There’s no outward sign of fame or notoriety when you watch Krishna Das preparing to lead an evening of chanting—no attitude, no fancy clothes, no big entourage. There’s little to distinguish the mild-mannered, unassuming, bespectacled 50-something man whom the New York Times called the “Chant Master of American Yoga” and Yoga Journal characterized as “The Pavarotti of Kirtan” from any one of the thousands of fans who come to hear him play.
But there’s no denying that Krishna Das is a full-fledged phenom. His albums of devotional chants serve as the backdrop in yoga studios around the country; fellow crooners Madonna, Sting and Alanis Morrissette have all chanted with him at one time or another; and he’s singularly responsible for the western revival of kirtan, the ancient practice of meditative chanting, an art he learned while living in India with his guru, Neem Karoli Baba.
No one is more surprised by his success than Krishna Das himself. In the 1960s, when he was known as Jeff Kagel, he was just another aspiring young rock musician stumbling his way through life. “I tripped and fumbled and fell in all the wrong directions,” Krishna Das remembers. “I was totally lost.”
Then he heard about Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass— author of the ’60s spiritual classic Be Here Now—whom friends convinced him to check out. When he went to meet him, Krishna Das immediately felt something he hadn’t experienced in all his reading and searching. In retrospect, he’s sure it was the presence of Baba, his soon-to-be guru, who was also Ram Dass’ guru. Krishna Das then went to India for three years to be with him.
Here Krishna Das recalls his journey, and shares some of the spiritual highlights:
Progress on the Spiritual Path
A real guru is not outside of you. A real guru is like an inner sun that shines within you and burns away your bullshit from the inside out, so that eventually your own light can just shine out. The guru knows that he or she is the same as you. There’s one of us in the whole universe, the guru knows that. And that love that they awaken in us is who we really are.
When Ram Dass came back from India after his first visit, he had met Baba (Neem Karoli Baba), this man who had changed his life. When I walked into the room with [Ram Dass], I immediately knew that whatever it was I was looking for, it was real. I didn’t know any more than that at the time, but I just knew it existed in the world, that this dream, this feeling that I had wasn’t just in books. That was a big thing.
I was really bottled up inside. I had been doing music, I used to sing blues and be in a band and stuff like that, but emotionally I was all bound up. But when I went to India [to be with Baba] I saw the way these people sang and you could feel it from a mile away, they were just letting it rip, they were pouring it out and it was extraordinary. I heard it once and that was it. I just knew I had to sing.
I wasn’t singing to the so-called Hindu gods and goddesses. That wasn’t what’s in my head. Those are the names for sure, because these chants grew from India, but I was singing to love. I want to be in that presence, in the presence of that love. Chanting moves me into that space. It opens—it widens my heart.
We had been singing because [Baba] liked it, so we sang. We could spend time with him that way. He had hired these Kirtan guys from Brindan [to] sing Hare Krishna. Towards the end of the season, one of them tried to seduce one of the Western women and Maharaji found out about it and in about 10 seconds, all 20 of these guys were sent back home.
One of the Indian folks in the temple said, “You just kicked the kids out, who’s going to sing now?” “The Westerners,” he said. We said, “No, we don’t want to sing, we want to hang out with you.” ‘Cause you had to sing in this little room around the corner. But we were asked to sing and so we sang. And it was really the first time I got a little glimpse of how chanting and meditation works.
I’d be sitting there singing a couple of hours at a time, “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna,” and I was bored out of my mind, really bored. Horrible, nails on a blackboard kind of bored. And you have to keep singing. So you’re bored and you sing, you’re bored and you sing. So the mind starts to grab at anything. I remembered my old girlfriend back in the States before I left for India, and I got real happy. Then in mid-Krishna, I remembered she broke up with me. Then that would pass and something else would come and that would pass, and all the time the chant was going. And gradually the hold that stuff has on you, the thoughts, the emotions, the feelings that we immediately believe everything about, yes I’m thinking this, I’m feeling this, it didn’t grab me so much. And the chant was getting deeper and smoother and richer and sweeter, and I didn’t want to leave the chant to go into those thoughts. So I got a taste of how beautiful it is, and how it works.
The more we do that, the more we learn how to let go of the stuff that causes us suffering and hurts us… Negative thoughts, unhappy thoughts, depression, all that stuff we don’t want but we don’t know how to get rid of. We push it away but it sticks. But with these practices, you learn how to sit deeply in your own being. And you sit more deeply than these feelings or thoughts, so you’re able to really let go of them because you’re getting nourished in a different way.
If you want to know if you’re making progress on the so-called spiritual path, see if you’re kinder to people, see if you’re a little easier on your self. See if you obsess about all the stuff in your life a little bit less. See if you’re happier in a simple way, more content. And see if you’re treating people more as you would like to be treated. That means it’s working.
You can’t have secrets. It doesn’t work. You can’t have places you don’t want to look at. You can’t hide your shame and fear and guilt and anger. Where are you going to hide it? It’s with you wherever you are. And if you don’t look at it, that shadow covers you and keeps you in darkness. Even though you might feel you’re not. If you’re honest with yourself you’d have to say, well, there’s stuff I’m not dealing with. And if you want your heart to be available—which is what we want our hearts to be—for people for relationships and for our own selves, you have to be whole.
My path isn’t chanting. My path is trying to be in that presence all the time, right now as much as when I’m sitting in front of people singing. It’s always the same. I want to be in it, I can’t stand being out of it. It’s very obvious to me when I’m out of it, and then I have to find out why I’m out of it and get back in it.
Krishna Das will be performing in LA in February. For more info, go to yogamates.com.