Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 494: Krishna Das

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

Krishna Das, incredible musician and the only kirtan wallah to ever chant at the Grammys, re-joins the DTFH! You can learn more about Krishna Das on his website, KrishnaDas.com. You can hear his music on Apple Music and Spotify. and check out his podcasts: Pilgrim Heart and Call and Response with Krishna Das. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. Athletic Greens - Visit AthleticGreens.com/Duncan for a FREE 1 year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase! Babbel - Sign up for a 3-month subscription with promo code DUNCAN to get an extra 3 months FREE!

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Don't lie, baby, don't lie. With us here today is, as far as I'm aware, the only Kirtan Walla who has performed at the Grammys. Kirtan, it's another way of saying, chanting the names of God. Walla means a person who chants the names of God. It's like a musician who sings mantras. This is a really great conversation.

We don't just talk about what it was like hanging around with Nimkuruli Baba or Maharaji, as you may know him as, if you're familiar with Ram Das or be here now. But also the time he went to jail for money laundering. We're going to jump right into it, but first this. Thank you Squarespace for supporting the DTFH podcast. Not just that, thank you for creating an incredible, futuristic, and very powerful tool

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Friends, I want to invite you to join our Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. If you sign up, you will join a collective of beautiful, powerful, glorious, noble geniuses. I really mean that. We just wrote a book together and we'll be releasing it shortly. Just a couple of things to tie up

and then you will be able to buy the first book written by the DTFH family. It is an anthology of cryptid erotica. Cryptid, of course, meaning mythological creatures and erotica meaning fucking. 100% of the proceeds of this anthology are going to the Love Server Member Foundation, which is Ram Dass' foundation and Planned Parenthood.

The point is, we wrote a book together and we need you to join us and help us with our next book, which we're going to start working on as soon as we publish the cryptid erotica anthology. You'll get access to our Discord server. If you sign up for the video aspect of the Patreon, we have a weekly meditation group

and our Friday family gathering, where we plan and scheme and ramble. It's at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. Also loves, I'm going to be at the Tacoma Comedy Club in Tacoma on March 10th, 11th, and 12th. You can go to their website, TacomaComedyClub.com and buy tickets. Come see me.

Also, I've got other dates coming up. I'm coming back to Austin. I'm going to be in Portland. I'm going to be at the Denver Comedy Works. All those dates are going to get announced soon. You can find them at dunkitrustle.com. Okay, all righty, enough about me. With us here today is an incredible musician

who I'm lucky enough to have been able to hang out with at the Ramdas retreats because he would sing kirtons with all of us every single night. He spent a lot of time in India hanging out with Ramdas and Neem Krolibaba and a lot of the people that you've gotten to know through the DTFH or maybe through Raghu's podcast,

Mind Rolling or through the Love Server Member Foundation. You can find them at krishnadas.com. You know, I guess one of the great things about the pandemic, God forgive me for saying that, is that a lot of the teachers like Krishnadas are now really accessible. You don't have to fly across the country to go see them. They offer a lot of stuff.

And if you want to hang out with Krishnadas, you could join as one of his kirtons or his online group, Chai and Chat. He's got a satsang that gathers for free every Thursday. It's all at krishnadas.com. I hope you will go pay him a visit and say, I said hello. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the DTFH Krishnadas.

idor into the world. Krishnadas, welcome back to the DTFH. I'm so happy to hear that you're recovering from COVID. 11 days still positive. That's a long time. Yeah, yeah. Probably got another couple of days. There's this new variant.

There's two variants of Omicron. And I have one of them apparently. And they're very mild, but they have different effects. Oh, they do? Yeah, I don't know about the new variant. I know my whole family except me got Omicron. The kids got everyone, everyone got it. Everyone around the planet got it.

Yeah, yeah. I've got some questions for you. And I'm sorry if they seem like maybe I know the answer to them or like I'm trying. I don't know, like dumb questions, I guess. But I when I'm when I'm thinking through like, like things that I've learned at the Ram Dass retreats or things that I've learned from the Satsang as it's called, I think about you a lot.

And you've said a few things to me that have been like atom bombs that really were slow motion atom bombs. You know, like you said, and you did it. You always do it in this incredible like almost like a sniper or something where you'll just say something to me and then I'll I'll like almost be frozen by the thing and then spend a long time thinking about them. So I thought I would bring up two of them just to clarify what you meant. And these are two things you've said to me over, I don't know,

the last eight years or something that I still think about. OK, so the first one was in New York and you said to me, I think after or before the podcast, you know, you're going to have to you have to burn off all the karma. You just have to burn it all off. You said it with this in a very compassionate, sweet way, not like in a dark way or anything, but just the like you patted me on the shoulder and said, you've got to burn off all the karma.

Basically, I think about it a lot. Do you remember saying that? The way you're looking is like, I don't remember that at all. I'm trying to think. I not only don't remember, I can't even imagine what I was. There must have been some reason you were telling me that you were telling me some like I don't think it's necessarily public information. Just some like of the jobs that you have held in your life

other than Kurtanwala. Well, it's not necessarily public, but it's not necessarily private either. OK. But yeah, but yeah, I've had, yeah, I understand. So. You know, I didn't really get into deep shit until after I was with Maharaj. He sent me back. He kept me in India for two and a half years. He actually got my visa extended for the last year himself.

