Call and Response with Krishna Das

Call and Response Ep. 64 Consciousness, Spiritual Names, Vipasana Q: When you sing other lineages’ Names like “Tara” or “Jesus on the Mainline” like how do you integrate that with all the other Names that you got from the Vedic tradition? “My parents were about as Jewish as the Pope. So, but still, I didn’t know much about Jesus and then I get to India and He looks at us and says, ‘Hanuman, Krishna and Christ are the same.’ Terrific. Who wants to hear that?  I’m in India. You know? But He started talking to us about Jesus and whoa, it was powerful. Really powerful. I have to say, it was more powerful than the way He spoke about Hanuman, Krishna and Ram.” – Krishna Das Q: Namaste. KD: Hi. Q: Hi. Yesterday you were saying that all the mantras are love. KD: All the what? Q: All the mantras are essentially love. KD: Yeah. Q: And today you were talking about how we get what we need. And I kind of have this theory that I’ve been running with that certain mantras just come to me and I’ve been thinking maybe it’s my Guru sending me what I need and I just wondered if that happened to you or what you kind of thought about that. KD: I never thought about it. But if that thought works for you and that helps you do your practice more sincerely and more completely, that’s a good thing. But ultimately, it’s another thought. Some thoughts are helpful because they help us let go and they help us enter more deeply into our self, and some thoughts aren’t helpful. Q: Hello. You spoke about the heart connection to consciousness. Could you touch a little more on that. Just, you said it’s not heart chakra but it’s a different connection? KD: No. Because I don’t know. I was repeating what I read that Ramana Maharshi said, who was one of the great saints that ever lived. So, whatever He said is cool. So, that’s what He said. He said there’s this consciousness is always present and there’s a spot in the body that we kind of, like a little… that fills up the body with the consciousness. When we leave the body, the body’s just inert. There’s no consciousness in the body itself. It’s just flesh and bone and blood and pus and all that stuff. Q: Could I ask you anything that you have taken from that for your life? KD: You could ask whatever. Ask. Q: From that insight that He gave you? KD: No. I mean, I don’t think about that stuff. I thought, “That’s true.” And that’s about as far as I went with it. Q: Thank you. KD: Ok. _________ Q: I have a question around, in certain moment you were given the name “Krishna Das.” KD: Yeah. Q: But you were born “Jeffrey.” KD: Yeah. So… Q: Sometimes I struggle with this thing about the spiritual Names. And I think to myself, “What happens when the spiritual Name is not just given, but you embody it.” Can you share a little bit about that? KD: It’s just more stuff to deal with. My real name was “Driver.” For a year, Maharajji called me “Driver” because He took Ram Das’s keys away to the van and He gave them to me. “Driver.” Then I was going to kill myself because He didn’t give me a Name. So, finally He gave me a Name. He said, “Arjun. Krishna. Nay. Krishna Das.” I said, “Krishna Das? I’m a Hanuman guy. What’s that stuff?” And He just laughed. He said, “Don’t worry. Hanuman served Krishna, too.”  It didn’t change me at all. It just gave me pride which was hard to get rid of. You want a Name? Q: No. And about singing other lineages, where you have sung, “Tara” or “Jesus on the Mainline…” When you sing other lineages’ Names like “Tara” or “Jesus on the Mainline” like how do you integrate that with all the other Names that you got from the vedic tradition? KD: I like it. I sing what I like. Right? What’s the big deal? If I don’t like it, I don’t sing it. A Name is a Name is a Name. Right? Different traditions, same God. Big deal. You know? Come on. Argue. Come on. Come on. What do you think? Q: No, I think it’s true. KD: You know, Maharajji talked to us about Jesus. Listen, I’m Jewish from Long Island. My parents were about as Jewish as the Pope. So, but still, I didn’t know much about Jesus and then I get to India and He looks at us and says, “Hanuman, Krishna and Christ are the same.” Terrific. Who wants to hear that?  I’m in India. You know? But He started talking to us about Jesus and whoa, it was powerful. Really powerful. I have to say, it was more powerful than the way He spoke about Hanuman, Krishna and Ram. For us, He Himself would just like, you could see how intense it was for Him to talk about Jesus. “He never died. He felt no pain on the cross. He loved everyone. He loved the people who nailed Him to the cross. He tried to die but He couldn’t. He became immortal.  Why? Because He never thought of Himself. Thoughts of “Me” never arose in that Being. Why would they arise? There’s only God in there. There’s no “Me” anymore.” So powerful and deep. Q: I like Jesus on the Mainline. KD: Yeah, there’s a lot of songs I like that I sing. Q: I was wondering if you’d ever practiced Vipasana meditation. KD: If I did Vipasana? Sure. I did five or six ten-day courses in a row in Bodhgaya in 1970-71. And I’ve done other, you know, since then I’ve done a few courses. Q: Were you already into kirtan chanting? KD: You know, somewhat. Not that much at the time. Not yet. That kind of started…when we started… not so much at that moment during those courses. I had just got to India and then after a couple of months, Maharajji sent us away and disappeared and then we went to Bodhgaya for a few months and then after that we found Him again. You know, the bus story? You know the story of the bus? You don’t know the story of the bus? So, we were all, it was a break between like, the fifth and the sixth ten-day course. There was like a day and a half between the courses and this guy arrived in a huge beautiful Mercedes bus that he had driven across from Europe to India. And he offered. He said, “Anybody who wants to go back to Delhi, I’ll give you a ride in the bus.” So, we were pretty much, me and the other folks… Ram Das had shown up and done a few of the courses and the other Westerners who had come to see Maharajji were there, so we had decided, it’s time to leave, let’s go find Maharajji. So, and Sharon was there and she still can tell you how she felt as she watched that bus drive away. Anywhow. So, we took off and we’re on the way to Delhi and one of the guys in the group said that he had been to the Mela in Allahabad. A Mela is a festival that happens every year in different places in India and it’s a gathering of pilgrims and spiritual aspirants and yogis and teachers and all those people. And there’s… one of the places it happens is in Allahabad at the Sangham where the Ganga, the Ganges and the Yamuna and the Heavenly River, the Saraswati, comes together. “Sangha” means “together.” Coming together. So, we were going to pass within a few miles of that on the way to Delhi, so it was a big discussion about whether we should just go right to Delhi, which was the Ram Das group, or whether we should go visit the Sangham and see what was going on there, sounds cool. That was my group and almost everybody else, other than Ram Das. Ram Das just wanted to get to Delhi and that was it. “We’re going to Delhi, we’re going to find Maharajji. That’s all we’re going to do.” But there was a lot of discussion about it, for hours. So, finally it was decided that we’ll just go. We’ll see it. Boom. Then we’ll turn around. Then we’ll head to Delhi so we could make it by nightfall. That was the idea. So, the bus pulls into this area where there had been maybe ten million people up until about two days before. Now, everybody was gone. There was hardly anybody there. Ten million, that was forty years ago. Now there’s 20 or 25 million at those festivals. They call them “Melas.” “Kumbh Mela.” “Ardh Mela.” “Magh Mela”. So, the bus pulls into this, the Mela grounds, which is absolutely deserted. Nobody. A dog. I remember there was a dog running across that thing. So, we pulled into this big vast place where there’s nobody. A vast field. So, the bus starts making this big turn, maybe this way and so Danny said, “Well, you know, there’s a Hanuman temple over there in the corner. Why don’t we go have darshan of the temple, see the temple, and then we’ll head back to Delhi.” Ok. So, the bus comes around this way and it’s at the edge of the field and there’s like a path at the edge of the field and the bus is going this way and who’s walking the other way? Maharajji. And He’s holding somebody’s hand and He’s walking and the bus passed Him and one guy just happened to see Him. And they said, “Wait, there’s Maharajji!” And the bus and we all went running off the bus and everybody’s weeping and crying and so then Maharajji said, “Ok, everybody get back on the bus and follow us.” He hops in a little rickshaw with Dada, this man with Him and this huge big silver Mercedes bus follows this little cycle rickshaw all through the streets of this little village and the rickshaw stops in front of a house and Maharajji and Dada go inside. We didn’t know Dada yet. They go inside and the bus stops and we get off the bus and we’re like, “What do we do now?” We’re looking around. And the woman comes out and says, “Come in. Come in. Come in and take your food.” And we said, “Food? There’s like 27 of us. What do you mean, food?” “Well, when Maharajji woke up this morning, He told us to prepare food for 27 people. That you would be coming later.” So, who decided that we should go see the Mela spot? We had… it seemed like we were making a decision, to us. There was a lot of discussion. There was anger and there was a lot of emotion, you know. Ram Das. “I want to find Maharajji. I want to get to Delhi.” I mean, it was intense. Then finally, “All right, all right, all right, we’ll just go by there and then we’ll take off.” We thought we did that. How could that… how did we do it if eight hours earlier He said to prepare food for 27 people? That was 26 people plus the driver. This was happening every day. All day. All right. That’s it. Thank you. The post Ep. 64 | Consciousness, Spiritual Names, Vipasana [https://www.krishnadas.com/podcasts/call-response/ep-64-consciousness-spiritual-names-vipasana/] appeared first on Krishna Das [https://www.krishnadas.com].

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 August 15 2020 “Maharajji said, “Repeat the name, whether you feel good, bad, whether you have devotion or not, whether you’re tired, whether you’re angry, keep repeating the name.” The Name will save you. It’s not your feelings that will save you. It’s the Name that will save you. There’s a big difference, and we don’t even know what that difference is because we are what we are, but Maharajji, when he was leaving the temple for the last time, he said, “I only know two things, ‘Ra’ and ‘Ma.’” Those two syllables can wipe the destiny from your forehead. This is what we’re talking about. You’re talking about becoming liberated from suffering, free of our ideas about who we think we are, finding out who and what we really are…” – Krishna Das Q: Hi. Hi. I have a question. The question is, I have heard Ram Dass a lot of times, and you spoke about karma, you know, most of your calls, and last time when I had a conversation with you, you said, “You have some karma with your sister and your mother,” and we spoke about your picture, with your mother’s picture on the past Chai and Chat. My sister and I had karma with my mother. That’s what I said. Yeah. So, I want to ask you, you said you want to clear this from your heart and everything, so how do we, is it like any family we are born in, we have karma with them? And if it is so, how do we clear this family karma from our heart? Everything that’s in this moment as a result of our karmas. Everything. This moment through the computer, that’s also a result of our karmas. It’s an effect of the causes that created this moment. So, parents are a very big thing. They imprint us with their stuff, which is also their karma stuff, and they provide us with a form, a physical form, an emotional form also, with which we go through our lives. Most people just accept that and don’t even think about it and then they just live their life the way they live their life, but if we’re on the spiritual path, it becomes obvious that our programming, so to speak, needs some tuning up, that there some fault in the code, in the programming code. We need to clean it up somehow, and that means we need to learn to accept it and love it. That’s the only way karma is released: when we no longer react negatively, so to speak, when we break, when our attachment, our identification with ourselves as a person or as a, as an ego that was programmed this way by that person. So, you know, it’s not as if our parents do anything to us, necessarily. They’re just being themselves, and we take everything personally and we develop a personality around that. Even if our parents have left the body, we’re still here, and we’re actually made up of their bodies and we’re still carrying their programming with us. So, if we want to be able to love everyone, that includes our parents and it includes ourself. So, but because our parents are so basic to the way we feel about ourselves, and our parents and our upbringing and all the things that happen to us, we need to forgive and release the negative responses and negative reactions that we have in our own heart about it all, and that takes a conscious effort. But like Maharajji said, through the repetition of the name, everything is achieved. Through the repetition of the name, you will have a deeper awareness of yourself. You won’t be so attached to your reactions. You won’t be so attached to your stories that you tell yourself about yourself, that you don’t like, or the stories you tell about yourself about other people, also. So, the whole answer to everything is to do as much practice as you can, without pushing it, without getting tense, and to recognize that practice is what enables us to find happiness, to touch the place within us that is already just fine the way it is, but that’s covered up by our emotionality and our programming. So, it’s through the practice, spiritual practice, that we move more deeply into our self, and that allows us to release the energy that’s tied up with those negative emotions. So, whatever practice you do, you don’t try to manipulate your feelings. You do the practice. “I have to forgive my mother. I have to do 10 million mantras.” It’s not going to work like that. You do your practice and you allow the practice to dissolve the inner turmoils and the inner attachments, and that, the practice gives us the strength to face things into different way and to move through our day in a different way, just by itself. We don’t have to help it. We are the problem. So, the practice dissolves the so-called “ego,” and reveals the beauty and the love that’s within us, but you don’t have to hold on to that because that’s who you are. So, it includes everything in your life and things that were there and that aren’t there now, like your parents may be gone or not, but it includes them too, because they’re inside of you. So, as you soften your heart and release the powerful attachments that we have, we become more loving, naturally, because that’s who we are, naturally. Sometimes, you have to work on it a little bit with a little direction, like, you know, you can bring your parents to your mind, and you can be in love with them, allow them into your heart. It might be hard for some people because they had very angry parents, damaged parents, hostile parents, violent parents, all kinds of things. So, it’s maybe difficult. So that’s why you don’t have to try too hard, but you have to manifest that love yourself and then include other people in it as best you can. And when you can’t, it’s not their problem. It’s your problem. It’s your issues, not their issues.  They’ve done their work already, whatever it was good, bad or indifferent. Now it’s up to us to see them as souls, like Ram Dass used to say, rather than “roles.” And that’s our work. When we see ourself as a soul, we’ll see everybody as soul. So, it’s all, it all works together. The work you do inside changes the way the outside appears to you. And that goes for anything, any part of life. It’s all the same. Last time, when I asked you a question about my sister you said, “You know, it’s your heart. Don’t try to rush towards her. Just love the part of you which is not able to connect to her and it will be fine.” And I have spoken to you twice before this call, and on both the calls, you said, “Okay, go check this book.” What book was that? The first book you said, about Ramana Maharashi, and the second book, you said about Shirdi Sai Baba and Naneshwar. So, I got those books and I want to thank you again because my sister, she’s a doctor. She was struggling to have, she wanted to have her own clinic for 13 years. Just me getting these books and reading a few pages of it she said, “Just come over at my place.” And I went there. I don’t know how it worked out now. She got her own place she’s owning, and she’s having her own clinic. It never happened in 13 years. It happened for the first time. Thank you so much for it, and is there any book you would suggest me to read to soften my heart more? I do Hanuman Chalisa and Stavan every morning and every night. I sing along with you. Good. Good. Read the book of your own heart. Okay? Okay. Thank you. Ram Ram. Ram Ram. Q: Hi. I’m from Mumbai. I also had a question about my parents. I read a lot of Meher Baba, and I have been following him for awile, but my parents don’t understand anything about this and they oppose it a lot. I have a few friends. When I’m with them, everything is very smooth because they are at the same conscious level and they understand what I’m doing and what they are trying to do, it goes like a hundred times faster when I’m with then.  