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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.
Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD September 12, 2020
“Siddhi Ma once said, ‘In this age, God comes as medicine.’
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
Hi, everybody. Some of you are becoming regulars. This is very scary.
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.
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.”
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.
Like that guy said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
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.
Okay. See you next week.
Hi.
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.
It’s very difficult to do that. Wonderful. Keep singing. Just keep singing. And you know, you can sing silently inside as well. You know? It doesn’t have to be outside. When you go out in the street, you don’t want to be singing out loud. They’ll put you away. So, you just quietly, inside your mind, because it’s in the mind that the name is really being repeated, without thinking the name, without it coming into your awareness. It’s never going to come out of your mouth. So, you follow the name into the source, where it comes. You just keep singing and stay with it. Beautiful.
Thank you very much.
Yeah. Thank you.
Q: Hi. Thank you. I was reading this book, the one you shared, the PDF of “Divine Reality,” last week. And it’s a beautiful book. It has all the pictures of all the temples Maharajji built.
I wanted to ask you, because just half an hour before, I saw one video of Ram Dass, and he said, “Krishna Das suffered the most, the death of Maharajji. We all were sad, but he suffered the most about it.” And he said, “I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t.”
And you also said in your documentary that it took you 21 years to be on the other side of life.
My question is this…
It might have been 50 years, you never know. It might be 60 years.
So, my question is, how did you get over this pain of losing Maharajji? We all crave him, even today, through your singing we go to him, through books, through Ram Dass. We still get the hint of what he is. You lived with him for two years, maybe more. How did you get through all the pain of, how did you get over the pain of losing him?
I haven’t, you know. One has a personality, a humanness along with everything else, and in my humanness, I still miss him. It doesn’t destroy me anymore, but I miss his physical presence. How can you not miss that? Because all the love and the beauty and the whole universe was wrapped up in that. I can’t not miss that, touching that, and laughing with that, and being hit by fruit thrown by that, and all that stuff. I can’t. I miss that. I miss that connection, because no one can be that for me, except him.
However, I also recognize that everything I’m feeling, all the love that I feel, is actually inside of me. I’m feeling that inside of me, and I’m feeling his presence also. So, it’s everything. It’s not one thing or another. Everything is, there has to be space for everything.
You know, Ram Dass said he didn’t miss Maharajji, but, maybe by the end that was true. Because he really had dissolved so much into that love and the fierceness of his tapasya, of his austerities, being in that wheelchair for 20 years, really ripened him and cooked him. So, maybe by the end, he didn’t miss him because he was so in his presence all the time.
But, you know, I miss him, because nobody can take the place of that on the physical plane. It’s not even, you know, it just can’t happen. Only He can be him. And even though he’s everything in the whole universe, that has to be something that we actually experience, not pretend, not manipulate ourselves emotionally to believe something that we hope is true. No, you have to have the direct experience. So, it’s okay to miss him, but it’s not okay to let that destroy you. So, I was saved from that, from being destroyed by my missing him, which is what was happening for so many years, and it was grace that saved me.
So, your job is to find that love inside of you, and to recognize that as the Guru, and you don’t have to worry about being attached to his physical form because you didn’t have that, and that’s a fucking blessing.
You think, you know, “I want a guru. I want a guru. I want a guru in a body. I want a guru in a body.”
Enough of that shit. Get on with your work. You never know what’s going to happen. In the meantime, clean the mirror of your heart. Become a good human being. And don’t worry about whether a physical manifestation of the guru is going to show up. The guru is with you. He has to be with you. She has to be with you. There’s no other place a guru can be, except with the disciple, with the devotee. So that’s where you have to look, is inside yourself, and right now, when you look inside yourself, all you see is your shit. 24-7-365. That’s what practice is about. Let go, come back. Let go, come back. Let go, come back. Let go, come back. Read the books about him. Read the books about the other saints. See how they lived, see how they treated other people. See how they went through their day, how they lived in the world. You know, immerse yourself in that stuff.
You can’t just sit around and do like, 10 minutes a day and think that you’re going to be blissfully happy and find the Guru. You have to see who you are. That’s who the guru is. Guru, God, and self. Not different. One thing.
What is self? Do you know? No. And yet there’s nothing that’s closer to you than your own true self. But we look outside, where our awareness is flowing out through the senses and meeting what we call the external world, and we don’t see what’s in there. Through practice, you’re turning your attention within, little by little, until you actually focus on something within yourself, your true nature.
And it’s all grace anyways, but you have to do some practice and cup your hands, right? To catch the raindrops. It’s always raining. Grace is always flowing over us, but we can’t drink. We can’t get it, because we don’t, we don’t know how to catch those drops of grace.
Through practice, we develop the ability, or the openness to allow the grace to come inside of us, to feel it inside. That’s the deal.
For the one who holds the sun in his heart, all negativity, all obscurations, all calamities, all problems are destroyed. So, that’s where you have to hold the sun in your heart, the sun of love, the sun of awareness, the sun of your soul. That’s where you have to move, in that direction. You don’t have to, but you might want to. Two minutes a day, you might want to.
Thank you. When you say “Jao,” I get the blessing. A little more sun comes and stays with Maharajji when you say “Jao” every time.
“See ya” is how we say “Jao” in America. See ya around.
Q: Hello. KD, I wanted to ask, you said once, Maharajji said, “I’ll turn your minds against me.” So, he might have done that sometime. How did you, because you said…
He never did that. He was just teasing us. And in fact, it’s the opposite. He turned our mind towards Him. He attracted us, just like flowers grow towards the sun. Right? So, our hearts grew towards him, grow towards him, because he is that sun. But he did transfer us, you know? He did definitely transfer people.
I told you this story about my friend Mira, right? Did I? You know, some years ago, maybe 7, 8, 9 years ago, this couple came back to India for the first time since Maharajji had left the body, and they came to Kainchi, and we, I was there, we were there. A bunch of people were there, and one day, we were doing Hanuman Chalisa in front of Maharajji’s temple, and I looked over and I saw this woman, the couple of standing on the steps just below where the tucket is, His tucket is, and that’s where we used to see him usually in the mornings, sometimes in the afternoon, and she was just staring, and wasn’t moving, and I went, “Whoa, what’s going on there? Something’s going on there.”
And later on, she came over to me and she said, “Krishna Das. I think you’re the only one here who could understand what I’m going to tell you.”
I said, What?”
“I was just standing on the steps, looking at the tucket where Maharajji used to sit, and I remembered that that’s exactly where I used to stand and watch him back in ’72, ’73. I was standing in the same spot, and I remembered that, in the old days when I stood and watched him, the feeling I had was, ‘I’m home. This is it. I’ll always be here. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.’” And she just said, “What happened?”
Married. Family. Business. 40 years go by. “Krishna Das, what happened? I was just where I was supposed to be. I’d made it. I was home.”
“Transfer.”
He brought us there. He gave us what we had to have. And then he sent us back into our lives. He’s the one doing it all. He didn’t turn our minds against Him. He was just joking. Of course, he could do that. You know, in fact, one time, we were sitting with him and there was this beautiful old devotee. Of all the old devotees I met, this one guy was the sweetest of them all. He was nothing but sweet. He was extraordinary. He was so beautiful. Maharajji looked at him for a second and He pointed to him, He pointed to him and he said, “He was my enemy in our last life.”
What?
