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 November 7, 2020

“Do what you can do to let go. It doesn’t have to be while you’re sitting down, cross-legged pretending to meditate. That’s not it. All day long, just let go. “I’m doing it again. Ok. Ram Ram.”   Just be at ease. Try to be at ease with life as it is, and then you’ll be at ease in the next moment and the next moment and next week and next month. Right? It’s inner strength. You have to cultivate that.” – Krishna Das

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FULL TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the world.

The resolution of any issue or any question that we have in our own minds is always to quiet down and listen to our hearts, feel our hearts, feel what our deepest feelings are. There’s a lot of panic, a lot of anxiety these days, a lot of fear, but that fear does not touch us. It does not touch our true nature. So, the quieter we can become, the less reactive we can become, the better it is, and to keep acting out of unconscious knee jerk reactions is very, it is not a good way to go. It creates more and more suffering for everyone around us and for ourselves. So, in that sense, everything we do for ourselves, we’re also doing for all other beings, because ultimately there are no other beings. We are all one. Maharajji said this, over and over.

“All one.”

There is only one, and we are the cells of that body of one. Everything we need to know comes from within. The one thing that we can share with other people are the techniques of accessing that place within us, techniques to help us release our delusional beliefs about ourselves, that we’re no good, that we don’t deserve love, that we’ll never be okay, that this life is meaningless. All these types of negative atmospheres exist within us. They are not who we are, but we believe them for so long that we take them as real. They’re as real as our ego is. So, our ego is made out of all these delusional beliefs, because the separateness, which we call ego, is also delusional. It’s not true. Ultimately it is not true. And yet, that’s where we live for most of our whole lives. We live in that place of separateness and self-centered actions. But when you recognize the true self, who are you going to hurt? Who are you going to manipulate? And for what reason?

The difference between Maharajji and almost all of the other yogis and saints that I’ve met is that there was no manipulation. He didn’t need anything from us. He didn’t want anything from us. He had recognized his true nature, which is our true nature. And he allowed us to enter into a field of love that was inconceivable to us. And his presence is here. He’s here now. He’s always here, but we don’t turn towards him. We don’t turn towards that place of love, and so we spin and spin and spin and spin and spin around.

There’s no way to find presence or Being. It’s not like something buried in the ground that you can dig and find, but as you release the things that keep us believing the stories we tell ourselves, then the light of that reality can permeate us. It’s always here. We’re in it all the time. There’s nowhere we can go where that is not here, and in these very, very, very, very painful and difficult times, it shows us how much work we have to do to make reality, to recognize that deeper reality, how important it is.

That’s why they always say, “Do practice when you can,” because there are so many times that come in life where we’re unable to even remember what practice is, but when we do practice, we create within us a gravity, like a magnetism that pulls us within and helps us and releases us from the suffering and the stories and the negative emotions, more quickly than not, but that’s the fruit of practice. So, we do practice when we can, and practice is, it doesn’t, it’s not necessarily a formal tense, willful kind of thing. It’s a question of just bringing ourselves back to this moment and releasing the thoughts and stuff that pull us away and pull us out of ourselves, again and again and again, until we actually don’t get pulled out so much.

When I first started chanting in India, when Maharajji ordered the Westerners to chant, I experienced the power of practice for the first time, and I saw the mantra, the name became home, home base, and thoughts just passed through the sky of mind of the space, just like birds flying through the sky, and I didn’t fly with them. I wasn’t trying not to fly with them. I had been trying to pay attention to the chanting, and as that deepened, the thoughts just came through and they didn’t grab me. And this is not, this is the way it is, but we are so habituated to identify and grab the thoughts that we don’t notice a lot.

One time, many, many years ago, when I was still in college, I took a humongous dose of LSD. Which is what I did. I had to take enough LSD to have enough propulsion to get through the lower atmosphere of my neurosis and my fears and all my stuff. So, I had to take a big enough dose to get me out into space. So, I’d been out in space for like two days, and then I was lying on my bed, well, you know, just at ease in my bed, just in this beautiful, open, relaxed space, presence, love, sweetness, everything, happiness, and all of a sudden, I sensed something coming towards me, something coming towards me from the distance.

“What is this? What? What? What’s happening? What’s coming? Oh my God, what is this?”

And it came closer and closer and closer, and then as it crashed over me, like a huge wave. I went, “Oh, no, it’s a thought!” And then I was thinking. And then after some period of time, it was leaving, you know, like just like a wave recedes back into the ocean. It’s just dripping off of me. It was receding through me.

I went, “No, no, no. Don’t leave.”

Back into space. Back into the now. And then, I had no sense of time, so I don’t know how long, but then after some period there was like, “Oh no, it’s coming back. Another one!” It crashed over me, and then I was thinking again, and for some period of time, I was thinking. Then, like I said, you know, like the wave, the water of a wave recedes back into the ocean, it dripped off of me back into the ocean, and then they started coming quickly, more quickly, more quickly, more quickly, and finally, boom, I’m back. I’m thinking. In other words, I was back in the prison of my thoughts. Of thoughts. I don’t even know if they’re my thoughts. They were just thoughts. And that is actually the way it is.

Our thoughts come so quickly. We don’t notice the space between them. There’s always space between the thoughts, but our minds are so gross. It’s like we don’t see all the colors. We only see the big primary colors, the big blasting colors, and that’s all we see. We don’t see the shades and the fading in, fading out, and the able to colors, and we don’t see the space between the thoughts because we think we are who we think we are. Amazing. Just amazing.

So, practice is what we do. Or, that’s what we call what we do to deepen that center of gravity within us that allows us to release the thoughts and come back, again, and again, again.  That’s why we do it, because we want to discover what’s really here, which is our true self, which is love, real love, real joy, real bliss, truth, sat-chit-ananda. That’s one of the names of reality. Truth, awareness,  consciousness and fucking bliss, real bliss, real joy, real Ananda.

So then when I was chanting, I had the same experience that I had on the acid trip, you know, 30 years before. Not 30 years. At that point it might’ve been 10 years before, or eight years, but not quite as dramatic. But still, I saw the thoughts just going through, and I did not think them, so to speak, and I felt wonderful. Not empty, not dead, not nothingness. I felt joy and peace and love, and the thoughts were just floating through that, like a bird through the sky.

Okay. That’s that.

Q: Thank you very much. The question I have, since I was very young, I love books, and the books, for me, have deep meaning in many ways. I collect them more than reading them. When I read them, I reflect, and I have several thousands of books, mostly yoga, Ayurveda, from India. They’re in boxes. And it’s almost like an addiction because, very briefly, I’ll be 62. I never touched a cigarette in my life. I have been listening to Krishna Das with my ears since 1999, and with my heart in the last two or three years, but I don’t have children. I live a good life, but I never owned a car, I never owned anything. I’ve never been drunk in my life. I love to drink with my food. So, the books, to me, are so meaningful. And I know you recommended books, you know, of saints, and I have several of those, but sometimes I just look at them and I feel them in this, you know, language of communicating. They remind me to be a good person. They remind me to look at the highest. So, I would like,