Ep. 30 | Family Karma, KD’s Mom

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Call and Response Ep. 30 Family Karma, KD’s Mom

I feel that my dharma is taking me into different direction, that family karma. Karma related to a lot of suffering, a lot of what I would consider tamasic energy, toxic and so if you or Maharajji would have any advice when you feel your dharma is, you know, upholding you and protecting you and…

“We don’t know our parents as people, for the most part, until maybe we get older. They’re people. I don’t know how my mother went through the day. I don’t know what my father… what tortures he had in his life, and betrayals and hidden desires that he couldn’t fulfill. I have no idea what went on with him. All I know is how he treated me and you know, another thing and it’s a theory of mine, I can’t prove it, but I kind of feel like we learn to see ourselves the way our parents saw themselves. Not the way they saw us. But the way they saw themselves, we absorb that. And we mimic that by seeing ourselves the same way. I don’t know, I can’t prove it, but it feels like that to me.” – Krishna Das

Q: Thank you for coming to Encinitas.  And I have a question. You mentioned the ripening, ripening of the karma, you also mentioned that when you let go of, you know, being obsessed or identifying with the movie of ourselves, thinking about others you may feel happy, so at this moment, I feel that my dharma is taking me into different direction, that family karma. Karma related to a lot of suffering, a lot of what I would consider tamasic energy, toxic and so if you or Maharajji would have any advice when you feel your dharma is, you know, upholding you and protecting you and…

KD: Is what, opposing?

Q: No, upholding dharma, you know? Holding you? And then the family karma kind of pulls you in the direction and yeah… it doesn’t make me happy to think about what’s happening with the family and this is sixty years. It’s not one year or five years.

KD: Yeah, yeah.  Well, there’s family and then there’s family. First of all, we’re made up of our parents. We didn’t come from the sky. We’re made up of them. So, there’s an inner. The outer is not as important as the inner and you can’t really free yourself… Maharajji said, as long as your parents are alive, the greatest worship that you can do is to honor your parents. Forget the temples. Forget the deities. Forget your japa. Serve your parents. He said that. I remember one time, this couple was having a fight, right? They came to Maharajji, and He said to the man, and He said, “It’s ok, just see her as your mother.”  And he says, “I hate my mother” Maharajji just couldn’t understand.  So, it’s big stuff, you know? Big stuff. And you just, you do what you can. You deal with what you can. That’s all. You don’t, there’s no clock ticking, you have to get it all worked out by 10:30 tonight otherwise it’s over, you know? You deal with what you can, the best way you can and you recognize that parents, somebody did it to them, just like they did it to you. Just like you’re doing it to your kids. So, who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator? Where was the first perpetrator? How did that start? So, you know, we don’t know our parents as people, for the most part, until maybe we get older. They’re people. I don’t know how my mother went through the day. I don’t know what my father… what tortures he had in his life, and betrayals and hidden desires that he couldn’t fulfill. I have no idea what went on with him. All I know is how he treated me and you know, another thing and it’s a theory of mine, I can’t prove it, but I kind of feel like we learn to see ourselves the way our parents saw themselves. Not the way they saw us. But the way they saw themselves, we absorb that. And we mimic that by seeing ourselves the same way. I don’t know, I can’t prove it, but it feels like that to me.

Q: Thank you and I hear you and I know that honoring the parents is one of the greatest, if not the greatest honor. You welcome us with a joke saying, “Are you here for more abuse” Or “Did you get enough abuse yesterday?”  This is the sixtieth year of my father abusing my mother, and my me, and myself. Yes, there is a justification from his childhood, her childhood.

KD: Yeah.

Q: But do I really let my father to call me after being a good daughter for sixty years, calls me shitty cunt and stuff like that and to go to the stuff of my mother, when she’s alive and not saving any pictures or anything for me and at the moment and at the moment I cannot be there. I will be there but we are dealing with a lot, a lot of abuse so I feel sometimes we have two, as you said, two families, one is spiritual family and that’s the chosen one, and I know that we should love and feed and serve everybody but I feel that this is like a liberation from that abuse and I feel the ripening of the karma.

KD: It’s a vacation from the abuse.

Q: Vacation. Thank you.

KD: Liberation is not going to come until there’s only love in your heart.

Q: Thank you.

