Krishna Das never set out to become the best-known voice of devotional chanting in the Western world. A former Long Island musician who abandoned a conventional life after meeting the Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba in the early 1970s, he helped introduce millions of listeners to kirtan—the call-and-response chanting tradition of bhakti yoga—through a career that has spanned more than three decades, Grammy-nominated albums, and sold-out performances around the globe. On August 16, he’ll bring that practice to the Woodstock Festival of Awakening (August 14-16), a gathering at the Bearsville Theater that explores the intersections of spirituality, consciousness, creativity, and healing through music, meditation, talks, and workshops. Ahead of his appearance, Chronogram spoke with Krishna Das about the enduring influence of his guru, the nature of prayer, the Hudson Valley’s role in his spiritual journey, and why, in troubled times, “the first thing we have to do is take care of our own hearts.”
Jason Stern: It’s great to talk with you. I’m so curious about your journey. I think of you as a transmitter of higher vibrations, and that’s a big and important role to fill—a task to perform. I know you were a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba. Is that the basis of the work you do?
Krishna Das: Everything I do is Maharaj-ji. Neem Karoli Baba is the basis of my life. That’s the main thing.
I lived there for two and a half years. In those days I was living in Rosendale with the Larsons, on the Larsens’ farm (Stone Mountain Farm in Tillson). That’s where I met Ram Dass. Shortly after that I went to live with Ram Dass in New Hampshire, and then traveled around for a year or so. Then I said, “Okay, I’m going to India.” Here we are all these years later.
Jason Stern: What a powerful influence Neem Karoli Baba had. Can you say something about what touched you personally, or the circumstances in which you were given something that you carried forward?
Krishna Das: He loved you more than you could ever love yourself. He opened the door to the room where love lives and let us come in just as we are.
We didn’t have to be good little boys and girls. We didn’t have to dress the same. We didn’t even have to like each other. But you finally found home. You were finally home in a way that you couldn’t even have imagined you could ever feel.
His presence is still, for me, very, very powerful. Everything I do is essentially inside of him. He’s like the sky: the clouds are inside; the earth is inside the space. He’s like that presence that’s always here, which is essentially the true being of each one of us. But we don’t know where to look. So a being like this comes along and says, “Hey, it’s over here.” And you go, “Oh, that’s what it feels like. Oh, yeah. Okay, I got it.” Kind of like that.
Jason Stern: But he spoke very little. How was that love transmitted or encountered?
Krishna Das: Let me ask you a question. When you’re making love with somebody, how much do you talk?
Jason Stern: Good answer.
Krishna Das: Some people talk a lot, I guess, but that’s not the case here.
It was the sweetness and the presence, the teasing and the impishness—the powerful presence. You had a feeling of complete trust in this person. There was no shadow there. There was no manipulation from his side. He didn’t need anything from you. He didn’t want anything from you. So you were free to be you.
You began to feel, first of all, that he knows something—or he is something. You really trusted that place, and we also found that place inside ourselves. I can’t speak for other people, but my whole path since those days with him physically has been to keep finding an ever-deepening awareness of that place inside that you can trust about yourself.
We’re not really taught to do that in this Western culture. It’s “my way or the highway.” People tell you what to think, what to do, where to go, how to do this, how to do that. But ultimately, I feel that the hardest and most important thing for all of us to do is find out how to trust our own hearts.
Jason Stern: It’s not easy. When you were with him, was there a sense of a paradox? The experience itself was, in a sense, already awakened, and yet there’s this idea of practice—of preparing oneself or working on oneself in certain directions. How does that work?
Krishna Das: Not really. That all came maybe later. He used to say, “When you come here, you should feel like you’re going to your grandfather’s house. Everything is given. You don’t have to do seva to eat. Everything—whatever you want.”
You should feel like it’s the best place to be. He was like that with everybody. One time one of his devotees brought a friend who had a different guru. Maharaj-ji looked at him and said, “Why did you come? At your guru’s place there’s kirtan, bhajan, all kinds of things going on. Here it’s just aao, khao, jao—come, eat, go.”
