Call and Response with Krishna Das

Call and Response Ep. 85 | Dada Mukerjee, Maharajji, and the Practice of Ram Naama

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

Call and Response Podcast Ep. 84 | At Home With KD, May 7 2020

Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep. 84 |At Home With KD, May 7 2020 “All we have is what’s in front of our faces, which is the ups and downs of life. So, you have to learn to deal with those situations in the best way… and there’s no God outside of your Self, your true Self. And that true Self is the same in every Being. So, if you treat other people the way you would like to be treated, you won’t have any problems at all.” – Krishna Das “Ram nam karne se sab pura ho jata” My Guru used to say that to us quite often. “From going on repeating these Names, everything is accomplished. Everything is accomplished.” A very simple statement. Easy to kind of just say, “Oh, yeah, ok,” but I’ve been thinking about that, or trying to truly believe that for 50 years or so. 40 Years. 45 years. So, if I truly believed that what He said, that from repeating these Names, everything is accomplished, I would probably be giving more of myself to the practice as I’m doing it. But, you know, we have our own karmic predicaments that we live in. Very distracted lives. Very fast lives. Although it’s a little bit slower these days. Although we can fill it up with stuff quite easily. I remember many many years ago, before I went to India I was up in the mountains of New Mexico with Ram Das at the Lama Foundation for about a month in the winter. It was fantastic. And every day we would spend many hours meeting together, singing, talking, meditating. And we heard about this New York artist who had moved out to New Mexico and lived just down the hill, down the mountain from where the Lama was, and he had been to India and he knew how to meditate. This was Big Time. So a group of us went down to meet with him, to see him. And we spent a couple of hours with him, talking to him. I just sat in the back of the room, listening. And as we were leaving, I was the last one to go out the door. As I was about to go out the door, he grabbed my arm and he looked at me and he said, “You. You have to find out why it is you can’t give yourself 100% to whatever you’re doing.” Oh. He nailed me to the wall. That was unbelievable. That was in 19-, the winter of, let’s see, ’69. That’s what? 50 years ago? I can still feel his hand on my arm. You know, if we look at ourselves, we notice how difficult it is to be fully engaged in something. We’re not talking about watching a movie where you’re fully lost for as long as the movie’s on or some kind of entertainment, but whatever you’re doing, being fully engaged. Not thinking about the future, not the past, not this and that, not the chatter that goes on in the brain all the time, but truly present. Truly present and aware. So, I’ve been working on that a long time. Or, at least noticing how little of myself I really can give to each moment. So, when it comes to chanting or a practice that you do regularly, you create a situation where you’re training yourself to let go and come back. Let go and come back. Over and over again. It doesn’t, it’s not about up here. It’s about in here. And it’s not an intellectual process. It’s not a learning process. It’s a training process. So, little by little your Being gets familiar with these sounds, with these Names in this case, and you begin to relax into the Name. And the Name, as we come to know it, has been brought into this world by a Being who has fully realized the reality of that Name, the reality of what is Named, and has brought that Name into this world for us as a practice, as a doorway into that Name, into the reality, which is our own true nature, which is our soul. The love we’re looking for exists within us. It lives within us. We look outside ourselves in the outside world. We look for it everywhere and we don’t find it. We don’t find it until we look within. It’s not like you look with your eyes within. It’s not like that. It’s moving more deeply into ourselves by releasing the stuff that holds us and takes us away again and again and again. That naturally moves us within. Letting go again and again. And we don’t have to make this up. We don’t have to manipulate ourselves. We don’t have to be looking for anything specific, any kind of experience. Once we know who we are, we’re wide open. Everything is here and now. Everything exists within us. We’re so achievement oriented in the West. We’re in such a hurry because everything is done so quickly here. But that’s not how we find ourselves. So, anyhow let’s take some questions for a while. Q: Who was Neem Karoli Baba’s spiritual master and what were some of the practices they would do? KD: We don’t know. We don’t know who His gurus were. We have no idea. He never spoke about it. He had some… We hear stories, when He was very young, He went to this ashram, that place, He met this guy, that guy. But nobody really knows that we ever spoke to, ever told us anything definitive about that. He never spoke about it. He never had pictures up of this and that, you know?  