Call and Response with Krishna Das

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

Call and Response Ep.76 Judaism, Christ and Namdev  “So, Maharajji, it seemed like He started to say something and then His eyes, He just stopped and His eyes closed and He just sat in front of us, perfectly still. We had not seen Him sit still for more than two seconds. It was always fruit in all directions, laughing, joking, barking orders to the people at the temple, talking to this one then all of a sudden, boom. I remember thinking we’d killed Him. He just sat there and it was, the feeling was like the whole world stopped turning. And then two tears came down His cheek. Then He kind of shook Himself. He opened His eyes. He said, ‘He lost Himself in love. That’s how He meditated. He lost Himself in Love. He’s one with the whole universe. He never died. No one understands. No one understands. He lost Himself in Love.’ He immersed Himself in Love.” – Krishna Das Q: Hi, KD. Hello. KD: Hi. Q: How are you? Thank you for being here today. Ok, I was just wondering, you being Jewish, I’m Jewish as well. KD: I’m Jewish on my parents’ side. Q: On your parents’ side? You don’t really practice anymore do you? Any of the Judaic traditions? KD: Anymore? Q: yeah. Or did you back as a child? KD: You know, my family’s about as Jewish as the Pope’s family, that’s all I can tell you. Q: I was reading the Yoga Sutras and they were talking about praying to God, and we were talking about “What does ‘God’ mean to you?” And it was interesting to see how people were like corrupted by religion and how they grew up, and you know, like, originally nobody really mentioned the nature of the “one-ness.” KD: I’m sorry Q: Of their one-ness and what Christ teaches us. But I was wondering, when you came into realization of that and who taught you that and what you thought of before, before like the little bit of your changing “awakening” to realize that and how that helped you. KD: You know, a woman once said to me at a workshop, she said, “Last weekend I was at a Jewish weekend and they say you can’t say the Name of God.” And I said, “Absolutely right. You can’t.” Maharajji used to say, “Go on, sing your lying Ram Ram. One of these days you’ll say it right once. Boom. You’re out of here. The real Ram will come.” So we’re practicing.  You can’t say the name of God because God is beyond Name and Form. It’s beyond any concept and anything that comes out of our mouths is a concept of some kind. So, it can’t be God. So, that being said, I remember I actually was bar mitzvah’d and I went to Hebrew school to learn the Haftorah, they call it, and my Hebrew school teacher used to bang his head on the blackboard and said, “If I didn’t see this class, I would not believe it.” And bang his head. Great memories. Yeah, you know, nobody in my family believed in God. Or forget God, nobody believed that they could even be happy. There was no idea of a path. All they did was complain. You know? We had one saint in the family and her qualification was that she did not complain. That was literally, I was told. I said “Why is Bubby a saint?” “Because she never complains about anything.” That was the qualification, you know? You know the Jewish lady sitting around, “Oh, how are you doing, is there anything all right?” You know the joke the old Jewish guy driving, driving though the mountains through a storm and the wind’s blowing and the snow and everything and he drives off the cliff and the car goes down down down, spinning, spinning, spinning and lands like upside down on the branch of a huge tree. So, the highway patrol guy comes up on his motorcycle and he runs down the mountain, he finds the guy, he’s hanging upside down in the car, right? He said, “Sir, sir, are you comfortable?” And the guy goes, “Eh, I’m making a living.” Oh, you know, I’m married to a Brazilian. She does not understand one joke I tell her. It’s torture. Not one. All the years I practiced abuse, being abused by all this Jewish humor I can’t share with her. It’s terrible. So. That’s about how Jewish I am. I don’t know. But like I said, Jesus was Jewish by the way. Did you know that? People seem to forget that, you know; painting Him like a white man with like long, straight hair, blonde. Forget it. He’s about as blonde as Bob Marley. It’s, you know, forget it. That’s not it. You know? And people, He wasn’t a Christian. He was a Jewish guy. They called Him “Rabbi”. For what, you think He was like, the Pope? He was a Rabbi. He just happened to, you know, find Reality somewhere along the line. He wanted to clean up. Just like Buddha did with the Hindu religion, you know. The priests had become all powerful and anybody who wanted to get good karmas had to pay the priests to do pujas for them or ceremonies or teachings. It was the same, all the money changes in the temple, you know the whole story. So, somebody said, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be” and tried to change it and you know. In India, they don’t hang people up quite as easily as they did in those days. Maharajji talked about Jesus, it was so powerful. I mean, He talked about Hanuman, of course, Ram and Krishna and Kali and Durga, but when He talked about Jesus it was, I can’t, I can’t, it was so powerful. Really. I mean, you must have heard me tell this story but I’ll tell you again. So, a Canadian guy came to the temple for the first time and he didn’t know anything about Maharajji, how He was, you know. He didn’t give lectures. He didn’t teach. He didn’t write books. He didn’t initiate people. He just hung around. So, Maharajji says to Him, “Why did you come? What do you want?” So, the guy thought he should give like a you know, spiritual answer, he said, “Well, could you teach me how to meditate?” “Get out of here. Go in the back with the crazy people, the Westerners.  Go on. Go.” And as he’s walking away, He said, “Just meditate like Christ. Go on. Get out of here.” So, the guy comes in the back and we, you know, we debriefed anyone who spent two seconds with Maharajji. What’d he say? Then what’d He say? Then what’d you say? And then what’d He say? What did He do? Did He give you fruit? How many pieces? You know. What can I tell you. So, the guy said, “Well, you told me to meditate like Christ.”  What? You know? So later on, we’re sitting in the back and Maharajji came to spend some time with us and Ram Das was there and Ram Das said, “Baba, you said we should meditate like Christ. How did He meditate?” So, Maharajji, it seemed like He started to say something and then His eyes, He just stopped and His eyes closed and He just sat in front of us, perfectly still. We had not seen Him sit still for more than two seconds. It was always fruit in all directions, laughing, joking, barking orders to the people at the temple, talking to this one then all of a sudden, boom. I remember thinking we’d killed Him. He just sat there and it was, the feeling was like the whole world stopped turning. And then two tears came down His cheek. Then He kind of shook Himself. He opened His eyes. He said, “He lost Himself in love. That’s how He meditated. He lost Himself in Love. He’s one with the whole universe. He never died. No one understands. No one understands. He lost Himself in Love.” He immersed Himself in Love. That wasn’t my idea of what meditation was, you know? I thought you had to sit down, fight with yourself and beat yourself up and pretend you were meditating. He lost Himself in love. I mean, what else do we want, right? Wouldn’t we like to live there no matter what else was going on? Wouldn’t you like to be in that space where you are open and flowing and connected with everything and at ease of heart with whatever arises in your life? You know? And you weren’t a prisoner of your own reactions and your own knee-jerk reactions and your own programming from the trauma we’ve had in our lives and the pain and the broken hearts. Wouldn’t we like to be free of that? That’s what that is, when we can immerse ourselves in that love that lives within us as who and what we already really are. It’s not something else. It’s really, it’s not something else. It’s who we are. Right now. So, I’m just going to read you this quick little poem I thought of today. It’s from a Saint in India named Namdev. “I have delved into the four vedas”- You know what the vedas are? The ancient teachings. “And I’ve drawn forth their hidden meaning. I’ve churned the six philosophies”- the different dualism, non-dualism, semi-dualism, UCONN basketball, you know, the six philosophies. “I’ve churned the six philosophies and I’ve extracted their essence And I’ve learned the ultimate goal of yogis and ascetics I’ve known the joy of merging in Brahma, the formless Lord Oh, My friend,” says Namdev, “I’ve transcended all this through the grace of the Saints. Realize, realize my mind that the secret is the Lord’s love. The secret is the Love.” That’s the secret. Everything we think we want, everything we’re looking for, the secret essence is the Love. We all want to get back home. Now. He’s a devotee so He, He expresses it in that way, that the grace of the Saints, but a non-dual person would say, “This is your own true nature. This is your essence, is this state of grace and that’s always pulling us home.”  It’s like gravity for the heart. The secret is the love and the chanting, all these Names are the Names of that place. So we’re constantly evoking, invoking and evoking that place which is the Love. These are the Names of that place within us that is the Love. It’s not in India. It’s not somewhere else. It’s everywhere. So, anybody have anything they want to say important? Otherwise we’ll sing. Yeah? Ok. Give her the mic. Q:  Hi.  