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Call and Response Ep. 51 Guru
“Any yogi or yogini who develops ability to concentrate and become mindful, pushing that mindfulness to deeper and deeper levels, discovers the Realm of Infinite Love, the Realm of Infinite or Immense Love, Immense Compassion, Immense Joy and Immense Equanimity within themselves. So, they have all the heavens in themselves.” – Robert Thurman
Bob: I was just kind of thinking of like, “Where’s my Guru?” You know? “I need a Guru. I want to get serious now, so I want a Guru.” So, people feel that way.
KD: Yeah.
Bob: And that’s good that they feel that way because, in one sense, it is a good thing to think that there’s some way of being that is higher than the way one habitually is and that someone exemplifies that and that person can maybe help one develop dimensions in themself, that there are, that will be new for them, that will be greater how they habitually think of themself as. So, you know, when you said, apart from yourself, but then what you found through the inspiration of your teacher was dimensions in yourself that you didn’t know that were there because your habitual thing was to think of yourself as not having those dimensions. Right? Like, you know, someone asked me earlier about the four immeasurables, as they’re called, which I decided to translate now as “immensities.”
KD: Immensities?
Bob: Yeah, because “immense” means “immeasurable” you know, but it’s a more nice word, you know? “Immeasurable” sounds kind of like, “Oh gosh, I couldn’t swallow it,” or something whereas an immensity is an immensity. So, immense love, immense compassion, immense joy and immense equanimity and those are in Indian cosmology, they are four ways of carving up the layers of the heaven of the pure form. And the Gods Brahma and others dwell in the highest level of equanimity, one, which can also be subdivided into sixteen different levels of heavens and the highest one is called Akanishta.
KD: Akanishta.
Bob: “Not smaller than anything else.” That literally means, “Akanishta.” “Not lesser than anything.” And, that’s where Brahma hangs and the big deities there, all those deities in the form realm have no gender differentiation. They’re all, they’re not exactly hermaphroditic, but they have male and female elements and they don’t have, you know, differentiated genitalia, for example. They don’t have ordinary like desire realm bodies. That’s why it’s called the Realm of Pure Form. And then it’s taught to people in terms of like, cosmology, like, there’s these heavens there. But any yogi or yogini who develops ability to concentrate and become mindful, pushing that mindfulness to deeper and deeper levels, discovers the Realm of Infinite Love, the Realm of Infinite or Immense Love, Immense Compassion, Immense Joy and Immense Equanimity within themselves. So, they have all the heavens in themselves. Not necessarily, it’s not like chakras. It’s like mental mind states and especially if they are, you know, not grasping at the pleasure of those Realms, because when you feel immense love, you feel blissful yourself, of course. You wouldn’t have immense love if you didn’t feel already blissful that you want, that the bliss wants to overflow, where you want to love everybody, you’re capable of loving everybody because you’re feeling so filled with bliss. So, the bliss itself isn’t you, but by letting go of it you want to send it to everyone. Right? So, you find all those heavenly planes in yourself. The Being that is unfortunate in that view is the one who wants to stay and grasp that state and then they become reborn as a deity of that realm, actually. They leave their meat puppet body. They get stuck in some heavenly plane or another. And then once you’re in a heavenly plane then you’re sort of complaining about the other immigrants to your heavenly plane. And you’re like, “Oh, there’s some yogis came from America, and all those American yogis are so annoying. They’re really, they wish they were back in the desire realm.” Like, whatever. So, the thing is, all of these realms and nirvana are within each of us. Each of you, each of us and then you know, you find in there immense love and you’re feeling blissful and then immense compassion comes when your bliss and love bumps into people’s resistance and their misery and their feeling of “not enough”, they want more. And then you feel compassion and then you console yourself but for the fact that even this immense love that you feel doesn’t necessarily kindle them because of their paranoid boundary-ing of themselves, but then you see that even underneath, underlying that they have the bliss and joy so then you feel the joy about the joy that they do have. And finally, the equanimity is where you become equal with them. And you know, it’s like a ladder that, when you go up to the higher rungs, the lower rungs go with you. You don’t leave behind the love and the compassion and joy, the equanimity is with all of that. You know? So, those are all in one’s self. Everyone has that ability, whether or not they have a technique or whatever. Everyone has that ability. Every single person has that. That’s what you discover. That’s what, that’s your voice, I think, comes from that. Doesn’t it?
