Call and Response with Krishna Das

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD May 14, 2020 Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond. “Listen, everybody’s doing the best they can. Period. Even you’re doing the best you can. Why dwell in judging other people? It makes you cranky and we’re all cranky enough, you know? Let it go. Let other people be who they are. You find your own way to live in this world in a good way. Don’t worry about other people and other things. Find what works for you and get it together. Don’t spend time worrying about whether other people are this or that, or whether they’re real or not real, or whether this is really spiritual. Who gives a shit? How do you get through your day in a good way? That’s all you need to care about.” – Krishna Das So, I’ve repeated this many times before, but it’s worth repeating many times. Maharajji said to us over and over, “From the repetition of these names, the repetition of these names, of God, everything is accomplished. Everything is brought to fullness and completion.” It’s a very powerful statement. There’s so many techniques out there. So many traditions, so many lineages and they all lead to the same place, but this is what, this is my lineage. This is, this is my guru, my lineage. This is what he taught us. This is, this is not something I got from books or heard from other people. This is direct transmission. Through the repetition of these names, everything, all our karmas are ripened. What we need comes to us. What’s not useful to us leaves us. Everything is brought to fullness and completion. So, this is my main practice. Although I do many other things, this is my main practice. And I’m sharing that with you. And I hope that it benefits you in some way like it benefits me. And it’s a practice that will go deeper and deeper and deeper the more you do it. And it cleans the mirror of our hearts so that what we see in the outside world and in ourselves and in our lives, that changes from within, the way we live in our daily life, the way we live inside of our lives, inside of our heads, inside of our hearts. This changes as time goes on as we ripen through the practice of the repetition of the name. And I’ve been doing this for over 50 years.  Basically, I still think I’m the same schmuck I always thought I was, but I think it a hell of a lot less of the time, less often. As time goes on, we spend less and less in negative States of mind. And we don’t notice that. Because we’re not in those negative states of mind. So, we don’t notice that we’re not in, usually, because the evaluator, that mechanism that puts us down, that evaluates us, that judges us, which is our own stuff, that doesn’t work quite as often and so intensely. And we become less and less involved with, with thinking about ourselves all the time, with trying to hold on to stuff we want, to try to push away stuff we don’t want. We become much more open and at ease with ourselves and with whatever comes to us in life. And this is from the repetition of the name. So, you know, he didn’t, he didn’t give a lot of generalized teachings. He didn’t give lectures. He didn’t write books. When he asked, we asked him, “How do we find God?” He said to “serve people.” We went, “What? What about, you know, Kundalini?” He said “feed people.” That’s how you raise Kundalini. “Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God.” These are the things he said to us. And over the years, the deeper and deeper and deeper meanings of that, those simple phrases are opened up within as time goes on. All right.

Call and Response Ep. 50 Sadhus, and Nirvana in Samsara “For Maharajji, everybody was His near and His dear. Everyone. And in order to stay in that space, you couldn’t hold on to your stuff. It had to go.” – Krishna Das KD: That reminds me of this story. One time, a wandering sadhu came to Kainchi and came to see Maharajji and he, he was, he didn’t have much stuff. He had like, a pot, a water pot, and just a couple of shawls or something. And he sits down in front of Maharajji and he says, “We’re really disappointed in you.” He says to Maharajji, “What is all these temples and all these people serving you and all this stuff. What is all this opulence? What is all this?” And Maharajji said, “Yeah, yeah, I know. Hey, can you give me ten rupees?” And the guy says, he gets very uptight. “No, no come on. You have, you have hidden in your lungi over there around the left side hanging there in the thing there, there’s, you have some money. Give it to me. Give it to me.” So the sadhu takes it. “Give me it. Give me it.” He takes his pouch of money. He drops it in the fire. All the money. And the guy flipped out. And he said, “What have you done? This was my retirement money. I have nothing and I’ve saved for years.” And Maharajji said, “Oh, what happened? Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” And He takes these long tongs and He reaches into the fire and He pulls out brand new one hundred rupee notes. Bob: Oh, really? KD: And hands them to the sadhu like this. One by one. The sadhu just starts weeping, you know? Bob: Really? That’s so cool. KD: Yeah, there’s another story like that. You know, everyone who came to Maharajji, in order to approach, for most of the beings who approached Maharajji, you always had to give something up. You had to let go of something in order to really… So one time, Maharajji was walking in the street in Vrindavan. This is a long time ago, even, maybe in the 50s. And He’s walking down the street and coming the other way is this jungly sadhu with the long jutta hair and the ashes, a really fierce guy. And they see each other and they go, “Oh.” And they run to each other and they hug and they jump around and they’re dancing and they say, “Oh, it’s so great to see you after so long!” “Oh, yes, it’s been so many years!” “This is so great!” And it turns out they had spent much time in the mountains many, many years before, you know, doing sadhana together. So, they enjoy their company for a little while and then Maharajji says to the sadhu, “Ok, brother, now you should go now. I have to go.” And the sadhu says, “What are you talking about? After all these years we meet? I’m not going to leave you. I’m going to stay with you.” He said, “Oh, no. You don’t understand. I’m only with householders and worldly people now. You don’t, it’s not good for you. You don’t want to hang out with me. Really.” “I don’t care what you say. I’m not leaving you. I’m not leaving you.” “Ok.” So, they began to walk from Vrindavan to Mathura, which is about 18 kilometers and it’s the middle of the summer. It’s about 120 degrees. The middle of the day. And in those days, there was nothing. Now, it’s like, built-up. But in those days it was like desert. So, they’re walking. And in the distance, and Maharajji told this to Mr. Tiwari who told me. He said, “We were dying of thirst.” And in the distance, they see a well and they go running towards the well and they get to the well. There’s a woman there getting from the well and Maharajji gets there first and He puts His hands out, and says, “Pour water for me.” So, the lady pours the water from the bucket into His hands and He’s drinking, you know, like this. And then, the sadhu arrives and he puts out his gourd pot, right? And the woman pours water into the pot and as she’s pouring, Maharajji starts chatting her up, because that’s what He does. He talks to everybody, 24-7, 365, all day long. So He says, “Who are you? What’s your name?

