So, you can be right there.

I remember once when I was separating from someone in a relationship that my mother knew. I went out to visit her and she started giving me the third degree about it, you know, and I realized she was frantically reaching for my buttons. She was trying to find the button to get me angry and make me react because she was afraid of whatever. So, I just looked at her and I said, “This is none of your business. This is my relationship.”

I wasn’t angry, but I was just telling her, I said, “Relax.” You know, “It’s not about you. You don’t have to be trying to find my buttons. You know, it’s not, it doesn’t concern you.”

And she let go. She relaxed a little bit, for that moment, anyway.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.  That’s the dream yoga.  Sorry, Rinpoche.  Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.  He’s the one that teaches dream yoga. He’s a very, very wonderful,  very, very wonderful Rinpoche.

Q: Can I tell you a story, a funny story about Neem Karoli Baba?

So many.

So, one time, you know, when he used to get up to walk, to go somewhere, walk across the courtyard or going to his room, he would usually reach for somebody’s hand because he kind of walked like a baby, sometimes. You know, it looked like it was going to fall over. It usually was an Indian person. So one day, I saw he was getting up and I kind of elbowed somebody out of the way, and I put my hand out and he grabbed my hand and he looked at me and he laughed. Right? And then we started to walk towards the back of the temple and I’m just like, “Oh, this is so great. I’m holding his hand. He’s holding my hand. He’s leaning on me, walking through the back of the temple.”

Then, he let go of my hand. It was just the two of us. And he let go of my hand and he took a few steps. So, I took a few steps. And then he said something in Hindi, then he took a few steps. So, I took a few steps. Then he said something in Hindi again and took a few steps. So, I took a few steps. Then he just looked at me and he went like this, and he knelt down and he peed.

He just wanted a couple of feet to pee in peace. I wasn’t going to give it to him.

You know, He knew everything; the past, the present, the future. He knew what was in your mind.

He said once, he said, “People come here and they try to fool me.” He said, “I go on fooling the whole world and they come here and try to fool me.” He said, “If they knew who I was, they, they’d pull the hair off of my skin to make an amulet and wear it around their necks.”

Q: What is the ring in the ring song? Hanuman, Where’d you get that ring? What’s the ring?

Well, in the story of the Ramayana, in the story of Ram, I don’t know if you know the story, but basically Rama’s wife, Sita, is kidnapped by the demon Ravana and taken to this island kingdom that he has off the coast of India, which is now Ceylon.  Lanka.

And Rama’s wandering around with his brother, Lakshman, trying to find Sita. He has no idea where she is and he’s tripping out. He’s having a breakdown. And then one day in the forest, he meets Hanuman, and through the meeting with Hanuman, an alliance is formed between the monkeys and Ram.

And later on, after the rainy season, all the monkeys spread out over the world to try to find seat Sita, but before they go, before Hanuman goes, Ram, who knows everything, but acts like he doesn’t, takes his ring off, his marriage ring and he gives it to Hanuman, and he says, you know, “If you find Sita, show her this ring, so she believes, so she’ll know it’s from me that you’re, you’re my devotee.”

And that’s what happened. When he first discovered where Sita was, he hid in a tree and he began speaking in very sweet tones so she wouldn’t be afraid, because she was being hassled by these huge monsters all the time. And he didn’t want her to think that he was one of them.

So, he spoke to her for a little while, and then he dropped the ring down to her from the tree above, and she picked the ring up and she said, “This ring cannot be created by magic,” because Ravana the demon was a great magician, but Sita knew that this ring, which was somehow or other, it was a divine ring given to them by the gods, I think, for their wedding.

She knew this ring could not be copied by magic. So, she knew that Hanuman was indeed Rama’s servant and then Hanuman jumped down out of the tree and spoke to her and all that. So, that’s the story of the ring.

Where did you get that ring?

Q: How old was I when I met Maharajji?

I met Maharaji in September, physically, in September, 1970. So, I was 23, but I first met Maharajji inside when I met Ram Dass for the first time in, just before I was 20 and, or wait, I was 21.  I was 20 going on 21 in the winter of ’68, ’69… that winter. That’s what I met Ram Dass.

Q: What is my definition of grace?

I don’t know in words. First of all, grace is grace. We don’t deserve grace. We don’t earn grace. It’s not based on anything we do to get it. We don’t not get it if we’re bad little boys and girls and we don’t necessarily get it if we’re good little boys and girls. Then it wouldn’t be grace. Grace is causeless. It’s the natural outflowing of the state of oneness, being, true being. Blessings, in some way, are grace. Real blessings.

In 1971, we were in Vrindavan with Maharajji and I stepped in a hole in the street and I snapped my knee, and when I woke up the next day, it was full of fluid. It was all swollen. I couldn’t put any weight on my leg at all. And we weren’t supposed to come to the temple to see Maharajji until four in the afternoon, but I figured that I had to go to the doctor or something because my knee was like, really bad.

So, I’ve got something to show you.

So, however, so I decided to go to the temple early. My friend, Raghu, he helped me walk to the temple. I had to lean on him because I couldn’t, I really couldn’t put any weight on the leg. And I limped into the temple and Maharaji was sitting alone. No, he was sitting in the courtyard, in the middle of the courtyard with one Indian guy, and I limped up. Right? And I went like this, I couldn’t even do a full pranam, a full bow, because I couldn’t bend my leg. And then I just sat down and he didn’t say anything. I thought he was going to say like, “What are you doing here so early in the morning? You know, I told him not to come.”

No, nothing. He just sat there, like that, looked at me, looked around, nothing. And so, I thought to myself, “Okay, we’re getting a chance to sit with him. They can cut my leg off anywhere they want. I ain’t going nowhere. I’m staying right here.”

So, after some time, not too long a time, he got up, and he took that Indian guy’s hand and they started walking towards the back of the temple. The further away he got from where we were sitting, he started leaning on that Indian devotee, leaning more and more and more, and it looked like he couldn’t even walk.

So, I thought to myself, “He’s taking the karma of my knee.”

Right? Big thought. Whoa.

So, the minute I had that thought, he turned around and basically ran back to where we were sitting, leaving the Indian guy in the dust and he sits 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. Good boy.”

That’s all. Right? And we just sat there. For hours.

Later in the day, some of the other Westerners arrived and Girija, Larry Brilliant’s, Girija Brilliant, Larry’s wife, had her shoulder bag there on the ground, and in it, there was a Bible. So, Maharajji… Now I had been sitting there for all these hours thinking about it, “What kind of karma is it that I hurt my knee? What is this all about? How does this happen? What did I do? What?”

You know, the usual nonsense that goes on in the brain. So, he grabs her Bible. He opens it up. He doesn’t even look, and he says, “Read this.”

Now you understand it, first of all, he wasn’t supposed to be able to read English. And second of all, he didn’t even look. He just opened it and said, “Read this.”

I looked at it and it was, I didn’t know the Bible. It turned out it was from St. Paul, Letters to Corinthians. And it said, “In order to save me from the abundance of revelation, 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 you. My strength is made perfect in your weakness.’”

“My grace is sufficient.”

So, Ram Dass and I have been talking about this for years, you know, and I reminded him of that story last year, I think it was. And we talked about, you know, what that says is that, Grace is happening all the time and it’s enough as it is, and you recognize how extraordinary that is when you see what that, what little you can accomplish with your own will, and that it’s through surrender and recognition of that grace, recognition of that love, recognition of that presence, and recognition of your desire to be in that presence of love all the time, that you surrender your, you recognize that your personal will can’t do that.

The only way to enter into that state of grace is through surrender.

So, which reminds me, I’ll read you something that Ram Dass wrote fairly recently.

“I now accept that his grace is sufficient for me. I need nothing more. Though I have no powers, no great visions or astral contacts, no super energy which frees from sleep, nor am I yet purged of all worldly desires, yet His grace is sufficient, for I am coming to know the power of love. My strength is made perfect in your weakness.”

Weakness is one of those words, it’s the translation, but I, what they’re pointing to is the impossibility of the personal will entering into the kingdom of Heaven. Like Jesus said, “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a man with attachment, or a person with attachment, a rich man, to go to enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Then he says, “I’m coming to suspect that I’ve been seeking and expecting the wrong sign, and that who we are to become, we already are.  But the humbleness of the sign of the spirit leads us to overlook it. I think that, in my Western desire mind, I have wanted great powers to heal and impress those who are impressed by power, that the spirit exists, and to impress myself, but as faith grows, I come to see that power attracts power and love attracts love, and I am blessed enough to transcend the need for power.

Then I shall become love and know only love in all whom I meet. That is heaven on earth. That’s the true teaching.“

So beautiful.

The post Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD June 18 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 57 Where Do Thoughts Come From, Suffering, Favorite Chants

Q: I’ve been coming to see you for many years and the last time I came after I left, there were just these uncontrollable tears for days, for weeks, like someone a sponge and tears were coming out and it felt like grief. And sometimes, when we’re together, when we come here I feel like, collectively there’s that energy of grief and I don’t know if it relates to suffering, you know, it seems like all humans are trying to avoid bad feelings and suffering, and like that’s the thing we push away.

“We’re already being called and when we, when we call out, we’re actually just calling back. When we chant here, we think we’re doing it. We think we made the decision to come here. We made the decision to sit in here instead of going for a walk on the beach. We made the decision to do this, do that. That’s our reality. There might be another reality which is that we were brought here and we were forced to sit down by our own hearts and made to chant because that’s what’s going to connect us. And that’s what we really want inside is to be connected to that love. “ – Krishna Das

Q: Hi. When you chant the song, “Saraswati,” I get that feeling, this like, incredible feeling like you fall in love and then I can’t listen to the chant because I spend the whole time saying, “Oh, I love this chant. I love this chant. I want to hear it, I want to hear it. Then I miss it, and then they have to play it over and over and over again.

KD: Could be worse.

Q: But it’s like insatiable. Like it’s a desire that like something pumps and I don’t know what it is and I’ve tried to listen to that chant with all the same words in a different chant and it doesn’t create the same feeling. It’s only that chant, that time. And so, it’s interesting to me why, like it’s not the words, it’s not the vibration, what it, it’s a crazy desire… and I hardly ever hear the chant because I spend so much time in my head saying, “Oh I love this so much, I love this chant, I want to hear it again and again,” and then I miss the chant. Do you know what I mean?

KD: Luckily we have a tape loop. Just put “repeat”

Q: Over and over again. But how is it that some of the… it’s the same words, you’re the same singer, you’ve sang it different ways, different times, it doesn’t have the same effect but that one, it’s like, “Just take me now.” You know? It’s that kind of feeling, you know? So, how… what are the differences… what’s happening there?

KD: How am I supposed to know?

Q: You sang it.

KD: So, I sang it. That’s all I did. That’s all I did. I sang it. That’s all I know. The rest of it’s your stuff.

Q: But when I hear it, like when you explained that you saw your guru, it’s the same feeling. If that song was, I would be there.

KD: Lock yourself in a room for three weeks with just that chant and see what happens. You might just levitate right out the window. If you do, come see me though. I’d like to know. That’s a good thing. Don’t worry about why, so much. Don’t worry about why. Why’s not necessary. That’s just actually resistance to going into it more. Just keep letting go and hearing it, letting go again and hearing it. Letting go… ok, eventually you’ll be through with that and you’ll be hearing it again. That’s all you do. That’s the practice. That’s great. You’ve found something that really pulls you, that your heart really responds to. That’s a wonderful thing. Don’t spend all of your time thinking about why or how or what is this and how did this work and why is it this way and it doesn’t work that way…

Q: That’s what I do, yeah.

KD: Those are what you call “the things you let go of.” Again and again and again and again. And little by little, you’ll just, you’ll be there. We’re so used to not being here. You don’t understand. From the moment we wake up til the moment we like, crash at night, we’re just gone. Gone, gone, gone. It’s very hard to get used to being here. We don’t even think, “Ok, I’m here, so what?” No you’re not. We don’t understand what it means to really be here and present and at ease within our own Being. So, you’ve found something good. Knock yourself out.

Q: Thanks. Thank you.

KD: Sure.

Q: Hi. Would you share with us what you think thoughts are coming from if they’re not coming from the Divine?

KD: Thoughts?

Q: Yes.

KD: You know, you look at the ocean. Ok, so there’s a wave that’s crashing on the shore. That wave started somewhere out there. Way out there. Just slowly made it to the shore. We don’t know what started that wave moving. We don’t know what wind blew that made that wave, right? All we know is what it feels like right now. Right now, we let it crash over us and disappear. That’s all our job is. Those waves were caused by something. They didn’t come from nowhere, but what caused them is beyond our ability to know. We don’t even know, most of the time, that the wave’s crashing over us over here. We’re too busy listening to Saraswati. Or watching TV or doing whatever we do. So, the beauty of it is, all we need to do is recognize this wave that’s crashing us, maybe it’s some kind of thought or some kind of emotion or some kind of feeling or some desire or some fear or some anger or some shame or greed or selfishness. Something in this moment, whatever it is, we just let go. That’s all we have to do. It’s not, no one knows, you know, where this stuff starts. But one thing you can guarantee, that if it’s happening now to us, this is a result of our own past karmas and how they’re manifesting right now in this world with all the other forces at work in this world at this time. It’s a mixture of stuff. Our own karmas and the atmosphere that in which we live. So, still, it’s simple. Let go. It’s so simple. That’s all you have to remember. It’s not so easy to remember because you can’t make yourself remember. You can only try to remember to remember. And then, oh, ok. Next wave. Ok. So that’s the deal. That’s where we are. We’re trying to be here with what’s happening right now. Yeah. There’s some good books about this. There’s a book by a Buddhist psychiatrist called Mark Epstein, called The Thoughts With No Thinker which is pretty good. There’s stuff you can read about. The Buddhists have got all their shit together. They know what’s going on. They like to talk about it.

(someone in the audience comments on the Saraswati chant)

KD: I’m gonna sing it for two hours and I’m going to watch you the whole time.

Q: Hi.

KD: Hey.

Q: I’ve been coming to see you for many years and the last time I came after I left, there were just these uncontrollable tears for days, for weeks, like someone a sponge and tears were coming out and it felt like grief. And sometimes, when we’re together, when we come here I feel like, collectively there’s that energy of grief and I don’t know if it relates to suffering, you know, it seems like all humans are trying to avoid bad feelings and suffering, and like that’s the thing we push away. When you went to India and you saw, met Ram Das before and you felt your suffering was gone for that moment and you had to go to India to be with your Guru and He would relieve your suffering, that’s what you’ve talked about in the past, so I guess my question is around that. It feels like the relationship between suffering and being at one with our hearts, is there a really close connection to those two things?

KD: Well, I’m not exactly sure what you’re referring to, what kind of suffering you’re talking about. Are you talking about longing to be in that space or are you talking about emotional pain?

Q: It’s more of an energy. Like people who’ve come here before, I’ve brought many people and they say “Wow, when I first walk in, it almost feels like people are depressed.”

KD: What’s that?

Q: I said, when I’ve brought other people to come and experience these, some people say at first, well, there’s a really heavy, almost depressive energy here.

So to me, when I say, “grief” I feel like, I don’t know, it’s not the emotion of actually losing a specific person. Maybe it’s a loss of what we know is already true, which is that connection to the Divine and so there’s this grief of knowing. We already know it and then the grief is that we feel so far away from it.

KD: That’s good. That’s good that you feel you’re far away because you are. And so, once you notice that, then you try to get close and you do what you have to do for that. The longing is actually the connection already. That’s the way we experience, actually being pulled towards our own true nature… is longing. There’s a beautiful poem by Rumi which I’ll screw up ridiculously, but… One night a man is chanting, “Allah, Allah” and his lips grew sweet with the praising and then a skeptic walked by and said, “Why are you calling out? You’ll never get an answer.” And he thought, “That’s right.” And he stopped singing. Then that night he had a dream where the Guide of Souls came to him and said, “Why did you stop calling out?” And he said, “I never got an answer.” He said, “The calling out is the answer.”

We’re already being called and when we, when we call out, we’re actually just calling back. When we chant here, we think we’re doing it. We think we made the decision to come here. We made the decision to sit in here instead of going for a walk on the beach. We made the decision to do this, do that. That’s our reality. There might be another reality which is that we were brought here and we were forced to sit down by our own hearts and made to chant because that’s what’s going to connect us. And that’s what we really want inside is to be connected to that love.

Q: I feel like the grief is like falling in love with the perfect lover, you know, the Divine. That you’ve been in love and then you break up and there’s no way to get back together.

KD: That’s… the first part was true. The second part is not true. Did you… you know the story of Krishna, right? You know how He sported and played with the Gopis and they fell madly in love with Him, all they did was think about Him all day, totally immersed in His love, and then He left. Right? And they wept and they cried. So, Krishna had a disciple named Uddhava who was a non-dualist and in other words, He believed that, I can’t even describe it, but He wasn’t into devotion like that. So, Krishna sends Uddhava back to Vrindavan with a message for the Gopis and the message was something like, “Don’t worry, I’m always with you. The One… we’re all part of the One” and this and that… The Gopis just kicked Him right out of town. “We don’t want to hear that shit. Where’s Krishna? We want Krishna? We want our Krishna. Where is He? Where is He?” That devotion is the connection. That’s the connection. The longing we have, it’s, it feels like grief but it’s not emotional grief, interpersonal grief, it’s different. It’s the grief that we have because we’re separated from our own true self, from that love which lives within us all the time. It’s like the famous thing about the musk deer that goes around searching for this smell. Where is that smell coming from? It’s coming from its own navel. Where the musk is in their own navel. They’re going, “Where is that? I’ve got to find that. What’s going on?” And it’s right there all the time. Everywhere they go. It’s like that.

So, the longing is the connection and it’s a saving grace. It also ruins the rest of your life. Because nothing will ever be enough. Because nothing is made to be enough. Stuff doesn’t satisfy for more than a minute and a half at the most. It’s not supposed to. That’s not the way it’s made. Stuff doesn’t satisfy fully. And but we keep grabbing onto rocks and squeezing them and trying to get water to come out of the stone. And our hands get bloody and bruised. But it’s never going to come out. Because the water’s in there already. And these Names come from that place where the water is. And they lead us back to that place within us. Bitch and moan all you like. It’s good. Scream it out. It’s all good. And really get into that grief. Don’t push it away. It’s not a mistake. That’s the part of you that knows what it needs and doesn’t have yet. Doesn’t know that it has it yet.

Ok? Are you all right? Are you ok? Not 100 percent but that’s ok. That five percent’s what will save you.

KD: Ok.

Q: I have hopefully a very quick question… and not a philosophical question…

KD: I have a very quick answer. Next question.