He had he sent me to his I was ready to essentially have to return. And he stopped me and said he would send me to the his devotee, who is the chief of police of Kanpur, and he would stamp my passport. But he kept me there that extra year when most people, everybody kind of left right around that time, Ramdas, Rameshwar Das, Raghu. Most of the Satsang, a large portion of the Westerners left. And I was getting ready to to be sent back, but he changed the program. So.

So then after like a year, I was me and this incredible Greek woman trailed Maharaj to Bombay. We we we we got we tricked the driver of one of the Western of the Indian devotees to tell us where his boss had gone, because we thought the two of them, Maharaj and his guy's boss were together. OK. And as it turned out, so we got we flew to Bombay. I mean, I'm just like, you know, this much information, nothing.

And we got to the hotel where Mr. Barman was staying and we sat in the lobby all day. And in the evening, Barman comes in and he sees us sitting there and he says, Krishna Das, what are you doing here? And we said, Mr. Barman, we hear Maharaj is in Bombay. Maharaj in Bombay. Oh, my God, I had no idea. Well, I have to go out, come up to my room, order some food.

And when I return, we'll try to find him. Well, that I thought that was it. I was ready to jump out the window and kill myself. If he didn't know where he was, nobody knew where he was. And we were we made this trip for nothing. So about an hour later, I'm looking out the window, wondering what it would feel like to hit the ground, you know, with my head first, maybe my knee first, something like that.

And the door opens, gone. Who is that? Who's there? And it was Maharaj. Wow. That great devotee had lied his ass off right into our faces as all devotees will do. And and he, of course, he had been with Maharaj all day, and he brought him back to the hotel. So every day for like two weeks or almost 10 days around Christmas,

1972, we spent the day with Maharaj. He would either come to the hotel or we would go to this apartment that he was Mr. Barman's daughter had. One day I'm sitting there. And he looks at me, he says, I'm going to go to America. And I said, Baba, I'm just learning Hindi. He said, too bad, you have to go, you have attachment there. I didn't know what he was talking about.

No idea. Now I know. Everything that's happened to me from that moment till this moment is what he was talking about. Wow. And you're asking about why I said that. I myself have experienced that. You cannot avoid your shit.

If you push it down, it sneaks up on you from the other side. If you jump into it, you could drown. But you cannot, you can't, you can't not. Your karmas are embedded in your subtle bodies, in your emotional bodies. There's bruises, there's wounds, there's knots, there's little, there's landmines, everything's in there. And sooner or later, they're going to pop,

they're going to come out in the right conditions arise. There's no escaping. I don't know what it was, why I said to you at that moment. But that's what I was, that's what was behind what I was saying. Yeah, I mean, I felt all of that. And that that is what thinking about it whenever, like I'm dealing with my own shitstorms growing out of me. And I think of you telling me that and it makes it like

creates a different relationship with it. Yeah, you know, it does. Yeah, because you see how much stuff is on automatic under the surface. And the only option that we really have, ultimately. You could call it surrender, you could call it. Witnessing, you can call it just allowing yourself to be who you are. But we are not running the show. Stuff arises in our life.

We don't know where it comes from. And we don't. It's not like we have a vote at that point. Our only vote is how we live with it once it's there. How? When you're hanging out with someone like Maraji. You know, like, you know, people will say to me, you you met Ramdas, you met him, you know.

And this is how I feel about Maharaji, you know, we're like, oh, my God. Like, how do how do you end up getting to be around a person like that? That that is incredible karma. But I'm curious how someone like that. Like it from maybe it's a ridiculous question, but from his perspective, is he seeing you as sort of like temporarily trying to evade that karma? Is he just recognizing that you're like in his presence is a kind of like escape mechanism?

And so out of some kind of compassion, he sends you to the very place where he knows you're going to like burn, like be able to burn through this as quickly as you possibly can. Like, is he seeing some landscape or just intuiting it? Do you thought about that? He's seeing it all, all of it. He sees who you think you are. He sees what your comrades have formed you into.

But of course, he also sees what and who we really are underneath all that. He's like the sun, he just shines. He ripens us. He doesn't judge the sun shines on everything equally. Assholes and saints, equally. And that's what and brings light. Oh, that's what the sun does. And that's what Maharaj is. That's all that's what he does.

And with that light that he radiates, you get to see yourself in a different way. You get to be who you really want to be, who you know yourself to be, who you and feel what you've always really. I tell everybody this, I say, what is like being with him? If you imagine in your deepest, wildest, most secret dreams of what you want to feel like, when you're going to feel like everything's totally cool, that's exactly what it feels like.

You're home, you made it. There's nowhere to go. You're there. Yeah, you won the race almost in a way, but you feel so blessed and so fucking lucky. You have no idea how it happened. Right. But it happened and.

You know, here's a really interesting thing. So about 10 years ago, I was in Kenchi, the temple I lived with, the Maharajah, and this couple came for the first time since they had been together with Maharajah, like 25, 30 years before. And we were singing in front of the temple. I looked over and I saw the woman standing on the steps, looking at the tucket, the little cot that Maharajah used to sit on. And she was just staring at it and standing there on the steps.

And I just had this feeling. I said, whoa, something's going on there. I wonder what that is. So after we finished singing, she came over to me and she said, Krishna Das, I think you're the only one who could understand what I'm going to tell you. What? She said, I was just now, I was standing on the steps, looking at the tucket.