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD May 9, 2020 Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond. “These are all the names of what lives within us as who we are. Already. It’s not something else. It’s not somewhere else. It’s within us. All these names lead to the same place. They’re the names of the same place. All these so-called deities are forms of our own true nature… whatever you sing is fine. It doesn’t make any difference. Sing what you’d like. If you think about it, you’re not doing it. So, I would just do it.” – Krishna Das Hey everybody. Let’s welcome each other to our minds. Let’s, let’s all close our eyes for a minute.  So, now we’re united in the space of the heart. This is where we always are together with all beings. It’s just as if we’re sitting in one room together. This room happens to be earth at this moment. Just be with the breath. Take a few deep, long, deep breaths. Let the body relax. All that tension we carry around, bouncing off the walls of our homes, just let it go. Sharon Salzberg and I once were doing a workshop in LA and we had such a nice time. So, at the end, I said “Wouldn’t it be great if we could all live together?” And then I laughed. I said, “Well, that’s what we’re doing. That’s earth.” Earth is our home at this point. It just didn’t give us a user manual. We’re having to figure that out. So, this time that we… we’re so apparently disconnected from everything is… can be very useful, and it is useful, even if we’re suffering and with all the difficulty. It’s going to change the way we sit in ourselves. It has to, regardless of what we think about it, and make us much more aware of our own stuff and everybody else’s stuff, but also aware that we need to care about other people, too, in this world, not just our close friends and family, but everything anyone on this planet does affects everybody. And at some point the amount of toxicity causes suffering for everyone. The main toxicity is the selfishness and the self-centeredness that we carry within us. So, all the practices that we do are all about one thing, and that’s to release us from the prison of egoistic self-centered actions and considerations. So, there are two paths to that. One is the path of, you could say “devotion” or “loving kindness, caring,” and the other path is a path of jnana or wisdom, which they say it’s more difficult to follow because of our attachment to our bodies. But really there’s only one path and that path is each of our lives. And within that life that we’re living, we need to find a way to become good human beings. And it’s only from following the path of Dharma, the spiritual path, that we can become good human beings, whatever that means to each of us.  Our motivations begin to come from kindness and compassion. Our caring about other people increases, so our obsession with ourselves decreases and how we feel and “How am I, how am I now? How am I now? How am I now?” All day long. You know, the movie of “me.” So how do we free ourselves from this prison of me-ness, of ego, of the belief that we are separate from everybody, and it’s around that sense of separateness that all our suffering revolves. When that planet of “me” dissolves, there’s nothing for the suffering to revolve around, to orbit around. It goes and find somebody else to bother. So, let’s take some questions and then we’ll just see how the day goes. Q: Thank you so much for this and for everything you’re doing right now, it’s so wonderful and so nourishing.

Call and Response Ep. 49 | How KD Met Robert Thurman “It was a wild time. There were a lot of… the Westerners in India, everybody would go to see teachers, different teachers and then when the seasons changed, all these different people would meet in the cities on their way somewhere else and exchange information and this kind of stuff and then you would go off in a different direction and it was an incredible amount of beautiful seeds were planted in those days. It was amazing, just amazing.” – Krishna Das KD: She said, I should introduce Bob. Bob and I met because both of our photos are on the wall at the post office. Most wanted. You know? And actually, I first met Bob and Nena on the ridge in Almora in 1971. Right? Bob: Yes. KD: 1971. Ram Das and I and a few others were on our way up further into the mountains and somehow, we didn’t have phones, we didn’t have iphones… how did we? Bob: Well, it was by accident. KD: It was by accident. Oh. By accident. Bob: We were there in our van. We had a Volkswagon van at the time and these two kids in the car and we were there shopping, you know, coming down from Crank’s Ridge where we lived without Lama Govinda and you guys were there on your way to… KD: Our way to Kausani. Bob: That’s right, Kausani. Where you were having a retreat and there we all met. That was really fun. KD: Yeah. I spent a rainy season up there. Bob: You guys were all wearing white. KD: White, my ass. Bob: You were like, so pure. We were like, amazed at how pure you were. KD: I wore white for maybe one minute. Bob: And we had this car on this thing and there were a lot of hippies there at the time. And so we were actually the local ambulance. Whenever things would go wrong, we’d drive them to the hospital in Nainital. KD: Yeah, right. Bob: And I think that was not one of those KD: Right, right. It was a wild time. There were a lot of… the Westerners in India, everybody would go to see teachers, different teachers and then when the seasons changed, all these different people would meet in the cities on their way somewhere else and exchange information and this kind of stuff and then you would go off in a different direction and it was an incredible amount of beautiful seeds were planted in those days. It was amazing, just amazing. “You saw who? Oh, wow. Yeah, ok. I think I’ll go over there. Ok, yeah. I’m going to go see that one and this one.” It was amazing. Yeah, and great times. And the first waves of Tibetans were coming out of Tibet at that time. Maybe not the first wave, but a very large amount of Tibetans were coming out for the first time and it was incredible. I was in Bodhgaya at that time and I remember Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa just walking down the road from Gaya, you know? It was amazing. Such a wonderful, wonderful time. So, Bob is, Bob is one of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s closest and oldest disciples, especially Western disciples. He’s know His Holiness for so many years and he’s a master of all the different schools of philosophy and when he talks, it’s, what comes, it just comes through, I mean there’s no, I don’t think he’s editing at all. It’s just pouring through and it comes from such a beautiful space. It’s extraordinary. So, I know that you’ll really appreciate that this weekend. Bob: Well, that’s very kind of you, KD but… KD: It’s a loving kindness weekend. Bob: One time I introduced the Dalai Lama at Sanders Theater at Harvard when He first came to America and I gave a big thing about Avalokiteshvara and a thousand arms. KD: Yeah, yeah. Bob: I gave a huge thing like that, then He came out, you know, and people were applauding, you know, how after you introduce somebody and He walked and as He walked by me He paused, you know, we shook hands and He said, “Don’t over-introduce me. Don’t over-introduce me,” he said.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD May 7, 2020 Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond. “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.