And he, of all the devotees, he was the sweetest of them all. But in their last life together, he was Maharajji’s enemy. What does that even mean? Who knows what it means? We don’t know. So, only he knows. He’s doing everything. He’s moving you here. He’s moving you there. And in fact, you, right now, are exactly where he wants you to be. Just because you haven’t seen him physically, you think he can’t do anything? What? He’s not like us. He’s the Lord of the Universe, and he does what he does for our sake. He does what he has to do for us. He puts us where we have to be to work out whatever karmas we have to work out and move along on the path to him.
He’s the goal. He’s the path. And he’s who we truly are, also. When we know that, then we’re ripe. So, we are exactly where he wants us to be. Everyone.
One time he said, even he said, he said to Dada, he said, “Dada, if I’ve done one thing in this life, I’ve remained wherever Ram has placed me.”
And I think there’s a line in the Ramacharitamanasa that says a being is always exactly where Ram wants him to be. So, the illusion of free will is something we have to get over through practice, not through thinking about it. Through practice.
So, when I said to Siddhi Ma, so I said, “Ma, you know, Maharajji said that he had the keys to the mind, which means to me that I am, not only am I where he wants me to be, but everything I think, everything I see, everything I feel is his doing.” So, I said, “Ma, what’s the deal? Do I have to make effort then? Or is it all his grace?”
She said, “Krishna Das,” She said, “Krishna Das, It’s all grace, but you have to act like it isn’t.”
So, that’s the deal. So, figure out what that means to you, and that’s the deal.
Thank you so much, KD.
Q: What you just said, “You’re where you’re supposed to be…” I’m in Southern Oregon, in the middle of Western America, that is on fire, and I feel safe because I’m where I’m supposed to be, and…
If you leave, then you’re also supposed to have left.
Well, exactly. The whole, Siddhi Ma, that beautiful thing Siddhi Ma said to you? I mean, it’s all grace, but our car is packed and we’re ready to go, and I’m here to testify that what you say about practice when you can, because you’ll need it when you can’t, for this week we were cut off from internet, and so I missed your course and I missed your Thursday satsang, but you recommended this book to us, and so I read the Ramayana, and thank you. It really speaks to Westerners, and I’m clearly a westerner, and what has really struck me is, every time something changed for Ram, he just was like, “Okay,” and he’d move into it. He was just so accepting of everything, and then this morning I listened to Ram Dass talking about Dharma, and I heard a lot of things that I hear from you.
And I’m leading up to a question. I guess I want you to, could you, well you kind of already have, speak a little bit to Dharma and accepting what, where we are?
Actually, I think you’ve already answered everything. But do you know what I’m talking about? Like I was just amazed at Ram’s consistent acceptance and you know, maybe understanding that bigger things are happening than what’s just right in front of your face.
Well, he is the bigger things happening to you. Remember, he’s the Supreme being acting like a human and every once in a while, he shows that he knows everything. Like when he gives Hanuman his ring. You know, there were a million monkeys, but he knew Hanuman was going to find Sita. So, he gave him his ring first, and he said, “When you find Sita, show her the ring.”
And every once in a while, it seems like he slips a little bit and forgets he was supposed to act like a human. See, Ram was, even though it was a full incarnation of God, just like Krishna, he was, he had certain limitations on his manifestation. He could only do certain things. He couldn’t reveal his divinity. And they say that, supposedly, he didn’t even know, but that’s bullshit. He just didn’t show that he knew, until his guru taught him about himself, and then he could, you know, admit that he knew something. But remember the Ramayan is a Lila. It’s Lila. Lila means “divine play” or “divine drama,” or even “divine play,” like playing a game, and the whole drama was created to destroy the darkness that had come into the world, and the negative energy, the demonic energy personified by Ravana and the demons who had taken over the whole world. They controlled the whole show. They told them when the sun went to rise, the wind went to blow. I mean, all the natural forces, they used to eat human beings. They used to sprinkle human beings on their, you know, for dessert. You know, it was a horrific situation. They ruled the four corners of the world completely.
So, Ram had to create a drama in this world, Ram, the Supreme, in order to destroy that negativity here. So, everything that was in that Lila, everything that was done, only had one purpose, whether we understand it or not, and it’s not possible to understand that with the human mind, but that’s the deal with that.
Well, I’ve got to say, burning down Lanka has a whole new meaning for me. There’s no negotiating with fire. It’s very thorough. So, thank you for all you’ve offered us. When I was all cut off from everything, my practice was still with me, and you’ve coached us through all that, and thank you.
And please take care of yourself. Don’t take any risks. There’s nothing you can do if the fire hits you anyway. So, you might as well be gone. So, make sure you have enough gas and the roads are clear.
Well, that’s the situation. There’s actually nowhere to go. So, staying here is the best, and staying, and calming our asses down, which you’ve taught us how to do, so thank you.
Somebody’s gotta teach me.
We’re all here for you, KD.
Okay, good.
Q: Well, hello to everyone. Well,I wanted to thank you, first of all, for all you do. Thank you very much for, you know already, and I have two questions, actually. One, if would you say that Guru and Buddha are the same?
Well, from an Indian, from the Hindu point of view, Buddha is one of the incarnations of God, like Rama, like Krishna, the full incarnation of God. The Buddhists don’t see it that way. They say that the Buddha is.. it’s very complicated and very subtle stuff.
Buddha certainly was a guru, is a Guru, of course. A Supreme Guru. But he’s, he’s also, from an Indian, from the Hindu point of view, He’s one of the avatars of God, one of the avatars.
And that means?
An incarnation. But he didn’t proclaim himself that way.
He said, “I’m a human being and I attained enlightenment by my own efforts, and so can you.”
That’s how he presented himself in the world because, well, I can’t say “because,” but his job was to help people. So, this is how he helped people. In that time, the Dharma was being… Actually, he brought the word “Dharma” into daily life, but religion was run by the priests and it was just the business and they controlled, they were the ones they would, they had to do special pujas for you. Otherwise, this wouldn’t happen, or this wouldn’t happen. So, they were making lots of money and the poor people were just suffering terribly. And so, he brought in the idea that everybody’s enlightenment is up to themselves.
Before, that was not the case. People would not, that that was not something that people were taught. They thought that they were, they were victims of their karmas and there was no way for them to become enlightened unless, you know, certain things happened for them. So, Buddha gave a whole, he was a rebel. He was like Christ in the temple. He destroyed,, you know, the whole power of the priestly class. And he taught a way, he Himself progressed on the path, he taught to others.
And that wouldn’t be a different with Maharajji actually, because he taught that if we sing the Hanuman Chalisa, then we can be also, our karmas would be erased.
When you make a fruit salad, you put in grapes, you put in peaches, you put an apples, you put in bananas. They’re not the same, they’re all fruit, but they’re different fruits. And they taste differently. Some people like bananas. Some people like this, some people like that. So, and more than that, Maharajji is instructing us how to connect with him and his transmission. He’s the captain of this huge boat, and we are the passengers on that boat. He’s taking us to the other shore. So, he’s telling us what we need to do to get on the boat, and the best place to sit, and all that stuff. So, if his teaching is universal, but it’s also, it’s also a way of opening ourselves to him and his lineage and his transmission, which is what we really need to do. I mean, we can do other practices. We can have other teachers. We can go to all kinds of teachings and do all kinds of different types of meditation, but if you feel connected to Maharajji, what you want to do is connect even more and more deeply, and when I go to see other teachers, I don’t expect… what I expect to get from other teachers is a deeper connection with Maharajji who lives inside of me. So, they are showing me other ways and other practices, maybe, to find that deeper place inside. It’s not necessary, but, you know, I like it. I like Saints. I like hanging out with yogis. They’re great. So, but I don’t expect, all I expect to find is Maharajji, you know. I don’t expect to find anything else, whatever he is, you know, which is his presence and love.
