Ep. 28 | Suffering, Gratitude and Burning Out

Call and Response Ep. 28  Suffering, Gratitude and Burning Out

So, I can feel this softening thing happening in my personal relationships and my everyday life. I’m having a really hard time with the world stage, how to not either not run away from it or like, bring just furious disgust and I’m not sure how to handle, like, what do you suggest with that?

“We don’t know what’s going on… Western culture is a few hundred years old. Modern science is a couple hundred years old, maybe, at the most, and we think we know everything about everything. We don’t even know who we are. How are we going to know who anybody else is. So, the best idea is to become the best human being that you can and everywhere you go and everything you do should be from the best place you can do it from.” – Krishna Das

Q: So, I can feel this softening thing happening in my personal relationships and my everyday life. I’m having a really hard time with the world stage, how to not either not run away from it or like, bring just furious disgust and I’m not sure how to handle, like, what do you suggest with that?

KD: Well, what can come from furious disgust except more furious disgust? And what can come from running away? Just keep running? So, neither one is very useful. Now what?

Q: Go on twitter and practice, I guess?

KD: One time, somebody came to Maharajji, you know, Janaka in Indian stories, King Janaka was a raja, a king, also a rishi, a saint, a realized Being. So He was a Rajarishi they called Him. He was a king that was a fully realized being, but he was still a king. So somebody came to Maharajji once and said, “Baba the world is so screwed up.” This was 40 years ago. Can you imagine? “But what’s going to happen in, you know, I wish there was some king like Janaka who could…” Maharajji said, “There’s a king much greater than Janaka.” We don’t know, you know. The ones who know seem to know. All we see are the results of everybody’s negativity.

Q: All the suffering which is so hard to watch.

KD: Yeah. But you know the story in the Ramayana, right? You know the story of Ram. So, Ram was an incarnation of God who took form to destroy the negativity in the world. And the negativity in the world was represented by this one demon king named Ravana, so however, the whole story was essentially written by Brahma, the Creator. The whole, the story about the release of negativity, the destroying of the negativity in the world, this whole story, the drama was written out by Brahma, so Brahma was looking for somebody to play the role of the demon, so there was this great yogi who had just three lives left before he was fully enlightened. And Brahma came to him and said, “Hey man, we need somebody to play the bad guy, and if you agree to do it, Ram is going to shoot you in the heart with His arrow and you’ll be liberated and just, it’ll just be one birth.” He said, “Fantastic, I’ll do it.” So Ravana was actually a great yogi who agreed to play the part of the bad guy so that all that negativity can be destroyed in one shot, so to speak. So, we don’t know who anybody is. We don’t know what’s going on. We have, Western culture is a few hundred years old. Modern science is a couple hundred years old, maybe, at the most, and we think we know everything about everything. We don’t even know who we are. How are we going to know who anybody else is. So the best idea is to become the best human being that you can and everywhere you go and everything you do should be from the best place you can do it from. What else can you do? And the less you react, the less you allow the world, you know someone once asked the Dalai Lama, “Your Holiness, are you happy?” And He said, “Well, I guess you could say I had a really hard life. I had to take the reigns of my country at a very early age. And then I had to watch the Chinese invade and take my country and kill millions and millions of my people,