Call and Response with Krishna Das

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD May 7, 2020

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

“All we have is what’s in front of our faces, which is the ups and downs of life. So, you have to learn to deal with those situations in the best way… and there’s no God outside of your Self, your true Self. And that true Self is the same in every Being. So, if you treat other people the way you would like to be treated, you won’t have any problems at all.” – Krishna Das

“Ram nam karne se sab pura ho jata”

My Guru used to say that to us quite often.

“From going on repeating these Names, everything is accomplished. Everything is accomplished.” A very simple statement. Easy to kind of just say, “Oh, yeah, ok,” but I’ve been thinking about that, or trying to truly believe that for 50 years or so. 40 Years. 45 years. So, if I truly believed that what He said, that from repeating these Names, everything is accomplished, I would probably be giving more of myself to the practice as I’m doing it. But, you know, we have our own karmic predicaments that we live in. Very distracted lives. Very fast lives. Although it’s a little bit slower these days. Although we can fill it up with stuff quite easily.

I remember many many years ago, before I went to India I was up in the mountains of New Mexico with Ram Das at the Lama Foundation for about a month in the winter. It was fantastic. And every day we would spend many hours meeting together, singing, talking, meditating. And we heard about this New York artist who had moved out to New Mexico and lived just down the hill, down the mountain from where the Lama was, and he had been to India and he knew how to meditate. This was Big Time. So a group of us went down to meet with him, to see him. And we spent a couple of hours with him, talking to him. I just sat in the back of the room, listening. And as we were leaving, I was the last one to go out the door. As I was about to go out the door, he grabbed my arm 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.”

Oh.

He nailed me to the wall. That was unbelievable. That was in 19-, the winter of, let’s see, ’69. That’s what? 50 years ago? I can still feel his hand on my arm. You know, if we look at ourselves, we notice how difficult it is to be fully engaged in something. We’re not talking about watching a movie where you’re fully lost for as long as the movie’s on or some kind of entertainment, but whatever you’re doing, being fully engaged. Not thinking about the future, not the past, not this and that, not the chatter that goes on in the brain all the time, but truly present. Truly present and aware.

So, I’ve been working on that a long time. Or, at least noticing how little of myself I really can give to each moment. So, when it comes to chanting or a practice that you do regularly, you create a situation where you’re training yourself to let go and come back. Let go and come back. Over and over again. It doesn’t, it’s not about up here. It’s about in here. And it’s not an intellectual process. It’s not a learning process. It’s a training process. So, little by little your Being gets familiar with these sounds, with these Names in this case, and you begin to relax into the Name. And the Name, as we come to know it, has been brought into this world by a Being who has fully realized the reality of that Name, the reality of what is Named, and has brought that Name into this world for us as a practice, as a doorway into that Name, into the reality, which is our own true nature, which is our soul.

The love we’re looking for exists within us. It lives within us. We look outside ourselves in the outside world. We look for it everywhere and we don’t find it. We don’t find it until we look within. It’s not like you look with your eyes within. It’s not like that. It’s moving more deeply into ourselves by releasing the stuff that holds us and takes us away again and again and again. That naturally moves us within.

Letting go again and again.

And we don’t have to make this up. We don’t have to manipulate ourselves. We don’t have to be looking for anything specific, any kind of experience. Once we know who we are, we’re wide open. Everything is here and now. Everything exists within us. We’re so achievement oriented in the West. We’re in such a hurry because everything is done so quickly here. But that’s not how we find ourselves.

So, anyhow let’s take some questions for a while.

Q: Who was Neem Karoli Baba’s spiritual master and what were some of the practices they would do?

KD: We don’t know. We don’t know who His gurus were. We have no idea. He never spoke about it. He had some… We hear stories, when He was very young, He went to this ashram, that place, He met this guy, that guy. But nobody really knows that we ever spoke to, ever told us anything definitive about that. He never spoke about it. He never had pictures up of this and that, you know?  He was very much believed to be a manifestation of Hanuman himself. I don’t even know what that means. You know, we use all these words, all these words that we bring, we learn from India or from the spiritual path, but we don’t really know what these words mean. But, the lineage that He seemed to be a part of was a Ram lineage, the lineage of Ram and Hanuman. But more than that we don’t know. We know that He, He spent many years in a cave, in caves. There were two small caves, well, one big cave in a town called Neeb Karori, which is where He got His name, the Baba from that town, that village. I visited there and it was a very small village, a very funky village and they told us not to leave the temple, especially at night. You needed to be very careful. Apparently, there’s a lot of murders in that part of the country. But that’s where He decided to build the cave. The villagers dug out a cave for Him in this field, or it was, I think, in the jungle at the time. Later on it was cleared. And nobody knew that He was there. And He was existing on, existing on one glass of milk a day, which, this old village lady used to bring to Him. And then, she died and so He was starving. Nobody knew He was there. So, the story goes that He picked up His chimta, which is this metal tong for moving fire around, moving the logs around, and He threatened Hanuman. He had a little murti of Hanuman that He had in the cave. He threatened Him. He said, “You’ll starve me so I’ll beat You.” And apparently, the next morning, there was milk outside the door.

Q: Do I draw any inspiration from Eddie Vedder with my vocal style?

KD: Excuse me. Eddie Vedder is a kid. I’m 20 years older than him. No, I mean, he’s great. In fact, I think his wife said something to somebody I knew, that she reminded me of him.

No, I love Eddie Vedder, but I just sing. I don’t have a vocal style as far as I know.

Q: How do I remain focused on God when I have to deal with the ups and downs of life?

KD: If you have to ask that question, you don’t know what God is, where God is or who God is. So, you can’t be focused on God, because you don’t know. We don’t know. All we have is what’s in front of our faces, which is the ups and downs of life. So, you have to learn to deal with those situations in the best way and there’s no God outside of your Self, your true Self. And that true Self is the same in every Being. So, if you treat other people the way you would like to be treated, you won’t have any problems at all. Calm yourself down. Calm your mind down little by little and find a way to get through the day without falling on your face too many times, or creating negative karmas by being angry at people and hurting others and hurting yourself. There’s no God out there. The God that you’re looking for is within us and until you learn how to be kind to yourself in a real way, which is to give yourself a break and learn to trust your own intuition about where to look for these deeper realities, you know, you need to do some practice. And  you need to treat others the way you want to be treated.

Q: Towards the end of your film, One Track Heart, you use a word. Someone said you were giving something to people. I tried looking it up but I found only something…

KD: Yeah, Maharajji had asked me to be the pujari or the priest of the Durga temple that He had built in Kainchi in the courtyard and I had to distribute the charanamrit. That means the nectar of the feet, which is the water that was used to wash the feet of the Goddess in the pujas, in the rituals. Yes, it is water, but it’s blessed water because it was used in the ritual. So, distributing that charanamrit was a way of distributing the blessings of the ritual that the other pujari did. I just watched. “Charanamrit” is the name.

Q: I need advice on suicide.

KD: You mean how to do it? I can’t help you.

I needed advice, too, you know? I was going to jump in the river and kill myself. I was having a nervous breakdown in Kainchi, right there in the temple. Maharajji was there and it’s a long story. It’s in my book, Chants of a Lifetime.  It’s in that book. But the short story is that I was completely flipped out and I was going to kill myself and He called me over and He said, “What are you going to do, jump in the river?” And He laughed. “Ha.” He said, “Worldly people don’t die.” Us. Worldly people. People who are attached to this world and to the ego. “Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.”

What?

“Why? Because He never thought of Himself. He gave His life for His people. He never thought of Himself.” So, the idea is that, all we do is think about ourselves and suicide is not going to change that. You go from this body to some other body and the karmas that you have, that you can’t deal with now, you won’t be able to deal with later, either. So, the best way is to try and find a way to be in this world in a good way. Whatever you have to do to find some peace of mind, you should do. Counseling, therapy, antidepressants, whatever works for you. And that’s what you should do. You should dedicate your life to finding a way to live here. Because you got born here for a reason. We all did. And what’s in our life is what we have to deal with and there’s nowhere we can go to get away from that. Suicide is not going to change that. You’re not going to have this body but you’re going to have another one and who knows what it’ll be? It might not be as good.

Q: These days I have to wear a police radio by my ear while I’m on duty.

KD: That doesn’t sound like too much fun.

Q: I have to listen and talk to others and write, etcetera. Any suggestions about how to not ignore the least urgent but to include?

KD: Once again, it’s all about when you’re not on duty, what you do. It’s about developing a practice that helps keep you in line as the day goes on. You just pay attention to what you’re doing. You do the best job you can do. Don’t try to… give yourself 100% to what you’re doing. Whatever it is. Just do the best that you can. And do that when you’re doing your practice, too. I’m sorry I can’t really get into that one.

Q: What’s your advice on sannyasa, to dedicate one’s heart and mind totally in service and surrender to God and also does Guru have to have a physical form?

KD: Absolutely not. Guru doesn’t have a physical form. We see it that way because that’s what we’re attached to, a physical body. A Guru is never identified with the physical body although a Guru might take a body to help us if it’s necessary for us, but Guru, God and our true nature, the Self, the Soul, are not different. And, you know, these days it seems like there’s Gurus on every corner, but those are not Gurus. Those are not Satgurus. Those are not real Gurus, true Gurus. They might be teachers, they might be more advanced than us. But a Guru, a real Guru is something else entirely. So, you can read books about some of the real Gurus; Swami Nityananda, who was Muktananda’s Guru; Shirdi Sai Baba; and my Guru, Neem Karoli Baba; there are many, Sri Ramakrishna. Read those guys. Read how they lived. Read what they said. Read how they got through the day. What did they do? That’s how you get a feel for what a real Guru is. They don’t do business.

Q: Can you get the grace of the Guru even though He isn’t in the physical form, through Bhakti?

KD: Of course, absolutely. Of course. Grace is always here. We’re just not paying attention. We are not paying attention. It’s raining everywhere all the time but we can’t drink until we cup our hands. So practice, devotion to practice, the path is what trains us to cup our hands to get the water that we need to drink. Absolutely. No question. Grace is all the time.

And the other part of that question is surrender.

What is sannyasa, to dedicate one’s heart and mind?

That’s wishful thinking, that’s what it is.

You know, that’s wishful thinking. Good luck, you know? It’s not so easy to do, you know? You’ll go to some cave, you’ll put on orange clothes. You’ll just have a big ego about having orange clothes and thinking you’re more humble than other people. Give yourself a break. Live in this world like you are now and don’t let your neurosis fuck you up and make you think you have to go be a sannyasi because you’re too scared to deal with your shit. There’s no where you can go where your shit is not going to be right there with you. Deal with it. Find a way to live with it. Find a way to love yourself. That’s sannyasa. Clothes, initiations don’t do anything unless you’re ripe and if you’re ripe, you’re ripe. You would know it.

Q: How do you know if your difficult, painful, stressful life situation is part of your dharma?

KD: Well, it’s certainly your karma…

Q:  and you stick with it all through ups and downs and pain and sorrow or if it’s time to make a change?

KD: I have a feeling you’re talking about relationships, because you can’t change your life. You can change the people in it and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that if you, if you find yourself in a situation that is causing you pain and causing others pain and it’s just not working, you certainly can find a way to make something work for you. You know, we grow up thinking relationships are going to make us happy. We get turned on by somebody and we so-call “fall in love” and we fall in love and we are in a relationship. Relationships are busines. You give, you take, you give, you take. When somebody stops giving, you freak out. When you stop taking, they freak out. So, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to find a more peaceful way to be in the world but you can’t avoid, by changing the external circumstances you can’t necessarily, necessarily make yourself happy.  So, whatever you do, you should do with as much kindness to yourself and others that you can do, whatever that means to you. You’re the only one who knows.

Q: How does it feel to offer the chants without the large energy you’re used to in the church or in a theater?

KD: It feels fine. Better than robbing banks. I’m having a good time. I’m singing and you’re singing. That’s good. You know, because we’re attached to the physical body, because we’re attached to the physical body, we think we’re here and other people are somewhere else. That’s only one way of looking at it. In the space of the heart and the sky of the mind, we’re all within that and when, certainly when we’re doing practice, we’re all tuning into that space together and it’s all about doing the practice and if I was missing the energy of the people, I would notice that and I would let go and I wouldn’t be missing it anymore. You keep coming back to the chant. Anything you think about it, you keep letting it go and coming back. So, for me it’s not, I mean it’s very different on many levels, but it’s also very much the same.

Q: I feel my devotion scattered over many aspects: Christ, Kali, Hanuman; and it keeps spreading over more. What are your thoughts over devotion: many aspects versus one aspect with full attention?

KD: The more the better. More love is good. You’re overthinking this. It’s the love that’s important, not the object. The object is allowing you to release that love feeling in your own heart. When the whole universe becomes objects for you to release that love feeling then you’re enlightened. So, keep going.   Don’t stop with Christ and Kali and Hanuman. Keep going until every Being you see turns you on and no beings turn you off. It’s all good. It’s all good.

Q: Much has been said about being mindful of the company you keep. Do you think it presents in issues in relationships or detours one’s path with relationships, in relationship with them when they have no spiritual path of their own?

KD: Maybe. But maybe not. If you’re in relationship with somebody, that’s the karmic imperative for the moment. That’s what’s there in your face. How it got there is irrelevant, but it’s there, so you have to be with that. And yes, the Buddha said that satsang or sangha is the most important thing in the spiritual life because our hearts are so hesitant and fearful and challenged that if we surround ourself with spiritual friends it can help us open up but it can also be completely negative because what we think is spiritual might not be spiritual at all. And the reasons you might move into an ashram or a so-called ashram or some kind of spiritual community might turn out to be very negative. Like you’re trying to hide from yourself so you want to go be with a group of people who turn out to be hiding from themselves. So, it’s all about learning to trust yourself and following your heart and yes, it’s difficult if somebody doesn’t understand what you’re doing, but you know, we probably don’t understand it.

I once got an email from a friend of mine who said she and her husband were about to get divorced, and I said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Why is that?”

And she said, “Well, you know, I play your music all over the house; in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room and he just hates it.”

I said, “Turn it off!” You know, what do you need to do that for? Turn it off. So she did and they’re still happily married.

Q: As a householder mother, how can I attain moksha?

KD: Be the best householder and mother that you know how to be and sooner or later you will be enlightened.

There seems to be theme here today about trying to get away from stuff. Trying to and not accepting what’s in your life as the given, or what you have to deal with. You can’t change things. It’s not so easy to change. If you go off to a cave, you know, you bring everything with you, in your mind at least. So, it’s a question of seeing God in everyone and everything, even the people you don’t like. Even the people, especially the people who give you a hard time. There was a wonderful lama who was going on a long journey in Tibet and He had to take an assistant with him to help. He was a very old Lama. And so He picked this guy, this young Lama in the monastery who was the most difficult person in the world, just really difficult. And all the other Lamas said, “Why did you pick him? You’re going to go on this long trip with this guy?”

He said, “Exactly. He’s going to teach me patience.”

We don’t want to learn. We don’t want to transform our own negative thinking. We just want to change the outside world. But that doesn’t work. It does not work.

What we need to change is the way we engage with the so-called outside world and so-called other people, and that’s what practice is about.

Q: Can you talk about how the music you make connects with your practice? I’ve noticed select melodies reoccur throughout the chants and I’ve been fascinated by how they might empower each other.

KD: Really? You know, if you have a good melody, you just use it to death. The music is part of the practice. It’s a way of transmitting the Name. If I sat here and went “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram. Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram.” I don’t think many of you would hang out much and neither would I. So, the music is, you know, when a child is sick you have to give it medicine, so you hide the medicine in a sweet syrup. So, the music is that syrup and the Name is the medicine. Music will not cure us of our suffering. It could calm our minds down a little bit but it’s the Name which has the power to transform our lives and change the painful into living reality. So, it’s the Name that’s the medicine.

Q: Years ago, you said something at a concert in Brazil that never left my mind. You were talking about Jesus and said He lost himself in love. Can you talk a little bit more about this state of the soul?

KD: Well, you know this happened in India with Maharajji. This Canadian guy came to see Maharajji for the first time and he didn’t know, you know, Maharajji didn’t talk about meditation and spiritual practice and stuff like that. He didn’t talk about those things. He just fed you more than you could ever eat and told you to go away. So, this guy comes and Maharajji says to him, “What do you want? Why did you come?”

And he thought he should give a spiritual answer. So, he said, “Well could you teach me how to meditate?”

“Get out of here. Go in the back with the other crazy people, the westerners. Go on, go.”

And as the guy is going, walking into the temple, into the back of the temple, He says, “Just meditate like Christ. Go on. Go.”

So, he came to the back and we were all back there. Ram Das was there and others and we were debriefing him because we debriefed everybody. “What did He say” and “What did you say” and “What did He say?”

And then he said, “You know, He told me to meditate like Christ.”

What? What does that mean.

So later on, Maharajji came in the back to hang out with us and Ram Das said to Him, “Baba, you said to meditate like Christ. How did He meditate?”

So, it seemed like Maharajji was about to answer the question, but instead He just kind of stopped and His eyes closed and He sat in front of us completely still. It was like the earth stopped turning. It was so powerful. The vibe was so powerful. And after a couple of minutes, two tears came down his cheek, you know and He just shook His head and He opened His eyes and He said, “He lost Himself in love. He lost Himself in Love. That’s how He meditated. He never died. No one understands. He lost Himself in Love. He’s One with All Beings.”

That wasn’t what I was taught about Jesus.

So, it was very shocking and very beautiful. Very moving. Very moving.

Q: Did you ever ask Maharajji when you were sitting with Him or listening to Him, “What is there after this life? And what is the purpose of this life? Do we just come here and do what?”

KD: Yes. No. We didn’t talk to Him about those things. He didn’t talk about those things. He didn’t teach like that. When we were sitting with Him, we understood what the purpose of this life is. It’s to merge in love and to live in that love all the time and that means including everyone in it. Everyone.

You can’t have any shadows. You can’t leave any shadows behind you. You have to follow that longing you have to be free of suffering and that leads you on to the path, to relieve yourself of suffering and then you start to recognize everybody’s suffering. So, you try to do your best to help whoever you can and learn how to be kind to yourself and others. We’re here to become good human beings. There’s no place else to go. This is it for now.

Q: What’s the connection between Maharajji and Sombari Baba?

KD: Now Sombari Baba was a very great Siddha who lived in the hills of India. I think He left the body. I’m not exactly sure when. I think maybe in the 1920’s. Something like that. And Maharajji, when He had His places, when He came to the hills in the 30s and 40s and 50s, He picked certain places that He built temples and a few of them were places where Sombari Baba had lived. He was a very great Siddha and “Sombari” means “Monday.” And Monday is Shiva’s day in India and He would do bhandara every Monday. Feed people. He was a great Sadhu. A great Siddha.

I don’t know what their real connection is, but I know that Maharajji respected Him greatly. And Kainchi, the temple in Kainchi where I lived, is built, the Hanuman temple is right in front of, it wasn’t even a cave, it was just under a ledge of rock where Sombari Baba had His sacred fire, His fire, for a long time. And Maharajji built the first Hanuman temple right there in front of that in that place.

Q: How did I know this was my path in life?

KD: I’m not sure yet, but I think it is.

I don’t even know what it is.

And why did I go to India?

I went to India because I felt pulled there. I felt tremendously pulled there. I wanted to go there more than anything. I just had to go. Had to go. So, I went. And in my mind, I was never coming back to America. I gave everything I had away. I sold my car, my guitar, gave my jeans away. I was gone. I had a couple of boxes of stuff in my mother’s basement but, you know, I didn’t think I was ever coming back. And then, after two and a half years, He sent me back. That’s why I’m here.

Q: Can you please kindly explain how to adopt forgiveness and move on in life? Some mistakes are blunder and are difficult to be forgiven.

KD: Yeah, forgiveness is a big thing. The sting of being betrayed and being hurt is something that is very hard to let go of. Very hard. But you know, on one hand, if we really look at the people who betrayed us and hurt us, we can see that their actions, just like our actions, are coming out of our own suffering and just like we’ve hurt many people without wanting to, it’s a very similar situation for other people. They hurt people out of protecting themselves, out of all kinds of reasons and yeah, and we take everything so personally. So it’s very painful. Very hard. But it’s a very powerful practice, trying to forgive. Trying to forgive… and we’re so involved with “me” and protecting “me” from pain that it’s very hard to forgive people who have crushed us, you know?  But that’s why we do practice; to get strength, to do whatever we have to do to allow our hearts to unfold again and again and again. Because that’s how we get strength.

It’s very hard to forgive ourselves, too, truly, for hurting all the people we’ve hurt. But I think once we can forgive ourselves a little, then we can forgive other people a little bit, too. Not easy, Not easy.

Q: My memory of events from 50 years ago is uncanny. Do you remember everything in your life that clearly? Or is there just some special way that you’re preserved.

KD: I can’t remember my name half the time. I don’t remember what happened 10 minutes ago or yesterday, but things that happened with Maharajji, I can remember so much but Oh My Goodness, so much is gone. You know, like for instance, some years ago, about 15-20 years ago I was, I found my diary from India and I opened it up just at random and I read in the diary, “Today Mahrajji looked at me and this other Westerner, Balaramdas, and He said to the Indian people sitting there, ‘these boys are my disciples.’ And He put ash on our tongues and our heads and said, ‘these boys are my disciples.’” I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember that. How do you forget something like that.

But I did.

I had forgotten it. I forgot it for like 20 years. So, the funny thing, being with Maharajji, it was like a dream. It was a different kind of reality. Things happened and you were aware of them but you didn’t grok them in a certain kind of way. Later we would talk about things and we would go, “Wow, did that happen? Oh, yeah.” So, but there’s so much of it I don’t remember from, you know, spending so much time with Him in certain periods. So much would happen in a one hour darshan. You could never, you know there’s a really nice book called “Love Everyone.” Parvati Markus who was with us in India put this incredible book together from the diaries from a large number of us who were there at the time. And it’s called “Love Everyone” and it kind of reconstructs a day, the days with Maharajji and how He played with people and interacted and it’s really fantastic. “Love Everyone” is the name of the book.

Q:  So, are we to love the corrupt liars and evil-doers?  I try every day to practice Metta Meditation and there’s great resistance I encounter with this.  How would Maharajji advise?

KD: Well, He would say, “Love everyone.”

Love everyone.

When Ram Das was very angry at the rest of the Westerners, you know, he felt that we’d, we had kind of stolen Maharajji from him in a way. Because we were taking up all the time and he had to share Maharajji with all of us. Of course, he did that by talking about Him when he came back from India the first time. But he was, Maharajji was working with Ram Das’s anger.

So, one day Ram Das walked to the temple over the hills, about a four hour walk, and he was furious with the Westerners. Furious. Really. And he walks into the temple and we were… Maharajji was sitting on one side of the courtyard and the Westerners were sitting in a line opposite Him.  He was feeding us. He was having us fed. So, Ram Das walks into the temple and one of the Westerners gets up with a plate of food and offers it to Ram Das and Ram Das takes it and throws it in his face, right there in front of Maharajji.

Maharajji goes, “Ram Das, something wrong? Come here.”

So, Ram Das goes over to where Maharajji’s sitting and Maharajji says, “What’s the matter?”

And Ram Das says, “I can’t stand impure things in people. And I can’t stand the impurity in my own heart.”

And Maharajji looks at him and says, like this, He says, “I don’t see any impurity.”  Then he looks at Ram Das. He said, “Ram Das, love everyone and tell the truth.”

Ram Das says, “Maharajji, the truth is, I don’t love everyone.”

“Ram Das, love everyone and tell the truth.”

So, he understood that he was going to have to get with the program as soon as possible.

So, evil-doers.  It’s a tough one. You know, I’ve told this many times, but back in the days when George W. was President, I wasn’t very fond of him. Not that I knew him, but I thought he was basically a bad guy. And one night I was going through the channels on the tv and I hit CNN and they were showing George W. going to meet the first group of widows from the Iraq war. Right? It was at some school in Florida, a public school, and he was walking down the hall towards this classroom where these women were waiting for him and the cameras are following him and he’s walking down the hall. “Yeah, I’m the President, hey.” “Hi Joe, hey Frank. How are you doing?” Walking down the hall all full of himself and he walked into this room. This was all live on television. He walked into this room and took one look at these women and he burst out crying like a baby.

I couldn’t hate him anymore. In that moment I saw that this guy was the pawn of different political interests, different business interests. He made deals, all to achieve the Presidency, which was his desire, and he started this, started or whatever, got into this war where so many people were killed all because he was the pawn of all this inner and outer vested interest, his own desires for fame and what he owed, that he was going to have to pay for this, too. There was no escape from the karmas. None. Ever. And to tell you the truth, that didn’t make me happy. I didn’t, in my heart I didn’t want to see him suffer but I saw that he was going to suffer because he didn’t know any better and he had no idea what he was doing in the greater of scheme of things.

He caused so much suffering, or was the primary cause, or the transformational cause of so much suffering. And he, himself, would have to pay for that. It was inevitable, but I didn’t want to see it. In my heart, I didn’t want to see him suffer. So, you know, I think as we learn to give ourselves a break and as we give some space to those negative places in ourselves and we see how hard it is to truly be caring and meet people in the best way, then we begin to give others a break, too. Even the worst people. It’s not something you can… It’s so emotional, and there’s no question when you’re in the emotions there’s no, nothing you can do about it. But, in the greater scheme of things, everyone has to pay, has to experience the fruits of their own actions. So, are we going to create more suffering with our own anger? Because we will have to pay for that ourselves. And our own hatred? So, it’s not just thinking of others only. It’s also recognizing that our own actions will be, we’ll have to pay for those karmas as well.

So, I don’t know if that’s clear, but it’s complicated. That’s for sure.

And you know, one time, Maharajji was sitting with one of His very old Indian devotees. Of all the devotees, this man was the sweetest, sweetest. Oh, he was so sweet. And he was sitting around with Maharajji and Maharajji pointed to him and said, “He was my enemy in our last birth.”

What?

What?

“My enemy in our last birth?”

“Enemy” means “enemy.” Right? So, that’s intense. So, who knows who anybody is, you know? We just, all we do is judge people by our own subjective standards and subjective understanding. So, it’s tough. It’s very hard to deal with those negative forces in a way that doesn’t create more karma for us, ourselves, as well.

The post Special Edition Conversations With KD May 7, 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 48 | Hanuman, Mrs. Hanuman, and Time Machines 

“When you attain that oneness, you’re also one with all Beings in all moments of time, past, present and future. So, because, after all, time is like a space, it’s like a subtler space than space is. You know, time, it’s a space of time, a space of duration, of continuum. Right? And so, everything is past and future. So, when you become Buddha, you’re all in all moments of the future, so then you become aware that everyone else will eventually become Buddha, and not only that but you then manifest to accelerate that process so they can do it as quickly as possible. The really dense ones might take a million lifetimes. The quicker ones, a hundred, etcetera. But You’re going to work on it with them. That’s your attitude. This is the sci-fi idea of Kalachakra, ok?” – Robert Thurman

KD: Yeah. All these practices, all these traditions really are here for us to help us overcome the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, which for the most part are at least limiting, to say the least. So all these practices are so based in love. Some years ago, one of the lamas I study with, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, invited me to sing at one of His retreats where He was going to teach on devotion. Now, in Tibetan Buddhism, devotion is not talked about separately as a subject usually. It’s part of the practices. But Rinpoche was going to discuss that aspect of devotion separately. So, He asked me to sing and so I sang and, but one of the things He said, over and over is that, if we don’t love ourselves, how will we ever really love all Beings? Not to mention, another Being? Real love. And it was very interesting to see some of His students react to that because, you know, Buddhists. What are you going to do with them? You know? So intellectual sometimes, you know? Thinking about stuff and understanding the philosophy and I remember one time, I said to Rinpoche, because I don’t take that many teachings with Him but we became very friendly at one point and I said, “Rinpoche, don’t underestimate the ability of Westerners to not understand what you’re talking about.”And He went… and then, by the next year, He had reorganized His teachings.  It was very interesting because I think He realized that we talk a good game, but when it comes to the nitty gritty, we hide. Our issues cloud the sun. Like the clouds, they block the sun, so… and of course, Her Loving Kindness talks about this all the time, you know, how to, how offering Loving Kindness to others heals our own hearts. And Maharajji used to say, “Don’t think about yourself.” You know? When I was going to kill myself that time… I was going to jump in the river behind the temple, you know? It was about six inches deep, but I figured if I got my head, you know, stuck under a rock, I could probably get it done, you know? So He said, “What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Jump in the river?” He said, “You can’t die.” He said, “Worldly people don’t die.” He said, “Only Jesus died the real death.” What is He talking about?  Only Jesus died? And He looked, “Yeah. Why? Because He never thought of Himself.” What is the real death? What’s the death of the ego? When thoughts of “me” no longer arise. When it isn’t about “me” anymore. “How am I doing?” “How am I doing now?” “Am I wearing the right clothes?” “Am I sitting straight enough?”  “Did I put on enough makeup?” “I got that…” what is it they call that stuff? “acne medicine” it’s been so long since I had a pimple. I don’t remember because I don’t have a mind either, you know? So, you know, He never thought of Himself. Thoughts of “me” never arose in that Being. And of course, all I did was think about myself. And I said, “Baba, all I do is think about myself. What am I going to do?” And He looks at me, “Attachment. Ha!” He wasn’t buying it. So eventually I gave it up for that particular period of time. All right. Let’s sing a little bit. And then we’ll, you know we’re going to go back and forth with Bob. Talking and singing. Talking and singing. Falling asleep. Talking and singing. And you’ll get a whole three hour dose tomorrow, so that’s going to be great.

So, I usually start with this prayer. In fact, I always start with this prayer. It’s a prayer to Hanuman. Now, in Indian system, in the Ramayana, the story of Ram, Ram’s wife, Sita is stolen by the demon Ravana. And Ravana has ten heads. Each head is for one of the senses and object of the senses. It’s the whole worldly attachment and identification. So, Sita is the individual soul, they say, and so the ego wants that soul, wants the shakti, wants the juice. So, it grabs it and takes it away to its island and it wants to mate with it. But due to a curse, the ego can’t seduce the soul. The soul has to fall in love with the ego. Otherwise, the ego doesn’t get the juice. And that could never happen. So, it’s a beautiful story. So, but in the story, Rama, who’s God and who’s job in that incarnation as that avatar, is to pretend that He’s a human being. The perfect human being. And He pretends He doesn’t know what’s going on. But at one point, He has to kind of shake it up a little bit and He sees, He tells Hanuman, “Ok, so here, take my ring. And if you meet Sita,” because the monkeys are going to, that Ram meets, are going to go out and try to find Sita, because Ram was wandering in the jungle crying for His wife and He doesn’t know where She is and He’s all alone and what’s He going to do and then He meets the monkeys. And He meets Hanuman. So, now all the monkeys are going to cover the earth looking for Sita. But Ram gives Hanuman His ring. And He says, “When you find Sita, show Her this ring so She knows you come from me.” So, Hanuman is this, the power of grace, the flow of grace which is always flowing and what it does is it connects that individual reflection with the great light, the one light. And by removing the obstacles and locating that within us, so this prayer to Hanuman is what I usually start with. Now, I really wouldn’t know anything about Hanuman except that when we we got to India, we found out that Maharajji was considered to be an actual incarnation of Hanuman. And the more we spent time with Him, the more we got glimpses into what that really means and how that works.

Bob: So, can I ask you a question? So, Hanuman has a, has a brother, Sughreeva, or something? Hanuman has a brother, doesn’t he?

KD: No, Sughreeva is His king.

Bob: Sughreeva is the king of the monkeys. Does He have a Mrs. Hanuman?

KD: No Mrs. Hanuman. According to most people. But you told me a story once.

Bob: Yes.

KD: Would you like to tell that now?

Bob: But that’s about Tibet. That’s Tibet’s vision, but I think in Ramayana and Rama lore…

KD: There’s no Mrs. Hanuman.

Bob: There’s no Mrs. Hanuman. He doesn’t show up for tea with Rama and Sita when all’s over in the war and He brings along Mrs. Hanuman.

KD: No Mrs. Hanuman anywhere.

Bob: Mrs. Hanuman has to stay in the tree? Mrs. Hanuman stays in the tree?

KD: Does He say He’s…

Bob: I mean, does she just stay in the tree? She doesn’t come and hang out with Rama?

KD: Who?

Bob: Mrs. Hanuman.

KD: There is no Mrs. Hanuman.