But at home, when I’m around my parents, it’s even a hundred times more difficult to keep my sanity around them. I don’t know. I just wanted to know if there is something that I can do. There’s no shortcuts. There’s no way to speed anything up or slow anything down. You have to work on your own reactions by trying to calm your mind and calm your heart. It takes time and regular practice over time to become comfortable in yourself, regardless of what’s going on outside of you. It just takes time. This is not a game. This is real life. So, there’s no quick button to push to make it all okay. You have to commit yourself to wanting to grow and wanting to not be judgmental about other people and not be judgmental about yourself, but that’s not easy to do. So, one must start with calming the mind down. One should do some, could do some japa, some quiet breath meditation every day, just to get into the habit of letting go of everything and relaxing. That’s the main thing one can do. Yeah, I am. It’s ok. I don’t mind that they don’t understand it. But it’s just like, when I want to do something, even if I want to read his books or something, they don’t accept this and they start reacting in some ways, and start doing things… Don’t you know how to hide things from your parents? You have to be sneaky. They don’t have to know everything. And if they’re going to, you know, you can always have a discussion with them. “So why don’t you want me to do this? What’s the problem?” Ask them what they think. Include them in the process and then explain to them why it’s important to you. It’s called “communication.” I know it’s a very radical idea, talking to your parents. So, it may be hard. I know it’s sometimes very very difficult, but it’s good work because it also, you have to become sincere and you have to become confident in yourself and you can’t be defensive and judgmental and angry and all the things we are most of the time. So, it’s very useful to try to talk to them. Ultimately, you’re going to make your own mind up anyway. There’s really nothing they can do except yell and scream. So, if that’s what they want to do, fine. You let them do it. What can you do? They probably won’t stop feeding you and they probably won’t kick you out of the house, but you never know. But you have to express yourself and communicate, and don’t just hide, but you also don’t have to push anything on them. But if they bring it up and they say, “Why are you reading this stuff?” You say, “Because it brings me peace. It helps me be better in the world. It helps me feel better as a person. Why don’t you like it?” Not angry, like, “Why don’t you like it?!” But, “I don’t understand why you don’t like this.” So, but you know, Indian families. Oh my God. So that’s all, you know, but don’t push anything. If they’re just going to be reactive, then just try to be quiet about it and simple about it, and you know, they don’t have to know everything about what’s inside of you. But you can love them. They only love you. They’re only trying in their way to protect you and do the right thing for you. Their motivation is not to hurt you but to help you, but you may have your own ideas. You’re allowed to do that, although in Indian families  it is very difficult. But you do the best you can. That’s all you can do. Okay? All right. Good luck. Q: Namaste. Namaste. I started chanting some 10 years ago and my first draw was, I heard Hare Krishna on a Pandora station I had made, and I just kind of allowed myself to really listen to it and I discovered that it made me feel happy. I didn’t know why, but it’s just, “I like this. This is nice.” And soon after that I found you and I started chanting with you and I had a couple of heart opening experiences. Just, you know, suddenly I find myself crying and just for no real reason whatsoever, but I felt that was my kind of opening to Maharajji, so I appreciate that. My question is, to go back to feelings, especially during chanting, now I’ve heard you say quite often, and you said it again today, that no matter how you feel, whether you feel tired, whether you feel upset, whether you feel good, that you should continue your practice and chant every day, and I understand that and I appreciate that. But one thing is, for me, the feeling of, and I believe this is correct with what I’ve learned, is bhav, this feeling of devotion or a feeling of warmth in the heart. And I kind of connect with that. I’m not sure if this is what it is, but I connect to it, beause sometimes when I’m chanting and my mind takes me away somewhere and I come back to the chant and give myself to it, it feels kind of like the sun has come out from behind a cloud and it’s a kind of a warm feeling. It’s a centering feeling, and I tend to cultivate that or I kind of look for that feeling. I don’t push it and I don’t feel bad if it doesn’t happen, but that’s a feeling that I like to cultivate when I’m chanting, and sometimes when I’m out and about and I see other people, that same kind of feeling comes and then I can be more light and open and loving towards other people. So, my question is basically, what do you have to say about that? That kind of cultivation of bhav? It’s all good, but you don’t want to be holding onto it because it is not ultimate reality. It’s a nice feeling. It’s a good, positive feeling. It can come from lots of things, a release of tension, maybe, you know, it even makes you feel good. Letting go of some fear or something makes you feel good. When I talk about things that arise in chanting, and I say, I don’t mean to push them away and reject them, but not to be attached to them. If they’re there, they’re there. If they’re not there, they’re not there. That’s why Maharajji just said to keep chanting. It’s not important, what you feel, necessarily. It’s not unimportant, but it’s not the thing. Yes. It’s great to feel that loving, wonderful feeling. But what if you don’t feel that? Should you go kill yourself or just go back and go, “Okay. Maybe I’ll try tomorrow. I’ll go watch tv.” No, you’re trying to cultivate a deeper awareness. You’re trying to move more deeply into your being where feelings will come and go. All feelings. If you hang on to a pleasant feeling, that means you try to push away an unpleasant feeling. It’s the same mechanism. You like one thing. You don’t like another thing. Okay. You can enjoy that. And it’s a great thing. It’s so nice. You feel, “Ah, I’ve got it now. I’m in the right place.” What do you do when you don’t feel that? You can still repeat the name. That’s the point. Whether you feel it or you don’t feel it or you feel this or you don’t feel that, you keep repeating the name. Because if you can let go of something, not push away… This is a really big point and maybe it’s misunderstood. There’s no reason to push any feeling away, ultimately. It just means letting go of it and coming back to the name. And even when you come back to the name, the feeling might still be there but you’re not feeling it the same way. You’re not holding onto it. You’re not identified with it, which is essentially the direction that we need to be going. You like this because it makes you feel good. Who are you? You don’t know. So, through the repetition of the name, you will know, and it won’t have anything to do with what you think, the person you think you are who’s feeling that when it happens. So, it’s an evolutionary technique.  You just keep chanting and you might go through like, a desert feeling for a long time. You might have no positive feelings or pleasant feeling. So, you’ll try to manipulate your emotions and look at the right pictures and put the right incense and the right candles and the right music on, and even if you succeed in getting a little hit, it won’t last, but that’s okay. It’s not supposed to last. You’re not supposed to be able to get water from a stone. Water is water. Stones are stones. When you let a stone be a stone and water be water, you don’t get broken hands trying to squeeze it. So, accept what comes. But if you’re practicing, I mean, in the rest of the day, you might feel good, fine, but when you’re in those, the more concentrated moments of practice, you try to remember to remember the name and not be distracted by pleasant or unpleasant feelings. That doesn’t mean you push them away. You don’t have to push them away. They will not last by themselves. You simply come back to the name and be with the name as much as you can. This practice takes time and commitment and dedication. This is not a hobby. This is our lives. This is trying to get this life to a place where we become good human beings and care about not only ourselves, but other people. We’re not so obsessed with, “What am I feeling now? What am I feeling now? What have I got now? What don’t I have now?” Those kinds of thoughts have to go eventually. You can’t push that stuff away because it’s like trying to push a wave away. It doesn’t work. It crashes over you anyway. So why not allow it to, and then it dissipates. That’s what it means to stay with the name as something comes over you and, or as you finally realize you’ve been dreaming about something and the name comes back and brings you out of it again. So, it’s a practice. It’s a practice. It’s all good and enjoy the good feelings, but don’t try to push away the unhappy feelings. You’ll see the mechanism at work. Yeah. I don’t try to push away the negative and I definitely do like to feel good, but it’s not so much the feeling good. It feels kind of like a, it’s just like when you sit down to meditate, it’s helpful to take a few deep breaths and relax the body. I’ll try to remember that. That’s what I do. So, I take a few Ujjayi breaths and it really relaxes me and it kind of acts as a portal to the meditation, and that’s kind of how this feeling is. It’s not that I’m grabbing onto it and I want to feel it all the time, but when it’s there, it seems to act as a kind of portal to the heart and it tends to kind of open the heart and that’s what I’m kind of asking about. Is that cultivating that opening something to even attempt? Let’s put it this way. I don’t even know what you mean by “cultivating that opening.” You mean holding onto that feeling? What do you mean by cultivating? Deepening into it. Feeling it more. How? What do you mean? Get a shovel? Bang yourself over the head? I don’t understand. What are you talking about? I’m bringing my attention to it and you know, it helps to get into the chant more. No. You bring the attention to the name. Bringing attention to it is being obsessed by it, attached to it. Enjoy it. It’ll be there for awhile. It may go away. You stay with the name. That’s the practice, repetition of the name. Maharajji said, “Repeat the name, whether you feel good, bad, whether you have devotion or not, whether you’re tired, whether you’re angry, keep repeating the name.” The Name will save you. It’s not your feelings that will save you. It’s the name that will save you. There’s a big difference. And we don’t even know what that difference is because we are what we are, but Maharajji, when he was leaving the temple for the last time, he said, “I only know two things, Ra and Ma.” Those two syllables can wipe the destiny from your forehead. This is what we’re talking about. You’re talking about becoming liberated from suffering, free of our ideas about who we think we are, finding out who and what we really are, but on the other hand, that being said, work with what you’ve got. See what, you know, get into it. It’s an experiment. Life is, you know, what works and what doesn’t work? Only you know from the inside. And no matter what I say, it was still comes down to how you’re feeling when you’re doing these things and what you feel is going to be good for you. You have those feelings, so you’ve got to go with them, whatever they are and see what happens. That’s how you learn. So, the more aware you are, the more you’re paying attention, the more you can actually see where you’re clinging, where you’re not clinging. That’s why the default motion is back to the name. Anything else is something else. So, see what it is and see if it includes the name or whatever, you know. It’s your life. Live it. Good. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Ram Ram. Q: So, my first question is about Guru Bhakti. Guru Bhakti? You know, when the guru is working on you. So how to be as dumb as, you know, anyone could be, so as to, you know, receive the bliss, the grace and everything. When the Guru is working on you, it’s not up to you to do anything. The Guru is doing it all. He’s pulling all the strings of your puppet from way above. We can’t see that. We make up a whole story about our lives, but it has nothing to do with reality. Once the Guru takes your hand, he’s leading you all the time. It’s not up to you to even understand, just to follow the best you can, whatever you can do. I’ll read you something here, you know. This is from Ramana Maharshi, right? “What is guru Kripa? What is the grace of the Guru? How does it lead to self-realization?” Ramana Maharshi says, “The Guru is the Self.” Right away.  Forget about it being somebody else. Forget about it being somebody outside of you, telling you what to do. It’s your own true self, already. That’s the guru. That’s who and what the guru is. He’s not in a body. Even if you think it’s in somebody, some “body,” that’s not what the Guru knows. The Guru knows that he or she is you, your true self, not who you think you are. That’s your nonsense. So, that’s the main thing. “The Guru is both inside and outside. From the outside, He gives a push to the mind to turn it inward. From the inside, He pulls the mind towards the self and helps in quieting the mind. That is the grace of the guru. There is no difference between God, Guru and self.” Because we don’t know what our true self is. We only know our stories and our emotions and our thoughts. So, what we can try to do is try to turn within and move more deeply within to ourself and like Maharajji always said, “Through the repetition of the names, everything is accomplished.” What more do you want to know? The concept is quite… it’s the truth. It’s the absolute truth, but right now, the state I am, you know, the mind, it’s right now, you know, will start… Do some Japa and shut up! Yeah, I do. I do it every day. That’s why it comes. But that moment? No, no. When you’re doing, when you finally start to do some practice, that’s when you see what your mind always has been doing. It’s not like it got worse. You’re finally seeing the way things are. So, you have to just have patience and keep doing your practice regularly and over time, the thoughts will recede over time. But if you’re in a hurry, that’s just another thought, another feeling, another emotion. Let it go and come back to the name. This is the practice. There’s no shortcut. I don’t know, there’s just no shortcut. There’s no sense looking for one. It’s your life. Every moment of the day is your life. So do some practice, as much practice as you can without getting tight and weird about it. Like, “I’m doing so much practice,” or “I have to do more practice.” Whatever bullshit story you tell yourself, let it go and do some practice every day and be a good person. The rest of the day look at people, see people, give them space to be themselves, do the best you can to not cause suffering and not to hurt yourself or others and do your practice. That’s the way it goes. There’s nothing more to discuss about it. This is what that one time, when you know, asked Maharajji, you know, when he asked you, “Okay, Krishna Das, what do you want in life?” I’m still waiting. You kept yourself completely prepared. “I’ll give this answer.” You know, so times like these, you know, I just want to know that one moment when it all started, when you completely gave up and, you know, you got yourself surrendered, that one instance. I haven’t surrendered. What are you talking about? It hasn’t happened yet. I have not surrendered. I still think I’m me. I think I’m still just another schmuck on the street doing what I’m doing. There’s no difference. I’m not better or worse than anybody else. Surrender has not happened yet. And when I said to Maharajji, he says, “What do you want?” And I say, “I want Prema Bhakti,” which is the state of ecstatic devotional… He said, “Abhi Nai. Not now. Baadamen (later).” So, I’m waiting for Baadamen. Right now, it’s not so great, but it’s ok.  I’m waiting for Baadamen. It hasn’t happened yet. But it will happen. Only if you would know how many lives you have changed, you know? That’s for him to know, not for me to know. I’m just being me. I don’t know anything. So don’t be in a hurry. Don’t look for one moment. It’s not one moment. That moment happened 40 billion years ago when you were first a soul, and all this, many thousands and thousands and thousands of lifetimes working to get back to God. This is just another one. So, you do the best you can. Don’t be in a hurry. There’s nowhere to go. Why are you rushing? Guru is the Self.  Japa is the name of the self. That’s all you have to do. And treat people well. One last question. I just wanted to know if it, if I’m not entering your private space, I just want to know that, you know, what is the daily schedule like, you know? Like you have constantly the repetition of the name going on? I don’t have anything special going on. When I remember, I sing. When I remember, I repeat the name, but I don’t know how much that is. It’s not very much. Really, I’m nothing special, but by Maharajji’s grace, when I open my mouth, he sings. That’s all. That has nothing to do with me. That’s his grace. I can’t take credit for that, and yet at the same time, I can’t pretend it doesn’t happen, but I don’t have anything to do with it. I don’t know how to explain it to you. I can’t take it personally. It’s not because I’m so great. It’s actually probably because I’m so horrible that he was able to, his grace shows up. I’m not doing that. I’m just like you. I’m just another schmuck in the street, but he’s not. So, when that grace comes, we all feel it. I also feel it. So, the more I sing, the better it feels, but that’s his grace, not my grace. Right Hello. Q: Hi Krishna Das. How are you? Very good. So, I have a practical question. I just, I got this mala maybe a month ago, and it’s got this great little picture of Maharajji on it. Yeah, I see. I love it. I love it. My grandkids, they play with it all the time. I was raised Catholic, so I worked with the rosary when I was a kid up until I gave up Catholicism. Is there a certain way? I saw something where it said, “Don’t touch it with your pointer finger,” and then I saw the Dalai Lama touching it with his pointing finger and… Yeah. Well, in the conservative Hindu way, you never touch it with your pointer finger. You go like this. Do you wear it around your neck. Do you take it off when you do it? Yeah, you don’t, I don’t wear mine around my neck. I keep my Mala separate. I keep it by the puja. I don’t show it off to other people. It’s nobody’s business. I don’t really show it off, but I find it very comforting to just kind of have it. Then you wear it. Like this, at the edge of the fingers. See this? Oh, like the tips. Yeah. Like that. Oh man, I have arthritis. I think these beads… That’s good. So do it like the Dalai Lama, like this. Is that ok? Yes. And then they also said to go, somebody said, “Go all the way around.” That’s true. You go all the way around, up to the guru bead, and then you turn around and go all the way back, up to the guru bead, then you turn around and go all the way back. You don’t cross over the guru bead. I want to be going backwards by doing it wrong, but it seems like that the universe wouldn’t really care if it was well intentioned. Yeah, we’re already going backwards. When we do Japa, we’re going forwards. I find it very comforting to have pictures of Babaji all over the house. So, I’ll just be doing something in a bad mood, in a good mood, and I’ll see a picture and it’ll, that’s such a great way to remember. Well, the funny part is you think you’re remembering. Actually, he’s remembering you. Well, the funny thing is I came across the Be Here Now and I was in college in 1973. I never connected with Maharajji until a few years ago, even though he was in that book, and I know that’s part of the plan, but it cracks me up that he didn’t register on my radar. It was all about Ram Dass. That’s interesting that it took all of these years for me to look at his picture and think, “Wait a minute.” Yeah. Well, when I first met Ram Dass, I also felt it was Ram Dass, because there he is, right there. Right? But after about a year and a half of hanging out with him, it became clear that it was Maharajji coming through him. But then we’re talking about, who is Maharajji and who’s Ram Dass? You know, they’re both the same being, and you’re also that same being. So, it’s just a question of what we’re ready to see at any particular time. That’s all. The other thing is, when you see photographs of Maharajji and I screenshot a lot of them. I’d love to make a picture book. There’s so many pictures. Yeah. His eyes are often sort of obscured and blurry, and I’m wondering if that’s because of his realization, that you couldn’t capture the actual light in his eyes. No, actually he was always kinda like squinting like that, you know, because he was seeing this world, but he was also seeing many other worlds at the same time. So, he was always kind of like half here and half gone in some other world. Yeah. I wondered about that. Do you think if he looked at you with this full eye, he would like incinerate you if you weren’t ready? Well, actually, definitely. I mean, let’s put it this way: he was in full control of what everyone that he was connected to is experiencing, whether you were in front of him, whether you’re in another town or another country, maybe even another planet. I don’t know. But he was, he said, “I have the keys to the mind.” So, whatever you’re experiencing is where he wants you to be, what you’re experiencing. But that doesn’t mean you don’t do your practices. You do your practice, and you try to remember to remember. Well, one thing is awesome, and like you said, I just gave up, from you saying it. I just chant, it doesn’t matter what mood I’m in. And it’s interesting to see how the mood can color the chant, but just chant. Like my granddaughter said to me the other day, because I play in the car all the time, they don’t object. The adults, I don’t play it in front of adults, but she says, “Yati, why do you keep singing the same thing over and over? Don’t you get sick of it?” Well, the first time I sang in Los Angeles, I did a big thing in Los Angeles, it was part of an Indian concert, a bunch of Indian musicians, and they asked me to open the concert, and so I did, and the next day there was a review in the LA Times, and it said, “And the concert was opened by this guy, Krishna Das, who kind of looks like a dentist,” you know, “and he kept repeating the same stuff over and over again, you know, but it was okay.” And I thought, “This guy,” you know? Oh boy. Yeah, repetition is the key. It’s like preparing a landing pad on earth. That’s really true. What you’re saying is so true, and I’ve only been doing it for a couple years, and I look back at things that I reacted to in the ways, of course, you know, a million, million years, a million steps to go, but it has definitely over time, changing the way you react to the world. So, I can attest. Just like you said, you don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to be all, just do it. Right. Absolutely. You got it. Thank you so much. Ram Ram. Take care. Q: Hi. Hello. Hi. My mom is about to leave her body in a few days, and she’s been ill for about two months. It’s been pretty fast. We’re far away from each other. We’re in different countries, and I was trying with my family to get back to her, but it wasn’t happening. It seems very clear, even though it was not what I wanted. I wanted to sit with her physically. I wanted to be with her in this time, and to really just be present with her as she comes into the end of her life, in this body and into her death. And that’s what I really wanted, and it just, because of borders, and the virus, and deep family issues that are coming up where she is at home, it’s just not happened, and so I’m far away physically. We’ve been together virtually, and for the past four or five weeks had, have had this extraordinary connection happen, which I’m so grateful for because there was so much stuff that was getting in the way, and somehow, I’ve been able to be with her. We’ve been able to be together in a very close way from very far away, and it’s been really beautiful, and it feels very, just very precious and very sweet, and I’ve been able to read to her. We read Ram Dass’s, “Walking Each Other Home” together. I’m able to sing to her, and she’s never really been into chanting, but somehow even going through chemo, she wanted to hear it. She still wants to hear it. My daughter is a violinist. She plays for her every day. And so, we’ve had this really sweet, beautiful space, and she’s ready to leave her body, and there’s a real peace between us, and I am treasuring and it’s so lovely. There’s also been, she’s at her sister’s home and there’s a lot of really old stuff coming up with her sister and towards me, and it’s been a lot of, it’s been very, I feel like I’ve been in a fire in that way, and I’m doing my best to be really open because this doesn’t look like what I would have wanted, but to just be really open and trust that it’s what I need, and to trust that this is the best way forward, and to just be open to feeling all the things I don’t want to feel in that way, with her sister. And I trust that, but I guess, because my mom is so close to leaving her body, and because I’m so far away, and I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid of her death, I’m not afraid of that at all, but I’m afraid of being far away and experiencing it far away, and I guess I just, I’m looking for courage. What more can you ask for? You’re doing great. You know, these are times when everything comes up for people; your aunt’s fears and angers and everything. So, just focus on your mother and let everything else go. That’s good. You know, what more can you do? You’re doing good to stay in touch with her and staying close. Very beautiful. Very good. