Call and Response with Krishna Das

Kirtan Wallah Foundation

Devotional yogic chanting with a Western influence. CDs and cassettes for sale, artist background, schedule of live appearances.

  1. 20 ENE

    Call and Response Podcast Ep. 86 | Faith & Courage

    Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 86 |Faith & Courage “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.” – Krishna Das 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

    1 h y 1 min

  2. 15 ENE

    Call and Response Ep. 85 | Dada Mukerjee, Maharajji, and the Practice of Ram Naama

    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 wit

    40 min

  3. 8 ENE

    Call and Response Podcast Ep. 84 | At Home With KD, May 7 2020

    Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep. 84 |At Home With KD, May 7 2020 “All we have is what’s in front of our faces, which is the ups and downs of life. So, you have to learn to deal with those situations in the best way… and there’s no God outside of your Self, your true Self. And that true Self is the same in every Being. So, if you treat other people the way you would like to be treated, you won’t have any problems at all.” – Krishna Das “Ram nam karne se sab pura ho jata” My Guru used to say that to us quite often. “From going on repeating these Names, everything is accomplished. Everything is accomplished.” A very simple statement. Easy to kind of just say, “Oh, yeah, ok,” but I’ve been thinking about that, or trying to truly believe that for 50 years or so. 40 Years. 45 years. So, if I truly believed that what He said, that from repeating these Names, everything is accomplished, I would probably be giving more of myself to the practice as I’m doing it. But, you know, we have our own karmic predicaments that we live in. Very distracted lives. Very fast lives. Although it’s a little bit slower these days. Although we can fill it up with stuff quite easily. I remember many many years ago, before I went to India I was up in the mountains of New Mexico with Ram Das at the Lama Foundation for about a month in the winter. It was fantastic. And every day we would spend many hours meeting together, singing, talking, meditating. And we heard about this New York artist who had moved out to New Mexico and lived just down the hill, down the mountain from where the Lama was, and he had been to India and he knew how to meditate. This was Big Time. So a group of us went down to meet with him, to see him. And we spent a couple of hours with him, talking to him. I just sat in the back of the room, listening. And as we were leaving, I was the last one to go out the door. As I was about to go out the door, he grabbed my arm and he looked at me and he said, “You. You have to find out why it is you can’t give yourself 100% to whatever you’re doing.” Oh. He nailed me to the wall. That was unbelievable. That was in 19-, the winter of, let’s see, ’69. That’s what? 50 years ago? I can still feel his hand on my arm. You know, if we look at ourselves, we notice how difficult it is to be fully engaged in something. We’re not talking about watching a movie where you’re fully lost for as long as the movie’s on or some kind of entertainment, but whatever you’re doing, being fully engaged. Not thinking about the future, not the past, not this and that, not the chatter that goes on in the brain all the time, but truly present. Truly present and aware. So, I’ve been working on that a long time. Or, at least noticing how little of myself I really can give to each moment. So, when it comes to chanting or a practice that you do regularly, you create a situation where you’re training yourself to let go and come back. Let go and come back. Over and over again. It doesn’t, it’s not about up here. It’s about in here. And it’s not an intellectual process. It’s not a learning process. It’s a training process. So, little by little your Being gets familiar with these sounds, with these Names in this case, and you begin to relax into the Name. And the Name, as we come to know it, has been brought into this world by a Being who has fully realized the reality of that Name, the reality of what is Named, and has brought that Name into this world for us as a practice, as a doorway into that Name, into the reality, which is our own true nature, which is our soul. The love we’re looking for exists within us. It lives within us. We look outside ourselves in the outside world. We look for it everywhere and we don’t find it. We don’t find it until we look within. It’s not like you look with your eyes within. It’s not like that. It’s moving more deeply into ourselves by releasing the stuff that holds us and takes us away again and again and again. That naturally moves us within. Letting go again and again. And we don’t have to make this up. We don’t have to manipulate ourselves. We don’t have to be looking for anything specific, any kind of experience. Once we know who we are, we’re wide open. Everything is here and now. Everything exists within us. We’re so achievement oriented in the West. We’re in such a hurry because everything is done so quickly here. But that’s not how we find ourselves. So, anyhow let’s take some questions for a while. Q: Who was Neem Karoli Baba’s spiritual master and what were some of the practices they would do? KD: We don’t know. We don’t know who His gurus were. We have no idea. He never spoke about it. He had some… We hear stories, when He was very young, He went to this ashram, that place, He met this guy, that guy. But nobody really knows that we ever spoke to, ever told us anything definitive about that. He never spoke about it. He never had pictures up of this and that, you know?  