Ep. 59 | Real Love

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Call and Response Ep. 59 Real Love

Q: I just wanted to ask you if you believe in true love and whether you find or think that personally you have experienced True Love. That’s my question. Thank you.

“Love with a capital ‘L’ is a different thing. It’s not an emotion. It’s not a feeling like an emotion. It’s the whole universe. It’s very big. It’s vast presence. It’s like the sky of the Mind in which everything exists. It’s… outside of which there can be nothing, outside of real love. Everyone is included. Love is looking out of our eyes right now. Each one of us. Right now. Love is looking out of our eyes. But we don’t see the love. We see the stuff. We don’t see what’s looking. We only see what the looking sees.” – Krishna Das 

Q: Krishna Das, I’m an old hippie from Haight-Asbhury and I turned 70 last year and I’m proud to say that, for the last 31 years, I have had a very strong practice in Sivananda Yoga and the hour that I do every weekday morning is the rock of my life and as a result of that, I’m finding that I’m able to sustain longer periods of bliss consciousness. I think that’s a direct result of my practice. But lovely ex-wife gave me your Kirtan Wallah cd two or three years ago. I have it in the car. I listen to it all the time. I sing along with all the words. I drive along through the English roads singing my lungs out to your wonderful music and what I find with your music is it brings me into Bliss Consciousness almost immediately. And I wanted to thank you for that. It’s a wonderful wonderful gift. And I think the result of those two things, four or five years ago, I found, I fell into a new relationship, funnily enough with an Indian woman named Saraswati. So, the Goddess has smiled on me, largely thanks to your music. But I do have an important question to ask you, which I hope will be of interest to everybody else. Because I think we are all looking for the One. We’re all looking for our Soul Mate.

And I just wanted to ask you if you believe in true love and whether you find or think that personally you have experienced True Love. That’s my question. Thank you.

KD: I’ve definitely experienced true love up to the limit that I could experience it, and that’s with my Guru. And His people who are rooted in real love, they just emanate that. So, definitely. Up to the amount that I’m karmically able to feel at this moment, I felt that with Maharajji. I feel that with Maharajji all the time. Anytime. So, if that’s your question, consider it answered. If it’s not, you can continue.

Q: I’m very happy with your answer. Thank you so much and thank you for your wonderful music.

KD: You’re welcome. I was very much in love with a woman, more than once, but one time, this one particular one, and I was with my Indian father who was a great yogi. I mean, just extraordinary yogi. He was involved in the world. He was a headmaster of a very prestigious school. He had a large family, children, grandchildren. But he was, had been with Maharajji for 40 years and he was just extraordinary. He seemed to know everything. So, I was telling him about this woman and I was going on and on and on for awhile, and he was listening. Finally, I stopped and he said, “My boy.” He said, “Relationships are business. Do your business. Do your business. Enjoy.” He said, “But love? Love is what lasts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Love is our true Being.” You don’t get it from somebody. You don’t give it to anybody. Everybody already has it. I hated him. It took me a year to get over my anger at him for destroying my bubble. Breaking my bubble. Relationships are wonderful. I mean, they are probably the way we can learn the most about ourselves. Human relationships. We’re in relationship to everything all the time. But human relationships between people are really such a powerful of seeing ourselves and seeing our stuff and when you develop a real friendship with someone, when you really can trust someone, it’s an incredible experience. But that doesn’t mean that you’re getting love from that. You’re getting affection, friendship, caring, all those things, but love with a capital “L” is a different thing. It’s not an emotion. It’s not a feeling like an emotion. It’s the whole universe. It’s very big. It’s vast presence. It’s like the sky of the Mind in which everything exists. It’s… outside of which there can be nothing, outside of real love. Everyone is included. Love is looking out of our eyes right now. Each one of us. Right now. Love is looking out of our eyes. But we don’t see the love. We see the stuff. We don’t see what’s looking. We only see what the looking sees.  Through practice and caring and kindness, little by little we move deeper into ourselves, into that love, into that Being, into that part that sees and is aware of all pure consciousness, pure bliss, pure Being, pure joy. It’s a question of expectations because we don’t know how to see ourselves. We think we’ll find it somewhere else. Yeah. Maybe for a little while you’ll feel that way. What are you going to do when something happens and the love disappears? The so-called love disappears. Love doesn’t disappear, but affection can disappear. Caring an disappear. A person can turn off and run away and do something else. Does that mean that there’s no love in the universe? There is love. There’s always love. That’s what we’re looking for: the love that doesn’t come and go, the love that is what lives within our own hearts. That doesn’t mean you can’t have relationships. You should. You should do whatever you want to do. Why not?