Q: Of all the chants and songs that you sing, do you have a personal favorite or a few favorites or Names of God that really speak to you and make you feel, in a way, different than some of the other songs? I’m just curious. Thanks you.

KD: You know, some times you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. One day this one works, feels the best, one day this one feels good. I don’t really have a favorite. You know? Sometimes, you’re Sweetheart, sometimes you’re Honeypoo. It’s all the same, you know? It doesn’t really matter to me. The question is, what can I give myself to? How can I give myself to the practice the most? That’s all. There’s no real favorite. They’re all the Names of the same place. Right?  Do you have a favorite?  What is it?  What did she say?

Q: Om Namah Shivaya

KD: We did that last night, so you can leave no.

Q: I was very excited. I listen to your chants every day on the way to work, walking through lower Manhattan…

KD: Oh my.

Q: And that’s a good way to center myself on the way to work in amidst all the hubbub. So, thank you for enriching my life and helping me center myself every morning on the way to work. And because there’s usually people on the sidewalk next to me, I can never chant along with the music in my earphones, but I do try and whisper it or have it in my head or you’re suggesting to get into the groove.

KD: Mentally is just as good. You don’t want them to put you away in a padded cell. Stay quiet. This woman once came up to me and she said she was getting divorced from her husband. They kids and everything. And I said, “Why? What’s going on?” She said, “Well, you know, I play your music in the house all the time.” I said, “yeah?” “I play it in the living room. I play it in the kitchen. I play it in the bedroom upstairs. I play it in the bathroom. And my husband hates it.” I said, “Turn it the hell off.” So she did and they’re still married. It’s good. You have to do what’s appropriate to the situation.

Q: Ok. I do 15 minutes a day. So, yeah it’s good.

KD: Ok.

Q: So, do you have that same…

KD: Soham.

Q: Soham, yes. Do you have that same feeling of the way of love, of devotion…

KD: Are you kidding?

Q: Well, I didn’t finish my question.

KD: I’m depressed all the time.

Q: No you’re not. You’re around a lot of people that like, want to share in your joy and your love…

KD: You don’t know me. I just mope around all the time. Ask my daughter, I mope around all the time. She’s afraid to even call me. She goes, “Hello, dad…” “ahhhh why are you calling?”

Q: It must be a parent, you know, child thing. I get it. It’s ok.

KD: Yeah. What are you asking?

Q: Well, I’m getting there. Do you feel that love, devotion, that joy, even if you’re not chanting but you’re still singing?

KD: First, do I feel it when I am chanting? That would be nice. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

Q: You just kind of roll with it.

KD: Don’t you understand? You don’t make that happen. You do your practice and you allow whatever to arise to come and to go. And what’s left is you. Again and again and again. And then that gets deeper and deeper and you start to feel things from within that you’re not manufacturing with your emotions or your needy little stuff. “I want to feel good, I don’t want to feel bad,” all that stuff. You just do your practice and you get to something real eventually. Sometimes I feel ok, sometimes I don’t. But I still sing, because as soon as I sit down to sing, anything that arises, you let go of and you stay with the chant. Again and again and again and out of that chant, out of those Names arises many things, many wonderful things.

Q: Well, even if you’re not chanting, if you’re just singing a song in the shower or on the radio, in the car or… you know, do you still feel like that? Those things still come up for you? Is what I’m saying…

KD: What things?

Q: Just, the joy of music, of sound, of vibration…

KD: I’m from Long Island. We don’t have joy.

Q: You fake it?

KD: Yeah, I fake it.

Q: There’s a lot of fake things, right?

KD: We have a modicum of pleasantness.

Q: Ok.

KD: That’s what we have.

Q: But I’m just saying, music, in general, do you have that, the love for music  moreso just wanting to share the music? The vibration? The energy of it?

KD: The chanting is definitely intensifies the moment, yeah. But whatever I experience while I’m chanting is not the point and I don’t really dwell on it. I just keep coming back. Again and again. I don’t push it away. I don’t… It’s not negative. But I just let it go and come back. Let it go and come back. Let it go and come back. And as far as the rest of the day, all day long I’m trying to do that. Whatever it is, I’m trying not to be lost in Dreamland the rest of the time, too. You know, your whole life is your practice, not just the moment you’re sitting your ass down. Your whole life has to be a practice. Even if you’re not doing formal practice, you’re still trying to treat people well, to be kind, to be caring and compassionate, to meet people in a good way and to treat them the way you would like to be treated. That takes a lot of awareness and a lot of energy to remember to do that and not be lost all the time. So, the whole day becomes your practice. Your whole life is your practice. Ok?

The post Ep. 57 | Where Do Thoughts Come From, Suffering, Favorite Chants 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.

Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD June 11 2020

“All the questions that you asked, they’re all issues that you can become aware of yourself. Don’t give up your practice. Deepen your practice as best you can. Keep it going. Remember, it’s not about what you’re feeling at the time of practice, necessarily. Keep it going whether you’re feeling any devotional feelings, whether you’re angry, whether you’re sad, whether you’re tired, do your practice. Do your practice. It’s the way. If we don’t plant those seeds, those fruits will never grow for us. So, regardless of how difficult it becomes in the world, regardless of what’s going on in your life, try to remember to remember, as often and as deeply as you can. “ – Krishna Das

Namaste. I hope everybody’s okay. Nice to see you again. Of course, I can’t see you, but it’s good to be together again.

As this pandemic continues, as we stay more isolated in our homes, as so many things seem to be blowing up in the world around us, it becomes more and more important to cultivate the ability to take refuge in our own hearts. And these chants that we’re doing lead us into that place within that is shelter from the storm.

Whatever we do in the world, we want to do it well and we want to be able to accomplish our goals, but if our motives are confused and subject to what they call “The Three Poisons,” which I’m not exactly sure what they are, but it’s certainly selfishness and desire-driven motivation and the delusion, and we can’t accomplish what we want.

So, by learning and training ourselves to take this refuge of this time to move inside, we are able to overcome the obstacles within us. And when we can overcome those obstacles, we can be more effective in the outside world. It’s a natural situation. The less fear we have, the better we’ll be able to interact with people, other people and situations as they arise. The rest, the less selfishness we have, self-centered actions, thinking only of ourselves, the more we’ll be able to accomplish in the world, the more people we’ll be able to help and the more we’ll be able to help ourselves.

So, it’s very important to cultivate this practice, any practice. And for those who don’t understand that there is a way to find refuge within, there’s nothing but continued suffering and frustration and trying to squeeze water from a stone. So, the best thing we can do is to learn how to take care of ourselves, and at the same time, that expands to include everyone, because we’re all connected. When we go within, we can feel that connection with everyone and everything. It’s not something you have to think about up here. It’s something you directly experience.

I mentioned the three poisons before that we are subject to in our dealings with our own stuff, and they are officially; ignorance, attachment and aversion. I’m not sure about that, actually, but it’s close. Something like that. Delusion for sure. Not seeing the way things really are. And then second, acting only out of self-referenced behavior, things that benefit ourselves in one way or another, where we are the center of the universe, and then attachment and aversion, which is clinging things and pushing things away.

Q: I’m afraid and sad that I can’t help others as before, because I must self-quarantine to protect the body. How can I still protect others if it’s risky to protect myself and then to be physically present? And if they are too young or intellectually can’t understand?

Well to everything, there’s a season. Right now, if we want to continue living, we have to protect the body. I don’t think that’s selfish in the usual sense of the word. There are times when we can serve others directly, externally, but on the other hand, when you’re serving yourself, your true self, your heart, and opening your heart and practicing, making intentions to help and to offer loving kindness to the world in your practices, you’re creating good circumstances within yourself and outwardly, and that’s not to be…. One should understand that’s very important also. So, when it’s time to take care of yourself…

Right now, I miss singing with people physically. Because it’s good for me. And it brings energy and joy into my life, and so I really enjoy that, but it’s going to be awhile before that can happen again. But in the meantime, here’s what I do. I do the best I can, given the circumstances. And many different things had to come together in my life to make this happen. And fortunately for myself and anybody who sings with me, they did come together.

So, you have to honor who you are, where at this time in your evolution and in your situation. Service is more of an attitude and motivation than actual action. It doesn’t have to be acted out in the physical world. The greatest saints have done the greatest service to us because they’ve liberated themselves from suffering and are around to keep that vibration here on earth for us and those teachings alive for us. So, it all depends on the moment. And as far as who can understand or don’t understand, what do we understand really?

So, let’s get real here. We’re just doing the best we can. You try to offer whatever you can. If it’s not accepted, fine. You still make the offering from your heart that you feel you must make. Whether somebody understands it or appreciates it, ultimately you just do the best you can.

Q: I want to know, after all these years of chanting, what difference do you feel in yourself? Any divine experience you want to share?

No.

Really, all I can tell you is I mope around less than I used to. I don’t have big experiences, things like that. I don’t see things. I’m just a regular kind of guy, but I do mope around less than I used to. And that’s a good thing.

Q: If you can’t fight hate with hate, you must fight hate with love. How do we bring this energy into the present situation?

Well, you don’t fight with love. You love. You offer loving kindness to yourself and to others and to everyone and to the different situations that are going on out there.

Everybody’s entitled to their own way of seeing things, and sometimes it’s surprising when you scratch the surface of someone to see what they really feel about things. It can be very a powerful experience to see what’s inside, what people carry around with themselves and they’re not aware of the results of their actions.

So, of course you can’t conquer hate with hate. You can only offer loving kindness and offer your actions with as much compassion and kindness as you can muster up. Only hate comes from hate, only anger comes from anger and only fear creates more fear.

So, what can we actually do? What are we really capable of doing?

Half the time I can’t even find the bathroom in the middle of the night. So, what we’re really capable of doing is not so much. Are we going to change the whole world? No, but that doesn’t prevent us from making the effort to do that.

Once again, in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says, “Do what you do, but offer the fruits of your actions to me.”

In other words, all we can do is what we do, whether we’re successful in making this a heaven on earth or not is not up to us. Whether it works or not is not up to us. All we can do is make the effort. And if we’re concerned with the outcome, then we’re not here in the present moment. So, be with your actions. Be with yourself as you do what you do, but don’t expect the universe to respond the way you want it to. It’s very rare that that happens.

But in the social arena, the situation is going on now. These are, you know, there’s this thing in India, they call old stuff, the Hindus and the Muslims fighting.  It’s an old thing that’s carried on through the centuries. Here, the racism that’s inherent in our culture and our political structure, it’s an old thing that’s been going on for a long time. We need to recognize that and we need to make whatever effort we can to help all beings be treated with kindness and respect and equal have equal opportunities. We don’t want our children to be scared to walk down the street. Why do we allow somebody else’s children to be scared when they walk down the street. It’s a terrible situation and it needs to change. How to do that is not so easy, but one thing’s for sure, if we act out of anger, we will not be as successful as we want to be.

Q: It’s a hard time. Can you give advice for those who are struggling financially? Also, those who have, but don’t feel secure?

It’s a very hard time for everybody. I can’t imagine what a single mother feels, someone who’s working as a waitress and all the restaurants closed down and this woman can’t afford to feed her family, people who lose their job, lose their apartments, lose the house. It’s inconceivable to me. It’s so horrendous.

I don’t know what to tell you in terms of what to do in the outside world, but certainly, if we’re going to survive this, we have to find a way to keep calm, to manifest some peace of mind as best we can, and don’t let the outside circumstances destroy us. It’s not easy. It is not easy. There’s no question about that.

You know, there’s some program running in us that we don’t feel, we don’t deserve to feel okay if everything around us is screwed up, but that’s not actually a good program that’s running. We are okay inside. We need to get in touch with that place so that everything we do carries that vibration of okayness.

But this is a terrible situation. It’s a very difficult situation, very, very painful for so many people. There’s no easy answer here, but you do the best you can to take care of yourself, take care of those that you can help and just do the best you can. That’s all we can ask for anybody. Just do the best you can.

Q: How much minimum should we chant daily? Sometimes I feel I don’t get the same kick that I got yesterday. What to do in this situation?

This is a spiritual practice. It is not a drug. This is not something we do for a temporary high or a temporary feeling of pleasure. This is mind training. We are training ourselves to become more present with whatever arises in our consciousness. When you sit to meditate, you might feel all blissed out one day and feel like shit the next day. The idea is not to be attached and identified with either one of those. If you’re doing your mantra, you sit and you do your mantra. When you notice you’re thinking about something, you come back. When you notice you’re dreaming about something, you come back. When you notice you’re planning something, come back, remembering something, you come back.

This is not, we’re not doing this for temporary pleasure. We’re not doing this to escape from life. We’re doing this to get the muscles and the strength to go through the day in a good way without being destroyed by too much of this or too little of this or too much. It’s not about that. This is about finding out who you really are, and who we really are is not either one of these two things, whether they’re feeling good or feeling bad. Those are experiences. They come and go. That’s the nature of experience. You don’t necessarily have to hold on to that. In fact, you can’t. As you say, one day, you felt good, now today you’re not getting the same kick, but you’re still just as here today, as you were yesterday.

That’s the point of all these practices; to accept what comes, and let it come and let it go. That’s the deal. That’s why it’s a spiritual practice and not a temporary way to get a little pleasure, and why it’s not something that you, there’s no button to push to make, all of a sudden, everything wonderful. It takes time to deprogram ourselves from just the situation you mentioned; wanting this and not wanting that.

You don’t want this. You want this. If you don’t get this, it’s not good. If you get this, too much of this, it’s not good. This is not about any of those things.

The third Chinese patriarch of Zen, who wrote this beautiful Sutra called the Trust in the Heart Sutra, said, “The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences.”

So, recognize your preferences and let go, again and again and again and again until there’s no one to let go. And then you’re fully here. You’re no longer identified with your thoughts, with your feelings, you’re no longer stuck like glue to your negative emotions and to the stories we tell ourselves. This is all about freeing us from that stuff so we can truly find happiness all the time and in everything and love, real love that doesn’t come and go. It’s there within us.

Q: Can you talk about falling in love with someone who you know will not be sensitive to your needs?

Sweetheart, kind sir, whoever you are, relationships are business. You give, you get. You take, you receive.

What we want is love. Love doesn’t come from somewhere else or someone else. Love is who we are. Most of us have programs that are running, that create the situation where we, we fall in love, and we think we’re going to get everything we need from this person. It usually takes some amount of time till you realize that is not what’s going to happen. How could it be possible that you get everything that you need from somebody when it’s already within us?

There was a time in my life that, as soon as I started to fall in love with somebody, I ran the other way, because every time I fell in love with someone and got involved with someone, it turned out to be the same person, my mother. It turned out to be someone who was incapable of loving me the way I needed to be loved. So, I would run. As soon as I felt myself falling, I would run in the other direction. I forced myself to. I did that for a long time, and I think it helped me in the long run because I kept noticing that need in me, and I fell asleep in that need. I believed I needed this. Without this, I could never be happy, which is strange, very strange.

One time, I was in India with Dada, who was one of Maharajji’s great old devotees. This is, I think Maharajji was still in the body, a long time ago, and there was this couple who had kind of met at Maharajji’s feet and kind of got together, but they were having all kinds of problems, and the guy had visited Dada just before I got there. And so, when I got to Dada’s house, you know, I was hanging out with him and we were talking and he told me that this guy had come there and he had said to Dada, “Dada, I can’t live without her. I can’t live without her.”

Dada just looked at me and he said, “Can you imagine that?”

It was so out of his conceptual reality, you know, he could not believe that anybody could say that. It was, the way he said to me, “Can you imagine that?” He was so, he was like…

A lot of times we get involved with people who, on purpose, who can’t give us what we need, because we don’t want to let ourselves be happy. Those are all programs that are running and all those programs are based on the fact that we believe we are separate from everybody else. We are a separate little bubble of individuality that is just the same all the time, and always different from everybody else, and around that belief, everything orbits, all our stuff orbits around that planet of “me.” Spiritual practice, over time, will thin out that belief.  It will lessen the gravitational field that holds all those stories so close to us, and it ripens us. It ripens our hearts. It ripens us, even it ripens us emotionally and brings positive emotions to us, helpful emotions rather than destructive emotions.

So, I wish you well.

Q: Which book?

Trust in the heart Sutra. It’s called, Trust in the Heart Sutra. It’s by the third patriarch of Chinese Zen. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t think it’s a book in itself, but it’s maybe part of a book.

Q: My partner isn’t taking COVID as seriously as I think he should. I’ve tried science, reason, compassion, examples, and he brushes it off. I’m having a hard time keeping my peace. What do I do?

Lock him in a closet.

What to do? Either you leave or you stay. If you stay, you recognize you’re not going to get him to be who you want him to be. If you leave, he has to deal with it by himself. If he falls sick, he has to take care of himself. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? You can’t change this person. Obviously, you say you’ve tried and that’s very kind of you, but if he’s not listening, he’s not listening. Nothing’s going to make him listen. He is not, he’s blinded by whatever particular ignorance he’s  blinded by, and he will have to live out the results of those karmas, of his own actions.

There’s so many crazy stories going on about this and that, and there is science out there. Now people don’t even believe in science, which boggles my mind. It’s like saying you don’t, “I don’t believe in gravity.”

You don’t have to believe in it. That’s what’s sticking you to the earth, my friend.

It’s strange stuff. All you can try to do is keep your peace of mind by recognizing that there’s nothing you can do, and there’s no way you can protect them from the results of his own actions. So, don’t allow yourself to be destroyed by that. There’s no reason to do that. You’ve done what you can. Next. It’s cold and it’s hard, but that’s the truth. What more can you do? You can only love him and let him be who he is and don’t let yourself be destroyed by it.

What are your options? Be destroyed or not be destroyed? It’s up to you. It’s hard because we care about people, but ultimately, we have to let other people be who they are. There’s nothing you can do about that.

Q: How can I be more fearless? I practice fearlessness daily.

How do you practice fearlessness? You know, how can you practice fearlessness? By making yourself go play in traffic and not be afraid? Sometimes fear is useful. It means recognizing that there’s danger in the world. There’s danger here. There’s danger here. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing what’s dangerous and not helpful to us. Fearlessness comes when you trust yourself, when you learn to trust your own intuition about things and you learn to act based on that trust.

There’s a saying that we used to have; “Faith, no? Fear. Faith? No fear.”

So whatever thing you have faith in, if it’s real faith, you have no fear. Without faith, or you could even say, confidence in oneself, there’s fear. And there’s a lot of fear in us, because we think we are separate limited entity, we fear the end of that entity, and so we fear death, but for those who know, they say death is not an end. Why fear it? It is a transition. I’ll let you know.