He was very much believed to be a manifestation of Hanuman himself. I don’t even know what that means. You know, we use all these words, all these words that we bring, we learn from India or from the spiritual path, but we don’t really know what these words mean. But, the lineage that He seemed to be a part of was a Ram lineage, the lineage of Ram and Hanuman. But more than that we don’t know. We know that He, He spent many years in a cave, in caves. There were two small caves, well, one big cave in a town called Neeb Karori, which is where He got His name, the Baba from that town, that village. I visited there and it was a very small village, a very funky village and they told us not to leave the temple, especially at night. You needed to be very careful. Apparently, there’s a lot of murders in that part of the country. But that’s where He decided to build the cave. The villagers dug out a cave for Him in this field, or it was, I think, in the jungle at the time. Later on it was cleared. And nobody knew that He was there. And He was existing on, existing on one glass of milk a day, which, this old village lady used to bring to Him. And then, she died and so He was starving. Nobody knew He was there. So, the story goes that He picked up His chimta, which is this metal tong for moving fire around, moving the logs around, and He threatened Hanuman. He had a little murti of Hanuman that He had in the cave. He threatened Him. He said, “You’ll starve me so I’ll beat You.” And apparently, the next morning, there was milk outside the door.   Q: Do I draw any inspiration from Eddie Vedder with my vocal style? KD: Excuse me. Eddie Vedder is a kid. I’m 20 years older than him. No, I mean, he’s great. In fact, I think his wife said something to somebody I knew, that she reminded me of him. No, I love Eddie Vedder, but I just sing. I don’t have a vocal style as far as I know.   Q: How do I remain focused on God when I have to deal with the ups and downs of life? KD: If you have to ask that question, you don’t know what God is, where God is or who God is. So, you can’t be focused on God, because you don’t know. We don’t know. All we have is what’s in front of our faces, which is the ups and downs of life. So, you have to learn to deal with those situations in the best way and there’s no God outside of your Self, your true Self. And that true Self is the same in every Being. So, if you treat other people the way you would like to be treated, you won’t have any problems at all. Calm yourself down. Calm your mind down little by little and find a way to get through the day without falling on your face too many times, or creating negative karmas by being angry at people and hurting others and hurting yourself. There’s no God out there. The God that you’re looking for is within us and until you learn how to be kind to yourself in a real way, which is to give yourself a break and learn to trust your own intuition about where to look for these deeper realities, you know, you need to do some practice. And  you need to treat others the way you want to be treated.   Q: Towards the end of your film, One Track Heart, you use a word. Someone said you were giving something to people. I tried looking it up but I found only something… KD: Yeah, Maharajji had asked me to be the pujari or the priest of the Durga temple that He had built in Kainchi in the courtyard and I had to distribute the charanamrit. That means the nectar of the feet, which is the water that was used to wash the feet of the Goddess in the pujas, in the rituals. Yes, it is water, but it’s blessed water because it was used in the ritual. So, distributing that charanamrit was a way of distributing the blessings of the ritual that the other pujari did. I just watched. “Charanamrit” is the name.   Q: I need advice on suicide. KD: You mean how to do it? I can’t help you. I needed advice, too, you know? I was going to jump in the river and kill myself. I was having a nervous breakdown in Kainchi, right there in the temple. Maharajji was there and it’s a long story. It’s in my book, Chants of a Lifetime.  It’s in that book. But the short story is that I was completely flipped out and I was going to kill myself and He called me over and He said, “What are you going to do, jump in the river?” And He laughed. “Ha.” He said, “Worldly people don’t die.” Us. Worldly people. People who are attached to this world and to the ego. “Worldly people don’t die. Only Jesus died the real death.” What? “Why? Because He never thought of Himself. He gave His life for His people. He never thought of Himself.” So, the idea is that, all we do is think about ourselves and suicide is not going to change that. You go from this body to some other body and the karmas that you have, that you can’t deal with now,

