Call and Response with Krishna Das

Call and Response Ep. 43 | Practice Arising By Itself, Dharmageddon and Does the Curriculum Change With Age

Question: I’m just finding it to be that I don’t have to try so hard because it just happens and what I like about that, it seems like it took a long time to get there. It gets better and it seems like it’s just easy. You just fall into it. Why all the struggles?

“Let’s say you’re home when that happens, you’re just sitting around and you remember the Name, for instance, or the Name shows up in your head. If you’re home, you could, you could go with it for a few minutes, right? You could allow it to surface, really surface.” – Krishna Das

Q: I’m finding out that the older I get, not old, whatever, that the practice comes by itself a lot of times. You’re thinking about it then all of a sudden.

KD: Sure.

Q: And I’m just finding it to be I don’t have to try so hard because it just happens and what I like about that, it seems like it took a long time to get there. It gets better and it seems like its just easy. You just fall into it. Why all the struggles? Oh, I don’t want to do that, it’s too hard. Now its so easy or easier.

KD: That’s good, but you know, so tell me about your experience. Give him back the mic.

Q: Well…

KD: What are you exactly referring to?

Q: Well, it’s just the whole practice in general, I guess.

KD: Meaning?

Q: Just like that? Oh, god.

KD: Like, for instance, a lot of times, the mantra will come back to me during the day and kind of, I’ll recognize that it’s there when I had forgotten, right? I’ve been just driving around or something and then I’ll hear, in a sense, in my head, the mantra, so that comes back to you. Sure.  But what do you do at that moment?

Q: Seems to me I try to keep going with it. Yeah.

KD: Right. That’s it. Sure. But, that’s all good. No question about it. But there’s so many levels of sleep, so to speak. There’s so much time we spend asleep. The idea is to kind of gradually shorten the amount of time it takes for us to remember the mantra, for instance, right? And the way that happens, the way that is shortened is by willfully, using our personal will to bring ourselves back. But even, that’s an interesting thing, because ok, so you’re chanting, right? And then you notice you haven’t been paying attention and then you come back to the chant. How did you notice? Ha. You just do. It happens by itself. But we know that nothing happens without a cause. There’s no effect without a cause and no cause that doesn’t have an effect that became a cause, so if you, all of a sudden, woke up, so to speak, and recognized that you hadn’t been paying attention, that waking up is a direct result of practice you’ve done in the past. Either this life or another life. Otherwise you would get born, you’d graduate from high school, you’d drink some beer, and then you’d die. And you’re not here for one moment of your life. How many people do we know? Most of them are in the supermarket when you go there. Look around. Nobody’s home. It’s unbelievable. It’s like, yeah, sure, swimming through, like, water and… so, there you are, singing, and you haven’t been paying attention and then you, you go, “Oh, ok.” And you come back. How did that happen? You didn’t do that. You weren’t here, you were in dreamland. How did it happen that you came back and noticed? Consciousness, you became aware and awareness is something that is always here but recognized more through practice, through remembering. That’s what practice is. Remembering. So, you sit down to remember. “I’m remembering. I’m remembering my breath. Breathing in. Breathing out. Breathing in. Breathing out. Oh, I’ve got to go to the store later. What am I supposed to buy? Did I write it down? I don’t think I wrote it down. Oh, ok. My breath.” That moment when we come back, that is, in itself, an effect of the cause of having done practice before.  Already. For instance, none of you would be here if you didn’t have some interest in this. Where did that interest come from? Why are you here and the other 400,000, 400 million people in DC are off having a good time?

Because we have, we share a common interest in something, something that’s supposed to be here today, I don’t know if it is but whatever. Ok. Thank you. All right, five bucks. Everytime you…

See me afterwards.

All right, so is that good? Yeah. That’s practice but, if that’s fine for you, if you’re happy with that, if you’re at ease with that, fine. If you feel that you still spend a lot of time asleep and you’d like to, you know, wake up more, then try doing, you know, let’s say you’re home when that happens, you’re just sitting around and you remember the Name, for instance, or the Name shows up in your head. If you’re home, you could, you could go with it for a few minutes, right? You could allow it to surface, really surface. If you’re driving in your car, you’ve gotta keep your eyes on the road, but if it happens sometime where you’re free of, you know, things that you… then you can kind of sit with it and notice it. It’ll fade. Cause it always fades, cause that’s our karmas, too. And then you’ll be off doing something else and then it’ll happen again. But the more you recognize that and allow it to deepen or allow the awareness to rise, however you want to say about it, that will shorten those moments when you’re not present. Ok.

Q: I have a question about those having a guru and karma and I’ve been practicing with a Buddhist community for 20 years that’s kind of going through Dharmageddon right now, people are saying. What if your karma has led you to take samaya with a guru who’s…

KD: Why don’t you explain to people what “samaya” is.

Q: Vows. Lifelong, lifetimes of being connected to, of taking him as your teacher for lifetimes.

KD: In, she’s talking about Vajrayana Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism. So, in Vajrayana, the Guru is treated as, almost like a deity. There’s nothing the Guru can do that isn’t purely motivated by compassion. That’s the ideal situation and when you take samaya it means you vow, you take a vow to see the Guru like that. And that anything they do is motivated only by pure intention and compassion, even if it doesn’t seem like that to you. It’s very, very advanced. It’s not for everyone. And it’s a very advanced situation. So, this young woman took this vow with a Guru who fucked up really bad. And hurt a lot of people and did a lot of terrible things. And there’s a whole thing going on in that community and a lot of different communities right now. And all I can say to you is, you have to listen to your heart as to what the right thing is to do. Don’t listen to anything other than your own feelings in this case, that you have every right to either leave the community or stay with the community or do whatever. It’s all completely and absolutely up to you. There should be no pressure you feel from the outside, because ultimately, they are just human like you are and this Guru came from a very particular lineage and there’s no way to understand why he did the things he did. No one can know another’s motivations, even though it’s pretty obvious that he was screwed up. But still, one can’t know. One can only trust one’s heart in any situation, whether you took a vow or didn’t take a vow. You took a vow because you trusted your heart. You can leave because you trust your heart. Nothing bad can come to you from the outside. That’s the deal.

Q: Thank you.

Q: So, thank you very much for being here. My question is about stages in life and the question is, does the curriculum always stay the same?

KD: Meaning what?

Q: Well, the question comes from actually thinking about this last book that Ram Das wrote with Mirabai Bush about preparing for death, and that death should be at the forefront of our awareness.

KD: Walking each other home?

Q: Yeah. And I guess I’m just wondering, you know, when one’s a kid, when one’s in their 20s, when one’s in their 30s, I mean does the curriculum, are there life stages and are there times in our lives where, I’ll put it this way, were there times in your life when the practice, you woke up and sort of said, “Wow, that’s the practice.” “Oh, no, that’s the practice.” “Oh, no, that’s the practice.” And are there times in our lives where, well, I guess, you know, I’ll leave it at that. Does the curriculum stay the same?

KD: Well, yes and no, you know? The curriculum is to wake up. And to find real love. That’s the curriculum as far as I’m concerned. And to live in that love 24 hours a day, or that space of presence or being or true nature, whatever you want to call it. It’s to be in that full-time. To recognize your true nature. To awaken. So that’s the curriculum that stays the same for somebody who’s interested in that. But you have different issues to deal with as you get older, as the body ages, as you mature emotionally, etcetera. But the curriculum stays the same. You just have other issues to deal with. And different things become, you know, when you’re sixteen, basically the curriculum is to wake up and get laid. When you’re eighty-six, the curriculum is to just wake up.

That was pretty good.

Wow.

So, yeah. You know, that’s like that.  Some traditions have as their practice, meditation on death, from the beginning. And what that means to an eight year old is very different than what it means to somebody who’s actually eighty with the imminent, with the end of the physical body much more imminent and actually, you know, feeling it in the body. Then you start to think, “ok. Wow. You know, you wake up in the morning and stuff isn’t working like it worked the day before. “What happened, I didn’t do anything.” Yeah, you did. You got old. So the curriculum is the same, but the issues are ever changing. No?  What do you think? That’s what I think.  Was that reasonable or was it not?

Q: That was totally reasonable. Yeah. The situations change. Maybe I’m just, maybe what I’m really asking is, do the practices change?

KD: Aha.

Q: Do the practices in which one uses to approach the changing situations, do some make more sense than others. For example, just a quick, in teaching kids about Thoreau and Walden, they’re like “What is this stuff? I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be… solitude is the last thing that feels… I need.” When you get a little older, you go, “whoa, there’s something there.” So I guess the question may be more about practice than curriculum.

KD: I don’t know. Yeah it could change.  I mean, in my situation it’s just a question of being able to give myself more fully to the practice I’m doing. That kind of seems to have deepened over the years. There’s less stuff pulling me out of the moment and I’m able to give myself more fully to whatever practice I’m doing and there are practices, you know, different traditions have different practices for learning how to die consciously, learning how to dream consciously, be aware in your dreams and stuff like that. A lot of practices out there that, I don’t know if they change necessarily with stages of life, I think they change as you change in your own life, too. But yeah, there’s all kinds of things and you might be led to other practices as time goes on because then they all of a sudden, they make more sense to you. You know, like, monks tend to do practices that teach them to be disgusted by the human body. So they don’t get attached to their own body or attracted to other bodies, to protect their vows.  You know, they meditate on, you know, this bag of slime and shit and mucous that, that we carry around with us, that we think is so beautiful, you know? You know? So, that’s… they’ll really cultivate that so when they look out, they’ll see bags of slime and shit and mucous. They don’t see somebody they’d like to screw. But that’s a very particular practice for a very particular person who’s involved that way. Not for us. Although, as time goes on, you know, Tulsi Das, this great poet in Indian traditions, said “Oh Lord, save me from the fever of youth.” You know, the older you get you go like, “What was I thinking? Oh, I wasn’t thinking.” You know, it’s like being young is like, the hormones cruising through your blood and it’s like, the fever. Gobble gobble gobble gobble. You know, you get a little older, it’s like, can I just rest a little bit? No! Go grab more stuff. You know. So, things change. It’s all good.

The post Ep. 43 | Practice Arising By Itself, Dharmageddon and Does the Curriculum Change With Age appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 11, 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.

“It’s very difficult time. So, it’s a good time to be kind to yourself and allow what is to be for now. This is the moment you have. You don’t have any other moments. Now is what you have. 10 minutes from that will be now… What happens three years from now, you don’t know, but now is the time that you have to try to relax about all these issues that you have in your life and in your emotions, come to peace with them, greet them, get to know them. Stop judging yourself so harshly for feeling these things. Stop judging yourself harshly for not having what you think you should have. ‘Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I don’t have what it takes for this to happen for me.’ This would be a good time to let the sting of all those kinds of stories dissipate a little bit and don’t believe them so strongly every minute of every day. Right now, you can’t do much about anything. We’re stuck at home. We have our minds to deal with, and it’s our minds that all the suffering comes from; our minds, our emotions and our stuff.” – Krishna Das

I’ve been traveling for 25 years, almost nonstop. Which of course I love to do, and I love to sing with people, but I can actually spend a whole day now without worrying what’s going in the suitcase. It’s amazing. Because usually I have to travel, and I’ll go through two or three different climates. Right?

So, I take two suitcases and the harmonium, wherever I go. And if I never came back home again, I’d have everything I need for the rest of my life. Now, having all this space around me, I have time to clean my room. I’ve been cleaning for weeks. I haven’t made a dent.

Well, what do you want to do? What do you want to talk about? You know, trying very hard to achieve some particular kind of state of consciousness or some kind of feeling that we think we’ll be able to hold onto, that’s not really the best, beset plan. What we need to really cultivate is the ability to live with whatever shows up in our, in our life in the moment.

When I was younger, when I was, and I was in India with Maharajji and every day when we’d come out in the afternoon, he would come out to sit with us. I’d take a bath, cold water bucket bath, put on some clean clothes and come out and sit in front of him, and one day I laughed almost out loud because I saw that I was waiting for something to happen, you know? And I realized, every time I sang, every time I meditated, every time I did any kind of practice, there was a program running behind, like waiting for something, waiting for it to happen.

And that moment, sitting with him, I laughed because I realized, wait a minute, it’s already happened. I’m here. And I realized I had this, this idea that liberation, freedom, Nirvana, ultimate bliss was, when I would get that, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be there when that was here. I wouldn’t be there.

And I laughed because I recognize that that moment, there will not be billionth of a second that I will not be here, that you would not be here, but we get washed away and blown around by the winds of this and that, and the waves of this and that. And so, we don’t recognize that we’re always here. It would be like the ocean thinking that it’s a wave only and every time the wave crashes and tries to hold on to that wave and then it crashes and disappears or grabs onto another one.

But the ocean is always there, regardless of how many waves come and go.

Q: Hi everyone. My starts maybe with more of a statement and hopefully it’ll roll into a question, but I’m thinking a lot about the hanging out in the heart space. And I’ve been tuning into the YouTubes on Thursday nights and thinking about the importance of being with people that are sharing good thoughts and good intentions. And I heard someone say recently that this is a good time to be strong and separate yourself from others that are full of fear and full of anxiety.  And I’m a teacher. And so, my colleagues and my students are full of fear and anxiety right now. And I feel that I’m starting to take that on. Trying not to, but how can I be in a, hanging out in the heart space with people and, and let my students know that it’s going to be okay, but at the same time, I can barely get myself through the zoom faculty meetings every Monday morning. I don’t know.

Well, if you, if we would greet each moment with compassion and kindness for ourselves and others, we wouldn’t feel the need to protect ourselves. So, you you’re afraid of being hurt by what’s coming from what you think is the outside. But as you know, there really is no outside.  We only experience it as an outside, but where do we experience it? Within ourselves. So, it’s our own knee jerk reactions, which are caused by our own attachments and our own fears and our own anxiety and all that stuff. It’s all that stuff that colors the outside world and makes us see it and experience it in a certain way.

And when you’re you become kinder to yourself, one of the things you notice is how fucking hard it is to keep it together and to feel okay. And then you see, well, if it’s so hard for me, imagine people who probably don’t understand that there’s any way to deal with this stuff in a in a positive way that w that you can learn and grow from. So, those are the people, then naturally your heart will feel for them, and there’s nothing to protect them. There’s no fear. There’s no worry. You can’t, you know, people’s, people used to say things like I’m gonna, I’m gonna will myself into some state of mind.  You know? What am I trying to say? I remember people saying to me, like, they were afraid of getting something from somebody else. Right? Like catching some kind of fear from somebody else. So, I said, wait a minute. All right. I want you to give me a headache now. Some on, give me a headache. You can’t. So, nor can you get a headache from anybody else? So, it’s just the fear.

Right? So, the fear is within us, that’s our own stuff. And once again, there’s always reasons for that fear. It’s not necessarily what’s happening in the moment outside of us. It’s what buttons that stuff is pushing inside of us. So, this is the time to cultivate kindness, compassion, and ease of heart with our situation, as it is. Not try to change it, but to be with it in an open, relaxed way that allows people to be who they are, but you don’t have to buy their version of reality.

Q: Right. Yeah. I’m thinking about letting go, too, in many ways, just in general.

It’s not easy.

Q: No.

That’s why we do kirtan. That’s why the chanting, that’s the meditative aspect of the chanting.

Q: Yeah.

You’re singing, you see a lot of people chant and they think that they’re supposed to feel some particular thing like love, imagine that, you know, but that’s not how I, that’s not what it means to me. That’s not the way I do it. I sing. When I notice I’m not paying attention, I sing. And when I notice I’m not paying attention, I sing. And that clears away the clouds that are between myself and the sun of who I really am, which is all the things that I really want to be and feel, so to speak. So, if you’re busy trying to manipulate your emotions, you’ll never let go.

Q: right.

So, we’re training, we’re training for these moments, right? When we sit down for whatever 10, 15, 20 minutes or whatever, and we sing, or we meditate or we chant quietly or whatever, we’re practicing letting go. And that moment that we practiced continues through the day underneath the conscious level.

So, when things come at us, there’s, now there’s other options in our awareness and our being to respond, other ways to respond.

It’s just like an athlete who practices foul shooting. You know? They’ll take thousands of shots, thousands of shots working on the right position, working on the thing. What do I look at? What do I do?

When it comes to game time? Boom. He shoots and he doesn’t think about it. There’s no thinking about it, but all the training that one did manifests in that moment. And that’s, that’s the deal. That’s why practice is so important because it’s the deal you make with yourself to not go, to try to pay attention and not go off with every thought forever, you know, but it’s not easy.

And the minute, of course, the minute you sit down and try to do some practice, you, then you really see how much nonsense there is in our heads all the time.

Q: Yes.

But that’s a good thing.

Q: Yes.

And then you start thinking, Oh, I’m totally fucked up. I’ll never get this. Right. That’s just a thought, let it go.

So, when in the non-practice session times of our life, we have those thoughts or we, we start believing those stories, there’s also a part of us that we’ve been training to release that belief in those negative stories. But we have to put the time in by ourselves in the practice time or with a group doing the same practice, like in the chanting.

And then it’ll happen by itself the rest of the day. But you don’t notice that, because if you notice that you’d be, we’d be patting ourselves on the back and forgetting that we’re not, you know, it’s not about us in the first place. It’s about letting go. The funny thing is, you know, the spiritual path is not about “me” at all.

It has nothing to do with, “I think, feel, taste, touch, want don’t want.” That’s all the stuff we let go of. And that actually allows a much for a much richer, deeper experience of life.

Q: Thank you so much.

Ok. One more thing, one more thing, the tail end of that is that, so the first step, for instance, when you’re in a meeting or you’re meeting with people who you feel are really cranked up in fear and stuff, so first you, you feel for them and you wish them well. This is a part of the loving kindness practice that Sharon Salzberg always teaches. The Metta meditation. Because then when you’re wishing them well, so they don’t feel so bad, you’re not thinking about how you feel at all. You’re freed of yourself, your little circle of me, me, me at that moment, and that plants seeds, as well, of being freed of that obsessive me stuff. That, those seeds will also grow it at a later time. So, the first thing is recognizing what’s in front of you, the fear and the, where a person’s coming from and the second one is wishing them well.

And In the meditation practice, the formal Metta practice, there’s four different phrases that we offer to, we offer the universe or ourselves: may I be safe, May I be happy, May I be healthy, and may I live at ease of heart with whatever arises. So, you offer this to, you start off offering to yourself and then when you’re just about to have a total meltdown, they say, okay, now offer it to someone who’s always been on your side, always been your friend, always been there for you, regardless of how screwed up you were. And you start bringing that person to mind and you say, Oh, may you be safe, may you be happy.

Oh, and then you’re floating, you know? Wow. Yeah. And then they say, okay, now come back to you. So, this is the practice. And it’s so hard to let ourselves be at ease. It’s so hard to be kind to ourselves because we grew up in a culture that, for the most part, is not kind. People are not trained to be kind to themselves.

They’re trained to get as much as they can of anything they can hold on to, to grab a little pleasure and avoid pain. That’s how we grew up. That’s the whole world we grew up in. In the West, Western psychology and Western culture. S

o, I was thinking about saying something else, but I don’t remember what it is, so,

Hello.

Q:  I met you in Madison last year at just about this time, when you were at that gorgeous church, it was so beautiful.

Yeah.

Q: And I am the recipient of your last hug because you had to come to me cause I’m the wheelchair user. Right? So, my question, you know, my life has, so, I try to balance again, we’re talking about that internal heart space with the absolute chaos around us and, and find my place and find my footing.  But my real question is, is it, is it my ego that wants to be pain-free, that wants to be able to get up and run and walk and participate in this life in a different way that my body won’t let me do right now?

I know, it’s big.

No, it’s not that big. Medium sized one, one medium sized ego.

So, it’s all ego, sweetheart. Everything on this side is ego, but that doesn’t matter. We don’t care what it is. How do we live in a good way?

So, you can’t stop the wind from blowing, so you might as well flow with it. When Ram Dass had his stroke, when he first had a stroke, he was lying in the hospital, paralyzed, unable to speak. And he was looking up at the ceiling cause he couldn’t move. He’s on his back. And he was thinking to himself, Where, where’s God? Where’s Maharajji? I was almost, I almost died.  He said, I failed death.  He said.  Yeah? It’s supposed to like, have, you, know, Ram Ram going, going. He failed death. All he could think about was the pipes on the ceiling. So, and at that time he said, he used to think that Maharajji had given him that stroke. He used to say he was stroked, you know? And in fact, there was a whole movie made called “Fierce Grace” based on around us, his belief at that time that Maharajji had actually stroked him, had given him that stroke for his own benefit, to some degree.

So, many years later, he finally went to India again for the last time, in the wheelchair. And he was with Siddhi Ma, Maharajji’s great devotee. And she said, Ram Dass, Maharajji did not give you the stroke. He would never do that. That could never happen. The stroke is your karma. What Maharajji gives you, and will, has given you, is the strength and the grace to overcome the results of your karma in this moment.

And that’s a very big difference.

So… and, Ram Dass’s beauty and strength and greatness was that he did overcome those, those shortcomings. He never, he didn’t focus on the physical pains. He had so much pain. He had diabetic neuropathy, which is like needles, and he had extraordinary physical suffering. He never mentioned it. He was able to overcome his pride of having to be helped to do anything. At some point, maybe 10, 12 years into the stroke, he had, he fell and had to have hip surgery, hip replacement, and then he fell again and ripped his rotator cuffs. So, he couldn’t do anything for himself anymore.

He couldn’t turn himself in bed. He couldn’t do anything. He, everything had to be done for him. And he overcame the pride and he accepted help. And. He really blossomed. It was extraordinary.

So, not just for you, but for all of us…

Q: right.

What we have in our life at this moment is what’s supposed to be there, whether, all right, whether it’s supposed to be there or not, but it’s there. So, there’s nothing to say about it. So, but that’s the first step is recognizing, okay, this is, this is the given. Now what? Am I going to let it run me?  Or am I going to deal with this?

You know, someone wants to ask his holiness, the Dalai Lama, are you happy?

And he said, well, I guess you could say I had a hard life. I was taken from my parents, like at the age of three, then I had to take the reins of my country at like 13. And then I had to escape while the Chinese invaded and killed millions and millions and millions of my people.

He said the Chinese have taken everything. The Chinese government,

Q: yes.

Taken everything from me. Am I going to let them take my happiness?

Happiness, peace, calmness, openness, compassion, kindness: This is our true nature.

Q: Yeah.

Let’s not let Our own actions of from the past, our own Karmas ruin this moment. We can overcome all that, but that’s where the work starts. That’s what it’s about. That’s why we calm our minds. That’s why we plant the seeds of the name.

That’s why we keep coming back from our thoughts. Everything you said to me is your thoughts and you believe them. Why? Why do we believe those stories? You know? We do. It’s, we’ve been trained to do that.

Q: I’ve been, I’ve worked a lot on dismantling a lot of them, and there are so many, there’s just layers and layers in everything that we looked at all around us.

Yeah, for sure. That’s the way it is.

Q: I guess. I don’t know how to let go of this one yet.

Just say Sri Ram Jai Ram for 24 hours. And every time you notice that you’re not paying attention, you come back. Gradually, you, your being gets more, it becomes more at ease with sitting in itself.

You become more at ease sitting within yourself. It’s practice. You have to do it. You can’t think about it. It’s not something you think about. We have to do it. Anything you’re thinking, let it go. Who gives a fuck what it is? Even, how great am I? Let it go. Oh, I’ve overcome everything except thinking, I’ve overcome everything.

Let it go. Keep letting go. It’s not pushing away. It’s not pushing away. Releasing,

Q: Allowing you to flow through.

Flow through. Flow through, and, and disappear in the mist. But don’t worry. There’s another one on the way. It’s practice, it’s practice. And you know, there’s many, they say there’s different levels of, of enlightenment. And at some point, even though you’re not creating karmas anymore, the karmas from the past are still coming. They haven’t been burnt yet.

Like when Buddha was finally enlightened and recognized his enlightenment, he said, Oh, house builder, no more houses where you build for me. Houses being the sense of a separate self.

Because there was no karma left. You had burned. It was burnt now, finished, but for us, we’re still putting additions on to the house, you know? You know, we’re putting in fancy tubs and, you know, Wi-Fi and all this stuff to make the house more comfortable, but it’s never going to be comfortable. There’s always going to be some dissatisfaction there.

So, recognize that.

Q: Yeah.

But when you recognize that, and you accept that then the sting goes away of it. Ah, yes. It’s always going to be like this and then it isn’t. When you really, when you really bow to it, then it disappears. It comes back. But you cultivate that, that the offering that you make of your heart, of your being to the moment, to keep cultivating that, coming back, coming back, coming back to the name, coming back to your breath, coming back to whatever your practice is, and then we gradually, but inevitably, that presence within us is uncovered completely. And then the stuff comes, but we don’t identify with it. We don’t grab onto it.

Practice. You have to do it. So. You don’t, then we just stay stuck in our stuff, which is okay. We keep rearranging it and polishing it up and showing it to other people, but it’s just more stuff.

So, and of course, as we, as we do sit more deeply inside of ourselves, we become less reactive to what happens in front of us, qhat happens in our world, and we get the ability to, to, to, we get a vote in how we respond to stuff. Right now, most of us don’t have much of a vote. Somebody says something weird, or it looks at us in a bad way or something, and we’re gone.

I mean, immediate emotional coloring. Right?

So, we’re trying to get a vote here little by little. We will, but it takes time.

Q: Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Q: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Hi,

Q:  I met you years ago in 2004. Doing Dharma Mittra’s 500 hour teacher training program and you had come to the studio for the afternoon.

I come in for the last hour of the 500. Yeah, I get the easy way.

Q: And you spoke with us for about two hours, and we did a kirtan that evening and it was just so beautiful.

Great.

Q: And I just wanted to share a little piece of magic that happened right before Ram Dass died. You know, I, I hold that meeting with you so dear and I got to meet Bhagavan Das and Krishna Das was on my bucket list, but with him being in Hawaii and, you know, just this state of things I never really got there.

And on a Wednesday morning I was teaching a senior yoga class in a beautiful greenhouse. And at the end in meditation, you know, my playlist is going. And all the sudden, Ram Dass’s song, “I Am Loving Awareness” came through, and I never heard the album. And I’m listening and I’m thinking, “I thought Ram Dass like Krishna Das. Yeah, Ram Dass.  Oh, I, I think that’s Ram Dass.” And I said to the class, I said, “I think Ram Dass has crashed our party.” That following Friday, your email came out saying that loved us. I had left us and I just, the magic of that. And of course, now it’s one of my favorite albums. And when I’m on my yoga mat for myself, I play the whole thing while I’m doing yoga and I just wanted to also thank you and let you know that, if you ever wonder if your emails make a difference and, you know, the things you do make a difference, they so do, because that morning it was like getting an email from my brother, you know,

That’s all. I just wanted to share that with you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Q: Thank you for your love, you know, cause I really, I feel it, you know

Thank you. Thanks so much.

Hi.

Q: Hi. I have a couple of questions, but I just have a little funny story because a few weeks ago I was getting some medical treatments and the doctors, like, hike up my dose of the medicine, and I was feeling kind of drowsy.  And in that state, I didn’t know where the thoughts come from and I had this stuff. I was worried a little bit about the virus and situation, and I was like, I need Krishna Das to call me. I think when I came out of this also, this has been most ridiculous idea ever. And here we are. And I guess my question is I’m in New York and I have a family in Belarus. I haven’t seen them in 10 years. It’s a long story. And I found myself having, I’m not very close with them, but I found myself having lots of anxiety over what’s going on. And I guess my questions are how to, how to trust that everything is happening in life as it should be without feeling pain and resistance?

And how to trust life that everything I cannot change is happening in my best interest?

Hmm. Yeah.

Well, interesting word you have used is “trust.” Yeah. What are the options? Not trusting, living in fear, living with anxiety, living in negative spaces and not being at ease. Those are the options. Either one trusts… Ram Dass and I used to say, he used to say faith No? Fear. Faith? No fear. So, it’s the first thing is really, we have no control. We can only deal with what we can deal with. Right? I mean, if you can’t, if you can’t fix something, then don’t worry about it because you can’t fix it. If you can fix something, then fix it. But if you can’t, you can’t, so then you’re left to deal with your own stuff about it.

And of course, once again, I sound like a broken record; practice when you can. This is why we do practice. So that whatever’s arising in our lives. We are more able to greet that moment that it arises in a better way, in a in a more open way, in a way that causes us less, less grief internally.

You know, we can’t… If we really think about it, we can’t really control much of anything, except we might be able to eventually control our reactions to stuff if we put the time in and recognize that that’s where the real work is.

Yeah. One has to remember that one’s work is to calm one’s ass down. Let it go, relax, find a deeper place to be as these things arise. You can do that. That’s the only thing you can do, you know, this moment, this moment is the only moment that we have. We can’t change the past. We don’t know what the future is.

We’re here now. So, this is the moment that we can, we can take action and, and work on ourselves, you know, and this is the only time we get a vote is now, right? And the past is gone. We have no way of changing that. And the future hasn’t come yet. Now is now and now is where we really are all the time.