Bob: There is. Are you kidding? Well, actually, in the Tibetan story, maybe you’re right, but in the Tibetan story, they don’t call them Hanuman, necessarily in that particular origin myth of the Tibetans. They say He’s a monkey.

KD: A celibate monkey God.

Bob: As a monkey, He’s an emanation of Avalokiteshvara, Lokeshvara, Avalokiteshvara. And Avalokiteshvara, you know, the word “Avalokita”, or even “Loka” but “Avalokita” especially, means, “Ishwara” means, you know “God,” and “Avalokita” means “the caring one who looks on with caring love”, loving care. So that’s what “avalokita” means. Avalokita Ishvara. It’s kind of like a little dig at Maha Ishwara, the great God who’s like a Big Shot type of thing. This is the one who’s futzing over people, who cares about them. So, anyway, they think of Him as, He’s an emanation, and He’s a monkey monk. He’s a monk monkey.

KD: A celibate monkey god.

Bob: A celibate monkey god. And a bodhisattva. And a bodhisattva god. And He goes to the mountains in Tibet and He meditates there and He’s meditating, and then He’s still the beautiful golden wonderful like, monkey, bodhisattva monkey, so there’s a kind of Goddess of the mountain who’s sometimes they call her an ogress. Or a demoness. But that’s because she can be fierce, but she’s really beautiful, also. And she falls in love with the monkey monk. So, she says, “Come on. What is this monkey monk business? I want to marry you. I want you to marry me. What’s the monk thing?” And He says, “No, no no I’m a monk. I may be a monkey, but I’m a monk. So, no marrying. I don’t marry.” And then this goes on and on, then finally, She gets desperate, because she’s really in love with Him. And She knows He should, He’s kind of likes Her a lot, too, but He’s a monk. And so then, He asks another form of Lokeshwara, the one who’s in the pure land, Sukhavati the blissful land of Amitabha, infinite light Buddha, and the heavenly plane up there in the Brahma Akanishta, heaven, and the top of what they call the Form Realm, the Realm of Pure Form. And He says, “Ok, I know you emanated me as a monk monkey, but this lady is going to throw herself off the mountain if I don’t marry her. So, could I give back my monk vow?” And, “Yeah, sure, you know? You don’t have to be a monk. It’s ok. You can give it back.”

KD: Just like that? Yeah, sure?

Bob: Just like what?

KD: Just like that? Ok, what the hell?

Bob: Yeah, He offers it back.

KD: Ok.

Bob: For an act of compassion. To save the life of this rock goddess, demoness, ogress, beautiful mountain goddess. And so, so they marry.

KD: He got the night off.

Bob: And they produced many many children and they have six different varieties of the children because these are Beings that come from the six planes of existence, you know? Hell, Preta Realm, the realm of so-called Hungry Ghosts, and the Animal Realm, Human Realm, Asura Titan Realm and Deva Realm, you know, God Realm. Six Realms. So, there are different kinds of Tibetans, in other words. And then the whole Tibetan race comes from that.

KD: From the mating of the celibate monkey God and the demoness.

Bob: So, they say that, typical chauvinist warriors, tribal, originally, they blamed their naughtiness on the rock ogress, and they blamed their goodness on the monkey monk. Typical chauvinist. But the point is, that’s the story and we connect that to Hanuman.

KD: He was a good monk. But was he… He seems to have been a good husband.

Bob: Because you discovered something that I didn’t realize, right? In the Kalachakra. Tell us what you discovered.

KD: Oh yeah.

Bob: In the wheel of time prophecy.

KD: Look. First, explain a little bit about what the Kalachakra is.

Bob: Kalachakra means “time machine.”

KD: The Time Machine. Ha.

Bob: And it’s a chakra, because chakra means a “wheel”, but just like we say about someone who comes up with a Tesla, we say, “Oh, nice wheels,” we say. So, in Sanskrit, chakra can just mean a “machine.” And so, the Kalachakra is a form of Buddha that Buddha manifests to show His presence in all Time, because, and He shows that to give an excuse, that’s His excuse for becoming a Buddha. Because He shouldn’t become a Buddha as a Bodhisattva, unless everybody’s already a Buddha. Right? So, in other words, we, like, I was probably some kind of, like, a worm or something on the side of the tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment. And I could have complained, “You promised, as a Bodhisattva, you wouldn’t attain freedom of suffering until we’re all free from suffering. So where are you heading? Where are you going? What’s up? You’re like the Lone Ranger? You’re leaving town and we’re still here? What is that?” And so He then shows Himself as a Kalachakra Time Machine because one of the aspects of enlightenment is not only do you experience yourself as everyone else, which is really weird, it’s a weird thing. People wrongly think enlightenment means something, some bright light goes off in your brain and you sort of go poof and disappear. And then we’re all, “Oh gee whiz, it was great, He attained enlightenment.” But that sucks, you know, that idea. It totally sucks. What good is that if He disappears. That doesn’t do mean any good. That’s silly. But actually enlightenment is defined as where you realize you’re everyone. And also, do you not realize you’re everyone, and this is very important, it’s not what I’d call the “cheap experience of one-ness.” The cheap experience of one-ness is where you kind of, you get a sort of bright light and everybody else is also dissolves into the bright light and you dissolve into the bright light, and you’re all one, and you’re all just a bright light. So, you don’t feel guilty that you abandoned people to go and enjoy being in a bright light, because you feel you’re not there either. So, we’re all one and nobody’s there. Isn’t that great?

KD: Fantastic.

Bob: That’s what I call the cheap one. And then you come back later and say “Oh, it was all One.”

KD: But do you come back later?

Bob: And then actually, some people even act like, “Well, I know it’s all One, because I saw everybody else and myself disappear and you did so I want like, a Rolls Royce or something.” Or nowadays it might have been a Tesla. “I’ll have a hundred Teslas please.” But never mind. So they behave badly sometimes, people like that. But you see, the Expensive Oneness is different. The Expensive Oneness is yes, you have a kind of bright light experience, maybe, but the final experience is, It’s All One and Everybody’s There. And they’re all looking at You. And You suddenly find yourself looking at Your Self from their perspective. Can you imagine that? You know, some of you probably are empathetic. Everyone who’s been a mother has been empathetic. Everyone who’s been a loving father has been empathetic. Right? You feel you are that little goo goo gaga thing there, you know, for awhile. Or you feel that about your lover. So everyone has had the experience of feeling they are two people or more, actually people on a football team, they think they’re the whole team, you know? Sometimes. That’s why they get mad when somebody knocks out their friend, you know? And army people even get like that. So, human beings can expand their sense of identification. So, but imagine if your sense of identification became so huge that you felt you were everyone, even just in this room, much less everyone on the whole planet? And much less, not just the human beings, all the animals? All the Gods? All the Devas? All the Demons? Everyone. That would be truly weird, wouldn’t it?

KD: That’s the Expensive Oneness, for sure.

Bob: That would be super weird, and then, you become frustrated because when you’re in that light, you saw that everyone already has Buddha nature, they’re made, even, of Buddha Bliss. That’s what the positive gracious vision is. But they don’t know it. And then, you can’t blast them with Bliss, because they’re too paranoid. If you go blast somebody with bliss, then they think the Alien is after them, and they’re going to like, “Don’t get in my space! I don’t want that bliss! That’s your bliss! Leave me alone! I have my own bliss!” That’s what people do. So, you can’t do that. The only thing, each one has to open to the reality, through their own mindfulness taken to its limit, taken to what they call the limited being, where they’re mindful of their true nature. So, then, apparently, and this, I know its preposterous, because the Indian people, they don’t need Star Trek. They had it thousands of years ago.

KD: Yeah.

Bob: Total Star Trek. The Ramayana is Star Trek. The Monkey brings the mountain for medicine and… all the soldiers jump up?

KD: They fly around in these big things, yeah.

Bob: They all had Star Trek a long time ago. And, you know, Star Trek is some way of trying to catch us up.

KD: Yeah.

Bob: You know? Really. Kirk is Rama. Spock is Lakshmana. Doctor McCoy is I don’t know which one, you know? And Worf is Hanuman.

KD: I see.

Bob: Seriously. So, it’s catching us up.

KD: Ok.

Bob: So, but anyway… time machines. So, “Time machine” then means that the Buddha, when you attain that oneness, you’re also one with all Beings in all moments of time, past, present and future. So, because, after all, time is like a space, it’s like a subtler space than space is. You know, time, it’s a space of time, a space of duration, of continuum. Right? And so, everything is past and future. So, when you become Buddha, you’re all in all moments of the future, so then you become aware that everyone else will eventually become Buddha, and not only that but you then manifest to accelerate that process so they can do it as quickly as possible. The really dense ones might take a million lifetimes. The quicker ones, a hundred, etcetera. But You’re going to work on it with them. That’s your attitude. This is the sci-fi idea of Kalachakra, ok? So, then, to be specifically on this planet, Shakyamuni Buddha’s time, Kalachakra is Him showing that history, it’s like omega point idea of time of….. [      ] it’s like, it’s an ancient Buddhist [        ] vision, if you know what that is, where things are going to a positive point, which is called Shambhala, and so there’s a time where Shambhala is here where a lot more people become enlightened. And it looks like everything is going down the drain into the Koch Brothers tar infested bank accounts and that’s what it looks like and that’s good that we see that because then we’re going to see that it doesn’t happen. But it looks like that. But actually, it’s going to go in a great place. We’re going to have a great time only 400 years from now.

KD: I see. Ok.

Bob: So, there’s a little struggle between now and then. We’ve been having the struggle, the world wars and things, and a bit of struggle and we had a struggle through 2018 election and 2020’s election is a struggle we’re all going to win.

The post Ep. 48 | Hanuman, Mrs. Hanuman, and Time Machines appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 30, 2020

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

“Ram Dass, my best friend, one of my best friends, long-term spiritual friends and elders, just died a month or two ago. He’s so present. Any time I think of him, he’s present. I’m not looking for signs. I feel his presence. And you will feel your people’s presence if you just allow yourself to. You won’t be able to touch them physically. But that doesn’t mean they’re not here. Because we’re attached to our physical bodies. Because we identify with our physical and emotional parts. We can’t imagine something without that. However, there are many Beings, many many more Beings out of the body than are in bodies I’m sure. I’ve heard that many times. And if you want to feel those things, one has to open up to these realities through practice.” – Krishna Das

So, you know, when we add a practice to our day, it changes the way we sit in the moment. It just does.

It just changes the way we sit in the moment and it’s not about whether we’re doing it well or we’re not doing it well or we’re having any particular type of experience. That’s one of our biggest problems. We’re expecting something. We have an idea that we have to get something. You know, I remember sitting in front of Maharajji and I almost laughed out loud because I saw that I was sitting there and I was waiting for something to happen and when I thought about what it was I was waiting to happen, I realized I was waiting for a moment when I would not be here, when I’d be gone. And I laughed because I realized, or I understood at that moment that I would never be gone. There was no time. There was no moment anywhere, ever where I would be gone. There will come a time I hope when I am not attached and identified with my thoughts and my negative emotions, especially. But I’ll only be more here then. More present. So, this whole feeling of wanting to be gone means I wanted to be freed from my unhappiness and my crazy neurotic mind. It was driving me crazy. My self-judging, my self-loathing, all the programs.

So, yeah.

Anyway, that’s the deal. Let’s see some questions.

Q: I would like to ask how to find hope in difficult times.

I know what you mean, but it’s really not hope that you want. It’s faith that you want. Maybe I’m picking at straws here but hope is like blind faith. Faith that you have no reason to feel hope because it’s out of your hands. It’s just like, you know, you put your hope in something else. You imagine maybe some time will come when you won’t feel so bad. But faith is something you get from… Faith means, in a way, it can also mean confidence in yourself.  Confidence that you can deal with whatever arises in a good way and that’s a big thing. I was sitting with Maharajji in an apartment building in Bombay. At the time it was called that. Around Christmas 1972. And we’d been sitting for hours. He was lying on the bed. He was lying this way. He’d sit up. Then He’d lie down this way and He’d sit up. And I was just watching Him. Watching Him quietly. All of a sudden, He sits up and He looks at me and He says, “Courage is a really big thing.”

I was like, “What’s going to happen?” You know?

And the Indian devotee there, he was the only one there. He looked at me and he said… He looked at Baba and said, “But Oh Baba, but God takes care of His devotees.” Maharajji just shot Him a glance and He looked back at me and He said, “Courage is a really big thing.”

Courage is a really big thing.

There have been times in my life when… that it was enough to deal with life as it appears to us, as it arrives in our moment, in our life, in our space. So, if you don’t… what’s the sense of having hope without developing your own muscles to deal with life. It’s not always fun and it’s not always pleasant and sometimes it really hurts a lot. Those are the moments that, if you have developed a way to sit within your self with a certain kind of confidence from your own experience, and a certain trust in your self based on your own experiences dealing with this stuff, that’s what happens. You don’t, you don’t get lost in blind faith or hope. But you develop real faith, real faith. You know?

I remember when I was a kid, I was on the track team and I used to throw the discus and so I would sit around for hours waiting for my chance and so I had this book on Buddhism that I found somewhere and I remember reading in the book, I was sitting there on the field, I remember reading that Buddha said that your enlightenment is up to you. And I couldn’t believe it because when you’re 18… 17, 18… nothing is up to you. Everybody’s telling you what to do. You have rules. You have regulations. You’ve got to go to school. You’ve got all this shit that’s going on. That my enlightenment was up to me was a revelation. But, all these years later, we’re still working on it.

Q: why it is important to have a picture of one’s guru in one’s space?

It’s not important. You don’t have to, but when you love someone and when someone’s been so important to your life… well, that’s the way I feel about Maharajji.  Meeting Him saved me. Meeting Ram Dass… totally opened up something else for me. So, it helps me remember. It helps me keep His image in my heart. That’s why I do it. I don’t know why you do it or don’t do it.

*Q:  Behavior… Hate, incest… I do not want to respond in kind…  (video glitched and question was cut off in video)

Inhumanity to man. Humans treating each other terribly.

There’s so many things to say about this. It’s not a quick answer. On one level, you do what you have to do to protect yourself, if it’s you we’re talking about. Protect yourself or a loved on.  There’s a lot of trauma that we store in the body, in the emotional body and work with it. As far as stopping someone from doing that kind of thing, well it depends on who it is, but certainly if you can stop it, if you can prevent that from happening, do whatever you can to prevent it I would say. Difficult situation though. Especially in families when there are secrets and one or other or both of the parents refuse to deal with the situation. Very painful. Very painful stuff. But, if you are involved with that kind of situation anyway, I would say to try to find some counseling. There’s certainly wonderful ways of counseling that are open to us now that even 10 years ago weren’t available. But definitely try to find a way to work with it. Try to find the best way to work with it in your life. There’s no quick answer that I can give.

Q: Do I have any words on corrupt Guru-Student relationships, like what’s happening in different situation?

I’m sure I do.

You know, it’s a quality of the times. It’s a quality of the times. People some power in a situation, you know. What do they say? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. If one has any desires, the minute one gets power, one will consciously or unconsciously use that energy or that power to fulfill those desires and those desires are mostly selfish self-centered desires for fame, for money, for sex, for power over people, manipulative power. It’s really horrible. Those situations are unbelievably painful. But on the other side, let’s…

See, I was in a cult for a few years after being with Maharajji, after He had left His body and after I was back in America. I got involved in a situation which was essentially a cult and the idea of a cult is that you give up your own sense of right and wrong. You give up your own feelings and  your own trust in yourself and you replace it with this person outside of yourself. And I did that for maybe three years. Maybe even longer. Until finally, I had enough. I had enough. I could no longer squelch my own feelings down like I had for those years. You see, I needed something from that person. I wanted… I felt bad Maharajji had left me, I thought, and I was lost in the world. I couldn’t find love and affection and this person was willing to pat me on the head and call me a good little boy and give me love and affection, but there was a price I had to pay which was, I had to give myself away. So, if I didn’t have that desire, I wouldn’t have gotten into that situation. If I didn’t have that unprocessed emotional need, neediness, I wouldn’t have gotten into that situation. So, there’s that aspect of it, too. It’s tricky. But, you live and learn, you know? You live and learn. And life is for learning and experiencing. And like I say over and over again, for me, it seems like the whole of spiritual practice and path is to learn to trust one’s self. And to be, and to be able to actually discern what your real feelings are about a situation and see all the different forces at work within yourself. It’s hard. It’s hard. So, there’s a lot more that can be said about that but ultimately it comes down to what we want and what we need and what we’re willing to do and willing to give away to get what we need. Now, truthfully, we don’t need anything from the outside and a real Guru will, for the most part, will not really take anything away from you other than your bullshit. So, I’ve just never been much, you know… very difficult situation. Because even in a valid tradition there are many so-called teachers who are not finished beings and they project themselves as if they are desireless and westerners, for the most part, humans for the most part, are easily led astray because of our own needs. You can bring the horse to water but if it is not thirsty you can not make it drink. So, we all need to take responsibility for our own actions, which we’re not used to doing. We always want to blame people for being, for this or for that, or this or that, we’re always blaming others. And we’re very unwilling or unable to actually responsibility for ourselves. So, I don’t think there’s any real damage for getting involved with a being like that. It may be a lot of pain but one has to deal with those situations as they arise. There’s a reason why we got caught in that situation. So, first let’s take responsibility for ourselves which is pretty much the only thing we can do.

Even the belief that we can’t progress on the path without a Guru and without getting something from a Guru… you know, I remember I saw this movie, what was it called? It stared Kate Winslett as this young woman from Australia who went to India and got involved with this guru scene, a big scene, and her parents were scared and she stopped coming home. She stayed there and her parents were afraid she was caught in a cult or something like that. And so, they sent a message to her saying that her father was sick and was dying and please come home and they sent her a ticket. So, she came home and then it turned out her father wasn’t sick at all and they, they brought in this deprogrammer who was Harvey Keitel, Bad Lieutenant, the Baddest guy on the planet, this programmer, brings him in from America and he gets off the plane all dressed in black and they keep her captive in this cabin with Harvey. I loved it. Anyway, so at one point she screams at him, “You’ll never take away what my Guru’s given me.” I laughed out loud because I thought, “What did Maharajji ever give me that could be taken away? Nothing. He only gave me my self and the love that lives within me.” Which, how could you… you could forget about it but it can’t be taken away. I just thought that was great. I think they wound up screwing and whatever. I don’t know what happened with them. Crazy thing.

Q: I was in a relationship with a girl but her love ran dry. Now those thoughts come up while doing sadhana. How to deal with that?

Come back to the japa. Come back to the chant. Let go of the thoughts. Again and again and again.

In a relationship but her love ran dry… You know, I remember I was very much in love with a woman once, many years ago, I was telling my Indian father, Mr. Tiwari about her and I was going on and on and he was listening… when I finally finished blurting, he looks at me and says, “My boy, relationships are business. Do your business. Enjoy. But love? Love is what lasts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” I hated him. I hated him for that. It took me a long time to get over that, how much…. How angry I was at him for that. But you know, what he meant was that, in relationships, the way we, human relationships, there’s give and take. You give somebody something and you get something in return. You give somebody a little pat on the head and they give you a pat on the head.  You push their button. They push your button. Is that love?  That could be friendship. It could be affection. It could be sense pleasures. It could be so many things. It could be comfort and kindness. Everything. Beautiful things. But, Tiwari was saying, “Love is not something that comes and goes.” It’s not something you fall in. It’s not something you fall out of. It is our true nature. Relationships come and go. These days, that’s the way it is. So, you deal with it by just doing your practice and living your life and seeing how much, seeing what you expected to get from that relationship, seeing how needy we are, you are. Noticing all those things. And you keep… the main thing is to just keep breathing. You keep breathing long enough, you’ll forget about it. Guaranteed.

Q: If by death you get moksha, then why did Hanuman immortal?

Who says you get moksha by death?

All you get is another body. There’s no moksha from just dying. What you take with you when you leave  your body is your state of mind. If your state of mind is moksha, yeah, you get moksha. You already have it. If it isn’t, you don’t. That’s a strange belief.

And as far as, it was Sita who blessed Hanuman… no, it was Ram. He said, “As long as my Name is remembered in this world, Hanuman, please keep your body to help people.”

So, that was grace, the grace of God to help us, to help us out of our suffering and our illusions.

Q: My sister is near the end of stages in her physical body from battling cancer. She’s in extreme physical pain. She’s afraid of dying and does not want to let go. How can I help her get peace?

Well, talking to her is not going to help. If anything is going to help, it would be sitting with her, holding her in your heart, talking to her in your mind and creating a space where, if there’s any part of her that’s able to, she could enter into that space or at least feel that space.

But, we westerners mostly and now most people in the world, we live like we’re never going to die. Like, it’s just an afterthought. Oh, you know… and so when that moment arises, we are not ready to let go. So, one has to do the practice now. One has to understand what life is about now or make the effort now because later you may not be able to. So, for someone who’s suffering like that, you can just, you can, I mean there are some techniques called Tonglen which is exchanging the pain of others and taking it on yourself, but this is something that one has to be initiated in and one has to really understand how to do it correctly. And even then, we may not experience, in that moment, that it was any help. We just don’t know because we don’t know what death, what really happens, what it feels like. It’s not nothing.

Nothing’s nothing.

Nothing is actually something, which it couldn’t be nothing. So, you can just sit with her and breath her in and out and wish her well and see her in light. All those things. I don’t know what else one could do in that situation. Try to make her as comfortable as you can. You know? Yeah. Someone once asked the Dalai Lama about painkillers when one is dying, if it was bad to take those to alleviate the pain and suffering while someone is dying and He said that the part of the being that reincarnates is not affected by painkillers, one way or the other. And so, if there’s any way to help that person who is in pain with more pain killers, there’s no problem there as far as I can understand. You know, Western medicine seems to have this strange thing that they should withhold painkillers for dying people. They’re worried that they’ll get addicted. If you don’t have a body, you can’t get addicted. So, it doesn’t make sense to me. So, you do whatever you can to help her and wish her well on her journey and don’t hold onto her. She has her karmic fruition that’s happening and all you can do is love it and offer that love to her unattached, unconditional love.

Q: When I cry, I listen to spiritual songs, prayers or speech. Why do I cry? Especially when I remember my family and the lost ones?

Well, I don’t know why you cry. We all cry.

Maharajji said, “Tears of…” What did He say… You know, when I was going to kill myself, He said to me, “The fruit of attachment is tears and you’re reaping that fruit now.” The fruit of attachment is tears and you’re reaping that fruit now. And He said, “Someone dies and people cry and they won’t eat but after a few days, they’re laughing and drinking again.” He said, “One attachment replaces another attachment in this world. One after the other after the other after the other. This world samsara. This world is the flow of attachment. No attachment, no world.” And then of course He said, “You can’t die. Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death because He never thought of Himself.” What do we do? All we do is think about ourselves all life long.  So, only you know why you cry. If it’s tears of attachment, that’s the fruit that you’re reaping. Tears of love are different. Tears of love include everybody. Everything is unbearably extraordinary and bearably full of love. There’s nothing you can do but cry. But they’re not sad tears.

Q: So many questions about these things… recently I lost someone very special to me. Can you talk about how you stay, feel connected to those who have passed? I feel like I’m searching for signs everywhere.

Now some people say, there are many signs, that you can ask for signs and they’ll show up. You know, I’m from Long Island. We don’t do that. However, Ram Dass, my best friend, one of my best friends, long-term spiritual friends and elders, just died a month or two ago. He’s so present. Any time I think of him, he’s present. I’m not looking for signs. I feel his presence. And you will feel your people’s presence if you just allow yourself to. You won’t be able to touch them physically. But that doesn’t mean they’re not here. Because we’re attached to our physical bodies. Because we identify with our physical and emotional parts. We can’t imagine something without that. However, there are many Beings, many many more Beings out of the body than are in bodies I’m sure. I’ve heard that many times. And if you want to feel those things, one has to open up to these realities through practice. It’s only spiritual practice that brings the fruit of awareness of these other realities. It’s not something you can think yourself into. Nor is it something you can convince yourself of. If you don’t feel it, you don’t feel it. But, the emotional sadness is what’s preventing you from feeling it. I think that will pass as time goes on. Or at least the volume will go down so you might be able to recognize that the love that you feel for these beings who are physically gone, is still right within you where it’s always been. And the more you focus on the love, the less you focus on the loss. That’s just the way it works.

Q: Is it still beneficial to say the Hanuman Chalisa if I do not know the four fruits of life? The three worlds? The four quarters? The four ages? The eight powers and the nine treasures? And if you don’t know who you are?

What else are you going to do?

Yes.

It’s beneficial. But don’t do it if you don’t feel like it. You know, we have to find some depth in our life. There is a reason why we bounce around, one thing to the next, without roots. And those are emotional issues that we have. One has to work on that on the level that they exist within us in order to find why we can’t find roots somewhere. Deep roots on the earth. Deep roots within humanity. Connecting us to others. Find out where that connection is and why, what we’re afraid of in terms of making a connection and facing certain parts of ourself. The kingdom of God is within us but we don’t know how to access that. We’re being prevented from accessing that by our own stuff. No other reason.

Q: How do balance your practice, the need to provide financial support and comfort for your family? How much money is enough? And what do I do with the rest?

Well, if there’s the rest, then it’s too much. In this culture, you know, you can’t walk around begging like in India. Sadhus go around, they put their hands out, people put food or money. Here, you get thrown in jail. So, one has to have a job somehow, some way of supporting one’s self and those who are dependent on you for support and it’s up to each person to figure out what’s enough and what’s too much.

You know, they say, it’s obvious, too that people with lots of money tend to spend a lot of time working with that money, protecting that money, organizing that money, making that money more, and they don’t really enjoy life that much. There’s a lot of fear about losing those things. It’s a generalization, I’m sure, but there is some truth to that. You see these sadhus in India. They have nothing. A couple of pieces of cloth. An asana. Something to sit on. And they’re happy. They’re free.  Not all of them. But it is possible to have absolutely nothing and be free and be happy and have every millions and billions of dollars and be totally depressed and unhappy. So, it’s an individual thing of how much is enough. And it’s also an individual thing of about who do you take responsibility for. Where’s your circle of people. Is it your immediate family? Is it your extended family?

Maharajji fed everyone who came to Him because in India, food is like money here in the West. Most, there are so many people in India and in the world who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. They don’t know. And especially in a time like this, so many more people are living with no savings and no job and no food. So, a very difficult time. Very difficult time.

But, once again let me, all I can do is keep trying to point us in the right direction. Someone once asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama if He was happy.

And His Holiness responded. He said, “Well, I guess you could say I’ve had a hard life. I was taken from my parents and raised in a monastery. I had to take over the reigns of my country as a teenager and I had to deal with the Chinese trying to take over the country and then I had to escape and now I’m living as a refugee and I watch the Chinese government murder millions of my people. Millions of my people. And helpless.” He said, “The Chinese have taken everything from me. Am I going to let them take my happiness, too?”

Big time. Big time.

What we’re trying to do is develop enough presence so that we don’t let  what happens in the outside world destroy our hearts. We’re not going to be able to push the stuff away. It happens. You can build huge walls that will also crash. We’re going to have to find a way to deal with it within ourselves so that it does not destroy us and that also makes us available for other people as well. So, at the same time as we’re developing compassion for others, we’re also developing a way of remaining at ease, at ease of heart with whatever arises. This is real time stuff. This is big time stuff.

Q: Why do we get so far away from who we really are to begin with?

Who says we’re far away? This close. You’re right there. You’re just not looking. Why do we have to get lost only to spend lifetimes trying to find our way back? Why any of it?

Why any of it?

Well, you know, in the Rg Veda, which was the first of the four vedas, the oldest, there’s a hymn called the Creation Hymn and it talks about how creation happened, how this all happened. And it says, “This happened and then this happened and then this…” It goes on for pages and pages I think. And then finally at the end it says, “And why? Why did all this happen?” It says, “Only He in highest heaven knows. Or perhaps, He knows not.”

I guess you could say, “why” is not the right question. Who cares why? If you step on a nail, you don’t ask, “why?”  You want to get that nail out of your foot. Which brings up an interesting thing, so, where’s my phone? I have to read you something.

Many years ago, of course, we were in Vrindavan and every day we were going to see Maharajji at His temple and one day while walking in the market, I stepped in a hole and my leg snapped like that and my knee, when I woke up the next day, my knee was like out to here and I could hardly put any weight on it. So, I thought, well, you know, I’d better go to Mathura, which was the nearest town, and go to the hospital and see a doctor because this is bad. But, I thought, “Well, if I do that, you know, I won’t be able to see Maharajji later. So let me go to the temple to tell Him I’m going to go to Mathura to see the doctor.” Now in those days we were forbidden to come to the temple until the late afternoon, because the visa guy, the visa official who was in charge of extended the Westerners’ visas was asking for bribes as was giving Maharajji a hard time, so Maharajji sent us all away and told us only to come late in the day. So, Raghu helped me walk to the temple. I was, like, had to put my hand on his shoulder because I couldn’t put weight on my leg. I limp into the back and we walk up, Maharajji’s sitting there with one devotee in this huge courtyard, empty courtyard, and He’s right in the middle of it and I walk up and I pranam and I sit down and I had to put my leg straight out underneath the bed He was sitting on and He didn’t say anything. He kind of hardly looked at us. So, and He didn’t send us away. I thought for sure He was going to send us away right away.

So, I thought, “Well, if He doesn’t send us away, I don’t care if they care if they cut my leg off right at the knee. I’m not leaving. We’re having darshan. That’s it. I’m right where I want to be.” So, after a few minutes, He gets up and He takes the hand of the Indian guy and they walk towards the back of the temple and the further He got away, the further away He got from where we were sitting, He started leaning on the guy, leaning on the guy like this. It was like He couldn’t walk. He was just leaning. And I had this thought, “Oh, my God, He’s taking on the karma of my knee.” As soon as I had that thought, He turned around and basically ran back to the tucket, the bed, and He plops down on the tucket and He looks at me, pats me on the head and says, “You thought I was in pain? You wanted to help me?”

So, He, we just sat there with Him for hours hanging out. And over time, some of the other Westerners came and Girija was sitting there and all the time I’m sitting there I’m thinking about the karma of my knee. Why did this happen? What does this mean? What kind of karma is this right here in Vrindavan? My knee hurts and everything. So, Maharajji leans over and He reaches into Girija’s shoulder bag and He pulls out her bible, because He started talking to us about Jesus. We started carrying Bibles around and reading. And He… now you understand, He’s not supposed to be able to read English, and He hardly looked at the Bible. He opened it up like this and He points to this, and He says, “Read this.” Hands it to me and says, “Read this.”

So, I opened it up and I looked at it and I read the following: Hold on…

“It was given to me…” It was from Saint Paul, Corinthians. And it said, “It was given to me a thorn in the side. In order to save me from the abundance, save me from being too exalted by the abundance of revelations, it was given to me a thorn in the side. I beseeched the Lord three times to take it from me, but the Lord replied, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect in your weakness.’”

My grace is sufficient for me. My strength is made perfect in the fact that you can’t do shit to help yourself. Something like that.

Interesting. Right?  So, a couple of years ago, I was with Ram Dass on Maui and we were talking. I was reminding him of this and he said to me…. So, what that means to me after many years of thinking about it is that the grace, it is… but when we understand our own inability to do anything except surrender… that we can’t help ourselves, we can’t lift ourselves up to the heavens, we can’t open our hearts with our will, we can’t destroy our minds with our minds… our will is not going to enlighten us but surrender on this path is surrender. Surrender… we recognize our helplessness and in that recognition, the power and the beauty and the extraordinariness of grace is revealed to us. So Ram Dass and I were talking about that and after that, he said, “Yeah, we’re proof of that.” So, I actually made two t-shirts, one for him and one for me that said, “Proof.”

Rameshwardas wrote to me yesterday. And he’s working on Ram Dass’s book. His biography is going to come out. And.. because he heard me… I think I said something about this last Thursday, so he said, “What are the details of that story?” So, I wrote to him and told him the details. He had gotten an email from Parvati, who was there with us at the time and she said, “I opened my own India journal for the first time in a long time and this is the first thing in it, I can’t remember where I got it from.” And this is Ram Dass talking.  He said, “I know 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 me from sleep, nor am I yet purged from all wordly desires, yet his grace is sufficient for I am coming to know the power of love. My strength is made perfect in your weakness. I am coming to suspect that I have 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, in my Western desire mind I have wanted great powers to heal and impress those who are impressed by power, that the spirit exists to impress myself, but as faith grows, I come to see that power attracts power, but love attracts love. And I’m 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 is the true teaching.”

