Sing! Krishna Das and Neem Karoli Baba
Linda Johnsen
The New York Times calls him “the chant master of American yoga.” He’s also been called “the Pavarotti of kirtan,” but many yoga students know Krishna Das simply as the soulful voice providing the soundtrack to their spiritual lives. Since his first CD, “One Track Heart,” made its debut in 1995, Krishna Das’ passionate rendering of Indian devotional music has introduced tens of thousands of enthusiastic American fans to the spiritual practice of chanting. His CDs, including “Pilgrim Heart” and “Live on Earth (For a Limited Time Only),” have sold nearly 100,000 copies, phenomenal sales for a New Age artist. Inspired by Ram Dass, author of the 1970 classic Be Here Now, Krishna Das set off for India in September 1970, where he lived in the Himalayan foothills for two and a half years as a devotee of Ram Dass’ guru, Neem Karoli Baba. (Maharaji, as his disciples called the aging master, was famous for wrapping himself in a plaid blanket and constantly practicing Ram Nam—continual chanting of the name of God, “Ram” in Hindi). I caught up with Krishna Das in Sonoma, California, where he’d just led a weekend chanting intensive. His eyes brimmed as he recalled his years with Maharaji.
• What was it like being with Neem Karoli Baba? He did everything from the inside. Outside he would pat you on the head and play with you. The outside was just for hanging out, but the inside was to comfort people. Everyone who came to him was comforted in one way or another. One man came, one of his two oxen had just died. He couldn’t plow his land, his family would starve. Maharaji gave him the money for another ox. One old lady came and Maharaji sat her down and fed her sweets, plate after plate, and she was crying. She said to him, “In my life, no one has ever fed me like this.” He fed everybody in every way, all the time. There wasn’t anything else he was doing. Beings visible and invisible, in worlds that we couldn’t see, all he did was feed them. You need a wife, you got a wife, you need a son, you got a son, your daughter needs to get married, you need a house, you need a job, you need a cure, everybody, everything, on every level, all the levels, he was feeding everyone. It took a while to get with the program. You have to understand, we came over from America, we wanted to be yogis. He wouldn’t buy any of that. We would ask, “Maharaji, how can we know God?” We figured we got the guy here, he knows the answers, we’re going to ask him the questions. “How do we find God?” “Serve people,” he said. What? It was totally beyond our understanding. We tried again. “How do we raise our kundalini?” “Feed people.” What? “But Maharaji, how can we be happy?” “Stop thinking of yourselves.” There’s a beautiful story in Ram Dass’ book Miracle of Love. One of his old local devotees is ragging on him: “Maharaji, you never teach us anything!” Maharaji ignores him, but he won’t stop, so finally Maharaji says, “Okay, what are you going to do today?” “I’ll take the bus back to Nainital, I’ll close up the shop, do some puja [worship], eat some food, and go to sleep.” Maharaji says, “What’s the use of teaching? You’re not going to do it anyway. You’ve got your lives planned. Beings come already taught by God. Anyone who poses as a teacher does it for the sake of their own ego.” He’s not talking about saints but about people who want to be known as teachers. He didn’t say it was bad, but he was one to call a spade a spade. If you’re doing business, you’re doing business. It has nothing to do with being a saint. We just wanted to run our lives through him, and be seen by those loving eyes. We knew that everything happening was freeing us and getting us closer to him, just by being in that vibe. For me the vibe is in some ways more present now than it was then. Most of the time I feel closer to him now than when I was holding on to his foot for dear life. Because the only thing between him and me was me. And since he’s spent the last twenty-five years grinding my head down at the grindstone, there’s less of it around now so I’m closer to him. Your whole life becomes the guru. The best moments were the sweet, quiet little ones when you’d sit staring at him, seeing all the beauty of the universe wrapped up in that blanket, the glow, the radiance of love everywhere. He’d open his eyes, look at you, break into a big smile and go “Krishna Das!” In every way, in every moment, he would see God, and would see God in us. That was really weird, because we didn’t see it ourselves. But he saw that all the time. As we go on through life we learn to see ourselves with the eyes of love like he did, and then we can see others with the eyes of love too. One day a woman visited us from another ashram. He asked her, “What did they teach you there?” At that ashram they teach kechari mudra, where you press on your eyeballs and see a light, so she answered, “They taught us to see the light.” He just looked off into space, and very quietly, very wistfully, he said, “But there’s light everywhere!”