Call and Response Ep. 48 | Hanuman, Mrs. Hanuman, and Time Machines  “When you attain that oneness, you’re also one with all Beings in all moments of time, past, present and future. So, because, after all, time is like a space, it’s like a subtler space than space is. You know, time, it’s a space of time, a space of duration, of continuum. Right? And so, everything is past and future. So, when you become Buddha, you’re all in all moments of the future, so then you become aware that everyone else will eventually become Buddha, and not only that but you then manifest to accelerate that process so they can do it as quickly as possible. The really dense ones might take a million lifetimes. The quicker ones, a hundred, etcetera. But You’re going to work on it with them. That’s your attitude. This is the sci-fi idea of Kalachakra, ok?” – Robert Thurman KD: Yeah. All these practices, all these traditions really are here for us to help us overcome the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, which for the most part are at least limiting, to say the least. So all these practices are so based in love. Some years ago, one of the lamas I study with, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, invited me to sing at one of His retreats where He was going to teach on devotion. Now, in Tibetan Buddhism, devotion is not talked about separately as a subject usually. It’s part of the practices. But Rinpoche was going to discuss that aspect of devotion separately. So, He asked me to sing and so I sang and, but one of the things He said, over and over is that, if we don’t love ourselves, how will we ever really love all Beings? Not to mention, another Being? Real love. And it was very interesting to see some of His students react to that because, you know, Buddhists. What are you going to do with them? You know? So intellectual sometimes, you know? Thinking about stuff and understanding the philosophy and I remember one time, I said to Rinpoche, because I don’t take that many teachings with Him but we became very friendly at one point and I said, “Rinpoche, don’t underestimate the ability of Westerners to not understand what you’re talking about.”And He went… and then, by the next year, He had reorganized His teachings.  It was very interesting because I think He realized that we talk a good game, but when it comes to the nitty gritty, we hide. Our issues cloud the sun. Like the clouds, they block the sun, so… and of course, Her Loving Kindness talks about this all the time, you know, how to, how offering Loving Kindness to others heals our own hearts. And Maharajji used to say, “Don’t think about yourself.” You know? When I was going to kill myself that time… I was going to jump in the river behind the temple, you know? It was about six inches deep, but I figured if I got my head, you know, stuck under a rock, I could probably get it done, you know? So He said, “What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Jump in the river?” He said, “You can’t die.” He said, “Worldly people don’t die.” He said, “Only Jesus died the real death.” What is He talking about?  Only Jesus died? And He looked, “Yeah. Why? Because He never thought of Himself.” What is the real death? What’s the death of the ego? When thoughts of “me” no longer arise. When it isn’t about “me” anymore. “How am I doing?” “How am I doing now?” “Am I wearing the right clothes?” “Am I sitting straight enough?”  “Did I put on enough makeup?” “I got that…” what is it they call that stuff? “acne medicine” it’s been so long since I had a pimple. I don’t remember because I don’t have a mind either, you know? So, you know, He never thought of Himself. Thoughts of “me” never arose in that Being. And of course, all I did was think about myself. And I said, “Baba, all I do is think about myself. What am I going to do?” And He looks at me, “Attachment. Ha!” He wasn’t buying it. So eventually I gave it up for that particular period of time. All right. Let’s sing a little bit. And then we’ll,

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 30, 2020 Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond. “Ram Dass, my best friend, one of my best friends, long-term spiritual friends and elders, just died a month or two ago. He’s so present. Any time I think of him, he’s present. I’m not looking for signs. I feel his presence. And you will feel your people’s presence if you just allow yourself to. You won’t be able to touch them physically. But that doesn’t mean they’re not here. Because we’re attached to our physical bodies. Because we identify with our physical and emotional parts. We can’t imagine something without that. However, there are many Beings, many many more Beings out of the body than are in bodies I’m sure. I’ve heard that many times. And if you want to feel those things, one has to open up to these realities through practice.” – Krishna Das So, you know, when we add a practice to our day, it changes the way we sit in the moment. It just does. It just changes the way we sit in the moment and it’s not about whether we’re doing it well or we’re not doing it well or we’re having any particular type of experience. That’s one of our biggest problems. We’re expecting something. We have an idea that we have to get something. You know, I remember sitting in front of Maharajji and I almost laughed out loud because I saw that I was sitting there and I was waiting for something to happen and when I thought about what it was I was waiting to happen, I realized I was waiting for a moment when I would not be here, when I’d be gone. And I laughed because I realized, or I understood at that moment that I would never be gone. There was no time. There was no moment anywhere, ever where I would be gone. There will come a time I hope when I am not attached and identified with my thoughts and my negative emotions, especially. But I’ll only be more here then. More present. So, this whole feeling of wanting to be gone means I wanted to be freed from my unhappiness and my crazy neurotic mind. It was driving me crazy. My self-judging, my self-loathing, all the programs. So, yeah. Anyway, that’s the deal. Let’s see some questions. Q: I would like to ask how to find hope in difficult times. I know what you mean, but it’s really not hope that you want. It’s faith that you want. Maybe I’m picking at straws here but hope is like blind faith. Faith that you have no reason to feel hope because it’s out of your hands. It’s just like, you know, you put your hope in something else. You imagine maybe some time will come when you won’t feel so bad. But faith is something you get from… Faith means, in a way, it can also mean confidence in yourself.  