Call and Response Ep 85 |Dada Mukerjee, Maharajji, and the Practice of Ram Naama
“When we chant, when we repeat the names mentally, physically, or when we even hear the names being repeated, when we chant, all we have to do is come back again and again to the sound of the name. We don’t have to manipulate our emotions to feel anything special. There’s no failing and there’s no getting anything. You simply come back, because you’re coming back to a flow, a living flow of grace.” – Krishna Das
So, the story goes like this.
Maharajji was staying in Allahabad at Dada’s House, which wasn’t really Dada’s house. It was Maharajji’s house, and it really was, because Dada had been living in a small apartment.
Let me tell you about Dada. Dada was a communist economics professor, and he had absolutely no interest in religions and spiritual things at all. He was a good person, but he had no… his wife and auntie and mother, who lived with him, they were all into all that stuff, but he had no interest, and he had a group of friends who also had no interest in that stuff. So, one day he and his friends were sitting around drinking their tea, and his wife and aunt were getting ready to go outside to leave the house.
So, Dada said, “Where are you going?”
And they said, “Well, there’s this small house across the street that we hear this saint comes and visits, and we’ve been waiting, and we heard he’s there. So, we’re going to see him.”
“Good. Go.”
So, they left, and they came back in about a minute and Dada said, “What happened? Why are you back?”
And his wife said, “Well, we walked into the house. It was a small mud house and a dark room. Couldn’t see very well…” So, they kind of had to bend over and come in the room, and just before his wife was sitting down, the Baba there said, “Jao, go.”
But she said, she tells Dada, “I couldn’t believe he really wanted us to go. We just came. So, I sat down, and a minute later he looked at me and called me by my name.”
“Kamala, go home. Your husband’s friends are waiting for their tea.”
How he knew her name is also a mystery. So, this piqued Dada’s curiosity. So, the next day he goes across the street with them, and they walk into this little mud house.
And as soon as they walk in, the Baba gets up from the cot that he’s sitting on, grabs a hold of Dada’s hand and starts walking across the street to Dada’s house, dragging Dada along behind him.
And he says to Dada, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you.”
Okay. Right. You just pulled up to the Stop-and-Shop, and you came out with your groceries and some homeless guy comes up to you and says, “From now on, I’ll be staying with you,” as he gets into your car?
I don’t think so.
But Dada being Dada, and India being India, this Baba comes in and sits down and the people from across the street all come to this house now, and all the other devotees start showing up and the Ma’s go into the kitchen. They start cutting fruit and prasad is served. And the whole thing starts.
And it continued. However, that house was owned by a relative of Dada’s, and after a year or so, or some period of time, Maharajji started telling Dada, “You’re going to have to leave this place. You need to get a house. You need to get a house.”
But they had absolutely no money. They were dirt poor. Dada used to tutor. Like I said, he was an economics professor, but he used to tutor students and stuff just to make enough money to live. So, every time Maharajji came and said, “Do you have a house yet?” Dada didn’t say anything.
So, finally Maharajji says, “Okay, I’ll build it.”
And so, this house was built and Dada was moved into it with his family.
And from that point on, Maharajji came there to that house and it was a bigger house with a big sitting room, and over time, Dada gradually became a devotee. And he’s written two books that are really lovely. One is called “By His Grace,” and the other is called “The Near and the Dear,” in which his premise is that he didn’t learn anything from Maharajji at all. He learned how to become a devotee from the other devotees who were already pukka, who already knew how to do it. And it’s a wonderful book. It’s really good.
However, one year Maharajji goes off on a pilgrimage with Siddhi Ma, Jivanti Ma, and Siddhi Ma’s husband, who had become a very close friend of Dada’s. And they went to Calcutta, and they went up to Dakshineswar.
Now, when Dada was a young boy, he had come home from college in the summer, and in those days, you could buy a day pass on the public transportation, and you could go as many places as possible in one day. So, in order to say that he had gone there, Dada had decided to go to Sri Ramakrishna’s Temple in Dakshineswar, this Kali temple where Sri Ramakrishna, who was a great saint, had lived, not because he was interested, but because it was a tourist place now. So, he went there and he pranamed to the Murti. Then there was a courtyard. I haven’t been there, but I think there’s nine Shiva Temples, It’s a small little mandir. It’s like this high, each one with a Lingam, and it’s a big courtyard. It’s the middle of the afternoon. It’s probably 120 degrees. But in order to say that he’d done it, Dada goes in front of each one and he goes like this, and then he goes to the next one. He goes like this, and then he goes to the next one.
He turns around and there’s some bulky gentleman standing there saying to him, “Come, I’ll give you a mantra.”
And Dada says, “I won’t take your mantra.”
“Yes, you’ll take it. You’ll take it and you’ll do it.”
“No, I won’t. I won’t do it.”
And then this Baba says, “Yes, you’ll do it. You’ll do it after you do your Gayatri.”
So, Dada was shocked. The Gayatri mantra is… when a Brahmin boy is initiated, he gets a thread and the Gayatri mantra. Now, Dada had been initiated by his father, who died very shortly after his initiation. So, in order to honor his father, he did the Gayatri mantra every day when he took a bath. But it wasn’t a spiritual thing, it was just to honor his father. How this Baba knew what he was doing? He said, “You’ll do it after your Gayatri.”
So, Dada said, “Okay, give it to me.”
So, this Baba tells him this mantra. Dada turns around, pranams to the Murti. He turns around again. Nobody there. Wow. A huge courtyard. I mean, just gone.
So, he thought, “This is very strange.”
So, now maybe 30 years later, Maharajji is traveling with this group, and they go to Ramakrishna’s Temple and as they go there, they walk by the courtyard and Maharajji casually points, and he said, “See there. That’s where I gave your Dada his mantra.”
Dada had no idea. He never connected that event with Maharajji, but he did that mantra every day because he said he would.
So, one time in Allahabad, during the time of one of the melas, one of the great gatherings, the festivals at Prayag, where the three rivers come together, a very sacred place, Maharajji left early in the morning, and he told Dada that he would meet him there on the banks of the Ganga in the evening.
So, that evening, Dada goes to Prayag, and he’s walking around on the banks of the Ganga looking for Maharajji. It’s nighttime, and he has this young servant boy with him, and they’re walking. They don’t see anything. Where’s Maharajji? They don’t know. And the servant boy is getting anxious and says, “Dada, we should go back. Maybe Maharajji has gone there. We should go back. We should, it’s late.”
And Dada was just standing there, and he wouldn’t go, but he was also concerned because the boy was so upset and this and that, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a boat appears right in front of them, and Maharajji is on the boat, and he says, “Dada, what were you doing? What are you doing?”
And Dada wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t say anything.
“Tell me, what are you doing? Why are you here? Why are you here?”
He said, “You said you would meet me here. So, I stayed.”
“Why didn’t you go back? It was late, then you didn’t see me. Why didn’t you go back?”
“You said that you would come. So, I stayed.”
“Oh, and what were you doing? What were you doing?”
Dada was quiet.
“What were you doing?” Finally, he said, “Tell me.”
He said, “I was taking Ram’s name.”
“Ah.” Maharajji goes, “Ram nam karne se sab pur ho jate hain.”
From going on repeating the names of God, everything is accomplished.