You talk about the practice helping to move us closer to our true Selves and you’ve brought up trauma. When you’re triggered by that trauma, I guess I’m talking about me, when I’m triggered by that trauma, I experience a paralyzing fear in my heart and I’m just curious if it’s been your experience that the practice will help to ease that fear eventually. KD: Well, there’s no question about that in my mind. However, the issue is, if we do the practice only to lessen the intensity of the effects of the trauma, will it work also? And it will. But, but as you focus, as you focus on other things in your life, those moments, when the trauma arises become and less and less. As you focus on other things. If you focus only on the trauma and you, and you’re, and you do the practice to cure yourself from the trauma, it’s, yeah, sure, of course, there will be an effect but they have this thing, nishkama karma. Nishkama, desireless action or desireless practice, so, not desireless but so, like I said, Maharajji said, “You want to find God. Serve people. Don’t think about yourself.” You know? Right? So, if you’re not thinking about yourself and you start noticing other people more and seeing other people and becoming more sensitive to their needs and who they are and where they’re coming from, you’re just automatically developing a whole other way of going through your day, which precludes that trauma. It might still be there, but it’s not going to get triggered the same way as often because you’re, because even with that, in the presence of that, those issues, you’re expanding in many other directions at the same time and you stop caring so much about that. Right now, we tend to identify very strongly with that and for good reason, you know. It’s powerful issues in our lives. But when you start developing loving kindness, and I know this sounds wimpy. Shit. But loving kindness and caring about other people and thinking about others rather than yourself, you’re just creating a whole new way of going through the day that doesn’t leave space for that. You’re not having to push that away. You’re not having to deal with it directly. Like, I’m taking this medicine for this disease. That doesn’t really have to work exactly like that. And in fact, even if you started with that in mind, which is not bad, I mean, fine, perfect. Over time, the effects, you’ll be thinking about yourself less. And when you’re thinking about yourself less, you know, there’s no room for that to arise. Now, it might arise in certain situations. But there’ll be so much more space around it in a sense, because you’re not, you haven’t been holding onto it with such intensity. You know, you know, so it’s kind of like that. But it’s all good. There’s no, for instance, with the practice of the repetition of the Name, these are mantras. There are many types of mantras. There’s mantras to find buried treasure. There’s mantras to rob banks. There’s mantras to get people to fall in love with you. There’s mantras to become president of the united states. I wish somebody didn’t know that one. But anyhow, the repetition of the Name is good for none of that. It’s only good for one thing. It has absolutely no, it’s only good for love. For finding out who you are. It’s not good for anything else. Those other mantras, you find somebody to initiate you in them and then god bless you, you’ll get it. Then you’ll have to deal with it. So, but this is not good for anything other than opening the heart and purifying the heart and opening it up and giving us more space in our life to be ourselves. Yeah. Good. Nice. Thanks for asking that. Q: Thank you and thank you for sharing your experience and for being so genuine. KD: Yeah. There’s a new movie coming out called “Cracked Up” by a friend of mine and it’s about this comedian, Darrell Hammond, who was on Saturday Night Live, and it’s a documentary about his journey through the trauma that he had and discovering it and how you work with it and how he overcame so much of it and how it ruled his life for so many years and forced him into so many negative and hurtful behaviors and alcoholism and drug addiction, all that stuff. So, it’s really juicy. And it should be, it’s being released next week. So, “Cracked Up,” if you hear about it, go see it. See, in India they don’t talk about this stuff like this. They need some cultural appropriation, I think. They say “Ram Ram Ram” and then they go steal from their neighbor, you know? It doesn’t work. We’re all kind of in the same boat, you know. Maharajji had a great devotee named Dada. Dada means “elder brother.” And Maharajji was, his name was Sudir Mukerjee. He was a communist economics professor who became a devotee of Maharajji and Maharajji would call Him “Dada” which means elder brother, which he certainly wasn’t, of Maharajji’s. But Maharajji told his wife, Dada’s wife, to call him Dada, too. And she said, “He’s not my Dada, he’s my husband.” Maharajji said, “If he’s my Dada, he’s your Dada.” So she had to call him Dada, too. This book, you could read some of these books. They’re out, and stories about Maharajji, and get a feel for how He went through His day, how He lived and how the devotees, how they were affected by Him, how their lives opened up and changed. For instance, this guy Dada, he was, like I said, he was a completely non-religious. He was interested in nothing like that. Totally into his professorship and all that stuff. One day, his wife and his mother, who lived with them, they were going out, and Dada said, “Where are you going?” They said, “Well, there’s a little house across the street and we heard that there’s this saint that comes there every once in a while and we’ve been waiting to hear when he came back so we could go see Him. And we heard He’s there today. So we’re going to see Him.” “Ok, go. Go.” So, they left, but they came right back. And Dada said, “What’s wrong? Didn’t you go?” “Well, yes we went and just as I entered the room, the Saint looked at me, called me by my name and told me to go. But I didn’t go. I sat down and then He looked at me again in a few minutes and called me again by my first name. ‘Kamala, go. Your husband’s friends are waiting for their tea. Go, go. Come tomorrow.’” So, this got Dada curious, right? So the next day, he walks over with his wife and they walk into the room and this Saint gets up, takes Dada’s hand and starts walking out the door and says, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.” Now, think about your drive up to the Stop and Shop, you know, and you get out of your car and some homeless guy comes up and takes your hand and says, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.” I don’t think so. But India is another universe. So, Maharajji, you know, this was Maharajji. Long story. But anyway, it’s in the books. Really good stuff. Reading about the Saints, reading about the really, the realized Beings and seeing how they interacted with people and seeing how they lived in the world and what they did and it’s life changing. Really, it is. It’s a spiritual practice in itself.       The post Ep. 76 | Judaism, Christ and Namdev [https://krishnadas.com/podcasts/call-response/ep-76-judaism-christ-and-namdev/] appeared first on Krishna Das [https://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 January 16, 2021 “Practice is so important because we plant those seeds of what we want to grow with our practice. It doesn’t mean just meditation practice or chanting practice. It means caring about people, caring about ourselves, caring about the world and offering kindness and compassion to everyone that comes into our lives. But if we don’t plant those seeds, in those moments that get very difficult, like this moment in the world, there’s very little we can do.” – Krishna Das Maharajji said, “Courage is a very important thing, a very big thing. It takes a lot of courage to let go. It takes a lot of courage to do practice, because we don’t know where we’re going, and we don’t know what we’ll find. All we know is that we’re inundated by our stuff, 24 hours a day. In the Gita, Krishna says, “Even the littlest bit of this Dharma, the tiniest bit of turning against the flow of that river of immersion in external sense objects and awareness, sense awareness, just the slightest bit of turning away and back to the source is a huge thing, and only we can do that. No one can do it for us. So, depending on what we really want for ourselves and our loved ones and the planet and the world, that’s what will dictate what practices we do, how we turn within and how much we dedicate to that, how much of our hearts we dedicate to that. You can’t fool yourself, really, because we’re always here, and there’s a part of us that is always knows what’s going on. Even if we refuse to see it, there’s a deeper part of us, that knows everything that needs to be known, but we’re locked out of that place at this point in our karmic predicament. It’s like we have a big, beautiful house, but we’re sleeping on the lawn of the house. We don’t realize that the house is our true home. So we’re living on the lawn. We get a little port-a-potty out on the lawn, a little garden hose to wash our faces. The house is right there. We just don’t realize it. Then when we do realize it, we have to find the key to the door, but at least we’ll be looking at that point. If we don’t look, we don’t find. Okay. Hi. How you doing? I’ve had better years. And worse, I’m sure. Yeah. Well, not a lot worse, actually. I guess the last time I was on was in August, so, it’s been awhile. The way I’m going to phrase this question is going to sound really really dramatic because it sort of feels that way, but hopefully it won’t seem weird. In Christianity, there’s a condition or a state of mind called the Dark Night of the Soul. Yeah. Are you familiar with it? Very familiar. And you know, I feel like I’ve gotten there. Even when I sit in my meditation room, I feel just totally disconnected, and the phrase over the doors of hell in Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” is sort of what I feel like my life is doing right now. The outcome is likely to be that because of things that are going on with my grandsons, of ages 13 and 14, and my daughter, and also just not being able to see my friends in person is really, it doesn’t help at all. So, here I am just to find out what your thinking is about that state, and if there’s a similar state in the Hindu tradition. You know, I just read something about it saying it just has to do with ego transformation, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels really ego-taking-apart, in a way. So anyway, I appreciate your thinking on that. Have you seen the movie, the short film that was made about Ram Dass? There was a longer film made about Ram Dass by this guy, this English guy that we know, and most of it was clips of earlier talks that he gave way before the stroke, back in the eighties, nineties, early nineties, and we watched it together, me and Ram Dass and a few of the other people who were at the house in Maui at the time, and everybody said, oh, they liked it so much. And I was trying to hide, you know. Then they asked me what I thought and I said, ” Truthfully, I didn’t like it.” And the other thing was, it was kind of weird, kind of creepy, and Ram Dass said, “What do you mean?” I said to him, “Look, you’re giving lectures about suffering and dealing with pain and suffering and all these things, and you’re about to hit the wall at a thousand miles an hour, and you don’t know it.” He’s giving these talks, these lectures, you know. Brilliant. Intellectually brilliant. They’re wonderful. But the guy was about to be smashed against the fucking wall, and I said, “It’s creepy because you can tell you don’t really know what you’re talking about.” Anyway. Yeah. Right. And this is it. This is the stuff. This is what we have to deal with. There’s no way around it. So we keep looking for a cure for it, and that makes it just hurt more. It hurts. It really hurts, especially when those people that we’re very close with bound, by blood and karma, are suffering, and it’s just terrible. But there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s the hard part to accept, and I know you said that to me and other people many times, but I can’t find the key to surrender. If I sit there and I say, “Okay, I have to surrender now. I have to find a way to just give it up, but it doesn’t happen. And you can’t make yourself do that. No, you can’t. So when I hurt my knee in India you must have heard this story, maybe everybody didn’t. So I’ll just tell it briefly I stepped in a hole in the road, snapped my leg, and I woke up the next morning and my knee was out to here. It was all swollen, and I couldn’t hardly walk. So, we were not, supposed to come to the temple to see Maharajji until the afternoon, till about four, but this was first thing in the morning and I thought, “Well, you know, I have to get to the doctor. Otherwise this is really bad. I don’t know what this is.” So, my friend Raghu helped me walk to the temple. I had to lean on him the whole way. I could hardly walk. We get into the temple and I limp up to where Maharajji’s sitting in this middle of this empty courtyard, on his cot, on his little bed. I sit down and I put my leg out underneath the cot because I can’t bend me knee, and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say, “What are you doing here? Why’d you come so early? Why? What’s wrong with you? Why did you hurt yourself?” He didn’t say anything. He just sat there for a couple of minutes, and I said to myself, “Well, I’m not going anywhere. I’m having Darshan. Let them cut the leg off. I don’t give a shit. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” So then he gets up and he starts walking to the back of the temple and he took the hand of the Indian devotee that was there with him. It was the only other person there. And they’re walking away from where we’re sitting, and the further away he got, the more, he was kind of leaning on the guy, and leaning on him, and it was like he couldn’t walk, and I thought to myself, “He’s taking on the karma of my knee.” You know? At that minute I had that thought, he turned around and basically ran back to the tucket. He plops down and he looks at me and he said, “You thought I was in pain? You wanted to help me?” And he pats me on the head. “Good boy.” Meanwhile, I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, “What is this? What’s going on here?” You know, “What did I do? Why did this happen?” All the time I’m sitting there with him. Later in the day, other Westerners started to show up and at one point, he reaches down into the shoulder bag of this woman, one of the Westerners, and he pulls out a Bible. We started carrying Bibles around because he was always talking about Jesus. So we started reading the Bible. So, he pulls out the Bible. Now he’s not supposed to be able to read English and supposedly he doesn’t speak English, supposedly he doesn’t understand English. So he picks out the book, opens it up like this and holds it up for me and says, “Read this.” And he points to this like that, just like that. So, it was from Saint Paul, Corinthians and it said, ” In order to protect me from the abundance of revelations,” from getting a big head, “it was given to me a thorn in the side, and I beseeched the Lord three times to take it from me. And the Lord said, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect in your weakness.'” Well Ram Dass and I have been talking about this for 50 years, and at one point, he said, “Well, we’re proof of that.” So I had t-shirts made up, one for him and one for me that said “proof.” And the point is this, when we recognize our inability to really do anything, to save our own asses, that’s when the reality of grace shows up for us, not the grace itself, cause that’s always there, but we recognize that power of grace. “My grace is sufficient for thee.” It’s enough, no matter what’s happening to you, and you recognize that by seeing that grace is made perfect in your weakness. You can’t change this. You can’t even change your mind. You can’t let go. You can’t surrender. Recognize that’s surrender and don’t fight against it. And you can’t even stop thinking about it. “Well, that’s not surrender. I haven’t given up. I’m still thinking about it.” Right? That’s because you can’t. “My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect.” And the fact that you can’t do a fucking thing to help yourself except bow again and again. How long do you want me to go on? With you I might have to go on for 30,000 lifetimes,. Right. That’s what it feels, like again and again, and it ain’t happening. Yeah. And then you judge yourself, “Oh, I’m still doing this and it’s not working.” Again and again. That’s the recognition of your weakness. And that’s what the Lord said is the way it is. “My strength is made perfect in your weakness.” But do you ever come out the other side of this? I mean, is this this going to be forever? That’s not up to you. Why do you even think about that? It’s not your problem. You’re unable to do anything about it. Just stop thinking about it. You’re just obsessing. This is the program that’s running your whole life, beating the shit out of yourself every fucking moment, and I’ve known you long enough to say that. That’s what you can’t let go of ,beating the shit out of yourself. Stop that first, or keep recognizing that and let go of that. ” There I go again, again and again.” Yeah. But you know, what makes that really hard is that, the fact that I am inadequate is being reinforced by so many other people and circumstances. It has nothing to do with other people. Nobody said you’re inadequate. The Lord doesn’t say you’re inadequate. Well, that was a euphemism for what I really feel like. That was a what? A euphemism for what I really feel like. What I feel like is that I’m useless. Label it, “self evaluation.” Yeah. Again and again, and you’ll see all day long, that’s all you do to yourself is judge yourself harshly. Now that’s a program that’s running. That’s not you. That’s your training. That’s what you’ve been trained in, and that’s where you’ve lived most of your life, judging yourself harshly. Is there really anything wrong with you? Are you really bad? No, you’re not bad. Like everybody else, you’re fucked up. Everybody’s fucked up. That’s what samsara is. That’s where they put us. That’s the prison they put us in here. We’re all fucked up. We’re all hating ourselves, hating others, using others, manipulating ourselves, manipulating others, grabbing onto this, pushing this away, afraid of this, wanting this, ashamed of this, blah-blah-blah. This is the world. This is the world we live in. Everybody’s doing this. Yeah. But you know, it’s my inability to get to that good place that you’re talking about. Nope. Nope. Nope. Stuff. But the thing is… That’s just judgment. Hello? Hello. Hello. Listen to yourself. You’re just fucking repeating the same shit over again. Different words. Same shit. But it affects other people. It affects two kids. Fuck other people change yourself first and everything will happen for other people. If you can’t change yourself, what chance do you think they can change themselves? Can anybody do this for you? No, you have to do it. You can’t do it for somebody else. Once you accept yourself, the vibe will change, totally. But you can’t fake it. It’s not something you can fake. So how many times am I going to have to talk to you about this before it finally happens? I don’t know. As soon as you’re finished, whenever you’re ready. Okay. Just keep noticing. If it’s hard for you to notice, why don’t you get a brick, and every time you notice that you’re beating yourself up mentally, drop that brick on your foot. And maybe you’ll notice it.. Maybe eventually you’ll, ” Okay. It’s enough.” But see, you don’t get enough torture in your mind. It’s never enough for you, but if you actually bang your head on the wall every time you caught yourself judging yourself, you would stop, because the minute you start judging, “That means I’m going to have to bang my head on the wall. I can’t do that. It hurts too much.” So that’ll stop you. Put your hand on the flame, on the stove. Every time you find yourself judging, you’ll stop judging quick enough. You’ll notice it immediately. But right? It’s just too comfortable for you now. This is where you’ve lived your whole life. It’s so comfy. “Oh, I’m such a fuck up. And everybody look what I’ve done. My daughter and my grandson. It’s all my fault. I’m so fucked up.” Listen, girl, somebody did it to you as well. You’re no worse or no better than anybody else. And they have their own karmas. If you want to help them, help yourself first, and then everything will change in your dynamic with them as you change how you treat yourself. But you just don’t notice how hard, even now when we’re talking, you’re still thinking about, “How am I going to figure this out? I can’t do this.” It’s going on in your head and you can’t stop. That’s what I’m saying, wake up. Drop a brick on your foot. After a couple of times, you’ll start to notice. It doesn’t hurt enough. It’s too comfortable. You’re so identified with it. It’s so much Homebase for you. That’s why it’s so hard to stop. All of us. You’re not different than anybody else, and no worse and no better. We’re all in the same stew here. And this is the work we have to do. I didn’t mean to take up so much time. I just realized that I’d take up a lot of time. Other people might have questions. Fuck other people. They’re listening. They’re getting out of this too. This is more judging yourself. Oh, I’m not worthy. I took up too much time. Get over it. If I’m in charge here, if I didn’t want to talk to you, I’d just say, “Fuck off, go somewhere else. I’m finished with you.” Did I say that? No. Not yet. Okay. So, fuck off. We’re finished. Really. You’re so hard on yourself. It’s really heartbreaking. And it breaks your own heart, too. Yeah. There’s a lot of pain in there, you know? And that pain is not yours. That was given to you by the world and by your upbringing and by your karmic predicament, and you, like the people before you just transmitted that. You had no choice. Now you have a choice. Now you have a choice. Now you can do something to lessen the energy that that program rips off from you all the time. But you’re too hard on yourself. You sit for two seconds, “Ah, this is not working, you know, I’ve been doing this for more than 50 years and nothing’s happened.” You know, it just goes on and on, and every time you do it, you actually believe that. Maybe start to think of it as somebody else talking to you. What would you tell that person? You say, “Excuse me? Get the fuck outta here. Who do you think you’re talking to?” But no, because you just believe it. You accept it as if it’s true. It’s not true. It’s a program. It’s a reaction to the way the life you’re in the way you see it. You can change the way you see it, but not easy, but you can, and the longing to change is so strong in you, but the self hatred is just as strong. And I always say this, that the way our parents saw themselves is very much the way we learn to see ourselves, not how they saw us so much, but how they saw themselves. We absorbed that view of that way of seeing ourselves the way they saw themselves. And so you absorbed that. They absorbed that. Their parents absorbed that. It goes back to, you know, whatever, back to whatever, there wasn’t a beginning. So now just wake up. This is it. That’s a dream and it’s painful. It’s really painful. And it really, I’m not saying it’s not painful. It is painful. But yeah, the only thing you can do is to work on yourself and treat others as well as you can at this point in life. What’s done is done and what’s going to happen, hasn’t happened yet. So this is it, now. Intellectually. I understand all this. It’s just. Yeah. So now apply the understanding to actual practice and try to notice when you’re doing it to yourself again. I mean, you walk around all day long and you do it to yourself, and you don’t even notice that you’re spending all your time beating yourself up. And of course, these times make everything worse. There’s no question about it. It’s like injecting steroids into it. It’s just ridiculous. It makes everything so much harder to bear, so much more despair, but that’s also not