Call and Response with Krishna Das

Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das | Special Edition – Saint Junky This special edition comes with a special offer from our friends at SoHum Mountain Healing Resort ~ When life moves too fast, the body and heart begin to whisper for rest. Ayurveda is the science of life, teaching us how to live in balance with our true nature. SoHum mountain healing resort offers Ayurvedic Pancha Karma detoxification retreats in a calm, supportive environment. You can learn more at SoHumhealing.com and use the code KrishnaDasPK2026 for $500 off on your PanchaKarma retreat! “When we sit down to chant, the biggest obstacles are our expectations. We think something’s supposed to happen. Problem is, it already happened. We’re here, but we don’t know it. So, what we’re trying to do is come back home. We’re not looking for any particular kind of experience. You might be looking for bliss or ecstasy, but that actually might be just running away from suffering. And you can’t run away from things, nor can you hold onto things.” – Krishna Das Cover photo: Lonnie Raffray TRANSCRIPT: I remember when Ram Dass, we were at Brighton Bush. This is a long time ago. Soon after the stroke, a few years after the stroke he decided that he would try to talk with a group without smoking dope for the first time in 60 years, or something like that. So he was in total panic, right? “What am I going to say? What do I do?” You know? I say, “Look, just go out and say, ‘we will sit in silence until someone has something to say.’” And he said, “oh, that’ll never work.” I said, “just try it. Just try it.” So, he came out and he said, “we will sit in silence until someone has something…” Everyone, all the hands went up like in about a quarter of a second. He was worried that, you know, nobody would say anything. So, could be nappy time for the Das, too. You never know. Q: So you didn’t smoke today? KD: Huh? Did I smoke today? I, not only did I not smoke today, it’s probably been about 40 years or maybe more… What am I talking about? 50 years. Hi. Q: Hi. I hope this isn’t too silly, but… KD: I hope it is. Turn it up. If it’s silly, I really want to hear it. Q: Okay. I’ve always wondered, after Maharajji gave you the orders to sing, what you sounded like when you first started. KD: You’ll never know. I just… Q: Does she know? You know? KD: No, she doesn’t know. Q: Maybe she can do an impression KD: Somewhere, actually… the first thing I recorded was probably about a year and a half or two years before One Track Heart was recorded. We recorded it out in Taos, New Mexico, and how should I put it? It’s cringe-worthy. It’s so horrible. I can’t even bear to think about it. And even…. you don’t want to hear all this shit. Oh, you do? I even don’t like One Track Heart. I’m sorry. Except for the Devi Puja was very good. Because I can hear my mind, you see> I was thinking, how do you do this? What should I do? And I could hear my mind. Every time I listen to that, it’s like, ooh. But by Pilgrim Heart, that was a whole other thing. And then from then on, God knows what it is, I hope. So, yeah. There’s just so much less in between my ears these days. It’s scary sometimes. Anybody else? Yeah. It’s been a strange… long, strange trip. I mean, Ram Dass and I, in Maui, after breakfast, we would sit at the table together for hours and hours. Everybody else would go away, and we’d just kind of sit in silence, and talk, then silence, then talk. So, one day I turned the phone on… a recording and we sat there for hours. So, when it was over, I said, “you know, I recorded this.” And he goes, “Oh.” I said, “What should I call it?” He said, call it, “Dick And Jeff’s journey to,” what did he say… Oh, “Dick and Jeff’s journey to Soul Land.” Yeah, what a journey. Q: Hello, Krishna Das. I’ve waited 20 years to say this. You’re on my bucket list and I’m sorry, I’m going to tell everybody how old you are right now, but… KD: Don’t be sorry. I’m still alive. Be sorry if I wasn’t. Q: Last year when I realized you were 75, I knew I had to come and see you after 20 years. Because I’m like, “he might be gone!” KD: I’ve got at least 20 minutes left. Q: I wanted to give you a hug. I’m like, “oh my God, you’re still alive. Thank you for breathing. Thank you for continuing to breathe. I know it’s an effort, but make that effort.” KD: I’m actually not any more alive than I was before I had this body, but that’s okay. Q: That’s good. That’s good. Actually, I have a question. I’ve been studying Sikhism, I’m sorry, and I noticed that the name’s Krishna Das… KD: I’m sorry. No, I’m just teasing. Q: Krishna Das and Ram Dass. I noticed that Ros. Was a name that came from the Sikh tradition and I was wondering if … KD: It didn’t come from the Sikh tradition. It just means servant of God. It’s from all the traditions. Q: Okay. KD: All the same. There is Guru Ram Dass, of course, in the Sikh tradition. But the name itself is, it’s just like John or Frank or Tony in English. Q: So, there wasn’t like a significance to why Neem Karoli Baba named you guys Krishna Das and Ram Dass? KD: Well, the significance is that Maharajji is Hanuman. And that’s the Ram, the tradition of Ram, and Das means “servant.” Hanuman is the servant. So, part of that lineage. So Dasses and the non Dasses are all part of that with Maharajji. Q: Thank you. KD: You’re welcome. Was that worth 20 years waiting? Q: One of them, one of the things. Just being in front of you is enough. KD: Oh, really? He can’t pay for that. I mean, how do you get something like that? Q: So, God bless you. Thank you for all your music. Thank you for a lifetime of music. You’ve changed my life, and you’ll continue to change my life for the rest of my life, so I appreciate it. Q: I was introduced to your chanting when I was 12 years old, and then… KD: two years ago? Q: no, no. Oh no, no. 15. And then about five years later I got involved, heavily involved in a spiritual institution where I did kirtan a lot, both leading and just being in the audience, responding, but it was an environment where there was, it was just very damaging and destructive and there was a lot of ego and spiritual bypassing. And now that I’m out of it, I’m feeling that really damaged my relationship to the holy names of all kinds. And I still want, of course, to cultivate a relationship with them in my heart. But as I’m starting to be exposed to kirtan outside of that environment that I was in, I’m just feeling all of the blockages. And I’m wondering if you have any suggestions or advice on how to…yeah… repair that KD: First of all, let’s just think about chanting for a second. When we sit down to chant, the biggest obstacles are our expectations. We think something’s supposed to happen. Problem is, it already happened. We’re here, but we don’t know it. So, what we’re trying to do is come back home. We’re not looking for any particular kind of experience. You might be looking for bliss or ecstasy, but that actually might be just running away from suffering. And you can’t run away from things, nor can you hold onto things. So, when you sit down to chant or remember the name, silently or outwardly, you just… when you notice your thinking, whether it’s positive or negative, or fantasy or fear, you notice it, and you come back to the name. You see, you can always come back. That’s the beauty of the name. You can always come back from whatever you’re thinking. You have to notice that you’re thinking. So, you notice you’re stuck. You have all these negative stories that are going on. Okay, so come back. That’s all you have to do. And the more you do that, the more often we come back, the less glued we are to those stories, and then they’ll eventually, they just come through like Indian food. Right through. But they call it practice for a reason. It’s a repetition of training ourselves to let go again and again. And you might think, “oh, it’s unfortunate that I have all this negativity about the name,” but it doesn’t matter what the negativity is about. It’s not really about the name. It’s about your experience with that group and the names involved with that. But it doesn’t really matter what the subject matter is of the negativity. As soon as you notice that you’re stuck, you’re actually not stuck at that moment. I mean, the mist of the stuck might be around, but you actually, if you’re noticing, you’re no longer that stuck. That’s when you rededicate yourself just to the sound of the name. You don’t push it away and you don’t grab onto the name. You just remember it. You see, inside, everything’s totally cool. It’s just the next bump out, we’re totally fucked. Everybody’s the same, you see. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is. Everybody’s screwed up, one thing or another, but the letting go is exactly the same for everybody. And here’s the other thing. So, you sit down, you’re going to practice and you, you know, all of a sudden, you’ve got all this stuff going on, and then you notice it. How did that happen? That you noticed you were stuck or that you noticed you were thinking? You woke up for a second. Now nothing can happen without a cause. Can the cause of waking up be “asleepness?” No. The cause of waking up can only be that we planted seeds of waking up previously. So, that’s already working. Underneath what you think you are and what you think you’re doing, there’s a whole karmic flow going on. So, you just keep letting go into that again and again, and you don’t try to push away the negativity. Look at it. Allow it to be. You can really learn a lot. You know, like one of the lamas I study with talks about the handshake practice. He says, “well, okay, you see something comes in, like some negative thing, a negative feeling, and you go, ‘oh, hi. How you doing? I know you, yeah, you weren’t you here just 10 minutes ago? I think you were, yeah. You know,’ so you say, ‘come on, come on in. Have a cup of tea. What do you like in your tea? Poison. Okay, I got some of that. Oh, okay. Never mind. I won’t give you poison. Just come in, have some something. How about sugar? That’s pretty bad for you.’” But the thing is, don’t be afraid. You’re here. Whatever happened, happened, but you’re still here. You’re here now, and 10 minutes from now you’ll still be here now. And tomorrow and next week you’ll be here now. So, it’s just a matter of remembering to let go, and just be. Don’t try to make something happen. It already happened, and nothing we can create in our minds or you know, “I want this kind of feeling. I want to have this.” None that could never last, because we created it. This is why Groucho Marx is my guru. He used to say, “I’ll never join any club that I’m invited to to join.” And that’s perfect, because I don’t want to join anything I can create in my mind, or my emotions. It won’t last. But what last is what is here now, and what will always be right here now, which is our true nature, who we really are. So, it’s good. And then you have resentment for being stuck. But there’s a secret in that, and the secret is, the lesson of betrayal is trust. Not only other people’s betrayal, but we gave ourselves away. So that’s how we learn to trust. We forgive ourselves for being, how should we put it… assholes, and needy and greedy, and wanting this and wanting that, and all the reasons we would join any kind of group, and be attracted to that underneath the surface. We have to forgive ourselves for that, because it’s just like everybody, we’re just like everybody else. But the lesson that we learn, that’s imprinted on us from betraying our own hearts, is learning how to trust that heart, because that’s what you’re doing now. It’s just a little unfamiliar. That’s all. But that’s okay. Q: Thank you. KD: Yeah. I was in a cult myself, you know? So, I know what it’s like. Fun. Q: Thank you. Hi. KD: Hi. Q: Two things. One may be silly. And then the other one’s more practical. The first one is, I think I remember seeing or reading that Maharajji threw fruit at you. KD: Everybody. Q: Right. If you were thinking? KD: Anytime. Q: Anytime? KD: He needed no reason to throw fruit. He wasn’t throwing it at you. He was distributing Prasad in all directions, but if He wanted to, it could hit you right in the head, you know? Q: Okay. Maybe I misunderstood. KD: Yeah, it wasn’t a violent act. Q: Okay. Oh, because then, yeah, I wanted to ask if it worked. KD: Sometimes. No, it didn’t work. It could be a wake up call, you know, like bringing you back from outer space. Because you’re sitting in front of him thinking about, you know, some movie you saw back in New York three years ago. Boom. Q: Okay. KD: But very gentle. I mean, yeah. However, I once got hit in the heart with a hard unripe guava from about 50 yards away by by a baba who was 270 years old. Q: Wow. KD: He hit me, and I turned away from it, and I went, what? And he was so far away I could hardly see him. You know, there were like a thousand people there, like, you know, and Maharajji, you just kind of…. Q: Oh, okay. KD: Soft bananas. Usually not hard. Q: I’m going to update my visual. KD: Yeah. Okay. Okay. And the other question was, I have a family. I have three kids, and many people in my house and I don’t really have like a sanctuary that I couldn’t go to and do this. And so, and I’m from Iceland, so I… KD: That’s what the bathroom is for. Q: True. And I’m from Iceland and I do the Thursdays a lot. KD: Oh, I love Iceland. I’ve been there so many times. Did I see you there? Q: No. KD: No? I love it there. Q: I found you after. But, and so it’s at like midnight or something and sometimes or 11 at night. And so I’ll go for walks in the empty cold tundra with my dog and so I’m walking and moving when I’m listening and chanting. Is that okay? KD: Sure. Any, anytime you remember the name is good. Yeah. You’re planting a seed. You know, if you’re walking on a tight rope, 3000 feet off the ground, maybe you should pay attention more to the rope. But you know, if you fall, the name will be there.So that’s good. Q: Thank you. KD: Where, where in Iceland are you from? Q: I’m from the north, but I live in Reykjavik now. KD: Very good. I loved it there. Q: will you come back? KD: You know, this is a country that the government, they believe in gnomes and stuff like that, you know, and there’s these certain rock formations that they believe these gnomes live in. So, if the government’s building a road, they build the road around the foundation. Not like America where they destroy cities just to put a road up. You know? They move 50,000 people just to make a highway. In Iceland, they go around it like that. It was so cool. Yeah, I had a great time there. I loved it. Was I there twice, or once? I don’t remember. Once maybe. Q: What were we like? KD: We were very nice. Q: I’ve just never seen a harmonium or anything like this there, so I was just curious. KD: This one group, this one spiritual group brought me over. But we sang, I sang in that beautiful new… I think it just built when I got there. Q: And will you come back? KD: Yeah. You know, it is. Iceland is amazing. We went down to the beach, it was like 110 degrees, and then we got into a car, and we drove maybe 15 minutes up to this canyon, and then we got into this machine. It had these paddles, but they’re like 15 feet wide, right? These big paddles going around like this, and we get up on this thing. And it starts going up the mountain. In 10 minutes we were in a blizzard and it was like 30 below. Unbelievable. We went up right into a glacier. It was extraordinary. Within like, you know, 10 minutes, you’re like on the beach, then you’re in a glacier. It was amazing. What a place. Yeah. Good. Q: Thank you. KD: Yeah. Nice place. I love that. Q: I have a Haman Chalisa question. Um, So I enjoy chanting, and like today I loved it, but a lot of times I mumble through certain parts because I just can’t pronounce everything. And when COVID hit, then you talked about the Hanuman Chalisa, I decided I really needed to learn it. That it would be important, but I really struggled with it, and it caused a lot of stress. Because I thought, “I need to learn this so I can find some peace and I, and I wasn’t.” And, so I think it was you that told the story about. Neem Karoli Baba put, that he put a song in someone’s head in India, and he was able to sing it and knew it perfectly. KD: Oh yeah, yeah. That was the Bhagavad Gita. Yeah. Q: And so I thought, you know, I’m going to ask if Neem Karoli Baba would put this in my head so I could just repeat it. And so I get down on my bicycle and I spin and I put like a YouTube of the Hanuman Chalisa, on or a cd and I just spin and I try to repeat it and learn it. And usually like I’ll listen to Nina’s, because she has that nice long one. And normally another Nina one pops up, But this time the, the next one that popped up was Neem Karoli Baba, who I’ve never Googled. And he’s just going, “Ram Ram Ram.” And I thought, “I can do that.” You know, it kind of took me off the hook from learning it, and I feel like I can just “Ram Ram Ram.” And I was just wondering what your thoughts were. KD: My, my thoughts are you are the hook. If we could repeat the name constantly, we would be, but it’s not so easy. We have a lot of other stuff going on, habitual patterns of thought, et cetera, et cetera. And the Hanuman Chalisa is a practice that purifies the heart, and the effort that it takes to learn it…. Now, it doesn’t have to be memorized. Nobody said you had to memorize it. Okay? Carry on a little piece of paper. You know, it’s not a test. But the Chalisa itself, the practice, Maharajji gave us that practice. And if you read the Chalisa, the translation, you learn a lot about Hanuman, and about a lot of things. You know, and Maharajji said, “Go on saying your fake Ram Rams. One of these days the real, your call will come and the real Ram will come.” So it’s not that you can just go Ram Ram… and that because we say Ram… But it’s said that the name and what is named, or God, are not different. But when we say “Ram,” you know, nothing happens. So, we don’t have that awareness. We’re not open that way. Our bandwidth is still too constrained. So, repetition of the name is also purifying. No question about it. And Maharajji just said, do it whether you feel any devotion or not. Whether you’re angry, whether you’re tired, whatever. Just do it. Because if you don’t do it, then what? You don’t plant seeds, nothing will grow. That being said, the practice of chanting the Hanuman Chalisa is very powerful, and it’s a direct connection with Maharajji, who is Hanuman himself. And so, if you want to learn it, there’s those two, you know, the Flow of Grace cd. And the second CD has every word or every phrase very slowly, easy to repeat. And you can just do it, just do it a thousand times. You’ll know it, it doesn’t have to be memorized. It’s just some kind of weird trip that we do to ourselves. Q: Okay so it’s okay just to keep repeating it with you on the cd. KD: Of course it’s okay. Right. Better than raping and killing, right? Then? Q: My name’s Peter, and I’m kind of on this almost opposite journey of everybody else where I’m a Gen Z. So, I’m kind of very young, especially among this group, and I don’t have, sorry… KD: Gen Z? What happens after z? You start back at A? Q: And I’m sorry if I offended anybody. I just… KD: I don’t even know what language you’re talking Go ahead, go ahead. Q: So I’m in this specific situation where I feel a strong calling towards service and towards kind of a spiritual path. And that’s very new towards my family and specifically even me. And I feel this calling towards specifically service in any way I can find it, but I don’t see many outlets in my, my current life to find that. And I always hear Ram Dass talking about the classic “be here now” and your next step is always right in front of you. But that can be a little hard to find and especially when there’s, there’s so many paths, especially for the younger generation to go, and there’s so many needs of this world when it comes to different societies, and I was wondering if you had any help with the ability to find that path when it comes to specifically a spiritual practice, but also just a pragmatic way to live life, I guess. KD: Whatever else you do, sooner or later you’re going to have to calm your mind down. So, start there, see what happens. And there’s a million different practices to do that. You can just simply watch your breath come in and out. And if you do it well enough, you know, you can get enlightened just with that. But start somewhere. I mean, start practicing calming yourself down a little bit, you know, and then see how things go. See what shows up in your life. I mean, the more open you are and receptive, the more you become aware of what shows up. A lot of things are there that you’re not aware of right around the corner. You know, Krishna could be living next door, but until you look, you never see. Actually, he is. He’s actually living in your house, as you. Yeah. So, you know, this is what’s called life and living. It happens. So, according to what you want in life and how you greet every day and every moment, you see what happens. It’s exciting. Sometimes it’s very depressing, but that’s what’s called an emotion. Let it go. Come back to your breath. Don’t believe what you think. Okay? That’s the definition of insanity. We all believe what we think. Isn’t that crazy? I mean, there’s no reason for us to believe what we think, but we do. And I feel like shit today. Why? Why did I think that? I don’t feel like shit. Why did I think I did? That’s weird. Okay, but calm your ass down. That’s the main thing. Every day. Just a couple of minutes at first, right? If you try too hard, if you ruin everything. Just chill. You know? Three minutes, four minutes. Set a timer so you don’t sit there too long. Maybe an alarm clock to wake you up when you fall asleep in 30 seconds. Q: Thank you. KD: Yeah. Oh, good advice. Really. Q: Hi. I wonder if you could… KD: Nah… Q: No, probably not, because of your attitude towards your own stories now. But I was wondering if you could elaborate on a story from your autobiography where Maharajji asked you to have courage, and I’m not sure in the book, whether it, you go into detail of like later in your life when you thought that that. Like you looked back and said, oh, he’s addressing this moment. So I guess the question is can you continue that story and how did you find the courage and what sort of grace was involved? KD: Well, he had just told me that he was sending me back to America, and I was sitting there, and my mind was totally spinning out. You know, I was thinking about chocolate chip cookies, and Wheaties and, you know, going to basketball games again, you know. I was just going crazy sitting there. Right? And I started to get worried. What am I going to do? I just didn’t know what I was going to do in America. And I still had January, I still had like three months in India. He said when my visa was up, that’s when I had to go back. So, this was Christmas time, and my visa was up at the beginning of March, so I still had a couple of months. So sitting there, all of a sudden he sits up and he looks at me really intensely and he says, “courage is a really big thing.” And the Indian guy goes, “Oh, Baba, God takes care of his devotees.” “Courage is a really big thing.” I was thinking, “what’s going to happen?” You know? So, I just remembered that, you know, because he put it in there pretty strongly and… there were a lot of times when all I had was the vague memory of that moment, which was just about enough to get me through whatever I was going through, internally or externally. There were a lot of, you know, horrible situations I found myself in over the years. But it was interesting because, you know, we have all these ideas. “Oh, God does everything,” or “everything is karma” or “it doesn’t matter.” But he was telling me courage was really important. So that was a big thing. There’s not really much to elaborate about other than that. There were times that there was nothing but the memory of that.You know, there wasn’t any courage, but just remembering that moment kind of got me through to the next moment. Yeah. Q: Thank you. KD: Yeah. Q: Namaste Krishna Dasji. You were introduced to me may be three, four years ago by a close friend of mine, and the first time I’ve heard you, the tranquility of your voice actually has taken me to a different plane. And since then, I’ve been a huge fan of you. So along with me, I brought about three, four friends of mine to attend this retreat. So, the question to you, what has been your experiences or transformational journey to took you on this path of Bhakti Marga? I don’t think you’re born as a singer or probably you’re not born as a practicing singer. So, what took you, or what experiences led you to that path of Bhakti Yoga Marga? KD: Bhakti, Jnana, Karma, it’s all the same. It’s your life. Bhakti means love. And when I met my guru, I fell in love, and I never fell out at that love. And that’s Bhakti. It’s also wisdom because Guru is everything. The whole universe. So, when you’re in a loving relationship with the universe, everything changes. So, I don’t know if there’s been much transformation, to tell you the truth. I mean, really, I just, you know. I just cut myself a break every once in a while now, when I didn’t use to, and as a result, I cut other people a break once in a while. Because everybody’s guru. When I can see that, when I live in that space, then it’s a very different universe, and that’s the way it really is. Guru is not a physical person and not limited to a body, a physical body. We think that, because we think we are physical bodies. That’s what we identify with. And so, when somebody says guru, you think of somebody out there. That’s not what it is at all. Guru is like the space of the sky. Inside, everything is inside of that. There’s nothing outside of that vast space, that vast presence. But we, our minds, our stuff is focused on stuff, on little things, on forms and shapes and egos and psychology, and all this stuff. So, we miss the space. We don’t see this. We don’t experience that presence in which we all live. When we do, then everything’s fine. That’s real devotion and that’s a mature devotion, a ripe devotion. But it starts very simply, you know, with a loving connection with either yourself or a being. You don’t have to meet that being physically to feel the love. I felt the love from Maharajji when I met Ram Dass, and I didn’t know what it was at first, you know. I thought it was Ram Dass, but he very quickly abused me of that thought, disabused me, or whatever the word is. Q: You beautifully explained that in your book though, by the way. That was very nice. KD: Yeah. And he liked that too. But you know, so one has to experience these things oneself. But we hear about them from other people. We hear about what’s possible, but it’s up to us to plant those seeds in our lives of the things that we want to experience. If we don’t plant the seeds, nothing can grow. The Hanuman Chalisa is a very powerful practice for cleaning the mirror of the heart. The mirror is covered with crud, all our stuff. So, when we look into the mirror, all we see is the crud. We don’t see what really could be reflected, but as the crud is polished off, we see more clearly and more accurately what’s reflected in that mirror. So, on one hand we’re looking in a mirror ourselves, and when the mirror is all our stuff, all the me, me, me stuff, all the ego stuff, all the greed, the selfishness, the shame, the fear, all that stuff, the anger… all that stuff. However, this is the mirror. Right now, what you’re looking into is a mirror, and you’re seeing your stuff, all your, all our, our ideas, all our interpretations, all our likes and dislikes, all our frustrations, all our neediness, all our beauty, all the everything. So, as we clean our hearts, everything we see changes. It’s like you’re born with glasses on that are the wrong prescription, but you don’t know that. So, you look around and everything, kind of what it is, doesn’t seem weird to you because it’s what you were born with. Little by little, that those glasses start, the prescription changes. It self-corrects and little by little, things come into clarity. And clear. Everything becomes clear and you see things as they are. I mean, you see yourself as you really are, and that’s the result of practice, spiritual practice, in a very general sense. So, we’re all in our own little version of the universe. But we share a bandwidth, so we can talk to each other, and we can see all these bodies and all these minds and all this stuff. But when the mirror of the heart is perfectly clear, everything’s very different. And that’s when you, you experience the oneness of it all. And on the way to that oneness, a lot of different qualities arise, compassion and kindness, equanimity, happiness, just for no reason. Just because that’s who we are. And Maharajji said, “from going on, repeating these names, everything is accomplished.” Whatever it is, it’s accomplished. It’s made full and complete. Q: I like, I’ve had… KD: Dysentery? Q: Not yet. A long way to go, though. It’s probably going to happen. So I’ve had, like, I’ve had these deep and profound awakening experiences in my life, and I used to be a person who sought ceaseless pleasure. KD: Good luck, Q: Right? And so I recognize that that’s a fool’s errand. And I no longer seek that. I want to be here for all of life. That includes all of it, the horror, pain, love, beauty, all of it. And so, like I feel this resistance to the possibility of enlightenment. Partially because I don’t believe, I guess I question if there would even be a me there to experience it, like this idea of enlightenment being a transcendence of being human, being here, being here in this form. I love that you’re making these faces at me. KD: It is totally the opposite of that, of course. You’re totally here and there’s nothing in your way. Everything is experienced because there’s nothing to filter or to push away or to judge or evaluate. It’s wide open total presence, which is who you are already. So, there’s no sense fighting it. That’s who you are. All this other stuff is just stuff. Let it go. By saying you want to be here for all of it. You’re actually narrowing it down pretty fiercely. Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. Just be here. But that’s not so easy. Because we’re always thinking all this stuff. When, when the me is not functioning, you’re completely present with everything and everyone and everything completely. Absolutely. There’s no fear, there’s no distance. You’re out of your own way. It is just exactly the way you know it is. But you can’t get there yet. And it’s just another storyline that you’re identifying with, which is gotta go anyhow, so let it go. Q: Thank you. I had a, another question. KD: He’s, he’s, he’s saying something. Oh, okay. Q: So, you’ve lived this amazing life with these amazing experiences. KD: You think so? Q: And these awakenings, we’re being…. KD: falling asleeps Q: A guru, right? And so I’m curious about your current experience. Like we all, we’re all coming starry-eyed, looking at you, and if there’s a need for you, like, do you look outward for something, to a person, a discipline? And is your current experience, is there a deepening, a deeper awakening? And or what, like what challenges you now in, in life? I’m curious about your current experience. KD: I am just hanging out. I don’t have much of an agenda. I signed the line and said I’d be here for a few days, so I drove over from my house. Other than that, I didn’t make any commitments to be especially holy or anything. I just said I’d be here with y’all. What did you ask? We could roll the tape back. Q: Oh, like there, well, I asked like a shitload of questions. That’s really the problem here. But like, one, if you’re seeking inspiration elsewhere, is there like a current deepening or awakening, or like, what is showing up as challenging or like in the way for you these days? KD: Having to get here at two in the afternoon is really hard. Okay. So, I love, yeah. I get inspiration. I love to find saints, yogis. I met a couple of really great yogis in India this time. Wow. They’re still here. It’s unbelievable. Let me tell you, they’re here. It’s extraordinary. So that’s what I am. I’m a Saint junkie. That’s what I am. And it’s all Maharajji. Everything that happens, happens inside of him. So, I don’t worry about that. But I love, I love finding, you know… I just love saints. You know, I love the beings that, that shine so much. It’s great. That’s very inspiring. Just knowing that they’re here is very inspiring. Because we get, you know, we see the world going down the toilet and we wonder is there any use or any hope and how could it get like this? But there are beings who know exactly what’s going on, who are doing what has to be done. And it’s all… Maharajji used to say, “It’s all perfect.” It’s a hard one. That’s a really hard one. Ram Dass wanted to take his van and go be a, like an ambulance out in in Bangladesh when all this bad stuff was happening. Maharajji said, “Ram Dass, don’t you understand? It’s all perfect.” That’s really hard, because people are suffering. That means suffering is also perfect, but we don’t like suffering. So how could it be perfect? Well, that’s a good question. So that’s very inspiring to me. And the only thing in the way for me, is me. So, I’m working on it. I’m not in a particular hurry, but I’m working on it. Time goes by though. Things happen. The post Call and Response Podcast Special Edition | Saint Junky appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep 85 |Dada Mukerjee, Maharajji, and the Practice of Ram Naama “When we chant, when we repeat the names mentally, physically, or when we even hear the names being repeated, when we chant, all we have to do is come back again and again to the sound of the name. We don’t have to manipulate our emotions to feel anything special. There’s no failing and there’s no getting anything. You simply come back, because you’re coming back to a flow, a living flow of grace.” – Krishna Das So, the story goes like this. Maharajji was staying in Allahabad at Dada’s House, which wasn’t really Dada’s house. It was Maharajji’s house, and it really was, because Dada had been living in a small apartment. Let me tell you about Dada. Dada was a communist economics professor, and he had absolutely no interest in religions and spiritual things at all. He was a good person, but he had no… his wife and auntie and mother, who lived with him, they were all into all that stuff, but he had no interest, and he had a group of friends who also had no interest in that stuff. So, one day he and his friends were sitting around drinking their tea, and his wife and aunt were getting ready to go outside to leave the house. So, Dada said, “Where are you going?” And they said, “Well, there’s this small house across the street that we hear this saint comes and visits, and we’ve been waiting, and we heard he’s there. So, we’re going to see him.” “Good. Go.” So, they left, and they came back in about a minute and Dada said, “What happened? Why are you back?” And his wife said, “Well, we walked into the house. It was a small mud house and a dark room. Couldn’t see very well…” So, they kind of had to bend over and come in the room, and just before his wife was sitting down, the Baba there said, “Jao, go.” But she said, she tells Dada, “I couldn’t believe he really wanted us to go. We just came. So, I sat down, and a minute later he looked at me and called me by my name.” “Kamala, go home. Your husband’s friends are waiting for their tea.” How he knew her name is also a mystery. So, this piqued Dada’s curiosity. So, the next day he goes across the street with them, and they walk into this little mud house. And as soon as they walk in, the Baba gets up from the cot that he’s sitting on, grabs a hold of Dada’s hand and starts walking across the street to Dada’s house, dragging Dada along behind him. And he says to Dada, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.” Okay. Right. You just pulled up to the Stop-and-Shop, and you came out with your groceries and some homeless guy comes up to you and says, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you,” as he gets into your car? I don’t think so. But Dada being Dada, and India being India, this Baba comes in and sits down and the people from across the street all come to this house now, and all the other devotees start showing up and the Ma’s go into the kitchen. They start cutting fruit and prasad is served. And the whole thing starts. And it continued. However, that house was owned by a relative of Dada’s, and after a year or so, or some period of time, Maharajji started telling Dada, “You’re going to have to leave this place. You need to get a house. You need to get a house.” But they had absolutely no money. They were dirt poor. Dada used to tutor. Like I said, he was an economics professor, but he used to tutor students and stuff just to make enough money to live. So, every time Maharajji came and said, “Do you have a house yet?” Dada didn’t say anything. So, finally Maharajji says, “Okay, I’ll build it.” And so, this house was built and Dada was moved into it with his family. And from that point on, Maharajji came there to that house and it was a bigger house with a big sitting room, and over time, Dada gradually became a devotee. And he’s written two books that are really lovely. One is called “By His Grace,” and the other is called “The Near and the Dear,” in which his premise is that he didn’t learn anything from Maharajji at all. He learned how to become a devotee from the other devotees who were already pukka, who already knew how to do it. And it’s a wonderful book. It’s really good. However, one year Maharajji goes off on a pilgrimage with Siddhi Ma, Jivanti Ma, and Siddhi Ma’s husband, who had become a very close friend of Dada’s. And they went to Calcutta, and they went up to Dakshineswar. Now, when Dada was a young boy, he had come home from college in the summer, and in those days, you could buy a day pass on the public transportation, and you could go as many places as possible in one day. So, in order to say that he had gone there, Dada had decided to go to Sri Ramakrishna’s Temple in Dakshineswar, this Kali temple where Sri Ramakrishna, who was a great saint, had lived, not because he was interested, but because it was a tourist place now. So, he went there and he pranamed to the Murti. Then there was a courtyard. I haven’t been there, but I think there’s nine Shiva Temples, It’s a small little mandir. It’s like this high, each one with a Lingam, and it’s a big courtyard. It’s the middle of the afternoon. It’s probably 120 degrees. But in order to say that he’d done it, Dada goes in front of each one and he goes like this, and then he goes to the next one. He goes like this, and then he goes to the next one. He turns around and there’s some bulky gentleman standing there saying to him, “Come, I’ll give you a mantra.” And Dada says, “I won’t take your mantra.” “Yes, you’ll take it. You’ll take it and you’ll do it.” “No, I won’t. I won’t do it.” And then this Baba says, “Yes, you’ll do it. You’ll do it after you do your Gayatri.” So, Dada was shocked. The Gayatri mantra is… when a Brahmin boy is initiated, he gets a thread and the Gayatri mantra. Now, Dada had been initiated by his father, who died very shortly after his initiation. So, in order to honor his father, he did the Gayatri mantra every day when he took a bath. But it wasn’t a spiritual thing, it was just to honor his father. How this Baba knew what he was doing? He said, “You’ll do it after your Gayatri.” So, Dada said, “Okay, give it to me.” So, this Baba tells him this mantra. Dada turns around, pranams to the Murti. He turns around again. Nobody there. Wow. A huge courtyard. I mean, just gone. So, he thought, “This is very strange.” So, now maybe 30 years later, Maharajji is traveling with this group, and they go to Ramakrishna’s Temple and as they go there, they walk by the courtyard and Maharajji casually points, and he said, “See there. That’s where I gave your Dada his mantra.” Dada had no idea. He never connected that event with Maharajji, but he did that mantra every day because he said he would. So, one time in Allahabad, during the time of one of the melas, one of the great gatherings, the festivals at Prayag, where the three rivers come together, a very sacred place, Maharajji left early in the morning, and he told Dada that he would meet him there on the banks of the Ganga in the evening. So, that evening, Dada goes to Prayag, and he’s walking around on the banks of the Ganga looking for Maharajji. It’s nighttime, and he has this young servant boy with him, and they’re walking. They don’t see anything. Where’s Maharajji? They don’t know. And the servant boy is getting anxious and says, “Dada, we should go back. Maybe Maharajji has gone there. We should go back. We should, it’s late.” And Dada was just standing there, and he wouldn’t go, but he was also concerned because the boy was so upset and this and that, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a boat appears right in front of them, and Maharajji is on the boat, and he says, “Dada, what were you doing? What are you doing?” And Dada wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t say anything. “Tell me, what are you doing? Why are you here? Why are you here?” He said, “You said you would meet me here. So, I stayed.” “Why didn’t you go back? It was late, then you didn’t see me. Why didn’t you go back?” “You said that you would come. So, I stayed.” “Oh, and what were you doing? What were you doing?” Dada was quiet. “What were you doing?” Finally, he said, “Tell me.” He said, “I was taking Ram’s name.” “Ah.” Maharajji goes, “Ram nam karne se sab pur ho jate hain.” From going on repeating the names of God, everything is accomplished. And he said this to us many times. And this is somebody who actually knows what’s going on in the universe. This is not like a chai wala on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 14th Street, although you never know. So, through the repetition of the names, everything is accomplished. I mean, how difficult is that to understand, word-wise? Very simple, right? You do this, then that. However…Personally, I mean, it’s now more than 50 years since I heard that. If I really believed it, if I had the karmas to believe it, if I didn’t have all the tamasic nonsense in my emotional body, what else would I be doing but Raam Naam all day long? So, that’s what I ask myself. So, Maharajji didn’t teach much. He didn’t give lectures. He didn’t write books. He basically said that the Westerners were qualified for the five limbed yoga. Eight limbed yoga, right? Ashtanga yoga. This is Paanchtanga Yoga. Eating, drinking tea, sleeping, gossiping, and wandering around. This was the yoga that we Westerners were qualified for. Unfortunately, I think it’s true. He used to say to us Westerners, he said, “You can get everything from devotion.” He said, “You don’t need yoga.” And even, one time I asked Siddhi Ma many years later, I said, “Ma, should I meditate?” I’ve taken a lot of meditation courses with Tibetan Lamas, Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, all this really powerful, big-time stuff, and I like to fool myself and pretend I know what it’s about. So, I said to her, I said, “Ma, should I meditate? Or should I chant?” She said to me, “What do you like to do?” Hello? My mother never told me that what I’d like to do would be good for me, but this Ma, my real Ma… And then she said something very interesting. She said, “Krishna Das, in 40 years with Maharajji, not once did he ask me to meditate. He asked me to do Japa, to remember the name, to repeat the name, and to serve others. But he never asked me to meditate.” And she said, “Maharajji said that the more subtle, higher states of consciousness cannot be brought about with the use of personal will.” In other words, you can’t. It’s like Ramana Maharshi said, “It’s like asking the mind or the ego to kill the mind or ego. It’s like asking the thief to be the policeman. There’ll be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.” The ego, the will that comes from the sense of a separate self, the “me” will never do what’s necessary to dissolve itself fully. It wants to live, it wants to keep its separateness, which in some of the, like in Dzogchen meditation or in Mahamudra, it isn’t the use of the will. It’s a different type of meditation, also. So, it’s interesting. Now I want to… Robert’s not the only one who can read stuff. I want to read stuff. Where are you? Not that. So, we were talking this morning. Robert was talking about surrender in different contexts. But here’s what Ramana Maharshi said. One of the things. I’m going to read you a few things. “Surrender to Him 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 cannot 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 have no longer any cares. All your cares are His. Such is surrender.” This is Bhakti. This is devotion. It’s a nice idea, but how do you do that? How do we give up? How do we let go of our stuff? How do we let go of all the things? Like Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was saying: your stories, all this stuff, all the things you think you need, that you want. How do you let go of that and really turn it, really let it be? So, when we chant, when we repeat the names mentally, physically, or when we even hear the names being repeated, when we chant, all we have to do is come back again and again to the sound of the name. We don’t have to manipulate our emotions to feel anything special. There’s no failing and there’s no getting anything. You simply come back, because you’re coming back to a flow, a living flow of grace. Like Robert said the other day, these names are the sound form of reality, of what’s beyond form. And so, as we become more and more familiar with letting go and returning, letting go, and returning to the name, to the sound of the name, every time we come back, it’s a very big thing. Most people, like I’ve said before, they get born, they graduate high school, they drink some beer, and they die, and that’s it. They’re not here for one second in a whole lifetime. So, if we’re at all involved in this situation, it’s because our own karmas are blossoming right now in our lives, bringing us to this place where we might be able to move towards our own hearts in a new way, in an ever-deepening way. Here’s another quote. “The guru is within. Meditation is meant to remove the ignorant idea that he or she is only outside. If he be a stranger whom you await, he’s bound to disappear. So, what’s the use of a transient being like that? In order to receive the grace of the guru, one of two things must be done. Either surrender yourself because you realize your inability and need a higher power to help you, or investigate into the cause of the misery by self-inquiry, and so, merge in the Self. Either way, you will attain freedom from misery. God or guru never forsakes the devotee who has surrendered himself.” Sometimes it seems like surrender might feel like driving a car with a blindfold on. Scary. But the reason that we have Saints, the reason that we know about these great beings, is because they have cultivated an attachment that keeps them here in physicality, and that attachment is compassion. They have no agendas. There’s nothing left. They don’t need anything. They’re finished. But because they know that there’s only one of us, and if there’s one person that thinks that they’re separate, then there’s no real freedom yet. There’s only one being here. We’re all parts of that. And if one of us is hurting, we’re all hurting. And they know that in a way that’s beyond what we could understand. They experience that directly. Maharajji, every minute of every day, He was taking suffering from people. He was giving. There’s a prayer to him called the Vinaya Chalisa. “Vinaya” means “to beg,” or what’s another word, Robert, for “Vinaya?” “Plead.” Like to plead or beg. To ask for something a polite way. “And you wander like a God distributing alms to all you meet.” And this was like Maharajji. Everywhere he went, he was giving things; children, jobs, curing people from diseases, twenty-four-seven. And the thing about these great beings is that they have hearts as wide as the world. So, at the same time that they can feel and experience our suffering, it doesn’t destroy them. There’s nothing in there to take it personally. Like I told you the other day.. did I tell you? I don’t know where I was. I told somebody. When I was going to kill myself in India, in the Temple, Maharajji, He said to me, “You can’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.” Because he never thought of himself. There was nothing in there, no person in there thinking about themselves. That’s the real death. And these great beings have died that real death. They’re only visible because we need them. And the more we understand that, the more we trust, the more we can trust life itself, that it’s leading us in the right direction. And that’s hard to do, especially if you read the papers. It doesn’t look like that in this world. Here’s another one. “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. God knows the past, present, and 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 to the divine.” One way or another, we have to lay our burden down. We have to lay this burden of this delusion of feeling that we’re separate from other beings. Like right now, everybody sitting in this room probably thinks they’re different from the person sitting next to them. I mean, it’s reasonable, isn’t it? It looks, they look different, but what’s inside of each one of us is exactly the same. What’s looking out of our eyes, hearing through our ears, feeling through our skin, tasting in the tongue, smelling through the nose, what’s doing, that’s all the same in each being. That presence, that awareness, consciousness is the same. That’s one. There aren’t two of that. There’s one in the whole universe and world. Our true nature is that, and these names that we chant are the names of that place. So, as we get more familiar with letting go, coming back, letting go, coming back, we move more deeply into our own hearts, into our own being. Here’s a tough one. “The ordainer controls the fate of souls in accordance with their Prarabdha karma.” Prarabdha karma, which is the amount of karma to be worked out in this life. “Whatever is destined not to happen, will not happen, try as you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to prevent it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain in silence.” And when he says “silence,” it doesn’t mean physical silence. It means the silence of the Self, the peace of being. So, it would be nice to even just touch that for a minute. Forget about remaining in it all the time. But that’s an interesting one. Most of us think we’re running our show. It gives me a good laugh sometimes. Like when I stub my toe, my day is ruined. What show am I running? So, ultimately the first and most important thing for us to do is to learn how to let go, is to quiet the mind a little bit, is to move out of the flow, the crazy flow of daily life, of daily worldly life, which is full of stuff and buttons that are getting pushed all day long. What we like, what we don’t like, what we want, what we don’t want, what we have, what we don’t have. This is like a whole sphere of stuff that we’re born into, and we die. But we, inside of those few years that we’re here, we can find a way to be in it, and not of it, but it means some type of practice has to be done. It just doesn’t happen. You can trip and fall in it, but it’s not too often that happens. And so, for me, the chanting has been an ever-deepening experience. There doesn’t seem to be a bottom to it. It’s always, every time I sit down to chant, it’s different, and the same in a way, but also, it’s ever deepening. One gets more and more familiar with the feeling of just being here and letting go again and again to whatever pulls you out of this or that. So, this mantra, this sloka is to Hanuman, “that Mahadev, that great God Mahakala, the eternal goodness, the blissful one who bestows liberation by allowing seekers to merge into his own state, as well as bestowing the enjoyment of all one’s cherished objects of desire.” So, this is not a renunciate path, this is a path of honoring the desires that you have, and allowing the desires that are good for us to come to fruition. We’re hungry. We’re born hungry. We have all kinds of hungers and a certain amount of food has to be eaten, otherwise we die. And not all food is physical food. We have desires. We have desires for certain things, and sometimes you just have to get those things in order to complete something. And this sloka talks about Hanuman as being the force that actually makes it possible for us to get those things. And when I was with Maharajji, I was twenty-three years old. The only job I ever had was like, driving a school bus around here in Kingston, and most of the Westerners there were around the same age. There were a few actual adults there, but very few. None of us had lives. We hadn’t done anything. I look back and I think, “Whoa, this is really interesting,” because I, not only had I not done anything, I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to stay in India for my whole life. And there were other people also. I, did I tell you about where was? Did I tell you the story about my friend who was standing on the steps in Kainchi? I’ll tell you again. So, I saw a friend of mine standing on the steps in Kainchi. She had just come back to India with her husband for the first time after Maharajji left the body, since Maharajji left the body. And we were singing Chalisas at the temple, and I noticed her standing there just staring at the tucket, the cot that he used to sit on. She was just staring, and I thought, “Whoa, what’s going on over there?” And after we finished singing, she came over to me and she said, Krishna Das, I think you’re one of the few people who could understand what I’m going to tell you.” I said, “What?” She said she was standing there on the spot, looking at the tucket where he used to sit, and she remembered standing in that very spot watching Maharajji, and she remembered thinking, this is 30 years before, she remembered knowing that she was home. She finally made it, and she’d always be right here. And she looked at me and she said, “What happened?” Transferred. We were dragged there, and then we would drop-kicked back into our lives and all the desires. When Maharajji sent me back to America after two and a half years… He kept me in India. He got my visa extended twice, I think. When he sent me back, “You have to go. You have attachment. You have attachment.” And I said, “Baba, I’m just learning Hindi.” “Too bad. Jao.” I said, “What attachment?” I gave everything away. I gave my jeans away. I sold my guitar, my car. I had maybe one small little cardboard box in the basement of my mother’s house with some holy books. That’s all I had left. I was never going back to America when I left. My program was “America… finished.” What attachment was he talking about? Now, I know. Every single thing that’s happened to me from that moment to this is what he was talking about. Every single thing. Every single thing. Some of them cannot be spoken of here, but every single thing. That’s what he was talking about. And he could see it all. I mean, it was all sitting there for anybody to see, just all these uncooked seeds, these desires that just had to be worked out one way or another. India’s not the place to do that. It gets tricky. I’ve had friends who’d stayed in India a long time, and they get stuck in certain ways. They can’t quite get through some of their stuff. It’s not the place to work out certain karmas. New York on the other hand… So, this thing about trust is a really big thing. There’s so, many reasons not to trust life, the way things are in the world right now and the way people are suffering and the violence and the wars, but trust is what we need inside. We need to trust the process that we’re going through. We need to trust the love and beauty that’s in our own hearts when everybody’s telling you “no.” When everything you read is telling you, “no, you can’t do that, you can’t trust, you have to do this, you have to do that.” That doesn’t mean that we have to expose ourselves to danger. We need to take care of business and do what we have to do. But when it comes to the internal life, our internal work, our spiritual work, we have to find a way to unwind all that stuff and release all that stuff that we carry in our bodies, in our subtle bodies, all the emotional, all the betrayals, all the broken hearts. We have to find a way to let that stuff heal by releasing it again and again. Because the stories we tell ourselves, they go on and on just by themselves. We sit down and all we do is think. So, until you add an anchor, until you put an anchor into the ocean, the ship’s just going to get blown around. So, the anchor is some practice, some object of concentration and a mantra, your breath, something else that you can come back to, and you cultivate that a little bit every day. You don’t try too much because then the ego gets involved and you start trying too hard and then you fuck everything up. A little bit, more times a day. Every time you remember, just let go and then you’re gone again. Then you remember and you let go. Try not to let go when you’re at a red light because you know it’ll turn green before you can pay attention again. Somebody will wake you up. So, when we have something to come back to, after a while begins to feel like coming back home. There’s a shift that happens. The reason I’m chanting today is because Maharajji forced me to chant. He ordered me and the Westerners. After he kicked out the Kirtan Wallahs, he ordered the Westerners to sing. So, we had to sing all day long. We couldn’t even see him. It was like hell, it was horrible. Hare Krishna my ass, all day long. It was just, whoa. But because of that, I was forced to sing through every possible state of mind that could fucking arise. And they did. But I had to keep singing. Right now, you’re going to go home. You don’t have to keep singing. TV goes on, the 4,062 channels. You never have to turn it off, one channel to the other. We don’t have the space to go through what we have to go through to finally settle a little bit. You have to face, you have to feel that boredom. You have to like, sit in it. You have to allow it to be, and watch it dissolve. You have to go through the anger and then the memories of how many times you’ve been hurt and how many of “this one didn’t love you,” and how many of “this one took you away.” And all this. You have to sit there with it. You can’t push it away. You have to sit there with it, and you have to sing through it, chant through it. You can’t push it away. And then you think about, I mean… When I started thinking about my girlfriend back in America, Hare Krishna, and then I went, “Wait a minute. She broke up with me.” It went from one to the other and back and forth, this, but Hare Krishna kept going, and eventually something actually happened. Nobody.. who knew? really, you understand? I wasn’t doing it as… I was doing it because he told me to do it, not because I thought anything was going to happen. And after like, 400 years of Hare Krishna, I’m not going to tell you exactly what happened, but something happened and there was a shift and I understood how it works. But you have to find that yourself. You have to have that experience. And it only comes if you’ll do the practice. You have to surrender to the fact that you need to do the practice, whatever practice is to you. It can be anything that works like that. But really the simplest thing is watching your breath. I mean, you’re not going to imagine that you’re going to go bodily to heaven just by watching your breath, but when you say Rama Rama Rama, you think, “Oh, this is so, good.” Oh yeah, bullshit. So, watching the breath or bringing the name in with the breath, but the point is don’t try to make something happen. Your job is simply to pay attention, no more and no less. And it’s not easy. It’s ridiculously simple, but it is not easy. Nothing is required, except to pay attention to what you’re doing. And from that, everything else becomes possible.   