And he said this to us many times. And this is somebody who actually knows what’s going on in the universe. This is not like a chai wala on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 14th Street, although you never know.
So, through the repetition of the names, everything is accomplished. I mean, how difficult is that to understand, word-wise? Very simple, right? You do this, then that.
However…Personally, I mean, it’s now more than 50 years since I heard that. If I really believed it, if I had the karmas to believe it, if I didn’t have all the tamasic nonsense in my emotional body, what else would I be doing but Raam Naam all day long? So, that’s what I ask myself.
So, Maharajji didn’t teach much. He didn’t give lectures. He didn’t write books. He basically said that the Westerners were qualified for the five limbed yoga. Eight limbed yoga, right? Ashtanga yoga. This is Paanchtanga Yoga. Eating, drinking tea, sleeping, gossiping, and wandering around. This was the yoga that we Westerners were qualified for.
Unfortunately, I think it’s true.
He used to say to us Westerners, he said, “You can get everything from devotion.” He said, “You don’t need yoga.”
And even, one time I asked Siddhi Ma many years later, I said, “Ma, should I meditate?” I’ve taken a lot of meditation courses with Tibetan Lamas, Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, all this really powerful, big-time stuff, and I like to fool myself and pretend I know what it’s about. So, I said to her, I said, “Ma, should I meditate? Or should I chant?”
She said to me, “What do you like to do?”
Hello? My mother never told me that what I’d like to do would be good for me, but this Ma, my real Ma…
And then she said something very interesting.
She said, “Krishna Das, in 40 years with Maharajji, not once did he ask me to meditate. He asked me to do Japa, to remember the name, to repeat the name, and to serve others. But he never asked me to meditate.” And she said, “Maharajji said that the more subtle, higher states of consciousness cannot be brought about with the use of personal will.”
In other words, you can’t. It’s like Ramana Maharshi said, “It’s like asking the mind or the ego to kill the mind or ego. It’s like asking the thief to be the policeman. There’ll be a lot of investigation, but no arrest will ever be made.” The ego, the will that comes from the sense of a separate self, the “me” will never do what’s necessary to dissolve itself fully. It wants to live, it wants to keep its separateness, which in some of the, like in Dzogchen meditation or in Mahamudra, it isn’t the use of the will. It’s a different type of meditation, also. So, it’s interesting.
Now I want to… Robert’s not the only one who can read stuff. I want to read stuff.
Where are you? Not that.
So, we were talking this morning. Robert was talking about surrender in different contexts. But here’s what Ramana Maharshi said. One of the things. I’m going to read you a few things.
“Surrender to Him and abide by His will. Whether he appears or vanishes, await His pleasure. If you ask Him to do as you please, it is not surrender, but a command to Him. You cannot have him obey you and yet think that you have surrendered. He knows what is best and when and how to do it. Leave everything to Him. His is the burden. You have no longer any cares. All your cares are His. Such is surrender.”
This is Bhakti. This is devotion.
It’s a nice idea, but how do you do that? How do we give up? How do we let go of our stuff? How do we let go of all the things? Like Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was saying: your stories, all this stuff, all the things you think you need, that you want. How do you let go of that and really turn it, really let it be?
So, when we chant, when we repeat the names mentally, physically, or when we even hear the names being repeated, when we chant, all we have to do is come back again and again to the sound of the name. We don’t have to manipulate our emotions to feel anything special. There’s no failing and there’s no getting anything. You simply come back, because you’re coming back to a flow, a living flow of grace. Like Robert said the other day, these names are the sound form of reality, of what’s beyond form. And so, as we become more and more familiar with letting go and returning, letting go, and returning to the name, to the sound of the name, every time we come back, it’s a very big thing.
Most people, like I’ve said before, they get born, they graduate high school, they drink some beer, and they die, and that’s it. They’re not here for one second in a whole lifetime.
So, if we’re at all involved in this situation, it’s because our own karmas are blossoming right now in our lives, bringing us to this place where we might be able to move towards our own hearts in a new way, in an ever-deepening way.
Here’s another quote.
“The guru is within. Meditation is meant to remove the ignorant idea that he or she is only outside. If he be a stranger whom you await, he’s bound to disappear. So, what’s the use of a transient being like that? In order to receive the grace of the guru, one of two things must be done. Either surrender yourself because you realize your inability and need a higher power to help you, or investigate into the cause of the misery by self-inquiry, and so, merge in the Self. Either way, you will attain freedom from misery. God or guru never forsakes the devotee who has surrendered himself.”
Sometimes it seems like surrender might feel like driving a car with a blindfold on. Scary. But the reason that we have Saints, the reason that we know about these great beings, is because they have cultivated an attachment that keeps them here in physicality, and that attachment is compassion. They have no agendas. There’s nothing left. They don’t need anything. They’re finished. But because they know that there’s only one of us, and if there’s one person that thinks that they’re separate, then there’s no real freedom yet. There’s only one being here. We’re all parts of that. And if one of us is hurting, we’re all hurting. And they know that in a way that’s beyond what we could understand. They experience that directly.
Maharajji, every minute of every day, He was taking suffering from people. He was giving. There’s a prayer to him called the Vinaya Chalisa. “Vinaya” means “to beg,” or what’s another word, Robert, for “Vinaya?”
“Plead.” Like to plead or beg. To ask for something a polite way.
“And you wander like a God distributing alms to all you meet.” And this was like Maharajji. Everywhere he went, he was giving things; children, jobs, curing people from diseases, twenty-four-seven. And the thing about these great beings is that they have hearts as wide as the world. So, at the same time that they can feel and experience our suffering, it doesn’t destroy them. There’s nothing in there to take it personally.
Like I told you the other day.. did I tell you? I don’t know where I was. I told somebody. When I was going to kill myself in India, in the Temple, Maharajji, He said to me, “You can’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.”
Because he never thought of himself. There was nothing in there, no person in there thinking about themselves. That’s the real death. And these great beings have died that real death. They’re only visible because we need them. And the more we understand that, the more we trust, the more we can trust life itself, that it’s leading us in the right direction. And that’s hard to do, especially if you read the papers. It doesn’t look like that in this world.
Here’s another one.
“Place your burden at the feet of the Lord of the universe who accomplishes everything. Remain all the time steadfast in the heart, in the transcendental, absolute. God knows the past, present, and future. He will determine the future for you and accomplish the work. What is to be done will be done at the proper time. Don’t worry. Abide in the heart and surrender your acts to the divine.”
One way or another, we have to lay our burden down. We have to lay this burden of this delusion of feeling that we’re separate from other beings. Like right now, everybody sitting in this room probably thinks they’re different from the person sitting next to them. I mean, it’s reasonable, isn’t it? It looks, they look different, but what’s inside of each one of us is exactly the same. What’s looking out of our eyes, hearing through our ears, feeling through our skin, tasting in the tongue, smelling through the nose, what’s doing, that’s all the same in each being. That presence, that awareness, consciousness is the same. That’s one. There aren’t two of that. There’s one in the whole universe and world. Our true nature is that, and these names that we chant are the names of that place. So, as we get more familiar with letting go, coming back, letting go, coming back, we move more deeply into our own hearts, into our own being.
Here’s a tough one.