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You’re letting her know that you love her and that’s all she needs. That’s great. I feel some courage now. Thank you. Q: Hi. In my childhood, I mean, I’m from a Brahmin family, so they like, forced me to read Hanuman Chalisa, and I don’t know how, I just connected with Hanuman a lot more than other Gods. Not that they’re different, but I enjoyed more chanting the Hanuman Chalisa. And then during the undergrad, I was in Jaipur and one of my friends was visiting from elsewhere and he said, “Oh, you know, this guy, Krishna Das, he had this concert, and he played your song.” And for the first time, I listened to you. And we were smoking hookah at the time and doing all sorts of stuff that people do in undergrad, but this was so weird because you don’t do, like, you know, you don’t listen to, you know, the spiritual songs and bhajans and do like, hookahs, and you know, other sort of stuff. And around that time, I guess I disconnected a bit. I started practicing, also part of the reason, because my dad died around that time and I sort of lost all faith in God, and I was like, no, I tried to be atheist, but like, somehow, I was listening to you.  “Om Namah Shivaya” was the song, now I remember. All the time we were just playing that like, all of the time, but I was like, considering myself like to be an atheist and I’m not ever going back. I’d just lost all faith. Fast forward. I’m in the U.S., and I think in the beginning of this year, I guess I just tuned into, accidentally tuned into one of your workshops and just started listening, and this sadness and this, all sort of emotions that I felt in my heart, and I couldn’t stop. Like, I kept on listening to all the video and all the audio clips I could find you speaking and chanting, and at the time I didn’t know much about you. My friend told me, “Oh, there’s this white dude from Germany and he sings all these nice chants.” And now, I know, like, I guess you found me or Maharajji found me or, I know like more. I’m in much better shape. I’m much more peaceful now, thanks to you. I had never been so happy before in my life that I’ve been like, since the beginning of this year. What bothers me a lot is, a lot of my, a lot of my questions are already answered by you, and a lot of, many people have already asked those questions, but there’s one thing that is still, I cannot come to terms with is, I became non-vegetarian at some point, which is not allowed in my family, but I mean, my mom didn’t care about that. You became what? I’m sorry. Non-vegetarian. Non-vegetarian. Okay. Yeah. I tried to find out, I’m sure, sort of sure, there’s a connection between what you eat and how spiritual you are and all of those, but then I’m like, “Okay. My guru is going to love me anyways, like, however I am. So will this matter or not?” So, I have this ongoing, you know, sort of, I’m fighting myself to like, I don’t, I can’t use this excuse to keep doing that. Not that I’m, like, I am vegetarian from last couple of months now, but I still have this doubt. Like, how do you, you know, what do you think about it? Like what’s your personal approach or what can you say about this? I’ve been vegetarian since 1967. I used to be on the basketball team in college, and when I quit college, when I quit the team, I stopped getting free hamburgers. So, then I became vegetarian. Maharajji didn’t encourage, didn’t insist on anything. He only insisted on love. If you ask somebody else, you’ll get a different answer. Some people would say, “You must be vegetarian. How could you not do that? You’re harming other beings,” they say with great anger and great right righteousness that harms you. They don’t seem to mind that. So, it’s up to you. Whatever makes you happy. There is some type of connection between what you eat and your, the state of your mind. Some foods are rajasic. Some foods are tamasic, and if you want a calm mind, it helps to eat more sattvicly, but the way life is these days, it’s very complicated, very difficult. There’s so much stress. What Jesus said is also true. What comes out of a man’s mouth is more important than what goes in, so how you treat other people, how you’re with other people, is much more important than what you eat or don’t eat. That being said, for instance, you know, I heard a story. One time, way before I came to India, there was another westerner who came in the early, not the early sixties, but maybe mid-sixties. He came from England and he spent a lot of time with Maharajji, and one day, Maharajji said to him, “The state of mind you want to achieve, you can’t because you ate eggs in this life.” So that’s interesting, but that must be a very particular state that he was trying to reach. Right? I’ll take any state. I’ll take even, well, I might not take, nevermind. Somebody will get mad at me. I’ll take New York. That’s where I am, you know, but I’d rather take Uttaranchal, but I’m in New York. To some degree, it’s important, and in some degree, it’s not important. It’s really up to you and what makes sense in your life. Many Tibetans eat meat, because traditionally up in Tibet, they had no vegetables. Nothing grows up there. But now there’s a big movement among the Tibetans that they should become vegetarian now that these other things are available, and so many of them have, but on the other hand, there’s some people that say that meat is necessary for their health. You know, I don’t think it’s the most important thing in life, what you eat. I think is much more important what you do and how you treat other people and how you treat yourself. So, I don’t think it’s worth obsessing over, but if you are obsessing over it, that means you’re not comfortable with what you’re doing. So, maybe do something else for a while and see how that seems, how that feels to you. If you can’t forget it, then change it for a while and see how you feel. There’s no reason to be thinking about it all the time. It’s better to think about a million other things. So, but once again, “Ram naam karne se sab pura hojata hai. Bas ho gaya.” That’s what the main thing is. Right? Turn your mind to that as much as you can. Turn your heart to that as much as you can, and things, other things will change in your life. My daughter was not raised as a vegetarian. At that point, actually, in my life, I did eat fish, maybe even a little chicken for about a year in the eighties, and then I stopped, but my daughter looked at this piece of fish on her plate and said, “I can’t eat this.” And then she became vegetarian. She was eight years old. So, you know, it’s not the biggest problem, but on the other hand, you’re supporting a whole, the slaughtering of beings, which is… Jesus, that’s not… who wants to see that? You know, there’s this place when you drive across country in America, you drive through the Midwest and there’s these huge cattle farms where there’s hundreds of thousands of cows waiting to be slaughtered, and it’s like driving through a cloud, a dark cloud. It’s so intense. They know what they’re, they know they’re about to get slaughtered, and they there’s fear. There’s anguish. There’s anxiety. So, by eating meat, we’re, without even wanting to, we’re supporting that whole culture of slaughtering animals for our sake, when it’s really not necessary for our health. There’s many other ways to get protein. On the other hand, so, we’re killing vegetables. They’re beings too, but they’re not supposedly as high on the ladder. There’s a saying that says, “When you die, you get eaten by what you eat.”  By what you’ve eaten, you know. I don’t know, it’s not the biggest worry in the world. There’s a lot more things that we can do to help ourselves and help others without thinking about our diet all the time. Ram naam bhajan karo. The more practice you do, these problems and these questions have a way of dissolving on their own, and you wind up feeling a little bit more peaceful about things and at ease about things. Hanuman Chalisa? I do it more or less every day now. If you, I read this somewhere, if you allow your ego to dictate to you when you do practice and when you don’t do practice, how would that ego ever dissolve? You’re allowing yourself to be ruled by the very part of you that you would like to get over. Right? So, that’s why a little discipline is important. So, I would say if you feel, this is totally up to you, but if you feel like it and you take a vow to yourself, not to somebody else, that you will do Hanuman Chalisa every day, let’s say for 40 days, just make something up yourself, and then you use your will to allow yourself to do that, and that way you’re overcoming the vasanas of your mind, which are saying, “Okay, I feel like it, I don’t feel like it.” If we allow ourselves to be ruled by, “I feel like it, I don’t feel like it,” how will we ever get past that? You know what I mean? Okay. Thank you so much. All right. Good talking to you. Q: Hi, Krishna Das.  Do you remember last week when you were helping me figure out how not to look up the ex-boyfriend? Okay. I never looked him up. It was very helpful talking to you. I want to respond to the other caller who has a, like, he sees you as a guru. You’re explaining to him, you’re just another person. I don’t know that he really saw me as a guru. I wasn’t really responding to that. I mean, I think at this point, people are starting to listen to you, but I, you know, you’re very smart. The wisdom that you give out is very helpful. I mean, it helped me out and, but I think it’s, I wanted to respond to the viewer that also, your humanness and you’re so relatable, and it makes people want to listen to you more, because you’re saying that, and people just really identify with you. That’s all part of the program. I’m just sucking people in. I’m starting to get your secrets. Okay. But this is what I wanted to say, is that I actually, I’m an author of books, and I help women in different situations, in relationships, but one of them is to how to detach, and I have been struggling with that, which is why I turned to you because you helped me out when I listened, and I have women who’ve written to me and they’ve said I helped them from not committing suicide, and they look up to me now, like, I’m almost a little bit like a guru, but I’m in the same situation where I am openly sharing that I’m struggling with this very thing that I’m an expert on. I’m still a human being and things happen. The pandemic came and it put me in a vulnerable position. I couldn’t use my regular tools and I needed some extra help. I turned to you, and you gave me great wisdom, and then it completely helped, and so I added to my arsenal of tools to “not contact lyour ex-boyfriend.” Okay. But I guess I just wanted to share that. It’s, you know, you could be like a healer, but you could still be a human being. I just wanted to, I don’t know, put that out there. I’ve tried to be everything else, but failed. But you are really helpful. I just, that’s why people are starting to…. Like they need people to help them, and they get it. They start to… Everybody needs help. Everybody. We all need help. I need help. Everybody needs help. Satsang is very important. Satsang is the group, you know, those of us who are on the path and trying to find a good way to live, we all need help, and there’s nothing wrong with reaching out for help and advice and somebody who will commiserate, certainly. That’s easy. As far as being a guru, that’s because just people don’t understand what a guru really is. Guru is guru. Guru is someone is realized, who has become one with the universe, who’s just, it’s inconceivable for us here, in this world to, and I mean, in this world of our minds and emotions, we can’t imagine what it’s like to be free, really free, and free to be love, real love, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s something you can’t explain to anyone. I tripped and happened to fall into one of those beings, and that’s the only reason I have any clue about who and what a guru might be. So, I know for sure, I can say that, you know, even to say, “I’m not a guru,” sounds so weird, because it’s not even something, that’s like a ridiculous thing to even have to say, you know. We’re just human beings here on earth. We’re trying to do the best we can. Some of us are a little older than other people, either karmically wise or this body-wise, and so, we have experiences we can share, like you share your experience with people and help them. So, that doesn’t mean you know everything/ Definitely not. And so that, you know, and certainly, you know, I don’t know everything. I hardly know anything. So, I don’t even know what I don’t know. That’s how bad it is. I have to say though, that when I went into, when I met you the first time and I went and 2000-, it was 2014, turning it into 2015, that December, and I saw Ram Dass, and I remember the thing when you stand online at the very end and he blesses you. Yeah, the Mala Ceremony. And he’s staring and he was like, looking at me. I do have to say, because I’m not like, I’m not a big, I can’t explain it. Like, I don’t practice that. I wasn’t, I never even did that, so I was like completely new to it, but that was like this, it really was a surreal, out of ordinary spiritual experience, and I have to say that, not only that, but that year, that following year, like my whole life, I don’t mean, recovery life changed. I don’t mean it like that. I just mean all these wishes and desires came true in that one year, but of course, it didn’t last. I just mean, it was a little bit like, like super magical, I have to say. So, I didn’t know. I didn’t even want to go back. So, I said, “What if I go back and I look into his eyes again, and the next year is not like that?” I just wanted to leave it the way it was, you know? But, so I have to say, I mean, in a sense, like, I do think there’s something about him now. Yeah. Well, you know, he had a stroke in 1997. Was it? Or in 1999? 1997. And for all those years, he really had to step up his inner work, and he did, and he had to overcome pride, and he had to be helped to do everything. It’s so hard to accept help from people, and he needed care 24 hours a day, and it was really hard for him to accept that at first, but he did overcome pride, and he could let people help him, which he needed, and he just did, he just overcame so much stuff in those last 20 plus years, that by the time he was ready to leave the body he was shining like the sun. It was a beautiful thing, really beautiful. I always used to tease him. I’d say, “You’ve finally become who we thought you were 40 years ago.” He would laugh. You know, it was beautiful thing, how he ripened so sweet. What a beautiful thing. You know, Ram Dass used to be very nervous about what he was going to say when he would give a lecture, what he would say to people, and he was always afraid that it wouldn’t come, and what would he say. So, I said to him, “Look, you just go out in front of the group, and you say, ‘we will sit in silence until someone has something to say, and then see what happens.’” He hadn’t finished talking before there were like 40 hands up. It was so funny. He just looked at me. So, that’s okay. We could sit in silence. The most important thing is practice, is to remember to remember. That’s what practice means. It’s not like, “Practice, practice!” It’s to remember to remember, to remind oneself that one has to turn within in order to, in order to become less reactive to the stuff that happens every day in one’s life and inside one’s own head. So, it’s not going to happen unless we remember to remember, and that memory, the remembering gets deeper and we, that what we are trying to remember gradually comes more into focus, which is our own soul. It’s not somewhere else. You can’t find it out there. It’s within us. But on the way to get to that place, all our stuff is arrayed, preventing us from moving, coming back home to our own hearts. So, that’s, when the stuff becomes, you have to deal with it. If you see it, you have to deal with it. And it’s not so easy at all. A certain amount of courage is required, really. Maharajji, one time I was in Bombay with Maharajji, and he was at a devotees house, and we would spend all afternoon with him, and I would sit on the floor. He was on the bed, and he would sit this way. He would sit that way. He would lie down. He would stand up. Sit down and sit up, turn over. All of a sudden, he looked at me and he said, “Courage is a really big thing.” And there was an Indian devotee there. He said, “Oh, Baba, God takes care of his devotees.” Maharajji just looked at him, and he looked back at me, and He said, “Courage is a really big thing.” And I thought, “What’s going to happen?” You know? How old was I? I was 25 at that time. That was Christmas, 1972. If I had any idea what I was going to go through in the next, almost 50 years, I might have run to some other planet. I never would have agreed to go through this shit. But luckily, it wasn’t my choice. And sometimes it took lot of courage just to get out of bed in the morning. But here we are. Q: You said something so interesting. I have a couple pictures of Neem Karoli Baba, and he’s doing this with his head. He puts a few fingers on his head. It just makes me smile, just looking at that. The other participant asked you about having pictures, and you said, “You’re not looking at him, he’s looking at you.” And then, but when you said that, she kinda kept talking and could you just share, add some color, say anything more? It’s very mysterious and wonderful, and I’m intrigued. I remember one time we were sitting with him, and he looked at Parvati, and he said to her, “Why do you love me?” And she said, “I don’t know.” He said, “You love me because I love you.” So, who is saying that? Right? Who is, who’s saying, “You love me because I love you.” That’s love talking, itself. Love is first. We can’t remember love. We’re lost. When love remembers us, we feel it. And so, Maharajji said, “Once I take a hold of your hand, I never let go. Even when you let go of mine.” But because we think we are who we