I’m going to put this up somewhere on the website soon so you can read that. I don’t know when Ram Dass wrote that, but it’s so beautiful. Ramana Maharshi used to say, “Asking the mind to kill the mind, or the ego to kill the ego, is like asking the thief to be the policeman. There’ll be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.”

Now Maharajji used to say, the higher states or the more subtle states of consciousness can not be entered through the use of your personal will, that they will arise within us as we are ready. This is what Siddhi Ma told me.

That’s a big thing. So, I… one time I asked Ma, I said, “Ma, so then, is it all grace? Or is personal effort needed?” This is the famous question: grace or effort? And She looked at me and said, “Krishna Das, it’s all grace but you have to act like it isn’t.”

Like that?

It’s all grace, but we have to act like it isn’t. Which means, it’s raining everywhere, but if we want to drink, we have to cup our hands and catch the drops.

We’re so stuck in achieving and doing and that’s all based on self-loathing, really. Wanting to fill up that place inside of us that is not loved and doesn’t know love, won’t let ourselves love or be loved.

And it goes on all day long.

All day long.

So, what we can do is plant seeds. Seeds that will bring the fruit that we want. Those seeds, for me, is the repetition of the Names. Repetition of the Divine Name. Kirtan. Chanting. Sri Ramakrishna wrote about this, or spoke about this back in the 1850s, something like that… 70s? When did He die? 1880s, I think. He said, “Every repetition of one of these Names is a seed. Just like the seed of an oak tree might be very tiny, but inside of that seed is a huge tree, the potential for a huge tree.” So, He said, “Just so, with the repetition of the Name, it has within it potentiality, potency and strength.” He said, “Every repetition of the Name is a seed and the seed gets caught by the wind and is blown about and it lands on the roof of an old house in the jungle and it gets stuck between the tiles on the roof of this old house and over time and seasons, wind, rain, snow, whatever, sun…those tiles begin to break down, decompose and they get softer and at that point, the seeds of the repetition of the Name begin to root, take root. And the roots grow. The roots keep growing and they destroy the roof of the house. And they keep growing and they destroy the walls of the house.” Ramakrishna said, “That house is who we think we are.”

When we no longer think we are, we are open to, we are, we’ve… the walls are destroyed and we’re everywhere. We’ve merged with the universe. Did we actually merge? No. We always were the same. The space in the house is no different than the space outside. It’s just separated by the false belief in a “me.” All those thoughts, “Me, me, me, me, me…” That’s the walls of the house. So, through the repetition of the Name, this house, this old house is destroyed and we recognize the whole universe. So, we have to do some practice.

The Gospel of Ramakrishna was one of the first books I read, this life, about spiritual stuff. I read it before Autobiography of a Yogi.

Q: How do you deal with politicians and their cruelty without being angry?

KD: Vote. Vote them out of fucking office. Get busy. Vote.

Q: Which author of Gospel of Ramakrishna?

KD: Only one author, it was written by, accumulated by a devotee of His named M. Mahendranth, I forget his last name. It’s from the Vedanta Society. Yeah. There’s only one book called that. “Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna” published by the Vedanta Society.

Every question, so many questions about grief and dealing with dying.

Hard times. Hard times.

The Loving Kindness practice is a very powerful practice for these situations. If someone has died, from our point of view there’s very little we can do for that person, but they say that our feelings regarding that person, especially if we’ve been close to them, have an influence on them and actually causes them suffering if we’re grieving. Because from their point of view, once they’re released from the physical body that we know, well… I’ve only read a little bit about this. There are many books these days on death and dying and the travels that the soul or the Being goes through after death between reincarnation. There’s a lot of things to read about that and I would suggest looking into it. But from one point of view, they really haven’t gone anywhere. They’ve just left the body and because we identify with the body and we don’t see them, we think they’re gone. But that’s our situation. And our situation is not, is not ripe. It’s not matured. We are identified with the body, so we see bodies. We don’t see the soul within that person. We don’t see the awareness looking out of that person’s eyes, which is the same as our awareness looking out of our eyes. One awareness only. Consciousness. Satchidananada. Truth, consciousness or awareness, and sublime joy. Unbearable joy. That’s our true nature. So they say. So, as somebody from Long Island, I find it a little bit hard to believe, but that’s what they say. So, one thing that’s very important, offer that being who has passed out of the body, offer them love and kindness and friendship and compassion and wish them well. And then wish yourself well because we’re hurting ourselves with our own negative emotions. So, we can extend kindness outward but we also have to extend it to ourselves. Once again, if we did only one thing, each of us, in this world, there would be no suffering at all. If we would treat other people the way we would like to be treated. End of story. No problem.

One more little wrinkle on that, is if we would do unto ourselves the way we would like other people to do unto us, we would feel much better also. So, it’s kind of two things, but they’re not different. So, you can’t push grief away. You can only release it. It will pass as time goes on. And it can soften your heart. It can soften your heart so that you let the universe in there and we find a way to live with these things without it destroying us, which is why I told that story about His Holiness.

Q: I lost a friend a friend and her brother in homicide. What happens to your soul when an untimely death like this happens?

It’s only untimely for us. Their death was right on time for them. They say that your time is written and nothing can change that and more, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be when it happens.

I was very upset when my friend Shyam Das died in an accident in Goa and from my understanding, he wasn’t supposed to be there at that time. He was supposed to be somewhere else, but due to some kind of argument with he had with this other person, he decided not to go to that other place. So, he was in Goa and then he was in a motorcycle accident and was killed. So, I mentioned it to Robert Svoboda, my friend and he said when Mahakala, the God of Death, when Mahakala wants you, He makes sure you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Apparently, there’s no slippage in the system and the manner of death can be very painful for us also because we tell ourselves a story about that and we’re allowed to do that. We’re allowed to grieve. We’re allowed to be angry. We’re allowed to have all our emotions about it. No question. But, what can you do ultimately but surrender to the way things are and wish your friends well? And they wouldn’t want you to be sad. They wouldn’t want you to grieve and be hurt. But it’s hard. We’re human, after all.

I’ve lost, see…

I’ve lost… I haven’t lost anybody but in the last two years, almost all of my elders, my spiritual elders are gone now from the physical plane. It’s like Muhammad Ali hitting you so fast, you can’t get out of the way. Boom boom boom boom boom. So many of the beings that I look to for the bottom line, for love and affection and support on this path have left, left the body.

So, in 1989, I was at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad at Prayag, which is where the Ganga and the Yamuna and the invisible river from heaven worlds, the Saraswati, all meet and it’s called Triveni, the three rivers meeting and every four years there’s a Mela, every 12 years there’s, no, every 3 years there a Mela, every twelve years there’s a Kumbh Mela and every 144 years there’s a Maha Kumbh and 1989 was the 144th year since the stars were in a certain position. So, I was there with a Sadhu, with a Baba. He was a very old Baba. He was 163 I think, at the time and one day He said to us that He was going to visit His elder Gurubhai, His elder Guru Brother whose name was Dayoraha Baba who was over 270 years old and, you know, everybody knew it. He’d been in the same county. Dayoraha is a county. He’d been in the same county for all that time. He was the Guru of your grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. Everybody knew it. So, He says He was going to go see Him that afternoon, that He was in another place on the Mela grounds. So, when He came back, He said to us He’d had a wonderful time with Him and Dayoraha Baba had told Him that Sri Krishna had come to Him and asked Him to Vrindavan to play with Him. So, He was going to go. What He was saying was that He was about to leave the body.

Sri Krishna had come and asked Him to come to Vrindavan to play, so He was going to go and He left the body shortly after that.

It just depends on how we live in this world. Are we going to allow our one life programming to destroy our peace of heart? Are we going to cry every time we stub our toe? I do. But eventually we have to get with the program and with the intensity of what’s going on now, it becomes very obvious that we have to get with the program.

This is an intense one, huh?

Well, as the days go by we see more of ourselves and it’s not easy to look at that stuff but we have to and spiritual practice is the one thing that will, over time, give us the strength to release the stories we tell about ourselves all life long, that hurt us and limit us and cripple us and crush our hearts. So, all right.

The post Special Edition Conversations With KD April 30, 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 47 | Hindu-Buddhist Connections and A Short Discussion of Hatred

“Once it reaches India, the vajra idea, that’s when it’s coming from, central asia, chariot warriors and so on. They were kshatriyas, you know? But when it gets into India after some time, it comes to mean this infinite, stronger than the thunderbolt is this infinite energy of love and that infinite energy of love is not violent because its, it doesn’t need violence because it’s everything. So, it’s a really wonderful Indian vision, and it’s general, both sides, all sides in India, Jain, Buddhists, Hindu. “ – Robert Thurman

KD: So, at some point, things get very bad and the negative energy gets very strong and kind of get, they all decide to attack the kingdom of Shambhala where all of us will be living at that point.

Bob: Petroleum Industry attacks them, they say.

KD: Petroleum Industry, etcetera.

Bob: They do.

KD: So, they form a big army and they get ready to attack. Now, there happens to be a king in Shambhala, in the kingdom of Shambhala, named Raudra Chakri, which means, “the wrathful one with the wheel”. Now, you know Vishnu, His weapon is the chakra, a wheel. And so He becomes aware of this, the demons and the humans and all the bad negative energy getting together and what He does is He goes into this super long trance and He gathers all His powers and when He comes out, the army of Shambhala goes out to meet the army of the bad guys and now, in the Ramayana, we’re talking about earlier, Hanuman finds Sita, comes back and then Rama goes to beat up the bad guys. And the armies of Rama kill all the other bad guys but they leave the real bad guy for Rama to kill, because He has to kill, only He can kill that guy. So, in the Kalachakra tantra, this battle begins and the king sends his two generals, this is in the text, the king sends his two generals to fight, to lead the fight against the armies and what are their names? Shiva and Hanuman. Hello.  Hello are you there?

Bob: You discovered it. I didn’t even notice it.

KD: I found this in a book one day. I opened up this book. It was on a friend’s shelf and I went, “what?” So, this was in the Tibetan text, the generals of the army of Shambhala are Shiva and Hanuman; Sanskrit text, originally, and they destroy the armies, leaving only the bad guy for the king to fight and he kills the guy and then the golden age arises.

Bob: By the way, also the name of the king, Kalki, is also the name of the 10th Avatar of Vishnu.

KD: Yes.

Bob: So, it’s a similar, there’s a similar apocalyptic succession.

KD: The lineage of Shambhalic kings, the lineage of Avatars, the so-called Hindu avatars, and the lineage of the Siddhas, each incarnation is exactly the same and what we’re talking about here is Raudra Chakri, which is the Shambalic King, and then on the so-called Hindu side is the Kalki Avatar, the next Avatar, and Raudri Chakri, and where’s Maittreya in this?

Bob: Raudra Chakri’s the incarnation of Vajra Pani

KD: Vajrapani. That’s beyond my pay grade.

Bob: Vajrapani.

 KD: So, then, but it’s…

Bob: Maittreya’s around. That happens later. Thousands of years later.

KD: Oh, I see, thousands of years later.

Bob: This is still Shakyamuni Buddha’s time, you know. So, Shakyamuni Buddha is seeing to it that this planet, it becomes the best platform for people to realize, Beings to realize their own true nature, which is the nature of love and wisdom. Wisdom and love, which everybody already has if they only knew. If we only knew.

KD: It all comes back to the love again. It all comes back to that. Again and again and again. That’s the way we’re made, you know? That’s the way we’re made. We’re made that way.

KD: Funny thing.

Bob: What’s that?

KD: When I was having my nervous breakdown in India, when I was going to kill myself.

Bob: The one in India.

KD: Yeah, in India, in the old days with Maharajji. So, He was teasing me about getting married all the time and I, I didn’t want to do that because I saw my other friends kind of met, you know, there and they, “oh, hey how ya doin?” and they’d come to Maharajji and He’d say, “Oh, you’re friends?” And they’d go “yeah.” “Oh, that’s really good.” The next day He’d say, “Oh, you’re good friends.” And the next day, “Ok. Boom. You’re married. Go to America.” So, America was not my idea. I was not going back so I was just avoiding that situation.

Bob: You were a Buddha and then you’re married? I couldn’t catch what you said.  Are you married?

KD: No. He was teasing me about getting married, Maharajji, all the time. Teasing me.

Bob: To save you from suicide.

KD: To save me from suicide, as if that would save me.  But anyway, I saw the other people get married and then he’d send them away. And I didn’t want to get sent away. So, I was just like this, “No, no no.”

 Bob: I see.

KD: So, a couple of days after my breakdown, I was in the jungle by myself sitting on a rock and I thought, “Why don’t I smoke some hash?”

Bob: You had some?

KD: I had some. I wasn’t a big smoker, but it just so happened that I had a little bit and I was sitting on this nice rock in the jungle and I thought, “Ok, let’s smoke a little, this is good.” So, I took a couple of hits and I completely freaked out and I went running back to the temple into the temple, I ran into the temple, He’s sitting there inside His room with the door, with the window open waiting for me. And He goes, “Come here!”

And I went there. He said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Krishna Das.” He said, “No! You are Bajarang Bali. The thunderbolt, lightning bolt body form of Hanuman, strongest…” Bajarang Bali. “Bali” means powerful. Bajarang. “rang” means body. So, He said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Krishna Das”. He said, “Nay. Bajarang Bali. What’s your name?” “Krishna Das.” “Nay! Bajarang Bali.” We were arguing. So, I said, now Bajarang Bali, Hanuman was celibate, right? Not married, until he got to Tibet, so I said to Maharajji, I said, “Oh, ok, you want me to be Bajarang Bali, ok, but You remember, He was the eternal celibate” and He cracked up. He laughed so hard.

Bob: Really?

KD: He was slapping His thighs and laughing. It was as if He knew something that nobody else knew. I had the feeling then, long before I knew this story and then He said, “Ok, wiseguy. You’re Janaka.” Now, Janaka was Sita’s father, adopted father, and He was a Rajarishi. He was a king but he was also a saint, a realized Being. A Rishi. A Rajarishi. And He said, “Ok, you’re Janaka, you’ll have Yog and Bhog.” Bhog is worldly enjoyments and Yog is union with God. So, I said, “Ok.”

Bob: That’s good. Bajarang Bali.

KD: Bajarang Bali. Yog and Bhog.

Bob: Vajra means, Vajra is a really great word. It means “diamond” because it’s unbreakable and it can mean a thunderbolt. But it’s a wonderful thing when we come to tantra in India, where it comes to mean what they call the clear light of the void, which means, or of emptiness, which means “infinite energy of reality”, basically. But that infinite energy is the love energy and what I’m saying is that India took, from the vedic idea, in the vedas it’s not love. In the veda, vajra means a thunderbolt and it’s a weapon of Indra

KD: Yeah, Indra’s weapon

Bob: And He uses it like, to shatter citadels. And so much of the vedic mantras are war songs.

KD: Right.

Bob: And they’re calling on Indra after He takes Soma, He goes and He shatters the citadels of their enemies and then they conquer those places. But in, but once it reaches India, the vajra idea, that’s when it’s coming from, central asia, chariot warriors and so on. They were kshatriyas, you know? But when it gets into India after some time, it comes to mean this infinite, stronger than the thunderbolt is this infinite energy of love and that infinite energy of love is not violent because its, it doesn’t need violence because it’s everything. So, it’s a really wonderful Indian vision, and it’s general, both sides, all sides in India, Jain, Buddhists, Hindu. Vajra.

KD: Yeah.

Bob:  So, you’re Vajra Rang Bali.

KD: Bajarang Bali

Bob Thurman:  You had arguments with him (Maharajji) about your name?  You talked back sometimes to your guru?

“When He first named me Krishna Das? I said, “Krishna Das”? Give me a break. Krishna Das? We’re Ram guys, I’m a Hanuman guy. What is this Krishna stuff? He just laughed. He said, “It’s ok. Hanuman served Krishna, too.”” – Krishna Das

Bob: You had the arguments with him about your name.

KD: Hm?

Bob: You had arguments with him about your name?

KD: Yeah, well, you know…

Bob: You talked back sometimes to your guru

KD: You know, playfully.

Bob: Playfully.

KD: Like, when He first named me Krishna Das? I said, “Krishna Das”? Give me a break. Krishna Das? We’re Ram guys, I’m a Hanuman guy. What is this Krishna stuff? He just laughed. He said, “It’s ok. Hanuman served Krishna, too.” And, in fact, it’s true. In the Mahabharata, the great battle between good and evil, when Krishna is not fighting, but He’s driving the chariot of Arjuna, the great warrior. Through the whole battle, you know, in those days, they fought with missiles, atomic weapons that they activated with the power of their mind and mantra. It wasn’t like a little arrow like Robin Hood. They shot missiles. Huge missiles at each other. And the most powerful missiles were the ones that were invoked with the most consciousness, the most attention, the most concentration. Those were the most powerful missiles. So, all through the war, all the other warriors keep getting new chariots because they’re getting blown up all the time. So, now the war’s over, the good guys have won, and Arjuna asks Krishna to drive him up on this hill and look out at the whole battlefield. So, they get up on the hill and Krishna says, “Ok, today is different than other days.” Just like, why is this night different than other nights. So, usually I get down first as your charioteer and I help you off the chariot, but today, you get off first and you run as fast as you can away from here. So, Arjun gets down and he runs away.

Krishna steps off the chariot, and then there was a white flag on top of the chariot with a red monkey in the flag, and the minute Krishna got off the chariot, the monkey flew out of the flag and disappeared in the sky and the chariot blew up in a million pieces. And Krishna says to Arjun, “Didn’t it occur to you that you didn’t have to change your chariot?” He said, “Hanuman was guarding the chariot and absorbing all the missiles.” So, there you go. Yeah.

Bob: In a way, the Tibetan Rinpoche, one Tara Tulku, His name was, He has a reincarnation who has a midlife crisis right now, but the older one, previous one, passed away in the 80s. He actually said that the hydrogen bomb, atomic bomb now is activated by the mind, by the mind of hatred. And that the trigger of it is not just the plutonium, you know, the thing, it’s another kind of bomb that kind of ignites the chain reaction. It’s the intelligence mobilized by hatred. So, the real trigger is the hatred in the mind of the person who pulled the trigger, you know? And in a way, the creating of it, the creation of it was out of hatred against its enemy. So, it still is actually activated by mind, and mantra now is the e=mc2 formula. That’s that mantra. Which is a kind of mantra, you know. Unfortunate thing. But in a way, in a way, maybe it’s like Baba Ram Das thinking of His stroke as something good, in a way, the human intelligence sort of generally, not just some semi-deities in the ancient past, but generally realizing the power of intelligence can destroy everything, you know, I kind of think of 1945, you know, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as atrocious as they were, you know, especially civilian bombing I think is terrorism, its really a bad thing, personally. That’s my personal view. But even though government does it, it’s not really a righteous thing. But I’m saying the fact that this became known in the world, that you know, where people used to feel that “my body is a really solid thing,” you know. And then there’s some atoms in there that are like hard little like, billiard balls, and you know, like, “I’m made of those things” in their mind, you know and until, of course, I die, but then, you know, you see materialists feel like that. But the idea that one’s own atoms have an energy to pulverize you instantaneously when triggered in a chain reaction. So, this is kind of a deep subliminal teaching of impermanence, of transformation, of instability that therefore, in a way, it’s a spiritual teaching and also it has war basically impossible.

KD: Impossible to survive.

Bob: They act like it is possible and they have their little ones. But once war can not escalate, you know, it has to divert into facebook. You’re not really able to have real war, you know? It’s impossible.

KD: Right.  Yeah.

Bob: And my son is a little bit of a radical, and he’s been saying for years, people just push him up and tell him to run away, but he’s saying like, everybody should have a nuke. He goes around saying that. Everyone should have a nuke. Like, what’s this, U.S. and Russia and China have nukes? Let everybody have a nuke, then nobody will be able to mess around and kill each other. They could all sit there and clutch their nukes. So that weird guy with the hairdo, the other other hairdo. There’s two of them, it’s really funny. The two hairdos. You know? One of them looks a little bit like, in the cartoons they make it look like a mushroom cloud and the other one looks like, the other one looks like some kind of like weird flame thing, flame thrower.

KD: Flame thrower, yeah.

Bob: Really. And they’re both like disgustingly overweight and they’re both completely, really we have to send them love, you know. No, we do.

KD: Definitely. We must. Absolutely.

Bob: In the form of an appeal to resign. But that’s love. That is love. Just, you know, let them both move in together and let them be housemates at Mar a Lago.

KD: Yeah, yeah, that would be great, yeah.

Bob: I’m sorry. That’s off-topic. No, that’s off-topic.

The post Ep. 47 | Hindu-Buddhist Connections and A Short Discussion of Hatred appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 25, 2020

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

“You know, there were people, there were gurus in India, Beings in India that other Westerners went to.  They would bounce up and down off the pillows, they would howl like dogs. They would  be in bliss and fall over like this.

I sat around with mom Maharajji for two and a half years. Not one fucking thing happened. Except love. Except love that was so deep and so beautiful and so unbearable, so wonderful that I couldn’t pull myself away from that person.  Nor did I want to, except when I got pissed off. So, the whole thing is learning to trust yourself.

Take your time. There’s no hurry. You’re not going anywhere. You’re just trying to get here, where you are already. Relax. Let it come to you. Be yourself. Be you. Follow your heart. Trust your heart. Trust yourself. Trust your deeper feelings. But in order to trust them, you have to listen deeply to yourself and then you have to pay attention. You have to honor how you feel. If you don’t honor those deeper feelings, you’re not doing the right thing to yourself, but most people don’t. Okay? But the spiritual path means really following your heart, following your deepest heart. What do you want? What do you really want? Don’t get caught.  Don’t spend time getting things that you don’t really need. You might enjoy a little bit, but go after what you really want, which is the same thing everybody wants, which is love. And if you’re not getting what you want from one situation, recognize that that’s the case. That doesn’t mean you have to change anything, but you have to pay attention.” – Krishna Das

So, here we are, everybody here is still here, which is good.

Somebody just wrote from Gangotri? It can’t be. It must be a name of somebody. There’s no wireless up in Gangotri. can go to in India is the source of the Ganges. The Ganga. I don’t think there’s any internet up there.

Q:   Okay. I have a little, I wrote it down so I could, yeah. I wrote down my question or just my thought. So, I guess when all this started, I started making choices in my life that felt more safe and secure. I was always doing service work and I needed to quit that I needed to just do service work around here instead, kind of redefining what my thought was on, on service.

Because also, I had all these outer things going on with the world, and also personal things in my life that felt really out of control. So, I wanted to find a little bit of control and I’ve been trying to find that, but there are days where I feel so overwhelmed by guilt or overwhelmed by sadness or overwhelmed by anger.

And I know I should be practicing to kind of get out of my own way, but sometimes. That wave feels so strong. It feels like I’m drowning, and it feels so heavy that it’s kind of like, I know what to do to get myself out of it, but going, getting out of that heaviness is, is so incredibly hard for me. So, I was wondering what your thoughts would be around that. Some, some insight?

I can give you thoughts. I don’t know about insight.

Well, first of all, you’re a human being, I think. So, especially at this time on the planet, it’s a very rough time. No question about it. And not only do we have our own stuff to deal with, but the atmosphere is full of it. Every time we turn on the television or read the newspaper or talk to friends, we’re coming, all that anxiety and fear is coming right into our face, right into us. And it’s floating around all the time. So, it’s, it’s actually the, the atmosphere we live in is very charged right now in a very, a way that disturbs the mind, disturbs our, our sense of okay-ness.

You said you think you should be doing practices to work with that, but you know, that’s that’s just another story you’re telling yourself. No matter how bad the situation is that, or how uncomfortable you’re feeling, you’re still here. And, but you have a fear that you won’t be here. That something will get too strong, too big.

That’s not going to happen. Because if you’re not here, neither is anything else. So, start from there, that’s ground level, zero feet altitude. So, the idea that, you know, but we have our, our knee jerk reactions to things in the way we’ve been programmed in our lives to deal with this stuff. A lot of it comes from the way we saw our parents deal with their stuff, our schoolmates, our teachers, the culture that we grew up in. You know, we’ve got a lot of programming going on, no question about it.

And then we have our individual karmas, which brought us right to this place, with everything in our lives as part of that. So, a lot of the meditation teachers talk about making friends with your negative stuff, you know, like, “Oh, hi, You’re back. Well, have a seat. You mind sitting over in the corner so I can finish my work? Oh no? You want to sit into my lap? All right.”

You know, that’s you know, there’s so many techniques that you can use to recognize that you are not what you’re feeling.

See, you’re not what you’re feeling, but you don’t like it. So, you want to push it away. Unfortunately, that can’t work for more than a few lifetimes, you know?

Yeah.

Then it comes back. So, the trick is to try not to push it away, try to be with it, allow yourself to feel all those feelings there. They’re very unpleasant and can be very painful and they can have a lot of charge to them, a lot of negativity, a lot of heaviness, and they can push all the buttons on all our, our self-hatred and self-loathing and guilt and shame and fear and all that stuff, you know? But what are we going to do? You know… nor will it work to do a practice like this and, and you know, “All right, I’m going to push it.  I’m not going to feel this stuff. I’m not going to feel this stuff. I’m not going to feel this stuff.”

That’s not gonna work either. So. Really, what, what are we scared of? We just don’t like it. We don’t like feeling that way. We want to feel good.

Actually, who we are is perfectly fine. Not who we think we are, not who our emotional stories tell us we are, but who we really are when all that stuff, you know, drips off of us and, you know, fades away, or the clouds move on to something else. We’re actually perfectly fine as who we really are already always, and always will be

All the other stuff gets caught, gets clouded over with.

Yeah. It’s like living in a, in a, in a fog and the fog turns different colors according to, you know, it feels like this, it feels like that, you know. So don’t panic, you know, don’t panic. And if you panic, say, “Hello, panic.”

You’re always here. You can always be with it in a different way. You can always recognize that… you know, when I was going to kill myself, because I was how you were feeling, you know, on steroids, you know, and I was gonna kill myself. I was gonna jump in the river in Kainchi while I was with my guru, you know, in the temple. So, he looked at me and said, “what are you going to do? Jump in the river?  Ha ha. You can’t die.”

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

Why? Because he never thought of himself.

What do we do All lifelong is nothing but think about ourselves? “How am I now? I don’t like this. I like this. I don’t like this. I don’t like this more than I don’t like that. I like this more than I like that. That’s good.”

It’s all how we spend our whole lives lost in that, that self-referencing kind of small “S” self-referencing thoughts. “Okay. Hi, self-referencing thought, how are you doing? What’s up? Oh, you’re making me feel like shit. Ah, that’s so nice of you. Thank you.”

Yeah. And we take it so seriously too. I mean, that’s the other quality of those emotions, you know, it’s not, it’s not that we take it seriously.  It’s that the emotion itself, when we’re in, it makes it feel serious. Like, they say they say eternal damnation is eternal when you’re in it. But ss soon as the karmas that brought you into that state of mind, dissipate, it ain’t there anymore. So, it’s not eternal, but the quality of the state is eternal.

When you feel like shit, you’re always going to feel like this, this is who you really are. You’ve managed to escape it once in a while to one thing or another, but it always comes back. “This is me. I’ll always be like this.”

And we believe that. We, we trained ourselves very well to believe that. We should get some credit for that.  You know, we’ve done such a good job on ourselves. So, you should open a little school, “How to make people feel like shit.” Make a lot of money and you’ll be really helping a lot of people fulfill their real feelings about themselves. And then when everybody feels like shit, then you close the school down and leave everybody with it and then run away with all the money.

Okay.

Or, have everybody teach everybody how to do it and then say, “do you see what happened here? You see how I in reinforced all your negative thoughts about yourself now, guess what? I was faking it, it isn’t real. Let go of it.”

Because it isn’t, but it feels that way. We’ve been born into this world. What else do we expect to know? We weren’t born in a cave in the Himalayas.  We weren’t born to a family of yogis. We weren’t, we didn’t grow up with Saints and Siddhas and the deities. We grew up with fucking Mickey Mouse. You know, it’s a long way from Mickey Mouse to Ram, a long way. But Ram is who we really are. That presence, that divine presence is who we really are.

So regardless of what we’re feeling or how horrible we’re feeling, or even how wonderful we’re feeling, we can, we’re always present there at the same time.  We’re always present. There’s no, there’s no second, ever, will there ever be when we won’t be here. So, and suicide doesn’t end it either. That’s what they say. I haven’t, I haven’t died. So, I can’t tell you from my own experience this life, but what they say is that, you know, what you take with you when you leave your body is your state of mind only.

So yeah, you have time, you have space and, and there are even practices where you feed your demons. These are your demons. You could call them demons. These are your negative, your negative stuff.  There’s even practices where you, you say, “okay, come on here, eat a little bit here. My arm, take my arm. And the bicep probably is good. Here, bite.”

And because you recognize that no matter what, you’re, there always. They can’t eat you.

They can only nibble on some stuff and actually, they’re the stuff. So, the point is, as I said before, calm your ass down. That’s all you have to do. There’s nothing more you have to do. Just keep letting go. Let the clouds come over. You let the rain fall on you. Let the shit, let your feet step into the shit.

You’re still here. It can’t hurt you. It only feels bad, but it can’t do anything to who you really are. Not in the wildest dream could it ever do that. But we can experience very unhappy, very unpleasant states of mind that we want to get away from. So, what’s the best way to get away from them?  It’s not trying to get away.

No, because eventually you, you recognize that everything that’s, that’s here right now in your life, including all this unpleasant stuff is a result of our own past karmas. It’s a result of all our own experiences with other people, with ourselves, with you know, with the environment, with your car, with your kids, with everything, all of that’s a result of everything that happened up to right now.  How are we going to meet it right now? If we blindly react and with our knee jerk reactions and our, you know, automatic responses, we’re simply giving it more energy and creating it again in the next moment. So, to whatever degree we can observe and make a move to just calm down in the midst of it all, that allows it to move through without creating more and it allows us it’s releasing process.

You can always let go. You can, and it’s very easy. It, it may not last more than a millisecond, but that’s practice. You keep letting go again and again and again. And then when the, the shit doesn’t go in it and so “fuck off, I’m finished with this. I’m going to watch the TV, then you get back to it later.”

So, if you really look also, you’ll see that these states, they’re not always there. They’re there when you… they’re there for awhile. And then you say, Oh, I’m going to go make a sandwich. And you forget about the state. Where’d it go? And then you finished your sandwich and it’s back. So, if you, if you really pay attention, you’ll see it.

They’re not always there. They come and go. Everything’s changing all the time, but they keep coming back because we’re used to it. It’s like home base for us, really, for our, our emotional reality. You know, so try not to think of practice as a, as a willful fighting against this stuff. Okay?  Try to think of practice as, allowing it to just flow through you, flow in and out of you without grabbing onto it. Grabbing onto it means reacting. Okay. You reacted. Okay. And then you get back into it. Okay. Short periods of practice, really. Five minutes where you turn the phone off and you say, “this is for five minutes. I’m just going to sit here and I am not gonna try anything.”

When you catch yourself trying, let go. Trying is just more bullshit. That’s more “I should, I have to.” You don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything. Just relax through it and things will change and you won’t be so affected by it all the time.

And as practice ripens us, we don’t, we naturally, we don’t react so strongly. Like somebody gets mad at you. And instead of like, you just kinda go like, “What?” you know? “what is that?”

And you just like, look at it and it doesn’t eat you alive immediately. Later on, when you go back to your room and you realize what that son of a bitch said, then it eats you, but then you let go.

So it’s just life, sweetheart, you know, get used to it. You know? There’s nowhere to go. You can’t go anywhere even if you wanted to. There’s nowhere to go.

So…

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Take good care. Keep breathing. That’s the main thing.

Q: Good morning, KD. I’ve got a couple of fairly quick questions, at least I think so. What mantras did you sing while you were with Maharajji in form, besides the Chalisa and Hare Krishna?   

“Don’t send me away. Don’t send me away. Don’t send me away. Don’t send me away. Don’t send me away. Don’t send me away. Don’t send me away.” That was the main mantra.

Okay.  Okay. Question two is, I watch your Thursday satangs.

Extravaganza.

And they’re wonderful. And I am so grateful for that. Thank you. But I’m learning to play the harmonium and I wonder why you cover the holes on the top of the harmonium.

It’s just for the sound now. Yeah, the harmonium so loud that because of the way we’re transmitting the sound to the internet. If I didn’t cover that up, all you’d hear is the harmonium. That’s all, it’s not, it’s not a secret. It’s not like, you know, the secret teaching or anything, you know, and if it was, I wouldn’t tell you.

