Call and Response with Krishna Das Ep 78 | Real Happiness and Becoming a Good Human

“So, the cards are stacked against us in terms of finding any kind of peace of mind. But that’s just the way it is. That’s this world at this time. That doesn’t mean we can’t find it, but it means one has to start paying attention. One has to start looking at one’s self and trying to figure out what you want, what we want. What do we really want? And on one hand, in some way, finding out what we really want is our spiritual practice. It’s not just when we sit down to meditate or calm ourselves down or do some asana or whatever we do. That’s part of it. That’s a method. Why do we do those methods? So, we can have a good life. And so, we can have the strength to become a good human being.” – Krishna Das

There’s a place in our hearts, in our Being, it’s not in our Heart, it’s like, not here or here or here or here or there, where it’s ok. Where everything’s fine. Where it’s all right. Where there’s a core of a feeling of wellbeing. It’s ok right now. Not later. Not when your hair looks better. Right now. And we’ve lost that connection to that place. So, we’re, everything we do is, we’re trying to find that feeling. But it’s not out there. It’s not in anything you can get or hold onto or let go of. It’s who we are. But maybe you notice, we think a lot. Have you noticed that? No? Oh. Ok. Let me say something else then. I wonder if the Giants won today. What do you think? Or are you a Jets fan? Who’s a… they both suck. Give them some time. And then when they win, I’ll be all right. What if they play each other, like today, will I be all right or not all right? You know, there’s never going to be a time when you get it all up here. We’re never going to figure it out. It’s not figure-out-able. Finally, you just stop trying to figure it out and you get tired of trying to make it all right and then, guess what? Then, you notice that it’s all right, but you know, you have to be really obsessively crazy out of your mind trying to make it all right for a long time. Which most of us qualify for. And you know, I’m not making this up. This is what I experienced directly when I was with these great beings in India. They weren’t trying to make it all right. It was just all right. As we are. That’s really hard. Because nobody told us that, you know? Not our parents, not our teachers, not our friends. Nobody told us it was all right. One time, I was sitting in the back of the temple with Siddhi Ma, who was Maharajji’s great disciple, and the eldest son, no, the eldest grandson of a family, the Tiwari family, a very close family of devotees of Maharajji, the eldest grandson was getting married. He was the first one of the generation to get married. So, all the cousins and brothers and cousin brothers and cousin-sisters and sister-cousins, if you know India, some of them don’t even know each other, they all came to get blessings for the marriage, and I was sitting back there and all like, 15 or 20 of these younger people were there and I was just sitting there and I was watching them. There was so much love and affection between these relatives. I don’t know about you, need I talk about my relatives? Anywhow, and I was astounded, I mean, I just, I was just like, I couldn’t believe how much sweetness and joy there was with these kids and Siddhi Ma saw me and She said, “See, Krishna Das? You see? You see what you missed by being born in America?” Ain’t it the truth.

I mean, really, you know.  All of Western culture is basically dedicated to fucking us up. That’s what it’s here for. And we’re doing that. Our, all of us, collectively, all of our karmas, debts, this is what we created. The world we create every day over and over. Dedicated to keeping us asleep and unhappy and unfulfilled, because we’ve been trained, and we’ve been taught to believe that we’re going to find that thing outside of our self, whatever shape or form it is, animate or inanimate, a real person or whether it runs on batteries. We’ll find it, and it will make it all right.

Gonna be a fun day.

And, it never makes it all right. It gives us a little pleasure, which releases a little tension, and that’s nice, but that passes, right? Pleasure and happiness are two different things. If you have pleasure, there’s always an opposite of pain. Either the pleasurable experience goes away, or a painful experience goes away and then becomes pleasurable. So, if the pleasurable experience goes away then there’s dissatisfaction. It’s called, “The Pairs of Opposites.” And if you look at life, you can see that. If there’s fame, there’s always shame. If there’s loss, there’s always gain. There’s always two things like that. But happiness, happiness is in that feeling of ok-ness, lives inside of us already. It might be in here. Let me see. Is this going to give me eternal ok-ness? Depends on how high a dose it is. Nice. Temporary pleasure. So, yeah. So, then, you know, if you’re doing some spiritual, so-called “spiritual practice”, look at your motivation. Why are you doing it? One time, I was living in San Francisco and I had this little closet, it was a house with other people, I had a big closet where I could go in and sit down and meditate and I wouldn’t be bothered by anybody. So, I went in, closed the door, lit the candle, lit the incense and then I sat down. Before my ass hit the cushion, I went, “Oh shit.” Because I saw my motivation for meditating. I recognized it was to create a “me” that I could like. Right? Somebody I wouldn’t give such a hard time to like I do all the time to myself. So, then I said, “Shit,” and I left the closet. Now, if I’d stayed in that closet… but I didn’t. But I saw my motivation was self-hatred. So, what can come from self-hatred. Just more nonsense. So, when we sit, when we sing, when we do asana, when we do any kind of, whatever spiritual practice means to you, don’t try too hard. Be with it, you know? Just be with it. You’re not going to be able to take your mind and hold it on one thought. That ain’t going to happen. Not living in New York City or anywhere else on this planet. Very difficult to do that. It takes a lot of serious effort to concentrate the mind that way and it takes a lot of willpower and it’s probably beyond most of us to do that. It’s certainly beyond me to do that. But when I sit, or when I sing, I can notice when I’m, it allows me to notice when I’m gone. And then I just come back. Then I’m actually already back. So, you’re sitting or you’re singing. “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram,” and you wonder if you set the recorder to get the Giants game, so you can watch it when you get home. “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram” “Shit did I do that, I don’t know, man, I’m so stupid, I couldn’t do that. Oh. Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram.” That’s what it’s like and that’s what it’s going to be like. There’s no button to find that’s going to make that go away. Little by little, actually, we can calm our asses down, but it takes some regular intention and some regular practice to do that and we’re really busy.  All of us. We have busy lives full of all kinds of stuff. So much input from so many directions. So, the cards are stacked against us in terms of finding any kind of peace of mind. But that’s just the way it is. That’s this world at this time. That doesn’t mean we can’t find it, but it means one has to start paying attention. One has to start looking at one’s self and trying to figure out what you want, what we want. What do we really want. And on one hand, in some way, finding out what we really want is our spiritual practice. It’s not just when we sit down to meditate or calm ourselves down or do some asana or whatever we do. That’s part of it. That’s a method. Why do we do those methods? So, we can have a good life. And so, we can have the strength to become a good human being. I’m sorry.

Didn’t anybody tell you, you were human beings? That’s what this is about.

What are you, trying to become a good Martian? You’re not from Mars. Human. Earth. That’s it. That’s the deal. You’re gonna go somewhere else? Where? How? Or you think you’re going to go to some nice blissful heaven world? Forget about it. It doesn’t last either. The only thing that lasts is what and who we really are. And that’s already here. That’s inside of us. That’s looking out of our eyes right now. We don’t see what’s looking out of our eyes. We only see what we see. We don’t see the consciousness, the being, the awareness that is doing the seeing. We’re surging out of our senses towards objects and all we see are the objects, the stuff. And our thoughts are stuff, too. We don’t see who we are. So, as we do these practices, as we start to overcome some of our crazy neurotic programs, we start to calm down a little bit and we stop giving ourselves such a hard time. If we weren’t giving ourselves such a hard time, like if I wasn’t having a thought, “Krishna Das, you’re such a piece of shit, you can’t do anything.” If I wasn’t having that thought, where would that thought be? In the whole universe, it wouldn’t be there. So, if we weren’t constantly telling ourselves, “We’re not enough,” or “We’re too much,” or “We’re this” or “we’re that,” those thoughts wouldn’t be anywhere We wouldn’t be a prisoner of that thought. So, practice means learning to let go of that stuff. Training to let go. Now, it’s not easy to just let go without finding, without bringing in another object that you begin to orbit around. So, maybe you watch your breath. You know, you’re going to be breathing no matter what else you’re doing, so, it’s always there to watch and it’s always there to come back to. So, that’s a great thing. That’s why it’s such a fantastic practice, just being with the breath. You don’t have to make yourself breath. “Ok, now what do I do? No what? Oh.” It just happens. So, you can just be with it. You don’t have to manipulate it. You don’t have to do anything, It’s a wonderful thing to come back to. So, now you’re watching your breath and you, after 20 minutes, you notice you haven’t been aware of one breath. You’ve been thinking about all kinds of other stuff, so you simply come back. Every time you come back, every single time you remember, they say, it creates a deeper neural pathway in the brain. It actually changes the shape of the brain. They’ve proven that now. And so, it makes it easier on the next time, the next time you remember.

Bollywood.  Where is that coming from? Outside? Oh. Very nice.

So, anyhow, where were we? We don’t know.

Our minds got, you know, ripped off again. “Ok. Breath. Ok, we’ve gotta come back to the breath. Oh, time to go to work, see ya later.” Boom. That’s how it is. We don’t have, you know, we have to make a little bit of time in our lives just to not do anything. Not even to do meditation. We need to make a little bit of time just to slow, you know, there used to be, they used to have standard transmissions, which are now not standard, where you push the clutch in. You’ve got to push that clutch in every once in a while, and just let the stuff… and be with it and then get busy again when you finish but it’s going to take regular paying attention to begin to become aware of the beauty and the love that lives within us as who we already are. It’s going to take a little paying attention. Nobody can do it for you. Nobody can give you that, because you already have it. There’s no room for anybody else to give it to you. Some great Beings can temporarily point you in the right direction, but you have to take the steps. And so, that’s the deal.

So, I asked Siddhi Ma, after She said that, I said, “Ma, what is it with Westerners? Why can’t we love? We can’t we let ourselves be loved?” And She said something to me. I’m going to tell you what She said. “Well, Krishna Das,” She said, “What were your parents thinking when you were conceived?” Ok, we’ll just leave it there. And then, She said, “What were they eating when you were conceived?” You know, “What was their diet?” You know? Well, you know, meat eaters, of course. That seems to have some effect on the consciousness. And then, She said, “Affection was used to control you as a child.” You know, when you were crying and nasty, they didn’t even want to see you. But you know, you had to be picked up. So, you very quickly learned that to get the attention and the affection you needed, the way you needed it, you had to kind of give them what they wanted. So, affection became a business deal at a very early age and it hasn’t changed. We’re still doing business. What do you think relationships are? Business. “You give me a little bit of that, I’ll give you a little bit of this.” Ok. “You’re not giving it to me? What’s wrong? Oh, you have a headache. Ok. I thought it was me. I was about to go jump of the cliff, but you have a headache. I understand.” See, we can’t navigate this shit. It’s too difficult. So, relationships are business.

So, once I was very in love with someone and I was with my Indian father, Mr. Tiwari, who was a great yogi. I mean, He was totally in the world, He was the headmaster of a big school. He had a large family. But he’d been with Maharajji for 40 years and he was just amazing. So, I was telling him how much I loved this woman and when I finally finished he said, “My boy.” He said, “Relationships are business. Do your business. Enjoy.” He actually told me, “Do my business.” Somebody finally telling me I could be stupid. Gave me permission to be stupid. How great. “Do your business. Enjoy. But love?” He said, “Love lasts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” We don’t get it from somebody. We don’t give love. Where is it that you give it? You can give affection, kindness, caring, but love is who we are. Love is in there as we are. But we’ve covered it up. We’re so busy, we can’t look. We don’t know where to look or how to look. And you know, there’s some confusion about the so-called “spiritual path.” We think we have to renounce or deny ourselves our desires. But on this lineage that I’m a part of, Hanuman, there’s a sloka in Sanskrit that says, I don’t remember the Sanskrit right now but it says, “Hanuman gives not only liberation but allows you to satisfy the desires that are useful for you to have.”

It’s not a renunciate path.

The only thing to renounce, ultimately, is selfishness and self-centered seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain. That’s the only thing we have to renounce. The rest of it, we need. When you’re hungry, you eat. The body has lots of hungers. You have to eat, you have to have certain things. Why not? Who told you, you can’t? You know? Besides my mother? So, we’ve got to get over that. It’s ok to be a human being in a human body because that’s where we are. But that doesn’t mean we have to be selfish and greedy. That doesn’t mean our fears and shame have to control us 24 hours a day. We can come out from all of that. We can come through all of that. But it takes a little paying attention. It takes a little practice. And it takes, also kind of really getting comfortable with the idea that we’re beings-in-progress. We’re working on it.

 

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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.

 

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The post Ep. 77 | KD and Surya Das on Mantra, Bernie and Hungry Hearts appeared first on Krishna Das.

Call and Response Ep.76 Judaism, Christ and Namdev 

“So, Maharajji, it seemed like He started to say something and then His eyes, He just stopped and His eyes closed and He just sat in front of us, perfectly still. We had not seen Him sit still for more than two seconds. It was always fruit in all directions, laughing, joking, barking orders to the people at the temple, talking to this one then all of a sudden, boom. I remember thinking we’d killed Him. He just sat there and it was, the feeling was like the whole world stopped turning. And then two tears came down His cheek. Then He kind of shook Himself. He opened His eyes. He said, ‘He lost Himself in love. That’s how He meditated. He lost Himself in Love. He’s one with the whole universe. He never died. No one understands. No one understands. He lost Himself in Love.’ He immersed Himself in Love.” – Krishna Das

Q: Hi, KD. Hello.

KD: Hi.

Q: How are you? Thank you for being here today. Ok, I was just wondering, you being Jewish, I’m Jewish as well.

KD: I’m Jewish on my parents’ side.

Q: On your parents’ side? You don’t really practice anymore do you? Any of the Judaic traditions?

KD: Anymore?

Q: yeah. Or did you back as a child?

KD: You know, my family’s about as Jewish as the Pope’s family, that’s all I can tell you.

Q: I was reading the Yoga Sutras and they were talking about praying to God, and we were talking about “What does ‘God’ mean to you?” And it was interesting to see how people were like corrupted by religion and how they grew up, and you know, like, originally nobody really mentioned the nature of the “one-ness.”

KD: I’m sorry

Q: Of their one-ness and what Christ teaches us. But I was wondering, when you came into realization of that and who taught you that and what you thought of before, before like the little bit of your changing “awakening” to realize that and how that helped you.