Confidence that you can deal with whatever arises in a good way and that’s a big thing. I was sitting with Maharajji in an apartment building in Bombay. At the time it was called that. Around Christmas 1972. And we’d been sitting for hours. He was lying on the bed. He was lying this way. He’d sit up. Then He’d lie down this way and He’d sit up. And I was just watching Him. Watching Him quietly. All of a sudden, He sits up and He looks at me and He says, “Courage is a really big thing.” I was like, “What’s going to happen?” You know? And the Indian devotee there, he was the only one there. He looked at me and he said… He looked at Baba and said, “But Oh Baba, but God takes care of His devotees.” Maharajji just shot Him a glance and He looked back at me and He said, “Courage is a really big thing.” Courage is a really big thing. There have been times in my life when… that it was enough to deal with life as it appears to us, as it arrives in our moment, in our life, in our space. So,

Call and Response Ep. 47 | Hindu-Buddhist Connections and A Short Discussion of Hatred “Once it reaches India, the vajra idea, that’s when it’s coming from, central asia, chariot warriors and so on. They were kshatriyas, you know? But when it gets into India after some time, it comes to mean this infinite, stronger than the thunderbolt is this infinite energy of love and that infinite energy of love is not violent because its, it doesn’t need violence because it’s everything. So, it’s a really wonderful Indian vision, and it’s general, both sides, all sides in India, Jain, Buddhists, Hindu. “ – Robert Thurman KD: So, at some point, things get very bad and the negative energy gets very strong and kind of get, they all decide to attack the kingdom of Shambhala where all of us will be living at that point. Bob: Petroleum Industry attacks them, they say. KD: Petroleum Industry, etcetera. Bob: They do. KD: So, they form a big army and they get ready to attack. Now, there happens to be a king in Shambhala, in the kingdom of Shambhala, named Raudra Chakri, which means, “the wrathful one with the wheel”. Now, you know Vishnu, His weapon is the chakra, a wheel. And so He becomes aware of this, the demons and the humans and all the bad negative energy getting together and what He does is He goes into this super long trance and He gathers all His powers and when He comes out, the army of Shambhala goes out to meet the army of the bad guys and now, in the Ramayana, we’re talking about earlier, Hanuman finds Sita, comes back and then Rama goes to beat up the bad guys. And the armies of Rama kill all the other bad guys but they leave the real bad guy for Rama to kill, because He has to kill, only He can kill that guy. So, in the Kalachakra tantra, this battle begins and the king sends his two generals, this is in the text, the king sends his two generals to fight, to lead the fight against the armies and what are their names? Shiva and Hanuman. Hello.  Hello are you there? Bob: You discovered it. I didn’t even notice it. KD: I found this in a book one day. I opened up this book. It was on a friend’s shelf and I went, “what?” So, this was in the Tibetan text, the generals of the army of Shambhala are Shiva and Hanuman; Sanskrit text, originally, and they destroy the armies, leaving only the bad guy for the king to fight and he kills the guy and then the golden age arises. Bob: By the way, also the name of the king, Kalki, is also the name of the 10th Avatar of Vishnu. KD: Yes. Bob: So, it’s a similar, there’s a similar apocalyptic succession. KD: The lineage of Shambhalic kings, the lineage of Avatars, the so-called Hindu avatars, and the lineage of the Siddhas, each incarnation is exactly the same and what we’re talking about here is Raudra Chakri, which is the Shambalic King, and then on the so-called Hindu side is the Kalki Avatar, the next Avatar, and Raudri Chakri, and where’s Maittreya in this? Bob: Raudra Chakri’s the incarnation of Vajra Pani KD: Vajrapani. That’s beyond my pay grade. Bob: Vajrapani.  KD: So, then, but it’s… Bob: Maittreya’s around. That happens later. Thousands of years later. KD: Oh, I see, thousands of years later. Bob: This is still Shakyamuni Buddha’s time, you know. So, Shakyamuni Buddha is seeing to it that this planet, it becomes the best platform for people to realize, Beings to realize their own true nature, which is the nature of love and wisdom. Wisdom and love, which everybody already has if they only knew. If we only knew. KD: It all comes back to the love again. It all comes back to that. Again and again and again. That’s the way we’re made, you know? That’s the way we’re made. We’re made that way. KD: Funny thing. Bob: What’s that? KD: When I was having my nervous breakdown in India, when I was going to kill myself. Bob: The one in India. KD: Yeah,

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 25, 2020 Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond. “You know, there were people, there were gurus in India, Beings in India that other Westerners went to.  They would bounce up and down off the pillows, they would howl like dogs. They would  be in bliss and fall over like this. I sat around with mom Maharajji for two and a half years. Not one fucking thing happened. Except love. Except love that was so deep and so beautiful and so unbearable, so wonderful that I couldn’t pull myself away from that person.  Nor did I want to, except when I got pissed off. So, the whole thing is learning to trust yourself. Take your time. There’s no hurry. You’re not going anywhere. You’re just trying to get here, where you are already. Relax. Let it come to you. Be yourself. Be you. Follow your heart. Trust your heart. Trust yourself. Trust your deeper feelings. But in order to trust them, you have to listen deeply to yourself and then you have to pay attention. You have to honor how you feel. If you don’t honor those deeper feelings, you’re not doing the right thing to yourself, but most people don’t. Okay? But the spiritual path means really following your heart, following your deepest heart. What do you want? What do you really want? Don’t get caught.  