That was the way it was. He wasn’t a teacher. He is a transmitter of the deepest love and caring and kindness. Everyone who came into his presence—or even thinks of him—is blessed, really, at least from my point of view.
Jason Stern: Beautiful. Looking back, so many people of your generation who went and found Eastern teachers—and made contact with something deep through Eastern teachers—were Jewish. Was there something in your tradition that prepared you?
Krishna Das: Not that I could put my finger on. My parents were good people—liberal, kind, caring, humanistic or humanitarian people. Good people. But as far as religion, we were about as Jewish as the Pope. There was no religious anything there. It was all cultural.
I guess there might have been something in that many of my Catholic friends got very seriously programmed early on. Then they had a lot of overcoming to do, a lot of stuff to get rid of, because they got that good-and-evil stuff.
I remember when I was in about sixth grade, half the class was out. I was told they were at their first confirmation or something like that. All my friends came back and wouldn’t talk to me. I said, “What’s going on with you guys?”
“You killed Christ.”
I said, “What? I didn’t fucking kill anybody, you asshole.”
There’s a lot of stuff put into people’s heads. Nothing was put into my head about religion or God. Nobody in my family believed in God or had any concept other than being a good person. So that was a big thing.
One time somebody asked Maharaj-ji about Moses, and he just totally ignored him. But another time he talked about Jesus—who, by the way, was Jewish. Okay? He was Jewish. He called him “Rabbi.” Rabbi. He didn’t start any fucking Christian religion. He didn’t do anything like that. He came, he said a few things, and he split. He didn’t start any religion.
Maharaj-ji said, “I follow Christ.” What does that mean? What did Christ say? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Treat your neighbor as yourself.” It’s all about kindness, caring, compassion, taking care of people.
That was the way Maharaj-ji talked. We asked him, “How do you find God?” He said, “Serve people.” What? “How do you raise kundalini?” “Feed people.” What?
We weren’t ready for the teachings he gave us. But now, 50 years later, you begin to see that the problem is that we think about ourselves all the time. If we weren’t thinking about ourselves, we wouldn’t be so fucking depressed all the time.
One way of freeing ourselves from that self-referential way of going through life is to stop thinking about it. Think about other people. See what they need. Along with other types of practices, you find that how you feel ceases to be the most important thing in your mind all the time.
“How am I now? Is this right? Is my hair long enough? Is my shirt okay? Do I have the right job? Do I have the right girlfriend?” It’s me, me, me, me, me, all fucking life long. God, it’s such a drag. But how do you get free of that?
When I had a full-on, hallucinatory nervous breakdown in the temple, Maharaj-ji said, “Just don’t think about yourself.” He said, “What are you going to do—jump in the river?” It was only three inches deep. He laughed. He said, “Be like Christ. He never thought of himself. He gave his life for his people.”
He says things very simply, but they’re no different from the deepest Buddhist teaching on bodhicitta, compassion and kindness, or the real Christian teachings of doing unto others, caring for people and serving others. Every true religion has that at the core. Of course, it gets fucked up two minutes after the original person is gone. But what to do? That’s the way the world is.
Jason Stern: My own path since I was a teenager has been working in the Gurdjieff tradition. Gurdjieff teaches precisely what you’ve just said, and there is a great respect for the messengers. But the distortions that happen very quickly around teachings can become a tool of a power structure.
I’m curious for myself. I noticed that in Be Here Now, of all the traditions, Ram Dass speaks most frequently and in the most depth about Gurdjieff’s teachings.
Krishna Das: I’ve also read a lot about Gurdjieff—many of the books about him—and I have a tremendous feeling for it. From what I understand, some of the practices are very similar to mindfulness, mindful-awareness practices, and Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am.” That’s right, absolutely.
It’s also very similar to the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, who was very much about the difference between “me” and “I”: the sense of being as actually the whole thing, and how you can dissolve those thoughts in that sense of being, of I-ness.
And, of course, Meetings with Remarkable Men is one of the greatest books ever written. It’s phenomenal.