KD: You know, a woman once said to me at a workshop, she said, “Last weekend I was at a Jewish weekend and they say you can’t say the Name of God.” And I said, “Absolutely right. You can’t.” Maharajji used to say, “Go on, sing your lying Ram Ram. One of these days you’ll say it right once. Boom. You’re out of here. The real Ram will come.” So we’re practicing.  You can’t say the name of God because God is beyond Name and Form. It’s beyond any concept and anything that comes out of our mouths is a concept of some kind. So, it can’t be God. So, that being said, I remember I actually was bar mitzvah’d and I went to Hebrew school to learn the Haftorah, they call it, and my Hebrew school teacher used to bang his head on the blackboard and said, “If I didn’t see this class, I would not believe it.” And bang his head. Great memories. Yeah, you know, nobody in my family believed in God. Or forget God, nobody believed that they could even be happy. There was no idea of a path. All they did was complain. You know? We had one saint in the family and her qualification was that she did not complain. That was literally, I was told. I said “Why is Bubby a saint?” “Because she never complains about anything.” That was the qualification, you know? You know the Jewish lady sitting around, “Oh, how are you doing, is there anything all right?” You know the joke the old Jewish guy driving, driving though the mountains through a storm and the wind’s blowing and the snow and everything and he drives off the cliff and the car goes down down down, spinning, spinning, spinning and lands like upside down on the branch of a huge tree. So, the highway patrol guy comes up on his motorcycle and he runs down the mountain, he finds the guy, he’s hanging upside down in the car, right? He said, “Sir, sir, are you comfortable?” And the guy goes, “Eh, I’m making a living.” Oh, you know, I’m married to a Brazilian. She does not understand one joke I tell her. It’s torture. Not one. All the years I practiced abuse, being abused by all this Jewish humor I can’t share with her. It’s terrible. So. That’s about how Jewish I am. I don’t know. But like I said, Jesus was Jewish by the way. Did you know that? People seem to forget that, you know; painting Him like a white man with like long, straight hair, blonde. Forget it. He’s about as blonde as Bob Marley. It’s, you know, forget it. That’s not it. You know? And people, He wasn’t a Christian. He was a Jewish guy. They called Him “Rabbi”. For what, you think He was like, the Pope? He was a Rabbi. He just happened to, you know, find Reality somewhere along the line. He wanted to clean up. Just like Buddha did with the Hindu religion, you know. The priests had become all powerful and anybody who wanted to get good karmas had to pay the priests to do pujas for them or ceremonies or teachings. It was the same, all the money changes in the temple, you know the whole story. So, somebody said, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be” and tried to change it and you know. In India, they don’t hang people up quite as easily as they did in those days. Maharajji talked about Jesus, it was so powerful. I mean, He talked about Hanuman, of course, Ram and Krishna and Kali and Durga, but when He talked about Jesus it was, I can’t, I can’t, it was so powerful. Really. I mean, you must have heard me tell this story but I’ll tell you again. So, a Canadian guy came to the temple for the first time and he didn’t know anything about Maharajji, how He was, you know. He didn’t give lectures. He didn’t teach. He didn’t write books. He didn’t initiate people. He just hung around. So, Maharajji says to Him, “Why did you come? What do you want?” So, the guy thought he should give like a you know, spiritual answer, he said, “Well, could you teach me how to meditate?” “Get out of here. Go in the back with the crazy people, the Westerners.  Go on. Go.” And as he’s walking away, He said, “Just meditate like Christ. Go on. Get out of here.” So, the guy comes in the back and we, you know, we debriefed anyone who spent two seconds with Maharajji. What’d he say? Then what’d He say? Then what’d you say? And then what’d He say? What did He do? Did He give you fruit? How many pieces? You know. What can I tell you. So, the guy said, “Well, you told me to meditate like Christ.”  What? You know? So later on, we’re sitting in the back and Maharajji came to spend some time with us and Ram Das was there and Ram Das said, “Baba, you said we should meditate like Christ. How did He meditate?” So, Maharajji, it seemed like He started to say something and then His eyes, He just stopped and His eyes closed and He just sat in front of us, perfectly still. We had not seen Him sit still for more than two seconds. It was always fruit in all directions, laughing, joking, barking orders to the people at the temple, talking to this one then all of a sudden, boom. I remember thinking we’d killed Him. He just sat there and it was, the feeling was like the whole world stopped turning. And then two tears came down His cheek. Then He kind of shook Himself. He opened His eyes. He said, “He lost Himself in love. That’s how He meditated. He lost Himself in Love. He’s one with the whole universe. He never died. No one understands. No one understands. He lost Himself in Love.” He immersed Himself in Love. That wasn’t my idea of what meditation was, you know? I thought you had to sit down, fight with yourself and beat yourself up and pretend you were meditating. He lost Himself in love. I mean, what else do we want, right? Wouldn’t we like to live there no matter what else was going on? Wouldn’t you like to be in that space where you are open and flowing and connected with everything and at ease of heart with whatever arises in your life? You know? And you weren’t a prisoner of your own reactions and your own knee-jerk reactions and your own programming from the trauma we’ve had in our lives and the pain and the broken hearts. Wouldn’t we like to be free of that? That’s what that is, when we can immerse ourselves in that love that lives within us as who and what we already really are. It’s not something else. It’s really, it’s not something else. It’s who we are. Right now. So, I’m just going to read you this quick little poem I thought of today. It’s from a Saint in India named Namdev.

“I have delved into the four vedas”- You know what the vedas are? The ancient teachings.

“And I’ve drawn forth their hidden meaning.

I’ve churned the six philosophies”- the different dualism, non-dualism, semi-dualism, UCONN basketball, you know, the six philosophies.

“I’ve churned the six philosophies and I’ve extracted their essence

And I’ve learned the ultimate goal of yogis and ascetics

I’ve known the joy of merging in Brahma, the formless Lord

Oh, My friend,” says Namdev, “I’ve transcended all this through the grace of the Saints. Realize, realize my mind that the secret is the Lord’s love. The secret is the Love.” That’s the secret. Everything we think we want, everything we’re looking for, the secret essence is the Love. We all want to get back home. Now. He’s a devotee so He, He expresses it in that way, that the grace of the Saints, but a non-dual person would say, “This is your own true nature. This is your essence, is this state of grace and that’s always pulling us home.”  It’s like gravity for the heart. The secret is the love and the chanting, all these Names are the Names of that place. So we’re constantly evoking, invoking and evoking that place which is the Love. These are the Names of that place within us that is the Love. It’s not in India. It’s not somewhere else. It’s everywhere. So, anybody have anything they want to say important? Otherwise we’ll sing.

Yeah? Ok. Give her the mic.

Q:  Hi.  You talk about the practice helping to move us closer to our true Selves and you’ve brought up trauma. When you’re triggered by that trauma, I guess I’m talking about me, when I’m triggered by that trauma, I experience a paralyzing fear in my heart and I’m just curious if it’s been your experience that the practice will help to ease that fear eventually.

KD: Well, there’s no question about that in my mind. However, the issue is, if we do the practice only to lessen the intensity of the effects of the trauma, will it work also? And it will. But, but as you focus, as you focus on other things in your life, those moments, when the trauma arises become and less and less. As you focus on other things. If you focus only on the trauma and you, and you’re, and you do the practice to cure yourself from the trauma, it’s, yeah, sure, of course, there will be an effect but they have this thing, nishkama karma. Nishkama, desireless action or desireless practice, so, not desireless but so, like I said, Maharajji said, “You want to find God. Serve people. Don’t think about yourself.” You know? Right? So, if you’re not thinking about yourself and you start noticing other people more and seeing other people and becoming more sensitive to their needs and who they are and where they’re coming from, you’re just automatically developing a whole other way of going through your day, which precludes that trauma. It might still be there, but it’s not going to get triggered the same way as often because you’re, because even with that, in the presence of that, those issues, you’re expanding in many other directions at the same time and you stop caring so much about that. Right now, we tend to identify very strongly with that and for good reason, you know. It’s powerful issues in our lives. But when you start developing loving kindness, and I know this sounds wimpy. Shit. But loving kindness and caring about other people and thinking about others rather than yourself, you’re just creating a whole new way of going through the day that doesn’t leave space for that. You’re not having to push that away. You’re not having to deal with it directly. Like, I’m taking this medicine for this disease. That doesn’t really have to work exactly like that. And in fact, even if you started with that in mind, which is not bad, I mean, fine, perfect. Over time, the effects, you’ll be thinking about yourself less. And when you’re thinking about yourself less, you know, there’s no room for that to arise. Now, it might arise in certain situations. But there’ll be so much more space around it in a sense, because you’re not, you haven’t been holding onto it with such intensity. You know, you know, so it’s kind of like that. But it’s all good. There’s no, for instance, with the practice of the repetition of the Name, these are mantras. There are many types of mantras. There’s mantras to find buried treasure. There’s mantras to rob banks. There’s mantras to get people to fall in love with you. There’s mantras to become president of the united states. I wish somebody didn’t know that one. But anyhow, the repetition of the Name is good for none of that. It’s only good for one thing. It has absolutely no, it’s only good for love. For finding out who you are. It’s not good for anything else. Those other mantras, you find somebody to initiate you in them and then god bless you, you’ll get it. Then you’ll have to deal with it. So, but this is not good for anything other than opening the heart and purifying the heart and opening it up and giving us more space in our life to be ourselves. Yeah. Good. Nice. Thanks for asking that.

Q: Thank you and thank you for sharing your experience and for being so genuine.

KD: Yeah. There’s a new movie coming out called “Cracked Up” by a friend of mine and it’s about this comedian, Darrell Hammond, who was on Saturday Night Live, and it’s a documentary about his journey through the trauma that he had and discovering it and how you work with it and how he overcame so much of it and how it ruled his life for so many years and forced him into so many negative and hurtful behaviors and alcoholism and drug addiction, all that stuff. So, it’s really juicy. And it should be, it’s being released next week. So, “Cracked Up,” if you hear about it, go see it.

See, in India they don’t talk about this stuff like this. They need some cultural appropriation, I think. They say “Ram Ram Ram” and then they go steal from their neighbor, you know? It doesn’t work.

We’re all kind of in the same boat, you know. Maharajji had a great devotee named Dada. Dada means “elder brother.” And Maharajji was, his name was Sudir Mukerjee. He was a communist economics professor who became a devotee of Maharajji and Maharajji would call Him “Dada” which means elder brother, which he certainly wasn’t, of Maharajji’s. But Maharajji told his wife, Dada’s wife, to call him Dada, too. And she said, “He’s not my Dada, he’s my husband.” Maharajji said, “If he’s my Dada, he’s your Dada.” So she had to call him Dada, too. This book, you could read some of these books. They’re out, and stories about Maharajji, and get a feel for how He went through His day, how He lived and how the devotees, how they were affected by Him, how their lives opened up and changed. For instance, this guy Dada, he was, like I said, he was a completely non-religious. He was interested in nothing like that. Totally into his professorship and all that stuff. One day, his wife and his mother, who lived with them, they were going out, and Dada said, “Where are you going?” They said, “Well, there’s a little house across the street and we heard that there’s this saint that comes there every once in a while and we’ve been waiting to hear when he came back so we could go see Him. And we heard He’s there today. So we’re going to see Him.” “Ok, go. Go.” So, they left, but they came right back. And Dada said, “What’s wrong? Didn’t you go?” “Well, yes we went and just as I entered the room, the Saint looked at me, called me by my name and told me to go. But I didn’t go. I sat down and then He looked at me again in a few minutes and called me again by my first name. ‘Kamala, go. Your husband’s friends are waiting for their tea. Go, go. Come tomorrow.’” So, this got Dada curious, right? So the next day, he walks over with his wife and they walk into the room and this Saint gets up, takes Dada’s hand and starts walking out the door and says, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.” Now, think about your drive up to the Stop and Shop, you know, and you get out of your car and some homeless guy comes up and takes your hand and says, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.” I don’t think so. But India is another universe. So, Maharajji, you know, this was Maharajji. Long story. But anyway, it’s in the books. Really good stuff. Reading about the Saints, reading about the really, the realized Beings and seeing how they interacted with people and seeing how they lived in the world and what they did and it’s life changing. Really, it is. It’s a spiritual practice in itself.

 

 

 

The post Ep. 76 | Judaism, Christ and Namdev 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. 75 | Humility 

Q: I just wanted to mention how 2019 was the year of practicing humbleness for me because it was how I understood love, how to get into somebody else’s shoes in order to understand where they’re coming from so that we can all be at peace. Can you speak about humbleness?

“Our inability to really do anything that’s for our own sake, that will be good for us, that would lead us to happiness, to openness, to being a good human being; our inability, so, the strength of God, of the Universe; it’s all from that place that all goodness comes. Of course, that place is within us.” – Krishna Das

KD: Yeah, hi.

Q: So, I have a hard time being in love and when you have, like, a neighbor that hates you or you hate them and trying to find that place of love

KD: You love hating that neighbor. It’s so wonderful, isn’t it?

Q: So, we play your music and the neighbor hates it.

KD: Ah, good. Excellent. Play it louder.

Q: We do. And so, we also have another neighbor that, her father passed away and she came over crying one day that, you know, “thank you for playing your music. So, it was totally contradictory to…”

KD: Well, put the speakers on that side of the lawn. So, you know, I have this friend who wrote to me and she said, you know, she’s breaking up with her husband and it’s so painful and she wishes it wasn’t happening. So, I said, “Well, what’s going on?” She said, “Well, you know, I love your chanting, so I play it in the kitchen. I play it in the living room. I play it in the bedroom upstairs. I play it in the guest room downstairs all the time.” I said, “Turn that music off and save your goddamned marriage.” So, put the speakers only so that one person can hear it. Leave that poor guy alone, you know?

Q: Well, with that in mind, I just wanted to mention how 2019 was the year of practicing humbleness for me because it was how I understood love, how to get into somebody else’s shoes in order to understand where they’re coming from so that we can all be at peace. Can you speak about humbleness?

KD: I don’t know, you know. I’m so humble, it’s hard to really talk about it. People say that to me all the time. “Oh, you’re so humble.” And I say, “Well, I know me.” But nobody gets it. They think I’m humble. It’s so weird. You know, real humility is the whole thing. Real humility is, you know, so I was in India and I was in a little town called Vrindavan and I was walking down the street and I stepped in a hole in the street and I snapped my leg, my knee, like this, and when I woke up in the morning my knee was like, swollen, like huge, right? So I figured I was going to have to go to the hospital. Now, Maharajji had forbidden us to come to the temple before four o’clock in the afternoon because the local Visa guy, Visa official, was harassing Him about the Westerners.  It was politics. He just wanted some money, you know. And Maharajji wasn’t going to give it to Him so He was giving Him a hard time, so but I woke up in the morning with this knee and I thought, “I have to go to the hospital down in Mathura which is the town about 20 miles away, but before I go I should tell Maharajji I was going.” So, with great difficulty, I walked to the temple, leaning on a friend of mine, you know and I limped in, you know, like this and He was sitting all alone on, sitting on His cot, a tucket, they call it, in the middle of the courtyard, a completely empty big courtyard and He was right in the middle of it and there was one Indian guy sitting with Him. So, I kind of limped up, you know, and I pranamed and bowed and I sat down but I couldn’t bend my knee so I had to put my leg out straight underneath the tucket, you know? In India, you don’t really do that. You don’t point your feet towards your teacher. So, He didn’t say anything, right? He just looked at me and then after a few minutes, He gets up and He walks towards the back of the temple and the Indian guy got up and walked with Him because He walked like a two year old, bong, bong, bong, and the people would take His hand and walk with Him, you know? So, He was walking like this and the further away He got from where I was sitting, He started leaning on the guy and worse, like this, you know? And I, it looked like He could hardly walk and I thought, “He’s taking on the karma of my knee.” You know? The minute I had that thought, He turned around and He ran back to the tucket and He plops down, He looks at me and said, “You thought I was in pain? You wanted to help me?” And He pats me on the head. So, He didn’t say anything about, like, “Why did you come? Why? I told you to come at four o’clock.” So, I thought, you know, I’m just sitting here. I’m getting darshan. I’m hanging out with Him. I don’t care, if you can cut the leg off over here it’s fine with me. So, we sat around for a while and I kept thinking, “What’s the karma?” You know, I used to think about these things. Like, “What’s the karma of this knee? I wonder what I’ve done in the past to step in a hole in Vrindavan, such a sacred city. How could this happen?” All day long, yada yada yada. So, gradually, other people showed up and so, there was this woman sitting there, and she had a bible with her because he used to talk to us about Jesus. There’s this little guy in a temple, He would talk to us about Jesus. It was like, what is going on here?  You know? It was quite interesting, but that’s another story, so anyway, so He grabs her bible, He opens it up and He points to this, just like this, “Read this.” So, I looked at it and I, it was from Saint Paul and it said, “In order to save me from the abundance of revelations, 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.’” So, Ram Das and I had t-shirts made up. I forget what, you know, like, right, we believe, because what that means, I’ve been thinking about this for 45 years and this is…

Our inability to really do anything that’s for our own sake, that will be good for us, that would lead us to happiness, to openness, to being a good human being; our inability, so, the strength of God, of the Universe; it’s all from that place that all goodness comes. Of course, that place is within us. It’s not out there up in the sky, standing around with a long beard and you know. That’s My strength. Capital “My”. That’s the strength of the Lord is within us, our true nature. And everything good that comes in our lives, everything we accomplish, every openness that comes, every compassionate thought, every helpful thought, every kind thought, it comes from that place. Once again, the ego will never do anything to diminish itself. It’s not what the ego does. It wants to live and it takes credit for all kinds of things but the Lord said, “My grace is sufficient, is enough for you.” You don’t need anything but this grace and your weakness, our inability to really do anything on the same level that our bullshit is, to help ourselves, that’s the proof of that. And the fact that we’re here is grace and it’s the grace pulling us into our self. Human beings experience being pulled within as longing. Yeah.

The t-shirt said, “Proof.”