you. That’s the whole world. The whole world is suffering like this. So, we’re absorbing that as well. Every time we look at the newspaper, every time we talk to somebody we’re getting the bad news. So it’s everywhere. It’s in the atmosphere. We’re breathing in and out. Yeah, that doesn’t help because not only do I feel like I’m coming apart, but I feel like the whole country, at least is coming apart. Maybe the whole world is coming apart. The whole world. Yes. It’s the whole world, the whole planet, and every level, socially, politically climate wise, everything falling apart. Everything. Right now, right here is all we’ve got. To do the best for other people, we have to be able to do the best for ourselves, too. And that would be in your case, trying to give yourself a break. It’s not easy. Yeah. Set a little alarm in the house. Every 20 minutes when it goes off, “Oh.” That will just get you out of your thought flow, which you’re completely immersed in all the time. That alarm goes off, it’s oh, so for 10 seconds you won’t be thinking about yourself. You set it again, and then for 20 minutes, you’ll be gone again till it rings. At least it’ll bring you back for a second. ” Oh, okay.” Don’t forget to hit the alarm and set it again, though. Yeah. I mean, I spend most of my time actually worrying about the other people in my life, more than I spend beating myself up, although there’s plenty of that. What does that help? What does that accomplish then? So why do it? It’s a habit and it’s another way of beating yourself up and making yourself feel bad. Concern can certainly be there because people are suffering. People are hurting and it breaks our hearts and it really hurts. And we don’t want it to be that way, but it is that way. So what can we do? We can release and let ourselves breathe and just let that stuff drip off of us, just drip out of us, just drain out of us. Whenever we remember, let it drain away. Just come back to your breath and let your body breathe, and relax and let that stuff drain away, and then you’ll forget, and then it will be built up again. Then as soon as you remember, just let it drain away. That’s huge. Don’t try to solve everything. Just let it drain off of you, drain out of you, and then you’ll do it again. No problem. But every time you allow that leaf to settle a little bit, just like a leaf falls from a tree, you know, so every time you go with that, it makes it easier and easier as time goes on. Once in a while, you’ll laugh at yourself. “Am I doing this again? Am I still doing this to myself?” At some point it looks so ridiculous. You can’t believe that you spend your whole life like this. That’s our situation. That’s what we do most of the time. So, your practice can only be one thing, just letting go. And you can pray if you feel like praying. “Can’t you do something, God damn it?”  I’ve tried that. But you didn’t try it enough because they didn’t do anything. By grace, we’re saved. Faith. Isn’t something you manipulate yourself into. It’s something you recognize, you experience directly, and then it becomes real, and that happens by grace. And grace is always here, but we’re not tuned to it. You’re too busy, beating yourself up to even look for it. And when you do look it, you look for it with a chip on your shoulder. “Come on, where the fuck are you?” What do you expect? You’ve got to let go. And it hurts. I know it hurts. It really does. But what are the options? Going on like this? That’s not an option. Okay. You’re right. Recognize the severity of the situation and the importance of this moment. This is the only time that you have to make a stand against these programs that have been running your life. This is it. When you take your last breath, you don’t want to be thinking, “Oh, if I only paid more attention, if I only let go. Why didn’t I let go?” You don’t want to have that thought. So do it now while you can, because you can. It doesn’t mean doing more practice. It means being with what’s going on in a less obsessive, compulsive way, noticing how this is always going on. This can keep going. You don’t have to listen to it after a while. Eventually it just goes through. It doesn’t even grab you. You can’t stop thoughts. Sometimes I notice that there’s a certain attachment to that feeling and that makes it hard to let it go. To w hat feeling? To the feelings of worry and… Oh, absolutely. Totally. You’re totally identified. Not totally, but you’re mostly identified with all those thoughts and feelings. You actually believe them, and you feel them, and you think, “This is me. And this is the way I feel,” and you don’t recognize that the feelings are constantly changing, going and coming, rearranging. First it’s guilt. Then it’s fear. Then it’s anger. Then there’s despair. There’s not just one thing all the time, but for you, it’s just a big dark cloud, and you’re in it. You’re dancing around and you think this is the way it’s always going to be. But the cloud is not you, period. It’s just not. It’s an object of awareness. It’s an object of your consciousness. You’re aware of those feelings. That means there’s you. And there’s the feelings. But you’re like this with them right now. You think you are and so you are, but you’re not, really. But you think you are. And so that’s how you act. You identify with them. They are attached to those thoughts. You’re glued to them. But if you look closely, you’ll see it’s something outside of you, these feelings. But the main thing is to just let go. Notice that you’re caught. That’s already letting go. It’s not, ” Okay,, I’m going to take it. I’m going to let go.” No, just noticing that you’re doing it to yourself again, means, at that instant, you’re not. You’re noticing that you are and that’s different, but you can’t hold on to that noticing. You can only re-notice, because by the time you’ve noticed that you’ve noticed, you’re not noticing anymore. You’re tripping out on the fact that you noticed and you’re trying to hold on. “Yes. I just noticed.” But it’s already back and doing it to you again. So, you have to keep noticing and at the same time, one thing I would do is, as many times as in the day that you remember, just sit down and allow the breath to settle. You can’t settle the breath. I’m not asking you to slow your breath down. I’m asking you to sit down and allow the breath to settle. Allow your body to relax. That’s all. And then get up and be stupid again. It doesn’t matter, but do that 50 times a day, a hundred times a day. Do it for just two minutes. Don’t try to hold on to it because you won’t be able to, and then you’ll be beating yourself up again, and that will go on forever again until it stops. So, as many times as you feel, as you remember to do it, stop. Sit down and settle. “I can’t settle. This is stupid. I can’t do this. I’m not going to do this.” Yeah. Just allow it to settle again and again, and those thoughts will just float off into space, which is where they are anyway. And love means letting people be who they are. Our children and our grandchildren took these bodies. They brought their own karmas to those bodies. Those bodies themselves, are the creation of their karmas, and then with, and we were hosting them, and all we can do is the best we can do. There’s no more we can do, especially when we recognize how our weakness, our inability to do anything really. So, all we can do is the best we can do and pray for grace. But you still have to clean out the vessel to hold the grace. That’s the slowing down. The dirt is your thoughts. The sludge is our thoughts and emotions and the grace can’t come into a cup that’s filled with that stuff. So slow down, let it go and allow yourself to feel okay sometimes. You’re allowed. There’s no law written. “Everybody except Diane can feel okay in the world. She is not allowed to do that.” That’s something that you were taught about yourself, way early. Could be even in the womb. You just don’t know. We absorb a lot of stuff even before we’re born from our parents. Because we’re there while they’re yelling and screaming at each other. We’re there while they’re depressed, while they’re drinking, while they’re fucked up. We’re in that. Our consciousness is there and we feel all that stuff. So it’s not something you did. It’s just life. And so the more you learn how to give yourself a break, the more you have a possibility of allowing other people to do that for themselves as well. That’s about as much as we can do at this point. Thank you. Yeah. Good to see you. How’s the judge? She’s good. She’s good. She’s painting all the time now, right? Yeah. She loves the solitude. I don’t do so well in solitude. Well, that’s what you say, but you don’t know. It brings all this up and it’s a great time to do the work that you have to do. Yeah. Because tomorrow might be too late. Now. Today. Yeah. And at this point in my life, I’m really aware of it. Tomorrow might be too late. Well, don’t worry. You’ll have another chance, but now is now. Okay. All right. Take care. Hi. I’m from London. Thank you, Krishna Das, for taking my question. Actually you’ve sort of answered a lot of it, really, with the lady just then. Well, first of all I found you by accident and I’ve been sort of following you now for the past, I don’t know, few months now, and I’ve started chanting and I realized there’s something coming from you, and I don’t know what it is. When I start singing, listening to your melodies, I start crying you know, and I’m not depressed or anything like that, but I just feel like this release, and even as you’re talking now, I know it’s not about you, it’s about the universe. I know. I feel like this sensations in my hands, a lot of vibration inside me you know. And I think I’m making progress. I’ve come from a very abusive background, you know, as a child, and I’ve done a lot of shit things really when I reflect back. But I was really tested by the universe on Thursday, and somebody cheated me out of 50 quid, which is about one $70 as well as, which not a lot of money, but then murderous rage I got towards this person. I’ve never, and I’m not a murderer, by the way, and I’ve never hurt anybody, but I can be really nasty with my tongue, you know. I’ll keep that in mind. Yeah no, but I just I have this really murderous rage, like inside of me. Yeah. And then I thought, “Okay just go with the feeling. Go with the feeling.” Exactly what you’re advising the last lady. And it did. It sort of by it went, you know, the intensity did go then the following day, but that day, you know. It’s just like telephone scam, it was, I got ripped off on that. You know, and then I don’t usually fall for that kind of stuff, but I did on this occasion, but it’s the reaction really. And it frightens me sometimes because they diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder about 10 years ago. And I just, you know, I have got into rages of people in the supermarket sometimes, and so I’ve never hurt anybody, but it can result to me calling somebody an “F-ing…” you know. I think I’m following a spiritual practice, but I’m not doing very well. I’m not doing very well here. Anyway, I’ve shared with my flatmate who lives with me here. And he’s so honest. And I said to him about this. He says, “Oh, I just choose light. I just choose love.” So he’s following Louise Hay. And I agree with that. But when that fucking intensity of