So, “each path is fine in itself, and all paths lead to the same goal.” He said that.
So, for me, it’s all about connecting to him, the way I see him, more deeply, and so that’s what it can be for you, how you feel him, what you feel he is, what that feeling is, that you want to connect to that more deeply inside yourself.
And that leads to my other question, because you say that he doesn’t really appear, like nobody can make him appear. No? Like, he appears when he wants to appear, basically. No? So, if I see him, then I’m not imagining him. No?
The answer, the simple answer is, that’s correct. The subtle answer is, who’s who? What do you think you are that you’re seeing something you think you’re seeing? So, in the world of duality and you and him, yeah. He comes to see you. In the world of oneness, who is seeing who? It’s just, all your questions and all your whole universe is based on who you think you are. That’s all. So, of course, in that universe, he’s something outside of you that has to come to see you, but when you recognize yourself as the whole universe, you’re everywhere and he’s everywhere and there’s only one of you. So that’s ultimate reality, which is not where we live.
We live in this world where you think you’re you, I think I’m me, and if Maharajji comes into our awareness, it’s because he did that. Yes, that’s true. That’s what I believe. That’s what I’ve been told, but ultimately there’s no Maharajji outside of you because you are not you. You are him.
And how do you do to really, not believe that or understand that, but to really feel that, you know?
You already said it. The Hanuman Chalisa. Repeat the Name. That’s what he said. I’m not telling you anything that’s new. I’m just, I’m a parrot. I’m just repeating what he said. Through the repetition of the name, everything is achieved. What else do you want to know? Oh, do we believe that? Well, maybe 30 seconds a day. But he said it, but we don’t believe it. Even when we read it over and over again, and think about it over and over again, we don’t really believe it, because if we really believed it, that that’s all we’d be doing. But we’re busy. We’ve got things to do.
“Oh,” you know, “I have to go to the movies. I have to go shopping. I have to make dinner. I have to do this.”
We forget the name in two seconds, because we believe it in our minds, but we don’t believe it with our whole hearts yet. The minute we do believe it with our whole hearts, that’s it. It’s over. So…
What’s over? That’s the question. What’s over?
The delusion of being who you think you are.
And then what about family? What about everyone you love, also?
They’re all still there, but there’s only love everywhere, and everybody is exactly who they are and you’re exactly who you are. What do you mean? “What about family?” What do you mean? Do they disappear? You think that they disappear?
Yeah. I don’t know what I think exactly, but I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I still have to say, I still have to sing.
There’s fear. You have fear of something, of letting go. Yeah. You want to hold on to the, you think something’s going to be taken from you if you let go and open into love. It’s exactly the opposite. That’s your ego talking. It’s the ego that’s afraid of letting go, wants to hold onto everything, maintain its separateness. So, that’s okay. Keep singing, keep repeating the name. Don’t think about it. It’s not your problem. It’s his problem. You do what he says. He’ll take care of everything. You don’t have to give up anything. You just have to remember the Name.
Hanuman, I’ve said this a million times lately, is that Hanuman is that great Lord, the great God Mahadeva, Mahakala, the Supreme, Cosmic time himself. He’s the one who allows us to become liberated by allowing us to enter into his state of consciousness, which is Ram. So, that’s how he gives us liberation, by allowing us to enter into him, into Maharajji, into the love, and more than that, he also allows us to satisfy the desires that we have to satisfy. This is not a renunciate trip. This is a trip of fullness and completion in everything, and finding the desires are not bad for you. The desires that will hurt you, you don’t get to do. He takes those away. The desires that you need to satisfy, they may even hurt you for a while, you have to go through that also, but he allows you. He makes it possible. He gives you the fruit of your desires on the way to merging with him. Life, you live a full life. You don’t sit in an ashram or a temple for your whole life. You’re in the world. You become a full, complete human being, and you treat everybody the same way you would like to be treated, and then you have no problem. He makes it possible for that, for us to have all the things we want to have, we need to have, not everything we want, and just like Mick said, “You can’t always get what you want, but you always get what you need.”
So, on the way to becoming him, that’s all his doing. He brought that football player into your life. He brought those kids into your family. He’s making it possible for you to get what you need, so you’re not hungry, and then, when you’re not hungry, you can move on. You can’t, He said many times, you can’t talk to a hungry person about God. Feed them first. All the stuff we have, he’s feeding us. He’s feeding us so that we’ll be ready to look for God, ready to allow God to open up to that, because you can’t talk to a hungry person about other things. They need food. Some desires need to be satisfied, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And that’s Hanuman.
Hanuman Saha Mahadeva Kaala Kalaha Sadashiva
Muktido Muktikaivalya Buktido Sarvakamada
Hanuman is that Mahadeva, the great God, Mahakala, the eternal goodness, the blissful one who bestows Mukti, liberation, by allowing seekers to merge into his own state, as well as bestowing the enjoyment of all one’s cherished objects of desire.
Right? So, you think that, by allowing more love in, you’re going to lose everything you wanted or you created? No. You just enjoy it more, because there’s no fear of losing it. The fear of losing what we’re holding on to is so destructive to our happiness. So, you have to let go of that fear, little by little. That’s a program that’s running and has been running and will keep running until we practice letting go. That’s what the Chalisa is about. That’s what the repetition of the name is about, and the Hanuman Chalisa itself will purify the mirror of the heart. The fear, the dust on the mirrors, the fear, the anger, the shame, the grief, the selfishness, that’s what’s cleaned off the mirror of the heart, through the practices.
Thank you.
Q: Hi. Thank you. I have been listening to all the answers, KD, because like, all the questions that keep arising in my mind, I keep getting answers, little by little, in others questions, also. What brings me here today is like, I feel this great churning inside me for, I mean, I’ve been feeling it for, I don’t know how long, like maybe days or years, and I am in the middle of my samsara stage. Like, I had two young children and am responsible for the family, for the kids, I’m also facing this newly developed fear of death for some reason. Like me and my husband, we both have been going through physical ailments for the past few years, not like, they are pretty early for our age, I think. We are in our middle thirties, but every time we hear, these days it’s very easy for like, if somebody passes away sadly, like in other society, like in our, friends or friends of friends, you get these GoFundMe campaigns for them, for their families, and many of those people are parents of our age. They have young children, and they are mostly non-immigrant families in the U.S. We are one such, we are not citizens of U.S., but we are living here for work. So that puts us in a spot where there are a lot of uncertainties. Like, we are good to live in the now, but we don’t have like, a very set long-term future in front of our eyes. So, that aggravates that fear of death for me, probably because every time I hear somebody else is going through it, I feel “What if that happens to me?” I know about … We also practice most of the times about being in the present moment, doing the right thing and all those things, but that’s still like, spiritually, it’s very, very dampening for the spirit of learning and moving forward, when you get stuck in the loop of… I think a lot of this is… I’m just letting out my personal anguish right now. I don’t know. I don’t want to bother like, the whole group with that, but yeah, that’s what I… I just wrote down what I was feeling and the main points are about the fear of death that I’ve been experiencing, and I also know that it might be a fear of uncertainties more than that of death. And why am I using the word so clearly? Like, why am I talking about death so clearly is because of the physical ailments that my husband suffered something six months ago, which was like a rare autoimmune condition, and then he’s been recovering from that, and I have been living with something and I developed something else, and something else like, by God’s grace on one hand, everything is good. But on the other hand, it’s always taking me, pulling me back to looking at the suffering part instead of like, looking at the grace part. Like, I hope you can understand what I’m saying.