Somebody’s blocking the flow. Somebody’s not feeling good…

So, the idea of grace, that’s a hard one for us, you know, we’re westerners, we don’t know what grace is. And even if we think about grace, we’re taught that grace comes from up in the sky somewhere, somewhere else, but grace is our natural state. It’s who we are. Underneath who we think we are, which is the whole, it’s where all the bullshit is, all the problems is who we think we are. Who we’ve been trained to believe we are by our life experiences, by our parents, by our school, by the students in the school, by the teachers, by the programs, by the place we happen to live, by the culture of that place. This formed us. This is the one lifetime manifestation or what’s the word, this is the karmas that we’re born into and that created who we think we are. But underneath that is the state of grace that we actually are. And once again, Maharajji said, “You can’t, the higher, more subtle states, the deeper states of awareness can’t be done by ‘me’. It’s only by removing the covering of that that that shines more brightly.” Our personal will, we can’t, “Ok, I’m going to go to that state of grace,” I, me, is never going there because me would dissolve in there and I don’t want to dissolve. Me is going to go anywhere else but there. But the longing in our hearts to be free of that me-ness, that prison of our thoughts. Every thought is a prison. Every thought is a prison and you can’t, you can’t think yourself out of a prison that’s made of thought. That’s personal “me” and the personal will, so but we do practice to release ourselves from that prison of thought, into the open space of our true nature, who we are. That’s before we were hurt. Before we were traumatized, before we were beaten up, before our hearts were broken. That place is always here and that’s where we want to be. That’s where we want to live. But ‘me’ is that place of trauma, of pain. To be released from that, some practice, whatever that means to you, whatever you do to help yourself is practice and one thing leads to another.

The post Ep. 75 | Humility 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.

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 2, 2021

“You’ve got to have some courage when it comes down to it. Don’t let anybody tell you what to do that doesn’t feel right to you. Don’t do that to yourself. Listen to your heart. If it feels right? Fine. If it doesn’t? Fine. More than fine. Just listen to yourself. You know better than anybody else what you want to do, and if you’re not doing what you want, how will you get what you want? You’ll always be hungry and never feeding yourself. Desires are not bad. They are not meant to be destroyed. They are meant to be transcended. That’s a very big difference.” – Krishna Das

Thanks for coming today. This pandemic reality of isolation and distancing from other people, on one hand, it’s very difficult. On the other hand, if we pay attention, we can actually feel close to people without the bodies having to be in the same place, and that’s big thing because, in reality, we are all together all the time, and in fact, we are one body.

Maharajji used to go like this, you know. “”Sab ek.” All one.

This is not something that we have to convince ourselves about, you know, or try to talk ourselves into believing. There’s no need to try to, what’s the word, anyway, force ourselves to believe anything. What we need to do is find a way to actually experience this stuff directly. Otherwise it won’t help us in the deepest way.

Our knee jerk reactions to daily life will continue endlessly until we actually find a way to move more deeply into our own being. But that being is the same being, that sense, that very fine, subtle sense of just being here, so to speak, where just existing is the same in everyone. It’s actually where we truly live, but we are so attached to our thoughts and emotions and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the programming we received entering into this life, and the programming we have coming from, endless lifetimes of nonsense. It’s not easy for it to wind down.

So, if we feel called to it, we can start paying attention to stuff and start practicing letting go. Letting go is the one thing we can do. Letting go is not pushing away. When I say, “Let go,” like say, you’re feeling like shit, right? Okay. So, “I want to let go of this,” but what are you going to do? You’re going to pick it up and put it over there. Where is it, you know? It’s not something you can grab onto and kill, or move, or dissolve, or evaporate.

But what we can do is notice how stuck we are, and we notice that we are stuck, and in that moment of just noticing that we’re stuck, we’re not that stuck. Of course we get stuck again immediately, but that’s why we add a practice to our lives, any practice, repetition of the name, coming back to the feeling of the breath, any type of practice that forces you to pay attention.

Tightrope walking over a raging fire will definitely make you pay attention. You won’t be thinking about, you know, what that person did to me and what I’m going to do to him. You’ll be thinking of not falling in the goddamn fire. So once we recognize that we are on fire already, then we want to cool that down. We’ve already fallen into the fire.

You know, the Buddha gave a sermon called “The Fire Sermon,” very early in his teaching, and he said, you know, “Hey monks, guess what? The eye is on fire with seeing. The ears are on fire with hearing. The tongue is on fire with taste. The skin is on fire with touch and the eyes on fire with sight and the mind also on fire with thoughts.”

We don’t experience it as being on fire. We’re so absorbed in all that stuff. We’ve been underwater. We’ve never come up for a breath. So that’s the idea. Just start to notice how, when you notice how caught you are or when we notice how caught we are, or that we are caught, even then you just try to come back to the practice that you’ve picked to do.

That’s why the moments of practice are very important, and they do spread out over the day. You know, they stay with us, but we do have to find a time where we can make that dedicated, sincere aspiration effort to pay attention, to come back from dreamland, come back from sleepwalking. Because that’s where everything is. That’s where the guru is. That’s where the self is, the capital “S” self, the true self. That’s where Buddha is. That’s where all the deities are. That’s where love really lives, at that place when we’re not stuck in our stuff. And don’t imagine that just because you’re sitting your ass down for a couple of minutes a day, that all of a sudden you’re going to be, you know, filled with bliss and ecstasy and radiating and levitating around, you know. No. But you do get in the game. You’ve entered consciously onto the path and gradually but inevitably this effort that we make to pay attention and to release and to keep coming back. You see when you’re gone, you can’t make yourself come back. You’re gone. You’re thinking about some other stuff. You’re not here. You’re lost. You’re in dreamland. So when you’re lost and sleepwalking, we can’t wake ourselves up. But the weight of the effort to make, to come back to the practice pulls us out of the dream and we are, “Oh, I’m back.”

It’s not like you push a button in the dream and all of a sudden you’re back. No, when you’re dreaming, you’re dreaming. Just like at nighttime, when you’re dreaming, you think it’s real, you think this is really happening and there’s, you know, there’s no way to wake yourself up in the dream. Somebody has to wake you up or something has to wake you up.

And that something, in this case, is the longing to be free. That generates making the effort to remember.

And Maharajji used to say, “Repeat the name. Repeat the name. Repeat it even if you feel, if you’re angry, if you’re sad, if you’re tired, if you’re depressed, if there’s no feeling at all of any kind of devotional thing, repeat it.”

And one of these days, the real Ram will come and then everything will be all right, but the effort has to be there, and the other thing is, if we’re making any effort at all, if we, if we’re even interested in this stuff at all, this is also a result of our own past aspirations and longing and efforts.

What’s really heartbreaking is when you see somebody suffering, somebody completely lost in their stuff and they have no idea that there’s anything, any other way to live, you know, that’s really, and those people, just like us, when they bounce off the wall, there’s no end to it. It’s all, their minds eat them alive. Their thoughts eat them alive. But we who have some concept of practice, some concept of possibly being free from this stuff, and ending the whole giving ourselves a hard time thing. This is a really wonderful thing. And we should not take that for granted because as difficult as this life might be, and especially these days, life got really difficult, we’re still here and we’re still striving to wake up. We’re trying to remember to remember, and that’s a big thing. And if we didn’t judge ourselves so harshly, how great would life be? Right? If I don’t think I’m a piece of shit, there won’t be anybody out there doing that to me. It’s just me doing it to me.

So, that’s really interesting. You know, if I wasn’t giving myself a hard time, where would it be? And it wouldn’t be anywhere in the universe. That’s the deal. So we’ve just got to keep on recycling our stuff and letting go and trying to be a good person.

You know, I’ve heard lately, I used, I quote Ramana maharshi quite often because he’s one of the most, the clearest, well, he’s one of the greatest saints that ever lived, and the way he explains things is extraordinary. And one of the things that he said many times is guru, God, and self, capital “S” self, are not different. They’re one. They’re the same. So now I hear people going around, they’re saying, “Krishna Das says, ‘We’re all gods.'”

Excuse me, give me a break. This is delusion. And what does that, what are those people thinking? They’re all Gods. That means their egos, their self, their small “s” self, bright and shiny and huge and all encompassing, and that’s complete bullshit. Right?

I get these very nice emails from these grandmothers, Indian grandmothers. “Oh Krishna Das, you should not use words like that. Nobody talks like that. No saintly people talk like that.”

That’s it that’s me. You have to live with it, if you want to. If you don’t, go somewhere where somebody talks nice all the time. I wasn’t brought up that way. Maharajji cursed like a bandit, but he could do that.

One time, he was going off on somebody and the Indian guy next to me was like, sitting there like this, you know? And I said, “what is he saying? What is he saying?”

He says, “No,, I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you.”

Nobody would tell us the way he used to tease people, because it was so incredibly brutal, but so filled with love.

I mean, in India, you know, when I lived with the Tiwari family, they would argue. And they would get angry and they would, you know, at times they would yell at each other. And this was shocking to me, you know. I mean, in my house, you know, where I grew up, “Don’t look at me like that. Don’t talk to me like that.” And here everybody was free to just really just be themselves. Nobody was afraid that the other person would throw them out of their hearts.

That was thing. It was all okay. It was a functional family. I don’t know about you, but I had never seen a functional family in my life before. So, that was a great education for me. That was just liberating. And Mr. Tiwari, KC, would, he would love to get me pissed off. He would say something to me that was, and then he would look at me.

“You will fire upon me now?”

You know, he wanted to fight. He wanted to party. He loved it, you know, and we would yell at each other, you know, like inches away from each other’s face, you know, looking each other in the eye and like screaming. It was so great. I saw that over there. It was so wonderful because it was just so great, so freeing to be able to just be myself a little bit and not be afraid.

You know, there was so much stuff in my childhood, so much anger and so much unhappiness and so much fear. That takes a long time for those programs to even reveal themselves in us. You know, we don’t even notice how we behave and the things we take. We don’t even notice how we see things, what’s behind it, but the quieter we get inside, the more we notice, actually, what we’re adding to what’s going on and what we’re imagining over, what’s going on. We’re making things up in our own minds and taking things our own way, and they may not be that way, but we have no clue at first, but as we calm down a little bit more, we begin to see what we’re doing, how we’re crushing up and twisting up the world.

So practice is so important. Really. It’s just, it’s such a big thing, but it’s a lifetime. It’s not just like a couple of minutes. It’s everything that we do. It’s from practice that we get the strength to be present and to notice what we’re doing and then to be able to let go of it, and it’s through practice, we start to become aware of other people’s suffering. And the fact that almost everything people do is out of their own desire- driven, fear-driven, self centered actions, and that people are just stepping on their own toes, shooting themselves in the foot all the time and they can’t stop, because they don’t even know that we see that it’s possible to stop.

When somebody gets mad at you or says something that’s really nasty or does something that hurts us, you know, the first thing is we take it personally. We go, you know, we get hurt, we get angry. We go through all our stuff. But after that initial explosion, we might see that this person is exploding out of their own pain in all directions. We just happened to be standing there in their life at that moment. And so we become the focus of all their pain and then you see, and when we see how hard it is for us not to hurt other people and to hurt ourselves and we go, “Whoa, if I’m trying to pay attention and it’s so hard for me, how hard must it be for somebody else who has no clue, no clue that there’s a way out of this?” You know?

So we’re all very blessed, very graced, and very lucky to be any understanding that there is a path at all. That’s just so huge. That’s so huge. Without that, what do we have? Right? You know? And to know about these great beings who have actually done the work, who have accomplished, and have stayed here for us, to show us what’s possible and to show us that it is possible.

I remember one time I was sitting in the back of the temple with Siddhi Ma, and the oldest grandson of Mr and Mrs. Tiwari, who had been my Indian parents, the oldest grandson was getting married, and he came to the temple with his wife to be. No, no, maybe she didn’t come. Right? Not yet. But with all the other cousins, they all came to the temple for blessings. Like, there were 20 of these people between like 12 and 25 and they all came back, because it’s all a big family. They came back into the back with Ma, and we’re all sitting there. I was looking at these kids and there was so much love and affection between them.

I was like, “Whoa.”. And I was just thinking, like, I was just blown away by it.

And Siddhi Ma looked at me and she said, and I hadn’t said anything, she looked at me and she said, “You see Krishna Das? You see? You see what you missed by being born in America?”

Tell me about it. You know, the family life in the West, it’s very difficult, different from the family life in the East, for the most part. These days it’s different than it was back in the seventies, for sure. Because India has gotten cable TV, cell phones and Asian MTV, which they didn’t have back in the seventies. So there’s a whole other world going on there now.

So I looked at Ma. She said, “You see what you missed by being born in America?”

I said, “Ma, what is it? What is it with us Westerners? Why can’t we accept love? Why can’t we love? What’s going on here?”

She said some really interesting things. The first thing she said to me, she said, “Well, what were your parents thinking about when you were conceived?” Okay. Then she said, “What were they eating? What was their diet when, in their lives at that time?” Okay. Sacred cow, obviously, three times a day. That’s all that people ate. And then she said, “Affection was used to control you as a child.” And so love went out the window, because affection was used to control me and control the children. Immediately affection gets us something that you trade for attention, and you trade to get what you want, and that carries right over into all our relationships. You know, , we misconstrue love with desire and business, trying to get what we want from other people, what we need from other people, and that’s not unreasonable. It’s just, unfortunately it doesn’t work, but we never pay attention to that. We go from one to the other, to the other, to the other and we think it’s perfectly reasonable. Well, on one hand, it is. Right? But on the other hand, what we’re looking for can’t come from some other person. What we’re looking for is our true self, the love that lives within us.

One time I was telling Mr. Tiwari, I was telling him about this woman I was in love with, and I was going on and on and on, you know, and he just let me talk for a long time, and finally, when I finished, three years later, he looks at me and he says, “My boy,” he said, “Relationships, they are business. You do your business. Enjoy. Do your business. Enjoy,” he said. Not “Don’t do your business.” That was a big thing. “Do your business. Enjoy.” He said, “But love? Love is what lasts all day, every day, all the time.”

Love is our true nature. Love is always here, but we’ve covered it up with all our stuff and we’re looking in the wrong direction. So practice is what slowly turns us around and moves us more deeply into that love within us, right now. It is not somewhere else. It is not something else. It is not someone else.

Somebody once wrote, “Maharajji is nothing special, but his body fills the universe.”

That love fills the universe. And this is what we really want. This is what we’re looking for every minute of every day of our lives. But if we’re on this path at all, it means that we actually believe it could find it. And that’s a big thing. He said, “Do your business. Enjoy.” He didn’t say, “Don’t do it. Don’t have relationships.” He did not say that, because relationships are extraordinary teaching vehicles. They show us ourselves brutally, all the time, and when we begin to work with that, it’s a very powerful practice.

I’m really grateful to be here and really grateful to be listening to you. And it’s always invigorating. So thank you for that. Well, my first question is, what role do you think your formal spouse or partner plays in your personal spiritual journey?

You mean like my wife?

Yeah.

Well, she steals the covers every night. I wake up freezing and I try to get them back, but she’s got, she’s totally wrapped up in them. So, I have to go sleep on the couch in the living room.

No, just kidding. All relationships really are very much the same, and we’re in relationship to everything all the time, you know, and not just people. We’re also interconnected and with everyone and everything, including the earth, the sky, the sun, people, animals, plants, and in those relationships and all relationships, we can see our stuff. You know? It’s really powerful. Relationships are very extraordinary, extraordinarily powerful practice because we tend to project so much onto other people and onto the outside world, and we tend to just see our version of everything. So, when you have somebody else talking to you out there, they’re also doing that with you.

And so you go like, “Whoa, that’s how that person sees me? That’s what that person thinks I said? Now, wait a minute. I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, wait a minute, but I meant this.”

So, that’s why relationships can be such good practice, because it shows us our stuff. It shows us where we’re tied, where we’re hiding, where we’re afraid and we’re shy, and we don’t know how to communicate. Learning how to communicate is a powerful spiritual practice, how to say what you feel without accusing another person.

Like, you know, “You make me feel like shit.”

Now that’s accusing that person of making you feel like shit. It’s much better to say, “I feel like shit when this happens. What is this about?”

And that gives a person a chance to speak back to you and say, “Well, I don’t know, but blah, blah, blah, blah.”

So that starts communication, and it’s an incredibly purifying practice. It really cleans our stuff. It really shines a light on our stuff, all relationships, you know. But as Westerners tend to really hide in relationships, you know, and we tend not to be able to really use them as practice because we’re hiding from ourselves and we don’t want to see that stuff, you know. Why we get attracted to a particular person? We don’t see everything we bring, all the subjectivity we bring to the moment. We don’t see all our needs, all our desires, that we’re hoping this will feel better. You know, it’s a big mess.