For a while there was this thing called the Arica Institute, which was also based on some Gurdjieff teachings. Ram Dass knew some of those people.
Jason Stern: Oscar Ichazo.
Krishna Das: Oscar Ichazo, exactly. John Bleibtreu, the writer, was part of that. Ram Dass was familiar with them, but I don’t think he ever became a student of that.
Jason Stern: For me, it’s been a practical, bootstrapping way to prepare myself to be open to the kind of thing you talked about in the presence of Maharaj-ji.
I remember the first time I had a glimmer of what you’re talking about. I was chatting with some Jehovah’s Witnesses on the side of the road. I had been doing my work, and they said, “Jesus loves you.”
I said, “Yeah, okay.”
He said, “No, Jesus really loves you. Jesus loves every part of you—even your deepest secrets, the things you’re most ashamed of, and your most shameful moments. Jesus loves all of it.”
It was a shock. I had never considered a love like that. I took it in, and I felt myself relax at a level that I didn’t know was even there, let alone holding tension. That has always been a reference point. That’s the love that is the aim of life, and it’s not elsewhere.
Krishna Das: Exactly. That’s just what we felt around Maharaj-ji. Exactly the same thing. He knew everything, also, by the way.
Jason Stern: Beautiful. Talk to me about your friend who recently passed, Robert Thurman.
Krishna Das: He was one of the most wonderful beings I ever met. He was an incredibly advanced Buddhist scholar—a scholar of religions and philosophy of all kinds, Buddhism especially. He was a monk for four years, then gave his robes back, got married and raised a family. But he had a way of—
For instance, when you read a lot of Buddhism or meet many Buddhists, you find them very serious and very intellectual in many ways. But Bob was so juicy. He was so alive, with so much happiness in him. He would say things like, “The Buddha didn’t discover suffering.” Suffering? That would be like standing outside a prison and going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” to the prisoners. The Buddha discovered bliss. Wisdom is bliss. It’s joy.
He had a way of transmitting these extraordinarily deep concepts through words, but you felt it. It wasn’t up here. You really felt what he meant and what he was talking about.
He was open to everything. He honored all the paths. I’m a devotee of Maharaj-ji, a devotee of Hanuman, the monkey god. Bob was totally into Hanuman. It was crazy.
Bob had experiences, too. He had many experiences. It’s a shame and a loss that he didn’t get a chance to write his memoirs, because he was about to start them soon.
He was an amazing translator and scholar, but also a practitioner—a real, juicy, loving and kind person, one of the sweetest people I ever met. And he was a tireless worker on behalf of the Tibetan people, always trying to do what he could to help the cause of Tibet and the people who had to escape their country.
He started Tibet House US and the Menla retreat place up in Phoenicia. They didn’t own anything; it’s all owned by the Tibet House organization. His Holiness was up there once, and I was there with His Holiness. Bob was tirelessly committed to helping the Tibetans in their diaspora.
Jason Stern: You mentioned that you lived in Rosendale, so you know this region. Our magazine, Chronogram, is a magazine for the Hudson Valley. What was your experience being here? What’s your relationship with the area?
Krishna Das: I was at Stony Brook University on Long Island. In the fall of 1968, an Asian Studies Institute was supposed to be opening at the State University in New Paltz, run by a man who had been secretary to Rabindranath Tagore.
In those days, I desperately wanted to learn about Asian and Indian philosophy. I actually finished two semesters in a row for the first time in my life. I transferred up to New Paltz and went to meet the guy—and then I wanted to kill myself. He was so nasty, and of course I was naive and young. He just ripped my ideas and my heart to shreds.
I had a wonderful literature teacher named John Alphonso Karkala, who was from South Kanara in India. He was a beautiful being. I really loved him.
I stayed only a few weeks in school. Then I quit and started driving a school bus for Arthur F. Mulligan, Inc in Rosendale. I was the hippie bus driver all through Kingston. It was fun.
That winter I met Ram Dass for the first time because of Steve, his wife Robin. They were going up there, and I said, “I’m not interested.” But when they came back, Steve had light shooting out of him. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen anything like that. I said, “Write down the directions. I’m leaving now.” I drove through the night in my old, broken-down Volvo. That was the beginning of the rest of my life.
