Special Edition Conversations With KD May 9, 2020 Call and Response with Krishna Das

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD May 9, 2020



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.

“These are all the names of what lives within us as who we are. Already. It’s not something else. It’s not somewhere else. It’s within us. All these names lead to the same place. They’re the names of the same place. All these so-called deities are forms of our own true nature… whatever you sing is fine. It doesn’t make any difference. Sing what you’d like. If you think about it, you’re not doing it. So, I would just do it.” – Krishna Das

Hey everybody.

Let’s welcome each other to our minds.

Let’s, let’s all close our eyes for a minute.  So, now we’re united in the space of the heart. This is where we always are together with all beings. It’s just as if we’re sitting in one room together. This room happens to be earth at this moment. Just be with the breath. Take a few deep, long, deep breaths. Let the body relax. All that tension we carry around, bouncing off the walls of our homes, just let it go.

Sharon Salzberg and I once were doing a workshop in LA and we had such a nice time. So, at the end, I said “Wouldn’t it be great if we could all live together?” And then I laughed. I said, “Well, that’s what we’re doing. That’s earth.”

Earth is our home at this point. It just didn’t give us a user manual. We’re having to figure that out.

So, this time that we… we’re so apparently disconnected from everything is… can be very useful, and it is useful, even if we’re suffering and with all the difficulty. It’s going to change the way we sit in ourselves. It has to, regardless of what we think about it, and make us much more aware of our own stuff and everybody else’s stuff, but also aware that we need to care about other people, too, in this world, not just our close friends and family, but everything anyone on this planet does affects everybody. And at some point the amount of toxicity causes suffering for everyone. The main toxicity is the selfishness and the self-centeredness that we carry within us.

So, all the practices that we do are all about one thing, and that’s to release us from the prison of egoistic self-centered actions and considerations. So, there are two paths to that. One is the path of, you could say “devotion” or “loving kindness, caring,” and the other path is a path of jnana or wisdom, which they say it’s more difficult to follow because of our attachment to our bodies. But really there’s only one path and that path is each of our lives. And within that life that we’re living, we need to find a way to become good human beings. And it’s only from following the path of Dharma, the spiritual path, that we can become good human beings, whatever that means to each of us.  Our motivations begin to come from kindness and compassion. Our caring about other people increases, so our obsession with ourselves decreases and how we feel and “How am I, how am I now? How am I now? How am I now?” All day long. You know, the movie of “me.”

So how do we free ourselves from this prison of me-ness, of ego, of the belief that we are separate from everybody, and it’s around that sense of separateness that all our suffering revolves. When that planet of “me” dissolves, there’s nothing for the suffering to revolve around, to orbit around. It goes and find somebody else to bother.

So, let’s take some questions and then we’ll just see how the day goes.

Q: Thank you so much for this and for everything you’re doing right now, it’s so wonderful and so nourishing.