Surrender to Grace with Musician Krishna Das
Sarah welcomes Krishna Das to The Psychic Artist Podcast. He is such a beautiful soul and devoted being who brings an incredible experience of God through his music and chanting. Krishna Das is a kirtan singer, a musician, and a teacher who leads by example with his practice of bhakti yoga. He went to India in the late sixties and lived with Neem Karoli Baba, and has brought many of the teachings from this great being to share in the West.
The conversation pivots around an important topic: How do we integrate what we learn in a spiritual context and use it to connect more deeply to the divine in our daily lives, through our soul purpose, and in our creative work? We talk about surrender, the ego, self-inquiry, grace, and repeating the name – and how chanting the name of God can be an actual experience of God.
Listen to the episode here:
Surrender to Grace with Musician Krishna Das
Welcome to The Psychic Artist podcast. For today's episode I would like to share a wonderful interview that I had with Krishna Das. Krishna Das is a kirtan singer, a creative musician, and a brilliant lover of God. He shares from his heart at all times. He has a great website that you can check out to learn more about him, and all the events and things that he's doing. You can connect with him online at KrishnaDas.com, where he shares a free Satsang on Thursday nights, that he's live streaming.
I'm just going to read a little introduction from his website about the beginning of his journey, which started in the late 1960s. Krishna Das met spiritual seeker Ram Dass and traveled across the country with him as a student, captivated by the stories of his recent trip to India, where he had met the legendary guru Neem Karoli Baba, known to most as Maharajji.
Finally, following his heart, in 1970 Krishna Das left behind his dreams of being a rock star and made his way to meet this remarkable being. And in the three years that followed, that he spent with Maharajji, Krishna Das' heart was drawn to the practice of bhakti yoga, a yoga of devotion.
After two and a half years, he returned to the US, and then six months later Maharajji died. In his heart he said, "I will sing for you in the West." This did not come easily, but about 20 years later he began to sing to groups of people around the US. He has many CDs and chants that are devotional, that come from his time with Maharajji and time spent in India. I invite you to listen to his beautiful music. I hope you enjoy this interview.
So good to see you, and hear you!
You too, but you know you're frozen, it's like looking at a murti.
Really?
Yeah. You're not moving at all. Now you are a little bit, but you keep freezing up. That's probably just the connection. I mean Hawaii, you know. Come on, give me a break, by the time the internet gets over there it's like a stagecoach or Pony Express.
I feel you and I are connected energetically nonetheless.
Okay.
I just wanted to thank you for joining me on my...
Do you know how to record energetic connections? Does Zoom record that?
I'm pretty sure it will be transferred through the audio.
Okay. Very good.
And you?
I'm good.
No I mean, I think you do record energetic connections with your music.
I sing, I eat and I sleep. That's about all I know.
You're a wonderful transmitter of consciousness. And my podcast developed because I'm an artist, and I didn't know how to integrate my spiritual practice into my art practice. I got the message pretty clear and loud during COVID to just drop all that stuff, and drop what should be, and what the ego says, and what society says, and just go for the heart. And share the message that was coming from my heart and to really be fearless, and to integrate my spiritual work into my art work, and vice versa.
I started to look around me at other creative people like yourself and see how do they do it and how do we...
And when you looked at me you saw a big ocean, and out in the middle of the ocean you saw like a little bit of a head, with the nose sticking out like this. And when I sing I stay just like this. When I don't sing I sink. And that's all I know, that's it.
I know, I can see that and I think that's part of the beauty of your authentic message is that you say, "Hey, guys, we're all in this together. It's not easy." But we were born in these bodies, in this world to express. It's a powerful thing when you really sing from your heart and it connects to other people's hearts, and they can find the courage in themselves to go out and express as well.