You know, two weeks from now, if you ask me if you’re asking yourself, well, what time is it? Well, it’s now. Where am I? I’m here. Just like, if you asked the same question to yourself right now. You’ll always be here. And here is where the work goes on. Here’s where we can, we can train ourselves to release the anxiety. The anxiety is not out there.

What’s going to happen? It’s going to happen. What we can change, okay, we try to change. In other words, we, we disinfect the cartons of food that come to us, that’s delivered. That’s an action, a positive action. We can’t control what’s on that package of food. What, but we can disinfect it when it comes into our awareness, into our life.

So, it’s the same with other things. We can’t disinfect the actions of the world, but, as they’re out there, but when they come in contact with us, we can disinfect them from our own emotional colorings, you know? And then… and as we learn to do that, we get more confidence in our self too. We recognize, okay, I can deal with this. This is, I know how to be with this. It’s not going to kill me. You know, it’s intense, it hurts, but I’m here. And the more we, we come back to ourselves the less the clouds around us color things.

So, but once again, sit every day, three minutes. I don’t know what your life is like. I don’t know what you do, but I know you have three minutes.

Three minutes.

Turn the phone off.  Turn the television off. Everything. And just let yourself settle. Like a leaf coming down off the tree. Don’t try. The leaf doesn’t have to try. Gravity brings it down. Sit quietly. Let your thoughts begin to settle. That’s all. Don’t kill them. Don’t manipulate them. Don’t chant a mantra like this, Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram. Be with your breath, be with yourself, relax the body.

Do it laying down. Whatever’s easiest for you to really relax, but give it, for that three minutes or five minutes or whatever, really be there with it. Experience what’s happening at that moment, you know. Don’t try to change it. Quiet. Settle. Easy. When you, when you notice you’ve been thinking, just come back, just come back.

There’s you know, one can watch one’s breath come in and out in a simple, gentle way. You don’t have to breathe. You’re breathing all the time. You don’t have to make yourself breathe. So just allow the breath to come and go. Let the stomach relax. Let the muscles relax. Let the body relax. Just calm. And once you know how that works, you can always go there.

It’s your place to go when things are too tough, too crazy, that slows everything down. It doesn’t change anything out there, but it slows it down so you can digest it, so you can be with it in a different way.

We can do anything inside, but we can’t do anything or everything outside. We are, we can be ultimately powerful within ourselves to overcome fear and anxiety and shame and grief and selfishness and all the things that we, how we usually function. And that’s the deal. That’s what we’re trying to do because all those different things, that’s what causes us pain and suffering, you know, and hurts us.

So, you’re always here. You’re always here. At any moment, you can let go. You can always let go, but it takes a little practice to get what that feels like. You know? So do something regular every day. Don’t expect, you know, the sun to rise in the West just because you’re sitting for three minutes in the morning, you know, or whatever, but just do it.

And little by little, you’ll find a comfort in that space that will, the taste of which will stay with you more often. And that’ll help you be the best person you can be, the best human being you can be, and, and when you think of your family and you can wish them well, you know, bring them to mind and say, “be safe, be happy, be healthy, and live at ease.”

You can repeat those lines. It’s four, four phrases that they teach in the Loving Kindness Meditation, and that’s our offering to people, and ultimately an offering to ourselves.

Be safe.

It’s, it’s better than worrying about it all the time and letting that anxiety eat us alive. This is, this is what we can do to overcome all those, all that stuff that, that we’ve been trained to allow to eat us up all these years. But you’ve got it and we all have it. You have the power to do that.

So, add that to your life. Add, add some moments like that, where you’re just allowing it to settle down. You’re not trying to make it feel this way or that way or push it around or manipulate it or shape it into anything. Just be you, which is who you are already. So, it’s not that hard, is it?

Q:  Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. And don’t go outside.

Q:  Hi.

He just took his first steps 30 seconds ago.

He was trying to get away from me. That’s why.

He just walked for the first time.

Hello? Hello. How are you doing?

Well on our babymoon, we came to Maui just for Thanksgiving. We were with you and Ram Dass.  He’s been chanting since he was …

since he was a baby, right?  Yeah, I get it.

But I wanted to say, sadhana for us and chanting was much more prevalent when, when when he was in my womb and now my, my husband is here in the room as well, and I, we just it’s it, I mean, it feels impossible to chant. It feels like, we have our harmonium and I, I sit down with it and Oscar loves it.  He starts banging on the keys, crawling on it, you know, I get, you know, a couple minutes out and then it’s onto the next toy or whatever.

I mean, we just, we used to meditate for hours a day, and now it’s zero moments of, you know, and so I just, I know you’re a parent and I would love to just get a realistic perspective on what sadhana, you know…

You think something from me is going to be realistic? You’re a very optimistic person,

Q:  yeah, whatever your thoughts are on that…

You know, just love the kid have fun.

Don’t go crazy when he goes crazy and do the best you can. Your meditation is not just when you’re sitting down doing some formal practice. Meditation is how you live in every moment. Be aware, calm yourself. There are times when babies go completely nuts and nothing can calm them down, but that doesn’t mean we have to go on the trip with them.

We don’t get, we don’t always get, we can’t arrange our lives the way we want them all the time. So, we have to deal with them as they are. And this is, this is your life. Enjoy. Be with it. Don’t try to change it. You can’t change it. It is what it is. And there’s an incredible book called, Oh my God, What’s the name of that book? “Knee deep in grace.” Look that up. This woman, an Indian woman who married, got married and moved to Burma. And then she had one child, I think. And then her husband died, and she was devastated, and she started doing meditation practice, but not just sitting, you know, cause she had to raise her kid.

So, it’s an incredible book. She became an enlightened being dealing with her life every moment. It can’t be any other way than it is. So don’t try to make it some other way.

Relax. Let it come. Let it come. Let it go. Don’t try to hold on. Yeah, don’t try to hold on to, to what your, your ideas of things are about, “This is what I should be doing. I should be doing this. I shouldn’t get carried away with this.”

That’s nonsense. That’s that’s all, you know, mind poop. Let it go.

Throw that diaper away, you know, get rid of it and just be with it as it is. There’s no, there’s no….Because like His Holiness said, he wasn’t going to let the world and the events that happened take his happiness away. Happiness is our true nature. Joy, peace, calmness, openness, kindness, compassion. These are all qualities of our real heart.

So, it’s not just when you sit down and squeeze that harmonium. Chances are the kid’s going to break it within six months anyway.

Q:  He’s on his way.

Yeah, I know. It’s going to become useless anyhow. So, he’ll take that away from you too.  Just go with it, go with it, relax. Let it come. Nothing to do, except be with it all the best way you can.

You always have the option to release the reaction that you just had. It’s not easy once that juice is flowing. Like once you get angry, Oh, there’s very little you can do until it calms itself down so the energy dissipates a bit, but you can still be aware, “Oh, that was horrible. I’m really caught.”

Yeah. Okay. That’s also thoughts. Keep letting go, letting go. Be with it as it is, not as you think it should be. It’ll never be like you think it should be for long. Anyway.

Just look, pretend, just pretend you don’t need to sleep for the next two or three years. That’s okay.

Q: That’s the, that’s the realistic expectation for a very many months.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thank you so much.

I just had this weird feeling that this is like a radio talk show. You ever see the guys that’s in sitting by the mic. “Hello? Yeah. Our next caller from New Jersey is,” you know, it’s crazy.

Q: Namaste Krishna Das. Thank you for allowing the space for everybody to come together and to share what’s on their heart and their mind.

I have a quick story to tell you. I purchased your book, “flow of grace” last week. I’ve been doing the Chalisa a couple times a day.  Wednesday was Hanuman Jayanti, which was his birthday, I guess, right?

Every Tuesday, right? whatever. Yeah.

Anyway, so I made sure to keep him in the heart and did the Chalisa like once an hour, picked up the book, read a part in your book that said the monkey took the form of a mosquito.

Later that night after I read that, I go to shut, the lights off in my place and what’s in my place? There is a mosquito the size of a baseball

really? Oh my God.

So, yeah. So, and my girlfriend is pregnant. So, I have all these things going in my head with the virus and West Nile or whatever it may be out there. So, I go to open the door up to let the mosquito out and the mosquito comes in.

So now this divine chase is going on for about an hour, as I see this mosquito remembering the path that you wrote and long story short, I ended up taking the life of the mosquito.

Ah huh.

So, what goes through my head? Here I am ruining yet another chance to meet God and all this guilt comes on me and later on, you know, after dealing with all the sadness of that, as silly as it may sound, my girlfriend was asking about what’s the problem.

When I explained to her, she looked at me a little crazy, which was,

which wasn’t the first time.

Yeah, yeah. I’m used to that reaction from a couple of people, but anyway, so, you know, and then I started to think about it. Well, you know what, maybe this was a lesson to kind of forgive myself and to maybe not take form so literal.

When I do the chanting, when I do my prayers and meditation, I tend to attach to a form. I close my eyes and I picture, and I picture, and I picture, and I just want to know what your insight would be on that experience. What would Maharajji say with that mosquito and me taking the life of that mosquito.  And what would be the lesson than that?

Yeah. One thing I can tell you is that I have no idea what my heart would say under any circumstances. I’ll tell you a funny story. So back in the India days, Ram Dass had bought a Volkswagen bus from these other people, other Westerners, and we were driving around.

We’d drive to the temple every day from Nainital. There were maybe 20 people hanging off of this Volkswagen bus up on the roof, hanging off the back. It was crazy. And at one point Maharajji looks at Ram Dass and says, Ram Dass, you’re a Saint. You have to, you have to take the regular bus.

He takes the keys away to the Volkswagen bus and he hands me is the key. And he says, you’re the driver.

You know? So actually “driver” became my name for a long time.  Driver!

So, I always drove, or I always had the keys to the bus. Now I always had this desire that I wanted to drive Maharajji around, you know, but I never said anything to anybody. I never asked Maharajji.  I never said, but I always kept those keys with me 24 seven, every minute of every day, I had the keys with me, no matter what I was doing, because I knew it could happen any time. So, I, but I never said anything to anybody.

So, one day, about a year later, we were in Allahabad and we’re all sitting around with Maharajji, sitting in the room and he looks at me and he goes, Hey, you have the keys?

And I said, yeah, let’s go. Right.

So, Dada, it was Dada’s house.  Dada was one of these great old devotees.   So, he walked Maharajji out of the room, down to the car. And I opened the door for Maharajji to the passenger side. And Maharajji was very short and and the Volkswagen bus seat is pretty high. So, he kind of had to throw himself up into the seat. Right? And he bashed his head head on the door, the top of the door. I mean, whack.

I almost shat my pants. I could not believe it. And I went, Oh my God, look at that. What? I can’t believe this; this is my fault. I, my desire created this. I never, this is the worst, my own, you know, my, my guru bashed his head on the car because of me and I said to Dada, I said, Dada, did you see that? And he said, He did it on purpose now, just drive

Because with the world that Dada lived in, anything that Maharajji did, he did it on purpose. He did it for a reason.

And so, I, okay. So, I got in the car and we drove. Maharajji was like, watch out, watch out, look over there. Oh, there’s a car. Be careful. Watch out over there. Oh, Oh, all the way to the, like about a 20 minute drive to the to where the, this Holy place in Allahabad and I’m driving, like he’s freaking me out.

So, we get to this place, we parked the car, I turned the car off and after a minute He says, okay, let’s go back. And all the way back He’s going. Oh, watch out. Be careful that you’re going too fast. Slow down…

So finally, we get there, back to the house, but about two or three days later, we were sent off to the South to do a pilgrimage with Swami Muktananda. Because Ram Dass had promised Swami Muktananda he would do that.

And even though he tried to get out of it, Maharajji said, you’ve promised, so you have to go. So, we all went, there were three or four of us that went.

We were driving out of Allahabad.  And I’m driving and we’re coming in this long curve, right? This long, slow curve and off to our left, on the other side of the road, there was this big reservoir, a huge reservoir.

And there was no gates or no, nothing. It’s India. Right?

So, I come into this curve and I’m driving way too fast. And I realized that too late. And we’re, we’re, the car is sliding across the road. And it’s going to go right in the reservoir. And all of a sudden, this wind came, and it moved us like this back onto the road.

Q: Wow.

Right? So, my storyline was like your storyline. I did this. This is all because of me. I’m responsible for this. This is my karma blah, blah, blah. The other storyline is Maharajji did that on purpose. Right? So, it’s not exactly the same situation, but who knows? Maybe that, maybe that mosquito could have bit your wife or you and made you sick.

You don’t know what the next minute is. Right? You made a choice in that minute to do it one way or other you’re going to live with the karmas of that. So, you might as well just give up thinking about it. Give up your stuff about it. This is what we practice doing. Our stories that we tell ourselves all lifelong about me.

This is me, me, me, me, this way, me, me, me, that way. I’m me. I’m this. You know, maybe not. It’s just our story and there may be no reality to it at all. So, you know? Enough, right? Give yourself a fucking break.

Q: I know. The old self came in and said, man, I just want to get close to the god. This is what I do. I stomp him out.

But well, maybe, you know, karma is a very strange thing. Nobody understands karma except the fully, a fully enlightened being really understands all of that.

On the other hand, you know, my friend David Nichtern, many years ago, one of the great Lamas of the previous generation, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, he came to America, and David’s teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, was hosting him here. And at one point, David was driving Khyentse Rinpoche around in the car. And Khyentse Rinpoche was sitting in the back seat.  David was driving.  Khyentse Rinpoche said, pull over here, pull over. So, he pulled over and Khyentse Rinpoche… there was a fly in the, in the back, the rear window, you know, of the car and it was buzzing around. It couldn’t get out. Khyentse Rinpoche lovingly carefully, lead it along the window and released it from the car and said, okay, we can go.

The attention to detail of a great being is extraordinary. They understand all the ramifications of every action of everything that comes into our awareness, you know? And they, they have so completely transcended obsessive concern about themselves, that all they have is care for other beings.

It’s natural. Right? So maybe next time, you’ll find another way to deal with that. But you don’t know, but in the meantime, why beat yourself up?

Q: yeah, my intention was pure…

Your intention was good. Yeah.

Another thing happened once when Dada was in America, I was driving him around and we were going for a drive one afternoon and We’re driving around this neighborhood in Westchester, New York, where it’s big neighborhoods, big kind of very upper middle class houses. Right. And as we were driving through these beautiful country roads, this squirrel ran across the road and I hit it.  I killed a squirrel and I said, Dada, Oh my God, Dada, look, look what happened. I killed that squirrel. I had no intention to kill it. It just happened, Dada. I don’t understand.

He just said, just be quiet and drive.

Q: Good. Like keep on going

Be quiet and live. Okay? Have a good time.

Thank you so much.

Ram Ram. Yeah.

Q: Hi. Hi KD. Hi. Here’s the thing, right? So, I’ve kind of written it down because it would make it simpler for me.

Well, As I may have told you in the past once or twice, and I’ve met you a few times, I’ve lived up a pretty screwed life. I’ve lived a pretty screwed up life…

Oh, I met you in England last time, right?

You did. Yes.

Right after the, after the evening we talked outside.

That’s right. Camden town. And I saw you in Shivananda this year.

Oh, okay. Yeah. It was good to see you again. So, KD, here’s the thing, I have a kind of spiritual sense of inadequacy because, you know, I, well, as I said, I just now really, really screwed up in my time and the practice, the teachings and the practice can make me feel really melancholic because how do I, how do I, I mean so much to learn and so little time. How do I make up for this?

How do I fill the hole?

Okay. I’m not putting this very well. I mean, you know, you know?

Yeah, but you know, there’s no making up for time. You’re here. You’ve always been here, but you haven’t been paying attention and there’s nothing to learn. It’s just to relax and let it go. Just relax. Let it go.

When you’re giving yourself a hard time, Relax, let it go.

You don’t need to understand why this is, why you’re that way, why this way. It’s enough to just let it go again and again.  Little by little, you start to feel at ease with letting go and not allowing those stories to eat you alive. They’re just stories. Yeah. Maybe they’re true on some level, but right now, let it go.

But when I’m sort of thinking I, I’m in my head a lot of the time and it’s kind of hard, you know, I listened to various meditation teachings, Ram Dass being one and of course, yourself. And Ram Dass saying, you know, you can focus on one thing. You’ve got these methods of meditation but still, still the demons come.

So feed them. Feed them, love them. They’re not going to hurt you. The demons are not going to hurt you. You’re only hurting yourself. So, just, you know, say, hi, how are you doing you’re back? What can I do for you?

Sorry, I can’t give you my life. So, you have to go. Bye.

So, you just kind of banished them away.

Don’t banish them, release them. You think they’re coming to get you, but really, you’re holding on to them.

Let them go. They’ll keep coming, but that’s okay. You can keep letting go. Why should you stop letting go? And then of course you’ll get caught and then you’ll spend three days depressed and then somehow or other it’ll kind of pass a little bit and you go, Oh, okay.

So that’s why, that, that’s, that’s what meditation practice brings.

That’s the fruit of meditation practice, is that we might get caught, but we don’t stay caught for so long. So, you don’t always feel so bad, so depressed, but you’re so used to identifying with that, that you don’t notice the space is in between, when you’re not giving yourself a hard time. You know?

So, I’m a moper. Right?

A moper. I mope around. This is my natural state. I mope. And over these years of practice and being involved in, in this path, you know, I mope less than I used to. Really. It’s amazing.

Q: So, the continuation of the practice will, eventually it’ll be it’ll, it’ll lessen this feeling.

I mean, I’ve been doing this now in your kind of world, the kirtan world, the bhakti world two years, maybe less. Meditation itself, About seven years.

I’ve been doing this 50 years and I’m still the same schmuck I always was. Yeah. But I don’t care. That’s the difference. Why do you care? Don’t care. So, you feel like shit.  Okay. Next.

But we care because you’re inhabited by that negative state and you care. Don’t care. Say, okay, hello. How are you? Oh yeah. I feel like shit too. You feel like shit? Okay. Let’s feel like shit together. And then it changes little by little, a little change comes back, goes away. Just keep letting go.

That’s all you can do. You can’t change anything on the level that it exists. You can’t think yourself out of a prison that’s made of thought. Every thought is the prison. You have to let go. But one of the issues is that until we have something to hold on to, it’s hard to let go of those kinds of things.

That’s why we, we allow another, in practice we, we pick some, one thing to think about, and then that excludes all the other thoughts eventually. Maybe it’s what you say.

Q:  That’s what you focus on?

And you’ll notice that you can’t focus on it for more than like a breath until you’re thinking about something else.

So, you let go and then you’ll come back again and again and again. And if you think seven years is long enough, talk about 7,000 lifetimes of this. So just be now, deal with what’s in front of you right now. Don’t worry about the past. That’s gone. Don’t worry about the future. It’s not here. You’re here now.

And I, I don’t know if I don’t feel so good. I don’t, I don’t care so much. Those feelings may still arise: inadequacy, self-doubt, self-hatred, all these things come, but, you know, number one, they don’t last very long, as long as they used to, maybe just 20 years. And then they go because of the practice, the practice releases them automatically over time.

So, like I said before, it’s like an athlete. You practice one particular move over and over and over, then when it happens in the game, it’s almost automatic. So, you practice letting go in a, what’s the word? You practice letting go, you practice letting go. And then the rest of your day, that practicing will manifest in many ways by itself. By itself.

So, you don’t feel good. Who cares? Hello? You’re still here. We’re here. And it’s like, okay, you’re talking about, what about if you’re dying? You know, like Ram Dass used to go out and sit with people who were dying, you know? And he recognized, if he saw them as people who were dying, that trapped them in that.

So, he would say hi, I’m here, are you here?

And that would help liberate them from their own storyline as well, because that was going on. But they could recognize that they’re present within that at the same time. So, you’re always here, but right now you identify with your emotions pretty much all the time.

So, you’re not recognizing that you’re still here and that the emotion is an object that you are aware of and feeling. It’s a feeling that you are having. Who’s having the feeling? You are not the feeling. You never are, but you it’s like a cloud that envelops us. And we start to think of ourselves. We lose ourselves in the cloud, but we’re still there. So just keep coming home again and again. That’s why we add an object of concentration to practice. It gives us a place to land again and again. That doesn’t guarantee we’re going to be happy. It doesn’t guarantee we’re going to be able to fly and, and, and change our shapes and, and, and, you know, become Kings and Queens of the world. No, it’s just a place to land again and again and again. And eventually we become more comfortable being at home in ourselves.

Practice. Be kind to yourself. You haven’t been taught to be kind to yourself. You weren’t kind, your parents weren’t kind to themselves, their parents weren’t kind, and where are we going to get this from? We get it from the people who have it, the great beings that have brought these teachings and these, these new ways of seeing ourselves, to this world. So, you have to practice being kind to yourself, give yourself a break for your own sake. You deserve that. We all deserve that.

Release the grief, release the suffering. Let it come. Cry for three years if you have to. Let it out. If you don’t let these things out, they push us around from the inside. Give yourself a break, okay, please.

Thank you. You have been a great help.

take care.

Hey, what are you eating there? A fork?

Ah, okay. I’ll pretend that I understand just what you said.

Q: you partly answered really all my questions and everything, what’s, what’s in my head. But my original thought was to ask you, how do you invite the flow of love inside when you are so emotionally constipated?

When this so hard to let anything that is positive and actually, I experienced resistance to it, to the positivity, to anything that is good, whether it’s gratefulness, whether it’s meditation, whether it’s practice, there’s intent or resistance to it, possibly there’s the fear. And also, what I experience is that if I do the practice or I invite, you know, the flow of love, then it backfires, that the demons that Sue was talking about, they come even strongly. And there’s always a feeling that no matter what I’m going to do, I am the, you know, the, the bad one, that nothing’s going to change because I am, you know, when you’re talking about the real qualities, those real qualities don’t apply to me. They apply to everybody else. But not to me, that I’m just so fake.

Well, you convinced me.

Well, sweetheart, that’s a program that’s running and it didn’t come from nowhere. There are causes that created that program in you.

We come up against our stuff like that all the time, but that’s, you can recognize that as a program, you know. When you calm down a little bit, you notice you can feel that. It’s a feeling and you, you have the whole idea of chanting and meditation is to release those feelings and come back. That doesn’t mean they’re not going to come back again and again and again, but over time you internally understand that this is not me. The feeling that you’re worthless, you’re not good enough. You’re not worthy of love. You’ll never be happy. Okay. On one hand, like I have a lot of those same feelings, but when I look at my parents, you know, I see where I got them from. Neither one of my parents loved themselves in a real way.

Neither one of my parents knew how to be good to themselves. Neither one of my parents knew how to be happy, at ease in life. And I know my grandparents, and the same goes for them. So, the same must go for my great grandparents and their great grandparents, you know, on and on, it’s just programmed behavior. There’s nothing wrong with you.

Your soul, your true nature is exactly the same as Buddha, as God. There’s no difference between you and the greatest beings that ever lived and walked this earth.

But you’re accustomed to just believing these things and it’s a habit, and it’s a hard habit to break. That’s why there are many, you know, I think Metta Loving Kindness Meditation would be a great practice for you for all of us. It’s one of my favorites. It’s my number two or three. I mean, it’s right up there. Besides chanting, the loving kindness practice that Sharon shares and other teachers share. It’s really fantastic because it cleans out our room.

It cleans out a safe place, makes it, it makes it a safe, clean place for us to sit inside of ourselves. And it’s almost like deep programming, reprogramming ourselves. The program is running. You’re not enough. And based on that, you’ve made so many decisions in life to try to fill up that hole with a hole that is not fillable with stuff.

The only thing that fills that hole is love and that love lives within you as who you are. It couldn’t be anything else. That’s not possible. But you don’t believe that.

So how are you going to change what you believe? Well, it’s a lifetime’s work. You know, you have to recognize that, that this is your given right now. This is your karmic predicament. You know? You don’t always feel like shit, but when you do, you really do. So, beautiful kids… They bring much joy. They bring a lot of craziness too, into your life. They take up a lot of space.  They create a lot of reactions in us, you know, that we don’t want to admit to having. It’s all OK. Everything you feel is OK. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s the past manifesting right now. How we meet this moment is the only time we have to vote on, on how we meet this moment.  Is now.  So just relax and feel like shit and enjoy it. Don’t try to change it. See what happens. After a while you get tired of feeling that, but the problem is you haven’t really focused on it. You just react and run with it. But allow it in and look at it, like, what is this? Where did this come from? What is this? Let it go, come back to the name or to your breath.

Now with two kids in the house, there’s not a lot of time to sit quietly. Three? Where’s the third one? Out driving around somewhere? So, but you can always find a couple of minutes to just let go completely of everything, even of your own desire to not feel this way. See, that’s another obstacle. “I don’t want this. I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t like this.”

The fear of feeling like that is really the hardest thing to let go of. Because once you’re at ease with whatever you’re feeling, it doesn’t eat you up. But that fear, the apprehension of, “Oh, it’s always going to be like this,” It’s called, that’s called eternal damnation. But it’s eternal as long as you’re in it, when you’re not in it, it’s not even there.

There is no eternal damnation. It’s a state of mind. When you’re in it, It’s eternal. When you’re not in, it’s not. So, you just have to… It’s it’s, this is the real stuff. This is the real spiritual work. Sitting cross legged and pretending you’re in bliss is bullshit. The real spiritual work is allowing yourself to be who you are with all the beauty and all the ugliness, the ups and the downs, the fear, the shame, the grief, all that stuff.

Let it be. It can’t hurt you. It can’t hurt you. It’s from the past. How you live, how you meet it right now creates the next moment. Yeah, come on, do your best. Give me your best shot. You know, these things are not Muhammad Ali, they’re little mosquitoes. They seem so big because of our fear. Nothing can hurt you. Nothing ever.

It’s your programming. Like, my program is very similar. Really. I, my programming is very hard for me to be happy and at ease and feel worthy of love. No matter how much love Maharajji showered on me. Look at my life, I could have done so many things in life. The choices I made, so many of them were based on needing something I couldn’t give to myself.

So, we’re in the same club. You’re not alone. Everybody has this stuff. This is what it’s like to be alive at this time. So, take some joy in that, you know? You’re not special. You’re not worse than anybody else. We’re all in the same club.

After a while, and this is one thing that I’ve experienced, is that over the years, and I’m talking 50 years, Ms. Big, seven years over there with her eyes closed, I don’t care so much how I feel. I just don’t care. So, I’m not feeling like God on earth? Big deal. I don’t care. It’s okay. It’s not about me.  My stuff, how I feel about me today is not the most important thing in the world.

Right? Is that right?  Yeah, that’s right.

So, our baseline, our home base is that kind of, oh, there’s number three. Hello… Hello. Oh, you’re a number two, I think.

Q:  Yeah. I’m double trouble.

So yeah, you know, it’s all okay. Even feeling bad is okay. Don’t push it away. Just Pat it on the head, give it something to eat and tell it to be quiet for a while. Okay?

You’re not going anywhere. There’s nowhere else to be. So, let’s clean our room, huh? You know, that’s it. That’s all we have to do. We have to clean our room and be kind to ourselves and everything in our lives. And then we won’t be thinking about ourselves all the time. That’s the real habits that we, that will change, is that it’s all about me.  “My state of mind, how I feel” is the number one most important thing in the universe, obviously. Okay.

All right?

Thank you.

Just keep breathing. That’s the main thing. If you’re not breathing, that’s a whole other ball game.

Q: Ram Ram. Namaste.  Those kids were, so those kids were so beautiful.

Yeah.   She’s looking all around for beauty and it’s; it’s jumping up and down in her lap.

Yeah. but that’s so how hard it is to let let stuff in it’s we have such a problem with that because we don’t love ourselves. We don’t, we’re so caught in our programs about ourselves that we can’t let ourselves feel love, but we will. Oh, can I, can I talk to both of you for a second?

So, one time I was sitting with Siddhi Ma in the back of the temple and all the cousins and yeah, that’s her From the Tiwari family, the third generation that I knew, they came. The oldest son was going to get married, so they all came to the temple for blessings. And I was sitting in the back with Ma and there were all these, like 20 of these kids around, right? And I looked at them and they were so happy. There was so much love between them, you know? And I thought about my family and my grandparents, grandparents yelling at each other and my parents not talking to each other and the tensions and, you know, and I, I saw how much love and I thought, what is wrong with us Westerners?

So finally, I said to Ma, I said, Ma what is wrong with us Westerners? Why can’t we love? Why can’t we let ourselves be loved?

So, here’s what she said. I’m going to just tell you what she said. The first thing she said was, well, Krishna Das, what were your parents eating when you were conceived?

Hamburgers. Okay.

And then She said, what were they thinking when you were conceived?

Okay. Then she said an affection was used to control you as a child. It was given when you were good. It was refused when you weren’t doing what they wanted you to do. So early on, even before you knew consciously, you, you understood vibrationally that if you needed to, in order to get what you wanted from them, which was everything, your parents were the whole universe, you had to give them what they wanted.

