Call and Response Ep. 71 | Life Is A Teaching

“There’s nothing in this world that doesn’t have some dissatisfaction associated with it. Either you have what you don’t want, or you don’t have what you want, or you have some combination of the two. Or, you just recognize that everything is like that… That’s the way it is. You can’t squeeze water from a stone.” – Krishna Das

Where were we, oh, yeah…

So, India, you know, you walk down the street, you see Durga Travel Agency. You see Krishna Insurance Agency. Sri Ram Carding Agency. Everything is, they’ve got everything, it looks like everything’s Holy until you look a little closer. But in America, you know, we don’t have the… spirituality has infused the culture of India for many thousands of years. Now, who knows what’s going on but at least… but here, our own culture, Western culture’s a few hundred years old, right? Right? Hello. Hello? Anybody home? Am I right? I don’t know. I think so, right? The cultural, so-called cultural revolution or whatever? No, that was something else. The Age of Enlightenment. Ha. What a name, huh?  So, you know, it’s a few hundred years old and it’s based on the world of the senses and sense perception, intellectual understanding of all that. As far as India, as the East is concerned, that’s a very narrow bandwidth. A very limited understanding of things. But my point is that, here in the West, being born as who we are, with a very Westernized sense of self, sense of ego, so to speak, when we do these practices, we should understand or we could understand, I don’t like the word “should” because I never liked anybody to say that to me. “You ‘should’ do this.” And I’d just do the other thing. Absolutely. The exact opposite. Which is why Maharajji never told me to do anything, except “go away,” which I didn’t do. Which is why He told me to go away, because He didn’t want me to go away. But He knew that, you know, how it goes. So, yeah.

