Call and Response with Krishna Das

Call and Response Ep. 83 | Recovery, India, Letting Go

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

Call and Response Podcast Ep. 82 | Real Enlightenment, Service

Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 28 | Real Enlightenment, Service “A lot of people don’t give. You know, there’s so much fear about contacting other people and opening up and allowing the reality of this world to enter into our hearts. It can be very brutal. There’s no question about it. That’s why you need inner strength. Now there’s something to do. So, that’s why, when we have inner strength, when we trust our own hearts, when we learn to take it easy on ourselves, then we can just do what comes naturally. Helping people will come naturally once we overcome our own fears.” – Krishna Das Q: So, you were saying, now my question is gone. KD: Ok. No problem. Q: It’s back, ok. So, KD: Problem. Q: What if, in your life, you look and listen to your heart and you don’t get the direction for your life like you say. More, you just want to meditate and be in the silence and you don’t, you know, I’m going to work but it’s just so I can pay my bills and for awhile now, I don’t have any motivation to go after anything in life, and I wonder, is that wrong? From what you’re saying, because the only thing I want to do is be in the silence. KD: It’s not for me to say it’s wrong or right. You know, it’s your life. Only you know and only you can work through it, find out what’s right for you. But I will say that there is a lot of confusion about states of mind and when you say you want to stay in the silence, in the real silence, there’s no “you.” So, I hear that you seem to want to hold onto one particular type of feeling as opposed to other types of feeling. That’s not going to work. Q: yeah. KD: Because you’re pushing things away. Ultimately, the silence is everywhere, all the time. Because it is that way. And nothing can disturb it. Any state of mind you try to hold onto will not last. States of mind are all temporary. The only thing that’s not temporary is who you are, which is not a state of mind. It’s pure being. Pure ultimate reality. That’s who is in there. That’s what’s in there. So, it’s no different than wanting desert without eating your meal, you know? So, if you’re pushing anything away, it’s not something that’s ultimately going to give you what you want. So, that’s all I have to say about that. Ok? Q: Thank you.   KD: People think, you know, we hear about samahdi and all this meditation stuff, you know, it’s very subtle stuff, really. It’s not so easy. I mean, don’t think you’re going to sit down and meditate yourself into some other planet. You know, it doesn’t work that way. And I remember, we used to, a lot of times we’d see Maharajji in the late afternoon when the temple gates had closed and just the people in the temple were there. So, I used to put on my Holy clothes and go out and sit down and one day I was sitting there, and I almost burst out laughing because as I was sitting there, I saw that my idea of enlightenment, nirvana was some place that I would not be. And where was that going to be? Where was the place that you’re not going to be? You’re here now, when you go to the bathroom, you’re going to be there, too. Tonight, you’ll go to sleep. Where are you going to be? Right there. There’s nowhere you can go where you will not be, and nirvana is not some other place. Liberation is not some other place where you won’t be. It’s actually where you are finally going to fully be present, when you stop hating yourself and limiting ourselves. So, that was interesting.   Q: Good evening. KD: Hi. Q: In this process of serving, feeding and remembering, what is your understanding of the role of children and own children or children in general? KD: Your own children or other people’s children? I’m not sure what you mean. Q: Both. Having your own children, is this an important part of this or how does this fit into this? KD: It’s one of those things that happen when you do certain things. Yeah. You were a child. We were all children once, you know? And our parents, whether they were, whatever part of the scale they were on, were still here. They took care of us enough and at least cared enough that we’re still here and you know when you’re a baby, there’s nothing you can do for yourself and you know, India has a very strange way of looking at things. There’s an incredible hymn by Shankaracharya and I recorded part of it on my first CD, it’s called the Devi Aparadh Kshamapana Stotram. How do you like that? And it translates as “begging the Goddess for forgiveness.” And the line that’s repeated, verse after verse, is “in the whole,” let me see, basically, He keeps on saying that there will never be a bad mother, even though I’m such a bad child. And He begs the goddess for forgiveness. And the idea is simply, we don’t, we barely know we’re alive on a day to day