“The ordainer controls the fate of souls in accordance with their Prarabdha karma.” Prarabdha karma, which is the amount of karma to be worked out in this life. “Whatever is destined not to happen, will not happen, try as you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to prevent it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain in silence.”
And when he says “silence,” it doesn’t mean physical silence. It means the silence of the Self, the peace of being. So, it would be nice to even just touch that for a minute. Forget about remaining in it all the time. But that’s an interesting one. Most of us think we’re running our show. It gives me a good laugh sometimes. Like when I stub my toe, my day is ruined. What show am I running?
So, ultimately the first and most important thing for us to do is to learn how to let go, is to quiet the mind a little bit, is to move out of the flow, the crazy flow of daily life, of daily worldly life, which is full of stuff and buttons that are getting pushed all day long. What we like, what we don’t like, what we want, what we don’t want, what we have, what we don’t have. This is like a whole sphere of stuff that we’re born into, and we die. But we, inside of those few years that we’re here, we can find a way to be in it, and not of it, but it means some type of practice has to be done. It just doesn’t happen. You can trip and fall in it, but it’s not too often that happens.
And so, for me, the chanting has been an ever-deepening experience. There doesn’t seem to be a bottom to it. It’s always, every time I sit down to chant, it’s different, and the same in a way, but also, it’s ever deepening. One gets more and more familiar with the feeling of just being here and letting go again and again to whatever pulls you out of this or that.
So, this mantra, this sloka is to Hanuman, “that Mahadev, that great God Mahakala, the eternal goodness, the blissful one who bestows liberation by allowing seekers to merge into his own state, as well as bestowing the enjoyment of all one’s cherished objects of desire.”
So, this is not a renunciate path, this is a path of honoring the desires that you have, and allowing the desires that are good for us to come to fruition. We’re hungry. We’re born hungry. We have all kinds of hungers and a certain amount of food has to be eaten, otherwise we die. And not all food is physical food. We have desires. We have desires for certain things, and sometimes you just have to get those things in order to complete something. And this sloka talks about Hanuman as being the force that actually makes it possible for us to get those things.
And when I was with Maharajji, I was twenty-three years old. The only job I ever had was like, driving a school bus around here in Kingston, and most of the Westerners there were around the same age. There were a few actual adults there, but very few. None of us had lives. We hadn’t done anything. I look back and I think, “Whoa, this is really interesting,” because I, not only had I not done anything, I didn’t want to do anything.
I wanted to stay in India for my whole life. And there were other people also.
I, did I tell you about where was? Did I tell you the story about my friend who was standing on the steps in Kainchi? I’ll tell you again. So, I saw a friend of mine standing on the steps in Kainchi. She had just come back to India with her husband for the first time after Maharajji left the body, since Maharajji left the body. And we were singing Chalisas at the temple, and I noticed her standing there just staring at the tucket, the cot that he used to sit on. She was just staring, and I thought, “Whoa, what’s going on over there?” And after we finished singing, she came over to me and she said, Krishna Das, I think you’re one of the few people who could understand what I’m going to tell you.”
I said, “What?”
She said she was standing there on the spot, looking at the tucket where he used to sit, and she remembered standing in that very spot watching Maharajji, and she remembered thinking, this is 30 years before, she remembered knowing that she was home. She finally made it, and she’d always be right here. And she looked at me and she said, “What happened?”
Transferred. We were dragged there, and then we would drop-kicked back into our lives and all the desires. When Maharajji sent me back to America after two and a half years… He kept me in India. He got my visa extended twice, I think.
When he sent me back, “You have to go. You have attachment. You have attachment.”
And I said, “Baba, I’m just learning Hindi.”
“Too bad. Jao.”
I said, “What attachment?”
I gave everything away. I gave my jeans away. I sold my guitar, my car. I had maybe one small little cardboard box in the basement of my mother’s house with some holy books. That’s all I had left. I was never going back to America when I left. My program was “America… finished.” What attachment was he talking about? Now, I know. Every single thing that’s happened to me from that moment to this is what he was talking about. Every single thing. Every single thing.
Some of them cannot be spoken of here, but every single thing. That’s what he was talking about. And he could see it all. I mean, it was all sitting there for anybody to see, just all these uncooked seeds, these desires that just had to be worked out one way or another. India’s not the place to do that. It gets tricky. I’ve had friends who’d stayed in India a long time, and they get stuck in certain ways. They can’t quite get through some of their stuff. It’s not the place to work out certain karmas. New York on the other hand…
So, this thing about trust is a really big thing. There’s so, many reasons not to trust life, the way things are in the world right now and the way people are suffering and the violence and the wars, but trust is what we need inside. We need to trust the process that we’re going through. We need to trust the love and beauty that’s in our own hearts when everybody’s telling you “no.” When everything you read is telling you, “no, you can’t do that, you can’t trust, you have to do this, you have to do that.”
That doesn’t mean that we have to expose ourselves to danger. We need to take care of business and do what we have to do. But when it comes to the internal life, our internal work, our spiritual work, we have to find a way to unwind all that stuff and release all that stuff that we carry in our bodies, in our subtle bodies, all the emotional, all the betrayals, all the broken hearts. We have to find a way to let that stuff heal by releasing it again and again. Because the stories we tell ourselves, they go on and on just by themselves. We sit down and all we do is think.
So, until you add an anchor, until you put an anchor into the ocean, the ship’s just going to get blown around. So, the anchor is some practice, some object of concentration and a mantra, your breath, something else that you can come back to, and you cultivate that a little bit every day. You don’t try too much because then the ego gets involved and you start trying too hard and then you fuck everything up.
A little bit, more times a day. Every time you remember, just let go and then you’re gone again. Then you remember and you let go. Try not to let go when you’re at a red light because you know it’ll turn green before you can pay attention again. Somebody will wake you up.
So, when we have something to come back to, after a while begins to feel like coming back home. There’s a shift that happens. The reason I’m chanting today is because Maharajji forced me to chant. He ordered me and the Westerners. After he kicked out the Kirtan Wallahs, he ordered the Westerners to sing.
So, we had to sing all day long. We couldn’t even see him. It was like hell, it was horrible. Hare Krishna my ass, all day long. It was just, whoa. But because of that, I was forced to sing through every possible state of mind that could fucking arise. And they did. But I had to keep singing. Right now, you’re going to go home. You don’t have to keep singing. TV goes on, the 4,062 channels. You never have to turn it off, one channel to the other. We don’t have the space to go through what we have to go through to finally settle a little bit. You have to face, you have to feel that boredom. You have to like, sit in it. You have to allow it to be, and watch it dissolve. You have to go through the anger and then the memories of how many times you’ve been hurt and how many of “this one didn’t love you,” and how many of “this one took you away.” And all this. You have to sit there with it. You can’t push it away. You have to sit there with it, and you have to sing through it, chant through it. You can’t push it away. And then you think about, I mean… When I started thinking about my girlfriend back in America, Hare Krishna, and then I went, “Wait a minute. She broke up with me.” It went from one to the other and back and forth, this, but Hare Krishna kept going, and eventually something actually happened. Nobody.. who knew? really, you understand? I wasn’t doing it as… I was doing it because he told me to do it, not because I thought anything was going to happen. And after like, 400 years of Hare Krishna, I’m not going to tell you exactly what happened, but something happened and there was a shift and I understood how it works.