And I remember standing in that exact same place, looking at Maharajah. And I remember thinking at the time, I'm here, I'm home, I'll always be right here. This is where I belong. This is the way it's always going to be. And she looked at me and she said, what happened? Wow. 30 or 40 years of life, kids, businesses, marriage, cars, houses. You know, he used to say, I had the keys to the mind.

He said, I could turn your minds against me. And we would go, Bob, I don't do that. He'd laugh, you know. Then he said, I could transfer you. And, you know, he would say, transfer her to Jaya Gala. I'll transfer you. And that's what happened to us. That's what he brought us there.

It wasn't a mistake. He brought us there. He did what he had to do and he sent us back into our lives. He transferred us back. Whoa. And as much as we bitched and moaned and tried to hold on, he he did what had to be done. I want to thank Babel for supporting this episode of the DTFH and also for creating the first language learning system that I've ever gotten addicted to.

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And maybe it's getting a little too technical. My mind is very technical. I like to think about the metaphysics of things. And, you know, I love to study Buddhism. And, you know, I had a conversation with Bob Thurman, where he was talking about. I want to hear that one. Oh, he's a, you know, he's such a brilliant scholar and unbelievable. And so he was sort of describing like the in Tibetan Buddhism, the concept of the enlightened

being or a Buddha having the ability to, you know, see all of your future lives. Know your name when you like become a Buddha and whatever Eon it's going to be or whenever. See the whole picture, this kind of, you know, you hear Terence McKenna talk about something like similar in shamans, like they're somehow outside of time. They're seeing a different landscape. But I'm just I'm curious what your thought process is regarding that peculiar sense. Because when, you know, when you're talking about Maharaj now, you aren't talking in the past tense. You're talking in the present tense.

And so I'm curious if we if we could kind of zoom in on what you mean by that. Well, you know, in Buddhism, they have, there's four, four different times. There's past, present, future and timeless time, beyond time. And in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna, when he's showing him the universal form, his big form, he says, I come as time, the great destroyer. In other words, time itself is is what ripens us and then decays us and then we the bodies die. But the souls keep coming and going around and around in this endless,

not quite endless, but almost infinite circular thing of reincarnating and taking form and burning shit off and the same and same. But Krishna said, I come as time. I'm beyond time, but I come as time, the great destroyer. So and Hanuman is called Trikala Vesham, the dweller in the three times, the past, the future. And right now. Wow. And it's always now. So Hanuman is always here. Maharaj is always here.

Because for being like that, there's no time. The body lives in time, the cells grow and die, and ultimately, the body falls off. But the being, the atma, the soul is beyond the time. Always present. This isn't an intellectual exercise for you. Like this isn't like intellectually, you know, this, this is this, I think. Yeah, OK, this sounds wild, but I can remember being on a great acid, reading the book of John when I was in college in the Bible and somehow, thanks to LSD, I realized someone wrote this.

I know it sounds obvious, but, you know, like somebody wrote that someone wrote this and you ever wrote it. Their consciousness had been altered in the mind of the person who wrote it. They wrote this and whoever wrote it, their consciousness had been altered in the most extreme way by contact with this being that they were trying to write about. So that's how I feel when I'm around people who are hanging out with Maharaj. It's it's like it's not like for me, like I, you know, ever all of us who've been in the satsang long enough, we all have our own miracle stories and dreamy, hopeful contacts with that being. But when I'm around people like you and Raghu or obviously Ramdas, it's like it's not intellectual anymore.

Like you seem to be mostly in that space. Is am I just hoping that's the case? Or do you find yourself flickering back and forth from that timeless time to now? No, that's that's a very wonderful projection of yours. And I wish that's who I was. But when I'm watching Nordic nor serial killer videos, you know, I don't know if I'm present or not. Right, right. Yeah, I'm just gone.

Yeah, but I'll tell you the truth. This pandemic time has been really extraordinary for me because I would I've been traveling. About 27 years, full time, maybe a week or two at home and then gone for a month or two. And after a few months, I was sitting on the couch and I looked around. And I thought, I can sit here. I'm not planning to go anywhere. I can't go anywhere. I'm not planning what to put in my suitcase.

I'm not lining up the doctor's appointments. I'm not making the reservations. I can just sit here. Holy shit. It was an amazing and over this period of time. You know, I'm I've just relaxed a little into just being here. It's been quite extraordinary. I imagine you need a break.

You are, you know, I think if you're a world class musician and you're constantly on the road, you live a life. You've been living the life on the road. And what an intense sort of tour that you're doing because, you know, there's this it's not like you're, I don't know, the Rolling Stones or something, you know, it's like, it's like you're the crowds that you're generating, who knows who's in the audience? You know, like I've seen people show up for your shows where you're like, did you just come out of a cave or something? Did you just come out of a cave or something? You know, you're not like it. Like, you know what I mean? You draw beings to your shows where I don't know who you are, but you're something like just, you know, what's that like for you?

That has got to be the strangest sort of life as a musician. Well, you know, what am I known for? I'm not known for jumping up and down on the stage and sticking my tongue out, you know, and grinding my hips. I'm known for sitting on my eyes, closing my eyes and singing, chanting. Yeah. That's what I don't have to be in. I don't have to work out five days a week just to be able to do it. You know, all I'm doing is sitting down, right?

