Special Edition Conversations With KD April 30, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

So, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Courage is a really big thing.

There have been times in my life when… that it was enough to deal with life as it appears to us, as it arrives in our moment, in our life, in our space. So,