And so, affection became a business deal. Love became a business deal from day one. And that’s why it’s hard for us to feel that love without business, and what is love without business? So that was very powerful for me, very, very powerful. We were trained to buy attention and affection and we, and we still suffer from, from the experience that, that’s not enough. We can’t feel it in our hearts because it isn’t in our hearts. It’s in our emotions. It’s in, it’s a business deal. You give me, I’ll give you. That’s business. And so, no wonder we feel like shit, you know, so, but underneath that, before that programming went in, and even during all the programming right up to this moment, the love lives within us as who we are all the time already. The programs are covering it up, but that doesn’t mean the love is not there. But it may not feel the way we are accustomed to looking for it. So that’s why I always say, when you practice, don’t try to manipulate your emotions to feel one particular thing. Allow everything to come and go.  And from the inside, a different quality will arise from within us by itself because it’s natural to us.

Okay. Sorry.  What up?

Q: I have so much gratitude for you and your teachings. You know, I was student of Ram Dass from the eighties and, but it took your singing to get me to Maharajji. And then finally, a couple of times in Maui, with being introduced, literally, to Maharajji where I can say, Oh, he can be my guru, and now I have pictures everywhere and I’m a little obsessed and I’m kind of embarrassed by it sometimes. And I want to hide the pictures and put them in the closet or something.

Yeah. When, when the cable TV comes, I pull that, you know, I don’t let him into the room.

Yeah. Yeah. But I’m so grateful. And I have an easy question.  I’m not going to ask the easy ones. I have a bunch of questions. I’m not going to ask the easy ones. I’m going to ask the one I don’t want to ask. The one I don’t want to ask is I trained as a clinical psychologist. I went to school for like a decade or whatever and worked as a psychologist for 30 years, basically treating patients for close to free you know, in, in clinical settings and stuff. I got very burned out and then I got, multiple sclerosis hit me, and I literally couldn’t do the work anymore because I’m not, I, I have no control emotionally. I start crying, like immediately just start crying. Like, it’s really hard for me to even just speak right now. But so, I basically can’t do that work anymore. And then I fell into a job where I’m basically a, a tool for the insurance industry where I’m basically reading clinical cases and saying this person can have more treatment or less treatment.

I can work from home and I can do the work. I’m mentally capable of it. But I’m very concerned about the karma implications. I try to get myself in the right head space before I do it. I, I, I do some prayer and work before I do the work, but I’m basically saying to some people, you can’t have more therapy.

I try to say, yes, you can have therapy, to everybody. Then I’m definitely not doing my job at all. There’s some of them that are real easy, but a lot of them are, are like, Oh, you’ve had X number of treatment sessions and you can’t have any more because that’s what the rules are. And I’m allowed to break the rules sometimes.

But it’s gnarly and I’m just concerned. I’m concerned what I’m, what I’m doing.

Yeah.

I know. It seems like to you, it must look like you’re, you have responsibility in the situation, but really you don’t have much freedom to do what you would like to do. You do have to stay within your rules, but you know, you may not be able to change the rules, but you can change. Do you have direct interaction with these people or it’s just on paper?

Q: it’s all paper.

Okay. But that’s okay.

Q: It’s a total game. I mean, there’s lawyers involved and there’s people that….

I know the game. Yeah.

Q: I know it’s ugly.

No, it’s not. It’s just this world. It’s not ugly. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, what you could do is that every time, no matter who, what you’re dealing with, you take that piece of paper, you, you have the name of that person. Bring that person into your heart. Wish them well. Include them in your openness and your compassion and kindness, and really feel that, that they, that you truly wish them well. And then tell them they can’t have any more therapy. You know, you’re, you don’t have freedom to do what you want to do. So, you have to do what you have to do, but you don’t have to suffer yourself from that. So, you’re allowing yourself, because you’re taking it very personally, you’re allowing yourself to feel that you’re hurting these people where it’s not necessarily the case. The world, the situation they’re in, their own karmas is what’s hurting them.  So, you can free them from that in your heart if you take that as your practice. You can be in love all day long and let these people into your heart every single day.

That… what a great practice, “Ah, Frank Smith was in a car accident, living with panic attacks. Okay, Frank? Yeah. You’ve had treatment for the last 32 years.  The insurance company says it’s enough,” but while you’re signing that paper, Frank can be gushing in your heart with love and kindness and compassion. That’s going to have an effect somewhere, and at least you won’t be absorbing your own guilt and suffering from your own guilt that you can’t help these people.

Your job is not to help them. Your job is to do your job. Now, add on top of that, you can really help them by wishing them well, by bringing them into your heart and freeing yourself of guilt, which is just another way of protecting ourselves. So, open up and if you’re home alone, you can cry your ass off.  Who cares?

Frank, I love you. God bless you. I can’t stand that you don’t feel good. Be happy, be happy, be well, all these things. You know, nothing’s required that make you feel that you should feel bad. You have a job. You need the job. Do the job without attachment, which means with compassion, not with coldness of heart, but with wide open heart, a heart as wide as the world.

Q: Hmm. Thank you. Thank you for this guidance. Thank you.

Thank him for me. I have nothing to do with this.

Q: Hi. It’s been such a trick this entire time, knowing I was going to get to be sitting in this space with you and just be here with you right now, not even knowing what question I was going to ask, although I have a story. Two years ago, almost two years ago now, and it’s been about four or five years of going through all of my things, but I went to India two years ago and touched a space that I don’t exactly know how to explain, but brought back with me and then, getting back, I mean, I teach, I teach yoga as well. But I, I found that I brought chanting back with me from India.  So, sitting here talking to you feels kind of like I’m sitting here talking to myself and I never really thought I would have this chance. Feels pretty surreal at the moment. But I guess my question is that now, coming back from that experience and bringing also that experience with me, that space that I connect with, that saying that I use to connect into my heart center with, how did you, when you came back, how did you start sharing that and cultivating that experience?

You know, I’ll tell you the short story, but if you want to read the whole story, I did write a book about it.

Q: Oh, okay.

Which you’d probably enjoy, called Chants of a Lifetime.  But I came back from… Maharajji had just sent me back to America. And then. After two and a half years in India… he kept me there… He allowed me to stay…  definitely let me stay… created that whole thing for me. And then he told me I needed to return to America because I had attachment there. So I went, came back and before I could return to India, he left the body and that was a brutal blow to my life. Because I, my, I saw my life as just being with him physically.

I thought I’d always be with him. And then it became apparent that I’d never see him again in the body. So far. So, anyway, the short story is that 20 to 21 years after he left the body, that’s when I started singing with people. And I started for only one reason. And I continue to sing for only one reason, which is to save my miserable ass.

That’s why.

Q: That’s the same reason I do it too.

If, if that’s why you sing, keep singing. If you sing for any other reason keep singing but keep your eyes open because Ultimately the whole universe is inside of our miserable asses. We’re all, we’re all one. We’re all interdependent on each other for everything.

And when you chant, you chant to that place within you that is that love. And that’s the same place in everybody, that is that love. Everybody is that inside. The coverings are different. The shapes are different. The names are different. The emotions are all changing, but the inner reality of every being is exactly the same.

So, we chant into more deeply into that divine presence within. It’s not about who, how many people are out there. It’s not about if they like it or they don’t like it. It’s not about if anybody’s out there. When I sing, my eyes are closed, I don’t even know why I can’t, I don’t even think about it. So, it could be one person or a thousand people, it makes no difference to how I sing.

So yeah, that’s the short version, but I think you’ll get a lot more out of the book.

Q:  Okay.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

Hello. How are you?

Q:  Hey, hi, I’m good. How are you? So, actually I didn’t have any questions. I’ve read your books. I’ve read, I’ve heard all your podcasts. So, I kind of know most of the things that you say, but I had a story I wanted to share with you. And also, I wanted to ask you something about chanting. So, I, at the age of 15 found Hanuman and it was, it was like the Lila, it just happened.

And I was, I used to go to the temple every Saturday, And I just said, then I just started believing that he’s there. Cause he, I had my Lila’s with him as well. Like they they’re very childish, but it’s my faith. And then like around seven years back, my cousin made me hear Om Namah Shivaya. Yeah. And I did not know who you were. I did not know anything about you at that time, but I kept listening to the song and my only thought is that I follow Hanuman. Why am I listening to Om Namah Shivaya?  And then and then I found out, okay, he was the reincarnation of Shiva. So that’s, that’s how that happened. And the more that kept listening to you, then I, I started believing in Ram.  You know, I started doing Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram, even the Ram Sita Samadhi you take Neem Karoli Baba’s name and for a year, I did not know who Neem Karoli Baba was. I just kept singing the name. And as time went by, I obviously I’ve had so many gurus I’ve read about and so many gurus that I personally believe in, like in our families, we have gurus as well, but especially in this bad time, I have, I mean, not bad time, but in this particular time I might actually be spending an hour just singing.  And it’s, it’s a variety of songs from Kali Durga to Township Krishna, which like just starts my day on such a high note. So, I just wanted to ask you, like, from what I understand, Neem Karoli Baba, was, he followed Hanuman right? Or maybe he didn’t?

Yeah. I don’t know. You could say that. He was actually considered to be…

Q:   a reincarnation of Hanuman?

An avatar of Hanuman.  An incarnation.

Q:  Correct. So, my, my family Guru is known to be an avatar of Krishna. So, for me, like, you know, it’s still difficult to relate to these gods except for Hanuman because I have my connection with Him. But when I listen to your songs, you have, like the way you think for each and every God, I’m sure you sing because you’re singing for Neem Karoli Baba, so the love is there, but I just want you to understand how, why, why did you sing about all these gods? Like, is there any particular reason or you just do it like that? I actually wanted to know that

I don’t know what else to do.

All the forms of gods are the forms of that love that lives within us as who we truly are already. They are manifestations of our own true nature. We’re part of them. They’re the whole, we’re the part, on one level. Of course, Sri Ram asks Hanuman, He said, “how do you see me?”

He says, “well, when I identify with the body, I serve you. When I identify with the mind you are the whole, and I am a part, but when I know the truth, you and I are one.”

So, there’s many levels of that. So, you know, when Maharajji named me Krishna Das, I said, Krishna, Das? what is that? You know, I’m a Hanuman guy.

He just said, Oh, don’t worry. Hanuman served Krishna too, which is actually true.

Q:  Yup. That’s what I wanted to know.

The names are not here to separate us from love. These are all the names of love, period. They’re the names of your own true nature, who you are underneath who you think you are. These are the beings that have recognized that, are made of that completely.

So, all these names are equally powerful. That’s what my lineage tells me. Some lineages say only their names. Only the names they repeat are the real name. Well, as my grandfather would say, God bless them. But, you know, let them do what they want to do. You do what you do and don’t worry about it.

So, if it makes you feel good, sing it. If it doesn’t make you feel good, why sing it? That’s all. It’s up to you, how you feel, your decision. Follow your heart. There’s no, the whole path is learning to follow our own hearts because that’s where it lives. In there. Now we can take advice and teaching some other people, but if we agree, where are we agreeing? in here.

If we disagree, where we disagreeing? In here, we’re listening to here. So, it’s all about that. Just sing what makes you feel good. That’s what I do. No?

Q:  They all make me feel good by the way,

Then keep singing everything all day long, 24 seven.

Q:  Yeah. My husband, when he found that you’re coming live, so you’re going to come to India and I thought, I, and I thought, I’d come meet you there. And it didn’t happen. And I was and I got your email. I replied I’m so happy and then it didn’t happen. And then my, I just told my husband that you’re going to be live. And the first thing he did is he went and he just, you know, he got me this, this community thing where I can come on through, and he’s like, you listened to him all day long, just go meet him.

So, I said, yeah, I’m very thankful to be here.

Thanks for your husband too. Yeah.

Thank you. Thanks.

Q: Hi, KD. I get to see you every year in New York. It’s an annual pilgrimage and I did get to see you in Joshua tree once, which was amazing.

Rochester, I was there a long time ago.

Q: Yeah, so this feels really personal to share. So, I’m gonna try and share it and not get emotional. But I feel like life’s been a journey to find my partner and like in this time where we’re all secluded, and we really have downtime to focus on what we want… And it’s something I’ve already, you know, I feel like I’ve been doing different spiritual practices and just really trying to settle in and be honest and feel what there is to feel and work through everything. But this is like a really good time for new practices. So, I just thought, I’d ask you if there’s anything you’d recommend that I add

Just that this moment is the result of all the previous moments, everything in it, all your emotions, all your aspirations, all your desires, all your needs, everything here now. The way you feel about it, how you see yourself, how you treat yourself, how you inhabit the day, how you inhabit your life, all of that’s the result of previous karmas, our own lives, our own programming.  Just so, how we’ve live in this moment has a tremendous effect on how we trip and fall into the next moment. So yeah, on the deepest level, you don’t need anything from anyone. And more than that, there is no one outside of you. But we’ve been brought up to believe, to fully believe and to, to, to identify with that. We need to find love and affection outside of ourselves. We need someone to push the button for us to make us feel loved. We’re all, most Westerners have that basic emotional shape.

The only problem with that is that if we demand another being to give us what we want, we’re not allowing that being to be who they are necessarily. We’re only relating to them in a way that we want to squeeze something out of them that we can use to feel good. And for the most part, they’re probably doing the same thing.

So, relationships are very, very difficult because we enter them on multilevels, many different levels, many different levels based on fear and shame and self-hatred and all those things that we’re trying to get away from. We’re hoping that we can find something in life that frees us from that.

We can learn so much from relationships because for the most part, they’re never going to give us what we were looking for. No matter how hard we try. The minute we understand that everything we need is within us, that takes the pressure off of relationships to be something particular. We can allow a person to be who they are in all their glory and they can allow us to be ourselves, even when we don’t flush the toilet, even when I’ll wash the dishes, even when we throw our dirty clothes around, even if we watch TV too much, we can allow a person to be what they are. We don’t need them the same way.

So, so for this period of time where you’re really faced with all that stuff, it’s like everywhere you turn your, your, your stuff is out there right in front of you. And it’s very difficult time. So, it’s a good time to be kind to yourself and allow what is to be for now. This is the moment you have. You don’t have any other moments. Now is what you have. 10 minutes from that will be now, was what you have. What happens three years from now, you don’t know, but now is the time that you have to try to relax about all these issues that you have in your life and in your emotions, come to peace with them, greet them, get to know them. Stop judging yourself so harshly for feeling these things. Stop judging yourself harshly for not having what you think you should have. Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I don’t have what it takes for this to happen for me. This would be a good time to, to let the sting of all those kinds of stories dissipate a little bit and don’t believe them so strongly every minute of every day. Right now, you can’t do much about anything. We’re stuck at home. We have our, our minds to deal with, and it’s our minds that all the suffering comes from; our minds, our emotions and our stuff.

You know, I think you can get some of Sharon’s books on Kindle, Sharon Salzberg’s books. Read a little about, about the practice of loving kindness. It’s a wonderfully powerful, intense practice that’s easy to do. It’s not a fight with your mind. Like most people think meditation is sitting there and fighting with your thoughts.

This is not like that. I think reading about them, getting to know the concepts of what loving kindness practice is and what it means to our hearts will give you a much bigger context for the world and, and for your daily life, what can be done with that inside of your daily life. So, because if you weren’t giving yourself a hard time, where in the whole universe would you find a hard time?

Nowhere.

So, the ball’s in your court, you wanted this, you got this, this is what, you want to be happy. And you’re now seeing exactly what’s creating suffering for you. Very clearly. Problem is you still identify with that stuff like we all do. Yeah. We’re all on the same boat. Believe me, some people are sitting in the front of the boat, some people in the back, some people in the engine room, but we’re all in the same boat.

So, I don’t have any, what did they call them? Soulmates? That kind of thing? I don’t understand what that means. Everybody’s your soulmate actually. Everybody’s your soul. Exactly. Like you. There’s only one soul and we’re all spark of that same light. All of us, every single one of us, it’s all encased in little different casings, but you can find love everywhere at all times, but because of our emotional shape, we are, we only want it a certain way.

Well, if we can relax that a little bit, we’ll find it everywhere.

At some point we do get out of our own way, guaranteed. You do. But you have to let that happen and that’s not easy. It takes a little letting go. Practice letting go practice, noticing how hard you are on yourself about not having what you want. You know, and this time, of course it’s magnified. So, it’s really visible. There are other times we can kind of avoid it. These programs that are running all the time, we, you know, we get busy with other stuff. So, this is a brutally brutal grace, you know. It’s right there.

You know, when you’re really screwed up and really feeling bad. Just think if you can ask yourself, why do I believe this thought? Why do I believe this emotion? Why, why do I feel like? where is this coming from? And then just try to let it go. You can’t understand it intellectually, but you can notice how tight it makes you feel.

And then you can release that again and again and again and again and again and again, and then those emotions have less to grab onto when they come, because you’re, you become habituated in the letting go mode more. And when you let go, the minute you let go, there’s a, an extraordinarily brief instant where you are your true nature, where, where you see your true nature, but, because look, okay. So, you’re really caught in a story. You’re really suffering. Something’s going on here. It’s terrible. It’s dark, it’s heavy. And then say, let’s say, you’re watching your breath, right?

So, and you notice, all of a sudden, you notice that for the last 20 minutes, you’ve been completely lost in your story when you had supposed to be watching your breath. How did you notice that? How did that happen? That you became aware that you were gone and lost in thought? At that instant you were not lost in thought.  That instant passes immediately. So, we train ourselves that the minute we notice we’re gone, come back to the name, or come back to the breath, come back to the chanting or the practice that we’re doing as best we can, and then we’re gone again. But then we notice we’re gone. How did that happen? That’s our true nature shining through the clouds for a second.

So, but we don’t fully see it. It’s just like, and then, so that’s why at that moment that we recognize that we’ve been thinking and going on and on about this and that and this and that…. We’ll come back to the name at least. But even then, you can’t hold onto the name. If you try too hard, you squeeze it and you’re gone.

So, you just have to allow it to be going on inside of you for that period of time, it needs to be some ease of heart about it all.

Take it easy. See, I could be singing Eagles songs, but I’m singing the other thing

Q: I like yours better.

So, so really, we’re so hard on ourselves. You know, we really are. It’s a shame how hard we all are on ourselves.

It’s just part of, you know, also it’s not just us, the whole world, the vibe of the world right now is pretty out there. And when we all feel it on many levels…. I didn’t know you were living with somebody there.

Q:  Yes. Two furry relatives,

My friend, Joseph Goldstein, teaching meditation class once. And he was doing interviews with people and this guy comes in for his interview and he’s all anxious and crazy. And he looks at Joseph and says, I want to be the guy My dog sees me as. So that’s what you want to be.

Q:  Yeah. I feel like I’m that person

That love. That unadulterated unending total love that our dogs look at us with, you know, that’s who we really are. So how do we do that for ourselves? Well, it’s in there. We have to find it. That’s all.

Q: Thank you, KD.

Yeah, thank you. This is what we’re all going through every day, 24-7-365, you know? This is life. But what we don’t recognize, inside of all this intensity is that we are blessed with the understanding, we are graced with the understanding that there is a way out, a way to deal with this. And if you look out at the world and all of the billions of people, you recognize how, how much we have to be grateful for that we even know we’re in the game. Most people, they’re born, they graduate high school, they drink some beer, and they die. And that’s it. They’re not here for a moment. So, compassion arises in our hearts about that. So, they have no understanding there’s any other way to be here, there’s any other thing to feel, to find the jewel in the heart.  They don’t know. And if we know, it’s all the grace of the great ones and our own longing, which is result of our own karma, it’s nobody else’s. You are longing to find this love, that’s you, that’s your grace. And you have to go with that, get into that longing and follow it to where it really comes from.

And I’ll try to do the same. Okay.

We should, we should slow down here and come to a pause in the day, but let’s just all be here.

I mean, you don’t have to close your eyes, but just kind of just for a minute, let’s all sit together and this, the presence of the one of in which we all live.

We’re all little bubbles in this oneness and we’re separated from the whole, by this thin veil of me, which is the bubble.

This is the community of souls which make up the great one. So, of which we’re all apart,

We all want the same thing. We may call it by different names, but the longing is exactly the same in every being, to be in that love, to live in truth. We’re all United in that, no matter where we go or what we do, we’re all within this one, vast presence, like the sky holds the clouds and the people and the buildings and the pollution and everything is held within the vast being of the sky. We are held within this vast being, this oneness.

So, it’s a pleasure being with you today. Take good care. I’ll see you again sometime.

The post Special Edition Conversations With KD April 11, 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 09, 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.

“One has to set boundaries. They have to be healthy boundaries and we’re not really trained to do that. We’re not really trained. We’re not trained, as children, to have healthy boundaries. Our parents tend to step all over our boundaries and not respect us. We’re trained to do that in life. So, it’s very difficult. So, when we talk about letting go, let’s first talk about it as practice. So, while we’re actually doing the meditation practice, while we’re chanting, that’s when we train ourselves to let go, because we’ve added the mantra into our consciousness and we’ve agreed that we’re going to try to pay attention to that. So that helps us be aware when we’re lost in thought. When we become aware that we’ve been gone, we’re actually already back. We come back to the mantra again. The rest of the day we try to be kind and compassionate and good to ourselves as well by setting healthy boundaries.” – Krishna Das

Satsang is so important. You know, Buddha asked one of His disciples, I think it was Ananda, once,  “Ananda, what’s the most important thing in spiritual life?” And I think Ananda answered to Him, you know, “You are. The Buddha. Without you there’s no life at all.”

Buddha said, “No, Ananda. Satsang or Sangha is the most important thing. The community of seekers.” The community of Beings who have gone to the other shore, so to speak, and yet remained here for us so that we would know what’s possible, so we would get a taste. And then the group of us who are trying to find where our asses are actually meeting the ground.

So, company is very important. The company you keep is very important. And, it’s something that one has to keep paying attention to in life, no matter how far along you might think you are.

One time, in Allahabad at Dada’s house, who was a great old devotee of Maharajji, I guess I was reverencing him a little too much, you know. So, at one point, he stopped and looked at me. He said, “Krishna Das, I may be a step or two ahead of you and you may be a step or two of someone else,” he said, “but we’re all on this shore. We’re all on this side of the ocean of samsara, this side of the world. Only He’s gone beyond. Only Maharajji has gone beyond.” So, what does it matter? You know? One has to live in one’s heart as best as one can and try not to take everything so personally. We all take everything so personally, as if it was aimed at us. But really, if we really look, we see that what we thought might be aimed at us or even caused by us in some way or degree, is really just someone’s suffering bursting out of them in all directions. It’s another person’s unhappiness, anxiety, fears, shame. Something motivating, creating that anger or that nastiness that happens in life. But we take it all so personally so it’s very hard to release it, you know? Very hard to release it. Very hard. And especially when we’re locked up like this with people, even that we love. Things get antsy every once in a while. So, we just have to keep letting go. That’s the whole thing. Letting go, letting go, letting go. Letting go allows us to be the best people we can be. It doesn’t mean “not engaging.” It means being able to really engage. Letting go of our subjective bullshit, our completely personal subjective version of reality. When we chant, we’re training ourselves to keep coming back to the sound of the Name, the sound of the Name.

Let me see if I have something here that I want to read to you.

“When a mantra is repeated, if one watches the source from which the mantra sound is produced, the mind is absorbed in That.”

So as you listen to the sound of your own voice, of the people who you’re singing with, as you listen to that sound, your attention, your mind is moved in that direction to where that sound has come from. Now, we so, “Well, I’m making that sound.” Yes, we’re making that sound with our voices, but before we did that, we had the intention to make that sound in our minds. We had the desire to chant, the intention to chant. Where did that intention come from? What part of us did that intention to sing and do the practice actually come from in the first place? So, that is a creation of our own karmas and grace, both together.

One time I asked Siddhi Ma, who was Maharajji’s great disciple. See, in the old days, Maharajji had said, He used to tease us. He said, he said, “I have the keys to the mind.” He said, “You know, I could turn your minds against me.” And we went, “No, Baba, don’t do that.” And He’d laugh. He was just playing, you know. He loved it. “I could turn your minds against me. You know, you’d wake up in the morning and say, ‘What am I doing here? I’m going to go back to America.’” And we said, “Don’t do that, Baba. Don’t do that.” And He’d just laugh. But He said, “I have the keys to the mind.”

So, at one point, many many years later, I said to Ma, I said, “Ma, Maharajji said He has the keys to the mind. So, for me, that means that, in my mind, my head is exactly where He wants it to be, whatever that means from His side.  That I am where He wants me to be in life and my consciousness is where He wants it to be.” So, I said, “Ma, does that mean it’s all grace? Or is personal effort required?”

A lot of people wonder about this and I was wondering. So, She said to me, “Krishna Das, it’s all grace but you have to act like it isn’t.”

It’s all grace. Done deal. Nothing ever happened. Nothing’s going to happen. All this is a done deal. But, we don’t know that. We don’t understand that, experience that in the deepest reality. In Buddhism, they talk about Ultimate Reality and Relative Reality. Ultimate Reality, again, is that, you know, it’s all done, there’s no one here in the first place. Relative reality is that, if you step out into traffic, you’re going to get hit by a car. So, there’s different rules involved in those two. They each have a set of behavior. Relative reality, you have to pay attention to that. You have to do the right thing. You have to, your morality has to be pure. Your intentions have to be good. You have to develop compassion, kindness, caring for people. Ultimate reality is seeing through all the delusions and illusions and seeing that it’s all perfect. But that’s not a mental construct. That’s something that’s experienced directly, very deeply and you can’t make that up with your own mind. That has to come from within through practice and grace.

Ok, so maybe there’s some questions?

Q: How do I choose what to sing?

KD: I open my mouth, there it is. I have no idea. There’s no thought process, really. Sometimes I start to play a chord and my mind is completely blank. So, I just wait to see what’s going to come in. I have no idea. No idea at all.

Q: What’s the best way to build community? And talk about surrender in spiritual practice.

KD: Well, it just so happens, that first quote I gave was from Ramana Maharshi, who was extraordinary. Everything He says is so amazing and so right on. And there’s a funny story. Not funny, but a beautiful story. Ramana Maharshi, I think He left the body in ’51 or ’52. I could be wrong, but I think it was that, and Maharajji was up in the mountains in India and in the middle of the night, He pulled His blanket over His face, over His head and He started weeping and weeping and the devotees said, “Baba, what’s wrong? What is it? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“He’s leaving. He’s leaving. He’s in so much pain. India is losing such a saint, such a saint, oh…” and tears were coming. He said, “Bring me water, bring me water. He’s so thirsty. He’s so thirsty.” So, they brought Him some water. He sipped some water from a spoon and He was just weeping. “India is losing such a saint.” And it was just at that time that Ramana Maharshi was leaving the body, down below Chennai, down in the South. So, this is from Ramana Maharshi.

“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, it is not surrender but a command to Him. You can not 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 devotion.”

I don’t know how you feel about that.

Maybe it’s hard for Westerners to really think about things that way, but at the point of life that an I’m at, this point at this time, surrender is the only option that makes any sense to me at all and that means letting go of my stuff. Somebody gets to me. Somebody’s nasty to me. I get a whole trip going on. Let it go. Don’t even try to understand it. Just find a way to let it go. Let it go. Release it. Release it. Something doesn’t happen. Somebody’s sick. Somebody worried you. Something, you need something. Just let it go. The ego can not understand these things. Ego can not make anything better.  It can only make itself bigger and more worried and more desire and more shame and more disappointment and more betrayal and more yada yada. So, let go. You can’t have Him obey you. You can’t say to God, you know, “Do this! I want to feel this way. I want this experience. I want this to happen. I want blah blah blah.” You can’t have Him obey you and  yet, think you surrendered. Surrender is something that happens through grace within us. We don’t surrender. The ego does not surrender. Another thing Ramana Maharshi said is, “asking the mind or the ego to kill the mind or transcend itself is like asking the thief to be the policeman. There will be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.” So, you can’t think yourself into this stuff. You can’t. It’s not an intellectual exercise. Every thought is the prison. Every thought is the, you’re identifying with all these thoughts and every thought that arises, that we identify with: that is the prison. We can’t think ourselves out of a prison made of thought. We have to let them go again and again and again. So…

Q: I think, “how do you know the difference between letting go and avoiding?” I think that’s what that is. The difference between letting go and not setting boundaries?

KD: One has to set boundaries. That’s this world. Relative reality. One has to set boundaries. One has to pay attention to what’s good for one in one’s best understanding.  One has to learn how to feed one’s self what one needs to eat. One has to set boundaries. They have to be healthy boundaries and we’re not really trained to do that. We’re not really trained. We’re not trained, as children, to have healthy boundaries. Our parents tend to step all over our boundaries and not respect us. We’re trained to do that in life. So, it’s very difficult. So, when we talk about letting go, let’s first talk about it as practice. So, while we’re actually doing the meditation practice, while we’re chanting, that’s when we train ourselves to let go, because we’ve added the mantra into our consciousness, and we’ve agreed that we’re going to try to pay attention to that. So that helps us be aware when we’re lost in thought. When we become aware that we’ve been gone, we’re actually already back. We come back to the mantra again. The rest of the day we try to be kind and compassionate and good to ourselves as well by setting healthy boundaries. But it’s a little different than when you’re sitting down to do practice. That’s when you’re really making the training. So, for instance, if you’re an athlete, when you’re practicing, you’re doing exercises, particular things, you’re trying things over, but when you’re in the game, all the work that you put in, in practice, comes out naturally. You don’t have to think about it. So, that’s how it works.

Q: What is the point of all this if nothing ever existed?