Although I do need to get some help carrying my suitcases next to them. But anyhow, I mean, I can't, you know, it's too much. I'm 74 now. I lost all my muscles. I can't even get out of bed in the morning. Wow. I'm 48 and I lost all my muscles and can't get out of bed in the morning. You can get them back.

Mine are gone forever. Oh, I don't know about that. But I don't, you know, from those times when I'm chanting with people are the peak moments of my life. Yes. Because I'm just, there's no people there for me. It's only Maharaj. Siddhi Ma, you're still looking at me and say, Krishna Das, you're not chanting to people.

You're chanting, she'd point up to the mountain opposite. Can't you, you're chanting to the Siddhas, the yogis that live up on the hill there. That's who you're singing to. Wow. Remember that. And so I, by his grace, that's kind of what it is. I mean, I don't know who's there. I don't know who's not there.

And I sometimes, I can't, I forget to open my eyes. I like, if I could remember, I might enjoy it a little bit, but it's just, I'm just in it because that's my practice. That's, that's the thing that I've been able to cultivate all these years. And from the first moment I heard chanting in India, I knew I can do this, this, this I can do. I could give myself to this. And it turned out, actually, it was right. It was true. It called you, it pulled you in.

Oh, it was all the lights went on for that minute and a half, you know, and then of course, back to normal. But I, I, I understood immediately, this is, I can do this. This is, this is for me. Um, I, okay. So I want to speak, you doing this in the chanting in particular. And again, any question I ask, I'm terribly sorry if it's like a dumb question. Would you stop? Well, I'm curious.

Okay, I'll stop. Anything you want to say? Okay, thank you. Okay, so, you know, I, like some people listening, they might not know much about chanting or they might not know much about bhakti yoga that in bhakti yoga, there's, um, you know, various forms of bhakti yoga. Some of them have Hanuman is the focus of devotion. Some of them have Krishna is the focus of devotion.

Some of them have the guru is the focus of devotion. Um, or, and maybe I'm making it too narrow. Maybe there's some mix of all, all of those. Yeah. You know what one, one Tibetan Lama, who we writing about, he called it the source of blessings. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's, that's where the devotion is aimed at or connecting with whatever it is, whatever

name it looks like, whatever form it has, it's for you, it's the source of blessings. The source of blessings. And, and, but what I've always loved about Hinduism and in the, in the yogic, the various systems is that there is an acknowledgement of the wildly different personality traits people have and, and how some people are going to have specific attractions to like different chants. Like, you know, I love Hare Krishna. I love it.

I've loved ever since I've heard it. I've loved it. I just love, I love it. That's my, I like it. I don't rom though, rom, rom, rom. It feels, I can't get, it's, I don't know why. I don't know why, but I'm curious. Do you have a chant like that, like a favorite chant or your sort of go to mantra?

Not really. Hare Krishna mantra, I, I love very much. And, but from not, not because of what it is name-wise or mantra-wise, but because it's long musically, there's a lot of space to play with it and to, you know, open it up because it's such a long mantra. There's so much you can do with it musically. And of course the music is like the sweet syrup that the medicine of the name is hidden in. And so because it tastes good, we take the medicine, but it's not the, it's not the

syrup that cures us. It's the medicine. Oh, wild, wild. Oh, wow. So the music, the musical part is really just part of the compassionate lure to get people to start saying those names. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Because we, it's pleasurable. We like it. And we like to sing. We like to dance. We like to open up that way. And it also, music is a pacifying thing. It can actually help you calm down and open up, you know, beyond the, underneath the conceptual mind.

It just, it does, does that. It can really affect us. But in this case, you know, if music was enough, every musician would be not just happy, but enlightened, right? Right. But it's not like that, is it? So it can't be that. But that's why they say that the name is, is the medicine.

And this, this is the other thing I love about the Hare Krishna Mahamantra, which has always astounded me, is that regardless of whatever my particular cynical outlook is at whatever period in my life, anytime I start chanting it regularly, some shift happens. Inevitably there's, and it doesn't matter if I'm like, this is saying stupid words, somebody made up, or whether I'm like, these are the names of God. It doesn't really, it's not, it's like when you're taking Advil or something, it doesn't matter if you believe it is working or doesn't. Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, really, that's true. And isn't that great that, that we have access to something that actually frees us from our stupidity and our thinking mind. Yeah. Wow, that's amazing. Most people, you know, they get born, graduate high school, drink some beer and they die, and they're not here for a moment. Right.

You know, and that's it. Next, but some, by some lucky thing we must have tripped over 300 million lives ago. We have access, we know there's something we can do to change our, our, our, our experience. How we go through the day, how we see ourselves, how we see others. It's amazing that we know that at all. What's the theory on it though? I mean, that's the part where, to me, it's just so, I can't understand it at all. I don't know what, what it's doing, or I, because I do have a very cynical part of me

that wants to reduce it. Like I can remember when I was in college, a very long time ago, having met the Hari Krishna's and loving the Hari Krishna Mahantra. And one of the teachers was saying, I've invented this mantra. It's happy, happy, blah. I don't know. It's some stupid thing. And like, you know, at the time I was more fundamental, I was like really, you know,

an idiot college kid, very spiritual materialism. And I'm thinking like, that's not a real mantra. That's bullshit. You know, but to this, you know, but, you know, and in cynical times of my life, when I've looked at the Mala beads or whatever, I've thought this is placebo or something. You're making it up. You're just saying some noises that humans make that is meaningless. But what's your, I don't think that now, but what's your theory on it?

