Special Edition Conversations With KD April 16, 2020

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

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

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

Oh, hi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, if we’re prevented from doing that by skepticism or by a negative take on reality or a belief that we could never be happy,