Yes it's very powerful. But I think the most important thing about any practice is your motivation. I think if... You know, I can't even say that. All I can say, my motivation is very simple. I want to be with my guru. That's where I want to be. And the way I do that is to sing. And whatever is generated from that, but basically it's the chanting, and the remembering of him, and the mantras, the practice, whatever meditation I pretend I'm doing. It's all about being in his presence. That's what it is for me. It's very simple. I don't particularly want to share it with anybody either, but I have to. If I don't then... Because my practice is chanting with people, so people have to come in order for me to do my practice to some degree.
That's how it started anyway, because back in... When was it? Somewhere in the mid '90s I was very... I wasn't doing very well. I wasn't very happy, very depressed.
I was in my room in the city and I walked from one room to the other and I was struck with like a lightning bolt, and all of a sudden I knew that if I did not sing and chant with people that I'd never be able to clean out the dark corners in my own heart.
I understood that that's the only problem I had, was these dark shadows in my own heart was causing all the suffering, and the only way I had to do it was sing with people. It took a little while to get with the program, because I wasn't singing at all. I don't think I was chanting at all in those days. I wasn't doing much of anything. So that was the deal. It was really that simple for me.
It's not about anything else. I don't know anything about vibrations, or sacred this or sacred that, or holy breath, or anything. I just know what my guru is and where I want to be. But I used to say I'm doing this to save my own ass, but my ass has gotten wider over the years to include lots of people, so basically I'm screwed, you know? Everybody is a part of it now, which is the way it should be.
What practices do you do to ground yourself before you go on stage or chant or share your satsang? Is there some conscious thing that you do or some unconscious thing?
No. Nothing. The chanting with people is the practice. That's the most grounding, opening, communicating, sharing thing that I do. I don't have to prepare for it because that's my practice. I'm not trying to do anything...
It's not like that's a tool that I use to express myself to people and to give them an experience. No, no, that's my practice. I'm doing my practice.
Everybody is involved in that. I chant, they respond. I chant again, people respond again. That's the practice. Paying attention while you're doing it is part of the practice. Letting go of whatever you're thinking about is part of the practice. Letting go about any ideas you have about what you're doing, that's part of the practice. And just doing it and being present with the sound of the name, and that's the practice. There's no preparation for that except to be alive, mostly.
And breath.
Yeah. You have to be breathing or you can't do it. You'd be doing it in some other world, that's all.
When I heard you sing in English it really struck me... I've listened to a lot of chants and I've chanted in Sanskrit and it's very powerful because of the... Well you can talk about it more than I, but how the Sanskrit language is powerful. For example, I've heard Buddhist chants said in English, and it rocks you because you think oh, I was going along with this, I was benefiting from the vibration of those words, but I didn't know the meaning. And when you sing in English it touched me on a couple different levels, so I was wondering if you could talk about that experience for you?
It's very hard for me to sing in English, to chant in English. I can sing lots of songs in English, but it is hard for me...
To write your song?
I'm sorry?
You wrote a song in English. I feel like you said it was hard for you to do that.
Yeah. Well, a couple of things that I wrote in English actually weren't really written by me at all. One of them, I woke up in the middle of the night and recorded something and went back to sleep, and in the morning I didn't even remember that I had woken up and done that. Then I realized, wait a second, did I record something? The whole song was written like that. Boom. The whole thing.
Which song was that?
That was By Your Grace.
Yeah.
Yeah. Then probably... I think the other one that you could say I wrote, or didn't write, was Heart as Wide as the World. That was also a flow.
It's very hard. English has been kind of appropriated by Christianity, you know, and all those words for sacred stuff tend to have a very Christian vibe and association. I am a follower of Christ, no question about it, but I'm not a Christian. I don't belong to the Christian religion. I don't belong to any religion actually. So to express the feelings or the connection that I have without it veering into one of those recognizable kind of organizational things is very interesting and very difficult for me.
Some people don't have a problem. Some people are just wow, like they can just... the words come through. It's extraordinary. But for me English is very difficult, to do it in a way that doesn't lead to more suffering, to put it simply. That leads to opening. You can sing, "My girlfriend left me, I want to die," you can sing that a million times and then you jump off a cliff.
So you want to express things that when you sing them a million times they plant good seeds, the seeds of love and kindness and caring and openness and fearlessness and courage.