Like what are the, when people say these are the names, what do they mean names of who names of what and who named those things in the first place? Well, first of all, I want to say two things. Ramana Maharshi talks about silence. It's not the absence of thought. What it is, if thoughts are clouds, the silence is the space in which the clouds move. Okay. So keep that in mind.

So then there's this other line from St. John of the Cross. In the beginning, the father uttered one word. That word is his son, and he utters him forever in everlasting silence. And it is in silence that the heart must hear. Wow. It's a constant moving in, moving back, letting go, moving in, letting go, moving in, then until you're there at the first sound and then through the sound, you enter into the beyond, the one, the oneness, the supreme being, the supreme being,

nests, if you don't like being, we call it being nests, space. So the point is, no matter what you're thinking, if you can let go of it, you can always let go of a thought, which means it's not permanent, no matter what you're thinking. So when you do let go of a thought, then what? Another thought arises. So you let go of that. But the letting go itself is moving more deeply into that space. I want to thank Athletic Greens for supporting this episode of the DTFH.

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of immune-supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash Duncan. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Duncan to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. The letting go itself is moving more deeply into that space. But we are so, but our minds are like, you know, so we don't see. Oh, so you're talking about acid. So once I took this trip a long time ago, when I, I've only taken maybe 12 or 13

trips of acid in my life, and I had scored 10 caps of Sando's acid. Good God, right? Pure thousand microgram caps. You mean ampoules? I'm sorry. Not a little capsules. Okay. Little turquoise blue capsules.

Wow. But there were a thousand mikes of Sando. Oh my God. And how did you? I'm sorry. I'm a little bit of an LSD nerd. I'm curious how you score Sando. Okay.

Well, turned out a kid from my high school was going to my same college and he was dealing acid. I don't know how he got it. He was a, he became a high school science teacher on Long Island, but anyhow. Cool. So, so I took the first, I'd split the first cap in water. We mixed it up, me and my friend. And, and then, but the next nine I took all by myself because I knew intuitively

that I had so much heaviness and so much, my stuff was so fucking thick. I had to blast myself through it to get into space. And the thousand mikes is what I needed. And I would blast through it. And for like 18 hours, I was playing. I was, I was kid again. I was free.

And of course, there were all kinds of visions and all kinds of things. But the basic thing was like, wow, I would play with my dog in the snow, you know, and it would all be rain. Every snowflake was a different color, you know. So one day I had been up for, I don't know, you know, a long time. And I'm finally getting into bed and I'm just lying there. And there was a window on the other side of the room. And I'm lying there in bed like, you know, just kind of, and then I sensed something.

And it seemed to be coming from outside of the room, like through the window. So I was looking out the window and what, what is this? What, what, you know, and it seemed to be coming closer and closer. I was going, what the fuck is this? What's, oh no. Oh no, it's a thought. That sucks. Wow, right.

Then I was thinking. Yeah, right. And then after some indeterminate period of time, I felt it leaving me. No, no, no, don't, don't go, don't, the, uh, space again. It was so that, and then of course, little by little, they started coming faster and more frequently and faster and fast. And finally all there was was the flow of thought again. And I was back.

Yeah, yeah. So we're so dull. We don't experience our thoughts like that. We, we actually believe what we think most of the time. That's, that's actually the definition of insanity, you know, but okay. We believe what we think and we don't, but as we practice letting go of the thoughts, we begin to be aware of this little space there, you know, and then that space gets deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.

And, um, so the chanting practice, that's why I always, I never tell people, this is what Ram means. This is what Krishna means. This is what Hanuman means because I don't give a shit what it means. I want to be there. And the only way to get there is to keep letting go, but you need something to let go from. Um, that's why when we add a practice to our daily lives,

we find ourselves coming back to it from out, from dreamland. We live in dreamland. Yes. We're basically asleep, but once we add a practice to our lives, it actually brings us back for a millisecond or a minute or when you're driving, all of a sudden you're back and then you get busy again. You forget, but it's that idea of forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering.

So it doesn't matter what you think about it. Everything you think is, is ridiculous. You know, it makes, it has no reality to it at all. It's your programs running, our programs running. And because we believe those programs, we act a certain way. We feel a certain way. We react a certain way. Sure.

We treat people a certain way. We treat ourselves a certain way, all because of our programs. Yeah, it's like someone shoved an iPhone into our brain that we can't turn off. It's some terrible neurological social media hallucinatory simulator device. It's impossible to turn off. I'm curious if being around Maharaji, if it was instant in that space, like being around him, you just had to be there. There was no way to not be in that space around him.

Or did you find yourself assailed by your thought flow even around him? Well, you know, he didn't teach. He wasn't a teacher. Like he didn't give talks and lectures and textbooks. But what he did was he opened the door to the room where love lives and called us in. And then we were in. But then our minds started working. Our thoughts would pull us out.

And he would call us back. And then our thoughts would pull us out. Then he would call us back. Then I thought, this is what happened around him. And you know, when a kid is playing, there's not a meta story going on like, wow, I'm a kid and I'm really playing. This is fantastic. What a great time I'm having.

No, that's later. When the kid is playing, there's 100% into it. But he doesn't know he's 100% into it. He's not like that. So that's what it was like. We were brought into this space of to use a dirty word, happiness. Can't say that on my pocket. It's the one word we don't say on the show, actually.