Faith & Courage Any questions or anything? Anybody but Robert. I’m not qualified to answer his questions. Okay. I’ll be brave. Give him the mic. Give him the mic. I’ll be brave. Robert had a question. Let me take a deep breath here. RS: It’s a very simple question. KD: I’ll give you a very simple answer. RS: (Someone I know) is in India right now, and he texted me a photo of the Hanumanji at the Lucknow Neem Karoli Baba Temple. Ha. RS: So, I wondered, and he was saying that Babaji had spent some time in Lucknow. I knew he spent time in Allahabad, , I knew he spent time in Brindavan, but I didn’t know about Lucknow. KD: Oh sure. RS: If you could tell me about Lucknow. Is that an easy enough question? KD: I think that’s okay. I think I handle that. Maharajji spent a lot of time in up UP, Uttar Pradesh, it was called, at and now it’s also, called Uttaranchal, the mountains. He was mostly, most of the life that we saw of him was in UP, Lucknow, Khanpoor, Aligarh, He was everywhere it seems. There’s a very old temple, a Hanuman temple in Lucknow, in Aminabad, a very ancient Hanumanji temple, and he used to spend a lot of time there. It used to be outside of town and now it’s… but Tiwari told me an interesting story. He said before this temple was built, there was an old Hanuman temple right by the river near this, the new temple, and he and Maharajji were walking by there, and Maharajji said to Tiwari, “Okay, do your puja here, your Shiva puja, right now.” Now, this means like three and a half, four hours of puja, and he had no book. He had to do it all by… But Tiwari said, “No, I’m not going to do that.” “I said, ‘Do it! You do it, what I say.” “I don’t care what you say, I’m not going to do it.” “Why?” He said, “Because the minute I sit down, you are going to run away. And you run away. You’ll leave me sitting here, and once I start my puja, I must finish. So, I’ll be sitting here for four hours by myself.” “Nay nay. I won’t run away.” “Yes, you will.” “I won’t.” “Yes, you will. Okay, promise me.” He held his ears like this. This is like cross my heart and help to die in India. And they sat down, and Tiwari started the puja and Maharajji sat down, and He sat there the whole time right next to him and Tiwari’s doing the puja. The other thing about it, Tiwari’s puja guru was also a very great saint, and he told Tiwari that when he did pu ja, he had to do it at the top of his lungs. And his voice was something like a chainsaw. Oh God, it was incredible, but like a chainsaw. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Okay. But anyhow, so, this was right by the end, the last minute, the last “Om,” and Maharajji lept up, and said, “You miserable shit. You made me stay here and I have to have so much to do!” And he ran away. And that was right down below where the temple is now. There was an old Hanumanji there. He had so many devotees from Lucknow and all those places. Kanpur… The man who was the manager after the temple was built, the first manager of the temple, had been the head jailer of Central jail in Agra. His name was Mahotra, and whenever somebody needed to be kind of, reigned in, Maharajji said, “I’m sending you to Central jail.” And he would send him to the Lucknow Temple, to this guy. Maharajji had his own room in Central jail in Agra, his own cell that was kept empty for him. And he used to just go in there and they’d lock him in, but they’d find him walking around all night, and one time there was this, he had a devotee who was a really big dacoit, a bad guy, a criminal, and who had two guns, one registered with the government and one unregistered, which was for killing people. But he could sing the Ramayana, the Ramacharitamanasa very beautifully. And he had his own village in the jungle. It was like, he was like a king in his own village, and so he finally got caught and he was in central jail. So, Maharajji went there, and He said to him, He goes up to his cell and he says, “I know you’re planning to escape. Don’t do it. Because if you escape my other devotee, who’s the head of the jail, will lose his job, and who’s going to support his family? Don’t do it.” So, the guy literally didn’t escape, and one year later he was pardoned, and he was released forever. That’s faith. Because he could escape. He could. He was a really powerful bandit, a big guy. The way these people, I mean, this is how we learned about him. We watched how the Indian people, we observed, how they interacted with him, how they saw him. The reason we have the Hanuman Chalisa is because we saw they saw him as Hanuman. They Worshipped Maharajji as Hanuman himself. And look, I’ve said before. We used to come to the temple every day. And they would give us this little yellow booklet with a picture of a flying monkey on it. I had like at least a hundred of these booklets in my room when finally, one day I said, “What is this?” Right? And they said, “Oh, it’s a hymn to Hanuman.” Oh. So, I thought, wow, if we learn this, we could sing it to Maharajji. We knew he wanted to spend more time with us, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. And we thought, okay, if we learn this, we’ll be able to sing to him and he’ll like that. And that’s exactly what happened. And here we are. We’re doing it now. It all came from that little yellow booklet and that one little thought that he finally got into my thick skull. But his old devotees, the Pukka devotees, the older ones, they worshipped him as Shiva. There was one guy, a very poor man who came from Aligarh. His name was Vishwambhar. I will never forget this guy. He used to come with a basket full of Puja articles, the trays and the plates and the lamps and the things in the ghee and everything. And he’d come outside Maharajji’s door and he’d prepare everything and he’d just stand there and wait. And Maharajji would be inside. He’d be saying, “Oh, he’s here and he’s got this and that. And he brought this and that. And he brought this kind of Prasad and that kind of Prasad.” He said, “Oh, I won’t go out. Okay, I’ll go out. No, I won’t go out. Okay, I’ll go.” So, he’d come out, and this guy, he would do his puja and he’d be weeping, right? I mean, it was such an extraordinary sight. And he’d be doing his puja and chanting these mantras and weeping. Weeping. And finally at the end, he’d start doing the Arati and he’d, he would just go into Samadhi, and he’d just be standing there like that. And then he’d be kind of crazy. He came up to the westerners and say, “Who are you people? Are you the gods who have taken forms to be with Maharajji? Who are you?” And Tiwari was like that, my Indian father was like that. He’d been with Maharajji for 40 years. The first time he met him, he was a school kid, maybe about eight years old. Maharajji had started coming, showing up in the hills, but he was kind of hanging out in the jungle, and he wouldn’t be with any adults, but he would come to see the school kids and he would do acrobatics for them and they would give him their lunches and stuff like that so he’d get something to eat. But he used to be able to put his arms on the ground like this and do a full somersault without picking his arms up, like whoop. And the kids, so, the kids would give him stuff to eat. That’s nothing. Sai Baba used to take his intestines out and wash them and put ’em back in. Shirdi Sai Baba. He’d take his arms off and put them back on. I mean, if it’s a dream, you can do whatever you want in your dream. It’s a dream for them. Q: You’ve been talking about the faith that you witnessed around you there. Yeah. Q: But could you talk about the evolution of your own faith? Because when you first arrived, you couldn’t have had much faith and then somehow you got to a point where you would do what He told you to do. Could you talk about that evolution? Let me think about it. It’s interesting. I was just on Maui, where Ram Dass lived the last 20 plus years of his life, and we were very close for many years, over 50 years. I first met Ram Dass in the winter of ’68-‘69. He was living at his father’s place in New Hampshire, and I heard about him from my friends, and I went to see him. And I walked into the room where he was sitting. He was sitting on the bed, and the bed was on the floor, and he had his eyes closed. He was leaning against the wall, and I walked in the room and without a word being spoken, without eye contact, the minute I walked into that room, something happened inside me, and at that moment I knew that whatever it was I was looking for was real. It was in the world and you could find it. That was the beginning of the rest of my life. And I was just on Maui, and I went to the house, Ram Dass’s house. It’s still there. There’s some people living there, keeping it together. And I went up to his room where we used to sit for hours, and I sat in the chair that I used to sit in, right next to his chair where he would spend a lot of time because he, after the stroke, he couldn’t walk. And I closed my eyes, and I was just sitting there and I thought, “Wait a minute. This is no different than the way we used to sit together.” And it was so strong, the presence, the feeling, that I opened my eyes to see if was there, because he was so there, that what I felt was so, strong. And that feeling that I had at that moment was exactly the same feeling that I had in 1968 when I walked in that room. That presence which I felt for the first time in that room with Ram Dass, the first time, which I felt in India with Maharajji and after he left the body, whenever I was not too stupid and busy to pay attention, it was there. And I saw that had been with me, unchanging, all these years. It had never changed. It was perfect as it is, and it never came and went. It was always here. I never thought of it as faith. That word kind of makes Westerners nauseous, but, the trust that I have, that the presence is with me all the time, even when I forget, is probably the biggest gift that I got from him. One time I was sitting with him in a Parsi apartment building in Mumbai, in Christmas, 1972, and he was sitting on the bed and he would sit up, he’d lie down, he’d sit up, he’d lie down, turn this way and turn that way. I was just sitting on the floor doing my practice, which was like… All I did was want to stare at him, because all the beauty of the universe was wrapped up in that blanket. It was like, my eyes did not, they wouldn’t go anywhere else. They just wanted to be right there. At one point, he sits up like this and he looks at me and he says, “Courage is a really big thing.” And there was an Indian guy there. He said, “Oh, Baba, God takes care of his devotees.” “Courage is a really big thing.” And he laid down and went back to sleep. I was like, “What’s going to happen?” But there have been times in my life that all I had was the vaguest, most distant memory of that moment, and it was just enough to kind of make it to the next moment. The faith thing, it’s my experience that no matter how close I’ve gotten to being destroyed by one thing or another, every time I would fall off the cliff, he’d move the cliff and I’d fall on my face, instead of 10,000 feet to my death. That just happened so many times. But a funny thing happened when I first met him physically. It was confusing because I was feeling him everywhere all the time after that first meeting with Ram Dass and then after traveling around with Ram Dass in the States for a year and a half before going to India. He was huge. And then I saw this little guy in a blanket, and I thought like, “Wait a minute, how does all that fit into that blanket?” I don’t know. It was like, how does this work? I got really confused. But I got over it. I got over it and I got completely attached to the body and I forgot about the space. So, that took a lot of getting over. I don’t know. It’s not much of an answer, but when you go, the more you go through and survive, you can start to trust that you’re going to make it, regardless of how you feel. Sometimes it feels like you’re not going to make it, but we’ve all survived so many difficult situations in our lives and we’re still here. Maybe we could relax a little? I don’t know. What do you think? Fear is a big thing. Fear is very crippling. But fear itself never hurt anybody. It’s a feeling that comes and goes. There’s reasons it arises in us for sure, but the more we get used to letting go of whatever pulls us away from whatever we are thinking about or concentrating on, every time you come back, it’s training, it’s mind training, and you get more used to what it feels like not to be lost in dreamland, or absorbed in thoughts, or thinking or planning, or the past. I mean, every moment is either that everything, it’s either that you’re thinking about the past or imagining the future or judging how you are now. So, it gets easier and easier to notice the more you, the more practice you do, to notice when you’re gone. Of course, when you’re really gone, you don’t notice until you’re back. But how does that happen? Shri, Ram, Jai, Ram, and you’re thinking about, “Oh man, what’s on Netflix tonight? Yeah, right. Okay.” Oh. How did that happen that you notice you weren’t paying attention? That’s a great moment. Because we’re not doing that. We’re gone. And yet, oh, we woke up. So, if you understand a little bit about cause and effect, nothing can happen without a cause. What could the cause be of waking up? We must have planted seeds of waking up already or we’d never wake up. So, that’s the work we’ve already done, coming into fruition and waking us up, bringing us home. But don’t think about it too much. But it’s there. You notice, you come back. I mean, I remember once I got asked to sing at this teacher training for this yoga studio. So, I showed up and the teacher who was going to train these poor people started haranguing them. And there were pictures of all the deities on the wall, and this person was going, “If you don’t know what all these, every one of these beings are, you’ll never be a good yoga teacher.” I wanted to commit Hara Kiri. I just wanted to get out there. I couldn’t, but there was nothing I could do. Man, the deities is who we are. It’s our true nature, home base. And we’re always home, but we’re not paying attention. So, all we have to do is train ourselves to let go of what’s taken us away, and come back. Let go, come back, let go. When you let go, you are back. You don’t have to then find back. You notice, you’re gone, you’re home. And then you try to stay with the sound of the name if that’s what you’re doing, or with the flow of the breath or whatever, but you can’t. The personal will can’t do that. You’re gone again, then you wake up, then you’re back, and you stay with the sound, but you’re gone. You just watch it happen again and again, over and over. And little by little you, you’re not gone so, long. That’s over time. One of the definitions of meditation is becoming familiar with getting used to being here. Someone asked Ramana Maharshi, what’s the result of Raama Japa, the repetition of Raam’s name? He said, Raa is reality. Ma is the mind. Their union is the fruit of Raam. Japa, utterance of words is not enough. The elimination of thoughts is wisdom. So, the reality, when the mind merges with that reality… mind is an interesting word. So, what we usually call mind is just thoughts. The mind is like the sky and the thoughts are like birds flying through the sky. The birds are not the sky. The mind is the awareness in which all of that happens, in which we’re always present, inside of that space. There’s no place we could ever be except here, but our stuff pulls us away all the time, all day long, all life long, and then… next life. Q: Thank you, KD. Q: Thank you, first of all, and Nina and Robert, everyone for being here. You mentioned how in that experience with Ram Dass, you saw or felt what was real, and that was that everything you wanted could exist. And like beings like Maharajji, Neem Karoli Baba are love, I’ve heard you say. And they remove the dirt from your eyes so you can see your true self. And these things are, in my experience, easier around beings like yourself and Nina and Robert, and so on. And you mentioned how quickly we forget and fall off this mountain, and Grace will, you fall on your face instead of to a horrifying death. What can we do to maybe fall off that mountain less often? Like, this is easy because I can walk down the road and Krishna Das is live in front of me and chanting in a room with people. But by the time you leave, I’m picking up a six-pack, and hitting the weed showcase in Woodstock sounds good. Why is it so easily that we forget and like neglect things that feel so, in harmony and like chakras balanced, good. Just keep doing this and then before I’m out the door, I forget everything you said. KD: That’s just who we are and there’s nothing to do about it. You have to be you. Inside of that, you are waking up slowly at your own speed. You can’t go faster, and you can’t slow down either. It’s happening at its own speed. It is a question of what you want. If we really wanted to be awake and present, really wanted, we would be, but we’re very conflicted. We have all kinds of things we want, so many programs running. You want this, you want that. But yeah, you take a little bit of that on the side, too. You’ve got to be you, but you’ve got to learn to love that, too and accept that’s who you are and just not fight it. No sense fighting who you are. But when you cultivate a practice, if we don’t plant the seeds of the things you want, we won’t get them. They don’t, the seeds don’t come from Outer space. They come from within us. The seeds of paying attention, the seeds of the repetition in the name, the seeds of coming back to the breath, the seeds of the mantras. This is what we can do to help ourselves. All those practices, all those things. Reading the books about the saints, how they lived, what they did, getting that kind of inspiration in our lives. There’s so many videos about so many Great Saints, but I watch Korean serial killer movies. Hello? I could be watching a video about the 16th Karmapa, but I’m watching a Korean serial killer movie. That’s me. What can I do about it? Well, when it’s over, when this 49 episode thing is finally over, I’ll never watch another one. I’ve said that a few times. It’s just who I am. It’s okay. But inside of that, at the same time I’m still doing a little bit of practice once in a while, and inherent in everything you said is a lot of self-judgment. And as long as you believe everything you think, you’re fucked. Just like the rest of us, we believe everything we think. Excuse me, why? Well, we do. And the thoughts, they’re showing up in this moment from the past or from, they’re like waves coming off a big storm in the far-off ocean of time, and now they arrive here and we think we’re thinking, and then we think we’re not thinking. So, we’re just becoming aware of the thought in this moment. And you go, “I’m thinking.” No, you’re not. You’re just glued to that thing, identified with it temporarily until it dissolves. But those programs, those repetitive thoughts and unconscious ways that we limit ourselves and judge ourselves and criticize ourselves and all that stuff, we’ve really been trained well to do that. So, it takes time to unwind that stuff. It just does. And really, I think of spiritual life as a ripening process more than anything else. You plant the seeds and as time goes on, they grow, and they literally change you from the inside. They change your experience. They change how you see yourself. They change how you go through your day. As these seeds that we ourselves plant along, with the grace to plant them in the first place, they change the way we navigate our lives. They change how we see other people. It’s like you’re born and there’s no sun and you grow up and it’s dark all the time, and you think this is the way it is because it’s always been that way. This is the way it is. And then, the sun starts to rise, and a little light comes into the world and all of a sudden everything looks different. That’s what happens on the inside. Everything starts to look different, naturally, as we release our stuff because it is different. It’s not how we think it is. We are completely involved, more or less, with our subjective version of ourselves, and life, and people around us, and our judgments, the likes and dislikes. The third patriarch of Zen said, “The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences.” Okay, well next. So, yeah. So, anyhow, that’s the deal. So, you just have to chill. Everything that you think about yourself is something you think about yourself, but you do, and you believe it. We all do. That’s what makes us, that’s where we share the same kind of bandwidth, mostly. We can drive on the same roads and stop at the red and go on the green. We share a bandwidth, and as time goes on, it does change. So, before we get there, Sri Ramakrishna, who was a very great saint in the 1800s, he talked about how the repetition of the name works. He said every repetition of the name is a seed, and just like a tiny seed can have a huge tree in it. So, does every repetition of the name have reality in it. And he said, the seeds of the repetition of the name are caught by the wind and they’re blown around. And some of those seeds land on the roof of an old house in the jungle somewhere. Right? And they get stuck between the clay tiles on the roof, and then time, seasons, snow, rain, sun, everything. Years go by, and the tiles begin to soften a little bit as time goes on. And when they get soft, the seeds start to grow, and the roots of the seeds start to grow. The seeds of the repetition of the name, they start to grow, and they destroy the roof of the house, and they keep growing, and they destroy the walls of the house. He says, that house is who we think we are, our version of ourselves, our subjective, delusionary, separate self, and that separate self was created by Karmas. The house was built for certain reasons, but when the walls of the house are gone, there’s only open space. Nothing is lost. You recognize your oneness with the whole universe. You’re no longer limited to the house, which is who we think we are in this, that house. But you notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, you’ll feel like this, or you’ll feel like that, or it’ll be blissful or anything like that, because it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point of it. The “what it feels like,” the experiences that might come as the house is being dissolved and broken down, and at the end there’s no walls. There’s no version of a “me” anywhere left. You’ve recognized reality. So, that’s why you simply plant the seeds. You do your practice, and you live your life in the best way you can. And we try to treat other people the way we would like to be treated. That’s one thing, one possible thought to keep in mind as we go through our day, in terms of how we meet each moment, how we meet each person that arrives in our lives. Because if we could treat other people the way we would like to be treated, the world would be a different place immediately. But it takes tremendous awareness and strength to be able to do that. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of work on oneself to release oneself from the grip of likes and dislikes and wants and all that stuff, to be freed from that so that you can be present. It’s something that takes time and dedication. When singing the divine name becomes continuous, all other thoughts cease and one is in one’s real nature, which is invocation or absorption. We turn our minds outwards to things of the world and are therefore not aware that our real nature is always invocation. That’s from Ramana Maharshi, also. “Invocation” really means clinging to one thought, to the exclusion of all others. That’s the purpose of it. It leads to absorption, which ends in self-realization or to surrender.   Coming to America and the Vindhyavasini Q: I was curious about what your re-entry was like for you, when you came back from India to the United States? KD: Last year you said? You mean the first time? Q: And how you kind of found your… Well, my philosophy at that time… “Well, he’s sending me back, all right, fuck it, I’ll party.” My idea was to get as far out on the limb as I could, and just before it broke, to come back to him. So, I got out on the limb as far as I could go, and just before it broke, He left the body. Talk about fucked. I was fucked forever. And I spent the next 21 years hating myself. That’s how I came back. It took a long time to get over that, because he actually wrote to me, He had somebody… One day, He looked around, he said, “Where’s Krishna? Das?” The guy who knows everything. They said, “Baba, You send him to America.” “Nay. Tell him to come back. I want to see him. I want to hear him sing. Tell him to come back now.” So, I got a letter. It’s a long story, but I didn’t go. I betrayed… just like that, like nothing. I betrayed the love of my life as if it was nothing. I was so lost and so immersed in my own shit that I didn’t even know what I was doing, but just like that. “I love him. I’m such a great devotee. I sing to Him,” and in a split second, I betrayed it as if it was nothing, and I had to live with that for a long time. Just part of the show. Anybody? Oh, hi. Q: So, part of my rehabilitation from being strictly raised Irish Catholic has been following the teachings of Ram Dass, particularly his teachings about unworthiness and worthiness, and through my kind of contemplation about this, I’ve discovered it really shows up as self-hatred and self-loathing, and how this is stemming from the kind of indoctrination of fear by, really, the western religions, in my case, Catholicism. And in kind of investigating this, I found that the Eastern religions don’t, or just Eastern cultures, don’t really experience this phenomenon of self-hatred. There’s this story that Sharon Salzberg tells that she had an opportunity to ask His Holiness a question. And so, she asked him, what do you think of self-hatred? And his Holiness answered, “What’s that?” KD: Q: Yeah. And so, what I’ve noticed is that the Eastern traditions have a much deeper sense of honoring and regard for the sacred feminine, which the Western traditions do not, and there’s rampant denial and repression of the sacred feminine and of women in general. And so, as you just spoke about your own experience with self-hatred, I can assume that you’ve had some experience with overcoming it. KD: I’m an expert. Q: I’m just wondering how your, one, your relationship with the sacred feminine on the subtle plane evolved as you hopefully overcame your self-hatred, and two, how your relationship with women on the physical plane may have changed as you overcame self-hatred. KD: That’s a big chunk. Okay. One something at a time. First of all, there’s another story about His Holiness the Dalai. Lama. These Christian missionaries came to see him, and they said, your Holiness, what’s your idea of sin? And he thought for a minute, and he said, “That’s kind of a Christian thing, isn’t it?” They don’t have that. Paap. The word for sin usually is paap, which means to burn. Correct, Robert? Robert Svaboda: Not exactly. KD: Not exactly. Tell… Robert Svaboda: well, what you’re thinking of is paschat tapam, which means burning with regret. Paap is just a word that basically means karma that is unwisely performed. KD: Yeah. Okay. Which you suffer from. Robert Svaboda: Which you suffer from. KD: So, yeah, there’s no real concept like that, like original sin… Robert Svaboda: I mean, there’s plenty of guilt in India, but there’s no word for guilt in India. KD: A lot of times Indian people will come to talk to me and, oh boy, it is just how did, there’s a whole different family structure. The issues are not exactly the same as ours. But a lot of it has to do with our relationship with our physical mothers. Once a couple was having a problem and they came to Maharajji and he said to the guy, “Just see her as your mother.” He said, “I hate my mother.” He, “What? What did he say? What did he say?” Westerners are really strange. Early on, when I started getting interested in this stuff, I was very much into Kali. I really loved, I got very attracted to the idea of Kali and the Goddess and Durga, and Maharajji made me the pujari of the Durga temple also, for a while. There was a new temple he had built in the courtyard to Durga, and they brought in a pujari, but they caught him stealing the money in the donation box. They sent him home and brought in a second guy. They caught him stealing the money. So, they brought a third guy. They caught him stealing the money. So, the Temple Trust came to Maharajji and said, “Baba, we can’t find a priest or Pujari that won’t steal.” “My priest won’t steal.” “So, who’s that?” “Krishna Das.” So, that was my qualification. Guru is everything. Guru is male, female, and beyond all that. He could be the sweetest, sweeter than the sweetest mother. He was a mother to us and a father, and everything, even still, and then when he left the body, Siddhi Ma was there. She took care of us for so, many years and actually there’s a story. Near Allahabad, there’s a place called Vindhyachal, the Hill, Vindhyah Hill, and on that hill, there’s an ancient temple to Vaishnavi Devi, Vindhyavasini, Durga Devi, the form of Vaishnavi Devi who lives on this hill, this very sacred place. So, one time, Maharajji and Siddhi Ma and others were in a car and they were on their way up there to do Puja at the temple. But it got late in the day. They started late, and so the temple was going to be closed by the time they got there. So, halfway up, Maharajji says, “Pull over.” So, they pulled the car over and he gets out of the car and Ma was sitting in the back. He opens the door, he sits down on the ground, and he took all the utensils for the puja that they were going to do to the Murti on the hill. And he worshiped Siddhi Ma as Vindhyavasini Durga Devi. And the temple that he built in Kainchi, which is where Ma lived, is in Vindhyavasini, Durgadevi. That’s one of her forms. So, living with Ma, being with Ma was extraordinary. This, it’s hard for me to talk about it, because for 30 years she didn’t want anybody talking about her, and now she can’t stop us. But still, it doesn’t come out easy. But she was so great with the Westerners. She never judged us. She always loved and supported us and helped us, and we were really stupid. I mean, the level of stupidity that we were functioning under was… is… extraordinary. Forget “was.” But she never said a word, and she knew everything, and she just loved us. And that love, that love was more important than the blood in our veins. But still, the programs are running, they don’t go away so fast. The glue that holds us to that stuff is super, super, duper glue. But over time, it dissolves. And we no longer believe that shit about ourselves so much. In fact, I can actually tell that I mope around less than I used to. Really. I mean, I was born a moper. I spent my whole life moping around, but I hardly mope around now. I miss it. I really do. There’s something to moping around. Sometimes I do it just for fun, like, “fucking-a god damn piece of shit.” I mean, it’s like a home base, but I don’t go there very much anymore. My mother came to India after I’d been there for two years. I was in the living in the temple with Maharajji, and one day He looks at me and said, “Is your mother coming to India?” I said, “My mother? No.” Right. Okay. Later that day, a message arrives from town. Your mother called. She wants to talk to you. Oh, shit. So, I went to the town, and I called the local operator that called the town operator that called the county operator that called the national operator that called the international operator that booked the call. It took like 12 hours, “Hi mom.” “I want to come to India.” I said something to my mother that, if my daughter said it to me, I would lock her in a room and give her food once a week. I said, “I have to ask my guru.” “What? Why’d you say? What?” “I’ll call you tomorrow.” I said, “Maharajji. My mother wants to…” “Let her come.” So, she came. She had an idea. She’d seen pictures of Maharajji, because I sent some pictures back to my sister and everything. So, she had an idea that Maharajji’s nose was the same as her father’s nose, and she was going to come to India to see if that was true. Yeah. So, the whole time she was in India, she looked like this. I had to leader around. It was amazing. So, but it was good for us. So, we spent like 10 days in the hills seeing Maharajji every couple of days, and then we had to go down to the plains, she wanted to see the Taj Mahal and a couple other places. So, coming out of the temple. So, the temple is kind of below the road. There’s the road and you go down these steps and a bridge across the river, and then you walk down into the temple. So, we said goodbye to Maharajji and we walked out up the steps, and we’re up on the road, and I opened the door to the car for her to get in, and she turns and she looks back down into the temple. And Maharajji was just sitting on the tucket and she completely, she burst out crying. She exploded in tears, and I had to catch her so she didn’t fall. And I had to like, pick her up and kind of get her into the car. She totally lost it. She just was weeping. She just broke in half, and she cried for like an hour as we were like, driving down. It was amazing. She never knew what that is, but she, at that point in her life, she was still drinking. She was an alcoholic. And I think she went through like three rehabs before she stopped drinking. And then, when I’d be singing in the city, sometimes people from Long Island would stop and pick her up and bring her into the city, and they would ask, they’d say, “You met Maharajji?” And she’d start talking and she’d be like, but she couldn’t maintain that, but the hook went in, and that, that hook will never come out. So, it, it was interesting. She wasn’t a happy camper. But by the end of her life we had pretty much worked most of this stuff out. I told her to bring the best cashmere sweater she could find, right? So, she brought this beautiful sweater, and she brings it over, and Maharajji starts abusing the the Indians. “You miserable shits. You never bring me anything. This woman’s come all the way from America. Look what she’s…” He puts on the sweater, and they loved it. I mean, it’s teasing. Not really abuse, but you know, all the pictures of Him with the blue blanket. This is one of the most pictures that you see. There’s a red turtleneck, a maroon turtleneck he’s wearing. That’s my mother’s sweater. Is it there? No. I have no pictures of Him around here. Bob said he was going to put some pictures up. Bob used to come by the temple because he had a Volkswagen bus. He had to drive people to the hospital in Nanital from Almora, and he drove by Kainchi a number of times while we were there, while Ram Dass was there, but he never came in because he was mad at Ram Dass, and so he never saw Maharajji. Yeah. It’s a long story from the old acid Davis at Millbrook, and Ram Dass was… it’s a long story, but he was mad at Ram Dass, so he never stopped and went in the temple and he drove by it like this. Wow. Talk about regret. He regrets. Q: Thank you. It’s interesting that you just mentioned Bob Thurman being in India, because I was just wondering, although it’s, you can see that your hearts are in the same place as if you discuss with one another, just your different approaches and of your sacred practices between Bhakti and Tibetan Analytical Buddhism. KD: Was that a question? Yeah. I was wondering if you discuss it with one another. I just haven’t heard you talk about a different angle. KD:I take a lot of Buddhist teachings. A lot of Buddhist teachings. I go to a lot. I have, there are lamas I’ve been studying with for years. Q: So, you’re still doing that? Okay. I didn’t realize that. KD: Because, the Hindus or the Indians, they worship the car. You know, they do puja, they wash the car. The Buddhists, they tell you how it fucking works. When it breaks down, you can fix it. When the car breaks down in India, they just do some more puja and then it goes. But the Buddhists know how to fix the engine, the brakes, everything. Q: I didn’t realize that. Okay. KD: Well don’t take it to heart. One day Maharajji grabbed my book. Let me see what happened. Oh yeah. He grabbed my notebook. I had two notebooks, a diary, and then I had a notebook where we wrote out prayers and stuff from different traditions, so, he grabs it and he opens it up and he says, “What’s that?” He didn’t, supposedly he didn’t read English, right? He says, he goes down, stops at this one page. “What’s that?” And I looked. I said it was this Buddhist prayer. The song of Mahamudra. I said, it’s Buddhist. He said, “Translate some.” So, I couldn’t. So, the Indian guy there, he translated. He goes, “Teek. Correct. Very good.” I went, “What? What? What’s he talking about?” So, then he keeps going through the book and He, we had made these postage stamps, like a page of postage stamps of him, these little… he come across one of these stamps and he goes, “Who’s that?” I said, “Baba, it’s you.” “No! Buddha.” Interesting. And so, so many of us have done Buddhist meditation courses and things. And there’s another little story. So, the previous Karmapa, the 16th Karmapa, the head of the Kagyu sect, was an extraordinarily great Being. He was really special. And Maharajji had, there was a Westerner, Larry Brilliant, Dr. Larry Brilliant, who Maharajji sent forth to ultimately eradicate smallpox in India. They went all around India, inoculated everybody. It took years, but they, but it was Maharajji who got him doing that. So, at one point they had gone all through India and inoculated everybody. And now they were going around again to check and make sure there were no outbreaks of smallpox. And they were in Sikkim and they went to visit the Karmapa. And Karmapa said, “What are you doing?” And Larry told them, and He said, “Oh, no problem. The king is my disciple. You’ll be able to go wherever to check everything.” And then he says to him, “What’s your spiritual thing? What do you do?” We never knew what to say because all we did was sit around with Maharajji and eat and sing. It wasn’t like we did anything. So, how do you tell somebody that? So, he just, he took out a picture of Maharajji, and he hands it to the Karmapa. The Karmapa goes, “Oh, the teachings of all Bodhisattvas are the same, even if they appear different.” And then he points to his altar, and he says, “You see those statues? Mahasiddhas.” He points to the Mahasiddhas, then points at the picture. “Mahasiddha.” And then couple of days later, he asked Larry and his wife if they wanted to take refuge. There’s a ceremony where you take refuge in the Triple Gem, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. It’s an initiation of sorts. So, they said, sure, yeah. But actually, on the day they went up on the roof and there was a whole Puja and an altar. Larry got nervous and he says to the Karmapa, he said “Your Holiness, do I have to give up my Guru?” And he said, “No, I’m going to give you refuge in your Guru, the way I give refuge in the Buddha. I’m going to give you a refuge in your work, the way I give you refuge in the Dharma, etc.” Like that. So, same. One thing. There was also a Lama that Maharajji met who had escaped from Tibet after the Chinese, and he was just wandering around. And he took care of him for two years. He called him Tibeti Baba and he made sure he had a place to stay and everything. And one day, early in the morning, Maharajji is banging on his door. He opens the door. Maharajji said, “Don’t listen to them. Whatever they say, don’t listen to them.” And then he went away. Lama doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Later in the day, the Lama’s guru’s brother arrives at this place to bring him back. His guru was now in Darjeeling, I think it was. And he wanted him to come back because he was his meditation master. He ran the retreats. So, the Lama comes to Maharajji and said, “Baba, they wanted me to come back.” And Maharajji said, “Don’t go. We love each other so, much. Don’t go. We’ll stay together our whole lives.” He said, “But Baba, he’s my guru.” “You must go. If you don’t go, your sadhana won’t bring fruit.” So, the Lama says, “But Baba, we’ll meet again.” Maharajji says, “Yeah, we’ll meet again. But after you die.” We’re so, hard on ourselves, we Westerners. We, whatever we are, we’re so, hard on ourselves. It’s not easy to let go of that. It’s so, ingrained in us, but we’re so busy being distracted and busy, and avoiding real love and not letting it, allowing it to show up in our lives. But through the repetition of the name, everything is accomplished. So, whatever else you do, try to remember that. Just like me in the middle of a serial killer movie, I remember that for 10 seconds or less. It’s a guarantee. Really, what else can I tell you? It’s a guarantee. He said that. He meant it. He knows what he’s talking about. Through the repetition of the Names, everything is accomplished. So, whatever else you do, what other practices you do, keep in mind that you can always do this practice. You don’t need to be initiated. You don’t have to wear holy clothes. You don’t have to stand on one leg. You don’t have to be vegetarian. You don’t have to give up serial killer movies. Nothing is required except the repetition of the Name. And then anything else you want to do is good. And all the names are the names of the One.       The post Call and Response Ep. 85 | Dada Mukerjee, Maharajji, and the Practice of Ram Naama appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 83 | Recovery, India, Letting Go “Ultimately, nothing ever happened, nothing ever will, there is no one and there never will be any one. No one’s separate from anybody else. It’s all one, all the time and always has been. Nothing ever happened. Obviously, when you stub your toe, that makes no sense. It hurts. So, we have to find a way to deal with that pain. You have to learn not to stub your toe. Pay more attention. Up-levelling it intellectually is not useful, as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s based on a fear of engaging with life for most of us. Not that it’s not ultimately true, but here, now, we have to get in the battle of life and go after what we want and find out what we want.” – Krishna Das Q: Hi KD. KD: Hi. Q: Actually, every question answered so many thoughts I had in my mind. The spirit in chanting did a major role in my transformation and especially through this mantra to the divine mother, Ma Durga. Can you explain a little bit about that? KD: Which one? Q: Ma Durga. Durga Ma.Yeah, it’s unbelievable what I felt when I chant that. KD: Yeah. Q: It’s a sort of divine connection. KD: Wonderful. Why do you want me to screw it up for you? Sounds like you’re doing just fine. You know? Don’t ask me to ruin it. The experience of the Name is your experience. That’s it. You don’t need to think about it. Just move into it more fully. Always. Every time. You don’t need this. It’s useless.   Hi. Q: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed listening to you last night and also especially today with this format. So, I’m glad you like it, too. KD: Good. There’s two of us, then. Q: You know, you were just talking about the selfishness and I’ve been in recovery for the past two decades and I’ve found myself here. I’ve really, you know, heard a lot of what you said today has really resonated with me and I believe you have a past with addiction and I was wondering what your feelings are about that and… KD: A path with? Q: A past with addiction, and what your thoughts and feelings are on addiction. KD: Well, it just doesn’t work. Bottom line. You know? Good luck with your addiction but it doesn’t work. So, I’m not a fan of anything that doesn’t work. And I’ve told many times how I was strung out on freebase cocaine for a couple of years and so people think I’m an expert on addiction. I mean, no offense, but I don’t know anything about it. I was saved, literally, by my Indian father and Maharajji. They just saved me. I’d flown in from California. Ok, Mr. Tiwari was coming from India to visit. Now, I was very close with this family for many years and I was actually treated like the eldest son in this family and I really treasured that and so, Mr. Tiwari came to America to visit with the devotees. He flew to Canada first. I was living in California and I was very addicted to freebase cocaine. And I flew into New York and I had enough to smoke for one night and I was up all-night smoking and then I ran out and I was scrounging around the floor. I was smoking lint from socks. Anything that looked like anything to smoke, I was smoking. And then I flew to Canada the next day and I drove out to the place, a couple of hours outside of Montreal where he was visiting. And I walked into the room where he was sitting. He had his back to the door. He was talking to another friend of mine and I walked into the room and as I walked into the room, I felt this, I don’t know what, like a forcefield and I stopped and I was just about to kind of back away, get away, I wasn’t even thinking, I was just like, and he turned and he looked at me, he said, “You, promise me now you will give up cocaine! Promise me now!” Like that. I said, “Ok.” And that was it. From that moment to this moment, gone from my consciousness. And I just want to tell you, if it had been up to me, there was no way. I was gone. I was on my way out. I could not deal with that. I could not get sober myself. “You.” And I couldn’t say no to him. I mean, it wasn’t an option. I would do anything he ever asked me to do. So, I just said, “ok.” And that was it. I don’t know. I guess they wanted the kid to live. Otherwise… So, but I was, I had just a black hole in my heart. And this is after being with Maharajji, you understand? After my time in India. This is in the 80s. I was still ridiculous. Completely meshuga. Meshuga? That’s what I got. So, they took it away from me. They just took it away. There’s no way I could have ever let go of that. So, I have tremendous respect for anyone who’s dealing with those issues because I know I couldn’t have. And I know how hard it is. And I also know what’s at stake and how difficult it is, so, that’s it. And how much it’s worth to be in the battle, by the way. And how much, what that means, to cherish one’s self enough to enter into battle with one’s own darkness and one’s own hungers because after all, it’s a desire for bliss. It’s a desire to be free from suffering. But it doesn’t work. That’s what I mean by that. It doesn’t free us from suffering. It creates more and more and more. So, there’s nothing wrong with the desire. It’s a good desire, to be free. But we’re not actually. We’re putting ourselves in bondage, which is just one of the ways we get fooled by our own stuff. When we look outside of ourselves for something that can give us that, what we want. Hi. We’re gonna sing. Yeah, no. We’ll be there in a second, but I mean, the woman who asked to sing, two hours ago, she went home to listen to me on cd. You can’t please everybody, what are you going to do?   Q: Hi, Krishna Das. KD: Hello there. Very good. Q: I’m trying to wake everyone. KD: Ok, thank you. You woke me up to. Q: In recent times, how have you been spending your time when you visit India? KD: Oh, I go up to the mountains and visit the people that I knew for all these years, you know, wander around here and there. Been hanging out in the jungle with a nice Baba sometimes. And also, I’ve been singing in India, you know. I get so many emails from Indian people, you know, so sweet. You know. “I’m your devotee. You are my Guru. Please come sing. I want to see you.” You know? Delete. You know, I mean, I can’t. You know, enough already. But, I do go. So, I said to Siddhi Ma, I said, “Ma,” and She was always telling me to rest. Take care of myself. Get enough rest. Don’t sing too much. Don’t travel too much. So, once I said to Her, “Ma, you know I ‘m getting all these emails from India. You know, they want me to come sing. You know, should I accept?” And I figured She’d say, “No, no stay home.” I said, “Should I accept?” She said, “You must.” Why did I ask? So, I’m screwed. Now I have to go and sing. Any other questions? And then I go from pharmacy to pharmacy and get all the medicine I need to get over the dysentery and the malaria and everything else, you know? I love it very much.   Q: Hi. KD: Hello. Q: Some of the Vedanta yoga teachings… KD: Say what? Q: The Vedanta yoga teachings… some of them teach that everything in your life is already destined to happen. Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. KD: Really? What a concept. Q: Well, because you were talking about free will, and I’m just wondering how that Vedanta teaching… KD: Talking about what? Q: Will. And I’ve, I mean, I’ve had, I’ve heard people say, some Vedanta yoga teachers that, it’s like your life is a film that’s already been filmed and that your choice in your free will is how you respond to suffering or not suffering, but I was just curious to ask you your perspective on that. KD: People say all kinds of shit, you know. All I can tell you is Maharajji never spoke about that stuff. He said, “Serve people. Feed people and remember God.” If that talks to you, if that makes sense to you, fine. If it doesn’t, fine. Everybody’s selling something. You know? What are you going to do? You’re looking for a button to push to relieve you of the job of living your life, making your decisions. You’re looking for a way to make it ok. You’re looking for a concept to lay on your life that makes sense. I don’t think there is one. Give her the mic, where’s the mic. Finally, we’re getting into it here. Oh, it’s too late? The mic’s away? Ok. Some people say things like that, but the point is, those kind of statements, they’re very difficult to understand. One thing is, there’s ultimate reality, ok? They say. Which is ultimately final, this is the way things are, and then there’s relative reality, which is our worlds. So, the two things, ultimate reality includes our reality but relative reality, which is the way we live, all the stories, everything we see, it’s all relational. That’s included in relative, but relative reality doesn’t include ultimate truth. It’s all relative. It’s all subjective stories and our version of stuff. In relative reality, you just do the best you can. Ultimately, nothing ever happened, nothing ever will, there is no one and there never will be any one. No one’s separate from anybody else. It’s all one, all the time and always has been. Nothing ever happened. Obviously, when you stub your toe, that makes no sense. It hurts. So, we have to find a way to deal with that pain. You have to learn not to stub your toe. Pay more attention. Up-levelling it intellectually is not useful, as far as I’m concerned. I think It leads to, I think it’s based on a fear of engaging with life for most of us. Not that it’s not ultimately true, but here, now, we have to get in the battle of life and go after what we want and find out what we want. There’s no escape from that because, because every day we’re going on and on in one way or another and if we’re not paying attention, we’re not paying attention. If we’re not living in a way that satisfies us, how is that going to change unless we pay attention and notice it and understand it and find out why. So, yeah. Willpower doesn’t necessarily change the storyline because you don’t know what the storyline is. The storyline might be, yeah, on June 10th 2019, you decided to go this way. Well, that could have been the story, you just don’t know. You can’t, you know? One time, I was sitting with Maharajji and I was with one of my guru brothers. He had this book called the Ashtavakra Gita, which is the ultimate non-dual teaching book. I mean, it’s like, “there never was anything. It’s all one.” On like that. So, Maharajji sees the book. He said, “What’s that book?” So, he showed Him. “Oh, what does it say in there?” And the guy goes, “It says, it’s all One.” Which Maharajji always said. Maharajji goes, He looked at the Indian people and said, “These boys know everything.” You have to be it. You don’t need to hold onto it. You don’t need to understand it. You have to manifest it. One must manifest it in one’s heart and the only way to do that is to engage in some training, which is to keep coming back. Letting go, coming back. Letting go and coming back. As far as I can see, that’s the way you get the strength to let go. And you keep letting go until there’s no more letting go and no one to let go of anymore and then it’s a different ballgame. So, let’s practice letting go. The post Call and Response Ep. 83 | Recovery, India, Letting Go appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 81 | Not Getting What you Want Also: Kirtans VS. Bhajans, Judaism, Willpower “If you don’t allow yourself to feel that terrible disappointment and the pain of not getting what you want, you’re never going to move through it to get what you really want. You know, we can’t pretend that we don’t hurt. All of us hurt, that’s the deal. And we have to allow that to be in our lives. It’s a big part of being human, to allow that all the different kinds of suffering and pain, to allow ourselves to feel that. It makes us human and it bonds us with every other being on the planet, because we all suffer.” – Krishna Das Q: Yes. KD: Yes. Sir. Q: Every morning I met, in the place that I go, I have five cats, seven peacocks, several dogs, several other animals, and they all have expectation that they’ll be fed. I try to temper my expectation. What do you say to that? Should I? Or should I expect what they always expect? Not necessarily to be fed kibble or whatever they get, meow mix, whatever, but should I always expect that things that I want to have or think about or whatever, is not expecting something a way to expect it? KD: You mean, can you fool yourself? No. Q: Yeah. In some ways… KD: We can’t. We can’t really fool ourselves. Sometimes you just have to live with the fact that a particular thing you want, you won’t get. You know? Like, I wanted to be 6’8” 240 lbs power forward on a basketball team. But I was 6’1” 185, and that guy used to beat the shit out of me. So, I’m never going to be 6 ‘8” 240, no matter what I do. I had to live with that. And, in fact, you know, in my life, I really wanted to play basketball and I went to, I had a basketball scholarship to Brandeis and before my senior year, I ripped up my leg, ligaments in my right leg, and I didn’t get into shape in time and they took the scholarship back. I was destroyed. That was the only thing I wanted. I mean, I was playing music. I loved doing all that, but I was a basketball maniac and I was destroyed by that. My whole life changed that day that I ripped up my ankle, my leg. It was amazing And it was very painful. So, my friend and I were going to build a Harley. Back in the old days in the comic books, there was a little ad, you know, “Build a Harley Motorcycle.” So, we were going to get this kit for like $10, build a motorcycle and drive out to the West Coast and be lumberjacks. And the basketball coach for Stony Brook called me. It was his first year. His name was Herb Brown, Larry Brown’s brother. He called me, he said, “Hi, Jeff, whatchya doing?” I said, “Well, I’m going to go be a lumberjack.” He said, “Oh, don’t you want to play ball?” Yeah. So, I went to Stony Brook, which was great, because it turned out to be the drug and music capital of the East Coast. I played more games on LSD than any other drug. It was unbelievable. The coach used to have me come sit next to him in the front of the bus and he’d put his arm around me and he’d say, “It’ll be ok, it’ll be ok.” And I’d be, “Ok, ok.” It was amazing. So, you know, you have to live with it, you know. But if you don’t allow yourself to feel that terrible disappointment and the pain of not getting what you want, you’re never going to move through it to get what you really want. You know, we can’t pretend that we don’t hurt. All of us hurt, that’s the deal. You know. And we have to allow that to be in our lives. It’s a big part of being human is to allow that all the different kinds of suffering and pain, to allow ourselves to feel that. It makes us human and it bonds us with every other being on the planet, because we all suffer. And so, it makes you more human, you know? And then you look at other people and you see what they feel, and you can feel that. You can relate. And you know what a person’s going through and that makes you compassionate, without even pretending to be compassionate. You just automatically understand what that person in the street is feeling. And you see somebody yelling at somebody else with terrible anger and you know what that feels like, not only to the person they’re angry at, but what it feels like to be owned by that fierce passionate anger in your own heart that’s burning you alive. That’s just a part of being human.   