He was very much believed to be a manifestation of Hanuman himself. I don’t even know what that means. You know, we use all these words, all these words that we bring, we learn from India or from the spiritual path, but we don’t really know what these words mean. But, the lineage that He seemed to be a part of was a Ram lineage, the lineage of Ram and Hanuman. But more than that we don’t know. We know that He, He spent many years in a cave, in caves. There were two small caves, well, one big cave in a town called Neeb Karori, which is where He got His name, the Baba from that town, that village. I visited there and it was a very small village, a very funky village and they told us not to leave the temple, especially at night. You needed to be very careful. Apparently, there’s a lot of murders in that part of the country. But that’s where He decided to build the cave. The villagers dug out a cave for Him in this field, or it was, I think, in the jungle at the time. Later on it was cleared. And nobody knew that He was there. And He was existing on, existing on one glass of milk a day, which, this old village lady used to bring to Him. And then, she died and so He was starving. Nobody knew He was there. So, the story goes that He picked up His chimta, which is this metal tong for moving fire around, moving the logs around, and He threatened Hanuman. He had a little murti of Hanuman that He had in the cave. He threatened Him. He said, “You’ll starve me so I’ll beat You.” And apparently, the next morning, there was milk outside the door.   Q: Do I draw any inspiration from Eddie Vedder with my vocal style? KD: Excuse me. Eddie Vedder is a kid. I’m 20 years older than him. No, I mean, he’s great. In fact, I think his wife said something to somebody I knew, that she reminded me of him. No, I love Eddie Vedder, but I just sing. I don’t have a vocal style as far as I know.   Q: How do I remain focused on God when I have to deal with the ups and downs of life? KD: If you have to ask that question, you don’t know what God is, where God is or who God is. So, you can’t be focused on God, because you don’t know. We don’t know. All we have is what’s in front of our faces, which is the ups and downs of life. So, you have to learn to deal with those situations in the best way and there’s no God outside of your Self, your true Self. And that true Self is the same in every Being. So, if you treat other people the way you would like to be treated, you won’t have any problems at all. Calm yourself down. Calm your mind down little by little and find a way to get through the day without falling on your face too many times, or creating negative karmas by being angry at people and hurting others and hurting yourself. There’s no God out there. The God that you’re looking for is within us and until you learn how to be kind to yourself in a real way, which is to give yourself a break and learn to trust your own intuition about where to look for these deeper realities, you know, you need to do some practice. And  you need to treat others the way you want to be treated.   Q: Towards the end of your film, One Track Heart, you use a word. Someone said you were giving something to people. I tried looking it up but I found only something… KD: Yeah, Maharajji had asked me to be the pujari or the priest of the Durga temple that He had built in Kainchi in the courtyard and I had to distribute the charanamrit. That means the nectar of the feet, which is the water that was used to wash the feet of the Goddess in the pujas, in the rituals. Yes, it is water, but it’s blessed water because it was used in the ritual. So, distributing that charanamrit was a way of distributing the blessings of the ritual that the other pujari did. I just watched. “Charanamrit” is the name.   Q: I need advice on suicide. KD: You mean how to do it? I can’t help you. I needed advice, too, you know? I was going to jump in the river and kill myself. I was having a nervous breakdown in Kainchi, right there in the temple. Maharajji was there and it’s a long story. It’s in my book, Chants of a Lifetime.  