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 October 24, 2020

Hello. Namaste everybody. How are you doing?

Let’s take a minute to just calm down and deepen and expand into this heart space that we all share. Everything exists within this vast space, this presence. This is Being, not the verb, but the noun, “Being,” and when we chant, when we repeat the name, we are turning towards this presence. So, here is where we are, and why we do practice is to recognize where we truly are, which is in our own true Being.  It’s a vast, vast presence, inside of which we all live. Everything is within this presence. This presence is eternal and spontaneously present, this moment, always. And it’s only our thoughts, our emotions, our attachments and aversions that block our access to who we truly are.

So, it all comes back to remembering. At first, we remember to remember to look, and eventually we actually remember this presence. We re-recognize, we re-cognize this presence. It’s like coming home after being away for a long time. When you first get home, after being away, you fall down on the bed or into a chair and everything let’s go, and you’re just happy to be home. You forget where you’ve been. You don’t think about where you’re going. You just relax into yourself.

When we do practice, it is not important to be evaluating how we’re doing. We’re simply planting seeds, so to speak. We don’t stand over them to watch and see if they’ve grown yet. We plant the seeds, and then we plant another seed, and another, and then we go about our day, and those seeds grow. That action of coming home again, again, and again, keeps working on us through the day, and the magnetism, or the gravity, of our true nature becomes more and more real to us.

All the names that we chant are the names of this place that we live, in which we live, our own true nature. All the different names, all the different traditions, all the different lineages, all the different practices, they’ve only been brought to this world to bring us home. So, whatever you’re attracted to in terms of practice, follow that. See where it takes you. Listen to your heart. If you don’t trust yourself, what will you do? Even if you listen to advice from someone, a teacher, a yogi, a saint, whatever, you’re listening, you’re evaluating, and you’re seeing if you relate to that in your own being. So, if you don’t trust your own feelings, you’ll never be able to trust anything or anyone.

It’s not something that’s easy to live in for us at first, but because it is true, because our hearts do know, it’s inevitable that, as we practice, as we live, as we learn, as our hearts are purified of our attachments and aversions, this is where we move into our own self, our true self, which is the self of all, which is the great self of all, this fast presence.

Q: HI there, KD. First of all, I want to thank you very much for the email that you sent me. You probably get hundreds of them, so you might not remember.

I remember.

You did.  Yeah, it helped soften a very unquiet mind since I left the hospital from, septicemia is what I had, but what you said in the email about Ram Dass and how he felt through those first, I think you said two years, might not have been, that he just lost all sense of everything, I lost all sense of everything during that time, and that feeling of being lost was, well, it hit me like a train. I thought, wow, I’m a pretty spiritual person, I thought, “Yeah, you know, I can, you know, taken in by ambulance, you know, they give you gas now and you think you’re fine,” but in fact that wasn’t the case at all, and what I’m trying to say is, I’m not asking you a question. I’m putting forward my appreciation for your help in that communication that you gave me over the internet. It was, the suffering was worse when I left the hospital, because I thought I’ll never get back to this again. I’ll navigate back into the meditation, chanting practice, but your email, it gave me hope, and I appreciate so much for what you did because, you know, I was in a kind of a brain fog, and I’ve written something down here because I still have brain fog.

Well, that’s why we don’t hold on to things, you know? That’s why we practice letting go, whatever it is we’re thinking or imagining or feeling when we do our practice, right? We don’t want to get caught in holding on to like, a pleasant, little peaceful spot and pushing away negativity. What we’re training in, is letting go. So, the next time a big dark cloud comes into your life, number one, you remember, “Oh, this is a dark cloud. Didn’t this happen? Yeah. this happened like three months ago. I remember that. And then it was gone. Now it’s back. I guess it’ll go again.”

Number two. This is all thought. All the things, even when you say, “I know it’ll happen again.”

Really? You don’t know that. You don’t know that, but you’re polluting this moment with that negative, let’s forget the word “negative,” with that feeling of fear that it’s going to happen again. “Will I be ready?”

This is not, these are real feelings, and we can’t kill them. We can’t push them away, but we can be with them in a different way than usual, because we know we can be aware. “Okay. I’m really stuck in this shit now. Okay. I’m still stuck. It’s been 32 seconds and I’m still stuck. How long is this going to go on?” et cetera, et cetera.

Right? And then something will happen, and it’ll dissipate. This is life, you know? And no matter what we’re feeling, we’re here. So, that’s why practice is so important for us, remembering to come back to the mantra, to the breath, to the Name, this develops inner strength and courage, also, because we see that we can let go. We get the strength to let go. Nothing can grab us and never let go. We can let go. That’s the option we have.

It’s not pushing away, though. You understand that? It’s not saying, “I don’t want this. Get away, get away.”

Because it gets stuck to your hands then. So, it’s not about pushing away. It’s about recognizing we’re stuck again. “Hello? How are you? You got me, bastard. I can’t believe you came back. Well, enjoy eating me alive because it won’t last.”

And then you just naturally, because of the practice you’ve done, you actually pay less attention to it. You see, it’s only when we’re caught by something, that it grabs our attention, that we respond. If we’re not paying attention, it’s like maybe you’re watching a movie on television, and there’s trucks going by the street outside. You don’t hear them while you’re watching the movie. They’re there. They’re going by, they’re roaring through the street, motorcycles, everything, but you’re not aware of it because your attention is on the film, the movie. Right? So, as you get stronger in practice, you’re able to keep your attention on the name, on the mantra, on the breath, on being here, and those clouds that come, they just pass through and they don’t grab you the same way, because you are not allowing your attention to be sucked up by them. But this only comes through practice. Practice, practice, practice. If you want to learn to play an instrument, practice, practice, practice. Like the guy in New York city who gets into a cab walking down the street and he’s looking for Carnegie Hall, and he says to this guy he meets on the street, “Hey, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?”

And the guy goes, “Practice, practice, practice.”

So that’s the way it is. Keep saying that to yourself. “Practice, practice, practice.”

And whenever you remember that, and you’re able to sit down for two minutes, not three minutes, just two minutes and settle, allow yourself to settle like a leaf falling from a tree, gradually, lightly touches the ground. Just try it. 20 times a day, just sit down, whenever you remember, sit down and just let everything go, just for a minute. It’s a really big thing and that will change your whole life. Let everything go, all the bullshit you tell yourself about yourself, all the stories, all the fantasies, all the imaginations, all the wants, and the don’t wants, just sit down and let it go, again and again and again, for just a minute. Don’t try. Let go. Release. Breathe. Just feel the breath. So, give it a shot. See what happens.

I’ll do that. And again, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Bye.

Q: How are you doing?

Good.

I just noticed on some of your videos that you posted, that your right pinky finger is slightly bent. Mine is that way, too, and I was just curious, it’s a silly question.

First, let me ask you, how did that happen to you?

How did that happen to me? My brother stepped on it with an ice skate when I was quite young.

I had much more fun doing it.

Did you?

Yeah. I had been… on a Friday night, this is back in 1966, I was on the basketball team at my college, and on Friday night I took a thousand micrograms of Sandoz acid, and by Sunday morning, like about 36 hours later or more, I guess I started to come down and I was lying in bed and I heard this banging on the door downstairs, and I just thought it was part of the trip, so I didn’t pay attention, but it didn’t stop. It kept banging, banging. So I, I felt like, you know how a dirigible floats through the air, you know, it kinda doesn’t really… I kind of floated downstairs and I opened the door, and there’s the coach of the basketball team. We had a game that afternoon in Queens, and I hadn’t