KD: Well, I think it exists, doesn’t it? And so do you. That’s why it exists. Ultimate reality and relative reality exist at the same time. Relative reality is within the Oneness. The Oneness is not in the relative reality. That’s why you can’t make this up in your brain, in your mind. Relative reality is the way we see the world. Who asked that question? That’s the person that sees relative reality. That’s the person that is made up of relative reality. So, that’s what I said before. Ultimate reality is something that you become aware of from within and then you might see, like, the consciousness expands like the sky and you see the clouds. You see the people. You see everything. But, it’s all, you’re also aware of the presence in which everything is held. The Beingness. The space, so to speak. In which everything exists and that’s essentially ultimate reality, or some description of it. So, when you’re aware of that, you still have to stop at the red light. Otherwise, you get hit by a car. So, there’s no use saying it doesn’t exist. When I said that, I just meant in ultimate reality this looks different. So, let’s leave it at that. Whether it exists or it doesn’t exist is a philosophical discussion, but when you’re aware of ultimate reality, when you live in the Oneness, when you’ve become that, merged into that Being of which we are all apart already, this world looks different. Our daily life is different. We see ourselves differently. Very differently. This is something that has to come from within.

Q: Why is it important not to change the mantra from tradition when we sing it?

KD: I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what that means. I just sing whatever I want. Whatever I feel to sing from my heart. That’s what Maharajji taught me to do. That’s how He taught me to live, to trust my own heart. That took a lot of work, to begin to even do that. So, I don’t even know what you mean about… I sing mantras from all traditions, and I sing them in the same clothes I’m wearing right now. I don’t change anything. I have the same devotion to all those mantras as well. It’s just us folks here.

Q: Can drinking alcohol affect practice?

KD: Intoxicants are intoxicants. They dull the mind and they destroy our will and our ability to pay attention and concentrate and they, we think that we’re having a great experience and then we wake up in the morning and we don’t remember nothing. So, absolutely. All intoxicants, unless you know how to use them, like Maharajji once said to us, “If charas, if smoking hash would bring you to God, we’d get a room, we’d fill it up with charas, hash and we’ll sit in there and we’ll all smoke together.” He said, “But you can’t smoke charas, hash unless you can, unless you’re like shiva who can swallow the poison and transmute it into bliss.” He said smoking hash will destroy your health and it makes you think that you’re hanging out with your good brothers and sisters but its not real. But, on the other hand, about LSD, He said, “The yogi medicine,” which is what He called it, “can bring you into the room with Christ but you can’t stay. The only way to stay,” He said, “Is love.” So, at some point, I stopped doing all those things because I felt, even though I was getting shot up into these beautiful spaces, I was always coming down and I felt that if I stopped going up like that and crashing down that the level of my consciousness would gradually rise by itself without all the up and downs.

Q: How do you control anger?

KD: I wish I knew. I don’t think you can control it. It eats you up. By the time you get angry, you’re finished. All you can do is ride the wave until you crash. You could just try to let go, you can, you know, but usually it’s so immediate. Anger really is a very destructive emotion, and not just for what happens between you and another person, but it destroys so much of your inner balance, your inner awareness. It’s brutal. It’s like a hurricane inside. So, that’s why you practice when you can. You know? You practice when you can. You give it your best when you can give it your best and, just like an athlete, later, while you’re in the world, what you’ve trained for will manifest from within. That’s why practice is so important. And once again, with anger, we usually get angry when we feel that we’re the target of somebody’s whatever, right?

However, if we’re calm enough to really keep our eyes open and not blow up into the anger, like I said before, we usually can see that, that energy is coming to us out of another person’s suffering and that the best thing would be for that person to be relieved of his or her suffering so that they wouldn’t keep doing that to themselves and others. And then that’s how emotions like that can become your teacher and can also be a vehicle for developing compasison because it makes you see your stuff and you have to deal with it. You have to see it before you can deal with it.

Nobody deserves grace. That’s the nature of grace. The definition of grace is that it’s grace. You don’t win grace, you don’t deserve grace. It’s grace. The phrase they used about Maharajji was that He has no cause to be kind. No cause to be kind. He was just kind. Everywhere. All the time. To everyone. Grace is flowing all the time but we’re not aware of it. We’re not aware of it. We’re not programmed to see it yet. We have to let go of our stuff to experience it. But even so, it doesn’t come through our personal will. If it did, it wouldn’t be grace. You don’t win grace. Nobody deserves grace. We’re all screwed up. But there is grace for all of us because our soul, our inner being is pure. We’re already totally a part of that. Our inner awareness is graceful, full of grace already. But we’re turned to the outside world.

Someone’s asked about offering prasad.

 Prasad usually means two things. Either we’re offering to a Divine Being in one way or another. We’re offering something to them as prasad or we’re receiving something that’s blessed by them. One time, we were eating on the other side of the courtyard, maybe 15 or 20 of us and Maharajji was sitting on the other side of the courtyard with Dada standing next to him. Dada never sat in Maharajji’s presence. He always stood. And Maharajji just looked at Dada and said, “Dada, I’m eating through all those mouths.”  “I’m eating through all those mouths.”

He is Antarayaami. He is the indwelling presence. Not just Him but all the great Bodhisattvas, all the Great Beings, they’ve identified with the indwelling presence that lives within everyone and everything. So, He said, “I am eating through all those mouths.”

There’s a beautiful story in the Mahabharata. Sri Krishna goes to visit the Pandavas when they’re in exile in the jungle and all the men are out hunting and Draupadi, their wife is waiting for them to come home with food to eat, but when Krishna arrives, she wants to offer him something but there’s nothing in the house, and Krishna says to her, “Feed me, feed me I’m hungry.” There was nothing in the house. And Krishna sees on the floor a little piece of rice. He says, “Give me that rice, give me that rice.” So, she gives it to Him and He puts it in His mouth and He says to her, “Right now at this instant, not one being in the whole universe is experiencing hunger.”  He just fed all beings because He identified with all beings at that moment. He entered that, whatever state that was where He became everybody and He ate that piece of rice, at that moment there was no hunger in the universe.

So, it’s such a deep story. There’s so much in that story.

I’m sorry.

Q: How important is celibacy as a man, not spilling seed, in practice and higher consciousness?

KD: You’re asking the wrong guy. Ah, no. You know I was celibate in India for three and a half years, two and a half years… when I first went. Really, not for spiritual reasons but because, you know, I saw there were all the westerners, there was so much juice and so much love that they would, you know, men and women would start looking at each other and they’d get, you know, “Hey, how are you doing? What’s happening?” You know? And we’d go back to the town, to the hotel where we were staying, our friends’ hotel and I’d go to my room and go to sleep or read a book and I found out later everybody was partying. People were getting together and balling and having a wild time. I had no idea, luckily. But the reason I was trying, I kind of swore off relationships, first of all because they were always so painful for me, but also because, so, a couple would get together. They’d kind of, like, turn onto each other and they’d start getting it on and Maharajji would look at them and say, “Oh, look, they’re friends. You’re friends. Oh, that’s good. They’re friends. Isn’t that good? That’s great.” A couple days later He’d look at them and say, “Oh, you’re really good friends. Oh, they’re good friends now. Isn’t that great?” A couple days later, “Boom. You’re really good friends. You’re married. Now go to America. See your parents.” No.

My job was to stay in India for the rest of my life. That was my job. That’s what I thought was going to happen and I thought I would always be with Maharajji. I was never going to go back to America. So…

However, it’s like, the energy was so blocked. I had so much passion and so much desire all hidden and buried inside of me that I just did not want to deal with, could not deal with, that the energy was just like… I was walking around like this, you know? And I wasn’t, nothing was being transmuted. Nothing was being digested, you know? It was…

So, then, you know, finally Maharajji was sending me back to America and we were in Vrindavan and it was what turned out to be my last darshan with Him in the body. So far. And so I’m sitting with Him and I’m freaked out. Totally freaked out. What am I going to do in America? I’d been walking around in a red dress, stepping in cow poop for a couple of years. I had no idea how to be in America anymore. When I spoke, I spoke like this. Only Hindi English like this, “Very good. Thank you. Ok. Just going. Now coming.” You know? So He looks at me and He says, you know, so, and I’m thinking, “You know, I’ve got to ask Him. I’ve got to ask Him what to do in America. I need some… what am I going to do?” I was freaked out. But on the other hand, I was saying to myself, “Just shut up. Just shut up. You don’t have to ask. Just have faith. Just be quiet. You don’t need to know anything. Just be quiet.” But the other side was, “What are you talking about? I’m going to America?” So, finally I blurted out to Him, I said, “Baba, how can I serve you in America?” Which was just yucky, you know?

And He looked like He’d bit a pickle. He looked at me. He said, “If you ask about service, it’s not service. Just do what you want.”

Do what I want?

And my mind went completely blank. I’d been celibate for two and a half years. I knew what I wanted to do and He knew what I wanted to do and He looked at me and He laughed. He laughed. He said, “So, how will you serve me in America?” He loved it.

It was too funny.

So, at some times, traditionally in some paths, in some practices they tell you that should be celibate to raise the energy up. My energy is down around my ankles. I’m not thinking about energy. I’m thinking about love. Maybe it turns out to be the same thing, ultimately, but I had to honor who I am as a human being now and that includes sexual relationships. So, I’m not worried about that anymore. When I was young, when I was young the celibacy was coming out of fear and the celibacy was coming out of fear of dealing with it, fear of being hurt, fear of relationships, fear of engaging with people and so that wasn’t real healthy. That wasn’t healthy. So, none of my teachers ever told me to be celibate. None of them.

And in fact, you know, Maharajji, one day He, I was having a nervous breakdown and you know, full on crazy meltdown and He kind of got me through it. And a couple of days later, I decided to go walk in the jungle and smoke some hash, which was not very smart. So, I was out in the jungle sitting on this rock and I’d smoked some hash and I began to freak out. My mind just went crazy. I don’t know what was going on and I ran back to the temple and I ran through the temple and He was like waiting for me at the window. There was nobody else around and He said, “Come here.” So, I went to the window and He looked at me and He said, “You’re Bajarangbali. What’s your name?” I said, “Krishna Das.” “Nay, you’re Bajarangbali. What’s your name?” “Krishna Das.” “Nay! You’re Bajarangbali.”

Now “Bajarangbalibali” means the thunderbolt-bodied Hanuman, the extraordinarily fierce and wrathful aspect of Hanuman that destroys all the negativity, the demons and everything like that and traditionally Hanuman is said to be celibate. So, here He is, changing my name from Krishna Das to Bajarangbali.

He said, “You’re Bajarangbali. What’s your name?” I said, “Krishna Das.”

Then I looked at Him. I said, ok, this is me talking to Maharajji. “You want me to be Hanuman? You want me to be Bajarangbali. Well, you just remember…”

See, He was teasing me about getting married all the time.

He would look at this person. “Oh, you want to get married?” And it was freaking me out, right? So, now He says to me, “Ok, you’re Bajarangbali.” I said, “Maharajji, you want me to be Bajarangbali, but you remember He’s the eternal celibate.” He laughed so hard. He just completely… slapping His knee and laughing. And He said, “Ok, wise guy.” He said, “You’re Janaka. You’ll have yog and bhog.” King Janaka was Sita’s father and He was a Rajarishi, a King but a Saint, an enlightened Saint. And He had, He was fully in the world. He had a harem. He had children. He had the whole thing. But He was fully enlightened. So, He had yog and bhog, which is worldly enjoyments. So, that’s what He said.

Now, I’ve got the bhog. I could do with some yog. But we’ll see. Grace comes when it comes. When you surrender, it’s His deal, not mine. So, I’m just hanging out.

But, like I said, there are certain times when you can, if you’re in retreat you can you know, keep it in your pants and see how you, see how not using that energy and not releasing that energy affects your emotional reality. A lot of people can’t handle it because we’re used to that release. It’s a physical release. It releases tension in many ways. It’s the poor man’s samahdi, the poor man’s nirvana so to speak.

So, but then again, there are monks, there are a lot of Westerners for instance who are, who have become monks in one tradition or another, who have taken vows of celibacy. It’s a very individual thing as far as I can see. It depends on your karmas, what path you’re drawn to, what your teachers tell you to do. My teacher never told me to do that. So, it’s not something, in my opinion, I don’t think it’s something that we could, we should… try to decide on a personal, individual level of your personal will, saying “Ok, now I’m going to be celibate. I’m going to take a vow of celibacy.” Firstly, you don’t want to take vows that you can’t keep. First of all. You don’t want to take vows that you can’t keep. You want to do, you want to have a whole life. You want to be happy. You want your heart to be open. You want to be kind and compassionate. There are enlightened Beings who are married and have children and there are enlightened Beings that don’t. It’s not a requirement. Maharajji was married. He had three children. We didn’t know that until after He left His body. That’s a whole story in itself. So, yeah.

You have to see what works for you. You know? I had two periods in my life, almost three year periods where I was celibate, before the age of 20-, let’s see… So, I was in India from 23 to 26 and then maybe from 28 to 31 or 32, I was celibate. So, that’s a long time. That’s because, the first time I was in India, I was scared, and the second time I was involved in a situation where I was required to be celibate to stay there. So, for two and a half, three years, I was. That’s a total of like six years before the age of 30 or so that I was celibate. So, that’s a long… that’s prime time stuff, too. So, it wasn’t easy but it was useful for me at that time.

Q: The advice I was given was to stay away from relationships.

Well, it depends who gave you that advice. And it depends how you feel about it. You know, people, anybody can say anything to us. Even a Saint. You have to feel that it’s ok in your heart to follow that advice. It has to feel right to you. It at least has to feel right enough to you to overcome your own feelings about it if you’re not sure. So, you have to keep your eyes open and deal with things every day. Is this working or not? What do I want in life?

Q: My fear is not to make a mistake, not to miss this opportunity of freedom, turning from this guidance.

Well, it all depends who told you that, you know? If Maharajji told me that, I would have done my best to do that. But He never did. If a counselor or somebody who knows you very well, you have to listen, weigh it in your heart to see what that’s about and then look at the issues inside of yourself, why somebody who you supposedly, I would hope, respect very much, would tell you that; why that would seem important for you. We learn by mistakes. We learn by hitting the wall at 150 miles an hour. We don’t learn by sitting at home, avoiding pain. Because you can’t avoid pain. Everywhere, all the time there is suffering. Not just for ourselves but others. So, there’s no, it doesn’t make any sense to try to avoid pain. One has to understand pain. One has to transform pain and let go of pain in a healthy, open, wide-open hearted way. There’s always going to be some pain. So, think about it. Work on it. See how you feel about it. It’s up to you. It’s up to nobody else. It’s up to you. It’s always up to you and you have to just decide if you want to try to that and if it’s right for you. If you’re thinking about it all the time, if you’re not doing it but you’re still thinking about it all the time, you know… its up to you. You have to find out what works for you. Nobody can tell you. But try to be honest with yourself, as much as  you can. Because who are we hiding from?  Who are we hiding from?  Everything’s there. There’s no sense hiding from ourselves. Nothing can be more destructive than pretending or not really looking at things. Whatever works for you is what you should do.

Q: What would I do if I were a young person now?

A young person now… well, you’d have to tell me how young. If I was physically young and still had gone through everything, that I know what I know now? What would I do as a young person? I’d probably have a rock and roll band. This is close but not exactly the same.

Q: Why didn’t we come and live without an ego, with total freedom, like trees?

Listen, trees are not necessarily egoless. Trees don’t have self awareness, they say.  Which is what human beings have, which is why they say the human birth is so important. We didn’t come without an ego because of our karmas. Egos dissolve when there’s no karma there. The belief that we are a separate self from other separate selves is orchestrated by our karmic situation, our own particular karmic debts that we have to pay and desires that we have and versions. It’s just, it’s our whole schmear of stuff. That’s what created this belief that we are separate people. So, nothing comes from nothing. Everything comes from something. Every effect has a cause. Even if it’s buried in a place that we can’t see it. We can see the causes by seeing the effect, once we understand that idea of cause and effect. If we have an ego, it’s because we created that ourselves in the past and I don’t know about trees, whether trees have self-awareness or not. Some people say there are tree spirits. I don’t know.

And I don’t know that trees have no illusion. Do you? I mean, it’s an assumption we might make. But I don’t know that. Do trees have self-awareness? Do they? I don’t know.

Q: What were Maharajji’s teachings on illness?

You know, in India, they don’t have doctors… especially in the old days, up in the mountains, there were no doctors. There’s no healthcare. People in the villages had no access to modern healthcare until very recently. And even now, there are many places where there’s no, not much access to healthcare. So, they come to the saints, to the yogis to be freed of suffering. People came to Maharajji all day.

“Baba, I’m sick. I have this. I have that. This and that. My child is sick.” And He would bless people and they would be well. He would free them from those things. Sometimes it wouldn’t happen and sometimes it would.

So, think about Ram Dass. Ram Dass had that terrible stroke. And if you saw the movie, “Fierce Grace,” you can hear him talking about the stroke and he said that Maharajji stroked him.  Meaning that Maharajji had given him the stroke as a teaching for him. And he believed that. But then when he went back to India finally, for the first and only time after he had the stroke, he met Ma, Siddhi Ma and She said to him, “Ram Dass, that’s not true. Maharajji would not give you the stroke. The stroke is your karma, caused by your karma. Maharajji gave you the grace to transcend the stroke and grow through the experience that you have to go through.” And that’s very true. Very true.

So, illness comes from so many different ways. It comes from all the things we do to ourselves, where we live, what we’re exposed to, what toxins we absorb, how we eat, how we take care of ourselves and all that is also karmically determined. How we deal with it determines how we can learn from it.

And it’s a tough time right now, huh?  Many people are suffering. The first responders are suffering. The doctors and nurses are getting sick taking care of people. They don’t have to do that. But they did out of the goodness of their hearts and they’re suffering because of that. So, it’s a very intense time. Everybody has to find a way to deal with that themselves and so, yeah.

Meditation. Chanting is meditation. It’s spiritual practice. There are many different forms of meditation. A million different forms and chanting is most definitely a meditation practice. One kind of meditation is called “shamatha,” which means, essentially, a concentration practice. And you can do that through being aware of your breath or the feeling of the breath coming in and out of the nostrils or as the stomach rises and falls with the breath, you keep coming back to it. You’re letting go and coming back, letting go and coming back. So that’s shamatha.

That’s one aspect of the practice of the repetition of the Name.

And here’s a little quote from Ramana Maharshi about celibacy.

“To live and move in Brahman is real Brahmacharya.  Continence of course is very helpful and indispensable to achieve that end, but so long as you identify yourself with the body, you can never escape sex thoughts and distractions. It is only when you realize that you are formless pure awareness that sex distinction disappears. That is Brahmacharya, effortless and spontaneous.”

So, at times, there might be, you might be part of a practice where you would be practicing continence, celibacy. But it’s not required. It can be useful if it’s done in the right way. But for westerners it’s very rare that we do it in the right way, because we have so many issues about sex and emotions and love that it’s very difficult to really make a clean decision that’s not based on fear or shame, etcetera etcetera etcetera, when it’s in regard to sex. At least that’s what I think. Maybe I’m wrong.

You know, don’t… people ask me, “Can you do a chant to help these people or those people…” When I chant, I hope, my belief is that it helps anyone and everyone. I can’t direct it to one group or another group. I don’t feel I have the understand or ability or power to do something like that. All I can do is what I do. And I hope, my belief is that it helps me, and that it helps everyone who does it, and that it helps everyone who hears it, and that if everybody’s feeling better that the world is better. I just, I don’t know. I’ve never felt comfortable trying to aim at one group or another. I mean, I just don’t know why. But I don’t.

That doesn’t mean I don’t wish them well. This person is asking, you know, could I do a chant for the medical professionals?  When I sing, when I chant, I’m invoking and moving towards the love that lives within each and every being in the universe and in myself. And my understanding is that, that’s helpful to all, in all directions, at all times. More than that, I really can’t do. The chanting gives us the strength to release negative emotions. It’s not just strength. It actually, by chanting, we’re moving deeper within us and just as we move deeper within ourselves, those emotions drop away. They may come back. But they drop away in those moments and we become accustomed to that feeling of being released from the obsessive thoughts and those obsessive emotions that may come back. So… but every time we chant, we’re loosening up those knee-jerk identifications that we have of all that stuff that we carry around with us.

Q: Do I ever write songs based on experiences and wisdom that you could record and embrace by our youth of today, might influence them towards living a life of love?

Well, I don’t know.  These days I don’t feel much to write in English. I mean, I sang one song I wrote earlier. There’s a few other little parts, English parts to chants that I’d written. I haven’t really written many songs lately like that. You know, this is what I do. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve been… we have so much fun in soundcheck singing old rock and roll songs and everything. I’m tempted to spend some time recording them, just because it’s so much fun. But then I say, “wait a minute, what am I doing? Other people have done them better than me. This is what I do. I should just keep doing it.” So, that’s my bullshit. That’s what I go through. As far as helping the youth, you know, I’m glad I’m not growing up now. There’s so much stuff out there. I think it’s so difficult to be a child now. Wow. So much, so much of it’s just a different world. It’s such a different world now and being a parent at this point is really a tremendous responsibility of transmitting goodness of heart, you know. It’s really, there’s so much out there that children get fascinated by now, young people. So many negative things. So many things that just lead to more pain and suffering. In some ways there always was. There was always enough for sure. But now, you know, it seems like it’s much more difficult now, so… yeah.

I tried singing with children, but the parents just dragged their kids to the chant so they could sing. So, it didn’t, it wasn’t what I would have hoped. But it was ok.

Q: Do I think Ram Dass is a fully realized being now and has he visited you in spirit?

You know, essentially I wouldn’t know a fully realized being if I tripped over him in the street. Ram Dass was a beautiful being, is a beautiful being who overcame so much stuff in one lifetime and who truly manifested real love by the end of his life, by the end of his physical life. It was extraordinary. The last twenty years I spent with him, going out to Hawaii 2 or 3 times a year, doing the retreats, the “Open Your Heart in Paradise” retreats, which are still going on, we hope, will still go on, they will go on, was such a great blessing for me to be with him and spend so much time. I miss him and yet he’s right here. You said, “Has he come to me in spirit?” Has he walked through the door and, you know, said, “Hey what’s up?” No, but I feel him quite often very strongly. Very strongly. I feel, you know, over the last few years especially, when I would sit with him, we would have breakfast together and then we would sit for three or four hours, just there alone at the table, the two of us, mostly in silence and I became aware, I realized, finally, after years of that, we were developing this way of communicating in silence, that actually silence was the communication. It was very very beautiful, very beautiful. So, I don’t know what a fully realized being is. I believe that my Guru, Neem Karoli Baba is a fully realized being but that’s because I love him, you know? I don’t know. I suppose everybody feels like that about their Guru or about their partner or about their dog, you know? But, what can I say? What can I say?

So, one thing about the chanting… there’s a question about the right way to chant. The right way to chant is the way you do it. “So, when singing the divine name becomes continuous, all other thoughts cease and one is in one’s real nature, which is invocation or absorption.” I’ll read that again, “When singing the divine name becomes continuous…” Now that doesn’t mean you have to go around in your house all day long, all night long, singing out loud. At some point, the name repeats itself within us in a silent way, a quiet way, and a part of our awareness is with that, even while we’re doing other things. Once again, this is something that happens within that you’ll only know when it happens. You can’t make it happen, but through practice and ripening ourselves with the repetition of the Name, it happens.  So, when singing the divine name becomes continuous and all other thoughts will cease and one is in one’s real nature, which is invocation or absorption. We turn our mind outwards to things of the world, and therefore are not aware that our nature is always invocation. So, our hearts are always invoking the presence of love, of god, of reality. Our individual blips of light are always bowing to that oneness but we are focused on the outside world, on the information coming through the senses, being interpreted by the brain, the mind. So, we are not turned towards that place within us, which is always absorption. But when the chanting of the name becomes continuous and natural, which it will at some point, then all other thoughts will cease. Those thoughts will finally cease.

When Maharajji first, you know, back in India, in ’71 in the temple, He always had the kirtan wallahs come up from Vrindavan. The Vaishnavs come up and sang Hare Krishna around the clock, pretty much, in the temple. And we used to sit with them. Then one day, one of those guys kind of tried to seduce one of the western women that was there with us and of course Maharajji found out about it right away, and He sent them all away. All 20 of them loaded onto the back of a truck with all their stuff, driven down to the train and back home to Vrindavan. So, one of the Indian people said to Him, “Baba, you just kicked the kirtan wallahs out. Who’s going to sing now?” “The Westerners.”

So, we had to go into this little room, which is now a temple but at the time it wasn’t, around the corner from the courtyard where we used to sit with Him, and we sat there all day singing and we had only one instruction, “Sing.”  There was no, like, don’t sing for an hour or two. Just sing. We didn’t know when He was going to tell us to stop, so it was scary. So, you know, when you really ask yourself to pay attention, your mind says, “What are you, kidding?” and goes everywhere it can possibly go as fast as it can to get away from whatever it is you’re supposed to be thinking about or paying attention to. So, I’d be singing and I’d just be reliving my life, you know? Just like, rewinding it. Rewinding it back and thinking about this and the whole thing. But the chant had to go on even while I was thinking all this stuff and not paying any attention. After days and days and days of this, not all night, but all day, many days, something actually, I started to have a very interesting experience and that was that the chant began to feel like home. And I was aware of thoughts floating through my awareness, like the sky, but I wasn’t thinking them. It was really strange. And it was an incredible experience. It was the first way, the first thing I ever experienced about the way that chanting might work.

I had another experience with thoughts many years before that. I had scored ten hits of acid from a friend of mine. Each little cap, it was when acid was actually still legal, each little turquoise capsule was 1000 micrograms of pure Sandoz acid, the best acid you could get. I split the first capsule with a friend of mine, but the next 9 I did all by myself. So, it was like I needed enough propulsion to get through the dark atmosphere of my emotions and mind. So, that like propelled me right into outer space, gravity-less freedom, openness, it was amazing. So, one day, after like 24 hours, I started to kind of, I was lying in my bed and I was kind of just gazing out the window without, you know, just like… and then I saw something, or felt something in the distance coming towards me, closer and closer and it was like, “what is this? It’s making me antsy. What’s going on? What is this? Oh, no! It’s a thought!” And it crashed over me like a wave and I was thinking. And then, the wave receded and I was like, “No, no don’t go.” And then again after some time, out in the distance I felt this thing coming towards me. “Oh, no.” Crash. And they started coming faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and finally I was back. I had come down into the relative universe of thought. And I was me again, the way I knew myself to be.

So, but the experience, when I was chanting, was qualitatively different. It was right here. It was here in this world and I was not identifying with the thoughts going through and the Name was going on and it felt like home and sweet and at ease and the thoughts were just floating through by themselves. It was amazing.

Q: How do you explain wavering faith?

What’s to explain? Real faith is really knowing. Blind faith is hoping and wanting to believe. You don’t need to manufacture faith. You need to deal with your stuff. That’s all. Faith will come. One word for faith is “confidence.” The more we deal with our stuff and we’re not afraid of our stuff and we’re not afraid of our desires and we’re not afraid of this and that and everything, we get confidence that we can deal with things in a good way and that’s a wonderful experience and that gives you a confidence that you’re on the path, that you are ripening in the right way. Faith, you know, Mahrajji used to point things out. Saint Paul said, “By grace, I was saved through faith.” Real faith comes from Grace. It’s a gift. But we need to prepare for it, just like Siddhi Ma said. “It’s all grace, but you have to act like it isn’t.” And Suzuki Roshi from the San Francisco Zen Center used to say, “Come take a walk with me in the rain. But don’t rush. It’s raining everywhere.”  We’re rushing so much, we don’t even know we’re getting wet, with the rain of grace, of presence, of being. So, don’t worry about faith coming and going. That’s not real faith. That’s an emotional experience to some degree. You feel good. And then you feel bad. Then you feel good. Then you don’t feel so good. The pairs of opposites have nothing to do with reality. Who’s experiencing that coming and going of faith? Where’s that happening? Right here. So, if you can keep moving back behind the experiences to see and experience where, to whom the experiences are happening, that’s the fruit of practice.

Q: Can someone experience Maharajji’s non-physical presence?

You know, I don’t even know if that body that we saw was really a physical body. It seemed that way. And then it seemed to disappear, and it seemed to have been burned, but then people have seen Him all over the place. So, of course. He can do anything. And if you even hear about Him, He’s there. He said, “When you think of me, I am there.”

You see, we hear those things and it’s like, what’s the word, not “apocryphal,” but we hear that He said something like that and we say, “Oh, yeah, that’s nice.” But imagine if it was really true? “When you think of me, I am there.”

He said that. He’s not just patting us on the back to make us feel good. He doesn’t do that. Well, He does do that. And then another thing He said, “Once I take a hold of your hand, I never let go. Even when you let go of mine.” Not “if.” Because He knows. “When you let go of mine, I never let go.” You know, Ram Dass and I used to say to each other, “What do we have to offer people really?” All we can offer people is our limited faith, our limited understanding of Maharajji, our limited experience of Him. This is what makes our lives, this is what lights us up and this is all we have to share. And don’t think that you have to become His disciple. It’s irrelevant. That bullshit is irrelevant. Work on yourself. Find that love that lives within you. Love everybody. Love anybody. It doesn’t make any difference. He’s not making disciples. He’s not counting. But He’s a path to love that anyone can walk on, whether you call it by His name or not. Don’t think, you know, I’m trying to sell you my Guru. I’m not.  You just change the name that makes you feel good and plug it into to everything I said and it’s just the same.