It’s in that book. But the short story is that I was completely flipped out and I was going to kill myself and He called me over and He said, “What are you going to do, jump in the river?” And He laughed. “Ha.” He said, “Worldly people don’t die.” Us. Worldly people. People who are attached to this world and to the ego. “Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.” What? “Why? Because He never thought of Himself. He gave His life for His people. He never thought of Himself.” So, the idea is that, all we do is think about ourselves and suicide is not going to change that. You go from this body to some other body and the karmas that you have, that you can’t deal with now, you won’t be able to deal with later, either. So, the best way is to try and find a way to be in this world in a good way. Whatever you have to do to find some peace of mind, you should do. Counseling, therapy, antidepressants, whatever works for you. And that’s what you should do. You should dedicate your life to finding a way to live here. Because you got born here for a reason. We all did. And what’s in our life is what we have to deal with and there’s nowhere we can go to get away from that. Suicide is not going to change that. You’re not going to have this body but you’re going to have another one and who knows what it’ll be? It might not be as good.   Q: These days I have to wear a police radio by my ear while I’m on duty. KD: That doesn’t sound like too much fun. Q: I have to listen and talk to others and write, etcetera. Any suggestions about how to not ignore the least urgent but to include? KD: Once again, it’s all about when you’re not on duty, what you do. It’s about developing a practice that helps keep you in line as the day goes on. You just pay attention to what you’re doing. You do the best job you can do. Don’t try to… give yourself 100% to what you’re doing. Whatever it is. Just do the best that you can. And do that when you’re doing your practice, too. I’m sorry I can’t really get into that one.   Q: What’s your advice on sannyasa, to dedicate one’s heart and mind totally in service and surrender to God and also does Guru have to have a physical form? KD: Absolutely not. Guru doesn’t have a physical form. We see it that way because that’s what we’re attached to, a physical body. A Guru is never identified with the physical body although a Guru might take a body to help us if it’s necessary for us, but Guru, God and our true nature, the Self, the Soul, are not different. And, you know, these days it seems like there’s Gurus on every corner, but those are not Gurus. Those are not Satgurus. Those are not real Gurus, true Gurus. They might be teachers, they might be more advanced than us. But a Guru, a real Guru is something else entirely. So, you can read books about some of the real Gurus; Swami Nityananda, who was Muktananda’s Guru; Shirdi Sai Baba; and my Guru, Neem Karoli Baba; there are many, Sri Ramakrishna. Read those guys. Read how they lived. Read what they said. Read how they got through the day. What did they do? That’s how you get a feel for what a real Guru is. They don’t do business.   Q: Can you get the grace of the Guru even though He isn’t in the physical form, through Bhakti? KD: Of course, absolutely. Of course. Grace is always here. We’re just not paying attention. We are not paying attention. It’s raining everywhere all the time but we can’t drink until we cup our hands. So practice, devotion to practice, the path is what trains us to cup our hands to get the water that we need to drink. Absolutely. No question. Grace is all the time. And the other part of that question is surrender. What is sannyasa, to dedicate one’s heart and mind? That’s wishful thinking, that’s what it is. You know, that’s wishful thinking. Good luck, you know? It’s not so easy to do, you know? You’ll go to some cave, you’ll put on orange clothes. You’ll just have a big ego about having orange clothes and thinking you’re more humble than other people. Give yourself a break. Live in this world like you are now and don’t let your neurosis fuck you up and make you think you have to go be a sannyasi because you’re too scared to deal with your shit. There’s no where you can go where your shit is not going to be right there with you. Deal with it. Find a way to live with it. Find a way to love yourself. That’s sannyasa. Clothes, initiations don’t do anything unless you’re ripe and if you’re ripe, you’re ripe. You would know it.   Q: How do you know if your difficult, painful, stressful life situation is part of your dharma? KD: Well, it’s certainly your karma… Q:  and you stick with it all through ups and downs and pain and sorrow or if it’s time to make a change? KD: I have a feeling you’re talking about relationships, because you can’t change your life. You can change the people in it and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that if you, if you find yourself in a situation that is causing you pain and causing others pain and it’s just not working, you certainly can find a way to make something work for you. You know, we grow up thinking relationships are going to make us happy. We get turned on by somebody and we so-call “fall in love” and we fall in love and we are in a relationship. Relationships are busines. You give, you take, you give, you take. When somebody stops giving, you freak out. When you stop taking, they freak out. So, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to find a more peaceful way to be in the world but you can’t avoid, by changing the external circumstances you can’t necessarily, necessarily make yourself happy.  