So that's why it's really hard in English. And also probably because the Hindi/Sanskrit stuff just works so easily for me that I haven't really wanted to... And sometimes it's like...There's a friend of mine who did a translation of the Hanuman Chalisa in rhyme, in English, and even though it's okay it just... I get this, what's this word... I cringe a little bit at it. It just doesn't work for me. I don't know what it is. It's too... I don't know, I don't like it.
I know what I'm singing when I sing it in Hindi. I know what it means, but there's more to it than the actual meaning. There's the mantra part of it, which in English is kind of lost, is lost, definitely lost. But it's also very devotional and very beautiful in it's way, but I just don't like it. What can I tell you? I can't help it.
Well maybe it's the vibration, there's a frequency in the words. I was listening to your version of that and Nina Rao's, and I was getting to know it, but maybe you could tell us more about it?
The Hanuman Chalisa is a prayer to Hanuman, 40 verses. Chalisa is 40 in Hindi, so a chalisa is a hymn of 40 verses. There's chalisas to many different beings, like Durga, Durga Chalisa, Shiva Chalisa, there's a lot of Chalisas.
But Hanuman Chalisa is what was sung at the temple in India where we met Maharajji. And we began to understand that his devotees saw him as Hanuman himself, and they worshiped him as Hanuman, and they connected to him as Hanuman.
So we Westerners, wanting to be a part of that satsang and wanting to get deeper into it, we began to absorb those different forms of devotion and we learned the Hanuman Chalisa. The Maharajji loved it that we sang to him. He just loved it. He just loved it, and we loved... It was one of the ways that we got to spend time with him, otherwise it was... You didn't get to spend a lot of time with him usually. He wasn't one for having you hang around.
One time one of his old Indian devotees brought a friend of his who had another guru. He brought a friend of his to the temple to meet Maharajji, and right away Maharajji looks at the guy and says, "Why'd you come? At your guru's place there's kirtan, bhajan, seva, everything. Here is just: aao, kha, jao.” Which means come, eat, go.
That's what it was like, come, eat, go. That was one of the amazing things. It's not done in India that way. He fed everyone who came a full meal, everybody got fed. He used to say, "You can't talk to a hungry person about God. Feed them first." Food. Because in this world you got to eat or you don't live. Breathing happens more or less by itself, sleeping happens, but food has to come. You don't make it yourself, so food has to come, and this is the world... So he would feed everybody. Really amazing.
So we began to see that he was believed to be an incarnation of Hanuman, so we began to move into that place, to learn about Hanuman, to learn about Hanuman's story, which comes in the Ramayana, the story of Rama, and all the things he did and how Hanuman helps us, and who's Hanuman.
Maharajji used to say... He would ask us, "Who's Hanuman?" We'd give the pat answers, "Oh, he's the servant of Ram, the perfect servant," this and that. He said, "Nahi!" He said, "Ram ke swas." He's the breath of Ram, the breath of God.
Everything I do is based on my relationship with him and my meager, limited, tiny, little understanding of who he is. Everything. That's the only thing I have. I don't have anything else. That's it. That's what I have to share. That's what gets shared when I chant. That's what gets shared when I talk to people. That's it.
That's what I have. I don't have learning. I don't have knowledge. I don't have wisdom. I don't have anything. I just... By his grace I have this little ability to sing, to chant. It's all by his grace. I was a goner, I was history. There were two or three times in my life which without his direct, direct, absolute paw print, monkey print, you know - the iron paw came down and saved me, there's just absolutely no question, right there.
I would have been dead more than... two or three times, absolutely gone. He saved me. He created this whole drama, going around singing, and when I open my mouth that's what... He comes out, and he's doing it. I have nothing to do with it, other than it's my way of serving him.
You show up.
Just show up. My job is to stay as healthy as I can, and keep doing it as best I can. That's all.
I was just looking at the translation of the Hanuman Chalisa, and then I was looking at the song that you wrote, By Your Grace, when you woke up in the middle of the night, is that right?