But you have to find that yourself. You have to have that experience. And it only comes if you’ll do the practice. You have to surrender to the fact that you need to do the practice, whatever practice is to you. It can be anything that works like that. But really the simplest thing is watching your breath. I mean, you’re not going to imagine that you’re going to go bodily to heaven just by watching your breath, but when you say Rama Rama Rama, you think, “Oh, this is so, good.” Oh yeah, bullshit. So, watching the breath or bringing the name in with the breath, but the point is don’t try to make something happen.
Your job is simply to pay attention, no more and no less. And it’s not easy. It’s ridiculously simple, but it is not easy. Nothing is required, except to pay attention to what you’re doing. And from that, everything else becomes possible.
Faith & Courage
Any questions or anything?
Anybody but Robert. I’m not qualified to answer his questions.
Okay. I’ll be brave. Give him the mic. Give him the mic. I’ll be brave. Robert had a question. Let me take a deep breath here.
RS: It’s a very simple question.
KD: I’ll give you a very simple answer.
RS: (Someone I know) is in India right now, and he texted me a photo of the Hanumanji at the Lucknow Neem Karoli Baba Temple.
Ha.
RS: So, I wondered, and he was saying that Babaji had spent some time in Lucknow. I knew he spent time in Allahabad, , I knew he spent time in Brindavan, but I didn’t know about Lucknow.
KD: Oh sure.
RS: If you could tell me about Lucknow. Is that an easy enough question?
KD: I think that’s okay. I think I handle that. Maharajji spent a lot of time in up UP, Uttar Pradesh, it was called, at and now it’s also, called Uttaranchal, the mountains.
He was mostly, most of the life that we saw of him was in UP, Lucknow, Khanpoor, Aligarh, He was everywhere it seems. There’s a very old temple, a Hanuman temple in Lucknow, in Aminabad, a very ancient Hanumanji temple, and he used to spend a lot of time there. It used to be outside of town and now it’s… but Tiwari told me an interesting story.
He said before this temple was built, there was an old Hanuman temple right by the river near this, the new temple, and he and Maharajji were walking by there, and Maharajji said to Tiwari, “Okay, do your puja here, your Shiva puja, right now.”
Now, this means like three and a half, four hours of puja, and he had no book. He had to do it all by…
But Tiwari said, “No, I’m not going to do that.”
“I said, ‘Do it! You do it, what I say.”
“I don’t care what you say, I’m not going to do it.”
“Why?”
He said, “Because the minute I sit down, you are going to run away. And you run away. You’ll leave me sitting here, and once I start my puja, I must finish. So, I’ll be sitting here for four hours by myself.”
“Nay nay. I won’t run away.”
“Yes, you will.”
“I won’t.”
“Yes, you will. Okay, promise me.”
He held his ears like this. This is like cross my heart and help to die in India. And they sat down, and Tiwari started the puja and Maharajji sat down, and He sat there the whole time right next to him and Tiwari’s doing the puja.
The other thing about it, Tiwari’s puja guru was also a very great saint, and he told Tiwari that when he did pu ja, he had to do it at the top of his lungs. And his voice was something like a chainsaw. Oh God, it was incredible, but like a chainsaw. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Okay. But anyhow, so, this was right by the end, the last minute, the last “Om,” and Maharajji lept up, and said, “You miserable shit. You made me stay here and I have to have so much to do!” And he ran away.
And that was right down below where the temple is now. There was an old Hanumanji there. He had so many devotees from Lucknow and all those places. Kanpur…
The man who was the manager after the temple was built, the first manager of the temple, had been the head jailer of Central jail in Agra. His name was Mahotra, and whenever somebody needed to be kind of, reigned in, Maharajji said, “I’m sending you to Central jail.” And he would send him to the Lucknow Temple, to this guy.
Maharajji had his own room in Central jail in Agra, his own cell that was kept empty for him. And he used to just go in there and they’d lock him in, but they’d find him walking around all night, and one time there was this, he had a devotee who was a really big dacoit, a bad guy, a criminal, and who had two guns, one registered with the government and one unregistered, which was for killing people. But he could sing the Ramayana, the Ramacharitamanasa very beautifully. And he had his own village in the jungle. It was like, he was like a king in his own village, and so he finally got caught and he was in central jail.
So, Maharajji went there, and He said to him, He goes up to his cell and he says, “I know you’re planning to escape. Don’t do it. Because if you escape my other devotee, who’s the head of the jail, will lose his job, and who’s going to support his family? Don’t do it.”
So, the guy literally didn’t escape, and one year later he was pardoned, and he was released forever.
That’s faith. Because he could escape. He could. He was a really powerful bandit, a big guy.
The way these people, I mean, this is how we learned about him. We watched how the Indian people, we observed, how they interacted with him, how they saw him. The reason we have the Hanuman Chalisa is because we saw they saw him as Hanuman. They Worshipped Maharajji as Hanuman himself.
And look, I’ve said before. We used to come to the temple every day. And they would give us this little yellow booklet with a picture of a flying monkey on it. I had like at least a hundred of these booklets in my room when finally, one day I said, “What is this?”
Right? And they said, “Oh, it’s a hymn to Hanuman.”
Oh. So, I thought, wow, if we learn this, we could sing it to Maharajji. We knew he wanted to spend more time with us, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. And we thought, okay, if we learn this, we’ll be able to sing to him and he’ll like that. And that’s exactly what happened. And here we are. We’re doing it now.
It all came from that little yellow booklet and that one little thought that he finally got into my thick skull.
But his old devotees, the Pukka devotees, the older ones, they worshipped him as Shiva. There was one guy, a very poor man who came from Aligarh. His name was Vishwambhar. I will never forget this guy. He used to come with a basket full of Puja articles, the trays and the plates and the lamps and the things in the ghee and everything. And he’d come outside Maharajji’s door and he’d prepare everything and he’d just stand there and wait. And Maharajji would be inside. He’d be saying, “Oh, he’s here and he’s got this and that. And he brought this and that. And he brought this kind of Prasad and that kind of Prasad.” He said, “Oh, I won’t go out. Okay, I’ll go out. No, I won’t go out. Okay, I’ll go.”
So, he’d come out, and this guy, he would do his puja and he’d be weeping, right? I mean, it was such an extraordinary sight. And he’d be doing his puja and chanting these mantras and weeping. Weeping. And finally at the end, he’d start doing the Arati and he’d, he would just go into Samadhi, and he’d just be standing there like that. And then he’d be kind of crazy. He came up to the westerners and say, “Who are you people? Are you the gods who have taken forms to be with Maharajji? Who are you?”
And Tiwari was like that, my Indian father was like that. He’d been with Maharajji for 40 years. The first time he met him, he was a school kid, maybe about eight years old. Maharajji had started coming, showing up in the hills, but he was kind of hanging out in the jungle, and he wouldn’t be with any adults, but he would come to see the school kids and he would do acrobatics for them and they would give him their lunches and stuff like that so he’d get something to eat. But he used to be able to put his arms on the ground like this and do a full somersault without picking his arms up, like whoop. And the kids, so, the kids would give him stuff to eat.
That’s nothing. Sai Baba used to take his intestines out and wash them and put ’em back in. Shirdi Sai Baba. He’d take his arms off and put them back on.
