Chants of a Lifetime by Krishna Das

Author:Krishna Das [Das, Krishna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2010-02-15T08:00:00+00:00

MOVIE OF ME

The love that I felt coming from Maharaj-ji when I was with him in India was so extraordinary and unusual because it kept flowing. It didn’t come to me if I was good, and it didn’t stop flowing to me if I was bad . . . and he knew everything. There was no way that I deserved this love. Of course, that’s the nature of grace; no one deserves it. That’s why they call it grace. It comes to us when we least expect it—when we are at the end of our rope and can’t see how we can go on anymore, we turn a corner and there it is. We trip and fall and we’re in it. Grace surrounds us all the time, but we only feel it at rare moments. It is the true state of the Universe. As Suzuki Roshi said, “Come walk with me in the rain. But don’t hurry. It’s raining everywhere.”

What keeps us away from the gentle rain of grace? It’s our endless obsession, all day long, with I, me, mine. We wake up in the morning and start writing “the movie of Me”: What am I going to do? Where am I going to go? How am I going to get there? Is this enough? Is it too much? What’s going to happen? What am I going to wear? How do I look? Does he like me? Why not? All day long. The movie of Me. We write it, direct it, produce it, and star in it. We write reviews that we read and get depressed! Then we go to sleep and do it again the next day. I’ve seen it so many times. And still, every time I turn on the TV, there it is: me, myself, and my stuff.

Gradually (key word) and inevitably (the other key word), spiritual practices like chanting remove this subjective version of life by slowly dissolving the attachments that keep us feeling separate from the people around us, and separate and cut off from the beauty that lives in our own hearts. Everything we do in life is connected to everyone and everything else, but because we’re locked up in our own little world, when we reach out to touch another person, all we touch is our version of the other person, and all they touch is their version of us. We’re rarely really touching each other.

In 1997, when I first started traveling around to chant with people, a friend of mine arranged for me to lead kirtan in Tucson, Arizona, at a Middle-Eastern restaurant called The Caravan. I was going to be singing in a small waiting area that was part of the entrance to the restaurant. On the other side of this room was the kitchen. I was sitting on the floor with my friend Bub, who was drumming; the eight or nine people who showed up to sing were sitting in chairs by the walkway that the customers and the waitpersons took to get to the dining room.

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