Uh-huh.
Can I read it?
Sure.
By Your Grace / Jai Gurudev
by Krishna Das, from the album Heart as Wide as the World
Closer than breath, you are the air
Sweeter than life itself, you are here
I am a wanderer, you are my peace
I am a prisoner, you are release
Jai Gurudev…
I am a pilgrim, your road so long
I am the singer, you are the song
Held in the open sky, so far above
I am the lover, you are the love
Jai Gurudev…
I follow your footsteps through the flame
All that I ever need is in your name
Carry your heart in mine, vast as space
All that I am today is by your grace.
By your Grace…
I live by your grace.
That's quite profound and beautiful. Thank you for letting me read it.
Yeah.
I think you should wake up more in the middle of the night and write these.
Well, you know, you put the request in, but when the response comes is up to them.
What comes to mind? When you hear the words, what did you experience?
I experienced vast as space, Maharajji's presence.
So there's this incredible... I don't know if it's a dichotomy, but it's something to talk about, this being in the body and not being in the body. Being no one and nothing, and yet having a voice and having creative ability, and skill, and connection. I find it's often for me like a challenge, how to integrate one's spiritual experiences and be in the world, and go back and forth between the two. How do you feel that?
Experiences come and go. You can't hold on to them. You can't understand them necessarily. They change you and then they move along. We just have to go, one foot in front of the other. The subtle thing is that all we do is think about ourselves all the time. That's all we do. How to change that, how do you change it? You can't stop the thoughts about yourself, about ourselves. The only peace will come when we're not thinking about ourselves, when we're just being. But you can't make that happen with your personal will. I don't give a shit about what I think about myself. It's not my problem. I just sing. I just try to be open and work on my issues as best I can. But I'm not running the show. It's not up to me. I sing. Some nights it seems like it sucks, some nights it seems like it's good, but I don't give a shit. That's not my problem.
Why should I think about myself all the time? How am I doing? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? If I had to pump gas at a gas station I really wouldn't care, as long as I had enough to buy some food, some Cheerios and raisins and oat milk, and then went back to the gas station to pump gas, I'd be okay, as long as I remembered him.
That's the only thing, to keep remembering the love, turning back towards the love.
Do we really want to spend our whole lives thinking about ourselves? What a fucking drag. That's all we do. It's so horrible. Who cares? The same thoughts over and over again. How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? Is this working? Is this not working? Oh, I'm so this, I'm so that. It's enough already. Give something else a chance. It doesn't just go away, but the thoughts themselves and the amount of time you spend locked into that delusionary feeling of egoness, what happens over time is you just spend less and less time there, but you don't notice it because it's the ego that's evaluating, that's judging.
When the evaluating and the judging is not going on, you're just being. And you don't get to write down okay, I started being at 12:22 today and I finished at 12:23, and the rest of the day I was just thinking about myself. It just happens. Who cares? Our spiritual work is not up to us. It's not our responsibility. We just show up, best we can. And we begin to see the things that hold us prisoner, the fear, and the shame, and the guilt, and the ways we feel we have to protect ourselves from other people. There are no other people. It just looks like they are, because of our own stuff.
So the more you're in that love the less we're threatened by other, other, other. Because all we're seeing is our own view, our own subjective version of other. We don't know who's there. We don't know who those others are. We just know that we're afraid, and if we're afraid we're not in the love. And for me the love is Maharaja-ji, and that's just what I want to do.
It's hard, because the way we grow up, we're very severely programmed. All this stuff we've gone through, the trauma and the betrayals, and the broken hearts, and the hurts, and the stuff we absorbed from our parents and world that we grew up in. But that's always churning onto the surface.
The more we can let go of that, little by little and keep coming back to the love, coming back to ourself, the less control, the less we're pushed around by that. At least that's what they say.
You make me think of Kabir. He says, "I am no one. I am nothing." There is this longing to connect with the divine and become the thing, but then I always feel that the divine is always pointing right back inside of our hearts, that we have everything we need inside of us, and it's a matter of perception.