But I remember once when I was in India, many years ago, we were in Chitrakut, I was with Mr. Mrs. Tiwari and another great devotee of Maharajji named Jivanda, who recently also left the body. He was over 95, I think. And he was a wild guy. He was a great guy. So the first morning we arrived, we got there very early in the morning before the temple that we were going to stay at was open. It was still closed. So we sat in the car, outside the temple and right next to us, on the other side of the street from the temple, was this little hut on stilts and it was all closed up. We just noticed it. Right? And then at some point, the flat, the wooden door to the hut opens up, you know, it was only maybe eight feet long, you know, and maybe four feet, five feet, six feet deep or something, and the door opens up and this young woman steps out with a big clay pot, and she walks down the road ,and then she walks back with the pot on her head. She went to get water. And while she was down the road, this young man comes out of the hut, starts chopping some firewood, making some kindling and he starts a little fire and she comes back and she puts the water in the pot and starts to heat it up, you know? And they didn’t say a word to each other, you know?

There was no talking, but it was such a beautiful thing to see how they were just doing what they knew they had to do, what their role was ,perfectly. You know, it was amazing. Of course, the woman was very beautiful and Jivan said, ” Oh, they’re making Sundari chai. ”

“Sundari” means “beautiful.” And he said, “Let’s go get,” and everyday, he looked and me said, “Let’s go get some Sundari Chai,” you know, like this, you know, but it was such a powerful thing for me because, you know, so engrossed in my ,stuff and relationships being so difficult and so full of garbage and so much stuff, you know, just to see these two people doing what they had to do, simply quietly performing their tasks. Then maybe they’d beat each other up later, but we didn’t see that, you know.

I hope I said something that had something to do with your question. Okay.

I had another question too, which was a little bit different than my first one. And this question is really, what are your thoughts on the journey of the soul or like, life after death?

After death? I haven’t died yet, so I really don’t know. I’ll let you know, though, at some point if possible.

There’s so much talk about that. You know, there’s so many writings about that. I think the most important thing I ever heard about leaving the body was that, the only thing you take with you is your state of mind, and this is why we need to work on that while we can. Because at that moment, when we leave the body, we are unable to ,more than likely unable to work on ourselves at that point. So that’s why they always say do practice when you can, because when you’re really suffering it, when you’re in a lot of pain, when you’re ill, when you’re in terrible grief over a difficult situation, it’s very hard to practice, very hard to remember. We’re in it. We’re completely wiped out temporarily, completely by the emotions, the power of the emotions and the feelings that we have, and the suffering. So it’s the same with leaving the body.

You know, on the other hand, it’s also said that there are no dead beings. You know, bodies come and go, but the soul never dies. It just takes another form. So that’s a good thing to remember, especially when we’ve lost someone close to us physically. Like, you can’t see it, but right here behind the camera is a shelf, and all around the shelf of pictures of me with many of my elders who have left the body, and I don’t think there’s many elders left at this point. So many of my elders who I turned to for whatever are not available in the body anymore, you know. They moved on and, you know, watching Ram Dass as he came closer and closer to leaving the body, was such an extraordinary experience.

You know, he was so ready. He was just like a ripe mango, just ready to fall from the branch, naturally. It didn’t have to be pulled or picked, or the branch didn’t have to be shook. He was just ready to go, so open and relaxed and at ease, and there was no fear in him at all, and he was, it was a beautiful thing. It was so radiant. So radiant. It was really great.

There’s a lot of stuff you can read about that. That Tibetans really have a very specific practices about leaving the body and going through the in-between state they call the Bardo, where the, they don’t call that a soul, but where your essence is passes through a number of different experiences as it moves toward getting a new body.

But because we’re identified with our bodies and our thoughts and emotions and our egoistic, small “s” self, which only exists with this body, all those things disappear when this body goes and we’re in a different state, but because we identify so much with this stuff, we suffer terribly when someone we love disappears from this life, you know. And you know, we’re human. What can we do? That’s part of being human, is being attached to this, but it’s not required. And as we deepen our understanding and awareness and deepen our love, those hard edges that define me and you, they get softer and more and looser and they expand, and eventually you have a heart as wide as the world, and everyone and everything is a part of it. So there’s no coming and going from that place, but that’s big time. And that’s once again, not something you have to talk yourself into intellectually. It’s something we must and will sooner or later experience.

So I just wanted to ask you, if you could share about your relationship with Govindas and Radha from Bhakti Yoga Shala in Santa Monica.

You asked me about that. Did you write to me or something like that?

I wrote it on the last satsang,but you didn’t get to that. Oh yeah. I did write you about that as well.

Yeah. I don’t have much to say about it. I know them. I know Govindas for a long time, and Radha. I taught Govindas his first bhajan, his first kirtan, Baba Hanuman, and he’s taken it all the way to the, you know, to the depths of hell. No, he’s a good man. Good man. And yeah, that’s it. I don’t really, you know, they’re part of the greater satsang. I love them very much. And more than that, what can I say? And why do you ask by the way?

Well, you know, I’ve been in Govindas’s satsang for seven years or so. He’s the one that introduced me to kirtan. I’ve been doing a bunch of learning kirtan with him on his harmonium classes. And, you know, he’s like, I feel like he’s my connection to Ram Dass and to Neem Karoli Baba and Hanuman, and just trying to, I guess, keep closer to the community and learn more about our relationships with each other.

Then what do I have to do with it? Why are you asking me for? I’ve known them for a while, I thought maybe you had a fun story from a Bhaktifest, Shaktifest, anything behind the scenes?

Oh, no stories. He’s a good man, a good man.

Maybe any stories about Shyam Das?

Shyam Das was a wonderful being. He’s one of the few people that really stayed in India after Maharajji left the body. He stayed there in Vrindavan and really immersed himself in the Radha Krishna kind of devotional path. It was wonderful. He was a good friend, a good Gurubhai. I don’t really have many stories about him to share with other people. We knew each other very well for a long time. There’s a lot of love there. I was really broken up when he died, but what are you going to do? I’m sure he’s fine, wherever he is.

Thanks. No more questions. Thank you.

Hi, Krishna Das. Happy new year to you and to everyone. Thank you. I very much value your book recommendations. I just finished reading “Sometimes Brilliant,” and it was brilliant.

What a great book.

Yeah, really amazing. And a different version of the power of Maharaji. You mentioned Ramana Maharshi, and I was hoping you could recommend a work from Ramana Maharshi to read because you do quote him often and it’s very compelling, what you have to say.

Well, David Godman has written a lot of books about Ramana Maharshi and they’re really wonderful. But there’s a book by, I think it’s Arthur Osborne, called “Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self Knowledge.” I think that’s the name of it. That’s an introductory book. It tells a lot about his life and his story, and then later on, you can get into David Godwin’s books, which talk a lot more about his teachings and explain his teachings much more there.

He was a great, great, great, great Saint, you know, and he was, it was clear and as pure and as real as you’ll ever find. He didn’t do any business. He didn’t want anything. He was extraordinary and it’s an incredible story. So yeah. You’ll enjoy that. Yeah.

Thank you very much.

Hi. So I actually typed out a question and you’ve actually talked semi-about it already. We’ve touched base on it. I did the Menla Retreat this weekend. I’m still actively kind of doing it. So I was taking a bath this morning and I was out of the tub, you know, totally human and raw and was having a moment of overwhelming, you know, reflection of experiences I’ve been going through and presently I’m going through, and the retreat’s helping me. But I got to a place in my journey in the last year that I noticed, any time somebody genuinely would sit with me and give me space to remind me to be myself, I just, I just wondered… to me, I see a reflection about it because I’m not a sad person. I said, “Does this mean I’m this sad?” I almost feel like choked out by the world, and not allowing that when someone offers it without this dismissive way, this overwhelming sorrow ,and I’m trying to work with it. I was just hoping for a little more guidance of wisdom. What I have gotten to was, it feels deep and cellular and it’s almost like this impermanence of life and death. It’s almost like when you’re so in love with someone and you want to climb inside of them and just know everything about that.

So much, so many things happen to us, you know, that we’re not even aware of as we’re growing up. Some things we are aware of, but many things we don’t know, we don’t know what our parents went through in their lives. What happened to them? What broke their hearts? And we’re not conscious of the atmosphere that we live in as we’re growing up. We’re not conscious, but it’s affecting us terribly, very powerfully. Yeah.

that person you wanted to crawl inside was you, that would be good, but we have a lot of shame and doubt and fear about being good to ourselves and loving oursevles, and we don’t really feel it’s okay just to be me, you know. We’re trying, constantly trying to make ourselves look one way or feel one way or build some house on top of the quicksand that we feel that we’re living in, and we get panicked when that house starts to crumble. We try to make ourselves feel good about ourselves, but without being aware of all the issues underneath, it’s very difficult, you know? So, you can’t brutalize yourself into feeling good about yourself. It’s not a power trip and one needs to look into one’s heart and really try to feel what one needs to do to kind of solve this puzzle of why we feel the way we do about ourselves. You can’t use yoga and meditation and practice to create a “me” that you could like. It won’t work, you know? And I think we try to do that. We’d really try to do that and we’re hoping it will work, but it will never work. And every time it crumbles, we suffer terribly.

Don’t try so hard. Don’t try so hard. Probably you won’t be able to stop trying, but if you notice, “Oh, I’m trying so hard again. What am I trying for? What am I doing?” And you can maybe just kind of notice that kind of tension of trying to be something special. Everything you need is inside of you right now. And nowhere you go can get away from that because you’ll always be there, whether you’re sad, whether you’re happy. Everything we need is within us. And not only is it within us, but it’s actually who we are. So our work is to just keep letting go, releasing all the tension and the anxiety and the fear and coming home again, again and again, in a simple, easy way. You don’t have to breathe yourself into some kind of other planet. All you have to do is be you. Be here. Relax. Take it easy. The fear is the thing that hurts the most, because if we’re so afraid that there’s just a black hole in our hearts, there’s no way we’re going to go in there. But it’s the fear that makes it look like that.

So be at ease with yourself as much as you can. Learn how to listen to yourself as to what you want to do to help yourself. But notice when you’re trying to build a better, you. That’s not going to work.

So what I did notice was Nina and her beautiful daughter last night on the live broadcast. And it was a beautiful reflection, and there was one more mother and daughter, and it was a beautiful reminder of that craving that I feel, to want ceremony and to be seen and the lack of that.

Well, that’s good you see that. These are the programs that are running. Like Siddhi Ma said, this is the result of being born in America, being born into families that have all these issues. But it’s not a mistake. This is the work we need to do for ourselves. So it’s not like it’s being done to us. Don’t think of yourself as a victim. We’re not victims. We are co-conspirators in this moment with everything that we’ve ever experienced and everyone we’ve ever met. And as co-conspirators, we can also change this moment. We are not victims, but it takes reminding ourselves to calm our asses down again, and again, and again, and again, and again. This is the work. It’s not about trying to get something else so it gets somewhere else or have some kind of experience. It’s about letting go and allowing ourselves to be here, regardless of what’s going through our heads. That’s the hard part. Remember just to relax and breathe easy. Don’t change your breath. Let it come and go on its own and be with it. It’s rich and it’s real and it’s always here, your breath, and so that’s something you can always come back to.

 I catch myself not breathing a lot. I just like, yeah, don’t breathe at all, and I’m just, it’s almost like, you know, part of my soul is here and the rest of it’s somewhere else, and I’m tired and I just want to go back to it.

Back to? Your soul is right here. It’s looking out of your eyes right now. There’s nowhere to go to get it, but your thoughts and emotions take you away from here. You just have to come back, and when you notice you’re not breathing, sooner or later, you will be breathing again. What’s the big deal? And if you’re not breathing, it will be a whole different experience, won’t it? Try not breathing for a day or two. It’s not so easy.

It’s not. I try sometimes.

I’m sure you do. Just let it come and go. That’s the first thing. That’s a good place for you to really practice because obviously you’re aware of it a lot. So when you notice you’re not breathing at ease, just stop for two minutes, one minute and allow yourself to settle down. Come back to earth. Allow the breath to ease up and then go get stupid again for awhile. And then you’ll remember, “Oh, I’m not breathing.” Come back. Do this a hundred times during the day and it will change your day as time goes on. That’s a really good thing to remember. Remember to allow the breath to breathe. Don’t breathe it. Allow the breath to breathe. Allow the body to breathe as it wants to. Don’t try to stop it. Don’t try to relax. Nothing’s worse than trying to relax. It makes more tension. Just stop, sit down, or lie down for just a minute and allow the stomach to relax and the breath to come in and out on its own, and then go get busy again until you notice, and then stop again, just for a minute, just for a minute. Just stop for a minute. A thousand times a day, just stop for a minute. And those times will become less and less. And you’ll also relax mentally, too, because the breath is very attached to the thoughts and the mind. They work together. So when the breath is calmer and naturally more at ease, the mind will also calm down.

So please, whatever practices you’re doing, you’re free to keep doing them. But add this, where you just relax for a few seconds, a million times a day. Just relax. Don’t try. Just let go and let the body breathe. Cause it’ll do that. You are not breathing the body anyway. The body is breathing itself, and so you can always relax back into that. Okay? And then as time goes on, I think you’ll find new ways of working with the issues that you have, that we all have. But if we’re totally tightened up, it means the issues have got us, totally. So we have to just start from ground zero, just slow down and just tell yourself, “Okay, time to let the body breathe.” And then just for a few minutes, and then that’s all. Don’t try to be quiet. Don’t try to stop your thoughts. Don’t try to concentrate. Just let the body breathe. Okay?

Thank you.

All right. Yeah. That’s your work. Take good care.

Thank you for having me and thank you for having everyone here. My question is, so last summer when I was listening to Ram Dass and know I was also listening about Neem Karoli Baba, and you know, at that time I was not feeling his presence or anything, but recently I read “Be Here Now,” the first 20 pages and after, like for the next three days and even right now, I start, you know, the picture that you have behind him, and even the picture that he has put in the book, I started feeling around, you know, sometimes I would just close my eyes and I would start crying and I would just feel him, and I said to my friend, “Maybe, oh my God, maybe, you know, he’s my guru.” And I always loved Ram Dass, and maybe this is it. And he said, “Oh, but how do you know that you’re doing everything right when he’s not here in physical form?”

So basically my question is, does the guru have to be in physical form? And a guru finds you, right? But the guru, does it have to be in physical form? That is my first question. And second question is, what are you eating right now? I saw you eating something.

Which was the more important question?

Oh, I see. Okay. Just checking there, you know. The guru is never in a physical body.

Yeah.

It looks like that to us, but the guru is never identified with the physical body. That’s why a guru is a guru.

Yeah.

Yeah. Sometimes that a guru will enter into a body the way we get into a car and drive around. We’re not identified with the car, but we drive around and people see the car and we wave to them. So the guru comes into a physical body and says, “Hey, how you doing?” Gets our attention and pulls us out of our stupidity and confusion and sleepwalking and wakes us up, but the guru is never in a physical body, never identified with the physical body.

That’s what I thought, but then he said, “How do you know you’re in the right path? How do you know you’re doing whatever it is you’re supposed to do if nobody is guiding you?”

What do you mean, “nobody’s guiding you?” How could nobody be guiding you? The guru is not identified with that physical body, but he’s identified with the soul, and your soul is with you all the time, and the guru is with you all the time. But we don’t listen, we don’t know where to look and how to look, and that’s what spiritual practice is about, trying to contact that place within., Guru, God and Self, capital “S” self, soul, essentially, are one thing. They’re not different. And the guru knows that. The guru has realized that. We haven’t. So, to look for something outside of yourself, you’ll never find it anyway, and if it’s going to be the best thing for you to meet a guru in the physical body, then that will happen. If it’s not going to be the best thing for you or isn’t necessary for you, it won’t happen.

But in the meantime, what are you going to do? Hide in the room until a guru knocks on the door? No you’re going to live your life because the guru lives within you as your own true nature, as your own self, because there’s only one self in the whole universe, the paramatman, the Supreme self, and that’s within us.