The post Special Edition Conversations With KD April 09, 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 02, 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, all this craziness in the world is our doing. Nobody else is doing this. It’s us. We human beings are doing this. All of us. So, we human beings can change it. But not everybody believes that. Not everybody believes that there’s a better way to live. Most people live in fear, shame, guilt and selfishness and greed. And that’s what drives us and when we’re in that mode, it’s us and them and we’ll do anything we have to to protect ourselves and our small circle of people. That’s the kind of thinking that kind of has to go. It has to loosen up a little. Will it happen? I don’t know. I hope so. “ – Krishna Das

It’s amazing how connected I feel these days. Every time I turn my computer on, there’s forty people checking in or putting up something online. It’s really amazing. All my Lamas from, living in Nepal, they’re online today and every day there’s teachings, so many teachings available, it’s incredible. So, really plug into those if you’re home, instead of sitting around worrying and panicking. It’s wonderful to get these teachings from these wonderful Beings, these Great Beings. It’s extraordinary.

So, we’re here. The same place. The next week. And next week. And next week. And next week. The chanting is so important to overcome the habits of thought, the way we, we shutter ourself inside this dark, this dark room that we call ourselves, our emotions. It’s just, we’re brought up that way. Our parents were that way. Our grandparents were that way. It’s very rare that we meet people in our growing-up phase that are at all really plugged into something really deep, you know?

It happens. But so, it’s extraordinary. You know when I was first getting interested in this stuff, there were like three books on yoga and meditation.  There wasn’t, I don’t even think there was any yoga studios anywhere. Maybe a few people teaching yoga here and there. So, now so much is available and we need it, as you know. We need it and it’s there. So, use this time to get deeper into your own being and to open your heart and let go of fear and embrace feeling, wishing this world and everybody in it, well. Breaking down the barriers that we have: shame and fear and sadness and betrayal and broken hearts and all that stuff. We’ve got to get over that stuff. We’ve got to digest it. You can’t push it away but we’ve got to digest it and use it as fuel, as food to move on into a deeper, a deeper love. And the chanting, it’s just so powerful, too, because either you’re paying attention or you’re not. It becomes very obvious to you. So, every time you’re not, you keep coming back. And little by little, there’s a, you know, when you drive towards the ocean, like out in L.A.,  on the Pacific Palisades and you’re driving towards the ocean and the windows were open in the car and I went, “Oh… I smell the ocean.” Just then there’s a street, what was it called? I forget, but it was like, you could, that street was where you could smell the ocean and then you know you’re moving in the right direction.

So, as we do these practices, as we chant and meditate, pray and do whatever we do, we touch that place where we can, we can taste it just a little bit. We can smell that fragrance of sweetness just a little bit. You can’t hold onto it. But you cultivate it through your practice.

So, let me see, there’s some questions here.

Q: How does Ram Das come to me now?

You know, I can’t even say it’s a memory. It’s not a memory at all. It’s a living presence. He’s so, he’s such a natural part of me.  We bonded so deeply towards the end and especially in these last years, but especially in the last couple of years. I feel like he’s always around and just smiling. Where’s that picture? I love this picture. This was our, this was a picture of us.  Can you see it?  That’s how we were at the end, like two crazy little kids. You know? Just having fun in our hearts. It was really, really deep. Really deep. We’ve been through tons of shit together over the years and all that was left was this real joy in each other’s presence.

Q: How many times do I chant?

I don’t know. I don’t count. I chant and then I stop chanting. I don’t know how long. You just do what you can. You don’t have to memorize things. You can read them. You can chant them as you go. Read them as you chant. You don’t have to memorize the Chalisa. You’re not preparing for an exam. So, read it, sing it, read it. You don’t have to try to memorize it. It’ll come to you. Do it a few million times. You’ll remember it. No problem.

Q: Can I talk about staying strong and courageous in these times?

Well, what are the options? What are your options? You know, many years ago I was in, me and a friend of mine had trailed Maharajji down to Bombay. They called it “Bombay” in those days. And we actually found Him. I mean, it was crazy that we found Him. But we did. And, long story, but anyhow, so one day we were in this building, an apartment building with Him in someone’s apartment, and He was lying on the bed in the back of the room and I was sitting on the floor next to Him, just doing my practice, which is staring at Him. And there was an Indian guy there, an Indian devotee and many hours had gone by. Maharajji was just lying on the bed. He’d sit up. He’d lie down. He’d sit up. He’d lie down. Then all of a sudden, with great intensity, He sits up and He looks at me and He said, “Courage is a really big thing.”

Now, the Indian devotee said, “Oh, Baba, God takes care of His devotees.”

Maharajji just shot Him a glance like that and He said to me again, “Courage is a really big thing.”

It is. It’s a big thing.

We need courage.

We need courage not to, not to give up. Because life goes on. Everything’s going to go on whether you’re there with it or not. It’s best to try to stay with it as best you can.

Don’t give in to fear. Don’t give in to too much worry. And do what you can to overcome that. It’s not courage for nothing. It’s for courage for the sake of your own heart and the hearts of those around us. It’s not like courage in battle and you’re going to go kill people. The battle is, you’re going to kill your own limitations. You’re going to kill and conquer the things that drag us down, that prevent us from allowing our hearts to be open and wide and prevent us from being who we really can be in this world.

So, courage is very important.

You just have to talk yourself down, you know? I mean, even Hanuman had to talk Himself down in a slightly different way. One time, Hanuman was, He’d jumped over to Lanka to try to find Sita who had been kidnapped by Ravana and Lanka was His Kingdom. And He had to go all through the kingdom looking for her. So, at one point, looking in, and he came across Ravana’s harem. And He looks down, and Hanuman was not, He was brahmachari. He was celibate and He was looking at all these naked women in various degrees of undress and He stopped and went, “Oh my God, I’ve sinned.” You know? “I’ve done something wrong. I’ve looked at these women.” And He started to have a meltdown. If monkeys can melt down, He was having a monkey meltdown, and then He says to Himself, “Now, wait a minute. I didn’t do this of my own volition. I did this in the service to Ram to try to find Sita. This was not, there was nothing in this of ‘me’. This was all to serve Ram. So, there’s nothing for me to worry about.” You know? And then He went on His way. But He was having a meltdown. He had to talk Himself down. Sometimes, we just have to talk ourselves down. Like, “Let go of this. Let go of this. You’ll deal with it some other time. Just let go of it now. Chill.” Sometimes you just have to do that. And of course, the things that help us do that is our regular practice. Regular connecting again and again coming back home to our hearts.

When I Chant The Chalisa, it feels very mechanistic and lacks joy, love and all the sweetness that it once did. What gives? What’s the fix for this? Should I move on and cultivate other practices?

Sweetheart, my friend, it’s not the practice. It’s you. It’s not the practice. It’s us. At the beginning, we had an excitement. “Here we are. We’re singing the Chalisa. Oh, it’s so great, I’m in so much love.” But that superficial excitement passes. Of course. It has to. Then you get down to the nitty gritty of seeing your own mind and the bullshit that’s going on all the time in our heads. But you still practice. You just do your best to pay attention. The Hanuman Chalisa is a mantra. Maharajji said every line is Mahamantra. So, Mahamantra is Mahamantra. Do it. Give yourself to it as best you can. It’s only our own stuff that keeps us separate. I have the same thing. That happens. You think I’m in total bliss all the time? I’m singing and floating off the ground? I don’t think so. You keep doing. You keep doing. You keep doing. In this case, the way you asked that question, the answer is, “Just keep doing.” And notice your emotions. Notice the inability you have to give yourself to it. Just keep noticing. Let go and come back. Noticing. Let go and come back. That’s the deal. You don’t have to manufacture some kind of feeling. What happened at first wasn’t, it’s not the real thing. It’s only a temporary little hit. The real thing is always here and that’s why doing the Chalisa will uncover within us. All these practices do the same thing like that. So, keep chanting.

Q: If were Baba were here physically in the same form that I knew Him in, do you think He’d still live in Kainchi?

No. I don’t think so. He might be here in the same form that I knew Him in, but He’s not in Kainchi as far as I can tell. He’s not anywhere that I know. When we start talking about Maharajji, it’s like stepping, it’s like diving into a pool. We don’t know how deep it is. We’re trying to get to the bottom but we don’t know how to and we never can find the bottom. There are so many stories about Him, so many stories about Him. There’s no way to know.

You know, these great Beings, this world is a dream. This body is a dream. And you’ve heard about conscious dreaming, right? Which is the ability to enter into your dreams consciously at night and then you can do all kinds of things in your dreams that you can’t do in a physical body. So, in some way, for the Great Beings, this world is their dream. If Maharajji wants to have three bodies, He can have three bodies. In fact, Tiwari told me a story. There was a new temple being inaugurated in Delhi, just outside of Delhi and Maharajji was asked to come and bless the inauguration, but He said He wasn’t going to come. And He was way up in the mountains, maybe twelve, fourteen hour car ride from Delhi, way up in the mountains with Tiwari and other devotees at this house. Way up. And at about, I think it was about like 11 o’clock in the morning, Maharajji says to Tiwari, “Let’s go, let’s take a walk.” So, they walked out on this ridge, which is one of these, like, the Himalayas are kind of right there, you know, like a few ridges away. And He says to Tiwari, “Sit down and meditate.” So, Tiwari sat down facing the Himalays, closes His eyes. Boom. He’s gone. So finally Maharajji hits him. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go. Come. I have work to do. Let’s go.” So, they walked back to the house and then they spent the rest of the day. The next day, a car arrives from Delhi and it’s the people who, the trust, the temple trust. They came into the house and they said, “We wanted, Maharajji left before taking prasad. So we’ve come from Delhi to bring the food for Him, the prasad from the temple.” And the house owner says to him, “What do you mean ‘he left?’” And they said, “Well, He was there in the morning, but then just around 11, He was there around 11 and then we went to get Him food and He disappeared.” And the householder said, “What nonsense you’re talking. He was here all day. Here in the house. What are you talking about?”  And the people from Delhi just looked around and they saw Tiwari sitting there in the living room and they said, “Look, and he was there, too.”

So, Maharajji had gone to Delhi and taken Tiwari with Him while they were both here in the mountains. So, what can be said? What can be said? But I doubt He’d be in Kainchi.

Q: Do I think that after COVID-19 blows over, if it blows over the way we hope it will, as a society we’ll see there’s more to life than money and consumerism?

There is?

Or will things go back to the way they were?

Well, one would hope that at least the people who had the karmas to wake up, did; will wake up and manifest more strongly in the world for sure. This is a very powerful time. People don’t wake up without difficulties. When you have difficulties, you have to overcome them. And that’s when people start to pay attention. Maharajji used to say, “I love suffering. Suffering makes me remember God.”

So, yes. I think that maybe there will be, the people who are ripe enough and have been, whose karmas allowed them to ripen even more at this time will be more active in the world and help and be more open and more, more helpful in making good things happen.  But you know, we’ll see. One can only hope and do what one can.

You know, all this craziness in the world is our doing. Nobody else is doing this. It’s us. We human beings are doing this. All of us. So, we human beings can change it. But not everybody believes that. Not everybody believes that there’s a better way to live. Most people live in fear, shame, guilt and selfishness and greed. And that’s what drives us and when we’re in that mode, it’s us and them and we’ll do anything we have to to protect ourselves and our small circle of people. That’s the kind of thinking that kind of has to go. It has to loosen up a little. Will it happen? I don’t know. I hope so.

I hope so.

Q: Maharajji gave me darshan in a dream. Am I imagining it? Playing a trick? Or was it real? How do I know?

Well, they say that we can not create the form of a Saint, a real Saint with our own minds. That if we see a Saint in a dream, they have come to see us. They have given us darshan. That’s what they believe, or what’s believed. So, I think that feels right to me. We can’t conjure up that form in our mind. We can when we’re awake. We can visualize. But when we fall asleep, we don’t have that will to visualize, so if we have that darshan, see a Saint or a Yogi in our dreams, it means they’ve probably come to see us. In most cases, I think that would be true.

Q: What is Maharajji’s big form?

You know, Dada, who was a great devotee of Maharajji’s, he used to say Maharajji had two blankets. He had an outer blanket to hide his physical body from us because, Dada used to see Him with sores that would manifest and then go away. All kinds of things going on as He was taking karma on and eating people’s karmas up, burning it off on His own body. But Dada also said He had an inner blanket that hid His true being from us because we could not handle it, we could not, it would burn our circuits up. So, Maharajji’s big form is the Big Form, the Universal Form. He is One with God. He has become the Universe. And like Krishna shows Arjuna His Universal Form, the whole Universe, everything within Him, this is Maharajji’s Big Form as well. Outside of that huge, vast Being, Being-ness, Presence, there can be nothing outside of That. Everything exists within that Presence. Just like the clouds float through the sky, the birds fly, the pollution pollutes, the wind blows, all inside of this vast sky.

Q: How would you find a Guru in Staten Island?

I don’t know. There might not be. They might be all over the place. Everybody might be a Guru in Staten Island.

Some of the Lamas I referred to at the beginning: Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Mingyur Rinpoche, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. Those are the three Rinpoches that I was just thinking about, that I saw today online. Also, Tai Situ Rinpoche was online today.  So many are available, giving messages and hope and support for us. So many. Beautiful.

You know, somebody asked me once about happiness, you know, and I said, “Well, you know, someone once, some reporter I think it was, once asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama if He was happy.  And He said, ‘Well, I know, I guess you could say I’ve had a tough life, really. I was taken from my parents at an early age to be educated in a monastery. Then I had to take over the reins of my country at a very early age. Then I had to escape from my country as was helpless as millions, millions of my people were slaughtered by the Chinese Government. And now I’m living as a refugee in another country. But, yes, I’m happy.’ He said, ‘The Chinese have taken everything from me. Should I let them take my happiness, too?’” That’s really deep. Because we, we’re so accustomed to getting all the things we want in the course of our life, in a day, in a week. We reach here, we amazon this and this and that. We get so used to being empowered that way and using and being so busy that way, we forget that happiness is an innate quality to our true nature. And it’s up to us to find that within.

You got me with that “big form” question. Once my mind went there, I was zoned.

There was a question just before about, how can I achieve spirituality and closeness to Lord Krishna?

Lord Krishna is God. And certainly, if you call His Name and Chant His Name, you will achieve closeness to Krishna. You will recognize divinity in yourself and everywhere because as He says, “And when He sees Me in All,” this is Krishna speaking in the Gita, “and when He sees 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.”  “And when He sees in All and 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, loves Me in whatever he sees, wherever this man may live, in truth he lives in Me.” So, that’s what we’re talking about. When we see Krishna in all Beings then Krishna is always with us. He never leaves us. And again, He says, “Who burns with the bliss and suffers the sorrow of every creature in his own heart, making his own, each bliss and each sorrow, him I hold as the highest devotee.”  A heart as wide as the world. A heart as wide as the world.

Surrender is the issue here. Surrender is our path. Surrender of the separate self. Surrender of the ego. Surrender of our own subjective delusion that we call reality. And that’s what practice is for. Practice trains us as we keep coming back to the moment, coming back to the mantra, coming back to the breath, coming back to moment. We let go again and again of the thoughts that take us away, the emotions that take us away, the sensations that take us away. We’ve come back again and again. That’s surrendering. Every time you let go.

And as Krishna says in the Gita, “Do what you do, but the fruit of your actions is not up to you. It’s up to Him. It’s up to God.”  That’s what He says.

So, we do what we do. We do as much good in the world as we can. We try to help everyone we can but whether we can change this world or not, we don’t know. Our job is simply to do the best we can. Every day. The best we can. Which is what we’re doing. But it could be better.  So, and the surrender is very deep so I’m going to read this again, I read it last week.

From Ramana Maharshi: “Place your burden”, your burden, our burden, which is this heavy delusional “me” that we carry around… “Place your burden at the feet of the Lord of the Universe who accomplishes everything.  Remain all the time steadfast in the heart, in the transcendental absolute, in the oneness, in the present moment.”

God knows the past, the present and the future. He will determine the future for you and accomplish the work.

What is to be done will be done at the proper time. Don’t worry. Abide in the heart and surrender your acts, your selfish acts, your self-centered acts to the Divine.

Surrender is the goal. Devotion is the path. Surrender is the goal. By letting go, we get everything. Nothing is lost. Everything is gained. And Maharajji used to say, over and over again, “Ram nam karne se sab pura ho jata.” From going on repeating the Names of God, everything is accomplished. Everything. The goal is reached.  Which is, we merge, we’re merging, completely becoming one with the universe. Recognizing the onenesss of the universe, of which we are a part.  Or so they say.

So, let’s see, any more questions?

Q: When Maharajji said He would come to America, He didn’t say in a new body, He just “in the body, in a body”. He said He would come to America and Radha was there and said, “You’ll come in our heights.” He said, “Nay. In a body.” So, where is He? 

How the hell do I know?  If He wanted me to know where He was, I’d know. But I don’t.  That doesn’t mean He’s not here or hasn’t come. So, don’t hold your breath.

Q: Is this the end of the Kali Yuga?

Well, that would be nice.  That would mean that the Golden Age is just down the road, but I don’t think so. I don’t think so.

Q: Why do I wear red clothes?

I wear red clothes because I was told to wear red clothes. Maharajji made me dye everything I had red. And He said, “You’re Hanuman. You’re Bajarangbali. You have to wear red all the time.” So, I do, mostly. Red, red-orange. Orange-red. You know, whatever, as close as I can get.

Q: How can we support the dying and their families and those who may be dying alone?

Well, obviously, there’s not much we can do physically at this point. We can donate to the first responders. There’s many places to donate that help the first responders who are also getting sick. There’s plenty of places to donate to help.  Different charities. Food to people. It’s very difficult because it’s not just a question of you’re not getting sick yourself. It’s a question of not spreading it to people that the virus will actually kill more easily. Old people. Although apparently many, most of the people who have it are between 20 and 50. That’s what I’ve understood.

And there was another question about, you know, should I read the news? It drives me crazy.

Well, “I read the news today, oh boy.”

So, the news feeds fear for me. We pray for ourselves and humanity but I feel guilty. I feel like I’m not witnessing as Bernie would say. Like turning my head away.

Well, you’re witnessing turning your head away. That’s part of witnessing. You witness your own reactions, too, and you let them go so you can become more present. It’s a practice. Don’t expect yourself to go straight to the whole, the end of everything. You have to do it step by step. That’s the way it works.

Witnessing is very powerful.  When I went to Auschwitz with Bernie, twice, it was really intense, obviously. I don’t want to belittle the situation. It was a very powerful situation. Very powerful practice place. Very powerful. And we had come there to bear witness to the suffering.

Obviously, to be witness, which means “seeing something,” you have to be able to see it without coloring it with your own stuff. Otherwise, you’re not witnessing and in this case we were witnessing as an offering to those beings who suffered there. Not necessarily for ourselves but because to be with them as they are, to give our being to them, one had to drop your own trip. Not so easy. So, the first time I was there, the first few days, the sun was shining. It was autumn and the leaves were multicolored on the trees, all flickering gold, red, yellow. It was so beautiful. Grass growing. I walked around furious. Screaming, literally. Raging at God. And the sun, the sun was shining and I would walk around and inside I was going, “How can you fucking shine on this place? How dare you shine on this place? How dare you shine on this place?” Right?

I was nuts. It drove me crazy. And for two days, I was kind of out of my mind. “How dare you?” You know?  And then all of a sudden, I went, “Oh, it’s your nature to shine.” It’s your nature to shine on all equally. On the shit. On the gold. On the good. On the bad. On the up and the down. The poor and the rich. The good and the evil. You know, it was like, the top of my head just blew off. That’s unconditional love. On all beings. All the time, equally. It was a very very very powerful situation, a very powerful experience for me. I was stuck in judging, which we do and my version of it. But the sun was just shining on all, even on me and my state of mind. This is witnessing. This is where witnessing and practicing being able to witness will open up for us those kind of experiences where we see from a different place. And you know, Bernie was all about that. All about that.

Q: What about charas, which is hash? Do I recommend it for spiritual…

I recommend it for lung infections and pulmonary disfunction.

No. You know, Maharajji said, if hash would bring you to God, we’d get a room full of it and we’d all go and smoke together, but it won’t. It will just destroy your health. And that’s what He said. And I haven’t smoked anything like that in so many years. I can’t even imagine. However, He did say that LSD, which He called the Yogi Medicine, can bring you into the room with Christ.  Which means, God. But you can’t stay. The only way to stay is love. That’s what He said. So, I don’t think He was being judgmental from a worldly point of view. I think He was just simply telling it the way it is. So, you deal with that. Do as you wish.

The post Special Edition Conversations With KD April 02, 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 42 Only Jesus Died the Real Death

Question: He, so the thing that kind of like I had an epiphany about was He never died, the part about Jesus, you know, “I never died.” I had that experience with Jesus, when He said, “I never died.” Could you say a little bit more about somebody who never died, and that whole idea?

“States of mind have their own qualities. Now, heaven is a state of mind. It’s not a place that you go to. Where are you going to go? How are you going to get there? Right? So, it’s a state of mind. When you’re in it, it’s eternal. That’s why it feels like heaven. “It will always be like this.” Pleasure, beautiful pleasure, unending pleasure, the world of the Gods. Heaven. The lower Gods. The devatas. Indra and the whole posse. But then there’s also hell, which they also say is eternal. But it’s not like it lasts forever. It only lasts as long as your karma puts you there. And when you’re there, it feels eternal. That’s why it feels so bad. It’s always going to be like this. It’s like our normal depression states. We think they’re going to last forever, but then they’re gone after ten or fifteen years. Or until we meet somebody else that knows how to push the right buttons. So, He lost himself in love. That’s how Maharajji said Jesus meditated. He didn’t watch His breath. He didn’t stand on one toe. He lost Himself in love. He immersed Himself fully in the love that surrounds us all the time. That lives within us. That’s who we really are.” – Krishna Das

Q: Namaste, beloved. It’s Karuna.

KD: Hold on, louder please. Just want to get the sound right.

Q: This question has to do with your Guru, Maharajji and the story that you shared at another workshop. It has to do with somebody who came in, a Canadian who came in and ask Maharajji how to meditate. And Maharajji said, “Meditate like Jesus.” And then, the Canadian asked, how would he meditate like Jesus. And then Maharajji closed His eyes, almost as if He went to ask Jesus how He meditate, and a tear, you said a tear came out of His eyes and Maharajji said, “He’s lost in love. He never died.”

KD: He loved everyone.

Q: yeah. So, He, so the thing that kind of like I had an epiphany about was He never died, the part about Jesus, you know, “I never died.” I had that experience with Jesus, when He said, “I never died.” Could you say a little bit more about somebody who never died, and that whole idea?

So, that morning, these two young men were coming into Allahabad from a village outside of Allahabad. They had heard that Neem Karoli Baba was around and they knew that their grandmother liked Saints. One of them’s grandmother, was a grandmother, grandson, or nephew or something. And they knew that she liked Saints. So, they stopped at her house and they said, “Would you like… we’re going to see Neem Karoli Baba, do you want to come?” And she said, “Neem Karoli Baba? What are you talking about? He was my grandfather’s Guru. I used to sit on His lap when I was 8 years old when I was a kid. He’s long gone, this must be some imposter.” Then they came.

Then she didn’t come. So, the two boys came and they were sent home by Maharajji to get the old lady. So, and she said to Dada, she said, “I don’t understand how it could be. He looks exactly the same as when I was eight years old.  But I don’t remember the blanket.” That’s the only thing, because Maharajji always wore a blanket. “I don’t remember the blanket.” So, you tell me. Even if He died and was reborn consciously, how could He look exactly the same? These guys can do whatever they want. They can do whatever they want. They know. They are living in this dream, consciously aware. When you’re dreaming at night, you think it’s real in the dream, right? You’re walking down the street. “Yeah, I’m walking down the street.” You think it’s, that’s reality in the dream. You don’t know anything else except what’s happening. When you wake up, you recognize it’s a dream.  But these great Beings do not fall asleep through the different states of consciousness. They’re fully aware. So, they can create anything they want in the dream. He could show up right here and sit on stage, just like he looked, anytime, because He’s aware that this is also a dream. We think this is real. But when we’re sleeping and dreaming, we think that’s real. So, there are Beings who are more awake than we are, who know that this is also a dream. And what does that mean? Well, I don’t really know, but, for instance, right now, I’m sitting here, looking out at you all. Do I know you? No. But, unconsciously, I’m telling myself a story about who you are. I see you, you’re kind of slouched in the chair and relaxed. That’s nice. You’re standing up straight, looking like you know what you’re doing. You know? Other people have got their hair this way. Other people are wearing this. Immediately, I’ve got a whole version of life. It’s my subjective version, based on all my stuff and guess what? You’re doing the same thing. We’re all playing each other’s parts in our movie. All of us. All the time. That’s why, that’s why spiritual practice works. Because It shows us, little by little, how subjective we are. You know, it’s very simple, like for instance, you might work in an office where there’s some guy who walks around cranky all the time and never talks to you, and you, you know, you start to develop a story around that. “Why doesn’t he like me? What did I ever do to him? He’s a nasty guy” And you’ve got this whole thing going. Then you find out he has terminal brain cancer. And that it wasn’t about you at all. But you acted like it was. Until you found out the truth. So, when we find out the truth, things will look a little different.

So… and we won’t be caught in our knee jerk reactions about everything that happens to us. We’ll get a vote. Like, for me, when I drive now, when I remember, I try to see all the other drivers in the road as His Holiness the Dalai Lama. “Son of a… Oh, His Holiness, Thank you for cutting me off like that. I appreciate it. You’ve shown me my craziness, I appreciate that teaching. Thank you. Yes. Ok.” You know? I try, you can’t be angry at His Holiness, so I try to see everybody as the Dalai Lama and that makes life interesting. So, as far as that story goes, that’s what He meant. But, the real thing about that story was, for instance, I had all kinds of ideas about meditation and spiritual practice and what I have to do and what I wanted to accomplish and how this, I was going to be a great yogi and I need… and we were always trying to get Maharajji to give us some practice to do, you know? Like, come on. “Give us a mantra” you know? “Give us the secret meditation teaching.” So, when He said we should meditate like Christ, you know, it was Ram Das later in the day that asked Maharajji, well, “You said we should meditate like Christ. Well, how did He meditate?” And then He closed His eyes. He wasn’t asking Jesus. He knows exactly what Jesus thought, felt and who He is and who He was because they’re all One like we are but we don’t know. So, He just closed His eyes and then two tears came down His cheek, you know? And He just said, “He lost Himself in love. He lost Himself in love. That’s how He meditated. He’s one with all beings. No one understands, He never died.” This is a Catholic school, I think.

It’s obviously and I don’t know shit about it.  I’ll pay for that, but what the fuck.

That was the thing, when I got to India and I met Beings, great Beings, I realized “This is what Jesus is, this is who He is, this is what it was all about.” And then I realized, “Jesus, what did He have to do with Christianity?”  He let 100 years, before that Jewish guy had a vision and created all this bullshit. Well, ok. Religion, organized religion, doesn’t have much to do with God. Ask Sinead O’Connor. She feels the same way. It’s just organization. Mind control. Emotional control. Manipulation. “Do this” and you’ll go to heaven. Yeah, right.

As if heaven was eternal. See, states of mind have their own qualities. Now, heaven is a state of mind. It’s not a place that you go to. Where are you going to go? How are you going to get there? Right? So, it’s a state of mind. When you’re in it, it’s eternal. That’s why it feels like heaven. “It will always be like this.” Pleasure, beautiful pleasure, unending pleasure, the world of the Gods. Heaven. The lower Gods. The devatas. Indra and the whole posse. But then there’s also hell, which they also say is eternal. But it’s not like it lasts forever. It only lasts as long as your karma puts you there. And when you’re there, it feels eternal. That’s why it feels so bad. It’s always going to be like this. It’s like our normal depression states. We think they’re going to last forever, but then they’re gone after ten or fifteen years. Or until we meet somebody else that knows how to push the right buttons. So, He lost himself in love. That’s how Maharajji said Jesus meditated. He didn’t watch His breath. He didn’t stand on one toe. He lost Himself in love. He immersed Himself fully in the love that surrounds us all the time. That lives within us. That’s who we really are. So, now that makes sense to me.

There’s so many stories about Maharajji.