Yeah. Well, first of all, this is a very unusually horrible time. Everybody’s suffering everywhere in the world. This is, we don’t know that there was ever a time like this, and so the whole atmosphere is filled with fear. You’re breathing it in, you’re breathing it out, everywhere you go. Forget your own fears. The atmosphere we’re living in daily, not even, I’m just talking externally. The news is full of fear. Everybody you meet on the street is full of fear. Your friends are full of fear. It’s a terrible time. It’s a very difficult, painful time. There’s no question about it. It’s unheard of that this, it’s never been been like this in the world, where the whole world has basically shut down. Really. So aside from your personal issues, this is what you’re sitting in every day. And there’s a lot of that, that we take personally, also. It fits right in with our story. So, it magnifies our stuff. Okay?
Look, what’s going to happen is going to happen. What’s not going to happen is not going to happen. Then? What’s our job is to stay here best we can. When we catch ourselves lost in the fear of the future, we try to let it go and come back. That’s what we do. We can’t change the karmas that are going to manifest for us and what’s manifesting. They’re already here. So, the best we can deal with them, we have to find, we have to do the best thing we can, physically, for ourselves.
Siddhi Ma once said, “In this age, God comes as medicine.”
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. They just glue us to them. Right? And we believe everything we feel, and then something else happens and we forget about them. And then they come back. And we don’t realize that we spent two hours not thinking about them, because when we’re in the grip of those types of emotions, one of the qualities of those emotions are, “it’s always going to be like this.”
It makes you feel like that. So, but when you don’t feel like that, you don’t even notice it. You don’t. Don’t tell me that you live in anguish and fear 24 hours of every day. No, but when you are in that anguish, one of the qualities of that anguish is that, “this is it it’ll always be like this,” and then it disappears. But you don’t notice when it disappears.
So, as far as your spiritual work, you need to pray and connect to a deeper place inside of you, and I would suggest, because it’s the only thing I know, is that you sing the Hanuman Chalisa, and if you don’t know it, just learning it is a big enough tapasya to destroy a lot of karma. So, this is what Maharajji gave us to develop strength and inner strength and also compassion and kindness. And don’t think about yourself all the time. That’s all you do, all we do, is think about ourselves all day long, every day, and we never get bored obsessing about ourselves and “what’s going to happen” and “how will I do this?” And “if this happens, what then?” and then “if this, and then that…” You have to find a way to release that stuff.
So, sing Hanuman Chalisa and repeat the names God, and try to connect with any of the great beings, great saints, the great yogis, with Ram, with Krishna, with Kali, with Buddha, anything other than thinking about yourself all day long, and then see how you feel. If you’re not thinking about yourself, you don’t even know how you feel. It’s not a problem.
Yeah, no, but like, like I mentioned to you, I mean, I was told that there is a tumor, like there’s a development on my thyroid and it needs to be taken out, and a lot of things are going on in the last one year, and that’s the main thing, and okay, the connection, I have one specific question written down over here to ask you, is, if everyone is love, we talk about the advaita, advaitism, like, non-duality, if everyone is connected, everyone is love, then we do we experience suffering to the level of getting physical ailments. Like, I mean, I have experienced bullying in terms of, it’s like a passive aggression. I take things to Maharajji. That’s what I think. I think that’s how things have been, like being too sensitive to whatever somebody says, does, behind your back, in front of you, to somebody else. So, all of those things like, gathering up and manifesting into physical elements, probably like that.
So yeah, that’s a story you tell yourself that, you know, because you’re so sensitive, you absorbed so much negativity and this made you sick. That’s just a story you’re telling yourself. It may not be true. It’s at least 50/50, but you believe that. So that makes you feel worse about yourself. What’s the sense? You keep telling yourself stories that make yourself, make you feel bad, and you believe them as if they’re ultimately true, and there’s no question about it. How could that be? It’s just your thoughts, your programs. Yeah. Based on certain experiences that you have, you make up a story about yourself that makes you feel worse.
Do some puja. Do some practice. Try to let go of this stuff. And you, as an Indian, you know what it means to ask God for things and ask God to help you out, and pray, and beg. And I don’t care if you don’t believe in it, you have to do it anyway, because you, what you believe in sucks. You believe in yourself and how horrible you are and how sick you are and how sensitive you are and how hurt you are. And you don’t see yourself at all, the true self. You don’t see God in you. God is in you. The love is in you. It’s in you. That’s what you are. You have to find that within you. You have to find a way to release all this heavy thinking. What’s going to happen is going to happen. What’s not going to happen is not going to happen.
So, you’ll be here now with it. You repeat the name. You pray. You do puja. You try to connect with something you believe in other than your own ego, and you do the best you can to take care of everybody in your life, the best you can. And don’t think about yourself all the time. But that’s what we all do. We all do that. Right? What good does it do? You can’t figure it out. So, if you want to feel better…
One good thing that happened, whatever result came up in my biopsy last year, it came better just last weekend. The doctor who was advising me to go for an immediate surgery, she canceled it. She said, we can wait for another six months, and we can hold it off. So, yeah. And yeah, so I’ll tell you personally, it’s not like I’m sitting in this stress all the time, but yes, I hear you. I don’t want to like, you know, clarify and defend anything, because a lot of things that you said we are already trying to do, the prayers and practices, but then also some of the things…
You’re planning to do or you’re going to do now?
No, no. We do. I’m saying that already, like, you know, we practice Hanuman Chalisa. My two and a half year old sings the Chalisa with us. So that’s how we all are fond of, and we do it, all four of us. So, yeah, I mean, we are somewhere there on the way, and then we keep getting like off track many many times. So, I understand like, you know, where I’m falling short.
Whatever you do, you should always get second opinions about your physical issues. Especially before surgery. Don’t take one doctor’s opinion of it. Find another, and make sure that that’s the best thing to do, at least with a different doctor. And there’s other ways to treat those things too. You know, there must be some Ayurvedic doctors in Charlotte. I’m sure. Herbs are very good. I know people who have those thyroid issues, but definitely get a second opinion. Okay? Have you done that?
No, I like, this is, this is the second time, we just went to the same doctor, but I have to find another doctor for second opinions.
Yeah, you should definitely find it, because it’s always a good idea to do that, especially before surgery.
Yeah. At least I put my foot down. Like saying that I want to repeat the biopsy instead of going for the immediate surgery. That’s what happened in August and at least that took us in the right direction. So, I’m glad.
Yeah. Hanuman Chalisa. Maharajji says, it can wipe the fate from your forehead. Okay? I wish you the best. Okay?
Thank you, KD. Thank you so much.
Q: Ram Ram. I had two questions, and one is, one I think I’ve already asked you before, but there’s a quote from Dilgo Rinpoche…
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, and he said, “To meet someone that really hurts you is a rare and precious treasure. You should hold that person in high esteem and makes the full use of the opportunity to eradicate your defects, to make progress on the path. Because if you can’t feel love and compassion, for those who treat you badly, it’s a sign that your mind has not been fully transformed and that you need to keep working on it.”