So, when we can calm down and learn to trust our intuition and our own hearts and learn to really follow our deepest yearning and longing, then, you know, we have no questions, because guru is within and that’s all you have to know. Maharajji is here right now. Always. Once he takes your hand, he will never let go, even when we let go of his, which we do like a thousand times a day, but he never lets go. So live in that place. Keep coming back to that understanding and that feeling. And don’t worry about doing the wrong. If you were doing the wrong thing, how would you have been feeling him in the first place? That’s called worry, anxiety, fear. Let it go. Guru’s always with us, but we have to turn towards that place, and to remember to turn towards that place, and that’s why the repetition of the name is so powerful. Okay.? And Maharajji was always repeating “Ram.” Always.

One time, Maharajji was driving Ram Dass crazy, as usual, and so Ram Dass walked up to his tucket, all the way across the courtyard. We didn’t do that. We stayed and waited for him to call us, but this day, Ram Dass went across the courtyard, and he sits down on the ground next to the tucket, and he says, “Maharajji, I want you to raise my Kundalini!” Basically saying, you know, “Do it to me, get it over with, I’ve had enough of this shit. Get me out of here.” That’s what he was saying.

So Maharajji says, “Oh, I don’t know anything about that. You know that Baba down in the south? Oh, he knows that. You go see him. He’ll raise your kundalini.”

And Ram Dass got angrier and he says, “No, Maharajji. I want you to raise my Kundalini.”

He said, “Ah, yeah. Oh yeah, what’s that other Baba who lives over there? You know that Baba? He knows all about that. You go see him, he’ll raise your Kundalini.”

Ram Dass got even angrier. “No, Maharaji I want you to raise my Kundalini.”

Maharajji stands up, throws his blanket up over his shoulder, and he looks down at Ram Dass, and he says, I only know two things, “Ra” and “Ma,” the two syllables of the name of Ram, and he went into the back and left Ram Dass sitting there.

“Ra-ma.” That’s it. That’s all you have to do and you’re in the same place as him. Ram Dass wanted Maharajji to do something, but there’s no Maharajji to do anything. There’s only God and it’s all happening in its own time. Maharajji had so fully merged with God that he has no agenda of his own. Only God is working through him because he’s completely surrendered, merged, become one with, and that one lives in your heart as your true nature. It’s not something else nor is it somewhere else, nor can you find it somewhere. You can only relax into it as time goes on. So that’s why japa is so powerful.

Do your japa and become a good human being and treat everybody the way you want to be treated. Good luck. Okay? Is it a deal?

Yeah.

Okay. Take care.

See you soon, hopefully.

 It seems like there’s a resurgence in Sanskrit, not just in India, but around the world, and the meaning of those words and the loss of translation into English, and there’s a new Gita that’s just been recently launched called “The Gita Comes Alive.” It’s by Jeffrey Armstrong. It removes a lot of the colonized English that was like, Christian language that overlapped into Sanskrit, that there was no correlation directly, and translation is always very hard. But you know, you use some Sanskrit terms quite a bit in the chanting, and the mantras are Sanskrit words.

I have no idea what they mean, though.

You know, some. I hear you, you know. But it’s, at some level, do you think it’s important to, to dig into that? Do you think it’s important to dig into some of those deeper meanings if you’re ready?

If one is so inclined. Sure. Does one need that to drive to the supermarket without hitting somebody? No. Does one need that to be a good person in this world? No. Unless one feels one needs it. If one feels drawn to it, sure, there’s nothing wrong with it, but Maharajji never encouraged us with any of that stuff. He told us to do our japa and to serve people and to really, you know, love everyone, serve anyone, remember God. He didn’t say to become a Sanskrit scholar.

Right.

So the Sanskrit mantras that I do, I have no idea how I learned them, even. I don’t know what every word means, but I know what I’m doing when it’s Devi Puja, I know I’m worshiping that love in some form or another. And that feeling of devotional aspiration is very dear to me and it brings me into that loving presence, which is where I want to live. I never learned sargam. I never learned Indian music, which is an incredible science, because I don’t have time. I’m sorry. I’d rather be in love. I can’t be studying these things all day long. It makes no sense to me at this point in my incarnations.

The translation of the Gita that I like the most it’s by Christopher Isherwood and his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, I think his name was. Isherwood really is a great writer, a great wordsmith and a lot of the so-called Christianized versions, like of Juan Mascaro’s Gita, the Penguin Gita, that’s kind of not in there, and a lot of the words are very clear and specific. You know, it’s a nice, good translation. I like it. And there’s another book that’s hard to find. It’s called “The Yoga of the Bhagavat Gita” by Shri Krishna Prem, who was an Englishman who lived in India his whole life, and became like, a sadhu, and had a little temple up in the Hills, and was like, an extraordinary being, and he wrote this book. It’s a teaching about the Gita and it’s extraordinary, really fantastic. But other than that, what I read mostly is the lives of the saints, you know, how they lived, what they said, how they went through their days, and try to get a feel of what life looked like to them, from how they acted, the great yogis and the great Rinpoches, the great Lamas and the Sufi saints and Kabir and Rumi and Hafiz and the great Christian saints, Saint Serafin of Sarov. That’s what I like the most.

But yeah, on some level, if you’re going to use those words, it’s a good idea. You have some idea what they’re talking about, right? No question about that.

Yeah. What I found in a lot of yoga studios that is exploding in the west, they throw around a lot of terms. Most of the time they don’t know anything, and so it’s almost more of a service to people to maybe use some Sanskrit words and have that more in a conversation, like “soul” and “atma.” You know, they’re similar but different. You know, I found the deeper understanding of what that is. So that’s some thoughts.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, but what are you going to do? Yoga is big business and people are going to do what they do. It’s better than robbing and killing.

Sure, sure. Yeah. Just conversation.

Yeah. Good. So, I’m interested in this book. Which one? What’s the name of the book and who’s it by?

It’s called, “The Gita Comes Alive.” Jeffrey Armstrong.

Isn’t he a Buddhist scholar? Jeffrey Armstrong?

No, no, no. No, he’s a Sanskrit. He’s a, he’s a Bhakta, but it’s done with, instead of all the commentary, it’s just the reading of the conversation and it has the Sanskrit above in English, but he will put in Sanskrit words where there is not a real clear word for word, so you get a little bit more expansion of the meaning. Very helpful. Again, you just feel like you’re more in the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna. And…

You realize that whole conversation happened in a billionth of a second. It was, you know, open up, close down. That was it.

 And we’ve read the Mahabharata this past year. Reading the Gita in that context is so helpful. I don’t know how you can go without the epic.

Yeah. I love the Mahabharata. It’s extraordinary. I mean, it’s an amazing story.

Blows the mind.

And it’s so poignant the way the different sides developed and how some of the greatest beings on the planet had to fight for the bad guys, because they had eaten their food. They had been supported by them. So they karmically owed them. Like Bhishma, you know. Very interesting stuff.

He’s one of my favorite characters in the whole plot. Unbelievable. It’s amazing you said that because that’s exactly, as you were talking, exactly what I was thinking is Bishma laying on the bed of arrows.

Yeah. He says, Arjun make me a pillow. So Duryodhana goes to find a pillow, and Bishma says, “Not that kind of pillow. Arjun!” A hundred arrows and he lies down on the pillow of arrows. Whoa. And then he waited. Nobody could kill him. He could only leave at his own, when he wanted to. So he waited for the perfect moment, when the sun was in the right position and boom.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you. Maybe we’ll have coffee or chai at a diner on Long island sometime.

Yeah, in Great Neck. What do you call it? The Landmark Diner is a good place on Northern Boulevard.

Okay, Namaste. Thank you so much.

Ram Ram. Be well. The Gita Comes Alive. I will remember that.

Hey, thank you. It doesn’t really express everything that has been helpful to me over the years of being with what Love Serve Remember Foundation is doing, and all of you who were with Maharajji. This week in the Hanging in the Heartspace, you had a fairly deep question about suicide, and I don’t want to bring this whole thing down, but this is about the only place I know where I could maybe discuss. I’m not really looking for the answer. I think that would be asking way too much, but like most of the people, or maybe all the people on this call, I’ve had a lot of instances of grief and loss in my life. That makes me one of humanity. Two years ago, the most recent event was the suicide of my brother. And there were only the two of us and he was 10 years younger than me. And he was not making a cry for help. In fact, he never talked. He was rather unreachable, but he was the most lovable creature on the planet ever since he dropped on the planet. All through high school, people were just attracted to him because he was basically so lovable. You know, he’s a football player and all that stuff too, but so I’m thinking God is, whatever name we want to use, is so much bigger than I can comprehend or that any discussion would cover. You mentioned that it’s a serious thing to have interrupted, perhaps your, the Dharma of your life, but what I’m feeling, and I just wonder if this resonates at all with you, is that for my brother to have been the person that we did know, and to never reach out for help and to be so intensely miserable for so long that he just took his own life, done, I just feel that God has to have way more compassion for that than even any of the rest of us. I look at that and think, I wouldn’t wish my brother to be existing in that level of misery, unspoken unexpressed a minute longer than he did, neither would I wish the suicide, of course, but I guess it’s a comfort to me to think that God welcomed him, even if he did something that interrupted his journey. Does any of that resonate with you?

You know, nobody knows. All we have is our own version of things. We can’t know what another being is going through, really. We can only get some clues and imagine a little bit about what a person is feeling. We certainly don’t know what happens after a person dies. We don’t know why a person suffers the way they do in this life, and why another person doesn’t. This “God being somewhere to greet him.” This God is always here. We’re just not paying attention. I mean, that’s a nice way of comforting yourself, but you can also comfort yourself and say that God was always here and we’re just not paying attention.

Why a person does that and why another person doesn’t, it’s way beyond our pay grade, you know? Yeah. All we can do is be with that person, who’s still a person. That body is gone, but the being, the soul is still ,present still somewhere here. So we can resonate with that person and send that person kindness and love and caring. And we don’t want to lay anything on that person just because they’re not visible, physically visible anymore. We just want to love them and send them the best that we can send them. And that’s the best we can do. To try to understand why, nobody knows why. I mean, they say only a fully realized being can understand all the workings of karma and why we’re born into this family and why we’re born into that family and why our parents saw themselves a certain way, and why we absorbed that. The “why” is always beyond us, you know.

Even in the Rg Veda, which is the oldest scripture in Indian religion, there’s a hymn called The Creation Hymn. You want to think about why? Right. Okay. So this goes, “In the beginning, there was this. And then this happened and then this happened,” and it was like pages and pages of, “and then this, and then this.” And then after all these pages, it says, “and only he, and highest heaven knows why.” And the next sentence says, “or perhaps he does not know.” Right? So all we can do is love, sweetheart. That’s all we can do. And that’s the best thing we can do in any situation, love that person and wish them the best we can, and stay with him, keep him in our hearts and pray that his next birth is easier, and if we don’t believe in another birth, then whatever, just that his soul comes to rest and is at ease wherever he is. And don’t be concerned with why, you know. Everybody has their reasons for doing the things they do. And another person we’ll never know, you know, from the outside, and the best thing for us and them is to just hold them in our hearts and be with them in love as best we can.

That sounds right to me. Thank you.

You’re welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Hi, how are you? Let me see. Well, her question just made me think of the two high schoolers I mentioned before that had been killed when I was in high school. I went and chanted for them at their grave, and somebody told me that helped release them. I don’t know if that’s true, but I find pennies and I feel there’s some release and I definitely don’t understand it, but it’s a strange thing this life, I guess, the things that happen in this world and all the suffering. So my question was about, it was about the Hanuman Chalisa. I find it a very powerful practice, and I guess I’ve been in a number of different groups where they teach that. They teach the Chalisa, or they teach mantra chanting, like bhakti as a form on the spiritual path. But many times there’s no conversation about yamas and niyamas, and I guess my question is, did Maharajji ever talk about, you know, that there are yamas and niyamas? Like, once you come on the path and if you’re chanting the Chalisa, you know, “every line,” he said, I read, “is Mahamantra.” So it’s really powerful. It has power in it, you know, and awakens your own inner power. So I don’t know, I think there should be some responsibility then with that. So I guess I was just wondering if he ever, if Maharajji ever talked about that, like ahimsa. You mentioned earlier what Jesus always said, or at least what they teach. Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

Far as I know, he didn’t talk about those things that way. He told us to love everyone, to serve people and to remember God, and if you’re loving everyone, you can’t be creating negative karmas. There’s no question if you look around. First of all, for those of you who don’t know yama and niyama are the, in some ways you call the ethical rules of how to live in a good way and not to create negative karmas and suffering. And there’s a whole list of them, which I don’t know, but it’s easy to see, if you look around, that people’s neurosis, people’s selfishness and self-centeredness easily rips off the spiritual practice and makes people shinier and more egoistic and more self-centered, and this is a lack of the yama and niyama, which is essentially how you should behave if you’re not full of yourself and not full of egoistic craving and egoistic preening, which is what happens a lot on the so-called spiritual path. People decide they want to be on the spiritual path and they do some meditation and all that energy goes into their stuff because they have no awareness of that. So on that level, learning a little bit about ethical behavior…

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama talks about that a lot .That without becoming ethically correct, which means kind and caring, then you really can’t progress because everything you do will just feed your ego. So one has to have some self-awareness about those things.

I don’t think you have to memorize lists of things. You just have to see. Look at yourself and see what you’re doing, and hopefully you have the grace to see where you’re being very self-centered and how you were using the spiritual path to satisfy our, all our desires, which is not what it’s for necessarily, although desires might get satisfied on the way.

It’s very easy for our neediness to appropriate what looks to us to be the path, and we start using it to. Shine ourselves up. So more than that, I don’t really know, but if you’re dedicated to becoming a good person, a good human being and treating people well, which includes oneself, then there’s work you have to do in order to be able to do that. I don’t think it’s just enough to go “Ram Ram Ram” for a few minutes a day and think that you’re going to become enlightened. One has to take a look at oneself and see how one is spoiling the moment with one’s programs and one’s selfishness, and be honest with oneself about those things. And when one does spiritual practice, have some humility about it and allow the awareness that comes with that when you see yourself, to allow that, to allow you to let go of those things and become, let your heart open more, but it’s not easy because everybody hears their own thing. “Let your heart open,” means a billion things to a billion, different people. So it’s really difficult to talk about these things and get a message across. Like I said earlier, I quoted Ramana Maharshi and now everybody’s running around saying, “We’re all gods,” you know. Excuse me? That’s what I’m talking about, and like what Alan was just saying before, the real meaning of some of these words, is not easy for us because we are so immersed in our self-centeredness. It’s very difficult to figure out how to even recognize that.

So all those things being true, Maharajji said, “From repeating the name, everything is accomplished”.

So go on doing your practice. Repeat the name and pray for grace. And that’s what I say. So I’m not a big scholar. I’d rather be in love than read about it. Although reading about it’s not bad sometimes.

Yeah. I guess just as a corollary or connected to that, like when people aren’t nice in these spiritual groups, how do you not get upset by it? I mean, I say Metta and I say “Ram,” and I try to remember to say, “Ram Ram Ram.”

When you’re doing Metta, you’re not trying to change somebody. You’re trying to love them as they are. You’re not trying to make them some other way. What’s to be upset about? You’re feeling the love. When you’re offering the method, you’re feeling the self, the kindness and the compassion and the friendliness of offering loving feelings towards people. It has nothing to do with how they accept or not accept. Your Metta is your Metta.

Now, what effect it has on other people in their immediate daily lives, we don’t know, but that’s not our business. Our business is to make the offering. It’s an offering. When you make an offering to Maharajji, you don’t sit around and wonder, “Does he like it? Did he take it?”

The very first time I was in the room with him, we gave him our apples. We heard you bring apples. So we brought apples and put the apples down next to him. And he took them and threw them to the other people in the room. And I went like, “He didn’t like the apples.”

And he immediately turned to me and he said, “What did I do? Did I do right? Did I do right? What did I do?”

And I said, “I don’t know.”

He said, ” Did I do right?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

He said, “When you have God, you don’t need anything.”

I wanted him to need my apples for him. I gave my apples to him, but he wasn’t identifying with being him. The apples just went to the rest of the room, to the other devotees there. He himself didn’t need anything. So when you make the offering, you make the offering. It’s not your business, our business to figure out what he did with it, or didn’t do with it. Same with another person. That’s not our job. We’re not running the universe. We’re not even running our own universe, you know. We’re just like completely screwed up. So we make the offering. That’s all we do. That’s all we can do. And that’s a huge thing. Making an offer. Of kindness and caring about people. That’s all. Whether they respond or levitate up directly to God in a minute, you know, that’s not our business.

