Call and Response Special Edition Conversations With KD January 16, 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.

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD January 16, 2021

“Practice is so important because we plant those seeds of what we want to grow with our practice. It doesn’t mean just meditation practice or chanting practice. It means caring about people, caring about ourselves, caring about the world and offering kindness and compassion to everyone that comes into our lives. But if we don’t plant those seeds, in those moments that get very difficult, like this moment in the world, there’s very little we can do.” – Krishna Das

Maharajji said, “Courage is a very important thing, a very big thing. It takes a lot of courage to let go. It takes a lot of courage to do practice, because we don’t know where we’re going, and we don’t know what we’ll find. All we know is that we’re inundated by our stuff, 24 hours a day. In the Gita, Krishna says, “Even the littlest bit of this Dharma, the tiniest bit of turning against the flow of that river of immersion in external sense objects and awareness, sense awareness, just the slightest bit of turning away and back to the source is a huge thing, and only we can do that. No one can do it for us.

So, depending on what we really want for ourselves and our loved ones and the planet and the world, that’s what will dictate what practices we do, how we turn within and how much we dedicate to that, how much of our hearts we dedicate to that.

You can’t fool yourself, really, because we’re always here, and there’s a part of us that is always knows what’s going on. Even if we refuse to see it, there’s a deeper part of us, that knows everything that needs to be known, but we’re locked out of that place at this point in our karmic predicament. It’s like we have a big, beautiful house, but we’re sleeping on the lawn of the house. We don’t realize that the house is our true home. So we’re living on the lawn. We get a little port-a-potty out on the lawn, a little garden hose to wash our faces. The house is right there. We just don’t realize it. Then when we do realize it, we have to find the key to the door, but at least we’ll be looking at that point. If we don’t look, we don’t find.

Okay.

Hi. How you doing?

I’ve had better years.

And worse, I’m sure.

Yeah. Well, not a lot worse, actually. I guess the last time I was on was in August, so, it’s been awhile. The way I’m going to phrase this question is going to sound really really dramatic because it sort of feels that way, but hopefully it won’t seem weird.

In Christianity, there’s a condition or a state of mind called the Dark Night of the Soul.

Yeah.

Are you familiar with it?

Very familiar.

And you know, I feel like I’ve gotten there. Even when I sit in my meditation room, I feel just totally disconnected, and the phrase over the doors of hell in Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” is sort of what I feel like my life is doing right now. The outcome is likely to be that because of things that are going on with my grandsons, of ages 13 and 14, and my daughter, and also just not being able to see my friends in person is really, it doesn’t help at all. So, here I am just to find out what your thinking is about that state, and if there’s a similar state in the Hindu tradition. You know, I just read something about it saying it just has to do with ego transformation, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels really ego-taking-apart, in a way. So anyway, I appreciate your thinking on that.

Have you seen the movie, the short film that was made about Ram Dass? There was a longer film made about Ram Dass by this guy, this English guy that we know, and most of it was clips of earlier talks that he gave way before the stroke, back in the eighties, nineties, early nineties, and we watched it together, me and Ram Dass and a few of the other people who were at the house in Maui at the time, and everybody said, oh, they liked it so much. And I was trying to hide, you know. Then they asked me what I thought and I said, ” Truthfully, I didn’t like it.”

And the other thing was, it was kind of weird, kind of creepy, and Ram Dass said, “What do you mean?”

I said to him, “Look, you’re giving lectures about suffering and dealing with pain and suffering and all these things, and you’re about to hit the wall at a thousand miles an hour, and you don’t know it.”

He’s giving these talks, these lectures, you know. Brilliant. Intellectually brilliant. They’re wonderful. But the guy was about to be smashed against the fucking wall, and I said, “It’s creepy because you can tell you don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

Anyway. Yeah. Right. And this is it. This is the stuff. This is what we have to deal with. There’s no way around it. So we keep looking for a cure for it, and that makes it just hurt more. It hurts. It really hurts, especially when those people that we’re very close with bound, by blood and karma, are suffering, and it’s just terrible. But there’s nothing you can do about it.

That’s the hard part to accept, and I know you said that to me and other people many times, but I can’t find the key to surrender. If I sit there and I say, “Okay, I have to surrender now. I have to find a way to just give it up, but it doesn’t happen. And you can’t make yourself do that.

No, you can’t. So when I hurt my knee in India you must have heard this story, maybe everybody didn’t. So I’ll just tell it briefly I stepped in a hole in the road, snapped my leg, and I woke up the next morning and my knee was out to here. It was all swollen, and I couldn’t hardly walk.

So, we were not, supposed to come to the temple to see Maharajji until the afternoon, till about four, but this was first thing in the morning and I thought, “Well, you know, I have to get to the doctor. Otherwise this is really bad. I don’t know what this is.”

So, my friend Raghu helped me walk to the temple. I had to lean on him the whole way. I could hardly walk. We get into the temple and I limp up to where Maharajji’s sitting in this middle of this empty courtyard, on his cot, on his little bed. I sit down and I put my leg out underneath the cot because I can’t bend me knee, and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say, “What are you doing here? Why’d you come so early? Why? What’s wrong with you? Why did you hurt yourself?”

He didn’t say anything. He just sat there for a couple of minutes, and I said to myself, “Well, I’m not going anywhere. I’m having Darshan. Let them cut the leg off. I don’t give a shit. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

So then he gets up and he starts walking to the back of the temple and he took the hand of the Indian devotee that was there with him. It was the only other person there. And they’re walking away from where we’re sitting, and the further away he got, the more, he was kind of leaning on the guy, and leaning on him, and it was like he couldn’t walk, and I thought to myself, “He’s taking on the karma of my knee.”

You know? At that minute I had that thought, he turned around and basically ran back to the tucket. He plops down and he looks at me and he said, “You thought I was in pain? You wanted to help me?” And he pats me on the head. “Good boy.”

Meanwhile, I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, “What is this? What’s going on here?” You know, “What did I do? Why did this happen?”

All the time I’m sitting there with him. Later in the day, other Westerners started to show up and at one point, he reaches down into the shoulder bag of this woman, one of the Westerners, and he pulls out a Bible. We started carrying Bibles around because he was always talking about Jesus. So we started reading the Bible. So, he pulls out the Bible. Now he’s not supposed to be able to read English and supposedly he doesn’t speak English, supposedly he doesn’t understand English. So he picks out the book, opens it up like this and holds it up for me and says, “Read this.” And he points to this like that, just like that.

So, it was from Saint Paul, Corinthians and it said, ” In order to protect me from the abundance of revelations,” from getting a big head, “it was given to me a thorn in the side, and I beseeched the Lord three times to take it from me. And the Lord said, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee. My strength is made perfect in your weakness.'”

Well Ram Dass and I have been talking about this for 50 years, and at one point, he said, “Well, we’re proof of that.”

So I had t-shirts made up, one for him and one for me that said “proof.” And the point is this, when we recognize our inability to really do anything, to save our own asses, that’s when the reality of grace shows up for us, not the grace itself, cause that’s always there, but we recognize that power of grace. “My grace is sufficient for thee.” It’s enough, no matter what’s happening to you, and you recognize that by seeing that grace is made perfect in your weakness.

You can’t change this. You can’t even change your mind. You can’t let go. You can’t surrender. Recognize that’s surrender and don’t fight against it. And you can’t even stop thinking about it. “Well, that’s not surrender. I haven’t given up. I’m still thinking about it.” Right?

That’s because you can