    53 min

  4. 30/12/2025

    Call and Response Ep. 83 | Recovery, India, Letting Go

    Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 83 | Recovery, India, Letting Go “Ultimately, nothing ever happened, nothing ever will, there is no one and there never will be any one. No one’s separate from anybody else. It’s all one, all the time and always has been. Nothing ever happened. Obviously, when you stub your toe, that makes no sense. It hurts. So, we have to find a way to deal with that pain. You have to learn not to stub your toe. Pay more attention. Up-levelling it intellectually is not useful, as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s based on a fear of engaging with life for most of us. Not that it’s not ultimately true, but here, now, we have to get in the battle of life and go after what we want and find out what we want.” – Krishna Das Q: Hi KD. KD: Hi. Q: Actually, every question answered so many thoughts I had in my mind.  The spirit in chanting did a major role in my transformation and especially through this mantra to the divine mother, Ma Durga. Can you explain a little bit about that? KD: Which one? Q: Ma Durga. Durga Ma.Yeah, it’s unbelievable what I felt when I chant that. KD: Yeah. Q: It’s a sort of divine connection. KD: Wonderful. Why do you want me to screw it up for you? Sounds like you’re doing just fine. You know? Don’t ask me to ruin it. The experience of the Name is your experience. That’s it. You don’t need to think about it. Just move into it more fully. Always. Every time. You don’t need this. It’s useless.   Hi. Q: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed listening to you last night and also especially today with this format. So, I’m glad you like it, too. KD: Good. There’s two of us, then. Q: You know, you were just talking about the selfishness and I’ve been in recovery for the past two decades and I’ve found myself here. I’ve really, you know, heard a lot of what you said today has really resonated with me and I believe you have a past with addiction and I was wondering what your feelings are about that and… KD: A path with? Q: A past with addiction, and what your thoughts and feelings are on addiction. KD: Well, it just doesn’t work. Bottom line. You know? Good luck with your addiction but it doesn’t work. So, I’m not a fan of anything that doesn’t work. And I’ve told many times how I was strung out on freebase cocaine for a couple of years and so people think I’m an expert on addiction. I mean, no offense, but I don’t know anything about it. I was saved, literally, by my Indian father and Maharajji. They just saved me. I’d flown in from California. Ok, Mr. Tiwari was coming from India to visit. Now, I was very close with this family for many years and I was actually treated like the eldest son in this family and I really treasured that and so, Mr. Tiwari came to America to visit with the devotees. He flew to Canada first. I was living in California and I was very addicted to freebase cocaine. And I flew into New York and I had enough to smoke for one night and I was up all-night smoking and then I ran out and I was scrounging around the floor. I was smoking lint from socks. Anything that looked like anything to smoke, I was smoking. And then I flew to Canada the next day and I drove out to the place, a couple of hours outside of Montreal where he was visiting. And I walked into the room where he was sitting. He had his back to the door. He was talking to another friend of mine and I walked into the room and as I walked into the room, I felt this, I don’t know what, like a forcefield and I stopped and I was just about to kind of back away, get away, I wasn’t even thinking, I was just like, and he turned and he looked at me, he said, “You, promise me now you will give up cocaine! Promise me now!” Like that. I said, “Ok.” And that was it. From that moment to this moment, gone from my consciousness. And I just want to tell you, if it had been up to me, there was no way. I was gone. I was on my way out. I could not deal with that. I could not get sober myself. “You.” And I couldn’t say no to him. I mean, it wasn’t an option. I would do anything he ever asked me to do. So, I just said, “ok.” And that was it. I don’t know. I guess they wanted the kid to live. Otherwise… So, but I was, I had just a black hole in my heart. And this is after being with Maharajji, you understand? After my time in India. This is in the 80s. I was still ridiculous. Completely meshuga. Meshuga? That’s what I got. So, they took it away from me. They just took it away. There’s no way I could have ever let go of that. So, I have tremendous respect for anyone who’s dealing with those issues because I know I couldn’t have. And I know how hard it is. And I also know what’s at stake and how difficult it is, so, that’s it. And how much it’s worth to be in the battle, by the way. And how much, what that means, to cherish one’s self enough to enter into battle with one’s own darkness and one’s own hungers because after all, it’s a desire for bliss. It’s a desire to be free from suffering. But it doesn’t work. That’s what I mean by that. It doesn’t free us from suffering. It creates more and more and more. So, there’s nothing wrong with the desire. It’s a good desire, to be free. But we’re not actually. We’re putting ourselves in bondage, which is just one of the ways we get fooled by our own stuff. When we look outside of ourselves for something that can give us that, what we want. Hi. We’re gonna sing. Yeah, no. We’ll be there in a second, but I mean, the woman who asked to sing, two hours ago, she went home to listen to me on cd. You can’t please everybody, what are you going to do?   Q: Hi, Krishna Das. KD: Hello there. Very good. Q: I’m trying to wake everyone. KD: Ok, thank you. You woke me up to. Q: In recent times, how have you been spending your time when you visit India? KD: Oh, I go up to the mountains and visit the people that I knew for all these years, you know, wander around here and there. Been hanging out in the jungle with a nice Baba sometimes. And also, I’ve been singing in India, you know. I get so many emails from Indian people, you know, so sweet. You know. “I’m your devotee. You are my Guru. Please come sing. I want to see you.” You know? Delete. You know, I mean, I can’t. You know, enough already. But, I do go. So, I said to Siddhi Ma, I said, “Ma,” and She was always telling me to rest. Take care of myself. Get enough rest. Don’t sing too much. Don’t travel too much. So, once I said to Her, “Ma, you know I ‘m getting all these emails from India. You know, they want me to come sing. You know, should I accept?” And I figured She’d say, “No, no stay home.” I said, “Should I accept?” She said, “You must.” Why did I ask? So, I’m screwed. Now I have to go and sing. Any other questions? And then I go from pharmacy to pharmacy and get all the medicine I need to get over the dysentery and the malaria and everything else, you know? I love it very much.   Q: Hi. KD: Hello. Q: Some of the Vedanta yoga teachings… KD: Say what? Q: The Vedanta yoga teachings… some of them teach that everything in your life is already destined to happen. Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. KD: Really? What a concept. Q: Well, because you were talking about free will, and I’m just wondering how that Vedanta teaching… KD: Talking about what? Q: Will. And I’ve, I mean, I’ve had, I’ve heard people say, some Vedanta yoga teachers that, it’s like your life is a film that’s already been filmed and that your choice in your free will is how you respond to suffering or not suffering, but I was just curious to ask you your perspective on that. KD: People say all kinds of shit, you know. All I can tell you is Maharajji never spoke about that stuff. He said, “Serve people. Feed people and remember God.” If that talks to you, if that makes sense to you, fine. If it doesn’t, fine. Everybody’s selling something. You know? What are you going to do? You’re looking for a button to push to relieve you of the job of living your life, making your decisions. You’re looking for a way to make it ok. You’re looking for a concept to lay on your life that makes sense. I don’t think there is one. Give her the mic, where’s the mic. Finally, we’re getting into it here. Oh, it’s too late? The mic’s away? Ok. Some people say things like that, but the point is, those kind of statements, they’re very difficult to understand. One thing is, there’s ultimate reality, ok? They say. Which is ultimately final, this is the way things are, and then there’s relative reality, which is our worlds. So, the two things, ultimate reality includes our reality but relative reality, which is the way we live, all the stories, everything we see, it’s all relational. That’s included in relative, but relative reality doesn’t include ultimate truth. It’s all relative. It’s all subjective stories and our version of stuff. In relative reality, you just do the best you can. Ultimately, nothing ever happened, nothing ever will, there is no one and there never will be any one. No one’s separate from anybody else. It’s all one, all the time and always has been. Nothing ever happened. Obviously, when you stub your toe, that makes no sense. It hurts. So, we have to find a way to deal with that pain. You have to learn not to stub your toe. Pay more attention. Up-levelling it intellectually is not useful, as far as I’m concerned. I think It leads to, I think it’s based on a fear of engaging with life for most of us. Not that it’s not ultimately true, but here, now, we have to get in the battle of life and go after what we want and find out what we want. There’s no escape from that because, because every day we’re going on and on in one way or another and if we’re not paying attention,