Sure.
And so, I keep doing practices to work on it.
You mean you keep looking for people who are going to give you a hard time? I’m an expert.
You’re really good at that. But it turns me to God, right? Because Maharajji said suffering, he’d rather you choose suffering over happiness because…
Yeah. You would hope so, but you know, it wouldn’t hurt to feel good sometime either.
Yeah. Well, I I guess my question is like, in my mind I do Metta and I put flowers on their head and I forgive them and wish them well, and time is supposed to heal all wounds, supposedly. And so, I guess my question is, how do you let go like, of those things, which are not real beause they’re in the past?
They’re as real as you are. They’re as real as you are. Because you think you’re real, those things are also real. They’re your experiences. They happen to the real you and they’re real experiences. Neither are you real, nor are the experiences real, but we don’t know that. That’s a mind trip. That’s a head trip. We’re not here to manipulate ourselves emotionally or conceptually to believe something that we haven’t experienced ourselves. So, how do you let go? Again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again and again. That’s how. And you also let go of the expectation that someday “I’ll be finished with this,” and you deal with the now and not the future. And when you offer Metta to someone, you really try to connect with the feeling. Deeply. Not just like, “Okay, feel good,” you know? Yes, “I wish you the best. I love you. May be safe.”
You try to actually feel that and connect with the feeling, and then that feeling expands within you and opens up a deeper field of okayness inside of you. It’s the feeling that we are okay as we are that we’ve lost, totally, touch with. And so, we keep trying to plug up all the holes in our emotional self, with stuff, with people, with experiences, because we’ve lost touch with the fact that inside, we’re perfectly fine. We’re okay. We are That, but we don’t know that. So, the practice of Metta, for instance, and offering Metta is a way of really, of dissolving and disappearing the situation that’s causing you suffering, because when you envelop that person in the field of loving kindness, who you think that person is just dissolves. You know, it’s not, then you see them differently. You see, “Oh wow. What a life this person must have,” you know?
And then you start to see that everything people do that hurt you, that seemed aimed at you, they’re not really aimed at us. They’re just exploding out of their own pain, and if they can’t fucking deal with it, you know, if we can’t fucking deal with it, how can we expect anybody else to deal with it?
So, that’s called compassion. It just arises naturally when you see somebody else in pain and then you don’t accept the gift of the negative behavior. Like with Buddha, you know, one time this farmer came to the Buddha and was yelling at him because his son became a monk. And then he had no one to plow the fields with him, and he’s yelling at the Buddha, and when he finally stopped, Buddha said to him, “Old man, can I ask you a question?”
“Yeah.”
“So, if someone brings you, someone brings someone a gift and the gift is not accepted, where does the gift stay? What happens to the gift?”
And the farmer says, “Well, it stays with the person who brought it.”
And Buddha said, “Just so, I don’t accept the gift of your anger. It stays with you.”
So that’s why the practice of loving-kindness can expand that field of love without, it’s not a field of love that can be expanded with our will. We can’t say, “Okay, now I’m going to love everybody.”
No, we plant the seeds of that love through our practice, which is why people who give us a hard time are such a blessing, because they force us to see ourselves clearly, how much shit we have, how reactive we are, and then we have so many options. First of all, we can, we deal with that person, but then we can also try to see why we feel this way about ourselves. Where does it come from? It has to come from somewhere. Everything comes from something. Every effect, what’s here now has come from an experience or effects in the past.So, that’s one of the ways that that starts to lighten up for us.
And so, you know, in the loving kindness practice, there’s different phases. The first phase is you offer to yourself, and then you offer to your benefactor, somebody who’s always been there for you, never judge you, has always been on your side, like a grandparent or something like that, you know, or a teacher, and then, one of the other ones is the neutral person, somebody that you have no, you don’t really know much about, but they’re somewhere in your life and you see them, you know. So for me, it was the it was the clerk at the video store. That’s who came up in my mind when I thought of a neutral person. I don’t know anything about him, but I see him. In those days, in the ancient days, we used to rent videos. So, I spent like 10 days offering him, you know, loving kindness and nothing much was happening. You know, I didn’t really feel anything much. So, then after the course was over, I came back to the city and after a few days, I went down to rent a video. I walked into the video store, and I saw this guy behind the counter and I started weeping and I, Maharajji exploded with love. It was so crazy. I had to go hide in the back of the store until I could compose myself. It was just totally unexpected. I still, right now, this was 25, 30 years ago, I think about this guy, tears come to my eyes.
So, this is what the idea behind the practice, and neutral people and people who are supposedly, you know, called the “enemy,” people who always give you a hard time and seem to judge you all the time. It’s only, all the suffering is happening inside of us. It’s not their fault. They’re just being them. It’s us. So that’s why someone like Khyentse Rinpoche, who was like Buddha himself, was saying that, because this is how you see your stuff. If you don’t see your stuff, the shadows push you around. You can’t see them unless they manifest in our daily lives.
So, I wonder what happened to that guy. I hope he’s happy. I don’t know where he is, what he’s doing. I miss him.
Thank you for that. And then can I ask one more? Like the Rudrashtakam?
Rudrashtakam. Those are two words. “Ashtak” means eight verses, and “Rudra.” Rudrashtakam.
When you saying that recently, I found it extremely powerful and I was just curious, like, what, where did it come from? Like where did you…
Have you ever read Tulasidas? Ramacharitamanasa?
No.
I’m deleting you right now. You can’t not read that.
I think you just recommended a version in the class and I ordered it online but it hasn’t come yet.
You can get a PDF online right now. It’s an extraordinary book. You must read that. It will change your life. I guarantee you it’s going to change your life. It changed my life. When I first read it back in ‘69, Ram Dass gave me his copy to read, I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t. Even today, I can’t believe it. Yesterday, we read Sundarakand for three hours online. It was so beautiful to read it again. I have to read it more often. It’s just so extraordinary. The Rudrashtak is coming from the last chapter of the Tulasi Das Ramayana, in the Uttarakhand, it’s called, and the whole story of that is in there. So that’s what you have to do. You have to find that.
I’ll find it.
Yeah. It’s so great. You just, you’ll think you died and went to heaven. It’s so fantastic. Read it, read it. That goes for everybody.
Namaa miisha mishaana-nirvaana rupam
vibhum vyaapakam brahma-veda-svaroopam
So good. Shiva Stuti. They call it the “Shiva Stuti,” also.
And did Maharajji like it?
I don’t know. I don’t, I’ve never, I didn’t hear it around him. Tiwari, It must be Tiwari that turned me onto it. It must be. I don’t remember exactly, but it must’ve been Tiwari. Because in the book, in the temple prayer book, the first temple prayer book was assembled by Tiwari. Siddhi Ma asked him to do that. So many of the prayers that he did all the time were the first outline of the prayer book, and then later they added others and stuff, but he had put the first one together. So many great prayers in that.
The Devi Aparadh Kshamapana Stotram. That’s a great one. That’s in there, too. That’s a prayer to beg the goddess for forgiveness. That’s what the name is. So beautiful. Yeah.
You’re happy? You’re smiling. That’s enough. Very good.
Maharajji, you know, Hanuman, remember, Hanuman is Shiva. You know that. Hanuman… Shiva wanted to help Ram, and so he sent his shakti through the wind God into Anjani’s womb, and so, Hanuman is actually the form of Rudra, the soul of Rudra, of Shiva. There’s 11 forms of Shiva, and the 11th one is Rudra, which is the form of which is, what Hanuman has, that this energy to destroy all the demons, and especially Ravana, because Shiva had given Ravana of the boon in the first place. So, he created a way for Ravana to be killed, also.