I mean, if it’s a dream, you can do whatever you want in your dream. It’s a dream for them.
Q: You’ve been talking about the faith that you witnessed around you there.
Yeah.
Q: But could you talk about the evolution of your own faith? Because when you first arrived, you couldn’t have had much faith and then somehow you got to a point where you would do what He told you to do. Could you talk about that evolution?
Let me think about it. It’s interesting. I was just on Maui, where Ram Dass lived the last 20 plus years of his life, and we were very close for many years, over 50 years. I first met Ram Dass in the winter of ’68-‘69. He was living at his father’s place in New Hampshire, and I heard about him from my friends, and I went to see him. And I walked into the room where he was sitting. He was sitting on the bed, and the bed was on the floor, and he had his eyes closed. He was leaning against the wall, and I walked in the room and without a word being spoken, without eye contact, the minute I walked into that room, something happened inside me, and at that moment I knew that whatever it was I was looking for was real. It was in the world and you could find it.
That was the beginning of the rest of my life.
And I was just on Maui, and I went to the house, Ram Dass’s house. It’s still there. There’s some people living there, keeping it together. And I went up to his room where we used to sit for hours, and I sat in the chair that I used to sit in, right next to his chair where he would spend a lot of time because he, after the stroke, he couldn’t walk. And I closed my eyes, and I was just sitting there and I thought, “Wait a minute. This is no different than the way we used to sit together.”
And it was so strong, the presence, the feeling, that I opened my eyes to see if was there, because he was so there, that what I felt was so, strong. And that feeling that I had at that moment was exactly the same feeling that I had in 1968 when I walked in that room. That presence which I felt for the first time in that room with Ram Dass, the first time, which I felt in India with Maharajji and after he left the body, whenever I was not too stupid and busy to pay attention, it was there.
And I saw that had been with me, unchanging, all these years. It had never changed. It was perfect as it is, and it never came and went. It was always here. I never thought of it as faith. That word kind of makes Westerners nauseous, but, the trust that I have, that the presence is with me all the time, even when I forget, is probably the biggest gift that I got from him.
One time I was sitting with him in a Parsi apartment building in Mumbai, in Christmas, 1972, and he was sitting on the bed and he would sit up, he’d lie down, he’d sit up, he’d lie down, turn this way and turn that way. I was just sitting on the floor doing my practice, which was like…
All I did was want to stare at him, because all the beauty of the universe was wrapped up in that blanket. It was like, my eyes did not, they wouldn’t go anywhere else. They just wanted to be right there. At one point, he sits up like this and he looks at me and he says, “Courage is a really big thing.”
And there was an Indian guy there. He said, “Oh, Baba, God takes care of his devotees.”
“Courage is a really big thing.”
And he laid down and went back to sleep.
I was like, “What’s going to happen?”
But there have been times in my life that all I had was the vaguest, most distant memory of that moment, and it was just enough to kind of make it to the next moment. The faith thing, it’s my experience that no matter how close I’ve gotten to being destroyed by one thing or another, every time I would fall off the cliff, he’d move the cliff and I’d fall on my face, instead of 10,000 feet to my death. That just happened so many times.
But a funny thing happened when I first met him physically. It was confusing because I was feeling him everywhere all the time after that first meeting with Ram Dass and then after traveling around with Ram Dass in the States for a year and a half before going to India. He was huge.
And then I saw this little guy in a blanket, and I thought like, “Wait a minute, how does all that fit into that blanket?”
I don’t know. It was like, how does this work? I got really confused. But I got over it. I got over it and I got completely attached to the body and I forgot about the space. So, that took a lot of getting over.
I don’t know. It’s not much of an answer, but when you go, the more you go through and survive, you can start to trust that you’re going to make it, regardless of how you feel. Sometimes it feels like you’re not going to make it, but we’ve all survived so many difficult situations in our lives and we’re still here. Maybe we could relax a little? I don’t know. What do you think?
Fear is a big thing. Fear is very crippling. But fear itself never hurt anybody. It’s a feeling that comes and goes. There’s reasons it arises in us for sure, but the more we get used to letting go of whatever pulls us away from whatever we are thinking about or concentrating on, every time you come back, it’s training, it’s mind training, and you get more used to what it feels like not to be lost in dreamland, or absorbed in thoughts, or thinking or planning, or the past.
I mean, every moment is either that everything, it’s either that you’re thinking about the past or imagining the future or judging how you are now. So, it gets easier and easier to notice the more you, the more practice you do, to notice when you’re gone. Of course, when you’re really gone, you don’t notice until you’re back.
But how does that happen? Shri, Ram, Jai, Ram, and you’re thinking about, “Oh man, what’s on Netflix tonight? Yeah, right. Okay.” Oh.
How did that happen that you notice you weren’t paying attention? That’s a great moment. Because we’re not doing that. We’re gone. And yet, oh, we woke up.
So, if you understand a little bit about cause and effect, nothing can happen without a cause. What could the cause be of waking up? We must have planted seeds of waking up already or we’d never wake up.
So, that’s the work we’ve already done, coming into fruition and waking us up, bringing us home. But don’t think about it too much. But it’s there. You notice, you come back.
I mean, I remember once I got asked to sing at this teacher training for this yoga studio. So, I showed up and the teacher who was going to train these poor people started haranguing them. And there were pictures of all the deities on the wall, and this person was going, “If you don’t know what all these, every one of these beings are, you’ll never be a good yoga teacher.”
I wanted to commit Hara Kiri. I just wanted to get out there. I couldn’t, but there was nothing I could do.
Man, the deities is who we are. It’s our true nature, home base. And we’re always home, but we’re not paying attention. So, all we have to do is train ourselves to let go of what’s taken us away, and come back. Let go, come back, let go. When you let go, you are back. You don’t have to then find back. You notice, you’re gone, you’re home. And then you try to stay with the sound of the name if that’s what you’re doing, or with the flow of the breath or whatever, but you can’t. The personal will can’t do that. You’re gone again, then you wake up, then you’re back, and you stay with the sound, but you’re gone. You just watch it happen again and again, over and over. And little by little you, you’re not gone so, long. That’s over time. One of the definitions of meditation is becoming familiar with getting used to being here.
Someone asked Ramana Maharshi, what’s the result of Raama Japa, the repetition of Raam’s name? He said, Raa is reality. Ma is the mind. Their union is the fruit of Raam. Japa, utterance of words is not enough. The elimination of thoughts is wisdom. So, the reality, when the mind merges with that reality… mind is an interesting word.
So, what we usually call mind is just thoughts. The mind is like the sky and the thoughts are like birds flying through the sky. The birds are not the sky. The mind is the awareness in which all of that happens, in which we’re always present, inside of that space.
There’s no place we could ever be except here, but our stuff pulls us away all the time, all day long, all life long, and then… next life.
Q: Thank you, KD.
