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 January 2, 2021

“You’ve got to have some courage when it comes down to it. Don’t let anybody tell you what to do that doesn’t feel right to you. Don’t do that to yourself. Listen to your heart. If it feels right? Fine. If it doesn’t? Fine. More than fine. Just listen to yourself. You know better than anybody else what you want to do, and if you’re not doing what you want, how will you get what you want? You’ll always be hungry and never feeding yourself. Desires are not bad. They are not meant to be destroyed. They are meant to be transcended. That’s a very big difference.” – Krishna Das

Thanks for coming today. This pandemic reality of isolation and distancing from other people, on one hand, it’s very difficult. On the other hand, if we pay attention, we can actually feel close to people without the bodies having to be in the same place, and that’s big thing because, in reality, we are all together all the time, and in fact, we are one body.

Maharajji used to go like this, you know. “”Sab ek.” All one.

This is not something that we have to convince ourselves about, you know, or try to talk ourselves into believing. There’s no need to try to, what’s the word, anyway, force ourselves to believe anything. What we need to do is find a way to actually experience this stuff directly. Otherwise it won’t help us in the deepest way.

Our knee jerk reactions to daily life will continue endlessly until we actually find a way to move more deeply into our own being. But that being is the same being, that sense, that very fine, subtle sense of just being here, so to speak, where just existing is the same in everyone. It’s actually where we truly live, but we are so attached to our thoughts and emotions and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the programming we received entering into this life, and the programming we have coming from, endless lifetimes of nonsense. It’s not easy for it to wind down.

So, if we feel called to it, we can start paying attention to stuff and start practicing letting go. Letting go is the one thing we can do. Letting go is not pushing away. When I say, “Let go,” like say, you’re feeling like shit, right? Okay. So, “I want to let go of this,” but what are you going to do? You’re going to pick it up and put it over there. Where is it, you know? It’s not something you can grab onto and kill, or move, or dissolve, or evaporate.

But what we can do is notice how stuck we are, and we notice that we are stuck, and in that moment of just noticing that we’re stuck, we’re not that stuck. Of course we get stuck again immediately, but that’s why we add a practice to our lives, any practice, repetition of the name, coming back to the feeling of the breath, any type of practice that forces you to pay attention.

Tightrope walking over a raging fire will definitely make you pay attention. You won’t be thinking about, you know, what that person did to me and what I’m going to do to him. You’ll be thinking of not falling in the goddamn fire. So once we recognize that we are on fire already, then we want to cool that down. We’ve already fallen into the fire.

You know, the Buddha gave a sermon called “The Fire Sermon,” very early in his teaching, and he said, you know, “Hey monks, guess what? The eye is on fire with seeing. The ears are on fire with hearing. The tongue is on fire with taste. The skin is on fire with touch and the eyes on fire with sight and the mind also on fire with thoughts.”

We don’t experience it as being on fire. We’re so absorbed in all that stuff. We’ve been underwater. We’ve never come up for a breath. So that’s the idea. Just start to notice how, when you notice how caught you are or when we notice how caught we are, or that we are caught, even then you just try to come back to the practice that you’ve picked to do.

That’s why the moments of practice are very important, and they do spread out over the day. You know, they stay with us, but we do have to find a time where we can make that dedicated, sincere aspiration effort to pay attention, to come back from dreamland, come back from sleepwalking. Because that’s where everything is. That’s where the guru is. That’s where the self is, the capital “S” self, the true self. That’s where Buddha is. That’s where all the deities are. That’s where love really lives, at that place when we’re not stuck in our stuff. And don’t imagine that just because you’re sitting your ass down for a couple of minutes a day, that all of a sudden you’re going to be, you know, filled with bliss and ecstasy and radiating and levitating around, you know. No. But you do get in the game. You’ve entered consciously onto the path and gradually but inevitably this effort that we make to pay attention and to release and to keep coming back. You see when you’re gone, you can’t make yourself come back. You’re gone. You’re thinking about some other stuff. You’re not here. You’re lost. You’re in dreamland. So when you’re lost and sleepwalking, we can’t wake ourselves up. But the weight of the effort to make, to come back to the practice pulls us out of the dream and we are, “Oh, I’m back.”