But don’t expect unending happiness and joy to come from something outside of you. And if you’re feeling love with another person, in a relationship, where are you feeling that love? Out there? Over there? No, you’re feeling it here. So, what happens when that person no longer loves you and you don’t feel love anymore? Then it wasn’t real love. Because real love doesn’t come and go. It was emotional connection. It was fulfilling certain needs that we have to feel and to feel loved and affection and all those things, which we need as human beings. But as spiritual aspirants, one has to recognize that real love is something else. True love is something else. It includes everyone all the time. Not just the people we like. Not just the people we are attracted to. So, that’s ok. We’re working on it. I’m sorry. And the less you demand another person to be who you need them to be, the more they can be who they are, which is love. And then there’s two beings who are love hanging out. It’s fantastic. But if you need, if we need someone to look at us a certain way and be a certain way for us and they stop doing that for whatever reason, what are we going to do? It’s going to hurt. And that’s life.

But the more practice we do, the more we understand what this is all about, the less we have those unreal expectations. We’re brought up with those, all the tv shows, all the advertisements, all the programming that we get as a kid. It’s all about getting it from the outside.  That’s a lot to overcome.

Anybody want to argue?

Come on. Let’s fight. Come on. Somebody’s saying, “This guy’s full of it.” Which 5,000 of you are saying that? Chickens. Maybe tomorrow. “I’ll get him tomorrow.” I remember once I was in this place called Chitrakut, which is a very holy place for Ram, Seetha Ram, and we, we had arrived early in the morning and the temple we were supposed to stay at was still closed. It was like three in the morning. We got there by car. So we just sat outside in the car. And so, while we’re sitting in the car, just across the road, right there, there was a little shack on posts, right? About this far off the ground. So, the shack opened from inside, right? This beautiful woman comes out and she’s got a clay pot. It’s up on her head and she walks down the road. She comes back in a little while with water. She puts it down. Her husband comes out, starts chopping some wood, making some kindling to start a little fire. And they start making some chai and I was watching this, you know, it was so beautiful, you know? They all, they both had their job to do. They weren’t talking. It was 3 in the morning. There’s nothing to say. They knew what to do. He was doing this. She was doing that. It just struck me so deeply. I wanted that. I wanted that kind of relationship. It was just so beautiful, you know? That was my programming. That’s what I wanted. That was my fantasy. They probably hated each other. I didn’t care. I was seeing my fantasy. And that’s what we do. “Sundari” means “beautiful”. So, I was with this old guy, one of Maharajji’s old devotees who was a real funny guy. He used to say to me, “Let’s go get some Sundari chai. Some beautiful tea,” he said. So, the woman was very beautiful. That’s what he was talking about. “Let’s go get some Sundari Tea.” He would tease me. Yeah.

We want love. Where are we going to find it? That’s the whole question. We have to kind of, start looking in the right places. That’s all. Or, rather, looking in the right way. The correct way. That doesn’t mean, that doesn’t negate human relationships. Why would we do that? We don’t want to negate them. We want to enjoy them and have them. But we don’t. We don’t need to feel that everything is going to be perfect all the time if we only find the right person. We already have the right person living within us as our own true nature. As our own self. As our own Atma. But every Atma is exactly the same. Your Atma, my Atma, their Atma, Her Atma, His Atma. Exactly the same. It’s just got a different covering.

Anybody else?

Not after that.

Q: I was thinking I could just talk in my very loud voice. A few years ago you were going to take a sabbatical and then you didn’t.

KD: I was, yeah. I kind of did. I didn’t get on a plane for four months, which was a big thing. But I sang around locally. I tried.

Q: I’ve been on a sabbatical, too. It’s good to be back.

KD: Praise the Lord. That’s great. I love sabbaticals. Someday, I’ll have a life that is a sabbatical. But not this one. Yeah, I tried to take some time off and I did, you know, with four months of not traveling and I was home every night except one for those four months. That’s a big thing. So, that was good.

One more before we quit?

Ok. Now we’re going to have the quitting mantras.