Q: Thank you, first of all, and Nina and Robert, everyone for being here. You mentioned how in that experience with Ram Dass, you saw or felt what was real, and that was that everything you wanted could exist. And like beings like Maharajji, Neem Karoli Baba are love, I’ve heard you say. And they remove the dirt from your eyes so you can see your true self. And these things are, in my experience, easier around beings like yourself and Nina and Robert, and so on. And you mentioned how quickly we forget and fall off this mountain, and Grace will, you fall on your face instead of to a horrifying death. What can we do to maybe fall off that mountain less often? Like, this is easy because I can walk down the road and Krishna Das is live in front of me and chanting in a room with people. But by the time you leave, I’m picking up a six-pack, and hitting the weed showcase in Woodstock sounds good. Why is it so easily that we forget and like neglect things that feel so, in harmony and like chakras balanced, good. Just keep doing this and then before I’m out the door, I forget everything you said.
KD: That’s just who we are and there’s nothing to do about it. You have to be you. Inside of that, you are waking up slowly at your own speed. You can’t go faster, and you can’t slow down either. It’s happening at its own speed. It is a question of what you want. If we really wanted to be awake and present, really wanted, we would be, but we’re very conflicted. We have all kinds of things we want, so many programs running. You want this, you want that. But yeah, you take a little bit of that on the side, too. You’ve got to be you, but you’ve got to learn to love that, too and accept that’s who you are and just not fight it. No sense fighting who you are. But when you cultivate a practice, if we don’t plant the seeds of the things you want, we won’t get them. They don’t, the seeds don’t come from Outer space. They come from within us. The seeds of paying attention, the seeds of the repetition in the name, the seeds of coming back to the breath, the seeds of the mantras.
This is what we can do to help ourselves. All those practices, all those things. Reading the books about the saints, how they lived, what they did, getting that kind of inspiration in our lives. There’s so many videos about so many Great Saints, but I watch Korean serial killer movies. Hello? I could be watching a video about the 16th Karmapa, but I’m watching a Korean serial killer movie. That’s me. What can I do about it? Well, when it’s over, when this 49 episode thing is finally over, I’ll never watch another one. I’ve said that a few times. It’s just who I am. It’s okay.
But inside of that, at the same time I’m still doing a little bit of practice once in a while, and inherent in everything you said is a lot of self-judgment. And as long as you believe everything you think, you’re fucked. Just like the rest of us, we believe everything we think. Excuse me, why? Well, we do.
And the thoughts, they’re showing up in this moment from the past or from, they’re like waves coming off a big storm in the far-off ocean of time, and now they arrive here and we think we’re thinking, and then we think we’re not thinking. So, we’re just becoming aware of the thought in this moment.
And you go, “I’m thinking.”
No, you’re not. You’re just glued to that thing, identified with it temporarily until it dissolves. But those programs, those repetitive thoughts and unconscious ways that we limit ourselves and judge ourselves and criticize ourselves and all that stuff, we’ve really been trained well to do that. So, it takes time to unwind that stuff. It just does.
And really, I think of spiritual life as a ripening process more than anything else. You plant the seeds and as time goes on, they grow, and they literally change you from the inside. They change your experience. They change how you see yourself. They change how you go through your day. As these seeds that we ourselves plant along, with the grace to plant them in the first place, they change the way we navigate our lives. They change how we see other people. It’s like you’re born and there’s no sun and you grow up and it’s dark all the time, and you think this is the way it is because it’s always been that way. This is the way it is. And then, the sun starts to rise, and a little light comes into the world and all of a sudden everything looks different.
That’s what happens on the inside. Everything starts to look different, naturally, as we release our stuff because it is different. It’s not how we think it is. We are completely involved, more or less, with our subjective version of ourselves, and life, and people around us, and our judgments, the likes and dislikes.
The third patriarch of Zen said, “The great way is not difficult for those with no preferences.”
Okay, well next. So, yeah. So, anyhow, that’s the deal. So, you just have to chill. Everything that you think about yourself is something you think about yourself, but you do, and you believe it. We all do. That’s what makes us, that’s where we share the same kind of bandwidth, mostly. We can drive on the same roads and stop at the red and go on the green. We share a bandwidth, and as time goes on, it does change.
So, before we get there, Sri Ramakrishna, who was a very great saint in the 1800s, he talked about how the repetition of the name works. He said every repetition of the name is a seed, and just like a tiny seed can have a huge tree in it. So, does every repetition of the name have reality in it. And he said, the seeds of the repetition of the name are caught by the wind and they’re blown around. And some of those seeds land on the roof of an old house in the jungle somewhere. Right? And they get stuck between the clay tiles on the roof, and then time, seasons, snow, rain, sun, everything. Years go by, and the tiles begin to soften a little bit as time goes on. And when they get soft, the seeds start to grow, and the roots of the seeds start to grow. The seeds of the repetition of the name, they start to grow, and they destroy the roof of the house, and they keep growing, and they destroy the walls of the house.
He says, that house is who we think we are, our version of ourselves, our subjective, delusionary, separate self, and that separate self was created by Karmas. The house was built for certain reasons, but when the walls of the house are gone, there’s only open space. Nothing is lost. You recognize your oneness with the whole universe. You’re no longer limited to the house, which is who we think we are in this, that house.
But you notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, you’ll feel like this, or you’ll feel like that, or it’ll be blissful or anything like that, because it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point of it. The “what it feels like,” the experiences that might come as the house is being dissolved and broken down, and at the end there’s no walls. There’s no version of a “me” anywhere left. You’ve recognized reality.
So, that’s why you simply plant the seeds. You do your practice, and you live your life in the best way you can. And we try to treat other people the way we would like to be treated. That’s one thing, one possible thought to keep in mind as we go through our day, in terms of how we meet each moment, how we meet each person that arrives in our lives.
Because if we could treat other people the way we would like to be treated, the world would be a different place immediately. But it takes tremendous awareness and strength to be able to do that. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of work on oneself to release oneself from the grip of likes and dislikes and wants and all that stuff, to be freed from that so that you can be present. It’s something that takes time and dedication.
When singing the divine name becomes continuous, all other thoughts cease and one is in one’s real nature, which is invocation or absorption. We turn our minds outwards to things of the world and are therefore not aware that our real nature is always invocation. That’s from Ramana Maharshi, also. “Invocation” really means clinging to one thought, to the exclusion of all others. That’s the purpose of it. It leads to absorption, which ends in self-realization or to surrender.
Coming to America and the Vindhyavasini
Q: I was curious about what your re-entry was like for you, when you came back from India to the United States?
KD: Last year you said? You mean the first time?
Q: And how you kind of found your…
Well, my philosophy at that time… “Well, he’s sending me back, all right, fuck it, I’ll party.”
My idea was to get as far out on the limb as I could, and just before it broke, to come back to him. So, I got out on the limb as far as I could go, and just before it broke, He left the body. Talk about fucked. I was fucked forever. And I spent the next 21 years hating myself.
That’s how I came back.
It took a long time to get over that, because he actually wrote to me, He had somebody…
One day, He looked around, he said, “Where’s Krishna? Das?” The guy who knows everything.
They said, “Baba, You send him to America.”
“Nay. Tell him to come back. I want to see him. I want to hear him sing. Tell him to come back now.”
So, I got a letter. It’s a long story, but I didn’t go.
I betrayed… just like that, like nothing. I betrayed the love of my life as if it was nothing. I was so lost and so immersed in my own shit that I didn’t even know what I was doing, but just like that.
“I love him. I’m such a great devotee. I sing to Him,” and in a split second, I betrayed it as if it was nothing, and I had to live with that for a long time.