    16 min

  5. 16/12/2025

    Call and Response Podcast Ep. 82 | Real Enlightenment, Service

    Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 28 | Real Enlightenment, Service “A lot of people don’t give. You know, there’s so much fear about contacting other people and opening up and allowing the reality of this world to enter into our hearts. It can be very brutal. There’s no question about it. That’s why you need inner strength. Now there’s something to do. So, that’s why, when we have inner strength, when we trust our own hearts, when we learn to take it easy on ourselves, then we can just do what comes naturally. Helping people will come naturally once we overcome our own fears.” – Krishna Das Q: So, you were saying, now my question is gone. KD: Ok. No problem. Q: It’s back, ok. So, KD: Problem. Q: What if, in your life, you look and listen to your heart and you don’t get the direction for your life like you say. More, you just want to meditate and be in the silence and you don’t, you know, I’m going to work but it’s just so I can pay my bills and for awhile now, I don’t have any motivation to go after anything in life, and I wonder, is that wrong? From what you’re saying, because the only thing I want to do is be in the silence. KD: It’s not for me to say it’s wrong or right. You know, it’s your life. Only you know and only you can work through it, find out what’s right for you. But I will say that there is a lot of confusion about states of mind and when you say you want to stay in the silence, in the real silence, there’s no “you.” So, I hear that you seem to want to hold onto one particular type of feeling as opposed to other types of feeling. That’s not going to work. Q: yeah. KD: Because you’re pushing things away. Ultimately, the silence is everywhere, all the time. Because it is that way. And nothing can disturb it. Any state of mind you try to hold onto will not last. States of mind are all temporary. The only thing that’s not temporary is who you are, which is not a state of mind. It’s pure being. Pure ultimate reality. That’s who is in there. That’s what’s in there. So, it’s no different than wanting desert without eating your meal, you know? So, if you’re pushing anything away, it’s not something that’s ultimately going to give you what you want. So, that’s all I have to say about that. Ok? Q: Thank you.   KD: People think, you know, we hear about samahdi and all this meditation stuff, you know, it’s very subtle stuff, really. It’s not so easy. I mean, don’t think you’re going to sit down and meditate yourself into some other planet. You know, it doesn’t work that way. And I remember, we used to, a lot of times we’d see Maharajji in the late afternoon when the temple gates had closed and just the people in the temple were there. So, I used to put on my Holy clothes and go out and sit down and one day I was sitting there, and I almost burst out laughing because as I was sitting there, I saw that my idea of enlightenment, nirvana was some place that I would not be. And where was that going to be? Where was the place that you’re not going to be? You’re here now, when you go to the bathroom, you’re going to be there, too. Tonight, you’ll go to sleep. Where are you going to be? Right there. There’s nowhere you can go where you will not be, and nirvana is not some other place. Liberation is not some other place where you won’t be. It’s actually where you are finally going to fully be present, when you stop hating yourself and limiting ourselves. So, that was interesting.   Q: Good evening. KD: Hi. Q: In this process of serving, feeding and remembering, what is your understanding of the role of children and own children or children in general? KD: Your own children or other people’s children? I’m not sure what you mean. Q: Both. Having your own children, is this an important part of this or how does this fit into this? KD: It’s one of those things that happen when you do certain things. Yeah. You were a child. We were all children once, you know? And our parents, whether they were, whatever part of the scale they were on, were still here. They took care of us enough and at least cared enough that we’re still here and you know when you’re a baby, there’s nothing you can do for yourself and you know, India has a very strange way of looking at things. There’s an incredible hymn by Shankaracharya and I recorded part of it on my first CD, it’s called the Devi Aparadh Kshamapana Stotram. How do you like that? And it translates as “begging the Goddess for forgiveness.” And the line that’s repeated, verse after verse, is “in the whole,” let me see, basically, He keeps on saying that there will never be a bad mother, even though I’m such a bad child. And He begs the goddess for forgiveness. And the idea is simply, we don’t, we barely know we’re alive on a day to day basis. We float through our lives in a sleep. We don’t understand how hard it is to be, get a human body and to be in a position to satisfy our desires and live a good life and especially in this circumstance. We’re all, there are many places in the world where you can’t rest for a second, where you’re on the road, you’re being driven by this or driven by that. Bombs are falling. Poverty. A human body in a good circumstance is very difficult, they say, to get. But we don’t appreciate it. And we would not be here if our parents, regardless of their own problems, didn’t take care of us enough to keep us alive. It’s very interesting. I mean, I have all kinds of issues with my parents, right? But still, they fed me. They took care of me. They allowed me to live on this earth and to live and to manifest whatever karmas I had to work with. And now, here I am, learning to sing and chant the Name and find a good way to live. Without them, I wouldn’t be here. And it’s the same with our own children. We just do the best we can, which is, try to, regardless of our own shortcoming, we try to let our children know that we love them. And that’s not so easy sometimes. I don’t know. More? Anything else? I’m sure I didn’t answer your question. You’re right to give up.   Q: Hi. KD: Hi. Q: So, you were saying earlier that we should be thinking about other people, we should be serving people and helping them out. KD: I don’t think I said, “should.” That’s one of the words I try to avoid. Especially when I’m talking to myself. Q: So, what was the word you used? KD: I have no idea. What’s your question? Q: So how do we help people or how do we think about them without we, ourselves, getting fatigued by it. Like, either in our work life, or in our family life or in other phases of life? KD: So, how do we think about other people? Q: yeah, how do we help them and not get fatigued by it? KD: Well, one of the ways you help other people is recognizing your own projections onto them and not doing that to other people. Like, say there’s somebody at work who never looks at you, never talks to you, seems to avoid you everywhere, you know, and you build up a story about that person in your own mind. And then you find out that he’s got brain cancer and the fact that he never spoke to you has nothing to do with you. He’s totally absorbed in his own shit. So, that’s one thing that we can do to help other people is not believe our own stories about them, unconsciously. And then as far as, you do what you can to help people. It’s not a question of trying to change anybody. The best way to help people is to work on yourself and allow some compassion towards yourself to also extend outward to other beings and not be so harsh on yourself or others. And more than that, I mean, if there’s some other way that you can help, you try to find a way to help, you know. I remember being completely blown away, I read about this woman down in Texas somewhere who just decided, she recognized how much food was wasted at the supermarkets, you know. That after a certain time, they have to throw everything out. She created a business of collecting all that food and feeding homeless people and people who needed it. It was amazing. I mean, like, she fed hundreds of thousands of people a week, and I thought, “Goddammit, I wish I could do that.” But it’s not me, you know? So, you find your way of doing it. Everything is good. And anything you can do for anybody is a good thing. But once again, it’s not done out of a sense of “I’m going to help this person,” you know. “How great I am. I’m going to give,” you know. Get over it, you know? You just do what you can in a very simple, easy way. A lot of people don’t give. You know there’s so much fear about contacting other people and opening up and allowing the reality of this world to enter into our hearts. It can be very brutal. There’s no question about it. That’s why you need inner strength. That’s why we need to get new mufflers for everybody on the fucking street. Now there’s something to do. So, that’s why, when we have inner strength, when we trust our own hearts, when we learn to take it easy on ourselves, then we can just do what comes naturally. Helping people will come naturally once we overcome our own fears and stuff like that. You just do what you do. You know, our own karmas allow us to do certain things and not to do other things. Sometimes, you have to feed yourself first before you can help another person. Sometimes, you have enough, you can just give. It’s just a way of overcoming selfishness and self-centeredness and the obsession with “me, me, me.” It’s a good practice to help with that. I’m sure that didn’t satisfy you, but I did the best I could.     The post Call and Response Podcast Ep. 82 | Real Enlightenment, Service appeared first on Krishna Das.