That reminds me of the joke, you know… This really old couple, and the guy’s been sick a long time and he’s dying, and his wife comes. They’re sitting talking, and he’s lying in bed. He’s getting very close to death. And she says, “Tell me, tell me, do you want to be cremated? Or do you want to be buried?”

The guy’s silent for a minute, and he looks up at his wife and he says, “Surprise me.”

Sorry.

All the questions that you asked, they’re all issues that you can become aware of yourself. Don’t give up your practice. Deepen your practice as best you can. Keep it going. Remember, it’s not about what you’re feeling at the time of practice, necessarily. Keep it going whether you’re feeling any devotional feelings, whether you’re angry, whether you’re sad, whether you’re tired, do your practice. Do your practice. It’s the way. If we don’t plant those seeds, those fruits will never grow for us. So, regardless of how difficult it becomes in the world, regardless of what’s going on in your life, try to remember to remember, as often and as deeply as you can.

Sharon Salzberg always says, “The most important moment of the practice is when you break from your life to do it. It’s the first moment you sit down.” Because then you’ve given yourself a chance to calm down and to cultivate a deeper awareness, a more open awareness and a wider heart.

The post Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD June 11 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 56 Hearing the Name, Chanting the Name, and A Talk About Gurus

Q: Thank you for being here. I want to know about your Guru.

“That Body died in 1973. So, does that mean that for these last years, these last, what, how many years is that? 46 years? That He’s been gone? He’s not available? I don’t have Him anymore? Is that what that means? Because that’s what it would mean if a Guru was a physical body. Gone. But that’s not the case. He’s more present to me now than He was when I was sitting in front of His physical body.” – Krishna Das

Q: What about the idea of humming the chants throughout the day?

KD: Humming the chants? You mean, without the words? Why? Why?

Q: It just seems to come natural.

KD: Well, you think imagining doing headstand is the same thing as doing it? Do you? Ok. There’s your answer. But even when you’re humming, your mind is hearing the chant, right? Yeah. That’s ok. As long as you’re paying attention to what you’re hearing in your head. That’s the mantra going on inside. That’s fine. You don’t have to necessarily sing out loud. Take the mic.

Q: Isn’t that the idea of what to do other than your hour in the morning?

KD: Hour? You do an hour? Wow. I do three minutes.

Q: No. Whatever it is in the morning your practice is. If this is in your head during the day, that’s the idea?

KD: That’s not the idea but that’s good. The thing about doing it out loud is that it adds another way of paying attention. It helps you stay more centered, that’s all. It doesn’t always have to be. The idea is to just be aware of the Name. So, when you sing it, you hear it and that’s awareness. When you hear it in your mind, when you’re repeating it mentally, you hear it mentally. But it’s harder to hold on to that, at least at the beginning. Otherwise, there’s no problem. Ok?

Anybody?

Oh, it always takes so much to get you people here to talk. We should give you coffee. How about coffee? Want some coffee?  Let’s all go down to Starbuck’s for tomorrow’s session.

Q: Can you be present and connected to the One, the Divine and still have thoughts?

KD: Can you? I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I get present and connected to the Divine. Maybe next week. Thoughts are not going to stop coming, but they’re not going to grab you once you’re really connected more deeply to your Being. The thoughts will just flow through like birds through the sky. They may poop on you a little bit, but they’re not going to hold you. So, there’s less, you don’t identify with them immediately like we do in our daily lives. But, if at that moment you’re thinking, “Wow, I’m not really attached to that thought”, you were attached to that one. So, when a kid is playing, when a young kid is playing, do you think they’re going like, “Wow, I’m really playing, this is fantastic. I’m totally into it.” No. They’re just totally into it. Those metta thoughts and that that that that… it’s not existing. They’re present, totally involved. And that’s what it’s like when you… you’re not going, “Wow, I’m totally involved. This is fantastic. I’ve finally made it.” Next. You know? Not that.

Q: Thank you.

Q: Yeah. As soon as there’s something you notice, as soon as you notice you’re back, you come back to yourself again. Whatever it is, whether it’s when you’re driving in a car, hanging out or talking to people, the minute you notice that you’re kind of like, “Oh, I’…” you just woke up for a second and then you’re gone again. You can’t old on to that, because you didn’t do it. It’s underneath the you that wants to hold on. You just notice it, let it be and then you’re gone again until it happens again. But doing these practices, all the practices, any practices that brings you back to what you’re doing and where you are, that creates this, this automatic response, this wake-up response that happens all the time during the day. Once you start noticing, you’ll notice it a million times a day, but you can’t hold on to it. Eventually, through practice and through devotion and sincere, sincerity and creating good feelings and compassion and kindness. Through all that, we wind up sitting more deeply in ourselves more of the time. Naturally. Because it is natural. The way we live is unnatural. It’s programmed responses. Learned responses from one lifetime at least.

Q: What about if…

KD: Where are you? Hi.

Q: Hi. What about if… you can’t chant Names of God in the Jewish Faith.

KD: If you can’t what?

Q: Chant Names of God and the Jewish Faith.

KD: It’s totally correct. We’re just faking it because God…

Q: God’s name is…

KD: You can’t say what God is. God is not a concept. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t do a practice to bring us back home. You may not believe these are the names of God. If you’re Jewish, you have a certain agenda and a certain way of seeing things and that’s the reason, you know, in Indian philosophy they call it, “Neti neti” “Not this and not that.” God is not this and not that. Not this, not that. Not that and not this. You just keep doing it. That’s a practice. And then eventually, what you’re left with is That, which has, which is beyond Name and Form. But the Name… in India, they believe, some of the people believe, that one can not reach the formless or the Nameless except through the form because you’re a form already and you’re identified with your body and your mind and your thoughts and your emotions. That’s form. So, within that form, what you want to do is release the identification with all that stuff and finally go into your true nature and at that point, you’ll be beyond form. But it’s only by releasing, it’s by gathering yourself and moving towards that Oneness within you by letting go. That’s what the practice is about. So, Ram is not necessarily, from our point of view, in this reality, when we say “Ram” we don’t experience “Ram.” Even when we say, “God,” we don’t experience God. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. It just means we don’t experience it. We’re not aware of it. So, how do we get those awarenesses? Through the repetition of the Name, we’re actually, we keep releasing everything, all the thoughts and the feelings, the emotions, the memories, the fantasies, the dreams, and we keep coming back to being here and then, at some point we go through the door. So, what you’re talking about is a philosophical issue which I don’t know much about. I just know Sri Ram Jai Ram.  That’s all I want to know.

Q: This is a little bit less philosophical, I’m trying to get the words in English in a better way. So, our Guru used to say, “You can not talk to God to hungry people” and the country where I come from there is a lot of hunger and a lot of despair. But a lot of times it’s not physical hunger.

KD: What’s that?

Q: A lot of times it’s not physical hunger.

KD: That’s your interpretation of it. What he was talking about was physical hunger.

Q: Yeah, the Guru said, “the physical hunger.” But in my country where I come from, there is people starving, some of them are like, physical hunger, but there is also this hungriness because there is a lack of social sort of, union, you know. There is this very very divided country for 50 year war, and my question is, actually, how can you chant to people that is starving? And how can you do that in a way that is also not just, you know, a song but something that can touch their hearts in order to awake people to feed each other or to be more kind

KD: You want to help people by singing to them? By waking them up?

Q: I think I got to first wake up myself.

KD: Exactly. Next question.

Q: I’m curious why the high notes are so difficult..

KD: I’m sorry?

Q: Why the high notes are so difficult to hit?

KD: Why the notes are? You mean in the singing? Difficult for who?

Q: Me.

KD: Oh. Sing lower. Wrong key for you. That’s all. I’ll see. If I sing down here you’ll hit all the high notes. Because I, that’s just a physical thing, you know. Everybody has a range that’s comfortable for them. You know, some people can sing high, some people can sing low, some people can do the whole thing. I’ve got about a five note range, so I sing right in the middle of it all. And that works for me, you know? If you can’t reach the high note, you can also sing it low, you know, like… you can sing it lower if you can’t reach the high thing. Nina has that trouble all the time because the key I sing is too, it’s either too low or too high for her, but it’s not in the middle. It’s not comfortable. So, just don’t hurt yourself, that’s all.

Q:  Thank you for being here. I want to know about your Guru.

KD: Me, too.

Q: When you met Him, I have a feeling maybe you were, how did you, when did you realize He was your teacher? Was it right away?

KD: Did you ever fall in love?

Q: Yes.

KD: Next question.

Q: But I want to know your story. How did it happen for you?

KD: Actually, for me, I had heard about this guy named Ram Das and I went up to meet Him and I didn’t know anything about Him and when I walked into the room where He was sitting, the second I walked into the room, I didn’t even look at Him, there was no eye contact, there was nothing. I walked into the room and all of a sudden something happened inside of me where I knew that whatever it was that I was looking for, I didn’t even know what to call it, right? But whatever it was, it was real and it existed and it was in the world and you could find it. That was what happened to me at that moment and that was Maharajji. Yeah. And that never changed. That understanding or that experience, that knowing, that’s the same right now as it was then more than 50 years ago because that was Him. I walked right into Him. Bam. So, do we need to talk about Gurus? Is that what we’re going to talk about? “I want a Guru. I can’t find my Guru. I can’t do anything until I have a Guru. I feel so bad, where’s my Guru.” You know, that’s a crock of shit. However, we have those feelings. Guru, God and Self are our true nature. Your true nature is not, they are not different things. I know it’s very hard to accept that. And I know that. I mean that. We think a Guru is a Human Being that’s somewhere out there in the world that we need to find and until we find it, our lives won’t be, we won’t be together, we won’t have it together. It’s not like that. Luckily, it’s not like that. Yes, Neem Karoli Baba, my Guru, was that body wrapped up in a blanket and I met It.

But that Body died in 1973. So, does that mean that for these last years, these last, what, how many years is that? 46 years? That He’s been gone? He’s not available? I don’t have Him anymore? Is that what that means? Because that’s what it would mean if a Guru was a physical body. Gone. But that’s not the case. He’s more present to me now than He was when I was sitting in front of His physical body. Because there’s less “me” around than there was 45 years ago. “Me” is all my stuff. “Me” is everything that prevented me from seeing Him clearly, which was all my stuff. I was sitting in front of Him but 90% of the time I was gone in my thoughts. I was in Dreamland. Then He’d hit you with a banana and you were back. For a minute. And He was so, you know, one of the Names of God, one of the Names of Krishna is Mohan. Now, “Moha” means “attachment,” right? But “Mohan” means the One who makes all hearts attached to Him. So, it’s the Divine grabbing us and holding us. And that’s the Guru. But we’re not ready to let go of our stuff. You can’t jump off the ground if you’re holding your house full of stuff. So, whether you know you have a Guru or you don’t know you have a Guru, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a Guru. Everyone has a Guru. Everyone’s a part of some lineage already, especially, even people who aren’t involved in this stuff are already… their paths are laid out, so what more the people, at least, who claim to be looking for something, like us… so we all have a lineage, we all have a Guru. We may not meet that Being in a physical body. Maybe that Being’s not in a physical body right now. What are you going to do? Watch tv for the rest of your life and do nothing else? Eat pizza and watch tv? Vegan pizza? No. Buddha said very clearly, He pointed out the reason we search for something is because we are suffering. We have unhappiness and so we want to be free from that. That’s the impetus for looking for whatever it is you want to call it. True Love. Real Love. Love that you don’t fall in or fall out of. Love that you don’t get from somewhere or give to something. Love that’s who we are every day all day all lifelong. That’s what we want. That’s God. That’s Guru. And if we don’t have it, it’s because of our stuff. So, how do we get rid of our stuff? We do a little practice.  Whatever that means to you. And that helps us release the issues and the programs that we identify with that are causing us pain. That are creating suffering for ourselves and others. Yeah. Over there.

Somebody here?

The post Ep. 56 | Hearing the Name, Chanting the Name, and A Talk About Gurus 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.

Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD June 6 2020

Namaste everybody. Can you send some chai over from India? I didn’t bring my tea this morning. I’m a train station. Only best jive. So nice to see you all. And anybody have anything to say? How are you? I’m doing good. How are you? Good morning, I guess. Thank you. It’s a little early for me to be a good morning person.

I don’t go to sleep till like three or four. And then when, when everybody gets up and go to sleep, right?

My question, I have at least two questions because I’ve been waiting for a long time, like past giant chats. So the first question was that Ron does in his, one of his talks, he said that eventually not having something turns out we more interesting than having something. Not getting what you want. Turns out to be more interesting than getting what you want.

This is what I’m Gracie will cause wishful thinking.

Um, yeah. So then your question is what my question is, what

So what is the question again, is that I wanted you to know, I can interpret that in my model of thinking, but I, because you are more aligned to who Ramdas was, so you can probably better explain what he meant by that, because I, in my set of morality and the set of values, I can interpret. But I need to know what you think of that.

I think he was talking from a point of view of spiritual practice. When you deny yourself something that you want, or you don’t take it, then you see all your stuff immediately. You start thinking obsessing about it. Then you start thinking about it. It brings up everything in you that wants to grab onto something.

Uh, I think that’s really what he meant. It wasn’t, it was pretty, uh, pretty Maharaj Maharaji used to say you want it, don’t take it like that. So of course who’s, who’s capable of that, not me and most people, but when you don’t immediately take something that you want and you go for instant gratification, when you don’t do that, you see your reactions, you see how attached you are to something, how much you’re invested in trying to grab something outside of yourself in order to get it.

So I think it’s just a practice issue, not really in terms of daily life and going through the day and relationships, but with people and things, but in internally, if you don’t immediately go for something and grab it, you see the part of you that continually obsesses about it and wants it and can’t let go.

And then you start dealing with that place with yourself and that’s good work. It’s good work. So

the second question was about the prayer and it says that yet read the

So that probably means that wherever there is a key than four by one and a mile deep probably shows themselves in one form or another. So in your 50 years of gluten, has anybody ever come up to you and said that they might have seen Maharaji in any form?

You know, people who have their astral eyes open, so to speak, you know, there and can see other planes of consciousness. They always tell me that whenever I sing to her edgy comes and sits right next to me and plays with me and laughs and pushes me around and everything while I’m singing and stuff like that.

But I don’t see them. I don’t have those experiences. It’s nice to hear that. Even if it’s a fantasy, I like it. I’ll take it. That’s all. That’s all I can work upon. You know, I sang in through phenomena, like at the  a couple of years I saw that. Yeah. It’s amazing. I was so shocked. They invited me. It was really

okay. That was the first time you sang in deli too, right? No, I think I had sung in Delhi before that stainless not in 2015. I think it was, maybe it was better than me. I just wake up and look around all day and then go back to sleep. I don’t know what time it is or what they, or what year? No, that’s good.

Thank you. Hello. Thank you, Krishna DAS. It’s great to see you this morning. I thought you must be in India because of the time I thought, well, there’s the us is going to be up at 10 30 in the morning. Yeah, I thought so too.

Anyway, I just want to talk a little bit about the times and get your take and some advice. So in the United States here, I’m in San Francisco, um, and, uh, you know, there’s a lot going on and a lot of it is very, a lot of it is good. Um, and they, I guess those things are not mutually exclusive. Uh, so, you know, a lot of us are feeling a little torn with, you know, being told to stay home, to be safe from the pandemic and having these wonderful, peaceful protests going on that are long overdue.

And I feel like we have a real momentum and change opportunity, uh, for the better. Um, but I also want to, you know, be concerned about my own, uh, not getting too much caught up in outcome. Um, and I don’t want to create more karma for myself or others. And it sort of brings me back to the, the part of the, the godlike Gita, where, um, rom is about to go into battle, but is it’s hard as broken and he can’t go and kill his basically other family members.

And I’m wondering if that’s, if there’s a lesson there that I could work with, um, or if you have any other perspective. So that’s, that’s what I’d like to talk about. Well, there’s a lot of lessons there more than I could even ever understand. One thing that Sri Krishna says to Argentina. When Argenta says, I can’t go kill my families.

You know, they’re all my, my relations. I can’t do that. Uh, Sri Krishna says your words sound wise, but are they real? Is it real wisdom or not? And then Christian begins to unpeel peel off the layers of delusion until finally by the middle of the Gita, he shows him his true form. And then it keeps on. It goes on after that as well.

So that first chapter, you know, they say that every chapter, the Gita is, is a yoga. So the first chapter is called the yoga of the desolation of Argentina, which is the first step and on the path. You don’t, you can’t, you can’t move you. Can’t everything you want to do seems to be wrong. You’re, you’re required to do things that you feel required to, to throw out attachment, but it’s my family.

What are you talking about? How do I not be attacked? So you seem to be fighting with yourself, but Krishna, uh, gradually show us and uncovers the truth for him. And then he, he sees that, that the right thing to do in his situation is to fight, but he has that experience himself based on his, the visions that Sri Krishna gives to him.

So for us who are stepping chapter one, the preamble, it’s like, wait a minute, how do we get the chapter two? You know? So first of all, in terms of the pen, You have to be healthy. You can’t do anything without embody on this plane. So that’s, you don’t want to jeopardize that. So step one, of course, we don’t want to jeopardize the health of our body because without a body, we’ll be, uh, we won’t be here able to do anything at this point.

So that’s step one. Step two is about the social action. The situation is horrific. You know, this, this is, this racism has been going on since day one and it has to be rooted out and it has to be destroyed. And it has to a new way of incorporating all, all of us into a righteous and just system has to develop.

So everybody has to do what they’re called to do from their own part. So you have to see what, what works for you. You’re the only one who, who knows, nobody else can tell you, you have to listen to your heart and find out what’s right for you. Uh, there are other ways to help, uh, then go into the streets necessarily.

You have things that can be done without going to the street and jeopardizing your health. So, um,

this is no different than every day. It’s just becoming more apparent. This is and going on in America and in the world all over for men, you know, since then. So

yeah, I forget who it was. I think it was the poet beer. Maybe that Maharaji quoted. He said, you know, you can do whatever you do, but you don’t throw anyone out of here, but that’s hard. That’s a multilevel state. Because sometimes in order to, to, you have to say no to certain people, or you don’t have to say it with anger.

You can say it with force, but if you are caught up in emotion, then you’re creating karmas. You’re always creating climates. Every thought is karma. So you have to choose what actions you, you, uh,

th th you have to choose what actions you perform based on what you feel you want to happen, but even so the results of our actions. So not up to us,

what’s up to us is to do what we do a hundred percent or give ourselves fully to it. But whether it works out the way we imagine it’s going to or not, that’s not up to us at all. So with that in mind, you go ahead and file. Just like RJ and I had to fight

the key to the, to that whole thing is, uh, just to backtrack a little in the Mojave part there, which is where the bug of I get this from, uh, before the war, uh, both crude, both Arjun and dirty Odin, the bad guy suppose or bad guy go to ask Christina to help on their side and so dirty and then gets there first.