KD: Hello. Q: Hi. I wanted to ask you a question, since you lived in India. What is the difference between kirtans and bhajans? KD: Well, you know, bhajans is usually a story, a song about a story, like something happened in the Ramayana or Krishna’s play, just like gospel songs, but kirtan is the repetition of the Name, only. I mean, more or less. You know, it’s India so anything is good. No problem. But, technically, one thing is one thing and another thing is another thing, you know? But yeah. So.   KD: HI. Q: Hello. My name is Maura. KD: Oh, really. Q: How are you? I saw you the other night. KD: I know, I’ve got you down. Q: We were talking. We’ve been talking. I just was, you said the other night when you played with David, you know, you’re just two old Jewish guys playing in a band and I was curious how you feel or felt or where does your Judaism come into play for you. KD: I’m about as Jewish as the pope. Q: Ok. So, there is none. KD: I also, I usually joke, I say, “I’m Jewish on my parents’ side.” I mean, culturally, I’m Jewish. I grew up in that culture to some degree, but you know, I mean, nobody in my family believed in God, believed that there really is something to find in the world other than fighting over the pope’s nose. Anybody know what the pope’s nose is? It’s the part of the chicken that goes over the fence last. That’s what they… at the table they would fight over that. You know, it was… Q: You’ve sat with rabbis, I’m sure. KD: You know, my grandparents were so good to me on both sides. Without them, I would be dead, you know. And I realized later that every other weekend, when I was sent to my grandparents’ house, that’s when my parents went to therapy. You know? So, I got all that wonderful love and caring and affection from my grandparents. Not that my parents weren’t loving, but my grandparents really… so culturally, there was, but you know, the other thing, they never talked about the holocaust. I never heard about it. And all of those people I grew up with, they had relatives there they never mentioned. So, it was interesting. But yeah, you know, and then, of course, my bar mitzvah. I was bar mitzvah’d, you know? So, we had the celebration at this place called the Club Jericho on Jericho Turnpike in Long Island. Really fancy. And by the end of the day, I had like $1,000 in checks in my pocket, people, all my relatives, gave me. My father comes up to me and says, “Give me the checks.” What? “Give me the checks. I have to pay for this.” That’s when Judaism went out the fucking window. Not one minute after that did I ever think I would want anything to do with this ever again. I was thinking of all the porn I could buy. I was 13 and I’d just became a man, so, what else do you do? No, you know, but, later on I came to appreciate it a lot more. I read a bunch of books about the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov was, I believe, was 16th century. He was an incredible saint. And you know what it means, Baal Shem Tov? It means, “The Master of the Good Name.” Hello? The Name. I don’t know, maybe he sang Sri Ram Jai Ram when nobody was looking. The Name, the Name. So, he was incredible. So, I had come to appreciate a lot of that mystical, but you know, I’m a one trick pony. I woke up in India. I always… this is what I do. This is what I am. You know? I can’t do anything else except some things.   Q: Hi. Can you hear me. KD: Yeah. Q: Ok. Thank you. I, maybe this is a little bit of a, you know, a for me question, but hopefully other people will appreciate it, too. KD: Don’t have hope. Q: I just want to acknowledge that we’re here in this space, like you had mentioned earlier, we’re here at Dharma’s place and I’ve seen you here before over the years, and I’m wondering maybe, if you could speak a little about your relationship with our teacher and if you want to share a story. Because I don’t really know much about it. KD: Dharma and I have spent very little time together physically, really. We love each other very much but we don’t, it’s never been, we’ve never had a lot of time to spend together. He would invite me to come sing to the teacher trainees at the old place and I would love to do that. It’s just kind of, we kind of know each other and love each other but we just haven’t spent a lot of physical time together. And of course, all the yogic teachers that I know, the older generation, they all used to come to Dharma for teaching. They all learn so much from him. He’s not just a yoga teacher. He’s a yogi. There’s a difference. And he’s a wonderful being. Yeah. Good. Good Being. It’s really not easy to be that. You have to really be that to be that. Ok. More? Or we can sing a little bit. Ok, yeah good. No, no. This is important. I don’t care if you don’t like it. It’s important to me. I go all around the world and I do this people all around the world and I want to tell you, they ask, it’s the same thing every time. Everybody wants the same thing. Everybody has the same issues, the same problems, a slightly different way of… the only place, two places… once, the first time I did a workshop in Zurich, they sat there like this for three hours. When the gong rang at three hours, they rushed me, and they all had questions. I said, “What’s been? For three hours, what have you been doing?” The other time was in Norway, ok. So, everybody, we had great singing, everybody was talking, there was one guy sitting like where you’re sitting, like this, the whole time. He didn’t move for three hours. And I thought, this guy’s a serial killer. What am I going to do with this guy? I’ve got to get out of here the minute I stop singing. So, I tried to get out, but everybody rushed the stage and they were waiting in line to talk to me and I saw he was like, in the line, so I was like smiling, “Hi, thank you, thank you so much.” And then the next one and all of a sudden, he’s there and he goes, “This was great!” All the sweat that I sweated for the first three hours was ridiculous. The guy, he was scary looking. This is why, we live in our own worlds, we’re projecting all the time on everybody else, you know. I don’t know who any of you are. A couple of you I might have some ideas. But basically, when I see you, you know, you’re playing your part in my dream, so I’m really playing your part in my world. Isn’t that incredible. So, when we talk like this we kind of bring the inside out and everybody can share so much of the same stuff. We’re all in the same place. We all want the same thing and we have all the same issues. So, I think this is great. And you came, so screw it, you’re dead. Where was it? Over there, yeah hi.   Q: Hi, I have a practical question. KD: You’re asking me practical something? Q: I probably should just email somebody, but it was exciting to ask you directly, and then I have a spiritual question if I get two for one. KD: I’ll see if I can tell the difference. Q: I sing with a few people in Knoxville, Tennessee. And it’s mostly bhajans for Ammachi, the Hugging Saint. KD: Sure. Q: And some Sai Baba bhajans, but I’ve been doing some Krishna Das in the mix and I always feel really guilty because I always think “Oh, you know, should I be paying somebody some royalties, like, if we perform?” KD: 50 cents a mantra. Q: Does it matter if it’s donation? Does it matter if there’s a fee? KD: Nah. Come on. It’s all free. You just, when you buy a cd, you know, then I can pay my rent, other than that there’s nothing you have to do. Yeah, no problem. Q: Thank you. KD: They don’t punish you for singing my stuff in there? Q: Everybody told me not to worry about it, but I’ve got a guilty conscience. KD: I used to sing a lot for Ammachi here in New York when she came but I came once and there was a battle going on for stage time. There were like, a lot of people wanted to sing, and they were like, fighting with each other. I just took my harmonium and went home. I was just like, fine let them have it. What do I care? It’s crazy. The kirtan wallah wars I call them. One in World War Two, Kirtan Wallah War Two. Ok, go ahead. Now, your spiritual question. This is going to be great. Q: It’s probably pretty standard. You tell a great story about willpower and when you learned about the need and purpose of it and I get that, and then there’s also an element of like, about surrender and I feel like I get that, as well, and what I have trouble with is when to do which and the balance between the two. KD: Well, it’s not quite like that, at least as far as I can see. Surrender, real surrender means dropping the separate self, the sense of a separate self, the sense, the belief that you’re you and not that you’re, that you’re actually who you think you are. So, that surrender, being able to drop that and being able to merge into the oneness, and without willpower, there’s not the slightest possibility in hell that will happen. You just don’t drop it. You have to transmute it. You have to let it go. You have to give it away. You have to move it over. You have to look to see through it. You have to analyze it. You have to understand it. You have to see your motivations. You have to be good to people. You have to care about yourself and others. It’s really, it’s the whole path. Surrender is the goal. It doesn’t mean giving up your will to somebody else. It means dropping your separate self and merging with the whole universe. Dropping it, just letting it go. You think you can do that without willpower? No possibility. But we don’t even use our will well. You know? She’s referring to a story I told. What happened to me once, I was in the jungle with this very very old yogi. He was 163 years old. This was back in the 80s. He’s still alive, I hear. I haven’t seen Him for many years. So, we were sitting together, and he looked at me and he goes, and he said, “You have to develop,” he said in Hindi, “Iccha-shakti”. Iccha is desire, shakti is power. Icchashakti is willpower or the power to get what you want. And my thought was, “What do I need that for?” And then he went like, “oh,” and then he did something. He could read your thoughts. It was ridiculous, so then he did something inside of me. He showed me, inside of me, what he saw, and I went, “Oh.” I didn’t see that. And I saw myself. I was doing nothing. Nothing. I was floating. I wasn’t doing anything to help myself be happy, even. I was just, I wasn’t doing anything. It was a really dark time in my life. It was in the 80s. And I saw that I had chains around my own ankles and I wouldn’t let myself go after the things I wanted in life for so many stupid reasons, you know? Oh, I might not get it. What’ll they think. All that stuff. It was amazing what he showed me. And from that moment was life changing in many ways, and it kind of led, it was one step on the, on the path of getting, becoming, starting to sing with people. It was one move in the right direction. Our wills are really compromised by all the conflicting emotions that we have and all the conflicting desires and all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves that we don’t like. So, we don’t, even when we use our will, our strength to go after something, the motivation for going after that particular thing is very confused. Very confused and it really doesn’t ever give us what we want, what we really want. And then, I saw, wherever that was, over there somewhere, I saw that there wasn’t worldly life and spiritual life. There was just me and my life and I was crippling myself in my daily life, my so-called worldly life. The life of my desires. How was I going to do something in the so-called spiritual realm? With no will, how am I going to calm my mind? It was the same will. There’s not two of me. There’s one of me. And if I wasn’t doing it over here, it wasn’t going to work over there, so it was very interesting. I had to start paying attention to myself in a different way. And you know, I think one has to find out that what one wants isn’t really what one wants, to some degree. You know, you have to live. You have to go for it. Even if it winds up that you just bash your head against the wall again at 100 miles an hour, because there’s no other way to learn. There’s no other way to find out that what you want, other than getting what you thought you want and finding out it wasn’t enough, or that it doesn’t last, or it’s not really what you want. It’s experiential. You can’t do it in your head. Maharajji sent me, after two and a half years, He looked at me one day, out of the blue as far as I was concerned and said, “Ok, go back to New York. You have attachment there.” What? What are you talking about? Forever I was going to live in India, you know? I had no plan to go back in my head, and now all of a sudden, I’m going back. He said, “You have attachment there.” I didn’t know what He was talking about. Hello. How are you, Mr. Attachment? Everything that happened to me, from that moment to this moment, is what He was talking about. I could not work through my stuff in India, in the way I was living in India at that time. And also, He was getting ready to leave as well. So that would have been very difficult to be there. So, He was telling me, I had to come back to America and deal with my stuff. It’s the only way to become free is to deal with it. There’s no fast track around it. It just doesn’t work that way. We misinterpret a lot of those things that we, oh, hello, Where were we? Willpower. Yeah, yeah, so you know, He sent me back. I would have, first of all, I was so sick. I had every disease you could get. I had it. Hepatitis. All kinds of parasites. Every kind. I wouldn’t have lasted long in India and, but there was no possibility of me working through my stuff in India. It just wasn’t going to happen. So, He sent me back. And I guess I’m ok with it. Eventually, I’ll probably get with the program. I don’t know. You know, He knew what was best for me and He knows what’s best for me and I try to listen to my own heart because that’s how He speaks to me. He didn’t tell me to go back to America and sing with people. He never told me to do that. I had to recognize that this was what I needed to do for me. And this is what’s happened, you know? I didn’t plan this. It just happened. So, it must be ok. But willpower is a very interesting thing. One can use it for so many different reasons, but if it’s the ability to keep yourself moving in the direction you want to move, ultimately.     The post Call and Response Podcast Ep. 81 | Not Getting What you Want appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 80 | He Knew Everything. There’s Only One Life “There’s nowhere to go where you’re not going to be. And there’s nothing that you’re going to be doing that’s somebody else is doing. You’re doing everything. So, all you need to add, all we need to add to our lives is paying a little attention to ourselves and why we do what we do and keep trying to clean up our act. That’s all. It’s not, there’s not two things going on. There’s only you and your life and your desires are beautiful. They will never give you what you really want, but that doesn’t mean you have to try to kill them, pretend they’re not there.” – Krishna Das Q: You’ve described to us, what it was like for you and your devotees to be in the presence of Maharajji. If you could just maybe let us have some insight into what was your sense of Maharajji’s, did He understand the depth of the effect He was having on His devotees? KD: He knew everything, you know? Everything. Who was that? Where was the question from? Ok. Yeah, no, He knew everything. Past, present, future. He knew everything you were thinking, everything you were feeling. It was hard to get used to, living in the presence of somebody who knew everything about you, every miserable thought, thing you’ve ever done, and He loved you more than you could ever even imagine loving yourself, or be loved by anybody? That was really intense. And when we could open to it, it was fantastic. But the other times, we just couldn’t bear it, it was like trying to look at the soon. You know, we were just like, whoa, you know? It was interesting. Opening, closing, opening, closing, and then He would look at us and giggle and we’d be open again. Because He didn’t care about our stuff at all. Not at all. He literally didn’t judge us. He knew everything, but He didn’t judge. Q: So, He just loved you? KD: He, well, no. He didn’t just love us. He loved us more than, loves us more than anything and He also was a siddha, is a siddha. A siddha is a being that has the ability to change the situation from the inside. He can ripen your karmas, He can change the way your life is going to unfold, and He did that for everybody that He, with whom He had work to do. And I have no idea how many people that was. It could have been millions and millions of people. You know, we were sitting with Him, I was sitting with Him and like, I was looking at Him and He went like this. So, He’s talking to people and all of a sudden, He goes like this and He saw me looking and He went, “The mind can go a million miles in the blink of an eye.” He just went… and I realized He had just gone somewhere and come back. It’s very extraordinary. It’s, I mean the closest we get to this stuff is kind of science fiction and comic books, you know. It’s just like, we don’t grow up with the capacity, almost, to feel something. It’s like, how many colors are there? Red, orange, green, blue? ROYGBIV, I learned that in High School. Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Indigo, Violet. Seven colors? Am I right? But it’s like there’s an eighth color that’s visible to those who can see it. But our eyes, our senses only can see, only can see those seven colors and every combination of that. But there’s an eighth color that’s here all the time but we don’t see it. And that’s interesting because we don’t see it, so we don’t believe it. And you should not believe anything you don’t experience yourself, by the way. Just because we’re talking about this stuff, don’t think you need to believe it. That’s not important. We need to believe ourselves and in ourselves and we need to deal with our lives as they are. Not to fantasize that there’s some other way of being. We have to deal with our shit as it is and learn to let go of it and learn to accept ourselves for who we are as we are and allow ourselves to breathe, really breath and just be in this world. It’s not necessary to believe any of this stuff about India or any of this stuff. It’s not necessary. I’ve been in India more than half my life, more than half, Jesus. Five-Sevenths of my life. And I can’t, I don’t necessarily believe that that stone sculpture in a temple is alive and real, but they do. You know? And nobody ever required me to believe that. Maharajji didn’t make us, He loved us, loves us as we are. He didn’t make us Hindus. He didn’t make us this or that. He helped us become human. That’s amazing. Human. With other humans. Wow. People everywhere. And it’s ok. When we asked Him, “How do we find God?” He said, “Serve people.” What? “What about, how do you raise kundalini, you know?” He said, “Feed people.” Feed people? What is He talking about? What is this? We just weren’t, we couldn’t handle it. It was too subtle. He was telling us not to think about ourselves all the time. Think about others. If we don’t think about ourselves, we won’t be unhappy. Because we won’t be thinking about ourselves. How simple is that? But how hard is it not to think about ourselves, right? It takes practice. So, He said, “Serve people. Feed people and remember God. Repeat the Names of God.” He was very big on that. And He said, over and over again, “From going on repeating these Names of God, everything is accomplished.” He said it. Ok, maybe five percent. Maybe, after 50 years. So, it’s not easy. But that’s what He said. “From remembering these Names, from repeating these Names, everything is accomplished. Everything is brought to fulness and completion.” Period. Amen. That’s the deal. Ok. Let’s get with the program. “I think I want to watch the Giants game.” It’s not so easy. The vasanas of our, of our mind and our own karmas keep propelling us into limited programmed reactive ways of thinking and being in the world everyday. We just can’t stop the flow. There’s no button to push. Nowhere. So, we have to do something. We have to start paying a little bit of attention, add a little bit of practice into our daily lives, start trying to figure out what it is we want. How do we want to feel? What do we want to do? When I started singing with people, nobody else was doing this, really, the way this is. So, I had nobody to follow or to ask, how do you do this? I had to listen to my heart. I had to do what I wanted to do. That’s what I’m still doing. I actually, I can’t believe I can actually live, I can do what I like to do in my life most of the time. How amazing is that? That’s not, you know. I grew up on Long Island, what were the odds of that happening. Right? Not much. So, it’s extraordinary. So, everybody has to find that. And you do it right where you are as your life is, right this moment. Everything in our lives is there. This is our karmic predicament at this moment. Now what? So, there’s no eraser, there’s no spray eraser. You can do like this one, erase him from our life, now that one. No. We have to find a way to deal with this stuff and still learn to listen to our own hearts and what’s good for us, what we need to do. Sometimes we have to do what we have to do and then you’re doing what you want to do because taking care of business is good. And there’s all kinds of business in our lives.   Q: Thank you. I do want to thank you for all that you do. You, Nina and everyone, all that you do in giving us, I want to thank you. KD: Ok. Q: I would like to know, in your experience, understanding that Hanumanji is immortal, if you have ever experienced in your relationship with the Chalisa, that He has physically come to sit by you in your chanting, over your 50 years. KD: First of all, about “immortal”: I don’t even know what it’s like to be alive, temporarily. So, immortal is kind of out of the question. I have no idea what that means. However, as far as Hanumanji coming and sitting by me, that would mean that, I don’t see Him that way. I feel a presence and I want to enter into that presence of Love when I sing. That’s my Guru, for me. He hasn’t come like a person or a thing as far as I can tell. That’s not the way I see it. Some people do see those things. They’re open in different ways. I totally honor that. It’s just not my deal. But when I sing, I feel it. That’s why I sing, is that the rest of the day sucks. The only time I’m really happy these days is when I’m singing, you know? But you would think I sang more, but I don’t. Like, I’m sure, you might think, “Wow, Krishna Das, He gets up in the morning, He takes a cold shower, then He eats some vegetables, then He puts on His dhoti and His holy clothes and He sits by the harmonium and goes into bliss.” That’s a nice fantasy. Maybe someday. Probably not this life. I’m doing the best I can. That’s all I can do. What else am I going to do? I try not to give myself too hard a time. But I’m not sure how successful I am most of the time. Ok?   Boy, I’m really good at avoiding questions today.   Q: Hi. Two quick things. They maybe slightly, they might be slightly different than my colleagues here, but, first of all, did you remember to record the UCONN women’s game before? KD: I did. Q: Good man. Good man. Secondly, it means a lot to all of us that come here and have practiced in this space with Dharma to have you here as the closing act, as it were. KD: Oh, yeah. It’s next week. They’re moving out of here. Let’s stay! We won’t let them move us. Q: I wanted to ask you, very selfishly, as someone who subscribes to the Sirius and listens to your channel often, if you might consider honoring Dharma’s kirtan band with a little more air time? KD: You know, one of the first things I learned to say in Hindi, was “Dekhenge”, which means, “We’ll see.” Is that two question? Oh, yeah, it was. I’m still avoiding them. Good. Keep going.   Somebody over here? There. Ok. Good.   Hi.   Q: Hey, KD. Thanks for coming. KD: Yeah. Q: I’ve heard you talk about there not being a divider barrier between the spiritual life and every day life. Can you talk a little bit about how you build up strength to bring those together? KD: they were always together. There’s not two lives. Are you, like, do you roll out of bed on both sides in the morning? What? There’s only your life. And everything’s a part of it, you know. There’s nowhere to go where you’re not going to be. And there’s nothing that you’re going to be doing that’s somebody else is doing. You’re doing everything. So, all you need to add, all we need to add to our lives is paying a little attention to ourselves and why we do what we do and keep trying to clean up our act. That’s all. It’s not, there’s not two things going on. There’s only you and your life and your desires are beautiful. They will never give you what you really want, but that doesn’t mean you have to try to kill them, pretend they’re not there. That’s what they do. You know, that’s not a good idea, as we know from all the problems with the priests and all the different organized religions, the problem that they never deal with the sexual energy, wind up being destroyed by it. So, it’s just a question of being alive and being true to yourself and learning how to do that, finding out who you are and what you want. That’s spiritual. There’s no “worldly” or “spiritual” as far as I’m concerned, you know. And Maharajji was totally in the world. He was totally available all the time and yet He was also totally present all the time. He never, everything was within that, you know? It’s not like there’s, nothing’s ultimately all good or all bad. It’s always a mixture of stuff. The point is, Buddha was very clear about this when He came out of the jungle. He said, “Oh, monks. Shit don’t work.” “Stuff does not work. Happiness will never come from stuff.” There’s always some dissatisfaction with objects. They never give us what we think they will give us. What we hope they will give us. You can’t squeeze water from a stone. It’s not meant to happen. But if you keep trying to do it, you suffer. Once you give up that activity that causes suffering, then there’s no suffering. If you don’t expect, when you sit down to a big meal, you eat, you eat, you eat, you understand without saying that, tomorrow you’ll probably have to eat again. Probably every day you’ll need to eat again. That doesn’t bother you because you don’t think ultimate final satisfaction will come from that meal. You know, and that’s the way it is with desire. It always has to be one more. More, more, more. Ultimately, we recognize how to live with that by seeing it clearly for what it is. At some point, you might decide to take some time off from your desires and see how that works. Usually, it doesn’t work very well. But, it’s useful to play with that and see how you are. But then you can, you know, you have to look at yourself. Is it because I’m afraid? Am I afraid of my desires? And if I am, why am I afraid? What’s, what is it? What is that fear? You know, you have to see yourself. You can’t, it’s up to each one of us to move through those places. It takes tremendous courage. It really does. There’s no two ways about that. It really takes courage to face ourselves and the incredible level of bullshit that we tell ourselves all day long. It’s very very very fierce. One time, I was in Mumbai with Maharajji. We had trailed Him. Long story, but we found Him in Mumbai and so, we were in this, every day we’d go to this apartment building, this beautiful new building and He was hanging out there. It was the son of a devotee. So, one day I was sitting, He was up on the bed lying down and I’m sitting, doing my spiritual practice, which was…He would sit this way, then He would sit up, then He would lie down this way. And then all of a sudden, after hours, He sits up like this and He looks at me and He goes, “Courage is a really big thing.” What’s going to happen? So, the Indian guy there said, “Oh, but Baba, God takes care of His devotees.’ Maharajji shot Him a look that could have destroyed a tank or something, and He said to me, “Courage is a really big thing.” Then He laid down and went to sleep again. There have been times in my life that I just had this very vague memory of those words and it was enough to save me from falling off a cliff or jumping off a cliff. It takes tremendous courage to really look at ourselves and see how conflicted we are about letting ourselves be happy. How hard it is to overcome the programs and all the betrayals and all the broken hearts. It’s really hard. But what else are we going to do. Eventually, you just say, “All right, I’m going to deal with this,” and you try to find a way to be more kind to ourselves. Buddha said that you could search the whole universe and never find a being more worthy of kindness and caring than yourself. So. Is that how we feel about ourselves? I don’t know. Only each one of us has the answer to that question. So, the chanting is a way of letting go of the programs for a little while and planting seeds of something else in our being. So, like I said, with Ramakrishna, I didn’t really finish that whole thing. So, the seeds of the repetition of the Name start growing at some point when the causes and conditions are good and then they destroy that house and He said, that house is who we think we are, right? So, when we’re no longer thinking that, so a house is a temporary structure and it’s built for a reason and when the walls and the roof are gone, the space was inside the house is just becomes the space that was outside the house. The division is gone. The difference between me and you and me and all the other “me’s” that bounce off each other all life long. That’s gone, and you live in the oneness of it all. You can still see other people. And you can see, and you can react and act with them and interact with them, but you know yourself to be the living inner presence of all beings. You don’t lose anything by not believing you’re who you think you are anymore. You gain everything. So, and you notice what Ramakrishna didn’t say. He didn’t say it’ll feel like this or it’ll feel like that and then you’ll have this. Because it isn’t about that. People ask me, “what do I experience when I sing?” And I say, “How do I know?” I sing. And anything that comes up, I let go and I sing. I don’t write it down. “Oh, then he thought about this.” Why would I? That’s not the deal. The deal is to sing. One hundred percent. At least 100 percent of my usual three percent. I’m not interested. I have no idea what happens. I sing. That’s it. Next. Then I go home. But if you’re doing spiritual practice and you’re like, evaluating the whole way down, “Yeah, this is a really good meditation, this is fantastic, I haven’t had a thought in maybe four seconds. Wait a second, that was a thought, wasn’t it, wow that’s amazing. There’s no way out of this, is there?” Let go. Come back to the breath. That’s all you have to do. It’s not about, how do I feel now? That’s more bullshit. Who cares how you feel? I don’t care. And when you don’t care, you’ll be happy. That’s the funny thing. When you don’t think about yourself, you’re ridiculously happy. When I was going to kill myself, you know, I was going to. There’s a river out behind the temple and I was going to jump in the river. It was only six inches deep, but I figured I could get my head under a rock maybe, you know. So, Maharajji called me. He said, “What are you going to do, jump in the river?” “He’s not taking this very seriously.” He said, “You can’t die. You can’t die. Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.” What the fuck is He talking about? Why did He die? Why did He die? Because He never thought of Himself. That Being, there was no planet of “Me” in that Being. For the thoughts of “me, me, me” to revolve around, orbit around. That Being was liberated. There was no “me” left. Like any true saint, there’s no “me” there. There’s only presence, being, bliss, happiness, a sense of well-being and even in the face of suffering, that well-being, that core of ok-ness is not lost. It’s not lost. So, plant the seeds of the things you want to grow. Period. That’s it. Plant the seeds of what you want to grow. If you keep planting selfishness and shame and fear and greed and anger and all that stuff, that’s what’s going to grow. We do that, we can’t stop, so we have to plant, when we can, plant the seeds of the good stuff that we want to have in our lives. It’ll make a little less room for the weeds as time goes on. Nobody can do it except us. That’s the good news and the bad news. The post Call and Response Podcast Ep. 80 | He Knew Everything. There’s Only One Life appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Podcast Special Edition with Krishna Das | April 1, 2021 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. “Empathy is not exactly compassion, but it’s a good beginning when you start to be aware of what other people are feeling and how they might be hurting and how their pain is causing them to act in certain ways, even ways that might be difficult for you to deal with. So, the development of compassion is to see all that and wish them well and really feel for them, and see clearly that their own issues are causing them to act this way, which is causing them tremendous suffering.” – Krishna Das I lost it there for a minute. it reminded me of what something that happened when we were on tour. I was in Australia many years ago. Ty was still playing with me then. We had started in Melbourne and gone all through Australia, many places, but so many people came in Melbourne that we agreed to come back and do another kirtan at the end of the tour, and by that point, it was really hot. I don’t know. We went in the summer. That was the last time we ever went in the summer to Australia because everybody’s on the beach usually. But it was so hot. We got to the hall and there was no time to do a sound check, and I mean, it was a really fast sound check and I was sweating and there was no air conditioning. I was really cranky. Very cranky. So, I was just really pissed off and just in a bad mood and we started playing, everybody’s singing along, and at some point, in my mind, I just said to Maharajji, I said, “What would it be like if I could really sing to you?” And immediately this wave came over me and I just started going… And Ty was sitting, playing tabla and he was looking over at me like…Trying to follow me. I didn’t know. I was just like, “Ah, Sita Ram…” It was too funny. And finally, I came back to earth and it was just hilarious. I can still remember, the look on his face was like… All right. Let’s do some questions and stuff. Okay. So the question is, “I am in a very weird point. It’s so hard to choose if I want to surrender to Krishna, or if I want to choose the way of the Buddha. Please help me.” Well, ultimately, all ways lead to the same place: our true being; our true nature. I certainly don’t have any answers for you. I do whatever makes me, whatever I feel like doing, and I don’t even know why you think you have to choose right now. Just do something. Maybe it’s just a way of your mind keeping you from doing anything. just do something. And ultimately, little by little, maybe you’ll feel more comfortable in something and that’s what it is. That’s what it’ll be. It’s not such a big deal. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Just go with it. Actually the whole idea of trying to work through this situation is part of your path anyway. So no one can tell you what to do. I do it all. I don’t care what it is. If it makes me feel good or helps me when I feel bad, that’s what I do. Singing to Krishna, singing to Tara, chanting “Om Mani Padme Hum,” which is to Avalokiteshvara Chenrezig, they’re all the same, ultimately. The paths may be taught differently. Of course, if you’ve taken or if you’re going to decide to take a transmission or lineage and join a particular group, well then go for it. Once you join a group, you should stay with it as best you can, unless you find that it’s just, after years, it’s just not working for you. Then I would talk to your teacher and tell him your problems or your situation, but this whole egoistic nonsense of thinking you have… First of all, you can’t surrender to Krishna,anyway. Who do you think you are? Krishna surrenders you when he wants you, not before, and same with the Buddha. You think you’re doing something in Buddhist teaching, supposedly. You think it’s up to you to do the practice. The way of surrender is a very different way of thinking about things, but the path is actually not any different. I mean, the actual results of the path. Yes. Some teachers would say, some teachers of this, Krishna, would say, “Oh no, this is the way.” And some teachers of the Buddhist path would say, “No, they’re not all the same. You have to do it this way.” Maybe they know. I certainly don’t, but I could see that you’re stuck in this point and this is all egoistic nonsense and just, relax. Take it easy. Enjoy life and do what you feel like. You don’t have to make a decision. Surrender happens. It’s not something you do. Your mind, your ego will never surrender. Never. When the grace is there, surrender happens. So, prepare for grace. Purify your heart. Prepare for grace. That’s that path. The other path is a little different, but it depends which type of Buddhism you’re talking about. In Theravada Buddhism, it’s very cut and dry. You do this, you concentrate. This is what you do. This is what you do. In Mahayana Buddhism, you cultivate compassion and the goal is to develop what they call Bodhi Chitta, which is well, there are two types of Bodhi Chitta, but simply, feeling of one with all beings, kindness and compassion and caring for all. And in Vajrayana, it’s also again different. The first basic step in Vajrayana is to unite your mind with the mind of your guru. That’s devotion. So then from there you get, you get the sense of direction and then teachings can be given to you, different types of teachings. So, yada, yada, yada. Just enjoy the fact that you’re totally fucked up and what are you gonna do? A lot of these questions are about, “What should I do if this is happening in my life?” Chant. That’s my answer. I’m not Dr. Ruth. I can’t give you advice, what to do in your life. You have to figure that out. What I can offer you is my practice, which helps me figure out what to do. So, if you do your practice, that’ll help you figure out what to do, hopefully. So, we all have problems in life, and we have to deal with them. And it’s very hard to see them clearly, sometimes, and it’s very hard to know what the best thing is to do, but we don’t have to know what the best thing is to do. We just have to do the best we can and try to work through these issues. That’s the whole path. It’s not like, “Okay, I’m gonna fix my life. Then I can get spiritual.” Whatever that means. No. This is the karmic situation. Find a way to deal with it in the best way you can, and by not hurting others and not hurting yourself. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to distinguish the difference between those two sometimes. And it’s very hard to know what to do, but there’s no playbook here. There’s no book that gives all the answers. There is, but that’s inside your own heart. So, calm yourself down. Chant. Do some practice. Try to become a good human being. And what does that mean to you? Okay? Oh boy, this is a good one. Do we really want to go there? “Why is sexuality such a challenge on the path?” Hare Ram. Well, it’s interesting. A few years ago, I was on tour in Southeast Asia and we were in Hong Kong and I took this shuttle train way up, that goes straight up this big mountain, and then you walk around the mountain, and from the top of the mountain, I looked down on Hong Kong and all these huge skyscrapers were squeezed together, and there were ships in the Harbor and there was more construction going on and it was, you could feel the energy of this place, and I thought, “This is so weird. This, how did this happen?” All we have to do is eat, sleep shit, fuck. And that’s the deal. Where did this come from? How did this happen? That everybody gathers together and business is done and money… I mean, it just looks like… I was astounded by it. It was amazing. So, you know, we’re in human bodies and the body itself has different hungers, not just for food, but it has hungers for sex, for procreation of the race, of the human race, and pleasure, and anything can be a, what’s the word you use? a “challenge,” so to speak, or you can embrace it and try to see what it is. My guru was married and had three children. We didn’t know that when we met him, actually. We only learned that after he left the body, which was very far out, but we’ve, since then we’ve met his children, and so obviously for him, sex was not a challenge. It didn’t seem to interfere with his becoming enlightened. So, we each have karmas to work through. We each have hungers, and it’s, I think, from my experience in my life and the people that I know, you have to eat. You don’t have to overeat, but you do have to feed certain things. And once again, Hanuman, the path of Rama, this type of devotion is not a path of renunciation. I’ve read that sloka many times, that Hanuman not only bestows liberation upon people, but he makes it possible for them to satisfy the desires that will be helpful for them to have to satisfy. So, a lot of times sexuality can be very painful and unsatisfying and scary, and the energy of that can also be very difficult to understand and feel at ease with, but that’s mostly psychological stuff. Animals don’t seem to have a problem jumping on each other at the right times, but human beings have confused pleasure with happiness. And that’s the real crux of the problem. It’s not just sex. It’s food. It’s listening to things. It’s craving pleasure from the outside world. And then of course it changes. It doesn’t last. So that’s one of the real issues. Anyway, good luck. Someone was asking me, the whole time that I knew Ram Dass, “Were there any teachings of his you can think of that didn’t age well or you disagreed with?” I never listened to him about relationships. Never. I barely ever spoke to him about relationships because everything he said just meant no sense to me. It was not something I could work with. And he had issues with his own relationships too, earlier in life, his romantic relationships, sexual relationships. So, it’s something that was… I never spoke to him hardly ever about my relationships. “How does one transition from the body when it’s time? How to let go when the ego is clinging?” That’s a good question. What they say is that the only thing you take with you when you leave your body is your state of mind, and obviously most people in this world don’t work on developing a harmonious state of mind, a wisdom mind, and a mind that understands or feels things in a certain way, in a spiritual way. So, there’s a lot of fear, a lot of clinging when the body is being dropped. The point is basically that, if you don’t practice now, if you don’t develop insight now and understanding now, and don’t develop the ability to let go of negative states of mind now, then you won’t be able to, when the body is dissolving, when your attachment, the connection to the body is dissolving, it’ll be very difficult and maybe painful and maybe scary. So, that’s the idea. One has to work on it now, because certainly, absolutely certainly the time will come when the breath that we take will be the last and how we meet that moment has a lot to do with how we live. You can’t expect to be angry and greedy and nasty to people your whole life, and then be smiling when you leave the body. It’s unreasonable to expect that to go through life, not caring about yourself or others and not working on your issues and just being an emotional mess your whole life, that it’s going to be easy to leave the body in a good way. And the problem is most people don’t really feel, in the west they don’t really believe in rebirth, so called “reincarnation,” rebirth, so there’s no reason to do anything. “I’ll be gone. Who cares?” That’s unfortunately, most likely a mistake, but that’s also karma. And one can always turn within. There is nothing, when it comes to turning within that, and when you really want to do practice and understand the need for it, nothing can stop you from doing that, no matter what’s going on in the outside world. You can always, every moment, be practicing, to just use a phrase. There’s a lot of books on this stuff. Andrew Holecek wrote books. There’s a book, “Living is Dying.” He talks a lot about the Tibetan tradition of hearing in the in-between, which is called the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or liberation in the Bardo, liberation in the in-between states, between death and rebirth. They seem to know what’s going on there. But for most of us let’s become good human beings now. Let’s work with our fear, our selfishness, our greed, our manipulative stuff, and let’s try to expand our hearts now, and that will help us when it’s time to leave. “Do I feel that my bond with Maharajji was particularly special in comparison to other devotees?” Absolutely not. Maharajji made everybody feel that they were special, because they were. They are. That was the amazing thing. Larry Brilliant said, “It wasn’t just that I loved him when I was with him. It was like, I loved everybody.” And conversely, you felt loved in a way, but so did everybody else, mostly, everybody who was attracted to him in a certain kind of way. We all felt that it was special. Every single one of us all sitting around, because he spoke, he would say something to somebody, but another person would get the message. He might tell a story to somebody or say something, and then somebody remembers “I had that dream last night and it was just about that.” And he was doing that. That was happening, let’s put it that way, all the time. So, we all felt special, and that’s not, I don’t think that’s wrong. We don’t think “special.” Like it’s mine and nobody else has it. It’s like we felt loved. Everybody felt loved in a way that we had never felt loved before. So, “How to let go? how to know when to let go and let God? And when to apply, ‘God helps those who help themselves?’” I don’t know. You can let go and let God, and still do what you have to do, and give up the attachment to the results. That’s one thing. But that’s a good quandary to work through in your life. And the more practice you do, the more deeply you move along the path into the heart, those kinds of issues just get resolved themselves. Nor did they really have to be resolved up here. They just dissolve in the heart. So, there’s no quick answer to that, but I just gave one. “How to make Maharajji, Neem Karoli Baba, my guru when he is not physically anymore with us?” It’s not up to us to make him our guru. If you feel attracted to him, it’s because he’s present with you. Why would you feel attracted to him? There’s so many other things to do in life. There’s so many other Babas out there. There’s so many great saints and Siddhas and Devis and Maas and everything out there. If you’re attracted to him, that’s the pull. That’s him pulling you to some degree you might say. You’re not gonna get a certificate of acceptance as a devotee. He doesn’t do that. It’s up to the devotee to follow his heart. And then eventually, you realize, you’ve been thinking you are following your heart, but actually you’re being pulled into your heart by the inner guru. “Do you ever have workshops or courses to teach people to sing or lead kirtan?” No, I don’t. Just sing. Nobody has to teach you. And leading kirtan is not a job. It’s spiritual practice. And I didn’t learn how to do it as much as I just absorbed by singing with people in India. That’s where I was immersed in this stuff for the first time. But Jai Uttal gives kirtan workshops. What does he call them? Something. Where he teaches people how to lead and sing Kirtan. So, if you want to do that, you can do that, but I don’t do it because I just sing, and then you just sing. It’s about love. How do you teach someone how to love? You don’t have to lead kirtan. You don’t have to be a Kirtan leader. If it’s your karma to do that, if it turns out to be good for you, you’ll do it, but it might turn out to be a problem. There’s a lot of egoistic stuff that can go on when you start to feel important and that you know more than other people. It’s an interesting situation. “Was I on the bus with Ram Dass when they found Maharajji at the Kumbha Mela grounds and went to Dada’s house?” Yes, I was on the bus. Absolutely. That was the bus from Bodhgaya on our way to Delhi. So, the bus got to the Mela grounds, and like I said before, it was absolutely deserted. Where there had been 12, 15 million people a week before, there was no one. And the bus made this long slow turn, because we were just gonna turn around and go, and as we were making this turn, in the other direction, there’s Maharajji walking, and he just kept walking. He didn’t even look up. If we hadn’t seen him… He didn’t go, “Hey, I’m here.” He just kept walking. And Rameshwar Das was the one who saw him. And as the bus approached, he just looked at Dada. He just said to Dada, the man who was with him, he said, “They’ve come.” It’s extraordinary. “How can we practice empathy and dispassion?” Well, one thing that is not useful is to try to stop your feelings. Feelings arise in the dispassion part. You can’t crush your feelings. Empathy is not exactly compassion, but it’s a good beginning when you start to be aware of what other people are feeling and how they might be hurting and why, how their pain is causing them to act in certain ways, even ways that might be difficult for you to deal with. So, the development of compassion is to see all that and wish them well and really feel for them, and see clearly that their own issues are causing them to act this way, which is causing them tremendous suffering. There are many books about this. We said, “Maharajji, how do you find God?” He said, “Serve people. Love everyone. Serve everyone.” That’s empathy. That’s empathy. And compassion and dispassion, I’m not even sure what that means, but if it means to you that you have to close off your feelings to protect yourself, that’s not correct. That’s not useful. So somebody wants help to pronounce the line in the Hanuman Chalisa, “Haata bajra aura dwajaa biraajai” ha the bud hot means hand, “Bajra” is the Thunderbolt or means that’s the is the cord, the sacred thread. Haata bajra aura dwajaa biraajai” “In your hands shine a mace.” The vajra is, in this case, is a mace, and you have a banner. “Biraajai.” You’re wearing a banner. I don’t even know what that is. a banner must be some like a little shawl or something. “Haata bajra aura dwajaa biraajai.” There you go. “Can I tell about my dark nights and how I moved through them?” No. Too much. Too many dark nights. But chanting and my connection with Maharajji and his grace and my longing to be in that love and my inability to function in the world when I don’t feel that love, that’s what pushed me through all those dark nights. And still to this day, that’s what helps me every day, the practice, developing a regular practice of turning within, one way or another, whatever that means to you. And if you want to read about it, the book I wrote, “Chants of a Lifetime,” describes so much darkness. You’ll be too happy. And there’s also an audio book of that now. Okay? So, that’s my plug of the day. Good to be with you again. May we all remain together in this heart space. Now and for all time. Namaste.   