I'm sorry. We'll bleep it. We'll bleep it. You have to bleep it out. Yeah. Really just happy. And not thinking, wow, this is great. I'm really happy.

No, we were just happy. Okay. We were home. And then we would chop it up with our stuff. And then he would bring us back. He was like, you know, in Star Wars, when the smaller little space vehicles are like coming back to the big mothership, you know, they're playing like a billion miles an hour and they're right through these tiny little holes into the ship.

There's a homing beacon, you know. He's a homing beacon and it's full time 24, 7, 365. So it is a homing beacon. If you don't like, he is a homing beacon. Right. It's the homing beacon that that just that's already connected to your software. Right. And it's pulling you in and you're doing everything you can to avoid it, you know,

because maybe you're screwing the assistant pilot in the back of the ship and you don't want to go back to the mother's sword, right? So you're trying to fuck up, you know, but it's pulling you in. There's nothing you can do. Nothing you can do. That's called grace. That's grace. Grace is just grace.

And there's no explaining it. Okay. So this brings us me to the second thing that I think about all the time that you said, in fact, which is I think I'd been up there with Ron, I don't know. Or I'd just been bitching about like, I didn't get to meet this guy. You all get to meet this guy. You're talking all these stories about this guy. I didn't get to meet him.

You know, that thing you go through, I don't know. I guess you don't because you met him. But like a real sense of like. Yeah, but yeah, but I also lost them and I wouldn't wish that on anybody. Right. What I went through. That. And because that is the, you know, people, folks listening who might be,

I don't know, more secular than we are. There's a thing you do at those retreats, you know, you brush shoulders with that thing. And you're like, this is it. What is that? Is that just me? Or I don't know. And then it's gone. And then you're like, well, what, what, what did I, how did I fuck up?

You know, like what, like how did, what did I do that I end up being in the like distant periphery of the thing. And I don't get to be in the presence in the, in the actual like presence of him. And you, I remember you put your, you like, you're so good at like transmitting these ideas, but you just said the longing is the grace. Do you remember that? Do you remember saying that? I don't care if you don't remember, I know you run into a lot of us hippies all the time

and you're always saying cool things to us, but do you remember that idea? The longing is the grace. Can you tell me about what grace is and specifically what you meant by that? Well, just like we've been talking, you know, the longing is our, how we experience as people, as individuals, what being pulled into our deepest self feels like. We, that longing is actually what we, what we're feeling as we're being pulled into ourselves. And we want, we don't even, we don't know what's actually in there, but we, we've got this longing to, to, to be it, to be in it, to, we don't even know what we're longing for, but we know we're

longing and we know on one level we do know what it is because we know what it's not actually. That's, that's kind of, you know, right, right. By knowing what it's not, you can identify what it is almost. You can almost just, whoa, that's so cool. Yeah. But yeah, that longing is, is, is the saving grace because without it, where are we? What do we have? We're just in our lives, which is not so bad, but we're just lost in our lives. It's the longing that pulls us, that makes us look for something more, more satisfying, more fuller, more deeper, more sweeter.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's a yearning. It's a, but it feels sometimes I wonder, you know, because your guitar player is my meditation teacher and he's a very good one at that. And he's teaches me, he's like really, really good at talking about, about Buddhism. And, you know, sometimes I'll go through periods of catching a glimpse of that thing, you know, and at my sitting practice. And, but then exactly your acid experience will happen where the moment I've caught a glimpse, I'm like, that's it. Wow, that's it. In the beginning, I was really dumb. So I would think I'm getting enlightened for sure. And now whenever I get that thought, I'm like, Oh, fuck, you think you're getting enlightened? You're in trouble because

never, it never lasts. And it always like, it's, but isn't it greedy? Are we not supposed to long for it? Isn't there some, something about like giving up, like there's a red flag if you find yourself suddenly greedy for that space or really wanting it too much or something? Well, yeah, I mean, you could say that. But on the other hand, what you learn in your practice, in the devotional side, we just call it surrender. Right. Right. This is, this is now. Okay. I'm here. It's going to change. Okay. And what immediately you're underneath the waves, you're not in the waves anymore. Right. It's the same as awareness. It's the same as

the witness or, or that calm abiding, because you're no longer clinging to ideas of higher, lower, right and wrong in and out. You're now more identified with the space. Oh, you're froze. Not me. Oh, okay. So just where we stopped yours. You were alluding to this, this idea of like dropping underneath the waves, which I love. And in that space underneath the waves, suddenly like all the comparisons and stuff, I think sort of melt away. Or yeah, exactly. Yeah. And all the thinking about whether you're high or low or this experience of that experience in and out, all that stuff,

it's, it's only, it's just passing through the space of awareness. And on the devotional side of that, we would just call that surrender. You know, we're no longer identifying with the concepts and the thought forms and accepting them all in this case as Maharajis doing. So, or Maharajis gift, Maharajis Prasad. So we just accept it. And, and mine doesn't work on it. I'm sorry, the thought forms you're saying, even like the like depraved thoughts, all of it you're saying except that is a gift from Maharajis? No, no, I'm not necessarily, no, no, those are our karmas unfolding. But what I was saying is whatever happens in our daily lives and stuff like that.