It’s not like you push a button in the dream and all of a sudden you’re back. No, when you’re dreaming, you’re dreaming. Just like at nighttime, when you’re dreaming, you think it’s real, you think this is really happening and there’s, you know, there’s no way to wake yourself up in the dream. Somebody has to wake you up or something has to wake you up.

And that something, in this case, is the longing to be free. That generates making the effort to remember.

And Maharajji used to say, “Repeat the name. Repeat the name. Repeat it even if you feel, if you’re angry, if you’re sad, if you’re tired, if you’re depressed, if there’s no feeling at all of any kind of devotional thing, repeat it.”

And one of these days, the real Ram will come and then everything will be all right, but the effort has to be there, and the other thing is, if we’re making any effort at all, if we, if we’re even interested in this stuff at all, this is also a result of our own past aspirations and longing and efforts.

What’s really heartbreaking is when you see somebody suffering, somebody completely lost in their stuff and they have no idea that there’s anything, any other way to live, you know, that’s really, and those people, just like us, when they bounce off the wall, there’s no end to it. It’s all, their minds eat them alive. Their thoughts eat them alive. But we who have some concept of practice, some concept of possibly being free from this stuff, and ending the whole giving ourselves a hard time thing. This is a really wonderful thing. And we should not take that for granted because as difficult as this life might be, and especially these days, life got really difficult, we’re still here and we’re still striving to wake up. We’re trying to remember to remember, and that’s a big thing. And if we didn’t judge ourselves so harshly, how great would life be? Right? If I don’t think I’m a piece of shit, there won’t be anybody out there doing that to me. It’s just me doing it to me.

So, that’s really interesting. You know, if I wasn’t giving myself a hard time, where would it be? And it wouldn’t be anywhere in the universe. That’s the deal. So we’ve just got to keep on recycling our stuff and letting go and trying to be a good person.

You know, I’ve heard lately, I used, I quote Ramana maharshi quite often because he’s one of the most, the clearest, well, he’s one of the greatest saints that ever lived, and the way he explains things is extraordinary. And one of the things that he said many times is guru, God, and self, capital “S” self, are not different. They’re one. They’re the same. So now I hear people going around, they’re saying, “Krishna Das says, ‘We’re all gods.'”

Excuse me, give me a break. This is delusion. And what does that, what are those people thinking? They’re all Gods. That means their egos, their self, their small “s” self, bright and shiny and huge and all encompassing, and that’s complete bullshit. Right?

I get these very nice emails from these grandmothers, Indian grandmothers. “Oh Krishna Das, you should not use words like that. Nobody talks like that. No saintly people talk like that.”

That’s it that’s me. You have to live with it, if you want to. If you don’t, go somewhere where somebody talks nice all the time. I wasn’t brought up that way. Maharajji cursed like a bandit, but he could do that.

One time, he was going off on somebody and the Indian guy next to me was like, sitting there like this, you know? And I said, “what is he saying? What is he saying?”

He says, “No,, I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you.”

Nobody would tell us the way he used to tease people, because it was so incredibly brutal, but so filled with love.

I mean, in India, you know, when I lived with the Tiwari family, they would argue. And they would get angry and they would, you know, at times they would yell at each other. And this was shocking to me, you know. I mean, in my house, you know, where I grew up, “Don’t look at me like that. Don’t talk to me like that.” And here everybody was free to just really just be themselves. Nobody was afraid that the other person would throw them out of their hearts.

That was thing. It was all okay. It was a functional family. I don’t know about you, but I had never seen a functional family in my life before. So, that was a great education for me. That was j