The post Call and Response Podcast Special Edition | April 1, 2021 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 77 | KD and Surya Das on Mantra, Bernie and Hungry Hearts “There’s no possibility of being truly happy until everybody is happy and these great beings called Bodhisattvas, they are almost, essentially fully enlightened, but they make a vow, they take a vow to stay here in this realm or in a realm that we can access at least for our sake because we don’t know what it’s like, what real love means, so the beings who have recognized what that is, they hang around so we can get a taste of it, otherwise we don’t know.” – Krishna Das   SURYA DAS: We’ve been chanting the six-syllable mantra of Tibet, “Om Mane Padme Hung,” the Dalai Lama’s mantra, the mantra of the Buddha, of Great Compassion, Avalokita, Chenrezig, Kuan Yin. “Om Mani Padme Hung”, the Jewel in the Lotus where the Buddha is within our own spiritual blossoming mantra. And cultivating boundless heartitudes or attitudes of noble heart, loving kindness, compassion, joy, equal to all, forgiveness and mercy. I love chanting. Chanting is a big part of the lightening path or the dharmic path of Vajrayana, like so many traditions, like the bhakti tradition and others. It really gets me out of my head, my New York motor mind, motor mouth, into my heart and into my gut and Hara, and Root Chakra, and healing, it’s really healing, the split between body and mind, heart and soul, self and other, heaven and earth, as you become just breath. Inspiration, expiration, the divine sound, shabda, and offer or surrender our bodies and mouths and lungs and throats and breath and energy to that which can come through us and through all together, like co-meditating, inter-meditating, inter-being together, and raise the spirit. KRISHNA DAS: So there’s a part of the practice, a very big part of the practice in Tibetan Buddhism and Buddhism in general, is the offering of the merits of our individual practice for the sake of all others, all beings in the universe, and in fact, it’s taught that the real, the purest motivation that we could have for doing our practice is not just to end our own personal suffering, but also to include, trying to relieve the suffering of all Beings. That means your mother and your father and your sisters and brothers and all the people who beat you up in elementary school. It’s a very, it’s not, it’s a very subtle and beautiful understanding of the way things really work. I think a lot of people in the yoga community and the so-called Bhakti community tend to think that they’re doing their practice for their own sake and that they’re trying to get something that, number one, they don’t have and number two, when they get it, they’re going to hold onto it and squeeze it to death and this is a self-defeating way of going about it. There’s no possibility of being truly happy until everybody is happy and these great beings called Bodhisattvas, they are almost, essentially fully enlightened, but they make a vow, they take a vow to stay here in this realm or in a realm that we can access at least for our sake because we don’t know what it’s like, what real love means, so the beings who have recognized what that is, they hang around so we can get a taste of it, otherwise we don’t know. I mean, I grew up on Long Island. Jesus. You know, there was nothing. Nothing and no one that I met in my life that had a clue. Really. It was extraordinary. He grew up on Long Island.   SURYA DAS: I grew up on Long Island. What am I, chicken liver? Chopped liver? KRISHNA DAS: You were on the south shore. They didn’t let us go to the south shore. SURYA DAS: No, I didn’t have a clue, either. I had no interest in these things. KRISHNA DAS: No interest at all. SURYA DAS: And no inspiration to be interested. KRISHNA DAS: We had interest in the sense that we had longing, but we didn’t know what it was for, what we were longing for, because no one around us was manifesting that. We didn’t see it. And I remember, one of the first things that hit me was, I used to be on the track team. I used to throw the discus, you know, this thing would swirl around, so, but I was also smoking a lot of dope and thought I was really cool, so I used to bring this book on Buddhism to the track meets, and in between my discus throwing, I’d read a few lines of this book. And I remember, I opened up this book, I don’t remember which one it was and one of the first things it said is, “In Buddhism, it’s believed that your enlightenment is up to you.” And I read that and was like, when you’re sixteen, nothing is up to you and this book said that the whole thing was up to me. That really lit me up, you know? It’s up to me? Because nothing was up to me, you know? I had to be home by eleven o’clock. I couldn’t drive the car without my mother, you know. I had a junior license or whatever, it was a learner’s permit. Nothing was up to me. And this was up to me, so that was big news, you know, so… But one has to recognize that whatever state one is in, it influences everybody that you meet, everybody in your life and also we are influenced by everybody else in our life, too. So if we’re in reaction mode all the time then we’re always bouncing off of other people like pool balls, like pool, you know, just like bang bang bang and we never get a break from those reactions, so as we deal, as we start to relax our hearts and try to calm our minds a little bit, calm ourselves down, we begin to see how much we’re the slaves of these knee jerk reactions we have to the people in our lives and the events that happen to us all day long and then that’s when, when we notice that, then we start to try to do something about it. Bernie Glassman was a very close friend of mine and he was a Zen Roshi. He held the lineage of an ancient, a very ancient lineage from Japan and he was a recognized master and when his teacher finally died, Bernie took his robes off. He had, previous to this, he would be in the Zen center, and he’d be leading these intense meditation retreats, and people would have all these incredible experiences and you know, Satori experiences they call them, all these amazing experiences, and then they’d leave. And he was doing this. He was facilitating this. But, he had come to realize and to recognize that the only thing that, the only thing that keeps us locked up inside of our, all our emotional programs is our fears, the things we’re afraid of. So he decided to let go of his robes. He took his robes off. He grew his beard. He started dressing like a mensch from Brooklyn and he started going to the places that were the most fearful for us as human beings, the places where incredible suffering had happened, like Auschwitz, like Rawanda, like in Ireland and the terrible times in Ireland. And he would go and he would sit there and he would deal with his fears and he would be with his fear and he would bear witness to the suffering that was going on, that had gone on there and to be around somebody who’s not afraid of their fear is quite extraordinary because we all, we all, we kind of like, we signed a little thing and we won’t deal with it, you know? We’ll be together but we’re not going to really deal with our shit. We’re just going to try to get a little high and have a good time and go home, but that’s no going to work in the long run. Unless we face our fears and, or find a way to witness them within ourselves and outside of ourselves, we will always keep building that wall to protect ourselves from other people. So, in vadryana buddhism, in Mahayana buddhism, the very first thing is offering all the practice we do for the sake of all beings because it’s other beings who we’re afraid of, we think. First of all, we think there are other beings, which is pretty interesting, a nice illusion, so we try to deal with those fears. That’s one of the ways that we kind of can calm that kind of fear down, when we connect with other people from our hearts. SURYA DAS: Sometimes, I feel like KRISHNA DAS: A motherless child. SURYA DAS: Or a mother with child. That our dharma movement in the West, of meditation and yoga and tai chi and chi gong and many things, could easily get overburdened with just, falling into the self help bag and thinking about ourselves and self-development and self-actualization and self-realization, and self-help, but really the dharma is what heals us on outer physical and inner emotional and psychic and energy and really subtlest and mystical levels and liberation enlightenment, awake-ness, oneness with god, whatever you call it, inconceivable transcendental wisdom is possible within that in this life and I think it’s important and I feel, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I wrote a book about it, “Make Me One With Everything”, about moving from “me” to “we” and not just seeking self improvement, self help, self realization, but universal awakening. Awakening together. And I think that’s very important for us today, especially in these partisan times. So fractured. So fractious and violent. So I’m making a call or a plea or a calling us out like Rabbi Hillel of old. if not us, who? And if not now, when? The Bodhisattva, be altruistic, compassion, compassionate warrior, the really peaceful warrior code. If not you, who? If not now, when? And each of us has our part to play, large or small is irrelevant. It’s just a judgement. And coming together like this, I believe, has a great and profound effect on quelling a lot of the agitation in the force and on balancing the military activities right across the river and also helping us to not build walls around our hearts. Not just around our country, which I trust will never happen, but not build walls and moats around our hearts out of fear. And if Buddhism, Buddhist thought things or seems to say that there is no self, what it really means is there’s no separate independent, permanent self or identity. Everything is interconnected and changing. We could look into that. I think it could help us release the tight fist, the tight fisted grasping, the grab that things have on us because we grab it. Help us release all these fleeting things that are in any case passing through our fingers so we don’t get rope burn from holding on too tight. That’s the meaning of letting go. It means letting things come and go. Letting be. In fact, I just had a loss recently and my wife passed two weeks ago, Debby. It was a story I wanted to, it reminded me, it was two or three months ago I was across the river at His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche’s Center, and there was a cremation there of Shenpen Dawa Rinpoche, his lineage successor. And I saw one of my old Lamas from Nepal, [ ] that I hadn’t seen in two or three years. Because I’d been here and staying here and taking care of Debby and things and not going to the East or France where he sometimes is. And I said to him in English, He speaks English, He’s about 60 years old, “Rinpoche, how are you keeping?” which is how people speak English in British-ified India. Not, “How are you?” Not “How are you doing?” like in Brooklyn. Not “Whassup,” or whatever it is now. “What’s shaking?” I said, “Rinpoche, how are you keeping?” This is not a translation, so you can hear it directly, and Rinpoche said, this wonderful, “Not keeping anything, Surya.” I was like, “Whoa… I was just asking ‘how are you?’” Oh, and then He went further and He said, “I’m not Rinpoche anymore. I’m not Tulku anymore. I’m just Pema Wangyal.” He just said His personal name. And then later, one of my students who was there, Drew, he said to me, “Whoa, I talked to Tulka Pema Wangyal, did you?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, this is Drew speaking, “Tulka Wangyal said to me, ‘I’m not a Lama anymore. I’m a siddha.’” So he gave me, like, the lesson in humility I needed and he gave my student the lesson in awesome, like, divine pride, transcendental authenticity that he needed. “Not keeping anything, Surya.” That was the message for me a few months before my wife died and other things. So that helped a lot for me to remember that the only true refuge is beyond all these comings and goings, the safe port that we can find under Maharajji’s blanket, in God’s arms, in Siddhi Ma’s arms. I was just looking at that picture over there and getting so much light and love from that picture of our Siddhi Ma, Maharajji’s disciple, and from all of you. We’re all in this together. No one can do it alone. Even the Dalai Lama, lifelong monk, says this, “No one can do it alone.” Because we need to develop empathic and warm, heartfelt compassion as well as transcendental wisdom and awareness and that’s why I love coming here to Garrison, because that’s what goes on here much of the time. And I love chanting with Krishna Das and all of you. It remembers me of when I learned to sing at Maharajji’s ashram. Before that, growing up on Long Island, unlike Krishna Das, who I think dreamt of being a rock start, I dreamt of pitching in Yankee Stadium in the World Series. KRISHNA DAS: Different sport. SURYA DAS: And, I learned to sing in front of Maharajji and learned that no one was listening and I could just really let it go and kind of, it opened my throat chakra, because I let go of my fear, you know, I didn’t really think this… I was 21 years old, I didn’t know anything. But the fears let go of me, in a sense that no one was listening and judging. KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. SURYA DAS: Well, maybe Danny or somebody. But mostly not. KRISHNA DAS: The other devotees were judging. Don’t worry. SURYA DAS: But I was singing to Maharajji and God and they were just nipping at my heels at dinner, or with my own mind’s judgements. But the Big Love doesn’t judge. Non-judgemental Day has already come in the Big Love. KRISHNA DAS: yeah. Yeah to be with somebody who not only knew everything about you, everything, everything, and loved you more than you could possibly love yourself was ridiculous, just ridiculous. Even now, I can’t believe it, you know? And there was no time in that Being, you know? When we were with Maharajji physically, that was the physical plane, but the experience we would have, had at the time, was Being Here, right now. It was no different. It’s hard to explain because people come to me and they, “Oh you were so lucky. You saw Maharajji, you were with a Being like that.” And I said, “Yeah, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” Because half the time it was the most extraordinary blissful wonderful experience. The other half of the time was being in the bottomless pit of hell and one of the qualities of hell is that it’s endless, which is why it’s so bad. When you’re in it, it’s always going to be like that and half the time we were with Him, it was like that, until He threw an apple at you or something, or laughed and then you were released from the hell of your personal darkness, which is where most of us live most of the time. And then you go back into it because, “Great, I’m from Long Island. That’s where I live.” In that darkness and then He’d, you know, He’d let us out, and then we’d go back. He’d let us out. We’d go back. He’d help us out. We’d go back. That’s how He taught. He didn’t teach with words. He didn’t write books. He didn’t initiate people. But He shined like the sun and He burnt through our own clouds, you know? And then, then they would come back. And He’d burn through them again. But the quality of those moments was here and now and forever. It wasn’t… when I think of Him now, it’s not now as opposed to then, it’s always here. He’s here. Always here. Which is the only place He could be, by the way. SURYA DAS: The problem is we’re not always here. We’re not always totally here for that. KRISHNA DAS: I’m hardly here at all. You kidding? But once a year, I might wake up for three seconds and be here and that’s when He’s here. SURYA DAS: So, I’m getting tired of hearing this narrative that “I’m from Long Island.” I don’t feel like I’m from Long Island anymore. Do you really feel like you’re from Long Island? KRISHNA DAS: No, I feel like I’m from Rockland County. SURYA DAS: I’m not going to one-up you and say “I feel like I’m from God” or “from the mystery.” But I’m from this, I’m from this group like all of you. KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. SURYA DAS: That’s a narrative that I like to remember. KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. I don’t relate to… SURYA DAS: I know you like to say it and we have a good schtick about it. You know, the Das Brothers and we’re all Jewish on our parent’s side and we’re Hindjews and… but deep down we know that we’re just screwing with you all, that we’re really living the darkness… KRISHNA DAS: Yeah we’re just visiting. SURYA DAS: No, but even the shadows are nothing but light if we look deeply. Maharajji showed us that. Even in the ashes, we find God, or in Auschwitz, Bernie Roshi showed us. Bernie Roshi didn’t just go to Auschwitz, or Ireland and the other place that he mentioned, Calcutta, he went to the Bowery and slept and lived on the Bowery with his Buddhist friends and whoever else was living and sleeping on the Bowery. He called it a street retreat. If 2,500 years Bernie Roshi, Bernie Glassman, Jewish Roshi, Zen Master, invented a new kind of retreat, the street retreat. It was very impressive. He asked me to come once and I said, “No thanks, Bernie, I’m afraid.” KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. SURYA DAS: I lived in India but I don’t want to be sleeping in the Bowery. KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. I’ve been in India. I’ve been in the streets in India. Not New York. Yeah, I know, I was, I avoided going to Auschwitz for years. SURYA DAS: Did you go? KRISHNA DAS: Well, then one day he asked me to drive him back home so we were somewhere, I drove him home. And he said, “Why don’t you come in?” So I came into the house, we sat in the back yard for awhile, we smoked a cigar. About half way through the cigar, he said, “I think you should come to Auschwithz.” “Ok.” So that’s how I wound up going. And it was fantastic. It was a really extraordinary experience on so many levels. So many levels. Because we went there to bear witness to the suffering that happened there, to the souls who suffered there, the Beings who suffered there. We went there to be with that, not to judge, not to run away, not to impose our view of it, not to project our own feelings onto it. But to bear witness for their sake. To be with them. So in order to be with somebody, you can’t, you have to drop your trip. You can’t bring your trip, otherwise you’re not with somebody. You have to be with somebody to listen, to see, you have to look and see. You can’t be judging and and laying your trip on them, so, on the course of this four or five days we spent inside Auschwitz, you know, in order to open to that kind of suffering, I remember the first few days I was furious. I walked around because it was Fall and the trees were all golden, red and yellow. It was just amazing. And the grass was green and the sun was shining. And I said, I looked up at the sun, I said, “How fucking dare you shine on this place?” “How dare you?” And I walked around for two days like that, flipped out of my bird, you know? “How can you shine on this place? What happened here… “ And then, like, it was just building up and building up and building up and one day, I just looked up at the sun and I went, “oh. I get it. You’re the sun. You shine. That’s what you do. You shine on the good. You shine on the evil. You shine on the high and the low. You just shine. You don’t pick and choose.” And that lifted me out of my mind. And out of my emotions. And it brought me into a place where I recognized the bigger picture, so to speak and that, what unconditional love is and what, what that could feel like. Because one of the next thoughts I had was that, if I had been born in Germany at that time and raised by a family of Nazis, why would I be any different than anyone of those guards? Right? I couldn’t prove it to myself that I would be any… because how I know myself is, where I grew up, what my parents were like, what I was led to believe in this life by my experiences. So if I had been born in Germany at that time, my experiences would have told me that this was perfectly ok and there would be nothing. It’s not like I’m better than anybody else, that I wouldn’t have been, I wouldn’t have been that way. I couldn’t prove it to myself. That was very humbling and liberating at the same time because I saw that there was no innate evil. You were born in certain places, and due to your karmas, you were programmed in a certain way, but that’s not who you are. That’s not who I am, and it wasn’t who they are. Like Ram Das talks about the difference between the role and the soul. What a person does and what we really are inside. And what we’re forced to do by our experience. We may not even, most of us, we don’t recognize that, that we’re all like on a runaway train where there’s nobody driving. It’s just one experience after the other and we get very little vote. In fact, we get no vote about what actually happens. The only vote we could get is how we meet each moment as it arises. How we meet each experience as it it comes to us. Usually, it’s just a knee jerk reaction. Anger. Fear. Shame. Guilt. All those things. So, going to Auschwitz and facing my own fears about what’s going to happen to me there, how am I going to deal with this, etcetera etcetera, and going through that whole process was very, very, very powerful. And Bernie, because Bernie was there, it created that space of letting go. It became possible to let go into that bigger picture, so to speak. Because he was… that’s where he lives. And since he was there, everything that bounced off of him was kind of liberated, so to speak, into that more open space. But we don’t get that mostly going through our daily lives. We don’t get, we don’t meet the cashier at the stop and shop doesn’t liberated us the same way. But also, we’re not looking, you know? We’re just, we go through our days on automatic. SURYA DAS: When you guys were at Auschwitz, and gals, did you, did Bernie, being a Zen Roshi, did he lead prayers? Chants? Meditate? Or just be and walk around as is? KRISHNA DAS: All of the above, yeah. There was chanting. There were ceremonies. There were Christian ceremonies. There were Jewish ceremonies. There were Buddhist ceremonies. And the main ceremony was the, what did they call it… the offering ceremony, which I’ll sing this prayer for you in a couple of minutes. One of Bernie’s deepest experiences happened in the back of a car on the way to work, which, by the way, is where most of your experiences are going to happen. Forget about that. They happen when you’re not paying attention, then “Oh.” So, he’s on his way to work and he experienced the Oneness of Creation in the back of the car and he saw all beings were totally connected and totally interdependent on each other and his heart opened to such an extent that he offered his heart or his Bodhi Mind, the Bodhi Enlightened Mind, Enlightened Heart, he offered the heart to all beings who were suffering. And this prayer is part of the Japanese Buddhist Prayers. It’s called the Gates of Sweet Nectar. And one enters through the Gates of Sweet Nectar by offering your heart to all Beings who are suffering or lost or afraid. So, about oh, 15-16 years ago, he sent me eight lines. Like, this little piece of a prayer, and he said, “Can you do something with this?” So I said, “Like what?” He just sent me an email, “Can you do something with this?” “Like what?” He said, “Well, we Buddhists aren’t that good with melody, maybe you could come up with a nice melody for this prayer and then we could sing it at our Zen Peacemaker Community Gatherings.” So, I carried it around with me for about, and I said, “When is that?” He said, “About eleven months from now.” “Oh, good. Ok.” I carried it around the world with me for about eight or nine months and I wrote back to him, I said, “Bernie, can I mess with the words a little bit?” So he, a one word email comes back. “Mess.” Very Zen. So, I kind of messed with the words a little bit, then they kind of worked together in a different way and then a melody came for the prayer. So I said, “Ok, I’ve got this melody now.” He said, “Good, now you can start working on the rest of the prayer, which is like, 40 pages.” And I said, “Bernie, that’s going to take 3 lifetimes.” I get a one word email back. “Two.” So let me sing you the prayer that he asked me to come up with a melody for. And I think you’ll get a feel for what we’re talking about. I’ll sing it three times. So this is part of a longer ceremony that they do in his tradition, but it’s part of the prayer… Calling out to hungry hearts… KRISHNA DAS: Which one of us isn’t lost? Isn’t left behind? All of us. Funny thing, the original prayer says, “All of your sorrow, I make it mine.” You’re taking on the sorrow of all those who are lost and afraid. So, when I had finished the prayer, I handed it to Bernie and he looked at it and he saw the last line, he said, “All of your sorrow? What about your joy? I want your joy, too.” So I had to change it to “your joy and your sorrow.” SURYA DAS: We miss Bernie. But he still inspires us all. KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. SURYA DAS: Wonderful. KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. SURYA DAS: I didn’t know that he had that big awakening in the back of the car on the way to work. KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. SURYA DAS: In case you’re wondering what American Zen Masters like Bernie did for work, or even unknowing that they had to work… hmm, I can’t remember, what did he used to do in LA before he led the LA Zen Center, what was it? KRISHNA DAS: Actually, it was like a, like a nuclear engineer of some kind. Some kind of, I forget the word… SURYA DAS: It’s like in astrophysics or something like that. KRISHNA DAS: Astrophyics, something like that. SURYA DAS: He was… he covered the whole spectrum. KRISHNA DAS: First he figured it out one way, then he figured it out the other way. It’s so amazing, being with somebody who’s just not afraid, you know? Not afraid and not afraid of their own fear, either. You know, that’s another thing. Walking around the city with him was ridiculous. Just too sweet. Everybody was his friend. Everybody, you know… people were critical of him, too. “This isn’t Zen,” they’d say. “This is not Zen. He’s left the path.” That’s what they said about Buddha. Buddha’s original disciples were sitting next to Him by the tree waiting for him to be enlightened so they can get some of it, and there He was, essentially, doing these very difficult austere practices, maybe breathing three or four times a day, eating nothing, almost nothing, and they said you could see through Him. He had become like translucent. His skin was wrapped around His bones and it’s like, and so…they were just waiting for Him to get enlightenment, meanwhile Buddha’s sitting there thinking like, “This shit ain’t working. What am I going to do? This is not working,” you know? “I don’t know what to do.” And He was in terrible despair and then He had a memory came to Him of when He was a boy, sitting under a tree, watching his father work in the distance in this field and He experienced what He had experienced as a boy, which is this extraordinary joy and happiness. Now, He was practicing these austerities and happiness was not something He was accustomed to. He was starving Himself to death and doing all these practices, trying to achieve something. So when He had this feeling, this memory, He got scared actually and He said, “What is this?” Well, let me look at this feeling. Being Buddha, He said, “Let me look at this.” And He saw that this feeling of ok-ness that He was experiencing had no cause. In other words, it didn’t come from the joining of the senses or the mind with a pleasurable object, nor did it come from the separation of the senses or the mind with it, and what do you call it… a not nice object… so, it didn’t have a cause and He said, “If it has no cause, it must be natural. It must be natural.” And then He thought, “Maybe through this feeling of ok-ness, maybe this is the way to enlightenment.” And just then a woman comes by with some yogurt, some dahi, and He said, “Maybe I should eat something.” He puts His hands out, and she pours some food into His and eats and then those five disciples looked at each other, “Oh, Gautama has left the way, let’s get out of here.” And they took off and they left Him there. Disciples, you know? Yuck. You hate disciples. Devotees and disciples, they should all be shot. SURYA DAS: Darkness. KRISHNA DAS: They’ll kill each other, so it’s ok. Anyhow, so then He just kind of, that’s when He got up and He wandered some more and then He sat down under this other tree, which He sat down and said, “I’ve got it now. Not getting up til this is over.” So the idea is that the feeling of ok-ness, the something we’ve not lost touch with, we’ve lost touch with that feeling of basic all right-ness. Whatever reason, for whatever reason, the culture we’re born in, what our parents believed, how they lived, how they saw themselves, what our classmates were like, what our teachers are like, we were never allowed, we never had the chance to stay in touch with that place. You know, as kids, we had that, but then it disappears. We lose the connection to that and that’s where it all is, by the way, in that basic feeling of all right-ness. That’s the feeling of real love, the real heart. You think? SURYA DAS: I love thinking about our friends and how they each, through their own personality, it manifested their true heart. Like Bernie, for example, the astrophysicist went into Zen. After his teacher, as Baba, Krishna Das was saying, then he took off his zen robes and he took off his shaved head and started to wear hair and a beard again, and not only that, I don’t know if you remember, so for six months, he went to clown school because he’s a funny guy and he became more funny and then he did something else outrageous but I can’t remember what it was… flower arranging or calligraphy or something… and he was a strong, robust guy but then I was in India with him after that at an international Buddhist congress or something and all the muckybucks were there, the Karmapa and the Dalai Lama and the head monks and nuns of Burma, Thailand, Korea and Japan, all this, and Bernie, when it was his turn to speak, he said, “It’s very nice to see all of you gentlemen, a few women and not one untouchable from a hundred million untouchables in this country who are Buddhists,” and everybody went… because it was so true and it was so in our face. That was Bernie. And not one untouchable among the hundred million untouchables in this country, who were Buddhists. Maybe he didn’t say a hundred million, maybe he said 50 million, but the truth is, again, we’re afraid of what’s different and what’s unknown and we still have our class and our caste systems, even in our spiritual movement where we think about universal love and compassion. So again, I am calling out for moving from “me” to “we” and obviously inclusiveness and tolerance and acceptance and Krisha Das said it great and I want to highlight and underline it, especially in these partisan days where we all have a boogey man or boogey woman that we can’t stand when they come on tv, to give some kind of some kind of talk or something or whatever they do. Maybe we should put their picture on our altar like Ram Das used to do. Try to even out our feelings towards the saints and to them. It’s an austere practice and remember what Krishna Das was saying, he learned at Auschwitz, it’s a Buddhist practice of exchanging self in others, learning to see through the others’ eyes like the native americans say, “If you want to know where a person is coming from, walk a mile in their moccasins. Remember what Krishna Das learned at Auschwitz and we might check it out and come to our own conclusions but I’ve learned this, too, from living in a monastery with a bunch of people I would not have necessarily chosen to be married to for three and a half years as it were, that if I was brought up in their situation by those parents, with those genes, I would have been, you know, like I was on Little League in Long Island, I probably would have been Hitler Youth instead of the Cub Scouts. And that’s a hard thing to accept about one’s self, but I think it’s true. So when I see how the people from the other side, the other side of the aisle in politics, or the other religions, some of whom want to go back to the 14th Century ways, I think, “Well, if I grew up in a Madrass and was 15 years old and it was the only education I had in the middle east, I’d probably be thinking about being a martyr or some kind of, you know, terrorist, too. Because the peer pressure and cultural conditioning and parental guidance and it’s not that I condone that but I do have more sympathy for having seen that in the world and in myself. KRISHNA DAS: And the other side of that is let’s look at who we are now. We are not, most of us, contemplating those things, and most of us are not in the situation where we have no choices. We are finding ourselves with a longing to unravel the knots in our own hearts and find real love and real happiness in this world now. And that’s also the result of our own karmas and our own actions in the past. So, let’s take advantage of that situation as best we can because we can make choices and our choices will lead to making other choices and the quieter, the more open our hearts are, the choices we make will change and they’ll lead us further and further on the path to what, to finding out who and what we really are. So we have that opportunity and that possibility. Otherwise, what are we doing here? You know? So, let’s give ourselves credit for that, too. It’s both things. It’s not one or the other. It’s the whole thing. As they say in Tibet, the whole schmear. SURYA DAS: I think that’s in Brooklyn. KRISHNA DAS: Oh. SURYA DAS: But that’s what it means. But we call it the “middle way” of balance and inclusiveness. KRISHNA DAS: Ocean Parkway? Middle Way. SURYA DAS: Thank God for the dharma, that’s what I always say. Thank God for Buddhism, which is a non-theistic religion. That’s my little joke to myself. KRISHNA DAS: Yeah. There’s only one thing going on here, you know? All these different paths are different ways of looking at the same thing. Different ways of reaching towards the same thing and walking… all the paths converge at some point, depending on what your emotional, psychological, religious preferences are you follow the path that you feel works for you. It’s all you. It’s all us anyway, so… SURYA DAS: So Sab Ek. KRISHNA DAS: Maharajji used to say, “Sab Ek.” It’s all one. All One. All One. One time, I was sitting with Maharajji and He grabbed my notebook where I had all these prayers written out, you know, like, hundreds of prayers from all different traditions and He’s going through it, going through it, and He stopped on this one page and said, “What’s this?” And I looked at and I went, “Uh-oh.” I said, “It’s Buddhist.” I thought, “Oh shit, I’m in Hanuman temple with My Guru and He’s looking at my Buddhist stuff. I’m going to get it, right?” And He said, “Translate some of it.” So I couldn’t because it was… but there was an Indian guy there who translated a few verses. And then He goes, “Thik, correct. Very good. “ And I went, “Really?” He keeps going through the book and He comes across a little picture. We used to have these postage stamps made up of just Him, a little picture of Him. He said, “Who’s that?” I said, “Maharajji, it’s You.” “Nay. Buddha.” There you go. Ok. It’s ten o’clock. We were going to sing some more but it’s too late. So you’ll have to sing your own lullabye’s tonight and tomorrow. SURYA DAS: We should sing one more. KRISHNA DAS: Why don’t we sing Tara Mantra, but I can’t play your melody and I can only sing my melody. SURYA DAS: I’ll follow you. Even though disciples get shot around here. KRISHNA DAS: He said as he waved from the edge of enlightenment, “I’ll follow you.” SURYA DAS: And leading from behind is called… KRISHNA DAS: Leading from behind, yeah… talking from below. Nobody got that, that’s ok.   Sign up for KD’s newsletter for updates on new events and offerings Have to been to the Heart Space Digital Library? Make your own FREE private account, we will add new material like videos, special podcasts, chant downloads and more Interested in a deeper dive? Check out KD’s Online Courses Krishna das often refers to the books he has read during his programs- head over to our Suggested Reading section for a list Follow Krishna Das ~ FACEBOOK: facebook.com/KrishnaDasMusic INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/krishnadasmusic YOUTUBE: https://youtube.com/krishnadasmusic X (formerly TWITTER): @krishnadas Call and Response Podcasts are made possible and free for all by Kirtan Wallah Foundation   The post Ep. 77 | KD and Surya Das on Mantra, Bernie and Hungry Hearts appeared first on Krishna Das.

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. Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD January 16, 2021 “Practice is so important because we plant those seeds of what we want to grow with our practice. It doesn’t mean just meditation practice or chanting practice. It means caring about people, caring about ourselves, caring about the world and offering kindness and compassion to everyone that comes into our lives. But if we don’t plant those seeds, in those moments that get very difficult, like this moment in the world, there’s very little we can do.” – Krishna Das Maharajji said, “Courage is a very important thing, a very big thing. It takes a lot of courage to let go. It takes a lot of courage to do practice, because we don’t know where we’re going, and we don’t know what we’ll find. All we know is that we’re inundated by our stuff, 24 hours a day. In the Gita, Krishna says, “Even the littlest bit of this Dharma, the tiniest bit of turning against the flow of that river of immersion in external sense objects and awareness, sense awareness, just the slightest bit of turning away and back to the source is a huge thing, and only we can do that. No one can do it for us. So, depending on what we really want for ourselves and our loved ones and the planet and the world, that’s what will dictate what practices we do, how we turn within and how much we dedicate to that, how much of our hearts we dedicate to that. You can’t fool yourself, really, because we’re always here, and there’s a part of us that is always knows what’s going on. Even if we refuse to see it, there’s a deeper part of us, that knows everything that needs to be known, but we’re locked out of that place at this point in our karmic predicament. It’s like we have a big, beautiful house, but we’re sleeping on the lawn of the house. We don’t realize that the house is our true home. So we’re living on the lawn. We get a little port-a-potty out on the lawn, a little garden hose to wash our faces. The house is right there. We just don’t realize it. Then when we do realize it, we have to find the key to the door, but at least we’ll be looking at that point. If we don’t look, we don’t find. Okay. Hi. How you doing? I’ve had better years. And worse, I’m sure. Yeah. Well, not a lot worse, actually. I guess the last time I was on was in August, so, it’s been awhile. The way I’m going to phrase this question is going to sound really really dramatic because it sort of feels that way, but hopefully it won’t seem weird. In Christianity, there’s a condition or a state of mind called the Dark Night of the Soul. Yeah. Are you familiar with it? Very familiar. And you know, I feel like I’ve gotten there. Even when I sit in my meditation room, I feel just totally disconnected, and the phrase over the doors of hell in Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” is sort of what I feel like my life is doing right now. The outcome is likely to be that because of things that are going on with my grandsons, of ages 13 and 14, and my daughter, and also just not being able to see my friends in person is really, it doesn’t help at all. So, here I am just to find out what your thinking is about that state, and if there’s a similar state in the Hindu tradition. You know, I just read something about it saying it just has to do with ego transformation, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels really ego-taking-apart, in a way. So anyway, I appreciate your thinking on that. Have you seen the movie, the short film that was made about Ram Dass? There was a longer film made about Ram Dass by this guy, this English guy that we know, and most of it was clips of earlier talks that he gave way before the stroke, back in the eighties, nineties, early nineties, and we watched it together, me and Ram Dass and a few of the other people who were at the house in Maui at the time, and everybody said, oh, they liked it so much. And I was trying to hide, you know. Then they asked me what I thought and I said, ” Truthfully, I didn’t like it.” And the other thing was, it was kind of weird, kind of creepy, and Ram Dass said, “What do you mean?” I said to him, “Look, you’re giving lectures about suffering and dealing with pain and suffering and all these things, and you’re about to hit the wall at a thousand miles an hour, and you don’t know it.” He’s giving these talks, these lectures, you know. Brilliant. Intellectually brilliant. They’re wonderful. But the guy was about to be smashed against the fucking wall, and I said, “It’s creepy because you can tell you don’t really know what you’re talking about.” Anyway. Yeah. Right. And this is it. This is the stuff. This is what we have to deal with. There’s no way around it. So we keep looking for a cure for it, and that makes it just hurt more. It hurts. It really hurts, especially when those people that we’re very close with bound, by blood and karma, are suffering, and it’s just terrible. But there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s the hard part to accept, and I know you said that to me and other people many times, but I can’t find the key to surrender. If I sit there and I say, “Okay, I have to surrender now. I have to find a way to just give it up, but it doesn’t happen. And you can’t make yourself do that. No, you can’t. So when I hurt my knee in India you must have heard this story, maybe everybody didn’t. So I’ll just tell it briefly I stepped in a hole in the road, snapped my leg, and I woke up the next morning and my knee was out to here. It was all swollen, and I couldn’t hardly walk. So, we were not, supposed to come to the temple to see Maharajji until the afternoon, till about four, but this was first thing in the morning and I thought, “Well, you know, I have to get to the doctor. Otherwise this is really bad. I don’t know what this is.” So, my friend Raghu helped me walk to the temple. I had to lean on him the whole way. I could hardly walk. We get into the temple and I limp up to where Maharajji’s sitting in this middle of this empty courtyard, on his cot, on his little bed. I sit down and I put my leg out underneath the cot because I can’t bend me knee, and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say, “What are you doing here? Why’d you come so early? Why? What’s wrong with you? Why did you hurt yourself?” He didn’t say anything. He just sat there for a couple of minutes, and I said to myself, “Well, I’m not going anywhere. I’m having Darshan. Let them cut the leg off. I don’t give a shit. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” So then he gets up and he starts walking to the back of the temple and he took the hand of the Indian devotee that was there with him. It was the only other person there. And they’re walking away from where we’re sitting, and the further away he got, the more, he was kind of leaning on the guy, and leaning on him, and it was like he couldn’t walk, and I thought to myself, “He’s taking on the karma of my knee.” You know? At that minute I had that thought, he turned around and basically ran back to the tucket. He plops down and he looks at me and he said, “You thought I was in pain? You wanted to help me?” And he pats me on the head. “Good boy.” Meanwhile, I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, “What is this? What’s going on here?” You know, “What did I do? Why did this happen?” All the time I’m sitting there with him. Later in the day, other Westerners started to show up and at one point, he reaches down into the shoulder bag of this woman, one of the Westerners, and he pulls out a Bible. We started carrying Bibles around because he was always talking about Jesus. So we started reading the Bible. So, he pulls out the Bible. Now he’s not supposed to be able to read English and supposedly he doesn’t speak English, supposedly he doesn’t understand English. So he picks out the book, opens it up like this and holds it up for me and says, “Read this.” And he points to this like that, just like that. So, it was from Saint Paul, Corinthians and it said, ” In order to protect me from the abundance of revelations,” from getting a big head, “it was given to me a thorn in the side, and I beseeched the Lord three times to take it from me. And the Lord said, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect in your weakness.'” Well Ram Dass and I have been talking about this for 50 years, and at one point, he said, “Well, we’re proof of that.” So I had t-shirts made up, one for him and one for me that said “proof.” And the point is this, when we recognize our inability to really do anything, to save our own asses, that’s when the reality of grace shows up for us, not the grace itself, cause that’s always there, but we recognize that power of grace. “My grace is sufficient for thee.” It’s enough, no matter what’s happening to you, and you recognize that by seeing that grace is made perfect in your weakness. You can’t change this. You can’t even change your mind. You can’t let go. You can’t surrender. Recognize that’s surrender and don’t fight against it. And you can’t even stop thinking about it. “Well, that’s not surrender. I haven’t given up. I’m still thinking about it.” Right? That’s because you can’t. “My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect.” And the fact that you can’t do a fucking thing to help yourself except bow again and again. How long do you want me to go on? With you I might have to go on for 30,000 lifetimes,. Right. That’s what it feels, like again and again, and it ain’t happening. Yeah. And then you judge yourself, “Oh, I’m still doing this and it’s not working.” Again and again. That’s the recognition of your weakness. And that’s what the Lord said is the way it is. “My strength is made perfect in your weakness.” But do you ever come out the other side of this? I mean, is this this going to be forever? That’s not up to you. Why do you even think about that? It’s not your problem. You’re unable to do anything about it. Just stop thinking about it. You’re just obsessing. This is the program that’s running your whole life, beating the shit out of yourself every fucking moment, and I’ve known you long enough to say that. That’s what you can’t let go of ,beating the shit out of yourself. Stop that first, or keep recognizing that and let go of that. ” There I go again, again and again.” Yeah. But you know, what makes that really hard is that, the fact that I am inadequate is being reinforced by so many other people and circumstances. It has nothing to do with other people. Nobody said you’re inadequate. The Lord doesn’t say you’re inadequate. Well, that was a euphemism for what I really feel like. That was a what? A euphemism for what I really feel like. What I feel like is that I’m useless. Label it, “self evaluation.” Yeah. Again and again, and you’ll see all day long, that’s all you do to yourself is judge yourself harshly. Now that’s a program that’s running. That’s not you. That’s your training. That’s what you’ve been trained in, and that’s where you’ve lived most of your life, judging yourself harshly. Is there really anything wrong with you? Are you really bad? No, you’re not bad. Like everybody else, you’re fucked up. Everybody’s fucked up. That’s what samsara is. That’s where they put us. That’s the prison they put us in here. We’re all fucked up. We’re all hating ourselves, hating others, using others, manipulating ourselves, manipulating others, grabbing onto this, pushing this away, afraid of this, wanting this, ashamed of this, blah-blah-blah. This is the world. This is the world we live in. Everybody’s doing this. Yeah. But you know, it’s my inability to get to that good place that you’re talking about. Nope. Nope. Nope. Stuff. But the thing is… That’s just judgment. Hello? Hello. Hello. Listen to yourself. You’re just fucking repeating the same shit over again. Different words. Same shit. But it affects other people. It affects two kids. Fuck other people change yourself first and everything will happen for other people. If you can’t change yourself, what chance do you think they can change themselves? Can anybody do this for you? No, you have to do it. You can’t do it for somebody else. Once you accept yourself, the vibe will change, totally. But you can’t fake it. It’s not something you can fake. So how many times am I going to have to talk to you about this before it finally happens? I don’t know. As soon as you’re finished, whenever you’re ready. Okay. Just keep noticing. If it’s hard for you to notice, why don’t you get a brick, and every time you notice that you’re beating yourself up mentally, drop that brick on your foot. And maybe you’ll notice it.. Maybe eventually you’ll, ” Okay. It’s enough.” But see, you don’t get enough torture in your mind. It’s never enough for you, but if you actually bang your head on the wall every time you caught yourself judging yourself, you would stop, because the minute you start judging, “That means I’m going to have to bang my head on the wall. I can’t do that. It hurts too much.” So that’ll stop you. Put your hand on the flame, on the stove. Every time you find yourself judging, you’ll stop judging quick enough. You’ll notice it immediately. But right? It’s just too comfortable for you now. This is where you’ve lived your whole life. It’s so comfy. “Oh, I’m such a fuck up. And everybody look what I’ve done. My daughter and my grandson. It’s all my fault. I’m so fucked up.” Listen, girl, somebody did it to you as well. You’re no worse or no better than anybody else. And they have their own karmas. If you want to help them, help yourself first, and then everything will change in your dynamic with them as you change how you treat yourself. But you just don’t notice how hard, even now when we’re talking, you’re still thinking about, “How am I going to figure this out? I can’t do this.” It’s going on in your head and you can’t stop. That’s what I’m saying, wake up. Drop a brick on your foot. After a couple of times, you’ll start to notice. It doesn’t hurt enough. It’s too comfortable. You’re so identified with it. It’s so much Homebase for you. That’s why it’s so hard to stop. All of us. You’re not different than anybody else, and no worse and no better. We’re all in the same stew here. And this is the work we have to do. I didn’t mean to take up so much time. I just realized that I’d take up a lot of time. Other people might have questions. Fuck other people. They’re listening. They’re getting out of this too. This is more judging yourself. Oh, I’m not worthy. I took up too much time. Get over it. If I’m in charge here, if I didn’t want to talk to you, I’d just say, “Fuck off, go somewhere else. I’m finished with you.” Did I say that? No. Not yet. Okay. So, fuck off. We’re finished. Really. You’re so hard on yourself. It’s really heartbreaking. And it breaks your own heart, too. Yeah. There’s a lot of pain in there, you know? And that pain is not yours. That was given to you by the world and by your upbringing and by your karmic predicament, and you, like the people before you just transmitted that. You had no choice. Now you have a choice. Now you have a choice. Now you can do something to lessen the energy that that program rips off from you all the time. But you’re too hard on yourself. You sit for two seconds, “Ah, this is not working, you know, I’ve been doing this for more than 50 years and nothing’s happened.” You know, it just goes on and on, and every time you do it, you actually believe that. Maybe start to think of it as somebody else talking to you. What would you tell that person? You say, “Excuse me? Get the fuck outta here. Who do you think you’re talking to?” But no, because you just believe it. You accept it as if it’s true. It’s not true. It’s a program. It’s a reaction to the way the life you’re in the way you see it. You can change the way you see it, but not easy, but you can, and the longing to change is so strong in you, but the self hatred is just as strong. And I always say this, that the way our parents saw themselves is very much the way we learn to see ourselves, not how they saw us so much, but how they saw themselves. We absorbed that view of that way of seeing ourselves the way they saw themselves. And so you absorbed that. They absorbed that. Their parents absorbed that. It goes back to, you know, whatever, back to whatever, there wasn’t a beginning. So now just wake up. This is it. That’s a dream and it’s painful. It’s really painful. And it really, I’m not saying it’s not painful. It is painful. But yeah, the only thing you can do is to work on yourself and treat others as well as you can at this point in life. What’s done is done and what’s going to happen, hasn’t happened yet. So this is it, now. Intellectually. I understand all this. It’s just. Yeah. So now apply the understanding to actual practice and try to notice when you’re doing it to yourself again. I mean, you walk around all day long and you do it to yourself, and you don’t even notice that you’re spending all your time beating yourself up. And of course, these times make everything worse. There’s no question about it. It’s like injecting steroids into it. It’s just ridiculous. It makes everything so much harder to bear, so much more despair, but that’s also not you. That’s the whole world. The whole world is suffering like this. So, we’re absorbing that as well. Every time we look at the newspaper, every time we talk to somebody we’re getting the bad news. So it’s everywhere. It’s in the atmosphere. We’re breathing in and out. Yeah, that doesn’t help because not only do I feel like I’m coming apart, but I feel like the whole country, at least is coming apart. Maybe the whole world is coming apart. The whole world. Yes. It’s the whole world, the whole planet, and every level, socially, politically climate wise, everything falling apart. Everything. Right now, right here is all we’ve got. To do the best for other people, we have to be able to do the best for ourselves, too. And that would be in your case, trying to give yourself a break. It’s not easy. Yeah. Set a little alarm in the house. Every 20 minutes when it goes off, “Oh.” That will just get you out of your thought flow, which you’re completely immersed in all the time. That alarm goes off, it’s oh, so for 10 seconds you won’t be thinking about yourself. You set it again, and then for 20 minutes, you’ll be gone again till it rings. At least it’ll bring you back for a second. ” Oh, okay.” Don’t forget to hit the alarm and set it again, though. Yeah. I mean, I spend most of my time actually worrying about the other people in my life, more than I spend beating myself up, although there’s plenty of that. What does that help? What does that accomplish then? So why do it? It’s a habit and it’s another way of beating yourself up and making yourself feel bad. Concern can certainly be there because people are suffering. People are hurting and it breaks our hearts and it really hurts. And we don’t want it to be that way, but it is that way. So what can we do? We can release and let ourselves breathe and just let that stuff drip off of us, just drip out of us, just drain out of us. Whenever we remember, let it drain away. Just come back to your breath and let your body breathe, and relax and let that stuff drain away, and then you’ll forget, and then it will be built up again. Then as soon as you remember, just let it drain away. That’s huge. Don’t try to solve everything. Just let it drain off of you, drain out of you, and then you’ll do it again. No problem. But every time you allow that leaf to settle a little bit, just like a leaf falls from a tree, you know, so every time you go with that, it makes it easier and easier as time goes on. Once in a while, you’ll laugh at yourself. “Am I doing this again? Am I still doing this to myself?” At some point it looks so ridiculous. You can’t believe that you spend your whole life like this. That’s our situation. That’s what we do most of the time. So, your practice can only be one thing, just letting go. And you can pray if you feel like praying. “Can’t you do something, God damn it?” I’ve tried that. But you didn’t try it enough because they didn’t do anything. By grace, we’re saved. Faith. Isn’t something you manipulate yourself into. It’s something you recognize, you experience directly, and then it becomes real, and that happens by grace. And grace is always here, but we’re not tuned to it. You’re too busy, beating yourself up to even look for it. And when you do look it, you look for it with a chip on your shoulder. “Come on, where the fuck are you?” What do you expect? You’ve got to let go. And it hurts. I know it hurts. It really does. But what are the options? Going on like this? That’s not an option. Okay. You’re right. Recognize the severity of the situation and the importance of this moment. This is the only time that you have to make a stand against these programs that have been running your life. This is it. When you take your last breath, you don’t want to be thinking, “Oh, if I only paid more attention, if I only let go. Why didn’t I let go?” You don’t want to have that thought. So do it now while you can, because you can. It doesn’t mean doing more practice. It means being with what’s going on in a less obsessive, compulsive way, noticing how this is always going on. This can keep going. You don’t have to listen to it after a while. Eventually it just goes through. It doesn’t even grab you. You can’t stop thoughts. Sometimes I notice that there’s a certain attachment to that feeling and that makes it hard to let it go. To w hat feeling? To the feelings of worry and… Oh, absolutely. Totally. You’re totally