Okay. And this is the third. Now, this is one might be a little longer.  I love singing the Chalisa and I love your version of the transliteration and I wonder how you and other folks were able to do that in India. You know? Where everybody speaks Hindi and back in those days, there weren’t a lot of English speakers.

Yeah. There were a lot of, there were a lot of, a lot of them. Remember the English owned India for a long time. So English was, is like the second language of most of India. Mostly in the North, they speak a lot of English, many people speak a lot of English, enough English, of course. Many people don’t, but we learned Hindi. We learned the Hindi alphabet. We learned the letters.  We went through the Chalisa letter by letter by letter until the whole thing was written out. And then we, you know, started trying to say the words properly. And then we got some help from friends and it was just one of those things. It just happened.

How long did it take?

What time is it?  It took us, to get to a point where we could actually sing it even while we were reading it, it took much longer to actually memorize, but it was like a whole rainy season, about four months, three and a half, four months of doing it every day. You know, there also wasn’t any TV, nothing else to do. So, it took, it took about that long to really be able to, you know, see, sing it through.

So, basically you did it letter by letter then. Wow.

When I started. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how we, that’s how you had to learn it. Ja-ya Ha-nu-man.   It’s all it’s, you know, it’s written out.

Okay. Do you recommend any other transliteration dictionary where you can, I could look up each word of the Chalisa and other things I read?

You know, it would be difficult because first of all, that, that transliteration is, is it’s really not a hundred percent correct in terms of the actual letters in Hindi. For instance, in Hindi, there are four “T’s,” Okay?  Did you hear four T’s? I didn’t, but they do. And there’s four D’s. So, yeah. And there’s all kinds of nasal sounds and half sounds and stuff. So, we’re working on, so I, what, what that is, what you have is, is what I felt is a happy medium for Westerners to be able to at least get close, pretty close in most cases to, you know, to what, to what it actually is so that an Indian person could actually know what you’re singing.  You know, that’s kind of, that was the idea.

So, no, I don’t think there’s a dictionary where you can actually that you could plug in and find a transliteration that makes sense to you because most transliterations are done in special characters that you then would have to learn with those mean, too. So just sing, just sing. The second CD in the flow of grace book; that has every word separately slowly with semi correct pronunciation.  So that’s a good way to go back and forth and listen to yourself. The main thing with the Chalisa, I found with people, is mixing up the long “a” and the short “a”. The “ah” and the “uh”. So that people “Haanuman”, it’s not “Haanuman.” It’s “Hanuman.” A short “a.”  So that’s, that’s, you know, but you know what, mostly, it mostly depends on, on the sincerity of your offering.

You know, God doesn’t give a shit about how you sound that much. Because God lives within us and is hearing from within anyhow and hearing our hearts. That’s the main thing. But if you want to, if you need something to do while you’re saying at home, knock yourself out.

You bet. Thanks KD.

Take care.

Namaste.  Maharajji gave you, Ram Dass and Lama Surya Das the opportunity to bathe in his light and love, ultimately sending you each on your own unique path into the world to reflect these into the hearts of seekers, to help guide us home.

Are you at peace with the path he sent you on? Do you feel it has cleared out some of the dark places you have often referred to? And then secondly, if you had been allowed to stay under his blanket, so to speak, do you think you would have accomplished as much as you have on your spiritual path?

There’s no place that’s not under his blanket for me.

So, it’s all under His blanket. And as far as what…  I haven’t accomplished anything. I’ve managed to stay alive so He could accomplish things. So, it’s quite extraordinary, really.

And you know, I’m a work in progress like everybody else. So, there are times I’m happy. I’m okay with it. And there’s times I’m pissed off about it, but most of the time I’m okay with what’s going on. And certainly to be able to chant with people is a great blessing for me. So…

Yeah, for us as well.

So, anything else?  Are you still there?

Thank you so much,

Q:  Hi, I’m good. Thank you. So yeah, I just… shame… and I know that the question’s sort of been answered already with being with it. But I find the story around my shame or the shame is it runs so deep and there’s all the time that’s feeling that it’s so very true, and I’m practicing with it, but it’s like, I can’t feel anything different. Or it’s like, I’m living for other people, you know, on them. It’s been with me so long and I just, it’s like, I can’t really get over it. Stemming from, just a not very nice childhood, you know, and like, the suffering continues. I think I get sort of caught in the karma conversation, you know? What have I done, or am I continuing to do something?

But something happened when I was really little. How was it, how can I be to blame for something?

Who’s blaming you? I mean, is it, I’m asking you, is it somebody outside or another person who blames you or are you blaming yourself?

Yeah, I feel the separate, it’s like the shame voice, the shame voice in me. Yeah. It’s sort of, you know, yeah. It’s like taking all this information that I’m hearing or reading or listening to, and it’s like, oh, I’m so inclined to take all the negative all the time. Yeah.

Are you doing any, what kind of practices are you doing these days? Anything?

I sing kirtan. Yoga. I ride horses, I walk my dogs. Yeah. Yeah.

I love horses.  Spend more time with the horses.

Hmm. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Find what makes you feel good and do it. Spend more time with the horses. Find the things that help you, you know, not help you not participate in the ongoing obsessive beating up that you do of yourself. You know, the horses don’t care.  They love you. They, they don’t want to beat you up. So, spend more time with them. And little by little, really, when you’re with the horses, look at your state of mind and you’ll see that you’re not beating yourself up at that moment.

No, it’s the opposite. I feel like a different person.

So get used to that and recognize it though, and really enjoy it. Allow yourself to feel it. Don’t just take it for granted. It’s a great blessing to have that. Many people don’t have anything in their lives that released them from their stories, many, many, most people, and they spend their whole lives in this story and they die.

You know, you have something that just does it for you, for whatever reason. It’s not necessary to understand it, but what’s what would be really good is to just kind of really be with it, you know, and enjoy it. And really enjoy it. Let yourself enjoy it as much as you possibly can. It won’t be hard.

And that itself will, will release a lot of, it’ll fill a lot of the space that your thoughts have been stealing from you in a way, you know? And is that a dog back there?

Yeah

I don’t think she blames you for anything.

No, she loves me.

Joseph Goldstein, one of the great Western meditation teachers, a good friend, he was telling once that he was doing interviews during a meditation course that he was leading and this guy comes in and he looks at Joseph and he says, “ah, I just want to be the guy my dog thinks I am.”

Yeah. Yeah.

And we are, actually, just as much as we are anything else.

I love that. Thank you.

Yeah. Well, and then, like I was telling our earlier friend, don’t be afraid of the emotion so much. They’re not going to do anything to you except make you feel like shit. They can’t hurt you. They just, for a while they’re there, they make you feel like shit.

When you’re with the horses, where are they?

So it can’t be you if they’re not there all the time. It can only be something that comes and goes, which is not who you are. So, but there’s a very large part of us that really clings to those stories for so many reasons, you know. We all have our version of the story.

Yeah.

You had your parents and your life. I had mine. It’s the same story with different characters. It’s the weirdest thing, you know, so everybody has this stuff. And so don’t, don’t, don’t let it sting you so much that you have it.  Everybody has it. Everybody’s like this. Everybody has these stories. Everybody has their own particular ways that they torture themselves, or that torture goes on. Let’s forget about doing it to ourselves. But it’s just there, right?

Just talk to it when it comes to you, you know. Say, “what do you want from me?” You know, “where do you come from? Go away. Okay. No. Stay here. Let’s hang out. No. Talk to me.” Ask it, ask your emotion to talk to you. What does it tell you? And then have a conversation with that. Like, “excuse me, where did you get this shit from?”

“Explain yourself or fuck off,” you know? I mean, come on. So, and the reason and what practice does, what spiritual practice does, is little by little, it gives us some space between the input and the reaction. Okay? Just maybe a little bit. So, we might get, learn to get a little bit of a vote.

“Okay. I can let go of this.” You know, “I can just be with this. I can stay with my breath.” Not, not with this kind of, you know,… but just “okay. Yeah.” Where you keep breathing and you know, just like I said, when you go to make a sandwich, it won’t be there. You know? So, paying attention is really a very big thing.

Not asking “why?”, but just noticing that things aren’t always here. We think they’re always here because when we’re in them, it feels like they’re always here. Just keep saying, eternal damnation is eternal when you’re in it. When you’re not in it, it wasn’t eternal, was it? But the quality of the state of mind is that it’ll always be like this.

“It’s always been like this. I’m no good. I’ll never be any good. And all the thoughts that come from that.”

But nobody in our lives taught us to give ourselves a break, you know? Because they didn’t give themselves a break. And when you start to recognize that the shit that we have, to a large extent, came from our elders, our parents, and it hurts us so much, they also must have been suffering terribly, taking it out with anger or many other ways, you know, hurting other people, but it came out of their suffering.

So, if it’s so hard for us to deal with it, how much harder it must’ve been for them. And they got it from their parents, you might say, to simplify it. And their parents got it from their parents. So, we’re here now. We can actually have some, we can be with this in a different way than our parents and our family and our, our karmic situation was, with it. We have a lot of wonderful things within us, you know, that we can discover they have no clue about. We have clues and that’s a great blessing, you know. It’s not so, it’s not like this, you know, but pay attention.  You’ll see. It’s not always like it feels, like it always will be.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, the hardest thing for me was, was learning how to give myself a break. You know, nobody gave me a break. I mean, I never learned how to give myself a break. My parents, I knew them very well, especially later in my life and their lives. And I could see how much they just… Like, I spent a lot of time with my mother at the, towards the end of her life and I was sleeping in the living room and her bedroom shared a wall. Her bedroom was… and she’s, she couldn’t sleep. So, she spent all night listening to the radio at very loud volumes because she was deafer than I am, about money markets. What to do with your money and what to do with this and that, you know, all night long in, in a despair and panic state about money.

And I lie there in the living room and I was just crying. I couldn’t.  That this woman has so much fear and so much anxiety and has no way to deal with it. And she spends all night worrying about money when there was no reason to actually have to worry at that level. But she had no way to deal with that.

It was, it was so painful, and it was an insight into who she was, you know, and how she lived and what, what hurt her and what beat her up and how it just went on for so long. It was… so the point is that when you start seeing your own stuff a little bit differently, that’s when you start to develop compassion for other people, you start thinking about other people. You see, “Oh, even though they hurt me, it wasn’t aimed at me. It was really just exploding out of them towards me because I was there. It didn’t have anything to do with who I am. It had to do with who they are.”

And then you say, “If I’m having such a hard time with this, Jesus, they must have really been fucked up.”

You know? And what that does, it changes our relationship to our own self.

We see where you’re not the target. We may look like the target even to ourselves, but from, and they may have even thought we were the target, but it was only coming out of, exploding out of their own pain and suffering and how much they’re going to suffer and did suffer. It’s just a whole new way of kind of inhabiting your states of mind, you know?

And, and it’s a way that leads to being able to release it more and not identify with it so much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, more time with the horses.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Q:  Hi. Nice to see you. This is really fun. Thank you for doing this. I have, kind of a simple question.  I’m wondering, I know Maharajji taught you about the spiritual body. I’m wondering…

He did?  Wait a minute, wait a minute. What was that? I missed it.

I’m wondering about the physical body. Did he give any suggestions for diet or exercise or how to take care of the physical part of our body?

He told us not to do headstands if we didn’t eat a very pure diet, because all the impurities in the food were going through our, into our brain actually.

Really?

Yeah.

Like, seriously?

Yeah. Seriously. There was a woman there from who, who was doing a headstand somewhere where he saw, and he told her not to do it. And he said, if you’re not eating a very pure, I guess, pure in this case meant very sattvic diet, then the impurities in the food will go into your brain. So, he told us not to do headstands. So as a result, I didn’t do an asana for 50 years.

I think for the most part, you’d have to say he didn’t talk much about taking care of the physical body so much. You know, we’d been doing a lot of things. I was doing Asana practice, meditation, pranayama and all this stuff. But when I met Him, those things fell away. I, I just didn’t do them anymore because I was, I was sunbathing, you know. I was out there in the sun of love and I just wanted to bathe in it, absorb it and be with it.  And there was no nothing else I wanted to do. And I, in some kind of way, and He used to say you can get everything from devotion. He said you can get everything from, everything will come, can come from devotion. Everything.

You know, as time went on, I realized that I do have to take care of my body because if my body is messing me up, if I’m in pain and not healthy, then it’s very hard to actually do any practice or kind of not be obsessed with what’s going on in the body. So, you want to keep your body as calm as you can, you know, Be at ease, as much at ease as you can,

So, He didn’t promote like veganism or, you know, not eating meat…

He was vegetarian. He didn’t eat too much, actually. Yeah. He was vegetarian, as many Indians are, most Indians used to be anyway. And as far as yoga goes, for them you know, vegetarianism is very important in a way. He did, I think he said some things about, you know, he alluded to… You know, the thing is, he loved us as we are, loves us as we are. That was, that preempted any kind of thoughts about what should I do? We were bathing in that love. And he didn’t really, it was all about that. It was all about our hearts being open and, and really ripening in a certain kind of way.

But yeah, I, I’m a vegan. I’m vegan basically, and I used to make fun of vegans, but then I stopped being able to digest milk products. No male on my, on my father’s side of the family, ever had milk products for like, lifetimes. I was the only one and now that’s gone. So, but they say that it’s, that it helps calm the mind, but, you know, I don’t know. They say that, but I don’t know.

Well, some people say that meat, I eat meat, but some people say the fear and the pain and whatever the animal went through, you’re absorbing that energy. So, I just, I just kind of wondered.

Yeah, well, it’s reasonable because if an animal is in fear when it’s murdered then all the adrenaline and all those hormones are in the meat that you’re eating and that’s gonna definitely affect you.

The Tibetans eat meat because you can’t, there are no vegetables at 20,000 feet. So, but they have special, there are special people who do the butchering, who are also, offered prayers for the, you know, for the, for the deceased animals. So, it’s not just, it’s within the philosophical matrix that they live in.

With us, it’s just, you know, eating meat.. We don’t… Yeah, I’m hungry. So we eat. So there’s no, there’s no interdependent awareness of who that being is. And the other thing they say in the East is that all, of all the beings, every incarnate being has either been our mother or father at some point. So, if you really have, if that pushes a button for you, then you can’t be, you know, not very comfortable eating your parents.

You know, there’s a great story about one of the Buddhist elders in the time of Buddha, just after I think Buddha left the body. His name was Mahakashyapa and he came out of the jungle to beg with some of his disciples, and I should get this story, right, I’m always fucking up, but I get the basic thing. So, he comes out of the jungle and they walked towards this village and He stops and he smiles when he sees, when he comes to the edge of the village. And one of his disciples says, “Oh, great one, An Arhat does not smile without a cause. What could be the cause of this smile?”

So he says, “Oh, tell me what you see.”

And he points to this hut. Some people sitting around. And the disciple says, well, I see a hut.And in front of the hut, there’s a young woman sitting on a chair, nursing her baby, eating a piece of meat and kicking the dog to keep him away from the food. And the elder said, “Just so, the woman is nursing her enemy, eating her ex-husband and kicking one of her children from a previous birth, to keep it away from the meat.”

That’s funny.

Yeah. Well, it’s funny, but unfortunately probably true. So anyhow, you do what you have to do for your health. I think that’s main thing. Like I’ll take, if one of my physicians recommends a supplement that he says I really need this to take this and it might have animal products in it, I will take it, because ultimately I need to be, I want to be healthy enough to keep doing what I do to the best of my ability and, and serve Maharaji and serve myself and others. So, if this is what it’s going to take to keep me healthy, then I’ll do it, but I won’t do it for , you know, that’s the only reason I would do it.

Good. That was really interesting. Thank you.

A little long winded, but okay,

That was so good. Thank you. Namaste.

Hello.

Q:  Hi KD. It’s amazing to share this in this virtual space with you and with everyone. Namaste.  I think for most of us, we’re approaching at least the sixth week of this staying at home business. And so, first of all, I wanted to ask how you’re doing. And then also, have you found that your practices have shifted in this time period where all of this stuff, emotional or whatnot is coming up for a lot of us?

Well, thank you. I’m doing very well, I think, you know. I don’t have to think about what to pack. I don’t have to think about carrying clothes for three different climates in the next month or two on the road. So, and as far as six weeks, you know, there are people who go into the three-year retreats voluntarily.  So, this is an involuntary retreat we’re doing here. So, yeah, I think as I kind of slow down, I feel like some of the crust around my heart is kind of falling away a little bit and you know, there’s always deeper to go. It’s always, more opening can happen. There’s more, there’s, you’re always able to relax more into yourself if you allow yourself that space to do that.

So, when there’s so much disturbing situations happening in the world it becomes really urgent to remember to calm our asses down, you know, and it’s the intensity of the, of the craziness that, that we experience that actually will force us to do practice, because otherwise we get eaten alive by our minds, by our thoughts and our emotions. So, there’s really only one thing to do that’s gonna help us in a real way, and that’s some kind of, some kind of a practice, you could say.

And that’s, you know, it’s funny that many of the saints that I met in India and many of the saints that I’ve read about, and many of the saints that the saints talk about, they say that the repetition of the names of God in this age is not just the easiest practice to do, but the only practice that will save us, so to speak.

And if you think about it, this, even when there isn’t a Corona virus around, the world is still pretty screwed up. So, there’s a lot of suffering and that, that’s why they call this the dark ages, the Kali Yuga. So, in the Kali Yuga, in these dark ages, they say the repetition of the name is very efficacious because we can just do it.  You know, you don’t have to understand it,  you don’t have to study it. You don’t have to be initiated. You can just repeat the name and you can go deeper into yourself that way. So, it’s the level of suffering that creates the opportunity to overcome that suffering as well. So, if any real change is going to come to this world, or if the world, if the people in the world are going to actually recognize that change has to happen in order to continue to live in a good way, it’s the suffering that’s going to force us to do the practice, that’s going to allow us to change.

Anything else?

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Love to you and to everyone.

Thank you,

Q: Namaste KD. I’m joining you from Copenhagen in Denmark.

Oh, one of my favorite cities. Thank you.

So I became very unpopular today because I forgot my, me and my wife’s wedding day and the only thing in my calendar was Chai and Chat with Krishna Das.  So that was not so good, but okay. My wife was loving and forgiving, so everything is good again.

So, yeah. So, so thank you so much for doing these online gatherings. And thank you for transmitting that love and that light from, of your guru to all of us, it means so much. And I was actually lucky to meet you last year in August when you played in, in Hamburg and somehow I don’t know what happened, but I ended up on the stage together with my close friends, and we watched the kirtan from the side of the stage it was very magic magical for us.

So yeah, they were the first ones to bring me to Copenhagen.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So yeah, a really funny thing happened to me in Copenhagen.

Okay. Maybe the second or third time I came there to sing, a friend of mine was walking down the street and coming the other way was a guy she knew who had been living in India for like 20 years. And he had the hair and he was walking around with the dhoti and he, you know, ashes on his forehead and then, you know, so she goes up and says to him, guess what?  Krishna Das is singing tonight. Are you going to come?

And he says, “Krishna Das? He’s in just an American burger with Indian ketchup.”

I love that.

Who was that? Was it, who was the guy saying that?

I have no idea. It was a friend of a friend. Yeah.

Okay. But I have many questions, but one question I would like to ask you about this is about music and it’s, Rick Rubin produced two of your albums, Breath of the Heart and Door of Faith, which is just amazing albums and as a producer and songwriter myself, these, you know, these albums have just been very, very inspiring to me and has, you know, yeah, they go very deep, I think. And so, my question really is, have you guys ever talked about doing a third album?

Oh yeah. He’s open to doing something or he was last time I’d spoken to him, but I got comfortable working in New York, recording in New York.

One of my good friends, Jay Messina, he engineers all the CDs and helps produce them. David Nichtern, another close friend helped produce a couple. So, I just got real comfortable here in New York. And Rick really doesn’t leave California. Yeah. Well, that’s not to say I wouldn’t go out there at some point.

The Hare Krishna CD, All One, which was right, the next one, after the ones we’d done with Rick, I wanted to do that with him originally, but he didn’t want to come to New York and I didn’t really feel like going to California. So, that’s you know?

Yeah, because you did. Yeah. Yeah. You have been in touch.  You did, you were featured in the documentary that he did.

Yeah. The documentary on Showtime. I think it was right about his recording studio called Shangrila.

Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t seen it because it’s not available here in Europe.

Get a VPN, a VPN and you can rip it up. You can.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nice. Can I ask one more question? I, is it okay? I haven’t, I’ve been seeing some videos of you singing together with, with Shyam Sundar Das Baba, the jungle Baba

You mean in the jungle? Yeah.

Yeah. I was just wondering, what is the connection with him? If there’s anything you could share about that and what, you know, is there a connection with Maharajji?

There’s no direct connection with Maharajji at all. But a friend of ours had met him and had a nice time with him and told me about him. So, I went to visit him and after a couple of days, then I kinda got happy. It was weird, you know, so not my normal state. So, he’s, I think he’s on retreat now in the jungle. I don’t think he’s meeting people much now for a while.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Nice. Okay.

It’s nice to see whether, you know, we wouldn’t know an enlightened being if we stepped on him in the street. So, it’s not a question of really knowing intellectually where somebody is at.  It’s a feeling. Do you like? Do you enjoy or not? Some people didn’t feel comfortable with him and some people do, you know? It’s just question of taste.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. But I think that was it for me, so. Okay. Thank you so much.  Namaste.

Namaste. Take good care.

Q: Hi, do you remember us from Mexico city? We interviewed you and Jeff.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Hi. Hi, on the porch, right? We were out on that porch. Great. Are you there now?

No, we came back to LA and kind of got stuck here, but what’s kind of my question, my mom and my best friend both have Alzheimer’s and they’re in Mexico and we’ve been overseeing their care for some years now.  And my friend, especially has early onset and she’s like, you know, she can’t eat or walk or go to the bathroom, but she’s conscious. She can’t speak, but she’s there. And my mom is there and there’s been, my friends are really into assisted suicide. So, I asked another teacher here about that and it was more like, you can’t interrupt their karma.

So, no matter how much a person is suffering, you are interrupting their karma if you do that to them and my friends are giving me a lot of blow back about this. This is hard. This is not what I want to do here, but I kind of think that’s why I didn’t, I don’t know. What do you think about that?

Well, my father left the body with complications from Alzheimer’s. He had Alzheimer’s and

he wasn’t suffering. We were suffering, which was okay with me because some people get sick, they get very sick, they suffer terribly, they’re in terrible pain that can’t be alleviated. There’s nothing that can be done for them. They have to lie there. And there, you know, that’s, and though, if those people decided to, if they decided that they wanted to end their life, there’s really not much you can say about it, but for some, for me to have decided that, “Oh my dad’s losing it, You know, let’s, let’s give, let’s do that to him.” I don’t think that’s the right thing. I think a person, whether cosmically or not it’s okay, I don’t know. But if a person makes that decision, then that’s also their karma. So, but to make a decision for somebody who can’t decide that’s, you know, You’re the one who’s suffering. Your mother and your other, they’re not, they have no, their consciousness isn’t, isn’t, there’s no connection between this moment and that moment.  Like I would, my father would wake up in the morning and his wife would come in and he’d have a big lump on his head. And she said, what happened? He said, “what do you mean?” You know, he had no memory of falling.  He had no pain. That even the pain sensations didn’t go from one moment to the next one mind moment to the next. So, I always felt, let us suffer with this, that this hurt our hearts. He’s not suffering. God bless him. I don’t know, you know, there are so many issues involved, you know?

So, at one time my sister was with my father at the Alzheimer’s ward at this place that he finally had to go to because he couldn’t be cared for anymore by his wife, who’s just too, she wasn’t sleeping. She was, she had, she was getting autoimmune diseases because of the tension and the stress.

So, my sister came and they played a video of me chanting. And in the middle of the video, my father came back from wherever he was and he looks at my sister and he says, “Tell KD I’m chanting with him in my mind.”

Oh, beautiful.

So, you know, and another time, you know, whenever I would leave on a tour, I would go to see him because I would be gone a couple of months and who knew if he’d remember me when I came back, you know?  So, one day we’re sitting there in the, in the afternoon watching the same reruns of Seinfeld, which he watched over and over and over and over and over. Cause he couldn’t remember anything. I don’t even think he knew what he was looking at.  So, in the middle of this television program, he was sitting in a chair and I’m sitting on the couch. He kind of looks over at me and he goes, and he gets up out of the chair, which he usually could hardly do. And he comes over and sits down next to me on the couch, right next to me, you know? And then he looks at me and he says, “What you’re doing is incredible. I can’t believe it. Traveling around the world, singing with people all over the world. It’s amazing. I’m so proud of you.”

He was going on and on and I was like, you know, it was like, “Oh, okay, what is this?” You know? And then after like, it seemed like three hours, it was probably just a good minute, he just, you could see his, just like, and he got up, went back to the chair and back to Seinfeld. And that was the last time I ever saw him fully here. You know?

So, I don’t know. I mean, you know, I’m not one to, I don’t know. That’s just, I pretty much said it all I have to say about it. You know, you have to work with how you feel about it, and live with that.

And you did allude to, not fear of dying, but fear of suffering, which I also have. I also worry about getting it myself…

For who? For yourself, you mean?  Or for, yeah…

For myself because it’s hereditary, well, and so on and so forth. And what would, what would I do, you know, like, how am I going to handle it? What if I forget how to meditate? That’s a big fear of mine. It’s stupid.

Yeah. If you, if you, first of all, I don’t even know what to say about that, but anyway let’s see. You know, the hardest thing for me was, as my father’s Alzheimer’s was progressing, you know one day we were in a cab together and we’d been talking about in the city, and we made plans for like the next week to get together. Right? So, as he was getting out of the cab, I said, “okay, dad, so I’ll meet you, I’ll meet you there.”

And he looked at me like, the panic in his eyes because he knew that he had no idea what I was talking about. And he knew that he had lost it, you know? When he was like… that was so painful for him and me, but that in between kind of stage passed, and then it’s very difficult to know what his reality was, but I’m pretty sure I can say that he wasn’t suffering the way we would normally think about suffering and, you know, you can have the genes for Alzheimer’s and never, never develop it. So, as I say, be here now.

And thank you for Thursdays. We’re really enjoying it.

Okay.

Ram Ram.  I’m here in San Diego, Encinitas. We missed on tour. Hopefully you’ll come back  and honor your ticket when this is all over. First of all, I just want to say, I think our hearts go out to you in New York for everything you guys are going through.

You’ve taken the brunt of this pandemic. And it’s just amazing to see the New York tough and strength and love of all the care workers there and community and prayers go out to you and, and everybody in that city and everybody across the country.

Yeah. It’s the best of human nature.

Yeah, that’s amazing.

But it comes down to compassion and you were kind of just, you know, talking about compassion where it touched me, where it’s like, I’m looking for, if, if compassion is truly being a, and this goes back to what I was reading about Ram Dass and his work in the hospice kind of work, and I was thinking, well, how could you really have compassion for someone and really truly know compassion if you haven’t walked in their shoes.

So, I kind of got lost there and sat there. And so then I started thinking, well, there, if you can’t walk in somebody else’s shoes to really know and feel compassion for them, is there kind of like a common denominator that every, that’s an in, in a reality, I guess, that you would go to the same, I truly do feel compassion for this person.  Because I feel like I feel but at times it’s like, just because I have a certain point of view, for example, someone might look at me like, well, that’s not compassion, you know, and it, but for me it is. And so, I guess I’m looking for a common denominator that I could go to that would go like, you know, just because you see things differently, doesn’t mean I’m not compassionate.

That was my question.

You know, like if you go to a movie and you’re looking at the screen, you see all different characters, right? All different characters. The common denominator in this case is, you could say, the projector. The projector is projecting all of those characters onto the screen. And you’re also a character on the screen.

You’re observing it. So, the common denominator is actually, the same thing looks out of your eyes that is looking out of the eyes of everybody you’ll ever meet. Satchidananda.  Truth, awareness and joy. That’s our true nature. That’s what’s looking out of your eyes, pure awareness, pure being.

You are identified with your story, just like everybody else is identified with their story, but the same one inside lives within you that lives within everybody. And that’s the divine presence. The soul of everyone is exactly the same. And we’re all part of the same being.

Why would you not feel bad for your foot if it hurt? You would try to make it better. Other people are just another part of your great body. You’re a huge body. You’re a big body, but we don’t believe that because we are attached to the information that comes in through our sense organs and we’re attached to our subjective conditioned way of interpreting all that information which tells us that I’m in here and they’re out there and there’s really no connection at all. But it’s actually completely inside out. Everyone is inside of your awareness.  There is nobody, nothing out there. Everything you see is lit up by your own awareness. And that awareness is the same in every being in the universe.

No.

That’s your true nature. So, when somebody hurts, it’s natural to have compassion. These, these wonderful beings who are first responders, this is the best of humanity. This is the natural state of, of humanity, to care for others at the expense of your own suffering or your own possibility of suffering. That’s thinking of others first. When I was going to kill myself, I told you Maharajji said, “you can’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.”

Why? Because he never thought of himself. All we do is think of ourselves. So, you know, when our hearts relax, when the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves don’t eat us up alive the way they usually do, our hearts naturally go out to everything we meet, everyone and everything, because there’s no reason for them not to. It’s only our stories that are our reasons to protect ourselves from other people, to hoard our stuff, to hide our stuff, all that stuff we do out of selfish interest to preserve our sins, our false sense of separateness.

It’s false because it’s not real. We are not separate beings. We only look like that to ourselves because of our identification with the sense information. The deeper you go into yourself, you can experience that directly. But that takes, what that takes is a recognition of how much pain we’re in, confined to this small little box of me, you know. But we don’t want to face that. So, we don’t do anything about it. We ignore it and we suffer. So, the more we, the more we notice, begin to notice how this, how we’re stuck in this little neat box with all these stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, that we believe for some crazy reason. The more we’re aware of that kind of suffering, the more, first of all, we see everybody else also is. So, and if it hurts us this much, it’s got to be hurting them that much, too. So that unites us as humans. We’re all in this soup together. We have to figure a way out of here or into here or up there or out of there, you know, who knows? But compassion is natural. That’s what arises when you not, when you’re not obsessing about me, me, me all the time. It’s natural caring for people, but that’s been destroyed and, not destroyed, but that’s been crushed by the way we’ve been brought up in a culture that doesn’t give a shit about anybody else. I want my house., My cable TV, my car, my food, my partner, my kids, my, this, my, that.

It’s fucking horrible. That’s earth. That’s what we have to learn. And that’s school. That’s the school. So, and it all, it all, well, it all centers around…  We’ve been programmed to believe that we’re separate from everybody else and the most important thing is how “I” feel.

Yeah.

Maybe, maybe not.

Thank you. I have a quick question.

Okay.

A double, double dipping here.

Yeah.

I was really looking forward to your trip to Rishikesh in India, New Delhi, for your tour. I was actually thinking about going out there. The whole world is on retreat. But my, I guess my question is I’ve, I’ve spent some time in Kainchi Dham in the mountains, in the Kumaon Mountains with Benji and Heather and David Newman and spent 10 days in the, in the area visiting the temples of Maharajji and it was just so amazing.

I feel his presence there. I, I felt a connection. I would love to experience that with you and some others from back then. Have you ever entertained or thought about doing a similar type of retreat where maybe you wouldn’t have to be with a lot of people all the time, but you could maybe make a, spend a couple hours talking about your times there.

I would love to experience that with you and pay probably a lot of money to do that.

How much, how much, how much?

Well, you know, well, my, the first answer I would give is, God forbid,. The last thing I’ll fucking ever do take the, and if I did take someone to India, you would have to sign a release form before you go that when you drop dead of whatever you drop dead of in India, I could just throw your body in the fucking river in the end of it.

I guess that’s my answer, but you, you, were going to go, you were going to go on tour, so…

You never know. That’s all I can tell you

Anyways. Just thank you for everything and take care.

Thank you. You’ve been an integral part of my life and my spiritual practice for, so you’re very close to my heart. Although you don’t know me, I feel I know Maharajji through you. So thank you. My question has to do with human relationships and…

You’re going to ask me that question?  Okay.

There’s an angle to this that I haven’t heard you talk about. Cause I’ve heard some, so many of your talks, but one angle that I haven’t heard talked about is healthy human bonding

Is what?

Healthy human bonding.

That’s because I don’t know anything about it.

