Ep. 55 | The Practice of Chanting

Call and Response Ep. 55 The Practice of Chanting

“As much as we like to think that we’re running the show, it’s always those little epiphanies, those things that (we) all of a sudden understand or all of a sudden, we just recognize something or we know something. It doesn’t come from the outside. It comes from within. It feels right. And if there’s one thing that the spiritual path is about, more than any other thing, or if there’s one thing that the spiritual path requires before anything, it’s that we learn to trust ourselves.” – Krishna Das

Oh, I thought it was a rooster. It’s a baby. Hello baby!

He wants us to keep singing, but that’s just too bad.

Because you can sing and sing and sing but if we… what do we do when we’re not singing? What happens to us? We sink.  You don’t sing, you sink. So the issue is, what do we do the other 23 hours of the day when we’re not doing practice? How do we go through that time? How do we live in our lives and how do we find a way to do that in a good way? That’s one of the issues. Life is an issue. When I first went to India, and I had just really gotten there, I was up in the mountains and the town I was staying in had a beautiful crater lake up about 7,000 feet. Beautiful, in the Himalayas, and at one end of the lake there was a very ancient temple to the Goddess Durga. So, at night, I was walking around, and around the lake and I was passing that temple and I heard this chanting coming from inside. I just stopped. I couldn’t move. I had never heard anything like that, certainly not in the temple on Long Island.

Thank you, that was for you.

So, and I was just struck the intensity of the chanting, at how powerful it was and how everybody was completely in it, you know? And I just felt, all of a sudden, I just knew that this was something that I could really do. Something I could really give myself to. You know, some years before, I was up in the mountains in New Mexico and, at the Lama foundation for the winter with Ram Das and we heard that there was this artist from New York who had gone to India and learned how to meditate and now he was living just down the mountain from us in, North of Taos New Mexico. So, a bunch of us went down to visit him and we went into the room with him and we sat there for a while and everybody was asking questions. I kind of hung out in the back. I wasn’t talking because I was listening to everything. And after an hour or so, we were leaving and I was the last one out the door and he grabbed my arm as I was going out the door and he looked at me and he said, “You, you have to find out why it is you can’t give yourself 100% to whatever you’re doing.” And, you ever see like, in those taxidermy shops, you know, the squirrels on the wall? Like this? That’s what I felt like. He nailed me to the wall. Because that was the thing that was killing me, you know? I could never really do whatever I was doing. I was always… I could never really give myself to what I was doing, 100%. Not even 10%. I was just too scattered or whatever and I just didn’t know. I just didn’t know how to get into things. And I can remember that day just like it was yesterday and it was just a few years ago. Like 50.  So, when I was outside that temple that night up in the mountains and I heard this chanting, that’s what I knew immediately. That this was something that I could really do. So, I was just standing there and some guy was walking in and he kind of grabbed my arm and he said, “Come in, come in, you must come, you must come.” He dragged me in and I sat down with these guys in the temple and they were just wailing. It was unbelievable. And they came, “Come sing, sing, sing.” I didn’t know what they were singing, you know? Later, it turned out it was the Hanuman Chalisa. I didn’t realize that until much, much later. It was a Tuesday night, which is Hanuman’s day. So, that was the beginning and after that, everywhere I heard chanting,