KD: Yeah.
Bob: yeah? Yeah, you let it go? You’re about to say some thing, negational thing? I can tell. Which is good. Never mind. I don’t want to just praise you. That’s terrible. So, the thing about the Guru, and the other thing is that every Guru like Maharajji, Geshe Wongyal… actually, they say in Tibetan, my teacher once told me, He said, “Whenever you say my name, you should say… (in Tibetan) I call, I mention Him by Name for a specific purpose.” Because they say, it’s unkind to mention your Guru’s name just kind of casually, because mentioning the Name, you know, kind of, it doesn’t agitate them but it sort of brings them present, you know? But what I’m trying to say is, they’re all still here. They don’t leave. There’s this idea, and in Theravada Buddhism, there’s that lying down Buddha, but that’s just, He’s just showing leaving the body to teach impermanence to people who need that teaching. And actually, it’s amazing, for a hundred years have mistranslated parinirvana in English as “final nirvana”.
KD: Oh, yeah.
Bob: For a hundred years, since it’s been translated. But “pari” does not mean final. “Pari” means “total.” So, it means that when you leave more anchor in yourself in the previous body you had before or something like the body you had before you reached Buddhahood, you’re just giving a teaching and you’re being more present in your, what they call “Reality Body” which is everybody. So, you’re more manifestly everywhere, in other words. Right? So you are the nirvana in everybody else as well, if you follow me by that. You’re more, you have more access. You’re less focused on being, responding to people seeing you in your previous course body. So, so you don’t, you should never feel you don’t have a guru. And once you realize that the Guru is everywhere and never dies, the true, the really good Guru never leaves a person who needs a Guru. Absolutely not. They’re not the Lone Ranger who leaves town after getting the bad guys. You’re the one who’s going to get the bad guys and the Guru’s always there with you to help you. That’s really key.
KD: Aren’t we the bad guys?
Bob: What’s that?
KD: Aren’t we the bad guys?
Bob: Well, yeah. We have… the bad guy is our side that doesn’t let us see that we’re good guys. We’re not really the bad guys.
KD: That’s right.
Bob: Look at you, agreeing with me.
KD: You’re the good guys, for sure. I’m not so sure about me.
Bob: You’re not bad. You went to the dining hall with your socks on, but that’s not that bad. They were clean socks. The socks were clean.
KD: Not only did I go into the dining hall with my socks, but when the woman tried to stop me, I like, showed her my card. “Do you know who I am?” I didn’t say that, but I said, “See the name on there?”
Bob: You did then you ran away.
KD: You’re stopping me from going in the dining hall?
Bob: You ran away and I was point guard for me.
KD: You were point guard.
Bob: I blocked a tackler. I did. I did.
KD: You know, Maharajji used to say that when you think of Me, I am there. He said that. “Whenever you think of Me, I am there.”
Bob: That’s right.
KD: Of course. And I always say to people, “The great Beings are here. We’re the ones who aren’t here.” You know? Get here and we’ll be with them. We’ll know we’re with them. We’re the ones who aren’t present. We’re lost in our thoughts, our emotions, our stuff. Let’s get here. And, He also said, “Once I take hold of your hand, I never let go. Even when, not if, even when you let go of mine.” So, these, this is a real Being. This is a real Guru. This is what it’s like.
Bob: That’s right.
KD: And we’re all part of that love just because we are. We don’t need a reason. We are a part of that love.
Bob: Well, there’s a very important Indian concept, which I think the Buddhists might emphasize a bit more, but it’s in all of Indian traditions called “beginningless-ness”
KD: Beginning?
Bob: Beginningless-ness. Lack of “beginning”
KD: Lack of Beginning.