You know, He used to talk sometimes about these, “Oh, there’s a Saint that lives there and He’s a really good saint and He feeds people and this and that, you know, and there’s another Saint that lives over there.” So, after Maharajji left the body, His greatest devotee, Siddhi Ma, they took off on a pilgrimage and they went to these places, two or three of these places that Maharajji used to talk about, and they get there and they asked to see this Saint and they said, “Oh, He just left the body.” And then they’d describe. “Well, tell us about Him.” And they described Maharajji to a ‘t’. So, it was like He was living in three or four places at the same time. And because, you know, He used to say to us, “I have the keys to the mind. I can turn your minds against me.” “No Baba! Don’t do that!” He’d laugh. Can you imagine waking up one day, you’ve been in India, you know, you wake up one day, “What am I doing here? I’m going home. When’s the next bus out of here.” Because all of a sudden, it’s really interesting. And he would say, “I’ll transfer you.” “No Baba! Don’t do that!” And He’d laugh. He had a great time teasing us. But then time would come He would transfer us. Like, about five or six years ago, a couple that had been with me and others in India with Maharajji, they came back to India for the first time and we were out singing the Hanuman Chalisa out in front of the mandir, the temple for Maharajji, and this, I noticed the woman standing over on the side where there was a place where Maharajji used to sit just like on a porch. And she was standing on one of the steps of the porch, just like standing there like this. And I noticed it and I said, “Oh, something’s going on over there. “ So when I finished, we finished singing, she came over to me, she said, “Krishna Das, I think only you can understand when I’m going to tell you.” I said, “What’s that?” She said, “I was just standing on those steps and I remembered standing there, what was it, 40 years ago, right? Standing there 40 years ago, looking at Maharajji and thinking, ‘this is where I, I’ve finally made it, I’m home. This is where I’ll always be.”  She looked at me and she said, “What happened?” She married, had two kids who were now, then in college, she’s got a real estate business, a big house, a whole life going on, and she remembered standing there and thinking, “This is where I’ll always be. Standing here looking at Him. This is where I want to be. This is where I’ll always be.” Transfer. Back into the karmas. Back into your life. He brought us there. He gave us what we needed. He shipped us back into our lives. He didn’t need people to be there. I remember this old couple came from Lucknow, a whole family actually that came from Lucknow and they a train, then they took the bus, then they got another bus. They got off at kainchi and they walked inside. Maharajji looks, “You’ve come? Good. Now go.” And they got up. Got back on the bus and went home, you know? He didn’t need you to be there because He’s everywhere. These great beings are everywhere. We’re the ones who are stuck in this thing that limits us so totally. They’re not. You don’t… and they’re running the show, PS. So, good luck thinking you’re making any decisions. But you have to.

People ask me all the time, you know, is it all grace, what should I do? I say, if you think there’s a choice to make, make it. Make the best choice you can make. Don’t sit around doing nothing. That ain’t going to work. That is not going to work. Because doing nothing is still doing something and it’s not very helpful. Make a choice. Make the right choice, the best choice you can make for yourself and the people you’re around and the situation you’re in. Make that choice and go for it 100%.

So, He used to say, one time I was with Siddhi Ma, who’d been with Maharajji for 40 years and the fire company’s coming, I wonder what they want… So, I said, “Ma, Maharajji said, He had the keys to the mind. Ok. Let’s say He does. If He does, that means that I am exactly where He wants me to be. Otherwise I’d be somewhere else, right? He would just move me. So, is it all grace? Or is it my own effort?” And She said, “It’s all grace. But you have to act like it isn’t.” The deal is done but we don’t know it. So we have to act. We have to deal with who we believe ourselves to be. We’re not who we think we are. But we think we are who we think we are. So, we have to make the best decisions in life and be the best person we can be. But in the other picture, the big picture, it’s already done, but we’re not seeing the Big Picture and you can’t pretend that you are. And just, even if you know there’s a big picture, that’s not enough. You still will come across choices that you have to make in your daily life. Like, where do you put your food in the morning? Do you throw it over your shoulder? Or do you put it in your mouth? That’s a choice. There’s so many choices all day long. Do I go to pee now? Or do I wait? It’s ok. We’ll be there. So, that’s the deal. So until we uncover what really lives within us, who we really are, we should be kind to ourselves and kind to others and do some practice. That’s the whole thing. You can’t figure it out. You can’t think yourself out of a prison that’s made of thought. Right? How can you do that? Every thought is the prison because you’re identified with it, you think you’re really thinking. It’s ridiculous. But we believe that. So, that’s the level we live on. That’s the level we have to go through our lives on and make our choices and one choice is sitting our asses down and doing some practice. One choice was coming here to be abused. It gets so bad sometimes, people make t-shirts saying “I survived the Krishna Das workshop.” Really. I don’t know what to do. Anybody else? Questions?

The post Ep. 42 | Only Jesus Died the Real Death appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 41 Karma and Consciousness, Dealing With Negativity

Q: I’ve been putting a lot of emphasis on my mind a lot of my life and to turn that around, I find that quite difficult. I’m a recovered Catholic and I’m trying my best to remove all belief systems. They’re inappropriate. Lately, in trying to find, and this is one of my shortcomings, always the quickest way to get somewhere, and I’m reading quite a few things on YouTube, believe it or not, and I found out that some people believe that there is no such a thing as karma when we reach a certain level of consciousness and I was wondering if this (karma) is a belief system?

“It’s real easy to see the atmosphere you create for yourself when you’re kind to people, when you care about people, when you’re someone that’s open to being with people in a good way. Your life becomes simple and filled with good things. Consciousness doesn’t have to be created. It’s here. Always.” – Krishna Das

Q: I’ve been putting a lot of emphasis on my mind a lot of my life and to turn that around, I find that quite difficult. I’m a recovered Catholic and I’m trying my best to remove all belief systems. They’re inappropriate. Lately, in trying to find, and this is one of my shortcomings, always the quickest way to get somewhere, and I’m reading quite a few things on YouTube, believe it or not, and I found out that some people believe that there is no such a thing as karma when we reach a certain level of consciousness and I was wondering if this is a belief system

KD: A what? A belief system?

Q: That karma is a belief system? And at a certain level, our spirit, when it’s very evolved, can create not having karma or is one with the godliness, the essence of godliness, that they, it can create whatever it wants so it certainly doesn’t want karma except, naturally, the good karma. Is there such a thing as being able to remove karma by just creating, being evolved eventually, etcetera.

KD: Yeah, if you have good karma.

Yeah, so karma, yes, it is a belief system, so to speak. But it’s pretty misunderstood, you know? Karma is actually the key to freedom, because it says, every action has an, every action has an effect, has a, no not necessarily an opposite reaction, not at all, but every action is like a seed that gets planted and that seed will grow, sooner or later. So, if you’re a cranky nasty person treating people bad all the time, you’re thinking always about yourself before others, these are the kind of seeds you’re planting. A lot of happiness doesn’t seem to be able to come from that. If you’re a kind person who’s thinking about others and serving others and taking care of yourself as well, that’s a whole different atmosphere that you’re living in. And in that atmosphere, different things can happen. When you’re living in a very dark, unhappy, cold atmosphere, in a very self-centered kind of way, then you’re creating all those kinds of karmas as well, and the way you’re talking, someone would say, “Well, you have very good karmas, very positive karmas, because you’re already thinking of how to create more freedom, rather than more bondage.” So, even being involved in that process is already very positive, very, there’s sattvic, so to speak, harmonious way of living, because you recognize if you’re treating other people bad all the time, you create a very negative atmosphere about yourself, around yourself, and it’s, it’s not easy to free one’s self from that. And so even, you could say, karma’s just another belief system, like any so-called belief system, but my experience tells me that, regardless of what I think about karma, it seems to be a way of dealing with cause and effect. Because one of the things they say is that nothing can come, nothing can be, exist, without a cause for existence. You know? If you have children, there was a cause for their existence. If you have money, if you have money in life, they say that’s because you were generous in a previous birth, for instance. And so, people with money in this birth, they tend not to be so generous, they tend to have a lot of fear and try to hold onto that and protect it. And so, they’re spending their generous, their money creating karmas and not creating more money creating karmas, so in the future, their selfishness and fear has created poverty, so to speak. It’s things like that. Most of these things are off the radar, but it’s real easy to see the atmosphere you create for yourself when you’re kind to people, when you care about people, when you’re someone that’s open to being with people in a good way. Your life becomes simple and filled with good things. Consciousness doesn’t have to be created. It’s here. Always.

What’s looking out of our eyes, what’s hearing through our ears, what’s feeling through our skin, tasting through our tongue, seeing through our eyes and being aware of thoughts in our so-called mind, is consciousness, is awareness. It’s here. Always here. They say it’s uncreated. They say it’s before creation, so to speak. Consciousness. So, everything comes after that is an object of that consciousness, so one doesn’t have to create that. One has to recognize it, to look for it. Look towards it. And so, for instance, in a practice of like, the repetition of the Name, where’s that Name come from? They say that these Names that we’re repeating, in India of course they call them the Names of God, whatever that means, they say those Names were brought to this world that we live in by a Being who recognized Reality, who merged with the Universe and then offered this path to finding that merging with the Universe. So those Names come from a place that’s deeper than our thoughts. Deeper than our emotions. Deeper than our conceptual understandings. So, by the repetition of those Names, we’re moving ourselves deeper within our own Being. And ultimately, we recognize that deeper reality. There’s no proof, you can’t prove these things, you know? But, if one meets Beings who radiate this goodness and this happiness and strength, inner strength and kindness, one says, “Well, how did that happen for you?” And they tell you, and that’s what they tell  you, you know? They all have their way, each one of them has a way that they realized that, that experience. Saint Francis, all the great saints, they all tell you certain things and they’re all about not focusing only on your small “s” self. You now, we always wanted Maharajji to give us, to tell us what to do. Give us the thing, we’ll go do it.  And He would say, we’d say, “Baba, how do you find God?” He said, “Serve people.” Serve people? He’s obviously out of it today.  “Ok, Baba, how do you raise kundalini?” Mmmm… kundalini. He said, “Feed people.” What?

What is he talking about?

This is what He told us. “Don’t think about yourself. “ He never encouraged us to do spiritual practice for the sake of our own enlightenment. Why? Because all you get is a big ego that you can’t see because it’s spiritual. Must be good. Even though it doesn’t seem to be working very well. So, that’s the deal.

And, you know, in Vajrayana Buddhism, in Mahayana Buddhism, they talk about offering the fruits of your practice to others. So, you sit and you make your effort of remembering that you’re actually sitting, trying to remember, you know, and then before you get up, you say, well, may this practice that I’ve done, may this effort benefit all beings. And that expands you. It connects you. You begin to feel that you’re not, neither are you alone in the universe and neither are you, nor are you isolated.  And that what you do affects others, and others affect you too. And on the other hand, I don’t know how many hands we have, but on the other hand, a lot of our unhappiness and our fear and anger and is not really ours alone. We’re living in a very dark, unhappy time and it’s very scary. And it’s the atmosphere. Everybody’s living in it, in this planet, in the same atmosphere. So, a lot of the stuff that happens mentally is not really our own personal issues, although we do take it all personally, our depression, our anger, our grief, our shame. All the stuff that we have, that’s my stuff. But it’s not always only your stuff. It’s a combination of the atmosphere we’re living in, so you know, trying to surface, to come up to the surface and get a breath of air in that atmosphere is very difficult. It takes time, and a kind of sincerity and whole-heartedness to really, to bring to our lives, to be able to give ourselves fully, or at least, more fully to what we’re doing. Whatever it is we’re doing.  I hope that wasn’t too horrible. Ok. Thank you.

Q: You just spoke about lot about this not being our own, but really a societal thing or rather I’d call it, more like, it’s in the ether, so there’s a lot of negativity polarity as we all understand. Too little of ability to come up for, for fresh air or have an alternate by many many many many layers upon layers upon layers upon layers. With all the awakening going on, those of us who get what you just spoke of also find ourselves overwhelmed by the overpressure of what’s in the ethers, it’s like an imbalanced see-saw. How can we build critical mass to right that see-saw for there to be more light? For there to be more of what you do want rather than what you don’t want and then reacting because you see more of what you don’t want and then you’re just pissed off at that. It is just so dense and intense, permeating in the ether and there is still, as a global society, as a, it’s really in the global planetary ether, how to change all that?

KD: Got it. Got it. Ok? Got it.

So, one time a reporter was interviewing the Dalai Lama. And he said, “Your Holiness, are you happy?” And the Dalai Lama said, “Well, I guess you could say I’ve had a hard life. I was recognized as a reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama and taken from my parents at a very early age. And then, the Chinese invaded and I was forced to take the reigns, become the, run the country at like, 15 years old. And then, the Chinese continued to invade so I had to escape my country. And then I had to watch helplessly as millions, millions upon million of my country’s people were slaughtered and killed. But, I’m happy.” He said, “The Chinese took everything from me. Am I going to let them take my happiness?” This is big time. Big Time. Your happiness is not dependent on what’s happening in the world. And in fact, until we can be happy within ourselves, we’re severely limited in what we can do in the world because motivation is what, is what dictates the result of our actions. You know? If we, if we plant a seed by just throwing it out, you know, like this? Maybe it will grow. If we plant the seed and plant it in the right place and give it some fertilizer and the prevent the cows from eating it, then it might grow. So, our actions have a lot to do with the motivation of our why we do what we do. Two people can do the same thing and have totally different result. Why? Well, there’s a million reasons, but it has a lot to do also with why a person does something. For instance, once I, when I was living somewhere, I had a little closet that I went into to meditate. And I had a candle and incense and a little cushion, and one day I went in there and I got in, I closed the door, ok, and I started puffing up the cushion and I turned around, before my ass hit that cushion I went “ahhh..” and I saw that my motivation for doing these practices at that time was that I wanted to create a “me” that I could like. And if I was doing spiritual practice, well I must be a very good person and I must like the right things… In other words, I was creating a version of me that I could love because I didn’t love myself as I am. So what could come from that? If my motivation is hatred of myself, then the practice, all it’s going to do is make me a bigger ego that I don’t even like. If it was a big ego I liked, ok that’s not so bad. Although it’s the same. But yeah, see?

So there’s nothing out there. There’s nobody out there. There’s only you.

You are every being that you see in this world. That’s the other side of taking responsibility for everything out there. So, when you clean up your act, the whole world is cleaned up. Now, I know. The neighbors are still going to be noisy. Your car’s still not going to work. The kids are going to be yelling and screaming, but you will be dealing with that and meeting every minute in a completely different way. One time, Maharajji said, somebody asked Him about something, He said, “I’ve already done everything. I just leave the mind to you.” Thanks.

But He was saying, like Siddhi Ma said later, “It’s all grace.” We live in a state of grace. We’re swimming in an ocean of grace, but we don’t realize it and so, we suffer. You can’t, it’s not something you can manipulate yourself emotionally to feel. It’s not like that. It’s already there. It’s looking out of your eyes, right now. When Maharajji left the body and I was running around looking for Him, because I knew He was somewhere, He just wasn’t showing me. I was running through the jungle and I meet these Babas, and I go, “I’m looking for my Guru.” “Your Guru? Your Guru is looking out of your eyes? What’s your problem?” “Ah, you don’t understand.” I went somewhere else. You know, it’s you have to hold, what they say there’s ultimately reality and relative reality, ok? In other words, this, there is what it is already, ok? Perfect. And then there’s relative reality, which is all the bullshit we think all day long. Ultimate reality is like the sky and it holds everything within it. The earth, the smog, the trees, the birds, everything, right? Relative reality is all that stuff. When we’re in relative reality, we don’t experience ultimate, the real thing. We’re stuck in this. But those who are in, who recognize ultimate reality, they live in this world freely and they, they’re here. Those are the great Beings that are here only to remind us and show us what’s possible. So, It’s not like you can make that happen. You don’t have to make it. You have to find what this is. Who you are. And then everything will come. And like I say, the most important thing, one of the most important things is how do you meet every moment? How do you meet every person that shows up in your awareness? Every person. How do you treat that person? Because all we see is our subjectivity. We react, whether it’s attraction or aversion. It’s usually one part of one of those or some mixture. But when Maharajji looked out, He saw God everywhere. He saw His own true nature everywhere. And He could see what I thought about myself, which is why compassion arose in Him, because that’s the only thing that can arise in one of these Beings. Kindness and compassion. And the ability to help me extricate myself from my self-hatred and my self-judging and my self-limiting and the whole thing.

So, be, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be active in the world. We should do everything we can to relieve any kind of suffering that comes into our lives, whether its for somebody else or our own personal suffering. That would be a wonderful way to go through life, being somebody can help anyone and anything that comes into your life. But we’re not capable of that. We don’t know how to, I mean, one time, many many years ago, before I went to India, before I met Ram Das, I was living on a farm. I had taken way too much acid, so I went off to live on a farm in the mountains of Pennsylvania all alone, with my two dogs and my cat and I was living up in the mountains with no human beings in sight. And, so I used to walk around and I got friendly with the people who owned the farm next door. So one day, the phone rings. My name was Jeff. They said, “Jeff, come on up here. Come on up to the house. Hurry hurry!” So, I thought, “What’s going on?” So, I ran up to the house up the road, you know? And I walk up and she comes running out of the house and she hands me a rifle. “Look, we got a coon treed!  You can shoot it!” “Ah… What?” “Yeah yeah. Right here right here! Take the rifle, you can shoot the coon!” I didn’t know what to do. I took the rifle and I shot the racoon. And then I didn’t kill it even. I had to like, shoot it three times because I was a terrible shot. And the whole time I’m like… you know? I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. I didn’t know how to not do what life was putting in front of me. Boy, I can still feel it. I tell ya. Another time, many years later, Dada, one of Maharajji’s devotees, he came to visit us in America and I was driving him around, going through these neighborhoods, just showing him around and I hit a squirrel. A squirrel ran across the street and I hit it with a car. And I said, “Dada, what happened?” You know? “I had no intention of killing that squirrel.” You know? “What about the karma of killing the squirrel? I killed the squirrel!” He said, “Just drive.” So another time, so Maharajji, Ram Das had bought a Volkswagon bus from some westerners that were in India, and we were driving it all around the mountains. We were driving it to the temple every day from the town, like 17, 18 westerners piled into this volkswagon bus, hanging on the top, sitting on the roof, hanging off the back. It was a scene. And it was getting a little intense. And Indians would come out of their houses to watch the bus go by. You know? So, Maharajji killed the bus eventually. It just wouldn’t start one day. But before that happened, before that happened, he took the key, He said to Ram Das, “Ram Das, you’re a saint, you have to take the bus with the regular people.” And He gives the keys, takes his keys and gives them to me. He said, “Jeff will drive.” So, from then on, He called me “driver.” “Driver!” For a year, my name was “Driver.” So, that’s cool, it’s pretty hip. “I’m driver.” That’s cool. So, I had a secret desire. It wasn’t so secret but I never told anybody, but I wanted to drive Maharajji in the car, right? So, I kept the keys with me. I never, the keys were never out of my sight. When I went to sleep, they were in my shoulder bag, right by my pillow. I never, so like, a year later, Maharajji looks at me one day. “Got the keys?” “Yeah.” “Let’s go.”

So, we went out of the house, Dada’s house. Dada was walking with Maharajji. We were walking out to the bus, the volkswagon bus and I opened the door. Maharajji and Dada come up, and Maharajji was short and He had to throw Himself up onto the seat of the Volkswagon bus, right? So he throws Himself up and He bashed His head on the doorjam, on the top. I mean, really bashed His head. I almost pissed in my pants.  I said, “Dada! Did you see that?” And he said, “He did it on purpose. Just drive.” That’s a real devotee.

Obviously. The seal of approval over here. Because in Dada’s eyes, nothing could, everything Maharajji did was on purpose. There was no, everything that happened. And a really interesting thing  happened. So, two days later we were sent away to do this pilgrimage with this swami down in south india that Ram Das had promised. So, Maharajji said, “You promised. You have to go.” So, off we went. Three or four of us with Ram Das. And I was driving and there was a big long curve and on this side was a reservoir, right? And I entered the curve too fast. And the car, you know, those old Volkswagon buses weren’t very good and I felt the car moving out off the road, you know? And I’m thinking, we’re going into the reservoir and as soon as I thought that, there was like a wind came, like woosh and pushed the car back on the road like that. And I thought, He hit His head.

Prove it isn’t so. Go ahead.

He hit His head. He saved us. We were going, I swear to you, we were going into the water. The car was already drifting across and I couldn’t, nothing I could do, I was… and then woosh. Really. It was amazing. What are we talking about?

So…

The post Ep. 41 | Karma and Consciousness, Dealing With Negativity appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 40 Dark Night of the Soul, Gratitude and the Renaissance of Psychedelics

Q: So Ram Das talks a lot about how, as you awaken or you go on this spiritual journey, the passions of life kind of start to fall away, and for me, personally, it can be such a release some days when I look out and I see people that this is it and that car is it and doing this and winning is it and I kind of see through it, and then there are days when I just want to go back to sleep because I want to be lost in it. It’s so hard sometimes, I mean just to, I don’t know, everybody’s going bowling as Ram Das says in his talks and you don’t want to bowl anymore. It’s just like, “I can take it or leave it.” Are we just supposed to get to that point where the highs are gone, the lows are gone and we’re just here? Now?

“On this path, those moments of darkness, all that energy fuels the longing to be free, fuels the longing to connect more deeply with what we want to connect with. It’s a good thing, ultimately. It’s a dark night of the soul but there’s a morning right after the night.” – Krishna Das

Q: Can you just talk a little bit about the dark night of the soul.

KD: Oh.

Q: I know. So Ram Das talks a lot about how, as you awaken or you go on this spiritual journey, the passions of life kind of start to fall away, and for me, personally, it can be such a release some days when I look out and I see people that this is it and that car is it and doing this and winning is it and I kind of see through it, and then there are days when I just want to go back to sleep because I want to be lost in it. It’s so hard sometimes, I mean just to, I don’t know, everybody’s going bowling as Ram Das says in his talks and you don’t want to bowl anymore. It’s just like, “I can take it or leave it.” Are we just supposed to get to that point where the highs are gone, the lows are gone and we’re just here? Now? Just kidding.

KD: Like, be here now, you mean? Oh, wow, I never thought of that. Yes and no, of course. Dryness of heart is not something that’s useful, so when shit doesn’t work for you anymore, you can start to feel very dry and very disconnected from life and very, you know, you can really feel like, isolated from things and cut off. So, that’s not useful. That’s neurosis, essentially. But the problem is that we’re so used to trying to squeeze water from a stone that everything we see, we try to squeeze and bring out pleasure from it. It’s very hard to break that habit so that when it’s not working for whatever reason, the hands are still going like this but there’s nothing there, you know? That’s why there has to kind of, that’s why, when you have a practice that you’ve been doing for awhile and you recognize that you understand that you’re not supposed to be, it’s not about how you feel. How you feel is irrelevant. You do the practice. If it makes you feel a certain way and you’re still doing the practice in that moment, that feeling becomes the object of awareness and you come back from being lost in how good this feels, then you can also extend that to how bad this feels. You get lost in that. And the more you’re used to letting go, the more you’ve trained yourself not to be identified so strongly with the experience, you come back naturally a little quicker. So it doesn’t feel dry. The dryness is that you still wish there was something coming from that stone, which there isn’t. But when you become aware of that, see, you have to get used to, so what I was saying, It’s not easy. It takes time to cultivate that motion of letting go. So, Sri Ramakrishna was a very very great saint who lived in India in the 1800s and he talked about the way the practice of the repetition of the Name works, for instance. There are other practices, of course. But this one… and he said, every repetition of the name is a seed that gets planted in your mind stream, so to speak, in your heart stream in your life. And just like the seed of a huge tree carries that whole tree in a tiny little seed, that potential, that energy, that whatever it is, it’s all in that little seed of a huge oak tree. So, these seeds get planted through the repetition of the Name. He said, every single repetition of one of these names is a seed, ok? Just take it or leave it. It’s a seed. So, that gets planted. You planted it through the repetition of the Name. So, he said, some of these seeds might get caught by the wind and blown miles and miles and get stuck on the roof of an old house in the jungle. And in those days, the tiles on some of those roofs were baked in the sun, not necessarily in a kiln, and so the seeds of the repetition of the Name get stuck between these tiles and then, over rain and snow and wind and seasons changing, the tiles start to break down. Ok? And then, the seeds, the roots from the seeds start to grow. And the roots grow and grow and grow and they destroy the roof of the house. And they keep growing. And they wind up destroying the whole house. Ramakrishna says that house is who you think you are. So, it’s gonna happen. You plant the seeds and you live your life. But what’s being dissolved is your… so that house was built, right? There was just space before and then somebody built a house, and those walls and roof of the house separated the inside from the outside, like who you think you are and who everybody else thinks they are in the room. There’s all these little houses here. They say the repetition of the Name gradually destroys that temporary sense of separateness. It’s just temporary because that house was built for certain reasons. There were causes and conditions that built the house. You needed to protect yourself from the rain and the sun. You had a family you wanted to protect from the tigers and the elephants so you built a house. Through the repetition of the Name, you’re liberated from that sense of separateness and you’re opened up into everything. You’ve become one with the whole universe. The space, and even, the trick is that even when the house was there, the space inside was not different than the space outside. So, the space inside of me is not different than the space inside of you and the space inside of which we’re all living. When the walls come down, we’re everywhere. It’s not, we’ve lost nothing. We’ve gained the whole universe. You don’t disappear. You get here. So, that’s the fruit of practice. And you notice, Ramakrishna doesn’t say, “Oh when you’re practicing it’ll feel like this or that or one thing or another.” Why? Because it’s irrelevant. When you’re repeating the Name, the only thing that’s relevant is the Name. Anything you’re thinking, feeling, remembering, dreaming about, wanting, not wanting, blah blah blah blah blah… let it go. Come back. Until there’s no letting go because there’s nothing to let go of and you’re here all the time. Nowhere. Nothing grabs you. Thoughts will continue to come. They’ll float through like birds. They won’t grab you. You’ll still be here even when thoughts are thinking. You won’t be thinking them. They’ll be there to think, like “I’d better go to work.” Ok. Something like that. But you don’t identify with it. It doesn’t, that glomming, the glue is gone.

So, that dryness comes from not really being through with stuff. Who is, anyway? Right? We’re all here. So, you don’t want to judge yourself for that. You don’t want to put yourself down. You don’t want to evaluate. That’s all thinking. But we do it so much that we think that it’s necessary. “We should be thinking.” Not necessary. Except, you know, at certain times you have to kind of think. But those times disappear gradually and then thinking just happens when it’s supposed to. But, the dryness, you know… I don’t know if that really qualifies as the dark night of the soul. It can get darker than that. But, on this path, those moments of darkness, all that energy fuels the longing to be free, fuels the longing to connect more deeply with what we want to connect with. It’s a good thing, ultimately. It’s a dark night of the soul but there’s a morning right after the night.

Q: It’s not just one night, dark night of the soul, it could be months, years?

KD: Yeah it’s not a human, not a physical day. It could take you lifetimes. But what it does is it fuels the longing to be free. It is an intensification of the recognition of the fact that nothing you’ve done has worked, which is a good recognition to have. I’m sorry. It’s gotta come. So, yeah.

Q: Hi, first of all thank you for taking my question. I appreciate it. I didn’t, really, the only reason why I wanted to speak was just to thank you personally, just because, like, your music has helped me so much and that’s why I’m here and I never thought in a million that I’d get a chance to sit here and actually speak with you. So, thank you so much for your music, especially, Pilgrim Heart. I absolutely love that album. I spent a few years in Peru working with indigenous healers in the Amazon and yeah, it got really dark at times and then sometimes I work with ayahuasca, I don’t know if, I’m sure you’ve heard of it.

KD: Yeah. I’ve heard of it.

Q: Sometimes after a ceremony, I just put on your music and it would lift me.

KD: While you were puking your guts out.

Q: So thank you. You’ve helped me through some pretty hard times.

KD: You’re welcome. Music to puke by. Wonderful. Thank you.

Q: So, also, ok, so I figured I might as well have a question or two. One, I don’t know if the SDM… does that name ring a bell?

KD: Yeah, yeah. Surya Das.

Q: Yeah, so he’s a friend of mine.

KD: Yeah, I’ve known him since 1968.

Q: Yeah. So, he came down to see me when I was in Peru and he chanted during ceremony and what came out was just so beautiful. Just, the energy and just the, the vibration and I just wanted to ask you, in your chants, because, you know, a lot of healers are trained to visualize when you’re chanting, do you retrain to visualize at all?

KD: I wasn’t trained shit.

Q: Ok. Because I wasn’t sure, because also I study medical chi-gong and I’m learning a lot about distance healing.

KD: Then you were trained to shit.

Q: But you’re taught to visualize when you’re working.

KD: Yeah. Not me. I just sing. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Q: Well, whatever you’re doing its amazing. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. And its wonderful to be here and its wonderful to see you.

KD: Next, thank you.

Q: Just a quick question, all this talk about Ram Das and acid and ayahuasca, and you know there’s…

KD: Sooner or later, we always get to this, I know.

Q: There’s all this renaissance in psychedelics and Michael Pollan’s book came out

KD: Yeah.

Q: I was wondering, did they have a role in your spiritual growth?

KD: Oh, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for psychedelics, there’s no question. At least, in my mind, that’s the way it looks. I took peyote between my junior and senior year of high school. A friend of mine had come back from the Southwest with some peyote buttons, which is mescaline, essentially, and absolutely changed my life. I took it, after I finished puking, I just went “oh… this is what it is.” There was no doubt in my mind that what I was seeing was a deeper reality than Long Island in the 60s.