think we, we’re locked in that world. He’s not in that world. He knows what comes first, and God comes first. Love comes first. We’re lost. And when love remembers us, that’s when we know which way to turn. We automatically turn towards it. So, when you happen to gaze at his picture, you think, “Oh, now I’m thinking of him,” but that’s because he’s thinking of us. At least that’s my strange view of life. Very beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. You’re welcome. I remember once, a long time ago, this famous photographer wanted to take pictures of Ram Dass and the group. So, we all sat down in like a row, cross legged. We sat like this, because the guy said to us, “Okay, do what you normally do.” So, we just sat down, cross legged and closed our eyes, you know? And he was like, he took some pictures, then he said, “Well, what are you all thinking?” And everybody spontaneously broke out with their mantra, right? You know, like all 10 of us. “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram!” “Om Namah Shivaya!” And it was like, so funny. The guy just didn’t know what to think. I think he packed up his camera and ran away. I saw those pictures many years later, somewhere. That the guy’s name was Norman Seef, I think, something like that. Ram Ram. I remember, I went to Toronto for a 10 day Kala Chakra initiation with the Dalai Lama, and I’d been there for about two days, and Nina called me, I think it was, and she said Vanity Fair magazine wants to take pictures of you for their music issue. Once a year, they do this music issue. So, Vanity Fair wants to take pictures of you, and they want you to come back to New York like tomorrow. And I said, “I spent 4,000 lifetimes getting enough merit to be here with the Dalai Lama and they, and I’m supposed to go to New York for Vanity Fair? No way.” So, they couldn’t believe it. And so, they finally agreed. I’d be back like, in a week and they said they’d have their photographer call me. So, I get a call and it’s the assistant of this big photographer. “Oh, hello. So-and-so wants to speak to you. Would you hold the phone?” I said, “Yeah. Okay.” So, the guy gets on, I don’t remember his name. He gets on the phone, and he says, “Ah, yes. I’m thinking of shooting you. I know where you live and there’s a monastery near there. I’m thinking of putting you in robes and shooting you at the monastery.” And I said, “I don’t wear robes. I wear t-shirts.” And then he said to me, “Nobody ever questions what I want to do. What do you…” You know, and I said, “Well, okay you speak to me later or something.” I say, “I’m going away tomorrow. I’ll be back on after the weekend.” So, we were driving down to Yogaville, and the road we were on goes up like this, like a hill, and at the top of the hill you can get cell signal. Then you go down the hill and then there’s no signal, so you lose the call, and then you come up again. So, we’re driving along, and the photographer calls me again, and he said, “Nobody ever questions what I, how I want to dress them.” He said, “Even the Dalai Lama didn’t question how I wanted to dress him.” This is as we’re up on the top of the hill, and as we’re going over the hill, I said to him, “Did you ask him to wear a t-shirt?” And then we went down and lost the call and I never heard from him again, you know. And then, that wasn’t, they weren’t finished with me. So, then I left for England, and they sent a photographer over to the, we sang at the St. James Church, I think it was. Yeah, I think. I’m not sure. And there’s no real stage there. It’s just like a raised platform with steps. So, after the kirtan was over, the photographer and his assistants and his crew, they all come up front, and they put these candles on the steps in like a V-shape, getting closer and closer as they get to the top of the steps, and they had me sit on the top of the steps with my harmonium, and they took the shot from down below. It looked like I was a pimple on the ass of a cow or something. It was the funniest thing I ever saw. The candles were huge, getting smaller. And I was at the very top, like a tiny little pimple. It was hilarious. So, they couldn’t use that. It was no good. Vanity fair declined it. So, then I was in Germany by that time. So, the guy comes to Germany. He comes all the way to Germany and he finds me in this, way out in the country, doing this workshop in this place, and it’s haying season. They’re cutting the grass and I have hay fever like nobody’s business. So, I’m sneezing. My nose is bright red. I can’t stop. My eyes are dripping. So, the guy calls me, and I come out to meet him and he pulls the car into a field, and he opens his trunk, and he pulls out a blanket. Now this guy doesn’t know anything about anything. He said, “Yeah, so we’re going to go down to that where that Creek is, that stream is running. We’re going to go down there, and you’re going to sit on this rock and wrap yourself up in this blanket.” I just went, “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Okay. Let’s get this over with.” So, we go down across the road, down into this where the stream is, and there were a lot of clouds in the sky. It was going from cloudy to sunny, to cloudy, to sunny, like that. When it was sunny, it was great, but the minute the clouds came out, the mosquitoes would rise up, and they were about this big, and they would, they’d be circling me and they’d be dive bombing me while I’m trying to sit there for this photo, and then the sun would come out and they would disappear again. So, he took some photos, and they all looked like this, you know? And Vanity Fair didn’t use anything. All that shit. They must have spent $50,000 to get a photo of me and they never used it, and they wanted me to leave the Dalai Lama and take a photo. How crazy is that? This world is so weird. So weird. Q: I have a question about doing practice. Practicing, when it comes to removing myself from people, because I feel like I, it’s hard for me to be with people at times when I feel very ungrounded, and I feel like I would rather be separated and practicing instead of in front of them, cutting them apart in my mind, and judging them and condemning them and making them “other.” And it kind of feels like I don’t know what the most loving thing is to do. If I stay there, if I stay within a situation with people where I, from my own insecurities and cutting them apart in my mind and making them, as I said, making them “other,” and just judging all these things within. If I remove myself from the situation and I’m practicing alone, it doesn’t feel very loving to the people who are experiencing reactions. And I just wanted to know if you could speak to that. Well, sometimes you need to back away from people and get your shit together, and that can be useful, and there’s nothing wrong with, you know, listening to your heart and following what it’s, what you feel you need to do. But at some point, you will want to try to find out why you’re threatened by other people and why you have difficulty holding onto a sense of a confident, open, relaxed sense of yourself. So, this, these are your own issues, your psychological issues that, that you have already. So, as a temporary technique, you can remove yourself from people, but there’s no way to remove yourself from people forever. So, you can you remove yourself from people and calm down, and that’s good. I removed myself from people by hundreds and hundreds of miles when I was younger. I didn’t want to be around. I had taken a bunch of acid and by the 10th trip, I didn’t have skin left and I could feel everything around me. Everything. I could feel people and everything, and because I was so insecure in myself and had no confident shape, so to speak, I was very threatened by the interactions with people and other people’s minds. But mostly it was the way I saw it, not the way it really was, but it was my own fear that I was projecting out there and seeing in the world. And I did, you know, spend a lot of time alone. I got over it when I stopped doing acid. If you’re smoking dope and stuff like that, I would suggest you stop for a while, because that isn’t helping you. It’s making it worse. It makes you paranoid. It makes your mind anxious and makes your mind tumble ahead in all directions, and you have no, and you lose your center completely. But even so, I mean, that happened to me even without drugs, because I was just very, kind of neurotic, you know. I probably still am, some people would say. However, what you need is more love. Period. Where are you going to find it? That’s the problem. If you keep on trying to protect yourself, you’re never going to grow. And if you don’t protect yourself, you’re always going to feel threatened and you’re always going to be uptight. So, you have to calm down and you have to look at yourself and see what’s really going on. You know, “What’s going on? Why am I, what is this? Where does this come from?” You know? One of the things in my life was that my mother was a space invader. You know, she didn’t honor my borders, my boundaries. She just blasted through them. So, I always had, I had a terrible problem with establishing boundaries in my life, in between you and me. You know, I would feel I had no boundary and that I was at risk at all moments. You know? So, over time though, you know, in many years growing up and thinking about it and working on it in many ways, you know, that’s not the biggest issue anymore, but it might be an issue for you, and it would be good to address that, more or less directly as you can, because it’s not going to go away by itself. You’re not going to be able to drug it to death, you’re not going to be able to meditate it to death, and you’re not going to be able to avoid it. So, find a way to deal with it, and find a way to be kind to yourself. You know? Be kind to yourself. Why not? Why? Why be in fear? Why be harsh with yourself? Why be tense? Why hold yourself in? Be kind to yourself. Be kind to other people. Because it ain’t going to hurt you. The fear of being walked over and abused and betrayed, that’s a fear. It may or may not happen, but we have a fear of that happening. So, that keeps us very reactive inside, very on guard all the time. You know, there’s no one quick answer. You know, it’s your life. This is your life. This is your work. This is your path. Your path is your life. Don’t try to find a spiritual path over there, or over there, or behind a closed door. This is it. You’re it. You’re the path. Now, what do you want to do? So, it’s up to you. Find what works for you. If you’re fooling yourself, you’ll figure it out. Little by little things will loosen up, and the way we meet every moment, we’ll be much more at ease over time, much more open and relaxed, and we allow each moment to come to us without having to fit in a little mold that we can deal with. It’s the whole thing. So, practice. You know, ripen yourself through practice, little by little, and communicate with people, too. Don’t hide. Communicate. If there’s something going on, try to have the courage to deal with it, you know, with a person just like you. Everybody’s afraid, man. We’re all fucked up. Nobody more than anybody else. It just looks that way. So, share that. It’s not, it ain’t going to hurt you, and it might show you that there’s life out there somewhere. But yeah. So, all good. It takes time. It really does. It’s a ripening process. You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to make it happen. The seeds we ourselves have planted are continually ripening into this moment. So, let’s plant the seeds of what we would like to see in this moment, who we would like to be. You can be who you want to be. That’s the thing. You have a vision in yourself, of yourself, of who you really are, who you want to be, what it looks like to you. That’s who you are, and you can manifest that in the world. It takes some skill and some practice, but it’s certainly possible. And yeah, I wish you well. Q: Namaskar. She, my mother says, you’re so humble and you have so much humility. And even though you say you’re not a guru, but you are a guru, she thinks. You’re guru of the guru, I’m being told to say. And she’s just saying, you know, maybe the newcomers are going to be misled and not understand how evolved you actually are. I thank you. I appreciate your sentiments. But the problem is, I know who I am. She said she’s just watching out for the newcomers. She just wants to make sure. Yeah, those newc

Call and Response Ep. 63 Hanuman, How Chanting Heals Q: Can you tell us a story about Hanuman? Any story. “There are certain things that we need that, that Being that is Hanuman allows us to realize in our lives to get what we want. Why shouldn’t we have what we want? God is not your mother telling you, “You can’t have that.” That’s a program. We have desires based on our karmas and many of those desires are good for us to fulfill. Some of them are not. Hanuman boosts up the ones that are positive and removes the ones that are negative.” – Krishna Das Q: Can you tell us a story about Hanuman? Any story. KD: What’s that? Q: Tell us a story about Hanuman. Any story. KD: Well, stories you can read in books. For us, when we got to India, we noticed that Maharajji’s devotees considered to be Hanuman in the body. Considered Him to be a manifestation of Hanuman.  When we talk about these things, it’s very difficult to talk about these things correctly. And even Maharajji used to say, “They say Hanuman’s a monkey.” Hanuman is the flow of grace in the universe. It’s the flow of connection between the individual soul and the supreme soul. The nature of those two supposed things is not different. The Atma is not different than the Paramatma in its quality, except that it’s limited to an individual reflection. For instance, the moon is reflected in many different lakes and pools. It’s exactly the same moon. It’s exactly the same reflection. But it’s limited in some way. That’s the soul. The personal individual soul. And a lake is like a mirror. It reflects the light of the moon, which itself is a mirror reflecting the light of the sun. So, if that lake is covered with leaves and stuff, you can’t see any moon in the lake. Hanuman is what removes those leaves. That dirt on the mirror of the heart. It’s the flow of love, the flow of grace. Hanuman is considered to be the remover of obstacles, the destroyer of problems and suffering. And also, the bestower of the very things we need to get on with our lives. There’s a sloka in Sanskrit which I don’t remember, but it said, “Not only does Hanuman bestow liberation by uniting the Atma with the Paramatma or removing… and he does that by removing the dust on the mirror, not only does He do that, but He also makes it possible for us to satisfy the desires that we have that need to be satisfied.” We’re hungry people. We’re hungry beings. We need to eat. We need to sleep. We need to do a bunch of things. Which I won’t talk about here. And if we don’t do those things, we’re frustrated, and we don’t, our energy doesn’t flow. So, there are certain things that we need that, that Being that is Hanuman allows us to realize in our lives to get what we want. Why shouldn’t we have what we want? God is not your mother telling you, “You can’t have that.” That’s a program. We have desires based on our karmas and many of those desires are good for us to fulfill. Some of them are not. Hanuman boosts up the ones that are positive and removes the ones that are negative. That’s what they say. Here’s a story you won’t like. It’s from the Valmiki Ramayana. There’s many different versions of the story of Ram, which is called the Ramayana. So, in the Valmiki, which is the original, Seetha, Rama’s wife, was stolen by the demon Ravana. Seetha is the individual soul. Ram is the Supreme soul. Ravana is the ego. So, He steals the shakti. But He can’t mate with it, because He’s cursed. That if He tries to mate with a woman who doesn’t want Him, His heads will explode. He had ten heads. Every one of them will explode. So, He has to kind of seduce the soul into falling in love with Him, which is impossible. So, anyway, at some point in the story, Hanuman goes, all the monkeys go out to try to find Seetha and Hanuman jumps over the ocean and He gets to Ravana’s kingdom and He’s cruising around looking for Seetha. And one of the places He winds up looking is in Ravana, the Demon’s harem. He had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women there. So, Hanuman has to go look. So, He’s going, looking around, and He’s seeing all these women asleep at night, you know, naked and drunk and everything and Ravana’s lying there and He’s looking around and all of a sudden, He flips out and He says, “Oh, my God. This is sin. I’ve sinned. I’ve been looking at these women like this. How could I do that? This is terrible. What am I going to do?” And He really starts to completely flip out. And then, He says, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m not doing this out of any kind of lust or anything. I’m trying to serve Ram by finding Seetha. So, there’s no way there’s any bad karma for this.” And He chills Himself out. He had to talk Himself down. Just like us. You know, like, you get stuck in something and you think, oh, this is terrible. You have to talk yourself down sometimes. You have to say, “Ok, would you chill out please. Hello. Are you in there? Listen to me. It’s ok.” So, That was interesting, the first time I read that. Because I, in different versions of the Ramayana, that doubt that Hanuman had temporarily would never be written about. So, it was very cool. I’ll think of something else. Hold on. After finding Seetha, Hanuman comes back and all the monkeys go to see Ram and tell Him the good news. And the king of monkeys tells Rama, “Oh Lord, it was Hanuman who jumped over the ocean and found Seetha and now has come back to tell us.” So, Ram reaches down and He embraces Hanuman. He tries to lift Him up, but Hanuman was so absorbed in love that wouldn’t, couldn’t rise. And Ram says, “The debt I owe to you, I can never repay.” And Hanuman says, “Just let me remain ever your servant and ever to serve the love that You are.” There’s a beautiful, beautiful song that, in Hindi they’re called bhajans, and the line that’s repeated over and over, and it tells the story of when the war’s over and the demons are killed and Seetha’s freed and everybody comes back to the kingdom, Ayodhya and Bharat, who is Ram’s brother, who has been taking care of the kingdom while Ram has been away, He comes out to meet Him and He sees this monkey and He says, “Oh, Lord, what’s this monkey doing here?” And then Ram says, “Oh, Brother Bharat, we can never repay the debt we owe to this monkey.” And each verse describes one of the things that Hanuman did, and again, it ends with the phrase, “Oh, Brother Bharat, we can never repay the debt owe owe to this monkey.” “He jumped across the ocean. He killed the demons. He found Seetha. And not once, not for one second, did pride arise in His mind. Not for one second did He think, ‘I am doing this.’” He was living in the Reality that God is the doer. We live in the Reality that we are the doers. Good luck. Hanuman was not fooled by the ego. He had transcended all of that. And so, He never thought, “I’m doing this. Look what I’ve done.” He jumped over the ocean. He did all these things and not for one second did He ever think that He was the doer. He saw Reality, which is that everything is done within that universal Presence which is God. And one of the last lines of the song, which was written by Tulsidas, He says, Tulsidas says, “I’m telling you this story in the very words that came from the Lord’s mouth. In the very words that Ram spoke. This is what I’m telling you.” It’s just a beautiful bhajan. When I first read the Tulsidas Ramayana, which is the devotional telling of the story, it completely rewired my brain. We are wired for romantic love, for physical love, for love between two people. But when you read these books, you enter into a different field of Being. You enter into a different type of love, a love that is not personal. It’s universal. It’s everywhere all the time. It’s not self-centered. It’s not about “me.” And it’s not about, it transcends that “me-ness.” It blows it out of the fucking sky. It just destroys that separateness. It’s a different kind of love.  