Summary: “We don’t know who we are. We don’t know what we really are. We don’t know what’s looking out of our eyes. We don’t know what’s experiencing the things we experience. We just experience, we wake up, drink some beer, go back to sleep and drink some more beer. That’s all we do. So, if we don’t know our Self, how are we going to know guru? How are we going to know God? Well, when your karma is ripe, to a certain point, I guess, the Self recognizes itself in someone that looks like they’re outside of you. Another human. Another Being. Another body. You recognize something in that Being and it’s something that comes from within. A recognition from within that is like coming home, you know?” – Krishna Das<br> <br> So, what we’ve been doing is called the repetition of the Divine Name. So, The deal is this: we are imprisoned within our thoughts and our emotions so we are imprisoned within our thoughts because we think we’re thinking. Don’t we? And you can’t think yourself out of a prison that’s made of thought. Every thought is the prison. Every thought locks us into identification with our stuff. So through this practice of the repetition of the Name, all we do is we sing and when we notice that we haven’t been paying attention, we sing. That’s the whole thing. Nothing else is required. No visualization, no imagination, no anything, doing anything, trying to make anything happen. You just simply come back. Now, that’s an interesting thing. So there you are, sri ram jai ram jai jai ram and then 20 minutes later, you realize, “oh, I haven’t been paying attention.” How did that moment happen? The moment when you realized you weren’t paying attention? Right? You didn’t do that. We didn’t do that. It happened. We didn’t do that with our personal will. In other words, we didn’t say, “Ok, now I have to pay attention.” We were lost in thought and then we noticed we were lost in thought. How did we notice? Because we didn’t do that. It happened. So how did that happen? Well, that is the fruit, that moment of recognition or waking up from dreamland, is a result of the practice we’ve done in the past, our previous karmas. Or it would never happen. So, that’s what we’re doing. Every time, when that happens, and we notice that we haven’t been paying attention, we simply come back to the sound of the Name going on again and again. Because even while you were singing, the chances are you weren’t paying attention. But since you were singing, there was still a part of you that was doing it. And then you noticed, oh, wow, I’ve been thinking about that girl sitting next to me. Then you come back to the Name. That’s all. Any thought about that situation, you just let it go again and keep coming back and eventually, little by little, we get used to that feeling of coming back home. Coming back. And that mechanism, so to speak, keeps working during the day, the non-practice times. We’re cultivating awareness, presence and these Names that we chant are, they’re the Names of that place, so to speak, within us, that’s always here. The Awake Place. Presence, Being.<br> When I was with Maharajji, my Guru, He just kept bringing us back. Bringing us back, reminding us, waking us up again and again. And the, being in the presence of this kind of Love, it’s not like He loved us or loves us because He understands, He’s realized the oneness of the universe and we’re all part of that. That might be true. But on a personal level, He loves us because we are who we are. Because we are already who we are. That’s what He loves. He loves us just as we are. I had never met anybody that loved me that way. The people who cared about me, no question about it, but if I looked closely, I could see that they wanted something in return. They wanted some affection in return, some attention, some support. That’s ok, but this was different. So different. And it really ignited a place in me that wanted to live in that love all the time.