My business is making the offering and that’s plenty. That’s humongous. That’s the biggest thing anybody could ever do is make an offering like that. But you do what you do, but the fruits of your actions are not up to you. The results are not yours to create or run the show. You do what you do, that’s enough.

And the people who were murdered when you were in high school, did you ever read that letter that Ram Dass wrote to the parents and that young girl who was raped and killed up in Seattle? It’s one of the most beautiful things. It’s very intense. Very intense. I mean, it’s a serious dose. This young girl was raped and killed in an early age, and the parents wrote to Ram Dass, and he responded and it’s one of the most beautiful things you could ever imagine. So I’ll try to read that. We’ll try to get it up there. It was very beautiful, the way he responded and why things happen. We don’t know. We can never know. Really, all we can do is offer our hearts wish the best for everyone. And certainly prayers and practices that you offer to people is also a wonderful thing.

But as that guy said, you take the splinter out of your own eye first. Then you can take the splinter out of somebody else’s eye. You know, if we want to help other people, we can’t be needing so much help ourselves, because we’ll grab all that. We’ll take all that.

When I started chanting with people, I had to quit because I saw that I couldn’t do it, that I was going to use all this stuff coming to me for my own sake, to feed my own hungry desires, because that’s what I am. That’s who I was at that point. And it horrified me because that’s not why I was doing this. I was doing this to find Maharajji’s hand again, which I had let go of. Not that, he never let go of mine, but I let go of his, and now I needed to find his hand, and I was not going to be able to do that because I was distracted by all the stuff that was coming to me and I was hungry and I needed to feed. So I quit. I couldn’t do it the right way and it wasn’t going to even work because I was doing it the wrong way, and I was being prevented from doing it by my own stuff, by me. So where was I going to go to get saved from me when I’m everywhere. There was no escape. So I quit.

And I said, “You have to fix this. You don’t fix? I don’t sing. That’s the deal. Good night.” You know?

And he fixed it. Not right away. He made me suffer for a few months, but then he fixed it and I was able to come back and sing again. So do what you do and really do it. Don’t care what anybody thinks. Don’t care whether the universe responds in a way you think they should or not respond. That’s not your business. Take care of yourself. Clean your house. Clean your room. New sheets on the bed. A place where you can lie down in comfort, and from that place of comfort in your own heart, that will emanate to everyone, all directions. You won’t have to do anything. It’ll happen naturally.

Maharajji did nothing, but the whole universe danced to his tune, dances to his tune, because that’s the way it is when we transcend our personal version of stuff. It’s so liberating. The whole universe dances. And then we have to take responsibility for our stuff, you know? Not responsibility, that’s not the right way to say. We have to see how our programs push us around. We all have these programs, and they’re always running, no matter what we’re doing, whether we’re sitting, chanting, singing, standing on our heads, serving people. The programs are still running and that’s okay, but as time goes on, we become more aware of those programs and can let go of that pushing that we feel from inside that pushes us to do stuff, to try to get stuff and be a certain way. it’s oppressive, and loving other people, caring about other people and not thinking about ourselves all the time is a really big thing.

But once again, it’s not in our power to stop that. It’s only in hour power to notice and keep the repetition of the name going and the prayers and the Chalisa and the good wishes for the world and ourselves, and the change happens gradually, you know.

How can we know why things happen to other people? We can’t even take care of ourselves properly. We’re just babies. So someday we’ll grow up a little bit. That be nice. Meantime, we have to get our diapers changed. We can’t even change them ourselves. Anyway. Okay. Yeah.

Did we find that yet?

Yeah. I put it in the chat. It’s called, “A Letter to Rachel.”

Yes. To Rachel’s parents, actually, right?

Yeah. The URL says that yes, it’s for Rachel’s parents, but it says ramdass.org/alettertorachel.

It’s very intense, but really read it, and then read it again, and then read it again, and then read it again. It’s a very powerful response to very tragic and painful event. But it’s a very real response, a very true response. But it’s intense, very intense. But once again, I consider it to be the most useful perspective that one could have in a situation like that. It’s not an Uplevel, it’s not a spiritual bypass. It’s a spiritual, if you want to use that word, way of being with it, in a way that is positive, and frees us from being destroyed by the power of that negative karma, and in so doing transforms it into a situation that is livable with, we can learn from, and the suffering, it doesn’t go away, but it’s like seeing something from a thousand miles high in the sky, seeing something on the earth. It changes your perspective, not in a bypassing way, but in a real way.

Hi there. I’m actually in the UK in lockdown.

Very good. How you doing?

I’m okay. Thank you. My question actually touches upon the relationship with the spouse that you discussed at the beginning, but I’d like to refer it to parenting. And I just wanted a little bit of advice, really. I understand about relaxing and letting go and finding balance in order to see oneself, but I often feel lost because I’m navigating these external demands, worries, distractions of having children, and even though I know that if I thrive, they thrive. However, when they suffer, I suffer. It’s just really hard. And I wondered if there was a little, I don’t know, magic recipe for not feeling this push from the outside or this pull that is just so distracting, because I’m trying. I want to be my best self and I want to be my best self for them. However, I’m scared a lot. And the other day they were messing around and I was so proud of myself because I didn’t interfere. I didn’t helicopter. I purposely made an effort to let it go. And then one of them ended up getting a concussion, and now I’m beating myself up about that. So, if it’s flow, not force, why did that end up in one of them being, having a head injury?

What was the thing you said?

I was trying to exert flow, not force and trying, despite my instincts to protect them, I tried to take a step back and then one of them sure enough injured himself before my eyes and it just made me really sad that I would try and be against my nature, which is to be over-protective, trying to just, like you said, relax, breathe, let them be.

Yeah. But do the right thing, also. We don’t have to do it with fear, but you can do the right thing. Not that you aren’t doing the right thing. I’m in no position to judge. Things happen, of course. But it sounds to me you’re really overthinking this stuff way too much. Really. Way too much. Way too much.

Don’t think so much. Follow your heart. Protect people who need protection. If you’re really paying attention, perhaps those situations will arise where you’ll just be there, that you can jump in at the right moment. Just be. You’re a mother. Be a mother, and don’t worry about being this or that. Do what you have to do. You sound like you’re constantly holding yourself up to some image of what you think you have to be. And you’re trying to adjust your behavior based on your own judging of this image that you think is what you’re supposed to be. What if it’s not what you’re supposed to be? What if it’s just a trip you’re laying on yourself?

Just relax. Take it easy. That doesn’t mean letting everything happen. You still have to protect and take care of the people you have to protect and take care of, but you can do it with more awareness and less fear. I think the fear is a program that’s running from somewhere, other else from something else.

You know, you take care of people. Feel what has to be done. Like you overrode your feeling with your mind and somebody was hurt. Why you would override your feelings I don’t understand. Do you think it’s not spiritual to have feelings like that? That’s bullshit. Be a mom. And then when they’re 17 and they don’t like you anymore, it won’t make a difference what you did. That’s going to happen anyway. Do what you have to do. Don’t try to be spiritual and don’t try to do everything right. There is no right. Be you at a hundred miles an hour, which is caring and loving and super aware and protective. What’s wrong with that? It sounds like you short circuiting yourself out.

I don’t understand. Why? Don’t. Don’t do it. Be engaged fully. Don’t be sitting back, judging yourself, thinking about what the right thing to do is while your child gets hurt. Be there. Protect. Be, you know, be a hundred percent there, and then you’ll notice you can’t be. You keep wanting to be somewhere else other than where it’s happening. Get over that. Spiritual means being where you are and dealing with things as they arise as best you can, not longing to be sitting in a closet with your eyes closed while your kids are burning the house down. That won’t work, you know. Be a mom. Nothing better in the world. Except you think that there’s some other place to be, and there isn’t. This is your life. Live it 110%. Everything changes. When you’re a mom like this, there’s no time to sit down and calm yourself down. There’s always something to be doing, always something to be engaged in, but you can be present in that.

You don’t have to be panicked. If you weren’t looking for some place to go to get away from it, you’d be able to be much more present. You know, Mark Epstein, the Buddhist psychiatrist, talks a lot about parents who hate their children for being there and grabbing their attention all the time. And it’s almost like, “Oh no.” Endicott I think was the name of that British psychiatrist who wrote about that. I think it was Endicott. And you know, people would say, “Oh, how dare you talk like that? You know, mothers don’t hate their children.” Are you kidding? Of course they do. They resent their children. Many of them at times. Why not? It’s natural. Not all the time, but there are times where you would rather sit down and watch television and you’ve got a screaming, hungry kid and you have no time for yourself.

So if you want to work on, with that so-called spiritually, stop trying to be somewhere else. Be where you are. If you weren’t so busy fighting with yourself about trying to get away from all this, it would be much more easy to be with what’s happening. And deal with your issues about it all too, by being aware of them. Nothing’s off limits. Every feeling we have as human beings is workable with, is understandable, and it’s okay to have it because it’s there. But if you deny your feelings, you create tremendous tension in yourself. So it’s okay to be upset that your kids are ripping off all your time, but they’re also your kids. And you asked for this. You got it. Now be with it. Don’t try to get somewhere else. That’s not going to work. It’s not healthy for you. And it’s not healthy for the kids. Be a hundred percent engaged and you’ll try to be at ease. There’s no place where you’re going to be able to slip away for five minutes of quiet because your mind will be destroyed anyway. You couldn’t be quiet, you know, even if you went on a three-week retreat right now and the kids were covered, you would be a mess for three weeks. You know, that’s not what you’re doing right now in life, retreating. You’re mothering. That’s what you’re doing and do it the best way you can.

And then you’ll be doing the next thing the best way you can. And you’ll be doing every moment the best thing you can. There’s nowhere else to be except where you are. And this is what life has for you, right? This is your guru. Everything in your life is your guru. Respect it and treat it well, and be aware of how hard that is to do and how conflicted we are about that.

“I don’t know how this happened. I want better…”

We know how it happened. So now this is what it is now. So be with it. All we can do is the best we can do. That’s all. Perfection is some dream. There is no perfection. This is your spiritual path right now, everything in your life. Trying to be somewhere else is an illusion. There’s nowhere else. You’re here. Deal with everything in your life the best you can. There are no mistakes. This is not a mistake. This shouldn’t have happened to you. No, of course not. This is the way it is. You haven’t made a mistake. This is not bad karma. If you could only be free to meditate or wander around in India, everything would be much better. Not true. Absolutely not true. Absolutely not true. That’s just deluded fantasy. There’s no reality at all, you know. That’s just another way of you not being present. So be present. Be with it. All your kids and you deserve the best. So give it your best. Give yourself your best.

And when you’re in love, you don’t even want to be anywhere else. So love means just letting it be as it is, and allowing that wanting to run away thing, allowing that to go away because there’s nowhere to run, and your life as arranged that became a really neon sign reality, nowhere to run nowhere, to run nowhere, to run nowhere, to go ever anywhere. And of course in this time of pandemic and isolation and lock down, everything is a billion times more painful than it would be under normal situations.

So recognize that it’s not all you, with the tension and the fear and the anxiety and all the emotionalism. It’s not all your own. It’s the whole world. And we’re participating in that, all of us. It’s not just our own stuff. It’s everybody’s stuff. It’s a huge web of fear and pain and anxiety and worry, all those things that we’re locked into on a vibrational level, and it makes everything worse. So recognize that and say, “okay, fuck it. I’m not going to get caught in it. Relax. It’s not all my own stuff,” but we take it as our own always, you know, so take a few deep breaths and get back into the battle.

Everything I say to all you, I’m saying to myself as well. I hope you understand that. Yeah, I’m really talking to me and my own stuff too. I have the same issues everybody has. So I’m very thankful that you show up to show me all my stuff and how to deal with all my stuff, shit loads of stuff, endless shit. Loads of stuff. What am I going to do? Where am I going to go where it’s not going to be? I’ve been in India. It was there. I’ve been other places. It was there. Everywhere I am, it is. So you stop running away from it and you start to just be with it. And your practice is to be with what’s going on. Don’t try to find a quiet place to practice. Okay? You won’t find it. If you do find a minute alone on the couch, just breathe, but don’t run away from stuff to find a quiet place. It doesn’t work. It’s a delusion. The quiet place lives within you as your own nature. It’s your own space, but it’s full of stuff right now. It seems full of stuff. It’s always bigger than this stuff. It’s as wide as the sky and everything’s inside of it, but we identify and get caught with the clouds and the stuff inside. And we don’t know how to see the sky. We don’t notice the sky around everything. So we get very reactive to all the stuff in the sky.

And even when we do see the sky, we try to hold on to it and push everything else away and don’t let anything else come into the sky, but it’s already there. We don’t have to hold on to the sky. It’s already here, always. So everywhere you go, you are, and every reaction and every interaction, and every relationship, with your children, with everybody.

So just stop trying to get away from it because there’s nowhere to go.

Hey, Krishna Das.

Hi.

My question is, I’ve heard you talk about meeting the old Baba in the jungle.

He just left the body by the way.

Oh, he did?

Yeah, he was over 200 years old.

He said to you, “Ishta Shakti,” is how I’ve heard you say it.

“Iccha.” “Iccha” means “desire.”

Yeah.

Iccha Shakti, , the power to get your desires, or “willpower,” is what that means.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so, do you have any like, specific advice on that, on how to work on that part of us? Did he give you anything, you know? Did you, I’ve heard you mentioned standing on one foot, like joking, so that’s, that’s stuck in my head, but yeah. Any other specifics?

No, he didn’t. No, but what he showed me, I saw myself in another way. He showed me that inside myself, and I saw that, what I was doing to myself, how I was tripping myself up, how I was afraid to kind of get out there and go after the things that I myself wanted. I wouldn’t let myself do. I put chains around my own feet. It was just a weird thing. I wasn’t using my willpower to get what I wanted in life. It was very strange. I mean, it was an amazing, I had no idea until he showed me that. And just seeing that was enough to change everything. So just recognizing that, trying to see that in yourself is, if it’s the case for you, is enough.

There’s no practice to do. I wasn’t even doing any practice cause I was not, I was hiding from myself, you know? And the other thing I saw was that there wasn’t worldly life and spiritual life. It’s just life. One thing is not better than another thing. It wasn’t like, this is the good stuff, and this is the bad stuff. Everything with the world and desires are bad and everything with the so-called God up in the sky, which is God knows where, you know, is good. No, it’s just my life. And I was fucking it up. I wasn’t doing anything, you know. And if I didn’t use my will… and the other thing I saw is that if I wasn’t using my will in the world, that it meant that I wasn’t even able to use my will for so-called, in spiritual practice, either. My will was being compromised by my, whatever, my fears, my anxieties, my self doubt, whatever it was. And that was carrying over into everything in my life. Not just like daily life, but singing and chanting and meditating. I was crippling myself all across the board.

So that was a big thing to see that. Yeah, it was a very good blessing to get. Yeah. It was like, I thought, it was like, “This is beneath me,” you know, these things, and “I just want this,” and I was like, “Wait a minute.” You know, it’s not like that. There’s only one life, your life. That’s it. And everything in it, is in it.

Don’t be judging some things better than another thing. “Spiritual things are better and, you know, getting laid, is not good.” No, that’s bullshit. Go after what you want. That’s the only way you’ll know if you want it or not, or if it’s really what you want. You’ll always find that, no matter how good or bad something is, it doesn’t last.

Anyway, the only thing that’s going to last is who you are, the love that lives within us. Everything else is temporary. It’s not bad. It’s just temporary. It’s not what we really want, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have it. Why not? When Tiwari said, “Do your business, do your relationship. Do your business.” Enjoy. But don’t think that’s everything because it reveals itself as never being enough anyway, and it reveals also to us that we think those things should be enough.

“If I find the perfect relationship, I’ll always be happy all the time. I’ll always feel bliss.” You know, it’s not like that. The only thing that’s bliss is your true nature. Everything else is okay sometimes, you know, not okay other times. So don’t be afraid of jumping into life. That wouldn’t be good. That’s not healthy. If you don’t jump into life, you’re not going to find who you are, which is God. You’re not going to find love if you’re not jumping in. If you try to protect yourself, you’re putting up a wall around your heart and you won’t be able to feel if that wall’s up. You know, I’m not telling you to go out and be stupid, but I’m telling you that for me, I had to go after the things I wanted and not pretend I didn’t want them. That was not helpful. That was hurting myself. And I was pretending I didn’t want them because I thought they weren’t holy, they weren’t spiritual, they weren’t good, you know, and that was not the case. They’re just what they are.