So, Rudrashtak, that’s Hanumanji. It’s all in the Ramacharitamanasa. Everything you need to know is in that book. I guarantee you. Everything. The whole explanation of incarnation and avatars and who’s who, and why, and how it happened, it’s all in there. The difference between form and formless and how to get to the formless through the form. It’s all in this book. Every bit of it. It just drips out of the pages. It’s so extraordinary. Really.
They say Tulasidas was an incarnation of Valmiki, and he wrote this in the, the book is written in the dialect of Hindi that was spoken in Ayodhya, Ram’s kingdom, in the time of Ram. That’s the dialect that’s written in. Avadhi, it’s called, and it’s all poetry. In Hindi. It’s all poetry, so extraordinary. It’s amazing. And Tulasidas, He was, he was, the Brahmins persecuted him because they owned all the scriptures, which were all in Sanskrit, and the poor people had to pay them to have recitations and to have pujas done and prayers, and religion, spirituality was not available to the poor people because the Brahmin priests were corrupt, and they took it all. Very similar to the time of the Buddha, when Buddha came and took the power away from the priests. So, Tulasidas brought the story, which they could only hear when they paid a priest, and they had no money, so they weren’t getting these things. He told the whole story in the local dialect, and not only that, he told the story in a way that feeds devotion and explains devotion and shows how devotion is the way to go. Without, and that without devotion and love…
The lines in there, every way you look at stuff like, “Ram only loves love.” There’s no other way to get to him, except through love, not penance, not mantras, not nothing. Only love. And the one who knows this, knows everything there is to be known. This stuff is in there. It’s all in there. It’s mind-blowing.
Ram only loves love. The only thing dear to Ram is love. Anything else is anything else, but if you want God, it’s love, it’s the only thing you need. And this book just feeds the heart, like a swollen river of bliss into the heart. That’s what it is. But you don’t like bliss, so maybe you won’t read it.
Q: KD, I read the Divine Reality book, KK’s book and others. There are many stories of Maharajji. Is there a story about Maharajji that you wish was told more?
All of them, every single story is extraordinary in its own way. Yeah. There’s so many stories. They’re all amazing. The story, I mean, there’s so many, you know… the stories that I like the most, well, there’s so many stories. I like them all, but one of the stories I like the most, are the ones that show how kind and compassionate he is, without any needing to be prodded or reminded.
There’s that story, there was this young girl and she was at her grandfather’s house. She was eight years old and Maharajji was visiting that house because her grandfather was his devotte, Maharajji’s devotee. So, one day she comes running into the house crying, and she comes up to Maharajji and she’s crying. Maharajji says, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong. Ask me anything, whatever you want. Ask me, tell me what’s wrong. What’s wrong?”
And what had happened is this young girl had seen, in a neighbor’s house, she saw a dead body. Someone had died and it was the first time she saw death, and she was just like, in shock and she was weeping and weeping.
So, Maharajji is petting her on the head. “Tell me, tell me what’s wrong. Ask me anything, ask me anything. What do you want?”
And the little girl, eight year old girl, says, “Baba, When I die, bring me back to life.”
So, Maharajji is just petting her head and sent her away. So, many years go by. It had to be 25, 30 years at least. The woman was married. The little girl grew up, was married, had a family. She and her husband lived in another town. Her grandfather had died. They had lost contact with Maharajji because it was her grandfather that was his devotee, and so she’s living with her husband somewhere in some house, and she’s dying, she’s sick. And her husband calls, makes a call to her father, the little girl’s father, and says you know, “Sir, your daughter, she’s dying.”
And so he went to his guru, who was a very good Saint, and he said, “Baba, please,” you know, “save my daughter,” and his Guru said, “I can’t do anything like that, but pray the Neem Karoli Baba. He can do that. He’s the only one who can do that. He can bring your daughter back to life.”
So, the father of the young girl, who’s now an old woman, older woman, starts praying to Maharajji.
Now, back at the house where she’s living with her husband, there’s a knock on the door. Husband goes to the door and sees this bulky gentleman with a blanket wrapped around him, standing there, and he says, “Your wife is sick?”
And he says, “No.”
The guy doesn’t know who this is. He said, “No, sir, she’s actually died.”
“Nay. She’s not dead. Take me to her.”
So, he takes this guy into the house and Maharajji, and this guy looks at the woman lying dead, and he says to the husband, “She’s not dead. Do you have any grapes in the house? Bring me some grapes and a spoon.”
So, the husband goes away. He brings some grapes, and this guy squeezes the grapes with the spoon and dribbles some of the juice into the mouth of the dead woman, and she begins to breathe again. And then he looks at the husband, says “She’s okay. She’ll be okay now.”
And he leaves, and the woman recovered and lived many years.
That was Maharajji.
Nobody had to call him. Nobody had to send a telegram. No one had to write a letter. No one had to do anything. He promised an eight year old girl, he would bring her back to life when she died, and 30 years later, he shows up at the door at the moment of death.
That’s the kind of stories I like. He had all the powers in the universe, but what does he respond to? The prayer of an eight year old girl. Because he said he would.
We don’t know. We don’t believe what we see. We were with him. We read the stories. We hear the stories, but it doesn’t, the sun does not rise. It doesn’t dawn on us, who he is, because he doesn’t let it dawn on us. Because once we saw that, if you look at the sun directly, you’re blinded. You have to find a way to be able to hold that, and so he hides himself. He doesn’t let us really understand, experience who he is, but he will. He’s also preparing us for that. That’s his job. That’s what he does. That’s what the spiritual path is, being able to see God, coming into the presence of God, inside, outside, up there, in there, out there, wherever you want to think of it, it doesn’t matter. So…
Q: I wanted to ask you a question about your experience, if you’ve had any, with Chogyam Trungpa, if I’m saying that right? And then I was hoping, maybe, I’ve been trying to find information on his behaviors, and I just can’t find too much about…
He was a wild man. He was what they called Crazy Wisdom Lama, Rinpoche. He was a great being. He did not, he really brought the dharma to America. He totally immersed himself In the way Westerners see themselves, and of course, in these days, and now with the “me too” movement, that’s not really seen as being very good, but this was a long time ago, before people thought this way. He used to screw his disciples and he drank endlessly. But he was pretty much seen as a great, great siddha, a great enlightened being by his own teachers, the Karmapa, Dilgo Khysentse Rinpoche, who were two of the greatest Lamas who ever lived, they respected him. And Kalu Rinpoche also said, “Just because an Eagle can jump off a cliff, a high cliff, doesn’t mean that you can.”
This is very complicated stuff, but he really spoke, he really expressed things in English that, in a way nobody ever had before, because he had, he was in it completely, and he knew the English language so well that he, and the Western psyche so well, that he was able to explain things in a very powerful way. But he was not, he was a teacher, but he was also a siddha. He also did things. He wasn’t just somebody who just taught philosophy. He would do things. He was fierce.