basis. We float through our lives in a sleep. We don’t understand how hard it is to be, get a human body and to be in a position to satisfy our desires and live a good life and especially in this circumstance. We’re all, there are many places in the world where you can’t rest for a second, where you’re on the road, you’re being driven by this or driven by that. Bombs are falling. Poverty. A human body in a good circumstance is very difficult, they say, to get. But we don’t appreciate it. And we would not be here if our parents, regardless of their own problems, didn’t take care of us enough to keep us alive. It’s very interesting. I mean, I have all kinds of issues with my parents, right? But still, they fed me. They took care of me. They allowed me to live on this earth and to live and to manifest whatever karmas I had to work with. And now, here I am, learning to sing and chant the Name and find a good way to live. Without them, I wouldn’t be here. And it’s the same with our own children. We just do the best we can, which is, try to, regardless of our own shortcoming, we try to let our children know that we love them. And that’s not so easy sometimes. I don’t know. More? Anything else? I’m sure I didn’t answer your question. You’re right to give up.   Q: Hi. KD: Hi. Q: So, you were saying earlier that we should be thinking about other people, we should be serving people and helping them out. KD: I don’t think I said, “should.” That’s one of the words I try to avoid. Especially when I’m talking to myself. Q: So, what was the word you used? KD: I have no idea. What’s your question? Q: So how do we help people or how do we think about them without we, ourselves, getting fatigued by it. Like, either in our work life, or in our family life or in other phases of life? KD: So, how do we think about other people? Q: yeah, how do we help them and not get fatigued by it? KD: Well, one of the ways you help other people is recognizing your own projections onto them and not doing that to other people. Like, say there’s somebody at work who never looks at you, never talks to you, seems to avoid you everywhere, you know, and you build up a story about that person in your own mind. And then you find out that he’s got brain cancer and the fact that he never spoke to you has nothing to do with you. He’s totally absorbed in his own shit. So, that’s one thing that we can do to help other people is not believe our own stories about them, unconsciously. And then as far as, you do what you can to help people. It’s not a question of trying to change anybody. The best way to help people is to work on yourself and allow some compassion towards yourself to also extend outward to other beings and not be so harsh on yourself or others. And more than that, I mean, if there’s some other way that you can help, you try to find a way to help, you know. I remember being completely blown away, I read about this woman down in Texas somewhere who just decided, she recognized how much food was wasted at the supermarkets, you know. That after a certain time, they have to throw everything out. She created a business of collecting all that food and feeding homeless people and people who needed it. It was amazing. I mean, like, she fed hundreds of thousands of people a week, and I thought, “Goddammit, I wish I could do that.” But it’s not me, you know? So, you find your way of doing it. Everything is good. And anything you can do for anybody is a good thing. But once again, it’s not done out of a sense of “I’m going to help this person,” you know. “How great I am. I’m going to give,” you know. Get over it, you know? You just do what you can in a very simple, easy way. A lot of people don’t give. You know there’s so much fear about contacting other people and opening up and allowing the reality of this world to enter into our hearts. It can be very brutal. There’s no question about it. That’s why you need inner strength. That’s why we need to get new mufflers for everybody on the fucking street. Now there’s something to do. So, that’s why, when we have inner strength, when we trust our own hearts, when we learn to take it easy on ourselves, then we can just do what comes naturally. Helping people will come naturally once we overcome our own fears and stuff like that. You just do what you do. You know, our own karmas allow us to do certain things and not to do other things. Sometimes, you have to feed yourself first before you can help another person. Sometimes, you have enough, you can just give. It’s just a way of overcoming selfishness and self-centeredness and the obsession with “me, me, me.” It’s a good practice to help with that. I’m sure that didn’t satisfy you, but I did the best I could.     The post Call and Response Podcast Ep. 82 | Real Enlightenment, Service [https://krishnadas.com/podcasts/call-response/call-and-response-podcast-ep-82-real-enlightenment-service/] appeared first on Krishna Das [https://krishnadas.com].