It's a matter of uncovering. You could say perception. Yeah. It's what we see, but it's a matter of letting go of this stuff that covers our true nature, our true beauty, our true love.
Ramana Maharshi, who is arguably one of the greatest saints that ever lived said there's two ways to go. Either you focus on the sense of being, the I-ness, the sense of self, and you focus on that and leave off all other objects of thought and you find out who am I. What is this I-ness, what is this sense of self being, what is that? You constantly focus on that and ultimately you recognize your true nature.
The other way is surrender. He says both work fine. And surrender is surrender. First of all you don't do surrender. Surrender happens by grace.
You don't put that on your resume, I do surrender.
Yeah. Anybody that says I've surrendered, you ask well, who was that that surrendered? When you surrender you no longer have an ego. Like Ramana Maharshi says, asking God to do what you want, is not surrender. Surrender means accepting everything as it is. It even means accepting yourself as you are, with all the bullshit in there and all the horror and the beauty and everything. It means leaving it all to the divine. You know longer have any cares. You don't have any wants. Whatever comes is fine. Whatever doesn't come is fine. That's surrender.
So we're nowhere near either one of those poles at this point, you know? We're just locked into delusion all the time. So that's what practice is for. We must do regular practice. There's just no other option.
Maharajji used to tease us. He used to look at us and say, "I have the keys to the mind. I could turn your minds against me," and he would laugh and we'd go, "Baba, don't do that!" We thought like you'd wake up in the morning and you go like, "I'm still in India? What am I doing here? I'm going back to America." You thought you did that, but no, he pulled one of the puppet strings and sent you back to America. So I didn't want to leave him.
So many years later I said to Siddhi Ma, this is Siddhi Ma here... She was with him for 40 years. I said, "Ma, Maharajji said that he has the keys to my mind, which to me means that I am where he puts me, where he has put me, right? He's running the show, so I am doing what he wants me to do and being what he wants me... what I am. So Ma, is practice necessary? Is practice necessary, or is it all grace? Is it all his doing?" So she looked at me and she said, "Krishna Das, it's all grace, but you have to act like it isn't."
If you want some water to drink you have to cup your hands. The water is always flowing. It's all grace. We think we have choices to make, so we have to make choices. If we didn't think that we would be in the grace. We would be aware of the state of grace all the time. But we believe that we are who we think we are, and in that sense then we have lots to do. We have to relieve ourselves of the belief that we are who we think we are.
If you didn't think you are who you think you are, it wouldn't exist anywhere in the universe. That me. And all there would be is presence and space and peace and absolute blissful love. And you'd still be there, but you wouldn't be there as you, you'd be there as presence and being. You'd be in your true nature, our true nature.
So because we believe every thought that comes through our heads, which is absolutely the definition of insanity, we're stuck in being what we think we are. And so we have practice. We have to do practice. That's what she means, where you have to act like it isn't. It's already done. It's over. Time...
Like Krishna says in the Gita, "I come as time." Time is just an illusion. It's already happened. There's no past, there's no future, there's only right now. In one second it will only be right now, in a week it will only be right now. The past is gone, the future is not here, it's always like this. Now. But we experience it as passage of time, which is because we're stuck in that realm of me.
Me exists in time. The so-called ego, which really doesn't exist, which is only thoughts, exists in time. So when Krishna says, "I come as time," that's one of his forms, the great destroyer. But that's not all, he's beyond that also.
That's just one of his many forms, one of the functions. Because beings live in delusion and confusion. That's what they call maya. That's what they call maya. So as long as that's what we do, when we're living in those delusions, we have to do practice. We have to do something that's going to free us from believing every thought, to dilute the glue that holds us to every thought that we have, every belief that we have that we're not even aware of.
But if you don't do practice... If you don't do a practice that helps you come back to yourself and out of dreamland over and over again, it just keeps going on.