I’m not sure that I do either, but I mean, I I’ve thought about attachment quite a bit and I teach Eastern philosophy.  And typically when things come up about attachment and personal relationships, and then I say, well, this is really tough. That’s where the work really comes in, when you’re in a close relationship, but you’re attached in some way, you’re expecting something from someone. And here I am at 58 years old and I’m going through some heartbreak and this wasn’t a physical relationship and it caught me totally by surprise.

And I’m not sure that it’s all attachment either. Now, you know, ultimately, maybe that’s true. I don’t know, but it feels like there’s a connection there that’s like a living, feels like a living being between us. And it seems like that’s not just my attachment. It’s like a connection. And I don’t know that I understand what that connection is. And I’m not asking you to tell me what that connection is, but could you say something about, you know, when we feel bonded to another person, when that person either leaves us or dies, we suffer. And I wonder how much of that is just good or what is there about bonding with another human being.

Well, I don’t know. I imagine I know what you mean by bonding, but when Maharajji left his body, I wasn’t, I was destroyed. I, you know, I thought my life was over because the only place that I ever felt that way was with him physically. Physically. So, when the physical body was not there anymore for me to use, to feel that way, I had no tools to feel that way with, without that. That’s attachment.

So, while I couldn’t, I feel that way without… that, without being in the presence of that physical body. And so, for 20 years, I basically was sinking, sinking, sinking. And then I recognized that I had to find it in myself because he had shown me that love was real. I had felt it, I experienced it, so many things, but then the body was not there and I lost everything. I thought. So…

Everything you’re describing about your relationship with this other, where do you experience that? In the room behind you? inside the cat? You experienced it inside of you, which is where it is. The attachment is having to use another person or another thing to give you that experience. That’s, that’s attachment.

So, without attachment or the without the belief that you need something outside of you to make you feel good, you would feel good. Because the feeling is inside of you. It’s not… Many people fall in love with people that don’t give a shit about them. So, they still feel that love, but it’s not coming from that person. Definitely. So, you meet somebody who seems to respond to you and that makes you feel good about yourself and you allow yourself to feel good then. So, if that person goes away or turns away in one, one way or another, we lose the ability to let ourselves feel good.

Yeah.

So, relationships are for learning because you’ve come up against all the things that close you down when you interact with another person, as well as many other things.

Is there any way to know when like, to work towards maintaining a relationship because it might be helpful for the tool versus no, I can’t do that cause that must obviously mean I’m  attached?  It seems to me, well…

I wouldn’t say… Why should you not do it because you’re attached?   I didn’t say not. I didn’t say you shouldn’t do it, but be aware of what it is. That’s all. And if, once you’re in a relationship with somebody and two people make a pact, agree to relate together, then you’re bringing your shadow and they’re bringing their shadow.

So, if you think it’s all going to be the sunlight merging in the sunlight, but two people have to agree to help each other deal with the shadow. So there has to be honesty, integrity, sincerity, openness, and a desire to be free of the fear and hiding and all that stuff. It’s…. Relationships are work. Very hard work, but that’s how we see ourselves better.

We can see ourselves, where we’re at, with our relationships. So, and, and as far as people going anywhere, you know, if Maharajji went anywhere, then he would still be somewhere else, but he’s not somewhere else. He’s with me all the time.  Ram Dass, I feel him all the time. He’s totally available. So, you’re talking about the physical plane, which is because you and I, and most of us identify with the physical body and, but then they got free of that, but that doesn’t mean they’re not here.

So, but that’s kind of, you know, depending on who you talk to, they’ll say, “Oh, that’s just wonky bullshit.” But you know, let them feel that. You know what you feel and you have to honor that. You should honor that. Try to honor that and you have something anyway. Okay. So that’s the short answer.

That’s the big question, but that’s a good one.

Sorry. Okay. Yeah, no, just let me say, let me offer a disclaimer here. Okay?

These are my opinions. Okay? These are, this is not ultimate truth. Okay? You don’t like what you hear? No Problema. Or you don’t believe it? No problema. You don’t relate to it? Fine. This is not the gospel according to somebody, this is my opinions, what I feel like I’ve learned so far, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense to anybody else except me.  And maybe it doesn’t even make sense to me. So just remember, this is not the ultimate reality. This is just, we’re having a conversation, essentially. Okay. Take care.

Thank you so much.

Hi, Krishna Das. Nice to meet you. Basically I was wondering if you could give me some of your advice.

There’s nothing I like to do, but give advice.

I’ll try and say the best I can. I’ve kind of been in a forced quarantine isolation type situation for about four years now because I’ve been dealing with a chronic health condition, Lyme Disease.

Me, too. I have Lyme.

Oh, interesting. I didn’t know that.

Yeah. Chronic Lyme. I’ve probably had it for 20 years.

Wow. I didn’t know that. My family is from Massachusetts. I spent a lot of time there and you live in New York. It makes sense. I was just wondering, basically it affects me, the way that it had affected me is, I kind of was high functioning and then overnight was housebound in a lot of pain and fatigue. And I’ve tried lots of different treatments. And I was lucky enough to find Ram Dass when I needed, really needed somebody the most. Cause I was suicidal and in bed with severe neuropathy. And I was so grateful for that because, through him, I feel like I found Maharajji, and I’ve listened to all of his lectures and I found you and it really opened me to a whole new dimension and I, I’ve even been fortunate enough to feel Maharajji’s love and Ram Dass’s love on a very deep level through psychedelic exploration, too. And that, that, they’ve all changed my life. So that’s a blessing from the illness, but my life is still very limited and I just want to be able to, I’m only 26, so it’s really rocked my world. I haven’t been able to work for a long time and I just want to be able to be of service to others and I don’t feel I can do that right now. And I, I, and, and my spiritual practice is deep, but the suffering, you know, the mind still likes to, of course, create the suffering. And some days I deal with that okay and other days I can barely manage getting through the day and, you know, that kind of thing. So, I was just wondering if you had any advice for somebody in my situation and I’d really appreciate it.

Well, as you know, Ram Dass was also in terrible pain every day, terrible neuropathy from diabetes, he’d been in a wheelchair for over 20 years. So many things. He was dealing with blood pressure, blood sugar, so many issues, so many terrible… Yeah, many. He had so many procedures and operations and everything.

He never, he, he accepted it as his karma. He didn’t try to change it. He worked with all of that. I wish it would end. I’ve got to change this. I wish it would go away. Why me?  He, he worked through all that stuff and he developed real humility. True surrender. So, your situation is very intense, no question, but it’s your karmic situation. What’s the best way to deal with that is what you need to find out.

Do everything you can to heal yourself physically. But the main thing is what is your, what, what your state of mind is around everything you have to deal with. So, I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but this is, this is what you’ve been given, what it is. So your only option is to deal with this the best way you can.

So, you have to find out what that means to you. And don’t think about trying to serve other people. Not, it might not be what your karmic situation is right now. Right now, serve yourself, you know? Find out, you know Ram Dass really overcame all the, he was able to be with people just like he was with you. Did you have a one-on-one with him or how did you, did you ever speak to him?

No. Yeah, I wish I wish I did, but I didn’t know he was with those.

And when he, you know, when he was one-on-one with people or in a group of people, he radiated, he radiated his truth, his love is real, his true self, his true nature with people and he never allowed the physicality to interfere with that. So, he developed that kind of strength. Now that’s big time. No question about it. I doubt I could do that. If you could do that, that would be wonderful. Any little bit we can do on the way. So don’t try to be somewhere else. And when you notice yourself wishing it was another way, that’s not useful. So, really you’re here. You’re completely here always, but your body is ripping off your consciousness.

Don’t let it do that. Keep coming back. Not with anger or will or force, but in a relaxed way, come back to yourself again and again. And you never know, you never know what the next moment will bring. Pain is, is, pain, it is very hard to deal with. There’s no question about it, but we must. What are your options?  You know? You need to find the best way to deal with that since it’s a, it’s a major factor in your daily life and there are ways to do it, it can be done for sure. You know? So, this is your work. There’s no spiritual sadhana, spiritual practice somewhere else. It’s right where you are. This is it. How great?

That’s why I say the illness is the spiritual practice because it’s taken me so much. It can just be so challenging sometimes when you’re forced in bed all day. And you’re in great pain. And the mind tries to like escape the situation. It’s like, I don’t want this. Yeah. Yeah. This isn’t fair.  Which is like the worst thing to fail because that just creates more suffering.

That’s absolutely true. On the other hand, you’re not getting the luxury of being stupid for your whole life. It’s a luxury that, that destroys people. We just go living on in dreamland. We never pay attention. We live our lives. We’re hardly ever here for a moment. Your situation is forcing you, just like Ram Dass had to, force you to deal with it. There’s no time off. And that’s the way it is. And someday you will recognize that it was a blessing beyond belief.

So, from here to there, that’s your path, whatever it takes you, whatever you do. When I tell you, you know, I used to tease Ram Dass, I used to say, “you finally become who we thought you were 40 years ago.” He would laugh.

That’s, that’s a good one.

So I’ll say that to you in a few years, too. Okay?

Yes. Thank you so much. It was, it was such a honor to speak with you. Thank you.

Ok.  Take care.

Q:  Okay. I am a little bit excited now. My English is not so good. I had a few questions, but it’s late now and I think like the essence of all these questions is, did you ever have doubts on your path, on your path with Maharajji?  I mean, before?

Okay. And what?

Did you?

I doubt myself all the time, but I never doubt him.

I doubt my ability to let him in, you know, he’s knocking on the door all the time, but I doubt my ability to let him in at all. I do the best that I can to see him everywhere, to see him in everyone, to see that love and everyone, but, you know. I don’t doubt him. I don’t doubt that love. He showed me that’s real. What I doubt is whether I’ll ever be able to really be with that openly. That’s just a program, too. That’s just a program, also. But that’s the one that catches me. It’s one that catches me.

Yeah. It’s like, my spiritual path started like somewhere else. It’s not… in with Hinduism or Buddhism. It started like in, in South Africa, I mean in Austria, but it drew me to South Africa and I like, I didn’t have like, a guru, but it’s also like, like a teacher, and this is a very like, they’re very much praise earth and worship earth. And it was really beautiful because I could make this connection to earth and it was really healing me, like, also opening my heart. And now I feel like, between like, like a child who has to choose mother or father. I don’t know how to. When I, when I say it, it sounds stupid to me because I know that you don’t have to choose, but still there are these quarrels inside of me.  And like some somebody would be, if I like, if I go more for this South African path, then, then it’s like, Maharaji would think that I’m doing something wrong and the other way around, I don’t know. It’s, it’s really sounds weird. But this is coming to my mind all the time.

That’s just your own stuff. Maharajji didn’t judge anyone nor did he even encourage people to come see him.  So, it’s not an issue. It’s just your program. You know? It doesn’t matter what you do. It’s you doing it. Nobody else. So, don’t, don’t keep it. Why do you… notice how you believe all that stuff. That’s all. If you didn’t think those things, where would they exist in the world? Nowhere, but you believe them. So, they exist. That’s all, they’re not real. It’s just, you’re giving yourself a hard time for no reason. We’re also good at that. That’s all. Doesn’t matter. Follow your heart. It doesn’t matter what you do, to anybody else, but you.

Thank you. I have to live with this doubt.

For some reason that’s what you do. So make friends with it. Don’t try to fight it, allow it to come, allow it to go. When you’re watching television, it’s not there. When you’re taking a shower, it’s not there. When you’re going to the movies, it’s not there. When you’re talking to people it’s not there. It’s not there all the time. It’s only there when it shows up, so allow it to show up and then, you know, allow it to go away. It’s not real. It’s only your stuff.

Thank you.

Q:  Ram Ram KD

Ram Ram.

Okay. So first of all I want to say thank you. Never met you. I’ve always listened to your music. Actually, bought your book and in the lockdown, that’s what I’ve been doing, reading your book a lot and listening

There are two people who actually bought the book. That’s wonderful.

Ah, there you go. So the most amazing thing happened to me this week. In the five weeks of locked down, I’d been doing a lot of meditation and one of the kirtans that really, I listen to when I meditate, well, I don’t listen to it, it just comes into me is,  and it just floats totally through my body, and I’ve been getting deeper and deeper into it and sat on a hill this week and reading your book, I thought I’ve got to get through the book then decided, you know, I’m just going to take some time to meditate. As I’ve been getting deeper into it, and I’ve been brought up with practice in Hindu, anyway, I’ve always had people say to me, you’ve got to have a guru. You can’t get anywhere if you don’t have a guru. I’ve got myself, I’ve always felt that, well, I’m supposed to be part of the universe of God, so why do I need to have someone externally?

Anyway, I did the meditation and, you know, this kirtan is going through my body and the most amazing thing happened. Maharajji just came. I went to like a really high level and I do a meditation where my friend always talks about the blanket of love. I don’t know if it’s the connection with that and how you describe it in your book.

And I’ve never had a connection to Maharajji at all, and you know, when you say he’s here all the time, we just don’t believe cause we don’t see the physical body, but yet he was just so present, and in my meditation, I was just absolutely crying. And I have this real, Oh my God, this real abundance of energy for the last few days.

So, my question was, I know in your book, you spoke about that little window of going with Maharajji yourself, you went into that window, how did you, did you feel that overwhelmness when that happened to you as well? And if so, how do you actually keep… it? Cause it’s really just running through my body right now.

I feel so blessed. And for the first time after all these years, I actually feel like I know who I am now. It’s unbelievably amazing.

Isn’t that interesting. You come into contact with what you call him, but yet at the same time you say, now I know who I am, because he is not.. He and you are not different.

He’s that indwelling presence in each one of us that is who we truly are. So that’s a wonderful experience. Why do you want to contain it? Let it go. You can’t hold on to it either. So just be with it.

Oh, it’s really scary. And I’m like, yeah, you’re right. It’s like, what more am I supposed to do with it? I don’t know what to do with it.

It’s not your, it’s doing it with you. Relax. Take it easy. It’s not up to you. You didn’t do this. This is grace. So just enjoy, relax, take it easy. It’s all good.

Did you have the same feeling also when you got through the window? Or…?

Yeah, I probably cut my hand on the glass or something, you know.

Wow. Okay. But I so want to say thank you. I’ve been a passenger there and full of grace.

Very good.

Q:  Hi. Hello, Krishna Das. Hello for doing this. It’s amazing. I’m talking from Barcelona.

I was in your workshop the last time you were here. It was the first time that I saw you. And since then, I started chanting the Hanuman Chalisa and I’m also trying to share with some community that we have at the yoga studio. And I wanted to ask, like you were saying right now in this situation that we are, we’re feeling more well we’re feeling, everybody’s feeling different because of staying at home and not having so much contact with the outside world, so I was wondering if there was any change on what your practice, on what you’re doing in your practice, what you’re chanting in your practice as you also have to stay at home and not being able to chant with people?

Yeah. No, not really, you know, just to have more time. So, I’m able to spend more time singing or being, or reading or, you know, doing that kind of stuff. And, and like I said, I, I feel like there’s a lot of crust around my heart. That’s kind of falling away a little bit, little bit by little bit. Cause I’m having the chance to relax in a deeper way.

I’ve been so busy, moving so fast for so long that it’s just natural that, you know ah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I, I don’t, I can sit down and I don’t have to get up unless I get up. I mean, it’s not, I don’t have to catch a plane or a train or bus or a car, so it just naturally deepens as I allow it to. So, at least that’s what it looks like to me, but it’s just more of the same stuff, Sri Ram Jai Ram, same stuff over and over.

Is there any difference in chanting the Chalisa or any other mantra?

The difference is that when you’re chanting the Chalisa, you’re chanting the Chalisa. If you’re chatting another mantra, you’re chanting another mantra. The practice that’s best as the one you do when you’re doing this. No, just do anything. It doesn’t matter.

Anything you do feeds your own heart and you listen to your heart and follow what your heart asks you to do, what your heart’s hungry for in terms of practice, what works for you. That’s all. It’s all good.

Thank you very much,

Hi. How’d you sneak in?

So my, my question is about you know, I have a teacher, a meditation teacher, and like some of the things that like, I’ve been, you know, whatever, asked to do, like not share my notes or whatever, it really pisses me off and I know you’re supposed to like, follow the teacher and let go of your ego and whatever, but I find it really difficult.

So, I guess my question is like, presumably Maharajji he asked people, you know, cause he knew everything, right? So, he asked people what was best for them and they may have fought against that. And like, did that happen to you? And how did you deal with it?

You have to… it seems to me that there’s a trust issue here. If you have a teacher that you trust, then you say to yourself, “this is what my teacher wants me to do. This must be in my best interest, even if I don’t like it, or I don’t understand it. That doesn’t mean that it’s not in my best interest.”

So, then you would go ahead and do what your teacher asks of you, but you have to, this has to be based on trust. If you don’t trust that person who is your teacher, you really can’t get much from him other than, or her, other than techniques. If your heart doesn’t open to that person, if there’s fear there or… then that’s the situation and, where there’s love there’s no fear. Where there’s fear, there’s no love. So, having the reactions you say you have, there’s nothing wrong with those reactions. How you deal with those reactions is, is the issue. You can say, this must mean that I’m not trusting this person, or this, you could say, I do trust this person, these are just, this is just my bullshit. I have to drop it and do what, what they say. So, the whole, whole point, I’ve said this again and again, and I think I’ve said it to you before, in my opinion, the whole path is learning how to trust yourself.

It doesn’t matter what anybody teaches you. It doesn’t matter what anybody shows you. It doesn’t matter what anybody asks you to do, you have to trust yourself in order to do that in the right way or not do that. It’s you making the decision or having the reaction inside of you based on all your stuff, if this is the right thing for me or not.

A guru and a teacher are two different things, first of all. A real guru doesn’t necessarily teach at all. They might say a few words here and there. Who knows? They’ll do whatever they want to do, whatever they have to do. But a guru ripens you from the inside out. A teacher shares methods with you and can help you move along according to those methods that that teacher gives to you and has done themselves, one would hope. But when you meet a guru, either inside or outside, not necessarily physically, and your heart will automatically trust that feeling. And then your path is to just try to remain or try to keep coming back to that feeling of love.

There’s not necessarily big experiences. There’s not… I told you, you know, there were people, there were gurus in India, beings in India that other Westerners went to.  They would bounce up and down off the, the pillows, they would howl like dogs. They would, they would be in bliss and fall over like this.

I sat around with mom Maharajji for two and a half years. Not one fucking thing happened. Except love. Except love that was so deep and so beautiful and so unbearable, so wonderful that I couldn’t pull myself away from that person.  Nor did I want to, except when I got pissed off. So, the whole thing is learning to trust yourself.

Take your time. There’s no hurry. You’re not going anywhere. You’re just trying to get here, where you are already. Relax. Let it come to you. Be yourself. Be you. Follow your heart. Trust your heart. Trust yourself. Trust your deeper feelings. But in order to trust them, you have to listen deeply to yourself and then you have to pay attention. You have to honor how you feel. If you don’t honor those deeper feelings, you’re not doing the right thing to yourself, but most people don’t. Okay? By the way. But the spiritual path means really following your heart, following your deepest heart, what do you want? What do you really want? Don’t get caught.  Don’t spend time getting things that you don’t really need. You might enjoy a little bit, but go after what you really want, which is the same thing everybody wants, which is love. And if you’re not getting what you want from one situation, recognize that that’s the case. That doesn’t mean you have to change anything, but you have to pay attention.

What’s happening here? You know> What do I want? How, how can I live in this love all the time?

So, and the love is not something you get. It’s, it’s what we are, and that doesn’t go away nor does it come. It’s already here. That’s what we are. So, if you feel that your work, your spiritual path, what you’re learning is helping you to be a better human being, to be kinder, more compassionate towards yourself and others, and to obsess about yourself less, whatever it is, this is, this is your work. This is our work. There are teachings. You can learn anything out there. There’s millions of techniques, millions of teachers, millions of paths, but there’s only one love and that lives within you as who you already are, who we already are. That’s where we’re headed.

So, there’s many ways to get there. As long as you feel in your heart that what you’re doing is taking you where you need to go, and you trust it, that’s the key. That’s the issue. Because if you don’t trust your teacher, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean the teacher’s wrong. It just might mean that the karmic connection is not really there the way it should be or, but whatever it is, it’s your, it’s your feelings that count.

That’s why Maharajji never told us what to do. He didn’t tell me to chant, to go forth and spread the seed of chanting all through the world. He never said that, not once, but he changed me from the inside. He created this whole drama of me doing this without… he didn’t ask me if I wanted to do this.

But he, being the inner indwelling presence within me, he knows what I need to do to move into myself. And so, he created this whole drama. He took the guy who wanted to be a rock and roll singer and made him into a kirtan wallah.  Because the rock and roll singer would have, would have died from a drug overdose 50 years ago.

So, he changed that karma and you know, so that’s a guru. That’s what a real guru does. That doesn’t mean some gurus can, can’t be teachers. They can teach, too. Maharajji didn’t teach so much like that. As you know, we said, how do we find God? He said, serve people. He didn’t say meditate. He didn’t even say, chant.

He didn’t say, go on pilgrimage. He didn’t say, live in a cave. He didn’t say, be a vegan. He didn’t say, don’t watch TV. He didn’t say, do anything. He said, serve people. Simple. But what do we do? We think about ourselves all day long. The movie of me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me and more me, me, me.

And we think that’s reasonable. That’s how crazy we are. So, trust is the issue and Ram Ram.

Thank you. Ram Ram.   By the way I beat Corona virus.

Really? Did you have it? Oh wow. You’re okay. Now. Very good. Good. Glad to hear that. Very good. Yeah.

Q: Hi. Thank you for giving us a, something to chew on in terms of what Maharajji brought and, you know, you take it from whoever was closer and you were there. I appreciate that a lot. And thank you for making the in bad words okay with neutrality. But here here’s the thing. I know that one of the songs that you recorded a while ago when the, the Om Namah Shivaya, I think that is Maharajji at the beginning who was chanting or singing before your…

It’s Mr. Tiwari, my Indian father.  A great yogi and lifelong disciple of Maharajji

So there’s an online recording of what they say is Meraji saying “Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram,” and then another recording of him just chatting with other devotees. That would be him?

Yeah. Yeah that’s him.

That’s a beautiful.

That “Ram Ram Ram” thing, a devotee that we knew up in Nainital, up in the mountains, , recorded that on a cassette player, and this is 1970, so we recorded that through the air. We, what we recorded that…

I wasn’t born in 1970.

Good. So, it proves that you’re not my kid.

So, we recorded that through the air with another cassette recorder. So, he played it and we recorded it, you know, with a little Walkman. So that’s how we got that all those years ago. So, what do you think about that in terms of the darshan, like that, the view of the guru, getting some direct perception of what his energy was in his voice?

Yeah. You’re hearing him repeat the name, so that’s wonderful. Ultimately you have to repeat the name, hearing it is good. And of course, when you hear it, you’re actually having the image of the name, so to speak in your own consciousness, but you want to also be able to generate that yourself. It’s, it’s, you could use that as a, as a way to meditate on, for sure.

No question about it.

Why I started with it, I heard him before I met you. And then after that, we were doing a Ram Ram and trying really, really hard for our last couple of years to work with the Chalisa. And you know…

You don’t have to, you don’t have to memorize it. You know, you can just read it.

It doesn’t have to be memorized. Yeah. It’s not a test. Read it, listen to it, play it over and use my CDs or somebody else’s that you like and just be with it, you know, and learn it little by little. It’s not a test. Nobody’s going to grade you on it.

I like it, because it doesn’t create pressure.  It just creates the ability to enjoy it a hundred percent the way it is.

What creates pressure?

It doesn’t create pressure, to think that you don’t have to memorize it, a pressure-less experience to be able to do it and then go in at a hundred percent the way it comes out.

Yeah, I’d say so.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everyone involved.

Thank you. Yeah, it’s been great working overtime. Thank you.

Q:  I have a question about dreams. Did Maharajji ever talk, speak to you about dreams or your own thoughts of dreams? And the reason I’m asking is, I’ve recently had two very close family members who passed away and I’ve had visitation dreams and I’ve never believed in them or had any particular feeling about them.

And that was my question.

What do you mean you don’t believe? You don’t believe in your own experience? Is that what you said?

No, and it’s not that I don’t believe my own experiences. I never considered being… I had a dream where my grandfather was speaking to me in a dream that was not like any other dream. And it was very vivid, very rich. And we were talking about him. I was asking him why he was, he had died. And we were, he explained to me that he wasn’t, that he was still here. And we’re having this dream and it’s very vivid. And I had never, I had never considered… I had the dream on Easter too, which is kind of weird, but…

So, it was Jesus.

Yeah. It was something like that. I mean, the story was too good, you know? And I, I, I don’t, I never had expected to, to have a dream like that. And I wonder if, if you ever, if Maharajji ever talked about…

No, no, I don’t think he, yeah, he didn’t talk much about those kinds of things. From his point of view, I would imagine it was all very dreamlike.

But in our dreams, we can be visited by other beings, for sure, that we wouldn’t let come in our normal conscious state. And if they tell us we’re good little boys and girls, we should believe them. If they tell us we’re bad little boys and girls, we shouldn’t believe them, you know? So don’t take everything that happens in dream as, you know, it’s gotta be true, cause it’s a dream or it’s gotta be untrue because it’s a dream, but it’s the feeling of the dream that really matters, that counts the most, I think. But that’s, you know, those sound very wonderful.

And as far as dreaming about saints, you know what they say? They say this, that if a Saint comes to your dream, if you dream about a Saint, it means that they’ve actually come to see you, because we can’t create, even our creative consciousness, we can’t create the form of a saint. A Saint comes from within to us. So, if we get Darshan of the Saint in our dreams, they say it’s usually because they’ve come to see us.

So, and yeah, that’s wonderful you could meet your grandfather. That’s wonderful. Yeah. And it’s the feeling of it. That’s the essence of it.

Okay. It’s not just, it’s like, “Oh, is it really my grandfather?” It doesn’t really matter. Was your grandfather really your grandfather anyway? What dream was that? So, but the feeling you have, that’s really the essence of it. That you should trust that, or at least recognize that clearly. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. By the way, when, I don’t know if you’ve read a Chants of a Lifetime but, you know, I tell the story, one story of my former girlfriend coming to see me after she died. And she was very angry at me and I was flipped out. I woke up and I was like, ah, so I ran to the temple and I told him the whole story.

He didn’t, he banged me on the head and said, “Don’t worry. She won’t bother you anymore.”

I mean, it’s a much longer story, but the point was he, he tacitly agreed that that’s what happened. You know? I mean, he didn’t, he wouldn’t say that. He didn’t say that, but by saying, by blessing me, he said, “don’t worry. She won’t…” that he did, you know, recognize that she came to see me. So that’s an interesting, yeah.

And so, I never doubted it. I always, in fact, a psychic told me, not that many years ago, that she, she pulled that out of my conscious and she said, “Oh yeah, you know that girl, she came to see you after she died? She was very proud of that.” She said that she, that she was able to come see me and give me a hard time, actually. Anyway, Ram Ram best of luck.

Take care.

Okay. My friends, I’m sorry, but I think we’ve got to go. Well, the good news is that even if we were all together in one room, everybody wouldn’t have been able to ask their question. So, it’s just like real life. Right? Thank you so much for coming today and hanging out. Really. I enjoyed it so much, being with you and being together.

The post Special Edition Conversations With KD April 25, 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 46 | The Meaning of Ram

“When you shape divinity, your notion of the Divinity, by saying ‘Ram Ram Ram’ and use the Name for ‘joy’ and ‘enjoyment’, ‘Ramaniya’, ‘to be enjoyed in that form’, you know, it’s a gerundial thing, ‘to be enjoyed,’ ‘Ramaniya’ means. And then, you are saying that, this great power that I want to merge myself with out of my devotion, I want to connect to out of my devotion and I want to feel the presence in me of that, then that is enjoyment.” – Robert Thurman

KD: When we were singing just before, it occurred to me to ask you, so this chanting of the Tara Mantra is, in India, they call this Nama Japa, the repetition of the Names.

Bob: Sure.

KD: So, Maharajji used to say, “Ram nam karne se sab pura ho jata.”

Bob: Ram?

KD: Ram Nam Karne Se Sab Pura Ho Jata. From the repetition of these Names, everything is accomplished. Everything is brought to fulfillment and completion.

Bob: Why not?

KD: Well, I would like you to tell them why.

Bob: Well, I said that in the meditation.

KD: Yeah.

Bob: So, Ram, I mean if you think about Ram…

KD: Just, all the Names, any of the Names. He just meant the Names of God.

Bob: Yeah, but I thought it was especially Rama, though. He said, you can get everywhere just saying the Name “Rama”.

KD: Yeah.

Bob: Ok? So, Ram is a way of expressing divinity. Now a lot of, a number of Hindu theologians today might still go for a Maha Ishwara idea. Which means to say, a creator deity who created everything. But not really. It’s not really at home in India, that idea. Like that Abrahamic type of idea. In other words, that there’s one guy that everything can be blamed on. All the “ness”. It’s not really a comfortable Indian idea, because like the, you know, ok, the Shaivites… I don’t think the Shaivites ever had a war against the Vaishnavites. They had wars against, actually in South India, Shaivites had wars against the Jains and the Jains fought back. I was surprised. They’re big non-violence people. They had bad wars between Jains and Shaivites. They never had a war against Buddhists in ancient times. Now the Tamil, they pretend that it’s a Buddhist and Hindu in the Tamil, in Sri Lanka, but it isn’t really Buddhist. It’s fake Buddhist and it’s stupid terrorist Hindus. It isn’t really Buddhist and Hindu. And many many Hindu kings… I was just in Sri Lanka and I was looking at the history and many Hindu kings from Tamil Nadu and other places came and then they ruled the Buddhists there without suppressing Buddhism. And the Buddhist kings were there and they never tried to suppress Hinduism particularly, but now and then they would have, they would… and the religion would be an excuse. So, I’m saying that India has a very strong idea of Divinity and so does Buddhism. You know, when Buddha was born in the Buddha myth, the two people who gave Him his first bath were Brahma and Indra. You know, Brahma was the Brahminical Deity and Indra was the Vedic Maha Deity, you know the king of the Gods in the Vedic idea, like Zeus. Indra was like Odin, actually, connects to Odin and Zeus and Brahma was like a, kind of a little bit monotheistic type, but really based, having to do with the Vedic ritual. Brahma. And Brahma means the sound of language and all this. There’s a whole story about Brahma. But not really a creator so strongly. And the idea that one Being created everything and is in control of it all is pretty much not the best flavor in India, actually. It’s not the normal flavor. So, the reason I’m saying that is, and I will talk more about that, some Buddhist sutra where Brahma meets Buddha, where they talk together. But, so Buddhists never, Buddhists are not atheists at all, but they just don’t think there’s one creator. That’s the main point. And I think that they don’t really, when they switch back and forth, you know, He, Brahma the Creator, the Destroyer and the Preserver, right? Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the Destroyer, Brahma the creator, but then they all kind of intermingle and then they all tumble into each other.

KD: Yeah, and then there’s the Maha, there’s the Great One.

Bob: And they avoid, the developed the kind of ancient religious pluralism by saying, “Well, the one I like emanates as the One you like.” And then, “You think the One that You like emanates as the One that I like.” And the Buddhists and the Hindus did that sort of thing in the ancient time. So, what I’m saying, Rama therefore is a version of Divinity, His Name means “to play” and “to enjoy”. “Rati” means “delight” and it can mean “sexual delight”,  as well as, you know, eating food. “Bhoga”… some Bhoga can mean “orgasm.” “Bhoga” can mean “eating food”. Some Bhoga means “orgasm”. So, the Indians were not anti-pleasure like a few other people we know about in history. They were not. And even though they had tremendous asceticism and they had monkey monks and monk monkeys and monk people but they were not anti-pleasure, really. And so “Brahma” means that the most powerful thing in the world is joyful, wants to play. Ravana, in the Ramayana for example, interrupts that by running away with Sita, which is His fault because joy is, of the male, is the female, you know, like the female and the male. That’s also ancient an thing, you know? Most of the Hindu deities have a Mrs. Rama and Mrs. Vishnu a Mrs. Shiva, they do. They don’t have the poor Yahweh. Where’s Mrs. Yahweh? She’s just a ghost. She’s a Holy Ghost. Shekhina. Where’s she? She’s a ghost. Well, you can’t have that much fun with a ghost. And it sucks. So, naturally He gets grumpy. He’s sees people having fun and, in Sodom and Gamorrah, and blasts them. “If I can’t have fun, they’re not going to have fun.” You know? So, India was never like that. So, “Rama” means “joyfulness,” “graciousness” and then there’s this little interruption and Ravana’s like, destroying it, and He conquers that and then He’s back together with Sita, you know? That’s the whole theme of that, you know? But the divinity, that the Divine wants to come through you. Even this thing, Krishna, that Krishna and listen, they had color problems in India. Don’t believe some Brahmin who tells you, “Oh, no, we didn’t have that. No way.  We don’t… all you and the slaves and the racism in America.” They have the caste system.