Call and Response Podcast Ep. 81 | Not Getting What you Want

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

Call and Response Podcast Special Edition | April 8, 2021

Call and Response Podcast Special Edition with Krishna Das | April 8, 2021 Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond. “Shame is a trip we’re doing to ourselves. Forget about whether we’ve actually hurt somebody or not. The feeling of shame, that’s different than remorse, by the way. Remorse is truly recognizing that we’ve hurt someone, wishing that we had not created that suffering and hoping that we don’t create it again, and not just hoping, but doing what’s necessary that we don’t create more suffering again for others and ourselves. But shame, that’s a different thing. Remorse is useful. Remorse of spirit, that leads to, in Christianity they talk about confession. That’s ultimately what confession is supposed to be, giving up the feelings that of shame and stuff like that and starting again. You can’t forget what you’ve done. But what you have done in the past can stop bullying you in this moment if we truly have remorse.” – Krishna Das Namaste, everybody. Welcome to earth. Nice to be here. As you can see, I’m not exactly where I was last time I was somewhere. Now I’m here and through the graces of the Integral Yoga Institute in the Holy city of San Francisco, we come to you semi-live. I had to come out to the west coast for something, and befI had to change my plans before I could get home to do the Thursday night chanting, and so luckily our friends here at IYI manifested this whole thing, just like that. So, many thanks to them. They’re already asleep here, but that’s okay. It just looks like sleep. It’s actually the natural state. We did 53 straight weeks from home, except actually one, when I was recording the audio book for “Chants of a Lifetime.” 53 weeks. And then I got on a plane, and I don’t think I’ll know that I’m actually still alive till I get back home, but I’m doing the best I can. So, some of you may have heard this story before, but imagine how many times I’ve heard it. It was in the temple. It was in the days that we were coming back and forth from Nainital, which was the town nearby and coming to Kainchi, to the temple, Maharajji’s temple there. So, we came one day and as we were sitting there, these two old sadhus walked into the temple, and they were wandering sadhus, monks maybe. And they came into the temple and they asked Maharajji if they could stay for a while, and he said, “Yeah, you can stay. But every day I want you to sit out in front of the Hanuman temple and sing ‘Sita Ram.’ Just ‘Sita Ram.’” For three hours in the morning. Okay. Not bad rent to pay. So, the next day we arrived, and they were out there singing, the two of them, sitting opposite each other in front of the temple. They didn’t have any shakers or bangers or clangers or drums or anything. They were just singing. One of the guys would go, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Jai Sita Ram.” And the other guy would answer, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Jai Sita Ram.” “Sita Ram, Sita Ram…” Back and forth, back and forth. So, we were just sitting, waiting for Maharajji to come out, and this chanting was going on in the background. We heard it. And all of a sudden, I don’t know, something happened, maybe they got bored, so one guy goes, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram Jaya Lakshaman.” Oh. Jazz. So, the other guy goes, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Lakshaman Jai Hanuman.” And before you know it, they’re going, “Rama Lakshaman Janaki…” having a great time. So, all of a sudden, from inside his room, inside a room, you hear Maharajji’s voice yell “Sita Ram!” That moment when Maharajji yelled… I saw the whole thing. I’d heard it, but I hadn’t focused on it. So, they had drifted off. They had just gone with the… Maharajji said, “Sita Ram” only. He said that.  They had just gone off on their thing, probably getting bored with just the good old “Sita Ram.” So, he pulled them back and then they followed with that. And for me, that was a really big lesson of coming back. Because what makes this a spiritual practice is that no matter what, our job, so to speak, is to listen, to repeat the name, in this case we’re singing out loud, and hear it at the same time, not just so mechanically that we’re not even paying attention, which is what happens most of the time if we really look, and then when somebody else is answering the call with a response, we’re hearing it again. And the hearing is different than just listening. It’s an inner recognition. We’re hearing it from the inside, so to speak. And as time goes on, we begin to, through the repetition of the name, we begin to spend more time at home inside here.And when we go off in dreams and thoughts and fantasies and emotions and the past, the future, all that stuff, we spend less time in those states. Just take this morning. So, I got up. I got ready to leave to come to IYI here. And I looked around and I did not see my shoulder bag. My shoulder bag had my wallet