Gotcha. You're no longer writing a story about it, your own story. In other words, it happens. And when you think about surrender, you just simply let it go. You accept it as it is, you don't, you're not obsessed with it. It's the tractor beam. Yeah. Now this is going through the clouds on the way in, you know. Okay. Why don't I want that to be true? Why is there something when you hear a thing like that? You're like, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. I have to struggle. Like, I need things to not be that way. There's no way I've gotten so lucky that I'm in some kind of cosmic love tractor beam pulling me into a holy mothership being piloted by an enlightened saint. So what your question is, why don't you believe that or why don't you let yourself go?

What's the resistance to that idea? Like anytime I noticed something in me and other people, I know it's not just me that it's, it's almost like, yes, I know on the under the wave level, I know you're right. But the wave level for some reason, it's not like I don't believe it. It's almost like, no, I don't want it to be so easy. Well, it's not easy, but let's forget that. You know, we're afraid to be seen. We're, we don't want to be seen. Yeah. Because we've been programmed to believe that we're not, we're not worthy of love. Yes. And it's such a deep, it's almost like the ground of almost everybody's life that we meet. And we're willing to be a lover, but we're too afraid to be loved. We have to show ourselves, you know.

And it's, if you just have to, I mean, at some point, you just have to get over it. Right. You have to, you have to give up. That happened to me once in a very unusual situation. What happened? Well, you can decide if you want to keep this in there. Yeah. So I was being sentenced for money laundering in court. What? Money laundering? All my old friends from India became hash smugglers, and I used to handle all their money. I do want to keep it. Do you want to keep that in here? Yours and it's from, I wouldn't even, this is so funny. You mentioned this only because the other day I was hearing someone talk about money laundering and I was thinking, I couldn't do that

if I've tried. How do you even launder money? Like, what were you doing? Well, I used to pull up in the back at eight in the morning before the bank opened in this particular town outside of the United States. It was not in the United States of America. I pulled up in the back with a few duffel bags filled with cash, like millions of dollars of cash. Millions of millions. The guy would come out of the bank, take the duffel bags, and then in a few days I'd fly over to Europe or from wherever I was, and I would either pick up the money and put it in a safe box for somebody, or I wouldn't have to go anywhere and it would just be moved through the banking system to the people who want, who belong to them. So as I was saying, I was sitting there in court waiting to be

sentenced, and before the judge came out, the prosecutor came over to me, and I tell you, if this guy was running for God, I would vote more than once. I would sneak a million votes in there. This guy was one of the most wonderful people I've ever met. This is the guy who was supposed to be putting me in jail. So anyway, he comes over to me and said, look, I have to ask for time, because I'm the head prosecutor here, and you broke the law. I don't believe in these laws. I don't think they should be on the books, but they are, and I'm the head prosecutor, and I just have to maintain my position and uphold the law as it is, even if I don't like it. So I said to him, no problem, you do what you have to do, man, it's okay. So there's two tables, right? I'm sitting on

end of one table, and then he's sitting on the end of the other table. We're about two feet from each other, really. My lawyer's over here, his assistant's over there. So the judge comes out, and he says to my lawyer, well, it's such a long story. It's someday I have to write it all down, because after I'm gone, people will really like this, or after I don't care. We like it while you're here. Plenty of time. It's a podcast. We can turn this into multiple episodes. I got all the time in the world. Please keep going. Okay, so my lawyer, first of all, okay, back up just a little bit. The prosecutor gave my lawyer, who was an 87-year-old black attorney who worked his way up from the lowest ranks. Now he was like

the most respected attorney in the whole system there. And the prosecutor gave my attorney choice of judges. So in other words, what it comes down to, how do you want to die? Being smothered by a beautiful woman's, you know, or flayed alive, you know? Those are the two choices. Let me think about that, you know? So my lawyer picks the head judge in the whole state, because his father was my lawyer's best friend, and he'd known him his whole life. So he picks him. This is the head, the big guy. Okay, so the judge comes out and says, hi, Ray, what you got? What you got for me today? So my lawyer says to me, your honor, I'm going to use a word in court that I have never used in 50 years before the bar.

And the judge says, what's that, Ray? He says, spiritual, your honor. I don't even want to take this guy's money. I don't know what to do. Wow, that's so cool. It was insane. It was insane. Did you do that? I did six months at home. Wow. That's six months of the last 5,000 years. It was so great. Wow. So they were taking it easy on you, because you had this vibe. You'd been hanging out with Maharaj and you had this vibe, and they loved you. It was quite extraordinary. So anyway, this is the finished this little part of the story. So my lawyer says, you know, blah, blah, blah. So the judge says, okay, Ray, I got that. So okay. And he said the name of the prosecutor, I'm not going to say his name. What do you got for me? So he gets up and he said, your honor,

he cooperated with us fully. But his information was sold that it was essentially useless. So he's painting me as like a nothing. And then he says, and by the end, besides he had changed, he had already left that life before law enforcement contacted him, which was an out and out lie. And he knew it. And then blah, blah, blah. And he sits down. And he doesn't ask for time. He doesn't recommend that I do time. And I looked over at him. And he's looking down like this. He wouldn't, he couldn't look at me. He couldn't look up. But he could not get himself to look to ask for time. So here's what I was, here's where we were going to. So then the judge went into his chambers to deliberate. And I'm sitting there.