Q: So then, I guess my question then around that is, so there’s a renaissance, people seem to really be into it, somehow that’s going to lead to spirituality, but obviously, you know, you cite a Guru. What do you see is a proper role or what place do they play in all this?

KD: It’s different for everybody. I don’t think there’s one rule for anybody. It’s different. If you feel that you really want to take some drug like that, knock yourself out, so to speak. Who’s going to tell you what to do? Maharajji Himself called it the ‘yogi medicine’, you know? And He took it twice. Ram Das gave it to Him twice. The first time was the very first time Ram Das met Him, and He took three or four hits, and He said to Ram Das, Ram Das didn’t, Ram Das went to India the first time with a bunch of acid because he knew it had changed his life but he didn’t know what it was, so he went to find that, he thought maybe somebody in India will know what it is. So, he went around giving it to people, chai wallahs, you know, rickshaw wallahs, you know, storekeepers, anybody who wanted some, got some. And nobody, some people liked it, some people didn’t, but they all went… oh. So then he’s sitting in front of Maharajji the first time and Maharajji said, “You have some medicine?” So Ram Das thought He meant, like, an asprin or something, so he takes out a bottle of asprin. He said, “Nay nay, the yogi medicine.” Yogi medicine? He must mean acid, so he said, “Yeah?”  And He said, “Give it to me.” So, He put His hand out like this, and there were like, three or four tabs of acid, each one strong enough to put a horse on the moon.  Maharajji threw them all in His mouth. And they sat around all day, nothing happened. It was the same. No difference whatsoever. That was really powerful for Ram Das. I mean, it wasn’t the most powerful, the most powerful thing was the love that He felt from Maharajji, but the next day this happened and then he went, jeeze, you know, He’s beyond acid. Which was a big thing because it changed his life completely, right? Ok, so then Ram Das came back a couple of years later and this time he came, I was traveling with him and we came to see Maharajji at one point and we were sitting there. Now, when he came back from India the first time, he told the story I just told you, right? But people were saying to him, “Oh, come on, he must have thrown it over his shoulder. He didn’t take it. Nobody could take that much acid.” And even though Ram Das believed it, there was just a little bit of doubt, you know? I mean, really… but in the back of his mind, there was a little bit of doubt. He never said anything to anybody, but, so there we were, two years later sitting with Maharajji, and Maharajji says, “When you were in India last time, did you give me medicine?” “Yes.” “Did I take it?” “Yes.” “Got some more?” Yes.” “Give it to me.” Ram Das put his hand out like this with four hits of Owley acid. Unbelievable. Maharajji went like this,  I swear to you, I was sitting right there, He goes like this… four times, and then, after a couple of minutes, He goes, “can I drink water? Cold water? Hot water?” And then after a couple of minutes, He takes His blanket and He pulls it up over His head like this, and then He goes… Ram Das turned purple and he thought, “Oh my god, I’ve killed my Guru. He knew I had some doubts and He wanted to prove He could do it, now I’ve killed my Guru, what’s going to happen?” You know? The minute he thought that, Maharajji just stopped and said, “Yogis have known about this for thousands of years. It used to grow up in the Kulu Valley, and He said something very interesting, “A yogi would go and He would, He would do, He would do essentially ashtanga yoga. He would, he would do yama and niyama and then he would calm the body, calm the breath, he would bring the mind to one point and then he would take the medicine and go through the door.” He said, “For a yogi, no poison can affect him.” And that was it. The rest of the day was just like any other day. He was completely beyond those things, which was inconceivable to us. So, but He said, somebody, once, “A person should take this when his mind is quiet and he’s in a cool place.” And not overheat. But, He called it the yogi medicine. He said, “It’s good for beginners.” So, you have to, you know, whatever, knock yourself out. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. It’s up to you. Whether it’s going to change your karmas, who knows? Some people don’t have good experiences. Some people hang on and its scary, whatever. Some people open up. For me, it was like getting away from my mother and into playland. I would play with my dog in the snow for hours and hours. I just was so happy, just playing, that’s all. It was really wonderful, really liberated me from my stuff I hated. All that hard, nasty, dark stuff, hated myself and anger and all that, it just lifted me out of all that. And it showed me there must be something underneath all this stuff, something else.

And Maharajji told this one guy, his father came to India, you know? Maharajji told him, “Take him to Benares,” which is this incredible city on the banks of the Ganga, where they have a burning ghat where they burn all the bodies, you know? He said, “take him to Benares and give him acid. Give him the yogi medicine.” So, he took his father to Benares and gave him, the guy had a trip that changed his life. He turned from a very uptight advertising executive. He bought a farm and horses, invited everybody to come stay. But, you know, it’s up to you.

Ultimately, one has to deal with one’s self and one has to, has to learn to trust one’s own heart. Whatever it is. You have nobody who knows better than you. Somebody can tell you what they think you should do, you could agree with them, ok, but you’re agreeing with them. You’re trusting that.

Sometimes it leads you into a lot of suffering.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes you have to learn hard lessons about how to find what you want and a lot of the times, it’s about recognizing that you’ve found something you didn’t want. So, you have to come back. The whole spiritual path, whole life is about one thing, learning to trust your own heart every day, all day. It’s very hard to do because nobody tells us about that. Nobody. Our parents didn’t know, their parents didn’t know, their parents didn’t know. How could we know. If we know at all, it’s from the karmas we brought into this life coming to fruition right now. So, whatever’s going to help you, experiment. See. Or don’t. Whatever.

But also see what your motivations are for doing something that you don’t know what its going to be. A wild card. Why would you do that?

Can’t deal with this moment? What’s your problem? You need some self awareness about these things and what your motives are. There’s nowhere you can go where you’re not going to be, no matter how much acid you take. It just might look a little different. It might be scary. It might not be. You don’t know. So what’s your motive for taking a shot like that? I don’t know, but hopefully you will. Ok.

Remember to vaporize after we sing.

The post Ep. 40 | Dark Night of the Soul, Gratitude and the Renaissance of Psychedelics appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 39 Bad Aim and the Importance of Spiritual Practice

“The key to doing a spiritual practice is actually doing it. Every day whether you feel like it or not. Because if you only go with your, “You know, I’m tired today, I think I’ll skip it”, then the habits that are already pushing us around just get stronger and stronger. We have to create new habits that turn us within, that make us more available to our own inner self.”   – Krishna Das

KD: Well, so, what are we doing? Why do sing, “Sri Ram Jai Ram”? Why do we do these practices at all? And, ultimately, the reason is that we’re not happy as we want to be. We have suffering in our lives. We have, we don’t know how to get what we want. We don’t know how to get rid of what we don’t want. And the reason for that is that we believe what we think. Very simple. Right now, you believe that you’re hearing what I’m saying, which is pretty interesting.  But we believe what we think and we believe how we interpret what our senses, the information our, we, our senses bring in to us through the course of the day, the course of our life. So essentially, we’re living in a prison with one little window way up high, which we can’t see out of. But we can hear and we get some idea of what’s out there but we don’t really see what’s really out there. But we want to. And the prison we live in is the prison made of thought, our thoughts, all of our thoughts, and the way we believe our thoughts and you can’t think yourself out of a prison that’s made of your thoughts and your beliefs, our beliefs. Believe me, I include me in “us.” There’s no way out of it through thinking or emotional manipulation or trying to, you know that joke about not wanting to join any club that would actually let you join? That’s what it’s like. We have some version in our minds of what it’ll be like when and if we feel the way we want to feel and have the experiences we want to have of freedom or God or nirvana or happiness, whatever you want to call it, love, real love. But because we don’t know what that is, conceptually, we all share one major problem: bad aim. That’s the deal. Bad aim. You think it’s over there but you wind up over there. How did I get over here? Bad aim. We go after what we think we want and it’s not what we want when we get it for more than, you know, ok, sixty seconds if you’re really good. So, why, what do these practices do? Well, it’s very simple. You don’t know, I don’t know what who Ram is or what Ram is. But they say that through the repetition of the Names, gradually but inevitably, now that’s the deal. “Inevitably” is the kicker here. Inevitably, what lives within us, our own true nature, who we really are underneath all the things we think and feel and believe, gradually but inevitably, through the practice of the repetition of the Names, that’s uncovered. You can’t know what it is before it’s uncovered. We’re digging. But you don’t know what it is until you hit something. And even then, you just get a little glimpse. You think, it’s like digging out a corpse from underneath the ground. You hit the foot. “Oh, that’s what it is.” No. That’s just a part of it.

That was kind of a gross… I’m sorry.

I can’t help myself.

So, that’s it. So, the idea is you sing and because it’s a spiritual practice, that means that we have one job only, that’s to pay attention. That’s the beginning. Without some attention, there’s no possibility of ever being here or ever recognizing our true nature or ever finding real love or merging with the divine, because it’s all here and we’re not.

We’re lost in our thoughts. We’re lost in our day dreams. We’re lost in our knee-jerk reactions to things. All day long, all life long, boom, then we’re dead.

And we have to do it again in another body. It’s a pain in the ass. And you’ve got to deal with your parents all over again, a whole new set of bullshit, you know? First, you have a Jewish mother, then you have a Hindu mother. Oh, my God. You have to cry in a new language, you know? It’s like, terrible. You ask for milk, she doesn’t know what you’re saying. So, that’s why we have to add a practice to our lives. There’s just no other way to do it, I’m sorry. None of the saints say anything different. Well, some of them talk about sudden enlightenment, but they don’t mention that sudden of enlightenment takes millions of births to happen. So, we sing “Sri Ram Jai Ram”. What’s Ram? We don’t know? Who’s Ram? Is it some Hindu god up in the sky like what’s his name, Jehova? It’s not outside of us because there is no outside of us. It looks like that and that’s why we’re screwed. Oh boy. I’m going to tone it down. I had too much caffeine. Maybe if I have some more, I’ll go over the top and slow down.

So, you repeat the Name. My guru used to say, “Just repeat the Name. When you’re angry, when you’re sad, when you’re happy, when you’re, anything, just go on repeating.” And if you don’t, then what? If we don’t do the practice, then what? Then we’re just floating out in the ocean with no direction, and whatever winds come by blow us around.

If we want to slow down, we have to sink an anchor down into the bottom and that anchor is the Name in this case. Or, any other spiritual practice that you like to do.

The key to doing a spiritual practice is actually doing it. Every day whether you feel like it or not. Because if you only go with your, “You know, I’m tired today, I think I’ll skip it”, then the habits that are already pushing us around just get stronger and stronger. We have to create new habits that turn us within, that make us more available to our own inner self.  I mean, we didn’t have much of a vote in developing the habits we already have, other than our karmas that brought us into this life with those parents, to that school, with those friends, in that culture, in that country at that time. But we didn’t get a vote, who we are now did not get a vote in that. If we’re even going to get a vote now, then we have to start paying attention and that’s not so easy to do.  But it’s not that hard, either. For instance, let me ask you a question, are you breathing? Yeah? Oh. That’s how easy it is. You’re always breathing, whether you’re paying attention or not. So, you can always come back to the breath if you make the breath your object of awareness, you can always come back because it’s always there, then if you, if you add the repetition of the Name to the breath, also, you’ll find that shows up in your mind and then you can come back to that and then the breath, or just stay with that. We have to figure out, we have to find some way to keep coming back from Dreamland. All day long, Dreamland. Where are we going? And we wake up in the morning and we start writing, producing, directing and acting in the movie of me. The movie of me, all life long, the movie of me. All we do is think about ourselves. How am I doing now? How am I doing now? Is there too much stuff on my elbow, are my pants long enough? Do my shoes fit? Is my hair ok? Are they going to like me? They won’t like me. Maybe I’ll go there. Maybe I’ll eat this. Maybe I’ll just take rest. Maybe I’ll watch tv. What’s on? Nah, never mind. Ok. All day long, we’re never here, we’re just like, totally lost.  And, how can you make a good decision if you’re not here? How can we pay attention to what we really want if we’re not even paying attention to where we are? So, it’s not so easy. Really, it isn’t. Little by little. You can dress up in holy clothes and you can wear beads and wear white clothes and act spiritual, but that has nothing to do with it. Nothing. It’s just something else to let go of. Another identity. You’re trying to build another identity that you could like. Already, when you don’t like yourself underneath that. So, what’s the sense of adding more stuff on top of stuff. I did it. So, I know. It’s just, it just comes out of self hatred. It all comes out of not caring enough about ourselves. To really live fully, to really be sincere with ourselves and with the people in our lives and nobody ever trained us to give ourselves a break. So, how are we going to train, how are we going to, how is that going to happen? We have to step up to the plate and make a stand in life and get here. Or it ain’t going to happen. And when the stuff gets really hard, when  you get sick or someone in your family gets sick or somebody dies close to you, how are we going to live through that and not have our hearts completely destroyed? It’s very difficult. Very very difficult. But on the other hand, unhappiness is not required. It’s not required. A recognition of dissatisfaction in our lives is required, but unhappiness about it is not required, that’s just neurosis. And neurosis comes, it just grabs you so fast. And it’s right there in your so-called spiritual practice. Am I sitting straight enough? Neurosis. Wow, this is a really good meditation. Neurosis. I mean, it’s just ridiculous, but that’s ok, you understand? All that’s ok, that comes with the program.  That comes with the body. That comes with being born.

But you have to add a practice to that or how will we ever get out of it? How will we ever wake up?

My Guru was really strange, you know? I’m still working on trying to figure out who He is. He never told us what to do except, “Go away.” “Jao. Go.” He didn’t tell me to sing with people, He didn’t say, “Go forth and multiply.” He didn’t tell me to spread the gospel. I had to find out what I had to do for me. And this is what it is, as strange as that may seem. We each have to find out what we need to do with our lives and be the best person we can be. That’s what spiritual practice is about, by the way. It’s not about becoming God, you’re already God. What we’re not is good human beings. Ok, everybody out but her. I’ll give her the secret teaching.

We’re self-centered and selfish and greedy and nasty and cranky and we don’t give a shit about anybody. We pretend we do. That’s nice. But don’t step on my toe, dude. Really. You see, you can think you’re really Holy and then somebody cuts you off, you know? One time, I was in a car, there was a radio station in New York that wanted some of my cds, so I was driving them into the city to drop them off. So, they were on the car seat, right? So I thought, well, why don’t I listen to this? That’s where everybody else listens to me, in their car. So, I put it on and I’m going, “Hare Krishna… hey this is not bad. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna” and then somebody cut me off. “Sonofa!… Hare Krishna…”

So, I pulled up in front of and I sped around. “Who is that? Trying to hurt me and trying to kill me!” And I pulled up and there in this little old Toyota Corolla, right? Was a tiny little woman, like 90 years old, like this, couldn’t see over the windshield, you know? She reminded me of my mother. Was she aiming at me? No. She wasn’t aiming at me. She didn’t even see me. She wasn’t aiming at me, but I took it like, “Who’s that? What do they want? What are they trying to do to me?” Right? We all do that. Like, we’re the target of everybody else’s stuff. Why am I being so nice today?

Anyway, those knee jerk reactions are what we live, that’s the world we live in all day long. We don’t think about how we feel about things. We immediately feel something. We believe it and we act on it. So, we’re creating all kinds of unconscious karmas, all day long. That goes with the program. You can’t stop that on the level it happens. That’s why you sing one of these chants, or you watch your breath or you do some other mantra or something because you’re training yourself to come back. “Ok, Sri Ram Jai Ram, what time is it? You know, The UConn women’s basketball team is starting at 3:30, did I set the tape recorder? I don’t think I did. Damn it. Ok, I can watch it on, oh… Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram”. You don’t notice how far, how gone, we don’t notice how gone we are. You’ll be singing, but you’ll be thinking about something else. So, that’s ok, you don’t have to judge yourself for that, that would be more neurosis. You just come back. That’s all. You don’t spend time putting yourself down. That’s something else. That’s neurosis. Just come back. That’s all you have to do. Let go and come back, so we’re training ourselves again and again to let go and come back. It takes a long time to get used to that and the more we do it, the more it happens through the day as we’re going through our life in Dreamland. We’ll notice. You know, you’ll be driving somewhere and you’ll just recognize, “What am I doing? I’m just not paying any attention to any of this,” but yet you’re driving. You’re stopping. You’re going. You’re watching the speed limit. But you’re not really present. The thing about being with a real, a great saint or a great yogi or a great Being is they’re here, all the time. Right now, they’re here. They’re always here. All of them. But we’re not here. When we get here, we meet the whole party, the whole posse. They’re here and they’ll always be here. We’re not here. And to develop the strength, the inner strength to sincerely desire to be free and present, it takes time to really recognize what we’re doing. We all have a lot of motives for what we’re doing, a lot of different reasons that we think about practice or whatever you’re thinking about. Whatever it is, just keep doing it. Maharajji used to say, “Go on, sing your lying Ram Ram. One of these days you’ll say it right once. You’ll call out once and the real Ram will show up and then…” you know? So, we’re practicing. That’s what they call it. The real Ram is always present but we don’t recognize that.  The real God, the real love is always here but we don’t, we don’t allow ourselves to feel that. Little by little our hearts can soften and we will allow ourselves to be good to ourselves.

It’s a radical idea.

Ok. So, let’s have some questions or comments or whatever. We have a microphone that you have to speak into…

The post Ep. 39 | Bad Aim and the Importance of Spiritual Practice appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 37 Maharajji’s Language, Why Is Chanting Important?

Why is chanting transformative? Why is the chanting of names transformative? Does it require an understanding of what those names, the stories behind those names, in order for the chanting of those names to be transformative? 

“These names are mantras. These are sounds that come from a deeper place inside of us and they were brought into this world so you and I could hear them by saints, by yogis who have recognized the truth, have experienced reality through these names and they’ve experienced the reality of these names.” – Krishna Das

Q: Thank you so much. This is just a question about linguistics. Did He speak English? Like when you have all these conversations, how did this actually happen?

Q: When you speak of all these communications that was all through a translator

KD: There were always Indian people around who spoke perfect English. Not always, but most of the time. And when He had, sometimes He just would make you understand what He wanted, without a word at all. One time, I was walking towards the front of the temple and all of a sudden, I was running towards the front of the temple and He was right at His window, “Come here!” I went there. “Ok.” And I ran off to do something and I was halfway gone when I went “Wait a minute” how did I know what He said? Like that, you know? He didn’t need anything. I mean, He didn’t need to be told anything. He knew everything all the time. It was, it was just extraordinary to be in the presence of somebody like that.

Q: Can I ask one more question?

KD: Yeah. Sure.

Q: I’m just interested. I believe it and I kind of get how it worked, but you often speak of the abuse and anger?  And even language, like colorful language

KD: Oh yeah. He cursed. You can’t believe the things He said to people.

Q: Can you expound on this?

KD: Like what?

Q: In Christian background, it’s forbidden. You don’t speak that way. You’re always kind and good.

KD: Really?

Q: Supposedly.

KD: You’d have a tough time proving that in court. Always kind and good, uh-huh. Well… it was a way of changing the atmosphere of, and it was only the close people who were really abused, because they could take it. They loved it. They would look… and we’d be sitting there. We didn’t know Hindi at the time. “What is He saying?” “Sister fucker?” Things like that. The worst shit. You can’t imagine. These village people, this is how they talked. That’s what they do.  You know? I was recently with a young Baba in India and I had met Him once or twice before and He’s very wild and very loving, sweet but He likes the abuses so I came there from Delhi and I spent the day, and then in the evening I was going back to Delhi. I said, “Baba I’m going back to Delhi now.” “Why?” I said, “You know, now. I like my comfort. I’ve got my hotel room and everything.” “Ney. That’s not why. You’re afraid to shit in the latrine. That’s why. See this guy? He’s afraid to shit in the latrine. See this guy over here. He doesn’t want to shit in the…” He just was like abusing me in front of all these Indians. They were laughing, they were laughing. So, I had to stay.  But that’s love. That’s the way, you know? They’re not afraid. They don’t throw people out of their hearts. We’re all scared shitless that if somebody looks at us crooked, they hate us. And that’s why we’re, that’s why everything’s so screwed up here. They’re not afraid of that. It’s all loose and open and wild. They’re free with that. They know when to do it and when not to do it and who to do it with. And people, like expect that from Babas, too. They expect, especially these kinds of Babas who live in the jungle their whole lives, they’re not, they don’t want anything, they don’t need devotees, they come and go and they don’t care. They understand it’s a sign of affection and closeness, actually, to some degree. They’re not afraid. You know, even Mr. Tiwari, he pissed me off, my dearest, most beloved friend and teacher. He was like my Indian father. But he would really, he would do things that would just piss me off, you know? Then he’d go, “You will fire upon me now?” He wanted to fight. He wanted to argue, you know? This wasn’t, it took me a long time to get with the program because, you know, don’t look, don’t talk to me like that, don’t raise your voice to me. That’s how I grew up. “Be careful.” “Don’t say…” It took me awhile to get used to that, “Hey, it’s all cool.” You can just be anything. It’s really a very different feeling. Functional families, you know? Something we don’t have in America for the most part. Functional families. Not all of them, but many of them are. They don’t, there’s nobody afraid they’re going to be thrown out of their heart. They can just be themselves. And they are. At 100 miles per hour. Some of the weirdest stuff you’ll ever see.

Hi.

Q: Hi. Thanks for what you do. Why is chanting transformative? Why is the chanting of names transformative? Does it require an understanding of what those names, the stories behind those names, in order for the chanting of those names to be transformative?

KD: If it did require that, I’d be in shit, hot water. I don’t know any of that stuff. I mean, I’ve absorbed a little bit of it from being in India most of my life, but I don’t know most of those stories and everything. I’ve got a little basic idea. No, these names are mantras. These are sounds that come from a deeper place inside of us and they were brought into this world so you and I could hear them by saints, by yogis who have recognized the truth, have experienced reality through these names and they’ve experienced the reality of these names, what they are, and so, yes, Rama is also, Ramachandra was a king, and was supposed to be an incarnation of God, but Rama does not necessarily referred to that guy. Rama is another name of the indwelling consciousness within. So, every repetition of that name moves you towards that place inside of you. Same thing with Krishna. Same thing with… all these names are names of that place inside of us. Yes, they do have a storyline in India. They all have stories about them. What this one did. What that one did. But I don’t know them. But I do believe because Maharajji said it over and over that chanting of the Names is a very very very powerful practice and is very transformative practice.

Q: What do you feel when you’re chanting?

KD: I don’t know because that’s not the point of the chanting. The chanting is to chant.

Q: You, what do you feel?

KD: I don’t know, because I’m not paying attention to what I feel. I’m singing. And any thought about what I’m feeling is something to let go of. As long as you can let go, you let go. And if you’re thinking about it, you’re not doing it.

Q: So, what’s the difference, and I’m not challenging, I’m asking.

KD: No, it’s good.

Q: Between, so I meditate. I focus on my breath. Is there a difference in chanting meditation or meditation focused on the breath?

KD: Technically probably not. But they do say that these names have, are like seeds and like a seed has a whole tree in it. The repetition of the Name is like planting those seeds in your life stream, in your… and so it’s slightly different than just watching the breath, which is a simple concentration technique. It’s a concentration technique. Mantra practice is not only a concentration technique, but it’s an invocation technique as well, because the universe, when you call the Name, you call somebody, they come.  Or at least, they might hear and start to come, so that’s kind of the idea when we chant these Names, we’re calling inward to that presence within us which is alive and well, but mostly undiscovered by us.

Q: Yeah, I’m trying to figure out, by chanting the name of the lord you’ll be free.

KD: Yeah, he said, as he was snorting coke. Bunch of bullshit. Go ahead. Yeah? Yeah, that’s true. By chanting, sooner or later, maybe. Yeah that’s the idea, of course. You will be free. But it depends on how you do it and why you do it and what your intention is and how you approach the practice. So…

Q: I just substitute the chanting for the focus on my breath.

KD: You can if you like. Why not? You should do what feels good to you. I know you’re just trying to understand it. Sometimes I watch my breath. Sometimes I do the mantras with the breath. I find that helps me pay some attention, too. I’ve done a lot of breath, regular breath concentration work in early, beginning Buddhist practice. Samhita, before Vipassana. But I tend to do more mantra. I do a lot of things, you know? 19 minutes a day. Just enough not to get into the retreats. I don’t want to do anything that’d really be good for me.

Q: Thanks.

KD: So, yeah, just, why don’t you just play around with it and see how it goes. But you should listen to your heart. You should see what you feel that you like and try it. It doesn’t, nothing, you’re not going to waste, it’s not a waste of time to explore and find out what things are, how they work for you. But don’t expect something to happen. You know, that’s not the best motive for starting on this path. We’re on this path to find a way to live in a good way in this world and to limit the amount of suffering we go through and limit the amount of suffering that people we’re connected to go through. That’s the best motive for working on ourselves is that we can also be working on others and with others, but if we’re doing it to try and have experiences, all that does is you get a bigger ego. Really. And then you start feeling very important and you think you’ve made a lot of progress on the path, but you haven’t. So, it’s not about what you feel. It’s about your intention for the practice. Why you’re doing it. It’s about trying to lower the barricades around the heart, you know? Soften the heart. Untie some of the knots that we’ve tied inside of our hearts.

Q: Yeah. I’ve been meditating for a long time but I’m new to chanting and frankly, I only chant with your music.

KD: That’s good.

Q: Because I love the way you chant.

KD: Me, too.

Q: My wife, she chants, she’s a Siddha Yoga practitioner

KD: Get rid of her. Make sure she has her own room for that stuff.

Q: I’m just trying to see how I can shift the process of chanting to the kind of wonderful experience when I meditate.

KD: You know, we haven’t been really taught and trained to how to be good to ourselves, you know? Nobody, when I was growing up nobody told me trust myself. “You do it my way.” Right? That’s what I, what everybody told me, all my teachers, my coaches, my parents. Really, they weren’t about helping me empower myself and trust myself and be good to myself. So now, we’re starting out on this path or we’re trying to do this, these practices. It’s hard to let ourselves feel good.  It’s not so easy. It’s easier in a group sometimes. But when you’re sitting at home and trying to get your 19 minutes in, it’s like really hard, you know? It doesn’t, we don’t know how to let it happen. You know? It’s not easy. So, for instance, when I sing by myself at home, sometimes it’s really juicy. Most of the time, it’s not. When I sing with people, it’s always juicy or it’s always intense. But when I’m home alone, I don’t know how to do it for myself. And it’s interesting, so this is the way Mahrajji’s suckered me in to doing something that’s good for me and good for others. Like, I knew I had to sing with people in order to clean out the dark corners of my own heart. It was an epiphany I had. And it was very clear. It was about singing with people. Not alone in my room. Which I would have never done. But give me a group of people and hey, you know. The Hindu Frank Sinatra comes right out. You know? You push a button…

But what’ the motive? The motive is to open my heart and to clean the shadows out of my, the darkness out of my own life. And, so, that’s the way it works for me. And I knew Muktananda pretty well. I traveled around with Him. Me and Ram Das and others, we traveled around with Him. We had a lot of fun with Him because He wasn’t our guru. His devotees were scared shitless of Him. But we didn’t care. Because He wasn’t our Guru. We had a great time with Him. It was very fun. A lot of fun for us.

Q: In the New Year’s message this year, Surya Lama Das or Lama Surya Das suggested five times a day, five seconds, he said, “Who can’t do that?”

KD: Me.

Q: That’s it. I just wanted to throw that in.

KD: Five times a day. Five seconds. That’s reality. We are so out of it. It’s ridiculous. And we’re thinking, we’re so evolved. “I’m so high. I’ve been doing this for 14 seconds.” We really can’t do anything. But the chanting is nice because we like that, you know? It’s just that simple. We like it. We like how it makes us feel. And that’s because He’s transmitting. That’s Him. That feeling is Him. That’s the way I look at it. You don’t’ have to look at it that way, but that’s how I look at it. Because that’s my reality. That’s the way I see it. Yeah. So, I wanted to do some of that, can you give me that, who has a paper? Oh, over there, she’ll get it.

You know, I have difficulty feeling good.

It’s not easy for me to, when I’m home along, I mope. I’ve done it my whole life. It’s just who I am. I have to accept it. There’s no getting around it. And one of the things about moping is that, it’s hard to, hard to tell yourself nice stories about things if you’re depressed. Nice stories, happy stories make you sick if you’re depressed. And I’m depressed most of the time. However, one of the practices in bhakti yoga, devotional yoga, is prayer. Praying. And singing songs of praise. Which is a little bit different than mantra, which is the invocation of the actual Names of God. These other kinds of songs are descriptive of the qualities of love and divine love and real love. So, this prayer called Jaya Jagadeesha Hare, which means, “Hail to the Lord of the Universe”.