in it. And I looked all around once. I looked around 20 times, the room. I looked everywhere. It was just not there. So, the adrenaline starts to pump and the panic starts to set in. “Where is it? What am I gonna do? I don’t even have a record of all those credit cards and what should I do? And my vaccine, my two shot vaccine stamp is in there.What will I do? And I won’t be able to get on the plane to go home without my driver’s license.” So, on a scale of one to 10 in terms of from “okay” to “complete panic,” I was at about at 12, but I wasn’t there for long. I calmed my ass down and I thought, “Okay, so where could it be?” I called Whole Foods where I had gone the night before to get some stuff. They didn’t see the bag. Okay. That was one option. But I noticed I didn’t, I wasn’t as gone as long and as deeply as I could have been. It was interesting to me at the time. So, then it turned out I had left it in the car when I went to park and that’s a whole story in itself. So, I ran down to the parking garage and I found the bag in there, but I saw the whole arc of the situation, from the moment I noticed that the bag was gone to the moment I saw it there under the seat, and I saw that really, it wasn’t as crazy as it used to be, you know? Not from my own effort, because when you’re gone, you can’t make that effort to remember. It is very hard, which is why they always say, do practice when you can, because there will be times that you will not be able to even remember what practice is about or what remembering is about. So that’s why we put the time in, even we don’t feel like it, because why would we pay attention to what we feel like? We’re supposed to be listening to the name, or whatever practice you do. So, for me, that was a very interesting moment. And of course it was much more fun that I didn’t lose my wallet.  Then, I don’t know how we be right now with all of you. I would be smiling and thinking, “Where’s my fucking wallet…” Whenever we it comes over us that we’re really allowed to come home, that we really can come back to that place inside of us that is love, it is home, it’s just so powerful. Because we’re gone so much. So much of the time we’re lost in our stuff. And adding a practice to our life is what allows us, what creates the openness to return home. The sound of the name is the name of our own true nature, the love that lives within us is who we truly are. It’s the name of that love which lives in each of us, always all the time. Life after life after life, it’s the same. There you see Swami Shivananda, the Guru of this lineage, and behind me, unfortunately. He doesn’t want to be seen right now, Swami Satchidananda. And Maharajji loved Swami Shivananda very much. They were very close. They visited often. They knew each other very well. He came. Maharajji showed up at Shivannda Ashram in Rishikesh quite often, apparently, and it was Maharajji who, you can’t really say “forced,” but encouraged very strongly, Swami Chidhananda to accept the leadership of the Divine Life Society after Swami Shivananda left. Maharajji loved Swami Chidhananda very much. And in fact, a funny story is that one time maybe in ‘68, Could have been ’69, I’m not sure, Swami Satchidananda was giving a retreat at Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York. And I had heard Swami Satchidananda speak a few times in the city, so I went up for the day, and we were sitting out on the lawn, and next to Swami Satchidananda was this, another Sannyasin, another Baba. Very gaunt. And to me, he looked very fierce at the time and he was just sitting there like this, and Swami Satchidananda gave the talk and after his talks, or in the beginning, he would always go, “Hari Om,” in this beautiful voice. Right? So, he finished the talk and I had my eyes closed, and I was waiting for the “Hari Om.” Instead of the “Hari Om,” there was this, “Sri Ram Jaya Ram Jaya Jaya Ram,”like this, and my whole body exploded. Every nerve went into overdrive, and I was just sitting there like this. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know who this guy was. I had heard “Sri Ram Jai Ram” before. I think I had met Ram Dass maybe once or something by now, maybe not. And then I left and I never knew who that Swami was, but that moment did something. Okay. So, 1, 2, 3, maybe four years later, three years later, not sure. Three. I am living at the temple in Kainchi with Maharajji in India, and one day a car pulls up and a group of Swamis came out of the car like bowling balls into the temple, over the bridge, right into Maharajji’s room. And I was standing outside. I noticed this, and then all of a sudden, what did I hear? “Sri Ram Jaya Ram Jaya Jaya Ram…” The same Sri Ram. I went, “What is that?” It was Swami Chidhananda, who came with some Swamis from Rishikesh. They were on tour, and apparently he knew Maharajji very well. He used to come quite often to see Him, and Maharajji would always ask him to sing and actually Swami has written about this particular day. There was some miracle about the number of oranges there that day. The swamis brought five oranges or something like