• Maharaji seemed happy to have devotees from the West. We didn’t come there for anything other than him, anything other than love. We didn’t need jobs. We weren’t like some of the people who used him for what they needed to make it through the day, through the horror of their lives. We can’t take any credit for that—if we had been born in India we would have done the same thing. He had a great time with us. Here we were, these crazy people born in another country, sitting on the pebbles in the hot sun, singing the name of God. What else would someone like him want to hear, anyway?
• Why did you leave India? Maharaji sent me home in March of 1973. Then in May he turned to one of my guru-bhais [brother disciples] and asked, “Where is Krishna Das?” “You sent him back to America.” “A-cha? Write him a letter, tell him to come back. I want to hear him sing.” He would say to the women there, “Everybody comes here only to talk about worldly things. I’m so tired of this! I want to hear God’s name. I want to hear chanting.” It was toward the end of his time in the body, the last few months. He wore that body out—it couldn’t hold him anymore. But nobody knew that then.
• Did you go see him? No. The whole time I was in India I was celibate, which to me was essentially taking a vacation from the torture of relationships. I only wanted to be with him. Still, after two and a half years, every pore was exploding. He knew that. I also had a fantasy of being a great yogi and going off to the mountains for six months and meditating. I didn’t have the self-discipline. I would have just wasted my time. Of course he knew that too. One day Maharaji asked, “You think about your father?” I started to get very scared. I said, “Yeah, it’s his birthday; I phoned him today.” “A-cha. You go back to America, you have attachment there.” In retrospect I know I didn’t have to go, but I wanted to. I needed to blow some steam off. My last day in India the visa people were giving Maharaji a hard time, so he wasn’t letting the Westerners into the temple. Standing on the platform in front of the temple, we could see Maharaji sitting with his back to us. He wouldn’t look at us. And then, God bless her forever, this woman named Krishna Priya started singing “Jaya Jagad Ishvara,” a song we knew, so we all started singing. He whipped around and shouted, “Come on!” So we all ran in. This was to be my last darshan, you understand. It was complete pandemonium: everyone crying and laughing and bowing and fruit flying in all directions. I was completely panicked about what to do in America. I hadn’t had on a pair of pants in two years. When I spoke English I was like this: “Yes, very nice, just coming!” I had completely immersed myself in India. Finally I just blurted out, “How can I serve you in America?” He looked as if he’d just bitten a pickle. He said, “You ask about service? Then it’s not service. Then I’m telling you what to do. Do what you want.” Now, I had been celibate for almost three years. Can you imagine what I wanted to do? No one had ever told me to do what I wanted. Everybody else said, “Don’t do what you want.” He always said things like that because he knew you’re going to do what you want to do anyway. He never created structures that weren’t built on reality. Be who you are; it’s okay. You want to get married? Get married! You want to go to the jungle? Go to the jungle! Then he leans over to me and says, “So, how will you serve me in America?” As I’m bowing down I hear in my head, “I’ll sing to him.” When I got back to the States I had that arrogance people have when their teacher is still in the body. They think they can always go back. I met this woman and we started getting it on. Then the letter arrived saying Maharaji asked me to come back. Because I was getting laid, I didn’t want to run back. I thought I’d go in December. He left the body in September.
• Whoa. I was devastated. The betrayal of his love was unbearable. I felt I had totally blown it, the only chance I would ever have. That moment led to all the karma of my previous days—before India—coming back on me. I got back on the train of the life that I was leading before I was with him. If you asked me I would say, “I’m a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba,” but I was dead inside. Except for the fact that he is who he is. Eleven years later I did go back to India. I’d been doing a lot of self-destructive stuff. It was affecting everyone around me, my wife, my kids. I arrived there during Durga Puja and the Indian devotees said, “You’ve come to sit in the puja with us! Come make the offerings in the place of honor.” I just wanted to sleep for a week, but you can’t say no. They love you too much. At the end of the arati one old woman bowed down on the tuffet where Maharaji used to sit and she didn’t get up. She went into samadhi. Forget a knife—I already had a knife in my heart—it was like a spear. I thought, “He’s real for these people, and I’m so far away from him!” At that moment Siddhi Ma, who was one of his great devotees, called for me. I was thinking, “Why don’t they just leave me alone?” But you can’t say no. So I got up and followed her into the room where Maharaji spent a lot of time, his inner room. When I walked in the room, he was there. And I fell like a tree hit by lightning. I didn’t see him with my eyes, but he was there. I completely disintegrated. I was crying uncontrollably and I could not stop. I saw every second of my life from the moment I heard he died until that moment, every second like a frame in a movie. I saw everything I had thought and done from a completely clear space. I saw that I’d built a wall around my heart. I was like a stubborn kid and I would not let myself feel him. Every brick of this wall was shame and fear and guilt and anger and self-hatred. But I also saw that he had been with me every second of every day. The wall, what wall? He’s in the wall, he’s over the wall, there is no wall. He’d never left me for a second, but I wouldn’t let myself feel him. And in the next instant I could take the wall down. From that point on I knew that I could live again.