    15 min

  6. 02/12/2025

    Call and Response Podcast Ep. 81 | Not Getting What you Want

    Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 81 | Not Getting What you Want Also: Kirtans VS. Bhajans, Judaism, Willpower “If you don’t allow yourself to feel that terrible disappointment and the pain of not getting what you want, you’re never going to move through it to get what you really want. You know, we can’t pretend that we don’t hurt. All of us hurt, that’s the deal. And we have to allow that to be in our lives. It’s a big part of being human, to allow that all the different kinds of suffering and pain, to allow ourselves to feel that. It makes us human and it bonds us with every other being on the planet, because we all suffer.” – Krishna Das Q: Yes. KD: Yes. Sir. Q: Every morning I met, in the place that I go, I have five cats, seven peacocks, several dogs, several other animals, and they all have expectation that they’ll be fed. I try to temper my expectation. What do you say to that? Should I? Or should I expect what they always expect? Not necessarily to be fed kibble or whatever they get, meow mix, whatever, but should I always expect that things that I want to have or think about or whatever, is not expecting something a way to expect it? KD: You mean, can you fool yourself? No. Q: Yeah. In some ways… KD: We can’t. We can’t really fool ourselves. Sometimes you just have to live with the fact that a particular thing you want, you won’t get. You know? Like, I wanted to be 6’8” 240 lbs power forward on a basketball team. But I was 6’1” 185, and that guy used to beat the shit out of me. So, I’m never going to be 6 ‘8” 240, no matter what I do. I had to live with that. And, in fact, you know, in my life, I really wanted to play basketball and I went to, I had a basketball scholarship to Brandeis and before my senior year, I ripped up my leg, ligaments in my right leg, and I didn’t get into shape in time and they took the scholarship back. I was destroyed. That was the only thing I wanted. I mean, I was playing music. I loved doing all that, but I was a basketball maniac and I was destroyed by that. My whole life changed that day that I ripped up my ankle, my leg. It was amazing And it was very painful. So, my friend and I were going to build a Harley. Back in the old days in the comic books, there was a little ad, you know, “Build a Harley Motorcycle.” So, we were going to get this kit for like $10, build a motorcycle and drive out to the West Coast and be lumberjacks. And the basketball coach for Stony Brook called me. It was his first year. His name was Herb Brown, Larry Brown’s brother. He called me, he said, “Hi, Jeff, whatchya doing?” I said, “Well, I’m going to go be a lumberjack.” He said, “Oh, don’t you want to play ball?” Yeah.  So, I went to Stony Brook, which was great, because it turned out to be the drug and music capital of the East Coast. I played more games on LSD than any other drug. It was unbelievable. The coach used to have me come sit next to him in the front of the bus and he’d put his arm around me and he’d say, “It’ll be ok, it’ll be ok.” And I’d be, “Ok, ok.” It was amazing. So, you know, you have to live with it, you know. But if you don’t allow yourself to feel that terrible disappointment and the pain of not getting what you want, you’re never going to move through it to get what you really want. You know, we can’t pretend that we don’t hurt. All of us hurt, that’s the deal. You know. And we have to allow that to be in our lives. It’s a big part of being human is to allow that all the different kinds of suffering and pain, to allow ourselves to feel that. It makes us human and it bonds us with every other being on the planet, because we all suffer. And so, it makes you more human, you know? And then you look at other people and you see what they feel, and you can feel that. You can relate. And you know what a person’s going through and that makes you compassionate, without even pretending to be compassionate. You just automatically understand what that person in the street is feeling. And you see somebody yelling at somebody else with terrible anger and you know what that feels like, not only to the person they’re angry at, but what it feels like to be owned by that fierce passionate anger in your own heart that’s burning you alive. That’s just a part of being human.   KD: Hello. Q: Hi. I wanted to ask you a question, since you lived in India. What is the difference between kirtans and bhajans? KD: Well, you know, bhajans is usually a story, a song about a story, like something happened in the Ramayana or Krishna’s play, just like gospel songs, but kirtan is the repetition of the Name, only. I mean, more or less. You know, it’s India so anything is good. No problem. But, technically, one thing is one thing and another thing is another thing, you know? But yeah. So.   KD: HI. Q: Hello. My name is Maura. KD: Oh, really. Q: How are you? I saw you the other night. KD: I know, I’ve got you down. Q: We were talking. We’ve been talking. I just was, you said the other night when you played with David, you know, you’re just two old Jewish guys playing in a band and I was curious how you feel or felt or where does your Judaism come into play for you. KD: I’m about as Jewish as the pope. Q: Ok. So, there is none. KD: I also, I usually joke, I say, “I’m Jewish on my parents’ side.” I mean, culturally, I’m Jewish. I grew up in that culture to some degree, but you know, I mean, nobody in my family believed in God, believed that there really is something to find in the world other than fighting over the pope’s nose. Anybody know what the pope’s nose is? It’s the part of the chicken that goes over the fence last. That’s what they… at the table they would fight over that. You know, it was… Q: You’ve sat with rabbis, I’m sure. KD: You know, my grandparents were so good to me on both sides. Without them, I would be dead, you know. And I realized later that every other weekend, when I was sent to my grandparents’ house, that’s when my parents went to therapy.  You know? So, I got all that wonderful love and caring and affection from my grandparents. Not that my parents weren’t loving, but my grandparents really… so culturally, there was, but you know, the other thing, they never talked about the holocaust. I never heard about it. And all of those people I grew up with, they had relatives there they never mentioned. So, it was interesting. But yeah, you know, and then, of course, my bar mitzvah. I was bar mitzvah’d, you know? So, we had the celebration at this place called the Club Jericho on Jericho Turnpike in Long Island. Really fancy. And by the end of the day, I had like $1,000 in checks in my pocket, people, all my relatives, gave me.  My father comes up to me and says, “Give me the checks.” What?  “Give me the checks. I have to pay for this.”  That’s when Judaism went out the fucking window. Not one minute after that did I ever think I would want anything to do with this ever again. I was thinking of all the porn I could buy. I was 13 and I’d just became a man, so, what else do you do? No, you know, but, later on I came to appreciate it a lot more. I read a bunch of books about the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov was, I believe, was 16th century. He was an incredible saint. And you know what it means, Baal Shem Tov? It means, “The Master of the Good Name.” Hello? The Name. I don’t know, maybe he sang Sri Ram Jai Ram when nobody was looking. The Name, the Name. So, he was incredible. So, I had come to appreciate a lot of that mystical, but you know, I’m a one trick pony. I woke up in India. I always… this is what I do. This is what I am. You know? I can’t do anything else except some things.   Q: Hi. Can you hear me. KD: Yeah. Q: Ok. Thank you. I, maybe this is a little bit of a, you know, a for me question, but hopefully other people will appreciate it, too. KD: Don’t have hope. Q: I just want to acknowledge that we’re here in this space, like you had mentioned earlier, we’re here at Dharma’s place and I’ve seen you here before over the years, and I’m wondering maybe, if you could speak a little about your relationship with our teacher and if you want to share a story. Because I don’t really know much about it. KD: Dharma and I have spent very little time together physically, really. We love each other very much but we don’t, it’s never been, we’ve never had a lot of time to spend together. He would invite me to come sing to the teacher trainees at the old place and I would love to do that. It’s just kind of, we kind of know each other and love each other but we just haven’t spent a lot of physical time together. And of course, all the yogic teachers that I know, the older generation, they all used to come to Dharma for teaching. They all learn so much from him. He’s not just a yoga teacher. He’s a yogi. There’s a difference. And he’s a wonderful being. Yeah. Good. Good Being. It’s really not easy to be that. You have to really be that to be that. Ok. More? Or we can sing a little bit. Ok, yeah good. No, no. This is important. I don’t care if you don’t like it. It’s important to me. I go all around the world and I do this people all around the world and I want to tell you, they ask, it’s the same thing every time. Everybody wants the same thing. Everybody has the same issues, the same problems, a slightly different way of… the only place, two places… once, the first time I did a workshop in Zurich, they sat there like this for three hours. When the gong rang at three hours, they rushed me, and they all had questions. I said, “What’s been? For three hours, what have you been doing?” The other time was in Norway, ok. So, everybody, we had great singing, everybody was talking, there was one guy sitting like where you