identified. Not totally, but you’re mostly identified with all those thoughts and feelings. You actually believe them, and you feel them, and you think, “This is me. And this is the way I feel,” and you don’t recognize that the feelings are constantly changing, going and coming, rearranging. First it’s guilt. Then it’s fear. Then it’s anger. Then there’s despair. There’s not just one thing all the time, but for you, it’s just a big dark cloud, and you’re in it. You’re dancing around and you think this is the way it’s always going to be. But the cloud is not you, period. It’s just not. It’s an object of awareness. It’s an object of your consciousness. You’re aware of those feelings. That means there’s you. And there’s the feelings. But you’re like this with them right now. You think you are and so you are, but you’re not, really. But you think you are. And so that’s how you act. You identify with them. They are attached to those thoughts. You’re glued to them. But if you look closely, you’ll see it’s something outside of you, these feelings. But the main thing is to just let go. Notice that you’re caught. That’s already letting go. It’s not, ” Okay,, I’m going to take it. I’m going to let go.” No, just noticing that you’re doing it to yourself again, means, at that instant, you’re not. You’re noticing that you are and that’s different, but you can’t hold on to that noticing. You can only re-notice, because by the time you’ve noticed that you’ve noticed, you’re not noticing anymore. You’re tripping out on the fact that you noticed and you’re trying to hold on. “Yes. I just noticed.” But it’s already back and doing it to you again. So, you have to keep noticing and at the same time, one thing I would do is, as many times as in the day that you remember, just sit down and allow the breath to settle. You can’t settle the breath. I’m not asking you to slow your breath down. I’m asking you to sit down and allow the breath to settle. Allow your body to relax. That’s all. And then get up and be stupid again. It doesn’t matter, but do that 50 times a day, a hundred times a day. Do it for just two minutes. Don’t try to hold on to it because you won’t be able to, and then you’ll be beating yourself up again, and that will go on forever again until it stops. So, as many times as you feel, as you remember to do it, stop. Sit down and settle. “I can’t settle. This is stupid. I can’t do this. I’m not going to do this.” Yeah. Just allow it to settle again and again, and those thoughts will just float off into space, which is where they are anyway. And love means letting people be who they are. Our children and our grandchildren took these bodies. They brought their own karmas to those bodies. Those bodies themselves, are the creation of their karmas, and then with, and we were hosting them, and all we can do is the best we can do. There’s no more we can do, especially when we recognize how our weakness, our inability to do anything really. So, all we can do is the best we can do and pray for grace. But you still have to clean out the vessel to hold the grace. That’s the slowing down. The dirt is your thoughts. The sludge is our thoughts and emotions and the grace can’t come into a cup that’s filled with that stuff. So slow down, let it go and allow yourself to feel okay sometimes. You’re allowed. There’s no law written. “Everybody except Diane can feel okay in the world. She is not allowed to do that.” That’s something that you were taught about yourself, way early. Could be even in the womb. You just don’t know. We absorb a lot of stuff even before we’re born from our parents. Because we’re there while they’re yelling and screaming at each other. We’re there while they’re depressed, while they’re drinking, while they’re fucked up. We’re in that. Our consciousness is there and we feel all that stuff. So it’s not something you did. It’s just life. And so the more you learn how to give yourself a break, the more you have a possibility of allowing other people to do that for themselves as well. That’s about as much as we can do at this point. Thank you. Yeah. Good to see you. How’s the judge? She’s good. She’s good. She’s painting all the time now, right? Yeah. She loves the solitude. I don’t do so well in solitude. Well, that’s what you say, but you don’t know. It brings all this up and it’s a great time to do the work that you have to do. Yeah. Because tomorrow might be too late. Now. Today. Yeah. And at this point in my life, I’m really aware of it. Tomorrow might be too late. Well, don’t worry. You’ll have another chance, but now is now. Okay. All right. Take care. Hi. I’m from London. Thank you, Krishna Das, for taking my question. Actually you’ve sort of answered a lot of it, really, with the lady just then. Well, first of all I found you by accident and I’ve been sort of following you now for the past, I don’t know, few months now, and I’ve started chanting and I realized there’s something coming from you, and I don’t know what it is. When I start singing, listening to your melodies, I start crying you know, and I’m not depressed or anything like that, but I just feel like this release, and even as you’re talking now, I know it’s not about you, it’s about the universe. I know. I feel like this sensations in my hands, a lot of vibration inside me you know. And I think I’m making progress. I’ve come from a very abusive background, you know, as a child, and I’ve done a lot of shit things really when I reflect back. But I was really tested by the universe on Thursday, and somebody cheated me out of 50 quid, which is about one $70 as well as, which not a lot of money, but then murderous rage I got towards this person. I’ve never, and I’m not a murderer, by the way, and I’ve never hurt anybody, but I can be really nasty with my tongue, you know. I’ll keep that in mind. Yeah no, but I just I have this really murderous rage, like inside of me. Yeah. And then I thought, “Okay just go with the feeling. Go with the feeling.” Exactly what you’re advising the last lady. And it did. It sort of by it went, you know, the intensity did go then the following day, but that day, you know. It’s just like telephone scam, it was, I got ripped off on that. You know, and then I don’t usually fall for that kind of stuff, but I did on this occasion, but it’s the reaction really. And it frightens me sometimes because they diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder about 10 years ago. And I just, you know, I have got into rages of people in the supermarket sometimes, and so I’ve never hurt anybody, but it can result to me calling somebody an “F-ing…” you know. I think I’m following a spiritual practice, but I’m not doing very well. I’m not doing very well here. Anyway, I’ve shared with my flatmate who lives with me here. And he’s so honest. And I said to him about this. He says, “Oh, I just choose light. I just choose love.” So he’s following Louise Hay. And I agree with that. But when that fucking intensity of the murderous horrible rage comes in, I cannot focus on light. And I’ve listened to Ram Dass, and Maharajji when he was sort of telling the story of “Love everybody and tell the truth.” if I had to be honest, I don’t hate everybody, but I hate the unjust people. I really have hatred towards them, but I know it’s not them. I know they’re just acting out of ego just as much as I am, but I think the answer is going to be the same as you gave to the last lady, really, but I really struggle with it and I sometimes worry, am I going to really lash out at somebody? I think there’s like a schizophrenia in me. I’m either, I can be a best friend or I can be your worst enemy, and I’ll be the worst enemy to the person I perceive to be unjust. And that’s it really thank you. Well, you’re 51, but there’s still time, don’t worry. Yeah. To be an asshole. I mean, you know,. Yeah, we all have that stuff. Your flatmate: you step on his foot and see how much light and love he can find at that point. That’s bullshit. That’s just bullshit. You’re a thousand times more real than somebody who’s kidding themselves like that. You can’t talk yourself into this stuff. That’s not what it’s about. Be who you are. So, a good practice for you, really would be to remember to treat other people the way you would like to be treated. So, even when you hate somebody, when somebody has been such a fucking asshole and they ripped you off, just switch places with them for a second, and you see, well, you know, “I wouldn’t want to be treated the way I’m thinking about treating this person. You know, and you’re not going to be able to do that, but just trying to remember to see it that way is really big thing. If we could do that, if we could treat other people the way we would like to be treated, this world would be a different place immediately. Right? And all that anger, this comes from, you know, pain, being hurt. We’ve all been so hurt. All of our hearts. We’ve been so betrayed and we’ve been treated so badly by life that we really, that rage is our, it’s really our way of protecting ourselves from feeling how hurt we are. You know? So, when you hear that chanting and stuff and those tears come, they’re coming out of love. They’re coming out of the feeling that “Yeah, I’m letting go. I can let go. I can just be me.” You know? And that’s a wonderful thing. Don’t think about whether you’re unhappy or you’re sad. What else can you do when you come home? Right? You finally recognize there is a home to come back to. The tears always come. That’s a good thing. And let yourself cry. Let them come. It’s pure. That cleans the mirror of your heart. It’s a beautiful thing. Really. Just remember. And forget supermarkets. Supermarkets are where most people want to kill everybody else, anyway. That’s the craziest thing. It’s unbelievable. So, Yeah, just keep that in your thoughts. You know, keep the idea of treating, and the other thing is this, listen, don’t expect other people to respond to you that way. You’re not doing that in order to get other people to respond. You’re doing that because this is what you need to do, to treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Whether they respond and see you or not, that is not the deal. That’s not what it’s about. So don’t get upset when the world starts, all of a sudden, doesn’t put you on a pedestal and pour golden water all over you and lights come and everything. That’s not going to happen tomorrow. A little later, maybe. So just be you, man. And so that’s it. First of all, there’s nothing else you can be. There’s no one else you can be. So let’s make this the best you that you can be, which is fine because that’s already in there and it’s buried under all this stuff. And when we open up like that, when the chant, we hear the chant or something, it washes our souls. It washes our hearts. That’s a good thing. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming today. I’ll speak to you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Be well. Hi. I’ve talked to you about this a little bit before, and you touched on this a lot earlier, but specifically what I wanted to talk to you about was my brother. He’s been going through a dark night of the soul since about the time he was 20 years old and he’s been on and off the street with schizophrenia and this year with COVID, we didn’t know where he was a lot of the time and it was extra scary at times, of course. And you know, I just really, I was really focused on opening my heart and praying for him, and in July he emerged and we were able to get him into a supportive housing situation, but time and time again, that only lasts for so long, and then he’s off running again. And the past few years it’s fallen to me to really oversee his care when he does emerge and try to help him. And I feel okay. I know there’s only so much I can do, and chanting and all these practices have been really beautiful and helpful in helping me, you know, remind me that, do what you can do and then let it go. Do what you can do for the day, if you’re in contact with him, and let it go. You talked in the beginning about being out on the lawn and not being able to find the door or find the key. And so I think I have these moments of intense sadness when I think that, because of his karmic situation and having grown up with him and seeing what a good little boy was, and how sweet, and just knowing that he may never even have the knowledge of rightful action or the sense, I guess you could say, to have that opportunity to practice. I don’t know if Maharajji ever spoke specifically about the mentally ill and the fact that they can’t, there’s not that availability of choice, you know, to them the way it is to maybe, to other people. So I just felt like I kind of wanted to ask you about that a little bit. You know? You know, why things are the way they are, we don’t know. Why some people suffer the way they suffer, we could never understand why that happens that way, why a child gets sick and dies. What did they do? You know? Why did that happen? It’s above our pay grade and we just can’t see it and understand it. So that leaves us with ourselves, and what can we do in the moment to lessen the suffering? Every relationship has two or more people. So, there’s your brother and you, and every time you interact with your brother, he’s being himself and you’re being yourself. So all your feelings are interacting with his feelings. So, the best thing you can do is to stay as open, as loving, and as present with him as possible in those moments. And some part of him will feel that. And that’s a wonderful thing you can do. You can’t make him take his meds. You can’t make him go to the doctors. Those are the things you just can’t do. But what you can do is hold him in your heart in a certain way, and love him as he is, as he really is. Love his soul, so to speak. And see him that way. Hold him that way in your heart. And then your interactions with him have the possibility, maybe in some way, of helping him inside. But more than that, you can’t do. And you should try not to be destroyed by your own sadness about the situation, because you’re sending that to him too, in your relationship. You can’t fake it. Okay? I’m not saying that you should fake it and you know, “Just don’t show that you’re sad.” No, this is your work every day, your spiritual practice is to hold him in your heart, and when you notice that you’re feeling sad or wishing it wasn’t like this, and “wish we could do that,” let go and love him as he is. There’s a soul in there that’s perfect, but it’s surrounded encased in suffering. So, the more you see him as a soul, then you’re not identifying with the suffering part of him and maybe that’s going to help him a little bit. It’s certainly going to help you, because you don’t want to carry this burden. It’s not your burden to carry like that. But you want to carry him in love and you have to let yourself feel that, too, and the sadness. This is what you can do, I guess. I mean, it’s very hard. You have to let people be who they are. There’s nothing you can do. Yeah. I have so much love for him that I feel like it’s part of, like I’m partnering with him. I don’t know. I mean, he is my sibling. He’s my younger brother. So it’s hard not to feel like that intensely about it. Yeah. All feelings are okay. It’s all okay. All the feelings you have are okay. Thank you for reminding me of some of those things. Yeah, just hold him in your heart and send him love and be with him. Hold him. You know, be with him in your own heart, soul to soul, not “stuff to stuff.” Okay? Yeah. Practice is so important because we plant those seeds of what we want to grow with our practice, and I don’t mean, it doesn’t mean just meditation practice or chanting practice. It means caring about people, caring about ourselves, caring about the world and offering kindness and compassion to everyone that comes into our lives. But if we don’t plant those seeds, in those moments that get very difficult, like this moment in the world, there’s very little we can do. When you jump out of a window, you know, that’s it, until you hit the ground. When you trip, once you’re falling, you can’t stop yourself. You have to hit the ground. Then you can get up. I guess jumping out a window is a little bit different. Okay. We’re talking about tripping here. So now’s the time to plant the seeds of the kind of qualities that we want. We want to be kind and compassionate to people, but if we hate ourselves, what is that? How can we be kind? I mean, we can try, but it’s not real enough, you know? The more we’re in it with ourselves, that extends to other people. So that’s why they always say, do practice while you can, because when the shit hits the fan, it’s very hard to do it. When that rage comes, there’s nothing you can do except let it pass through like a huge storm. You can’t stop it, but you can also hold on to a tree so you don’t get blown away, but you can’t stop it. But if you keep remembering to try to see people. In a certain way and to treat them in a simply good way, the way you would like to be treated, those storms will arise less and less, and when they do arise, they won’t be as strong as they usually are. Over time, they get less and less, but it takes patience. Patience is one of the ways that we can be good to ourselves, be patient with ourselves. We don’t have it together. We know that, okay? We know that. So as time goes on, we’ll get together. So, patience with ourselves is a way of being kind to ourselves and that patience can extend to other people. “Don’t they fucking get it? Why are they acting like this?” You know? That’s not patience. That’s saying, “I guess they don’t fucking get it. Oh, well.” You know? And we can apply that to ourselves, too, when we’re really stuck in something. So, you know, I’ve been doing this stuff for 50 years or more, and every day is part of the deal. I mean, there’s no time off, you know? This is our life. This is our taking our lives in our hand, the reins of our lives in our hands and trying to direct it in the direction we want to go, toward what we want, which is love now, love for everyone, love for ourselves all the time, 24, 7 from ever. Forever and always. That’s where love is, always. And that lives within us right now, but it’s covered up and we’re not looking. So when we try to hold others in our heart, we’re really learning where our heart is and how to do that. When we try to treat other people with kindness and respect, and we’re learning how to do that for ourselves too. And that’s really important, . Hello. Thank you for taking my question. I’m feeling very shy, but mostly I just really wanted to express my gratitude for Thursday nights. My life circumstances found me kind of suddenly living alone in March. So it’s just been me, my cat and my ego for a lot of the time. And Thursday nights have been this refuge and I’ve shown up every Thursday. I don’t know why I just said that. Yeah. I’ve been noticing that my voice is getting stronger. Okay. That’s my cat. Where’s your ego? Can I meet that one, too? Yeah. My traps tend to be mental, so it’s easy to get kind of, into these ruts, but I find that on Thursday nights, it’s sometimes it’s the first time I’ve opened my mouth in two days. Yeah. I’ve had a pretty monastic year and my voice just comes out craggy and harsh and then after about a half hour, there’s no time and I can just go forever. Yeah. Good. Very good. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you. Hi. Well, first of all, I just wanted to say that I see everybody and it’s really cool to just be in a space with so many other people. I know, I can’t see many people’s faces right at this moment, but that’s pretty cool. Okay. So the other day I was going to get something out of my closet and I I like, reached up and I was like, “Oh shit, I’m going to die,” like someday, not at this moment, but someday, and I had this experience that I’m kind of used to by now, but I, for some reason, it just shocks me every time, where I realize I’m going to die and I get really real weird, like I’m totally not in the normal realm of being, and I feel, you know, my mom came and was like, “Hey, like what the fuck is going on?” And I was like, “Well, this is what happened.” And she was like, you know, “You breathe through it and you’ll get through it and you’ll go past it.” But sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t go past it and I should experience it. But I don’t know. I was just having that feeling that maybe I shouldn’t be like so afraid of feeling that way, because it’s just now that I began to really feel that way and not try to run away from it, at least. Well, you know, one of the major, most important meditations in Buddhism is the the meditation on death, the awareness of the imminence of death. I hate to tell you this, but you are going to die. And all of these nice people you’re looking at. Computers might still be here, but there won’t be anybody looking into it. Right. Yeah. Everybody comes and goes. That’s the deal. So, really serious, heavy duty practitioners. There’s a whole meditation on the awareness of the imminent nature of death, because that makes you feel more alive and gives you, it changes your perspective on things. It wakes you up. How are you spending your time? You know? Moping around? Why not use the time better? Why not feel better? Then you develop these practices to try to release yourself from the dream that you live in most of the time. And you’re kind of young. So having those experiences could easily be seen as the fruition of spiritual practice that you’ve done in a previous life and now that awareness is coming here in this life, because it’s some work you’ve already done and it’s going to change the way you go through your day. It’s going to make this life more precious and more real and you’ll be more present. If you know that everybody around you is going to die and you’re going to die and you see, why aren’t people happier? You know? Why are they wasting their time? Why are they getting busy getting more and more stuff when you can’t take it with you? They say, the only thing you can take with you when you leave the body is your state of mind. And so that’s the most important thing to work on, is one’s state of mind, how long it goes through one’s day. And so, you’re a musician. You want to bring as much of your self into the music. So right now you’re learning techniques. Everybody needs techniques, whether it’s meditation techniques or music or scientific techniques, and once you learn those techniques, what you use them for, that’s what’s really interesting. Right. How do you use the techniques to transmit what you’ve learned about yourself? So it’s like a learning tool. For sure. It’s a waking up tool, an awareness tool. Yeah, absolutely. But you need to pay attention because of who you are in this life right now, that little bubble of awareness, that experience might trigger some emotional responses, too, which would be not so pleasant. That’s not the point of the meditation practice, right? In Buddhism, for instance, there’s compassion and there’s impermanence. Impermanence is the fact that everything’s always changing. Everybody’s going to die. Everything that’s lives will die. Everything’s changing, and compassion is cultivating kindness and love and caring. So the Dalai Lama says to Westerners, especially, “Mostly spend time with the compassion, kindness practice, because if we spend too much time with the emptiness and impermanence practice, because we’re so emotionally out of balance all the time, we can get depressed and get stuck in a hard place.” So it’s better not to dwell so much on that until you’ve developed the real, what they call Bodhi Chitta, which is this feeling of kindness and compassion for everyone and one’s self. But still you’re having those experiences. They’re coming. You’re not asking for them. So be with them. Allow them to be there. Don’t be afraid. But if you notice that it’s making you depressed, then you need to try to counter that a little bit. The experience is not negative in any way, I don’t think. Right. But our egos, our emotional shape can be jarred by that, you know, and excited by that, and then we just get unhappier and that’s not the point of that. Right. Because it’s reality. Everyone who’s ever existed since the beginning of time has left the body at some point or other. It can get worse Okay. It can’t get worse. Everybody’s gone, but of course they come again, but that’s a whole other story. But allow that feeling to make you more compassionate for people who don’t know that. Right? Really. And you can cultivate that compassion and recognize, “Oh, there’s so many people don’t understand. They keep on just getting more and more stuff. And what good is it? It’ll never make them happy anyway.” So just naturally, that feeling of caring about other people will arise from that experience, but because we are so emotional, don’t let it make you unhappy. Right. Don’t let it make you depressed, because there’s that possibility of that happening. If that happens, you’ve got to talk yourself down, you know. “Oh, wait a minute. This is not something to be depressed about. This is something that’s waking me up to be more kind and more open and more living right now in everything that I do.” Yeah. I think that for a long time I felt like I had that feeling that I was going to die and like be dead, and then I built a lot of like, structure of emotion, like you were saying, around it. And then once I started, really when I started like doing some yoga, I would realize that all of a sudden, like the anxiety was less, like the excess was like going away, but I was reaching like maybe like the root feeling. And then I started having this feeling more often. It jumps up on me and I’m like, whoa. Yeah. So let me ask you, so when you say, when you get that feeling that you’re going to die do you ,have fear at that moment? Is there some fear that comes up a little? I think what happens, the first reaction is like an understanding, like the first thing is like a, whoa. Then of course, right after that, it’s just complete fear, and it’s like truest of fears for me. Yeah. So that’s ego fear, right? Because no one dies. The soul is not born nor does it die. It doesn’t come and go. The soul is eternal, so to speak. Bodies come and go. But there’s no dead beings. There’s dead bodies, but beings don’t die. They just take off this set of clothes and they put on another set of clothes. When we really have that understanding. I mean, not just here, but if we know that then of course we don’t worry about it, but that feeling of the fear is, that’s ego. The ego is afraid of it’s possible not existing anymore, but it doesn’t even exist in the first place. It’s just a bunch of thoughts, but it thinks it’s real. But you’re always going to be here. Actually. There’s nowhere you can go. That’s why spiritual practice is so cool, because it brings us back, it pulls us out of the past, pulls us out of the future and brings us right here, which is where we’ll always be. Even if you left the body now, you would still be able to say to yourself, where am I? And the answer would be here. You’ll always be here. There’s nowhere you can go. Bodies come and go, but the soul, the awareness within us does not diminish nor does it get more. It’s always as it is. It’s perfect. So when you have that fear, sit with it. Don’t push it away. Just like, “What is this? What is this fear? What am I afraid of? What am I afraid of?” You know? And then see what comes up. Don’t let it push you around if you can. So be aware of it, you know, but of course in those moments, it’s very hard, obviously, because once you say, “Whoa,” you know, you’re already in it, but then you’re still here, even though it’s happening. So you can always like, “Okay, what is this?” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, at the beginning of World War II, he said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Right. When you’re in that fear, it’s really scary. Yeah. But it comes and goes. It’s nothing in itself. It’s just the feeling. So when you’re in that feeling, there’s very little, you can do except just be with it and watch it disappear, come and go. Yeah, so write songs about it. That’s what they all say. Write songs about it. Yeah. Or poems to yourself. Not for other people necessarily. But just speaking about it to yourself will actually, you develop a relationship with it where it doesn’t overpower you all the time, that fear. But even so, it’s nothing to be afraid of. You don’t need to be afraid of fear. It’s just another feeling, although when you’re in it, it’s hard to think that. Yeah. as Meher Baba, the great Saint, once said, “Don’t worry. Be happy.” That’s what he said. Easy for him. But don’t worry. Be happy. Well, I won’t. I decided now, I’m never going to worry again. Don’t lie to me, but good luck. All right, sweetheart. Bye-bye. So I had a question. I’m pretty new to these practices and this tradition, to some of the statues and some of the things that you put maybe on your altar and some of the practices, and so, I was in a training and it was suggested to put a picture of Neem Karoli Baba and others, and I kind of had a real resistance to this just because other than listening to you, Krishna Das, I don’t know him. I don’t have any experience with it. And so my response was, well, “Why would I put that on my altar? I don’t have any connection with that yet.” And… Why would you even have an altar? I like candles. Put it on top of the TV and light a little candle there. So I guess my question is, you know, how much of this can we just kind of make it up and what works for us and how much is, you know, tradition regarding specifically maybe a statue of Hanuman or a picture of this or a picture of that. And then how do we be true to ourselves in that, in terms of what really speaks to us? No, listen, other people might tell you something else, but since you asked me, don’t, it’s not like, we’re not playing dollies here. You know, murtis are not dollies for us to play with. Pictures of the Saints are not like porn we’re supposed to use to get off. Do what feels right to you. You have to develop your own path, your own relationship with yourself and whatever helps you overcome, do some practice and overcome your own, you know, obstacles and stuff in your own heart, that’s what you should do. Don’t listen to people. Don’t listen to anybody. Even me. Just listen to your own heart and what works for you. Don’t make anything up. Don’t try to manipulate yourself into feeling something. That’s crazy. Why would you do that? Just be you. That’s what it’s all about. And you’ll find out more about yourself and more about who you are, and you’ll eventually you’ll go deeper into yourself and things will start to feel natural that didn’t feel natural before. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need pictures. You don’t need murtis. You are the murti. Inside of you is the living god. Just as you are inside, is the living presence. Real love lives inside of you right now. All those other things are tools. They’re like mirrors to help us see a deeper part of ourselves. But if we think it’s just like a little Dolly, that’s not going to help. So forget it. But if you want to read more about Maharajji, there’s a number of books about him. So you get an idea of why people are attracted to him in the first place, because that’s the main thing. So, there’s a list on my website somewhere of the books, about Maharajji and some other books that I like, and there’s available on krishnadasmusic.com, a link to a book of stories about Maharajji for free, a free download. That’s a lot of Indian stories, so there’s lot of Indian names. So if you’re not too familiar with names it might be hard. But they’re great stories and that’s free. So you can just take a look at that, and then Ram Dass wrote a book called “Miracle of Love” about Maharajji. So, there’s things out there, and that’s also spiritual practice. That is called satsang, hanging out with spiritual beings. When you read about these great beings and you see how they lived in the world or how they saw other people, what they did, and it starts to affect you very deeply. You see what might be possible in life, but it’s not about playing with dollies. Screw it. Forget that stuff, you know, until and unless it makes sense to you, then you do it. Otherwise, don’t feel manipulated by other people. You go through some training and they say, “Oh, you have to put this picture up and now light a candle.” Why the fuck would you light a candle? Go watch TV. Just be yourself. If you try to be something else, you’re not going to be successful. You have to be you. It has to be natural. It has to be what you want. That’s the deal, as far as I see it right now. Thank you, and I have one follow-up question, if that’s okay. You know, we practice together. We’ll sing together. I’m not very good at singing, but he’s really great at singing, and that’s wonderful at times, and then at other times you know, I guess for myself, I like to sit by myself and do my own practice, and I don’t know if there’s anything, suggestions on doing practices together or separate, or if it matters at all. It’s up to you, whatever works for you, but be honest with yourself and each other. Don’t do it with him because you think he needs you to, or he wants you to or you’ll hurt his feelings if you don’t. You have to be honest, you know, and that’s in your relationship and honest with yourself. If you’re trying to do something to please somebody else and it’s driving you crazy, what good is it? So be open about it. Talk about it all. If he can’t do it by himself, fuck him you know? Yeah. And if you can’t do it by yourself, you have to learn. Ultimately we’re doing it by ourselves. Sometimes it helps in a group, because there’s more people doing it. You’re helping each other remember. When you are being quiet and distracted, he’s singing and so that might pull you back, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s all okay. Play with it. it’s not like Catholic school, for Christ’s sake. This is just real life. There’s no nuns going to hit you over the hand with a ruler if you don’t do it right. Just find your way. You have to. The whole thing is to find your own way. Yeah, it’s all good. All right. I don’t know if I have a question, but it’s not a specific question. It’s just reaffirming myself that, you know, like when I was little, I used to talk to Allah, as in God, and all of those, and then I grew up and then last summer I told you I was listening to Ram Dass, and then this is, this whole thing started, and I realized meditation is very important for me. And I started doing meditation and I’m reading books and all of those, and I know you said just before, like you actually almost answered my question when you were talking to the other person. You said it’s what you feel is right for you. I just want to know that, if there’s anything else, if you have any suggestion, you know, like I want to be a better person and live a conscious life and then just be in the best possible shape to help others. Do you think, is there anything else I can do to make sure that I am, I’m having good intentions and I’m doing what is supposed to be done? Well, everything you said is a beautiful aspiration, you know, it’s a wonderful idea to be helping people, serving people. Maharajji never told us to meditate. He never told us to think about ourselves. He said, “Love everyone. Serve everyone. Remember God.” So you do a little practice. You do a little japa. You repeat the name, but you think about other people. And if you weren’t thinking about yourself all the time, if we weren’t thinking about ourselves all the time, we wouldn’t be wondering whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing. We’d just be doing it. There is no right thing or wrong thing. And you will find your path as you take a step forward. The more steps you take, the more you find your path it’ll feel right or it won’t feel right. It’ll feel right for a while, then it won’t. So you change. That’s okay. It takes a little bit of courage, but it’s okay. There’s no mistakes. You learn from things, always learning. That’s all. But your aspiration to help people is exactly what’s required. But how to do that? So you have to find out the best way you can do that. Now, you know, Mother Teresa, when she, a new person would come to work with her in Calcutta, and they worked in the slums with the poorest people, sickness, disease, death, she said, “If you don’t find joy here, you have to leave.” Joy in the service. Right? It’s not about sacrificing and “My broken heart. I give you everything to try to help.”. You know, that’s just a load of shit. Yeah. You can feel joy in the service while you’re working with the most suffering. So that takes great strength and great inner wisdom. So as you move forward in your life on your path, you’ll see what keeps you centered, what allows you to be able to give yourself more fully, and you have to do those things in order to serve others. One has to be strong, also. We can’t be destroyed by the things we’re trying to serve. Otherwise. What good is it? Right? So it’s both things. Right. But yeah, like I say, Maharajji never encouraged us to think about ourselves. You know? Serve others. Think about others. That’s not so easy, but because we have these tendencies to deny our own goodness and not let ourselves feel okay, and that’s not good. That’s not healthy. We can feel okay even when we’re dealing with terrible suffering and disastrous situations. We can feel that we’re okay. We’re doing the best we can for whoever’s there, but don’t push yourself, okay? Just be you. Let it arise. Let it unfold. It’s it’s wonderful thing. Let it happen. Let life come to you. You don’t have to go out and look for it. You’re already in it. It’s like Sharon Salzberg was saying, one of her teachers said, “Okay, I want you to close your eyes and sit there, and I want everybody to touch space.” Right? So everybody in the room will go like this, you know? And he laughed. He said, “You’re already touching space just being here.” You’re already touching. You’re in space. So you’re in your life already. It’s going on. So allow it to go on in the best way that you can, but it’s not about right and wrong and what’s the best thing. “What should I do? What should I do?” You won’t know until you do it, if it’s right or wrong, if it works for you, and you’re the only one who’s going to know. Nobody can tell you unless you happen to run into a real Saint and they can tell you, and then you’ll know, but that’s not every day. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. It might not even be every life. Okay? Okay. All right. Take care. I’ll speak to you soon. Bye. Hi Krishna Das, I’m glad to be here. Hi. I’ve been following you for about a year now, and I’ve done a lot of exploring, and for my question, I continually come up against this and I’m hoping you might be able to give me a little bit of insight, and that is in relation to, I don’t want to cry, I guess how it relates to karma. I kind of wrote it down a little bit. So for the most part, my life has been what most people would describe and what I would describe as pretty good, no real physical danger, no emotional traumas that I’m consciously aware of anyway, and then we see people that are just not so lucky and not privileged in this way. I just wonder like, how can I process How can I process that? Like how can I not ask, “Why them? Why not me? How can I accept this entire premise of karma and its perceived unfairness, really? How can I trust it’s justness from a position of privilege, essentially? Well, first things first, you can’t help anybody if you’re going to be destroyed by it, by other people’s suffering. You can’t carry water to somebody if you can’t walk. And you mentioned that a little bit earlier, so I did catch that. Yeah. So that’s where you should start, you know, these emotional reactions that you’re having, all they do is cripple you. Why you have them, why you were born where you were born to whom you were born and what situation you were born, and why other people were born in different situations, we don’t know, and we’ll never know, but if we’re going to help other people, we have to be strong. We have to have real strength, inner strength, and that means we can’t be destroyed by our own emotional issues. Your emotional issues are not other people’s emotional issues. There’s a difference between compassion and emotion. Compassion brings strength. It brings will. It brings power. It brings help to other people. It brings everything. But these kinds of emotions just cripple us and they cripple our will and we don’t do anything, and we can’t do anything because we’re wondering “Why is this like this? And I have this, and I’m ashamed that I have this and I have that.” This is just stuff you need to let go of if you’re going to ever be of any use to anybody else. So, all those questions of why and what, and if, and who cares. They’re not questions for us to answer. If you want to help somebody, you have to develop the ability to do that. And that means working on yourself, because right now we’re so limited in what we can do for anybody, because we’re carrying such a heavy burden of our own stuff with us. We can’t carry anything else for anybody else. I think we should just stay with that part of it. I remember when I first got to India and seeing the way people lived and seeing so much poverty and so much hunger, the thing that I was struck, more than anything else, is that those people were thousand times happier than I was and they had a million times less than I had, and that was a wake up call. So I’m not saying that’s an excuse you can use to yourself, but, and of course it’s not always true and you don’t wish suffering on anyone, but you’re wishing suffering on yourself right now with all these emotional issues that you’re dealing with. And they’re preventing you from actually reaching out to the people who could use help. Yeah, this is what we do to ourselves. We make up stories that cripple us, and then we moan and groan. You know, what else do we do? That’s what we do with our lives. We make up stories and beat the shit out of ourselves and we moan and groan and don’t do anything. So we got to get over that. So spiritual practice is required, calming the mind, practicing letting go of the stories when we notice that we’re doing that, developing some kind of practice, some ability to pay attention, some ability to calm down. That’s very important, to be where you are. This is very important. And to stop believing everything we think about it all. If you didn’t think these things, if you didn’t tell yourself this story about yourself and the world to yourself, where would it be? Nowhere. And neither would you be bound by it at that point. You’d be free and in that freedom, you’ll be able to do so much to help others. And of course, these times, once again, it’s very true, these times are really hard, and each one of us is pressured and it’s like a weight that’s on us. We don’t even know what it is. It’s not ours. It’s the world. Everybody in the world is whoa. It’s really heavy. So it brings out the worst in us. It brings out this dark stuff that we don’t even know is there. We can’t even recognize it most of the time, but it brings it out. So on one hand, it’s a great time to practice, because it makes it so apparent what’s going on. So you don’t try to push these feelings away. You don’t try to kill them. You allow them to be, and you just keep letting, go letting it go, letting the breeze, letting the breath, just wash it away again and again. It comes back again and again. It comes back. This is the dedication we make to our own wellbeing, and since we are all one, part of one body, if we help ourselves, we help others, too, and we create those possibilities. So, start where you are, but don’t push yourself, right? Just be where you are and let go of all this stuff, the stories, little by little, and see what happens, see how you feel. Hi. You know, when you were just talking just now, you were talking about how there’s this weight that, you know, everybody is kind of experiencing right now, and my question, I guess, without getting too specific, is how do you deal with traumatic situations that may trigger your emotions? I mean, the problem for me is that I’m going through something right now that is really scary to me and I just keep getting caught in the fear, and I believe my fear, you know, and I can get into these moments where, if I’m chanting and I’m like, right before, you know, when you were talking, it just, I could feel it draining out of me, but I’m driving everybody in my family crazy because I keep going, what’s that? It’s probably a very short drive. Yeah. Maybe so. You know, because I’m constantly meditating and chanting, which has made me making everybody you know, not constantly cause I have to work and I do other things, but I think I’m obsessively chanting, maybe, and obsessively saying the Hanuman Chalisa and things like this to try to control my fear. I don’t know. I’m like, what do I do? It’s hard for me to drain the fear all the time because my mind is telling me something that I’m believing and there’s some reality in there, you know? Let’s not overthink it. Okay. From what you say, it seems like the fear, whatever the cause of the fear is, I don’t know, but that the fear is actually, it’s pushing you to do all this practice and it’s making you very tense and there’s no space in it at all for you to be you. As far as practice goes, I think it would be better if you did one really good Chalisa where you really were present with it, one of them, rather than a 40 million where you’re like all scattered and running around the day, “I’m going to do a Chalisa between going to the bathroom and washing the dishes.” You know? Do one good one and that will carry you through a lot. If there’s any way you can get some help with someone you could talk to about the issues you’re going through, the nuts and bolts of them, why not? And you can do that online with people. There are therapists and counselors available to talk with us 24 -7 these days, anytime of the day or night. I would look into that because it sounds like there’s something that’s being, you know, some button that’s been pushed and it got stuck in for some reason, and it’s not releasing. So, maybe would be helpful to talk about it. Couldn’t hurt. It’s the fear that’s making you like, “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram, Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram. I’m not gonna allow myself to think think, cause I don’t want to do that.” That’s no use. So it’s better to watch TV, watch some good movies. Go back and watch Sesame Street again, you know, it’s probably been a few years. Do something nice. Do something fun. But there’s no way to fight with those emotions when they’re right on you. It’s, you’re surrounded by a cloud of it and you can’t really push it away nor can you get away. You know? So it’s not easy to say, you know. Sit with the fear, you know, and look at it. It’s not like you have to, “Okay, I’m going to look at the fear. I’m too afraid to look at the fear.” But you just, “What is it? What am I afraid of? What is this? What’s going on?” And then, like I said, really, counseling therapy is very useful in these situations. And again, in these times we’re so compressed, you know, and pressed down with the pressure of the fear in the world. That makes it really hard to let go and to relax. So try to find a way to be a little easier with yourself, you know. Just find a way to relax a little bit, you know. Go for a run. Go for a walk. Wear a mask. You know, find a way to release some of the pressure. You know, it’s like the pressures got stuck in there and you somehow have to release it. So constantly going around, like, “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram,” that’s not going to help. That just makes more pressure. I know. I know you’re right. Yeah. I may be. I may not be, but whatever. If it sounds good to you, I’ll take it. That’s enough. Yeah. But take it easy on yourself, and whatever the specific cause of your fear is, if there is a specific cause, that’s getting injections of steroids from the amount of fear in the world. So even though you think of it as “my fear,” it may not be, actually. It may just something you tripped and fell into. It could be somebody in your family has it, unspoken, unaware that you’re absorbing from them, but you wouldn’t absorb it unless you needed to, in a way, unless you had some of it yourself. There’s so much things going on, whatever it is, who gives a shit, let it go. You know? And don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about your feelings. There are no wrong feelings. Okay? Every feeling has a cause. Whether you need to find out the exact cause of the feeling or not, who knows? You can also just release again and again, and that kind of breaks the cycle of the glue that holds us to those feelings, but it’s not instant. It’s something that develops over time. Have you read the books about Maharajji or anything like that? Yes, I love Maharajji. I read Miracle of Love and I’m reading The Near and the Dear right now, and I watched, you know, the Maharajji film, Windfall of Grace the other night. So I just love him. Well, talk to him and ask him to get his shit together. I do. I’m like, you know, I’m sure he’s “ Oh, it’s her again.” Yeah, it’s her again and again and again. Yeah, no. So I do get a lot of comfort in that way and yeah. That’s good, well, talk to him. Tell him, “Baba, what’s going on here? You know, what is this? Can’t you do something about this? You know, what is this? Why do I have this?” Speak to him and then listen. What comes up from inside? And you’re not alone. You’re never alone. Believe me. Nobody’s alone. Yeah. Thank you. Be well. Okay, next victim. So I think you’ve answered my question throughout the session. Thank you so much, but I’ll just give you some background. So I come from a tiny country called Lebanon. If you’ve heard of it, you might have heard that… I think we’ve heard of it. Lebanese food is actually the best in the world. We ate at a Lebanese restaurant in Paris, and I would move. I would wash the floors of that place just to be able to eat there every day. The best. Yeah. So I actually, you might have also heard of the Beirut explosion that killed many people. Yes. Yes. So I don’t live there now. I’ve been living in a different country for around six years now, but my country is now going through a very tough time. There’s an economic collapse and the aftermath of the explosion is just bad. It’s only my mom living there now. So honestly I have big plans for myself. Now I’m turning 30 soon. I have big plans for myself. I want to go back and try to fix my country. My country is basically drowning in corruption. I want to use my thirties to try to prepare myself as much as possible to go back and try to, you know, try to fix things as much as I can before I die. So I was wondering if you have any advice for someone who’s going to be 30 soon. And what would you advise me to focus on specifically? If you have any advice, please. Thank you. Temper your exuberance with a little reality. The world’s pretty fucked up. Your country is arguably just, if not more fucked up at the moment, than a lot of other places, but the whole world’s going crazy right now. And this is probably not the best time to try to change things. I would definitely wait until the virus works its way through and it’s no longer the most, the one thing that you can’t get away from. You don’t want to die of COVID before you get home. So you want to take care of yourself also, and then whatever you can do to relieve suffering, you’ll be able to do. But it’s hard times in the world. And I don’t know, you know, I don’t know anything about you, what capabilities you have, what connections you have. So I can’t, I wouldn’t talk to that, but whatever you want to do for others, you also have to do for yourself. You know? One time this group of politicians came to the temple and were talking to Maharajji about their green revolution, back in the early seventies. Maharajji said, “What green revolution? What are you talking about? You assholes. Do you make it rain?” You know? “Can you do that? Can you make it rain? What can you do? We’re human beings. Those things come from God.” In the old days, traditionally they would do these fire ceremonies and make offerings to the devas in order to bring about rain and good sun and, you know, then good crops and stuff like that. So he says to them, “You’re not making any offerings. Where’s the rain going to come from?” And many years ago, there was a very great Yogi who came to America. His name was Shiva Bala Yogi, and he was really big time, and he was in California and I was visiting there. And in those days in California, there was a terrible drought, right? Really bad. So this guy comes and says, you know, said, “Yogiji, Swamiji, you know, there’s such a terrible drought. What can we do about this?” And he says, “Oh, simple.” He didn’t really know. He hadn’t been in America a long time. He said, “You know that drilling they’re doing out in the bay for oil? Well, they’re pissing off the Nagas, and that’s why you have this drought now. Just ask the government to stop drilling and then you’ll have all the rain you want.” So I don’t know. You could be somebody who can talk to the gods and make those offerings, but more than likely, you’re just like the rest of us. So do what you can do. Take care of yourself too. That’s all. Be careful and remember that it’s not so easy to change the world. You know, way back in seventies, somebody came to Maharajji and said, “Oh, Baba, you know, the world is in such bad shape.” In ’71? ’70? Really? “Such bad shape. I wish there was a king, like Janaka.” He was a great king in India and he was considered to be a Saint and a king, also. Like a realized being and as well as a king. So this guy says to Maharajji, “I wish there was a king like Janaka, you know, to run the world and make it work right.” Maharajji said, “There’s a king much greater than Janaka. There is a king.” Now, I don’t know. I’m just repeating the words. So if there is a king and things are the way they are, all we can do is the best we can do. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do, but don’t drive yourself crazy and destroy yourself trying to make something right that’s not yours to make right. Do what you can do, the best you can do. Right? Might be one soul at a time. Politics is really dangerous. And you know, politicians don’t really want the best for everybody. That’s not why they’re politicians. Mostly. There’s a few good ones. So don’t be naive and still do the best you can. Thank you so much. All right. And all the best. Thanks. I’m fairly new to chanting, but I feel like it’s been a lifetime of getting to this point and I’ve embraced it a hundred percent and I understand everything and I’m I just, yeah, I’m right there. So thank you so much for what you do and how you share that with people and the stories and everything, and it’s just, it’s touched my heart in such a way. I could go on, but anyway, listen, I have a question and it’s more of a concern, really. I was listening to a web cast the other night. You may know the guys, they are a couple of Swedish twins and they were talking about doing psychedelics a lot. And I grew up with Ram Dass and stuff. I don’t know all the details of his experience and I’m starting to sort of do some reading now and rekindle some of that stuff. And I’m not into psychedelics, but these two young guys were talking about taking, you know, lots of psychedelics and becoming spiritual and experiencing a spiritual awakening that one of them even went so far as to say that Maharajji appeared in the mirror and said, “Come with me. You know, I’ll teach you, come with me.” You know, and one of them freaked out and said, “No, I’m not ready to go yet.” And then explained later on that, that he knows that he can go back and become enlightened anytime he likes, because he’s had it and Maharajji was there. And I was like, actually I don’t get too caught up in other people’s trips, but I was a little bit annoyed about that. I was like, now come on, you know, it takes time to, to do this. You have to put in the work. You have to do some stuff. You can’t just say that you’ve seen the light and you’ve become a enlightened and you’ve talked to Maharajji and he’s, you know, tested you and all this sort of stuff. And I know I’m babbling on, but yeah, I came on. I just wanted to get your opinion on this because there seems to be a lot of young people out there and I mean, I’m kind of in the older age bracket, but this younger generation that, they’re really into these, how do you pronounce it? Ayahuasca and the mushrooms. And… Ayahuasca? Sorry that. Yeah, Ayahuasca and the mushrooms and they’re off to these festivals and they’re getting high and they’re like, om-ing, and everything, but they just seemed to be missing the hard work. It seems like some people just want a quick fix. Let’s forget. Let’s forget about the hard work. Nobody wants to do hard work. I don’t want to do hard work. I just want to do the work I have to do. So, as far as psychedelics, Maharajji said the Yogi medicine, he called it, “the Yogi medicine,” brings you into the room with Christ, but you can’t stay. Yeah. So these people and myself, I was actually one of those young people, you know, a few years ago, I took some acid and I had great experiences. And without that, I don’t know if I would have been drawn to spiritual things at all, if I even would have known they existed. So I can’t put them down, but I will say, just to repeat again, Maharajji said, “It brings you into the room with Christ, but you can’t stay.” If you want to stay, the only way to stay is love. And the deal is that people get attached to those experiences. There’s still someone experiencing those states. There’s someone separate experiencing. So that is not liberation. It is not freedom, but people get very into their stuff and, , you hope that they come out of it in a good way at sometime and actually get what they’re looking for. But the problem is you do get very attached to those psychedelic blissful states. And you just want more and more, and you lose the ability to put food in your mouth and stop at the red and go with the green. Your daily life starts to fall apart and you think, “Well, that’s not important. Who gives a shit about daily life.?” You know? But that’s not exactly true because when you destroy your body, you won’t have shit. So, it brings you into the room with Christ, but you can’t stay. The only way to stay is love. So let them be stupid. You be stupid in your way. I’ll be stupid in my way. And they’ll be stupid in their way. Yeah. What’s the problem? Don’t let it bother you. Why should it bother you? And if you take some acid, just don’t take too much. Exactly. I said to my partner, KD is going to help me answer this question two ways. He’s either going to say, “What’s the problem? Don’t worry about it.” Or he’s going to say ” It’s, you know, BS on the other side.” So, I mean… He said both things. Yeah, I was just a little bit like, you know, you can’t. And actually the fact of saying, “Oh, look, I can come back to this any time I like.” Yeah. Let’s ask them who’s saying that. Who’s saying that? The person who’s saying that isn’t going to go through the door. No. And so, so my, I’m thinking, well, it must have been part of the trip. Maybe they’ve created this situation because… Who gives a shit? Don’t think about it. Yeah. You’re overthinking it. And that tells me that you really secretly want to do a big dose yourself, but I’d be very careful. I don’t need to. Good. Very good. Okay. Every once in a while I think about it, you know. Well, I’ve never been down that road, but I found it a bit more concerning because of the amount of young people out there who seem to be grasping. And then they’re turning to psychedelics and stuff, which is great to expand the mind, but, and that’s what Ram Dass was doing. You see? But he asked that question, can we do this without the drugs. But he did for a long time, he was a crazy acid freak. So he had a period when he did that, but then he wanted to find out, what really is this acid? What is it? I know what it did for me, but what really is it? And he couldn’t find anybody that knew. And then he then Maharajji took the acid and nothing happened to him. And he went, “Oh, he must be beyond it. There’s somebody who’s beyond that.” So that was a big thing. Yeah. So let people do what they do. It’s not our job to worry about it. You just wish them well. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Everybody, it’s over two and a half hours. Got to stop now. So take good care. Don’t be too hard on yourselves if you can help it, because you don’t have to be, and just practice, letting go. Whatever you’re stuck in, just a few times a day, just sit down for two minutes and just let yourself settle. And then you’re going to notice. Just settle. Just let it just wash off of you. And that will help break the cycle of the crazy obsessive thinking. Just a few times a day. You can do it 50 times a day, just for two minutes. Just sit, allow it to settle and develop that habit and that practice of letting go. You don’t have to think about what you’re letting go of. You just let go. Just breathe slowly. Let your breath calm down and that’s naturally just letting go. And then you get caught again. Fine. Fine. And then half an hour later, just sit down for two minutes comfortably. You don’t have to sit in lotus.You don’t have to stand on your head. You don’t have to put dollies up on your altar. Just sit down. You’re the dolly. You’re the murti. Worship yourself by calming down and releasing and letting go. Okay. That’s an order. All right. See you all soon.       The post Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD January 16, 2021 appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 74 | Fear, Trauma, Cultural Appropriation, Mindfulness Club “We’re seeing the movie that we are projecting from within. So, we get to see what we have to work with a little bit. And little by little, that movie can be transformed into a screwball comedy from the 30’s. Carole Lombard? Nobody knows who she is. But we can, that movie can change. We can’t change the movie because we are the movie. But the movie can change through our aspiration to be free and the things that we do to help ourselves, to free ourselves from those negative emotions and aspects of our own personality.” – Krishna Das Yes, the alien. What can I do for you? Q: Yes, I’m the alien. KD: Do I speak your language? Q: Yeah. So, thank you so much for today. I just wanted to share… KD: Is it over? I don’t think it’s over. Q: No, no for being here and serving us. KD: Oh, I’m here. Thank you. Q: You talked about serving and it made me think of a story I wanted to just quick-share, really short, because I know you don’t want people to talk for a long time. KD: Which planet is the story from? Q: Let’s see, Lehra. I was five and an intruder came into our house and I was upstairs with my knees shaking and this man was chasing my mom around the table and he was going to hurt her and she just laid down on the floor and went to go on top of her and he had a knife and everything and she said, she said an angel came to her, whatever, an inspiration and she just looked him in the eyes and said, “What do you want from me? I am your brother.” You know, you were talking about the oneness and we’re all the same blood and connected and he just looked at her and he’s like, “I’ll leave you alone now, ma’am.” And he got up and he walked out and that was sort of a miracle or something. KD: Yeah, wow. Q: And I remember then the police came and we were all happy and relieved, the kids in the house, because the authorities were here and I said to my mom, “I hate that man. I want him to die. I want to kill him, mommy.” And she said, “No darling, don’t hate him. He needs love. He’s sick and that’s why he was doing what he did.” And it just struck me, this memory came flooding back just today when you said, “Be of service” and that stayed with me my whole life, to see the soul of everyone. You know? Underneath their pain, underneath their stories and their suffering and their violence. KD: Yeah. Q: I just really wanted to share it. That’s it. KD: Thank you. Because we are so hurt, we don’t let ourselves see the pain of other people too much. And we take everything personally. Whatever programs we have running, I have a friend who’s program is humiliation and he’s always being humiliated by things that happen. Even when they truly didn’t happen to humiliate him the way experiences it as if this person or this situation is humiliating him directly, you know? Or other people are hurt by other people, like that. It’s our programs, you know? And to unravel that program is very difficult. Very very difficult. Very difficult. But you have to start somewhere. Wherever you are, start. And things will, little by little, fall into place if one wants to be free, one can free one’s self. With a lot of help. A lot of help. Yeah.   Q: Hello. KD: Where are you? Q: Right to your left. KD: Hi. Q: Hi. Long time meditator and I recently have found you and chanting. KD: I’m sorry about that. Q: I’m very grateful for it. KD: Ok. Q: Over thirty years, I studied under Doctor Jon Cabot Zinn. KD: I know Jon. Q: And what, and to this day, I do it. And I’ve added the chanting to it and what I’ve learned throughout the years is how judgmental we automatically are as human beings, which arises a lot of stresses in people. KD: Yeah. Q: And one of the methods that Dr. Zinn always told us was to let the thought, the thoughts are going to come in, as in chanting, the thoughts come in, try not to judge them. Let them be there, even acknowledge them and let them go. And fear, fear’s another big thing that people have to deal with. KD: Yeah. Absolutely. Q: And what I learned years ago, I was a firefighter for 30 years, so I saw a lot of tragedy. And lived with a lot of memories of that tragedy. And I tell people, to this day, when they ask me what it felt like to be a firefighter, I say “Well, what’s it feel like when you’re going to the dentist?” And they all had apprehension. And I told them that the method that I used was to take on the apprehension and to work with it, and so my message to myself would be, “What if nothing happened?” If tomorrow, she has to go to the dentist and that’s her fear, between today and tomorrow, her worry is going to be constant of, what if this happens, what if that happens, etcetera. And you can compound that, I guess that’s the word I want to use, by using another thought, “What if nothing happens?” And you’ll notice that your being will relax and it’s a form of meditation. It’s a form of chanting. Right? And it allows for bringing you down because all fears are taught and told to us by ourselves. If you can change the way you think about the fear, that maybe nothing will happen. Try it and that’s all I wanted to say and I wanted to thank you for being here today and having a chance to be here also. KD: Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the fears and a lot of the stuff we carry, it’s hidden within us, you know. It’s not really available consciously for us to see it directly but if we look at our lives and we see those dark places, we see our behaviors that hurt us and others, we see the negative emotions that we carry with us. That’s, we’re seeing the movie that we are projecting from within. So, we get to see what we have to work with a little bit. And little by little, that movie can be transformed into a screwball comedy from the 30’s. Carole Lombard… nobody knows who she is. But we can, that movie can change. We can’t change the movie because we are the movie. But the movie can change through our aspiration to be free and the things that we do to help ourselves, to free ourselves from those negative emotions and aspects of our own personality. We can’t, it’s not like we can take the movie and push a button somewhere. We’re the movie. Our whole thing is the movie, so to speak. But when we add a practice and go deeper into that longing to be free, that movie will change automatically. It does. That much I can tell you. I don’t care if they say it or not. That movie will change and we will find a way to live in this world in a good way, which is how it’s supposed to be. You know, you might say, “Well, how can I be happy when there’s so much suffering in the world.” Well, that’s a good question. And somebody once asked the Dalai Lama, He said, “Your Holiness, are you happy?” And He said, “Oh, I guess you could say I’ve had a pretty hard life. I had to take over the reins of my country at a very young age and then I had to escape when the Chinese invaded and I had to also watch as millions of my people were slaughtered and tortured and killed. So, the Chinese have taken everything from me. Am I going to take my happiness?” Right? That’s real strength. He’s not saying that stuff didn’t happen. He’s not saying, He’s not pushing, He’s not not looking at this stuff. There’s room inside of Him for all that but He’s not going to allow that to destroy His heart. So, that’s real strength and that, that’s what we have within us and what we can discover, that place within us. One time I was at a teaching with His Holiness. It was a teaching on compassion and kindness and it was three or four days and the last half-day, He took questions from the audience that had been written and sent in, sent up to the stage and the translator would go through the questions and pick the question. So, the translator reads this question, “Your Holiness, I did something that hurt somebody once and I have apologized many times but they won’t accept the apology. For one year, I apologized. For two years, I apologized. For three years, it’s been three years and they won’t accept the apology. What should I do?” So, His Holiness says, “Well, you just keep apologizing. One year, two years, three years. If they don’t accept the apology, tell them to go to hell.” I said, “Wait.” I said, “What? Wait a minute.” His Holiness the Dalai Lama does not tell people to go to hell. Because if He did, they would and that’s not what He’s about. So, I grabbed ahold of Bob Thurman later, who’s one of His Holiness’s oldest students, he speaks perfect Tibetan. I said, “Bob, what did His Holiness really say?” Because it was through the translator, right? He said, “Oh, no. You keep apologizing. One year, two years, three years, they don’t accept the apology, you tell them to eat shit.” That’s how they say, “Go to hell” in Tibet. They don’t say, “Go to hell.” They say, “Eat shit.” I just thought you’d like that.   KD: Anybody. Hi. Q: Hello. I wasn’t sure if I was going to ask this question in this space but here’s the opportunity. I’m going to stand up. So, I lead kirtan and kirtan’s a big part of my life and lately the subject of cultural appropriation has been coming up and more and more and it’s mostly from people I know in my community who are white, who do not kirtan, are more like activist types and it’s only happened a couple of times where acquaintances in my community have come up and said, “You know, isn’t that cultural appropriation Jeanette? You’re a white person leading kirtan.” Political correctness, to a fault, is a big part of my life, and being respectful, and I sometimes don’t know how to respond and I really would love to hear your thoughts on this and some help. KD: One year, two years… Bunch of bullshit. I had a dream once, you know, I was being reincarnated, I was coming back to earth and I was heading right home to India. At the last minute I made a left turn and wound up in New York. I’m still wondering, why did they do that? What happened? Who did that? Who was driving that car? I’m really a little India guy in a… culturally appropriating a white body. It’s ridiculous. It’s so uncomfortable in here. I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t speak without doing this. I don’t know what’s going. Very nice. You know, I sing in India to Indians, which is the weirdest thing I could imagine. I was petrified. I got invited to sing, you know, I mean, for 50 years I’ve been singing in the temple. That’s where I sing, you know. Nobody’s there. It’s not… you know. So, then these people from Mumbai invited me to come and sing down there. So, ok. So, we went. I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t. That’s how bright I am, you know. So, I get to the venue. Well, I should have known, because on the way to the venue we stopped in Bombay traffic and I looked up and I went… There’s a huge billboard with my face on it in Mumbai. I went… Anyways, so we get to this hall and we do sound check. It’s a big hall. We do soundcheck and then I go. They give us a room and I go lie down for a while. And I come out on stage and there’s 2,000 people and they stand and they’re screaming and applauding. I just stopped halfway out. I said, “What are you people doing here? Go home. India’s full of kirtan wallahs. Go away.” They love the fact that a Westerner honors, respects and participates in their spiritual tradition. They honor bhavana which is the spiritual emotion. You can’t fake it. They don’t like it if you’re faking it, but if it’s real for you they respect that and they love that and it’s amazing. And I never wanted to do that. I mean, I figured, you know, Siddhi Ma was always telling me to rest, take it easy, stay home, go easy, you know. So, I finally said to Her once, “Ma, you know I’m getting all these invitations to sing in India. Should I accept?” You know, I figured She’d say, “No, no. Leave in India to the Indians. You stay home and rest.” So, I said, “Ma, you know, should I accept? Should I accept?” She goes, “You must.” Really? So, I must. So, I did and you now, it was great for me because it got me over, kind of a little tentativeness about it all, but you know, they’ve lost, this generation now is about three generations after the first generation that rejected the traditional culture and it was their grandparents who sat in the corner and sang and did puja and all that stuff. They were all about making money and getting a nice house and having all these things because Western culture moved in there. So, now, their parents and the grandparents, their grandparents are the first ones who kind of lost the culture. Their parents were completely out of it because they didn’t have anybody who’s still doing that stuff around them. They would never go to hear an Indian chanter. Almost never. They don’t give a shit. But because, ah, you know what it was, the Grammy. I’m a Grammy Loser. I was nominated for a Grammy. I didn’t win. I’m a loser. But they thought, “Somebody’s chanting is recognized like that?” And they respect that. They love that. You know? That’s all I can tell you. So, once again, one year, two years. Just smile and say, “Go away.” Don’t come, it’s ok. Nina: Can I say something? KD: Yes, you can, Missy. Nina: I don’t know. So, he’s talking about the Grammy’s and how that was important to Indians and that’s fine but way before that, I did chant with my grandfather when I was young and my family turned me towards the West because it was, there were more opportunities for us as women here and though we did puja in a house, we never discussed spirituality. It was not something that was discussed but I had an experience of this tradition when I was with my grandfather as a kid but it went away. And, you know, people ask me this question all the time because I’m Indian, in case nobody noticed. KD: You are? Nina: Yeah. So, I just want to say that it was coming here to the West and chanting with him that put me back on the path again. Then I, and he’s right, I didn’t chant with other people in India. It was just not, we didn’t do it. Even now people don’t go. It’s interesting. Unless you go to your temple and you do your practice, but the way in which they absorbed it and then are sharing with everyone is so important and yes, we did go to India and there were like 2,000 people there of all ages, youngsters, my age, older people, and they really get the transmission of what the practice is. People ask me this all time. I don’t even know what cultural appropriation is. Am I wearing trousers? Am I appropriating Western Culture? I don’t think that’s important. And I think that spiritual practice can be shared and beneficial to everyone. So, that would be my answer.   Q: Hello. Right here. KD: Hi. Q: Hi. So, at my university, I’m at the University of Connecticut. KD: Hey. Go UCONN. Q: So, we have a club called “Mindfulness Club.” And a bunch of people who are spiritually open-minded come together every week and we have a discussion topic and some practices and we usually experiment with whatever that week’s subject is. Do you have any recommendations for practices or discussion topics that we should do in the future? KD: Did Katie Lou ever go there? Q: I don’t know. KD: Secret teaching, you know. Sure, you know, just, I think really watching the breath in terms of practice, and entrance practice which will take you all the way to wherever you have to go. It’s a great thing because it doesn’t involve any dogma of any kind, or any belief of any kind, any religion of any kind. It’s a very basic, it’s not just basic but it’s an integral practice of coming back from Dreamland, you know, just watching the breath. It’s a great practice for everybody to do together, no matter what tradition they feel they’re a part of or what particular culture they’re, what’s the word, culturally appropriating at the time. Because it’ll change. Whatever culture will change from day to day, what they’re appropriating, but the breath will still be there and it’ll be exactly the same. So, it’s a very powerful practice and Maharajji actually said to us once, if you can bring the mind to one point, you’ll see God. Right? Being God is a whole other thing, but seeing God’s a good beginning, you know? Like, so, that’s a great thing to do as a practice and you might try starting with it and then having discussions and then having a short session in the middle with it, the same practice, and then ending with it again. Because I think you’ll find that, if I say what I think you’ll find you’ll go looking for it, so I won’t tell you, but I think it’ll be a great thing to do. A nice way to do things. Rather than, you know, I mean, if people are open to learning about other things and talking about doing different practices, fine, but you’ll notice that all the practices you do center on being able to pay some attention and until you can do that, the results of whatever practice you do will be very minimal. The more attention you can, the more present you are with it. So, watching the breath and there are different ways to watch the breath. You can find those practices. You know, you can, there’s a, when you breath in, if you really listen, if you feel that you can feel a little breath here at the tip of your nose, you can also see that your stomach rises with the in breath and falls with the out breath just naturally. So, you can rise and fall or you can in and out. So, there’s a lot of ways to keep the mind a little bit interested. And that’s a great thing to do. Yeah. And then, yeah. Then invite me to come and take me to a UCONN Women’s basketball game. Q: We would do that. KD: What? Q: We would do that. KD: Well, get my email. What are we, kidding here? I’m serious. I’ve been watching them for years. I feel like their grandfather. I watch all these young women, you know. They graduate and then they go to the pros. And then they, you know, their lives change and then the team changes. I feel like I follow them. I’m sick. I have no life of my own. I have to follow UCONN basketball. I’ll come. Call me. Get me there. I went to Wesleyan while my friend’s daughter at Wesleyan. No, not Wesleyan. Yeah, it was Wesleyan. Yeah, we went there. They had some kind of Buddhist club and they were silly enough to invite me. Were you there? Really? Far out. Nice to see you again. Great. You’re kidding me. My goodness gracious. The post Ep. 74 | Fear, Trauma, Cultural Appropriation, Mindfulness Club appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep. 73 | Ease of Heart Q: Two years ago, you used the phrase, “ease of heart” and I was like, “Whoa,” that’s it. That’s what I got. That’s what I need. That’s what I always needed. And so, I carry it, in my head, you know, all day, kind of. It goes in and out of my mind. Then today when I was coming, I thought, “I don’t know if I really know what you think it is.” “You can’t cure anger with more anger. You can’t cure hate with more hate. The only transforming power in the universe is Love and real Love means… Listen to me, as if I know… Real love means accepting things as they are and including them.” – Krishna Das Q: Hi. So, I heard you speak like two… KD: Where you? Q: I’m here. Two years ago, you used the phrase, “ease of heart” and I was like, “Whoa,” that’s it. KD: I used the part… what? Q: Ease of heart. KD: Ease of heart, yeah yeah. Q: And I was, “Whoa, that’s it.” That’s what I got. That’s what I need. That’s what I always needed. And so, I carry it, in my head, you know, all day, kind of. It goes in and out of my mind. Then today when I was coming, I thought, “I don’t know if I really know what you think it is.” KD: What? Q: I don’t know if I really understand what it really means to you, but I think it’s what you were just talking about, right? KD: Yeah. Q: Ok. That’s all I needed to know. KD: It comes from the Metta, the Metta Loving Kindness Meditation practice, which was originally given by the Buddha to some monks. He had sent some monks to meditate in a forest and they went to the forest and they tried to meditate but the tree spirits were causing trouble for them and harassing them. So, they came to the Buddha and they said, you know, “Give us a weapon to defeat these angry spirits that are giving us a hard time.” And the weapon the Buddha gave them was the Loving Kindness Meditation and it transformed the whole forest, of course. That’s the only way. You can’t cure anger with more anger. You can’t cure hate with more hate. The only transforming power in the universe is Love and real Love means… listen to me, as if I know… real love means accepting things as they are, and including them. Like, once again, a heart as wide as the world. And so, this practice is really great and right near here in Barry, Massachusetts is IMS, the Instant Meditation Society. Insight Meditation Society. And they teach, they teach that practice there quite a lot along with Vipasana also. But Metta is its own practice and it comes in that phrase. So, it starts off, they teach you four phrases, four phrases, and one is, “May I be safe, may I be happy, may I have good health and may I live at ease of heart.” “At ease of heart in this world and with whatever comes to me.” And you’re asked to offer these phrases to yourself. And the first couple of days of the practice, they describe the whole thing to you and they give you these phrases and they’re doing now and the meditation practice is to sit there and not to struggle with your mind and your thoughts, but to sit there and offer these phrases to yourself, to repeat them, not automatically or mechanically, but to try to connect with them. You know, “may I be safe.” “May I be happy.” “May I have good health and may I live at ease,” and on and on. So, after two days I was ready to commit suicide. I couldn’t feel a damn thing. I was just like getting harder and harder and more destroyed. I was like flipping out. And then they say, now take the phrases and offer them to what they call the benefactor, which is somebody who’s always been on your side. Maybe your grandmother, maybe somebody or a teacher who’s just always been there. Certainly, usually not your partner. Somebody who’s really always been there for you. And then offer the phrases to that person, and you know, in like, in a half an hour you’re flying because you bring that person to mind and of course, “May you be safe, may you be happy.” Of course. “May you live at ease of heart.” You know, yeah, it’s easy, you know. And then, then they say, and now come back to yourself. And you begin to experience how hard it is to wish ourselves well. How hard. It’s really hard. And once again, they don’t try to solve that issue intellectually, analytically. They see, they know come, then they say, go back and forth, they give you a period, “Now the benefactor, now come back to yourself,” and it kind of loosens you up a little but not too much. Then they go to, there’s the enemy, you know? That person who, if you could get away with it, you know, you know, that’s the one who’s always just, always been on your case, never given you a break and now try to wish that person well. “Oh, may you be safe, you piece of shit. May you be happy, so you leave me the fuck alone. May you be healthy and live far away.” I mean, you really, it’s like you have to torture yourself to try to get the words out of your mouth. It’s like… then you come back to the benefactor, ok. And then you come to yourself, all right. So you’re back, but it’s very interesting. And then the last part of the practice, at the end of the five or six or seven days or whatever, you try to wish all beings well. Now, some of us are very, we’re really good at wishing all beings well. “May everybody be happy” and then somebody cuts you off on the Parkway, “You son of a…” It’s easy to be all… so, it’s those knee jerk reactions where the karma is. That’s… so, and it’s only through practice and every time you come back, every time you land back somewhere where you are, it’s a miracle almost, and you’ve planted a seed of coming back that keeps coming, growing and growing. So, yeah, the ease of heart is the fourth, the fourth… and like I said, this is a practice that Buddha gave to those monks and Sharon Salzberg has been really practicing this for many many many years. She’s really, she took it on as her own personal practice and she’s doing it for so many years. She’s one of the great ones. And she’s written a lot of books about this practice and believe me, it’s an incredible practice and you come out of there, even if nothing’s happened, you know, in your head, “Oh, that was ok.” Something happened. And you’ve carved out a slightly deeper place in your own heart where you’re just sitting, naturally now because you’ve gone through that process. Once again, you don’t need a stamp, the good housekeeping seal of approval on this stuff, you know? You go through the fire of doing these practices and our hearts are purified. Our kleshas are lightened, the obscurations, the dust on the mirror of the heart is thinned out just from going through this practice, you know, doing the practices. So, it’s a good idea. I love going off for a retreat, you know, a personal retreat where I don’t have to, where I can really just do the practice for awhile. I don’t have to be busy being me, too much. It’s a great thing to do. It’s a great, the fact that we can do that is really quite amazing, because as difficult as the situation is in this world at this time, we still have a lot of luxury to pursue this kind of inner growth which, in most places in the world, they don’t have that ability, they don’t have the luxury. They’re starving or they’re running or there are bombs being dropped on them or, you know, it’s brutal. Or, there’s no electricity, you know, or no food. And there’s no rain. You can’t grow crops. Can’t pay the landlords. Your kids are committing suicide because it’s so bad. This is the reality out there and look at us, we have so much here. We have so much. And we use so little of it well. That’s also karma. Yeah. Q: Thank you, KD. I saw you on Friday night. Everything sounded great. I was talking to David, he said the soundcheck wasn’t good but it sounded great. It was amazing. But speaking with this nice lady… KD: Hold the mic a little closer. Q: I’m sorry, how’s that? KD: That’s very good. Q: Ok. They always told me I talk too loud at home so now I can be myself. KD: Hey, you’re talking to a deaf person here. Talk up. Q: Right. KD: Yell. Q: Last year, you gave the same talk and you spoke about the Guru had been taken prisoner for a very long time and I guess He had been tortured and they asked, somebody asked Him, “What were you most afraid of?” KD: Oh. The Lama. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Q: And I think there was a very good story that goes along with that and if you could share that again and also, the fellow with the banana, the Guru who said, “Everything’s going to be ok,” who would always tell people it was ok. I never forgot that. If you could share a little of that, that’d be great. Thank you, KD. KD: Well, the first story is about, it’s something that happened, a very old Tibetan Lama was released from prison in Tibet. Chinese Prison. After many years, 20, 25 years and the conditions are beyond brutal. I mean, you can’t imagine. We’re not going to go into that. But He was released and He was, His body was broken. He was in much… you know, He had been beaten and tortured and all these things and He finally gets to India and He gets an audience with the Dalai Lama, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and His Holiness asked Him, you know, how was, “Were you ever afraid?” His Holiness asked, “Were you afraid for your life?” Right? And the Lama said, “Oh, yes, I was afraid. I was afraid I would get angry at the Chinese.” We can’t even imagine, you know, if I stub my toe in the morning, I would say a week is ruined and this guy, tortured, beaten, starved, you know… and his one worry was that He would actually get angry at the Chinese, at these torturers. We can’t, you know… there’s another color. What do we see? Red, orange, yellow, green. ROYGBIV. I learned that in High School, right? Red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, violet, right? Hey. But there’s another color we don’t see yet. We don’t see it. It’s everywhere but we don’t see it because our senses can only pick up those colors. But we develop a different sense after a while which can see this other color and this other color envelopes all the others. It’s the background against which all the other colors exist. It’s like, you don’t really see space. Right? Most of the time. When I look out at you, most of the time I’m looking at you. I see you. I don’t notice the space we’re in. But the minute you kind of back in there a little bit and look at the space, look to see the space, you see that all of us are held inside of this space. All of us. In our own little bubbles. Right? So, the sky, there’s a phrase in India, in Sanskrit, Chitakash. Chitakash. The Sky of Consciousness. So, just as the sky holds all of us, everything within its own space, which is everywhere, everything is held inside of that space. But we, we’re identified with our little bubble and those colors. As we do these practices, as our hearts open, as our knee jerk reactions to everything in our lives lighten up a little bit, we become aware of this deeper reality. Little by little. And slowly, our hearts are transformed and opened up and wide, widened. And we don’t, we just naturally, the sting and the tortures that we’ve gone through in our lives, they don’t hurt us the same way. We still feel them but we don’t, they don’t elicit the same response that they have been getting from us. It’s not magic. It’s the result of practice and it’s the result of, you know, we used to ask Maharajji, “How do we find God?” We figured He liked us a little bit, He’d tell us, right? So, we asked Him. And He said, you know, “Serve People.” Serve people? What? Serve People? What is He talking about? Maybe He’s a little spaced, you know? So, “Baba, how do we raise kundalini?” You know? Til you break your nose or something… He said, “Feed people.” Feed people? It was beyond our understanding. We could not, we literally could not understand what He was talking about. I mean, we heard the words. He said “Love everyone. Serve everyone and remember God.” Love, serve, remember. The “remember” part is the practice part. The particular practice in this case, He used to talk about the repetition of the Names of God, in India they call that, what we’re doing, what we chant. But the loving and serving, He never told us to do practice for our own sake. He said, “Don’t think about yourself.” When I was going to kill myself, that time. There were a number of times, but this particular time, I figured, I was living in the temple with Him and I figured, you know, if I jumped in the river, it was only six inches deep, but I figured, you know, if I got my head caught by a rock or something underneath, I could probably get the job done. So, finally He called me over and said, “What are you going to do? Jump in the river?” He wasn’t taking this very seriously. He said, “You can’t die. You can’t die. Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.” What? What? Only who? Only Jesus the real death. Why? Because He never thought of Himself. In other words, thoughts of “me”, the planet of “me” around which all our bullshit revolves, orbits, didn’t exist in that being. The real death is the death of the so-called “ego.” The separate sense of self. Who we think we are. The death of that. The death of those thoughts is the real death. Because when you don’t think you’re you, guess what? You’re not. If we didn’t think, if I didn’t go through all day thinking, “Me, me, me, me. I’m me, I’m me, I’m me. And this and this. How do I look? Where am I going to go? What am I going to do? Will they like me? They won’t like me? Should I wear this? Should I do this? Should I cut my hair? Grow my hair? Wear these clothes? Wear these shoes? What should I do? This kind of car?” If I didn’t think that all day long, those thoughts would not exist in the whole universe. But I would be here. Completely present. And not thinking, “I’m me.” But how are you going to stop those thoughts? You can’t. Are you going to shoot them as they go through? There’s no gun big enough. Practice. That’s what we’re talking about. Let them go. When you notice you’re stuck in it. When you notice you’re thinking of it, when you notice you’re lost in dreamland, you’re actually already back, by the way. Now that’s an interesting moment, ok? Here we are. “Shree Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai, let me see what am I going to do when I get home… Jai Ram Ram… I think I’ll watch that tv show… Shree Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram… what is it, it’s on channel, I think I set the thing, I set the thing, I set thing… oh, Sri Ram,” So, how did you know, how did you recognize that you weren’t paying attention to the chanting that you came here to do in the first place? Right? So, that’s how hard it is to do practice. Ok, but we all got here together to do this practice today, of being together, but here we are, “Sri Ram Jai Ram” and you’re thinking about what you’re going to do later. Then you’ve noticed you weren’t paying attention. Right? How did that happen? We were lost in dreamland. And when you’re lost in Dreamland, you’re not here. How did it happen that we got here enough to notice that we were lost? Isn’t that amazing. I think that’s amazing. I’m a little weird but I do think that’s amazing. Because we didn’t do that. You didn’t do that. You didn’t say, “Ok, now I’m going to wake up. Oh, my goodness, I haven’t been thinking, I haven’t been chanting.” That’s not what happened. You were gone. And then, “Oh, Sri Ram Jai Ram.” Right? That moment arose as the fruit of seeds we ourselves have planted. There’s no other way it could get here. So, we’ve all done the practice before in some way. We’ve all brought all those karmas into this life, so they say. And those karmas just fructified at that moment when you noticed you were lost in thought and then you were here. And then you started singing again and of course you’re gone again in a quarter of a second. But that’s ok. But every time you come back and then every time you get, you say, “Ok, Sri Ram Jai Ram,” you’ve planted another seed of waking up. You can’t, what Maharajji said, you can’t, “The higher deeper states, more subtle states of consciousness can not be brought about by the use of your personal will.” “Ok, I’m going to sit down and meditate myself into this samahdi.” No. It don’t work like that. Even if you got a little hit, it isn’t the real thing. The real, the uncovering of our true self happens through letting go of the stuff which covers it up. That’s all. But look, we’re very identified with that stuff, though, let’s face it. So, we have to do something, loosen up the stuff. Every time you come back, it’s a big thing. It’s such a big thing, we have no idea. We take it for granted because we’re kind of almost doing all this in our sleep. But when we wake up a little bit we go, “oh.” Just waking up for a second is a huge thing. I mean, it’s a beautiful day out. What the fuck are we doing in here? This somehow must be more important than a beautiful day and not everybody feels that way. Don’t go to Australia in the summer and try to sing with people. They don’t want to know. They’re at the beach. Really. But the beach is more important at that point. Ok. Fine. I’ll go in the winter. So, today, we’re here. Whatever, for whatever reason we think we came here, we got here and you know, that’s our desire to be free, to find a way to be free and live a good life. It’s always about becoming a good human being. What else are you going to be? You know? Are there any aliens in here? Please raise your hand. Ok, you be a good alien. You know, we’re human beings. Let’s really be human. Let’s recognize our essential oneness. One time, sitting in the room with Maharajji, you know, we used to take the bus to the temple from the town. It was about a 45, 50 minute ride and then we’d spend all day in the temple and maybe see Him for an hour or two and then, in the evening, the late afternoon, the last bus would come out of the hills on the way to the town where we were staying. It was the last bus. If we missed that bus, we’d have to stay in the temple, which He did not want. So, wherever we were, we’d get the message, “Bus has come. Go.” So, most of the time, we’d come in the room and just pranam and then get on the bus, so one day, we came in the room and He was sitting on the tucket and He was, I don’t know how to, He was just completely absorbed in some, some state and He kind of, He just looked and we came in and we bowed, and “Go.” But that wasn’t going to get us out of there and He knew that. There was the “Jao.” “Jao” means “go.” There was the “Jao”, there was the big “Jao” and then there was the real “Jao”. We talk about three. There were three levels of “go away.” The first one never worked. The second one usually was enough, but if we were really feeling it, we made Him really give us the third one which, there was no coming back after that one. “Get gone.” So, this was like the first one. You know, “Go, go.” And then He just disappeared again into Himself. And it was like the room… You ever make jello? So, sometimes when you make jello, you put grapes in the jello and they kind of like, get suspended in the jello, you know they don’t go to the bottom, kind of. That’s what it felt, sitting in that room. It was so thick. I felt, I remember thinking, “this is like a grape in jello.” That’s how weird it is when you’re born on Long Island. Actually, I was born in Manhattan, so that’s worse. So, it was just so thick, you couldn’t even move and He was just completely like immersed in this. It was such a beautiful soft sweet feeling. Nobody wanted to move. We hardly wanted to breathe, you know? And then after a couple minutes, He opened His eyes, He saw us and He said, “Go.” And then He was gone again for awhile, right? And then, finally, some Western woman, I won’t tell you who, said, “Maharajji, what is this?” That was it. “Jao!” And He said, He said, He said, “It’s in the blood.” “It’s in the blood.” We all have the same blood. You can’t tell what a person looks like from their blood. It’s the same blood. The same blood runs through all our veins. He used to say that all the time. We’re all one. We’re all part of one Being. “Now get out!” The post Ep. 73 | Ease of Heart appeared first on Krishna Das.

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. Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD November 21, 2020 “Whenever you think of it, just take a couple of breaths and let go. You’re washing dishes, take a breath and let go. You’re watching TV. Take a breath in the commercials. If there’s no commercials, just pause the thing, take a breath and then start again. Practice letting go. Practice just letting go.” – Krishna Das Hi, everybody. Good to be with you again. It’s getting cold and people are stuck inside, which makes it even harder to wade through the mud of the mind, of the thoughts. It’s a good time to practice, and it’s just too easy to be swept away the tides of mental bullshit and the stuff that goes on and on and on and on, and the circular obsessive thinking that goes on all the time. We have to make an effort to release ourselves from that. And when it’s so intense like this, it’s almost easier because it’s so apparent how out of control we are. And actually, we’re always out of control, but we can be aware by remembering to look and remembering to remember. That’s all you can do. You can’t transform yourself. You can’t move to another planet. You know, all we can do is bow to the endless flow of nonsense that goes through our heads, and practice letting go of it. That’s all. That will change the way we live inside of our lives. And that’s what all the practices are about, ultimately. Every path leads to the same goal because the goal is reality, and that’s what lives within us as our own true being. So, just to continue to pay attention, to continue to remember, to let go, as the day goes on, you know, every time you just remember, just release for a minute, you know, even in the middle of something you’re doing just take a breath or two and let it be. Q: I am so, so pleased to be here today. Thank you for this opportunity. I’m from Maryland, and found you, I would say, actually, because of this situation that we’re under; home and tinkering around with Ram Dass, and I found you singing on a piece of his, Heart As Wide As The World, and I just was completely enamored. Yeah. Most people find me by mistake. It was, but a beautiful mistake. Yeah. Maharajji trips and then they fall in it. That’s what happens, you know? Oh, that’s great. That’s really great. Well, the thing I wanted to ask you about is this notion of surrender. And I feel, for me, sometimes we can distinguish it as surrender. It’s almost like a physical experience, like a relaxing, like you say, you know, giving it up, letting it go. And you also speak about finding, I don’t know, I can’t think of how you say it right now, but you know, yourself inside, and I’m wondering if those two things are similar in some way. There was a great Saint in India, not too long ago, named Ramana Maharshi, and he lived in South India and when he was a young boy, not that young, he was probably 16, He stayed home from school one day because he was feeling a little sick and he felt he was going to die, and he was perfectly healthy, but he felt, “I’m going to die.” And for some reason it didn’t upset him. He just said, “Well, what’s this going to be like?” And he laid down on the floor. He was alone in the house. He laid down on the floor and he clenched up his body and just wanted to see what, what not breathing would be like, and you know, what, if the body becomes like rigor mortis, and what was happening, actually, his consciousness was leaving the body, leaving the physical plane. And he became fully enlightened in that moment, a 16 year old boy, without ever doing any sadhana in this life. Of course, in previous lives he had done incredible amounts of practice. But, in that moment he was completely enlightened, and 50 years later he would say, “My state of mind had never wavered from that moment to this.” From that moment on, he was completely immersed in oneness, in the one, in reality. He became fully enlightened, what they call, becoming a jnani. And people came. And he went back to school and, you know, obviously he didn’t fit in anymore. And after a few days, his brother had given him some money to pay a fee at the school for him. And so he writes a note to his family. He said, “This is leaving. Don’t bother to search for it. PS, I owe you three rupees,” or something like that. And he wandered off. He didn’t know where he was going really, and he wound up at the foot of this sacred hill called Arunachala, in a town called Tiruvanamalai, and at first he sat. There was an ancient temple there at the foot of the hill. He sat around at the temple, but people were bothering him, because he was just immersed in samahdi. He was just gone, you know. And so, then he found underneath the temple, like an area that was dug out and he just went down there, and he just sat there with scorpions stinging him and snakes going over him and ants, eating his body. For years, He just stayed in there, and people began to bring him little bits of, the pujari of the temple started to bring him bits of food and stuff like that and would put it in his mouth because he wouldn’t communicate or move. Finally, he just, you know, everybody started to recognize him as not just like a crazy kid, but a great being. And he kind of moved up the hill, and finally later, when he got older, he came down from the hill and an ashram was started around him. All the time, He’s just being. He’s not doing anything, you know. And he would talk. He didn’t talk much, but when he was asked a question, he would respond usually, Usually, with words. Sometimes with words, sometimes without, but whatever he said was so dynamic and so absolutely clear and concise and right on. It’s extraordinary to read His stuff, which was collected by other people because he didn’t write down anything. He didn’t collect his things. He didn’t give lectures, nothing. He just was being. So there’s so many great things. Here’s one thing, about surrender. Now, maybe this takes a little bit of suspension of disbelief, but let me just read you this. “The ordainer controls the fate of souls in accordance with their prarabdha karma, which is the amount of karma to be worked out in this life.” It’s not all your karmas. It’s just a little bit of karma that this life is about, to work out. “Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try as you may. Whatever is destined to happen, will happen, do what you may to prevent it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain in silence.” And by silence, he means, “Being. Presence. Reality.” What underneath. The space around all our thoughts and emotions and stories which we believe. All that stuff, all the time. “I’m who I am. I know who I am. I know where I’m going. I know my people are here. I know what my house is,” and all this stuff. Maybe, but it’s the space around all that. So, the point about surrender is, you can’t control or change what you’ve done in the past and what’s happened in the past, and the future is not here yet. So, there’s nothing to do about that either. All we have is now, and how we live in this moment is where we find what our so-called work is. Who do we think we are? Where are places that we’re stuck and we judge ourselves and others? Where’s our greed? Where’s our shame? Where’s our fear? Where’s our anxiety? Where’s our selfishness? All that stuff. That’s what we have right now. Now, how do we live with that? How do we deal with that? Ramana Maharshi said there’s two ways to deal with that. One way is to ask “Who is experiencing all of this?” and question, “Who am I?” You know? “I’m experiencing this. Okay, well, who am I? Well, I’m me. Well, who said that? Who’s thinking that? Well, I am . Who is that ‘I’?” It’s a way of kind of backing into it. A way back in, But the other way is to accept it as it is, and for devotees or people who are attracted to the path of devotion, you would say that “everything in my life is there to teach, is there because it has to be there, and my attitude should be, what do I learn, what can I learn from all this?” And so, you accept it as teaching. So, if you have a guru, you simply say, “This is what my guru has left for me.” And so, you don’t try to push it away or kill it or reject it or change it even. You try to just be with it and release again. Release. And that’s what we’re training ourselves when we chant. We simply repeat the sounds, which they call the names of God in India, the divine name, these sounds, and we pay attention. And when we notice we’ve been gone, we’re already back, we pay attention again, and then we notice we’re gone and we come back again, and again, and again, and again, and again. So, your work is about what you just said, which is the chanting. It’s hardly work, you know, I could be pumping gas. Yeah, but what you’re what you’re expressing to people. So, before you said that thing about chanting, my question was going to be, well, how do I remember to do that in the moment? Because I, you know, as a human being, I get all wrapped up in how I’m feeling about something. Right? Don’t we all? All everybody ever does in this world is think about ourselves. That’s all we do. Yeah, absolutely. No question about it. So, you’re suggesting then that the chanting gives me, shall we, almost like an outlet for the not remembering? So, if I’m in a situation where I’m not actually chanting, right? And I get annoyed. For me to remember in that moment to do the releasing, might happen might not happen, but the remembering is very difficult for me. It probably won’t happen in that exact moment. Right. Exactly. But I love that word, “annoyed.” That that’s my mom talking to me. Another way to think about it, rather than an outlet, is that it’s an anchor, like in a boat, and the winds of thoughts and emotions blow that boat around all over the universe. So, we drop an anchor and then boom, it holds us within some radius, and without the anchor, we’re just blown about all the time. So, we drop that anchor and that’s our practice. That allows us, gives us something to come back to. Without the anchor, we’re just floating in freefall. There’s nothing to wake us up. So, we put that anchor in. And so that anchor is the practice, is the remembering, which we do in any way, you can sit, you can stand, you can walk, you can sing, whatever, makes no difference. It’s the repetition of the name that gradually, but inevitably, uncovers the deeper place within us. And as we do these practices, we remember more easily that we’re lost. We recognize that we’re lost more easily as the days go on. So you’re chanting, right? “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram,” and then you spend 20 minutes on the shopping list for later in the day. Right? And then you’ll go, “Oh shit. I can’t believe I, okay. Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram.” But here’s the thing. “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram.” Shopping list. “Oh.” How did that “oh” happen? You didn’t do that. You were gone. You’re in dreamland thinking about the shopping list and imagining walking through the aisles of the supermarket virtually, right? With a mask. So you didn’t do that. It happened as a result of practice. And also, because that’s your true nature. It’s here. It’s not somewhere else. It’s not lost in dreamland. You’re here. You’re always here, but we forget. Our stuff pulls us out of ourselves. So, we cultivate the remembering of the name or the breath or whatever practice you do that you do with awareness, with paying attention, and then that movement, that releasing happens under the radar. That’s your own soul shining out for a minute, and you’re released from the thought, or you could just say that thoughts and emotions have a certain amount of energy, and when that energy is dissipated, Boop, they’re gone and you’re back. They let go of you. So that’s why they always say, do practice when you can, because when the shit hits the fan, you know, you could say “Ram Ram,” but you’re ready to kill somebody anyway. And there’s nothing that’s going to change that at that moment. And that’s okay, but you keep doing the “Ram Ram” anyway, because every repetition of one of these names has incredible potential. Just like a seed. A tiny little seed can have a huge tree inside of it. Right? And it’s just a question of the right causes and conditions arising to let that seed grow and blossom and become a tree. So, it’s just the same with us. The seeds of the repetition of the name will come to fruition as the causes and conditions arise to allow it to blossom, and the greatest cause and condition to allow it to blossom is more practice, more remembering. So, it’s like a circle that feeds itself and gets deeper and deeper. So, like I said, Ramana Maharshi talked about two ways to move along the path, either the path of jnana, of wisdom, of self-inquiry, like “who am I?” and the path of devotion. Those are the two ways to reach the same situation. So, he says, this is the path of devotion, “Surrender to him,” or her, because that being is neither and both. “Surrender to him 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.” For instance, “Change this. I don’t like what’s going on here,” you know, “Take this away.” So, if you ask him to do as you please, it’s not surrender, but a command to him. “you cannot 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 entirely to him. His is the burden. No longer do you have any cares. All of your cares are his. Such is surrender.” So, this is why they say surrender is not only the path, but the goal also. So, and it’s not weakness. You’re not surrendering because you’ve lost the battle. You’re surrendering because you see how the battle is going to go anyway, and you bow to that, and in the bowing and accepting it as his will. See, you know, Maharajji could do anything. He could heal the sick and raise the dead and probably whatever the other thing is too. And he did it all the time, all the time, 24-7, 365, nothing but miracles and love and compassion. But there were times when he didn’t. It seemed like he didn’t change the karma of the situation. And that’s also action on his part, by allowing something to work out as it has to, and then you could say, possibly throwing a whole lot of shit in on that fire to burn it all up, right? Yeah. So that when that karma is over, a lot of other stuff has been burnt up as well. I mean, we had these experiences with him. Like for instance, there was this couple named Ed and Chris who he named Sunanda and Sudhama, gave them Indian names, and they wanted to get married. So, they asked Maharaji to marry them, and he said, “No, Krishna Das will marry you.” Which is why I never do marriages. So don’t ask. So, the next day we stood out in front of the Hanuman temple and we read from the Bible and “Okay, you’re married.” Good. However, sometime after that, they left India and went back to New York, and over the years we kind of lost track of them. Sunanda came down with cancer and she was fighting it for many years in every possible way, all kinds of therapies, everything, and Sudhama actually needed a lung and a heart transplant, and they had a son, too. And at one point I was spending time with this young Baba in India and we brought him to America, and when we got to the house where he was gonna stay, someone told him about Sudhama. Sudhama and Sunanda had divorced already and they were living separately. So, somebody told him about Sudhama’s sickness. So he said to me, he said, “Let’s go tomorrow. We’ll go and visit him.” So, me and the Baba drove there in the morning and we rang the bell. He knew we were coming, but it took him 20 minutes to get to the door. He had to basically crawl on the floor because he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t, there was no oxygen getting to his heart. He opened the door and we went inside. The Baba sat on the couch and me and Sudhama sat on the floor, and I sang Hanuman Chalisa, and he was mouthing the words because he couldn’t, and we spent a little time there and then we left. So that night he called me, and he said that he felt like Maharajji had come back to him and that his whole life, he felt his whole life was okay and everything, you know, he was so happy. And the next morning he was dead. Sunanda, later that year, six months later, his son died of an overdose, accidental overdose of heroin. And six months after that, Sunanda finally, died from the cancer. So, within one year, all three of them were gone. The whole karmic package was gone. Now I know Maharajji could have changed that, but I realized, or at least my belief is that, when he didn’t marry them way back, 20 years earlier, or how, how much, let me see, maybe 20 years earlier, that was his way of doing something, of allowing those karmas to be worked out the best possible way that needed to work out for everybody involved, and who knows, but maybe he threw a whole bunch of other shit on there for them to help them out also. But he could have changed all that. Because he did that all the time in India, you know. In India, people don’t have doctors, they go to Babas, at least in those days, you know. The doctors were very limited. So, they go to Sadhus and Saints and they say, “Cure me.” So, the Baba gives them some ash and they get better. That’s what Maharajji did all day long. People came asking for things all day long. Jobs, children, marriages that had no child. They come and prayed to Baba, “Please give us a child,” and he’d go, “Where will I get one from? Get outta here!” And then the next thing you know, they have a baby. So, he could have done that. He could have changed that karma, but he didn’t. And because these beings can only do what’s best for us, they only have compassion and kindness. They can’t not do what’s best for you. And so, I have to think that this was the best for the three of them. Because even though Jesse, their son, hadn’t even been conceived yet, he knew what was going to happen. And yet he let it go the way it had to go, because that was the best thing possible for all of them. Now, that’s a lot to digest. I know. And in fact, that story didn’t make it into “Chants of a Lifetime,” the book I wrote, because the editor, I couldn’t tell it in a way that the editor could understand it. So, I figured, “Well, if I can’t tell it, then I must not understand it myself. I’ll take it out.” So, I took it out. But that’s a serious dose and that’s a lot to digest, and it takes a tremendous amount of faith, or suspension of disbelief, which is something that Westerners kind of have to do. We call that faith, but it’s not really faith, but it’s close as we can get for a while, you know? All right. Okay. Maybe. That’s what you say. So anyway, that’s the point? So, surrender happens by grace and grace is something that happens by grace. You can’t make grace. You can’t force grace to happen, but you can prepare yourself to hold the grace. Just like if you go out walking in the rain and you want to catch some raindrops, you have to cup your hands so you can drink. So, grace is always here, but we don’t know how to receive it. We’re too busy. Grace is our true natural state in a way. It’s the being. It’s our soul, our Atma. It’s our natural state, but we’re too busy not paying attention. So, we drop that anchor, and we just keep coming back. And every time we come back, we may not realize it, but it’s a little deeper and those neuropathways in the brain get a little deeper. And they’ve proven that. The brain actually changes shape around meditative practices. So, thank you for that expression of joy, and I love what you just said about preparing yourself for grace. That really did it for me. So, thank you. Thank you. Good. Very good. Well, nice talking to you. Take care. Q: First of all, I wanted to thank you very, very much, because last couple of weeks I was going on about my books and what to do when I die, and you were so kindly, so patiently directing me towards myself. And you mentioned a book, which Ramana Maharshi used to keep under the head, and I didn’t write down the name of the Tamil Poet. So, I was a little ashamed about not really getting that, but then the most important was that instead of worrying about the external and that clinging to wanting to control everything, including what happens after I may leave this body, is not the most important in the sadhana. In fact, it’s not important at all. The most important I’ve found, from work, you were kindly answering, was to go to, you know, as Ramana, go inside and in the silence, which is a challenge for me because I have a childlike nature and a lot of unresolved family karma. And if I may ask, if you have the time, I wanted to ask how to make the peace with the family karma, with the parent who is unhappy, that’s my dad, all his life, pretty much. And in Encinitas I asked similarly, and you mentioned your mom. That was not an easy relationship either. And when she came to visit you in India, when you were waiting at the airport, you kneeled down, and I got from that, that if we can, not compliment, but let them feel, you know, not judged, not blame, I mean, not this conflict. But let me give you a little background. My mom died to two months ago, and I have made great peace with her, doing 40 days of tarpana and actually having sweet relationship now than when she was in her body. With my dad, he is alive. He’s back in Prague. That’s where I come from. Over the past 20 to 25 years, some people age and they melt in sweetness. And they melt in wisdom. And you are a great example of this, and I really revere so many things about you, not just the way you listen, you answer, but the way you lighten the spirit and so much evolution spiritually, just in you. It’s inspiring for me. But with my dad, he would, first of all, didn’t tell me when my mother was sick when she was. I had to go through calling every hospital in Prague and find out. And after that, he moved her from one hospital to another, didn’t tell me. I had to find out and he took her stuff when she was still alive and packed it, didn’t let me a chance to go through it. And he, you know, took the money. These things happen. We all have to accept our karma, but part of me is angry, of course, at him. Part of me is very compassionate. And I’m afraid that if he dies tomorrow, I will not finish the business. I would either feel like a victim. There is some inheritance which could be coming to me or not coming to me, and I know that Dharma is the most important, but this peace in my heart, which I would love to have when my father goes, or if I go before him, he’s 86, this is a hard one because I have so much I resent about him and how to accept 62 years of abuse, verbal and physical of me and my mom. And I understand why that has been happening and is happening. He even arranged for his funeral to be done by some kind of Russian neighbor, and I don’t even know if my torment is over. I mean, it’s a little unusual. I would love my father to, first of all, remember me differently or not to blame me. So, I know I have no control about his perception or his relationship with me, but for me, to clear this karma of negativity, resentment, you know, which takes serenity. I would appreciate if you can shine the grace into that. or if you have any more questions for me, I would be glad. Well, nobody could do it except you. You can’t change him, and you can’t change the past, and you have to find a way to release the anger from your heart, and the pain, and one of the best ways to do that is the Metta practice. Do it with sincerity and wholeheartedness. We don’t see our parents as people. We see them as our parents. We don’t know what they suffered as children. We don’t know how their hearts were broken. We don’t know the love that they looked for and never found. We don’t know. We don’t know. All we know is how hard it is for us to change our own, clear out our own stuff from our own heart. How difficult must it be for people who have no awareness of spiritual practice at all, or any understanding there might be another way to live in this world? So, the burden is on us to free our parents from our anger and grief and hurt, and it’s easy to have compassion for people you never met. You know, “I love everybody,” but you know, when it comes to yourself and your parents, it’s very difficult, and that shows you that you really don’t have compassion for anybody, if you can’t have compassion for yourself and the people close to you. If we’re still reactive, then we’re just fooling ourselves in terms of having ultimate compassion. We don’t have relative compassion, a little caring for people with kindness. It’s a joke to think that we can expand that to include the whole universe because we don’t have it. So, I mean, you know, I can’t give you advice. All I can do is say that, you know, this is up to you to find a way to release the energy that’s trapped between you, between who you both think you are. You think you’re you and he thinks he’s him, and in that drama, a lot of things happened. If you want your heart to open, you have to open it. Nobody can do it for you, and you have all the tools and all the understanding, intellectually, of what you could do. Now, you just have to actually bring it into today, into this life now and bring it out of your head and into your life. And we’re all in the same boat, you know? And besides that, our parents are inside of us. We’re made up of them. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them. We wouldn’t be here as we are, with our physical body and probably even our emotions. I always feel that we learn, we are programmed how to see ourselves by the way our parents see themselves, not the way they see us necessarily. That’s just an extension of the way they see themselves, but the way they see themselves, the way they treat themselves, the way they live in the world, the way they are positioned in life, we absorbed that and we take on the same position, a similar position. So much of our own stuff we got from them, and where did they get theirs from? From their parents. And where did they get theirs? It goes on until the beginning of karma. So, there’s nobody to blame. Because nobody’s doing it to anybody. It’s mechanical almost. Karma’s running running the show. Now is the moment where we can turn to face the wind and allow it to come over us without it knocking us down. This is the only time to do that, right now, and no one can do it for us except ourselves. Thank you. Could I say one more thing? One more thing. Ramana Maharshi didn’t sleep with that book under his pillow, but he had it by his bed. And it was Namdev. Poetry of Namdev. And whether it’s really true that he had the book by his bed or not, I’m not sure, but that’s what I heard. If I may, you mentioned something like this to, I believe, a young gentlemen, a few months ago, and I listened to your satsang, not everyone, but as often as I do. So, I reflected on what you said, but my dad keeps sometimes sending me 10, 12 texts a day within a few minutes and they could be all contradictory. They are putting down my Dharma. They are putting down my thing. He could ask me about what I did 40 years ago. It’s really making me very tired. It’s hard to take in because it happens almost every day, and of course, right now I cannot go. I cannot travel. And he’s alone. My brother, my only brother is in prison. So, I am tormented between being there and to still engage in this, or between what Patanjali would say, walk away. But my father is not evil. We don’t know what anybody would say. Don’t say “what Patanjali would say.” When Patanjali was around, there were no texts. No, but I was talking about the four types of relationship. Those Karuna, Maitri, Mudita and Upeksha, and it’s the Sutra which talks about that. But with my dad, how many more years the torment will happen? Because he lets me hope in one moment and in another, not, and then I’m insulted, like my mother was for 62 years. I’m losing you here. I’m losing the question. What are you asking? I am asking, how can I change, in me, the perception? I tried to visualize him as a little child, as an innocent child, and I feel what’s happening. It’s so toxic. That part of me does not want to be engaged in that toxicity, practically speaking. Do you know that they know the phrase, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink if they’re not thirsty?” The fact that it’s getting to you is good work, and not only that, your brother grew up in the same situation as you. So, he’s a part, the destruction of his heart is very similar to the destruction of your heart. So, it’s especially painful because you share the same abuse, and because of that abuse, you can’t even open up to each other. You know, if you just try to calm yourself down, that’s all. You’re reacting blindly and immediately without any awareness at all. Slow down. If you can’t handle it, block him, goddammit. Just block him. You can block his texts. And you can say, “Look, I’m going to block you starting tomorrow if you keep on sending me this shit. I can’t handle it. I’m not big enough to handle it, and it’s hurtful, and I’m hurting, and if you don’t stop, I’m just going to block you and that’ll be that.” But then again, you’ll see, you’re doing the same thing your father did to you. As a friend, which you said it was, the guy who was not getting sober, and eventually you said, you know, “I’m done with you.” And it’s hard because it’s my father who introduced me to yoga when I was little, and music, and so there is a great codependence. But thank you so much. This is helpful, and I am very grateful and I will be going, doing more inside and softening and surrendering and chanting. Good. Don’t try too hard. Okay? Just relax. That’s the thing. Thank you very, very much, and everybody else… Q: I was just wondering if you could offer some advice. When we know on a very, very, very deep, fundamental level, that our thoughts are not real, that our thoughts are illusion, that our very thoughts are the source of suffering, and we can see them very, very clearly, how it plays out within our daily lives, how it causes suffering for ourselves and for others, yet we repeatedly get sucked into the whole melodrama, and how to deal with the subsequent complete and utter desperation that falls out as a result of this? Yeah. That’s great. Lucky guy. You can see it all. But let me point out one thing. Everything you just said is a thought. True. Yeah. Let go and come back to the sound of the Name. Don’t be the doer. You’re not going to transform yourself. You will be transformed by practice. And don’t get so attached to understanding it all. “Understanding it all,” quote unquote, which of course we’d never can do anyway, that’s just mental, conceptual stuff that just keeps flowing, and you pick some things you like, or you think this, you think you’re understanding, but you’re just thinking about it. It’s good to see, just like everything you’ve described is accurate, of course, but what’s the cure? Where’s the medicine for that? It’s in coming back. It’s in releasing the thoughts and coming back. Practice, and practice takes time, and patience, and sincerity, and relaxing. The tension and the tightness is a part of the issue. The tension and the tightness and all the experiences that we’ve had in our lives, it’s from all that stuff that all these thoughts and stuff gets propelled and gets the propulsion. So, the issue is how to, how to relax and let go. And when you let go, in that moment, you’re not saying, “Wow, I just let go.” That’s not letting go. Right? That’s more mind, self-judging, self-evaluating, positioning ourselves in the world. Yeah. “I’m here and I just go, wow, that’s really great. I’m really cool. I can do this. This is fantastic.” You know, and then you go bang yourself on a wall or something, you know? So, when a kid is playing man, the kid doesn’t think, “Wow, I’m really playing. This is fantastic.” No, they just play. And that’s takes a tremendous amount of courage to let go, because we want to hold on to ourselves. We want to hold on to our, not only our stuff, but our sense of who we are. “I’m somebody who’s suffered a lot. I’ve gone through a lot. I’m going to overcome this.” Ok. Now let go and do it. A hundred percent. So, you have to be kind to yourself. It’s so hard for us to do. So true. So true. Thank you, KD. Q: First, I wanted to start out by saying thank you. When I found your “Om Namah Shivaya” it had given me peace that I had been looking for, and the chanting comes so naturally. I like when you talk about remembering, because it was there all along. But I wanted to ask you, so thank you very much. I wanted to ask you if you would talk about Krishna Consciousness. In what respect? Just, you know, I chant the Krishna chant every morning and Krishna Consciousness, to me, is sitting in that place of connecting with the source, and I just wanted to, I know you said you don’t follow the religious rules or aspects of organized religion. So, I was wondering what you thought about Krishna Consciousness as a model. You mean ISKCON? You’re talking about specifically ISKCON? The Hare Krishna movement? Not that in itself, because I don’t want to join an organizational movement, but that devotion to Krishna is what I’m looking for. So, Krishna Consciousness is only that organization? Well, no, that’s what they call themselves. “Krishna consciousness” means awareness of God. No organization can own that. Right. And that’s why, because I’m lost to join any organizations, that I was doing some research on it, and I wasn’t sure. No, I would definitely trust your heart. Trust your heart about it all. That’s what we need to do, learn to trust our hearts. Krishna Consciousness is a lineage that comes from the Vaishnava tradition of a great line of Gurus that go back to Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, in the past, who was one of the greatest saints that ever lived. If you’re attracted to that line of teaching, then you can join that. If you’re not, then you don’t have to. It’s up to you. Nobody can give you what you already have. Different teachings can help us learn how to look and learn how to, teach us how to find that in a way that’s more useful to us. But, personally, I don’t feel any need to join any organization. My own Guru never had an organization. He never asked us to join anything. He never started a movement. He didn’t even have a successor, officially. He just walked off the stage and that was that, but his presence is always with us anyway. So, that’s just one way of doing things, and there’s another way of doing things. So, yeah, you have to be you. Don’t force yourself into a mold that you think you have to do something. Why would you do that? It was more looking for like, community. And that’s why I came here today, to have these because, you know, I started teaching myself Sanskrit, actually, from doing the songs and the chanting and writing the words, but you know, going to temples, I’m not always, because I’ve looked into some of the temples around here. Where are you? I’m in south Florida. In south Florida by Fort Lauderdale. And I don’t know all the customs, I don’t know all the rules. I’m not really great with rules. So, I’m just looking for like-minded individuals to have conversations with and grow. That’s why, and then when I found kirtan, it made me very happy. Yeah. It’s great to be able to sing with people, but it’s very hard to find situations where you can just sing with people without being asked to sign your first born away, or mortgage or your life to some kind of organization. I think you have to be patient. I think everything will come to you that you need as you need it. In the meantime, follow your heart and do what you’ve been doing. When the universe feels that you should have some satsang, you’ll have it. It’ll show up. But, I think it’s better for you to try to, for all of us, to remain receptive rather than aggressive in our search for love. Being receptive is what will lead us to our, the love that lives inside of us. Being aggressive will just get us in trouble and make more karmas. Of course, that’s just my opinion. You ask somebody else, you’ll get somebody else’s opinion. So, but you see if it fits you, if it doesn’t, fine. If it does, fine. I like a lot of the things you said in your satsang, especially, “start cleaning your heart mirror.” Yeah. That’s what we can do. It doesn’t involve joining any organization, and the names of God do not, you do not need to be initiated in the names of God. The names of God are available to all at all times, and they don’t have to be given to you by any lineage. I’m kind of like Groucho Marx, you know. You remember Groucho? He used to say he said he didn’t want to join any club that would actually let him in. That’s about my speed. And to me, that means that, you know, anything I can imagine or project, that I think would be good for me, for instance, even, that’s just my own projection. It’s not reality. So, I don’t want to be caught in my own projections. I want to find real love, not just follow my own projections. So, the best thing to do is relax and be with yourself and allow life to flow through you. And you’ll never, you never know what will happen. Thank you. Q: Hi. First of all, thanks from Germany for your work. Aha, Germany. Wonderful. Thank you. The thing is, you’ve literally just answered my question. I wanted to ask for you to talk about finding a Guru, if it’s something we can look for or, you know, the path will guide us, and I listened and I think I got my answer. So, since I love listening to your stories, maybe you can talk a little bit about the beginnings of your own way. Yeah. Well, first thing is to recognize that, in reality, guru is not outside of us. Because we identify with the body and the mind and the emotions, we’re looking for love outside of ourselves. We feel it has to come from something else. We can’t tap into it ourselves. So, naturally, we just look outside of ourselves and then we find a situation that makes us feel better about ourselves, and we call that love. Somebody needs us. Somebody wants us. Somebody knows how to push the buttons to make us feel good and we call that love. But as Mr. Tiwari used to point out to me, he said, “Love is what lasts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s not something you get from someone.” Including a guru. Because a guru is not outside of us. Because we look through these kind of eyes and we see other bodies, yes, we might think that the Guru is that body, but it’s really what’s in that body, and what’s in that body is not different than what’s in this body, except what’s in that body knows that, and we don’t know that. So, when a Guru is in a physical body, they can help us in that way. When they’re not in a physical body, they can still help us, and they do help us, but not in the same way, and we don’t even recognize it because we’re not trained to recognize what happens within us in the same way as we are trained to decipher all the sense input that we get from the outside, the so-called outside world. So, where are you going to go to look for a Guru? You know? When Maharajji left the body and I was completely out of my mind, running through the jungles of India, looking for him, because I knew that he had actually dropped one body and taken another and that he’s still in a body somewhere. There’s no question about it. So, I wanted to find it, and I would go, and I would meet these Sadhus in the jungle and I’d say, “I’m looking for my guru, where is he?” They’d look at me like I was crazy and said, “Your guru? He’s looking out of your eyes right now,” but we don’t see what’s looking out of our eyes. We only see what our eyes see, but not the seeing. And the seeing is called “Satchidananda.” Truth, consciousness or awareness, and joy, love, bliss. So, a guru is whatever brings us into ourselves, and we may crave that interaction with the physical being or the physical manifestation of a guru, but if it’s not there, what are we going to do? Watch TV for the rest of our life? That’s one option. But the other option is to do a little practice and deal with the shit that’s making you think the Guru is outside of you, which is our own self-hatred and our own self-loathing and all the hurt and the pain that we carry in ourselves, which would prevent us from sitting deeply in our own hearts. So, let’s do the work that we have to do ourselves, and not get caught in wishful thinking, which can never, which we have no control over. The past is gone. The future is not here. Now is what we have. And it’s now, now. And it’s now, now. And now it’s now. And next week, when you say, what time is it? It’s now. So, this is what we have to deal with, and there’s no sense blaming the universe for not sending us a Guru in a physical body. And there are so many people who, like myself, later after Maharajji, we were attracted to beings who are only too ready to control and manipulate us so they could get what they wanted, and so we got what we wanted. It was another business deal. But Maharajji didn’t do business. He didn’t manipulate. He didn’t need us around. He used to say, “My mantra is ‘go away.’ You know? Because he’s everywhere. Where can you go where he’s not? The real guru is like that. So, these people who are out there claiming to be gurus, 99.9% of them are fakes, and at best, they’re just deluded, and at worst they’re vicious. So, don’t look for something outside of yourself. If you trip and fall into it, well, there you go. But in the meantime, be where you are and work on your stuff and try to heal the pain and the hurts that prevent us from allowing our hearts to open. That’s what we can do. More than that, we can’t do. So, once we clean our hearts and make ourselves, make that mirror, shine that mirror, clean that mirror that is our hearts, then what’s reflected everywhere is the beauty that’s in there. So, that’s what we can do. What we can’t do is control the rest of universe, you know? So, might as well stop trying. That’s all I’ve got to say. Thanks for the reminder, and one thing more, I love your humor. Thanks for that, too. Thank you. You need it. If you’re me, you need to be able to laugh at yourself. Oh yeah. Always. Yeah. Right. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Q: So good to see you all. Thank you for putting together these Chai and Chats. They have been very helpful and sort of a Sangha feeling from a distance. For sure. Absolutely. I agree with you. Yeah. I wanted to give, thanks for your advices on this text that sometimes you talk about. Especially lately. I’ve been reading Tulasi Das, and I actually found a copy of the Ramacharita Manasa in Spanish. Really? Wow, fantastic. And I just wanted to share a short story about how I got into the Chalisa. It was the first time I listened to you, because it actually is related with Tulasi Das, one way or another one. So, recently I read a blog from Jai Uttal of a poem called Hanumana Bahuk, and in that post, he talks that Tulasi Das used to have a cancer like illness in his arm, and when he was about to die in Benares, and what happened to me is, I was very rejective to yoga and to kirtan and mantras. I didn’t like it at all, and two years ago, a month or so after my mom passed away, I was passing through a lot of, not just inner pain, but a lot of, repercussions on my body, and then starting to think, I started having a hole in my hand, like here, like a big hole start growing, and then I didn’t pay attention. I thought it was just like an infection, but then I went to the jungle and it got bigger and bigger and bigger, until a day in December of 2017, when it was so big that I needed to go to the hospital. So, I went there and then this woman tells me, “Oh, that’s, Leishmania.” And I was freaked out. I mean, it doesn’t have any cure. So, I was sort of lost. I tried to find a plan, medicines and everything, and I was so deep in this, into this real sort of dark night of soul of my life, and in a certain moment, I just gave up. I was having these two, like deep illnesses at the same time. And that night I was feeling so uncomfortable in my own skin, I was laid down on bed, and then I, there was a playlist of relaxing music playing on Spotify. And suddenly I heard for first time, the Hanuman Chalisa, and it was actually the Sundara Chalisa, and for 20 seconds, I had a very short near death experience where something, somehow, somewhere, pulled me out of my body, and I was able to see my suffering body, and something just let me saw that I was not that suffering, that I was passing through that, but it was not my illness. And then suddenly I came back and I just kept reading. And the pain’s still there. Everything was as fucked up as before, but the mantra was playing. So, I let it play for about three days, just day and night, day and night, day and night, and on the third day, somebody called me and offered me a medicine that actually helped me heal, an indigenous medicine. But the peculiar part here was that, when I went out of the ceremony, the healer looked to me and he said, “Whatever you’re doing, whatever you have been residing, just keep doing it and stay alone for 30 days.” Oh, wow. So, actually that was the first time when I started looking at your webpage and reading more about Ram Dass and then I go to Neem Karoli Baba. So, I just wanted to share this story because the mantra has been there all of this time and daily, and in the last Chai and Chat, I asked you about the Sri Bajarang Baan, and you shared a word about bija mantra. Could you explain a little bit more on what is it and how, how does that work? Yeah, I’m not an expert on that kind of stuff, but bija means “seed” and those seed mantras are powerful sounds that have a tremendous amount of power to cut through everything. Like “hung” is one. “Om Mani Padme Hung.” The Jewel in the Lotus of the heart. Brings it right there. So, those kinds of mantras, and the Bajarang Baan, there’s a number of seed syllables like that. Seed mantras. And they need to be pronounced fairly correctly. They shouldn’t be mispronounced. Not that I think, it’s not going to hurt anybody much, but it certainly won’t help that much, but that being said, it’s a little bit difficult to get the right pronunciation of them. But the idea is that they’re powerful and they can, and they’re all, in the Bajarang Baan, all those bija mantras refer to Hanumanji. They’re all about Hanuman, who’s all about helping us anyway. So, “Hun, Hun, Hun, Hanumanta Kapisha,” you know. It’s like that, and they say that sadhus in the jungle will repeat that Bajarang Baan when they get scared, like when there’s wild animals around or demons or negative forces. It’s good at dissipating those negative forces, and it’s something I do every day because Siddhi Ma asked me to do it every day. Can you talk a little bit about the connection between, you have talked several times about the Kalachakra, Tantra and Hanuman, and I’ve been feeling very curious about it, because sometime I was like pushing away kirtan and mantras because I started moving forward in certain Buddhist practices. So, I was confused, you know, like Tenzin, non-Tenzin, this and that, but then you told that story and that’s sort of like helped me a little bit. Yeah. It’s all the same, more or less. All these different paths lead to the same goal, which is our own nature, Buddha nature, God, and you could call it whatever you want to call it, you call it, and Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism are nothing but mantra. I mean, mantra and awareness practice. Om Mani Padme Hung, Vajrasattva mantra, they’re all mantras, and those mantras are, you get usually empowered by your Lama, who gives them special strength for you. Not Om Mani Padme Hung, but there’s more esoteric mantras. But you know, the Kalachakra Tantra is a very, very, very, very, very, very powerful practice. It’s a worldview where, the continual rising of negative forces is continually destroyed by the positive forces, age after age. You know, the darkness arises because we’re also full of ourselves and selfish and hurtful and aggressive and nasty and all that, and that builds up and builds up, and then the positive energy flows and destroys that negativity. And then we start again, getting stupid. So, it’s the same story in the Ramayana that’s told in the Kalachakra. The demonic forces get strong, powerful, and decide that they’re going to try to destroy the kingdom of Shambala, which is the holy land, or the holy sacred realm, and so the king of Shambala, who is actually analogous to the next Buddha, Maitreya Buddha, which is also analogous to the next avatar, the Kalki avatar, which is also analogous to the Siddha of Siddhapur, the land of the Siddhas. It’s like this. So, they gathered their forces and then the army of the good guys goes out and destroys the army of the bad guys, and the two generals are Shiva and Hanuman. And then the king of Shambala, who is the same as Ram and Krishna and all the other avatars, goes out and fights with the demon, who’s the same as Ravana, and destroys the demon and liberates the world from the demonic energy. Same story over and over and over, age after age, cycle after cycle. Now, you’ve got to recognize, who’s telling you the story, me, some schmuck from New York. If you spoke to some Lama, he may tell it to you differently. But my understanding is what I’ve told you, and I found that in a book about the Kalachakra, where the preface was written by his holiness, the Dalai Lama. So, it can’t be wrong, but it might not be quite as accented or emphasized the way I’m emphasizing. But it said, Rudra and Hanuman were the two generals. And the other thing that, first of all, Maharajji always went, “Sab ek,” all one. Many names, many paths, all lead to the same goal. And he was recognized by many Lamas as being a bodhisattva, you know, an enlightened being. You can be confused by it all, or you can just say, “Okay, I can’t understand it all, but it looks pretty good. I think I’ll just go this way. Yeah. And I’m not worried about it.” I think I’m on that side. Just let it be. It’s the easier side to be on. I think. I heard Daniel Goldman in a podcast saying that his holiness, the Karmapa, maybe never met Neem Karoli, but there was another Lama who visited there, and he was said as a Maha Siddha, you know? Yeah. Well, actually the previous Karmapa never met Maharajji, the 16th Karmapa, but he knew of Maharajji, and when he saw his picture, he said, “Bodhisattva.” He said, “The teachings of all bodhisattvas are the same, even if they appear different.” And then he pointed to his altar and he said, “You see those statutes there? Those are the Mahasiddhas,” and he pointed to Maharajji, and he said, “Mahasiddha. Mahasiddha,” like that. So, and then he offered to give my friend, Larry Brilliant and his wife, Girija, give refuge to them, which is a great honor that the Karmapa would offer that. So, the next day there was a ceremony organized on the roof of the temple in Sikkim, I think, and all of a sudden, Larry got nervous and he said to the Karmapa, “Your Holiness , do I have to give up my Guru to take refuge with you?” And the Karmapa said, “No.” He said, “I’m going to offer you refuge in your guru, the way I offer refuge in the Buddha. I’m going to offer you refuge in your work,” the medical work, where he was in the process of destroying smallpox. “In your work, the same as I offer refuge in the Dharma, I’m going to offer you refuge in your satsang, in your, the devotees of Maharajji, in the same way as I offer refuge in the Sangha.” So, next. What are you going to worry about now? You know, the Karmapa was one of the greatest Saints that ever lived, and he saw it all from a place of clarity. So, let people argue that they can do what they do, but these things happened just like I said. Thank you. Gracias. Yeah. Be well. I’m very happy you are feeling good. Q: Thanks for taking my question, which I’m going to attempt to formulate here. So, I have been on a journey that has included a lot of physical symptoms and chronic illness, pain and auto-immune conditions, and so it set me off on this path a number of years ago, of seeking to find answers, which has led me down a completely different path, and I probably would’ve intended or thought that I was going to go down, and so it kind of felt like one door after another continued to open, and I have made gains as far as improvement in my health and symptoms, but there was kind of always and continues to be, pieces, which I suppose this is just humans being human. Right? It’s going to always open to something else that we have to face or kind of figure. And so, this year I asked the question. I figured, “Okay, I’m still having physical pain that I am not able to, to manage,” but like, what’s the underlying cause? Like , “Why am I continuing to have pain?” And so, I came to the idea that there could be something hidden, like in my body, like emotionally, like trauma or, it kind of opened that door to like, childhood, inner child work, shadow, work, that kind of thing. And so, I didn’t really know where that was going to take me, but recently, something happened and it kind of opened my eyes and I realized that it was a part of the answer to my ask, so to speak. And so, I was shown that I have been a part of a cycle of abuse for, I would say about 30 years. I think, you know, there’s a part of me that always knew that that was there, but it became very apparent, and actually something came out of me. I lashed out in such a way that was uncharacteristic for me and was actually really frightening, to see that I lashed out at this person who the abuse had been coming from for all of these years. And so, that person’s my stepfather and he’s with my mother, and my mother has been my best friend, and I am her pretty much like number one confidant, and have been very, very loyal to her. My stepfather’s a narcissist and so there’s been a lot of me accommodating and people pleasing, and so that kind of stuff’s been going on in my life for a really long time. And so, I have actually since separated myself from them, and that’s a different reality for me to be in, because my mom’s usually a part of my daily life. And so, I’m kind of in this spot where I’m attempting to be with and kind of understand, but also I don’t really know what it is, you know, that it, that I’m attempting to understand. And we’re kind of talking about cleaning our hearts and like, doing the work and working with the hurt and the pain, and that’s kind of the spot that I’m at right now, and I’m kinda like, “Hmm.” I mean, I assume that what’s going to happen is I’m just gonna like, relax into that and accept that that’s my spot right now, and that doors will open, and people will come and you know. I listen to chants every day and I chant every day and that’s absolutely, like probably the most therapeutic, like amazing outlet for me, currently, but you know, I had always kind of done this stuff, which, it’s the human condition, I think. Most of us can relate to like, getting in my own way constantly, like living with fear-based thoughts, like kind of chopping myself apart and down and not really living up to my potential. And I kind of always was like, “What is going on? Like, what is the underlying, you know?” And so, that’s kind of where I’ve been and the seeking has continued to bring me, you know, little by little more and more answers. It’s a very like ebb and flow kind of a situation, which I think is obviously the human condition, too. Like when you talk about being in sync with like your guru or like in that spot where you’re vibing high and feeling good versus, you know, that human spot where everything feels like shit and you can’t even quite, you know, like access that in the moment. So, I guess I’m just kind of at that spot where like, I’m wondering if you have any insights. First off, like anything that I said, and then second, like that cleaning the heart and like, you know, getting to that spot where we are like, cleaning up the mess. I’d love like any kind of insight that you might have to share about that. Well, the way things are, in this moment, is the result of the past. The past can’t be changed. It already happened and the future is not here yet. So what we have is now, and everything that’s in us, all the betrayals, all the hurt, all the pain, all the anger that’s sitting in there, a lot of it is unconscious and underneath the radar, and we can only see it, like you say, when you lash out. “Where did that come from?” You know? “It came from me,” you know, “a part of me that I wasn’t aware of.” And you know, the thing you say about your mother, she’s made her choice to be with this guy. And she continues every day to make that choice. And that has to be very painful for you to live with. So that’s very difficult to deal with and it throws you back on yourself and you can’t help but feel alone, and no matter how much your mother loves you and cares for you, she’s still made these choices that have created a lot of pain for you in your life. So, she’s complicit in the situation, and you have to kind of recognize that and that’s very painful. However, that’s okay. You’re still here. There are a lot of people who you can’t say that about in a similar situation. They’ve been so damaged and so hurt that they’re just in orbit out past Pluto and they ain’t coming back, you know, but you’re here and that’s fantastic, and it may not be very pleasant or comfortable, but it’s amazing actually, if you really think about it, and that’s a testament to your depth, which you may not even be aware of, but the fact is that it’s here. You’re here and it’s that basic being here with it and not having been destroyed by it, it’s in that being here with it that liberating yourself from it will come. Just the fact that you’re here, because it means that’s the part of you that’s not at all caught up in all the reaction and the emotionality. You’re just here. So that’s your real strength. That’s your anchor. Now, it’s very hard to focus on that from where we are in our daily lives. That’s where the chanting comes in. The chanting automatically separates us somewhat from the flow of thoughts and emotions. It’s not going to be like one button you push and then, “Ah, free.” No, it’s going to be getting used to the fact that the chanting allows you to let go of stuff and just be. It’s what we add to our lives to come back to. So the more we get comfortable with that, which in some ways means the more kind we are to ourselves and allow ourselves to let go again, and again, and again, the more that will function, the more at ease we get in that space of not being of not being glued to the negative emotions. So, it’s not like you have to force yourself to do anything. You just have to allow yourself to be present as much as you can every day and do some cultivation work, like you do the chanting. So, you chant. Nothing could be better. That’s great. And if you want help in extricating yourself on a conceptual level, then do some counseling and therapy. But the strength to let go comes from the chanting. But it is useful sometimes to explore all the memories and the stuff on that level itself. Because as you become aware of things, that’s when you can let go. When you’re unaware, you can’t let go. You’re caught and identified. So, whatever you’re doing sounds like it’s really good. Then you should just keep going and give yourself a break. And it won’t always be like this. It won’t always be such a struggle. As you feel more at ease in yourself and allow yourself to be more at ease in life, your choices will change, too. Where you spend your time. Just automatically. You don’t have to change them. Different things will appeal to you that never appealed to you before, because you were too much focused over here on this. But as that widens, you know, “Oh, why don’t I do that?” And then those are the things that will be more positive in terms of releasing the negative energy. So, you know, as you become more compassionate to yourself, and as we become more compassionate to ourselves, we become more compassionate to others because we see how fucking hard it is to deal with this shit. And then we see the people who, in some ways, or the conspirators that we absorbed this from, we see, “Wow, if it’s so hard for me, how much must they be suffering? Even if they don’t know it, how much fear they must have, how much anger, how much shame, and how much guilt.” I mean, they’re, they’re completely inundated with it. They’re not going to be able to free themselves of it. And that just naturally allows compassion to arise. Not idiot compassion. Not like, “Oh, I want to help them.” No. That’s not going to happen. You’re going to help them by freeing yourself. And then whatever happens, happens with them, without them, in relationship to them. But the freer you are and the more at ease you are with yourself as a being who is engaged in this daily longing to be free of suffering, that’s going to help everybody around you without you even trying. So, whatever you have to do, whatever your heart leads you to do to work with this stuff, just go for it. Give it a hundred percent. It’s all good. I actually have already started some of that phase that you were kind of talking about where I do feel like I’m in a bit of that spot where I’m letting go and surrendering, and also just being receptive and open to the things that feel good. So, like, I do meditate regularly, which is something that I started a couple of months ago. And so, to me, that’s really big. Like I used to get in my way. I wouldn’t do the things that I knew would get me to the next spot or the next level, and so I actually had to get with myself and say, “Look, you know that you’re asking, you’re seeking and you keep getting these answers, you keep getting these clues, like these pings of intuition and whatnot.” And I was ignoring them. And so I got to this spot where I was like, “Okay, well, in order to get to the next level, you have to have some discipline. You have to kind of just allow yourself to have the space to actually learn and grow.” And so, by actually making that a daily practice, you know, then it opened up the door to other spots where it was like, “Okay, well, you know, listen to chanting everyday, because you know that you live and breathe, like when you’re doing that.” And then, you know, like, “Open yourself up to art and things like that.” So, it’s, you know, amazing to me. I made the commitment to myself and that commitment has started to open many other doors that do feel good and therapeutic. There’s this other spot when you were talking about, you know, once I have this compassion for myself or, you know, us as humans, we’re figuring out the compassion piece, like how we’re able to have compassion for others, it’s a little bit of a slippery slope for me in terms of the fact that like, I’m also thinking about my parents and like, I’ve always been the one that’s been there for them and I’ve always excused the behavior and, you know, I have been betrayed, even by my mom, like openly betrayed by her, and she continuously talks about like, well, what, what would it be like if she did something else? And so, she gets my hopes up that she’s going to, you know, leave the situation. And now I’m kinda to this spot where I’m fed up, you know, it’s been so long and I’m fed up, and I’m like, okay. But it’s also hard because obviously, you know, she’s like my person. I’m her person. And I think to myself, God, life is so short. And so, you know, what is the outcome that I want? And I guess that’s the question that I don’t have the answer to yet. I don’t know what the outcome is that I want. I know I have to be patient because it’s a new development, but it’s also like, do I extend compassion? You know, do I think about, I know that obviously this stuff comes from his upbringing, his childhood, that the person that raised him, yada yada, yada down the line. So, it’s like, but there’s a part of me is it’s like so strange. It’s like we’re walking this line between boundaries and like, having compassion and you know, it makes me feel like it’s excusing the behavior, which I’ve obviously done. I’ve allowed that to play out for all of these years. It’s just this precarious spot where it’s like, well, where am I now? But I know that nobody can really answer that for me, except for me. And I don’t have the answer yet. Well, you do have the answer, but it’s confusing. You know, my friend, Sylvia Bornstein, a meditation teacher said, “You can throw somebody out of your life, but you don’t have to throw them out of your heart.” You can have a boundary, but you don’t have to hate them. The hate is your problem. The anger is your work on yourself. But that doesn’t mean you have to allow them to trample over you, over and over again, and compassion isn’t something you do, either. The more you understand your own situation and feel your own, that’ll expand. It won’t mean that you open up yourself for more abuse. It just means you can understand it and in understanding it, the edge is taken off of it. You can still say, “Well, that really sucks,” but at the end, you can not allow it to happen anymore, but you recognize what it is, and compassion doesn’t mean opening yourself to more abuse. Not at all. In fact, compassion, when you’re truly compassionate, it means you overcome any selfish desires, like feeling a certain way, even. So, there’s no you anymore. There’s no me anymore. There’s only presence. And real compassion means just allowing other people to be who they are. That includes you. You have to allow yourself to be who you are, and that is somebody who will not be trampled anymore. But it’s not something you have to do. Once you recognize what’s going on, you’re no longer a victim of it. You’ve been victimized, but when you recognize what’s going on and you see it clearly, then it’s not the same. So even when you’re in the presence of these people, like it, it changes, I assume see, I haven’t been back since this occurred. And so, I am kind of assuming that that’s what you mean. That if I were in his presence again, that perhaps I would feel differently just with this new awareness. Well, at some point, maybe not right away. I mean, these things, these are deep things, you know. I mean, we have so many conflicting emotions. You know, as victims of abuse, or as targets of abuse, we’ve already made, we’ve already given up our, we’ve given up our sense of right and wrong almost, and we’ve allowed the abuse to make us feel guilty. So, we’ve already sold ourselves out. You know, they say the lesson of betrayal is trust. The lesson that we learned from being betrayed by the outside world, by other people, is eventually we learn to trust ourselves. It’s a very fierce teaching, and we’re always betrayed by the outside world, because it will never give us what we want. Ever. Really. We can never find the love we’re looking for out there. We can find some kind of affection, et cetera, et cetera. But the real love is who we are and that’s with us all the time. But when we’ve been weakened by having been made to feel as if we deserve this abuse in a way, because when you’re young, you can’t, you take it onto yourself, and you’re not conscious of that. So, it goes in pretty deep. So don’t worry about being compassionate now. And don’t throw yourself back into the fire if you’re going to get burnt. There’s no reason to do that to yourself. Develop a relationship with them, whatever it is, that doesn’t compromise what you want, whether it means not talking to them, whether it means not going. It’s okay. Take time off. Let it rest. Let it settle. There’s no compulsion for you to solve this situation. It’s not yours to solve. It’s yours to be you and start to feel good about yourself and let that blossom. So, here’s a little poem from Rumi. “Burning with longing fire, waiting, wanting to sleep with my head on your doorsill. My living is composed only of this, trying to be in your presence. I’ve lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on the door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside.” We’re looking out there, but we’re really already inside. And this is where we live, inside ourselves. This is where everything is, but because we’ve needed attention and kindness and caring and physical help to exist, we’ve had to sell ourselves to get that stuff. And we’ve had to deny ourselves in order not to confront difficult situations, painful situations. So, we’ve got a lot of habits already, of behavior that has been really hurting ourselves. So, just take it easy. Relax. Take it easy. Let go. Take it easy. Don’t force yourself to do anything that doesn’t feel comfortable to you. There’s no reason. Why would you do that? It’s not your job to run the world and to change other people. Your job is to be you. So be the best you, you can, the most open, complete. Just be who you are. Find out what that means also. And you should feel good about the amount of presence you have , and the way you’ve been dealing with this already has been really great and just keep going. That’s all you have to do. Listen to your heart. Listen to your heart. That’s all you have to do. Okay. It’s good to be with everybody, and let’s also recognize that the situation now in the world makes all this stuff, it’s like shooting it up with steroids. It just makes it more powerful, more difficult to deal with more anxiety, more intensity, because we’re locked up with our minds and our stuff in a way that’s unprecedented in the history of the world, as far as we can tell. So be easy. Take it easy. Be kind. Let’s be kind to ourselves as best we can, not to cause more suffering to ourselves. It’s hard enough. Let’s just give ourselves space and be present as best we can. Be with the stuff and try to untangle all the reactions that we have to everything all day long, by just letting ourselves calm down a little bit every day. Whenever you think of it, just take a couple of breaths and let go. You’re washing dishes, take a breath and let go. You’re watching TV. Take a breath in the commercials. If there’s no commercials, just pause the thing, take a breath and then start again. Practice letting go. Practice just letting go. That’s so important. That’s really a big thing. Okay. So good to be with you again, and I’ll see you soon. Ram Ram.     The post KD Call and Response Special Edition Conversations with KD November 21 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.