KD: They do.

Bob: Totally white and dark. Malcolm X read about white virtue and dark sin. He would know that there’s already a color thing from ancient time in Sanskrit. Definitely. And yet, Krishna is the dark God and He loves you and then your soul is a gopi loving Him, I mean, that’s like, that’s pretty intense. That is intense. And the Indian achievement of taking in the whole Krishna thing, Krishna-Radha thing, once they passed Rama and Sita, actually, and Krishna-Radha and this sort of erotic, the unification of the erotic with the sublime spiritual, so bringing all the fully erotic energy into the spiritual. Instead of like, “Oh, the spiritual is not erotic. Oh no no that’s the dirty stuff. Dirty. Dirty. Ooh.” No way. India achieved that. Where the eros and agape where the eros and agape sit together, actually. The proper eros, proper eros is opening to the Beloved. Some pathetic one is grabbing and using the Beloved. That’s pathetic eros. That’s some kind of European pathetic armored sex, you know? Like Wilhelm Reich freaks about it, he doesn’t like it. But India, they saw through that, you know? And so, Jai Rama or Jai Sita, but I like “Jai Sita”. I like “Jai Radha” you know? I’m a recovering chauvinist wasp, you know, and I really, you know, the female element, is, now is the time to arise and put a stop to this nonsense. We were cheated out of our mom president. Totally cheated. She did win the election 100%. She’s like Al Gore. She’s president in exile. In Westchester. But you know, that can be exile. But you know, it doesn’t matter even, gender, who does next, but we’re going to get back there. So, I’m just saying that that Rama thing, so everything is there. Now, one thing I have to say about the Name, you see, the Jewish tradition has a very brilliant thing that I like where the Name of God, because they were semi-nomadic and nomads have a better, they get less stuck on hierarchies than urban people, and they had this great thing where YHWH, you can’t pronounce it. There’s no vowel. This is something you never even know in English. We don’t know that. Without a vowel, consonant has no sound. Did you know that?

KD: yeah.

Bob: I only discovered that when I discovered Sanskrit. I went to all good schools. And in Grammar, nobody ever mentioned that.

KD: It was obvious.

Bob: Seriously. We have, no, you try to say a mantra without a vowel.

KD: No, you can’t. But in Sanskrit, everything consonant has a sound.

Bob: What?

KD: In Sanskrit, every consonant has a sound.

Bob: No, but that’s a vowel. “ah” is a vowel. “Ah” is the primal vowel. Brahm-ah.

KD: All right.

Bob: “ah” is the creation.

KD: Ok, go ahead. You were saying.

Bob: So, that, you know the, in the Indian cosmology in the time of Pralaya, when the universe is in a state of, there’s multiverses, actually, when a local universe within a multiverse is in a state of dissolution, when there’s no sort of Earth and whatever, at that time, they don’t have an idea that’s there’s energies or atoms or quarks or something lying around. They don’t have that idea. They have an idea that there are consonants hanging around and the vowels have taken a break. And the consonants are lying around soundlessly and then when “ah” comes, the “ah” comes and picks them up and then articulates the mantras that then create all objects and the planets. That’s Indian. So India really had the thing about words create everything. So that’s the thing about the Name. But I just wanted to praise the Jewish thing because, then some of the more mystical Jewish writers, in English, they go G-D. They don’t put an “o” in there. So, you can’t really pronounce that. And that’s a very good vision because, also, when human beings say a Name of something, they think they’ve controlled it.

KD: And they think they know it.

Bob: So they think that’s a way of acting arrogant about it.

KD: And they think they know it.

Bob: “God told me to do this or that” or something, you know. So, then that sort of, that’s a way of sort of absolutizing and acting like they are the mouthpiece of God. So, when you can’t say that Name, it means you acknowledge that the universe is not something you can control, the power of the universe. So, that’s kind of very cool. On the other hand, even in that, you can shape different with sound and language, so when you shape divinity, your notion of the Divinity, by saying “Ram Ram Ram” and use the Name for “joy” and “enjoyment”, “Ramaniya”, “to be enjoyed in that form”, you know, it’s a gerundial thing, “to be enjoyed,” “Ramaniya” means. And then, you are saying that, this great power that I want to merge myself with out of my devotion, I want to connect to out of my devotion and I want to feel the presence in me of that, then that is enjoyment. You’re not saying, you’re not saying, you know, “Jai Dukha (suffering)”. You know? “Dukha Dukha Jai Dukha, Om Jai Dukha Dukha” you don’t sing that. You’re thinking “Jai Krishna,” “Jai Rama” and “Jai Krishna” is like, “Krishna” means “black.” Right?

KD: Dark like a cloud. Ram was also dark.

Bob: So this would be like, “Jai Krishna” is like somebody, like the guy in “Black Klansman” thinking He was talking to a white guy. “Oh yeah, I know when I’m talking to a white guy.” “Oh really? Is that right?” And a black guy’s talking there. You know? That was so cool. Or it was like the kind of joy that Chris Rock emanated one day. I happened to be at a dinner where he was present and he just couldn’t restrain himself. He’d just seen Black Panther and he said, “They used to say that black movies couldn’t really make money. I was just at a movie and the hero was black and everyone was black and the director was black and the cinematographer was black and everyone was black and in one weekend we made a billion dollars. And all you had to at that time in New York, you’d go around and you’d fist bump anybody. The guy in the street, you’d fist-bump him and mention Black Panther and it felt good.” And they knew that they would. They did. So in India, by loving Krishna, India is transcending where they had a light and dark in their uncaste, outcaste people were the dark ones, and somehow over centuries, that’s the love of God coming there with Radha and Him and the Gopis and the whole thing. That’s beautiful. That’s a huge, huge cultural achievement which we need, we need now. We can do it faster. Just go watch Black Panther 50 times. Anyway never mind. It’s ok.

KD: No mind.

Bob: Or blue people. You know we love blue people. Blue-black they associated the blue-black Krishna with the thunder cloud of the monsoon, you know. The color of the monsoon thunder cloud.

KD: Yeah. Dark cloud. Very dark.

Bob: You know, and avatar is a blue hero, you know. The Indians, an avatar Blue and they were nice. Did you notice that? When they won, they were nice? They didn’t kill those people. In the war, the casualties happened, but once they, they sent them home. They sent the little corporate guy home.

KD: Ok.

Bob: Ok. Why are they laughing?

KD: I don’t know.

Bob: Are they laughing? That’s the whole point. “Jai Rama” means “cheer up.”

KD:  I think because they just went on a long trip and found themselves back just where they were. That’s why.

Bob: It means, “cheer up.” Cheer up. It means, “cheer up.” Instead of committing suicide.

KD: I can’t be miserable around Bob.

Bob: Bajarang Bali.  Bajarang Bali. Cheer up. Look how cheery he is! He’s super cheery!  That’s India. It is.

KD: It is. It’s Indian.

There is No Nothing

Bob: What time is it?

KD: Time to go to sleep.

Bob: Yeah, I think so.

KD: Yeah. Ok.

Bob: There is a special sleep yoga I want to share with you. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

KD: There is. Yeah. We’ll do that tomorrow for three hours in the morning.

Bob: I want to say something. I have one more thing, one more small thing. We do have a few minutes according to the schedule and this is that. When you fall asleep tonight, you, as you’re muttering “Ram Jai Ram, Rama Rama Jai Krishna, Hare Krishna Hare Hare” then when you do that, as you fall asleep, right, your lights are out and you close your eyes and hopefully, you know, this, your roommate isn’t noisy if you have one. This and that. In my case, it’s easy, I just turn off my hearing aids. And, but you don’t think that even though your last moment of consciousness is slipping into a darkness, you don’t think that that’s where you spend the night because the clear light of the void, the bliss energy of the universe, of Ram and everybody is transparent. It’s not a bright light, and it’s not a darkness, it’s a gray light. But it’s like an infinite energy of transparency. And the reason I say that, is that we are all educated to think that, at the bottom of the universe is nothingness and that when we die, we’ll be nothing. And even if we believe in reincarnation, or even if we’ve done Hinduism or Buddhism, we have a subliminal feeling that this is the only life, because we’re educated like that. We hear it from all the supposed authorities, not in churches but in science classes, and you know, they write popular books, you know, Steven Pinker and people that you know, that they assure us that that form, that future life stuff that some weirdos in California, you know, telling your fortune, you’re going to be reborn as Cleopatra or something, I mean, really, they make it sound ridiculous. Whereas, actually, it’s obvious that we’re, nobody gets to die and stay dead because there’s no nothing. We all know for sure, there is no such thing as nothing. Is anybody unsure about that? They think nothing is something? Well, the scientists do, and they assure us that nothing is something and not only is it something, it’s some place, and it’s where we go when we die. So, subliminally, we reinforce that force view, very crippling view that it’s a belief to our spirituality, very crippling. We reinforce it by falling asleep and thinking we lay in dark nothingness and then we wake up. Because there’s no sense of time when you’re sound asleep, right? Isn’t that annoying? If you don’t sleep long enough, you wake up, you’re still tired? Terrible. But if you really have a good sleep, you wake up all energized, right? You couldn’t have got energy from nothing. Could you? Nothing has no energy to give you. Where would the energy have come from? If you lay in nothingness? So, the thing is, you lie in the transparency of the predawn twilight grey light of infinite energy. You lie in a bath of infinite energy and that’s why you’re so ready to go and chant and meditate and understand new things in the morning. Ok? But you don’t see that. Because you are that already so you can’t see it. What you see is, you go into dark. You let go of everything to rest in darkness. And that’s very nice and darkness is also friendly. Because it’s not nothing, either. Ok? There is no nothing. Don’t worry. But it’s always something, so do worry. What kind of something? What kind of something is it going to be is very key. So, with that, sweet dreams.

KD: Good night.

Bob: Ok. I’m so happy. I’m so happy. And remember to pray for Sharon.

KD: Yeah.

Bob: Before you dream. Please say some chants for Sharon. This is all for Sharon, this weekend. Ok?

The post Ep. 46 | The Meaning of Ram appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 23, 2020

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

Q:  Please put some light on how to overpower negative thoughts and anxiety, especially during meditation.

“If you’re meditating, you’re not supposed to be trying to overpower anything. You notice what’s going on and you come back to your mantra or your focus of attention. Where does it say you’re supposed to fight with your thoughts? That’s a misconception. That’s a struggle. Meditation is not a struggle. You just keep coming back again and again, again and again. And you’re training yourself to release those thoughts once you notice.” – Krishna Das

So, that was a half an hour, a half an hour that we didn’t spend as the target of our own obsessive thinking, of our own negative emotions, of our fears, our anxieties, and in the situation that we’re in now, that stuff is bouncing off the walls all day long. So, when we add a practice to our lives, it gives us something to focus on and without recognizing it even, we’ve released so much of those clouds of stuff that are surrounding us in our day.

It’s not necessary to try to manipulate yourself, to have one particular type of experience while you’re chanting. The main idea is to remember to pay attention, to listen, to hear, to allow the chant to flow over you and to allow yourself to flow into it.

This is not a philosophical situation. We don’t have to learn about the name. We don’t have to know all the incredible things that they say about the name, that yogis and saints have been talking about for thousands of years. Not necessary. What’s necessary is to repeat it, to remember, to bring the name to mind, to use the breath, to sing it, to use the breath to say it, to use the awareness to pay attention. Add that to our lives. That’s what we need to do.

And it becomes so obvious in this kind of a situation. This is forced retreat for us. So, we’re faced with all our stuff. So, the need to do practice becomes very strong. So, take this time to cultivate this practice. Do it, do it a few times a day, just for five minutes or whatever, 10 minutes, whatever. Keep coming back to it during the day. When you notice the chat going on in your head, spend a minute with it.

They say that there’s a place within us that these names are always being repeated, are always flowing. And the more you pay attention to the chant and the name, the more you hear that in your mind as the day goes on. You’ll be busy doing something and all of a sudden, there it is. You might actually just notice it, and not even notice that you notice it and then you’re busy with something else. It’s very… the reason it’s such a subtle practice, because even though we think we are doing this, you and me, we think we’re sitting down to sing or do Japa or mantra meditation. We think that we’re doing that, but in reality, it’s the name that’s repeating us. The name goes on repeating us from the inside, moving out, outward, outward, and purifying our hearts as it moves through us.

So, at least that’s what they say.

Q: Are there any religions that teach God is one with you with one or do they all teach God is separate and above?

No, none of the Eastern, so-called Eastern religions teach the God is separate and above us. They, there are some, some religious philosophies that, even in India, that say that you don’t want to merge with God. You want to stay separate to enjoy the bliss of union. If you merge, they say, then you, you don’t have that. But I don’t know if that’s true.

So, no, it’s just the opposite, actually. Western religions usually say that because Western religions, Western culture is based on the ego, on the belief that each one of us is a separate being from all other beings. Our selves are separate. And the Eastern religions, so-called mystical religions teach that yes, on one level, it appears that we’re separate, but when you see reality, you recognize, as my guru used to say, “Sab Ek.” All one, all, one. Many names, many forms, all one.

So, yeah. And mystical Christianity also goes in that direction too. All the so-called mystical aspects of religion talk about merging with God, which is the indwelling presence. Antarayaami, the indwelling presence. It isn’t out there. What’s out there? There’s nothing out there. It looks like there is. That’s what they call illusion.

The mind, the awareness, lights up stuff. Without the awareness, no stuff. And the karmas of each one of us is what creates all the stuff that we see when our awareness lights it up. Like the sun lights up the trees in the morning as it rises.

So, it’s the indwelling presence, which has manifested everywhere because it is everywhere.

Q: I can sing mantra along with me much easier than I can sing it on my own, repeating after you. Can you talk about that?

Me too. I can sing mantra along with me better than I can when I’m singing it by myself. These are just the habits of mind, the habits of thought, the vasanas, the tendencies of the mind to be caught up with the habitual way of, of living and of seeing things.

And it’s tamas. It’s tamasya. And it means, it means the inertia. To really turn within, you have to kind of, you automatically, you’re letting go of stuff. And there’s an inertia involved with that. So, when you, when you sit, do the practice, but don’t feel that you have to push all those thoughts away. Even the thought that, “Oh, this is hard you know, by singing by myself like this it’s hard.”

Is that a thought or a feeling, or is it? Yes. Let it go and come back. You’re getting stuck there thinking that that’s important. And even though it might seem to be the way it is in the moment, if you let go of it, where was it? It’s gone.

So, but that comes from our thinking that we have to feel a particular way, that we’re doing this practice and it’s like pushing a bliss button. And if we don’t get the bliss, if we’re not finding the button, we’re doing it wrong. That’s not the case. You can’t do it wrong. Just the doing it is such a big thing.  Just be aware of all your stuff. Don’t try. Do the practice, live your life. Do the practice. Live your life. Don’t judge yourself. That’s the program that’s running. You’re judging. You’re evaluating. With no judging, no evaluating, what’s the problem? You won’t find a problem.

So, you’re getting caught in, in identifying with those programs that are running. Let them go again, a million times a second. Just keep letting them go. It doesn’t matter. Letting go is what matters, not what you think about it, not how you evaluate it.

Q: When you first started chanting, were you particularly attracted to particular deities or chants? Did they affect you differently? Has this changed as your practice matured?

Thanks for thinking my practice matured.

Who knows? I was first, one of the first beings that I was very attracted to was Kali, Ma Kali, after I read Sri Rama Krishna’s Gospel of Ramakrishna. He used to sing the Kali and it was amazing. So, I was very attracted to that whole feeling, that whole being able to sing, to chant and feel love and all that. So, one time I was sitting with Maharajji, I think it was just me and him. And I had been practicing this bhajan, this Mira bhajan, this song by Mirabai, this famous, devotee of Krishna, a mystic devotee. So, I started to sing it for him and my tears were coming down my cheeks and I was singing it to him and I finished and I opened my eyes. I looked at him and he goes, “Why are you crying?”

And I went, Oh, I’m crying because I always wanted to be somebody who sang and cried tears of love. And there I was, I finally did it. Next.

Q: How can we get our egos on board with surrender so they remain loyal servants? Or is the ego inherently fearful and deceptive? I don’t know how to detach from my ego without cutting it off.

You can’t cut it off. You can’t detach from it. It’ll never serve your soul because it’s not supposed to. It’s not even real. It’s only a collection of thoughts that we identify with. There is no such thing as ego. There’s something we call ego, but it actually doesn’t exist.

Sri Ramana Maharshi, one of the great saints of the last generation, He said, “Asking the mind to kill the mind or the ego to kill the ego is like asking the policemen, the thief to be the policeman.” He said, “There’ll be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.”

So do your practice. Don’t think about it so much. It’s all ego down here. It’s all ego. We’re all on this shore. The other shore is enlightenment. First, we have to get to the boat. So, don’t, don’t, don’t worry about it. It’s not that big a deal. Everything is ego here, everything. Everything we do in our lives, almost everything has some motivation. It’s either based on greed or fear or pride or shame or selfish desires. All our motivations revolve around those kinds of things. That’s the way it is here. That’s what life is, this life, in this world, at this time, for most of us. By adding a practice to our lives, we’re adding another vector, another vibration you could even say, that doesn’t come from our stuff. The name doesn’t come from ego. It doesn’t come from a separate self. These names, these practices, and these names were brought to this world by beings who had totally transcended the illusion of self, who recognized reality, became one with the universe and said, here, try this. So, it didn’t come from our egos, our small “s” selves. Yeah.

Q: Do I feel the physical vibrations in spirals every time you build up a chant enough, or are those vibes just the part of opening up, accepting more and reduce over time?

I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I just sing. I don’t know what happens. There’s nobody in here planning like, “okay, I’ll speed up now.”

It just feels to go there. If you think that I know what I’m doing, other than squeezing this little box and pushing a button on the tabla machine, you’re dreaming. But I can do this pretty good cause I’ve been practicing for 50 years. So, I’m starting to get a clue as to what it might be about. The evenings just flow. They have their own flow. I’m not flowing it.

Q: Do I have a fear of death?

Well, I don’t know.

Q: Did you feel the shift after Ram Dass’s passing? an experience that altered your understanding of life?

I don’t feel like Ram Dass really went anywhere. I don’t, it’s, it’s kinda difficult to see his body now. It doesn’t seem to be available, but his presence is very strong. That’s not something new for me. My Guru left his body in ‘73, supposedly, and I feel him all the time. So, what I’m more afraid of the suffering, I suppose, pain. That’s probably what I’m more afraid of. I don’t know about death. I don’t really know what to expect. So, I feel that it’d be harder, the suffering that one might experience when one  gets sick and is dying, that might not be fun, but spiritual practice is what you would do anyway to develop the ability to have a good death, a death that wasn’t constricted by fear and clinging to life.

You want to be able to let go if that’s what’s going to happen. And at some point, it’s going to happen and we’re not going to have much of a choice at that point, except to let go. So, spiritual practice is the best way to live and the best way to die. A wonderful book by Ram Dass Mirabai Bush is “Walking Each Other Home.”

“Walking Each Other Home,” check it out. Fantastic

Q: How important is it that you can sing well if you want to lead kirtan?

Why do you want to lead kirtan?  Answer that question to yourself first, then we’ll talk about the rest.

Q:  Have you met Sri Anandamayi Ma?

Yes. I met her many times in India in the old days. She had a an ashram down the block from where Maharajji’s ashram was in Vrindavan. When he threw us out, we would go to her place, visit and have Darshan. And then we’d come back to Maharajji. He’d say, “You went to see Ma? Did she feed you? No, I feed you.”

They knew each other very well. Very well. Mr. Tiwari had been with Maharajji the first time that they met in this life, and they kind of looked at each other and just laughed, like “that’s you now? Oh my God.”

Q: Which Ramayana do I prefer?

Well, the version of the Ramayana that I’m closest to is Tulasi Das’s Ramayana.  And Tulasi Das was a Saint, I think, in the 16th century, the 1600s, maybe 1700s. I’m not sure. And at that time the Brahmins, the pundits were the only ones who could tell the stories because they were the only ones who spoke Sanskrit and the original Valmiki Ramayana which was the first version of the Ramayana, was in Sanskrit.

So they say Tulasi Das was reincarnation of Valmiki, and he retold the story in the vernacular language at the time, a dialect of Hindi called Avadhi, which is supposed to be the dialect spoken in Ayodhya, Ram’s kingdom in the time of Ram. And it’s all beautiful poetry and it’s very open and loving and Ram Dass gave me a copy of this when I first met him, before I went to India, and reading it was extraordinary. It rewired my brain because the story will be going along like this, and then all of a sudden something will happen and it’ll go into a complete explosion of love and go on, and it was just unbelievable, and then come back to the story and move along.

And it’s the kind of love we don’t have the wiring for in the West. It’s not romantic love. It’s not needy love. It’s not business love. It’s what the heart feels when it senses who it is, when the heart finally feels itself, as it is, it explodes with love, it flows with love.

So that’s what this book is about. It’s about the love that lives within us. And it tells a story of Rama, Hanuman, Sita Ram and yeah, it’ll rewire your brain and open up channels in you that you didn’t know existed.

Q: Please share your thoughts about overcoming food addictions, particularly coffee and sugar.

Now the sugar, no sugar. I use Monk Fruit. Lakanto. Monk Fruit is from a Chinese fruit. It’s just as sweet as sugar. No, no Glycaemic index at all. Diabetics can use it perfectly. It’s good for cooking. Good for coffee. So yeah. No, you shouldn’t drink coffee. Yeah. Yeah.

Be happy. Don’t worry about it. Do what’s healthy for you if you can. Those kinds of addictions aren’t that serious.

Q: There’s a question here, did Maharajji say if Ramakrishna was an incarnation of God?

I’m trying to remember. There was one time where somebody quoted Ramakrishna, I think it was, to Maharajji and Maharajji said, “I don’t follow Ramakrishna. I follow Christ.” So, what can I tell you?

But obviously he was a great being, I wouldn’t know, one way or the other,

Q: Do you think we have to pray or ask for something to God? Or have we been, already been given everything? In that case, we just have to give thanks. Sometimes I feel that pray or ask is a paradox.

It just depends how you feel about things, really. On one hand they say, God knows everything, supposedly. There’s no reason to ask for anything. It all comes to you. What you have and what’s going to come to you is what should come. What doesn’t come was not going to come. Well. I used to argue with Mr. Tiwari about this. We used to argue vociferously. We used to scream at each other about spiritual things.

So, I don’t know, I was having some problem and he said, “No, pray to Maharajji. Ask Maharajji to help.” Because he did that all the time.  And he was a great Yogi.

And I said to him, I said to him, “No, I don’t want to ask, I don’t have to want, I don’t want to have to ask him for things.”

And then Mr. Tiwari just with me, “Are you happy?”

And the answer was no, I was not happy. And yet I wasn’t letting myself,… you know, it just depends how your devotion is. Some people feel comfortable in not asking. They have peace with that. Some people are at peace with asking. Either way, it has to be with, you have to pray or not pray the way that you feel is, is, is, is a natural for you, that makes you happy. I don’t think there’s any particular one way that’s right or wrong.

Q: Did Maharajji know Bhagavan Nityananda? Did I meet Muktananda? What will happen when all our current masters leave the body?

Everything leaves the body. Nothing’s going to happen. It’s going to keep going on. 50 years ago, these current masters weren’t in bodies, there were other masters. They might be the same beings in other bodies.

This is not a relevant question. I mean, the main question is then how are you going to deal with your life right now? That’s what’s important.

So, on our way to India, me and Danny, and Rameshwar Das, we were in London waiting for a cheap flight to India, and Baba Muktananda had just come to London from India on his way to America for the first time. And I had had some experience with him previously while I was in America, from a picture of his. So, I had written to the ashram about it in India and they said, “Well, he’s coming to America in the fall. Go see him then.”

But I had left America before that. So, he happened to be in London while we were passing through. So, we went to see him. And we walked into this room, somebody’s house in London, and he looked up and he said, these boys aren’t English. Come here.”

So, we came in and he had us sit down and he asked us to come meditate with him in the morning, like at six in the morning or something crazy like that, you know?  So, we had no money. We had, we walked from the other side of London to this house. It took us about three hours. So, then we went home, we walked home. We laid down for a couple of hours. And then we walked back to the house and we walked in at like four or five or six in the morning. And we were ushered up to the bedroom and he was sitting like, naked on the bed with, maybe he had a langoti on, but he was covered with ashes and was sitting on the bed.

Whoa. It was powerful. I went “Whoa” like this.

So, he said, sit down, meditate. So, he gave us a mantra to sit with it. And sometime while we’re meditating, he got up and he went over, came over to each of us, I think. And he stuck his fingers in my eyes. He pushed really hard. I thought he was going to pop my eyeballs out. And then he made this thing on the top of my head like that.  Then after some time, it was time to go. And then I think he left for America shortly after that. We only saw him those two times, but he said to us, “Since you’re flying to Bombay, why don’t you go spend a week at my ashram before you go to your Guru?”

He said he knew Maharajji and we should go rest for a while at his place.

So, we did. We flew into Mumbai. And then we took a bus out to Ganeshpuri, and we spent a beautiful week there.

So, one afternoon, I was in this little kuthi that they gave us to stay in up on the Hill. There was nothing there, a small, one little room, one little building and some small kuthis. And I was reading the Gospel of Ramakrishna, actually, no Ramakrishna and his Disciples by Christopher Isherwood. Great book.

So, I was reading the part where Ramakrishna takes his foot, and he puts it on Vivekananda’s chest and Vivekananda starts to go into samadhi and then freaks out and pulls back and stops. Right? And Ramakrishna just laughed. So, I’m reading that point, “and he put his foot on the chest” and just at that moment, I kind of swooned and the book dropped from my hands, and I was lying on the bed, and my eyes went up, like where he pushed my eyes, and then I went out the top of my head up into the sky, into the, into space. And I was flying through space. I was going like, wow. And I see the stars and the planets. It was amazing. And then I thought to myself, did I take acid? And then I started to crash. I came down.

So, Baba Muktananda’s Guru, Swami Nityananda,  his place was just down the road. So, we used to go there and meditate and everything. When we got to, on our first Darshan with Maharaji when we came up North, finally, as we pranammed to him the first time, a picture of Nityananda fell out of Danny’s book and Maharajji said, “What’s that? Let me see.”

So, he took the picture of Nityananda and said, “Oh, he was a good sadhu, a good sadhu.”

For Maharaji, that means he’s God on earth. You know, when he said someone was a good sadhu or a great sadhu or a real Yogi, that means he’s really something. So, he knew Nityananda that way, anyway. I don’t think they ever met.

Q: I’m curious. What do I think of Zen Buddhism? Has anything from that tradition influenced you?

Oh, a lot. I used to sit, a lot of Zen sitting, before I went to India. One of the three books, I had read three books about this stuff in the old days, before meeting Ram Dass and learning more about India. One was “The Gospel of Ramakrishna,”  one was “Autobiography of a Yogi,”and one was “Zen and Japanese Culture” by TT Suzuki. And I was very, very into, into Zen Buddhism and samurai warriors and stuff like that because they were all, there were many spiritual aspects of that. And I had a friend named Fred who used to go to the Zen center in San Francisco and when I visited him, we used to go and sit there. He was like a little Buddha. I remember we came out of the Zen center and were waiting at the corner to cross the street, and when one of those city buses came by spewing diesel fumes, right? And Fred just went…. “Ahhhhh.” He was out there.

But I love Zen Buddhism. I love, you know, I have a lot of Buddhist teachers and I love Buddhist practice and philosophy and I find it very helpful for cutting through bullshit. Very helpful. Very helpful for seeing things clearly seeing your motivations and seeing where you’re caught.

Q:  Please put some light on how to overpower negative thoughts and anxiety, especially during meditation.

If you’re meditating, you’re not supposed to be trying to overpower anything. You notice what’s going on and you come back to your mantra or your focus of attention. Where does it say you’re supposed to fight with your thoughts? That’s a misconception. That’s a struggle. Meditation is not a struggle. You just keep coming back again and again, again and again. And you’re training yourself to release those thoughts once you notice. And in fact, this question is after the fact.

Okay, you’re meditating and you’ve got all this stuff going on. Do you know that it’s going on? Yes. So, if you know it’s going on, then you’re not stuck in it anymore. You’ve already come back. And now you’re judging yourself for being stupid and being caught. That’s just more stuff. Let go. You keep letting go. You keep letting go. And that Letting Go muscle continues to function during the day. That’s when those, that’s when you’re full of shit and you don’t know it. When you sit down to meditate, that’s when you realize how out of it we are, how, how completely on automatic, living in dreamland, that we are all the time. The rest of the time, we don’t know it because we’re gone. When you notice, then you’re not gone. Then you let go. You’ve already let go. But then, you’re adding the extra little whiplash to it, the, the other, you know, punch, gut punch, where you’re judging yourself and evaluating, blah, blah, blah, blah. You got to let go of that, too. Meditation means doing the practice, letting go. When you notice that you’re not paying attention, you’re already back.

Don’t stop in the middle and start judging yourself because then you’re not letting go of that. Keep letting go. Things change over time.

Q:  Raghu Markus always asks his guests what led them to a spiritual path…

Now we’re quoting Raghu Markus, my very dear friend and Guru brother. I don’t know. When did I start searching?

You know, there was a part of me, looking back, that never fit in where I was, never fit in my family. I didn’t know who my parents were. I mean, it was crazy. I couldn’t relate to anybody. I couldn’t relate to the people in school. I learned how to show them and give them what I knew they wanted from me. But there was always that part of me that was trying to find something real. That was just always there. And I think most of us have that, but we, we push it down. We bury it because it’s hard to deal with. It’s hard to, once we take responsibility for recognizing that life as we’re living it is not enough, then we have to find a way to change. We have to find a way to live in a way that works for us. So that’s a big, a really big thing.

Q:  How can I get deeper in my spiritual experiences? Yesterday I felt myself leave earth, but it was not long at all before I came back.

Where do you want to go? And why?  Experiences come, experiences go. That’s not the end all and be all, these experiences. The experiencer is the one that is real. The awareness within us is our true nature. That doesn’t come and go. That’s always there, no matter what the experience is. You think it was great that you left earth? I think it’s not so great.

Big deal. So you went, you came back. So, that’s going to happen a billion times. You never can go somewhere else because you’re here. You might have a state of mind where you become not aware of yourself in a certain way, but there’s awareness there as well. Otherwise, you would have no experience.

Just be here. Learn to be a good human being. What’s so bad about earth? There’s nothing bad about earth. All the uneasy stuff about earth is within us. Learn how to become a human being, a good human being. Practice developing compassion and kindness for yourself and others. Then you won’t have to waste time going anywhere else and coming back. Up and down, up and down, up and down. That’s not going to stop. Anywhere you go, you have to come back. Might as well be here. Might as well stay at home, especially if there’s TV.

Q:  How to overcome suicidal thoughts and overcome the fear of failure?

Once again, just the word “overcome” has a desperateness about it, right? It’s just thoughts. It’s just feelings. They come and they go. There are reasons they come and go. They don’t come out of nowhere, but when you’re here with them, you have the option to release them. But sometimes it’s like trying to push a cloud away. You can’t really push it away, but if you’re just at ease within that cloud, then you’re okay with it. So, thoughts of suicide and despair and fear, we all have that. And especially at a time like this, and it’s not just us, the whole world is in a crazy space. So, even if we feel that, we think it’s only my fault, this is only my stuff, and we judge ourselves for having it, but no. We’re absorbing it.  It’s everywhere all the time, now. So much fear, so much anxiety and with good cause really, but still, when it comes down to our inner experience, we can always practice letting go. We can always practice noticing how we judge ourselves for having those feelings.

Ultimately, we have to just slow down, slow down, slow down, and anywhere that you feel you can get help with those kinds of very painful dark feelings, you should try. Counseling, therapy, antidepressants, anything that you need to do to help yourself, you should try. There’s no, there’s no reason not to.

Someone once asked the Dalai Lama about painkillers. “When you’re dying and you’re in terrible pain, is it bad to take painkillers?” they said.