    27 min

  7. 01/12/2025

    Call and Response Podcast Special Edition | April 8, 2021

    Call and Response Podcast Special Edition with Krishna Das | April 8, 2021 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. “Shame is a trip we’re doing to ourselves. Forget about whether we’ve actually hurt somebody or not. The feeling of shame, that’s different than remorse, by the way. Remorse is truly recognizing that we’ve hurt someone, wishing that we had not created that suffering and hoping that we don’t create it again, and not just hoping, but doing what’s necessary that we don’t create more suffering again for others and ourselves. But shame, that’s a different thing. Remorse is useful. Remorse of spirit, that leads to, in Christianity they talk about confession. That’s ultimately what confession is supposed to be, giving up the feelings that of shame and stuff like that and starting again. You can’t forget what you’ve done. But what you have done in the past can stop bullying you in this moment if we truly have remorse.” – Krishna Das Namaste, everybody. Welcome to earth. Nice to be here. As you can see, I’m not exactly where I was last time I was somewhere. Now I’m here and through the graces of the Integral Yoga Institute in the Holy city of San Francisco, we come to you semi-live. I had to come out to the west coast for something, and befI had to change my plans before I could get home to do the Thursday night chanting, and so luckily our friends here at IYI manifested this whole thing, just like that. So, many thanks to them. They’re already asleep here, but that’s okay. It just looks like sleep. It’s actually the natural state. We did 53 straight weeks from home, except actually one, when I was recording the audio book for “Chants of a Lifetime.” 53 weeks. And then I got on a plane, and I don’t think I’ll know that I’m actually still alive till I get back home, but I’m doing the best I can. So, some of you may have heard this story before, but imagine how many times I’ve heard it. It was in the temple. It was in the days that we were coming back and forth from Nainital, which was the town nearby and coming to Kainchi, to the temple, Maharajji’s temple there. So, we came one day and as we were sitting there, these two old sadhus walked into the temple, and they were wandering sadhus, monks maybe. And they came into the temple and they asked Maharajji if they could stay for a while, and he said, “Yeah, you can stay. But every day I want you to sit out in front of the Hanuman temple and sing ‘Sita Ram.’ Just ‘Sita Ram.’” For three hours in the morning. Okay. Not bad rent to pay. So, the next day we arrived, and they were out there singing, the two of them, sitting opposite each other in front of the temple. They didn’t have any shakers or bangers or clangers or drums or anything. They were just singing. One of the guys would go, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Jai Sita Ram.” And the other guy would answer, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Jai Sita Ram.” “Sita Ram, Sita Ram…” Back and forth, back and forth. So, we were just sitting, waiting for Maharajji to come out, and this chanting was going on in the background. We heard it. And all of a sudden, I don’t know, something happened, maybe they got bored, so one guy goes, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram Jaya Lakshaman.” Oh. Jazz. So, the other guy goes, “Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Lakshaman Jai Hanuman.” And before you know it, they’re going, “Rama Lakshaman Janaki…” having a great time. So, all of a sudden, from inside his room, inside a room, you hear Maharajji’s voice yell “Sita Ram!” That moment when Maharajji yelled… I saw the whole thing. I’d heard it, but I hadn’t focused on it. So, they had drifted off. They had just gone with the… Maharajji said, “Sita Ram” only. He said that.  They had just gone off on their thing, probably getting bored with just the good old “Sita Ram.” So, he pulled them back and then they followed with that. And for me, that was a really big lesson of coming back. Because what makes this a spiritual practice is that no matter what, our job, so to speak, is to listen, to repeat the name, in this case we’re singing out loud, and hear it at the same time, not just so mechanically that we’re not even paying attention, which is what happens most of the time if we really look, and then when somebody else is answering the call with a response, we’re hearing it again. And the hearing is different than just listening. It’s an inner recognition. We’re hearing it from the inside, so to speak. And as time goes on, we begin to, through the repetition of the name, we begin to spend more time at home inside here.And when we go off in dreams and thoughts and fantasies and emotions and the past, the future, all that stuff, we spend less time in those states. Just take this morning. So, I got up. I got ready to leave to come to IYI here. And I looked around and I did not see my shoulder bag. My shoulder bag had my wallet in it. And I looked all around once. I looked around 20 times, the room. I looked everywhere. It was just not there. So, the adrenaline starts to pump and the panic starts to set in. “Where is it? What am I gonna do? I don’t even have a record of all those credit cards and what should I do? And my vaccine, my two shot vaccine stamp is in there.What will I do? And I won’t be able to get on the plane to go home without my driver’s license.” So, on a scale of one to 10 in terms of from “okay” to “complete panic,” I was at about at 12, but I wasn’t there for long. I calmed my ass down and I thought, “Okay, so where could it be?” I called Whole Foods where I had gone the night before to get some stuff. They didn’t see the bag. Okay. That was one option. But I noticed I didn’t, I wasn’t as gone as long and as deeply as I could have been. It was interesting to me at the time. So, then it turned out I had left it in the car when I went to park and that’s a whole story in itself. So, I ran down to the parking garage and I found the bag in there, but I saw the whole arc of the situation, from the moment I noticed that the bag was gone to the moment I saw it there under the seat, and I saw that really, it wasn’t as crazy as it used to be, you know? Not from my own effort, because when you’re gone, you can’t make that effort to remember. It is very hard, which is why they always say, do practice when you can, because there will be times that you will not be able to even remember what practice is about or what remembering is about. So that’s why we put the time in, even we don’t feel like it, because why would we pay attention to what we feel like? We’re supposed to be listening to the name, or whatever practice you do. So, for me, that was a very interesting moment. And of course it was much more fun that I didn’t lose my wallet.  Then, I don’t know how we be right now with all of you. I would be smiling and thinking, “Where’s my fucking wallet…” Whenever we it comes over us that we’re really allowed to come home, that we really can come back to that place inside of us that is love, it is home, it’s just so powerful. Because we’re gone so much. So much of the time we’re lost in our stuff. And adding a practice to our life is what allows us, what creates the openness to return home. The sound of the name is the name of our own true nature, the love that lives within us is who we truly are. It’s the name of that love which lives in each of us, always all the time. Life after life after life, it’s the same. There you see Swami Shivananda, the Guru of this lineage, and behind me, unfortunately. He doesn’t want to be seen right now, Swami Satchidananda. And Maharajji loved Swami Shivananda very much. They were very close. They visited often. They knew each other very well. He came. Maharajji showed up at Shivannda Ashram in Rishikesh quite often, apparently, and it was Maharajji who, you can’t really say “forced,” but encouraged very strongly, Swami Chidhananda to accept the leadership of the Divine Life Society after Swami Shivananda left. Maharajji loved Swami Chidhananda very much. And in fact, a funny story is that one time maybe in ‘68, Could have been ’69, I’m not sure, Swami Satchidananda was giving a retreat at Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York. And I had heard Swami Satchidananda speak a few times in the city, so I went up for the day, and we were sitting out on the lawn, and next to Swami Satchidananda was this, another Sannyasin, another Baba. Very gaunt. And to me, he looked very fierce at the time and he was just sitting there like this, and Swami Satchidananda gave the talk and after his talks, or in the beginning, he would always go, “Hari Om,” in this beautiful voice. Right? So, he finished the talk and I had my eyes closed, and I was waiting for the “Hari Om.” Instead of the “Hari Om,” there was this, “Sri Ram Jaya Ram Jaya Jaya Ram,”like this, and my whole body exploded. Every nerve went into overdrive, and I was just sitting there like this. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know who this guy was. I had heard “Sri Ram Jai Ram” before. I think I had met Ram Dass maybe once or something by now, maybe not. And then I left and I never knew who that Swami was, but that moment did something. Okay. So, 1, 2, 3, maybe four years later, three years later, not sure. Three. I am living at the temple in Kainchi with Maharajji in India, and one day a car pulls up and a group of Swamis came out of the car like bowling balls into the temple, over the bridge, right into Maharajji’s room. And I was standing outside. I noticed this, and then all of a sudden, what did I hear? “Sr