Bob: So that is to say, universe, multiverse, whatever you want to call it, kalpas. There’s no first Beginning. The idea that there was a first Beginning of anything is ridiculous. Obviously, something begins from something else. In relativity there’s no sort of, nothing, no something can ever come from nothing and so therefore there’s no coming out of nothing. Even monotheism that says “God created the universe out of nothing.” Well, God was there, He’s not nothing. You know? They just don’t want to say that the universe is God because that would make people too casual and relaxed and they wouldn’t pay dues and put a lot of money in the Sunday church pot. So, they act like, “Oh yeah, He made it out of nothing and it’s nothing and you’re nothing.” And they get all like, ridiculous. But, Swiss people did that. Calvin and people. So, the point is, Beginningless is a powerful concept because you’re Beginningless. Everyone is Beginningless. We have always existed. We have been everything. Once you’re past is infinite, we all have shady pasts. We also have luminous pasts. We’ve all done every bad thing and every good thing but we’re, on the moment we’re on an upward trend because we’re human and we’re a little backward because we were born in this Western barbarian land, brandishing nuclear weapons over everybody on the planet, and weird technologies and Facebook and I don’t know, whatever. And weird politicians. But the point is, we’re on an upward trend, but Beginningless means we can identify with everyone. There’s a bunch of modern Buddhists who are like, “Oh, I’m not going to teach former and future life, that’s old fashioned. We don’t want that. Oh, no, We’re modern. We’re scientific. We’re Americans. And so, we don’t teach that stuff.” Yeah, it’s just your mood, you know? You’re in hell when you don’t have your fix, you know? Or you know, you haven’t, you know, whatever. So, they don’t want to teach that and they think that you can, enlightenment just means, I don’t know, driving in your Tesla and it isn’t. The thing is, it’s very important, Beginninglessness. When poor Buddha, under, every version of Buddha’s life, He’s under that tree and He wants nirvana, right? And He’s on the edge of Nirvana and He’s going to finally relax. He’s going to eat some food. He tooks a bath. He cut His hair. Some lady brought Him some divine yogurt with rice and honey and it was really cool and His ascetic friends, they ran away.
KD: Yeah, His five disciples left.
Bob: And so, and He’s about to do Nirvana, but what does He do first? He suddenly becomes, He remembers infinite previous lives of Himself. Then He remembers infinite previous lives of everybody else.
KD: Really?
Bob: So, suddenly, here we are, ok? And we can stand each other because we’re just here for the weekend and you don’t have to be bothered by me or Baba KD forever. No, you can go back and you can watch a soap opera and the evening news and stuff and have a nice time in your house and we’re watching Chinese soap operas, actually, we particularly like them. And they’re very excellent, actually. You should really get into them. Korean ones, too. And so, we have only certain limited in moment, but to mention, if you suddenly had a vision and you wanted Nirvana, you thought you’d be floating in space, and feeling bliss, and like, Gods and Goddesses and whatever and suddenly, you were on a memory trip, smriti, a memory trip, where you were beginninglessly alive in every form. You’d been Mr. and Mrs. Dinosaur with everybody. You had eaten everybody. They’d eaten you infinite times. You were subtly all entangled with everyone forever from Beginninglessly. You can’t say “no” because there’s no limit. You’re totally entangled and engaged with everybody. That’s why everybody has to be happy otherwise they’ll bug you.
KD: Yeah.
Bob: And you’ll mess up your happiness. So, Buddha remembered infinite previous lives, everybody else’s previous life that means, everybody else had been His Jewish mother endless times. And He’d been their mother endless times and neither one wanted to do it again. And so He then quickly attained Nirvana thank goodness. But those two events, those two wisdoms, what they call them, or knowledges are right there in the thing. So, Maharajji, when you showed up at Maharajji’s, maybe He didn’t say it to you, He said, “Oh, there he is again.”
KD: What He did say is, He said, “They’re good boys. They come from good families.”
Bob: Really?
KD: And we thought, “What? What is He talking about? Maybe He isn’t…”
Bob: Really, He said that?
KD: Yeah, He said that.
Bob: Because that’s a big Buddhist expression, you know? “Kulaputra” they call it. And everybody says, “Good boy” or “good girl.” That’s an expression they say to the lay people. They say “kulaputra.” “Kula duhita.” And a good family is a family of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas and enlightened Beings.
