Summary: 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.<br> <br> Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD September 12, 2020<br> “Siddhi Ma once said, ‘In this age, God comes as medicine.’<br> So, you take medicine, you try to go to doctors, you do the best you can for your health, but you have your mental and emotional and spiritual health too, and you have to spend time on that, and there’s no quick medicine for that. Over time, you develop the faith to accept whatever comes the best way you can, and to keep giving those fears back to God, you know, offering them, you know, offering those emotions and trying to break the glue and dissolve the glue that those emotions come with. – Krishna Das<br> Hi, everybody. Some of you are becoming regulars. This is very scary.<br> Yeah, well, we’re still here. That’s one thing. That’s the main thing. When you’re not here, there’s nothing you can do. So, it’s good to be here. The past is gone. The future has not yet arrived. This is it. This is the moment that we have, to meet the next moment, which is just like this moment. This is the moment when we can make some effort to calm our asses down, and to try to be less reactive, and to, like they say in India, “bhajan karo” Remember. “Remember” is the key to everything. Remember to remember. And then when you remember, what do you remember? You try to remember the love that lives within you, within us, and that has many different forms for us.<br> Each person has their own version of that love and vision of that love, and the names of God are the names of that love. It’s not a name of something outside of your true nature. It’s not something else. It’s not something other than you are, but, actually your true name on the deepest level, ultimate reality. In relative reality, there’s “me” and there’s others, but ultimately, like Hanuman says to Ram, “When I don’t know who I am, I serve you. When I identify with my soul, you are the whole, and I am a part. But when I know who I am, you and I are one.”<br> So, that’s a statement of reality. It’s not something you have to beat into your head to try to believe, because the limited conceptual mind could never wrap itself around that. It’s not something that needs to be believed with blind faith. It’s something that has to be experienced, or at least moved towards in our daily lives, and ultimate reality, oneness, means that we are all a part of that one, all of us, even the people we don’t like, and so, what we want to do is learn how to treat everybody well, but that also means learning how to treat ourselves well.<br> Like that guy said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”<br> And that’s a big thing. If we could do that, the world would be a different place immediately. Immediately. But we can’t do that. It’s not easy for us to give up our defenses, our stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, all the lifelong. So, that’s what practice is about. Practices about learning to release that stuff. Let go of it. Weaken the glue that holds our sense of self to those miserable thoughts and feelings and emotions.<br> Okay. See you next week.<br> Hi.<br> Q: Hi. I’m here because I’m singing a lot of kirtans in this COVID period. I’m very happy, and I can’t stop singing kirtans. I thank you very much, and I’m in a very good place now because I turned, in my life, in some reactive things I was making, and it’s a very big change for me. So, I want to sing more, and it was very difficult for me.<br> It’s very difficult to do that. Wonderful. Keep singing. Just keep singing. And you know,