    48 min

  8. 10/09/2025

    Call and Response Podcast Ep. 80 | He Knew Everything. There’s Only One Life

    Call and Response Podcast with Krishna Das Ep 80 | He Knew Everything. There’s Only One Life “There’s nowhere to go where you’re not going to be. And there’s nothing that you’re going to be doing that’s somebody else is doing. You’re doing everything. So, all you need to add, all we need to add to our lives is paying a little attention to ourselves and why we do what we do and keep trying to clean up our act. That’s all. It’s not, there’s not two things going on. There’s only you and your life and your desires are beautiful. They will never give you what you really want, but that doesn’t mean you have to try to kill them, pretend they’re not there.” – Krishna Das Q: You’ve described to us, what it was like for you and your devotees to be in the presence of Maharajji. If you could just maybe let us have some insight into what was your sense of Maharajji’s, did He understand the depth of the effect He was having on His devotees? KD: He knew everything, you know? Everything. Who was that? Where was the question from? Ok. Yeah, no, He knew everything. Past, present, future. He knew everything you were thinking, everything you were feeling. It was hard to get used to, living in the presence of somebody who knew everything about you, every miserable thought, thing you’ve ever done, and He loved you more than you could ever even imagine loving yourself, or be loved by anybody? That was really intense. And when we could open to it, it was fantastic. But the other times, we just couldn’t bear it, it was like trying to look at the soon.  You know, we were just like, whoa, you know? It was interesting. Opening, closing, opening, closing, and then He would look at us and giggle and we’d be open again. Because He didn’t care about our stuff at all. Not at all. He literally didn’t judge us. He knew everything, but He didn’t judge. Q: So, He just loved you? KD: He, well, no. He didn’t just love us. He loved us more than, loves us more than anything and He also was a siddha, is a siddha. A siddha is a being that has the ability to change the situation from the inside. He can ripen your karmas, He can change the way your life is going to unfold, and He did that for everybody that He, with whom He had work to do. And I have no idea how many people that was. It could have been millions and millions of people. You know, we were sitting with Him, I was sitting with Him and like, I was looking at Him and He went like this. So, He’s talking to people and all of a sudden, He goes like this and He saw me looking and He went, “The mind can go a million miles in the blink of an eye.” He just went… and I realized He had just gone somewhere and come back. It’s very extraordinary. It’s, I mean the closest we get to this stuff is kind of science fiction and comic books, you know. It’s just like, we don’t grow up with the capacity, almost, to feel something. It’s like, how many colors are there? Red, orange, green, blue? ROYGBIV, I learned that in High School. Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Indigo, Violet. Seven colors? Am I right? But it’s like there’s an eighth color that’s visible to those who can see it. But our eyes, our senses only can see, only can see those seven colors and every combination of that. But there’s an eighth color that’s here all the time but we don’t see it. And that’s interesting because we don’t see it, so we don’t believe it. And you should not believe anything you don’t experience yourself, by the way. Just because we’re talking about this stuff, don’t think you need to believe it. That’s not important. We need to believe ourselves and in ourselves and we need to deal with our lives as they are. Not to fantasize that there’s some other way of being. We have to deal with our shit as it is and learn to let go of it and learn to accept ourselves for who we are as we are and allow ourselves to breathe, really breath and just be in this world. It’s not necessary to believe any of this stuff about India or any of this stuff. It’s not necessary. I’ve been in India more than half my life, more than half, Jesus. Five-Sevenths of my life. And I can’t, I don’t necessarily believe that that stone sculpture in a temple is alive and real, but they do. You know? And nobody ever required me to believe that. Maharajji didn’t make us, He loved us, loves us as we are. He didn’t make us Hindus. He didn’t make us this or that. He helped us become human. That’s amazing. Human. With other humans. Wow. People everywhere. And it’s ok. When we asked Him, “How do we find God?” He said, “Serve people.” What?  “What about, how do you raise kundalini, you know?” He said, “Feed people.” Feed people? What is He talking about? What is this? We just weren’t, we couldn’t handle it. It was too subtle. He was telling us not to think about ourselves all the time. Think about others. If we don’t think about ourselves, we won’t be unhappy. Because we won’t be thinking about ourselves. How simple is that? But how hard is it not to think about ourselves, right? It takes practice. So, He said, “Serve people. Feed people and remember God. Repeat the Names of God.” He was very big on that. And He said, over and over again, “From going on repeating these Names of God, everything is accomplished.”  