I thought of Arjuna and needing to take action and do something that is unpleasant but is his dharma. And I think a lot about the ways to include the ego. I don't know how that works in what you're saying, but I feel that we are most aligned when we are integrating the divine, ourselves, our ego, and the material world. When we are authentic in our dharma, which in my case is service, but it's through action.
Going to chant, going to make art, and in that activity you lose yourself again. So, again, it's not like I'm going to feed the ego by painting. I develop a practice in which the ego is either sublimated or maybe becomes or dissolves into... Consciousness flows through me and out me, and I participate. We each have a unique, I don't know if it's a gift or an expression or the shape of our body, the sound of our voice. We're individualized in this play of consciousness, so I participate. But I do feel like the ego or our unique abilities to connect with Spirit, God, Divine, Guru is... There's like, I mean you were told to go and sing. You weren't told to write a book, were you?
No, I wasn't. Nobody ever told me to do it.
Tell me more.
I had to do it. My self. I recognized that I had to do it. Otherwise I was not going to make it. Maharajji didn't send me back and tell me to chant with people. He never did. The only thing he told me to do was go away.
One of my favorite stories you tell you is when you went to sing in front of him. You were chanting and crying and he sort of laughed at you.
Well he wasn't laughing... He said, "Why are you crying?" I said, "Maharajji's love." But actually as I said that I realized that I was lying. I realized that I was crying because I had always had this dream of singing to him and crying out of devotion and love. It was an egoistic thing, and he knew it. He just said, "Why are you crying?" I was all, you know... Oh, man. There's times I realized I lied to him, it was so funny, and of course he knew it. I didn't know it until he showed me. Too funny.
One time I was in love with this woman who was hanging around with us and she was gonna go to Benares. He was sending us all away, which he did every once in a while. So I heard that she was going to go to Benares, but I also heard that the Karmapa, the previous Karmapa, the 16th Karmapa was going to be in Benares giving teachings. So Maharajji asked me what I was going to do and I said, "I'm going to go to Benares to see the Karmapa," and he laughed. He laughed and he said, "Oh Krishna Das cried over a woman. Ha ha, he cried over a woman." And I knew that I had lied to him, I was embarrassed to say I was going to follow this woman. Three days later I'm sitting on the roof of this place we were staying, looking out over the Ganga and crying my eyes out about this woman, and he knew. All he did was laugh. He didn't get mad or anything. He just laughed, "Krishna Das is crying over a woman," and three days later that's what I was doing. Unbelievable.
In that moment of tears did his voice come to you and give you any kind of... Like watching yourself from the screen...
No. I was pitiful, just pitiful.
I found a quote from you about Ma, Shri Siddhi Ma, and I just want to read it. "The problem is that our culture tends to completely destroy our ability to trust our own intuition. Nobody tells us to trust ourselves when we're kids, but developing that ability to know what truly moves us in a positive direction and then follow that is what this whole path is about, because that place, that feeling of rightness, leads deeper and deeper into the place where everything is right, which is God, our true self. We are it."
I guess I extracted that part of the quote from what you heard asked Shri Siddhi Ma, and you said, "Ma, should I meditate?"
Yeah, and she said... I asked her should I meditate or should I sing, and she said, "Well, what do you like to do?" And the idea that something I liked to do could be good for me, is like what? That's not what my mother said, you know? Then she said, "Krishna Das, in 40 years with Maharajji, not once did he ask me to meditate. He asked me to do japa, to repeat the name, but he never asked me to do... to try to get some state, to bring about some state of consciousness."
Then she said that he said, "The more subtle or higher states of consciousness cannot be created by the personal will, but when a person is ready they manifest." The idea was that one purifies one's heart through japa and service, et cetera, and then those states will just naturally arise as you...
And he would not let people meditate around him. Every once in a while somebody would close their eyes and try to meditate, and he would throw food at them, he would talk with them, pull their hair. The same thing happened with Ram Dass, one time he tried to meditate and he was like going up, you know this energy and everything... and Maharajji just started talking to him and he just wouldn't let him do it.