Now, you know, Mohan, right? Of course, yeah. Yeah. So Mohan had gone to see Sidhima when I got busted. And first thing for those of you, Mohan, he's in the satsang. He's a, he wanders through India. He just wandered. How would you just, he's like, he's like a wandering ascetic. He shows up to Hawaii for these things, but usually he's living in India. Is that the best way to describe him? And he was with Maharaja in the old days too. And he was a big businessman in New York for many years also. Oh, okay. I didn't know that part of it. Okay, cool. So Mohan. So Mohan went to ask for blessings from me. And the first thing she said to him was, was anybody hurt? So Mohan said, no. Okay. So she closed her eyes for a minute and she said,

okay, Hanuman will sit on the judge's hands, you know, and prevent them from doing anything to me. And then she gave him a little piece of Maharaj's blanket, which Mohan put in this, this little, it looks like a tiny little suitcase. And it's sealed up and the piece of blanket that she gave is in there. So now the judge goes into his chambers to deliberate. And I'm sitting there and the door to, after some time, the door to the chamber opened. And this invisible wind filled the room. It filled the room. Just, I went. And when, at that moment, I knew that I was not going to jail. And I started to have a complete fucking nervous breakdown sitting right there at that table. Because I was willing and expected to be seen as a bad guy who had done something wrong

and needed to be punished. But I could not bear to be seen as a good guy who did not deserve to be punished. I couldn't, I couldn't, it hurts so much. It hurts so much. My heart was like cringing and in pain. And then I said, I said to myself, Krishna Das, you were willing to accept the bitter Prasad, the bitter gift from Maharaj. You have to accept the sweet gift as well. And then I, then I chilled out. It was a huge moment. That's beautiful. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. You can't just, yeah. You have to give up this, like, is it, how is it that we ended up being the last part of the universe fighting against love? How did that happen? Like, it's such a strange predicament to find yourself in.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny, one time I was sitting in Kenchi with Siddhima in the back of the temple. And I had lived, I've been very close with a few families in India. One of them was the Tiwari family. They all, all the kids considered me to be the older brother. So the oldest grandson of Mr. and Mrs. Tiwari was getting married. So all the, that whole generation, all the cousins and nephews, they all came together to see Siddhima and get blessings. And they all came in the back of the temple and I'm sitting there. There's like 15 or 20 of them and they're all, and I'm looking at them. And it was so much love among these kids. I just thought to myself, I was like, I was stunned. I was like a stun gun hit me. I was just sitting there and Siddhima looked at me and she said,

you see Krishnadas? You see what you missed by being born in America. Whoa. Yeah, it's like an American disease or something. It's a Western disease. Western culture. Yeah. Because Western culture is just completely antithetical in a lot of ways to what you're talking about. You don't deserve love. You're supposed to just scrape by, you know, and happiness is on the outside. The more step you get the happier. Yes. As if it's going to last forever. Wow. Thank you. Thank you so much for that story. I needed to hear that. Thank you so much. Thanks just for spending time with us. It's just such an incredible honor to get to associate with you at all. And I'm so lucky.

And thank you. We're all lucky man. Great. I love talking with you. I love it. So much fun. I know that you're doing, I've been telling people, this is one of the ways that you can, like the weirdly lucky thing about the pandemic is all the teachers from the satsang are doing these like zooms and stuff. You don't have to fly anywhere. So I know you're, are you doing, are you still doing every Thursday? Every Thursday night for the last whatever year and a half since March 20, what was it? March 2019? I guess that was the first, we just did a weekend thing up at Kripalu. But COVID was already happening because I remember we weren't hugging. Right. At that retreat. Then we went home and boom, didn't leave the house for a year.

It was amazing. So yeah, every Thursday. So every Thursday. 730, 730, New York time. Got it. And then it's on, it's on replay on, on YouTube. It's always there. Okay, great. And, and I see you've got some shows coming up. It looks like what, a live show in May? Is that your first live show or? You know, I think we pushed everything back now to June. We're coming, we're doing a West Coast tour in, in May, June. Great. Starting in LA up and down the West Coast. Okay. Beautiful. I'll have all those links at dunkatrestle.com. And any, any other thing that you want me to plug, we'll plug up front, but Krishna Das,

I love you. Thank you so much for being here. And my pleasure. Howdy Krishna. Thank you. My pleasure. Round and round. Be well. Good to see you. Good to see you. That was Krishna Das, everybody. You could find him at Krishna Das.com. Tremendous thanks to our wonderful sponsors. And God bless you for listening. I will see you all next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. Welcome to the CPAP Games Live from the Hayes Bedroom. It's another eventful night, Bruce. It sure is, Ron. Steve has been flailing everywhere, struggling with this CPAP. His wife, Michelle, is as tense as a fiddle string trying to contain her rage.

Michelle's rolling Steve over. There he goes. And the mask is off. Oh my, the snoring. Michelle throws an elbow. Now a shove. If she's leaving for the couch, taking her place is the Hayes' 100-pound lab. Bask in that dog breath, Steve. With all this struggle, Steve should get inspired. Absolutely, Bruce. Inspires a sleep apnea treatment that gives you comfortable, restful sleep with the click of a remote. That's right, a button. As you sleep, Inspire keeps you breathing normally and sleeping peacefully. There's no mask and no hose. Just sleep. Learn more at Inspiresleep.com. That's Inspiresleep.com. Inspire, sleep apnea, innovation. Inspire is not for everyone. Talk to your doctor to see if it's right for you and

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