And he said, “No, no.” He said the part of you that reincarnates is not affected by the painkillers in any way. So, there’s no reason to suffer for it for no reason.

So, if you need, if you need antidepressants and anti-anxiety to get through the day and live at ease, there’s no nothing wrong with that. And it might not be forever. It might just be a short period of time, but those are things that you need to speak to a specialist about. And it’s not a bad thing in any way. Do what you have to do to get through the night, whatever you have to do. And that’s what it comes down to.

Q: How do you reconcile Buddhism ideas about how there is no God, you are empty, there’s nothing, and so on?

That’s a complete misunderstanding of Buddhist philosophy. It’s not like that.

Inside that philosophy, certain terms are used just like inside of Hindu, so-called Vedic philosophy, certain terms are used. They’re all describing the same thing from a different angle. So, don’t worry about that stuff. It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. All one. All one. We’re here. We’re all part of one being. There’s many ways to describe that. Many paths to the same place. Don’t worry about that stuff. Just calm your ass down. Do some practice, whatever it is.

Q:  If, if I could go back in time, is there anything I would like to say or ask Maharajji?

Yeah, there is, but that’s for me. Thank you. I would just say “Don’t send me away!”

Q: Do you do yoga at all? It doesn’t look like it was your important to your Guru. It could help to live better until we die.

Yeah. One of the things Mahrajji said with about Asana practice, he said, “Don’t do headstands.”

He told us not do headstands unless you’re eating a very pure sattvic diet. He said the impurities in the food will go into your brain. But he never said not to do Asana practice.  For us, it basically fell away when we got there. We were home, you know, we were exactly where we wanted to be. And we also felt we would never leave. And we didn’t meditate. We didn’t do asanas. We sang. We chanted, we chanted to him. We chanted on our own. That was the expression of being home and happy within his presence, in that love.

So, I do asanas. Yeah, because I’m old and I can’t get out of bed in the morning. So, I definitely have to do some Asana practice, pranayama and those things. Those are good for the body, very good for the body, and they have the ability to clean some of the inner channels, the inner winds. There’s a lot of very subtle things about pranayam and practice. Most people aren’t aware of all that. Basically, it’s just glorified exercise for most people, but it does calm your ass down a bit, which is a good thing. So, you can do.

Q: How can one cut down on compulsive behavior and exert some will or let the divine will exert itself?

There’s two ways to go. The way of surrender and the way of… bhakti or jnana, so to speak, surrender and wisdom. If you’re on the path of surrender, then it’s not your problem. The problem belongs to your guru or your, your divine, your deity. If you really surrender, which nobody has, almost nobody, surrender is actually the goal. It’s the path and the goal.

So, Hhere’s where it Ramana Maharshi says: “Surrender to him or her and abide by his will, whether he appears or vanishes, await his pleasure. If you ask him to do as you please… ‘remove this for me to take this away, take this compulsive behavior’… If you ask him to do as you, please, then it’s not surrender, but a command to him.

You cannot have him obey you and yet think that you have surrendered. He knows what is best and when and how to do it. Leave everything to him. His is the burden. You no longer have any cares. All your cares are his. Such is surrender. This is Bhakti. Or inquire to whom these questions arise. Who is having this compulsive behavior? Who can’t stop eating this or that and drinking coffee, and maybe doing worse things to oneself? Dive deep into the heart and remain as the self.

One of these two ways is open to the aspirant. Neither way is easy. Both ways take serious commitment and serious practice.”

So, compulsive and obsessive behaviors can be very destructive to ourselves, but even so, we can do practice. We can add that to our lives and that can’t help but help us. That’s got to help us as time goes on. Once again, using your personal will to try to overcome very destructive behaviors is very, very difficult.

We all need help. AA is great for those kinds of things, because you get into a group and you start talking and sharing your weaknesses with people and you kind of get a feeling. You see everybody’s got the same problems.

So, there’s no quick answer to that. There’s no ready, no button to push to make it all okay. This is your life. This is what you’re dealing with. If you’re on the path of devotion, you try to offer it to the guru, offer it to God and try your best to keep releasing again and again. You can’t just stop that stuff. There’s a reason we do those things to ourselves and without uncovering some of those reasons and releasing some of that negativity, it’s very hard to change those behaviors, very hard, but what else are you going to do? Except try and try everything you can, every way, every path, every teacher, every method. Do whatever you feel is going to help you. Commit to doing that. Commit to trying to solve that issue.

There’s so much judging ourselves for falling in the hole again, you know. It happens. We’re like that. So, there’s all kinds of stuff. It’s the stuff we do and then the stories we tell ourselves about the stuff we do, piling the shit on. Very difficult stuff. Five minutes a day, do some practice. In that five minutes you won’t be hurting yourself. So that’s good. That’s not nothing.

Oh, Journey to Enlightenment. This is a book about, someone’s asking about this book. It’s a book about a great Tibetan Rinpoche Saint, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, a fantastic book written by Matthew Ricard, a Frenchman who became a great disciple of his, of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.  There’s even a movie called Brilliant Moon. Brilliant Moon by Matthew Ricard. It’s a movie and a book. Very good.

That’s what I read. I love to read the stories of the saints, biographies, autobiographies, to see how they move through their lives, what they did, how they dealt with people, how they manifested. That’s the stuff that I love the most to read.

That last reading, it’s from the teachings of Ramana Maharshi. I don’t know exactly where it’s from. Oh yes, I do. It’s from a book called Padamalai , which is by a disciple of Ramana Maharshi named Muruganar and it’s on page 20.

Q: What’s the connection between Hanuman and Green Tara?

Well, I don’t really know, however, some of the Lamas that I’ve spoken with and Tibetan practitioners have told me that they feel… Bob Thurman, for instance, he, he feels that Hanuman is a form of Chenrezig Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig, the bodhisattva of compassion. And of course, Tara is also a manifestation or an embodiment of that, is that same being and another form of that same bodhisattva of compassion, a female form. But there’s a lot more about this.  There’s 21 different aspects of Tara and I don’t really know them all because it’s not my, what I’m immersed in most of the time.

The thing about, “do I do yoga at all, it doesn’t look like it was important to my Guru…” You know, Maharajji didn’t teach like that so much. Like he never told us to do practice for the sake of our own spiritual advancement, so to speak. When we asked him, how do we find God? He said, “serve people.” When we asked him, how do you raise Kundalini?

He said, “feed people.”

So, he was bypassing this whole egocentric, “I’m gonna find my way to enlightenment” kind of thing, because neurosis can take over so quickly with our practice. It’s ridiculous. You start competing with yourself and judging yourself and evaluating, “how am I doing? Well, yesterday was a great meditation today really sucks, I can’t do anything.”

Ego, all ego, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He didn’t encourage that. He didn’t not encourage it, but he didn’t encourage it. He said, “don’t think of yourself.”

When I was going to kill myself. He said, “You can’t die. Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.”

What?

Because why? Because he never thought of himself. He never. In that being there was no “me” anymore. The planet of me had been dissolved and there was only God, only one, only love, only truth, only reality.

Somebody wanted me to tell the story about Dada, Maharajji’s disciplee, Dada Mukherjee.

Dada was an incredible being. He was a communist economics professor. In India, Communism, it’s more of an economic philosophy. It’s not really the same as in China and Russia. It was different than that. And he was really just immersed in Maharajji so much. It was incredible. So, in 1989, we came to Allahabad to stay at the Khumba Mela at a sadhu’s camp, a yogi’s camp, and we got there early so we could spend some time with Maharajji, ah, sorry, with Dada at his house, Dada’s house.

So, after a few days, that Baba sent one of his disciples to lead us to the camp because there were 20 million people and it would be hard to find it if we didn’t know where it was. So, this youngish, younger sadhu walks into the house so full of himself. It was horrible. And he was disrespectful to Dada, who was his elder. And, you know, he was just radiating bullshit. And Dada thought this was the Baba that we were going to see. So, he, he was like, he grabbed my arm and he took me into Maharajji’s room and he closed the door behind me, behind us. And he goes over to this cabinet… old kind of aluminum cabinet and he reaches down underneath and gets a key. He unlocks the cabinet, he opens the doors, he reaches down on the back shelf, way in the back and he pulls out something wrapped in this funky, old, dusty newspaper. Right? And he looks at me and he unwraps it. And it’s this cheap aluminum water pot, lota, kind of rusty and dusty. He holds it and he looks at me.

He says, “Krishna Das, do you see, do you see?” And I said, “No Dada. I don’t see.”

“Do you see, do you see?”

And now I’m beginning to freak out a little bit. I said, “No Dada. I don’t see.”

He said, “This is what Maharajji left for me the last time he was here at the house, before he left the body. This, he left this, he left this, do you see?”

I said, no.

He said, “You don’t have to shine,” and then folded up the paper again, put it on the bottom shelf, locked the cabinet, closed the cabinet, locked it, put the key back there and left me standing there.

You don’t have to shine.

How much of our life do we spend trying to shine, either in someone else’s eyes or our own eyes? We spend so much time shining up this meat puppet, trying to attract things we want things, we think we need, trying to get healthy, to avoid being sick, even. So much time shining ourselves up.

The post Special Edition Conversations With KD April 23, 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 45 | A Meditation With Bob

“Why do we want Ram, the Divine Rama, and utter the name, Rama, which comes from a verb that means to play and to enjoy? Actually, Rama does. ‘Ramaniya’ means to enjoy something. And why do we say, ‘Jai Ram’? May Ram triumph. May the Divine triumph. Why do we celebrate that? This is India’s vision, actually, which is the vision of the goodness of the universe. India is really the garden of Eden in ancient time. The richest, most benevolent nature in Eurasia, by far. The ancient civilizations in India were the most peaceful. Everything is relative, of course, in the relative world, but they were. And so, it’s natural that from India, a reassuring prayer emanates throughout history as we know it, that the world is a beautiful thing, that the default situation, if you just let it all go, is all right, you will be embraced, you will be caught in Nirvana. You will be caught in the clear light of the void, as the Buddhists called it. You will be caught in the fundamental bliss energies, Satchidananda, as the Vedantists called it; Being, Awareness and Bliss.” – Robert Thurman

Bob: Shall we try to meditate together a little bit? I would like to lead a meditation if you’d like to go into meditative mode. Those of you who are sitting on the mat, cross-legged etcetera, you’re in good shape. Those of you who are sitting in a chair, you should try to cross your ankles and fold your hands in your lap and touch the tip of your thumbs if you can, although I sort of unorthodoxly like to link my fingers. I don’t know why. I’m not good about that.

And, any way you’re comfortable, and tuck your chin a little and your shoulders a little back so you can sit still for a little while without being uncomfortable. Now, think about your breathing. Put your attention in the flow of breath in the nostrils if you can. Your lips should be loosely closed, tongue on the roof, on the palate behind the teeth, and breathing through the nostrils if possible, and just enjoying breathing. You don’t have to count but just revel in the fact and feel happy at that fact that when you draw in breath, energy comes to you from the universe and when you draw, when you exhale breath, waste product from your physical system is embraced by the universe, especially, in this case, the glorious of plants that are there, so kind to us, producing the energy oxygen that we need, producing from the sun and then taking up the carbon that we exhale and creating their own green leaved beauty, flowers, fruits, grains, all sorts of things that we need. So the fact that you can breathe and do breathe shows that this world is there for you. And, in a way, you are helping this world. Normally, we don’t even think about it. We take it for granted. But it’s a little bit of a clue of what all the great teachers of reality have taught us about the world being a good place, actually. The world being a benevolent place. The world being a fitting place for us. Of the four noble opinions, or facts, or truths, that the Buddha taught, His basic framework, at least. He also untaught them at other times, but He was never dogmatic, but in those things that He taught, the One that is real, most real, is the third One, the truth of Nirvana. The other ones are less real, and so, in a way, the whole gift of India, why do we all love India so much? Why do we want Ram, the Divine Rama, and utter the name, Rama, which comes from a verb that means to play and to enjoy? Actually, Rama does. Ramaniya means to enjoy something. And why do we say, “Jai Ram”? May Ram triumph. May the Divine triumph. Why do we celebrate that? This is India’s vision, actually, which is the vision of the goodness of the universe. India is really the garden of Eden in ancient time. The richest, most benevolent nature in Eurasia, by far. The ancient civilizations in India were the most peaceful. Everything is relative, of course, in the relative world, but they were. And so, it’s natural that from India, a reassuring prayer emanates throughout history as we know it, that the world is a beautiful thing, that the default situation, if you just let it all go, is all right, you will be embraced, you will be caught in Nirvana. You will be caught in the clear light of the void, as the Buddhists called it. You will be caught in the fundamental bliss energies, satchidananda, as the vedantists called it, being, awareness and bliss. And this is a hard lesson, either in the Eastern direction; Chinese, Japanese, they don’t all have this view, and in the west and middle east and Europe, they also did not have this view, a very difficult one, because their life is more of a struggle. In those less-blessed areas. But India’s great gift, and the people of India, the different waves of them, the melting pot that was India, all the different world views and languages and nations; many, many nations, actually, in India, not just one, but all of them have this kind of message. So, this is what you’re meditating, just on the basis of breathing.

Ah, I can take in the ready energy that is there for me when I draw in my breath. It increases my life force, it is a life force for me outside of my skin. And my out-breathing is not giving up life force, it’s cleaning out an element that doesn’t increase my life force, a kind of waste product of carbon and, but this, the plant world around me likes that. So breathing proves to me, subliminally, that I’m, my life is something right, something real, something worthy, something desirable by the universe. And the Divine that I like is the Divine that India attained, vision of the Divine is the Divine that loves me. So, actually, contrary to what we’re kind of taught in our Western culture, that life is a struggle, a battle, that all kinds of negative things are lurking, they’re waiting for us at the macro, the micro, at all levels,the message of this divinity, of this vision of the Divine is that we are part of a field of joy, a field that’s Ramaniya, to be delighted in, to be enjoyed. And when we and our devotion, our bhakti comes from a sense of gratitude, of feeling the grace of that. So, this is the meditation, a meditation that the default, that behind the worries that nag at you, that nag at us, anxieties, the anticipations, the pains that we focus on, that we feel, behind all of that, that the depth, if we could get to the depths of the reality of it all, which is all enlightenment means, it means “knowing what is real.” Enlightenment does not mean “going into some other place.” You know? Developing some exotic strange ability of leaving, running away to something else. Enlightenment means “knowing what is real here and now about us and about our world and about others in our world.” So, this is actually quite a difficult meditation. To connect it to the mantra, Sri Ram. “Sri” means “Glory.” It means “grace.” It means, “glory.” It means, “a flow of blissful energy,” “golden blissful energy.” “Ram” means, “enjoyment of that.” So, “Sri Ram” means, “glorious enjoyment.” So, that means that Divinity knows your reality perhaps more than we do in our worrisome mind, and so we wish that divinity to concur, “Jai” our sort of state of worriness, our wrong, our ignorance-driven state of feeling isolated, alienated, lost and lonely, uncared for. So much so, maybe we don’t even care for ourselves. So, the meditation is meditating, and even if we don’t feel it right away, even if we don’t know it right away, even if it contradicts what we think we know, reality does care for us personally. It’s in the person of Rama, of Krishna, Buddha, Vishnu, Kalki, Kuruma, Dwarka, whatever, wherever it is. Many forms. So, we relax into that feeling at the deepest level is goodness, truth, beauty and the perceptions of all the difficulties is less real than that deeper level. Even death is not to be feared. Actually, death is the moment when we get closest to that deepest reality, actually. We don’t stay there because there is no place like that. It’s just when we’re most open to change, where our mind and spirit and soul has become completely free for a split second. So, it doesn’t connect to the meat puppet, what Baba Ram Das calls the “meat puppet,” therefore we call that death, because it leaves the meat puppet. And if it knew that deep reality it would not be driven to adopt a new meat puppet necessarily by, without free choice. It would only adopt one out of love because that deep reality is love. It’s an infinite energy that wants anything made of it, anything in contact with it to feel good, to be well, to feel beauty, to feel bliss. This is India’s great message, actually. All of the traditions in India teach this in some way or another. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is so honest and so beautiful. In one teaching He was doing in Delhi for many Indian devotees, He came to a place where it was scheduled, it had been requested that He give what’s called “The Blessing of Tara.” The, sort of, initiation or diksha, or blessing of Tara, introduction to Tara, the Savioress, the Messiahaess, and He said, “Ok, it’s time to do that now.” He said, “The problem is, I don’t have any blessing of Tara for you.” And there was like a feeling of sorrow at that statement, but then, lest that He get too deep, He then said, “But, you’re the ones who have the blessing of Tara. The blessing of Tara is in every single one of your own hearts. You have that blessing already. So, it’s nice when we do it like a ceremony or like a meditation together where you receive from a Guru, teacher, the Blessing of Tara, but really what it is, is it gives you the occasion, the excuse to feel that blessing within yourself that is already there.” So sweet. He’s such a sweet Being because He doesn’t want to take credit. He doesn’t want, He doesn’t personally, He doesn’t want people’s adulation. He’s not trying to somehow possess their affection. He just wants them to find in themselves this blessed grace that we all have in our deepest hearts. But we obscure it from ourselves, our culture conditions us to do so. Our habits condition us to do so. The actually really is the goal of mindfulness, in fact. Mindfulness is not just, sort of like, counting your breath or, you know, just kind of like, not thinking something. Mindfulness is being aware of your deepest self. What you really are. You’re the blessing in your soul, that is your soul, the connection to the deep, infinite, generous, gracious energy that is inexhaustibly abundant for all life, for an infinite life. Infinite beings. Infinite life. Amitayus.

The beauty of the Bhakti Tradition is, when you do this meditation, when you probe through mindful awareness in yourself, to go past a sense of anxiety, worry, pain, suffering, something opens up when you persist, when you keep reminding yourself that “I can just draw in air to nourish my life force.” Its waiting energy waits for me all around me without depriving others around me, either. I go deeper.

Then, the trick is to learn when we feel something well up within, seeming surprisingly to come out of nowhere, come out of soul space, subtle space, meaning “super subtle,” continuum space. When we feel that, we are pleased but we tend to grab at it. We want more. But strangely, when we do, that seems to cut it off. So, then the bhakti thing is, instead of grabbing at it, we give it away. We give it back. We let it just flow through us. We give it back to Rama, to Krishna, to Radha, to Sita. We give it back to Hanuman. Give it back to Tara. Give it back to Avalokiteshvara. Lokeshwara. And then, when we don’t grasp at it, but give it away, it becomes intense and again, there’s the temptation to grasp at it, which cuts it off. So, the Bhakti keeps an orientation of entering the flow, a sense of flow of grace, even though grace has already flown. But it doesn’t matter. We add our little bit by opening.

In a little while, I’ll tell you about, from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the meaning of the syallable “Da.” But let’s finish the meditation. Ok. I think we can close the meditation.

Now.

Ding.

I don’t have a bell. Ding. What do you think? What do you think? Guruji. What’s that? I can’t hear you.

KD: Sing the Tara mantra.

Bob: Oh, good. Tara mantra, yes. Tara mantra. If you go in the Padam Museum or the Calcutta Museum or in the old days, all over North India, the Delhi Museum, you will find these black basalt statues with Tara in the middle. Same Tara on the wall in the dining hall there. The one with one foot down, one foot cross-legged on their left leg, cross-legged under her thigh, but her right foot is down on the lotus in front of Her, which symbolizes that She’s about to get up. And then around Her on the stele, the black basalt stele that you’ll find hundreds of them, now there might have been thousands in ancient times, there are eight scenes and the eight scenes are like, wild elephants attacking someone, tigers attacking, lions attacking, thieves attacking, floods attacking, forest fires attacking and the king, a bad king, like our bad President attacking, putting you in jail for unjustly, you know… this is called the “eight dangers.” And they say, you call on Tara to quickly, She saves you from those eight dangers, the external ones, and those also symbolize internally, you know, the elephants are an attack of delusion, and the tigers are an attack of hatred, and the poisonous snakes are an attack of jealousy and so on, so there are eight mental additions, addictive emotions that tend to disturb our peace of mind, and she will also save from those, so internal and external. And we’ll talk about that more in detail. But this was just all over North India. And you know, Buddhist, Hindu, who cares, it’s like, irrelevant. Tara, you call on Tara, “Om Tare Tuttare Ture Swaha”. “Tare” is just calling on Her. “Tara” means Savioress. Female. And “Tuttare” means, “Super Tara.” And “Ture” means “quickly” Come here quickly. And “Swaha” means “welcome” or “hail” or “so be it” or whatever, you know. “Make it happen.” Like they say in Star Trek. You know? Make it so. “Swaha” means. So, then they say, you just say that with deep faith and the lions will, you can pet the lions and the tigers, the elephants will quiet down, the thieves will leave you alone, etcetera, they claim. I know some stories about getting out of prison and so on, I’ll tell you later. Ok. Guruji.

Take it away.

The post Ep. 45 | A Meditation With Bob appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 16, 2020

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

“We don’t know who God is, what God is, but he’s certainly not someone who sits in judgment of us. How could he even fit in there? We’re so busy judging ourselves. There’s no room for him to judge us or her to judge us.” – Krishna Das

Oh, hi.

Welcome back to the new abnormal, as somebody wrote. It’s good to be with you again. I can’t see you, but we’re here together on the planet.

Yeah, so we’ll spend some time together again tonight.

The chanting practice, for me, is the most powerful way that I have to keep letting go, coming back to some useful, reasonable perspective about things. Things tend to get a little intense when you’re locked in one space together, with people or without people. Even alone, it gets very intense because all you see is your own mind and at least when you’re alone, you can’t blame anybody else for your thoughts and your emotions. But when you’re with other people, it can get pretty intense. But regardless, alone or together, or whatever, sooner or later, we have to deal with our mind and our thoughts and our emotions.

As the previous Karmapa, the 16th Karmapa once said, “The only thing you take with you when you die is your state of mind.”

So, now is the time to begin, or continue working with that state of mind, getting to a place where it doesn’t push us around all the time, where we get some vote into how we go through the day, how we sit inside of ourselves.

The meaning of these chants is not to be understood intellectually. And what happens is, the more you chant, the deeper, the more often you come back to the chant. And so, you’re actually acclimating yourself to sit in the chanting and the flow of sound. And inside this flow of sound, many things will come, many understandings, intuitions, flashes of insight come from inside the chant, comes to the awareness, comes to our mind. Those are not thoughts. They are coming from inside the chant, their intuition coming from the heart, the seat of awareness in ourselves, our true nature, our heart cave, or as they call it, “hridayam,” the seat of consciousness in the body. It’s not actually in the body, they say, but it’s attached, it attaches itself to the body and pumps awareness into the body.

The mind is what lights up everything that we see. Just like the sun lights up the physical world, or lamps, flashlights, it’s the mind that lights up everything we see, everything we think. All the objects that we perceive are actually perceived by awareness. And this awareness is part of that Satchidananda, which is the way, one of the ways they describe reality or divinity, real divinity. Truth, consciousness, awareness and bliss.

Happiness is one of those things.  Although if you’re from Long Island, you know, you might be disqualified from that last last one, but we’re working on it. Yeah. So as we chant, and Maharajji used to say, from going on repeating these names, everything is accomplished. Everything is brought to fullness.

That’s a very powerful statement and is something that we have to, at least, if not take on faith, not blind faith, but educated faith, if not then at least we have to suspend disbelief long enough to do the practice and get the experience ourselves. If you can’t do the practice, if you can’t look inside, you won’t see.

So, if we’re prevented from doing that by skepticism or by a negative take on reality or a belief that we could never be happy, there’s no way we could deal with our shit. If we don’t do anything, if we don’t plant the seeds of waking up, we won’t wake up. That’s the deal. And all of these names that we sing, these are the names of that place within us. True being, true love, reality. Now, how can that be a name of something like that? We don’t know. We have to just do the practice and have our own experience of it, see if it changes the way we feel about how we go through our day. And it doesn’t happen all at once, it takes time and trying to give ourselves more and more to the practice, trying to really be there while we’re doing it.

It’s very hard, you know, we’re not used to it. We’re just used to getting lost in stuff. When we watch a movie on television, we’re not aware that we’re watching, we’re just gone into it. When we’re reading a book, we’re not aware that we’re reading. We’re just reading. When we go through our day, we’re not aware, we’re asleep. We’re just going through stuff automatically. So, the idea of doing a practice comes to us as a result of our own karmas, our own good karmas, the karmas that create the longing to be free of negativity, of stuff, of suffering. Which is created by our own minds.

So, as we do these practices, even when we get caught in stuff, we don’t get caught quite as deeply as we used to. Little by little, gradually but inevitably, that the reality, the presence that’s hidden within us is uncovered. It’s like the lights go on and you see the way home and you start to move in that direction.

People say, Oh, you know, what’s the most powerful chant?

And I say, the one that you do.

What’s your favorite chant?

Who knows?

Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don’t. You sing what you feel and follow that feeling. Believe in that feeling trust in that feeling, the whole path is nothing but learning to trust ourselves and our own experience, and to let the clouds go, let the clouds that come between us in the sun, just keep letting them go as we trust our own intuition and experience.

Back in the old days in India, I was staying at the Tiwari’s house, Mr. and Mrs. Tiwari, my Indian parents, and I had heard somewhere, someone was singing this thing that had these words, “Narayani Namostute”, which means I bow down to Naryani, the goddess Durga. So, I asked Mr. Tiwari, “Baba,” as I called him, I said, “Baba, have you ever heard this? Narayani Namostute?”

“Oh yes.”

“Oh really? Could you teach it to me?”

Well, so we were in the living room, drinking tea. So, he was having milk. I was having chai. And so he started to recite this prayer, just sitting there, no books or anything. And I was trying to write it down. He was going slow. And then he just kind of closed his eyes and went off faster and faster and deeper and deeper. And after about 20 minutes… So, I just had it after about 20 minutes, he’s going, “Om Narayani, Om Narayani, Om Narayani…”

He went into samadhi. He merged with the goddess. And he’s like this, and he’s not breathing. Not breathing. Not breathing. Okay? And tears are streaming down his cheeks just like this. So, I thought, “Shit, I killed him.”

Just then, Ma comes into the living room to get the tea cups. And I say, “Ma, look, it’s Baba. When’s he going to come back?”

And she picked up the teacups. She just looked at me and she said, very sweetly… that’s her over there, I don’t know if you can see her right now…  She said, “Don’t know,” and then went into the kitchen, leaving me with this crying corpse,

The thing was, it really pissed me off because he wasn’t even trying, he was just singing to the mother, calling the mother, calling the goddess and he just went.

She came.

So, we’re working on it. Okay.

All right, let’s see what kind of questions do we have here.

Q:  How did you overcome the sadness of having the Guru in the body? Does one ever overcome the longing to have him in the flesh, to see?

No. No, you never overcome that longing, but at some point, you see… because we identify with the body and the mind, and not the mind, but the body and the thoughts and the emotions. We see the Guru as the body, thoughts and emotions. And so, if that body’s not there, we get very upset, like me. I got very upset, very depressed, very suicidal, very screwed up, but at some point, I realized that… I came from one room to another in my apartment, in the city at that point, in New York, and I was struck like a lightning bolt with the understanding that if I did not chant with people, I would never clean out the dark corners and the shadows in my own heart. And it was obvious to me that at that moment, that those shadows and those dark corners were the only thing that was causing me suffering, and that I had to do that in order to reconnect more deeply with Maharajji. I had felt, I felt that I had let go of his hand. And he had said many times to us. He said, “Once I take your hand, I never let go. Even when you let go of mine.”

And I had let go out of my sadness and my emotional attachment to being with his body, I broke my, from my side, I broke the connection. I lost the connection and I recognized the only way to get it back was to start chanting with people. So, I started and as time went on, I began to feel his presence in a different way. And so I don’t miss him that way anymore, the way I did when he first left the body. I mean, it was the best show on earth. Totally fascinating, totally joyful, blissful a lot at the time. And amazing. So, you’re going to miss that, but that wasn’t the deepest part of it. And I had to recognize that and find that deeper presence in my own being and in everyone around me too, because he’s not limited to being inside of me, so to speak. So, part of practice is seeing that presence, that love, that beauty in every being around. And like it says in the Gita, I read it the other day. I’ll just read it again if I can find it.

Krishna, Sri Krishna says, “when he sees me,” that’s me Krishna, Guru, God, “When he sees me in all and sees all in me, then I never leave him. And he never leaves me. And he who in this oneness of love, loves me in whatever he sees. Wherever this man may live, in truth, He lives in me.”

I just had that stop moping around and get with the program, because that’s the deal. And coming from Long Island, it wasn’t very easy, but that’s the deal

Q: Did Maharajji have children?

Yeah. He had three children. He left home at a very early age. He had been engaged to a village girl when he was like eight or nine. They get engaged very early, and then, later on they get married. Many years later when they grow up more. So, he had been engaged to a village woman, a village girl and then he ran away from home, they say, because his mother, his stepmother, his mother had died and his father remarried and his stepmother, they had a son and she wanted the son, her son, to take, to inherit the land. His father was a landowner, a farmer, and he had a lot of land apparently.

So, she wouldn’t feed him and treated him very badly. So, he split and he went to the jungle for many years, and years later somebody recognized him and told his father and his father came and brought him back home, and he married the girl and they had three children, and he pretty much stayed around home until his daughter, who was his youngest child, went off to a school at his brother’s house.  And at that point he kind of left home and never much really lived there again, at home.

She said her name is Girija. She said that he was the ideal father. He used to walk her to school with an umbrella when it was too hot and the sun was shining. She remembers that he was just always there.  But that’s part of his, the word is “leela”, which means “play,” because he wasn’t always there, but people didn’t miss Him. Very strange stuff. Once you start getting into this, it’s really…

One of the things that happened is for many years, he would just sit inside the house. He wouldn’t travel, he wouldn’t go anywhere. And people would come to the house, Sadhus and yogis would come to see him how they knew he was there, no one knows, because he didn’t advertise, you know. He just stayed in the house, but they found him.

So, yeah, so many stories. Yes. He was married. Three children.

Q:  Did Maharajji give me the name, Krishna Das?

Yes, he did. All the other Westerners had Indian names, after a year or so. I was the only one who didn’t have one. My name, He used to call me “driver.”

Ram Dass had had bought a Volkswagen bus. And Maharajji said to Ram Dass, “You’re a Saint, you have to travel the lowest way,” on the buses, the state buses, public bus transportation.

And he took the keys from Ram Dass and he gave them to me. He said, “You’re the driver.”

From that point on, he called me “driver” for about a year. And finally, he’d go “driver!”

So finally, one day I get called into the room and he looks at me and He says, “Krishna. Nay, Arjun. Nay, Krishna Das.”

And I looked at Him and I said, “Krishna Das?” You know? I’m a Hanuman guy, what is this Krishna stuff?

And he just laughed. He said, “Nay nay, Hanuman served Krishna too.” So that’s how I got my name.

Q:  What can someone do if they live in a very small town in the USA and may never be able to have a guru find them?

Sweetheart, the Guru can find you anywhere, any time, any day, any year in a minute, in a second, if that’s what’s supposed to happen for you, if that’s the best thing for you and your development.

You know, you gotta get with the program.  It’s not about you. It’s not about what you want. It’s not about how you think it should be. It happens to be a certain way and it’s the gurus who run the show and they find us when we’re, when it’s, when we need that. If we don’t meet a guru in the physical form, does that mean that you don’t have a guru? Not at all. Everyone has a lineage that they’re part of. Everyone. Whether they’re aware of it is irrelevant. Look at yourself, see the work you have to do and get with the program.  That’s all.

It’s not about us. The program is running. Work on yourself. Be a good human being. Give up, work with your shame, your guilt, your fear, your anger, your selfishness. Guru is always with you. Guru, God and self are not different. That’s what they say.

So, don’t mope around. It’s not useful. Get to work and do what you have to do to find who you are, and then Guru will be everywhere.

Q:  Tell us how Mr. Tiwari came back from samahdi.

I’ll let you know when I go there and come back. Actually, you know, he was a schoolteacher and the headmaster of a school later on and in India, the family usually waits and they eat together at night when they’re finally all home. So, he would come home from work and he would start doing His Puja, His practices, and he would go into samadhi for hours and everybody would be waiting to eat and they couldn’t bring him down. So Mrs. Tiwari, she went to Maharajji and complained, actually. And Maharajji told her something to do to bring him back from samadhi. I don’t know what it is, but she knows.