KD: Which is almost impossible. I’m not saying it’s anything we can do. But you do what you have to do to save your own self, and to protect yourself and your children, etcetera etcetera, and whatever else from that abuse. You don’t stay there because it’s all perfect and let him beat me up. But, until those buttons are, the wires on those buttons are pulled out, it’s going to go on in one form or another within us. So, like I said, they’re inside, also. You can’t, there’s nowhere you can go where you’re not going to be a part of your family, your blood family. And we took these births, they say, and that’s what I say when I don’t know what I’m talking about, I should say it all the time but I don’t, we take these births as a result of our own karmas and nobody knows why things are. There’s an incredible story in a book, one of my favorite books, it’s called the Great Disciples of the Buddha and the elder after Buddha left His body, the elder was Mahakasyapa. He was recognized as the oldest devotee, the highest devotee, disciple. So one day He comes out of the jungle with His disciples to beg for their food, and they walk into this village and as they get close to the village and close to this hut on the edge of the village, Kasyapa laughs and the disciple, one of the disciples says, “Oh great one, a Bodhisattva does not laugh, does not laugh without a cause. What could be the cause of your laughter?” So, He says, “You see that hut there? Look at that scene.” And He pointed out the scene. There was a little hut and a young woman nursing a baby, eating a piece of meat and kicking the dog to keep him away from the meat, you know? He said, “You see that scene? She’s nursing her enemy, kicking her ex-husband and eating somebody else that she used to know.”  A big thick book but it’s phenomenal. Oh, boy what a great book. It blew my mind. I’ve read it a few times. So, from our point of view, there’s not much we can see. We don’t see the causes, we see the effects, so based on that, we still have to do the best we can and only you know what is best for you. Nobody can tell you. What you need to do, you have to do. And learning to do what you have to do for yourself and for the people that depend on you, that’s your spiritual practice. That’s the whole path is finding the best way to deal with the stuff that comes up. Sometimes you just have to wait until you get a clear and sometimes you don’t get a chance to wait, you just have to act. Whatever. You just do the best you can. That’s all you can do. Nobody could ask for more. My mother, when my mother was dying, she had cancer. She was in the hospital. And I was hanging out with her the last couple of weeks. At one point she was lying in bed, she was pretty stoned on morphine because she was in a lot of pain. She asked me for a glass of water, right? and she had this little table in front of her, you know? So, as I tried to give her the water, I bumped the table and the water pitcher just shook a little bit and she went… like that. And I went, *gasps* and as I was assuming that shape, you know, like the punch in the stomach shape, I went “oh… this must be, this went on before I was even aware of it when I was a kid” that I can’t even remember that I learned how to take this shape, you know? And I thought, she’s been doing this to me since before I can remember consciously so our whole relationship, my whole relationship with her was based on these learned responses to her anger and so, always around her, my stomach was crunched in, you know? You know, I was waiting for the gut punch, because it was only a question of time. And it was amazing. And then, then she left the body not long after that and something happened that was so unbelievable that I can’t, I don’t know if you can appreciate it, but I’ll tell you, you know how, you ever see an electromagnet, if you put it under a table, or under a metal pan or something and there’s iron filings on the pan, those iron filings will take the shape of the magnetic field. Right? You know what I’m talking about? When my mother left the body, somebody pulled the plug on that magnet, and the iron filings of me just went… ah. I went back to a natural shape because I held myself in this shape with my mother, we held each other in this, in these shapes, right? And whenever I was on the road, I left my phone on, especially when she was sick, in case she would call or something like that. Or I would call and say, “Hey ma, how are you doing? Just checking in, you know” “Oh I’m ok.” “Ok, good. I’ll speak to you soon. Ok. Bye.” There was a piece of me that was hanging out needing to be attended to her but was also waiting for the punch. When she left, it was, I just took a different shape. I could turn the phone off at night and it was like, wow. I’m all alone. This is fantastic. Now I know my mother and I know her father and mother. I know how she got that way. I tried to remember not to be angry and blame her for all the stuff. She didn’t mean to do those things. But she couldn’t help herself because she was trained by some very good people.  So, after that, I was like a different person. There was just, it was interesting. My whole body changed in a way. It was interesting. So, you just don’t know, you know? Meanwhile, so when I had hepatitis in India, I was really sick. I had recovered a little bit and I was in the temple with Maharajji. So, one day I wasn’t feeling good. I stayed in my room all day and the next day I came out and He looks at me. “You were sick yesterday?” I said, “yeah.” “When’s your mother coming to India?” “My mother? Coming to India? She’s not coming to India.” “Oh, ok.” Later in the day, I get a message from the town, your mother called, she wants to talk to you. So, the next day, I went to the town. I called, she said, “I want to come to India.” And I said something to her that, if my daughter ever said it to me, I’d lock her in a closet for 20 years. I said, “I have to ask my Guru.” Of course, He already said she was coming.  So, I went back and I said, “Baba, my mother wants to come.” He said, “Good, tell her to come.” Ah shit.  So, she came. And here’s how she looked the whole time she was in India…