• You started singing for Maharaji. I knew that unless I did that, there were places in my heart that I’d never get to. There was dirt in there, stuff that needed to be opened out. So I started going down to Jivamukti Yoga Center in New York. It was in August 1994. Every Monday night I would sing. For two years there was nothing more than a few people. It was for free, it was just to do it, to get it out there as an offering. Chanting breaks down the difference between the inside and the outside. It’s about having a heart that never shuts down, that nothing can shut down. In India when people retire, they don’t want to be a burden to their families, so one day they just disappear. They go to the temple and spend the rest of their lives living there, chanting the name of God. It’s a beautiful thing. They suffer a lot, I’m sure, but they also are deepening their relationship to God in an incredible way. Look what old people go through here in America: this needle, that operation, this medication, everything but Ram Nam. They don’t get any relief. I’m sure the Indians are hungry a lot and miss their relatives, but they also have an opportunity which almost nobody has in this world: to do nothing but Ram Nam. They turn to God with an intensity that only very good karmas provide. I hear people trying to chant these days. Some get into too much enjoyment and not enough depth, or too much meditation and not enough expression. Sometimes there’s no heart, no juice at all. When Mr. Tiwari, one of Maharaji’s devotees, would chant, the walls would shake. It was so intense, so rich, so incredible, and so deep. He gave every bit of his being to it. Singing pretty melodies isn’t enough. It has to be connected directly to the heart.
• You speak of your guru so lovingly. These days guru bashing is more typical. The naiveté of people in loving their guru in the ’60s and ’70s is no different than the bashing they’re doing now. This is the West, we just keep acting out. We expect the saints to be projections of our ideas of perfection, just like we want our lovers to be perfect, and they never are. So what else is new? I think it’s a good learning process—people are learning whatever they have to learn, however they can learn it. The guru is not outside, the guru and God himself are one. One of the things that Maharaji did for me was to free me from the attachment to his physical body. For a long time I didn’t know his big form. For me Maharaji was a man who I loved and who I lost. There was that heaviness left in my heart. When I went back again to India, he took me into himself. I experienced who he is in a different way. I know now he’s not the body. The guru’s not different than you are. The guru is the seer, the one looking out of your eyes. That’s what I know Maharaji to be. But I would still jump off a cliff if I saw him at the bottom. I don’t put a picture up of Maharaji when I sing because I’m not selling him. You can’t buy him. He doesn’t want disciples, he doesn’t need disciples, and there’s nothing to join. Where are you going to go? He’s dead; you can’t see him. What are you going to do? If I put his picture up, people think that’s him and they miss the feeling in the chanting that really is him, his presence and his sweetness. Maharaji would lie there and people would come and stuff would happen. There was no edge; he never had to take a position or a posture against anything. It was all clear and open in his sight. He’s become the heart of the universe; he’s one with that. He has no axes to grind, no karmas that are still blossoming and bringing more stuff. He’s here only as a manifestation of compassion. I need to sing for him and for myself. He made it possible—by grace the situation was created where I could do what I had to do. Grace will allow it to happen, but ultimately you have to do it yourself, you have to put one foot in front of the other. You have to become it, and the only way you can do that is by using your own muscles. Nobody else can do it for you. The guru can clear the path for you but you have to walk that path, there’s no avoiding it. Maharaji used to say, “I’ve done everything. I just leave the mind to you.” Thanks! But he’d done everything. He just leaves the mind—which means we have to get in there and iron the damn thing out. It’s all done; relax, take it easy and enjoy. But get in there and do what you have to do to realize it. It’s an incredible thing he said. He threw his blanket over me and it was the sky with all the stars and all the universe wrapped up in it. He showed me that no matter what I think, there’s no place outside of that vast presence and that endless love. Then I could just sing; I could really sing.
Linda Johnsen, M.S., is the author of Meditation Is Boring? Putting Life in Your Spiritual Practice; Daughters of the Goddess; and The Living Goddess.
October/November 2001