KD: Maybe He wasn’t perfect.
Bob: What? No, I think so. Definitely. But the point is, He already knew you’d been His relative many many times. We’ve all been like that. You know, that’s the meditation of compassion. You meditate, every single person that you know, including the male ones, they’ve all been your mother many times. And it’s so much a part of Tibetan culture and I think it was of India culture prior to the last eight hundred years, they say… they can hardly say “all beings” without saying “all the old Mother Beings.” So, the Mother Being means, it doesn’t mean, like the bad slang we have…
KD: Well, they have that in India, too.
Bob: It means they’ve been my mother. They are mothers, everyone. Even the men. And therefore I owe them, what, because a mother is a form of love within ordinary Beings even, biologically it lives for the child and definitely and there we can say they’re bad mothers, but any mother who carried that child to term and then went through the thing that people can not imagine, talk about suffering, you know, giving birth, that particular labor which is usually unpaid. How much an hour do you think it’s worth? Should it be a hundred thousand an hour? I think so. When I was in the room, once in a while, I was like, telling that doctor, I’ll take the spinal block if she doesn’t. Just from the empathetic, you know, connections that go on. So, everyone’s, every being has done that for you, so then you meditate that, and then you feel that kind of sentimentality and you will weep. You reach the level of that compassion meditation where you feel tears of gratitude to all beings who have been your mother many, many times and Buddha must have felt that under that tree. Because He saw them. He saw them, He was their mother, too. But that’s not, we don’t want to emphasize all that probably.
KD: Yeah.
Bob: So, this is our, this is the interconnection of the Guru and I’ve launched into this because people worry about, “Where’s my Guru?” What’s the nature of Guru? We decided one of the topics this afternoon was the relationship of the Guru and the Guru is… I like the Tibetan translation of Guru. I have to say something in praise of Tibet and the Dalai Lama would expect me to, which is, it didn’t translate it by a literal, in Sanskrit “Guru” means “heavy”, literally like a “heavy weight”, like “heavyweight” a guru means. But of course it means a person who’s a teacher and is an authority figure kind of thing. But the Tibetans didn’t translate it with the word for “heavy,” they translated it as “lama” and “lama” means, is a translation of the Sanskrit word which means “you can’t get past it.” So that’s holding your hand, even you let go, He’s right here with you holding your hand right now. Even though your hand is next to your foot, He’s still holding it.
KD: Yeah.
Bob: Even with your socks on.
KD: My what?
Bob: Even when you’re sneaking in with your…
KD: My coffee cup?
Bob: Socks.
KD: Socks on. Oh, with my socks on.
Bob: I’m sorry.
KD: He drew me into, it wasn’t me. He pulled me into the room. I had nothing to do with it.
Bob: He did. He didn’t have time. So, ok does everyone feel Guru’d now? So, the Tibetans translated it like this Being that you can’t get past. So, I like to say, instead of like, a high authority above you, it’s a tar baby. You know? Once you encounter it, you’re stuck to it. And you can never, it never leaves you. Isn’t that nice? Actually, George Lucas used to frustrate me. Because I wanted him to make movies about, you know, Gurus and Milarepa and the Buddhist tradition and he always used to tell me, “Oh that’s too far out. That’s too far out. I’m dealing with the ordinary American public. I can’t do that.” I said, “What is this Obi Wan Kenobi showing up in his light body after he dies? Excuse me, George? You’re so ordinary? What’s that? I want you to do that with these other…” “Oh, no I can’t do that…” But I always think of Obi Wan. Remember, Obi Wan? The jedi shows up? So, Maharajji is like that, Geshe Wongyal, which I mention His name for a purpose, He’s like that. All of them are like that. So, just don’t worry. The Gurus are around. And there’s a Beginningless infinite numbers of Gurus.
KD: And Guru is not necessarily have to be in a physical body.
Bob: And you know, there’s some devotion. You should practice well and more importantly, perform well. I’m more into performance than practice. You know, the people who practice, they practice and practice and then they get up and they throw a rock at you if you’ve made a noise, do you know what I mean? That’s not performing.