And he sits at Christmas. Christian is asleep. So durian van Gogh gets there first and he sits at Krishna’s head by Krishna’s head. Arjun comes in right afterwards and stands like this at Christmas feat. So Krishna wakes up and he sees Arjun first. Then he sees 30th down. So they’re doing done, says I came first.

I get to ask what I want. Christian says you came first, but I saw Arjun first. So what I’ll do is I’ll split, I’ll split myself in two, either. You can pick me or, and I won’t fight, or you can pick, you can have all my warriors, the greatest warriors. And, uh, so I’m going to just drop their child.

Okay. Or you can, or you can have my, my whole army, your millions of the greatest warriors in the world. So dirty Don said, I’ll take your warriors. And at that moment, the fate was sealed because wherever Christie is there’s Victor. So we want to be with Krishna regardless of what we do. We want to have that awareness in our hearts as deeply as we can.

According to how you know, how we see the world and what kind of practice we’ve done in our lives and where, where our vision is. We want to be with Christian, regardless of what we do, because there will be victory and who is Krishna. Krishna is our own true nature. So we want to follow our own truth as best we can and recognize that real victory may look different than most people think it will look.

And that’s just the way it is. Not everybody gets what they want, even if they go fight for it, because there’s a, a logic behind the whole thing. That’s a functioning. And, uh, we’re not in charge of that, but that doesn’t mean we don’t fight. We fight and we give it our, all the thing about Argento, which made him the greatest warrior was that he had full concentration.

He was able to give himself fully to what he was doing. There was no distraction, boom. And so that’s how we need to act. And if you’re angry and emotional, you’re not going to be able to give you a full, but you’re going to be, and all you’re going to be a churning churning inside. Yeah. So yeah, this is good.

You know, it’s very hard to talk about this stuff with most people, because most people don’t, I don’t even feel that there’s anything to find in life besides pushing re reorganizing things on the physical plane, what to do. They each live by our own truth, our own understanding of things and do the best we can.

Okay. Where in San Francisco are you. Very nice place. Very close to integral yoga institutes.

I love it. I lived out there for a long time. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Hey Katie, how are you? Hello. How are you? This is, this is unbelievable. We saw you last Thursday. And then, uh, we, we thought, you know, we’ll do a giant chit chat with you. And, uh, so this is awesome. Um, my question was as a young 20 year old KV, going back as a young 20 year in his young, 20 year old, 20 year olds already.

Sure. What made you, um, motivate to take this leap of a journey to India or, you know, As a young guy, who’s back like being from India, we usually are in that, you know, parents tell us, you know, you have to be an engineer, you have to be a doctor. So we are kind of trained and being the 32 years old right now, I am, it took me last four years to kind of understand what really matters and kind of focus on the spiritual side of life.

Right? As a young, 20 year old kid, what made you do kind of take that progression towards this journey? You know, I remember when we first got to India, you know, there weren’t a lot of Westerners there yet. It was, uh, August, 1970 people looked at us like, what are you doing? How could you leave the country of everything for this country of nothing?

You know, they, they, they just, you know, and we just looked at, we looked at them like they were. The country of everything sucks. You know, what’s wrong with you? There’s nothing there, but stuff. There’s no love there. There’s no happiness. There’s no peace. That’s what we want. We don’t want that shit. So it was like that, you know, but, uh, on a personal level,

I always, my whole life, I always felt something was missing. Everything was just slightly out of focus. I don’t know how to explain it. No matter what I did, I wasn’t, uh, I couldn’t connect. I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t feel anything. Um, uh, I was just looking for something, you know, and I guess it was my friend gave me the first book I probably read about this stuff was the gospel of Veronica.

I just couldn’t believe it, you know, it’s like, wow, I want that. You know? Um, yeah, there was no question about what, what it was like, everything over here is like a small little 10 watt bulb and this other stuff was like the sun. There was like, I want that. And was just, and I guess on one hand you could just say it’s, it was karmic ripening, you know, it was of some little degree, but there was no, and I, when I left for India, I was never coming back to America.

I gave, I left, I sold everything I had, I gave my genes away, but, and of course I didn’t tell my mother that, uh, also in America at the time it was a very wild time. It was a very, uh, There were a lot of changes going on in the culture. People were starting to look for a deeper meaning in life. The fifties had been so gray, you know, so repressed, so, uh, you know, shirt and tie and, and no emotion.

It just, yeah. So by the mid sixties, things were starting to change. People were looking for something deeper, it was like a whole wave, you know? So, uh, I was at, uh, when I was in college, uh, I re there was, they showed a movie, uh, but the punch really, it was such a Dick Ray’s first film as part of the APU trilogy, the first.

And I, I was like, I could not, everything was familiar the way people move the way they talk, the way they spoke, the way that the jungle looked. And I was just like, it was like a memory I’m, everything was so familiar. And then there’s one part in the movie where a very emotional part and the mother and the film raises her head to, to cry out in grief.

And she opens her mouth. But instead of her voice, you hear one note on the sitar, it goes like this, my mind shattered at that. And I said, I’m going to India like that, like that. Yeah. And it turns out that was the rubbish Shankar note on the sitar. He ma he did the soundtrack for that movie. So he just went around, you know, instead of her voice crying out, uh, her daughter had just died and she was raising.

It was just completely cracking. And now I don’t know, I was just pulled totally pulled to India. That’s just the way it is, which is why I can’t speak Hindi because I think I should be able to, so I don’t want to study. Yeah. I don’t blame you. I speak baby talk. You, you speak pretty well. I must say yeah.

For the four words. I know I say them well, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. It’s fun. It’s fun. In a taxi cab in New York, I put my baseball hat down like this, and I started talking to the guy. Hello? God. I knew anything that looks around the corner. Is that? Yeah. All right. Nice talking to you. Nice talking to you.

Thank you. Um, around us, I met you and, um, I came to Maui in 2014, but it’s nice to see you. Thank you. Was it part of India? Are you from no. Oh no. I’m in Georgia. I do have to say that. Um, it was a very transformational experience after I came back from the Maui retreat. You, um, like my life completely changed for the better.

So, um, it was, you know, so it was a great experience. Um, well I went to, uh, since then, um, a couple of weeks, so my mom passed away. Um, it wasn’t sudden it wasn’t from the, um, pan democratic thing. It was just natural cotton note. She was 85. Um, and I’m having a hard time. I’m really struggling with it. And I know when you talk about detachment and all that, it’s difficult with your mom when she, you know, she dies.

So I was just wondering if there’s something general kind of. Advice. I don’t know, like, you know, in the practice of, you know, when I try to do the work of detachment, but it’s just so hard when you feel such powerful feelings that the loss of your mother, you know, we did it. I did play you’re chanting right after she transitioned, by the way, don’t, don’t, don’t even think about detachment.

It’s not something you think about. Think about love and, and stay in that feeling of love with her. The love is always here. The bodies come and go, but the love never dies. So you stay with that connection feeling. And that brings you detachment from the loss of the physical body. You don’t try to stop feeling.

You can’t stop feeling that that’s, that’ll never work, but what you w what you, what you really want is to be remembering that love in a way they, they say, remember in India, in which means. To just keep reimbursing yourself in that, in the fact that the love is still here. And where is it it’s inside of you.

And that’s where she is. That’s where she’s always been inside of you, even though it looked like she was outside for awhile. When you feel like sometimes I’ll still experience like pain of missing her, you know, something will remind me of her and I feel the love, but then I’ll feel love NFL pain. Cause I can’t see her.

Don’t don’t be afraid of the pain. That’s quite normal. You’re a human being, I think so there’s no, you just allow the pain to come and then it allow, it will also go and as time goes on the level overshadow the pain and the pain will just disappear dissipate. Uh, you just have to allow it to be, if you try to squash it down, it just creates tension and you would make yourself sick for no reason.

The pain is actually there’s a. In devotional practice, the pain of separation is the connection. Okay. Because if you have that pain of separation, you’re not really separated. You’re, you’re, you’re thinking you’re fully involved with the being that you’re thinking about, but yes, you know, bodies come and go and, and as human beings, we, we, we hurt a lot, but as time goes on, that, that transforms itself into feeling the presence.

Like my dad died in 80, late, 80, maybe 88 or something like that. No, 88, 98 93. So I don’t know. Yeah. My mother died in 93, in 2003. My father died 2008.

I feel their presence very strongly. Yeah. And I don’t of course I miss the physical even still, but it’s overshadowed by the, by the presence, by the fact that I feel the love and I allow myself to feel the love. That’s another thing you have to do. You have to allow yourself to open to the pain or you won’t let yourself feel the love either.

It can hurt you. It just hurts, but it can’t do any, it can’t, won’t destroy you, you cry moan, walk around, bang your head against the wall. So all okay. Because that’s, you’re actually with that person at that time in your mind and your heart. And after awhile, the sting of losing the body, uh, calms down a lot.

Um, I noticed this sounds a little bit weird, but actually a little worried about her, like when we saw it and like, You know, she transitioned. I learned it’s almost like a ridiculous kind of question, but I like worry about her. My brother, the first time I was worried about her being alone. She’s not alone.

She’s with all the other beings who are just around, like all of us. Uh she’s she’s you know, just because you don’t have a physical body don’t mean you don’t have a body at all. She’s still an individual with, uh, with, uh, some type of body. Whether it, whether she’s reincarnated in a physical body where she’s in a subtle body, it’s like a dream world.

And it’s like, this world is like a dream world, but we think we’re in the dream, you know? So don’t think she’s alone. She’s not alone. And she’s not,

she’s not suffering any more than she suffered here and probably a lot less. Yeah.

Thank you very much. Thank you. My pleasure. Really just you have to let yourself feel, or, or you’re you’re you’re, you’re, you’re pushing things away that, that, and your mother wants you to be happy. Of course. So you you’re breaking your connection with her. With that, by pushing the feelings away, allow the pain to come, allow it to go and feel the love all the time.

That’s the practice, that spiritual practice. It’s not a pain. It’s not a waste of time. It’s not a side trip. And another part of the practice. Another life lesson. Yeah. It’s your life. Your life is your path. It’s not something else. Your life is your path.

Okay. Nice to meet you.

In Atlanta, Atlanta. Yeah, we’d go down and we used to go. We used to go down a chant. Lana Landa. Yeah. It’s a big chanting weekend down there. Oh. But I don’t, it won’t be this year for sure, but maybe next year, but I’m really from New York. I just, I actually moved to it cause my mom was sick. So I’m a real new Yorker.

I’m transplanted here. I’ve only been here eight months. Oh, okay. It takes getting used to I’m actually, I think from where you are, I’m from long island originally before. Well, I grew up in Smithtown and quorum, uh, near Stony Brook. I used to go to Stony Brook. I graduated from Stony Brook. Yeah, very good.

We have alumni. Okay. And my, my mother died in the Stony Brook hospital looking out over the campus and I was thinking my mother died from my sins.

No cause Stony Brook was a while in time for me, very depressed, very unhappy time. But that’s where I saw that movie though. There is such a dead Ray movie that I just talked about. That’s only bird. Okay. Take care. Thank you very well. Thanks Rhonda. Next we have, yeah, a bit. So I’d have shut through me now.

Well, uh, actually my whole family is listening to you right now. You’re all crazy for your music. And my question is introduced to Margie through this book and what I felt, reading that book, especially the debt part. Last few chapters of that book were around basically explaining what happened after he died and what happened to the people around him.

I failed. I felt an incredible amount of grace. I cannot deny it. Not neither. My mind was able to ignore or get away from this, that, okay. There’s nothing just old minded. I felt so much of grace. And then I thought, okay, I want to change this. I want this all. So I started visiting Kanji. I would travel 20 hours.

Uh, three times I went there in a matter of one month, nothing happened. I was more disappointed. I was frustrated in a temple. I was disturbed. I was trying to, I was doing hand-wash Alyssa, still focus on my breathing. And I was, I read your book and it’s like, I saw just the week before I saw your documentary.

I’m sorry if I’m giving you the background a little longer. While you’re talking. There’s a big spider about to attack me over here. Exactly. Same kind of feeling. I get exactly the first chapter of my life. I got a hint of it. I got a taste of it and I wanted it all and I’m not getting it. I want to feel his grace.

We loved you. I want to feel that again. I felt it for a moment. I left it. It just added all the books of roundness. I read your books. So how did you manage you starting your documentary? That it took me 21 years to finally be who I am today. I don’t want to wait for 21 years. I, I got a hint of something I wanted, well, too bad.

It’s not up to you. Isn’t it.

It’s not, you’re not running the show. Right? No, you can want this all you want, but when grace comes, it comes and you sound, it sounds like you’ve already tasted that grace, the lights have gone on for a minute and you saw there’s a door and the other side of the room, and then the lights went off again.

Now it’s your job to find the door. You can’t sit in the corner and said, I want to find it. Do I want to find the door? You have to go find the fucking door. So go find it. Which means calm your mind. Open your heart. Think about other people. Love everyone, serve everyone. Remember God, that’s the practice.

Do some jeopardy, do some breath things, relax, take it easy. And don’t think about yourself all the time, boring, but it’s not easy. You can’t, we can’t just stop thinking about ourselves. So you have to do some spiritual practice, some jump, some, some.

You know, uh, you have to cultivate that love in your heart because that’s where that is. That’s where Maharaji is in your own heart. Not as somebody else that he’s there as you, who you are, who you really are right now, you’re stuck in your thoughts. And so, uh, and you want somebody else to, uh, to change that nobody can change it only you can.

So, uh, do some jeopardy repeat the name and things will change at their own rate, according to your own karmas and, and what’s best for you. But, um, you know, read about, do read about Ramana Maharshi you know who he is.  under inshallah read some of his teachings. Try to get a feeling for what the path is really about.

It’s not all about you, believe it or not.

Uh, and, and try to, uh, get a taste of what kind of work you need to do on yourself. You know, you say you want, uh, you want that grace, uh, Maharaji said purify and wait for grace. So our job is to clean our hearts, which means to calm your mind, calm your thoughts, and start to, uh, think about other people as much as you, if not more, and, uh,

start to get a feel of, of what, you know, what what’s required of you to become a good human. Because that’s what an enlightened being as a perfect human being and not inhuman, there are real human. So that means dealing with everybody in your life in a good way, and treating people well and putting others, if not first, at least on the same level as you, you are, uh, there’s no where to go to get this it’s already within.

So that’s where we have to look for. And, uh, here’s, here’s the line. Here’s from the Bhagavad Gita. I am always with all beings. I abandoned no one and however great. Your inner darkness. You are never separate from me. Let your thoughts flow past Yukon. Keep me near at every moment. Trust me with your life because I am you more than you are yourself.

Okay? Chill out. Thanks.

You’re never away from Maharaji. You’re never away from around. You’re never away from God because God is looking through your eyes right now, but you don’t see, what’s looking, you only see what is seen. You only hear what is heard. You don’t hear the hearing. You don’t see God, you don’t experience that awareness pure being within you.

That’s where it is. That’s what it is.

Find a way to be happy in life, even when we don’t know what we’re doing, because you never really know surrender means surrender. If we ask God to do it, then we haven’t surrender. If we don’t accept where we are and rest at ease within ourselves, then we haven’t surrender. We’re still trying to get somebody to do something for us.

It’s all inside of us already. So just do some, do some meditation, just in a way of calming the mind, do some Japa every day, a few minutes. At least don’t try too hard because you’re only get tense and screw yourself up. The at ease. And if you can’t be at ease, figure out why, definitely your work. That’s what the spiritual path is.

It’s not, it’s not just, it’s not wearing fancy robe, fancy orange clothes and shaving your head and acting like they know something it’s becoming who you are. A good human being.

Good luck. Can I ask you one last question?

Lenny, when Margie said Joe, in, I think 72 or 1973 to you, he said, you’re going to leave now. You must be feeling the same. The way I did that. I want someone to redo something because you, you lose your self-esteem. You said, God is always near you. It’s not only wrong. Then your heart wait for the grease lab post to do your job.

Like if you feel that, no, I don’t think I’m capable enough to do that. I don’t think so. I don’t trust myself. Like everyone things along the way it happened to you. I don’t think so. It will happen to me.

Why are you thinking at all? So something wrong with you.

Got it.

Do some jumper and let go of your thinking. Where did you treat Christian? Say, let your thoughts flow past you calmly. Keep me near that means. Repeat the name. Whatever name you want. Keep me near every moment. Trust me with your life right now. You trust your thoughts. You believe everything you think. And that’s, that’s the definition of insanity, believing everything.

I think. Why would you believe what you think you wake up and you feel like shit, you believe that you’re no different than you were yesterday when you felt good. It’s your thoughts telling you this? And you believe them, but it’s not easy to stop believing them because we’ve been trained to believe those things do some practice and don’t complain.

I’ll beat you up. Thank you.

Those are the words I know in Hindi. You just say, hello, how are you? Okay.

Thank you.

Hello? Um, so, um, just one question, um, the moment, uh, I don’t know, um, like in one of your interviews, you mentioned that, um, when you were forced to do the cutin in Kanji and you didn’t want to, you just wanted to play around with my energy and then, you know, they would just deliver. And then you soon started practicing that, uh, while doing Harambe, uh, you started thinking about your girlfriend and then the ways you touched and all the emotions in that way.

So, uh, I regularly, like not regularly, I would say and pardon me, but around a half, an hour of my time, my headache is not 23 minutes. Um, was, you know, you have like huge spending and you know, all that. But, uh, it just like, I get so pissed off when it ends the moment, it ends all the feelings of void again, you know?

So the person who bit whom you had a chat last night group. So, uh, when he has the word with me or when I listened to your chance at that time, I feel that there is something concrete in existence in my existence though. But, uh, apart from that, you know, all the moments, all the moments of worried and, uh, you know, what is the meaning of everything in my life, it just vanishes like, whatever, what am I doing?

I don’t even understand. So when you do the chant, it’s the experience you had with your group that you are enjoying. Like you keep reliving it again and again, On his grace or what, because they’re very limited, you know, you have very limited, uh, Williams. I really need you to, uh, so that I can change with you.

But that is very, uh, you know, that feeling of what doesn’t go off except for when it’s you or my group. Yeah. Well, you born into this world, you spent your whole life in your emotions and your, your mind, your thoughts, you think just by sitting for 20 minutes a day, that’s all going to go away. No, so, but at least you found something that works for you when you do it.