So, whatever you do, you should do with as much kindness to yourself and others that you can do, whatever that means to you. You’re the only one who knows.   Q: How does it feel to offer the chants without the large energy you’re used to in the church or in a theater? KD: It feels fine. Better than robbing banks. I’m having a good time. I’m singing and you’re singing. That’s good. You know, because we’re attached to the physical body, because we’re attached to the physical body, we think we’re here and other people are somewhere else. That’s only one way of looking at it. In the space of the heart and the sky of the mind, we’re all within that and when, certainly when we’re doing practice, we’re all tuning into that space together and it’s all about doing the practice and if I was missing the energy of the people, I would notice that and I would let go and I wouldn’t be missing it anymore. You keep coming back to the chant. Anything you think about it, you keep letting it go and coming back. So, for me it’s not, I mean it’s very different on many levels, but it’s also very much the same. Q: I feel my devotion scattered over many aspects: Christ, Kali, Hanuman; and it keeps spreading over more. What are your thoughts over devotion: many aspects versus one aspect with full attention? KD: The more the better. More love is good. You’re overthinking this. It’s the love that’s important, not the object. The object is allowing you to release that love feeling in your own heart. When the whole universe becomes objects for you to release that love feeling then you’re enlightened. So, keep going.   Don’t stop with Christ and Kali and Hanuman. Keep going until every Being you see turns you on and no beings turn you off. It’s all good. It’s all good.   Q: Much has been said about being mindful of the company you keep. Do you think it presents in issues in relationships or detours one’s path with relationships, in relationship with them when they have no spiritual path of their own? KD: Maybe. But maybe not. If you’re in relationship with somebody, that’s the karmic imperative for the moment. That’s what’s there in your face. How it got there is irrelevant, but it’s there, so you have to be with that. And yes, the Buddha said that satsang or sangha is the most important thing in the spiritual life because our hearts are so hesitant and fearful and challenged that if we surround ourself with spiritual friends it can help us open up but it can also be completely negative because what we think is spiritual might not be spiritual at all. And the reasons you might move into an ashram or a so-called ashram or some kind of spiritual community might turn out to be very negative. Like you’re trying to hide from yourself so you want to go be with a group of people who turn out to be hiding from themselves. So, it’s all about learning to trust yourself and following your heart and yes, it’s difficult if somebody doesn’t understand what you’re doing, but you know, we probably don’t understand it. I once got an email from a friend of mine who said she and her husband were about to get divorced, and I said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Why is that?” And she said, “Well, you know, I play your music all over the house; in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room and he just hates it.” I said, “Turn it off!” You know, what do you need to do that for? Turn it off. So she did and they’re still happily married.   Q: As a householder mother, how can I attain moksha? KD: Be the best householder and mother that you know how to be and sooner or later you will be enlightened. There seems to be theme here today about trying to get away from stuff. Trying to and not accepting what’s in your life as the given, or what you have to deal with. You can’t change things. It’s not so easy to change. If you go off to a cave, you know, you bring everything with you, in your mind at least. So, it’s a question of seeing God in everyone and everything, even the people you don’t like. Even the people, especially the people who give you a hard time. There was a wonderful lama who was going on a long journey in Tibet and He had to take an assistant with him to help. He was a very old Lama. And so He picked this guy, this young Lama in the monastery who was the most difficult person in the world, just really difficult. And all the other Lamas said, “Why did you pick him? You’re going to go on this long trip with this guy?” He said, “Exactly. He’s going to teach me patience.” We don’t want to learn. We don’t want to transform our own negative thinking. We just want to change the outside world. But that doesn’t work. It does not work. What we need to change is the way we engage with the so-called outside world and so-called other people, and that’s what practice is about.   