Don’t spend time getting things that you don’t really need. You might enjoy a little bit, but go after what you really want, which is the same thing everybody wants, which is love. And if you’re not getting what you want from one situation, recognize that that’s the case. That doesn’t mean you have to change anything, but you have to pay attention.” – Krishna Das So, here we are, everybody here is still here, which is good. Somebody just wrote from Gangotri? It can’t be. It must be a name of somebody. There’s no wireless up in Gangotri. can go to in India is the source of the Ganges. The Ganga. I don’t think there’s any internet up there. Q:   Okay. I have a little, I wrote it down so I could, yeah. I wrote down my question or just my thought. So, I guess when all this started, I started making choices in my life that felt more safe and secure. I was always doing service work and I needed to quit that I needed to just do service work around here instead, kind of redefining what my thought was on, on service. Because also, I had all these outer things going on with the world, and also personal things in my life that felt really out of control. So, I wanted to find a little bit of control and I’ve been trying to find that, but there are days where I feel so overwhelmed by guilt or overwhelmed by sadness or overwhelmed by anger. And I know I should be practicing to kind of get out of my own way, but sometimes. That wave feels so strong. It feels like I’m drowning, and it feels so heavy that it’s kind of like, I know what to do to get myself out of it, but going, getting out of that heaviness is, is so incredibly hard for me. So, I was wondering what your thoughts would be around that. Some, some insight? I can give you thoughts. I don’t know about insight. Well, first of all, you’re a human being, I think. So, especially at this time on the planet, it’s a very rough time. No question about it. And not only do we have our own stuff to deal with, but the atmosphere is full of it. Every time we turn on the television or read the newspaper or talk to friends, we’re coming, all that anxiety and fear is coming right into our face, right into us. And it’s floating around all the time. So, it’s,

Call and Response Ep. 46 | The Meaning of Ram “When you shape divinity, your notion of the Divinity, by saying ‘Ram Ram Ram’ and use the Name for ‘joy’ and ‘enjoyment’, ‘Ramaniya’, ‘to be enjoyed in that form’, you know, it’s a gerundial thing, ‘to be enjoyed,’ ‘Ramaniya’ means. And then, you are saying that, this great power that I want to merge myself with out of my devotion, I want to connect to out of my devotion and I want to feel the presence in me of that, then that is enjoyment.” – Robert Thurman KD: When we were singing just before, it occurred to me to ask you, so this chanting of the Tara Mantra is, in India, they call this Nama Japa, the repetition of the Names. Bob: Sure. KD: So, Maharajji used to say, “Ram nam karne se sab pura ho jata.” Bob: Ram? KD: Ram Nam Karne Se Sab Pura Ho Jata. From the repetition of these Names, everything is accomplished. Everything is brought to fulfillment and completion. Bob: Why not? KD: Well, I would like you to tell them why. Bob: Well, I said that in the meditation. KD: Yeah. Bob: So, Ram, I mean if you think about Ram… KD: Just, all the Names, any of the Names. He just meant the Names of God. Bob: Yeah, but I thought it was especially Rama, though. He said, you can get everywhere just saying the Name “Rama”. KD: Yeah. Bob: Ok? So, Ram is a way of expressing divinity. Now a lot of, a number of Hindu theologians today might still go for a Maha Ishwara idea. Which means to say, a creator deity who created everything. But not really. It’s not really at home in India, that idea. Like that Abrahamic type of idea. In other words, that there’s one guy that everything can be blamed on. All the “ness”. It’s not really a comfortable Indian idea, because like the, you know, ok, the Shaivites… I don’t think the Shaivites ever had a war against the Vaishnavites. They had wars against, actually in South India, Shaivites had wars against the Jains and the Jains fought back. I was surprised. They’re big non-violence people. They had bad wars between Jains and Shaivites. They never had a war against Buddhists in ancient times. Now the Tamil, they pretend that it’s a Buddhist and Hindu in the Tamil, in Sri Lanka, but it isn’t really Buddhist. It’s fake Buddhist and it’s stupid terrorist Hindus. It isn’t really Buddhist and Hindu. And many many Hindu kings… I was just in Sri Lanka and I was looking at the history and many Hindu kings from Tamil Nadu and other places came and then they ruled the Buddhists there without suppressing Buddhism. And the Buddhist kings were there and they never tried to suppress Hinduism particularly, but now and then they would have, they would… and the religion would be an excuse. So, I’m saying that India has a very strong idea of Divinity and so does Buddhism. You know, when Buddha was born in the Buddha myth, the two people who gave Him his first bath were Brahma and Indra. You know, Brahma was the Brahminical Deity and Indra was the Vedic Maha Deity, you know the king of the Gods in the Vedic idea, like Zeus. Indra was like Odin, actually, connects to Odin and Zeus and Brahma was like a, kind of a little bit monotheistic type, but really based, having to do with the Vedic ritual. Brahma. And Brahma means the sound of language and all this. There’s a whole story about Brahma. But not really a creator so strongly. And the idea that one Being created everything and is in control of it all is pretty much not the best flavor in India, actually. It’s not the normal flavor. So, the reason I’m saying that is, and I will talk more about that, some Buddhist sutra where Brahma meets Buddha, where they talk together. But, so Buddhists never, Buddhists are not atheists at all, but they just don’t think there’s one creator. That’s the main point. And I think that they don’t really, when they switch back and forth, you know, He, Brahma the Creator, the Destroyer and the Preserver, right?