So you keep planting those seeds and that it, every, every repetition of the name is a seed that we plant within us and those seeds will grow. But if the whole world doesn’t change in two seconds, because you, you saying the part. No, but you just keep doing your practice and you try to live in a good way and you try to treat people well, you try to, uh, become a good human being the rest of the day.

And don’t think it doesn’t change like this. You know, if it was that easy to change it, there wouldn’t be any problems in this world. But all there is in this world is problems. So just do your practice with sincerity and, uh,

don’t worry about what’s happening in your head. The rest of the day. Yes. It’s going to be a mess cause it’s been a mess all these years. No problem. That’s the way it is. But when you chant, it makes you aware of that mess in a different way. And that’s different than the way it used to be, which is, it just was always like that.

And you never know. But now that you’re doing some practice, you notice, so that can help you make your practice deeper. And also you’ll notice during the day you’ll remember the mantra, the mantra will come back to you and that’s that’s so give it a couple of spins and then just get back to your work.

But when it comes to you, unbidden, that’s a very good thing because there is a place within us that that mantra is going on all the time. And eventually, eventually we become more aware of that. So there’s nothing to worry about. Uh, and don’t judge yourself for, for having thoughts and emotions and being a jerk half the time.

That’s okay. You’re allowed. So this, this is before, uh, the China. Uh, I had a deal. Do you have a long drive from my place to my group space? The one that you had a chat right before my chat. So, uh, in the, in the moment, the entire moment I was listening to your change and I actually stopped my car, uh, to, to enjoy that part

So that shows you have some intelligence to stop your car before you hit somebody. Yeah. I have experienced by doing , uh, after completing the Mundra, I realized they were, you know, honking, like, so I just close my eyes and then I get most, so I guess you’re not, you should pull off the road first, right before you start.

So it’s the moments of grace. I find it very hard to retain then it’s like, I know it doesn’t make sense. Definitely. You know, definitely it has to be a process. Uh, so just the two books I have read in my entire life was a  by his grace and medical afloat. So in that, you know, the various descriptions of what Mara G used to teach people, or, you know, to like tell him to, uh, follow or do like, you know, so people feed people.

So I’ve been like, you know, trying to align myself in that, but apart from your, uh, Janks, I don’t find grace in the outside world. So yeah. Well

you’re it’s okay. Yeah. Take it easy. Relax it. This does not happen overnight. Don’t be so demanding. Uh, go with the flow a little bit. Relax. It’s not bad. You’re not, it’s not a bad thing. That’s happened. It’s just life. When you remember, you remember when we forget, we forget and we remember that’s the one it’s okay.

What take it easy? You know, uh, they call it grace because it’s grace, which means we don’t do it when it’s there. It’s there. When it’s not there, it’s not there. It’s not up to us. When my hierarchy wanted to run away, he ran away and we couldn’t find him when he let us find him, we found him, but it was up to him, not us.

So it’s up to your true nature, your Optima to pull you in when you’re ready in the meantime, just be who you are. It’s okay. You are who you are for a reason. This is what your karma is created. No problem, nothing wrong with that. Add the practice, add the Japan to your life and allow that to ripen. It’s a ripening process.

It’s not a learning process. It’s not a doing prep. It’s not up to you to do it. It’s up to you to remember the name, what happens after that is up to the name, not you. So don’t worry, just be more at ease with the, with the practice and then in your life. And then it won’t feel so, so, uh, out of control when, when you’re at the rest of the day, you know, it’s okay, this is just life unfolding.

You’re still here. You’re here when you’re doing Jhumpa and you’re here when you’re not doing Java. So the only thing differences where your attention is. So, but because you’re the Boston is of the mind, right. So deep and so ingrained. It takes time to change that for that to change. That’s okay. Just take it easy.

Do your Japa take it easy. Drive on the right side of the road, pull over off the road when you want to bliss out and then get back on the road when you finish being selfish in India.

But thank you. Thanks a lot. So just one phrase of mine, if you could gel.

Thank you. Thanks a lot. I wish to see you in India soon. Ah, yeah, I hope so. Please visit after that I’ll join your group. I’ll be moving in. So make sure there’s a room for me. Sure. So you can have all the places. Okay. Thanks Todd. So hello. He saw you in 2014 when we got married and now we have a young daughter.

And she was super excited to see you. It’s almost past a bedtime. We have a chance of it being played. So she’s familiar with that. Very nice. We didn’t have a question, but we really wanted to thank you for doing this. And, uh, and uh, we would love to have invite you to India. We are in Bangalore, uh, if that’s okay.

Yeah. Yeah. I was supposed to be coming to Bangalore to sing, but with all this stuff going on, hopefully later when it comes down.

Good morning, Katie. Good morning. I had a page full of questions, but I think you already answered all of them for me. Answering questions about it. And I think Jay, can, I got all my answers. My question was about the grease and I think I was trying to demand you all to the journey that I’ve had. And I discovered you a chance and your music two months ago.

And it’s been, uh, it’s been a very significant funds for me. He probably for the lack of a better word, if I had a bit later, I would use that. And, um, yeah, so, so I, I guess I’m just left with, um, with a thank you and with the hope that I’ll keep listening to your chance and I’ll probably get an opportunity to meet you when you’re in India.

I’m in Boston, but I, I I’m based in Delhi. That’s very good. I’m looking for this quote here. I think I found it and I’m going to read it too. Surrender to him and abide by his will, whether he appears or vanishes await his pleasure. If you ask him to do as you, please, it is not surrender, but a command to him, you cannot have him obey you.

And yet think that you have surrender. He knows what is best. And when to do it, leave everything to him, his, the burden, you no longer have any cares. All your cares are his such as surrender. This is poppy that’s from Ramana. Maharshi so. Surrender is up to him. Not us. It comes by grace. So we clean our hearts.

We purify and we await his grace with a calm mind and an open heart. If we’re too cranky, he’s not going to come. So it’s grace. That makes it all. Okay. But it comes at his, his time, not ours. He knows what’s best. We can’t think that we’re running the show. So Becca, thank you, baby. Thank you. Uh, thank you for this, Katie.

Great to see you. Thank you for doing this. Um, Katie, I just had one question. Um, you’ve been talking about this already quite a bit. So this is, this is something which has come up a couple of times and I’ve heard somebody talk about it as well. So, so the, so the part is, uh, so while we talk about grace and, uh, Gracism is an unconditional sort of something which comes your way because of the guru or the God.

Um, but there is also karma on the other side. And is there, how, how does one understand grace in the light of karma? Because if there’s grace and it’s coming to you unconditionally, does it mean that it is, is it unfair to a lot of people who may not be getting the grace? How do you balance karma and grace?

How do they vote? Or do we understand maybe race better? So, you know, Maharaji used to say he used to look at us and he said, I have the keys to the mind. You said, I have the key, I could turn your minds against me and we will don’t do that. And he would laugh.

I said to Cindy mom, once I said, ma Maharaji said he has the keys to the mind, which means to me that I am where he wants me to be. Right. So I said, ma, if I am where he wants me to be, then it’s, is it all grace? Or is my effort required? She said, Christian does. It’s all grace, but you have to act like it.

Isn’t

it’s all grace. That’s the reality. That’s ultimate reality, but we don’t live in ultimate reality. We live in the relative world. This world Samsara in this world. We have rules. There’s things. You can do this things you can’t do. And there’s your karmic situation that you have to deal with. But if, if we recognize that ultimately it’s all grace, that takes a little bit of distinguished way of when we’re going through our tough stuff, our difficult stuff, we just do the best we can.

We deal with things the best we can. We make our effort the best we can, but ultimately the results of our actions, even our sadhana, not up to us. So then the state of the universe is a state of grace, a balance, pure sativa, but we don’t live in that world. We’re not aware of that. So we can’t pretend that we do.

You can’t think about this stuff up here and try to make it all right. Work in your head. It’s a reality. That’s beyond the thoughts in the mind. That’s just the way it is. You know, you can’t make sense of this world world on the level of the thoughts. It’s because we don’t see, we don’t know, see who we’ve been in the past life.

We don’t see who we’re going to be. We don’t see who other people are. Even now we only see the outer shell. So what we might think is, is, uh, that people are victims of this and victims of that and that they don’t have grace. We can’t know that we can imagine that we do, but that’s just imagination. Let’s deal with finding out who we are and let’s deal with trying to calm down our, our insane minds.

And not try to figure this out with, uh, with our mind. It will never help us. You have to suspend that kind of thinking. And because you Jew every thought is the prison. You can’t think yourself out of a prison. That’s made of thought the prison is our thoughts. And we think we are who we think we are.

Well, I know who I am. I was born there. I did this, I did this. This happened. That happened. Yeah. That’s very small part of the story. So one has to recognize that one is not in control of the results of our actions. All we can do in this moment is do the best we can. What happens as a result of our actions?

It’s not up to us. And really, if you really think about that, if you really start to feel that it frees you to give yourself fully to this moment, because what happens later is beyond us and what’s already happened is done. So now how we live our lives, this moment is the most important thing. Are we going to let our thoughts destroy us every second of every fucking day?

That’s what we do. And if we just going to let that happen, what do we expect? What do we expect if we allow ourselves to, to destroy ourselves every, every minute of every day, you know, it’s up to us to say enough of this. I’m going to calm my ass down because it’s up to me to live this in this moment in the best way I can, but it’s not easy.

We, we, the Vossen has the tendencies of our mind just keep going. They’re like, you know, it just like a thousand miles an hour. It’s not easy to slow down and we get angry. Why is it like this? I don’t want it to be like this, that anger is creating it. Right. They’re making more problems. So one has to develop the strength to release thoughts, to release the emotions, not push them away, not deny them.

It’s releasing, letting go and coming back, letting go, coming back, letting them go coming back. And that’s pretty much all we can do, but that purifies our hearts and the hunter munch Elisa. It says

I take. The pollen like dust from the feet of the group, the clean, the mirror of our hearts, my heart. What is that dust? It’s pure love, real love, real being it’s truth, reality consciousness, awareness, real love. That’s what cleans our hearts cleans the mirror of our hearts so that when we look outwardly, we’re actually looking into a mirror and what we see is reflect is the reflection.

So if there’s dust all over the mirror, what do we see dust? And it looks like we see individuals, we see suffering. We see all kinds of things when the heart, when the mirror of the hardest cleaner, when we. Into the mirror. We see a clear reflection of, of reality. So the dust on the mirror is our shame, our guilt, our fear, our anger, our selfishness, all our great stuff that we love so much that we can never let go of all our ideas of right and wrong.

All our righteousness, which is based really on self Patriot, because we don’t love ourselves as we are. We overcompensate and we get angry at things the way things develop and we keep spinning around and around and around some practices required to calm down. That’s all. If you don’t do it, you don’t do it fine.

You don’t do it. What can happen? Nothing Maharaji said, he said constant repetition of God’s name. Even without feelings of devotion and anger and lethargy brings out his grace. Once this is understood things change. So you don’t have to feel anything special. You don’t have to manipulate your emotions.

There’s no right and wrong in practice. You simply do the practice and you live your life and gradually, but inevitably that practice changes us from the inside. It changes the way we see things. It changes the way we react to things, not here in here, and eventually things that we, uh, were scary. They don’t look so scary.

Things that were desirable. Don’t look so good. Things that look ugly. Don’t look so ugly. Things change for us. The way we go through our day starts to change. But you don’t get the pat yourself on the back about that and go like, wow, I’m really doing good. Now things are changing because it’s the evaluator.

That’s getting thinned out the judger, the one that’s judging us ourselves, which is getting dissolved. So life changes, but you don’t necessarily notice it. That’s the weird part, because if you notice it, you just get a bigger ego about it, which makes it worse. Again, you can see these people with big spiritual egos.

They shine so brightly because they’re spending all their time, polishing their selves up. You know, that’s not what it’s about. No one of my heart is grid old devote these data Mukherjee. Uh, it was in, we were long after my heart had left the body. 89. We were in the LA spot for the Maha Kuhn. It was the 12th, the 140 fourth year, 12th, 12th.

So we were going to be staying at, uh, at the Khumbu site with this old Baba that we knew this great old Baba. But before we went to Dada’s house in a lot of bod to spend some time with him. So on the day we were supposed to leave that Baba sent one of his disciples to guide us to his camp at the mailer.

And this guy, this disciple was a real jerk and he walks into the house like this, like he’s God on earth, you know? And he’s disrespectful to data who was his elder. And he was just so full of himself. Like it was horrible. Thought it took one look at this guy and he grabbed me by the ear. And he dragged me into Maharaji’s room and it closes the door and he reaches down under this Elmira and he pulls out this old rest of the key and it opens, unlocks the door, opens the door, reaches down in the bottom shelf and he pulls out something wrapped up in old newspaper and he unwraps it.

And it’s this funky, dirty, old aluminum, cheap aluminum lota, you know, and he holds it up in front of my face. It says, Christian doubt. Do you see, do you see it? And I’m going like that. Okay. That I know. I don’t see. Did you see no, that I don’t see. You said this is what Maharaji left for me the last time he was here, when he left, he left his load at the beach.

Do you see, and I’m looking at this piece of crap is that’s the old piece of crap. And I said, no, dad, I don’t see. He just looked at me. He says, you don’t have to shine. And he takes it, wraps it up, puts it back, closes the thing, locks, it HIEs the key and leaves me standing out there. You don’t have to shine.

Don’t have to shine. It’s not about shining. How much of do we do in our lives that we’re shining ourselves up to make ourselves more attractive to other people, to ourselves and on and on and on. It’s not about that. It’s about becoming a good human being. And how do we do that? You find a way

don’t have to shine.

Everybody wants to shine, what to do.

Good to see you shining so nicely. Thank you, Katie. Thank you. They will love you. Okay.

Hello. I’m joining in from Connecticut, but my family is also joining it from Mumbai. Okay. You’re allowed then. Yes. Um, so, you know, we had a chance to visit, uh, kenchi last year and we saw this section of the temple, um, uh, which was, had many pictures of Sistema. It was really beautiful. And I know very little about her.

Um, you mentioned, you know, the story, but I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about who said DEMA was? Um, I wish I knew. No. My her ID said that she was actually a manifestation of Durga and he had to come to the Hills because she was there. And when people bless them, like, who is, she said, if I can’t find out who she is, how can I tell them?

You know, uh, she was the perfect devote issue was completely surrendered. She was merged in Maharaji. Um, and she hid herself even better than he had himself. She just seemed to disappear. Uh, and whenever anyone asked her to bless them, she said, no, you’re just asking. Maharaji I don’t know. You know, you have to ask him, she very rarely, uh,

she never thought of herself as the doers. She knew that everything was Maharaj, but he was doing everything, but she was, uh,

Incredible being. And she, she took care of all the devote for many years, until two, two years ago, I guess. Right. Is it too when she left the body since 1973, huh? 20 17, 20 17. December 17. Wow. Three years. Three plus. Yeah. So she was there. Uh, he had said to her that when a Saint leaves his body, the temples become his body.

So she used to treat the temple kenchi as if it was my Raji zoned body. And when she was there, it was spotless. Everything was kept so clean. So spotless, everything worked well. It was, uh, She, she, she cheated everything with that kind of love and passionate respect and, um, yeah, and she never promoted herself one time.

Uh, some Westerners invited her to come through a, a conference of, uh, women, women, teachers, spiritual teachers. And she said, I’m not a spiritual teacher. I’m just the devote the of Maharaji, you know, and she meant it. There was a lot of people who say those things who, you know, are secretly fishing for, for, uh, for respect.

And, but she was not like that. It was, uh, yeah, she really, she saved my life twice. Absolutely completely. And she never. Barely let on that she knew what was happening, but she, she did it all. She and my Harajuku, many times she would like when we’re going to budget enough, when she, she was saying to us, it’s a very dangerous ride.

You should do hunter munch, Elise. And she kind of like, okay, nevermind. You’re covered. It’s like, I could just see my hair. I just think they’re okay, don’t leave them alone. They don’t have to do anything.

So maybe, uh, maybe someday a book will come out about her. I don’t know. There’s only one person who could write that, but I don’t know if she’s even thinking about it. We’ll see.

Yeah.

This garden, we are so fond of you. We are so blessed to even be here. We have been chanting to your chance for almost five years. We met you earlier, this fab in the Garrison Institute, New York, uh, it was a very blissful evening. I said a lot of the questions that we had. Uh, the one thing that I do want to ask is with the current climate so much is going on.

Um, there’s a lot of ups and downs that everybody goes through in a day, in a week. We, you listen to the news, the friend, whatever. Um, so when we do the chant, like personally, when I do the chant, you feel so immersed, nothing seems to bother you at all. That’s your version of it? Yes. At least that’s how, you know, it definitely chanting has been the kind of decompressing, uh, thing.

So how, what do you think would like, has Maharaji ever talked to you about how do you deal with this rollercoaster called life? There’s never a straight line there. So many uncertainties, which, you know, we had in the thick of it, we were seeing a lot of uncertainty. So how do you get the grasp with so, so much being so transient?

What was the last thing I said, how do you, how do you deal with everything being so transient or uncertain?

You just do the best. You can, you keep doing your practice and you do it with sincerity and wholeheartedly, and then you go out and then you just, you take that with you. As you go through your day, you know, you can’t help, but have reactions to things and be upset by things. And, but if you understand that your job is to let go of that, you still have to act in the world and do things, but, uh, you just tried to do them the best way you can.

That’s all. Uh, and the strength to do that comes from. You’re the depth of whatever connection you have. If you’re trying to

you, can’t calm the waves of the ocean down, you know, with your hands. Yeah. Yeah. But you have to really stand there strong and let them come up against you. And then they gradually calm down because if you push back, they, it just makes more waves. Oh, you go with what you can, you do the best you can. And when you, you go crazy for a while, you recognize it and venue your back.

So everybody forgets, everybody remembers that’s the point, you know? So, uh, you can’t, we can’t protect ourselves from daily life. We’re in it. And if we do try to protect ourselves, we, we, we will recognize that that’s because we’re afraid. What are we afraid? We’re afraid we’re going to get lost. We’re going, they’re afraid that blah, blah, blah, a million things.

So it’s the fear. That’s the problem, not the stuff itself. So the more that the more faith one has in one’s own ability to calm down and reconnect, then there’s less fear, but it’s not even if you think, okay, I’m connecting to this guru or to that DT or to God, where’s the connection happening here. Right?