KD: I don’t see any rocks.
Bob: So, I’m saying, you know, if you’re devoted to enlightened beings, to the Gurus, to Krishna, Rama, to Vishnu, to whoever it is, then you should do everything you do to the best of your ability that you can because your guru feels, from the guru’s side, the Guru feels there’s no difference between Her and You or Him and You, depending on what kind of Guru it was, He or She was, and therefore, they have to suffer being less, your being less than you can be. Because they feel one with you. The true teacher is totally empathetic, actually. There’s a whole thing about empathy fatigue and that compassion doesn’t mean really be empathetic, that’s a bunch of B.S. and I don’t mean “Buddhist Studies.” The real Guru is a hundred percent empathetic and compassionate and they’re not exhausted by it because their bliss energy is so powerful. And they don’t recoil from it. “Oh, no you’re going to be compassion, don’t be too compassionate.” That’s nonsense.
KD: Yeah. That’s what Chogyam Trungpa used to call “Idiot Compassion.”
Bob: Hm?
KD: Trungpa used to call it “Idiot compassion”
Bob: Right. Guru is not afraid to have idiot compassion. There’s another Milarepa story where His sister was quite poor because Milarepa and His sister were disinherited by an evil uncle after His father died, and He did bad things to get revenge before He became a Saint. And then He became a practitioner and then He became enlightened, luckily. But He did really bad things first. Anyway, when His sister found Him and He had become fully enlightened and a great teacher, but still had a limited sangha because He stayed up on a mountain and He didn’t have a big temple and lots of people around, you know, He was like, He was a real sadhu like the one with the money, but He was really real. So, she said, “I’m sick of you, brother dear. I have to go around to the markets and trade and I’m poor and I only have one yeak and etcetera and you could be a great Guru and you could have a beautiful monastery and your relative could be in the back room living comfortably. And I want you to get busy. And the reason people, you don’t have a big following is because you’re naked all the time and it’s embarrassing for people. And so, here is a beautiful yak wool maroon robe, beautiful, and I want you, I know you know how to sew, so I want you to make yourself beautiful lama robes and buy some paraphernalia, you know, like a little crown, some brocade vest and you know, some real Guru stuff, you know? And some ritual implements and then you’re going to have a following because you’re really smart and you’re really enlightened. And I’m going to go do that, ok? So you behave yourself. Make some robes and I’ll be back.” So, then she comes back in a few days and as she’s coming up towards His cave up in the mountain, bringing up some new supplies for His Lama equipment. He jumps out from behind a rock as she comes on the path and He goes, “TaDa!” And she passes out with anger. She faints and why? He has a jockstrap on, first of all. He made a little jockstrap for Himself. And then He has not gloves, but finger sheathes and toe sheathes, not socks, but toe sheathes. So, twenty little bits for toes and fingers and a very jaunty cap and otherwise, He’s start naked. And He goes, “Tada!” And She’s like, “Aaah” and she passes out. And then He carries up and puts her on a little couch and He wakes her up and she says, “You idiot, not only you didn’t make a robe but you ruined this beautiful yak cloth that I gave you. What’s the matter with you?” You know? And He said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, Peta dear.” He said, “You know, I didn’t really mean to do anything. I’m so sorry. I knew that your real problem was that you were embarrassed by my thing hanging there, you know, my male member. So, I just wanted to take a little corner off and make a little sheath, a little jockstrap for it, so I wouldn’t embarrass you anymore. I’ve no intention of wearing robes and becoming a big city Guru. I have no intention,” he said. “I never would.” And He sings a beautiful song about His monastery and His vassal, and His golden ornament and His brocade vest and everything are all sort of mind, you know, “My compassion is this, and My insight is that, and My wisdom is the other.” You know, just beautiful, beautiful poetic song He sings. Really, it was. And then He said, “But I got carried away. I got into your idea that I was embarrassing that I had this thing hanging there, so I covered it, but then once I covered it, my fingers began to look obscene to me so I started covering the fingers then the toes, Oh My God. And then I knit the cap on my head, it’s just pure fashion.” That’s behaving like an idiot, right? That’s idiot compassion.