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 23, 2020 Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond. Q:  Please put some light on how to overpower negative thoughts and anxiety, especially during meditation. “If you’re meditating, you’re not supposed to be trying to overpower anything. You notice what’s going on and you come back to your mantra or your focus of attention. Where does it say you’re supposed to fight with your thoughts? That’s a misconception. That’s a struggle. Meditation is not a struggle. You just keep coming back again and again, again and again. And you’re training yourself to release those thoughts once you notice.” – Krishna Das So, that was a half an hour, a half an hour that we didn’t spend as the target of our own obsessive thinking, of our own negative emotions, of our fears, our anxieties, and in the situation that we’re in now, that stuff is bouncing off the walls all day long. So, when we add a practice to our lives, it gives us something to focus on and without recognizing it even, we’ve released so much of those clouds of stuff that are surrounding us in our day. It’s not necessary to try to manipulate yourself, to have one particular type of experience while you’re chanting. The main idea is to remember to pay attention, to listen, to hear, to allow the chant to flow over you and to allow yourself to flow into it. This is not a philosophical situation. We don’t have to learn about the name. We don’t have to know all the incredible things that they say about the name, that yogis and saints have been talking about for thousands of years. Not necessary. What’s necessary is to repeat it, to remember, to bring the name to mind, to use the breath, to sing it, to use the breath to say it, to use the awareness to pay attention. Add that to our lives. That’s what we need to do. And it becomes so obvious in this kind of a situation. This is forced retreat for us. So, we’re faced with all our stuff. So, the need to do practice becomes very strong. So, take this time to cultivate this practice. Do it, do it a few times a day, just for five minutes or whatever, 10 minutes, whatever. Keep coming back to it during the day. When you notice the chat going on in your head, spend a minute with it. They say that there’s a place within us that these names are always being repeated, are always flowing. And the more you pay attention to the chant and the name, the more you hear that in your mind as the day goes on. You’ll be busy doing something and all of a sudden, there it is. You might actually just notice it, and not even notice that you notice it and then you’re busy with something else. It’s very… the reason it’s such a subtle practice, because even though we think we are doing this, you and me, we think we’re sitting down to sing or do Japa or mantra meditation. We think that we’re doing that, but in reality, it’s the name that’s repeating us. The name goes on repeating us from the inside, moving out, outward, outward, and purifying our hearts as it moves through us. So, at least that’s what they say. Q: Are there any religions that teach God is one with you with one or do they all teach God is separate and above? No, none of the Eastern, so-called Eastern religions teach the God is separate and above us. They, there are some, some religious philosophies that, even in India, that say that you don’t want to merge with God. You want to stay separate to enjoy the bliss of union. If you merge, they say, then you, you don’t have that.