He said it. Ok, maybe five percent. Maybe, after 50 years. So, it’s not easy. But that’s what He said. “From remembering these Names, from repeating these Names, everything is accomplished. Everything is brought to fulness and completion.” Period. Amen. That’s the deal.  Ok. Let’s get with the program. “I think I want to watch the Giants game.” It’s not so easy. The vasanas of our, of our mind and our own karmas keep propelling us into limited programmed reactive ways of thinking and being in the world everyday. We just can’t stop the flow. There’s no button to push. Nowhere. So, we have to do something. We have to start paying a little bit of attention, add a little bit of practice into our daily lives, start trying to figure out what it is we want. How do we want to feel? What do we want to do? When I started singing with people, nobody else was doing this, really, the way this is. So, I had nobody to follow or to ask, how do you do this? I had to listen to my heart. I had to do what I wanted to do. That’s what I’m still doing. I actually, I can’t believe I can actually live, I can do what I like to do in my life most of the time. How amazing is that? That’s not, you know. I grew up on Long Island, what were the odds of that happening. Right? Not much. So, it’s extraordinary. So, everybody has to find that. And you do it right where you are as your life is, right this moment. Everything in our lives is there. This is our karmic predicament at this moment. Now what? So, there’s no eraser, there’s no spray eraser. You can do like this one, erase him from our life, now that one. No. We have to find a way to deal with this stuff and still learn to listen to our own hearts and what’s good for us, what we need to do. Sometimes we have to do what we have to do and then you’re doing what you want to do because taking care of business is good. And there’s all kinds of business in our lives.   Q: Thank you. I do want to thank you for all that you do. You, Nina and everyone, all that you do in giving us, I want to thank you. KD: Ok. Q: I would like to know, in your experience, understanding that Hanumanji is immortal, if you have ever experienced in your relationship with the Chalisa, that He has physically come to sit by you in your chanting, over your 50 years. KD: First of all, about “immortal”: I don’t even know what it’s like to be alive, temporarily. So, immortal is kind of out of the question. I have no idea what that means. However, as far as Hanumanji coming and sitting by me, that would mean that, I don’t see Him that way. I feel a presence and I want to enter into that presence of Love when I sing. That’s my Guru, for me. He hasn’t come like a person or a thing as far as I can tell. That’s not the way I see it. Some people do see those things. They’re open in different ways. I totally honor that. It’s just not my deal. But when I sing, I feel it. That’s why I sing, is that the rest of the day sucks. The only time I’m really happy these days is when I’m singing, you know? But you would think I sang more, but I don’t. Like, I’m sure, you might think, “Wow, Krishna Das, He gets up in the morning, He takes a cold shower, then He eats some vegetables, then He puts on His dhoti and His holy clothes and He sits by the harmonium and goes into bliss.” That’s a nice fantasy. Maybe someday. Probably not this life. I’m doing the best I can. That’s all I can do. What else am I going to do? I try not to give myself too hard a time. But I’m not sure how successful I am most of the time. Ok?   Boy, I’m really good at avoiding questions today.   Q: Hi. Two quick things. They maybe slightly, they might be slightly different than my colleagues here, but, first of all, did you remember to record the UCONN women’s game before? KD: I did. Q: Good man. Good man. Secondly, it means a lot to all of us that come here and have practiced in this space with Dharma to have you here as the closing act, as it were. KD: Oh, yeah. It’s next week. They’re moving out of here. Let’s stay! We won’t let them move us. Q: I wanted to ask you, very selfishly, as someone who subscribes to the Sirius and listens to your channel often, if you might consider honoring Dharma’s kirtan band with a little more air time? KD: You know, one of the first things I learned to say in Hindi, was “Dekhenge”, which means, “We’ll see.” Is that two question? Oh, yeah, it was.  I’m still avoiding them. Good. Keep going.   Somebody

    27 min
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Devotional yogic chanting with a Western influence. CDs and cassettes for sale, artist background, schedule of live appearances.

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