Maybe it’s the same love but not limited just like the reflection of the moon is limited by a lake or a pool. It’s the whole thing and we come into contact with that through these stories and when I read Tulsidas Ramayana, which is called the Ramacharitamanasa, the Lake of the Stories of Ram, and every chapter is a descent deeper into that lake. It rewired me. I had no idea that this existed like this. And it was mind-blowing. And then I went to India where everybody I met lived in that world, or so many of the people I met. It was amazing. That lives within us once again as what’s really in there already. And when we look for love in our daily lives, we’re really looking for that. But it’s the looking that counts. It’s the seeking that counts. So, somebody was asking about something. One of the things that Siddhi Ma said to me, I said to Her, “Ma, is it all grace? Or is it personal effort?” This is a big thing. They write millions of books about this. I was saying, you know, “If it’s already done, then what do I have to do? I just have to be here, right? I don’t have to do anything. Or, do I have to really make it happen?” She said, “It’s all grace. But you have to act like it isn’t.” That’s so great. It is a done deal. We are in time. So, there’s now, then there’s later, then there’s later. We’re into this, we’re into that. If time, if we were now living in the now, which, it’s always “now” if you think about it. When is it now? It’s now. Tomorrow, if you ask the same question, it’s now. It’s always now. But we live in a different level where time passes. On that level, we have to do practice. On the other level, nothing to do, you know, where’d it go. But we’re not living on that level. We’re living within that level, but we don’t experience that. We still suffer. We still don’t have what we want. So, that’s why we have to do some practice. It’s all grace. It’s raining everywhere. Suzuki Roshi said, “Come walk with me in the rain, but don’t rush. Don’t hurry. It’s raining everywhere.” And if we want to catch some of those raindrops, we have to cup our hands. That’s practice. You don’t cup, you don’t get anything to drink. The changes happen off the radar. We don’t notice. Just naturally you’re drawn to different things and you’re not drawn to other things. Places you used to go, things you used to do… the interest drops. You don’t notice that. But little by little, you wind up living in negativity less of the time. You spend less and less time in negative states of mind. But how could you notice that? Because it’s not like… it’s the “you”, the part of you that’s negative that’s not there, you don’t notice that, but as time goes on, you can look back and you can see a little bit, “Well, you know, my life isn’t as tortured as it was. I don’t spend so much time moping around.” It’s a really big thing. Q: Hi KD: Hi Q: How does chanting heal like, the deep trauma, PTSD, stuff, like generational, all that, that you were talking about? KD: All that stuff, you could say is dust on the mirror of the heart. When you look and when you look out at the world, what you see is your version of that world. Certain things are scary. Certain things aren’t. Certain things are attractive. Certain things aren’t. Etcetera. You’re like, “This is good. This is bad. This is tasty. This is not. This is ugly. This is beautiful.” We’re seeing our version of everything. As we practice, as we do, as we chant, for instance, the knee-jerk reaction that glues us to our feelings and thoughts has loosened up, little by little. And I say, “knee-jerk,” because you don’t get a vote. You just, we see it the way we see it. And that’s it. We’re in it. So, as time goes on… for instance, it’s as if you were born with… let’s say you’re born at night, ok? And it’s like, a night that lasts for 30 years. So, you’re born and you grow up in the dark, and everything is kind of murky and not distinct and you see things and you just assume that’s the way it is, right? Why wouldn’t you? Right? That’s the way you were born. That’s the way things are. But then, all of a sudden, the sun starts to rise. And just a little light comes into the sky and things look different. And the sun keeps rising and things look different. Trees that looked like scary demons just look like trees. Things change. That’s how practice changes things from the inside out. What we actually see, think and feel starts to change. Our subjective version is thinned out little by little. Of course, we come up sometimes against some big boulders of stuff and that may take more techniques to lighten them up, to loosen that glue up. So, anything we do in therapy, counts, like practice, anything that we do that loosens up the tightness of the way we see everything and believe everything we see. You have no doubt. I have no doubt that when I look around, this is the world. This is my world. Right? I look at you and I see your hair. I see the way you hold your head. I see the tenor of your voice. I get a lot of information from that, but I interpret that information. That’s who she is. She’s a person that… blah blah blah. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you think. But I’m stupid enough to think that I know who you are. Just because I see you a particular way.  And we all do that. It’s not stupid. It’s just the way we are. So, through practice, we become more receptive to information in a way and not so evaluative about everything, immediately. And so, and I’m talking about, so-called internal emotions, too. Like trauma and things like that. Damage. Same. Because that’s not, that’s also outside of our true nature, so to speak. It’s within our true nature, but it’s, it’s a thing, it’s a program. So, everything you do, every time you plant a seed of letting go or of coming back, that strengthens your inner heart and it loosens up the hold that those programs have over us. How’s that? Q: Thank you. KD: Ok. And it may be that as you develop, as you mature, as you ripen, you’re able to deal with that trauma differently. It’s not like it’ll just go away, you know? But all of a sudden, not all of a sudden, but little by little, you’re able to work with it in a different way. You’re not so threatened by it. You’re not so hurt by it immediately. So, you have a little more space in there where you can allow that to kind of rise up and then hopefully just vaporize as time goes on. But we need all the help we can get. That much is for sure. The post Ep. 63 | Hanuman, How Chanting Heals [https://www.krishnadas.com/podcasts/call-response/ep-63-hanuman-how-chanting-heals/] appeared first on Krishna Das [https://www.krishnadas.com].

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 August 1 2020 “One must try to get what one needs in life. One can not refuse to enter the fight because by doing that, you’ve given up. And if you think you can find God or find real love or be liberated without going through the battle, you’re dreaming. It’s only through getting into the fight, getting into the battle, the battle to be real and be present regardless of what’s going on in the emotional or outside world. That’s the battle, and if we don’t get involved in the battle, we will not be able to ever find any peace of mind or find any real love. We have to get in there and fight so we can see what our issues are.” – Krishna Das Q: My question is, I was doing one of your courses from your website, and I saw a story where Maharajji asked you to perform puja of your mother when she was at the airport going back home. Yeah. I have a mother and an elder sister. I have a hard time connecting to them. Whatever you did, whatever Maharajji asked you to do with your mom at the airport, how did at affect your relationship with your mother? Whatever it was, it wasn’t instant, really. My mother and I had a, we had a difficult relationship, mostly, until towards the end of her life. Then we got much closer. He brought her to India in order to purify the karmas between us and to help her, of course, but to also help me. And the puja in the airport was interesting, because many years later there, it was in the middle of the airport… in those days, It was just like an airport hangar in Delhi. At the airport in Delhi in ‘72 was like a cow shed. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes there are flying cows also. So, there I was. She gave the camera, her camera to somebody and I, he told me I had to get down on my knees. He told me I had to get down on my knees. So, I did the arati with the lamp and I said a couple of mantras, and when I look at the picture that was taken at that moment, the look on her face was so extraordinary. I tell you, she looked like the goddess Durga. The love that was coming from her at that moment, when she was looking at me there, she never looked like that. That was the only moment in her life that she looked like that. It was amazing. He had really done a lot for her, really helped her a lot. Although, she had been, she was an alcoholic and she had, at that particular time I don’t think, yeah, she had been through a round or two already of rehab at that point. And then even after she went back, once again, she still had a hard time, went through another rehab, and then finally the last 20 years of her life or more, she was not drinking. So, he really, I believe that was by his grace because there was some kind of karmic black hole in her soul, which I have had, the same thing, have the same thing. And he saved her and then he saved me also from addiction. But as far as my relationship, it was very difficult. So, what can you do? You don’t have to sit down in front of your mother, kneel down and do puja, but you do have to look inside of yourself and start to release all the negativity around your relationship with her. You know, in Buddhism, they make a really big point of recognizing that your mother is the most important being in your life, because our mothers carried us for nine months in their own bodies. We’re made up mostly of her body and a little bit of our father’s one night stand or whatever, but the father has very little role after just at that first moment. The mother supports us. We live off of her. She feeds us inside of herself, and if we’re here today, if we’re still alive at this moment, it’s only because our mother made that possible. No matter what else she did to us; crushed us emotionally, manipulated us, screwed us up, made relationships impossible, or difficult, whatever else our relationship with our parents has done to us, we are only in a human body because of them. And we don’t even think about that. You know why? Because we don’t even treasure the human body. We think, “Ah, who gives a shit. Okay. I’ll be dead in a few years. It makes no fucking difference.” That is not the case. It is said that the human body is so hard to come by. You know what they say? They say, “Imagine the huge ocean.” Okay? “And imagine at the bottom of this ocean, there’s a turtle that comes up to the top once every million years.” Okay? “At some point in the ocean, somewhere in the ocean, and then imagine there’s a bird flying across the ocean, anywhere in the ocean and it’s holding a handkerchief or a piece of clock in its beak that’s just hanging down,” Right? “Now, how often do you think that cloth will touch the shell of the turtle when it comes up for a minute or a second every million years?” That’s how hard it is to get a human body. That’s what they say, the people who know, and Shankaracharya, who was the nondual advaita guru was also an incredible devotee and an incredible bhakta, and he wrote incredible devotional songs, and one of his hymns is called the “Devya Aparadha Kshamapana Stotram,” begging the goddess for forgiveness, and in it, he keeps saying, “O Mother,In this world, a bad child may be born, but there can’t be a bad mother… but never a bad mother.” Just the fact that we got a body, that we’re alive and we were taken care enough to still be alive, no matter how fucked up we are, that’s an amazing thing. So, once we get through those dark clouds of emotional stuff that we have, the reality is this, what I’m saying. It’s very hard. It’s very hard. And the other thing that they say is that we’ve all been everything to each other. We’ve been mother, brother, sister, enemy, friend, lover, king, servant. All of us, everybody on the planet, everybody in the universe has been in every different relationship to everybody else over the millions of lifetimes that we’ve had. So, the mother relationship is really a big one. So, you don’t have to be in front of your mother, because fortunately or unfortunately, we carry that within us. And so, we can try to release that negativity and try to give some gratitude and thankfulness just for the fact that we have a body in the first place. The problem is, that these days, very few of us really understand or experience deeply what this body is, can do, what we can do in this body, so to speak. The body’s just a piece of meat, but our soul is sitting in it, and through this body and with the help of this body and this situation, we can actually liberate ourselves from suffering and actually help other people liberate themselves. But we have to deal with our shit. If you don’t deal with your shit, your shit deals with you. So, when you were speaking, I don’t know,  I was fine.  Today’s day was a nice day. As you said all these things, I am feeling very much a void in my heart. And the reason I asked you this question in first place was this, my sister right now, she’s struggling with her career. My mother she’s struggling with her mental and physical sickness. I don’t, I’m not capable enough to help them. Why not? You can’t wash the floor? You can’t make chai? If you can’t make chai, you’re not Indian, don’t lie to me. I can make. I just had one. I have Maharajji’s cup. You can help. It’s just hard because you don’t feel loved or accepted by them and it’s painful for you. So, all I’m saying is, you should sit with this whole situation. Don’t try to do anything right away. Just try to see the whole situation and see your feelings, relive the histories that, everything that happened. See, you have to see yourself. See what’s going on inside of you, and then when you feel this negative feeling or this hard place inside, just slowly let it soften. That’s all. You have to do this yourself. Nobody can do it for you. So, if you don’t do it, it doesn’t happen. That’s your choice. Can I try that prayer that you said? Of Adi Shankaracharya? You can, but you know, that’s just more bullshit right now. The prayer ain’t going to help you right now. Yes. You can certainly try. Look it up and you can read it and try to understand what he’s saying, though. Don’t just… don’t repeat the mantra mechanically. That’s not going to help you, but yes, definitely, look into that prayer. Keep reading it, understanding what it’s saying. Read it again and again and again and try to soften your heart. No technique is going to guarantee that you soften your heart. You have to want to, and that’s hard, because there’s probably anger, there is probably sadness, all these emotions. When we’re hurt, underneath the hurt is anger. If we’re hurt and sad, many times underneath that, there’s a lot of anger, unprocessed emotions, you know? So, you have to let them go. Just breathe quietly, slowly, gently, and just let yourself feel the whole atmosphere inside of you, and just let it release little by little, and then you’ll go, “Okay. Let’s do it again.” That’s practice. That’s what practice is. Letting go. So, there’s no inside or outside either. Your mother is not outside of you. She’s inside of you, also.  God is not outside of you, inside of you also. So, if you can’t release this stuff, how will you find real happiness, which is what God is? Real love, right? So, it’s all good. The fact that you’re asking and involved is a great thing. You don’t realize, look around you. How many people give a shit about this? Most people just go on, they spend their whole lives in reaction mode and creating more bullshit and creating more negativity in their lives. You’re looking to find a way to be free.  That’s fantastic. Give yourself some credit for that. That’s a really big thing. You don’t understand what a big thing that is. Most people pay no attention to this stuff. 99.9% of people on the planet, and many of them can’t. Even if they want to, they can’t. Because they’re homeless, they’re running from one government, kicking them out, they’re doing this, they’re running from bombs, they’re starving to death. Your karma has you in a fairly good place where you can at least look at the stuff inside of you and do some practice to get to know the Dharma. And that’s a great thing. That’s a result of your own work on yourself in the past. You want to be free because you know what freedom is already. So, now you just have to get with the program. Q: From my childhood, I was practicing a lot of yoga, basically different courses, anything. Whatever, I was just, over two years, I was just reading and practicing.  You know, I was a book yogi.  But the last two or three years, then I realized something is not working. So, after, maybe after this lockdown had started, I started listening to you more. But I think, one and a half months back, something happened and one day just, I was listening to your chants, I just burst into tears. Something happened that was missing. Now, my question is, should I continue doing my other yoga practices or do chanting? Also with devotion, I’m not sure, because sometimes I feel, I just realized this, when Krishna says, “Just leave everything, come to me,” that is, I think, devotion. Yeah. Sri Krishna says that at the end of the Bhagavad Gita. You have to go through the first 18 chapters to get to that, which means you have to live your whole life, a million lifetimes, to get to the place where you can actually surrender, or rather with surrender actually happens. We don’t surrender. The ego just will  never give up, but by grace eventually it’s released. We have such vasanas in our mind, such tendencies. It is very hard to overcome those tendencies, and you have, we all have our own version of that stuff. It doesn’t matter what practice you do. It will become mechanical sooner or later, because that’s what you do to it. So, whatever practice you do, you’re supposed to let go and come back to the practice. Whether you’re doing kriya, asana, pranayama, japa, kirtan, your only job is to let go of whatever feeling you have, whatever thoughts you have, whatever imagining you have, whatever memories, whatever fantasies, and come back to the practice. Bring yourself back again and again. That’s the only thing that will gradually release you, release us from the tendencies, the vasanas in our mind. So, you’re not doing anything wrong, but you’re just, the vasanas are still keeping you pointed towards them, in a sense. And you say, “Well, I’m greedy. Maybe this is…” This is all nonsensical stuff that we keep ourselves busy with all the time. So, when you see it, all you have to do is let go. You don’t have to understand. There’s nothing to understand. The illusion is that, “I have to understand this. What is this?” No, all you have to do is let it go. And that’s not so easy, which is why we do a practice. Then we have something to come back to when we let go. If we don’t have anything to come back to, how do we let go? Right? So, everything’s working fine. You have this, you’re in a hurry. That’s your vasanas of your mind. That’s your, the way you think about your things and yourself. That will change over time through practice. But one must do practice regularly, whatever practice it is, and one should try to do it wholeheartedly. But even that is difficult because of the way you think and the way you feel. You can’t do it wholeheartedly. So, what do you do? You notice that, then you beat yourself up, then you notice that, then you come back. Don’t forget to beat yourself up a little bit. I want you to be comfortable. So, it’s all okay. You just keep going. That’s all. Maharajji used to say, “Go on repeating the name, whether you’re having any kind of devotional feelings, whether you’re tired with your angry, it doesn’t matter. Just keep repeating the name and sooner or later, the real Ram will come.” So, this is a very deep philosophical statement that only Maharajji could say like that, like a simple little thing. It’s the whole path right there. It doesn’t matter what you think. It doesn’t matter what you feel. Who gives a shit? Nobody except you. And if you didn’t give a shit, where would you find anybody in the world to care what you’re thinking about? Right? That’s how flimsy it is. So, just keep coming back, keep letting, go. Keep coming back, keep letting go. That’s all. Don’t take yourself so goddamn seriously. But you can’t help it. We can’t help it because we’ve been brought up that way. Everybody we meet does it. It seems reasonable. I have to think about myself, don’t I? I don’t know. Maybe? So, don’t worry. You’ll be able to walk on the right side of the street eventually and wear a mask and do the right things. But while you’re doing your practice, your only job is to let go. See what’s there. Maybe it’s a blissful feeling. Very nice. Be with it. Don’t get trapped in it. Just be with it. And then when it disappears, which it will, don’t feel bad. That’s another feeling. And then it comes back. Then you feel good, then it goes away, you feel bad, then it comes back. Keep letting go. That trains the mind to just release more quickly and more gracefully. Then everything you do is planting seeds. Every breath, every thought every action is a karma that gets created by us. So, what do we want to create? More stuff or the letting go of stuff and coming back to our true self? So, when we do practice, we’re planting those kinds of seeds and one should try to do some regular practice. Even if it’s two minutes. Some people say, “I have no time. I can’t do it.” And they actually believe that, when really, they’ve wasted 23 hours of the day. Anyhow, they can always do a little practice, but it’s our expectations that torture us. So, let go. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the next instant, the next second. Nobody does. So, let’s be here now, again and again and again, and plant the seeds of devotion of wholeheartedness of sincerity, plant the seeds of kindness and compassion and caring, and notice how much you think about yourself. Really? Is it that interesting? You have to keep thinking the same shit over and over again? No, it’s not. And if you didn’t think those things, where would they be in the universe? Nowhere. So let them go, again and again. It’s all good. We’re in such a hurry and there’s no reason to be in a hurry. There’s too many stoplights. You have to stop anyway. And again and again and again. So, just take your time. Be at ease. Be grateful for what  you have. Be happy for what you have and still do the practice that you need to do to free yourself more and to feel better about yourself. There isn’t some feeling outside of you or some God outside of you that all of a sudden is going to push the button and make everything okay. It doesn’t work like that. You are the button, and when you come home to yourself again and again, you’re in exactly the right place. So just keep doing your practices, whatever you do. It doesn’t matter, but whatever you do, do it with wholeheartedness and sincerity as best you can. Q: Good to see you. Last time we talked, I think was in May. Since that time, I think at that time I was upset because my younger grandson who just turned 13 had been institutionalized by his father, and I was really upset. The truth of the matter is he’s still there six months later. At least, you know, I can talk to him now via Zoom. But then my older grandson, the reason he staying with me, he just turned 14. His father, he’s currently living with his father and his father’s girlfriend and her two younger children, who I think are five and seven, and he was just accused by that young girl of molestation. Well, let’s put it this way. Something she said has now caused him to be accused of molesting her. So, he’s staying with me because he can’t stay at home. He’s really upset. It’s like he’s been set up for something, which was unnecessary. And then on top of that, about two, exactly two weeks ago, my nephew, my sister’s older son, he’s an adult, was killed in a four-wheeler accident in upstate Pennsylvania. And I had to take my older grandson with me to go up and be with my sister, who’s my baby sister. And you know, I don’t even really expect an answer to this, because I have a therapist. I don’t expect you to do that. But I feel like I am lost in the jungle right now and I can’t find a path. And you know, believe it or not, I actually read the Ramacharitamanasa at the beginning of this spring. I did that because you said that really had inspired you when you when you were first involved. So, I decided I should do that.  In that time when Ram is in the jungle, or the forest, as they call it in this translation, anyway, I feel like that. You wish. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t I wish? Don’t I wish I were him in the jungle? You are. That’s the whole point. Yeah. Yeah. Technically speaking, I know that’s true. No, no. Actually speaking. Technically speaking, you don’t believe it, but actually speaking, you are. Intellectually, I do believe it, but having the experience of it is a different thing. So anyway, so that’s where I am right now. Okay. Big time stuff. This is a lot of big time, heavy karma. No question about it.. It’s not our job to make light of it in any way whatsoever. So, it’s really big stuff for everybody in your family. Very, very big stuff. And how lucky your grandson is to have you, by the way. Really. I mean, if you weren’t there, what would happen to him? So, how beautiful it is, a great grace on him and you, too, to be together at this point and to be brought together. But, and that being said, I spend a lot of time in my meditation room. I spend a lot of time crying while trying to chant with you because I think I have to. But, so I’m doing what I can. I just wanted to say, that’s where I am. But I really have a question actually about the Ramacharitamanasa, which is this: my favorite part of it, believe it or not, in some perverse way, was Shiva’s wedding procession. You remember that part? It was a great party. Let me tell you, I remember it well. And so I’m thinking, why of all the parts in that 600 page book, did that stand out to me as something that I actually related to when it was such a horrible, it was such a horror, you know, and if, I guess I should say what it is so people know what I’m talking about, which is, Shiva’s wedding procession to marry Parvati, the daughter of the mountain, of the Himalayas, was with his hair in complete disarray and wearing some kind of a wild animal skin, his jewelry was snakes and his entourage was made up of ghouls and demons, not even demons, ghouls and goblins and carrying, some with heads, some with no heads, some carrying the heads of dead animals. It was really a horror. And yet, when he got to the city, I forgot the name of the city where Parvati lived, everybody, of course, was horrified except Parvati, who kind of said, “Oh well, that’s Shiva, you know? And I just, I’m wondering, I liked that part of it better than I liked the whole part about Ram being in the forest, actually. There was something that I related to in that way, in that scene, just that I related to. So, there it is. That’s just your mind. It’s okay to be to be moved by what you’re moved by. You don’t have to try to pick it apart and destroy it. Shiva transmutes tamasya, the darkness, the inertia. He’s completely pure, untouched, unmoved, undefiled, pure being, pure consciousness. And Maharajji used to say that his devotees were Shiva’s wedding party. Maybe that’s where it came from. Absolutely. No question about it. It came from you then. Yeah. And his old devotees, the real old devotees that I met, they worshiped him as Shiva, not even as Hanuman, but Shiva’s the next bump up, so to speak. And Hanuman is a form of Shiva, but Tiwari and these other old devotees, many of them saw him as Shiva, and Shiva is completely, totally pure. He’s pure being, pure consciousness, and even the darkest inertia can’t touch him. It can’t defile him in any way, but the goodie goodies, they don’t like that stuff, because it’s beyond the rules. It’s beyond the accepted norm. And so, it’s always very disturbing when they, when you see an avadhut walking around naked. The English used to put them in jail. There was one great Sufi Saint named Tajuddin Maharaj, who was like, at the same time as Sai Baba, Shirdi Sai Baba, and he spent 30 years in a mental hospital because he was wandering around naked on the tennis courts of the English. So, they put him away. And every Thursday, which is the Muslim holiday, thousands of people would come for his Darshan at the insane asylum. So, these are the people who are, this is beyond form. This is another path than the Vaishnav path, which is goodness, purity in that kind of way, light. Lakshmi is light. All this beautiful shining, that’s one path, that’s a different path. The Shaivite path is very different.  There’s a great book called “Lord of the Meeting Rivers.” You’ll love it. It’s poetry from the south, and it’s extraordinary. You will die to read this. This is the real, this is mainlining. This is the biggest time. “Lord of the Meeting Rivers.” Wow. And yeah, it’s funny you should use the word “goodie goodies,” because that’s exactly the word that I use to try to describe what I didn’t like about certain parts of certain practices, that has nothing to do with anybody else. It just has to do with me. You’re Catholic, right? No. Oh, you’re not. Well, you should be Catholic with all that guilt. A goody-goody. Yeah. I mean, sometimes those people get very tense and very tight, but Shiva is the one who’ll blow all that up. He’s beyond the forms, beyond the rules, but completely, totally pure. You know what I mean? There’s no, he’s just beyond purity and impurity. That’s how pure he is. The Vaishnavs can also get a little bit attached to purity and cleanliness and all that stuff. And this guy lives in the graveyards smeared with ashes. That was part of it. Yeah. It’s funny because I once was given a spiritual name that I never used, but, because I never understood it, but it was “Nirguna.” “Nirguna.” Very good. Nirguna means beyond form, beyond Gunas, beyond qualities. Shiva. Yeah. I don’t get that. Yes, you do. That’s who you are inside. When you can slip out of your very tightly wound judgmental mind, that’s who you are. If you want to read another great thing about Shiva, go back and find, in Uttarakhand, where Kakabhusundhi is telling Garuda about how he became a Saint. I sing that all the time, the Shiva Stuti or the rudraksha, the Rudra Stotram or something like that. Don’t you do sing something from that on Door of Faith? Yeah, I do. Yeah. In between, I chant. I sing the whole thing on Door of Faith. Yes. So go back and read the “Namaa miisha mishaana-nirvaana rupam.” “I bow to the Lord of the North, whose form is liberation.” Wow. That’s just the first line. Where do you go from there? Nirvana rupam. Oh my God.  And Tiwari, Mr. Tiwari was a great Shiva Bhakta. That was his main thing. At Shiva Puja, we used to do three, four hours at a time. Just amazing puja he did. One time on Shivaratri, Maharajji happened to be, I guess maybe it was Lucknow but it could have been Nainital, Tiwari was there and he was going to do his puja that day and that night but he was supposed to fast. So, he was with Maharajji and a whole bunch of other people, and Maharajji said, “Here, take this prasad,” and Tiwari hesitated, and he said, “I can’t take it. I’m doing my puja.”  “Nay, take.” So, he took it, he ate, he broke his fast. So now he’s thinking then, “I won’t do my puja for the first time in my life on Shivaratri. Ok, all right. If that’s what he wants.” So then, sitting there, Maharajji says to him, “Okay. Do your puja now.” And he said to me, in his whole life, that puja that he did that night, that at that time, right there, was the one time that Shiva himself did the puja through him. Yeah. It’s amazing. Great. Yeah.  So, thank you. Thank you. I don’t want to hold you up because I know there are other people who want to ask. Thank you for your time. Yeah. Very good.  Good luck with your grandson and try not to judge too harshly what’s going on around you. Just let it play out and just keep your, try to keep some calmness of spirit and let the things play out. There’s nothing you can do on this level to change much, except to love everybody as best you can and let them, let this play out, and the calmer you can be, the wider hearted, so that the stuff doesn’t beat you up, you just let it come in and let it go through you. That’s the best you can do for this situation, and love that grandson of yours to death. I will. Thank you. Q: Hey, I wanted to know if you know more about this quote, if you know a story behind it. It’s just this quote I’ve seen attributed to Maharajji: “Treat all women as mothers, serve them as the mother and the ego disappears.” That quote, do you know where that came from or what the context was or any stories around it? You know, a lot of times, Westerners, couples would come to Maharajji and say they’re having problems. So, Maharajji would say to the man, “Just treat your wife, just treat her as your mother.” And the guy would say, “But I hate my mother!” And Maharajji would say, “What? What did he say? What did he say?” It was really funny, the two cultures coming aginst each other, you know,  but like we were talking about mothers before with that the other gentleman, Maharajji always said, “I follow the mother. I always follow the Mother,” the goddess. And because of the way, in India, mothers are seen by their children, even the Dalai Lama said he, the only reason he knows about kindness and compassion is because of his mother. He learned, He absorbed that from his mother’s kindness. So in in India, it’s not unusual, that’s not an unusual statement. “See all women as mother, as the mother, as the goddess and treat them that way.” Of course, in practice that’s very difficult, because we don’t, we’re just totally lost in our own egos and our own desires, but he would, he was presenting us with a path. To liberate ourselves from that stuff is to see all women as the mother, as the goddess, in the same way, all women would see all men as Ram or Krishna. It’s the same. It’s a way of getting through your worldview, which is very sense oriented and egoistic and limited. Thank you. And  like, He had me worship my mother and do the puja to my mother in the airport. That, I feel that created a seed of connection between us on a deeper level that, over years or maybe even lifetimes, will continue to deepen. So yeah. The west is such a, family life is so fraught with emotional issues that, at least previously in India, before the last couple of generations, it didn’t exist like that, you know? And one time I was sitting with Siddhi Ma in the back of the temple and all the grandchildren and cousins of the Tiwari family came. The oldest grandson was getting married so they came to the temple for blessings, and there were 15 or 16 of these younger people sitting with Ma and I was sitting there and I was watching these kids and I just, they were so loving with each other and so sweet. I was just, my mouth was hanging open and I didn’t say anything, but Siddha Ma turned to me and she said, “You see Krishna Das? You see what you missed by being born in America?” It’s like being born in a washing machine. You know? You don’t know what’s up, what’s down. Who wants what, what’s going on. It’s just another way and it’s very, it really instills a lot of programs within us that are very painful and very negative and very hard to overcome, for sure. So, but that’s all part of our work. We get other blessings by being born in America. Television and probably enough food and a place to sleep, which we take totally for granted and which we shouldn’t, but we do. And so, if  we are disposed to doing practice, at least we know we’re not afraid of where our next meal is going to come from. A lot, most of the world is. And we know we have, we’re probably going to have some food in the refrigerator and a place to sleep, which is a total blessing that we don’t, we take for granted, completely take it for granted. But you know, when Maharajji says things he’s not just mouthing off. He’s actually creating a new storyline, planting a new storyline inside of us. Now that storyline may not actually get activated right away, but over time. He doesn’t, mostly he’s not in a hurry. He does things at the right speed for everybody. So, when he says something and gives a little teaching or something… like He said to us way back when, “Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God…” “How do you raise Kundalini? Feed people.” You know, “What is he talking about?” at the time, but over all these years, those seeds that he planted, they’ve grown underneath the radar. I’m not growing them. You’re not growing them. They’re growing because he planted them. And the real meaning of the things that he says will manifest as time goes on. Because he’s not a teacher. He’s a Siddha. He does. He changes things. He doesn’t ask you. He just moves your karmas around to make things better for you. So, one should not approach the things he says purely on an intellectual level. I want us to understand he’s energizing some part of you. He’s making, he’s bringing life to some part of you that you’re not even aware of exists, and over time you begin to understand what those things mean, like “love, serve, remember.”  Yeah, we understood it word wise, but in terms of actual being that way and living that way so much purification of the heart had to happen. Q: So you read a book by Stephen Jenkinson called “Die Wise”? I think I haven’t read it, but I saw the book somewhere. My question for you is this, what are you doing to plan to die wise? Are you thinking about it a lot? How’s the plan going? Tell us about what your, what’s going to happen at the end? Will there be a cone at the end or… What’s happening? No. There’s going to be a commercial at the end. Well, you know they say that the way you live is the way you die. You can’t imagine that you come to that last moment, having lived a life of stupidity, and all of a sudden you’re going to be wise at the end, and they also say that, the previous Karmapa had said the only thing you take with you when you leave your body is your state of mind. So, if you’re asking what I do, I do the same thing I do every day. I try to live the best way I can. I try to keep my heart open as it can be. I try to give myself as much as I can to whatever practice I’m doing, and I try to manifest the best possible state of mind that I’m capable of.  So, I give myself a hundred percent, 3% of the time, and I think that’s pretty good. So, how do you envision that moment? How do you envision the moment that you leave here and you’re with Maharajji? Well, I don’t know, but I was just with Ram Dass about, maybe a week, a little more than a week before he left the body, and on the last day that I was leaving, I went to say goodbye in the morning, and he was lying in bed. He had already been in bed for about five days. He hadn’t gotten out and he didn’t get out again. And he was lying there in bed with his eyes closed. So, I bent over him like, with my face above his, and he opened his eyes and his expression on his face was so extraordinary. It was so extraordinary. There was love beaming like the sun. It was so beautiful. So beautiful. And he was completely at ease. He was not worried about where he was going or what was going to happen. He was completely at ease and open, even with all the pain that he was in. It didn’t affect him. It was extraordinary. So that’s what I’m looking for. That’s what I hope to be, and if I get the chance to be that way. You know, when Maharajji made me the pujari of the Durga Temple, he asked me to distribute the charanamrita which is the water that’s used to wash the murti. The people come up, you pour a little water into their hand and they sip it, and there’s a mantra that you do when you give charanamrita out. I ought to try to remember the whole mantra, but in English, it’s “to protect against,” what’s the word, “sudden death” and to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, the idea is that sudden death or dying, for instance, in your sleep is not well, but it doesn’t say that… sudden death, because you get a chance to prepare, just like you’re saying. If it’s a sudden death like an accident, you’re not ready to go necessarily. So, there’s a bit of a shock to the system, to say the least.  So, to protect against that, you sip this charanamrita, this water. So that’s what, you know that’s a very important concept in terms of yoga and the path, is that one lives as if one’s going to die with the next breath. This is why, in Buddhism they spend so much time meditating on the reality of death, which is, “I might not be able to take my next breath. There’s no guarantee.” So, do I want to have regrets? Do I want to have unfinished stuff? No. I want to finish up. I want to be at ease with everything, which means I have to work on my relationships with people. I have to work on my relationship with myself. I have to be aware of what I’m doing. Am I causing suffering? Am I not? This is all, how you live in this moment translates to the next moment. And then the next moment might be in another body. No one knows and if they do know they’re not telling me. Q: Hi KD. Hello. I love you, and if I think of you, even if I think of you, my heart opens and it’s uncontrollable and full and I’m so grateful, and I see you, I see you everywhere, and some quiet presence that’s really deep and vast. It’s in the trees as well, and actually Jesus used to say, “The kingdom of heaven is around us, but men do not see it” and I’m feeling like that sometimes. And I’m totally messed up, of course. I mean, I have all my issues and I keep working on them and I really wanted to talk to you today. Usually, I just listen to you talking to everybody. I have some questions, but I’m not going to ask them because I feel like I should work on them and work through them and see what happens. I’ve started talking to Ram Dass, too. I started in my twenties, obsessively listening to Ram Dass, reading all books, and I love his words.  