So you develop confidence that you can go through the day. And even if you get totally wiped out, you come back. It’s inevitable. We’re going to get wiped out a meal every day we lose it, but we come back because as Krishna says, let your thoughts flow past you calmly keep me near at every moment we, we need to remember.

He’s always inside. It he’s always within us. He’s our true nature. He is the Atma. So, but we don’t, we don’t know. We don’t know that in a deep enough way through practice and Japan and treating people well, we will get to, to know that in a deeper way. So in the meantime, we just do the best we can and you don’t worry about it.

What’s the problem. So it’d be Pago head Kayla. Um, I just want to, um, say something that I happened to me as similar to a person and saying that year I used to drive three hours. Then when dad actually quit my job, I used to sing and that you are against, um, no, most of the times, uh, they’ll start crying for some reason and he’d be really blissful.

Sometimes I’ll stop. We finished that. Um, so really have, um, um,

thanks. We hold on to your chance as our guide lighteners. Yeah. Hold on. Gently. If you hold on to tidy, squeeze it to death, you know the template. Yeah.

Thank you, Katie. Frank, thank you for this wonderful opportunity you gave us to listen to you. Uh, it’s my pleasure to give you an opportunity to look at me. I’ll

say that the Reynolds loving push their stance Graham’s life in front of him in the end, they said that they were really lucky that they got it. The thing is like in front of him, we got this opportunity today. We are so lucky to say rom, rom around sitting in front of us because we know you and Mara are not different.

So please, you know, we are so lucky today to actually be an opportunity to sit in front overall and do the knowledge around here. Thank you. Thank you so much, Katie. Thank you for Everett. She will live in recent years months. Thank you. Thank you for telling me something that I didn’t know.

well, at least you know that I know that’s the best thing you keep knowing that. And I’ll just relax then. Thank you, sir. Thank you for everything.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

Hello, how are you? I’m very well, thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure and honor to listen to your beautiful and wise words. And, um, I truly want to express my gratitude for this opportunity. And maybe if you shed some more light on surrender, you mentioned surrender several times. And at times when control is something we strive to have and achieve, um, may, maybe control seems to be the opposite of surrender, but maybe it is not.

So maybe kind of control. What do you mean when you say control? You know, for example, letting go of your thoughts or controlling not to have the mind controlling you. Um, committing and having the discipline. So it’s all mind games in a way. And so, uh, surrenders stood out and it will be great to hear more from you on, uh, on that.

The situation is that we are not in control of the fruits of our actions. We were barely have much say in terms of how we even go through the day. Mostly we go through the day, just reacting about this, reacting about that. So surrender is the recognition, you know, many years ago when I was in Ben Belvin with Maharaji, I was walking in the street and I stepped in a hole and I snapped my leg.

And when I woke up in the morning, my knee was out to here. It was all swollen. I could barely walk. So I thought I had to go to Madeira to the hospital or something because it was really bad. Now in those days we were, uh, we were not supposed to come to the temple until four in the afternoon. Maharaj had told us not to come until then, but it was early in the morning and my leg was really bad.

And I thought I’m going to have to go to the doctor, but I’ll stop at the tempo. And I’ll just tell my Raji that I’m, I won’t be there later because I’m going to the doctor. So got to the temple. And we walked in and my friend helped me walk. I couldn’t walk. So I was leaning on my friend and there I am. I limp into the courtyard and he’s all alone sitting on the, tuck it in the middle of the courtyard.

One, one devote. He was with him. I printed them and I sit down and I had to keep my leg out in front of me underneath the tuck it, cause I couldn’t bend it. He didn’t say anything, right? Nothing. It just sat there. He didn’t even say, why did you come so early? Nothing. After a few minutes, he gets up and he takes the devote his hand and he walks towards the back of the temple.

And the further away he got from where we were sitting, he started like this leaning on the guy. Like he could barely walk, you know? And it was like, like this. And I thought, oh, he’s taking on the karma of my knee. Right? The minute I had that thought, he turned around and he ran back to the ticket and he sits down and he goes, you thought I was in pain.

You wanted to help me. And he patted me on the head, you know? So later that day we’re sitting around and some other Westerners had come. So he reached down into this woman’s joy. And he pulls out a Bible, a Bible because he used to talk to us about Jesus all the time. So we thought, well, we better read about this guy.

So some of us had some Bibles and he pulls out this woman’s Bible and he opens it like this and he said, read this. He didn’t even look at the book. He just opened it, read this. So I took the book and I read it and it was, uh, in order to, uh, protect me from the abundance from pride for because of the abundance of revelation.

There was given to me a thorn in the side, and I asked the Lord three times to take, take it from me. But the Lord replied, my grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect in your weakness. My strength is made. Perfect. And the fact that you can’t do shit to help yourself so that, you know, and he wasn’t, first of all, he was supposed to read it and be able to read English or even speak English.

And he certainly didn’t even look at the book. So Ron Vesta and I have talked about this a lot over the years. What, what does this mean? It means that

we think we are doing it. That’s just what we think. Actually, we’re not able to do anything except offer ourselves to some degree, surrender to some degree. It’s the Lord, that’s doing everything. And the, and when we recognize that our egos are incapable of selfless service, because we as a self yeah. The small.

So when we recognize that we’re not capable of really even surrendering that’s when God’s strength is made perfect in our inability to do anything really, to help ourselves. The recognition of that is surrender. We still do what we do, but we don’t expect that we’re running the show. It’s not something you have to convince yourself up.

It’s actually reality, which we can experience directly and we’ll experience directly within ourselves. As we ripen as souls surrender happens by grace, we don’t surrender Ramana. Maharshi used to say asking the mind to kill the mind is like asking the thief to be the police. There’ll be a lot of investigation, no arrest will ever be made.

So it’s like that the illusion that we’re the doers, that’s an illusion, but, and we believe that. So inside of that delusion, like Sydney mindset, it’s all grace, but you have to act like it. Isn’t, that’s all you have to do. You’re still, you have to develop your muscles. If you want to sit up, if you want to walk you forward to do anything, you need some muscle power.

And the muscle that we have to develop is the letting go muscle. It’s not the pushing away muscle. It’s not that they’re denying muscle. It’s simply letting go again. And again, of our beliefs about thoughts of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Again, and again, let go, come back to the name, let go, come back to the name, but go, come back to that name again.

And again, every time every repetition of the name is a seed that is planted within us. And those seeds will grow at their own speed. Not they don’t listen to us, grow faster, grow faster. They don’t do that. They grow at their own rate. All we can do is plant the seeds

and how you plant the seed is very important. Is it you’re planted deep enough, the water at you. Make sure nobody steps on it. This is our motivation. Are we doing these practices with sincerity, with wholeheartedness? Oh, do we understand that this is about becoming a good human being, not being some kind of God.

Let us find out who we are first and then we’ll know everything. So it’s like that. He said,

thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

No, everything I say is kind of my opinion. So don’t take it as the gospel truth is just it’s. It’s my experience so far, this life that’s all. If it’s helpful, that’s good. I’m happy if it’s not, don’t worry about it. You, you still have to find your own way. We all have to find our own way. We’re just trying to help each other.

Get down the road. That’s all. If it’s helpful, that’s good. But don’t think if you don’t agree with me, there’s something wrong with you. It’s just your thing. You don’t need to agree with me. Okay. But that is just my experience. My friend, Bernie Glassman was a great Zen master. You know, they’re always talking about Buddha’s four noble truths, the four truths of existence, you know, Bernie used to call them the four noble opinions, because if it’s a truth, you said you can’t even talk about it.

But if it’s an opinion yeah. We can discuss. So, so, uh, yeah. Well, it’s been great hanging out with you. I hope. Uh, it’s been wonderful to see you all and be with you. Uh, please, uh, keep chanting, keep remembering the name. Become good. Be good. Human beings. Treat people well, treat yourself. And, uh, hopefully we, uh, we meet again down the road somewhere.

Okay.

Take good care.

The post Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD June 6 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 55 The Practice of Chanting

“As much as we like to think that we’re running the show, it’s always those little epiphanies, those things that (we) all of a sudden understand or all of a sudden, we just recognize something or we know something. It doesn’t come from the outside. It comes from within. It feels right. And if there’s one thing that the spiritual path is about, more than any other thing, or if there’s one thing that the spiritual path requires before anything, it’s that we learn to trust ourselves.” – Krishna Das

Oh, I thought it was a rooster. It’s a baby. Hello baby!

He wants us to keep singing, but that’s just too bad.

Because you can sing and sing and sing but if we… what do we do when we’re not singing? What happens to us? We sink.  You don’t sing, you sink. So the issue is, what do we do the other 23 hours of the day when we’re not doing practice? How do we go through that time? How do we live in our lives and how do we find a way to do that in a good way? That’s one of the issues. Life is an issue. When I first went to India, and I had just really gotten there, I was up in the mountains and the town I was staying in had a beautiful crater lake up about 7,000 feet. Beautiful, in the Himalayas, and at one end of the lake there was a very ancient temple to the Goddess Durga. So, at night, I was walking around, and around the lake and I was passing that temple and I heard this chanting coming from inside. I just stopped. I couldn’t move. I had never heard anything like that, certainly not in the temple on Long Island.

Thank you, that was for you.

So, and I was just struck the intensity of the chanting, at how powerful it was and how everybody was completely in it, you know? And I just felt, all of a sudden, I just knew that this was something that I could really do. Something I could really give myself to. You know, some years before, I was up in the mountains in New Mexico and, at the Lama foundation for the winter with Ram Das and we heard that there was this artist from New York who had gone to India and learned how to meditate and now he was living just down the mountain from us in, North of Taos New Mexico. So, a bunch of us went down to visit him and we went into the room with him and we sat there for a while and everybody was asking questions. I kind of hung out in the back. I wasn’t talking because I was listening to everything. And after an hour or so, we were leaving and I was the last one out the door and he grabbed my arm as I was going out the door and he looked at me and he said, “You, you have to find out why it is you can’t give yourself 100% to whatever you’re doing.” And, you ever see like, in those taxidermy shops, you know, the squirrels on the wall? Like this? That’s what I felt like. He nailed me to the wall. Because that was the thing that was killing me, you know? I could never really do whatever I was doing. I was always… I could never really give myself to what I was doing, 100%. Not even 10%. I was just too scattered or whatever and I just didn’t know. I just didn’t know how to get into things. And I can remember that day just like it was yesterday and it was just a few years ago. Like 50.  So, when I was outside that temple that night up in the mountains and I heard this chanting, that’s what I knew immediately. That this was something that I could really do. So, I was just standing there and some guy was walking in and he kind of grabbed my arm and he said, “Come in, come in, you must come, you must come.” He dragged me in and I sat down with these guys in the temple and they were just wailing. It was unbelievable. And they came, “Come sing, sing, sing.” I didn’t know what they were singing, you know? Later, it turned out it was the Hanuman Chalisa. I didn’t realize that until much, much later. It was a Tuesday night, which is Hanuman’s day. So, that was the beginning and after that, everywhere I heard chanting, I just went there. I just soaked it in. And, I was not gathering material for my career because I was never going back to America. I had no intention of ever returning to America. I had sold everything I had. I gave my jeans away, sold my car, my guitar, everything. And with a whole $200 I went to India. So, I just felt that pull. And there was no question at all about it. I just knew. And that’s how things work. As much as we like to think that we’re running the show, it’s always those little epiphanies, those things that all of a sudden understand or all of a sudden, we just recognize something or we know something. It doesn’t come from the outside. It comes from within. It feels right. And if there’s one thing that the spiritual path is about, more than any other thing or there’s one thing that the spiritual path requires before anything, it’s that we learn to trust ourselves. That we learn to listen to our hearts and to trust ourselves, which is something that we are not trained to do. “Don’t look at me like that. Don’t. Do what I say.” That’s how I grew up. Don’t trust myself. “You do it my way. This is what it is. I’m telling you.” So, it takes a long time for us to really learn how to feel what’s right for us. There’s so much static in the head. And a lot of times, we think, “Ok, I’ve got to get it together.” But that’s not how it works. We are not running the show. Although we think we are. And the more we learn to listen and to feel what our intuition, what our feelings are telling us, where we learn to honor those feelings, the better it is for us and the better it will be for everybody in our lives. What does this have to do with chanting? Good question. Glad you asked. These Names that we’re singing, in India of course they call them the Names of God. But where is that God. Up there in the sky? And is it the sky over the United States or is it the sky over South America? Which sky is it?  This God that we’re talking about lives within us as who we really are. Not who we think we are. And we think we are all day long, every day. So, how do we get out of those obsessive thought forms that we’re so identified with, that push us around, make us feel good, make us feel bad, make us go here, make us go there? How do we release those? And how do we begin to thin out the belief that we are who we think are and that we’re running the show? Well, these Names, they come from within us. They don’t come from outside. Nobody made these Names up. There was a Being who had a realization of Reality, who recognized Reality, entered into one-ness with the universe and then brought this name into the world for us to follow that Name back into ourselves, into God, into Love, Real Love. So, that’s why there were so many names, because so many Beings have entered into that place and out of compassion they’ve come back to bring us a path to finding that. There’s lots of philosophy. There’s lots of different practices. They’re all designed to move us more deeply into ourselves. My Guru, Neem Karoli Baba, used to say, “Ram Nam Karne Se Sab Pura Ho Jata.” “From the repetition of these Names of God”, these Names, “Everything is accomplished. Everything is brought to fulness and completion.” He said it over and over to us. So, we have to add some practice to our daily life. You know, we’re floating down the river, heading towards the rapids and we look at the bank of the river and we think the bank is moving and we’re sitting still. We have to find a way to get towards, move towards the bank of the river and move within our own hearts, deeper within our own Being. And that’s where these Names come from and that’s why the repetition of these Names, it reshapes our insides. It reshapes our mind, our thoughts. And that’s why I said last night, when you sing, and that also goes for when you do quiet repetition of the Name or mental repetition of the Name, you just stay with the sound of the Name and when you notice that you haven’t been paying attention, you just come back. And that happens, can happen a thousand times a second, if you’re really looking. You just keep coming back. That’s all you do. And in fact, since we think we’re doing everything, there you are, “Hare Rama Rama Ram, Sita Ram… What am I supposed to do… tomorrow at 3 o’clock I have to do that thing… I can’t remember… hare Rama Rama… what am I supposed to do? Oh… Hare Rama Rama Ram.” So, you were singing and then, the next thing is that, “Oh, I’ve been thinking.” So, then you went back to the singing, right? That’s how it works. But, how did that happen that you woke up? That you noticed that you weren’t paying attention?  You just weren’t paying attention, then all of a sudden, you noticed you weren’t. How did that happen? Did you do that? Did we do that? No. We were just lost in dreamland and all of a sudden, oh. I’m lost in Dreamland. Ram Ram Ram. That moment happened. It happens as a result, a direct result of all the practice we’ve done in the past. All the many times we notice and come back. This life or many lives before, those moment of awareness, of waking up are the fruits of our practice in the past. Otherwise, we get born, we go to High School, drink some beer, watch some tv and we die. And we’re never here for a moment. What makes that moment happen where we woke up? And where does the longing come to find something deeper in life? Why do we have that? And why don’t, why are there other people that don’t? It’s just a question of the karmas we ourselves have performed in the past, either in this life or some other time, and those karmas are coming to fruition. Those flowers, those seeds are growing. Those flowers are blooming. Flowers of awareness. We didn’t do that. You sit down to meditate, “Ok, I’m going to really pay attention. What was I saying? I can’t remember. Oh, yeah, I was like… Oh, wait, I’m supposed to pay attention, ok.” You just, you can’t do it. You make an effort to pay some attention and then you notice you haven’t been, so you make the effort again. That coming back and making the effort again plants a seed inside if you. That action is a karma. Recognition, paying attention. Recognition, back to the Name. Recognition, back to your breath. Recognition, back to the fact you’re standing on one toe on the rock in the middle of the ocean. You’d better pay attention or you’ll fall in. You know, you know that joke about the guy who says he wouldn’t want to join any club that would actually invite him to join? That’s me. And I don’t want anything that I can imagine in my head about what it might feel like when I’m, you know, when I really have a good meditation. Or a good chant. Anything that I can conjure up in my head, that’s not going to be the thing. So, we just try to let go. So, when you sing, don’t try to make, don’t try to crank it up and get some kind of blissful experience. Because it won’t last. The only thing that lasts is who we really are. Our true nature is always here. And if we try to conjure up some kind of experience, good luck. You won’t be able to hold onto that, either. So, why waste the time? Practice is to be done disinterestedly, which means, you do the practice, you give yourself as much as you can to the practice and you let it work on you. You don’t try to make it happen. You’ll never be able to do that. What’s the sense? But try if you like. It’s up to you. Knock yourself out. Believe me, I’ve been trying for 50 years and nothing happens.

Finally, you just say, “Ok, let it be.” Then you do the practice and you wound up, you wind up tuning into a deeper place inside of yourself where there is some joy, where there is some peace, where there is some happiness because that’s our true nature. That’s what’s underneath all our stuff.

And you know, my Guru never told me to go out and spread the word and chant with people. He never told me that. He asked us to sing to Him, which we did because He liked it. And when He liked, that means that we got to spend more time with Him, which was what we liked. So, it worked perfectly. But He never told me to do this. He never told people what to do so much, except maybe “Go away.” I had to find out for myself what I needed to do for me. If He had told to chant with people, I would have started with people maybe right after I came back from India. And in fact, I did for a while with Ram Das. We traveled together and I would sing and He would talk. But that didn’t work. I had to kind of go down into the valley of death into the darkness of my own soul until I found what I could do to bring some light into that place. And that’s the only time when I finally understood what I needed to do, then I could really do it. Otherwise I’d be doing it because He told me, which is ok, but it didn’t work for me. I’m very stubborn. So, when I finally understood that I needed to chant with people in order to clean out the dark shadows in my own heart and that that was the only way I had to do that, that’s when I started singing with people. So, you have to find what works for you. And you don’t have to wait for a big ephiphany, just jump in and do something. If it’s working, fine, if it’s not, fine. Do something else. It has to feel right to you or you won’t be able to give yourself to it. When I went to India, I thought, “I’m going to be a celibate yogi living in a cave for the rest of my life.” Right. Ask my daughter if I was successful.