Just part of the show.
Anybody? Oh, hi.
Q: So, part of my rehabilitation from being strictly raised Irish Catholic has been following the teachings of Ram Dass, particularly his teachings about unworthiness and worthiness, and through my kind of contemplation about this, I’ve discovered it really shows up as self-hatred and self-loathing, and how this is stemming from the kind of indoctrination of fear by, really, the western religions, in my case, Catholicism. And in kind of investigating this, I found that the Eastern religions don’t, or just Eastern cultures, don’t really experience this phenomenon of self-hatred. There’s this story that Sharon Salzberg tells that she had an opportunity to ask His Holiness a question. And so, she asked him, what do you think of self-hatred?
And his Holiness answered, “What’s that?”
KD:
Q: Yeah. And so, what I’ve noticed is that the Eastern traditions have a much deeper sense of honoring and regard for the sacred feminine, which the Western traditions do not, and there’s rampant denial and repression of the sacred feminine and of women in general. And so, as you just spoke about your own experience with self-hatred, I can assume that you’ve had some experience with overcoming it.
KD: I’m an expert.
Q: I’m just wondering how your, one, your relationship with the sacred feminine on the subtle plane evolved as you hopefully overcame your self-hatred, and two, how your relationship with women on the physical plane may have changed as you overcame self-hatred.
KD: That’s a big chunk.
Okay. One something at a time. First of all, there’s another story about His Holiness the Dalai. Lama. These Christian missionaries came to see him, and they said, your Holiness, what’s your idea of sin? And he thought for a minute, and he said, “That’s kind of a Christian thing, isn’t it?”
They don’t have that.
Paap. The word for sin usually is paap, which means to burn. Correct, Robert?
Robert Svaboda: Not exactly.
KD: Not exactly. Tell…
Robert Svaboda: well, what you’re thinking of is paschat tapam, which means burning with regret. Paap is just a word that basically means karma that is unwisely performed.
KD: Yeah. Okay. Which you suffer from.
Robert Svaboda: Which you suffer from.
KD: So, yeah, there’s no real concept like that, like original sin…
Robert Svaboda: I mean, there’s plenty of guilt in India, but there’s no word for guilt in India.
KD: A lot of times Indian people will come to talk to me and, oh boy, it is just how did, there’s a whole different family structure. The issues are not exactly the same as ours. But a lot of it has to do with our relationship with our physical mothers. Once a couple was having a problem and they came to Maharajji and he said to the guy, “Just see her as your mother.”
He said, “I hate my mother.”
He, “What? What did he say? What did he say?”
Westerners are really strange.
Early on, when I started getting interested in this stuff, I was very much into Kali. I really loved, I got very attracted to the idea of Kali and the Goddess and Durga, and Maharajji made me the pujari of the Durga temple also, for a while.
There was a new temple he had built in the courtyard to Durga, and they brought in a pujari, but they caught him stealing the money in the donation box. They sent him home and brought in a second guy. They caught him stealing the money. So, they brought a third guy. They caught him stealing the money.
So, the Temple Trust came to Maharajji and said, “Baba, we can’t find a priest or Pujari that won’t steal.”
“My priest won’t steal.”
“So, who’s that?”
“Krishna Das.”
So, that was my qualification. Guru is everything. Guru is male, female, and beyond all that. He could be the sweetest, sweeter than the sweetest mother. He was a mother to us and a father, and everything, even still, and then when he left the body, Siddhi Ma was there. She took care of us for so, many years and actually there’s a story.
Near Allahabad, there’s a place called Vindhyachal, the Hill, Vindhyah Hill, and on that hill, there’s an ancient temple to Vaishnavi Devi, Vindhyavasini, Durga Devi, the form of Vaishnavi Devi who lives on this hill, this very sacred place. So, one time, Maharajji and Siddhi Ma and others were in a car and they were on their way up there to do Puja at the temple. But it got late in the day. They started late, and so the temple was going to be closed by the time they got there. So, halfway up, Maharajji says, “Pull over.”
So, they pulled the car over and he gets out of the car and Ma was sitting in the back. He opens the door, he sits down on the ground, and he took all the utensils for the puja that they were going to do to the Murti on the hill. And he worshiped Siddhi Ma as Vindhyavasini Durga Devi. And the temple that he built in Kainchi, which is where Ma lived, is in Vindhyavasini, Durgadevi. That’s one of her forms. So, living with Ma, being with Ma was extraordinary. This, it’s hard for me to talk about it, because for 30 years she didn’t want anybody talking about her, and now she can’t stop us. But still, it doesn’t come out easy. But she was so great with the Westerners. She never judged us. She always loved and supported us and helped us, and we were really stupid. I mean, the level of stupidity that we were functioning under was… is… extraordinary. Forget “was.” But she never said a word, and she knew everything, and she just loved us. And that love, that love was more important than the blood in our veins.
But still, the programs are running, they don’t go away so fast. The glue that holds us to that stuff is super, super, duper glue.
But over time, it dissolves. And we no longer believe that shit about ourselves so much. In fact, I can actually tell that I mope around less than I used to. Really. I mean, I was born a moper. I spent my whole life moping around, but I hardly mope around now. I miss it. I really do. There’s something to moping around. Sometimes I do it just for fun, like, “fucking-a god damn piece of shit.”
I mean, it’s like a home base, but I don’t go there very much anymore.
My mother came to India after I’d been there for two years. I was in the living in the temple with Maharajji, and one day He looks at me and said, “Is your mother coming to India?”
I said, “My mother? No.”
Right. Okay.
Later that day, a message arrives from town. Your mother called. She wants to talk to you. Oh, shit. So, I went to the town, and I called the local operator that called the town operator that called the county operator that called the national operator that called the international operator that booked the call. It took like 12 hours,
“Hi mom.”
“I want to come to India.”
I said something to my mother that, if my daughter said it to me, I would lock her in a room and give her food once a week. I said, “I have to ask my guru.”
“What? Why’d you say? What?”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I said, “Maharajji. My mother wants to…”
“Let her come.”
So, she came. She had an idea. She’d seen pictures of Maharajji, because I sent some pictures back to my sister and everything. So, she had an idea that Maharajji’s nose was the same as her father’s nose, and she was going to come to India to see if that was true.
Yeah. So, the whole time she was in India, she looked like this. I had to leader around. It was amazing. So, but it was good for us. So, we spent like 10 days in the hills seeing Maharajji every couple of days, and then we had to go down to the plains, she wanted to see the Taj Mahal and a couple other places.
So, coming out of the temple. So, the temple is kind of below the road. There’s the road and you go down these steps and a bridge across the river, and then you walk down into the temple. So, we said goodbye to Maharajji and we walked out up the steps, and we’re up on the road, and I opened the door to the car for her to get in, and she turns and she looks back down into the temple. And Maharajji was just sitting on the tucket and she completely, she burst out crying. She exploded in tears, and I had to catch her so she didn’t fall. And I had to like, pick her up and kind of get her into the car. She totally lost it. She just was weeping. She just broke in half, and she cried for like an hour as we were like, driving down. It was amazing. She never knew what that is, but she, at that point in her life, she was still drinking. She was an alcoholic. And I think she went through like three rehabs before she stopped drinking. And then, when I’d be singing in the city, sometimes people from Long Island would stop and pick her up and bring her into the city, and they would ask, they’d say, “You met Maharajji?”