that, and put them on the table in a little bowl for Maharajji near his Tucket. And there were like 20 people in the room and Maharajji started throwing the oranges to people and everybody got an orange, and Swami Chidhananda wrote about that. But the thing that got me, what I realized later, Swami had sung that “Sri Ram Jai Ram” to Maharaji before I met Swami Chidhananda that first time at Monroe. So “Sri Ram Jai Ram” was Maharajji’s joy. The name of “Ram” is what he always repeated. “Sri Ram Jai Ram” was very dear to his heart. So that connection, it was a transmission almost of also Maharajji at the time. And here’s another little story about how much, also, Maharajji loved Swami Shivananda. At one point, one of the very, very original old Swamis with Swami Shivananda, one of his original disciples, I don’t remember, it could have been Swami Krishnananda. It might have been Swami Nirmalananda. I can’t remember which one. He was off, He went, he left Rishikesh to do pilgrimage in the Himalayas, and on his way up to the deeper Himalayas, he stopped at Kainchi, and he went to see Maharajji. He had met him before, and Maharajji looked at him and he said, “Your Guru is sporting like Krishna, but how long can this last? Go right back to Rishikesh now.”  He told him to go back to the Ashram. And so that Swami, Nirmalalanda or Swami Krishnananda, I’m not sure, He didn’t really take it to heart. “Oh yeah. Okay. Maybe after,” but he went back down to get his supplies to go up to the high Himalayas, and when he was at that house where he left him in Haldwani, that’s when he heard that Swami Shivananda had fallen ill. So, he finally rushed back to the Ashram, and as a result, he was able to see his guru before he left the body. But the way Mahrarajji said it: “Your guru is sporting like Krishna, playing like Krishna now, but how long can this last?” Because they say there’s a state of consciousness that only Shiva and Krishna can be in without having to leave the body. Only those two beings can hold the intensity of that state of… whatever. Believe me, I don’t know what it is, but I’m telling you about it. So, they say anybody who enters into that state, if they stay in that state too long, the body drops. And apparently, Maharajji knew that it was time for Swami Shivananda to go, so he entered  into that state and the body finally dropped off. These guys. This is the major leagues. This is big time stuff. We’re still in little league here. All right, some questions. “Can you speak about surrender? I’m a first responder and I see all that stuff. I want to stay steady.” So, surrender. Surrender is not an act of will, of our will. Surrender comes from grace. We aspire to drop the ego, drop our identification with that. But like Ramana Maharshi says, “If you ask the mind or the ego to kill the ego or the mind, it’s like asking the thief to be the policeman. There’ll be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.” So, asking yourself, saying to yourself, “I’m going to surrender.” This is not going to happen. Because the “I” does not want to surrender, the “me.” It likes to act like it will, but that’s just its way of staying alive longer. So that’s why practice is so important, and practice doesn’t mean, you know, when you’re sitting cross-legged on a pillow pretending to meditate. Practice means, first of all, being present with everyone as best we can, that we meet, and bearing witness to their suffering and “the suffering,” our own and theirs, and bearing witness means to be with it without projecting your own stuff onto it. “Oh, I’m so sad. This is so terrible.” We don’t know. We don’t know why things happen. We don’t why they don’t happen. All we know is what we feel in the moment. So, to bear witness is a big thing, and of course, Bernie Glassman, the great Zen master and my very dearest friend, used to speak of this quite often. In fact, this was his, one of his main teachings was to bear witness to the joy and the suffering. Because beings suffer. And when we bear witness, we are with them and that lessens their isolation, that lessens, takes some of the sting away of the pain. We can’t take their pain away, but we can be with them. So, the aspiration to surrender, that’s good, but don’t think that you can do it. When the mirror of the heart is clean of our greed, our shame, our selfishness, all our stuff, when the mirror of the heart is clean of that dust, then the reflection is true and accurate, and at that moment, surrender happens. We may get little hits on the way, of course, of what it might feel like to be less deluded, but surrender is the goal, and the path of devotion is the path of remembering over and over again, remembering “thy will, not mine.” That’s hard, because when we see people suffer, especially for us, the people who are closer to us, it hurts and we want that suffering to be taken away. But if we look at that, we want them not to hurt, so we won’t hurt so much by seeing it. So, there’s a selfishness involved in that, and we can’t accept things the way they are. We want to change them so we don’t hurt. Now that’s a motive that is actually not truly useful. It’s a perversion of real compassion. With real true compassion, Bodhi Chitta, we are not thinking about ourselves at all, but for most of us, what we call compassion is, “Oh, I wish you weren’t suffering so much so it wouldn’t be so hard for me to be with you.” That’s selfish. So, we have to see that stuff and let go and let go and let go, and then… because yes, that’s what we have to do. “How long does one need to chant before he can see God?” How the hell do I know? I’ll let you know. You know? What time is it? You know? Come on, gimme a break here. Maharajji used to say, “Go on, sing your fake lying ‘Ram Ram.’ Go on, keep doing. One of these days, the real Ram will show up and boom, that’s it. But until that time, keep faking it because you have to.” You have to. If we truly said the name, repeated the name fully with full devotion, a hundred percent awareness and concentration and paying attention. Boom. We’d see. We’d experience what and who Ram is, but we’re lying, but we’re faking it, because we can’t do that, but through practice and training the mind,  training ourselves to keep coming back to the sound of the name and letting go of whatever we’re lost in again and again… should I go on? There’s not enough time to go on in the universe….  again and again and again, little by little we stay home for longer and we don’t go so far away, and sooner or later, the real Ram comes. And Maharajji said, “Go on doing this practice, even when you don’t feel spiritual, even when you’re tired, even when you’re angry, even when you’re sad, even when you’re grieving…” everything.  Go on. Because if you don’t? Then what? One has to plant those seeds of remembering. If one does not plant seeds, nothing will grow. “Do you have any advice for overcoming shame for past negative actions towards ourselves, slash, others from many years ago?” Shame is a trip we’re doing to ourselves. Forget about whether we’ve actually hurt somebody or not. The feeling of shame, that’s different than remorse, by the way. Remorse is truly recognizing that we’ve hurt someone, wishing that we had not created that suffering and hoping that we don’t create it again, and not just hoping, but doing what’s necessary that we don’t create more suffering again for others and ourselves. But shame, that’s a different thing. Remorse is useful. Remorse of spirit, that leads to, in Christianity they talk about confession. That’s ultimately what confession is supposed to be, giving up the feelings that of shame and stuff like that and starting again. You can’t forget what you’ve done. But what you have done in the past can stop bullying you in this moment if we truly have remorse. I was at a teaching once with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It was a three day teaching about Bodhi Chitta, which is compassion and kindness, caring for others and one’s self. Day after day, he talked about this and the last session he took questions from the audience and questions were written on a paper and sent in, and the translator picked the question and read it. So, one question said, “Your holiness, I hurt somebody once and I apologized and they would not accept the apology. Year after year, I’ve apologized for three years, but they won’t accept the apology. What should I do?” So, His Holiness said, “You keep apologizing, one year, two years, three years. If after four years, they don’t accept the apology, tell them to ‘go to hell.’” I was shocked because the Dali Lama was talking Tibetan. This was through a translator. And I thought, “His Holiness the Dalai Lama does not tell someone to go to hell because if he does, they will. And that’s not what he usually does.” So, Bob Thurman was there, my friend, Bob, who speaks perfect Tibetan and is also very close to His Holiness. I called him over. I said, “Bob, what did he really say?” The Dalai Lama said, “One year, two years, three years, you keep apologizing. Four years come and they don’t accept? Tell them to eat shit.” That is what he said. Because in Tibet, they’re very spiritual country. They would not say “go to hell,” but the way they say what we say, “go to hell” is “eat shit.” But the translator, knowing what Americans think, didn’t say, “eat shit.” He said, “go to hell.” Anyway, that’s the idea. You do what you can. If someone doesn’t want to accept the apology, what can you do? As long as you’re sincere and you understand what you’ve done, and you wish you hadn’t done it, and you’re sorry, you did it. It isn’t about whether somebody accepts that apology or not. That’s up to them. That’s their trip. They can choose to hang onto the anger or not. There’s nothing you can do about that. So, one has to be honor one’s own heart and work with one own one’s own stuff. One can’t do anything for somebody else. “How do I deal with aging? Is it a challenge?” No. I lost. “Even when you’re on the path, seeing your youth and beauty fading way slowly, we are not this body. I know, but we deal with it.” Yeah. I’m this body. I don’t know about you, and this body’s… I’m in an ashram here… I won’t use my usual words… screwed up. Shit just