Jason Stern: You seem to be a man with a mission. The way it touches me is as a sense of purpose—or what I would call a destiny—to do this work that you’re doing.
Krishna Das: That’s a very nice way of seeing it. I appreciate that. But for me, I’m in the water up to here. If I keep singing, I can breathe through my nose. If I stop singing, I start to sink. That’s the way I see it. I’d rather see it the way you see it, but unfortunately that’s not the way I see it.
Jason Stern: It’s the same thing. Gurdjieff talks about conscious labor and intentional suffering, and that’s what we have to be doing continuously. You can’t rest on any laurels. The reward for inner work is harder work. That’s what I hear you saying.
Krishna Das: By the way, have you ever heard any of Gurdjieff’s harmonium playing—his music? It’s really amazing. And his music composed with Thomas De Hartmann. I’ve heard a lot of that. It’s so beautiful. Amazing.
Jason Stern: We work with his music and his Movements a good deal. Our group holds a weekly class and retreats in New Paltz. The music is very much a part of that.
He called his work “harmonious development.” It really is a sense of learning to bring our own instrument into tune. It plays in different registers simultaneously. The instrument plays as a physical body; it plays as an intellect and an awareness body; and it plays as a feeling and emotional body. They’re like different octaves.
In the inner work, it begins to have a very vibrational experience, even without the actual sounding of outward sounds. There’s a kind of tuning. I think singing and chanting can connect to that. There has to be an inner connection to the outer, and then something can happen.
Krishna Das: For sure. When I chant these mantras, if they weren’t first in my head, they could never come out of my mouth. They’re going on in there also, separately in a sense from whatever comes outside.
Jason Stern: Would you call your chanting prayer?
Krishna Das: Not the way prayer is usually thought of. Usually we think of prayer as begging God: “Give me a better car. Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?” That’s what we Westerners consider prayer.
But if you think of prayer as trying to connect with a higher or deeper reality, then of course—absolutely.
Jason Stern: In trying to connect to a higher or deeper reality, is there a particular intent or effort one would bring to chanting that would elevate the practice or experience?
Krishna Das: Every lineage has its own way of transmitting and teaching the practices. What I do is sing, and when I notice I’m not paying attention, I sing. More than that is not required.
The idea is that you’re training yourself to let go of thoughts. You don’t even have to let go, because the moment you notice you’re thinking, you’re no longer lost in the thought. Obviously, you’ve woken up for a very brief instant. Then you come back to the sound until you notice you’re gone again.
It’s an anchor. You just keep coming back. Little by little, you get more familiar. One definition of meditation is becoming familiar with actually being here—not being distracted or lost in thought or emotional stuff.
When a lot of people get together to do the practice, it generates some energy, and that energy helps us pay more attention. But in my way of doing this, there’s no manipulating and no forced visualization. There’s no trying to make something happen or hold on to any particular experience. The moment you notice you’re not paying attention, you’re back—until the next time. It’s very simple, but of course it’s not easy.
Underneath that is the understanding that, as we free ourselves from being dragged away by our thoughts, we’ll have a direct, deeper experience of our own true nature. In my tradition, that is the guru—not the physical, outside guru, but the manifestation of inner beingness. It’s a natural state, but we’re very unnatural these days.
Jason Stern: Did you know Leonard Cohen?
Krishna Das: Not personally. Of course, he’s wonderful, but I never met him.
Jason Stern: What you’re saying reminds me of him. I was fortunate to attend one of his concerts toward the end of his life, and it was holy. I could feel that he was doing what you’re talking about.
Another association is the Baal Shem Tov in the Hasidic tradition—the master of the word, the unutterable word.
Krishna Das: What does it mean? Well, first of all, I’ve read quite a few books about the Baal Shem Tov. There’s one book you might know by Yitzhak Buxbaum called The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov. It’s a phenomenal book. Just phenomenal. The Baal Shem Tov was a real—what they call in India—siddha. He was amazing.
The true name can never be spoken. The true name is silence.