Q: Can you talk about how the music you make connects with your practice? I’ve noticed select melodies reoccur throughout the chants and I’ve been fascinated by how they might empower each other. KD: Really? You know, if you have a good melody, you just use it to death. The music is part of the practice. It’s a way of transmitting the Name. If I sat here and went “Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram. Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram.” I don’t think many of you would hang out much and neither would I. So, the music is, you know, when a child is sick you have to give it medicine, so you hide the medicine in a sweet syrup. So, the music is that syrup and the Name is the medicine. Music will not cure us of our suffering. It could calm our minds down a little bit but it’s the Name which has the power to transform our lives and change the painful into living reality. So, it’s the Name that’s the medicine.   Q: Years ago, you said something at a concert in Brazil that never left my mind. You were talking about Jesus and said He lost himself in love. Can you talk a little bit more about this state of the soul? KD: Well, you know this happened in India with Maharajji. This Canadian guy came to see Maharajji for the first time and he didn’t know, you know, Maharajji didn’t talk about meditation and spiritual practice and stuff like that. He didn’t talk about those things. He just fed you more than you could ever eat and told you to go away. So, this guy comes and Maharajji says to him, “What do you want? Why did you come?” And he thought he should give a spiritual answer. So, he said, “Well could you teach me how to meditate?” “Get out of here. Go in the back with the other crazy people, the westerners. Go on, go.” And as the guy is going, walking into the temple, into the back of the temple, He says, “Just meditate like Christ. Go on. Go.” So, he came to the back and we were all back there. Ram Das was there and others and we were debriefing him because we debriefed everybody. “What did He say” and “What did you say” and “What did He say?” And then he said, “You know, He told me to meditate like Christ.” What? What does that mean. So later on, Maharajji came in the back to hang out with us and Ram Das said to Him, “Baba, you said to meditate like Christ. How did He meditate?” So, it seemed like Maharajji was about to answer the question, but instead He just kind of stopped and His eyes closed and He sat in front of us completely still. It was like the earth stopped turning. It was so powerful. The vibe was so powerful. And after a couple of minutes, two tears came down his cheek, you know and He just shook His head and He opened His eyes and He said, “He lost Himself in love. He lost Himself in Love. That’s how He meditated. He never died. No one understands. He lost Himself in Love. He’s One with All Beings.” That wasn’t what I was taught about Jesus. So, it was very shocking and very beautiful. Very moving. Very moving.   Q: Did you ever ask Maharajji when you were sitting with Him or listening to Him, “What is there after this life? And what is the purpose of this life? Do we just come here and do what?” KD: Yes. No. We didn’t talk to Him about those things. He didn’t talk about those things. He didn’t teach like that. When we were sitting with Him, we understood what the purpose of this life is. It’s to merge in love and to live in that love all the time and that means including everyone in it. Everyone. You can’t have any shadows. You can’t leave any shadows behind you. You have to follow that longing you have to be free of suffering and that leads you on to the path, to relieve yourself of suffering and then you start to recognize everybody’s suffering. So, you try to do your best to help whoever you can and learn how to be kind to yourself and others. We’re here to become good human beings. There’s no place else to go. This is it for now.   Q: What’s the connection between Maharajji and Sombari Baba? KD: Now Sombari Baba was a very great Siddha who lived in the hills of India. I think He left the body. I’m not exactly sure when. I think maybe in the 1920’s. Something like that. And Maharajji, when He had His places, when He came to the hills in the 30s and 40s and 50s, He picked certain places that He built temples and a few of them were places where Sombari Baba had lived. He was a very great Siddha and “Sombari” means “Monday.” And Monday is Shiva’s day in India and He would do bhandara every Monday. Feed people. He was a great Sadhu. A great Siddha. I don’t know what their real connection is, but I know that Maharajji respected Him greatly. And Kainchi, the temple in Kainchi where I lived, is built, the Hanuman temple is right in front of, it wasn’t even a cave, it was just under a ledge of rock where Sombari Baba had His sacred fire, His fire, for a long time. And Maharajji built the first Hanuman temple right there in front of that in that place.   