Call and Response Ep. 45 | A Meditation With Bob “Why do we want Ram, the Divine Rama, and utter the name, Rama, which comes from a verb that means to play and to enjoy? Actually, Rama does. ‘Ramaniya’ means to enjoy something. And why do we say, ‘Jai Ram’? May Ram triumph. May the Divine triumph. Why do we celebrate that? This is India’s vision, actually, which is the vision of the goodness of the universe. India is really the garden of Eden in ancient time. The richest, most benevolent nature in Eurasia, by far. The ancient civilizations in India were the most peaceful. Everything is relative, of course, in the relative world, but they were. And so, it’s natural that from India, a reassuring prayer emanates throughout history as we know it, that the world is a beautiful thing, that the default situation, if you just let it all go, is all right, you will be embraced, you will be caught in Nirvana. You will be caught in the clear light of the void, as the Buddhists called it. You will be caught in the fundamental bliss energies, Satchidananda, as the Vedantists called it; Being, Awareness and Bliss.” – Robert Thurman Bob: Shall we try to meditate together a little bit? I would like to lead a meditation if you’d like to go into meditative mode. Those of you who are sitting on the mat, cross-legged etcetera, you’re in good shape. Those of you who are sitting in a chair, you should try to cross your ankles and fold your hands in your lap and touch the tip of your thumbs if you can, although I sort of unorthodoxly like to link my fingers. I don’t know why. I’m not good about that. And, any way you’re comfortable, and tuck your chin a little and your shoulders a little back so you can sit still for a little while without being uncomfortable. Now, think about your breathing. Put your attention in the flow of breath in the nostrils if you can. Your lips should be loosely closed, tongue on the roof, on the palate behind the teeth, and breathing through the nostrils if possible, and just enjoying breathing. You don’t have to count but just revel in the fact and feel happy at that fact that when you draw in breath, energy comes to you from the universe and when you draw, when you exhale breath, waste product from your physical system is embraced by the universe, especially, in this case, the glorious of plants that are there, so kind to us, producing the energy oxygen that we need, producing from the sun and then taking up the carbon that we exhale and creating their own green leaved beauty, flowers, fruits, grains, all sorts of things that we need. So the fact that you can breathe and do breathe shows that this world is there for you. And, in a way, you are helping this world. Normally, we don’t even think about it. We take it for granted. But it’s a little bit of a clue of what all the great teachers of reality have taught us about the world being a good place, actually. The world being a benevolent place. The world being a fitting place for us. Of the four noble opinions, or facts, or truths, that the Buddha taught, His basic framework, at least. He also untaught them at other times, but He was never dogmatic, but in those things that He taught, the One that is real, most real, is the third One, the truth of Nirvana. The other ones are less real, and so, in a way, the whole gift of India, why do we all love India so much? Why do we want Ram, the Divine Rama, and utter the name, Rama, which comes from a verb that means to play and to enjoy? Actually, Rama does. Ramaniya means to enjoy something. And why do we say, “Jai Ram”? May Ram triumph. May the Divine triumph. Why do we celebrate that? This is India’s vision, actually, which is the vision of the goodness of the universe. India is really the garden of Eden in ancient time. The richest, most benevolent nature in Eurasia, by far. The ancient civilizations in India were the most peaceful. Everything is relative, of course, in the relative world, but they were.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 16, 2020 Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond. “We don’t know who God is, what God is, but he’s certainly not someone who sits in judgment of us. How could he even fit in there? We’re so busy judging ourselves. There’s no room for him to judge us or her to judge us.” – Krishna Das Oh, hi. Welcome back to the new abnormal, as somebody wrote. It’s good to be with you again. I can’t see you, but we’re here together on the planet. Yeah, so we’ll spend some time together again tonight. The chanting practice, for me, is the most powerful way that I have to keep letting go, coming back to some useful, reasonable perspective about things. Things tend to get a little intense when you’re locked in one space together, with people or without people. Even alone, it gets very intense because all you see is your own mind and at least when you’re alone, you can’t blame anybody else for your thoughts and your emotions. But when you’re with other people, it can get pretty intense. But regardless, alone or together, or whatever, sooner or later, we have to deal with our mind and our thoughts and our emotions. As the previous Karmapa, the 16th Karmapa once said, “The only thing you take with you when you die is your state of mind.” So, now is the time to begin, or continue working with that state of mind, getting to a place where it doesn’t push us around all the time, where we get some vote into how we go through the day, how we sit inside of ourselves. The meaning of these chants is not to be understood intellectually. And what happens is, the more you chant, the deeper, the more often you come back to the chant. And so, you’re actually acclimating yourself to sit in the chanting and the flow of sound. And inside this flow of sound, many things will come, many understandings, intuitions, flashes of insight come from inside the chant, comes to the awareness, comes to our mind. Those are not thoughts. They are coming from inside the chant, their intuition coming from the heart, the seat of awareness in ourselves, our true nature, our heart cave, or as they call it, “hridayam,” the seat of consciousness in the body. It’s not actually in the body, they say, but it’s attached, it attaches itself to the body and pumps awareness into the body. The mind is what lights up everything that we see. Just like the sun lights up the physical world, or lamps, flashlights, it’s the mind that lights up everything we see, everything we think. All the objects that we perceive are actually perceived by awareness. And this awareness is part of that Satchidananda, which is the way, one of the ways they describe reality or divinity, real divinity. Truth, consciousness, awareness and bliss. Happiness is one of those things.  Although if you’re from Long Island, you know, you might be disqualified from that last last one, but we’re working on it. Yeah. So as we chant, and Maharajji used to say, from going on repeating these names, everything is accomplished. Everything is brought to fullness. That’s a very powerful statement and is something that we have to, at least, if not take on faith, not blind faith, but educated faith, if not then at least we have to suspend disbelief long enough to do the practice and get the experience ourselves. If you can’t do the practice, if you can’t look inside, you won’t see. So, if we’re prevented from doing that by skepticism or by a negative take on reality or a belief that we could never be happy,