KD: That’s so great.
Bob: She finally calmed down and she settled that that’s what He was. He did have, He still has followers. Millions of them in Tibet over centuries, you know. Milarepa. And He’s even… I learned about Milarepa originally from Henry Miller.
KD: Oh?
Bob: He said Milarepa was like the St. Francis of the Tibetan Buddhists, you know, and He was really great. And he, even Henry Miller loved Milarepa.
KD: Far out.
Bob: Some Indian sadhus think that He was, who went to Kailash, they think He was Shiva, actually, because He was always naked because He had this inner fire, you know? And He was… So, that’s why He didn’t wear clothes because He was always so hot, you know with this inner chanda. What they call “chanda”, you know, fire. So that’s the Guru topic. Anything else on the Guru topic? But we didn’t do the mantra one you wanted to discuss.
KD: We can do it.
Bob: The Name.
KD: We can talk about that, yeah. The repetition of the Name and the use of Mantra and the invocation aspect of all that.
Bob: Yes.
KD: For me, it’s very simple…
Bob: You’re so lucky, singing like that. I really love it. No, really. It’s a wonderful thing, singing. It really is.
KD: Yeah, it is.
Bob: It lifts everyone. It’s like, really great.
KD: It lifts me, too.
Bob: You never tried that, that Tibetan thing.
KD: I did.
Bob: You could do that.
KD: Especially in the morning.
Bob: Can you do that?
KD: In the morning I can, yeah.
Bob: Do you know the story of that? One Lama in Lhasa, in the tantric college, He was meditating late at night and then He, suddenly this shaft opened in the Earth in front of where He was meditating, His meditating seat, and He saw down to Yama, you know in the underworld, and Yama and He had like, a conversation and then the Yama voice, the voice of Yama, sort of was given to Him by Yama. That’s that Ommmm. That deep thing. So their conversation was like that. Then they made it, they used it in chants after that. So it’s kind of the voice of Yama.
KD: Yama is death.
Bob: Because you know, Yama is the India God of Death and He has a Buffalo head and death is considered very enlivening to reflect upon it. It’s a very valuable thing for spiritual practitioners to think about. It’s not a morose or gloomy or morbid thing. It’s a very very enlivening and wonderful thing to think about. It really brings you to life, actually. It really does. And actually, I think we all should be praying for Baba Ram Das, actually. Shouldn’t we? We should dedicate… do you have a chant for him we could do?
KD: Yeah, we could do?
Bob: Where did the musicians go? You want to do an unplugged thing or is it that time? Almost time? We have a few minutes.
KD: They’re here. We just have to wake them up.
Bob: What? We have a few minutes. Do you have something we can all chant together for Ram Das?
KD: They’re here. Anything we chant, we can chant to Ram Das. Doesn’t matter what it is.
Bob: Would you like to do that? Thank you.
KD: Sure. They really are waking up.
Bob: Do people know that Ram Das… A lot of you, how many of you love Ram Das? See look at that. So, he’s, you know, having some physical difficulty now and he, he’s on the edge you know? So, I think it’s really good we hold him in prayer. Not that he will go, even if he leaves the meat puppet, he’ll be more present. Actually, that’d be great, he’ll be back at Harvard. I love it.
KD: I think that’s one place he won’t go.
Bob: That’s where I first met him. When he was Dr. Richard I met him there. He helped a lot of people there. Actually, he did. Once you don’t need a ticket and you don’t need to go through TSA, you can be everywhere.
Sadhu Stories
Bob: Until he wants to kill himself.