Sometimes when I play the podcast, his old talks, I feel like he’s right here. And then this morning, I was listening to him and I told him I really love him and he said, “I know, I love you too.” And I realized, “Oh, he’s just a presence too.” That’s easy for him now that he’s dead. I just love you. Thank you. Very good. Well, may you always be in that love. I miss you so much. I mean, just sitting in kirtan and coming to the kirtan, I miss it so much.  Probably not as much as you miss it. No, I don’t. I miss the band a little bit, but I’ve been singing a lot. It’s been good. It’s been very good. Keep singing, keep taking the name. The name is that love that you feel. That’s the name. That’s what it is. Q: Thank you. How can be balance desire and letting go? First, you grab. Then you’re let go. Totally balanced. What’s wrong? Easy. They’re actually not different things, to tell you the truth. Any action you take based on selfish interest or self-centered interests is desire-motivated. It doesn’t matter what it is. Letting go can happen all the time and desires can arise. You can actually satisfy those desires, but you don’t necessarily have to be imprisoned by the desire or the action. That’s a very advanced state. For most of us, we are very conflicted about getting what we want. We don’t know how to get what we want actually and what we need, and so, we’re completely screwed up about it all. And so, the idea of letting go is impossible for us because we’re totally identified with being stuck and not getting what we want and not having what we need in life. We don’t have money. We don’t have a house. We don’t have relationships that bring us joy. We don’t have this. We don’t have that. We’re in hunger, poverty mode in our emotional environment and emotional atmosphere, for most of us. So, the best way to let go is to get out there and get what you want and try to get what you need, and when you do that, you’ll come up against your own issues about being good to yourself and your own issues about feeding yourself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with desire. What’s wrong, or what’s not accurate is that we’ll be happy when we get what we desire. We might be a little happy for a little while, but it doesn’t last. So, another desire pops up and we go after that one and get a little happy and then that passes, et cetera. So, one must try to get what one needs in life. One can not refuse to enter the fight because by doing that, you’ve given up. And if you think you can find God or find real love or be liberated without going through the battle, you’re dreaming. It’s only through getting into the fight, getting into the battle, the battle to be real and be present regardless of what’s going on in the emotional or outside world. That’s the battle, and if we don’t get involved in the battle, we will not be able to ever find any peace of mind or find any real love. We have to get in there and fight so we can see what our issues are. Arjuna, the greatest warrior there ever was, did not want to fight because he saw he was going to have to deal with all his stuff, and actually he was thinking, in his case, it was the family. He was going to have to slaughter one whole side of his family in order to fulfill his role as the protector of the other side of the family. And he said, “No way am I doing that.” And then Krishna says, “Your words sound wise, but is it real wisdom?” And then he proceeded to unravel reality for Arjuna and show him what life really was about and how to go about becoming a real spiritual warrior. So, the only way we get the strength to let go is to see what we have to let go of, and unless we get involved in the battle, which is our illusion, delusion that we’re going to be happy with stuff, and happy with our desires, and getting what we want it going to make us happy forever, and we can keep on getting new stuff to stay on that excitement edge. So, that’s one way of looking at it. The other way is, Maharajji said, “You want it? Don’t take it.” Oh. “You want it? Don’t take it.” You want this chai? Don’t take it. That teaching was beyond my capacity. So, I had to go the other way, which is, I had to go through, and still going through dealing with the things that my desires have manifested in my life, and trying to stay present, and alive, and awake, and keep my heart open, regardless of what’s going on. Q: I wanted to ask you about the endings of romantic relationships, especially now, because everybody’s on the computer so much, you know on zoom and all that. It’s so tempting to try to look somebody up from your past.  So, do you have any?  That’s one thing, and another part of that question is the thinking, you know, about, ruminating about why it didn’t work out. And I know that you’ll say to let go, but you know, the whole thing about not understanding, it just doesn’t make any sense kind of thing. So, I guess those two things go together, and the looking the person up. Well, flirting with yourself about going, getting in touch with someone, with whom you had a relationship that caused you a lot of pain, that’s the same thing that got you into the relationship in the first place, the desire to hurt yourself, even though it didn’t look like that at the time, but that’s of course what happened. So, if you take time out of the factor, when you got together in the first minute, you’re already hurt. Can you understand that? But in the case the relationship was positive? And really, that’s what the confusion is. Sometimes, it’s really good and then eventually it doesn’t work out. So, there’s some positive. When you say it’s “really good,” what does that really mean? Well, like you were saying, the whole thing about the excitement and then the happiness and then it only stays temporarily. Yeah. Right? It’s like that kind of thing where there is happiness and then it just doesn’t last for whatever reason. There’s a happiness because that person needed something from you also, like you needed something from that person, and you were both willing to provide that for a certain amount of time. So, both of you were using each other to push the pleasure button and the love button, so you could feel okay about yourselves. The point was, neither one of you probably felt okay about yourselves underneath it all, which is why you wanted somebody to push that button. That’s why you needed somebody to push that button. And then when that person, for whatever reason, found somebody else’s button to push, or somebody else offered them a better button or a new button, or a more exciting button, or just a different button, your button became less fun for that person. So, that could have happened from your side, too. All of a sudden somebody else, a big shiny button shows up in your life and that other old dusty button didn’t look so good anymore. That’s human nature. Okay, but what about the whole thing now with the pandemic? Because everybody, it’s so hard if you’re not out and about, not to go look people up. So, it’s almost out of, it’s like out of just boredom. That’s not what’s hard. What’s hard is being okay just being you here now. That’s what’s hard. So, you’re looking for anything to do to take you out of just being here, and that’s perfectly normal, but at some point you have to kind of say, “Well, is this really going to be in my best interests?” And if it is, fine. Maybe you have something to say to somebody that you never could say 10 years ago, like, “thank you for this” or “thank you for that, without trying to get something from that person even now. So, maybe there’s some strings that you want to tie up and make sure that, from your side you’re feeling okay about it at all, but I don’t think that’s what it is. I think you’re just antsy. No, because you rightA person doesn’t want to be in the present because of boredom. That’s great. So just watch yourself. Watch yourself put your hand on the mouse. Watch it go to that place on Facebook. Watch it send a message and go, “Oh no, don’t do that. Ah, shit. I sent that message.  What am I going to do now?” And then, “But he didn’t respond. It’s been 13 seconds and they haven’t gotten back to me.” So then you go on that whole trip and then you’re ready to jump out the window and it goes off again. You go, “Oh, they responded! How great!” You have to see all that. It’s all beautiful. It’s all amazing. It’s all extraordinary how we fuck ourselves up again and again. It’s so extraordinary. We’re so good at it. It’s really, we’ve trained our whole lives to be like this. It’s amazing. So, try to watch it a little more than do it, but if you feel you really need to do it, do it. Why not? It may not be to send a message, it may be you just want to go look let’s see, like, you’re curious, what’s going on. Yeah, that’s called masturbation. It’s different than fucking, but it’s definitely a sexual thing. So, there’s nothing wrong with either one. Just turn your camera off. That’s all. You know, it’s okay. But you know, If I’m going to look somebody up, I’m going to remember what you just said and I won’t. I’ll be here now instead. Just slap your hand whenever you go for that mouse, just like your mother would have slapped your hand when you were a kid. I’m joking. I’m just joking around. But there’s an element of that. Isn’t there? Well, there’s a chance you could get hurt. It’s a gamble. You can get hurt. I totally don’t know. And it could be something bad. Sometimes you look something up and you find out they’re not doing well and they can make you feel good, too. Exactly. Yeah. But, okay, but how useful is it for you to see that you still have that stuff. It’s really useful because that stuff, just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been there. Just because you haven’t seen it, like that feeling like they’re really doing well, you know why? You know what they say?  There’s They’re called “The Four Immeasurables.”  One is compassion. One is loving kindness. One is equanimity. And the fourth and the most difficult one to cultivate is spontaneous joy, which means joy in another’s joy, happiness that another person is happy. This is very hard for us. When somebody else is happy, our first gut reaction is like, “Why not me? Why don’t I have more of that?” It’s really deeply ingrained in us, and they say in Buddhism,  you want to cultivate these four qualities, which purifies all the negative qualities that we have. They’re actually called antidotes for the negativity, too. But the most difficult one to cultivate is this joy in another’s happiness. Especially if you’re angry at them or if they made you upset. Exactly. For sure. But don’t you see that anger, even though it’s not present in your consciousness every day, is still pushing you around from within. And so, it’s good to be able to see that. If you don’t see it, You can’t let it go. You can’t deal with it. It’s just pushing from behind and you wonder why. “Why am I acting like this? Why do I feel like this?” Because you’re being pushed by your stuff, by the shadows from behind. So, this is really hard stuff. I mean, we’re making light of it a little bit, but it’s really painful, really hard stuff, but that’s why a regular practice, whatever it is, japa, chanting, meditation, breath work, something like that done regularly, it deepens your center of gravity. It moves you deeper into yourself and that makes it easier to let go of that stuff and easier to become aware of what’s pushing you around. If you’re not aware of it, it’s not going to go away by itself. It has to be let go of. So, this is great. That’s why this time of the pandemic, it’s such a great opportunity for us, for people who are working on themselves, because we look around the room and all we see is our mind dripping off the walls and there’s nowhere to escape it. So, you have to deal with it. So that’s great, but you’re doing good work. It’s great. I really respect it, and really continue to just pay attention and everything will be okay. Okay. Thank you so much. Q: Thank you for your advice you gave me the other day by email, and it got me to thinking outside of the box a bit because you, one of your suggestions was I should benefit most greatly by the addition of other people with the kind of issues that I have. These meetings aren’t easy to come by. In fact, I think because of lockdown, they’ve been stopped. So, I was thinking, yeah, I can get a circle of  people in my home, people I know and do it that way. So that was, yeah, that was a very innovative thought of yours. So, thank you for that. And the other thing, I just wanted to ask you a quick question, and the question was, I once heard you say, or perhaps it was Maharajji said it… There’s a small difference. Yeah, I’d say, actually there probably is. What about, if all the things that we have, all the things that we have about us, the people, the feelings, the physical things that we have about us, our homes, our cars, our dogs, that kind of thing, what if we were meant to have them? Wouldn’t that be okay? Yeah. I said that. Yeah, you said that. So, would that surely make us all feel better in a way? Because we live, some of us, in the socioeconomic divide in this country. There’s a great socioeconomic divide and there’s always guilt, there’s always and there’s always somebody who will be bound to put you down for something you have or something you don’t have, and I did, I just started, as a byline, there’s a book called “The Body,” written by a man called Paramananda. He’s from Cambridge, and in this book, he’s written out a radical Buddhist prayer, and it goes, “Everything about you is good, your name, your Christian name, your children, the day of your…” I’m not reciting this, right, but it goes along these lines. Everything about you and everything you have is okay. It’s good. Even the day you die. Everything about you, if you’re walking in the path, you surely cannot go wrong. Yeah, that’s a good aphorism. That’s a good positive statement to make. That’s on a personal level, that we want to stop feeling bad about the things we have. That doesn’t mean we can’t share and care about other people, but there’s no reason to hurt ourselves for no, you know, just for things that we have. Everybody needs to eat and sleep and have a certain amount of stuff. That doesn’t mean that we can’t help other people as well and be aware of the suffering that’s inherent in the world. That doesn’t mean we ourselves have to feel guilty in any way with that. Guilt goes with the territory. What’s that? Guilt appears, speaking for myself and for others, it appears to go with the territory. Well, your territory anyway. And that’s the way it is. Each one of us has our own territory that we live in, an atmosphere that we live in, and out of that atmosphere, we act and feel all kinds of things. So, you understand, the soul is fine. Your soul is perfect. Your soul is love. Your soul is light. It’s truth. It’s reality. There is no suffering in your soul. The suffering that we have is in our egoistic part of us, the part of us that relates with the egoistic world, the world of that self-centered, small “s” self, but we aren’t, it’s our soul that given us life in the first place, even right at this moment, but we don’t know what that is. We’re facing outside. We’re looking out from the inside and we’re identified with our emotions, with our feelings, with our stories that we tell ourselves. We’re identified with all that external stuff, but we don’t see our true nature. If we could be more in touch with our true nature, we would feel much better, regardless of all this other stuff. So, our work is to disentangle our stuff from our stuff and to train ourselves somehow not to believe every story we tell ourselves about ourselves, which are usually negative, because those are the ones we love. We’ve been trained our whole life to hate ourselves and to look, and not even to know ourselves, but to hate and loathe our self, and there’s really no good reason for that, except that’s the way the Western world lives, totally out of touch with reality and in the egoistic, self-centered mind. Sorry. You say that it goes, in an email you said it goes back to a very early age. Nobody had ever told me that. I didn’t realize, I thought it went back to, I don’t know, when you’re a teenager, like that. Before that even? Before that. Like when my mother was in the hospital, when she was dying, she was on painkillers. She had cancer and she was lying in the bed and there was a little table, right? Over her, a little table, and so there was water and a pitcher of water on the table. So, she asked me to pour some water. So, I poured the water and as I put the pitcher back down, I bumped the table a little bit. Right? Just bumped the table. And she looked at me like this. You know? And my whole body contorted. I went like this. You know? It’s like I got punched in the stomach, and at that moment I saw something so incredible. At that moment I recognized that she had always been doing that to me, that even before I can remember, she’d been throwing me these gut punches, and I grew up with this feeling like I could be punched at any moment. At any moment, I was going to get a punch in the stomach, and it was extraordinary because I saw that even before I knew “me,” that was happening. Before I could remember, before I had any, I grew up with that from such an early age, and it was an incredible thing to see that, because here I was like 50 years old, 60 years old and I’m still, I’m still trying to protect myself from this gut punch that could come at any time. It was a powerful moment. So that’s what I mean. We have stuff in there that’s been going on since day fucking one, and it’s still pushing us around and we don’t see it. We don’t have a way to see it. We don’t have a clue. The only clue we get is what we are doing to ourselves right now. Right? Those gut punches I give my myself when things go wrong, and I don’t mean to do it. I don’t do them on purpose. No, you don’t. But you’ve been trained. You’ve been trained just like I was trained. That’s what we do. So, once you see it though, it changes. It may not feel like it, but when, if you can see it, then it’s not the same as it was before you saw it. We used to think that that was just the way that, we didn’t even notice we were doing it to ourselves. Now we notice and sooner or later we will get a vote as to where we’re going to, are we going to let that happen again? Are we going to do that to ourselves? Are we going to believe that shit again? It comes little by little. It comes. There’s no quick button to push. We spend all our lives fucking ourselves up. It’s not going to unfuck in two seconds. But It will come? Of course, one way or another, of course. You talk about things on the satsang last night and you know, there was so many bits where I saw, “I haven’t got there yet. I haven’t got there yet either. No, I haven’t got there yet either.” Well, that’s one way of telling yourself a story, isn’t it, that you believe? Who knows if it’s true, but you believe it. If you didn’t think these things, where would they be? If these kinds of stories didn’t arise in your mind, and if you didn’t take them personally and believe them, where would they be? They would just go right through like a cloud and disappear, but we hang on to them because we’ve been trained to hang on to them. They are not necessarily true, but we believe them. So, is this where the meditation helps? Yeah, little by little, not all at once. It’s not a drug. It’s not something you take to have a particular experience, but it’s a lifestyle. It’s a commitment to trying to be here in the eye of the storm, no matter what’s going on, you’re calm and the eye of the storm. It doesn’t mean the storm stops. Storms don’t stop. Don’t even think about it. There’s no way to stop the storm, but there is a way to sit at peace in the eye of the storm and that’s the practice, and that takes a little time, a little commitment, a little sincerity of heart and wholeheartedness and a little discipline, little by little, but that’s only to let let ourselves into that eye of the storm. It’s not that it’s something new. We know what it is. All we have to do is let go to be there. So, it’s always here, the eye of the storm, but we’re caught in the turbulence. So, good luck and keep, you’re doing good. I know it doesn’t feel like they listen. Aside from everything else, this is a really hard time. Come on. This is unique in the whole world. There’s never been a time like this before, so don’t expect that you can just sit around and be at ease, just like that. This is a really hard time. We have no escapes that we’re used to. There’s no way to release pressure or energy. We’re stuck in our own minds, in our own rooms and our own houses. This is a very hard time. And so, let’s give ourselves some credit for just making it from one day to the next, even if we’re a little bruised. Sometimes it’s enough to be. Yeah, that’s right. Thank you. Definitely.  