the murderous horrible rage comes in, I cannot focus on light. And I’ve listened to Ram Dass, and Maharajji when he was sort of telling the story of “Love everybody and tell the truth.” if I had to be honest, I don’t hate everybody, but I hate the unjust people. I really have hatred towards them, but I know it’s not them. I know they’re just acting out of ego just as much as I am, but I think the answer is going to be the same as you gave to the last lady, really, but I really struggle with it and I sometimes worry, am I going to really lash out at somebody? I think there’s like a schizophrenia in me. I’m either, I can be a best friend or I can be your worst enemy, and I’ll be the worst enemy to the person I perceive to be unjust. And that’s it really thank you. Well, you’re 51, but there’s still time, don’t worry. Yeah. To be an asshole. I mean, you know,. Yeah, we all have that stuff. Your flatmate: you step on his foot and see how much light and love he can find at that point. That’s bullshit. That’s just bullshit. You’re a thousand times more real than somebody who’s kidding themselves like that. You can’t talk yourself into this stuff. That’s not what it’s about. Be who you are. So, a good practice for you, really would be to remember to treat other people the way you would like to be treated. So, even when you hate somebody, when somebody has been such a fucking asshole and they ripped you off, just switch places with them for a second, and you see, well, you know, “I wouldn’t want to be treated the way I’m thinking about treating this person. You know, and you’re not going to be able to do that, but just trying to remember to see it that way is really big thing. If we could do that, if we could treat other people the way we would like to be treated, this world would be a different place immediately. Right? And all that anger, this comes from, you know, pain, being hurt. We’ve all been so hurt. All of our hearts. We’ve been so betrayed and we’ve been treated so badly by life that we really, that rage is our, it’s really our way of protecting ourselves from feeling how hurt we are. You know? So, when you hear that chanting and stuff and those tears come, they’re coming out of love. They’re coming out of the feeling that “Yeah, I’m letting go. I can let go. I can just be me.” You know? And that’s a wonderful thing. Don’t think about whether you’re unhappy or you’re sad. What else can you do when you come home? Right? You finally recognize there is a home to come back to. The tears always come. That’s a good thing. And let yourself cry. Let them come. It’s pure. That cleans the mirror of your heart. It’s a beautiful thing. Really. Just remember. And forget supermarkets. Supermarkets are where most people want to kill everybody else, anyway. That’s the craziest thing. It’s unbelievable. So, Yeah, just keep that in your thoughts. You know, keep the idea of treating, and the other thing is this, listen, don’t expect other people to respond to you that way. You’re not doing that in order to get other people to respond. You’re doing that because this is what you need to do, to treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Whether they respond and see you or not, that is not the deal. That’s not what it’s about. So don’t get upset when the world starts, all of a sudden, doesn’t put you on a pedestal and pour golden water all over you and lights come and everything. That’s not going to happen tomorrow. A little later, maybe. So just be you, man. And so that’s it. First of all, there’s nothing else you can be. There’s no one else you can be. So let’s make this the best you that you can be, which is fine because that’s already in there and it’s buried under all this stuff. And when we open up like that, when the chant, we hear the chant or something, it washes our souls. It washes our hearts. That’s a good thing. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming today. I’ll speak to you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Be well. Hi. I’ve talked to you about this a little bit before, and you touched on this a lot earlier, but specifically what I wanted to talk to you about was my brother. He’s been going through a dark night of the soul since about the time he was 20 years old and he’s been on and off the street with schizophrenia and this year with COVID, we didn’t know where he was a lot of the time and it was extra scary at times, of course. And you know, I just really, I was really focused on opening my heart and praying for him, and in July he emerged and we were able to get him into a supportive housing situation, but time and time again, that only lasts for so long, and then he’s off running again. And the past few years it’s fallen to me to really oversee his care when he does emerge and try to help him. And I feel okay. I know there’s only so much I can do, and chanting and all these practices have been really beautiful and helpful in helping me, you know, remind me that, do what you can do and then let it go. Do what you can do for the day, if you’re in contact with him, and let it go. You talked in the beginning about being out on the lawn and not being able to find the door or find the key. And so I think I have these moments of intense sadness when I think that, because of his karmic situation and having grown up with him and seeing what a good little boy was, and how sweet, and just knowing that he may never even have the knowledge of rightful action or the sense, I guess you could say, to have that opportunity to practice. I don’t know if Maharajji ever spoke specifically about the mentally ill and the fact that they can’t, there’s not that availability of choice, you know, to them the way it is to maybe, to other people. So I just felt like I kind of wanted to ask you about that a little bit. You know? You know, why things are the way they are, we don’t know. Why some people suffer the way they suffer, we could never understand why that happens that way, why a child gets sick and dies. What did they do? You know? Why did that happen? It’s above our pay grade and we just can’t see it and understand it. So that leaves us with ourselves, and what can we do in the moment to lessen the suffering? Every relationship has two or more people. So, there’s your brother and you, and every time you interact with your brother, he’s being himself and you’re being yourself. So all your feelings are interacting with his feelings. So, the best thing you can do is to stay as open, as loving, and as present with him as possible in those moments. And some part of him will feel that. And that’s a wonderful thing you can do. You can’t make him take his meds. You can’t make him go to the doctors. Those are the things you just can’t do. But what you can do is hold him in your heart in a certain way, and love him as he is, as he really is. Love his soul, so to speak. And see him that way. Hold him that way in your heart. And then your interactions with him have the possibility, maybe in some way, of helping him inside. But more than that, you can’t do. And you should try not to be destroyed by your own sadness about the situation, because you’re sending that to him too, in your relationship. You can’t fake it. Okay? I’m not saying that you should fake it and you know, “Just don’t show that you’re sad.” No, this is your work every day, your spiritual practice is to hold him in your heart, and when you notice that you’re feeling sad or wishing it wasn’t like this, and “wish we could do that,” let go and love him as he is. There’s a soul in there that’s perfect, but it’s surrounded encased in suffering. So, the more you see him as a soul, then you’re not identifying with the suffering part of him and maybe that’s going to help him a little bit. It’s certainly going to help you, because you don’t want to carry this burden. It’s not your burden to carry like that. But you want to carry him in love and you have to let yourself feel that, too, and the sadness. This is what you can do, I guess. I mean, it’s very hard. You have to let people be who they are. There’s nothing you can do. Yeah. I have so much love for him that I feel like it’s part of, like I’m partnering with him. I don’t know. I mean, he is my sibling. He’s my younger brother. So it’s hard not to feel like that intensely about it. Yeah. All feelings are okay. It’s all okay. All the feelings you have are okay. Thank you for reminding me of some of those things. Yeah, just hold him in your heart and send him love and be with him. Hold him. You know, be with him in your own heart, soul to soul, not “stuff to stuff.” Okay? Yeah. Practice is so important because we plant those seeds of what we want to grow with our practice, and I don’t mean, it doesn’t mean just meditation practice or chanting practice. It means caring about people, caring about ourselves, caring about the world and offering kindness and compassion to everyone that comes into our lives. But if we don’t plant those seeds, in those moments that get very difficult, like this moment in the world, there’s very little we can do. When you jump out of a window, you know, that’s it, until you hit the ground. When you trip, once you’re falling, you can’t stop yourself. You have to hit the ground. Then you can get up. I guess jumping out a window is a little bit different. Okay. We’re talking about tripping here. So now’s the time to plant the seeds of the kind of qualities that we want. We want to be kind and compassionate to people, but if we hate ourselves, what is that? How can we be kind? I mean, we can try, but it’s not real enough, you know? The more we’re in it with ourselves, that extends to other people. So that’s why they always say, do practice while you can, because when the shit hits the fan, it’s very hard to do it. When that rage comes, there’s nothing you can do except let it pass through like a huge storm. You can’t stop it, but you can also hold on to a tree so you don’t get blown away, but you can’t stop it. But if you keep remembering to try to see people. In a certain way and to treat them in a simply good way, the way you would like to be treated, those storms will arise less and less, and when they do arise, they won’t be as strong as they usually are. Over time, they get less and less, but it takes patience. Patience is one of the ways that we can be good to ourselves, be patient with ourselves. We don’t have it together. We know that, okay? We know that. So as time goes on, we’ll get together. So, patience with ourselves is a way of being kind to ourselves and that patience can extend to other people. “Don’t they fucking get it? Why are they acting like this?” You know? That’s not patience. That’s saying, “I guess they don’t fucking get it. Oh, well.” You know? And we can apply that to ourselves, too, when we’re really stuck in something. So, you know, I’ve been doing this stuff for 50 years or more, and every day is part of the deal. I mean, there’s no time off, you know? This is our life. This is our taking our lives in our hand, the reins of our lives in our hands and trying to direct it in the direction we want to go, toward what we want, which is love now, love for everyone, love for ourselves all the time, 24, 7 from ever. Forever and always. That’s where love is, always. And that lives within us right now, but it’s covered up and we’re not looking. So when we try to hold others in our heart, we’re really learning where our heart is and how to do that. When we try to treat other people with kindness and respect, and we’re learning how to do that for ourselves too. And that’s really important, . Hello.  