stops working. You wake up one morning and something that’s worked your whole life and all of a sudden it doesn’t work, and it didn’t ask you if it was okay to take the rest of your life off. it just stops working. You don’t get a vote. That’s aging. However, this body is what we have right now. This body is what we are living in. In this body, we are doing practice. In this body, we are trying to find truth and love and God and whatever. So, we have to take care of this body as best we can. There’s no guarantees on how long this body’s going to last, but while we’re here, this is the car we’re driving in. You don’t drive a car with flat tires. You put on new tires, if possible. Yeah. You pull out your gallbladder if it’s screwing you up, and you put in the best gas in that you can, and you try to get where you’re going. All we can do is the best we can do. So, you just do your best to take care of yourself so that you can do the practice that’s going to bring youto freedom. And it just happens. Being with Ram Dass, you know, Ram Dass and I were together for 50 years, but the last 19, 20 years after the stroke were very powerful. He had a catastrophic stroke and he was in a wheelchair. His right side was paralyzed. He was a lefty, and he had diabetes problems, neuropathy. He had so much going on. I’m not even gonna go into it, and he couldn’t do anything for himself. Everything had to be done for him. By the last years, He couldn’t even turn himself in bed because he had torn rotator cuffs from falling and he couldn’t turn himself. So, someone had to turn him. But he overcame pride. He overcame anger. He overcame all these things, and he had to accept help from others, and he really conquered pride. This is a huge thing. And it was so beautiful to watch how he accepted help from others. And they wrote a book once early on called “How Can I Help?” And he used to say, “If I wrote that book now, I would write, ‘How Can You Help Me?’” So, he always had a sense of humor, even in the most intense situations. He went through so much pain and suffering and he never complained. Almost never. It was amazing to be around. If I stub my toe in the morning, the rest of the day is completely ruined. So, I’ve got a long way to go. “How to let the chant enter the heart?” First of all, let’s not pretend that we really know what the heart is. Okay? We might have some concept in our minds about what that heart is, but we don’t really know. What we do know is that through the repetition of the name, gradually but inevitably that presence within us, that heart, that essence within us is uncovered. We can’t really see it right now. Clearly. It’s always with us. It’s actually who we are. But right now, our awareness is totally involved with the sense input and the thoughts going, receiving information from what we say is the outside. So. we are not tuned in and aware of the heart, so to speak, in a deep way. So, it’s through the repetition of the name that happens, and of course other practices, but this we’re talking about this. You simply repeat the name, and when you notice that you have not been paying attention, you come back, actually. You’re repeating the name and then you’re thinking about something. You’re dreaming about something. And then, oh, you realize that you haven’t been paying attention. How did that moment happen? You were dreaming. You were gone or you were remembering something or you were planning something, and you’re sitting with a thousand people chanting and you are chanting, but you’re not even there. How did that moment happen that you, “oh”? I don’t know. That’s grace. That is your heart pulling you back. You didn’t make that happen. You didn’t wake yourself up when you were gone, when you were dreaming, when you were thinking about the girl next to you, or you were thinking about getting home to the old lady. Or thinking about going and smoking a cigarette afterwards, or going to a movie later that day. You were not here. You were lost, dreaming that stuff. How did it happen that you recognized that? And all of a sudden you were back. Your heart woke you up. Your true nature is awake all the time. And the more we come home to the sound of the name, the Name is the name of that place. So, we’re constantly evoking and invoking that presence and then we’re pulled away again and then, “Oh, okay.” It wasn’t your personal will that brought you back from dreamland. It was the seeds you planted in your heart, in your Being, through the repetition of the name, that brought you back. Because when you’re asleep, even at night, when you’re asleep, you don’t wake yourself up. You set an alarm. Your heart is that alarm that’s always going off, but we don’t hear it. More and more, the more practice we do, the more we get comfortable letting go and getting at ease with what that sense of letting go means. That’s when we hear that alarm, which is actually, which is  like, “Ah.” It’s, “Hi honey. Hi, sweetie pie. Welcome back. Love you. Okay. Here, have a banana. Okay.” “Is this my first time out of New York?” You betcha. 