So, then after two and a half years, Maharajji looked at me one day and He said, “Go back to America.” “What?” He said, “You have attachment there.” I didn’t know what He was talking about. This was 1972. He said, “You go back when your Visa’s up”, which was in March ’73.  I didn’t know what He meant, “What does He mean, I have attachment in America, I don’t care about anything there”, he said. Well, everything that happened to me from that day until this day, that’s what He was talking about. You can’t bypass stuff inside of you. You can’t. There are no shortcuts. The karmas that we ourselves have created must come to fruition. How we deal with those things as they arise in our lives, that’s up for grabs. That can be, there are different ways of dealing with things. But you can’t avoid your own stuff. Where are you going to go where you’re not going to be and your stuff is not going to be. A cave in India? Yeah, right. Bugs. Mice. Snakes. You’re not going to like that. No tv. No iphones. You think you’d be cool with that? Yeah, for about 10 minutes. First night you spend alone with the leopards outside the gate. Oh, yeah, you’ll sleep well. Once you enter the path, the best of dealing with things is to accept that whatever’s in our lives is there for a reason. We don’t know the reasons because we’re not in charge of what comes to us in life. But if it’s in our lives, it’s there because it’s supposed to be there. Because it has to be there. Sometimes that’s not a lot of fun. There’s so much suffering in this world. All of us have broken hearts. All of us have been betrayed by life in so many ways and beaten up in so many ways. That’s ok. Let’s deal with it. And how do we deal with it? We do some practice. We learn how to let go again and again and again and again and again and again and again. And learning how to do that, training ourselves to do that in a moment of practice, whether it’s 2 minutes a day or an hour a day, whatever you do, that movement of letting go will keep functioning through the day to some extent. And then the things that used to really screw us up, they won’t affect us so deeply, but we’re not going to notice that, necessarily. The real changes are off the radar, under the radar because it’s that person who’s evaluating and judging and noticing and taking and counting and all that stuff, that’s the thing that’s getting thinned out, little by little. So the repetition of the Name is a very very good practice, a very powerful practice, because ultimately, they say in India, they say, The Name and what is Named, God, are not different. That means, when we say “Ram” we don’t experience That because we’re stuck in our heads. Time will come that the Name will go on repeating itself within us and it will carry us deeper into our own true nature, our own hearts. Ok. That’s enough about this. Questions, anybody have anything to say?

The post Ep. 55 | The Practice of Chanting 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.

Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD June 4 2020

“We have to find a way to help implement the changes that have to come in our society, the changes that we hope will correct the imbalance of power and the devastating way that people of color are treated and hurt and abused and victimized. We definitely have to find a way to help make that happen, but we can’t allow our actions to come with negative emotions, if we can help it. It’s very hard, very hard, but that doesn’t mean you don’t do what you do. You do whatever you can do to help.” – Krishna Das

Namaste. Welcome back. Hope everybody’s okay, feeling good physically and hopefully able to deal with all the emotions flying around inside and out.

Believe it or not, It’s said that human birth is the best place to be to do work on ourselves, to actually achieve peace, find liberation from suffering, enter into the place within us that is real love, find compassion for ourselves and others and find a way to live in this world in a good way. Because they say that in human birth, we’re right in the middle, between the lower forms of birth and the more subtle planes, and they say in either one of these places, it’s impossible to do practice, because in these two places, we are too consumed with experiencing the fruits of our karmas. In the heaven worlds, in the subtle planes, it’s very pleasant.  In the hell worlds, in the lower realms, it’s not very pleasant to say the least. That’s what they say. But here in this world at this time, we have the opportunity to get a vote how we respond to the world around us and how we respond even to our own stuff within us.

But somehow, we have to find a way to get the strength, to release the emotions, the feelings, the knee jerk reactions that we have to everything that we come in contact with, because for the most part, all day long, every day of our lives, we are responding blindly with no mitigating factor of consciousness or awareness to the things that show up in our awareness, in our consciousness.

So, the idea is how do we get a vote and why do we want a vote? We want a vote so that our own actions won’t create more suffering for ourselves and others.

So, in this situation that we’re in now in the world, which seems very intense, it’s a very good mirror for us to look within and see our reactions, see the causes of our suffering, and then we can expand that awareness to the outside world, to social action, to living in the world and to dealing with the issues in our culture and our politics and in the way we treat other beings.

So, the way that I find that space to, when I’m lucky, not react blindly and instantly to everything that comes towards me, is through chanting. Because in chanting, we start repeating one of these mantras, one of these names of God, and then the deal we make with ourselves is that when we notice that we’re lost and not paying attention, we come back. We let go of whatever we’re thinking about. We don’t try to figure it out. We just let it go and we come back, again and again and again and again and again and again, and as time goes on, we begin to feel more comfortable being more present. We’re released from that obsessive flow of constant evaluation and judgment, constant flow of emotion, negative emotions, positive emotions, everything that pushes us around. Little by little we’re released from being the slave to that, and then we can extend that feeling to others and our own actions will extend that feeling in our relationship to every one of our situations in our lives.

Same, same, same old story from day one. The outside world looks different, but it’s the same stuff recycled again and again, and our work remains the same: to be clear, not falsely clear, but to really be at ease with ourselves and then extend that to the world. Regardless of what it is that we do in the world, the motivation is to relieve suffering, not to add to it. So, it’s up to each one of us to figure out what that means. But once again, without a practice, without some understanding of what there is possible to find in life, in this world at this time, right now, within ourselves and within everyone, it’s very difficult to accomplish the destruction of suffering.

So, the key is, first, well, the key is to have some understanding of the path and to do some practice, and to expose your, expose our knee jerk, gut reactions to things, to the light of awareness, to the love and the space that lives within us.

So, let’s get some questions.

Q: Namaste, KD. I’ve been listening to your track, “Narayana For Your Love.” Is there a story behind combining the Yardbirds song “For Your Love” with this track? We’d love to hear the story, if there is one.

I’d also love to hear the story. It was just one of those things came out of my mouth in soundcheck. And that’s the story. That’s the whole story. There’s no… it just showed up. We were, I was, I don’t know what I was doing, what I was playing, and all of a sudden it came out. So, there it is. Yeah. What can I say? I’d like to take some credit for it, but there is none to take.

Q: Thank you and guru’s blessings. With so many distractions, how do you keep up your sadhana?

Well, distractions are exactly what makes you do sahana. You get pulled out of yourself so strongly that you start to hurt. You’re so gone and so lost that it begins to feel terrible. So, it forces you to come back and try to find a way to center and let go and release stuff.

And besides, I don’t think I do that much sadhana anyway, but I do what I can.

Q: Any tips on maintaining balance between sharing Maharajji’s ways; love, serve, remember God; and being righteous?

I’m not sure what you mean. Balance between sharing love and being righteous? Maybe you mean, feeling righteous, thinking that you’re better than others and that you are doing something for others, something like that.

Well, that’s just part of the delusion that we live in, that we think that we are who we think we are and that everything revolves around us and that we are the doers of all our actions, when really, they say, that mostly we’re on automatic all the time. And even when we think we’re doing good, we have so many different motivations for action in this world that the so-called righteousness that we think we’re good people. We’re not really seeing ourselves very clearly. We’re good inside for sure, because that’s our true nature, but that’s covered up with tons of shit. And that shit takes over. That neurosis grabs on to everything we do. We feel proud about our service. So, then it’s not very good service.

So, you do what you can. You do the best you can, and you keep surrendering, letting go, noticing the stuff inside of you and trying to keep letting go of that stuff. And of course, practice, the formal practice is what precipitates the changes, precipitates a new way of seeing things, of experiencing things. Because the experiencer is being thinned out. So, you don’t get the pet yourself on the back.

“Wow. My experience has totally changed.”

Nope. Not like that.

The practices, the continual growing awareness and understanding of your motivations and the hidden stuff within us, that gradually thins out the evaluator, the judgmental mind, and we see things differently. We experience the world differently, so we act differently.

Q: Do you know the story Ram Dass told of seeing Maharajji screaming at some guy in the courtyard? Ram Dass was upset, felt betrayed, and then Maharajji sent the message to him later.

First, he said, “Tell Ram Dass I’ll explain everything to him,” which he never did.

And then later he said, “Never put anyone out of your heart, no matter what you do.”

Well, that’s an interesting story. Yes, I was there at the time.

So, the puris and potatoes which were given out to people as prasad in these bags when people came to the temple, were cooked in the back of the temple in the kitchen, and this devotee, a very new kind of devotee, was put in charge of organizing the cooking of the prasad and this… So some time went past and  Maharajji started asking Dada to check the puris for no apparent reason. So, Dada would go into the room where the prasadwas kept then he would look at the puris. Fine. Okay. But every day, Maharajji just started sending Dada back to check the puris.

“Dada,  check the puris.”

Dada would look at the puris.

After about a week, Dada comes back and says, “Baba, the puris are black. They’re burned.”

So, then what happened is this guy, this village guy, this new devotee was taking the ghee that had been donated to the temple, he was diluting it with mustard oil and using that dilution to cook the prasad and he was selling the ghee out the back of the temple to the villagers, to local people. And Maharajji knew, which is why he started asking Dada to check the puris, because at some point, when the ratio of oil to ghee gets to a certain place, the puris would be turned black instead of the golden brown that they are from ghee.

So, then he called the guy to him and he screamed at him and sent him them home. And all Ram Dass heard was the screaming without the backstory. And he got very upset because Maharajji had been telling Ram Dass to love everyone. But we have a misunderstanding about these things. We think loving everyone is somehow artificial and it’s something we have to do. And if we love everyone, we can never be angry. I think you can be angry at a person’s faults, at a person’s negative actions, or negative actions in general. Anger can arise, but you don’t have to want to kill the person and throw them out of your heart.

For a great being like Maharajji, all of us, all of us separate beings are part of his reality. We’re part of him. He’s become the whole universe and everything in it is a part of him. So how could he throw a part of him out of himself? But he can use anger to correct somebody and to… also, by yelling at someone like that and throwing him out of the temple, that guy gets to experience the negative fruits of his actions right away and not sometime later down the line.  Because to steal from the temple, to steal from your guru, that can’t be very good. So, by Maharajji responding with that force in some way, it allows that guy to immediately experience the fruit of his negative actions and he doesn’t have to experience them later.

I never thought of that before, and maybe it’s not even true, but it seems good.

You know, there was things like that that happened all the time, but Maharajji said, “Do what you do, but don’t throw anyone out of your heart.”

Which for us is impossible. because everybody’s already out, we’re out of our own hearts. We’re trying to get in there and figure out who we are and realize our truth. So, for us, we’re all out of our hearts and we’re only judging and reacting and liking and disliking and wanting and not wanting and pushing away and holding onto this. That’s the world we live in, but hopefully it’s not forever like that.

The other story like that, I was there also. Across the street, down the road a little bit lived the man named  Purnanand and he had 12, he had 11 children, I think, or 12 children at the time and he was very poor, and he was a devotee of Maharajji and in fact, he was partially involved with Maharaji getting that land for building a temple in some way.

Maharajji created a job for Purnanand so he could feed his children. Every day, the buses would come from the local village. They would pass by the temple, and Purnanand’s job was to make a check mark.

“Yes, the 3:30 bus passed by. Yes, the 5:30 bus passed by.”

That was his job and for that, he got, he was paid a certain amount of rupees, with which he was supposed to be able to feed his family. But in fact, every month he took the paycheck and he bought a month’s worth of hashish to smoke because he was addicted to smoking hash.

So, on this particular day, he had just bought his month’s supply and came to the temple to see Maharajji, and Maharajji saw him and he started coming down the walkway. Maharajji was in a very sweet, relaxed mood, very beautiful, and all of a sudden, Maharajji sees him and he sits up and he starts screaming at him like an enraged monkey. Purnanand, he had to  keep coming. He wanted to run away, but he had to keep coming and it gets down and he bows down to Maharajji. Maharajji hits him on the back and starts screaming at him, “Get out, get out!”

This happened almost every month. So, what can I tell you?

He still had the job. He still has the job. He died a long time ago, but his children.

There’s a lot of questions about… Here’s one.

Q: I lack determination to get up at Brahmamurta…

Which is 4 am. Hey, welcome to the club.

Q: What should I do to get the discipline in life to do Sadhana?

Do it when you can do it. Just because you can get up at 4 it means you can be an asshole all day long? Just do it when you can.

Q: So, I live in Denver less than a block from the protests. I hear the pain and suffering every night outside my window. How can I serve best my Dharma? How can I serve best? My Dharma compels me to participate.

Here’s another one.

Q: Maharajji said, “Cultivate mercy and awareness for the benefit of all sentient beings,” and I think Ram Dass is saying that “As our veils begin to lift, our suffering leads to grace.”

These teachings are very important to me. Can you speak to these in light of our current unrest and intolerance?

Well, so once again, I want to tell you this story of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Someone once asked him, “Your holiness, are you happy?”

So, he said, “Well, I guess you could say I’ve had a hard life. I was discovered as a Tulku, a reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama at 2. I was raised in the monastery. My parents were there a bit, but not all the time. Then I had to take the reins of my country as a teenager and negotiate with the Chinese who finally invaded, and I had to escape, and I had to watch helplessly as the Chinese murdered 3 million of my people.”

He said, “The Chinese have taken everything from me. Am I going to let them take my happiness?”

So, in this situation, now the Dalai Lama is doing whatever he can, according to his principles to save Tibet from extinction because of what the Chinese are doing. However, no matter what’s going on in the outside world, and it’s always going on somewhere, are we going to let it destroy our hearts?  And if we do let it destroy our hearts, how can we help anyone? How can we help alleviate suffering in the outside world or in ourselves?  If we’ve allowed, if the fear and anxiety and suffering and anger, we’ve allowed that to destroy us and push us completely off balance so that we are also in total reaction mode?

So, we have to find a way to help implement the changes that have to come in our society, the changes that we hope will correct the imbalance of power and the devastating way that people of color are treated and hurt and abused and victimized. We definitely have to find a way to help make that happen, but we can’t allow our actions to come with negative emotions, if we can help it. It’s very hard, very hard, but that doesn’t mean you don’t do what you do. You do whatever you can do to help and to find out what…

It’s funny. I just saw Conan the other night, and he was saying how he grew up in the seventies. I mean on TV, I saw him. Were social distancing. He was saying how he grew up in the seventies and he, you know, he was just in this bubble thinking that we fixed it. It’s over. We fixed it. It’s all good now. So now we are, it’s being revealed to him, how much has still needs to be fixed and how deeply ingrained this horrendously hurtful way of treating others is ingrained in our culture and in our society.

But once again, whatever you do, do it as completely as you can, as totally as you can. Give yourself to it. But if you let yourself be destroyed by the situation, what good will you be to anybody?

It’s difficult. If you’re on this, if you recognize that you’re on the spiritual path and that you are committed to trying to relieve suffering in this world, then whatever your actions you take, you do your best to make sure that you’re not creating more suffering with your actions. This is for each individual to figure out what that means to them in terms of what actions they take in the world.

But just, just becoming aware like we are now how much work has to be done, it’s intense and it forces us to really deal with these deeper emotions that we have, our own fears, our own anxiety, our fears for our self and fears for our friends.

So, whatever you do, I think practice, finding a way to keep coming back to home, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, no matter what protests you involve yourself with, no matter what group you involve yourself with to try to revamp the system and save our culture, our society, America, which is a very complex society.

You know, Maharajji was born in India. There’s a caste system. Supposedly they’ve done away with that, but they haven’t. It’s ingrained in the culture and there’s tremendous amount of caste discrimination, a tremendous amount. Every day, everywhere you go. But Maharajji’s templates were open to everyone. No one was kept away. Everyone was allowed to participate. He let the Westerners serve the prasad and help make the prasad. Do you realize we’re not even qualified to be in the caste system? We’re below that. In terms of the caste system, we’re even further out. We don’t exist. And yet he allowed us to do things and he said, “Their hearts are pure. They can serve, they can do anything.”

Pure or not. He let us do it. A lot of the Indian people didn’t like it. Really. But that didn’t bother him. He saw everybody as God. So, when we can do that, then we’ll see what we do. But until then we just do the best we can, and we do our best not to hurt ourselves or others and still try to accomplish the goals that we need to accomplish, to try to make this right, to fix this and not be suckered into hating the other side, because they are us too on some level. We may not like what they do, but we don’t have to throw them out of our hearts. Like Ram Dass said, like Maharajji said. But we can still say, “No more. Enough of this shit.”

So, we have to figure out a way to do that without, with at least as much loving compassion as we can muster. And it’s not easy. We’re not taught about that. We’re not trained how to do that.

Q: Would I agree with ice Cube’s lyrics, “Check yourself before you wreck yourself?”

Well, if he means what I think he does, definitely.

Q: How do you find the strength to choose when you’re at a life-changing crossroad and terrified? My mom says I’m suffering from analysis paralysis.

I never heard that one before.

But I can’t stop worrying or start moving forward.

Well, in this case, you know… You know who Yogi Berra was? He was a catcher for the New York Yankees and he was apparently quite a guy and he, he used to say, he used to have these aphorisms that came out of his mouth that were so extraordinary. And one was, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

You know, all I can do, I can speak for myself. You know, I never decided anything. I just let, I try to let things happen and I follow my heart as best as I can. To try to decide in the mind what’s best for me, it doesn’t work for me. I try to feel what, which way I should go. No one can tell you how to do that. No one can tell you what’s right for you. A lot of people do, but they don’t know. They certainly don’t know better than you.

It doesn’t even matter. Do what you want. See how it works out. Then do something else. What’s the big deal? You learn from walking into walls. You go, “Oh, I guess this is not the way to go.”

There’s no other way to learn. You have to engage in life. You have to get into it. You have to really do it, really be in it. You can’t protect yourself and hide and you have to go for it. So, listen to your heart, figure out what it is you want to do. Feel what you want to do, and then just go for it. And if you can stop worrying, then just keep worrying. But do it anyway. If you’re some person who can’t stop analyzing things, try to figure out what it is in you that causes so much fear, why you have no self-confidence. This didn’t come from nowhere. This is, this is something inside of you, a program that’s developed over the years and your mother says, you know, she said something about “analysis paralysis?” Well, that’s her idea, but she’s not you. You are you. Maybe you will always be stuck just like this. It could be worse. You’re still here. Recognize that you’re here wherever you go, whatever you feel. You’re still here. You’ll always be here. Just take a step.

Q: Please tell us how mantra helps us to be present. It’s a custom in many traditions to remember mantra all the time. Is it a tool to be present?

I don’t like the way that sounds, “to be present.” You are present. You are here. You are not somewhere else already. You’re here. Mantra can help you recognize that you’re here, but it’s not something you say, “oh, now I’m present.”

No, you’re not. If you’re saying that, if you’re thinking that, you’re thinking, and thinking is not being present. When you become aware of presence, it’s a very different level of being. It’s a different feeling. So, stop thinking about the mantra. Stop thinking about what it’s going to do for you. Stop thinking about if you’re making it or not. Stop thinking about if it’s working. Stop thinking about what it would feel like if you finally get here. Yada, yada, yada, yada, just more stuff. Let go, do your mantra and shut up. Shut the mind up. And if you can’t shut up, just let it go and do the mantra.