It would be good if we understood that adding chanting, that we should see practice as adding a new, adding something new to what’s already in our lives. And it’s something that doesn’t necessarily have to be understood intellectually to a great degree. You have to kind of understand why it is you’re doing what you’re doing, but how it works is not, is not, can’t be known in a conceptual way by the intellectual understanding because these practices work under the radar. And that’s an important thing to keep in mind because a lot of times we’ll do practice and we’ll be like, “I’ve been meditating for 18 minutes, I don’t feel a damn thing. Oh, there’s something. Hm. Oh, yeah. Ok. That’s nice. Oh, wait. Where’d it go? Oh my goodness. This is no good. I can’t do this. Wait. Maybe I can.” So, that’s our meditation practice, right there, pretty much. We think. We think. We think. We think. We think. So,  what we understand, what we can realize when we add a spiritual practice through our daily lives, that practice is designed to release us, little by little, from the tyranny of our thoughts and our emotions and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves all the time. The 24-7 kind of critique that goes on all day and all night. And these practices have the ability to do that, whether we understand how they work not, which we really can’t understand. Like, we don’t, if you’re sick and you take an antibiotic, you may not understand how it works, but it worked. Then it screwed up your intestines, but at least it saved you from pneumonia, you know. That’s a good thing. What is the sense of having intestines if you’re dead? That doesn’t make any, that’s not useful. It’s going to be quite an afternoon. Anyhow, so the chanting, that’s why, the way I share this practice is really the way I do it, which is really, I really don’t try to manipulate myself and my emotions into having some particular kind of experience. Like, I don’t try, I’m not trying to get all ecstatic, or all blissful. You know? Because my understanding is that that’s our true nature.  It’s who we are already. And of all the so-called ecstatic, ecstasy stuff, like, I hate going to ecstatic chant weekend at Omega. It’s a lot of pressure. What if I don’t feel ecstatic? You know? I mean, I’ll hide in my room? What should I do? You know? But that’s the point, you know, if we have some idea in our heads about what it’s supposed to be and what we want it to be, we’re going to be very depressed because it’s not really, we’re not going to get it that way, because… Who was it, Groucho Marks? Said he never wanted to join a club that would actually invite him? You know, because, you don’t want anything you can conceive of or imagine could never be enough, because you’re conceiving and imagining it from your own programmed reality right now, which is reaction to everything else that’s going on. It’s not a free imagination. It’s a programmed response. And then you get it and then it’s not enough. And you’ve spent your whole life trying to be a sadhu from India when you’re really a jerk from Long Island. It just is not going to work. “Believe me,” said the jerk from Long Island. So, let’s try to remember that, when we add this practice to our lives, we’re adding, it’s like a medicine we’re taking into ourselves which cures us, little by little, from the disease of believing everything we think. We believe everything we think. That’s so fucking crazy I can’t believe it. I’m sorry. I told you. I’m going to stop right there. Why do we believe everything? We wake up in the morning, “I’m such a piece of shit,” you know, and we go through the whole day pooping on ourselves. And we don’t even question that. Like, we don’t question, “Why do I think that?” “Where did that thought come from? Why did it arise?” Forget about thinking, trying to figure out why we believe, that’s a whole other ballgame. But where does this thought come from, you know. We just completely identify with that stuff. Of course, it’s not completely, because it could never be completely, because we are actually, the thoughts are actually happening in, within us. It’s a very, I’m not going to edit myself, ok? You deal with it. Go to the video tape. The thoughts are actually happening within us. We’re not thinking them. They are floating through our awareness and when the awareness meets the thought, consciousness meets the thought, we would say, “I’m thinking.” But that’s not what’s happening. It’s the thought. It’s the thought becoming, lighting up inside of our consciousness. And, but we’ve been doing that our whole lives so it’s very difficult to actually see it. But when you do some practice, you start to have a different, develop a different perspective on things. It happens naturally, that you begin to see things differently. You even begin to see yourself differently. And then when you see yourself differently, you wind up acting differently and feeling differently and being attracted to different people and being attracted, and entering into different situations that you might never imagine that you would be interested in before. And that’s how these practices work. They change us from within. So, that’s the good news and the bad news because it means you have to stay living in the weird life that you’re living and just add a practice to it. You can’t go anywhere. There’s no sense trying to create another you. Believe me. I tried to create another me for ages and I happily failed. You can’t. We’re who we are. So now, let’s deal with that, right?   It’s deal-able with, fuck it. We can deal with it. It’s not going to kill us. Well, it might. But asking the ego or the mind to kill the mind, to destroy the sense of separateness, which is ego, is like, Ramana Maharshi said, “It’s like asking the thief to be the policeman. There will be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.” So, you add the practice to your life and you just do it. You find one that works for you for a while or that you like, that’s what that means, like, I like chanting. And once I asked Siddhi Ma, who was one of Maharajji’s greatest devotees and She took care of us for many years after He left the body. I said, “Ma, you know, should I meditate or should I chant?” And She looked at me, She said, “Well, what do you like to do?” Now, my mother never told me that what I liked to do could ever be good for me. And now my spiritual mother was saying, “Yeah. What you like to do is good for you. You can do that.” And that was fantastic. Another thing She said, which is, She said that Maharajji never asked Her to meditate in 40 years with Him. 40. Years. But He told Her, asked Her to do, to repeat these Names, like we’re doing this practice, it’s called “japa” or in this case it’s called “kirtan” where you do it out loud. Chanting. But He said that the more subtle, deeper or higher states of mind, which we, you know, we might think we’re aspiring to, they can’t be brought about by the use of our own personal will. What that, it’s like, trying to pick yourself up like this. You can’t. No matter how hard you try. You can never pick yourself up like this. Because once again, anything we can imagine or conceive of can’t be something that’s beyond who we think we are. Which is who we are. Who we really are is beyond is much deeper than who we think we are. And so, when I share this practice with people, I say, “Just sing, and when you notice you haven’t been paying attention, sing. And when you notice you haven’t been paying attention, sing.” And, you know, because if you’re paying attention, you see, it’s almost impossible for more than a billionth of a second to actually stay with it. When you’re really, really right there razor sharp. But you keep coming back. And what we’re doing is training ourselves to just let go of the stuff that beats us up all day long, all life-long. Whatever it is. And it’s different than pushing away. We are not pushing a