“Jag” is actually “world” I think. And deesha means “lord” so the “lord of the world” and this is, we heard this somewhere, I don’t remember where we heard it, back in India in the old days, and we decided, the Westerners, we decided to learn it and then seek and plan a surprise ceremony for Maharajji. We were going to bring all the special plates and the aarti lights and all the fruits and sweets and everything and we were going to do the first worship of Maharajji by the Westerners. So our friend KK, who taught us the song, every day we’d come back, he’d come over to the hotel, and we’d get in this room together and we’d practice singing it and learning it and so we were going to do, we had everything arranged for this one Tuesday, which is Hanuman’s day, we were going to do this big surprise for Maharajji. And do this prayer, sing this prayer to Him, and do this puja as worship. And it was for this Tuesday so on Monday we were at the temple as usual and He comes out of His room and He sits down and He says, “Do the aarti now!” And we didn’t have it memorized. We were going to have to read our books. You know, everybody had written it out. So, we went running to get our books and then we just stood in front of Him and we sang the aarti. We didn’t have the lights and all the fancy stuff. We just had; you know… it was so powerful. This is, you’ve got to understand, Maharajji didn’t sit still for a second. He was throwing fruit to people, talking to this one, talking to that one, this one, this one, throwing things all around, yelling at this one, yelling at that one. Never. As soon as we started singing, He just went… like that.

He sat there the whole time unmoving. It was really intense. Now from the moment I met Ram Das, I felt Maharajji and at that very first meeting with Ram Das, all of a sudden, I knew without a word being spoken, I knew that whatever it was I was looking for was real. It existed. It was in the world. It could be found. I didn’t know what it was but that was the thing that happened to me at that moment when I met Ram Das. And as I got to know Ram Das and spend more time with him, I realized that what I had felt was Maharajji and so I knew He was my guru. I just, I just knew that. And I, at that time, we didn’t know where He was and if I could ever see Him, but the point was that I knew He was my Guru. So, there we were, now in India, it’s like 3 years after I first met Ram Das, there’s maybe 8 or 10 or 12 westerners, a tiny little, not one of these huge scenes with tens of thousands of people. He kept the lid on it. He really did. And so, we sing this prayer to Him and then afterwards, He just sat there and it was like being suspended in space. It was, you couldn’t even breathe. It was so intense. And at that, in those moments after we finished singing, with us all just standing there in silence, the thought went through my head, “Holy shit. I never thought I would know that I was seeing my Guru with these eyes.” It was another level of, a deeper understanding and a deeper awareness of the connection. It was really amazing. So, when you read this,

“Hail to the Lord of the Universe, who in an instant removes the troubles of devotees and humble people.” People who are devoted.

“Meditating on You brings these fruits. The sorrows of the heart are destroyed. Happiness and wealth come to the home. And physical sickness is removed.”

So, this is actually written by another saint named Swami Sivananda from Rishikesh who wrote this actual prayer.

So “meditating on you” and whoever that “you” is for you, is ok.

“It brings these fruits. Sorrows of the heart are destroyed.” Wouldn’t that be nice?

So, meditating on Him, on That, on Her, on that Divine, that Love, sorrows of the heart are destroyed. Happiness and wealth come to the home. We all need… we need to eat. We need to pay our rent. And physical sickness is removed.

“You are my mother and my father. From whom else can I seek refuge? Who else will give me shelter?”

Now since in Hindi, the word is paap, which means, burn, a burning. So, it’s not a question of original sin like in the Christian fantasy. It’s about our own actions that have caused us to burn and suffer, not some original thing that we did wrong.

You know, one time, these Christian missionaries came to visit the Dalai Lama and they were talking about stuff and at one point, one of the missionaries said, “Your Holiness, what’s your idea of sin?”

He went, “That’s kind of a Christian thing, isn’t it?” They don’t have that. There’s no original sin in the eastern religions.

They have original worry. Which is just as bad. So anyway, that’s this prayer. We’ll sing it maybe tomorrow because it’s late now but, these kinds of prayers are a way of entering into that river of love that’s always flowing. Born in West, we don’t have the wiring for love that isn’t emotional or physical. We don’t have the wiring for unconditional love.  We have to open up those channels and like, when I first read the Ramayana, the Ramcharitmanasa, that was incredible, I had no idea there was that kind of Love in the Universe and it showed me a whole new way. It opened up a whole new way of feeling things that I didn’t get on Long Island.

So, that’s one of the things that these practices do. They open up new pathways for these things to flow through us. And unconditional love is new for us. We’re not, we all know what it is because we’re all looking for it. But we don’t have a lot of experience with it. So have your unconditional dinner and we’ll have unconditional kirtan later.

The post Ep. 37 | Maharajji’s Language, Why Is Chanting Important? appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 36 There’s No Maharajji Outside of You, Committing To A Practice

So, when I try to tap into the energy or the meaning of Neem Karoli Baba, I feel like I’m grasping at clouds because I wasn’t there. He hasn’t written anything that I can read to understand.

“You’re looking to feel something from outside in a sense. You think He’s out there and you want to connect with Him. It’s not like that. He’s not out there, in fact, there is no “out there” there’s only here. But we’re not here, so we’re lost. We’re in dreamland. Sleepy-poo. So, when we wake up, you’ll remember everything.” – Krishna Das

Q: I have my real question, but I have to follow up with one of the questions, one of the topics before. There was actually research done after World War 2 here in the US to see whether or not Americans would also do what the Germans did, this was the Milgram studies.

KD: They said, “wait 50 years, you’ll find out?”

Q: And they found that Americans, you know, for the most part, 80% or so, were willing to kill people in these shocking experiments that they did up at Yale University. So, this was Yale University students. The reason is interesting, I think, because it does tap into our humanity, as you say is you know, to be Beings who are also impacted by our surroundings and I think if I was in Germany I’d be the guard next to you and you know, because our environment, while we have our sense of self and our self we also, through osmosis, take in culture and everything around us. I think it’s part of tapping into our humanity to be open to that angle. So that’s my back question, but now I have my real question.

KD: OK. Now I’ll give you the unreal answer.

Q: So, this is about Neem Karoli Baba, because I’ve thought about it a lot. You clearly respect and admire Him and I respect and admire you and I have many other people who I respect and admire who also respect and admire Neem Karoli Baba and I’ve thought about it myself that, well, I therefore need to respect and admire Neem Karoli Baba and try to tap into that. A lot of people are pointing me and say, “I came from there, that’s a good place. I came from there.”

KD: What do you mean? I came from there?

Q: I came from Neem Karoli Baba. He’s like a lineage of sorts. But when I, He didn’t say anything. So, when I try to tap into the energy or the meaning of Neem Karoli Baba, I feel like I’m grasping at clouds because I wasn’t there. He hasn’t written anything that I can read to understand.

KD: There’s a lot of stories about Him that have been written.

Q: There are the stories and the stories, the stories are of Beingness.

KD: Stories of?

Q: Of being around Him. Of like, He was sort of a Being, but there’s not meaning that is easy for the next generation to hold onto.  Like the written word, that’s how knowledge is typically passed down.

KD: Wait a minute. That’s bullshit. First of all, the written word, like the Bible? So, they’ve proven that less than three percent of what’s in the Bible can actually be traced linguistically to the time of Jesus. Three percent. So, what about those people who believe every word that’s in the Bible and if God said it, that’s the truth, and the world was made in, what, a day and a half? Seven days? Whatever. So, you can’t believe anything you read either.

Q: I was thinking books and academics.

KD: The bible’s a book more or less.

Q: That’s true.

KD: So, go ahead.

Q: So, I find myself not able to hold onto what He is.

KD: Your idea of Neem Karoli Baba, which is something outside of you.

Q: yeah.

KD: Someone who was outside of you some years ago and is no longer here.

Q: What wisdom to bring into me from Him? It’s hard to hold.

KD: Yeah. Look in the mirror sometime. That’s the best thing to do. There’s no Maharajji outside of you. There never was. The person next to you is in a body, but their soul is no different than yours. What’s looking out of their eyes is no different than what’s looking out of your eyes. That’s consciousness, awareness. Pure Being. That’s who He is. That seemed to inhabit a body at one point, but that’s not the reality. He’s just as much here as He was then, as He was here then. Because He didn’t go anywhere. The body dropped off but who He is was never identified with the body, so anytime you think about Him, He’s actually thinking about you. Which is why you were thinking about Him. How do you like that?

Q: I have to think about that.

KD: That’s a good one. Two points for you.

No this is kind of like a Catholic School thing. Believe it or die. It’s not like that. But my experience of Him is presence, Being. It’s not limited by time. It wasn’t then and it’s not now, you know? It’s not like that. He’s the living presence within. There’ s a word called Antaarayami, which means the indwelling presence. What’s looking out of your eyes, your true nature, your pure consciousness. Not self-consciousness. Pure being. Not ego consciousness. Not separate awareness but pure awareness, which is what’s hearing through your ears, seeing through your eyes, tasting on your tongue, feeling in the skin. And there’s another one. So, that’s presence. That’s being. That’s the true nature of a saint. And that’s our true nature, we just don’t know it. So, there’s no… Read the stories and see if you get any feeling or any kind of feeling of, if it touches you in anyway. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. I mean, you can’t, there’s no sense trying something that’s not happening. Maybe it’s not your path. Just because other idiots respect him doesn’t mean you’re supposed to. What if they’re wrong? Why would you want to be wrong? Listen to yourself. The problem is you’re not listening deeply enough to yourself. That’s the real issue. You’re not feeling. You’re not, you’re looking to feel something from outside in a sense. You think He’s out there and you want to connect with Him. It’s not like that. He’s not out there, in fact, there is no “out there” there’s only here. But we’re not here, so we’re lost. We’re in dreamland. Sleepy-poo. So, when we wake up, you’ll remember everything. That’s what the Band said. So, just be you and the longing that you have, that’s what you need to get in touch with. It’s not longing to find out who He is. It’s longing to know yourself. And to feel something real inside yourself. So, pursue that. Don’t worry about where it comes from, what it looks like, who has it, who doesn’t have it. Find out who you are. Find out what’s important to you and why. Find out what that longing is and where it’s taking you, where it wants to take you and follow it. Don’t, you can’t write the end of the story before you start living it. You have to kind of, it’s a story that unfolds as time goes on. That’s the beauty of the path. We don’t know where it’s leading. We just know we’re on it and we want to be on it and we’re working to get more present and more full hearted, whole hearted about life. You know? And He said that, He said, “When you think of me, I’m there.” He said that. So, either that means something to you, or you go, well, let me see. Prove it. So maybe He will, maybe He won’t. Maybe it’ll come to you, maybe it won’t.

This one time, we were living in the nearby town and going every day to the temple to hang out with Him, so I’d spend all day inside the temple with Him then I’d go back to my room and I’d go to sleep and I’d dream about Him all night long and I’d go the temple the next day, then I’d go back and I’d dream about Him all night long. So, one day I said, “Maharajji, when I, at night, when I’m sleeping and I dream about You and I see You in the dream, do you see me?”  He said, “Yes.” I said, “No, I mean, at night, in the dream, at that time, when I’m seeing you in the dream, do You see me?”  He said, “Yes.” “No no no. I mean, in the dream when I’m seeing You then, are You seeing me?” “YES.”

So, how He put up with us, you know, He was always going… “these westerners, oh my God. What am I going to do with them?” but on the other hand, He said, He would say to the Indians, “You miserable bastards come here, all you want is stuff from me. You want kids, you want jobs, you want healing, you want all this stuff. Look at these people, they don’t want anything, all they want is God.” We looked at each other. “Really?” Hm. “Let’s see, I was trying to get laid last night. What is He talking about?”  But in retrospect, it was true. We didn’t know anything. I was 23, I didn’t have a life. I hadn’t done anything. And all I wanted to do was sit there and stare at Him for the rest of my life. That was all I wanted. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to do anything. And even if I wanted to do it, I wouldn’t have done it, because I wanted that more than anything else. I didn’t think of it as God. Because God is like, up in the sky up there and only crazy people believe in that. I thought of it as Love. I had finally found real love. And I had found somebody who loved me more than I could love myself, but somebody who accepted my love, too.

It’s astounding. Who knew? Nobody on Long Island, that’s for sure. But it was another way of living. It was, these people lived a different kind of life. I remember one family I knew used to come once a year, or maybe twice a year, to do puja to the Guru, worship the Guru, and they’d bring their fruit and the special stuff and everything. They came twice a year. The rest of the time they were in this little town like 20 minutes away, 40 minutes away, and I would look at them and I’d think, “What’s wrong with these people? They don’t come for month after month after month? They just stay in their house and they stay home? What’s wrong?” There was nothing wrong. The point was that they were with Him no matter where they were and I couldn’t get 10 feet away from Him without having a nervous breakdown. There was nothing wrong, my head was on crooked.  So, you know, it’s all about finding that connection inside and feeling it, really feeling it and tasting it and making it, recognizing it and seeing that it’s more real than anything else in your life.  And without that connection, nothing, everything is kind of grey. But when you feel that connection, when you’re with it, everything is colorful and lit up. So, you call it what you want to call it and don’t call it anything until you feel it. It doesn’t have to be, look like that, you know? That’s not required. He doesn’t look like that. That’s just one phantasmagorical shape that He took for our sake. So, and for the people who had the karmas with that manifestation. And you can’t understand who He is anyway. He’s not a human being. Even when He was in a human body. It didn’t work like ours worked.

One time I was at Dada’s house. Dada was one of Maharajji’s great devotees. There’s a book called “By His Grace,” which is so incredible. You should read it. You can actually get it on kindle now, because it’s hard to find a hard copy. Dada was so great. He was a communist economics professor in Allahabad and he was living in the house of his aunt with his wife. A small little house with his aunt and his mother and it was another relative’s house. So, one day, Dada sees his wife going out and he says, “Where are you going?” And she said, “Well, we heard that there’s this Baba who comes to the little house across the street and we’ve been waiting to hear when He comes so we can go see Him. And we found out He’s there today so we’re going to see Him.” “Oh good, you go” Dada didn’t give a shit about anything spiritual. He didn’t care about Babas, yogis, saints, nothing. He didn’t care about any of that. He was a communist economics professor. So, his wife goes out, her name was Kamala. She went out with his mother; they went across the street and they came back in like two minutes. And Dada said, “What’s wrong, why did you come back?” She said, “Well, we walked into the little house. It was dark in this little hut. And the Baba was sitting on a little cot and I walked in and He says, ‘Go home, go home.’ And I didn’t know what to do. So, I sat down. Then He looked at me again, He said ‘Kamala, go home. Your husband’s friends are waiting for their tea.’ “He called her by her first name. He’d never met her before. “Kamala go home. Come tomorrow.” So, they had to leave. So, she told this to Dada, her husband and so that peaked his curiosity. So, the next day, he went over with her and they go into this, they kind of had to get into this, it was a mud house, a mud hut. They kind of get in there, and the minute they walk in, this Baba stands up, grabs a hold of Dada’s hand and starts walking out of the house, crossing the street to Dada’s house. And as He’s walking, He looks at Dada and He said, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.” Can you imagine? You just came out of the stop and shop and some homeless gets in your car and says, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.” I don’t think so.

But Dada being who he is and having the karmas that he had, he just went along with it and Maharajji, they went into the house, Maharajji sits down, in a few minutes the people from across the street came over and then the word spread and people started coming from everywhere and the house filled up with people and then the ladies started preparing food and everything and bhajans started going on and, from then on, He went to Dada’s house. And it’s a great book. There’s all these amazing amazing wonderful stories in it. Now why was I telling you that, that’s what I can’t remember. Let me drink some more coffee. I might remember.

Worship. We were talking about worship. I wanted to share and talk a little bit about the prayer, the arati prayer, which I will do when there’s no more questions.  When nobody has anything more to say. We’ll do it before we leave.

Q: I’m trying to, I’ll just say it the way it comes out, pretend that I have a practice.

KD: Me, too.

Q: For some reason, I live in Florida and when I went to Florida, I understand that part of a practice is a community. So, I found a Tergar community.

KD: Oh. Mingyur Rinpoche

Q: Yes. Yes. And I love the community.

KD: The best.

Q: They say… thank you, is if you don’t meditate, you don’t make the commitment, 20 minutes a day for three months and I’m not going to skip it, you’re not doing the practice.

KD: Ok. That’s what they… every lineage has their requirements, you know? Go ahead, sorry.

Q: It doesn’t work for me. Sometimes I’m tired.

KD: Twenty fucking minutes doesn’t work for you? Give me a break.

Q: You’ve got it. Well that’s because I’m so fucked up.

KD: Just sit there. Pretend you’re meditating and tell them you did. What the fuck’s wrong with you?

Q: Anyway, I want to negotiate, right?

KD: No, you don’t negotiate with Rinpoche. You sit.

Q: yeah. But I want to say, I chanted today for an hour.

KD: That doesn’t count.

Q: Yeah. I’m looking for help.

KD: I’m giving it to you. Sit your ass down for 20 minutes and shut up.

Q: Why does? Ok, so you meditate, you’ve got a monkey mind. You come out with…

KD: You just sit with it. You’re not supposed to, what can you do with the monkey, nothing, give it a banana and calm it down, but you just sit there. 20 minutes.

Q: If you chant, right, you don’t have enough space for that monkey. So why isn’t that as good.

KD: The problem is, it’s probably the monkey chanting. You just don’t realize it.

Q: Even if I’m doing it alone in my bedroom.

KD: That’s the monkey, yeah. I can tell you right off. It’s the monkey. You think it’s you but it’s the monkey.

Q: That’s for not helping.

KD: No, let’s put it this way, have you met Mingyur Rinpoche yet?

Q: No, I went to a mini-meditation weekend

KD: Have you seen any of His videos and stuff?

Q: yes.

KD: If you feel drawn to Him and His teaching, your requirement is to sit for 20 minutes a day. It’s just that simple. Because what He is transmitting, and the lineage He’s transmitting, that’s the way that lineage works. Now, our lineage is very unusual. You know, there’s Ashtanga yoga, the eight limbed yoga. Maharajji used to say, the Westerners were only qualified for the Five limbed yoga, which is gossiping, wandering around, eating, drinking and sleeping.

Q: I do all of those things.

KD: Very good. So, what are you looking for then? Forget about meditation. You’re right where you should be. You’re in the right lineage

Q: No because the yearning is still there.

KD: Well, then do something and shut up. The yearning might be there but if you want to be in, even I, the great Krishna Das, I can no longer go to His retreats. I can go to the first retreat, the joy of living retreat. One. I can’t even go to two. Because I haven’t finished one. And I know the people. The people, his teachers, I’ve known them for 30 years, so I called them and I said, “You know, I’d like to go to the, you know, higher teaching retreat” and she said, “Well, have you completed the course?”

Q: I’m on One as well.

KD: And they hung up on me, you know? basically. My 30-year friend won’t even let me go to the fucking retreat. So, what chance do you have? That’s my point. You don’t even know his teachers. I’ve known them forever. I remember when they went to their first mindfulness retreats and now, they, people, won’t even let me go to this thing. But it’s not my lineage. I love Rinpoche. I really love him. He’s fantastic. He’s really extraordinary. One of the really great Beings that we have access to in the West. But once again, if you’re not, this is the requirement, you know? There’s a lot of requirements for different things in life and that’s one of them. If you want to receive His teachings, you need to complete, you need to develop a receptacle that will hold them. And in that lineage, it’s the meditation practice that does that. So, you sit the way He asks you to sit for 20 minutes, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’re just, that’s it. You’re just not part of their lineage. You can appreciate Him. You can read His books, which are fantastic. You can watch His videos online. But you won’t, you won’t progress, you know, with the teachings, but that’s ok if that’s not what you want. There are other teachings with other requirements, but every teaching has a requirement of some time. You can’t catch raindrops unless you cup your hands. So those are the requirements. And it’s just the way it is, you know? Maharajji knew we were incapable of doing anything, so He’s doing it all for us. But that’s just the way it goes. But on the other hand, He said, “Love everyone.” Which I can’t do. “Serve everyone.” Which I can’t do. And “remember God,” which I hardly do. So, what good am I, right? If you really look at it that way. So, I’m doing the best I can. And it’s His problem. But that’s His lineage. That’s that lineage. It’s different.

Q: So, I take a long weekend here and I didn’t spend my 20 minutes yesterday. No go.

KD: 10 minutes. What did you say?

Q: 20.

KD: When you say, “no help,” what do you mean?

Q: No, I said, “No go.” It doesn’t count. I didn’t sit down.

KD: Oh, you didn’t sit down for 20 minutes. Yeah.

Q: I didn’t do tush on the cush for 20 minutes. Well, we did other things.

KD: Have you learned to sleep sitting up? It’s really great. You just pretend you’re meditating, you set your alarm and you just… And then you say, “Oh I sat there 20 minutes.” A little lying is good, you know, don’t worry.

Anyway, the point is, if you really had the longing to connect with Rinpoche, you would do this. It would be a blessing. You would think it was a blessing. “I have a way in.” But you don’t see it that way so obviously you’re not called to that.

Q: I see it that way when I do it. Then I leave it til the end of the day, I’m tired

KD: Yeah, I understand. I’m tired, too. I’m always tired. People say, “How are you doing?” “I’m tired.” I’m always tired. It’s ok. Yeah. See Maharajji used to say to the Indian people, “Look at these people, they left everything behind to come to India. They came from the country of everything to come to the country of nothing.” Which on one level is true. But it didn’t seem like that to us. We were going. We were going to be let in the temple. This is amazing. I can’t believe it. So, I left everything behind. I wasn’t, I didn’t feel like renunciation but I gave everything away I had. I sold whatever I had and I was going. And I was happy to go with nothing. With a backpack. You know? And on the other hand, it doesn’t, Rinpoche’s lineage doesn’t mean that much to you at this point. Let’s face it. It’s just the way it is. Or you would feel, 20 minutes? You know that story about these two yogis? Narada comes to, He’s flying around the universe, He’s this great being that causes trouble wherever He goes. A great devotee but He likes to make shit happen. So, He goes to this one yogi and this yogi says, “Oh Narada, I’m so happy to meet you. Next time you see Brahma, the creator, would you ask him how many more, I’ve been meditating for so many lifetimes, ask him how many more lifetimes I have?” He says, “ok.” Then He goes and meets this other yogi who says, “Oh hey Narada, great to meet you, when you get to see Brahma, would you ask him how much longer I have?” So, he goes to see Brahma and he asks and he comes back and he sees the first yogi and the yogi says, “Did you ask the Lord how many more incarnations I have?” “I did I did.” He said, “What did He say?” He said, “You have three more.” “Three more? I’ve been meditating for thousands of years. What is this? I can’t believe it.” And he flips out. And Narada leaves and He goes to this other yogi and the yogi says, “Did you ask Brahma how much longer?” He said, “Oh yeah.” He said, “What did he say? What did he say?” He said, “You see that tree there?”  “Yeah” he said. “As many leaves as there are on that tree. That’s how many lifetimes you have.” “Really? Fantastic! I can’t believe I’m finally going to be enlightened after all. This is great!” And He’s dancing around and of course, he’s enlightened immediately. So that’s the situation, you know? You’re seeing it from your point of view because you’re you. But when you do hear the message, you go for it. It’s just not the message for you right now. Tomorrow it could be. Tonight, it could be. Or maybe ten years from now. But whatever it is, it doesn’t seem that you’re pulled to that so I wouldn’t worry about it, it’s just the way it is. But, let’s talk about meditation for a second. Chanting is meditation. It’s a meditative practice. There are many different types of meditation. Chanting has many different aspects to it. You can chant and not pay any attention at all and dance around the room, “oh this is so great, hare Krishna hare Krishna” and then go kick the dog. You know? There’s many, but it’s how you do what you do that’s important. And most people think that meditation means sitting down and fighting with your thoughts and trying not to think. This is absolutely ridiculous and impossible, by the way. All you’re asked to do is sit there. You’re not asked to solve the problems of the universe in 20 minutes. You’re asked to be present with whatever is going on. And what’s usually going on is all our mental bull stuff. It’s too late now but my grandson is here. Bull stuff. You’ve heard of bull stuff right, Bodhi?

So, in most meditation practices, you are given or you take one, an object of concentration. An object to pay attention to. Whether it’s your breath coming and out. Because that’s always going on while you’re here. Or you start a mantra going or something like that. And all you’re asked to do is pay a little bit of attention to it. You’re gone. You come back. You’re gone. You come back. That’s all you have to do. You can’t kill your thoughts. How are you going to do that? Where do they come from? You don’t know. So, all you know is that you’re sitting there and then you realize you’ve been thinking and then you remember your breath so you come back to your breath and then you realize that you’ve been thinking so you come back to your breath. The coming back is the important thing. It’s not what you were thinking, it doesn’t matter. It’s not how you were feeling. It doesn’t matter. It’s just to keep coming back. Keep coming back. The thing about the path of devotion and loving devotion is that there’s a lot of juice in it and you know when you’re in love with somebody, you don’t even want to watch tv, you just want to stare at that person and do other things, like go out to dinner. So, when you have that kind of juicy feeling for someone, you’re permeated by that feeling, so that helps you pay attention. That keeps you more present. In other words, say you’re in love with Frank, right? You’re totally madly in love with Frank, so Frank, you can’t even say it without your heart melting and other parts of your body going through all kinds of things. Frank… ahhhhh. Frank. So that’s called devotional meditation. But the problem is, Frank doesn’t know he’s God so when you invoke Frank’s presence, you get Frank. But when you take one of the certified Names of God, so to speak, that have come to this world through Beings that have had the direct experience of Ram, of Krishna, of Kali, of Shiva, of Ma, all these things, these Names have come to us through Beings that realized what they are and brought them here for us so we can follow that path into our own hearts.  But it’s difficult, because we don’t know Ram, you know? Ok, Ram Ram Ram Ram, I’d much rather think about Frank. Because Frank, I’ve got something going with Frank, right? But I’ve got nothing going with Ram. But I’ve gotta Ram Ram Ram. So, what you do is you keep on coming back to that. You started going and there’s the sound of the Name. You don’t have to know what it means because it doesn’t mean anything especially, or it means a lot of things but it’s irrelevant what it means, it’s just a question of something that brings you back home again and again and little by little, as you settle in over years or months or days, into that Ram, things start to open up from the inside and things come to you from the inside, intuitions about things that, it’s not coming from the outside. And things open up and awarenesses open up inside about different feelings coming to you and eventually, we hope, we will experience Ram directly, God directly. But you can’t have a concept about it because it’s, the first thing they say about God is, like in the Ramayana, “Ram is beyond the ordinary means of cognition.” I love that line. Indian English. Beyond the ordinary means of cognition. What does that mean? Beyond the ordinary means of cognition. Well, cognition is seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, touching. Those are ordinary means of cognition, of knowing. And God is beyond the ordinary means so we have to develop an extraordinary means of awareness and that comes through practice. If we keep letting go of the thoughts, for instance, when Maharajji forced us to sing, back in the temple, He made us sing, we had to sing all day and we couldn’t see Him and all day long it was Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare. It was horrible, boring, painful. It was really tough. And you know, there were a few moments where it was ok, but mostly it was really hard work and we didn’t want to do it. We wanted to go sit with Him. But no. So, we had to sing. So, we kept singing. So, my mind tried everything to get away but there was nowhere it could go because I was singing. I had to keep coming back to that. Right? Because that was the deal. I was singing. So, I mean I went through everything. I relived my life 20 times. I did all these things. I thought about every girlfriend I ever had. But I kept coming back. The Hare Krishna kept going on. And little by little, that, I just kind of slowly, because it was such intense practice for so many days, I just kind of sunk into the mantra and it was no longer me doing the mantra. There was just this flow of the mantra going on and thoughts would come and they’d go and I wasn’t thinking them. It was an extraordinary experience and without that experience, which He forced me to do, in order to have that experience, I wouldn’t have understood, you know, how chanting works and how meditation works. You just keep letting go until there’s no one to let go anymore and you’re just present. There’s just being and whatever you want to call it, bliss, you can call it bliss, because it is, it’s no longer that obsessive flow of thought and judging and wanting and denying and pushing away  and holding onto all the crap we do all day long. But it takes practice.  So, what?

I still can’t go to the retreats.

He came to hear me sing once in Boulder.

I was standing outside in the back of the auditorium, just hanging out before we were going to start and two cars pull up and He gets out of this car with like, 8 or 9 other people, and I said, “Rinpoche what are you doing?” “I’ve come to hear you sing.” So, He went, they sat in like the third row. Somebody had saved seats for them. So, when I was singing, He was just like this. And when I was telling jokes, He was laughing, you know?  So I used to tell one, before I sang Jesus on the Mainline, I used to tell this long, fantasy story about, you know, walking up in the hills and finding this ancient temple, you know, and all this whole story and then I saw the temple and it was this incredibly beautiful murti holding a phone, and that I learned the ancient chants that they did to that murti and I’m going to sing it with you now and I would sing Jesus on the Mainline. So, I did that that day with Rinpoche there. Ten years later, I’m at one of His retreats, this is before they changed the structuring, and He invited, every day He would invite a few people that He knew to have dinner with Him. So, we were having dinner, and in the middle of the dinner, the tornado warnings go off. So we had to take our plates and walk down to the basement where the tornado shelter was and there was a big pool table, so we put our plates on the pool table, and we’re standing around the table, eating, and I’m standing next Rinpoche and He looks at me and He said, “You know that story you tell about the temple in the mountains? Is that true?” Ten years later. I said, “Rinpoche, no. It’s just something I do to kind of make people a little open to the Jesus song.” And He said, “oh, I see.” He’s incredible. He’s just incredible. He lives, although He travels all around the world, His main center is in Minneapolis but He teaches everywhere. Tergar is the name of His group.

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