Maharajji said, “Repeat the name whether you’re feeling good, whether you’re angry, whether whatever, whether you’re feeling in devotion or not, it doesn’t matter. Just do it.”

Because you’re planting the seeds. By doing that, we are planting the seeds of liberation within ourselves. So just do the practice. Stop trying to analyze it. You don’t have to  figure out if it’s working or what it’s going to feel like if and when it works. Just the doing of the practice is already grace coming to you, coming to us.

Q: Other than the Hanuman Chalisa, did Maharajji have a favorite chant or prayer?

You know, he loved all the Names. He loved all the prayers. He always had this chapter from the Ram Charitamanasa, which is Tulasi Das’s version of the Ramayana. He always had Sundarakand read wherever he was on Tuesdays, which is Hanuman’s day.

Sundarakand is the chapter about when Hanuman jumps over the ocean and finds Sita. It’s called “The beautiful,” Sundarakand means, “beautiful chapter.” And he loved hearing that read. And it’s actually sung because it’s all poetry. It’s all in rhyme.  And so that was one of his favorites. The Hanuman Chalisa was one of his favorites. Sri Ram Jai Ram was one of his favorites. He was always repeating the name of Ram. But all the names were his favorites. Everywhere He saw, everywhere He looked, he saw God. But not in a stupid way. In a real way. He saw everything. He saw who you were, who you’re going to be, what you’ve done, what you’re going to do, who you really are. And he loved, loves us as we are in this moment. We’re all inside of that space of Ram. We’re all inside of that vast presence, which is Buddha nature, which is being. So, any one of those Mantras or names that represent that place, which they all do, are very much the same. But like I said, there’s different little, there’s different streams, different lineages. And it would, one could say that He was in the Ram lineage, the lineage of Hanuman. That doesn’t mean that he judged any other. He accepted all ways, all religions. Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, everybody came to him because he was beyond all those differences and differentiation.

Here’s a question about suicide.

Do I have any advice for this person who tried to commit suicide?

All I can tell you is that when I was in India, I was having a nervous breakdown, whatever you want to call it, and I was thinking about suicide. I was very crazy and I couldn’t, I was like in free fall and I couldn’t find any ground and I couldn’t stop freaking. And, Maharajji called me over.

And He said, “What are you going to do? Jump in the river?”

He didn’t seem to take it very seriously. The river was like six inches deep and I thought, you know, if I got myself, my head under a rock or something, maybe I could make it happen. He said, “What are you going to do a jump in the river?”

H said, “You can’t die. Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.”

I looked at him like what? Why? Because he never thought of himself.

In other words, in that Being there was no “me.” There was no deluded, delusion of separateness. The real death is the death of the ego, so to speak.

And then He said, “Oh, somebody dies and people cry and moan and they stop eating. But after a couple of days, they’re laughing and drinking and eating again. This world,” he said, “is the flow of attachment. Samsara, this world, is the flow of attachment. One attachment after the other. No attachment, no world.”

Meaning, no attachment, no delusion about separateness and thinking that what you are is real.

So, for people who are experiencing extraordinary pain and think that they can alleviate that pain by killing themselves, he was saying that that’s not going to work. Now, I know that’s a big pill to swallow for most of us, because basically we feel that we are this body-mind complex and we die. We’re going to be done. That’s it. It’s over. So, if that was true, then of course suicide would work. But apparently it doesn’t.

They say there are no dead people. There are no dead beings. Bodies drop and change, but the soul, so to speak, takes another body, on and on and on until the karmas are exhausted. That’s what’s believed in the east. And that’s what he said to me, basically.

So you can, for somebody who’s thinking about suicide or has actually tried it, I remember Ram Dass used to say that this guy once called him up and he said, “Ram Dass, I’m going to kill myself. I just called you to tell you that.”

And then Ram Dass said, “Well, let me talk to the guy who dialed the phone.”

Because there are two sides there. Somebody wanted help and he dialed the phone. Then he said, “I’m going to kill myself.”

If you’re really going to do it, you could probably do it. A lot of times they say that trying to commit suicide is a call for help, especially when it doesn’t, when somebody does it in a way that they’re not successful.

It’s a hard thing because nobody… when it hurts, it really hurts. And you think, “Maybe I could end it.” But unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be that way. So, I would encourage this person to do whatever they can do to get through the day. Medication. Anything that they can do to try to find a way to live in this world, one way or the other.

So, it’s hard stuff, really hard stuff, but all you can do for somebody is love them, and really love them as they are, and if they’re determined to kill themselves, I don’t know what can be done. If somebody really wants to do something, they’ll find a way. Very difficult, very painful, no easy answers.

Q: Did Neem Karoli Baba ever accept money for his teachings? How come people are asked to pay or donate here?

Maharajj gave almost everything away for free. He didn’t sell his teachings. He didn’t ask for money, but in India, the system supports gurus. They support spiritual seekers. When a Saint starts an ashram, his devotees, they donate food, they donate money, they donate supplies. They consider it a blessing to be able to do that.  It’s been in the culture that way for thousands of years. We don’t have that in the West. I mean maybe Christian monasteries take donations from people.

In my case, I started singing with people because I had to in order to save my life. In order to save my heart, I had to start singing with people. So, I did it for free for years at Jivanmukti every Monday night when I was in New York. Then I got invited to California. How was I going to get there? I could walk, but my instruments were a lot to carry, and besides I’d probably still be on the way. So, I had to get a plane ticket. So, we asked for some money for the concert. And that’s how it started. The traveling started.

This is what I do. I don’t have another job. I’m not really qualified for much except pumping gas. So this is probably better and so, I do this. But I need to eat. The people who help me organize my tours and set everything up, it’s an incredible amount of work, an incredible amount of work. Nina, Sarina, Anna, my daughter, Janaki, everybody also has to eat and feed their family. So, if we’re going to do this, it has to also generate the money because people don’t donate here. They don’t support saints, not that I’m a Saint, but they don’t support spiritual work that way. in India, they do. In other countries, they do. In Burma, they do. Monasteries are, ashrams are supported by people who are grateful that they’re there. So that’s why we asked for donations, and that’s why sometimes we ask a certain ticket price to get in.

I have a mortgage. I have to eat. I mean, it’s the way it is. It’s life.

So, on the Thursdays we ask, we offer the opportunity to make a donation, but otherwise this is free. You don’t have to. On the other, some of the other programs that I do, we actually charge a certain amount so we can plan that we won’t have to move out of the house by the next month.

We have no savings. People think I’m a millionaire. Somebody said to me once, “Well, now that you become a millionaire, what do you think about money?”

I just laugh because I guess people assume if you’re a semi famous, you’re also semi rich. It doesn’t work like that. And in fact, many years ago, in the eighties, I was in the jungle in India with this very, very old Baba who at the time was 163. I think he’s still alive. I haven’t seen him in many years. So, I was sitting with him one day and he was sitting in a chair, and I was sitting on the ground in front of him and he looked at me and goes, “ah…”

This is back in the eighties. I was doing nothing. Okay? Nothing.

He looked at me, He goes, “You’re going to be, you’re going to be famous.”

So, I looked up at him and I said, “and rich.”

And he laughed, he laughed. And he came up to me, really nose to nose, eye to eye, and he said “Famous.”

So, that’s the story.

You know, I took my shot. I thought, “Why not?” Right? “If I’m going to be rich, if I’m going to be famous, maybe I’ll be rich too. That’ll make it easier.”

Then I wouldn’t have to charge for anything I could do, I could just travel and sing. That would be great, but that’s not the way it is. So, this is my work and it’s my offering. And people have an opportunity to help that continue to happen if they like to. And that’s the story.

The post Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD June 4 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 54 Guru Puja Meditation

“Every inhalation you’re drawing away the pain and suffering of all the Beings around you, all over the universe, actually, because you have, the center of your heart is the open clear light of freedom. It’s not any kind of a trap. It’s not any kind of a prison. It’s a prism through which all this is completely swallowed up into the vast infinite energy of love in the universe, of all the Krishnas and all the Ramas and all the Everybodys, Buddhas and the Kalkis from the future who conquer all darkness and sadness and injustice and suffering. And you triumph. Your inhalation draws that in and you triumph over it and your bliss triumphs over all that mass of sadness. It does not burn you out.” – Robert Thurman

Bob: Let’s meditate something. Can we meditate something?

KD: Yeah, please.

Bob: Ok. So, please go into meditative mode. In this light I’m moved to ask you to meditate something. And, this comes from the Guru Puja but I won’t read it. I’ll just, from the Guru Puja. The Guru Worship. Mentor Worship. Ok. So, please go into meditative mode. And in meditative mode, take a look at yourself to find your true self. And when you do that, when you use your mind to look back into your own face, what will happen to you is you won’t be sure who you are, if you look properly for yourself. You will find a certain uncertainty about, are the tip of your nose? Are you your face as it looks this morning? Are you your face as it was 20 years ago or 10 years ago or 2 years ago? Or are you something else? Do you have an angelic face inside? Are you, etcetera… You’ll feel a kind of vein like that if you really look intently into yourself to find your self. You’ll feel an uncertainty and if you do it strongly you’ll feel even a little nervous, anxious, maybe insecure, like “who am I?” A sort of Ramana Maharshi sort of routine. And just let yourself melt. Use that uncertainty to kind of melt your self-image about yourself. And as you’re self-image about yourself melts, your picture of the world around you will melt, can melt. You know? Your imagination that you’re in this room in Massachusetts and this and that and Kripalu and this and the other and whatever and just let go of it all. And then, imagine yourself in the best way you might want to be. On a mountain in Tibet. Sitting with Shabkar. Looking at another mountain with the billowing clouds on top of it. Beautiful. With shining sun, blue sky, rainbows in some parts of the vast view that you’re seeing and you’re feeling really alert, you don’t bother, like who you are, you’re in your best feeling and you’ve seen this vision in your mind’s eye. And then you see sort of like He did, His guru on top of that cloud. You see your Guru and if you don’t have a particular Guru, you think of, you could think of a Buddha, you could think of Krishna, you could think of Rama, you could think of Neem Karoli Baba, you can think of anybody you want, whoever you feel moved by, whoever, if they were there on that cloud, you would feel really excited. You know? Like, when you meet some celebrity or some really super person that you love and you’re just in their space and you get all like, keyed-up, you know, and you just feel like that, some amazing person even you don’t know that. A lama or some imagined lama. It doesn’t matter. And that person is sitting there smiling radiantly at you like Shabkar’s guru is smiling at him. And you just imagine that being is there. Like Obi Wan Kenobi’s like a light being. Like a pure light phenomenon. And you can have many beings there if you like. If it’s Jesus that you like, if it’s Moses, if it’s, if it’s Muhammad, if it’s, whatever it is you just… they’re all there together. Krishna. And really there, you know? Or Sita. Or Shakti. You know? Mother Teresa. It doesn’t matter. Because they’re all there and you can have a host up there on top of that cloud formation, sitting there smiling and they’re all looking personally at you. They’re like, you know, they found you. They love you. You feel, you visualize them there and then imagine if there’s someone who passed away, let’s say, could be your parents, your grandmother, grandfather or anybody you can imagine. And they’re there in their light body and you imagine that their real light body comes from wherever they may be, in whatever heaven plane or anywhere and inhabits what you’re visualizing. In the duplicate soul body comes in and inhabits what you visualize. Don’t worry if you can’t hold the visualization steady, you just flash it in your mind and sky above you, smiling at you and from the smile, gleaming light rays flow down to you and a rainbow, whatever color you need, blue or red or gold or rainbow and just flow this energy comes like a liquid coherent gentle laser-light flowing to you, comes in through the crown of your head, goes into all your chakras and your central nervous system fills with you up with this light and energy. You just feel you’re receiving grace and energy and light and your normal nagging doubting mind is like little shadowy things being washed out of you by this light and energy and it goes, flows out of you, flows down into the underworld where even your nagging doubts are like nectar the Beings under there and they like it, so it’s not just trash, you know. It comes to them in a blessing way. And you feel totally blessed. And then don’t neglect all the Beings that you know, all everyone else in this group here and also all your loved ones at home or everywhere you can remember. Even those who are passed away. They’re all around you in a huge host and all beings, actually are around you, and all your loved ones along the front rows on the left side and your acquaintances that you have no strong feelings for, one way or the other, are in front in the front row and the ones you have disliked and you have negative feelings about are on the front rows on the right side, but they’re all getting a reflection from you of this energy that’s going down to you, this grace energy and in reflecting off of you and they think it’s coming from you, which is ok. But you’re just reflecting it from those Beings above you and they send you encouraging thoughts and even your enemies and rivals, they send encouraging thoughts because they are getting light from you so they don’t mind, even though they’re a little jealous, they don’t care, they want you to send more light. Loved ones love seeing your light and the neutral ones are amazed that this neutral person is sending light to them. And then you sending your gratitude and your devotion and your dedication to your Krishna and your Guru and your Buddha and your Lama and whatever it is for you, your grandmother, grandfather, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, whoever it is, all of them together. And you’re in this like, infinity figure-eight of Blessing, of Grace and then reflecting blessing of Grace to all the Beings around you and then their gratitude coming toward you, gratitude, or any way agitation, incitation coming towards, inspiration coming towards you and then your gratitude and love and devotion going toward your source of your grace, your mentor, your Guru, your Gurus, your Gurinis, and you just enjoy this, and this Bliss setting, this meditational setting field, in Tibetan tradition for that Shabkar and then and every spiritual traditional has something like this and in fact, they build temples and churches and synagogues and mosques and everything to create in a building a feeling of being in a space like this with the grace flowing down through the roof or whatever it may be, through space. This is a universal thing and you just enjoy being there and in the Tibetan tradition, when you meditate on any theme, even if you’re meditating on death, if you’re meditating on the preciousness of life, you’re meditating on, on the inadequacies of the self-centered world view, you’re meditating on the beauty of the loving world view, you know, whenever you’re meditating a different thing you just know that you’re in a field like that, because actually all of us are in a field like that all the time, actually, whether we know it or not. As Rinpoche, Rinpoche said, KD Rinpoche said, “It’s all grace but we act like it isn’t.” So, we visualize it and then you meditate whatever it is you really most need to meditate. You know? Mindfulness. You can practice mindfulness. You can count your breaths within a field like that. And even you can then, even counting your breath, you know, you can use in every way… someone did ask me and I want to add to it just while we’re doing it, and don’t worry if you don’t remember, you know, who’s up there and who’s blessing and which color light’s coming and who’s around. Doesn’t matter because you’re in that field. You create it with your imagination and you’re in it. And then you just think about all the Beings around you and all their suffering and you feel how blessed you feel and how blissful you feel, feeling the grace of being beloved by deities and by Lamas and by Goddesses and by angels and by those in your life who have touched you in a positive way and then you, when you draw in your breath, you draw away the shadows of the doubts and worries and sufferings and anxieties and sorrows and sadnesses and distresses and pains of the beings around you, and you draw them into your heart and then in your heart is the vast absolute luminous nature of what they call “the clear light of voidness” “clear light of freedom” is in the center of your heart and therefore any amount of this darkness goes in there and completely transforms in the sun and moon and luminosity of that space. Infinite abundant energy, loving energy in that space. And then when you exhale, the light from that space of your loving bliss, the light of the bliss of your feeling and that from the center core energy of your heart comes flowing out, out of your nostrils and it goes out to all the beings around you and it feeds them bliss and nurtures them like nurses them with bliss and you, so you, this is called the “meditation of give and take”. So, every inhalation you’re drawing away the pain and suffering of all the Beings around you, all over the universe, actually, because you have, the center of your heart is the open clear light of freedom. It’s not any kind of a trap. It’s not any kind of a prison. It’s a prism through which all this is completely swallowed up into the vast infinite energy of love in the universe, of all the Krishnas and all the Ramas and all the Everybodys, Buddhas and the Kalkis from the future who conquer all darkness and sadness and injustice and suffering. And you triumph. Your inhalation draws that in and you triumph over it and your bliss triumphs over all that mass of sadness. It does not burn you out. And then when you exhale, this triumphant loving bliss energy flows out to all the Beings around you.

Your normal being becomes a purifier of other’s suffering ad infinitum and eternally, past, even the past suffering you draw away. You go back and fix the past. You don’t leave the past in a mess. You fix it. Enlightened beings go and change the past. There’s no set thing, it’s just this way or that way. They fix it. You undo all unhappy endings, all tragedies, all sufferings, all beings, not just all human beings, either. All beings. And you exhale the energy of infinite bliss flows out as love, as the will to the happiness of beings in the form of light. Indomitable light energy traveling instantaneously. You know, light is a concept, you know. Light, light travels at the speed where mass becomes infinite, so it doesn’t take any time to become infinite. And you do as long as you can do normally, though I’m not going to take that much time. So then, when the way you close the meditation, this meditation, like what Shabkar did, you imagine that your Guru is so pleased with you that you are channeling His or Her, you could be having a female Guru for sure, infinite loving blissful energy. The bliss void, bliss freedom indivisible, it’s called. Sukha shunya advaita.  The nonduality of bliss and emptiness or openness or freedom. Don’t be scared of emptiness, openness or freedom. Bliss freedom indivisible. They’re so delighted of you, that your work and your life and you’re spreading the grace and the love. It is so much Them that they melt into pure light, you no longer can see them there, they dissolve into pure light and then they flow down with their light as their light rays that they were sending down, they then become their light rays and they flow down into you and they come onto the crown of your head and then they melt into the central nervous system and they go down your central channel and they come to your heart center and there in the infinity of your, of the central core place in your heart center, the infinity of bliss freedom indivisible, they take up their happy residence. And they become indivisible from you. And you don’t have to worry about ever losing them. Or ever being apart from them. Because they are there, as He said, they are your mind, they are your heart, they are your super subtle, spirit bliss freedom indivisible heart-mind.

So, keep meditating then. Keep doing give and take. And let’s take away the suffering from Sharon. And let’s take away the suffering, with your inhalation take away the suffering from Ram Das and send them to them the bliss of your good health, bliss of our happiness and our blessedness, being here with KD Rinpoche and Nina Rinpoche and all the musician Rinpoches. And just keep doing that. Give and take. Giving your bliss and happiness and grace and taking everyone else’s feeling of being lost and forlorn and sorrow and so sad and sorrowful. Must keep at it.

The post Ep. 54 | Guru Puja Meditation appeared first on Krishna Das.