In fact, St. John of the Cross wrote that, “In the beginning, the Father uttered one word. That word is his Son, and he utters him forever in everlasting silence.”
The silence is not just an absence of thought. It’s presence. It’s being. You could say it’s the space in which everything exists, but you can’t say it, because it’s not a concept. It’s not a sound.
I remember one time a woman came to sing with me. She said, “I was at a Jewish weekend last week, and they said you can’t say the name of God.”
I said, “You’re right. We’re lying.” In fact, Maharaj-ji used to say, “Go on, sing. You’re lying: ‘Ram, Ram.’ One of these days you’ll get it right once, and boom—that’s it. You’re out of here.”
In India they say that, in order to get to the formless—or what is beyond form and beyond sound, because sound is a form—you have to go through form. We’re identified with our forms: our bodies, our senses, our thoughts. We can’t think ourselves out of a prison that’s made out of thought. So we use the tools we have, which are essentially forms.
In India, the practice of repeating the “names of God,” quote-unquote, is essentially one of the easiest, simplest and most powerful practices you can do. It’s understood that the real name can never be spoken, because at that point there’s nobody there to speak it.
Martin Buber also tells stories about the Baal Shem Tov. Somehow, they thought his stories weren’t kosher, but I don’t know what that was. I thought they were great—that little book he has about the Baal Shem Tov.
There’s one line in Buxbaum’s book that says, “We knew he had work with the goyim, but he never spoke of it.” He was a universal saint. He did one thing, but these saints work with everybody because that’s who they are.
Jason Stern: That seems like a common story. There are stories of St. Francis going and spending time with Sufis in Jerusalem. These figures have a role to play in their society and in the religion of their society, but there’s that image of a circle with spokes. Everybody is trying to find their way to the center, and the closer they get to the center, the closer they come to one another.
Krishna Das: Right. Beautiful. Maharaj-ji also had devotees from all religions: Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, and all the different lineages of Hinduism.
Hinduism is really a collection of different, almost separate religions. There are Shiva worshippers, Kali worshippers, Rama, Krishna. All of these are full-on paths called Hinduism. But is there really a thing called Hinduism itself? Yes and no—it depends on whom you ask.
They all coexist. Everybody loves Krishna. Everybody loves Rama. Everybody loves everybody. But when you go home and you’re alone in your room, you have your own particular path or methods.
Jason Stern: We live in what can feel to many people like a desolate time. It feels as if the traditions you and I are connected to have lost some of their force and have been diluted. There’s rampant materialism, a confusion of tongues, isolation, loneliness and conflict. In my lifetime, it seems to have become more and more intense.
So what do we do? I mean, “What do we do?” isn’t the question. How do we strive?
Krishna Das: The first thing we have to do—and maybe the only thing we have to do—is take care of our own hearts. We have to make sure we don’t allow our hearts, or ourselves, to be destroyed by the amount of suffering we see out there.
If we can do that, we become available for anything—to help anyone, at any time, anywhere, in any way. But if we allow ourselves to be crushed, what good is that?
The problem is that most people have no idea there’s any other way to live other than to dodge bullets, hoard food, and protect yourself from this and that. Unfortunately, most people don’t see that there’s any other way to do it. The world sucks.
But there are people to whom this makes some sense. Those are the people who can be available to do whatever good can be done in this situation: not to be reactive, and not to hate the people who seem to be causing all this stuff.
There’s a phrase I once heard: “The devil doesn’t know who he works for.” Everybody is playing their role. There’s a bigger thing going on here that’s way beyond our pay grade.
The best we can do—and what I think we should do—is simply do the best we can in our lives, treat other people the way we would like to be treated, and be available as much as we can.
Also, try not to get stuck in the storylines we read in the papers. This has been going on forever in one form or another, and it’s going to continue. Nobody is doing it to us. This is human nature. The minds of all of us—you, me and everybody else—are creating this.
It’s not like somebody is laying the shit on us. We’re doing this to ourselves. So we are the only ones who can change it. It has to be done individually: one person at a time, one heart at a time.