One day, Danny and Anasuya, Danny Goldman were living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was living in their house for a while, up in the top, in this couple of, up in the very top of the three-story old Victorian house. Fantastic. And I met this woman, and we were, we had planned to get together that night and she came to the house and we were walking up the steps…
Oh, earlier in the day, Rinpoche was staying there, too, at the time. Earlier that day, he called me into his room, just me and him sitting there, and he, he took a big bottle of Saki and a water glass, and he poured a water glass full of Saki, like 16 ounces of Saki to the very top, just before it would spill. And it was extraordinary. He was drunk out of his mind. His hands were perfectly steady and then he pushed it across the table to me and just went. So, I drank the whole cup, the whole glass. Later that day, this woman and I were walking up the steps to my room and we got halfway up the steps and a guy comes and calls her and says, “Rinpoche would like to see her.”
She never got upstairs. She never made it up to my room that night. She slept with him. He stole my girlfriend. This is the kind of stuff he would do. He was fierce. He did not fuck around. He was there to destroy your ego. And he did it. Now, a lot of people would judge that from our present day point of view. That’s their prerogative. They can do that, but the people who were with him, it’s rare that you hear from someone who protested that behavior. I mean, they knew what they were in for, and he just jumped into the way we were. You know, everybody was screwing everybody in those days, and so he was into it. He did it, too.
I’m not here to be his apologist or anything. I’m just telling you some of the things, but he was so brilliant. His first book I think was called “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.” It’s perfect. And the teachings…he also was a treasure revealer. In other words, he channeled, secret teachings were revealed to him in his mind, and he gave those teachings to some of his students. The teachings on the kingdom of Shambala were a treasure that he revealed. You know, in the old days in Tibet, the treasure revealers would be able to put their hand in a rock and pull out scriptures, because they say that Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche, the great, the second Buddha they call him, would reveal these things, but he would hide them and like put a lock on them until they could be revealed, until they would be useful to people, it would be of use to people. So, sometimes they were hidden for like a thousand years, and then somebody would have a vision, not somebody, but a great, great being, a great Lama would have a vision that he could just grab this, these scriptures from inside of this rock. I mean, and people saw this. It was a mystery, but it wasn’t, people were there. Like there would be 150, 200 people and the guy just put his hand on a rock and pull out these tiny things written in the Dakini script, in the script of the Dakinis, the Devis, really, the goddesses. And he would, he would be the only one who could actually read that script. Amazing stuff.
So, Trungpa was extraordinary and he was respected by his teachers. They did not judge him. And that, if you understand things from that point of view, then you have to, you have to really take that into account, that his teachers did not feel that he was abusing people. He was acting out in a certain kind of way, which was not unheard of in the Vajrayana tradition. There are many great beings who acted in ways that seemed inappropriate. For instance, there was an incredible, in the late 1800s, an amazing Siddha named Do Khyentse Rinpoche, who was a hunter, and he traveled with his disciples. They all had rifles and they would shoot at deer. They would cut it up, cook it up, and he would tell everybody to save the bones, and after everybody had eaten, they would put the bones in a pile. He would say a few mantras and the deer would get up and run away. Really. These things happened.
So, for those who can’t wrap their heads around that, it would be easy to fall into judgment or to feel judgmental about the behavior of those type of beings, but I believe that it’s not exactly, that wouldn’t be the right thing to think. That wouldn’t be correct.
Now that doesn’t mean there are a lot there aren’t like, an infinite number of assholes who do shitty things and should be beaten for it. There’s no question about that. Not everybody can do that. Very few people can do that, can be beyond the attachment, beyond good and evil, beyond fear and all that, you know, really beyond. And only those few beings can do that. The problem is that there are so many people claiming to be that way, and that really sucks, and they hurt people and they create karmas for themselves and others that will be unbearable for them. There are hell worlds that they go to, to burn, believe me.
So, what are you going to do? People are hungry and they’ll find any way they can to satisfy their desires. And they’ll eat people alive. They don’t give a shit about anybody. So, that’s bad stuff, and there’s really no way to know. That’s the other thing. There’s no way to know. There are probably a lot of people who feel that Trungpa was a bad guy, but I don’t think his students feel that. That’s one thing. Even now, all these years later.
Well, that was quite a blurt. Take care.
Q: Hello, Krishna Das. I’ve been hearing you since, I think I’m three years old, or somewhere around there.
What are you talking about? I haven’t been around that long.
Just like, 16 years. Yeah, and I think, especially this past year has been a very pivotal year for me, and you have been with me throughout this year. If it’s moving to college and doing laundry, I would always hear some kirtan, or even in the most random moments.
Listening to me when you do the laundry? Good.
It gave me a lot of peace and a lot of strength.
I see. I have to remind somebody about that later.
Yeah, recently I went through a very difficult period and had psychogenic seizures, non-epileptic seizures, and being, kind of, dealing…
Non-epileptic?
Non-epileptic. It’s called psychogenic seizures. I think just throughout this time, I feel like I have lost a freedom in myself. If it’s even just to, like, I have a fear of crossing the road at times, or like, I grew up in India and I’m not allowed to drive the bike anymore, at least for now. And I know these may be small things, but I think I internalized it into being like, I have no freedom in thoughts, or being, and I think one of my questions would be, how to separate the outer obstacles and the inner obstacles? Because I feel like I just take these outer obstacles and make them into the reality, but I do believe that in the mind, there is a strength to not see those obstacles and be free within yourself.
Well, you can’t fight against your thoughts. You’re not going to win, because you’re fighting on the same level that they exist. You know, all we can do is train ourselves to release those thoughts. Right? Which means developing a little bit of practice every day, a little mantra, a little chanting, a little breath, watching your breath, just calming yourself, just watch your breath come in. You know, you don’t try. You don’t get tense. You’re not trying to willfully make anything happen. You just watch your breath come in and out. Right? It’s doing it anyway, whether you’re watching or not. So, it’s always there. So, just bring your attention to it and let it come in and out by itself, and when you notice you’re thinking, you come back. What you’re thinking, doesn’t matter. What you’re feeling, “I’m afraid.” Well, I’ll come back. Right? You just keep coming back and that develops this automatic ability to release the hold of those type of things. This is good work, you know. It’s good work. It’s good that you recognize the situation. That’s very good. And also, it’s even better that you recognize something can be done about it. That’s fantastic.
Most people spend their whole lives completely asleep. They don’t even ever think anything could be done to help themselves, and that’s really sad. So, you’re already, you know, you’re in the game and that’s where you want to be. So, it’s all good. So now you just want to find a way to relax a little bit. That’s all.
You know, physical exercise is good. Asana practice is very good. Gentle, loving, relaxed asana practice. You know, something that just gets your body moving. It gets your muscles moving and lets the energy flow through you instead of getting stuck in places. You know, something like that. Simple. It’s not something that you have to worry about. It’s not violent exercise. Just gentle breathing with the movement of the body. Very good. And that will actually help release some tension, and the tension always affects the mind, too, but definitely just sing a little bit, you know, sing little bit, dance around a little bit, relax, take it easy. Don’t give yourself a hard time. It’s okay. How old are you?
I’m 19.
Well, you can pretty much count on the next four or five years being hell on earth. No, 19 is a very, it’s very, it’s good that you’re interested in this stuff. Very good. It shows that you have a deep sensitivity to the spiritual path. That’s wonderful. So, you just want to start to take responsibility for your states of mind. Okay? But you don’t do it like this. You know, you do it like this. You know? Letting go, releasing. Letting go again and again. So, just practice that, you know, for a few minutes at a time. Don’t think don’t try to sit for a half an hour. Don’t try to sit for, you know. Sit somewhere comfortable and just watch your breath. If you fall asleep, that’s perfect. Don’t worry about it. And you come back, fall asleep again. Sometimes that happens to me. You know, it’s not really sleep, actually. It’s just, it’s the mind kind of sinking into itself in a different way than sleep. It’s not really sleep, but it’s similar. It feels similar.