*laughter*

It was so wild. I had to lead her by her hand through the streets, you know? Oh my god. And so, when I was leaving, she stayed about 10 days in the hills I think and we went to Kainchi and saw Maharajji a number of times. He was so kind to her. I had told her to bring the best cashmere wool sweater she could find, right? The best one. So, she brought this red beautiful maroon turtleneck and Maharajji, she brings it and Maharajji said “ohh.” He took His blanket off. He took His sweater off and He put it right on and He said, “Ah you miserable people,” the Indians, “You miserable sons of bitches. You come here. You never bring me anything. Look at this woman, comes all the way from America and brings me this beautiful sweater!” And they would just go…

He wore that sweater. There’s so many pictures of Him in this blue blanket with the red sweater over here. That was her sweater. She looks at… He said to her, “Will you give him money?” You know, I was in India, I had no money. We had a little Hanuman fund, where people who had some rupees would put it in, if you needed some rupees to get to town, you took it. So, He said, “Will you give him money?” She said, “Oh, I want him to work.” He said, “Don’t worry. He’ll work.”

So…

And then He said, you know, my poor mother, He said something that was so sweet but she must have misunderstood it. He said, “He’s not your son, he’s my son.” And in India, that’s what you say, it means you love this person so much as your own son, but it’s not that you’re taking him away from her. But I think that flipped her out, you know?

Although it made me really happy.

So, He says to me, “Ok, when you take her to the airport, you have to get down on your knees and do Durga Puja. You have to worship her in the airport. You have to do aarti with the lights and everything.” Terrific.

So, there’s pictures of me on my knees with my mother standing there. I’m doing the lights, waving the lights, chanting the mantras. She had a little camera, a brownie automatic I think it was in those days. Right? Remember those? Took a picture. So, I just want to say, if you ever see that picture, look at the look on her face. No no no. In all seriousness, you’ve never seen a more beautiful look. The love that she was manifesting and pouring out on me in that moment was so extraordinary. She looked like Durga. It was just transcendent. It was so extraordinary. So, of course, she was going to Jerusalem, right? A little Jewish lady going to Israel, so He gave her some flowers and said, “Put these on Jesus’s tomb for me.” Ah. Well He was Jewish, wasn’t Her? Bet He was.

Oh, Jesus. Oh, sorry.

You know, we didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about Jesus until I got to India and Maharajji started talking about it. You’ve never, you can’t imagine the depth of emotion and feeling that He spoke about Jesus with. Really, it was astounding. Really, there was something going on there. I really…

I told this story so many times, but you know He, this Canadian guy came to the temple and he didn’t know the way Maharajji… you know, Maharajji didn’t teach, He didn’t write books, He didn’t initiate people, He just gave you as much food as you could possibly eat and told you to go away. So, this guy, Maharajji says, “Why did you come?” So, he thought, “Well I’ll give a spiritual answer, right?” You know? He said, “Well, could you teach me to meditate?”

“Ah, get out of here. Go in the back with the other crazy people. Go. The Westerners. Go on.” And as the guy’s walking away, He says, “Just meditate like Christ. Go on, get out of here.” So, the guy comes in the back and we debrief him, you know? We debriefed anybody who had ten seconds with Maharajji.  “What did He say? And then what did He say? And then what did He say?” He said, “He told me to meditate like Christ.” Jesus.

So, later on he came in the back to sit with us. And Ram Das said, “Baba, you said we should meditate like Christ. How did He meditate?” So, I thought, now this is the moment. We are going to get the secret teaching. We’re going to get the practice. I’m going to run away and do it. I can’t wait. I’ve got my book out.  So, He was like, almost, He looked like He was going to say something but He just stopped and His eyes closed.

And He just disappeared.

It felt like the world stopped turning.

And we just looked at Him. What? We’d never seen Him sit still. It was always crazy stuff going on.

Laughing. Joking.

And then two tears came down His cheek. And He opens His eyes. He said, “He lost Himself in love. That’s how He meditated. He lost Himself in love. He is One with all Beings. No one understands. He never died. He lost Himself in love.”

It was an absolutely shocking moment. Completely unexpected. Unimaginable. And there, we were sitting with Him and He right in front of us, “He lost Himself in love.” Immersed.

There are Beings like that and they’re here. We’re the ones who aren’t here. They are here. They will always be here.

The exact opposite of what I thought spirituality was about. “I’ve got to get enlightened. I’ve got to be a yogi. I’ve got to learn how to meditate. I’ve got to chant. I’ve got to do all this stuff.”

He lost Himself in love.

Oh.