Thank you for taking my question. I’m feeling very shy, but mostly I just really wanted to express my gratitude for Thursday nights. My life circumstances found me kind of suddenly living alone in March. So it’s just been me, my cat and my ego for a lot of the time. And Thursday nights have been this refuge and I’ve shown up every Thursday. I don’t know why I just said that. Yeah. I’ve been noticing that my voice is getting stronger. Okay. That’s my cat. Where’s your ego? Can I meet that one, too? Yeah. My traps tend to be mental, so it’s easy to get kind of, into these ruts, but I find that on Thursday nights, it’s sometimes it’s the first time I’ve opened my mouth in two days. Yeah. I’ve had a pretty monastic year and my voice just comes out craggy and harsh and then after about a half hour, there’s no time and I can just go forever. Yeah. Good. Very good. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you. Hi. Well, first of all, I just wanted to say that I see everybody and it’s really cool to just be in a space with so many other people. I know, I can’t see many people’s faces right at this moment, but that’s pretty cool. Okay. So the other day I was going to get something out of my closet and I I like, reached up and I was like, “Oh shit, I’m going to die,” like someday, not at this moment, but someday, and I had this experience that I’m kind of used to by now, but I, for some reason, it just shocks me every time, where I realize I’m going to die and I get really real weird, like I’m totally not in the normal realm of being, and I feel, you know, my mom came and was like, “Hey, like what the fuck is going on?” And I was like, “Well, this is what happened.” And she was like, you know, “You breathe through it and you’ll get through it and you’ll go past it.” But sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t go past it and I should experience it. But I don’t know. I was just having that feeling that maybe I shouldn’t be like so afraid of feeling that way, because it’s just now that I began to really feel that way and not try to run away from it, at least. Well, you know, one of the major, most important meditations in Buddhism is the the meditation on death, the awareness of the imminence of death. I hate to tell you this, but you are going to die. And all of these nice people you’re looking at. Computers might still be here, but there won’t be anybody looking into it. Right. Yeah. Everybody comes and goes. That’s the deal. So, really serious, heavy duty practitioners. There’s a whole meditation on the awareness of the imminent nature of death, because that makes you feel more alive and gives you, it changes your perspective on things. It wakes you up. How are you spending your time? You know? Moping around? Why not use the time better? Why not feel better? Then you develop these practices to try to release yourself from the dream that you live in most of the time. And you’re kind of young. So having those experiences could easily be seen as the fruition of spiritual practice that you’ve done in a previous life and now that awareness is coming here in this life, because it’s some work you’ve already done and it’s going to change the way you go through your day. It’s going to make this life more precious and more real and you’ll be more present. If you know that everybody around you is going to die and you’re going to die and you see, why aren’t people happier? You know? Why are they wasting their time? Why are they getting busy getting more and more stuff when you can’t take it with you? They say, the only thing you can take with you when you leave the body is your state of mind. And so that’s the most important thing to work on, is one’s state of mind, how long it goes through one’s day. And so, you’re a musician. You want to bring as much of your self into the music. So right now you’re learning techniques. Everybody needs techniques, whether it’s meditation techniques or music or scientific techniques, and once you learn those techniques, what you use them for, that’s what’s really interesting. Right. How do you use the techniques to transmit what you’ve learned about yourself? So it’s like a learning tool. For sure. It’s a waking up tool, an awareness tool. Yeah, absolutely. But you need to pay attention because of who you are in this life right now, that little bubble of awareness, that experience might trigger some emotional responses, too, which would be not so pleasant. That’s not the point of the meditation practice, right? In Buddhism, for instance, there’s compassion and there’s impermanence. Impermanence is the fact that everything’s always changing. Everybody’s going to die. Everything that’s lives will die. Everything’s changing, and compassion is cultivating kindness and love and caring. So the Dalai Lama says to Westerners, especially, “Mostly spend time with the compassion, kindness practice, because if we spend too much time with the emptiness and impermanence practice, because we’re so emotionally out of balance all the time, we can get depressed and get stuck in a hard place.” So it’s better not to dwell so much on that until you’ve developed the real, what they call Bodhi Chitta, which is this feeling of kindness and compassion for everyone and one’s self. But still you’re having those experiences. They’re coming. You’re not asking for them. So be with them. Allow them to be there. Don’t be afraid. But if you notice that it’s making you depressed, then you need to try to counter that a little bit. The experience is not negative in any way, I don’t think. Right. But our egos, our emotional shape can be jarred by that, you know, and excited by that, and then we just get unhappier and that’s not the point of that. Right. Because it’s reality. Everyone who’s ever existed since the beginning of time has left the body at some point or other. It can get worse Okay. It can’t get worse. Everybody’s gone, but of course they come again, but that’s a whole other story. But allow that feeling to make you more compassionate for people who don’t know that. Right? Really. And you can cultivate that compassion and recognize, “Oh, there’s so many people don’t understand. They keep on just getting more and more stuff. And what good is it? It’ll never make them happy anyway.” So just naturally, that feeling of caring about other people will arise from that experience, but because we are so emotional, don’t let it make you unhappy. Right. Don’t let it make you depressed, because there’s that possibility of that happening. If that happens, you’ve got to talk yourself down, you know. “Oh, wait a minute. This is not something to be depressed about. This is something that’s waking me up to be more kind and more open and more living right now in everything that I do.” Yeah. I think that for a long time I felt like I had that feeling that I was going to die and like be dead, and then I built a lot of like, structure of emotion, like you were saying, around it. And then once I started, really when I started like doing some yoga, I would realize that all of a sudden, like the anxiety was less, like the excess was like going away, but I was reaching like maybe like the root feeling. And then I started having this feeling more often. It jumps up on me and I’m like, whoa. Yeah. So let me ask you, so when you say, when you get that feeling that you’re going to die do you ,have fear at that moment? Is there some fear that comes up a little? I think what happens, the first reaction is like an understanding, like the first thing is like a, whoa. Then of course, right after that, it’s just complete fear, and it’s like truest of fears for me. Yeah. So that’s ego fear, right? Because no one dies. The soul is not born nor does it die. It doesn’t come and go. The soul is eternal, so to speak. Bodies come and go. But there’s no dead beings. There’s dead bodies, but beings don’t die. They just take off this set of clothes and they put on another set of clothes. When we really have that understanding. I mean, not just here, but if we know that then of course we don’t worry about it, but that feeling of the fear is, that’s ego. The ego is afraid of it’s possible not existing anymore, but it doesn’t even exist in the first place. It’s just a bunch of thoughts, but it thinks it’s real. But you’re always going to be here. Actually. There’s nowhere you can go. That’s why spiritual practice is so cool, because it brings us back, it pulls us out of the past, pulls us out of the future and brings us right here, which is where we’ll always be. Even if you left the body now, you would still be able to say to yourself, where am I? And the answer would be here. You’ll always be here. There’s nowhere you can go. Bodies come and go, but the soul, the awareness within us does not diminish nor does it get more. It’s always as it is. It’s perfect. So when you have that fear, sit with it. Don’t push it away. Just like, “What is this? What is this fear? What am I afraid of? What am I afraid of?” You know? And then see what comes up. Don’t let it push you around if you can. So be aware of it, you know, but of course in those moments, it’s very hard, obviously, because once you say, “Whoa,” you know, you’re already in it, but then you’re still here, even though it’s happening. So you can always like, “Okay, what is this?” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, at the beginning of World War II, he said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Right. When you’re in that fear, it’s really scary. Yeah. But it comes and goes. It’s nothing in itself. It’s just the feeling. So when you’re in that feeling, there’s very little, you can do except just be with it and watch it disappear, come and go. Yeah, so write songs about it. That’s what they all say. Write songs about it. Yeah. Or poems to yourself. Not for other people necessarily. But just speaking about it to yourself will actually, you develop a relationship with it where it doesn’t overpower you all the time, that fear. But even so, it’s nothing to be afraid of. You don’t need to be afraid of fear. It’s just another feeling, although when you’re in it, it’s hard to think that. Yeah. as Meher Baba, the great Saint, once said, “Don’t worry. Be happy.” That’s what he said. Easy for him. But don’t worry. Be happy. Well, I won’t. I decided now, I’m never going to worry again. Don’t lie to me, but good luck. All right, sweetheart. Bye-bye. So I had a question. I’m pretty new to these practices and this tradition, to some of the statues and some of the things that you put maybe on your altar and some of the practices, and so, I was in a training and it was suggested to put a picture of Neem Karoli Baba and others, and I kind of had a real resistance to this just because other than listening to you, Krishna Das, I don’t know him. I don’t have any experience with it. And so my response was, well, “Why would I put that on my altar? I don’t have any connection with that yet.” And… Why would you even have an altar? I like candles. Put it on top of the TV and light a little candle there. So I guess my question is, you know, how much of this can we just kind of make it up and what works for us and how much is, you know, tradition regarding specifically maybe a statue of Hanuman or a picture of this or a picture of that. And then how do we be true to ourselves in that, in terms of what really speaks to us? No, listen, other people might tell you something else, but since you asked me, don’t, it’s not like, we’re not playing dollies here. You know, murtis are not dollies for us to play with. Pictures of the Saints are not like porn we’re supposed to use to get off. Do what feels right to you. You have to develop your own path, your own relationship with yourself and whatever helps you overcome, do some practice and overcome your own, you know, obstacles and stuff in your own heart, that’s what you should do. Don’t listen to people. Don’t listen to anybody. Even me. Just listen to your own heart and what works for you. Don’t make anything up. Don’t try to manipulate yourself into feeling something. That’s crazy. Why would you do that? Just be you. That’s what it’s all about. And you’ll find out more about yourself and more about who you are, and you’ll eventually you’ll go deeper into yourself and things will start to feel natural that didn’t feel natural before. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need pictures. You don’t need murtis. You are the murti. Inside of you is the living god. Just as you are inside, is the living presence. Real love lives inside of you right now. All those other things are tools. They’re like mirrors to help us see a deeper part of ourselves. But if we think it’s just like a little Dolly, that’s not going to help. So forget it. But if you want to read more about Maharajji, there’s a number of books about him. So you get an idea of why people are attracted to him in the first place, because that’s the main thing. So, there’s a list on my website somewhere of the books, about Maharajji and some other books that I like, and there’s available on krishnadasmusic.com, a link to a book of stories about Maharajji for free, a free download. That’s a lot of Indian stories, so there’s lot of Indian names. So if you’re not too familiar with names it might be hard. But they’re great stories and that’s free. So you can just take a look at that, and then Ram Dass wrote a book called “Miracle of Love” about Maharajji. So, there’s things out there, and that’s also spiritual practice. That is called satsang, hanging out with spiritual beings. When you read about these great beings and you see how they lived in the world or how they saw other people, what they did, and it starts to affect you very deeply. You see what might be possible in life, but it’s not about playing with dollies. Screw it. Forget that stuff, you know, until and unless it makes sense to you, then you do it. Otherwise, don’t feel manipulated by other people. You go through some training and they say, “Oh, you have to put this picture up and now light a candle.” Why the fuck would you light a candle? Go watch TV. Just be yourself. If you try to be something else, you’re not going to be successful. You have to be you. It has to be natural. It has to be what you want. That’s the deal, as far as I see it right now. Thank you, and I have one follow-up question, if that’s okay. You know, we practice together. We’ll sing together. I’m not very good at singing, but he’s really great at singing, and that’s wonderful at times, and then at other times you know, I guess for myself, I like to sit by myself and do my own practice, and I don’t know if there’s anything, suggestions on doing practices together or separate, or if it matters at all. It’s up to you, whatever works for you, but be honest with yourself and each other. Don’t do it with him because you think he needs you to, or he wants you to or you’ll hurt his feelings if you don’t. You have to be honest, you know, and that’s in your relationship and honest with yourself. If you’re trying to do something to please somebody else and it’s driving you crazy, what good is it? So be open about it. Talk about it all. If he can’t do it by himself, fuck him you know? Yeah. And if you can’t do it by yourself, you have to learn. Ultimately we’re doing it by ourselves. Sometimes it helps in a group, because there’s more people doing it. You’re helping each other remember. When you are being quiet and distracted, he’s singing and so that might pull you back, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s all okay. Play with it. it’s not like Catholic school, for Christ’s sake. This is just real life. There’s no nuns going to hit you over the hand with a ruler if you don’t do it right. Just find your way. You have to. The whole thing is to find your own way. Yeah, it’s all good. All right. I don’t know if I have a question, but it’s not a specific question. It’s just reaffirming myself that, you know, like when I was little, I used to talk to Allah, as in God, and all of those, and then I grew up and then last summer I told you I was listening to Ram Dass, and then this is, this whole thing started, and I realized meditation is very important for me. And I started doing meditation and I’m reading books and all of those, and I know you said just before, like you actually almost answered my question when you were talking to the other person. You said it’s what you feel is right for you. I just want to know that, if there’s anything else, if you have any suggestion, you know, like I want to be a better person and live a conscious life and then just be in the best possible shape to help others. Do you think, is there anything else I can do to make sure that I am, I’m having good intentions and I’m doing what is supposed to be done? Well, everything you said is a beautiful aspiration, you know, it’s a wonderful idea to be helping people, serving people. Maharajji never told us to meditate. He never told us to think about ourselves. He said, “Love everyone. Serve everyone. Remember God.” So you do a little practice. You do a little japa. You repeat the name, but you think about other people. And if you weren’t thinking about yourself all the time, if we weren’t thinking about ourselves all the time, we wouldn’t be wondering whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing. We’d just be doing it. There is no right thing or wrong thing. And you will find your path as you take a step forward. The more steps you take, the more you find your path it’ll feel right or it won’t feel right. It’ll feel right for a while, then it won’t. So you change. That’s okay. It takes a little bit of courage, but it’s okay. There’s no mistakes. You learn from things, always learning. That’s all. But your aspiration to help people is exactly what’s required. But how to do that? So you have to find out the best way you can do that. Now, you know, Mother Teresa, when she, a new person would come to work with her in Calcutta, and they worked in the slums with the poorest people, sickness, disease, death, she said, “If you don’t find joy here, you have to leave.” Joy in the service. Right? It’s not about sacrificing and “My broken heart. I give you everything to try to help.”. You know, that’s just a load of shit. Yeah. You can feel joy in the service while you’re working with the most suffering. So that takes great strength and great inner wisdom. So as you move forward in your life on your path, you’ll see what keeps you centered, what allows you to be able to give yourself more fully, and you have to do those things in order to serve others. One has to be strong, also. We can’t be destroyed by the things we’re trying to serve. Otherwise. What good is it? Right? So it’s both things. Right. But yeah, like I say, Maharajji never encouraged us to think about ourselves. You know? Serve others. Think about others. That’s not so easy, but because we have these tendencies to deny our own goodness and not let ourselves feel okay, and that’s not good. That’s not healthy. We can feel okay even when we’re dealing with terrible suffering and disastrous situations. We can feel that we’re okay. We’re doing the best we can for whoever’s there, but don’t push yourself, okay? Just be you. Let it arise. Let it unfold. It’s it’s wonderful thing. Let it happen. Let life come to you. You don’t have to go out and look for it. You’re already in it. It’s like Sharon Salzberg was saying, one of her teachers said, “Okay, I want you to close your eyes and sit there, and I want everybody to touch space.” Right? So everybody in the room will go like this, you know? And he laughed. He said, “You’re already touching space just being here.” You’re already touching. You’re in space. So you’re in your life already. It’s going on. So allow it to go on in the best way that you can, but it’s not about right and wrong and what’s the best thing. “What should I do? What should I do?” You won’t know until you do it, if it’s right or wrong, if it works for you, and you’re the only one who’s going to know. Nobody can tell you unless you happen to run into a real Saint and they can tell you, and then you’ll know, but that’s not every day. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. It might not even be every life. Okay? Okay. All right. Take care. I’ll speak to you soon. Bye.  Hi Krishna Das, I’m glad to be here. Hi. I’ve been following you for about a year now, and I’ve done a lot of exploring, and for my question, I continually come up against this and I’m hoping you might be able to give me a little bit of insight, and that is in relation to, I don’t want to cry, I guess how it relates to karma. I kind of wrote it down a little bit. So for the most part, my life has been what most people would describe and what I would describe as pretty good, no real physical danger, no emotional traumas that I’m consciously aware of anyway, and then we see people that are just not so lucky and not privileged in this way. I just wonder like, how can I process How can I process that? Like how can I not ask, “Why them? Why not me? How can I accept this entire premise of karma and its perceived unfairness, really? How can I trust it’s justness from a position of privilege, essentially? Well, first things first, you can’t help anybody if you’re going to be destroyed by it, by other people’s suffering. You can’t carry water to somebody if you can’t walk. And you mentioned that a little bit earlier, so I did catch that. Yeah. So that’s where you should start, you know, these emotional reactions that you’re having, all they do is cripple you. Why you have them, why you were born where you were born to whom you were born and what situation you were born, and why other people were born in different situations, we don’t know, and we’ll never know, but if we’re going to help other people, we have to be strong. We have to have real strength, inner strength, and that means we can’t be destroyed by our own emotional issues. Your emotional issues are not other people’s emotional issues. There’s a difference between compassion and emotion. Compassion brings strength. It brings will. It brings power. It brings help to other people. It brings everything. But these kinds of emotions just cripple us and they cripple our will and we don’t do anything, and we can’t do anything because we’re wondering “Why is this like this? And I have this, and I’m ashamed that I have this and I have that.” This is just stuff you need to let go of if you’re going to ever be of any use to