53 weeks at home except one week doing the audio book. It’s a trip. I’ll tell you. I can’t wait to get back home to close the door. “Hello. If faced with a significant decision or choice, but it does not seem clear which way to go, do you, me, have a full proof discernment process?” Yeah, I do. I do what I want. I do what I want to do. Sometimes it’s hard to know what you want to do, because you want to do 40 different things, but Maharajji’s last instruction to me when I was, when he was sending me back to America after two and a half years in India with him, I said, “Baba, what should I do in America?” I’d been wandering around India in a red dress, barefoot, stepping in cow poop, very happy, and now I was going back to New York. I didn’t think that was gonna fly in the city. I said, “How can I, what am I gonna do there? What am I do?” He said, “Do what you want.” Nobody in my life ever told me that. Certainly not the way he meant it. “Do what you want.” So, that put the onus on me to find out what I wanted. And I fought with terrible negative destructive stuff inside of me that wouldn’t even let me do what I really wanted to do, which was to sing to Him. I had a lot of really heavy, negative stuff that was just pushing me around for years and years, and in fact, I did not start singing to him this way until 21 years had passed after he left the body. 21 years. Am I stubborn? What do you think? Yeah, I was not a happy camper and I had to find what I wanted, because when you do something that you want to do, not because you’re told to do it. He never, he didn’t tell people what to do except “go away,” of course, you had to find your own thing, your own way. You had to find it yourself, and then it’s so much more powerful because you have listened to your heart and you’ve done what you felt you should do and want to do. If it works out, that’s good. If it doesn’t work out, there’s nobody to blame. You can’t be a victim. It’s your own stuff. So, for me to get to the point where I could actually sit down and sing with people, it took me 21 years, but I’m very grateful that I finally managed to do it. And every day, every time I sing it brings me home. It brings me back. It puts things into perspective. It’s practice every time. It’s different every time. Just hearing the name, repeating the name, not thinking about it, not anything. “Wow, this was really good.” “Oh, this was really bad.” The Name doesn’t care. And our job is to listen and hear the sound of the Name. And in this case, sing it. Okay. Just one more, maybe one. “I’ve lost all interest. I’ve lost interest in all the things I used to love. All I want to do is sit, listen to satsang or walk in nature. I have to force myself to do all the worldly things. I’m scared of what this means. What does this mean and what do I do?” Why do you think I know? However, since you asked, you think practice is one thing that it isn’t. The practice is what gives us the strength to treat other people the way we want to be treated. You don’t have to hide yourself from the world in order to do that, and in fact, the so-called world is very happy to show you how much work you have to do in order to become a good human being. What you’re talking about is, you’re attached to what you think you should be feeling and not feeling from so-called spiritual life. You think it’s all gonna be blissful. Well, let me tell you, good luck. It isn’t. Everything in your life is your karma. There’s nowhere you’re gonna go where this stuff is not gonna be. So, you’re making a dichotomy between what’s holy and what’s not holy, and your evaluative mind that’s screwing everything up for you. If you were meant to be in a cave, you’d already be there. So, calm yourself down. Stop judging other people. Stop judging the so-called world. There is no world out there. There’s only what you see, and your subjectivity is creating this problem for you. Nothing else. So, you wanna go away? Run away. It won’t work. Maybe it will. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s up to you to figure out what to do. I’m just sharing my experiences. Because I thought I would be a monk living in India for the rest of my life. Here I am, not in India and not a monk. So, we have all kinds of ideas about what we think we need to be in order to be something holy or good or something. It’s not like that. So, just calm down and listen very deeply to yourself, and then follow your heart. See where it takes you. That’s how you learn. Those 21 years I spent in inner darkness taught me a lot. Believe me. Taught me a tremendous amount. And do I regret it? Well,  if it was 20 years, that might have been better instead of 21, but it was what it was so there’s nothing to do about it now. So, I think that’s it. Next week, I hope I’ll be home. Take good care. Ram Ram.     The post Call and Response Podcast Special Edition | April 8, 2021 [https://krishnadas.com/podcasts/call-response/call-and-response-podcast-special-edition-april-8-2021/] appeared first on Krishna Das [https://krishnadas.com].

Call and Response Podcast Ep. 80 | He Knew Everything. There’s Only One Life

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