Q: How did I know this was my path in life? KD: I’m not sure yet, but I think it is. I don’t even know what it is. And why did I go to India? I went to India because I felt pulled there. I felt tremendously pulled there. I wanted to go there more than anything. I just had to go. Had to go. So, I went. And in my mind, I was never coming back to America. I gave everything I had away. I sold my car, my guitar, gave my jeans away. I was gone. I had a couple of boxes of stuff in my mother’s basement but, you know, I didn’t think I was ever coming back. And then, after two and a half years, He sent me back. That’s why I’m here.   Q: Can you please kindly explain how to adopt forgiveness and move on in life? Some mistakes are blunder and are difficult to be forgiven.   KD: Yeah, forgiveness is a big thing. The sting of being betrayed and being hurt is something that is very hard to let go of. Very hard. But you know, on one hand, if we really look at the people who betrayed us and hurt us, we can see that their actions, just like our actions, are coming out of our own suffering and just like we’ve hurt many people without wanting to, it’s a very similar situation for other people. They hurt people out of protecting themselves, out of all kinds of reasons and yeah, and we take everything so personally. So it’s very painful. Very hard. But it’s a very powerful practice, trying to forgive. Trying to forgive… and we’re so involved with “me” and protecting “me” from pain that it’s very hard to forgive people who have crushed us, you know?  But that’s why we do practice; to get strength, to do whatever we have to do to allow our hearts to unfold again and again and again. Because that’s how we get strength. It’s very hard to forgive ourselves, too, truly, for hurting all the people we’ve hurt. But I think once we can forgive ourselves a little, then we can forgive other people a little bit, too. Not easy, Not easy.   Q: My memory of events from 50 years ago is uncanny. Do you remember everything in your life that clearly? Or is there just some special way that you’re preserved. KD: I can’t remember my name half the time. I don’t remember what happened 10 minutes ago or yesterday, but things that happened with Maharajji, I can remember so much but Oh My Goodness, so much is gone. You know, like for instance, some years ago, about 15-20 years ago I was, I found my diary from India and I opened it up just at random and I read in the diary, “Today Mahrajji looked at me and this other Westerner, Balaramdas, and He said to the Indian people sitting there, ‘these boys are my disciples.’ And He put ash on our tongues and our heads and said, ‘these boys are my disciples.’” I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember that. How do you forget something like that. But I did. I had forgotten it. I forgot it for like 20 years. So, the funny thing, being with Maharajji, it was like a dream. It was a different kind of reality. Things happened and you were aware of them but you didn’t grok them in a certain kind of way. Later we would talk about things and we would go, “Wow, did that happen? Oh, yeah.” So, but there’s so much of it I don’t remember from, you know, spending so much time with Him in certain periods. So much would happen in a one hour darshan. You could never, you know there’s a really nice book called “Love Everyone.” Parvati Markus who was with us in India put this incredible book together from the diaries from a large number of us who were there at the time. And it’s called “Love Everyone” and it kind of reconstructs a day, the days with Maharajji and how He played with people and interacted and it’s really fantastic. “Love Everyone” is the name of the book. Q:  So, are we to love the corrupt liars and evil-doers?  I try every day to practice Metta Meditation and there’s great resistance I encounter with this.  How would Maharajji advise? KD: Well, He would say, “Love everyone.” Love everyone. When Ram Das was very angry at the rest of the Westerners, you know, he felt that we’d, we had kind of stolen Maharajji from him in a way. Because we were taking up all the time and he had to share Maharajji with all of us. Of course, he did that by talking about Him when he came back from India the first time. But he was, Maharajji was working with Ram Das’s anger.   So, one day Ram Das walked to the temple over the hills, about a four hour walk, and he was furious with the Westerners. Furious. Really. And he walks into the temple and we were… Maharajji was sitting on one side of the courtyard and the Westerners were sitting in a line opposite Him.  