Take care. Q: I first became acquainted with your music in 2017. I saw you in New York City, at your concert in Tarrytown the night before your birthday, I believe that was last year, and then this past a year. And I started going to kirtan after that concert. And my background is I was a professional musician for decades and I am also a teacher of music now. What do you play? Keyboards and I teach voice, and now I’m getting into percussion because I’ve been playing kirtans using my djembe drums, and so I’ve been on this journey with kirtan for a couple of years now, and I’ve worked very hard to let go of the musician-side of me in kirtan and try to get deeper into that, and I’m just finishing up now a Bhakti Immersion course that I’m doing with Elizabeth Padma Anandama , who was at the Taos Ashram in New Mexico for three years. She asked us, and here comes my question, she asked us in the course, in the beginning, “Who are you?” I’ve done enough work to know that who I am is not what I do. So, I’ve let go of those things and stripped those away. I am having, I’m struggling with answering that question, and then three weeks into the course, she asked the question again and I’m like, “I can tell you how, what other people tell me, I am. Me, myself, I struggle with that.” So, I was just wondering, because it’s, I do have difficulty journaling and I’m still struggling with that part of our chapter, to answer that question. So, I would appreciate any thoughts you have on that. Well, you can’t answer that question on the same level it was asked. Who you are is beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond form, beyond emotions. It’s your true nature, your soul, so to speak, and there’s no words for that. I don’t know what she expects you to say, maybe nothing, maybe, but you are not who you think you are, and every thought is a prison, and you can’t think yourself out of a prison made of thought. So, just sing and shut the fuck up. That’s all you have to do. This is not an intellectual trip. You don’t have to know anything. You don’t have to figure anything out. Who you are is who you are, and you’re always right here, but we don’t know what that is. We don’t experience that directly because our awareness is flowing out through our senses and our thoughts and we’re just not paying attention. We don’t know where to look. So, just keep singing and let go. When you sing, you pay attention to the sound of the name you’re singing. Anything else is not the name. Let go and come back again and again. Ramana Maharshi said, “Asking the mind, or the ego, to kill the mind is like asking the thief to be the policeman. There will be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.” So, it’s not something you figure out here. Just keep singing, and in 30 or 40,000 lifetimes, you’ll get an answer. Just keep singing. That’ll save you from everything and it will save you from you, for Christ’s sake. That’s the thing. Just keep taking the name. That’s all you have to do, and you’ll notice when you’re not. Then you go. Then you come back. How do you ever come back from a thought? Havve you ever asked yourself that? How does it happen? You’re singing, “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram… Oh this is so great.” And then 20 minutes later you realize, “Oh, wait, I’ve been thinking about that new djembe I was going to get.” So how did that thought end and how did you recognize that you were gone? No answers. It just happened based on the seeds you yourself have planted in your own past. That moment of wake up came naturally because you planted those seeds to wake up and so that thought had a certain amount of energy, and that energy was dissipated. “Oh, I’m back.” Then you come back to the name again, but here’s the kicker. You didn’t do that. You’re thinking about your djembe. You didn’t wake yourself up. Your soul woke you up, which is not who you think you are. Who you really are brought you back. So, then you come back to the name, because the repetition of the name is, as Maharajji said, “Everything will be accomplished through the repetition of the name.” So, invocation, devotion is our true nature? We don’t have to manufacture it. We don’t have to manipulate our emotions. We have to be who we are, which comes from letting go. Many things will happen. Many feelings will arise naturally from within. That’s fine, but don’t try to make something happen. That’s a waste of time and worse. You’re hurting yourself. That’s like beating yourself with a whip. You think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re not. So anyway, when you figure out who you are, let me know. Okay? All right. I will. Thank you. There won’t be any internet 40,000 lifetimes from now butfind a way. Q: So, I am 56 years young and I first met Ram Dass in 1986 as a little 22, 23 years-old, and the Darshan came immediately for me. I had a dream of Baba that night, the first night that I met Ram Dass, and I told Ram Dass about it the next day and just got the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen in my entire life. So, that’s sort of what kicked off my journey, and I spent many years still connected to Ram Dass, but also seeking other stuff to fill me up.  I’m also a devotee to Amma, Ammachi, and deeply immersed in Bhakti at this point in my life. I had a medical happening about a month ago and it resulted in what I can only describe as having the lens of truth, instead of the lens of my mind, and everything I’m studying and looking at now, I’m no longer seeking. I’m just consuming it beautifully and understanding everything… not everything, but when I see truth or feel truth, it’s like I have this knowing that I never had before, and all of this energy flowing through me, now that I’ve come back into my body, is, it’s a lot for my husband. It’s a lot for the people around me and I am intending for it to be able to integrate so that I can walk normally in the world again, if that makes any sense. At this point, I’m just, I’m loving every moment that I’m here. And I guess really what I’m asking is, when something this huge of an experience is perceived and felt and shifted me so much,  how do I integrate that into the relationships that I want to nurture and how do I walk in the world in this space without, I don’t know, without? That’s it. Thank you. Well, all I can tell you is that if a person feels loved, everything’s okay. So, you’re seeing your husband and you’re seeing other people as somebody else outside of yourself, and you’re thinking a lot about yourself, and I would try to drop that kind of stuff and just love everybody. And you won’t have any problems whatsoever. Don’t hang on to whatever experience you had. It was, at the best, it was a gift and it’s not permanent. That state of mind or that vision was given to you, but it’s not yours. You don’t have to hold onto it, and you don’t need to be afraid of it dissipating. You don’t need to be thinking about yourself at all. You need to be thinking about others and loving everyone. Maharajji  said, “It’s better to love everyone than to try to figure it out.” So that’s what I would say. There’s a lot of “me, me, me” in your question and your presentation and that’s the only problem I hear, is that there’s just a little bit too much “me” in there. It’s not about you. It’s not about you. It’s not about how you feel. It’s not about where you’ve been. It’s not about where you’re going. It’s about how you treat everything that appears in your consciousness, every being that arrives in your consciousness. So,if your husband felt loved, he’d be at ease, but he doesn’t. So, you have to examine that situation carefully and see what that’s a

Call and Response Ep. 62 The Spiritual Heart, Addiction, Longing Q: I was curious to hear about your experience with your sobriety… “If I had to fight with my desire for drugs, I would have lost. That’s the deal. That’s the way I was made. If it had been up to me, every day to fight that desire, I couldn’t have done it. I just, you know, I’m being honest with you. So, I have such respect and honor so much the people who really do have to work with that every day and do work with it. Whether they’re successful every day or not. It’s a fierce battle for survival. And it’s very difficult. And truly, I don’t think anybody can do it on their own. I think if a person is doing it, it’s coming out of some kind of spiritual strength, inner strength which is not ego-based. Which is not based in the separate self, it’s based in the real self and that real self, your own self, your own true nature, is strengthening you to fight that battle.” – Krishna Das KD: Anybody? Q: Over here. KD: Hi. Q: Hi. There’s some talk in quantum physics community or whatever, for really some years now, maybe 10, 15, 20 years that consciousness is non-local and we are more like satellite dishes and it’s about, you know, your thoughts or absence thereof would be more about tuning into different channels, so to speak, almost like the radio. Like you get tuned to the channel of love or you know, or you could get caught in some just train of thought that is just in the vicinity or just happens to, you know, tune or something and then you could choose to maybe change it if you’re able. I don’t know. Have you heard anything about that? I was just curious if that resonates or anything like that. KD: Well, Ramana Maharshi who was one of the greatest saints that ever lived, said that, like you say, “Consciousness is everywhere all the time,” but there’s one spot in the body where we connect to it. It’s called the hridayam or the spiritual heart. But it’s not the heart chakra, He says. It’s on the other side, He says. I don’t say because I don’t know. So, that’s what He said. And there’s like a little kind of thing that connects us to the universal consciousness and that, the seed of that consciousness is here and when the body dies then that connection, obviously, dies with it. The body is no longer connected to consciousness. It’s just what it usually is, as in, inert. The light goes off. The light was not in there. It wasn’t coming from the body. It was coming from the connection to the light, so to speak. That’s what He says. Q: That’s beautiful. KD: And He says, “That’s the seat of the Self.” That’s where the Atma, the connection to the Paramatma, the Supreme Being, the individual connection is there through that spot. Q: Beautiful. Thank you. KD: Yeah. There’s one over here. Why are you sitting out there? Q: Hi. I asked you a couple questions yesterday. KD: Good because I don’t remember. Q: It’s ok. I gave you a high five on the beach… and I, instead of asking you about that, I asked you other questions and it was just kind of, I was curious to hear about your experience with your sobriety and like, the longevity you have there, like that, and your relationship to… KD: I don’t think of myself as sober. Q: Ok. Yeah, I just want to hear it because I’m going to be coming up on 12 years. KD: Yeah. Good. Q: And I don’t really… my relationship with it has changed over the years. In the beginning I was like, proud of it, and now it’s just become part of my lifestyle and I just thought I’d ask you KD: Sure. When I say, “I don’t think of myself as sober,” it’s not, in other words, it’s not a way I identify myself, in that way. But, in fact, I am sober. Very sober. Sober and boring. For many years. And sometime in the 80’s I was strung out on freebase cocaine for about a year and a half and I was going down. There was no possibility I was going to make it. And my Indian father, Mr. Tiwari, he came to America to visit Maharajji’s devotees here and he first came to Canada and I flew to New York from California where I was living and I stayed up all night smoking freebase and in the morning I got on a plane to go and see him up in Canada. And when I walked into the room, he was sitting on the other side of the room with his back towards the door, ok? So, I walked into the room and I kind of went… and I really, I was starting to back out of the room. I don’t know why. But I just felt this like, and I just started to back out of the room. And he turned and he said, “You. Promise me now you will give up cocaine. Promise me now!” Like that. Now, I loved this guy more than anything. He’d been my best friend, my teacher. He kept me alive after Maharajji left the body, he and his family. And there was no way I was not going to do what he asked me to do. So, I didn’t really have a choice. I just said, “Ok.” And that was it. From that moment to this moment, nothing. It was grace. It was grace and it was his love for me and his spiritual power, because he was a great yogi. So, it was his blessing to me. From that moment, a pile of shit and a pile of cocaine… I really couldn’t tell which one was better. So, if, completely honestly… if I had to fight with my desire for drugs, I would have lost. That’s the deal. That’s the way I was made. If it had been up to me, every day to fight that desire, I couldn’t have done it. I just, you know, I’m being honest with you. So, I have such respect and honor so much the people who really do have to work with that every day and do work with it. Whether they’re successful every day or not. It’s a fierce battle for survival. And it’s very difficult. And truly, I don’t think anybody can do it on their own. I think if a person is doing it, it’s coming out of some kind of spiritual strength, inner strength which is not ego-based. Which is not based in the separate self, it’s based in the real self and that real self, your own self, your own true nature, is strengthening you to fight that battle. Ok? Yeah. But what was taken from me at that moment until this moment, was the desire for cocaine. It was gone. Don’t. I can’t say “I let go of it.” I didn’t let go of it. It was taken from me. And so, we’re here today. Otherwise, it wasn’t going to be long before I killed myself. _______________ Q: So, I have seen you together with Sharon Salzberg who I absolutely love… KD: Keep the mic by your mouth, please. Q: I have seen you with Sharon Salzberg who I absolutely love and I listen to a lot of Ram Das’s programs and his podcasts and stuff. But you all studied under the same Guru. KD: Not true. Q: No? KD: No, Sharon never met Maharajji. Q: But Sharon, she meditates all the time and I love her meditations. Do you meditate or do you chant as a way of meditating? Is that your meditation? I’ve never heard you talk about actually sitting quietly. KD: I’ve done a lot of practices over the years. A lot of practices. I’ve meditated with Tibetan Rinpoches. I’ve meditated with Theravada Buddhist Teachers. I’ve done Sufi dancing. I’ve sung Christian chants. But what I do mostly is the repetition of the Name. Q: So that’s what you use for your form of practice or meditation. That’s how you connect. So Sharon does Metta… KD: Sharon does a lot of things, too. Q: Yeah, right. So, but I know that when she… KD: Yeah, chanting is meditation. What else would it be? There’s tv and there’s chanting. They’re not the same. Probably. Unless you’re watching chanting on the tv, then that’s meditation. Hearing the Name is meditation. Chanting the Name is meditation. Thinking about the Name is meditation. Anything that has the Name in it is the Name remembering you in the first place. So, it is meditation. There are Many different types of meditation. Many different types. Because there are many different kinds of people. Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don’t. And when you don’t, you can’t be a nut. So, you have to do something else. So, that’s the deal. It is meditation. It’s most definitely meditation. But there are many different ways to meditate. Just like there are different people, different kinds of people. Q: So the 20 minutes or 30 minutes meditation that some people sit on the mat and do silently or guided or however that is, is it something you would do, like 20 minutes or 40 minutes a day? KD: How about just a really good five minutes? You know? Anything more than that gets scary. Then you start to think, “Ok, I’ve got to sit here.”  Then you’re not paying attention. Give it a good three minutes. Don’t worry about what I do. But you, give it a good one minute and then go have a cup of coffee and come back and do another good minute. One good minute is worth like 500 hours of nonsense. Q: Is that true? You know I always thought it was about discipline of actually just sitting there and ignoring the fact that you’re saying, “Get up.” You don’t really want to do that. KD: That’s just a thought, isn’t it? Q: Yeah, so I thought, yeah. KD: Unless the house is burning, sit your ass down and don’t get it up. Q: Right. KD: And then just, just doing that is so ridiculous. How many people do that? Nobody. Because the minute you sit down, you’re facing everything. That’s when you… so, just to sit there and just remember to just like, “Ok,” just watch your breath. You don’t have to try anything too hard. Don’t try to make anything happen. It already happened. They called it, “The Big Bang.” We’re here. How amazing is that. Let’s just be here. But we can’t. So, we do some practice. But don’t try too hard. Just keep letting go. How can you let go if you’re trying too hard. “Ok, I’ve gotta let go now!  Aargh! Oh, no. Ok!” It doesn’t work that way. You let go. You relax. Q: If I had met you 25 years ago, my mornings would be a lot easier. Because I really prefer chanting over sitting on the mat for the half hour. KD: No time is wasted. No time is wasted. Start now. You’re not starting but you’re learning. You, yourself are asking the questions so you’re ready to, you’re feeling the need for something deeper. So, it’ll come. It’s already come and you’re feeling it. So, now follow that feeling. Q: Thank you. KD: You’re welcome. 25 years ago you weren’t asking these questions. You weren’t, you weren’t in touch with the longing to be here. Q: Your story that you share is filled with moments of such grace and receiving. KD: Yeah. Q: And the devotion that I think hear, it has allowed you to develop, has been supported in satsang, in many different ways, Mr. Tiwari showing up at the right time and so on. My question has to do with how to keep the faith, how to keep the devotional aspect to the practice and to, you know, for lack of a better a word, keeping your eye on the prize in terms of focus. When the messengers might not be as absolutely astounding as maybe some of yours may have been, given that a message could come anywhere anytime from anyone or thing… KD: Yeah. Q: My question is, can you share with us how to keep that connection? How to keep that devotional aspect in an everyday world without, you know, yeah… that’s my question. KD: Well, first of all, cherish it and recognize it and appreciate it, what you do feel in this kind of a world, in this kind of situation. The fact that you’re here, the fact that you asked that question and that’s something to cherish inside yourself, in yourself, that you want that. That the longing for that means that its already, you’re being pulled towards it already. So, it’s up to you to find what helps you live more of that kind of life. You don’t need someone to show up and bang you on the head with something. We do enough banging ourselves. Everybody has their own storyline. People say, “Oh, you’re so lucky to be with Maharajji.” I say, “Well, we were the people who weren’t going to make it.” You know? Maybe the darkness isn’t so intense for you. You don’t need that right now. So, if you don’t need it, you won’t get it. We only get what we need because the underlying logic or agenda of the universe is compassion. And so everything in our lives is there because it’s supposed to be there and whatever messages our life has for us, is what we need to work with. So, don’t be looking for something to come from the outside. See what you have now and nurture it, cherish it. It’s a little plant. Water it. Feed it. Fertilize it. Don’t let the dog piss on it. You know, take care of yourself. 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