Toronto, Canada - Recorded on July 5, 2015 Krishna Das Music Presents – Heart of Devotion Workshop At the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, Ontario, Canada Sunday, July 5th, 2015 PART 1 – PRACTICE [KD] My Guru was very unusual, very, very unusual. Most saints wear holy clothes and do holy things. He just hung around. He dressed in a blanket, just covered himself with a blanket. Someone wrote... his name was Neem Karoli Baba and we called him Maharaj- ji. Somebody wrote, “Maharaj-ji is nothing special but his body fills the universe.” And he used to say to us all the time, “Ram nam karne se sab pura ho jata.” And that means from repeating the Names of God, which is what we just did, what they call in India the Names of God, everything is made full and complete, everything is brought to fullness, pura. So it’s like a ripening process. A ripening process. I mean, we don’t know what we are doing, we don’t know where we are going, we don’t even know who we are. So how are we going to do anything for ourselves? But the people who know, they give us some simple instructions so that we can uncover what’s within us. Because everybody has it, everybody’s already got that within us. We all have Buddha nature, our soul, the atman, Shiva, Kali, whatever you have, that’s all within, living in our own hearts as who we are, not somebody else or something else. This is an important point – he said, importantly. We already have it, we just have to uncover it because we don’t know where it is. We just don’t know where to look or how to look. So through the repetition of these names and other spiritual, so-called spiritual practices, this presence within us will uncover and we open up into that. So, you know, it’s like we were born wearing glasses with the wrong prescription. You know? So we grow up and we’re looking out and we think everything is that way Toronto, Canada - Recorded on July 5, 2015 1 because that’s the way we see, right? Through these practices that we do that prescription little by little self corrects. And then, what happens? Little by little we see things differently and so we react to things differently because we’re seeing them differently. A shadow might look like some kind of demon sneaking up on us in the middle of the night so we would get afraid, but when we see it as a shadow there is nothing to be afraid of so there’s no fear. According to how we see things, that’s how we live in the world. How we perceive things, how we feel things. And so these practices, what they do is they change the way we see, think, and feel. It’s our job to do the practices. It’s not our responsibility to make the changes. The changes will come naturally as with the see things differently. Right? Let’s just say you work in an office and you come to work one day in your coworker has this nasty look on his face and he walks right by you and you go, “What the fuck did I do?” Right? What is it that get him off? And you spend a whole day like saying, “What did he do that for?” And you get all pissed off and angry, and you know, “What did I do this guy, why is he looking at me like that?” And you find out he has a migraine, or his dog died. Something that has nothing to do with you, but you spent the whole day wishing this guy a quick journey to hell. For no reason other than the way you perceived that situation, right? So, what we need to do is get a vote. Some kind of vote in how we go through the day, in how we act and react. So you get a vote through these practices, that’s why we do these. There’s a lot of things we can’t change about this world and about ourselves but one thing we can change with a little effort is how we get through the day and how we treat ourselves and how we treat other people. Maharaj-ji would never tell us what to do. He’d never give us practices to do. We wanted to be great yogis. When I went to India I gave away everything I had. I sold my car, my guitar, I gave my jeans away. I was never coming back to America, to the West. Never. I was going to live in India and be a saddhu. Right! Well, after two and a half years, one day he looks at me and says, “What are you doing here? Go home!” Toronto, Canada - Recorded on July 5, 2015 2 “But I’m just learning Hindi!” “Too bad, go. You have attachment there, you go, you have to go.” But of course he was right. So this is the interesting thing. You know, we approach spiritual life and spiritual practices the way we approach everything else. Like it’s something to get, something to accomplish. “I’m going to change myself.” What are you going to change yourself for? A Coke bottle? What are you going to do? What are you going to change yourself into? We can’t do anything like that. What we can do is take some responsibility for our thoughts and emotions and learn how to not be victimized by them, like we are all the time, 24/7. Everything we do has to do with what we think or feel about something. And we react... we believe everything we think, right? Do you ever say, “Oh no.” You don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I feel like shit.” You don’t say, “No, why do I believe that?” No, you just say, “Oh, I feel like shit.” You never question, we never question our thoughts. We believe everything. That is the definition insanity. Absolutely. We wake up in the morning, we start writing, producing, directing, and acting in The Movie of Me. Where am I going? What I am doing? What am I wearing? Do they like me, they don’t like me. What If I do this? What if I do that? All day long, until we fall asleep at night. And then we write reviews, which we read and get depressed, which changes the movie and makes it even worse. How do we stop this movie? We can’t stop this movie, we don’t know where it’s coming from. We don’t know where it’s going, we’re just like, “Ahh.” Once we start to do practice, we begin to train ourselves little by little to let go of this stuff that’s pushing us around all the time. This is what gives us the strength to become good human beings. Caring, kind, compassionate, strong human beings. That’s why we do these practices. We used to ask Maharaj-ji, you know, we tried to trick him into telling us some practice to do, like some serious meditation practice. “Baba, how do you find God?” We figured he’s tell us, he obviously knows. He said, “Serve people.” Toronto, Canada - Recorded on July 5, 2015 3 What? Serve people? What do people have to do with God? So then we thought, Okay, he must be a little spaced out, he’s not quite getting it. “Baba, how do you raise kundalini?” “Feed people.” What? Feed people? What is he talking about? He would never tell us or instruct us to do anything that centered around my spiritual well-being, thinking about me. He said love everyone, serve everyone, remember God. Remembering is this part, the chanting part, the meditation part. Those are the practices. One time an old lady came to the temple and she said, “Baba, show me God.” And he said, “Ma, not now. Later on. Go in the back.” So, he called everyone, all the women “Ma.” So the woman goes in the back, and she’s serving in the temple during the day, cutting vegetables or whatever. And in the evening she’s going out of the temple to catch the last bus to town and as she’s walking across the courtyard Maharaj-ji calls her, “Ma come here, I’ll show you God now.” “Not now, Baba, I have to get home.” Oh, well. We like to think we ready for something, anything other than what we’re already involved with. But this is what we’re ready for, our lives as they are. So it is inside of this life that you find yourself in that we can unwind some stuff and find a good way to live and to exist to get through the day into through the life. You can’t go anywhere else. Where are you going to go? The moon? There’s no TV on the moon. There is no vegetables on the moon. There’s nothing. This is where we are, this is what we have to deal with. We might as well start paying attention to it. Because there is nowhere else to go. When I was kid there were Quaker Oats. They used to have this commercial, they would shoot of a canon and it said, “Quaker Oats, shot out of a canon.” That’s how I feel my life.