And next victim.

Thanks.

All right.

Thank you.

Try to get lost. One second. Try to get lost. Go ahead. You know, try it. You won’t, it’s not possible. You’re always there. You’re in it. You know, you can’t get lost because you’re always here wherever you are.

“I’m lost.” Who said that? “I said that.” Where are you? “Right here.” Okay. Next.

You know, the fear of losing yourself is what stops us from getting into our lives, so to speak, but you can’t lose yourself. Where could you go where you won’t be? And if you’re not honest with yourself about your desires, and if you don’t feed those hungry desires that are useful to feed, how will you progress? You’re pretending you only live from the neck up. What about the rest of your body? You know, it’s not there? Last time I looked, it was there. Doesn’t work the way it used to, but that’s the way it goes when you get old. Good luck. Okay.

Happy new year. My question, very quickly, it hearkens back to the young lady who spoke about discovering the guru and the guru is no longer in his body, or trying to find a guru, and for me that I have a tremendous distrust of my own mind in terms of, if I hear a message, how do I know that that’s me or my higher power, so to speak, speaking? My question is, how do you navigate that process of trying to connect with the higher power or Maharajji, per se, and not misinterpreting messages from my own will in terms of what I think I should do?

I have no idea what you’re talking about, “messages.” You mean like, so you get a telegram or something, or an email from God. Is that what you’re saying?

No, just, you know, like if I decide that I want to do something or buy something or change my career or something, how do I know if I’m not mistaking that message from my own will speaking as opposed to, you know, I’ve had other friends who say like, “Baba wants me to blah, blah, blah,” and I have a distrust of that.

Well, that you should. Baba doesn’t want anything other than you to be happy. So you do what you want. That’s how you find out what you want. You’re not getting messages from the beyond. You’re the message. You live your life, the best way you can.

Do what feels right to do. If it turns out it wasn’t right, you learned a lesson. Next. There’s no messages. There’s no guarantee on that level that what you’re going to do is going to be whatever, you know. It doesn’t even matter. Just live. There’s no messages. Your life is the message.

People write to me all the time and say, “I have a message from Maharajji.” I say, “Thanks a lot. Keep it”. You know? I don’t want to know. He doesn’t need anybody to give messages. He just moves you to where he wants you and that’s the deal. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t have to. It’s all done in love. Nobody can tell you anything.

You have to trust your heart, trust your intuition. If you want to buy a new keyboard, buy a new keyboard. If that puts you in the poor house, you’ll learn not to buy another keyboard next time. It’s not that you need to have a message beforehand. That’s just fear. That’s just your own fear of life, of living, you know, that’s the way you trip yourself up.

You’re not using your will. That’s not useful. That’s very destructive even thinking about things like that. Those people got a message from God, God bless them.. You know? I have no idea what they’re talking about. So you live. You live. God lives within you as who you are, the love that lives within you.

That’s what you want. But we look outside all the time. We get very busy and we forget to recognize our true nature, because it’s not easy. But to stay at home because you get this message like, “Oh, I’m afraid I shouldn’t go out today.”

Really? You know? I’m like that. If somebody tells me to sit down, I stand up. You know, KK was like that. You know, Maharaji would say, “Stay here.” and he would go home. Maharajji would say, “Go home” and KK would stay there. Maharajji would say, “Eat.” KK would fast. Maharajji said, “Fast.” KK would eat.

And nobody could be closer to Maharajji than KK. Just live, man. And be honest with yourself about these issues and try to recognize where that fear is and how it pushes you around and try to release it in any way you can, whether we want to talk to somebody and get some counseling and therapy about these issues, that we can’t quite grip, and practicing letting go. This is all useful, but I have nothing to do with messages from anybody.

Maharajji doesn’t leave messages. You know, even Siddhi Ma, sometimes she would start to tell me to do something or not do something and she would stop. Like one time we were on our way to Bhadrinath, which is a very long and difficult journey through the mountains, and you know, if you go two feet off the road, on one side of the road, you would fall like a thousand feet into this valley. So it gets pretty intense. So she was about to tell us, she said,” It’s a very dangerous journey. You should do Hanuman Chalisa all the way. Nevermind. You’re covered.” You know? It’s like Maharajji said, ” Ap!, they’re covered. Don’t tell them to do anything.”

So you’re covered, you know, but you don’t feel covered. So it’s up to you to find out why and to learn how to release that fear. You don’t need messages. Just listen to yourself, listen to your heart and do what you want.

That’s the last thing Maharajji told me, “do what you want.” So I that’s been my practice and yeah. Did it take me to some weird places? Oh boy. Yeah. That’s the X-rated version of “Chants of a Lifetime.”. It will never be written, but here I am, I’m doing what I want. Now. All I want to do is chant with people and sing, and that’s it. How it got to that place, I have no clue, but I went from what I want, to what I want, to what I want, to what I want. Here we are.

So you’ve got to have some courage when it comes down to it. Don’t let anybody tell you what to do. That doesn’t feel right to you. Don’t do that to yourself. Listen to your heart. If it feels right, fine. If it doesn’t, fine. More than fine. Just listen to yourself. You know better than anybody else what you want to do. And if you’re not doing what you want, how will you get what you want? You’ll always be hungry and never feeding yourself. Desires are not bad. They are not meant to be destroyed. They are meant to be transcended. That’s a very big difference. That’s when you realize that those desires for certain things will never satisfy.

So you get over it, and it stops meaning the world to you. And on the other hand, it’s up to you to figure out how to get through the day. What I just told you is pretty much what I do for myself. I don’t know that that’s right for you, but whatever it is, you have to learn to listen to your heart and trust yourself and take responsibility for yourself and not be swayed by other people and their versions of things, not even your own mind, because your own mind is all full of fear. And your emotions are full of fear and frustration and longing. So one has to do what one can do to work with that stuff and to release it and not to beat oneself up for being somebody who wants to beat oneself up.

That’s a good one.

Yes. Yes. There’s that.

I think you got it. Okay.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks for coming again. And I appreciate everybody showing up and just remember, this time is very hard and the tension in our heads is not all our own personal tension. It’s the whole world, and it makes everything worse during this and harder to deal with in this period.

So, you should just try to chill as much as possible and just relax and let go and be as good to ourselves as we can and not try to figure everything out right now because it’s very difficult. So this is very intense time. Just keep letting go and try to be good to ourselves. Okay. Ram Ram. Take good care. Namaste, everybody.

 

 

 

The post Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD Jan 2, 2021 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!”

 

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Call and Response Ep. 72 | Family Troubles, Chant Etiquette

Q: I was curious if you could speak to having family members that are making choices that seem not helpful for them.

“People are going to do what they’re going to do. There’s not a lot we can do about that. We wouldn’t want anybody telling us what to do and the first step is letting them be who they are, you know? And hopefully, if you are with them in a way that’s not judgmental or you know, they might feel comfortable enough sharing with you what they’re going through and in that process they can open up a little bit. But if you’re going to be the enemy, there’s no way they’re going to be open.” – Krishna Das

KD: Hi.

Q: Hello.

KD: Hi.

Q: Ok. Hi.

KD: Ok.

Q: I was curious if you could speak to having family members that are making choices that seem not helpful for them and…

KD: Or you.

Q: Definitely not for me, I know. I might be about me. But I don’t know if you have some sort of… reaching to people who are not reachable at the moment from family members.

KD: Yeah, well, first thing we say is, “If you want to know how your spiritual practice is going, visit your family.” Nothing will show you your stuff as quickly as that. You know, yeah. People are going to do what they’re going to do. There’s not a lot we can do about that. We wouldn’t want anybody telling us what to do and the first step is letting them be who they are, you know? And hopefully, if you are with them in a way that’s not judgmental or you know, they might feel comfortable enough sharing with you what they’re going through and in that process they can open up a little bit. But if you’re going to be the enemy, there’s no way they’re going to be open. It’s not easy, because we want them to be happy and we think we know how they’re going to be happy and we think we know that what they’re doing is not, you know, good for them but, you know, they don’t know that. There’s a rule in India about grandparents. This is how grandparents have to behave in India. You know, you don’t say nothing and I’m a grandparent now and I try to follow that rule. I mean, you know, I know my daughter, I know where she got her stuff from.  Hello.  You know? So, how can I get, you know, what can I say? You know? I could just try to be available if anyone is interested, which is almost never. So, if that’s going to hurt me, I mean, if that’s going to make me crazy, that’s not fun. It makes her mother crazy. Ha ha ha. Which I like. No, I don’t. Much. So, you know, it’s a letting, you’ve gotta, you know, but on the other hand, you know, you want someone to feel that they care for them. That they’re cared for by you, regardless of what they’re doing, you care for who they are. So it’s a tricky thing, you know. We get caught in our own wantings for people. On the other hand, you have to think, you have to use your own, you have to trust your own intuition about situations. There are times when you just have to, you know, where it might be helpful to put your hand up. “Stop, now.” Or “Not here.” You know? You have to, if you can create some boundaries that they agree to respect, that’s a big thing, if the boundaries aren’t angry boundaries, you know? It’s not easy because nobody did that for us, right? I mean, not for me. Not my house. I wasn’t allowed to have boundaries so I grew up, it was very hard to learn how to say “no” and it was even to learn how to say, “thank you,” was hard. Because where was I? Who was I? Where was I standing to do that? You know? So, to make boundaries is, but it’s hard. But you know, if someone feels you’ve always been on their side, even if you haven’t been overly, you know, then they can come back at a certain point. You might be there. It might be good. But I’m sure people know better than me, so read a book or something. There must be books about this stuff.

Q: Hi.

KD: Hi.

Q: First I want to say, I have a lot of gratitude for a love that comes through the chanting and it saves my life every day, so thank you.

KD: Mine, too.

Q: And I never thought I was going to have grandkids but in three years I have four and another on the way. So, my granddaughter loves to chant and “Bhajelo Ji” is one of my favorites but she always asks for “Baby Lotion Ji Hanuman.”

KD: Baby Lotion Ji. That’s kind of what I thought it was the first time I heard it, you know? What are they singing? Baby lotion? Baby lo? Baby lo? Baby love. Baby love ji.

Q: Baby love.

KD: Baby love, my…

Q: And I did have one question. The call and response, I have a habit, I don’t know whether it’s good or bad, of singing for both.

KD: A little closer to the mic.

Q: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m doing the singing for both the call and the response. Is there a reason? Is that ok?

KD: Not if I have anything to say about it. Whatever gets you. I don’t care. Whatever. If the people next to you don’t beat you up, you’re all right.

Q: Yeah, well my voice is not great. But I just wondered if it was a tradition to have the listening and the singing as more effective…

KD: You mean on Long Island? That tradition? I have no idea. You know, I don’t know.

Q: It doesn’t matter?

KD: When I’ve heard chanting, it’s always been call and response, when the guys I used to sing with… there were three guys there. There was one call and then two responders and then the leader would change the melodies and then the people would respond one at a time. Sometimes together but also separately sometimes so you know, I don’t know. Don’t think about it too much, that’s all.

Q: Thanks.

 

 

 

The post Ep. 72 | Family Troubles, Chant Etiquette 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.

Call and Response Ep. 71 | Life Is A Teaching

“There’s nothing in this world that doesn’t have some dissatisfaction associated with it. Either you have what you don’t want, or you don’t have what you want, or you have some combination of the two. Or, you just recognize that everything is like that… That’s the way it is. You can’t squeeze water from a stone.” – Krishna Das

Where were we, oh, yeah…

So, India, you know, you walk down the street, you see Durga Travel Agency. You see Krishna Insurance Agency. Sri Ram Carding Agency. Everything is, they’ve got everything, it looks like everything’s Holy until you look a little closer. But in America, you know, we don’t have the… spirituality has infused the culture of India for many thousands of years. Now, who knows what’s going on but at least… but here, our own culture, Western culture’s a few hundred years old, right? Right? Hello. Hello? Anybody home? Am I right? I don’t know. I think so, right? The cultural, so-called cultural revolution or whatever? No, that was something else. The Age of Enlightenment. Ha. What a name, huh?  So, you know, it’s a few hundred years old and it’s based on the world of the senses and sense perception, intellectual understanding of all that. As far as India, as the East is concerned, that’s a very narrow bandwidth. A very limited understanding of things. But my point is that, here in the West, being born as who we are, with a very Westernized sense of self, sense of ego, so to speak, when we do these practices, we should understand or we could understand, I don’t like the word “should” because I never liked anybody to say that to me. “You ‘should’ do this.” And I’d just do the other thing. Absolutely. The exact opposite. Which is why Maharajji never told me to do anything, except “go away,” which I didn’t do. Which is why He told me to go away, because He didn’t want me to go away. But He knew that, you know, how it goes. So, yeah.