anybody else. So, all those questions of why and what, and if, and who cares. They’re not questions for us to answer. If you want to help somebody, you have to develop the ability to do that. And that means working on yourself, because right now we’re so limited in what we can do for anybody, because we’re carrying such a heavy burden of our own stuff with us. We can’t carry anything else for anybody else. I think we should just stay with that part of it. I remember when I first got to India and seeing the way people lived and seeing so much poverty and so much hunger, the thing that I was struck, more than anything else, is that those people were thousand times happier than I was and they had a million times less than I had, and that was a wake up call. So I’m not saying that’s an excuse you can use to yourself, but, and of course it’s not always true and you don’t wish suffering on anyone, but you’re wishing suffering on yourself right now with all these emotional issues that you’re dealing with. And they’re preventing you from actually reaching out to the people who could use help. Yeah, this is what we do to ourselves. We make up stories that cripple us, and then we moan and groan. You know, what else do we do? That’s what we do with our lives. We make up stories and beat the shit out of ourselves and we moan and groan and don’t do anything. So we got to get over that. So spiritual practice is required, calming the mind, practicing letting go of the stories when we notice that we’re doing that, developing some kind of practice, some ability to pay attention, some ability to calm down. That’s very important, to be where you are. This is very important. And to stop believing everything we think about it all. If you didn’t think these things, if you didn’t tell yourself this story about yourself and the world to yourself, where would it be? Nowhere. And neither would you be bound by it

Call and Response Ep. 75 | Humility  Q: I just wanted to mention how 2019 was the year of practicing humbleness for me because it was how I understood love, how to get into somebody else’s shoes in order to understand where they’re coming from so that we can all be at peace. Can you speak about humbleness? “Our inability to really do anything that’s for our own sake, that will be good for us, that would lead us to happiness, to openness, to being a good human being; our inability, so, the strength of God, of the Universe; it’s all from that place that all goodness comes. Of course, that place is within us.” – Krishna Das KD: Yeah, hi. Q: So, I have a hard time being in love and when you have, like, a neighbor that hates you or you hate them and trying to find that place of love KD: You love hating that neighbor. It’s so wonderful, isn’t it? Q: So, we play your music and the neighbor hates it. KD: Ah, good. Excellent. Play it louder. Q: We do. And so, we also have another neighbor that, her father passed away and she came over crying one day that, you know, “thank you for playing your music. So, it was totally contradictory to…” KD: Well, put the speakers on that side of the lawn. So, you know, I have this friend who wrote to me and she said, you know, she’s breaking up with her husband and it’s so painful and she wishes it wasn’t happening. So, I said, “Well, what’s going on?” She said, “Well, you know, I love your chanting, so I play it in the kitchen. I play it in the living room. I play it in the bedroom upstairs. I play it in the guest room downstairs all the time.” I said, “Turn that music off and save your goddamned marriage.” So, put the speakers only so that one person can hear it. Leave that poor guy alone, you know? Q: Well, with that in mind, I just wanted to mention how 2019 was the year of practicing humbleness for me because it was how I understood love, how to get into somebody else’s shoes in order to understand where they’re coming from so that we can all be at peace. Can you speak about humbleness? KD: I don’t know, you know. I’m so humble, it’s hard to really talk about it. People say that to me all the time. “Oh, you’re so humble.” And I say, “Well, I know me.” But nobody gets it. They think I’m humble. It’s so weird. You know, real humility is the whole thing. Real humility is, you know, so I was in India and I was in a little town called Vrindavan and I was walking down the street and I stepped in a hole in the street and I snapped my leg, my knee, like this, and when I woke up in the morning my knee was like, swollen, like huge, right? So I figured I was going to have to go to the hospital. Now, Maharajji had forbidden us to come to the temple before four o’clock in the afternoon because the local Visa guy, Visa official, was harassing Him about the Westerners.  It was politics. He just wanted some money, you know. And Maharajji wasn’t going to give it to Him so He was giving Him a hard time, so but I woke up in the morning with this knee and I thought, “I have to go to the hospital down in Mathura which is the town about 20 miles away, but before I go I should tell Maharajji I was going.” So, with great difficulty, I walked to the temple, leaning on a friend of mine, you know and I limped in, you know, like this and He was sitting all alone on, sitting on His cot, a tucket, they call it, in the middle of the courtyard, a completely empty big courtyard and He was right in the middle of it and there was one Indian guy sitting with Him. So, I kind of limped up, you know, and I pranamed and bowed and I sat down but I couldn’t bend my knee so I had to put my leg out straight underneath the tucket, you know? In India, you don’t really do that. You don’t point your feet towards your teacher. So, He didn’t say anything, right? He just looked at me and then after a few minutes, He gets up and He walks towards the back of the temple and the Indian guy got up and walked with Him because He walked like a two year old, bong, bong, bong, and the people would take His hand and walk with Him, you know? So, He was walking like this and the further away He got from where I was sitting, He started leaning on the guy and worse, like this, you know? And I, it looked like He could hardly walk and I thought, “He’s taking on the karma of my knee.” You know? The minute I had that thought, He turned around and He ran back to the tucket and He plops down, He looks at me and said, “You thought I was in pain? You wanted to help me?” And He pats me on the head. So, He didn’t say anything about, like, “Why did you come? Why? I told you to come at four o’clock.” So, I thought, you know, I’m just sitting here. I’m getting darshan. I’m hanging out with Him. I don’t care, if you can cut the leg off over here it’s fine with me. So, we sat around for a while and I kept thinking, “What’s the karma?” You know, I used to think about these things. Like, “What’s the karma of this knee? I wonder what I’ve done in the past to step in a hole in Vrindavan, such a sacred city. How could this happen?” All day long, yada yada yada. So, gradually, other people showed up and so, there was this woman sitting there, and she had a bible with her because he used to talk to us about Jesus. There’s this little guy in a temple, He would talk to us about Jesus. It was like, what is going on here?  You know? It was quite interesting, but that’s another story, so anyway, so He grabs her bible, He opens it up and He points to this, just like this, “Read this.” So, I looked at it and I, it was from Saint Paul and it said, “In order to save me from the abundance of revelations, it was given to me a thorn in the side and I beseeched the Lord three times to take it from me and the Lord said, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect in your weakness.’” So, Ram Das and I had t-shirts made up. I forget what, you know, like, right, we believe, because what that means, I’ve been thinking about this for 45 years and this is… Our inability to really do anything that’s for our own sake, that will be good for us, that would lead us to happiness, to openness, to being a good human being; our inability, so, the strength of God, of the Universe; it’s all from that place that all goodness comes. Of course, that place is within us. It’s not out there up in the sky, standing around with a long beard and you know. That’s My strength. Capital “My”. That’s the strength of the Lord is within us, our true nature. And everything good that comes in our lives, everything we accomplish, every openness that comes, every compassionate thought, every helpful thought, every kind thought, it comes from that place. Once again, the ego will never do anything to diminish itself. It’s not what the ego does. It wants to live and it takes credit for all kinds of things but the Lord said, “My grace is sufficient, is enough for you.” You don’t need anything but this grace and your weakness, our inability to really do anything on the same level that our bullshit is, to help ourselves, that’s the proof of that. And the fact that we’re here is grace and it’s the grace pulling us into our self. Human beings experience being pulled within as longing. Yeah. The t-shirt said, “Proof.” Somebody’s blocking the flow. Somebody’s not feeling good… So, the idea of grace, that’s a hard one for us, you know, we’re westerners, we don’t know what grace is. And even if we think about grace, we’re taught that grace comes from up in the sky somewhere, somewhere else, but grace is our natural state. It’s who we are. Underneath who we think we are, which is the whole, it’s where all the bullshit is, all the problems is who we think we are. Who we’ve been trained to believe we are by our life experiences, by our parents, by our school, by the students in the school, by the teachers, by the programs, by the place we happen to live, by the culture of that place. This formed us. This is the one lifetime manifestation or what’s the word, this is the karmas that we’re born into and that created who we think we are. But underneath that is the state of grace that we actually are. And once again, Maharajji said, “You can’t, the higher, more subtle states, the deeper states of awareness can’t be done by ‘me’. It’s only by removing the covering of that that that shines more brightly.” Our personal will, we can’t, “Ok, I’m going to go to that state of grace,” I, me, is never going there because me would dissolve in there and I don’t want to dissolve. Me is going to go anywhere else but there. But the longing in our hearts to be free of that me-ness, that prison of our thoughts. Every thought is a prison. Every thought is a prison and you can’t, you can’t think yourself out of a prison that’s made of thought. That’s personal “me” and the personal will, so but we do practice to release ourselves from that prison of thought, into the open space of our true nature, who we are. That’s before we were hurt. Before we were traumatized, before we were beaten up, before our hearts were broken. That place is always here and that’s where we want to be. That’s where we want to live. But ‘me’ is that place of trauma, of pain. To be released from that, some practice, whatever that means to you, whatever you do to help yourself is practice and one thing leads to another. The post Ep. 75 | Humility [https://krishnadas.com/podcasts/call-response/ep-75-humility/] appeared first on Krishna Das [https://krishnadas.com].

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