KD: That reminds me of this story. One time, a wandering sadhu came to Kainchi and came to see Maharajji and he, he was, he didn’t have much stuff. He had like, a pot, a water pot, and just a couple of shawls or something. And he sits down in front of Maharajji and he says, “We’re really disappointed in you.” He says to Maharajji, “What is all these temples and all these people serving you and all this stuff. What is all this opulence? What is all this?” And Maharajji said, “Yeah, yeah, I know. Hey, can you give me ten rupees?” And the guy says, he gets very uptight. “No, no come on. You have, you have hidden in your lungi over there around the left side hanging there in the thing there, there’s, you have some money. Give it to me. Give it to me.” So the sadhu takes it. “Give me it. Give me it.” He takes his pouch of money. He drops it in the fire. All the money. And the guy flipped out. And he said, “What have you done? This was my retirement money. I have nothing and I’ve saved for years.” And Maharajji said, “Oh, what happened? Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” And He takes these long tongs and He reaches into the fire and He pulls out brand new one hundred rupee notes.
Bob: Oh, really?
KD: And hands them to the sadhu like this. One by one. The sadhu just starts weeping, you know?
Bob: Really? That’s so cool.
KD: Yeah, there’s another story like that. You know, everyone who came to Maharajji, in order to approach, for most of the beings who approached Maharajji, you always had to give something up. You had to let go of something in order to really… So one time, Maharajji was walking in the street in Vrindavan. This is a long time ago, even, maybe in the 50s. And He’s walking down the street and coming the other way is this jungly sadhu with the long jutta hair and the ashes, a really fierce guy. And they see each other and they go, “Oh.” And they run to each other and they hug and they jump around and they’re dancing and they say, “Oh, it’s so great to see you after so long!” “Oh, yes, it’s been so many years!” “This is so great!” And it turns out they had spent much time in the mountains many many years before, you know, doing sadhana together. So, they enjoy their company for a little while and then Maharajji says to the sadhu, “Ok, brother, now you should go now. I have to go.” And the sadhu says, “What are you talking about? After all these years we meet? I’m not going to leave you. I’m going to stay with you.” He said, “Oh, no. You don’t understand. I’m only with householders and worldly people now. You don’t, it’s not good for you. You don’t want to hang out with me. Really.” “I don’t care what you say. I’m not leaving you. I’m not leaving you.” “Ok.”
So, they began to walk from Vrindavan to Mathura, which is about 18 kilometers and it’s the middle of the summer. It’s about 120 degrees. The middle of the day. And in those days, there was nothing. Now, it’s like, built-up. But in those days it was like desert. So, they’re walking. And in the distance, and Maharajji told this to Mr. Tiwari who told me. He said, “We were dying of thirst.” And in the distance they see a well and they go running towards the well and they get to the well. There’s a woman there getting from the well and Maharajji gets there first and He puts His hands out, and says, “Pour water for me.” So, the lady pours the water from the bucket into His hands and He’s drinking, you know, like this. And then, the sadhu arrives and he puts out his gourd pot, right? And the woman pours water into the pot and as she’s pouring, Maharajji starts chatting her up, because that’s what He does. He talks to everybody, 24-7, 365, all day long. So He says, “Who are you? What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s your village? What’s your caste?” Because that’s what they ask. In those days, they would, they needed to know who they were talking to, for whatever reason. So, the woman says she’s from this village, she says her name and she’s an untouchable. So, when the sadhu hears that, he takes the pot and he smashes it on the ground and he looks at Maharajji. “What have you done? Look at this? This was my only possession. I need this to wash and to do things in. Now, it’s become impure because of this woman who poured water in it.” And Maharajji’s going, “What? What? What happened? What happened? What’s happened? Oh, I thought you were a sadhu. I thought you were a sadhu. What is caste for a sadhu?” And the guy realizes what happened and Maharajji said, “He washed my feet with his tears and went off to finish his work. He went back to the mountains.”
Beautiful story.
For Maharajji, everybody was His near and His dear. Everyone. And in order to stay in that space, you couldn’t hold on to your stuff. It had to go. Whatever it was. It had to go. And He warned, and Maharajji’s so soft hearted, also, He warned the sadhu. He said, “No, you don’t want to be with me.” Right? “It’s not good for you. I’m only with householders. You don’t want to be with me.” He was, but the sadhu took it the wrong way. He thought, “No problem.” But Maharajji was warning him, if you hang out here it’s going to hurt. So, in order to go through that door, you’ve got to leave, you know, your stuff at home. You’ve got to leave your home. Your home and your me-ness. You’ve got to leave that. So…