We don't really understand, because we're in the dark and all we see is shadows. We don't really... There's no way we can understand what things look like in the light.
What I mean is that when we think about meditation, we think it's something we can do and we can achieve and get ourselves into some blissful state and away from suffering. And that is probably most likely not the best way to think about it. Because the ego is so subtle and so all-pervasive that it just grabs... it's all egoistic will, trying to create a better me, or someone that's in more bliss, and avoid all the different things in life that happen. And he wouldn't let us do that. He wouldn't let us meditate, try to meditate like that in front of him certainly, and he didn't encourage us to do it.
He encouraged us to love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God. That was it.
We thought "Ah, shit, we're not getting the real teachings. We're probably not qualified, a bunch of stupid Westerners, so he's not giving us..." But actually that's what he was doing. He was giving us the real thing.
Don't think about yourself. Think about others, because most of us do our practices, we're really just thinking about ourselves, aren't we? What am I going to get? I want to get happier. I want to get calmer. I want to get past my fear. I want to get more open. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna. With that as motivation all you get is bigger I wanna, I wanna, I wanna. You don't get free of the delusion of being a separate being, which is what the game is about ultimately.
So checking out versus checking in, is that a part of this idea that if you meditate you're just going into a blissful egoistic... I mean I don't want to put words in your mouth, but...
It all depends what your motivation is. It's all about motivation. That's why Maharajji said what he said, "Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God." Don't think about yourself. Thinking about yourself is thinking about yourself. How am I now? How am I now? How am I now? I'm meditating. I'm watching my breath. How am I now? How are my feelings, is this better or worse? Am I doing good? This is all nonsense.
That's why Jesus said, "Treat others as you would have others do unto you." That's the number one rule. In Tibetan Buddhism, and Mahayana Buddhism, it's all about serving others, caring for others, because that's the only way to release the fascination that we have with our egoistic delusions. It's not easy either. Now that's not to say that you don't do certain practices, but you do them in a particular state of mind. That's why, like in Mahayana Buddhism and Vajrayana, you dedicate your practice to all beings, to the happiness and welfare of all beings. That dedication takes the spotlight off of your ego for a minute and it increases the wideness of your understanding for a minute. Of course then you come back, so next time you dedicate again. And you develop the habit of not being so concerned with how am I now? How am I now? How am I now? How am I now? It's not easy.
It's very hard to explain these things. I've been doing this for a few years and I feel like I'm just a beginner. I'm not even a qualified beginner. I'm just a beginning beginner, and it's been over 50 years that I've been doing this stuff. Shit, it's like 55 or 56 years I've been... you know, starting to meditate, do asana, pranayama, all that stuff. I'm just working on it.
One really powerful thing that I became aware of was that in chanting – because you mention the name, repeating mantra, service, practice, chanting – in chanting, I have felt... like I had this idea that you go and you sing, you chant, it's like a practice, right? I just didn't... my mind couldn't conceive of what the magical, mystical qualities were. But I became aware that the name is God. Can you explain since you do it all the time?
Yeah well that's what they say.
They say that the name and what is named are not different. And in fact the name is the sound form of the deity, of the being. Just like Om, they say Om is actually the name, the form of all creation is in that sound, the original sound. So these names are the names of these essences, these diving beings, our elders, who are not deluded, who are manifestations of that real love, real being, truth, reality.
And so by invoking their name we're actually invoking their presence, but we're so deluded and so... The mirror of our hearts are so covered with dust that we don't experience it that way necessarily.
But Maharajji said over and over through the repetition of these names everything is accomplished. Everything is accomplished. So everything we've been talking about, it comes down to, in his words, "By the repetition of the name everything is accomplished." That's the antidote to all our suffering, to all our delusion. That's the cure, the medicine that will cure us of anything that ails us. That's what he said.
So do I believe that? If I really believed that... If the dust on the mirror of my heart wasn't so thick what else would I be doing but repeating the name from the morning until the night? But I don't. I'm busy with other shit. Why? How does this happen that I spend all day in dreamland, out of my mind, not paying attention, going from one stupid thing to the next? That's exactly how much I believe what he said, how much time I'm actually spending doing what's required for myself and for others. So it's interesting, huh? You can't fool yourself. You think you can, but you know. You know. We know.