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. Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations with KD November 7, 2020 “Do what you can do to let go. It doesn’t have to be while you’re sitting down, cross-legged pretending to meditate. That’s not it. All day long, just let go. “I’m doing it again. Ok. Ram Ram.” Just be at ease. Try to be at ease with life as it is, and then you’ll be at ease in the next moment and the next moment and next week and next month. Right? It’s inner strength. You have to cultivate that.” – Krishna Das MORE FROM KRISHNA DAS: Harmonium Tutorials: https://krishnadasmusic.com/collections/harmonium-tutorials/products/harmonium-tutorials Online Courses with Krishna Das: https://krishnadasmusic.com/collections/courses Online Shop for books, videos, music and more: https://krishnadasmusic.com/ FULL TRANSCRIPTION: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the world. The resolution of any issue or any question that we have in our own minds is always to quiet down and listen to our hearts, feel our hearts, feel what our deepest feelings are. There’s a lot of panic, a lot of anxiety these days, a lot of fear, but that fear does not touch us. It does not touch our true nature. So, the quieter we can become, the less reactive we can become, the better it is, and to keep acting out of unconscious knee jerk reactions is very, it is not a good way to go. It creates more and more suffering for everyone around us and for ourselves. So, in that sense, everything we do for ourselves, we’re also doing for all other beings, because ultimately there are no other beings. We are all one. Maharajji said this, over and over. “All one.” There is only one, and we are the cells of that body of one. Everything we need to know comes from within. The one thing that we can share with other people are the techniques of accessing that place within us, techniques to help us release our delusional beliefs about ourselves, that we’re no good, that we don’t deserve love, that we’ll never be okay, that this life is meaningless. All these types of negative atmospheres exist within us. They are not who we are, but we believe them for so long that we take them as real. They’re as real as our ego is. So, our ego is made out of all these delusional beliefs, because the separateness, which we call ego, is also delusional. It’s not true. Ultimately it is not true. And yet, that’s where we live for most of our whole lives. We live in that place of separateness and self-centered actions. But when you recognize the true self, who are you going to hurt? Who are you going to manipulate? And for what reason? The difference between Maharajji and almost all of the other yogis and saints that I’ve met is that there was no manipulation. He didn’t need anything from us. He didn’t want anything from us. He had recognized his true nature, which is our true nature. And he allowed us to enter into a field of love that was inconceivable to us. And his presence is here. He’s here now. He’s always here, but we don’t turn towards him. We don’t turn towards that place of love, and so we spin and spin and spin and spin and spin around. There’s no way to find presence or Being. It’s not like something buried in the ground that you can dig and find, but as you release the things that keep us believing the stories we tell ourselves, then the light of that reality can permeate us. It’s always here. We’re in it all the time. There’s nowhere we can go where that is not here, and in these very, very, very, very painful and difficult times, it shows us how much work we have to do to make reality, to recognize that deeper reality, how important it is. That’s why they always say, “Do practice when you can,” because there are so many times that come in life where we’re unable to even remember what practice is, but when we do practice, we create within us a gravity, like a magnetism that pulls us within and helps us and releases us from the suffering and the stories and the negative emotions, more quickly than not, but that’s the fruit of practice. So, we do practice when we can, and practice is, it doesn’t, it’s not necessarily a formal tense, willful kind of thing. It’s a question of just bringing ourselves back to this moment and releasing the thoughts and stuff that pull us away and pull us out of ourselves, again and again and again, until we actually don’t get pulled out so much. When I first started chanting in India, when Maharajji ordered the Westerners to chant, I experienced the power of practice for the first time, and I saw the mantra, the name became home, home base, and thoughts just passed through the sky of mind of the space, just like birds flying through the sky, and I didn’t fly with them. I wasn’t trying not to fly with them. I had been trying to pay attention to the chanting, and as that deepened, the thoughts just came through and they didn’t grab me. And this is not, this is the way it is, but we are so habituated to identify and grab the thoughts that we don’t notice a lot. One time, many, many years ago, when I was still in college, I took a humongous dose of LSD. Which is what I did. I had to take enough LSD to have enough propulsion to get through the lower atmosphere of my neurosis and my fears and all my stuff. So, I had to take a big enough dose to get me out into space. So, I’d been out in space for like two days, and then I was lying on my bed, well, you know, just at ease in my bed, just in this beautiful, open, relaxed space, presence, love, sweetness, everything, happiness, and all of a sudden, I sensed something coming towards me, something coming towards me from the distance. “What is this? What? What? What’s happening? What’s coming? Oh my God, what is this?” And it came closer and closer and closer, and then as it crashed over me, like a huge wave. I went, “Oh, no, it’s a thought!” And then I was thinking. And then after some period of time, it was leaving, you know, like just like a wave recedes back into the ocean. It’s just dripping off of me. It was receding through me. I went, “No, no, no. Don’t leave.” Back into space. Back into the now. And then, I had no sense of time, so I don’t know how long, but then after some period there was like, “Oh no, it’s coming back. Another one!” It crashed over me, and then I was thinking again, and for some period of time, I was thinking. Then, like I said, you know, like the wave, the water of a wave recedes back into the ocean, it dripped off of me back into the ocean, and then they started coming quickly, more quickly, more quickly, more quickly, and finally, boom, I’m back. I’m thinking. In other words, I was back in the prison of my thoughts. Of thoughts. I don’t even know if they’re my thoughts. They were just thoughts. And that is actually the way it is. Our thoughts come so quickly. We don’t notice the space between them. There’s always space between the thoughts, but our minds are so gross. It’s like we don’t see all the colors. We only see the big primary colors, the big blasting colors, and that’s all we see. We don’t see the shades and the fading in, fading out, and the able to colors, and we don’t see the space between the thoughts because we think we are who we think we are. Amazing. Just amazing. So, practice is what we do. Or, that’s what we call what we do to deepen that center of gravity within us that allows us to release the thoughts and come back, again, and again, again. That’s why we do it, because we want to discover what’s really here, which is our true self, which is love, real love, real joy, real bliss, truth, sat-chit-ananda. That’s one of the names of reality. Truth, awareness, consciousness and fucking bliss, real bliss, real joy, real Ananda. So then when I was chanting, I had the same experience that I had on the acid trip, you know, 30 years before. Not 30 years. At that point it might’ve been 10 years before, or eight years, but not quite as dramatic. But still, I saw the thoughts just going through, and I did not think them, so to speak, and I felt wonderful. Not empty, not dead, not nothingness. I felt joy and peace and love, and the thoughts were just floating through that, like a bird through the sky. Okay. That’s that. Q: Thank you very much. The question I have, since I was very young, I love books, and the books, for me, have deep meaning in many ways. I collect them more than reading them. When I read them, I reflect, and I have several thousands of books, mostly yoga, Ayurveda, from India. They’re in boxes. And it’s almost like an addiction because, very briefly, I’ll be 62. I never touched a cigarette in my life. I have been listening to Krishna Das with my ears since 1999, and with my heart in the last two or three years, but I don’t have children. I live a good life, but I never owned a car, I never owned anything. I’ve never been drunk in my life. I love to drink with my food. So, the books, to me, are so meaningful. And I know you recommended books, you know, of saints, and I have several of those, but sometimes I just look at them and I feel them in this, you know, language of communicating. They remind me to be a good person. They remind me to look at the highest. So, I would like, after I’m gone, to stay together, if possible, and I’m confused about, since the time of the debt is uncertain, in my life right now, I’m attached to them. I use them as a reference and I, as I said, they create more than just a book on a shelf. I have books everywhere, in my bathroom, in my kitchen in my, you know, it’s almost like an obsession, and there is this relationship with the books which is a little bit unusual than, just to buy them. Like, Robert Svoboda, he recommends two books a month. My eyes and my time don’t have the ability to read, or I have other priorities. I work nine to seven almost every day. I love my work. I love my dharma. But these books, I keep collecting them. Like the Russian Saint you recommended, Krishna Das, I didn’t buy one. I bought all the autobiographies I could find about him, and I still haven’t got, you know, even to read one completely… your own Neem Karoli Baba, all the books. So, to me, this is a little unhealthy. It’s obsession. It’s passion. It’s complex. And I would love them to go to a place where they appreciate them, but I don’t have that much money to ship them somewhere, like, I don’t know, to, you know, Belize or Costa Rica where I believe the books will really be, so the only place I can think it’s, you know, Dr. Lad, because I know Dr. Lad, and I know how much care is in his Institute. But there are also books in, you know, about photography. But 90% are Upanishads, you know, biographies of saints, all of Robbie Svoboda’s books, Freud books, Dr. Lad. Thank you for listening. I’m sorry to take so much time, but I’ve contemplated on this for a long time. Any advice? And of course, from you. This is a story. So please shine, shine on my, you know, little kind of childish way of, I don’t know. I don’t know because I could be dead tonight and I’m attached to what will happen to my books. And that’s the only thing I’m really attached to after my death. Something I care for very deeply. Thank you. You’re welcome. Well, promise me you’ll do me one thing, one favor for me. Don’t send them to me. Not even the Saint one? I’ve got my whole house full of books. I can’t even walk down from one room to the other, you know? One thing: I don’t have a house. I rent an apartment in San Diego, but I met you in 1999 and yes, I mean, I hope to be here, but I don’t own a house. I don’t own a car, no storage, so here we are. Everybody needs something to keep them on the earth, you know. Without any attachment, no body, you know? I really don’t think that’s a problem. I think you should just not worry about it. Worrying, obsessing about it is the only problem. The books themselves are not an issue. It’s your constant engaging in that, the issue about it all the time that is not necessarily the healthiest thing you should be doing or could be. When you’re ready to leave your body, you’re not going to be thinking about your books. You can not say that. Well, you better not be thinking that. You’d be born as a book. So right now, in the sense, you could say it’s some type of addiction, but it’s really more of just an obsession, you know? And I love books, too. I love what they represent. Like in this book, there’s wisdom, there’s something in there. There’s, wow, you know, there’s something, but, you know, I haven’t read like more than 10% of the books that I have. I will sleep quietly tonight. Very good. Thank you so much. So, I put my iPod of you chanting on my belly, also. There is a lot of other things, but I will of course leave the forum to you and everybody, and thank you so much. Om Shantih. Great to see you. I see you in other ways, but it’s wonderful. Take care. Be well. Use a book as a pillow. You know, Ramana Maharshi, He kept a book of Nam Dev. Nam Dev was a great poet-saint from Maharashtra, and Ramana Maharshi, who was fully enlightened, He always kept a book of his poems right by his bed, His bedside. Interesting. So, you know? He didn’t have any problem. He didn’t have a problem with it. So, you don’t have a problem. Q: These Chai and Chats have been really sustaining. Great. Yeah. I enjoy very much, talking to people. It’s really great. And I wanted to say hi, but I also wanted to, it’s not a question, but in one of the Chai and Chats, either the last one or the one before, you told the story about Ravana, the demon, that actually he like, made a deal to play that role. With Brahma. Yeah. That’s one of the things they say. And what about it? I wanted to hear that story again. The reason for an incarnation is that it’s to remove the darkness from the world, from negativity. Otherwise, there’s no reason for God to manifest in the form on this plane of consciousness, of being. All right, this is all stuff that I’ve heard. This is not from my own experience, but they say that everything we see, think, and feel, this whole world and all the worlds of creation, are created for us to work out our karmic situation, as individuals and as a world, also, you know, the group karmic situation, which is made up of all the different individual karmas of every individual. And so, usually it’s towards the end of an era, an end of one of the Yugas, as you could say, the sun starts to set more further down in the sky, more shadow arises, more negativity. And so, in order to cleanse the world of that negativity, and beings of that negativity, they say an incarnation manifests in this world to do that. And the whole story of the Ramayana, of Krishna’s story, the Bhagavatam, the Mahabharata, Krishna Leela, and you know, the Leelas of all the Avataras, they say that those stores are actually written by the Rishi’s in order to facilitate the cleansing of negative karmas, and allow people to recognize their deeper nature and merge with the one, so to speak, and work out their karmic situations. So, these dramas are created and all beings participate in them in their own way, with different levels of awareness, of course. Most of us are just completely asleep, but there are beings who are awake. And so the way that story was written for the, in the story in which Ram would show up, Sita and Ram and Lakshman and Hanuman and the other parts of that incarnation drama would show up, was written and they needed somebody to be the bad guy, you know, because there was going to be a war between the good guys and the bad guys. And this seems, something that seems to be in every age. In other words, Krishna also was part of a great war between what they say is, you know, the forces of good and the forces of evil and in the Maitreya, the coming Buddha, the Kalki avatar to come, the same thing happens again, they say. If you read the Kalachakra Tantra, the story again, repeats where the demons gather their forces and there’s a huge war between the good guys and the bad guy. Every age, it seems to be that negativity increases, increases, increases, and then there’s a relief from it because of the divine incarnation. And so, they needed somebody to play the bad guy, and the bad guy was not just some schmuck. You know, he had to have tremendous Shakti because he was going to, in Ravana’s case, he conquered the world of the gods, the Indra world, Indra gods, the sun, the moon, the wind, Indra’s you know, he conquered all that world. He was king of all that, as well as the earth. And so, they needed somebody who could contain enough Shakti to do that. And so, there was this yogi. They say that there was this Yogi who, a great, great Siddha yogi who had only three lifetimes left of tapas, that he was doing fierce practices, and then he would be relieved, released from, you know, into enlightenment. So, Brahma came to him and asked him, you know, “How about this for deal? You take this job and instead of three lives, that’ll be your last life. You’ll be liberated.” And he said, “Hey, fantastic.” So, that being took incarnation as Ravana, and they say… You know, let me recommend something. Roberts Svoboda, a good friend of mine and an incredible being, who’s written up a whole bunch of books about Ayurveda, he’s an Ayurvedic, a Vaidya, and he’s also a Jyotish and he’s written a bunch of books, on his website there’s a four-part retelling of the story of the Ramayana, and it’s exquisite, really exquisite. It talks about all the different forces at work and who is this and that, and I believe, I can’t remember off hand, but there must be a whole section about Ravana, also. But you’ll love that. So, the demon had to be, had to have the ability to win the battles with the gods, not Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva level, but the Indra level, Indra Lokah, what is many times called a heaven, the heaven worlds, the natural gods, the natural deities, the wind, the sun, the moon, et cetera. And so Brahma said, you know, “Ram is going to shoot you in the heart. And that’s it, you’ll be liberated, by dying by Ram’s arrows.” But the funny part of this story is that Ravana was obsessed with Sita. After he kidnapped Sita, he was obsessed with her beauty and he was in love with her, and so he was holding Sita in his heart, so Ram couldn’t shoot him there. So finally, what had to happen is they got Ravana so angry that for one instant, he forgot Sita, and at that instant, Ram shot him with an arrow in the heart, and then he was killed and liberated. So, you know, all of this, and I think Robbie goes into it also, the inner and the outer Ramayana, the inner story and the outer story. I mean, did that really happen? I don’t know, but there is an inner Ramayana where the same thing is going on. For instance, Ravana had 10 heads, right? And each head represented one of the senses and the object of the senses, of that sense. There were 10 heads and yet Ravana was, you know, had the awareness of all the 10. And in fact, that’s how he got all his, how he reclaimed his powers in his life as Ravana. He did Puja to Shiva. He did incredible puja for like, millions of years, and at the end of a million years, he’d cut one of his own heads off and offer it to Shiva. And when he was about to cut off his last head, Shiva said, “All right, all right. All right. What do you want?” And Ravana said, “I want to be immortal.” And Shiva said, “Sorry, can’t do it. What next?” And he says, “Well, if I can’t be immortal, I don’t want to be able to be killed by this and this,” and he named everything in the universe, except men and monkeys. Because he thought, “Humans, what can humans do to me? Monkeys? Come on. You know, they’re so low. They’re so beyond, you know, below me, there’s no problem.” He mentioned all the gods. He couldn’t be killed by this one, but he left out men, which is why Ram had to incarnate as a man and Shiva had to come and manifest as Hanuman, to serve, to work with Ram and accomplish the destruction of the negativity in the world. So, that’s more or less a basic story, according to my own delusional capacity. I’m sure there’s people with better, you know, a more accurate story, but that’s the basic, as far as I understand it. But recognize it’s all happening within us, also. Our own senses and the awareness of the senses, through the senses and our own inner reality needing to be freed from the obsession with the sense information and the identification with that information and thoughts based on what we see, think, and feel, et cetera. So, the Ramayana is going on within, as well. And Robbie talks a lot about that, Robert Svoboda. Anybody who listens to that will love it. So that’s the story. That’s as best as I know it, you know. Have you read the Ramacharitamanasa? Tulasi Das’s Ramayana? You will love that book. That book is going to blitz your brain right out of its socket and your heart will open and the tears will flow. There’s nothing like that book. It’s a retelling of the story of the Ramayana as a devotional text, and it was written in the 1600s by Tulasi Das, who they say was a reincarnation of Valmiki, and it was written in the local Hindi, or Avadhi, in the local language, so that poor people could read the story because the original is written in Sanskrit and only the priests could recite it. So, nobody, they had to pay to hear it, and so Tulasi Das rewrote the story to bring this devotion into the lives of the world, where it wasn’t getting through because it was in Sanskrit. And it’s incredible. Maharajji loved the Ramacharitamanasa, and every Tuesday, wherever he was, they read Sundarkand, which is one of the chapters about Hanuman, mostly, that chapter. You’ve been reading that chapter sometimes? Every once in a while we read it. Yeah, sure. Yeah. When we were in India, we read it every Tuesday and Sunday we read the gospels because Maharajji loved Jesus so much. And so yeah, there it is. There’s your homework. Yeah. Okay. I just wanted to say one thing, to the woman about the books, because I was just thinking that my father, his spiritual teacher was Edgar Casey, and he had a lot of books about dreams and he just wrote in his will that he wanted all of those books to go to the Edgar Casey center in Virginia Beach. And he just took care of it like that. Alright. Maharajji loved Edgar Casey. Somebody told him about Edgar Casey and he went, “Ah, he’s good. Very good.” Which is very rare for Maharajji to say any teacher is good, because he knows everything. But he loved Edgar Casey, and somebody gave him, we had rubbed his feet with Aura Glow oil you know. I don’t know if they still make it, but it was an Edgar Casey kind of formulation of peanut oil or almond oil or something. It was called Aura Glow. My father had it in his house. Absolutely. Edgar Casey was very far out. Yeah. Very beautiful. Very beautiful being. Be well. See ya. Q: Ram Ram. Hi KD. So, I have one question. Many times you have described this incident. Once you are in India, and I think you had a great realization when you saw Maharajji was there with you all the time in all periods of your life, and all the Saints. It just came into your mind as you are just watching them, past, present and future. And then you had, I think, some kind of a cleansing. All the time, you were just crying, crying, crying for some time. I was just trying to ask, is that, that was only a one time experience or has it happened to you like multiple times? It was just once or you have gone through those experiences, like after, after that incident happened? No, it was it was a very, very, very powerful experience for me, and I never had that experience again. I had a number of other experiences, but that was one of the most, that was part of one of the most powerful experiences of my life, yeah, when I was in very, very bad shape. And that’s when Maharajji came back to me. Not that he ever went anywhere, but I had closed myself off to him, because whatever my stuff was all about, and that’s when he came back to me. That’s when he forcibly broke down the wall that I had built between us and showed me that he was always with me. So that was, that was the beginning of the beginning of the rest of my life, really. And that was in 1987. Okay. So, I think it was the beginning of this phase, whatever cleansing had to happen, it happened at that time. It saved my life. Let’s put it that way. That was what he did to save my life, yeah. And Siddhi Ma was a big part of that. She was right there. Oh yeah. Okay. Thank you for sharing that. That incident, when you describe everything, and you’ve said it many times, it’s like awesome. Because sometimes I feel, I’ve felt that something was happening, not exactly that far, but some things similar kind of things, I also experienced, that’s why I thought of asking you. Ok, thank you. Very good. Yeah. Now just remember, don’t get stuck trying to compare experiences from one person to another, you know? Your way of opening has to be different than my way of opening. It can’t be the same because you’re you and I’m me. So, one must truly trust and really get into one’s own path, and not be comparing what happened to another person because it’s, it’s another world. Your feelings, your reality, your life is going to unfold the right way for you, and so is mine, but that won’t be the same. It couldn’t be the same. It might have the same effect, but the details of that will be different. So don’t be thinking, “Oh, that didn’t happen to me.” That’s just the ego, the eurosis taking over to put yourself down and that’s not useful at all. It’s very self-destructive. Okay? Yeah. Thank you. You. Q: Hi, Krishna Das. Hello. Yesterday afternoon, with the long wait that many of us have been in, at around five o’clock I’m like, “Oh my God, I hope Krishna Das has a Chai and Chat, because I don’t think I will survive another day without hearing some advice.” Anyways, here I am. But I’ve been following you for, I think, 21 years, and this is the first time I asked a question, or, actually I’m going to make a comment instead, and it’s because of the deep gratitude I feel today for the triumph of good over evil. That’s what I’m going to say. Maharajji has been my God, my higher power, my spiritual everything. All the good things that have happened in my life has happened to me because of my connection with him. And I’m deeply grateful to you and for, in some way, putting me in contact with him. I really connected with Maharajji during a workshop or a kirtan you had at Garrison, in Garrison, New York several years ago. And I just felt the deep connection and that has stayed with me. I have visited the ashrams. I had the huge boon of meeting Siddhi Ma in Rishikesh in 2007, and then going to Kainchi in 2010 and I’ve been following you for many years, but frankly, since 2016, I have felt that all these evil forces have been ruling the world, and although I heard you say that many of these evil characters are no schmucks, I guess I beg to differ. We’ve had a real schmuck brain and he is going to go, and anyways, I don’t want to talk politics, but I’m just want to express my deep gratitude because when in Kainchi and when I was in Rishikesh, Ma received me with such unconditional love. I’ve never felt that before or felt it since, but I have it from her and from Maharajji, and being in this Chai and Chat today is quite intense for me. And I just want to thank you and yeah, and that’s it, and I thank you. Thank you for doing these Chai and Chats and all that you do. Thank you. Q: Hey, Krishna Das, I’ve been following you. I’ve been listening to your music for, I don’t know, seven, eight years now, have had some very beautiful moments in times when I’ve been listening to your music, just bursting out in tears, driving, bursting out in tears. That’s how beautiful this has been for me. I used to live in the south of India, in Chennai until a few years ago, and I was always wishing that I would get to be in one of your satsangs, in one of your chanting sessions, and I think back in 2016 or ‘17, I finally got that opportunity, where I think you were traveling down to Tiruvanamalai, Ramana Maharshi’s Ashram, and I was like, “I have to be there.” And I was up at like 3:00 AM in the morning. It was like a five, six hour drive to be there, and I was like, “You’re coming in such a remote part of India, the South India, deep, right?” And like, I was hoping it would just be like, I don’t know, 50 people. And I show up over there, and it’s like 300 people. 300 inside and 500 outside. Yeah. It was amazing. It was amazing. I was completely shocked, but again, it was, it was a fantastic session that I had, and I don’t know if you guys can see this, but this is a picture that I was able to grab with you. Are you sure you didn’t Photoshop that? No. I’m not a collector of photographs like that. This is something that’s been very close to me. So, I will always hang onto this, but anyways I have tons of questions, but I’ll stick to one for now. My question is, when you’re on the path and you know about these different beings, right? Maharajji and other beings as well, and you learn about them. You read about them, you read about their teachings and guidance and wisdom, right? When you come across, you know, teachings which are kind of contradictory to each other, right? How do you work through them? Okay? And I’ll give you one very simple example, right? Like I have read about Maharajji always saying this quote, that truth is the toughest tapasya. Right? I think I read it in Ram Dass’s book, “Be Here Now.” Right? And he’s like, “Always say the truth,” right? No matter what. And then I am following another, you know, another spiritual master, who would always say that, you know, “Follow the truth, but also, you know, use your common sense.” Right? “You live in the 21st century,” right? Like it can really hurt you at times. That’s just one example. I don’t want to stick on to that, but I just had these many situations that the conflicting contradicting parts kind of confuse me. So, I don’t know how to work through them. There’s a few different things. First of all, there are many different types of people in the world and they all, they all respond to different stimuli to open their hearts and to get them moving in the right direction. So, a real guru, or a real teacher, or an enlightened being will, will use different techniques for different people, because it’s not the same. It’s not like the same medicine is going to work for every disease. Right? You have to have the right medicine for the right illness. So, a lot of times what we think, what we perceive intellectually as being different teachings, really turned out to be the same in a deeper way. And also, with Maharajji now, he was not, he didn’t write books, he didn’t give lectures. He didn’t make universal pronouncements that everybody in the world should be… And he said, “Tell the truth,” but he lied all the time. You know? He didn’t lie about spiritual things, real things, but he would say, “Well, I’m going, I’ll be back next week,” and he didn’t come back for three months. So where is that at? But you got to understand, those teachings are designed usually for the person He’stalking to, but then we hear them and we apply them as best we can to the rest of our lives. It’s the spirit of the teachings that are important, not necessarily the words. For instance, when he says, “Tell the truth,” you don’t walk up to somebody and say, “You know, I think you’re a stupid piece of shit and I wish you were dead.” Just because you feel that way, you’re going to tell that person that? why would you do that? That would be hurtful. And besides that’s not the real truth. Anyway, that’s your subjective emotional reality. So, you have to use your own discursive ability to understand the teachings and you take the ones that you feel are helpful for you. And the true, the real saints, it’s all the same thing. Give up selfishness. You know, treat other people with kindness, compassion, and consideration. It all comes down to that. How you could do that is very difficult. How you can achieve that means you have to overcome the delusion that you’re a separate being, you know, that you’re an ego, but we all think we are who we think we are. So how are we going to be freed from that? There’s many different techniques for that. Sure. And you use the ones that you relate to. And so ultimately, doesn’t it come down to trusting your own feelings? “Yeah, this, this teaching, I like this.” So, you try that. If it’s not working, once again, you’re listening to your heart. So, whatever allows you to become a better person, that’s what it comes down to. We’re in society. We live with other people. Our whole lives are filled with relationship to everything. You have a relationship through those electric plugs on the wall on the back. Somebody put them there. Somebody is generating electricity. They didn’t come from nowhere. You’re dependent on that. So, everything is interrelated. How do we live in this world without creating suffering for ourselves or others? That’s what it comes down to. And so, we each have to figure out what works for us? How are we going to achieve that kind of humanness that is so important. God is not somewhere out there in the sky. God’s looking out of your eyes right this minute, but you don’t know that. How are you going to figure that out? Well, you have to find a way. So, you read about these teachers. You try to meet some teachers that seem to be okay. You try their teachings and you try to try to find a way to become a better person. And everybody I say that to has a different image of what a better person is, right? So how can you tell that person, “Okay, push this button that will make you a better you”? No, it’s a different button for each person and that’s the way it should be. That’s the way it has to be. But on the other hand, the divine reality in each person’s heart is exactly the same as every other person, but we’re stuck in the level of differences. So, whatever’s going to help us overcome that selfish, self-centered way of living. But that doesn’t mean denying yourself and denying your own desires. That’s not reality. That’s that stupidity. You know, then you’re denying who you are. You have to find out how to be who you are in a good way, not to chop pieces of yourself off to fit some version of what you think might be holy. That’s bullshit. You have to be you, man. Nobody else. You’re it. There’s only one of you in the universe. And that piece of light wants to reunite with the Supreme light, and eventually it will, as soon as you get out of the way. But how to get out of the way? Only by becoming a good human being, caring about ourselves and caring about others and getting the strength to be kind and generous and compassionate. Most people think they’re going to sit down and meditate themselves into some blissful state that will never go away. I guarantee you that will not happen. Ramana Maharshi had no idea about what was happening to him when it happened, but from the moment it happened, when he was 16, he was never changed after that. His reality never changed. He was fully enlightened, fully freed at that moment. He didn’t sit down in order it to be that way. That experience was the fruit of his own tapasya in previous lives. It didn’t come from nowhere. Nothing comes from nowhere. Everything has a cause. So, if you want the effect to be that you are happy and free and loved and loving and kind, you have to plant the seeds for that. And that’s the deal. I understand. And if I may, just one quick, it just hit my mind, I read, in your book that you wrote about meeting a particular Yogi in some jungle of India, in the forest of India, who was like 300 years old. 163. What does that story about? I know about yogis and I’ve heard about, but actually knowing somebody who has met somebody, what was that story about? You know, these are advanced yoga techniques where you can actually, when the body dies, when the body’s worn out, you can take your atma and it can enter into another body, a young body, which is, which has been just vacated by its own atma for some reason, maybe it got sick and died, and at that moment you can enter into another body. And then there’s also yoga techniques for bringing life to the body and rejuvenation. This Baba was on his third body or second, second or third body when I met him, and this is way above our pay grade. You know, and it doesn’t guarantee that this being was enlightened either, by the way. The path is long and arduous and all we can do is the best we can do every life. And you know, there are things that are just so far beyond our ability to understand and conceive them, just let’s try to become good people, and then from that, a lot of things can happen, because when your hungers are not driving you all the time into getting them satisfied, there’s a lot of different things that happen inside, when we’re freed from all those obsessive behaviors and habitual behaviors. So, in order to become a caring, compassionate being that takes others into account, it takes tremendous inner strength to do that. And once that happens, you start living in a much less obsessive world, where you’re actually free and you’re happy, regardless of what’s happening in the outside world, regardless of whether you have too much or too little. It makes no difference to you. You’re at ease in the world as you are. And this is something that’s very deep and powerful and this is why we do practice, to try to ripen ourselves in that way. It’s already in there. We just have to expose ourselves to the sunlight of love, of truth, in order to ripen our hearts again. Okay? Thank you. Thank you so much. Namaste. Take care. You’re still in Chennai? No, in fact, I’m in Texas right now. Oh my God. You left Chennai for Texas? Yeah, a little, but for three years, I’ve been trying to see if you’re going to come down here, but you refuse to. No I didn’t refuse. The people who brought me had many changes in their agendas. So, they weren’t able to bring me, but as soon as I can, I’ll be down there. Okay. I look forward to that. Thank you. Ok, Ram Ram. Q: Namaste. I need your help. So, I have a scenario here. After 12 or 13 years in this lockdown, I have been with my parents, my brother, sister-in-law and their son for like last 8 or 9 months, and you know, sometimes I have losing patience due to anything that goes in family. Only sometimes? That’s very good. So, yeah, I am, right now, 31, and when I was like 21, I started following a guru of mine and his program used to come in religious channel of India. It had your intro music, “Om Namah Shivaya.” So, you know, that’s how I got connected to you. Yeah, I saw him on that Indian TV thing. So, yeah, so that’s how that good thing happened that I came to follow you. And since then, you know, since last nine, 10 years, I have been listening to you. And so, this is one question that, you know, how, how can I, I mean, I don’t want to hurt them, but then at times it happens. For example, I say, my father is like, you know, listening to news, current affairs in a loud volume all day long, and I want to stay away due to some reason. So, you know, debates happen between us and all those kinds of things, and then he stays calm, but then I do not stay calm. So, what can really help me here to stay peaceful with them? You have to recognize that this is your spiritual practice, and you should be grateful that the situation is showing you your own issues, showing you that your lack of love, your lack of openness, your reactivity, the way you tryto hold onto one particular feeling that you have. You think this is holy and anything that interferes with that feeling is bad. No, it’s not like that. You have to just be with what is without reacting, and if you see yourself reacting, you have to, you try to talk yourself down, you know, relax. “I got stuck again,” and you breathe for a few minutes and then you go back. Let your parents be who they are. This is a very difficult time for everybody. Everybody’s on their worst behavior now. Everybody, all of us. Because we’re faced with our minds. All day long. And you with yours. It’s not their problem. It’s your issues. And you don’t have enough love. That’s all. And love doesn’t mean, “Oh, I love my family. Anything they do is okay.” No. Love means letting them be who they are. And it also means letting, allowing, working on the things that close you down, and it’s not easy. This is big time stuff. You don’t expect this. This is your spiritual practice right now. Don’t expect to push. All of a sudden, it’s going to go away and you’re going to be happy forever. This is your life right now. This is the life of everybody in this world who’s locked down and dealing with their minds and no place to go to get away from themselves. It’s brutal, really brutal. And so, you’re in the game. That’s great. You know, feel good. You haven’t completely, you know, jumped out a window yet. That’s okay. That means you’re doing good. Sometimes I’m on the verge of thinking that the house just beside me is, you know, vacated so I should be shifting, and then I explained to myself that, you know, you know, this should not be the reason to escape. And you know, this is an institution that I have to, I have to learn something from here, family as an institution. But then, when I’m in that thought process that, you know, I need to be right now and just don’t be so far from them, but still just the next two. So, when I’m in that thought process, it’s just like, I would take that action right now. You know, right now it’s easier for me to speak that, you know, I explained myself, but when I’m in that thought process in that extreme, it is very difficult for me to stop myself. I understand. We get stuck trying to find a solution to the issue. Like, “If I do this, okay, I have to do this. No, I shouldn’t do this. I should do this. No, I shouldn’t do this.” This is very normal obsessive thinking about things, trying to work things out, but bottom line is you need to do what you have to do for yourself. Only you know what that is. Nobody can tell you. I don’t know what it is. And if it means moving out of the house and staying with some friends or something, as long as you’re, you know, this is between your family and yourself. You know what you want to do for you, what you think you have to do, what your family wants you to do, and what you think you have to do for your family. Only you know what it is. There’s no quick answer. The real point of it all is going through all this processing. That’s the spiritual work. It’s not like the spiritual work is later when you get to this place where you finally can close the door and be quiet. Your mind will be just as noisy, guaranteed. Yeah. It will be less quiet in your ears, but your mind will be the same messages right now. There’s nowhere you can go where it’s not going to be like this. So, but even so, you just listen to your heart and see what’s the right thing for you to do, and then do it and see how it works out. If you alienate your family, you know, Indian family things are, it’s very different in America, you know, very different. So, I have no advice to give you other than find out what the right thing to do is. Look at Tarun, he left Chennai all the way to Texas? He left his family and Chennai to move to Texas? Not that there’s anything wrong with Texas. But now, you know, he has long phone calls to his family and all this, the middle of the night, he just created different suffering for himself. It’s always going to be suffering wherever you go, whatever you do. So, you have to just figure out what is it you really feel you have to do, but the worst thing you can do is think that this is a waste of time. This is not. This is good. This is real spiritual work. And every day you’re getting lessons. Every day you’re working on yourself. Every day you’re seeing your stuff. This is a very powerful time and you’re not failing. Nobody’s failing. You’re not failing. So, feel good about that. And then do what you have to do, and then you’ll have to deal with the results of whatever you do also. So, don’t think that, you know, you move over here and all of a sudden life goes away and it’ll all be okay. No, there’ll be a lot of other results from moving your ass over here. So, you have to, you know, just play it by ear. Every day. Be with it. Don’t fight with it. Be with it. See what it is. It won’t always be like this and see how you can make it better for everybody in the best way you can. The worst thing you can do is think that this is a mistake and that this is a waste of time. No. This is really good work. And whenever you can, just sit down for two minutes and let it all just seep off of you. I know Indian people don’t go swimming in the ocean, but if you’re at the edge of the ocean and a wave comes over you, then the water seeps down and goes back into the ocean. So just sit, a couple of times a day, just for two minutes. Don’t try to do anything. Just like, “Ah,” and just let that wave just recede for a minute, because that’s mind training. That’s meditation. But if you try too hard, you hold onto the wave. You won’t let it go away. Just let it drip off of you, all the worry, all the thoughts, all the anger, just two minutes. Just let it be. And then as many times as you think about that in the day, just sit for a short, short period of time. Anyway, that’s the deal. So good luck. All the best. Namaste. Bye. Q: KD, during the COVID quarantine, we spent a lot of time in a small apartment in Bogota. The place was very near to the military hospital, and there were times where the atmosphere of collective fear was very intense and palpable around the neighborhood. Several times we sat down and sang Hanuman Chalisas, and that really helped us all. Then other nights, we used to gather in darkness and listen to Sri Bajarang Baan. That tune specifically had unique resonance during that time when fear was around so intensely. Can you share with us a bit more about the story behind the Sri Bajarang Baan? Well, Bajarang Baan is one of those great mantras, long mantras to Hanumanji, and they say that the Bajarang Baan is what the Sadhus sing in the jungle when they get scared from wild animals or whatever. They’ll recite Bajarang Baan. “Baan” means “arrow” or “weapon,” and “Bajarang” means “Hanuman.” So, it’s called the arrow of Hanuman, the weapon of Hanuman, to destroy fear and all those things. And it’s a very powerful practice. Very powerful, and there are some very powerful bij mantras in it also, which should be pronounced correctly, if you can. I tried to pronounce them the way I was taught and I hope they’re correct. And those bij mantras are very powerful in themselves. “Hanu hanu hanu Hanumanta Haṭhīle.” Those are mantras to really overcome inner reaction and fear and stuff like that. Very powerful practice. It’s a practice for Hanuman the Protector, who protects us from negativity, you know, outside and inside. Of course inside. So, it’s a very powerful practice. The old Baba and the jungle had me recite that, and Siddhi Ma also asked me to recite that every day. So, that’s a part of my practice every day. Just like the Hanuman Chalisa. In fact, Ma said to me, she said, “No doubt Hanuman Chalisa has had done so much for you, but don’t forget Bajararang Baan.” So it’s a very important part of our practice, our lineage practices to Hanumanji. And so that’s it. Keep chanting. Q: I think you may have answered my questions when you were speaking with Tarun and Sumit. I find myself hooked by this feeling of betrayal in a particular relationship. Otherwise, my friendships are pretty sweet, and at one point you had mentioned betrayal’s lesson is trust. The lesson of betrayal is trust. And the way in which I initially interpreted it was, that if I were in a situation in which I was feeling betrayed, it’s that ultimately, I had betrayed myself. In this situation, I’m not quite sure how to see it and I wondered if you could speak further on that teaching. You know, a lot of times in our relationships, our relationships are based on “You watch my back, I’ll watch your back.” You know? “You support me, I’ll support you.” So, it’s a business relationship after all, isn’t it? And then somebody finds somebody else to support or doesn’t like something you do, and you feel betrayed. But the relationship was put together as a business deal. Not that there wasn’t affection there. Could be friendship, but it was also, “You watch my back, I’ll watch your back,” and then the person gets too busy to watch your back and then you’re betrayed. But you were giving yourself away in the first place. That’s the betrayal of your heart, your own self. You were giving your own feeling of wellbeing. “I’ll be ok as long as you watch my back. I’m not going to watch my own back, but you watch my back.” So, by not watching your own back, which allowed you to not expect that person to always be there for you in the way you need them to be, which nobody can ever be. The expectations we have on other people are ridiculous. “You be just who I need you to be all the time, or I’m going to freak out, be angry and then I’ll come get you, God damn it.” You know, one thing leads to another. You know, one negative emotion feeds them all, like watering a whole bunch of different flowers. So, you learn. You learn to trust your heart and you learn not to give yourself away like that. You put your wellbeing in somebody else’s hands in that sense, you know. I mean, that’s a very quick generalization, but yeah, that’s basically it. And you see how much did that teach you about yourself? So, the lesson you learn by the betrayal, the so-called betrayal by another person, was that you really weren’t trusting yourself. You didn’t trust yourself, even in the beginning of it all. So, it taught you so much. You learn the most important thing is to trust ourselves. We give ourselves away so cheaply, to anybody for a quarter. You know, I just remembered something very funny. It doesn’t really apply to this, but there was a really wonderful, a celebrity named Merv Griffin, who was a host, you know, and he had been, his sexuality was a little bit here and there. So, somebody asked him if he was bisexual and he said, “No, no, I’m quarter sexual. I’ll do anything for a quarter.” We give ourselves away so cheaply. That’s the point of what I was saying. I thought that was great. That’s very helpful. Thank you. And like what you said also to Sumit, that it’s not a waste of time, these painful things. Absolutely not. There’s no waste of time. The more we can pay attention to what’s going on, the better it is. This life is teaching us every moment, showing us every moment what we need to work on. And we don’t have to pay attention, but it’s still not a waste of time. We’re getting the message somewhere. Yeah. Thank you. Namaste. Q: Hello. Hello. So, as we have been talking about family struggles, books and ethics, I think my questions relate. In fact, what I want to know is, I know a lot of dreaming interpretations according Jungian psychology, Freudian psychology, but I would like to know a little bit more about dreams on this path because when I was 15 years old, I lived in the countryside of Brazil and I had never heard about Hindu deities, gods and religion and philosophy, not even yoga. We didn’t have the internet. And I had a dream. I was spending my vacation with, in the house of my brother and I dreamed that my mother had died, and she came to the house of my brother in my dream, and she wanted to let me in. She wanted me to let her in the house and my brother would say, “No, don’t let her in, because this is not our mother. This is something else.” And in the end, I opened the door to her. I opened the door and then she opens a book in front of me and she told me, “Look, you just have to remember this. You just need to read these words and remember this.” And the word was “Mahabharata.” Only two years later, I saw the word for the first time in my life because Peter Brooks had his movie, “Mahabharata.” And when I had the dream, I called my mother on the following day, because I was very worried about her because I had dreamed that she had died, and she just told me that she had been to the doctor and she was diagnosed with a benign tumor. It was okay. She would have an operation and everything would be okay. During my life, I forgot about this dream, but I clearly had two revelations about the dream. One is that, first I married a man named “Krishna.” So, I found a Krishna in Brazil, which is very difficult. People have difficulty with his name. So, the first thing is I married Krishna, right? That is related to the Mahabharata. And the second thing is that when I went to live in India, five months after I was there, I was diagnosed with the same benign tumor that my mother was. I had the same condition, and in a week, I had to have an operation in India. It’s obvious, the connection, but I still think that this isn’t very superficial for very strong dreams, especially because I woke up, I remembered the words. That is so strange, so long, and it took me so many years to see these words in real life and to connect to it. But I never hear about dreams when I read philosophy, Indian philosophy, or Hindu religion. I never hear about dreams. So, I would like to know a little bit more about the role of dreams. Well, unfortunately you came to the wrong place. I don’t know anything about dreams from a spiritual point of view. No, I don’t. I know that when you see a Saint in your dream, a real Saint, it means that they came to see you, because they say that you can’t manufacture the form of a Saint by yourself, especially in a dream. But if you see like, Maharajji or Krishna or Hanuman or Ram in your dream, it means you’ve had, you’re having darshan and they’ve come to see you in your dreams. In our dreams we’re much more available to those higher beings. The Tibetans have dream yoga. You might want to look that up, Tibetan Dream Yoga, and maybe you’ll learn something about dreams. “Conscious dreaming,” they call it, which is like, they say that this world, this life, like right now, is a dream. We’re dreaming this. And when you’re in a dream, it doesn’t feel any different than this. It feels real, like this feels, and then you wake up out of it and, “Oh, this is real.” There’s ways to dream consciously, like where you can, most of the time in a dream, you’re just kind of watching the dream unfold. You’re in a story, but you can actually enter into a dream consciously and do other things in your dream. Just like you can make choices in this world, but I don’t know anything about that. That’s not my area of, well, I don’t have any areas of expertise, but that ain’t it either. I used to upset my mother when I was a small girl telling her that she was not my real mother, because I felt I was dreaming. And one day we would all wake up. You helped. You gave me something. Maybe I have to look into that. Well, obviously you’re very you’re very sensitive to the dream world. So, you might want to be interested in trying to find out about how to work with that in a good way. I will do that. Thank you so much. Q: So my question is, I just did a Vipashyana retreat for a week and found it like very irritating in the beginning. I know you’ve described a story in the past where I think you did one and found it powerful, but I found it, you know, as it went on through the week, my mind became more quiet, and I felt an inner calmness. And I guess my question is a question around that. So how do you approach it when you go into such a retreat? Like, have you ever felt that before? That sort of irritation or frustration in the beginning? Every day. Yeah, sure. I mean, you’re seeing your mind, and your inability to do anything about it, the way you usually think you could do something about it, which you can’t anyway, and that’s very frustrating and very painful to see how helpless we are, how helpless we seem to be. But as the practice goes on and you do what they ask you to do and you pay attention to it, and you start to feel the effects of calming the mind and disentangling yourself from your thoughts, from the identification, with your thoughts, you bring awareness to the thinking, and it’s no longer just total reaction, unconscious flow of thought. You’re actually with it. You’re seeing it. And our first reaction is probably frustration and no a sense of, “Yeah, II can’t do this. This is bullshit. I can’t. I can’t. I’ll never be able to do this.” But that’s just another thought, isn’t it? And you were caught by that sense of frustration, which you took as real, and at that point in your practice, you weren’t present enough to see it clearly. It got you. Now, if that thought arose again on the ninth day, it would have been a very different situation, because you were calmer, more aware, and you had got better at the technique that you were being taught. You were practicing the technique and the technique was doing its work. And if we paid attention to how stupid we are every day, we’d be frustrated all the time, but we don’t pay attention. We’re lost in other stuff. But if we were trying to pay attention, we would be amazed at how out of control we are and how we have no ability to calm ourselves down, no ability to quiet our minds, no ability to open our hearts, and we’re always looking for something outside of us, a button to push to make it okay in there. So, once we see that stuff, it’s very humiliating to ourselves, because we think we’re so on top of things and we’re not most of the time. So yeah, you know, the fruit, the seeds that you planted by doing that practice are with you all the time. They will influence your devotional practices. It stays with you. It’s not like it’s something else in a little room over there on one side of your head. No. It’s part of your life now, and the quietness you felt in the mind and the way you were able to do that, that’s with you. That’s there, no matter what practice you do. It’ll give you a better ability to not waiver when you’re doing a devotional practice. You’ll be more present because you just cultivated that. We did five 10-day courses in a row in Bodhgaya at first, in 1971, 70-71, and that’s when I met Sharon, at my second course. She arrived. Sharon Salzberg. And Joseph Goldstein had been there for like 300 lifetimes already. So, it’s a great, a very powerful practice. It’s an excellent, powerful technique that you can always use to calm down. It cuts through any kind of bullshit you’re telling yourself about yourself, at any time. Sometimes with our devotional practices it’s, “Oh, I’m not feeling any love. This is just terrible.” And then we just go, “Yada, yada, yada.” But sometimes you do one of these Buddhist meditation practices, it cuts right through all the nonsense very quickly. And that’s a great ability to have. Did the teacher sit with you when you were doing it? Well, the first 10 days was Munindraji, and then the second, the next four days were Goenkaji, and I don’t know if he was there for every single session. I can’t remember, but mostly he was there, yeah, sitting with us at that time while we were practicing. Guiding you? No, I don’t know about that. That wouldn’t be his reality. He’d be just doing his practice, you know? And in doing that, possibly vibrationally or on, you know, beneath the surface, there’s some kind of guidance going on, opening a space for us to enter into, but if he had that, yeah, I can’t even say that. I don’t know what he was experiencing. I don’t know what his reality is at all… was, is. So, all I know is that it was a lot of sitting. Yeah, we were all there because Maharajji had disappeared and we ran away and I was traveling with someone who brought me to Bodhgaya, me and Danny Goldman, and yeah, it was really beautiful there. Bodhgaya in those days, very quiet, small little village. His book really helped me at the beginning, The Meditative Mind, because he gave a description of this Buddhist practice. Who’s book? Danny Goldman’s, the Meditative Mind. I was reading that at the beginning. It really helped set the stage, because I hadn’t done a meditation like that before. And I just want to ask one other question. Before I did the retreat, I read something. So, when I was in high school, two people I know were killed and I felt like her ghost, one of the women’s, the girl who was killed, came to me when I was in grad school to write a letter, to keep the person who had done it still in prison, you know, from getting parole. And so, I did write a letter and it’s always been in my mind, you know, again, thoughts, but you know, what if he gets out? And so, I felt guided by her spirit before this retreat, to read what had happened since then, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that, well, I mean, one of the perpetrators was executed, but the other one was released. And it’s just been in my mind, you know, like, I feel like for some reason, and I guess my question, one question is like, if God is in all of us, right, the Antarayaami inside looking out, why would something so terrible be allowed to happen? And I know this happens in the world, right? There are atrocities everywhere, but for some reason, this particular, because I know them, it keeps coming into my mind, and I asked one Swami, who said that, “Oh well, Anandamayi Ma said that anything you suffer in this life it’s because of past karmas coming to fruition.” Like you took this birth, you knew what you were getting into. Maybe. It might not have. But the level that you say that “known” isn’t the same level that karma functions on. It’s a much deeper level. Like people say, “Oh, you took a birth to work this out.” You didn’t take the birth to work this out. Your karmas created this birth for your soul to take this form, to work out some karmas. It wasn’t your decision. That’s a mix up of levels. Just set that straight. You understand what I said? There was no Jennifer before you got born. Your soul was here, and your karmic package was here. Jennifer was created from your karmic package to, for this life, to be you and work out whatever you can work out. And when you die, your ego, Jennifer, will be gone. But your soul is still here, and so is your karmic package, and whatever’s left will create the next manifestation for itself until there’s no karma left and you merge into the one. The soul is never born and never dies, but it puts on different suits of clothes on its path back to itself, so to speak. That’s what they say. Personally, I don’t know, but that’s what they say. So, I guess mentally, just how does one deal with that? There are these things that happen to people, you know, like, all I can find in my mind is just that there, maybe there are demons, or maybe there was past karma they had to work through. Yeah. Very easy. You know what Metta meditation is? Yes. That’s what you do. You can’t figure it out. There’s nowhere you can possibly understand the why of it. All you can do is open your heart and offer that kindness, compassion and caring for all beings, for the ones who suffered because of this, and the ones who suffer because of that, and the ones who have suffered from the actions they’re creating right now, the way they will burn for lifetimes. We don’t want them to burn, because ultimately, they’re a part of us. Ultimately. Right now, “Fuck them. They screwed everything up. Let them fucking suffer.” But that’s not the best place to be in for yourself. Because that anger destroys your own heart. Loving kindness practice is the best way to deal with that issue in you right now, because that will cleanse your heart of its judgements about the situation. It will cleanse your heart about your fear about the situation, and your obsessive, trying to make it all fit in a way that works for you. It’ll cleanse your heart and release you of that, and they say that that vibration that will, precipitated by the love coming out of you and the calmness coming out of you, will help those other people move on in their incarnations as well, wherever they are. You know, as Bob Thurman says, there are no dead people. There are no dead beings. Bodies come and go. And that’s a very extreme thing to say because everybody’s, you know, we’re all identified with our stuff and our bodies and our thoughts. But he’s pointing out that, you know, just because the body goes doesn’t mean you’re dead. No beings die. You never die. The soul is eternal. It doesn’t come. It doesn’t go. Can’t cut it. Can’t wet it. It’s here. It’s reality. And it puts on different suits of clothes to work out the karmas that the suits of clothes have created over the millions of lifetimes and to try to figure out why, it does nothing but fuck yourself up, plain and simple. No Saint will ever encourage you to figure out why. Ramana Maharshi would say, “Who’s thinking this?” Maharajji would say, “Just do Ram Ram.” Buddha would say, “Offer all loving kindness.” So those are the three options that are open to you. Anything else is just mental masturbation, which will just hurt you, and is hurting you all the time. Not just you, everybody. When we try to think, “Why does this happen? Why is this person doing this?” It’s above our pay grade. When you’re God or enlightened, maybe we’ll know. Maybe we won’t, but who knows? So, our job is to remove the selfishness, the greed, the anger, the judgmental mind, the fear, the anguish. That’s our job, and that’s more than we can handle. You know, that’s a big job. Let’s do that first, and then we’ll see what happens. You know, what we need to know or do, if there’s an after that, who knows, but right now, no matter how much compassion and caring we have for others, are we going to let that destroy us? Are we going to let that ruin our day? Are we going to let that create suffering for ourselves and then everybody we meet? Which is what we do. People do that, and that’s not healthy. I know Nina had told me before, you know, that Siddhi Ma said to chant the Chalisa, you know, just keep chanting. And I did that. And you’ve taught that, too. It can reduce suffering, right? Well, for sure. I mean, what it really does, we don’t know, but when we’re opening our hearts to Hanuman or Maharajji and chanting the Chalisa, we’re certainly not sitting around worrying about who’s doing what to whom. Bottom line, we’re not out robbing banks, we’re chanting. So that’s good. That’s good. Probably. Right? You get hurt trying to rob a bank? You probably won’t get hurtchanting. Unless the house falls on you and then you’ll do it more next time. Thank you. Q: Greetings from Long Island, New York. The things that I’ve been listening to today in regards to what I wanted to address, the theme that’s been coming out to me is about trust, and my therapist and I have an ongoing joke. The meme that she says you have to trust people, and the meme shows a door with a cactus on the doorknob, and up top, it says it’s open. And that’s where I’ve kind of been. And I have found myself, you know, I’m teaching in that school, teaching music to special ed kids and by the time I come home, I’m wiped and I do about a half an hour of my chanting practice, and I’m really just like waiting for it to be time to go to bed, and I’ve really kind of cut myself off from other people and, you know, a part of me misses, and obviously with COVID, we can’t have it, but a part of me really misses the energy of the kirtans in person and the energy that goes with that. I mean, I do the Thursday night satsang and I’ve been listening to some of Nina’s stuff and trying to get in as much as I can with that. But I guess what concerns me is the fact that there’s a kind of, I wouldn’t call it a happiness peace, but there’s a kind of peace that comes from not having other people’s stuff all around me, you know? Starting with the simplicity of like, “No, I don’t want to go out because I I’m tired of wearing the mask all day,” you know. It’s like, I just want, in my place I can be free to do what I want and et cetera. But I’m not sure, when we talk about like giving love and service to others, you know, as I separate myself from people, how do I know if I’m doing that out of protection for myself or whether that’s my ego stepping in and separating myself from those people. And I remember you talking in your past when there was a time where you stopped chanting and moved away from everything, and then you found that you had to go back to community. So, I don’t know if I’m making myself clear in that, but that’s kind of my dilemma, is that like, I feel like I’m doing the best that I can do to follow the path and try to reach a level of spirituality, and there’s a peace, I don’t know if it’s a happy peace, if that makes sense, or a serene piece from just not being around others. I mean, eventually we have to take our stuff out of the room and bring it out into the world. And that’s where we know true spiritual quality is. But how can I tell the difference? It’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is your judgmental mind overworking everything. Just let go of that and everything will be okay, and things will happen as they happen, and you’ll do what you feel like doing. There’s no spiritual life somewhere else. There’s just your life as it is. And you’re allowed to be who you are. You’re allowed to hide yourself in your room and never go out if you want. No problem. But the problem is that you don’t give yourself any sense of peace. You’re constantly evaluating and positioning yourself and thinking, “Well, what if I do this? What if I do this? What if I do that?” Just let it go and then it won’t be a problem. Just try. You won’t be able to, but that’ll be your work. There’s no button to push to make it okay. You’re trying to find a button where it’s going to feel okay. There’s no button. You’re you, now. Be with it. Don’t try to change it. Don’t be evaluating it. This is not the time to be out with people. This is where we should be social distancing and isolating as much as we can, and you’re working with kids and that’s tiring you out for a lot of reasons, but whatever. I think what you’re really missing is the interactions with people that you get lost in, because you’re not able to do that now, and that’s hurting us all, everybody, not just you. This is the world we’re living in right now. We usually go out and we’re talking with people, laughing, joking, having deep conversations, all kinds of bullshit that we do all day long, and right now that’s taken away from us. So, we have to see ourselves. So, you’ve seen your stuff. “Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, is this enough? Is this real peace? I’m not happy.” You were never happy. Get right. Be honest. Nobody was happy. None of us are happy. We’re doing the best we can. Now though, you’re facing it and you think you want, “Do I, should I change it? Will that work?” No. What works is letting go of the judgments, and how do you let go? First, you notice. “This is what I’m doing to me. Why? I don’t know why, but I’m doing it. Let me stop. Okay. Ram Ram. Oh, I’m doing it again. Ram Ram. Oh, I’m doing it again. Ram Ram. Oh.” You can’t get through one “Sri Ram Jai Ram” without judging yourself. Nobody can, but that’s okay. This is fierce shit. This is in the fire, man. This is really a tough time, but it’s not a waste of time. This can be very purifying, very, very cleansing, but it’s also very painful and there’s no question about how painful it is. It’s really painful. We’re bouncing off of the fucking walls. We’re used to going out and doing things and just being stupid without even noticing it. Now we notice everything because we’re locked up with banging up against the wall. So, it’s all good. You’re not wasting time. The more you embrace the situation and accept it as it is, and not try to change it, not even try to change the way you feel about it and just be with it, you won’t be thinking, “Well is this real peace or should I go out and get hit by a car? Would that be better?” I don’t think so. Right? So, it’s good. It’s hard, but it’s good. And if you need to sleep, sleep. This is a really tough time. Sleep. Come home. “Sri Ram Jai Ram.” Goodnight. And that’s it. Don’t force yourself to, don’t push yourself past your limits to do practice because you get a rebound, a negative rebound from that. Be kind to yourself, man. That’s all we have to do. Let’s practice kindness for ourselves, and then the way we move into the world will be so different. We won’t be hating everything that bounces up against us, you know, from the inside or the outside. Start dealing with kindness for ourselves. This this has been my theme this week. This has been coming up a lot. This is a time to really practice kindness for ourselves and not be judging ourselves. But you see the intensity of the situation feeds that part of ourselves that’s always judging ourselves. It’s like on steroids, you know, but at the same time, it becomes more visible. We become much more aware of it, which gives us the opportunity to to let go. Whatever it is, let go. That’s the only option that we really have. Let go. You feeling this? Let go. You feel it again? Let go. Keep letting go and coming back to something, whether it’s the breath or a name or something. It’s the practice of letting go that that is ultimately going to liberate us. Letting go of the thoughts and the feelings and the judgment and the negative stuff and all the stories we tell ourselves and the unconscious atmosphere we live in all the time, you know, what that’s filled with, with self-hatred and the judging and, “I wish it was this and I don’t like this,” you know? In this time it’s like we’re getting banged on the head with it all the time. In a normal situation, we only get banged on the head once in a while, when something happens, otherwise we’re just in dreamland and nothing wakes us up, you know? But now we’re getting beaten up by our own stuff. So, it’s tough. It’s very tough. Do what you can do to let go. It doesn’t have to be while you’re sitting down, cross-legged pretending to meditate. That’s not it. All day long, just let go. “I’m doing it again. Ok. Ram Ram.” Just be at ease. Try to be at ease with life as it is, and then you’ll be at ease in the next moment and the next moment and next week and next month. Right? It’s inner strength. You have to cultivate that. There’s other ways of getting through the door. You can kick it up, kick it down. You don’t have to grab the cactus doorknob. You’re a big guy. Hit it with your shoulder. The whole house will fucking fall down. Thank you. Ram Ram. Okay. I’ve gotta go. I’m so sorry to leave you like this, but I really have to go. I wish all the best for everybody, and don’t go anywhere. See you next in a couple of weeks. Okay? Love you. Namaste.       The post Call and Response Special Edition Conversations with KD November 7 2020 appeared first on Krishna Das.