And she’d start talking and she’d be like, but she couldn’t maintain that, but the hook went in, and that, that hook will never come out.
So, it, it was interesting. She wasn’t a happy camper. But by the end of her life we had pretty much worked most of this stuff out.
I told her to bring the best cashmere sweater she could find, right? So, she brought this beautiful sweater, and she brings it over, and Maharajji starts abusing the the Indians.
“You miserable shits. You never bring me anything. This woman’s come all the way from America. Look what she’s…”
He puts on the sweater, and they loved it. I mean, it’s teasing. Not really abuse, but you know, all the pictures of Him with the blue blanket. This is one of the most pictures that you see. There’s a red turtleneck, a maroon turtleneck he’s wearing. That’s my mother’s sweater. Is it there? No. I have no pictures of Him around here. Bob said he was going to put some pictures up.
Bob used to come by the temple because he had a Volkswagen bus. He had to drive people to the hospital in Nanital from Almora, and he drove by Kainchi a number of times while we were there, while Ram Dass was there, but he never came in because he was mad at Ram Dass, and so he never saw Maharajji.
Yeah. It’s a long story from the old acid Davis at Millbrook, and Ram Dass was… it’s a long story, but he was mad at Ram Dass, so he never stopped and went in the temple and he drove by it like this. Wow. Talk about regret. He regrets.
Q: Thank you. It’s interesting that you just mentioned Bob Thurman being in India, because I was just wondering, although it’s, you can see that your hearts are in the same place as if you discuss with one another, just your different approaches and of your sacred practices between Bhakti and Tibetan Analytical Buddhism.
KD: Was that a question?
Yeah. I was wondering if you discuss it with one another. I just haven’t heard you talk about a different angle.
KD:I take a lot of Buddhist teachings. A lot of Buddhist teachings. I go to a lot. I have, there are lamas I’ve been studying with for years.
Q: So, you’re still doing that? Okay. I didn’t realize that.
KD: Because, the Hindus or the Indians, they worship the car. You know, they do puja, they wash the car. The Buddhists, they tell you how it fucking works. When it breaks down, you can fix it. When the car breaks down in India, they just do some more puja and then it goes. But the Buddhists know how to fix the engine, the brakes, everything.
Q: I didn’t realize that. Okay.
KD: Well don’t take it to heart. One day Maharajji grabbed my book. Let me see what happened. Oh yeah. He grabbed my notebook. I had two notebooks, a diary, and then I had a notebook where we wrote out prayers and stuff from different traditions, so, he grabs it and he opens it up and he says, “What’s that?” He didn’t, supposedly he didn’t read English, right?
He says, he goes down, stops at this one page. “What’s that?”
And I looked. I said it was this Buddhist prayer. The song of Mahamudra. I said, it’s Buddhist.
He said, “Translate some.”
So, I couldn’t. So, the Indian guy there, he translated.
He goes, “Teek. Correct. Very good.”
I went, “What? What? What’s he talking about?”
So, then he keeps going through the book and He, we had made these postage stamps, like a page of postage stamps of him, these little… he come across one of these stamps and he goes, “Who’s that?”
I said, “Baba, it’s you.”
“No! Buddha.”
Interesting. And so, so many of us have done Buddhist meditation courses and things. And there’s another little story. So, the previous Karmapa, the 16th Karmapa, the head of the Kagyu sect, was an extraordinarily great Being. He was really special. And Maharajji had, there was a Westerner, Larry Brilliant, Dr. Larry Brilliant, who Maharajji sent forth to ultimately eradicate smallpox in India. They went all around India, inoculated everybody. It took years, but they, but it was Maharajji who got him doing that. So, at one point they had gone all through India and inoculated everybody. And now they were going around again to check and make sure there were no outbreaks of smallpox.
And they were in Sikkim and they went to visit the Karmapa. And Karmapa said, “What are you doing?” And Larry told them, and He said, “Oh, no problem. The king is my disciple. You’ll be able to go wherever to check everything.” And then he says to him, “What’s your spiritual thing? What do you do?”
We never knew what to say because all we did was sit around with Maharajji and eat and sing. It wasn’t like we did anything. So, how do you tell somebody that? So, he just, he took out a picture of Maharajji, and he hands it to the Karmapa. The Karmapa goes, “Oh, the teachings of all Bodhisattvas are the same, even if they appear different.” And then he points to his altar, and he says, “You see those statues? Mahasiddhas.”
He points to the Mahasiddhas, then points at the picture. “Mahasiddha.” And then couple of days later, he asked Larry and his wife if they wanted to take refuge. There’s a ceremony where you take refuge in the Triple Gem, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. It’s an initiation of sorts. So, they said, sure, yeah. But actually, on the day they went up on the roof and there was a whole Puja and an altar. Larry got nervous and he says to the Karmapa, he said “Your Holiness, do I have to give up my Guru?”
And he said, “No, I’m going to give you refuge in your Guru, the way I give refuge in the Buddha. I’m going to give you a refuge in your work, the way I give you refuge in the Dharma, etc.”
Like that. So, same. One thing.
There was also a Lama that Maharajji met who had escaped from Tibet after the Chinese, and he was just wandering around. And he took care of him for two years. He called him Tibeti Baba and he made sure he had a place to stay and everything. And one day, early in the morning, Maharajji is banging on his door. He opens the door. Maharajji said, “Don’t listen to them. Whatever they say, don’t listen to them.”
And then he went away. Lama doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Later in the day, the Lama’s guru’s brother arrives at this place to bring him back. His guru was now in Darjeeling, I think it was. And he wanted him to come back because he was his meditation master. He ran the retreats. So, the Lama comes to Maharajji and said, “Baba, they wanted me to come back.”
And Maharajji said, “Don’t go. We love each other so, much. Don’t go. We’ll stay together our whole lives.”
He said, “But Baba, he’s my guru.”
“You must go. If you don’t go, your sadhana won’t bring fruit.”
So, the Lama says, “But Baba, we’ll meet again.”
Maharajji says, “Yeah, we’ll meet again. But after you die.”
We’re so, hard on ourselves, we Westerners. We, whatever we are, we’re so, hard on ourselves. It’s not easy to let go of that. It’s so, ingrained in us, but we’re so busy being distracted and busy, and avoiding real love and not letting it, allowing it to show up in our lives. But through the repetition of the name, everything is accomplished. So, whatever else you do, try to remember that. Just like me in the middle of a serial killer movie, I remember that for 10 seconds or less. It’s a guarantee. Really, what else can I tell you? It’s a guarantee. He said that. He meant it. He knows what he’s talking about. Through the repetition of the Names, everything is accomplished. So, whatever else you do, what other practices you do, keep in mind that you can always do this practice. You don’t need to be initiated. You don’t have to wear holy clothes. You don’t have to stand on one leg. You don’t have to be vegetarian. You don’t have to give up serial killer movies. Nothing is required except the repetition of the Name. And then anything else you want to do is good.
And all the names are the names of the One.
The post Call and Response Ep. 85 | Dada Mukerjee, Maharajji, and the Practice of Ram Naama appeared first on Krishna Das.
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