You know, and do what you can to be healthy, physically. Eat well and that kind of stuff. Take it easy. And you know, and through these practices, we develop the inner strength to have the courage to deal with whatever arises in our lives. That’s the main thing. You’ll be able to deal with whatever happens, good or bad, what we call “good” or “bad.” It might be painful. It might be physical problems. It doesn’t have to screw you up completely inside. But one must cultivate that a little bit, you know?
So, yeah. So, if you’re inclined to it, I would definitely try to learn the Hanuman Chalisa, because it’s a very powerful prayer that Maharajji gave to us in order to help us connect with him, with that place of real power inside ourselves, and to develop the strength to deal with daily life without being destroyed by it. So, it’s all good. It’s all good.
So, Ramana Maharshi was one of the great saints of modern age. He lived in the south, in a place called Tiruvanamalai, at the foot of a mountain called “Arunachala,” which is believed, actually, to be a living Shiva Lingham, itself. He was an extraordinary Being, and he wrote this. He said this.
“Remain all the time steadfast in the heart, in the oneness. God knows the past, the present and the future. He will determine the future for you and accomplish the work. What is to be done will be done at the proper time. Don’t worry. Abide in the heart and surrender your acts to the divine.”
This is so beautiful. So beautiful. This is a statement of where we’re really headed, ultimately. It starts off with, what he says is impossible for us at the moment. “Remain all the time steadfast in the heart.”
Well, next. You know, we would like that, but we’re working on it.
But this part, you know, “what is to be done, will be done. What’s going to happen, will happen at the proper time. Don’t worry. Abide in the heart.”
Once again, not easy. “Abide in the heart and surrender your acts to the divine.”
Surrender is, ultimately what he means is, surrendering the belief that you’re the doer. We see ourselves as being busy and doing lots of stuff. We’re meditating. We’re getting devotional. We’re getting this experience. We’re running around and now I’m going shopping. Now I’m watching TV. We have the sense of “me” all the time, but what we don’t have, is the sense of what’s in there.
There she is. She’s back. What happened to you? You went into samahdi? Like that?
My internet cutoff. I’m sorry.
Where are you?
I’m in India, in Tamil Nadu, in Auroville. I grew up here.
Oh, really? Very nice. Very nice. Maharajji went once and he, he met the Mother, and he later said, “Mother tried to keep me there. She tried to keep me, but I escaped.” He laughed.
I wanted to ask one more question, which is, what did Maharajji say to people for things about the fear of death?
Well, when I was going to kill myself, I was living in the temple and I was having a nervous breakdown, hallucinations, everything. I was out of my mind. He looked at me and said, “What are you going to do? Jump in the river?”
He laughed. “You can’t die. Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.”
What? Why? Because he never thought of himself. That’s the real death, the death of the ego. Thoughts of “me” never arise. They just don’t arise anymore. There’s only oneness there. There’s only the one, which is your true nature. So, he wasn’t worried about death and he, I can’t remember him really saying anything about it specifically. But I had a girlfriend back in the states before I went to India, and while I was in India, she committed suicide in America. So, I went to Maharajji, and I asked for blessings for her. It’s a long story. I’ve just compressed it. And he said, he hit me on the head. “Don’t worry. She won’t bother you anymore.”
Because she had come to see me after she died. She came to see me at night after she died and it freaked me out, and he said, “Don’t worry, she won’t bother you anymore.”
So, “But Baba, what about her? Will she have good birth?”
And he just said, “She’ll have a good birth.”
That’s the only time I ever heard him talk about rebirth. I never heard him, you know, he used to say things like, “Oh, I’m very old,” you know, things like that.
Which, and you know, when Maharajji left the body, some of the people who used to come see him in Allahabad went to visit this other Saint named Deoraha Baba, who was 270 years old, and he had lived in the county of Deoraha for all those years. Everybody knew him. That was in U.P. There’s the county, Deoraha. And I’m not exactly sure what the county is called, but Deoraha Baba means, the Baba from that place, Deoraha.
So, he said, “Oh, I’ve seen this Lila so many times before,” about Maharajji leaving the body. “He can’t die. He’s not dead. I’ve seen him do this so many times before.”
You know, these guys live in another world that we don’t have access to. So, the body dies, but the dweller in the body, the soul, does not die. And that’s who we really are. It’s the ego that has fear, and the ego is the delusion that we are separate beings, the belief that we are separate from everybody else, and that you’re you and I’m me. That is not actually true, except on that level, of little bubbles of egos. So, when the bubble pops, what happens? When the wave dissolves back into the sea, what was that wave? Was it anything else but ocean? At any time? It was only ocean. Right? Nothing happened. There was ocean. It’s ocean, but we call it a wave. Just like you call yourself, “you,”and I call myself “me,” but we’re just waves. And the wave is caused by winds that blow in from somewhere. Right? And start the waves moving. Right? And those winds are our previous karmas. They manifest this “me,” and then they, the winds abate, and that wave disappears. But was it anything other than the ocean, ever?
So, are you anything other than God at any point? No, but you think you are. So, because you think that, you have work to do, which is to remove those thoughts and remove the glue of those thoughts that hold us and make us believe we are who we think we are. That’s where fear is. That’s where longing is. That’s where shame and grief and anger and selfishness, those are all thoughts of me, me, me.
So, if you just relax every day for a few minutes, just take a little time off where nobody can bother you for just a few minutes, and just let everything go, and just let all that energy drain out of the body. Let the thoughts drain out of the mind and just be with yourself, and when you notice you’ve been thinking, you’re actually already back. Right?
Otherwise, you’d still be thinking. You wouldn’t know. So, when you notice you’ve been thinking, okay, and then you just relax again and let them all go. That’s meditation. And at some point, if you like, you can add, you can do Japa with the breath. You know, just repeat one of the names as the breath comes in and out. That’ll help too, but just… it’s a game. Play the game. Enjoy it. Find a way to in there. That’s all.
Okay. Nice talking to you. So, that’s the deal. This is from the Bhagavad Gita:
“When he sees me in all and sees all in me, then I never leave him, and he never leaves me. And he, who in this oneness of love, loves me in whatever he sees, wherever this man may live, in truth, he lives in me.”
That’s Sri Krishna talking to Arjuna.
“When he sees me in all and sees all in me, then I never leave him, and he never leaves me. And he who, in this oneness of love, loves me in whatever he sees…”
Difficult people…
“Loves me in whatever he sees, wherever this person may live, in truth, he lives in me.”
Well, that’s the path of love. And, when we see Maharajji in everyone, then we see him all the time. We don’t get fooled by the appearances. This is something that comes as a fruit of practice and a fruit of devotion. It isn’t something you do in your head like, “Oh yeah, okay, I’m going to see Maharajji in this person.” No, no. It doesn’t work like that. It’s the fruit of practice we do, whatever practice that is, the love that’s generated in our practice and in our hearts.
So, and the Hanuman Chalisa generates that kind of devotion and love, and the Ramacharitamanasa, the Tulasi Das Ramayana, really opens the heart to those realities.
So, okay, wonderful to be with you today. Thank you so much for coming. Be safe. Be good. Take care of yourselves. OK? Ram Ram. Namaste.