Call and Response Ep. 44 | Share Your Story Q: Could (you) share some of your story about what was going on before you decided to go to India “Everyone has a Guru. Everyone has a lineage that they’ve been involved with, especially if you’re interested in this crazy stuff in the first place, and everybody is, every moment, including this moment, receiving the fruits of their karmas. And the motivation for a great saint, they only have one motivation, they only have one agenda, which is compassion for us, because we don’t know what’s going on. So, they’re here for one reason only. For our sake. So, that means that everyone is getting exactly what they need at every moment. There’s no slippage in the system. If you’ve seen, if you’ve met a guru, a real guru, not a wannabe guru, not a “hope it’s a guru” not a fake guru… don’t let me continue, because it gets worse… if you’ve met a real guru then that was the best thing, that was what you needed. If you haven’t, that’s what you need.” – Krishna Das   Q: I guess mine was just asking about if you could share some of your story about what was going on before you decided to go to India that may be whatever it was for you, and also, how did you find your Guru? You land in India and then also, from there, I like those moments, the transition moments of all the things, you know, playing music, you know, doing what you’re doing now, of all the things you could do, how did that, just… KD: It was either this or pump gas. Those were the two options. Well, I went to India in August 1970. I had already been pretty involved in spiritual stuff for quite a few years. I read all three books on the stuff that were here in America at the time, Autobiography of a Yogi, Gospel of Ramakrishna and Zen and Japanese Culture. Oh, wait, and there was Yoga for Health. Something like that. Unbelievable. Thank you. So, but you know, I was really, I was very unhappy. I wasn’t really a happy camper. A lot of, a lot of self hatred, a lot of self loathing, a lot of not being able to be happy and get what I wanted in life. It was really not a lot of fun to be me. And then, oh, I moved upstate New York to live on a farm that the brother of a friend of mine had bought. They were Jungian acid head mountain climbers. These people would take 1000 mics of acid and climb mountains like this, straight vertical, they were unbelievable. Very wild. And they had a group, they had a family they called the Vulgarians. Anyway they were great folks and they, one guy, a friend of theirs, had seen Ram Das when he first came back from India in late 1968, yeah. And then they, he gave a talk in New York in early 1969, I think, and this guy met, went there, and then he came up and told his friends about it and then they were going to go drive up to New Hampshire where Ram Das was living on his father’s estate. He was living above the garage. It was a huge beautiful house, but he was living above the garage in like a little… he had come back from India and had camped out there. So, I had just come, so, they said they were going to meet this guy and I, you know, I said, “I’m not interested in any white yogis” you know? Once an asshole, always an asshole. What can I tell you? So, they went off. They were supposed to come back the next day. But they didn’t come back for like, three days, right? And I had just come out of the goat shed. We had two goats, Alice Bailey and Madam Blavatsky, our two goats, and I was holding a pale of milk, right? And they came back and I saw the car cut through the field, it comes around, and he parked it and he gets out of the car and he looks at me, like, and there was light shooting out of his head. I had never seen anything like that. I said, “Write down the directions. I’m leaving now.” I ran out to my cabin and I got my stuff together and I got my stuff together and took off and drove all night. So, I got, I got there around,

Call and Response Ep. 43 | Practice Arising By Itself, Dharmageddon and Does the Curriculum Change With Age Question: I’m just finding it to be that I don’t have to try so hard because it just happens and what I like about that, it seems like it took a long time to get there. It gets better and it seems like it’s just easy. You just fall into it. Why all the struggles? “Let’s say you’re home when that happens, you’re just sitting around and you remember the Name, for instance, or the Name shows up in your head. If you’re home, you could, you could go with it for a few minutes, right? You could allow it to surface, really surface.” – Krishna Das Q: I’m finding out that the older I get, not old, whatever, that the practice comes by itself a lot of times. You’re thinking about it then all of a sudden. KD: Sure. Q: And I’m just finding it to be I don’t have to try so hard because it just happens and what I like about that, it seems like it took a long time to get there. It gets better and it seems like its just easy. You just fall into it. Why all the struggles? Oh, I don’t want to do that, it’s too hard. Now its so easy or easier. KD: That’s good, but you know, so tell me about your experience. Give him back the mic. Q: Well… KD: What are you exactly referring to? Q: Well, it’s just the whole practice in general, I guess. KD: Meaning? Q: Just like that? Oh, god. KD: Like, for instance, a lot of times, the mantra will come back to me during the day and kind of, I’ll recognize that it’s there when I had forgotten, right? I’ve been just driving around or something and then I’ll hear, in a sense, in my head, the mantra, so that comes back to you. Sure.  But what do you do at that moment? Q: Seems to me I try to keep going with it. Yeah. KD: Right. That’s it. Sure. But, that’s all good. No question about it. But there’s so many levels of sleep, so to speak. There’s so much time we spend asleep. The idea is to kind of gradually shorten the amount of time it takes for us to remember the mantra, for instance, right? And the way that happens, the way that is shortened is by willfully, using our personal will to bring ourselves back. But even, that’s an interesting thing, because ok, so you’re chanting, right? And then you notice you haven’t been paying attention and then you come back to the chant. How did you notice? Ha. You just do. It happens by itself. But we know that nothing happens without a cause. There’s no effect without a cause and no cause that doesn’t have an effect that became a cause, so if you, all of a sudden, woke up, so to speak, and recognized that you hadn’t been paying attention, that waking up is a direct result of practice you’ve done in the past. Either this life or another life. Otherwise you would get born, you’d graduate from high school, you’d drink some beer, and then you’d die. And you’re not here for one moment of your life. How many people do we know? Most of them are in the supermarket when you go there. Look around. Nobody’s home. It’s unbelievable. It’s like, yeah, sure, swimming through, like, water and… so, there you are, singing, and you haven’t been paying attention and then you, you go, “Oh, ok.” And you come back. How did that happen? You didn’t do that. You weren’t here, you were in dreamland. How did it happen that you came back and noticed? Consciousness, you became aware and awareness is something that is always here but recognized more through practice, through remembering. That’s what practice is. Remembering. So, you sit down to remember. “I’m remembering. I’m remembering my breath. Breathing in. Breathing out. Breathing in. Breathing out. Oh, I’ve got to go to the store later. What am I supposed to buy? Did I write it down? I don’t think I wrote it down. Oh, ok. My breath.” That moment when we come back, that is, in itself, an effect of the cause of having done practice before.  Already. For instance,