He was feeding us. He was having us fed. So, Ram Das walks into the temple and one of the Westerners gets up with a plate of food and offers it to Ram Das and Ram Das takes it and throws it in his face, right there in front of Maharajji. Maharajji goes, “Ram Das, something wrong? Come here.” So, Ram Das goes over to where Maharajji’s sitting and Maharajji says, “What’s the matter?” And Ram Das says, “I can’t stand impure things in people. And I can’t stand the impurity in my own heart.” And Maharajji looks at him and says, like this, He says, “I don’t see any impurity.”  Then he looks at Ram Das. He said, “Ram Das, love everyone and tell the truth.” Ram Das says, “Maharajji, the truth is, I don’t love everyone.” “Ram Das, love everyone and tell the truth.” So, he understood that he was going to have to get with the program as soon as possible. So, evil-doers.  It’s a tough one. You know, I’ve told this many times, but back in the days when George W. was President, I wasn’t very fond of him. Not that I knew him, but I thought he was basically a bad guy. And one night I was going through the channels on the tv and I hit CNN and they were showing George W. going to meet the first group of widows from the Iraq war. Right? It was at some school in Florida, a public school, and he was walking down the hall towards this classroom where these women were waiting for him and the cameras are following him and he’s walking down the hall. “Yeah, I’m the President, hey.” “Hi Joe, hey Frank. How are you doing?” Walking down the hall all full of himself and he walked into this room. This was all live on television. He walked into this room and took one look at these women and he burst out crying like a baby. I couldn’t hate him anymore. In that moment I saw that this guy was the pawn of different political interests, different business interests. He made deals, all to achieve the Presidency, which was his desire, and he started this, started or whatever, got into this war where so many people were killed all because he was the pawn of all this inner and outer vested interest, his own desires for fame and what he owed, that he was going to have to pay for this, too. There was no escape from the karmas. None. Ever. And to tell you the truth, that didn’t make me happy. I didn’t, in my heart I didn’t want to see him suffer but I saw that he was going to suffer because he didn’t know any better and he had no idea what he was doing in the greater of scheme of things. He caused so much suffering, or was the primary cause, or the transformational cause of so much suffering. And he, himself, would have to pay for that. It was inevitable, but I didn’t want to see it. In my heart, I didn’t want to see him suffer. So, you know, I think as we learn to give ourselves a break and as we give some space to those negative places in ourselves and we see how hard it is to truly be caring and meet people in the best way, then we begin to give others a break, too. Even the worst people. It’s not something you can… It’s so emotional, and there’s no question when you’re in the emotions there’s no, nothing you can do about it. But, in the greater scheme of things, everyone has to pay, has to experience the fruits of their own actions. So, are we going to create more suffering with our own anger? Because we will have to pay for that ourselves. And our own hatred? So, it’s not just thinking of others only. It’s also recognizing that our own actions will be, we’ll have to pay for those karmas as well. So, I don’t know if that’s clear, but it’s complicated. That’s for sure. And you know, one time, Maharajji was sitting with one of His very old Indian devotees. Of all the devotees, this man was the sweetest, sweetest. Oh, he was so sweet. And he was sitting around with Maharajji and Maharajji pointed to him and said, “He was my enemy in our last birth.” What? What? “My enemy in our last birth?” “Enemy” means “enemy.” Right? So, that’s intense. So, who knows who anybody is, you know? We just, all we do is judge people by our own subjective standards and subjective understanding. So, it’s tough. It’s very hard to deal with those negative forces in a way that doesn’t create more karma for us, ourselves, as well.     The post Call and Response Podcast Ep. 84 | At Home With KD, May 7 2020 [https://krishnadas.com/podcasts/call-response/call-and-response-podcast-ep-84-at-home-with-kd-may-7-2020/] appeared first on Krishna Das [https://krishnadas.com].

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

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

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

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

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

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