It would be good if we understood that adding chanting, that we should see practice as adding a new, adding something new to what’s already in our lives. And it’s something that doesn’t necessarily have to be understood intellectually to a great degree. You have to kind of understand why it is you’re doing what you’re doing, but how it works is not, is not, can’t be known in a conceptual way by the intellectual understanding because these practices work under the radar. And that’s an important thing to keep in mind because a lot of times we’ll do practice and we’ll be like, “I’ve been meditating for 18 minutes, I don’t feel a damn thing. Oh, there’s something. Hm. Oh, yeah. Ok. That’s nice. Oh, wait. Where’d it go? Oh my goodness. This is no good. I can’t do this. Wait. Maybe I can.” So, that’s our meditation practice, right there, pretty much. We think. We think. We think. We think. We think. So,  what we understand, what we can realize when we add a spiritual practice through our daily lives, that practice is designed to release us, little by little, from the tyranny of our thoughts and our emotions and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves all the time. The 24-7 kind of critique that goes on all day and all night. And these practices have the ability to do that, whether we understand how they work not, which we really can’t understand. Like, we don’t, if you’re sick and you take an antibiotic, you may not understand how it works, but it worked. Then it screwed up your intestines, but at least it saved you from pneumonia, you know. That’s a good thing. What is the sense of having intestines if you’re dead? That doesn’t make any, that’s not useful. It’s going to be quite an afternoon. Anyhow, so the chanting, that’s why, the way I share this practice is really the way I do it, which is really, I really don’t try to manipulate myself and my emotions into having some particular kind of experience. Like, I don’t try, I’m not trying to get all ecstatic, or all blissful. You know? Because my understanding is that that’s our true nature.  It’s who we are already. And of all the so-called ecstatic, ecstasy stuff, like, I hate going to ecstatic chant weekend at Omega. It’s a lot of pressure. What if I don’t feel ecstatic? You know? I mean, I’ll hide in my room? What should I do? You know? But that’s the point, you know, if we have some idea in our heads about what it’s supposed to be and what we want it to be, we’re going to be very depressed because it’s not really, we’re not going to get it that way, because… Who was it, Groucho Marks? Said he never wanted to join a club that would actually invite him? You know, because, you don’t want anything you can conceive of or imagine could never be enough, because you’re conceiving and imagining it from your own programmed reality right now, which is reaction to everything else that’s going on. It’s not a free imagination. It’s a programmed response. And then you get it and then it’s not enough. And you’ve spent your whole life trying to be a sadhu from India when you’re really a jerk from Long Island. It just is not going to work. “Believe me,” said the jerk from Long Island. So, let’s try to remember that, when we add this practice to our lives, we’re adding, it’s like a medicine we’re taking into ourselves which cures us, little by little, from the disease of believing everything we think. We believe everything we think. That’s so fucking crazy I can’t believe it. I’m sorry. I told you. I’m going to stop right there. Why do we believe everything? We wake up in the morning, “I’m such a piece of shit,” you know, and we go through the whole day pooping on ourselves. And we don’t even question that. Like, we don’t question, “Why do I think that?” “Where did that thought come from? Why did it arise?” Forget about thinking, trying to figure out why we believe, that’s a whole other ballgame. But where does this thought come from, you know. We just completely identify with that stuff. Of course, it’s not completely, because it could never be completely, because we are actually, the thoughts are actually happening in, within us. It’s a very, I’m not going to edit myself, ok? You deal with it. Go to the video tape. The thoughts are actually happening within us. We’re not thinking them. They are floating through our awareness and when the awareness meets the thought, consciousness meets the thought, we would say, “I’m thinking.” But that’s not what’s happening. It’s the thought. It’s the thought becoming, lighting up inside of our consciousness. And, but we’ve been doing that our whole lives so it’s very difficult to actually see it. But when you do some practice, you start to have a different, develop a different perspective on things. It happens naturally, that you begin to see things differently. You even begin to see yourself differently. And then when you see yourself differently, you wind up acting differently and feeling differently and being attracted to different people and being attracted, and entering into different situations that you might never imagine that you would be interested in before. And that’s how these practices work. They change us from within. So, that’s the good news and the bad news because it means you have to stay living in the weird life that you’re living and just add a practice to it. You can’t go anywhere. There’s no sense trying to create another you. Believe me. I tried to create another me for ages and I happily failed. You can’t. We’re who we are. So now, let’s deal with that, right?   It’s deal-able with, fuck it. We can deal with it. It’s not going to kill us. Well, it might. But asking the ego or the mind to kill the mind, to destroy the sense of separateness, which is ego, is like, Ramana Maharshi said, “It’s like asking the thief to be the policeman. There will be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.” So, you add the practice to your life and you just do it. You find one that works for you for a while or that you like, that’s what that means, like, I like chanting. And once I asked Siddhi Ma, who was one of Maharajji’s greatest devotees and She took care of us for many years after He left the body. I said, “Ma, you know, should I meditate or should I chant?” And She looked at me, She said, “Well, what do you like to do?” Now, my mother never told me that what I liked to do could ever be good for me. And now my spiritual mother was saying, “Yeah. What you like to do is good for you. You can do that.” And that was fantastic. Another thing She said, which is, She said that Maharajji never asked Her to meditate in 40 years with Him. 40. Years. But He told Her, asked Her to do, to repeat these Names, like we’re doing this practice, it’s called “japa” or in this case it’s called “kirtan” where you do it out loud. Chanting. But He said that the more subtle, deeper or higher states of mind, which we, you know, we might think we’re aspiring to, they can’t be brought about by the use of our own personal will. What that, it’s like, trying to pick yourself up like this. You can’t. No matter how hard you try. You can never pick yourself up like this. Because once again, anything we can imagine or conceive of can’t be something that’s beyond who we think we are. Which is who we are. Who we really are is beyond is much deeper than who we think we are. And so, when I share this practice with people, I say, “Just sing, and when you notice you haven’t been paying attention, sing. And when you notice you haven’t been paying attention, sing.” And, you know, because if you’re paying attention, you see, it’s almost impossible for more than a billionth of a second to actually stay with it. When you’re really, really right there razor sharp. But you keep coming back. And what we’re doing is training ourselves to just let go of the stuff that beats us up all day long, all life-long. Whatever it is. And it’s different than pushing away. We are not pushing away. That’s a whole other ballgame. We’re releasing and coming back to the chant. You’ve made a deal with yourself. Whatever period of time you made the deal for, you’re gonna, whatever you catch yourself lost in, you’re gonna let it go and come back to whatever your object of concentration, so to speak. The mantra or the chant. That’s the deal you made when you sat down and now you’re watching, you know, “When are the Sopranos on?” But you know, you’ve seen the Sopranos 42 times already. It’s just the reruns of the reruns of the reruns now. But you still want to, so, “Ok, I have five more seconds. Time? No. Three more seconds.” It’s so hard to really do this stuff. Really. We, you know, many years ago, before I went to India, I was up in the mountains of New Mexico at the Lama Foundation.  And “Lama” means “mud” in Spanish. And we had heard that there was an artist who had lived in New York, had gone to India and come back, was living in a cabin just down the mountain from where we were. So a few of us got together and went down to see him and he, he knew how to meditate. We went, “wow. He knows how to meditate.” This was in 1966 or something like that. ‘7. ‘8.  ‘9. ’68-’69, the winter. So, we went down to see this guy. His name was Herman. And we went into his little cabin and I think he made tea for us or something and I was sitting in the back kind of, just listening, and everybody else was asking questions and, so when it came time to leave, I was the last one out the door and he grabbed my arm and he looked at me and he said, “You, you have to find out why it is you can’t give yourself 100% to whatever you’re doing.” You ever see like a squirrel on the wall?  He nailed me to the wall. I mean, I can feel, right now, how that felt. That was what, fifty years ago. Something like that. Forty years ago. Holy shit. I can still feel that. Because he was absolutely right. And that was, and I knew that, I mean, there was my, I could, I was suffering so much from my inability to really do anything. You know? That had to do with real life. Basketball I could play. But anything else was torture for me because I just couldn’t get into things. I couldn’t give myself totally. I was too paranoid. I was too sensitive. I was too neurotic. I was too whatever. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever it was, I couldn’t. And he just, boy. Wow. And so, my whole life has been answering that question. Why, not really why this? But how? To be able to give myself 100% to what I’m doing, right? And when I first heard chanting in India, I knew this was something I could really do. I could really give myself to this. And then I started going around, listening to, wherever there was chanting going on, I would just go sit there and just be part of it. So, it’s not useful to try to make another you. It’ll be just as screwed up as the first one. You know? So, just take it easy, you know? And we have to really recognize that, you know, there’s this thing and they call it the laws of karma and one thing they say about karma is that no one can understand it fully. That only a fully enlightened Buddha can really understand all the subtleties of karma. But the simple take on it is that, it’s like, there’s always these waves coming from way out in the ocean and they come and they roll and they roll and roll and roll and they finally get to the shore and they crash and the energy of that wave is dissipated. Right? Something created that wave. Some movement. Some storm in the middle of the ocean and that energy was carried all the way to the shore, manifested by that wave. This is like, these are our own actions in the past. That’s what they say. And that’s what I say when I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But when I haven’t personally experienced something, I say, “That’s what they say.” But, it’s my intuition, intuition and my belief that what I’m saying, I believe what I’m saying. I’m sorry if you don’t, but what are you going to do, you know? I’m just sharing my own craziness with you. So, our own actions in the past of some kind, in some past, some kind of past created, like, an energy and that energy will keep going until its dissipated. So, sometimes that energy can act like, can be manifested in thoughts but something… and if we get caught in those thoughts and fight against them and allow them to push us around, we are not allowing that energy to dissipate. We are actually pushing back against the wave and creating more waves. More waves. And so, that’s why we train ourselves to just let go. Not push away and cling to. Let go and come back to the practice that we agreed with ourselves to do for a certain period of time and then you get up and be stupid the rest of the day, it’s ok. Really. It really doesn’t matter because that practice you’ve done, that practice letting go, that, that’s an intuitive movement that will happen from within more and more as we get more comfortable with that. The letting go. And you may not notice, but like, a depression that was going to last three hundred and sixty five days may only last 364 and three quarters. You didn’t notice but it’s different.

And that’s the way it works. We get used to letting go and coming back to ourselves for a millionth of a second and then we’re gone again, letting go, coming back, letting go, coming back. That’s why they call it practice. You’ve got to do it. You don’t do it, you don’t do it. Nothing’s going to happen. The same story’s going to keep repeating itself on and on. So, whatever practice means to you, by the way. It can be anything. Whatever works for you to help you unravel and untie the knots in your own hearts. This is what we should try to find, we could try to find, if we’re interested. Now, chanting has helped me a lot, I think. I mean, I would say that. I probably can’t prove it to anybody, but, one thing is that, I mope around a lot less than I used to. And you know, I was born a moper. You know. I learned from my parents how to mope and I just carried the tradition right on. And now, I really, I actually mope around less. Really. It’s extraordinary. I can’t even believe it myself. I miss it. And truly, sometimes I’ll mope around just for fun. It’s just nothing that feels like that. “Ahhhh, shit. Son of a bitch.” Ah. It’s ecstasy. Fantastic. So, it’s really the complete, there’s so many ways to look at this, I mean, there’s a sloka in Sanskrit, “Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Devo Maheswhara, Guru Sakshat Param Brahma, Tasmai Shri Guruve Namah”. This is part of what they call “The worship of the Guru.” It says, “The Guru has created all this. The Guru preserves all this. The Guru destroys all this. The Guru is that, right before my eyes. To that Guru, I bow.” Now, we can take that on a personal level where, the physical level where you see your Guru as the one who’s doing everything and you bow to that Guru, that manifestation of the Guru in a human body. But you can also take it a different way.  Guru Sakshat Param Brahma”… this means “everything I see.” Everything is the Guru. To that Guru, I bow. To which, I surrender. I drop my trip To that Guru. And I accept everything in my life as teaching. As teaching for me. Personally, and that everything in my life is there because it’s there. And if it’s there, one has to deal with it. So, there’s different ways of approaching this. Somebody who’s very devotional might approach it that way. Somebody who’s more, less devotional, might see it differently or a combination of the two. And there’s so many other ways of looking at it. The bottom line is, we have to, we have to give ourselves a break, to start. We can’t be our own worst enemy forever. It’s just not going to be fun. It’s not going to work. It’s not going to be ok. And when we recognize that, that it’s up to us, we have the power and the intuition and the wisdom to begin to unravel those things and release those energies that we’re carrying around with us from all the broken hearts, all the betrayals, all the stuff we’re going through. And we have that power to do that. And more than that, only we can do that. We can get help and assistance and friendship and teachings but we have to do it. We have to ultimately let go. You’ve got to let go. Sooner or later, it’s your hand has to let go, nobody else’s. Yours. And that’s the good news, by the way. I know it doesn’t seem that way. But that’s the good news, actually. That we can do that. That’s the way the whole system was set up, by the way, that we, ourselves, can do that and will do that, by the way. It’s just inevitable. It’s a process. We’re in the middle of it right now. We’re not at the beginning. We’re not at the end. We’re in the middle of it. It’s an inevitability because once that, you ever see those quaker oats commercials? Shot out of a cannon? Remember that? Who’s old enough to remember that? Don’t raise your hand. Shot out of a cannon. Once you’re shot out of a cannon, the ball’s going to hit the ground sooner or later. It’s inevitable.  And that’s what it is. This is an inevitability. We’re in the process of revealing ourselves to be that one of which we are all a part.

You know, I don’t know, well, I do know, when I went to India, I was never coming back. I was gonna go. I, you know, I just had this fantasy I was going to go live in a cave, you know, and the hair and the ashes and all the stuff, you know, and the sacred fire and all that. I’ve seen caves. There’s no fucking way I’m going to live in one. Rats and scorpions and mice and bats and snakes. Are you kidding me? Give me my foam mattress and my MTV, you know? I’m outta here. Give me a break. Oh, my goodness. But yeah. So, I had this version of myself which I was hoping would be true, because I hated myself so much, I couldn’t be me. But I had this other version, which I thought was cool, you know? No. After two and a half years, Maharajji looked at me. He said, “Go back to New York. You have attachment there.” “Attachment?  But I’m just learning Hindi.” “Too bad. Go.” You know, I, “What is He talking about, attachment?  What does He mean? I left everything. I gave my jeans away. I sold my car. My guitar. I gave my records away.” Remember records? I was never coming back. What’s He talking about? I know what He’s talking about now. Every single thing that I’ve experienced since that moment to this moment. Fifty years of bullshit. That’s what He was talking about. My life. The seeds were in there to unfold, you know, you can’t, we planted those seeds ourselves. I don’t know what we’re thinking, but we did that. And now, here we are. Happy New Year, you know? Here it is. So, you’ve got to deal with it. There’s so many ways of dealing with things, but the first step is recognizing that this is life and we’re in it and this is me and yeah, this sucks. I’m gonna find out a way to make this ok. And that’s what Buddha said when He came out of the jungle. He said, “Yo, monks. Life sucks.” That’s a direct translation. More or less. He said, there’s suffering. Period. That’s it. There’s nothing in this world that doesn’t have some dissatisfaction associated with it. Either you have what you don’t want, or you don’t have what you want, or you have some combination of the two. Or, you just recognize that everything is like that. There’s no… that’s the way it is. You can’t squeeze water from a stone. People have been telling us, “Oh, yeah, squeeze this stone, you’ll get so much water out of it. Get this car. Get this job. Get this wife. Get this husband. Get this house. Get this. Get this. That’ll make you happy.” Who has it made happy? Nobody. It’s made people more stupid and more selfish. And more afraid. The more you get, the more you’re afraid of losing it. Really. Big gates. Gated communities. “Nobody can get in here. We’re safe here.” Then an earthquake happens. Nobody is safe. Nobody in the outside world, in the outside stuff, the physical body, we’re never safe. You can be at ease, by the way, with whatever arises, that’s part of the practice. That’s a fruit of practice. To be at ease of heart with whatever arises in your life, with whatever is in your life. Now, that would be nice and that’s a possibility, but on the physical level, nobody’s safe. So, you know, already. Shit happens. Stuff stops working. And you? “Wait a minute? I signed a warranty here. What’s the deal?” The warranty, you can’t find it.

So. Once we begin to get the strength to let go of the way we identify with everything so much that we think and feel and imagine and all our programs and all our stories. As we get the strength to release that, it’s an incredible experience, because no one can hurt you. And it’s not an invulnerability that’s hard. It’s an openness and a relaxed space where everything is free to come and go: the pleasant stuff and the unpleasant stuff.

There was the third patriarch of Zen. He said, “The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences.” Ok. Is there another way? How about the not-so-great way? Can we try that?  And my dear friend who’s picture is up there in the back, Bernie Glassman, you know, he used to talk about, he said, You know, Buddha, if you call the four, you know, Buddha used to, it’s often said that Buddha described the Four Noble Truths, right? The fact that everything has dissatisfaction associated with it, the cause of that is craving, and then there’s the path to free one’s self from identification with those cravings, so to speak, and then, the result is nirvana, enlightenment. So, that’s usually called the four noble truths. So, Bernie said, “You know, I call them the Four Noble Opinions.”  Only he could do that, you know. Because if it’s a truth, you can’t really discuss it, you know. So, either accept it or you reject it. I don’t believe that. But if it’s an opinion, “Let’s talk about it. What do you think about that?” And that’s the beauty of that. So, once we kind of get with the program and stop identifying with the victim stories so much and get our asses down to doing a little bit of practice, that’s a very hard step to take, because we are all victimized. All of us. And some, to more degree than others, but the biggest victimization is thinking that we’re separate from the universe. That’s number one. And then, from that, everything else comes. Everything else comes after that. You know, these great Beings experience all the suffering, all the pain, all the distress, all the turmoil of all Beings in the Universe, but it doesn’t shut them down because they’re hearts are as wide as the world. That’s the phrase that I stole from Sharon Salzberg. Her heart is as wide as the world. I can appreciate that and steal it. So, when your heart is as wide as the world, everyone is welcome to come and to go. It doesn’t affect that space. It doesn’t change that. And you can become at ease with everything. It’s very hard. I mean, it’s very painful. We all have our hurts and betrayals and our scars and our wounds. And we all need help to deal with those things. Spiritual practice can help us develop the strength to let go. No matter what else we’re doing, therapy, counseling groups, whatever else we’re doing, ultimately, you’ve gotta, you know, you’ve gotta open it up and let go. So, practice can really help with that over time. Many times, you don’t even realize the things that don’t get you anymore, don’t grab you because they’re gone. They disappear from your awareness and you don’t even remember them. Every once in awhile you go, “Oh, what?  You know, what happened to that?” So, but once again, you’ve got to do it. And it’s not easy to create a habit of doing practice. Because our habits, you know, are so deeply ingrained, habits of thought, the habits, behaviors that we have, the things we do to pacify our negative emotions and we’ve been doing those things so long, it’s very difficult to, to change that, so that’s why I say, just do some practice. Don’t try to change anything. It will change. You’ll notice things will change. Opportunities will arise that you didn’t even see before. They’ll show up in your life that you didn’t see before. They might have always been there, but now you’ll notice it. It’s like a person who, you know, always you’ve seen around and one day you look, “Oh, hi.” You know? They show up in a different way in your awareness.

Ok. We have a microphone somewhere… or two… and if you have something to say please raise your hand and we’ll hand you a mic to talk.

 

 

 

 

The post Ep. 71 | Life Is A Teaching appeared first on Krishna Das.