Krishna Das, what do you say we chant a Hanuman mantra or something?
How long we got? I'm good for whatever, so I can sing the whole Chalisa.
Whatever you like. Yeah.
So I will. But now I have to just disconnect everything and reconnect.
So I'm going to start with a short prayer that Bernie Glassman taught me.
It's called Gates of Sweet Nectar.
Calling out to hungry hearts
Everywhere through endless time
You who wander, you who thirst
I offer you this bodhi mind
Calling out to hungry spirits
Everywhere through endless time
Calling out to hungry hearts
All the lost and the left behind
Gather round and share this meal
Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine
[Sings the Shree Hanuman Chalisa]
Hanuman Chalisa words and English translation
That was very powerful. Thank you.
Thank you.
I read through the text as you sang, for the first time. Is it in Hindi or Sanskrit?
It's a form of Hindi that was supposedly spoken at the time of Ram, in the town of Ayodhya. It's a dialect of Hindi called Awadhi.
Is it in the North or the South?
The North, in Uttar Pradesh, Ayodhya.
So there was one line that stuck out to me.
Durgaam kaj jagat ke jete
Sugam anugraha tumhre tete
The burden of all difficult tasks of the world becomes light with your grace.
It means that all the difficult... Everything that's difficult to accomplish in this world is accomplished by your grace. Durgaam kaj is difficult stuff, difficult work. Jagat ke jete, in this world. Sugam anugraha, everything becomes easy by your grace.
There's so much in here. Most of it is talking about Hanuman's exploits, all the things he did in the Ramayana. But then they throw in stuff like:
Nase rog harai sab peera
Japat nirantar Hanumant beera
All sickness and disease is destroyed for those who repeat Hanuman's name.
Nirantar, unceasingly.
Yes.
That's the trick there, unceasingly.
Thank you.
Thank you. Take good care. Be well. Ram Ram.
So I really loved talking with Krishna Das. It was such an awesome conversation and he's such a generous and loving person. I also felt that there were some places where we came at it from a slightly different perspective, and I wanted to share my perspective on the Self and consciousness. I believe that we all have the power to express our unique gifts through our ego. We can use and harness our mind and ego to come from the heart and to support ourselves in really being creative producers and contributors to society and to the world in which we have been born and we are a part of.
I feel that Krishna Das is such an amazing creative being and his music is so powerful, but we all have the ability to express in that way, and his great devotion to the divine has propelled so many people to do more creative work and to connect to God. That's the beauty of being an amazing creative expressive being, is that it's infectious. Other people feel that. When you're connected to your heart it helps them to connect to theirs as well. It's okay for us to do self-inquiry and find at the bottom of most questions of who am I, why am I here, is a desire to connect with the divine. When you can get to this fearless place of allowing that energy to flow through you, you really shine and help others so much.
Sending you many blessings, and may you all connect to that source inside of you.
About Krishna Das
Krishna Das leads kirtan (chanting) events, workshops & retreats around the world. He has a catalog of 25+ CDs, DVDs, books and spoken word recordings. His music fuses traditional kirtan of the East with Western harmonic and rhythmic sensibilities. He has taken the call-and-response chanting out of yoga centers and into concert halls, becoming a worldwide icon and the best-selling western chant artist of all time.
Important Links
Learn more about Krishna Das on his website: KrishnaDas.com
Krishna Das’ free online satsangs take place every Thursday @ 7:30pmET.
Instagram: krishnadasmusic
Twitter: @KrishnaDas
Facebook: @KrishnaDasMusic
Podcast: Call and Response with Krishna Das
YouTube: Krishna Das Music
Sarah Rossiter is an artist, writer, psychic, and teacher. Her artwork is available for purchase online. Sarah offers private sessions and channels messages and artwork from artists, angels, and other great beings.
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