So, you know, I spent so much time with them. We used to sleep in the same bed when I stayed with them. He’d get up at 3:30 in the morning, go pee, come back to bed, sit cross-legged, boom. Gone for hours until tea time. I would roll over in bed and go back to sleep. I think to myself, “Krishna Das, why didn’t you try to meditate? What is wrong with you?”

But you know, he never even intimated like, “Would you like to meditate?”

He never said that. He allowed me to be just as stupid as I had to be. And he never pushed me that way. Every once in a while, when I was sitting, he’d come in and say, “Why are you leaning against the wall? Sit up straight.”

How did he know that? You know, he was amazing. He had all these, he had a lot of siddhis himself and he seemed to know a lot of things that couldn’t really be known.

Q: People who had near death experience described that they were sent back because they haven’t finished their work. Do you know what kind of work we are expected to finish?

Yeah. You’re expected to finish thinking you are who you think you are. You’re not who you think you are. And until you learn that lesson, we’ll keep reincarnating until we recognize our true nature and become one with the universe. We will keep taking bodies of one form or another. That’s the way it is. And there’s no hurry. You can’t go faster. You can’t go slower. You can only be who you are. So, deal with all that stuff. Learn to take care of yourself and to be good to yourself. Learn to listen to your heart and trust yourself in life and in your interior work as well.  That’s what we’re here to learn. We’re here to learn that only God is real.

Q:  How can I let go of fear of upsetting God and fear of going to hell for being on a new spiritual path different than Christianity?

Oh Jesus. So to speak. The fear you have is not about God. We don’t know who God is, what God is, but he’s certainly not someone who sits in judgment of us. How could he even fit in there? We’re so busy judging ourselves. There’s no room for him to judge us or her to judge us. The whole thing about hell is very interesting. Hell is in a sense, a state of mind and eternal damnation is a state of mind that, when you don’t have a body, it’s as real, it’s like a dream. And if you have negative karmas, if you’ve done a lot of, caused a lot of suffering for others and yourself, perhaps, I don’t know this for sure, but perhaps you might have to spend some time in that state of mind and that’s called, “eternal damnation.”

The thing is, it’s not eternal. It feels eternal when you’re in it, like a depression can feel eternal, like you’ll never get out of this. And then when the karmas that brought you to that state of feeling eternal damnation are exhausted and paid for, so to speak, burnt off, you leave that state and enter another one.

You might even enter a heaven world, but heaven is not eternal either, but it feels eternal when you’re in it. That’s the nature of the state, so the fear you have, the fear we have, that’s one lifetime kind of fear that’s brought, that’s given to us by people who believe in that kind of stuff and indoctrinate us with that kind of false belief.

And they do that so they can control us, so religion can control us. Just like reincarnation was taken out of the Christian teachings, I think, I forget… it was called the council of Trent, I think, or was that… there were two big councils and they threw out everything that would allow people to control their own destiny.

Jesus taught about reincarnation. It’s in the original teachings, but they took it out because the church wanted power over people. That’s what they say. That’s what I’ve heard. So, the fear you have is not from God. It’s your own fear. And that’s good news because, and bad news, it’s good news and bad news because only you can let go of that.

And there’s no God up there judging you. Everybody has karmas and everybody creates karmas constantly. And those karmas bring fruits. If you’re selfish and nasty and angry and you beat people up and cause people suffering and create wars and are responsible for the deaths of many many people and stuff like that, yes, there’s a price to pay for that. Definitely. They say there’s a price to pay for that. And on the same hand, if you’re generous and kind and compassionate, and you think about others more than yourself, the fruits of that are joyous and open. We don’t need any help from God to feel bad about ourselves. Our parents did a good job and organized religion does a good job of that.

So, there’s no God up in the sky, hurling thunderbolts at us. We’re hurling them at ourselves. So, calm yourself down and try to deprogram yourself from the kind of fearful stuff that you absorb from the community, which is hurtful and soul destroying and has nothing to do with God at all. God is love, love that doesn’t come. It doesn’t go. You don’t fall in it. You don’t fall out of it. Love that is our true nature.  That’s the deal. So, but if everybody knew that, then you know, you wouldn’t have to pay the priest to pray for you. And they wouldn’t be able to be the biggest real estate company in the universe. So, this is all worldly bullshit. And find out who you are, who’s feeling all these things? Let go of that fear.  Let go of that fear and fill your heart with truth and love. And only you can create your own happiness, can allow yourself to be happy, clear out those clouds of judging, of anger, of fear and let yourself be who you are.

Yeah. It’s just such a shame how many people suffer that way, and that’s not just Western religion, all religions to some degree get corrupt and get power issues, all of them, because people are in religions and people that are like that. So, yeah, I hope that helps a little bit. Maybe I’ll burn in hell for that.

Q:  Is it okay to change gurus? This person had a guru, but then the guru’s successor didn’t didn’t do it for that person. So, this person wants to change, is now attract to another teacher, another guru.

You know, Westerners don’t understand “guru.”

Guru exists for only one reason, to lead us, to find out our own true nature and become one with them. And they are one with the universe. So, they are leading us to overcome this false belief that we are a separate entity, different from everyone else. When we get over that, we merge with the universe.

Whether that first guru of yours was really a guru or not, who knows, but I wouldn’t even worry about it. Follow your heart, listen to your heart. Do what you feel you have to do and do what you want to do and learn whatever lessons you have to learn along the way. You won’t burn in hell. You will learn who you are.

So, and any real guru, doesn’t give a shit if you’re there or not. They don’t need you there. They don’t need you to be bound to them. They don’t exist for your pleasure. I mean, you don’t exist for their pleasure. They exist for your pleasure. So, if you’re not attracted to someone anymore, so called spiritually, just be at ease with that.  It doesn’t matter.

All gurus, all real gurus are the same anyway. They’re all one. That’s why they’re gurus in the first place. They don’t want anything. They don’t need you to be there. They don’t need anything from you, from us. They give us freedom, not bondage. They give us love. Not emotional manipulation.

Teachers are different. Teachers teach and we can learn things from them, but they’re not necessarily gurus. And not everybody with siddhis is a guru. Many people who have siddhis,  use them to manipulate things for their own pleasure, their egoistic pleasure, egoistic needs and desires. So, siddhis are not, don’t prove that a person is a guru.

So, don’t worry about it. Just be happy and find out where you want to go and follow your heart.

Q:  What’s my favorite spiritual books to read?

Well, the Ramacharitamanas by Tulsidas, which is a, the story of Rama and Sita and the battle against the evil forces, the negative forces, the demons. It’s all poetry and it’s all devotional. It’s so beautiful. It’s the Tulsidas Ramayana. That’s my favorite book to read.

And I also read biographies of saints from all different religions. There’s an incredible, I’ve been reading about this Christian mystic from the 1800s, yeah. Russian Orthodox Christian mystic, unbelievable. Saint Seraphim of Sarov. St. Seraphim. Phenomenal. I, it’s, he could have been from any culture, the most amazing Saint I’ve ever read about. And he was a Christian hermit in Russia in the 1800s. It’s an incredible story.

I read about Ramana Maharshi. I read autobiographies of all the saints. That’s what I like the most. Really. I like to see how they went through their day, what they did, how they saw people, how they saw the world, how they lived in the world, what they did. It’s amazing. I love those things.

Q:  Can you talk on this challenge? If you go on chanting a mantra, you will cling to it like a shelter, and whenever you become afraid, you will chant it again.

I don’t understand. Why is that a challenge? What’s a challenge about that? There’s nothing wrong with clinging to a mantra as long as you stop at the red and go at the green. And as long as you don’t beat up everybody around you and you’re good to people, what’s the problem with the mantra? I don’t know if clinging to a mantra is really… that implies egoistic need to hurt yourself. That’s what it means.

So, I don’t… A mantra is a shelter. Absolutely. It’s a shelter from the rain clouds of thoughts and emotions, but you don’t do a mantra with willful aggressive ambition. You do a mantra with ease and in a relaxed manner, you don’t try to crush it with your attention. You’re simply aware that as you’re singing it or saying it. It’s not a power trip. A mantra is shelter. A shelter of the name. We should all we should all be able to take shelter in the name. We need shelter from this, in this world. We need shelter of peace and of kindness and compassion and caring for others and ourselves.

So, I don’t really know exactly what you mean.

Q:  How do we know that the soul exists? How do we know the law of karma holds?

I don’t know. I don’t know how you know, and until you’re enlightened, I don’t think we really know for sure, but if you plant a seed of one type of flower, that’s what’s going to grow. So, the law of karma is law is cause and effect. Essentially. That’s basically what it is. Every effect has a cause. So, if one is selfish and greedy and fearful and lives their life putting up walls around them to protect them from things, that creates an atmosphere and out of that atmosphere, all your actions are tinged with that. So, where will light come? Where will kindness come in that situation? So, you’re planting seeds of selfishness and seeds of fear. How do you expect it to grow anything else?

I think when we don’t really have the direct experience of the truth of these things until we’re pretty much far along on this path, which I’m certainly not, but I’ve been around enough to see certain things and have my own experiences that lead me to believe that it’s probably true. And based on that, I try to live my life a certain way. But you have to find your own way into it. Karma is not blind. It’s not fate that can never change. It’s actually the key to freedom, because how we meet each moment, how we greet each moment as it arrives, how we react to the things that happen, that creates, that plants many seeds.

So, you can see if you’re fearful and tense and angry, you’ll see things a certain way and you act a certain way and you create more and more of that. So that on that very simple level, you can see how those things work. When you start talking about karma though, you, then you start to think about other lives, et cetera. And that’s a whole other ball game.

So, there’s a great book about karma. It’s called “The Laws of Karma”. And it’s by my friend, Robert Swoboda. Dr. Robert Swoboda. It’s part of a series of books that he wrote called “Aghora.” And the third book in that series is called “The laws of karma” and it’s exquisite.

He just put out a new edition of them. This is not for everybody right away. This is the advanced course here. You have “Aghora: at the left hand of God.” It’s about a tantric sadhu, his guru, his teacher, who did very extraordinary practices in graveyards and things like that. Very unusual but extraordinary practices. The second book is called Kundalini, which is also amazing, but the book, the one I’m talking about is called “Aghora Three, the Laws of Karma. That’s it. And it’s really quite amazing. And once again, this is not a Spirituality 101. This is the advanced course, but still, it’s quite amazing. Very deep, very beautiful, really great. So, you can try reading that about it. It’s very good.

At some point, when you look at yourself and you see how little vote that we have over our lives and how little vote we have over our own emotions, and we try to try to figure out how we got to that place. So, we can see that we were born in a certain culture, that our parents believed certain things, that our friends believe certain things. We were indoctrinated by the culture in a certain kind of way: how we see ourselves, how we experience ourselves, what we believe about ourselves. All that’s programming that came to us as we entered into this body into this world. When you try to soften up that stuff and slow down the knee jerk reactions to life and get a vote about how we respond to situations and people, How do we treat people?

Usually, we don’t see people at all. We’re too busy with our own version of things, but when we try to open our hearts and soften our hearts, and we see how hard it is, then we can look out at other people and recognize, well, if it’s hard for me, it’s gotta be hard for them too. And if I can’t stop creating suffering, then other people must be having a hard time doing that as well.  And then you start to give people a break a little bit as you begin to give yourself a break.

So, Ramana Maharshi said that everything that’s going to happen to us is written when we’re born. And the only moment of freedom that we have is right now, is in the moment. This is the moment when we can have the opportunity to make choices about how we respond to things, but even so, we can’t control the past. It’s done. But in the future, we don’t know what’s coming. Right now is the moment that we have to exercise whatever freedom we might be able to scrounge up to treat people better in a better way, and to treat ourselves in a better way.

Anyway. Not very clear, I’m afraid, but what can I tell you?

Q: Did Maharajji initiate me into his lineage to be a kirtan wallah? Do you believe we need to be initiated to teach other simple mantras like “Ram”?

No, I don’t believe that. I believe that you just do what you have to do and do what makes you happy. He did not initiate me as far as I know. He never did any, he doesn’t do stuff like that. He didn’t do stuff like that. He would just change everything in your life and you wouldn’t even know it. He didn’t make a show of making initiations and mantras and things like that. And he never told me to do this. He just wanted, we just wanted to sing to Him because He liked it, and also it got us more time with him, which is what we wanted. So that was the deal.

And so just as it used to bring us into his physical presence, for me now, when I chant, it brings me into his ephemeral presence, into his presence, his real presence right now. And I learned that in some way back then when we were singing to him. So, there was never any, as far as I know, any external initiation ceremony.

Now, as far as leading kirtan, which is what you’re asking about, the only thing that matters is your motivation. If you’re doing it because you don’t know how to write songs in English and you have a few nice melodies that you can do “Ram Ram” over, and you want to be a star and you want to have attention and you want to have a job and you want to make some money, you want to be famous and you want people to look up to you, then you’re going to create a lot of bullshit for yourself that you’re going to have to live through, one way or the other. So, the most important thing is having good aspiration or good intention. And you just do the best you can. You can sing with people or you can sing at home. If there’s a difference, work on it, because that means you’re getting something from the people that you don’t have yourself, that you think you don’t have yourself. So, that’s good work to do.

So, the thing is you can’t hide from yourself. You can pretend you don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re always here and it’s up to us to do the best we can. So, because you’re not just transmitting, you’re not just singing a song to people, you’re chanting. You’re praying, you know. You’re not singing to people when you chant, you’re singing to God in that person.

Siddha Ma used to say to me, “sing to the siddhas on the Hill.” They used to believe that these ancient yogis lived on this Hill opposite the temple.

“What can you get from people?” she said, “Nothing. Sing to the Siddhas.”

As you sing to those, to the great beings, you sing to the saints, you sing to God, that divine presence within.

So, it’s up to you. What you do.

Q:  Is crying a lot in Cureton. Just the phase that bhakti yoga beginners go through? And will eventually calm down over time? Or do criers become increasingly unhinged?

Well, I certainly hope so, as Groucho Marx used to say. I want to be completely unhinged. I want the doors to fall off and all the light to come in.  A lot of times you cry for a lot of different reasons. When you chant, you have many different experiences open up from within. A lot of times, it hurts when you let go of stuff, it hurts to relax the heart. We’re used to being so tight and tense. And the relief of just being able to, you know, that can cause tears. There can be so many things that happen.

I like that. “Unhinged.” I liked that. I liked that.

Q:  What could it mean when the sheer instant you wake, a mantra is playing inside your body?

Well, it’s not playing in your body, it’s playing in your awareness.

Q: I wonder sometimes if I engage with the souls in the mantra, in the subconscious while asleep….

I don’t know what you mean by souls in the mantra. You mean the great beings, maybe, that have chanted those mantras and whose energy and presence is in the mantras? Of course. And when you do enough, japa practice, mantra practice, you’ll find that the mantra surfaces in your awareness as you’re going through your day. Without you doing it, it’ll come back to you. You’ll notice that it’s going on. And they say that, eventually the mantra goes on by itself and pulls you into it, invites you in again and again, and then no matter what you’re doing, you’re always aware of that mantra. And they always give the example of the village woman in India, carrying a huge basket, a big clay pot of water, balanced on her head, carrying her baby and talking with all the other women coming back from the well. No matter what she’s doing, she’s aware of the pot on her head. Otherwise it would fall. And that’s they say that’s how much awareness you need to use at the very, at the beginning. You don’t grab onto it, but whatever else you’re doing in your day, the mantra is with you, just like the pot of water. The clay pot would be balanced on the head. If you go like that, you lose the pot. So, in this case, you don’t go like that. You’re aware of the pot and you’re doing all the things. So, as the mantra deepens, as your heart opens, as your awareness deepens, you can be aware of that mantra all day long and all night long, eventually. Even when you go asleep and you’re asleep, the mantra can be there.

Now, you might not be aware of it at that time because there’s your unconscious, so to speak, but the mantra can keep going. Even in that state, they say.

Q: What routines helped me center myself before I chant?

I make a cup of coffee. I warm up my voice a little bit. I take a couple of deep breaths. I don’t… nothing, you know. I’ve been doing this so long that the minute I sit down, that’s it. I’m just in it. It’s like, so much, so many years of singing.  It gets deeper every time. All the time, it gets deeper. But that letting-go muscle, that letting-go muscle that we develop by constantly coming back to the name, the sound of the name as we’re chanting, we’re gone. we’re back, we’re gone, we’re back. Every time you come back, the neural pathways in the brain are deepened. They’ve shown this and it makes it easier, as time goes on, to relax into the presence, into your true nature.

So, whatever I could say, however poorly I live, my life is getting ready to chant. That’s what it’s about. You know, that’s what it’s mainly about, getting ready to do practice, to let go of the stuff and come home again. Like go, come home, let go, come home. That’s really, we’re all doing that to one degree or other.

Q: Why did Maharajji build Vaishnavi Mandir at Kainchi?

Because, he said up in the mountains, where Kainchi is, in the foothills of the Himalayas, traditionally they worship Kali, the goddess Kali, and they do sacrifices. They’ll kill goats and chickens and offer to the goddess because certain forms of Kali traditionally, accept that kind of Tamasic or dark offerings. So Maharaji said, “I have to build Vaishnavi Devi, the Vaishnav Shakti instead of Shiva Shakti, because if I build Shiva Shakti, they’d be dragging the goats in there and killing them in the courtyard.”

That was his way of talking. So he built a temple to Vaishnavi Devi, Vindhya Vasini Durga Devi. the form of the goddess that lives in the Vindhya Hills and is a form of Vishnu Shakti. And for Vaishnavi Shakti, no sacrifice is allowed. You can’t even break a coconut, theoretically, in the temple grounds.  You can bring it it out and then you bring it in, break it outside. So that was the theoretically the main the reason, but another level of it is that Siddhi Ma herself was of manifestation of the goddess Vaishnavi Devi. In fact, one-time Maharajji was in Allahabad at Dada’s house and they all got in a car to drive up to Vindhya Vasini, which is near a Allahabad to do Puja to the goddess there, in the temple there. But they started so late that halfway up the Hill, Maharajji said stop. So, they pulled over. Maharajji got out of the passenger seat in the front, took all the supplies that they were going to do the Puja with, you know, the arati lamp and the offerings, and he opened the back door of the car where Siddhi Ma was sitting and he sat on the ground there below Siddhi Ma, and he worshiped her as Vindhya Vasini Durga Devi right there. And then they turned around and went home. So on one level, that temple is Siddhi Ma’s Temple. It’ a temple to Siddhi Ma.

The post Special Edition Conversations With KD April 16, 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 44 | Share Your Story

Q: Could (you) share some of your story about what was going on before you decided to go to India

“Everyone has a Guru. Everyone has a lineage that they’ve been involved with, especially if you’re interested in this crazy stuff in the first place, and everybody is, every moment, including this moment, receiving the fruits of their karmas. And the motivation for a great saint, they only have one motivation, they only have one agenda, which is compassion for us, because we don’t know what’s going on. So, they’re here for one reason only. For our sake. So, that means that everyone is getting exactly what they need at every moment. There’s no slippage in the system. If you’ve seen, if you’ve met a guru, a real guru, not a wannabe guru, not a “hope it’s a guru” not a fake guru… don’t let me continue, because it gets worse… if you’ve met a real guru then that was the best thing, that was what you needed. If you haven’t, that’s what you need.” – Krishna Das

Q: I guess mine was just asking about if you could share some of your story about what was going on before you decided to go to India that may be whatever it was for you, and also, how did you find your Guru? You land in India and then also, from there, I like those moments, the transition moments of all the things, you know, playing music, you know, doing what you’re doing now, of all the things you could do, how did that, just…

KD: It was either this or pump gas. Those were the two options. Well, I went to India in August 1970. I had already been pretty involved in spiritual stuff for quite a few years. I read all three books on the stuff that were here in America at the time, Autobiography of a Yogi, Gospel of Ramakrishna and Zen and Japanese Culture. Oh, wait, and there was Yoga for Health. Something like that. Unbelievable. Thank you.

So, but you know, I was really, I was very unhappy. I wasn’t really a happy camper. A lot of, a lot of self hatred, a lot of self loathing, a lot of not being able to be happy and get what I wanted in life. It was really not a lot of fun to be me. And then, oh, I moved upstate New York to live on a farm that the brother of a friend of mine had bought. They were Jungian acid head mountain climbers. These people would take 1000 mics of acid and climb mountains like this, straight vertical, they were unbelievable. Very wild. And they had a group, they had a family they called the Vulgarians. Anyway they were great folks and they, one guy, a friend of theirs, had seen Ram Das when he first came back from India in late 1968, yeah. And then they, he gave a talk in New York in early 1969, I think, and this guy met, went there, and then he came up and told his friends about it and then they were going to go drive up to New Hampshire where Ram Das was living on his father’s estate. He was living above the garage. It was a huge beautiful house, but he was living above the garage in like a little… he had come back from India and had camped out there. So, I had just come, so, they said they were going to meet this guy and I, you know, I said, “I’m not interested in any white yogis” you know? Once an asshole, always an asshole. What can I tell you? So, they went off. They were supposed to come back the next day. But they didn’t come back for like, three days, right? And I had just come out of the goat shed. We had two goats, Alice Bailey and Madam Blavatsky, our two goats, and I was holding a pale of milk, right? And they came back and I saw the car cut through the field, it comes around, and he parked it and he gets out of the car and he looks at me, like, and there was light shooting out of his head. I had never seen anything like that. I said, “Write down the directions. I’m leaving now.” I ran out to my cabin and I got my stuff together and I got my stuff together and took off and drove all night. So, I got, I got there around, maybe around 10 o’clock in the morning and my car, the carborator, not the carborator, the exhaust system had a hole in it so all night long it was like… eehhhhhhhhh. I pulled in, I turned the car off. Silence. And there was snow everywhere. There wasn’t a sound. It was unbelievable. And I felt this little thing in the center of my chest go… what was that? Did I have a heart attack? What was that? That was weird. So, then I walked up to the house and knocked on the door. The door opens. This guy with long hair and a long beard smiles. And he just points up these steps and I thought, get me the fuck out of here. What is this? These people are weird. But it was too late. So, I walked up the steps and there was like, you walk up the steps and there was like a wall, you know? And I walked up, I got to the steps and I turned and Ram Das was sitting in the corner. He had his eyes closed like this. The minute I walked into the room, something hit me, right? And I knew all of a sudden, I knew that whatever I was looking for was real. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what to call it. But all of a sudden, I knew that whatever it was, it was real, it was in the world and it could be found. That’s, it was just like that. And that was Maharajji. I didn’t know that at the time. So, I spent all day with Ram Das and one of the things he used to do was, you would sit opposite each other and look into each other’s eyes and he would say, “Whatever thoughts come to your mind that you don’t want to say, say.” And I thought, “right.” It made me so aware of my thoughts, and not one of them came out of my mouth. So, then, at the end of the afternoon or early evening he said, “Well, it’s getting late” oh, and at one point he gave me a mantra that had been given to him by one of his teachers. Not Maharajji but another teacher. He gave me this mantra and we repeated it for awhile. So then, later on, he said, “Ok, it’s getting late. If you want to stay, you can stay. We can have dinner and then spend the night. Or you could, but if you’re going to go, you should go now.” So, I’ve got to go because first thing in the morning, I have to drive a school bus. That’s what I was doing for Kingston High School in upstate New York. I was the hippie bus driver. So, I said, “I’ve got to go.” He said, “Don’t worry about it. Your mantra will protect you. Weird stuff. What is this guy talking about, you know? So anyways, so I get in the car and now remember, I’d driven all through the night, the night before, and then I’m all day with him, so I get into the car and I start driving. Somewhere along the line, I got really tired, like about an hour out, so I pulled off the road and I had one of those old wind-up alarm clocks, a baby Ben alarm clock. I wound it up, put it on the ash tray right by the front thing and I set it for, like, an hour, right? So, I go to sleep. The next thing I know, I’m driving.  Where am I? I’m driving. I’m on the right side of the road. I’m not speeding. But I’m driving. I’m on the road. You know? It took me so long to realize what was happening. I’m driving. I had woken up. I had turned the alarm clock off and I had started the car in my sleep. The first thought that came to me was, “Your mantra will protect you.” All the way to New York I screamed that mantra at the top of my lungs.

So, then, I started to get closer to Ram Das and then I wound up spending a lot of time the next year and a half and then I wanted to go to India to be with Maharajji, because he would talk about Maharajji all the time. And I began to understand that what I was feeling, which I thought was coming from Ram Das, was just coming through him and that it was Maharajji. I shouldn’t say, “Just coming through him,” that’s not the right thing. It was coming through him, which was a big thing. So, I said, he said, “Well, you know, when I left india, Maharajji said “not to talk about him”” but of course, that’s all he did, was talk about him. But he never said His real name and he never said where to find Him. So, Maharajji’s like, it’s a.. everyone’s, so many people, are called Maharajji, just so you know, you could call anybody, “Oh Maharaj” so it doesn’t really tell you who He is. So, I said, “Well, I’m going. I don’t care. We’ll find Him.” “Ok, ok, wait, wait. I have a friend named KK Shah, so you write to him and maybe he’ll help you.” So, KK lived up in the mountains, so I wrote to KK and I got a letter back saying, “Wonderful to hear from you and”, you know, “Maharajji is not in the hills at His temple in Kainchi at this time.” Ok, we’ve got a name and a place. “But when He returns, I’ll bring your letters to him and” you know, “I’ll write back to you.” Because I had said, we want to come meet Maharajji.” He said, “Well, He’s not there.” So, about a month later, I got another letter from KK and it said, “Maharajji has returned to His temple and after a few days, I was able to go and see Him. As you know, Great Saints like Maharajji do not encourage the devotees to come to them. But, their doors are always open. So, if you’re traveling in India, you can come see Him.” Great. Here we go. Right? No hesitation at all. Ok, fantastic, we’re going. Not exactly.

Many years later, KK said to me, “Did I ever tell you what really happened that day?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, I came to the temple and I took your letters. Maharajji, there was a couple other people in the room. And I took your letters and I put them down next to Maharajji. There were three letters. Three of us. I put them down next to Maharajji on His bed. And He was just talking to people. So, I began to peel an apple and cut it up in small pieces and feed it.” Maharajji had like three or four teeth. So you get a soft apple and cut it up and he would gum it. And so I was feeding Him the apple, and He was talking to these people and he happened to notice the letters. He said, “What’s that?” And I said, “They’re letters from students of Ram Das, they want to come see you.” “Nay. Tell them not to come. What do I have to do with this?” And he goes back to His conversation. So now, here’s the beauty of the whole drama, right? You see, KK had grown up in Maharajji’s lap, from the time he’s 8 years old, Maharajji was like, his grandfather. They had the closest, sweetest relationship. There was no, like, you know, no distance. They were very, it was very close and sweet. And KK’s like a spoiled brat. If you tell him to sit down, he stands up. If you tell him to eat, he fasts. If you tell him to go away, he stays. This is the way he’s made. So, even with Maharajji, he would act, like, the same way. And furthermore, when Ram Das came to India and met Maharajji, KK was there. So, Maharajji, Ram Das told, Maharajji told Ram Das to go home with KK and told KK to serve Ram Das.  So, KK was serving Ram Das by showing Maharajji our letters, right? That’s how he felt about it.  Now, Maharajji was interfering with the very service that he gave KK to do. And KK would not stand for that. So, KK told me, he began to pout. And he stopped feeding Maharajji the apple and looked down like this. Maharajji looks at him and said, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” KK wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t talk to him. “KK, what’s the matter?” And KK said Maharajji pushed his head up like this. KK said he’d look away. Finally, Maharajji throws his hands up in desperation, he said, “Ok, tell them what you want.” “Tell them what you want.” Now, is he going to lie? No. But, being a good devotee, he won’t lie, but also, serving Ram Das is helping us. So, he writes, “As you know, great Saints like Maharajji do not encourage the devotees to come to them. But their doors are always open.” That’s how it happened. My whole life, on a thread, you know? It seems, from our point of view, but not from His point of view. He knew exactly what was going to happen and how it was going to happen. And in fact, let’s see, so that was in, spring, spring ’72, so four months later, five months later, there we are in India, we get up to Nainital, which is where KK was from and it turns out, he’s at the temple with Maharajji that day. So, we got in a taxi and went to the temple and that was the deal. Here we are.

I mean, if KK, if it had been a different devotee who wasn’t as close to Maharajji, who didn’t have that kind of sweet, long-time relationship, he might have written back and said, “You know, Maharajji says not to come.” Then, I wouldn’t be here. I don’t know where you would be. It probably wouldn’t be here. So, this is all, these, it’s all grace, but we we don’t really see it clearly so we have to, we have to work our way through our nonsense until we can see things and be who we are.

I often think about, I kind of feel like, I was on the train, a train of my life, right? And it stopped at some station and, I looked out the window and there was Maharajji. So, I ran out of the train and I was just like hanging out with Him. “Hi.” Yeah. And then, He sent me back on the train, you know? But without having met Him, that train ride would have been a hell of a lot different.  A lot different. But that’s me. I always, people say, “Oh, I wish I had a guru.” I said, “What are you, kidding?” I was the one who wouldn’t have made it unless I saw him physically. You don’t seem to need that. That’s great. Have a good life. Leave me alone.

You’ve got to understand, you don’t have to understand but I’ll just tell you the way it looks to me. Everyone has a Guru, everyone has a lineage that they’ve been involved with, especially if you’re interested in this crazy stuff in the first place. And everybody is, every moment, including this moment, receiving the fruits of their karmas. And if and, the motivation for a great saint, they only have one motivation, they only have one agenda, which is compassion for us.  Because we don’t know what’s going on. So, they’re here for one reason only. For our sake. So, that means that everyone is getting exactly what they need at every moment. There’s no slippage in the system. If you’ve seen, if you’ve met a guru, a real guru, not a wannabe guru, not a “hope it’s a guru” not a fake guru, don’t let me continue, because it gets worse, if you’ve met a real guru then that was the best thing, that was what you needed. If you haven’t, that’s what you need. You’ve got to, you can’t think yourself into a corner and then sit around and mope for the rest of your life. It just won’t, it’s not the best thing to do. If you’ve met a guru, either, and ok, so I, after I met Ram Das, now up until that point, all I saw was a little, maybe four by six black and white picture of Maharajji, an old picture, ok? He didn’t even look, in that picture, the way he looked at that time. But I dreamt about Him. And I had this incredible dream about Him before I went to India and met Him. Ok? And in the dream, I saw Him walking. This was a long dream, by anyway, He had a very unusual walk. It was like a two year old bouncing from one leg to another. So He would always hold somebody’s hand when He was walking.  So, about a year and half into my visit to India, I came to the temple late one day, I don’t know why, I had something to do in town, and usually, when we came to the temple, we’d be sitting outside and He would come and sit right down on His bed and we would be sitting around Him. So, when I got to the temple, I walked into the courtyard and there He was, all alone, walking across the courtyard, and I just stopped like, because He was walking the way He walked in my dream. I had never seen Him walk before. It was like, and He just stopped in the middle and looked at me and He goes, “Oh, these westerners, come here!” You know? I didn’t even offer Him the apples I had. He just looked at me and laughed. He grabbed the apples and threw them to somebody. My mind just stopped. So, I really met Him before. And so, if I could meet a Guru before I met Him physically, so can you. They’re not limited. We’re limited. And we only need one thing, which we already have. That’s longing. The longing to connect. The longing to deepen our relationship with real love.

That’s all we need. That’s the only qualification that’s required. Because that’s how we, as human beings, experience being pulled into our true nature. It feels like a longing for something outside, but there is nothing outside. It’s that desire to be free to be real love, to be in love 24-7 365. Not just for a minute or two here and there.  And that longing, that’s what saves our lives. And what ruins our lives.

Because nothing is going to be enough. It’s never going to be… stuff was not made to be enough.  This is what Buddha said when He came out of the jungle after recognizing His enlightenment. He said, “Yo, monks. Stuff ain’t enough.” That’s what He said. Or something like that.

We keep trying to squeeze water from a stone, but there’s not, it ain’t going to happen. We keep trying to squeeze happiness out of pleasure. Not gonna happen. We keep trying to push pain away, to find happiness. Not gonna happen.

So, the more we understand that, the more we understand that, that everything we need is within us already and all we have to do is slow down and start pulling some of the energy away from the programs that are running in our heads all day, all life long, that’s all we have to do. And, as that guy that Maharajji mentioned, said, “Do unto others the way you would have them do unto you.” That’s all that’s required. It ain’t easy. If you can do that, you’re a God in Human form. Jesus. On the mainline. All right, who’s, somebody else, over here…

The post Ep. 44 | Share Your Story appeared first on Krishna Das.