Mindrolling With Raghu Markus

Sharon Salzberg joins Mindrolling on location on Maui and shares her incredible clarity and huge heart. She lends a hand to our intrepid Mindrollers on how to navigate the vicissitudes of our complex lives thru awareness, compassion and meditation. As she says, "May the Minds Roll." 

Raghu and David sit with Krishna Das, who the New York times has called the Chant Master of American Yoga. They discuss chanting as a practice and people taking on "uncooked Gurus". 

Activism without anger, resistance without rancor: it's hard to reach detachment when the political world is making you crazy.  What to do? Vajravarahi is a spiritual energy deity perceived to transmute the Five Negative Afflictions which represent five obstructions that obscure the true nature of life.  These Five Afflictions are greed, hatred, delusion, jealousy and pride. Like all fearsome figures in Tantric Buddhism, she is protective & simply wrathful for beneficial reasons.  She fits the bill for helping change the negative emotions that prevent us from balancing ourselves or society.   Original Text by: Tristan Rigby - Rishigallery.com

What is a guru? What is a teacher?  Raghu and David offer gentle though and definitions of an “accomplished being” a “siddha” and of a teacher, some of whom are great and some actually harmful...they speak about the saga of Joya Santanya, her Shakti, and her ego...

More spectacular experiences with sacred musicians: Bob Marley, Krishna Das, Jai Uttal and Bhagavan Das. Both frightening and enlightening times with world, trance and the beginnings of chant and kirtan music is explored. David and Raghu discuss the practice of opening the heart by chanting, where no thinking is necessary. 

This podcast with our dear friend Shyam Das which was scheduled for broadcast today January 22, 2013 tragically coincided with his passing in a motorcycle accident in India three days ago. There are simply no adequate words to describe this loss to all of us. Master chanter, brilliant Krishna scholar, Shyamdas was globally revered, but much more importantly, he was loved for his delightful and friendly ways, his sparkling humorand his seamless, astonishing devotion to the ancient tradition of the ways of love for the Hindu facsimile of the Manifest Divine, Krishna and Radha. Synchronistically, this podcast features a conversation we did with him just before he left for India for the last, fateful time.

David and Raghu talk about David's interview with Frank Zappa, and 60’s music from Detroit soul to California drug music. Raghu has an embarrassing Led Zeppelin experience. R & D discuss high beings coming into their lives...India...“dolphins in the Ganges”...Raghu’s father’s transformation...meeting Muktananda...Burmese Insight Meditation practice – Goldstein, Salzberg, Kornfield...Buddhism and Bhakti in the West...Ram Dass and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. 

American Lama Surya Das talks with us about his sixties influences such as folk music, John Lennon, and his early questioning of the meaning of life. He carefully compares these times for the current youth generation to our own, where crises often happen along with optimistic youth outreach.  He tells us more about the Dzogchen Buddhist Mindrolling tradition. He remembers being with Neem Karoli Baba and how he absorbed the Buddhist wisdom.  Surya Das gets into the path to authentic life balance and letting be.  He discusses his “WOW” suggestion – Wishing Others Well and the loving kindness practice.  He mentions how H.H. The Dalai Lama encouraged him to practice “compassionate action.”

This podcast explores the positive and negative aspects of media, including social media. Raghu recalls playing Ram Dass tapes on the radio back in the day and meeting Maharaji. David compares 1960’s media to 1980’s cable explosion to the 2012 vastly expanded current global Internet. The potential abuse of social media is weighed along with its progressive and humanitarian communication quantum leaps. Spirituality via media is analyzed. Does instant information actually make us happier, more relaxed, and more truly connected?

Our friend Danny Goldberg is a music industry legend, former Chairman of Warner Brothers Records and President of Atlantic Records, Danny discovered and managed Kurt Cobain and Nirvana and was the head of Led Zeppelin’s record company, "Swansong" amongst other things. The conversation revolves around Danny’s experience in combining great worldly success and a spiritual path. We get into the sixties and the origins of expanded consciousness via Ram Dass and the teacher Hilda Charlton. Remembering Martin Luther King’s words “Although we live in the colony of time, we owe our allegiance to the empire of eternity.”

How do we achieve balance in our life in a practical way? Dave and Raghu talk about the Tibetan leader of the Mindrolling lineage, Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche and her wise words...loving the present...combatting stressors...talking about everyone wanting happiness...practicality and practice...transcending the “monkey mind”...adventures with Chogyam Trungpa. And “how to be in this world?”

Raghu and David chat with Duncan Trussell, Los Angeles based conscious stand up comedian and podcaster about humor, awareness and the parallels between the late sixties and the Millennial generation, comparing boomer and echo-boomer predicaments and solutions.

Music can actually transform our consciousness, thereby changing our life, song by song, chant by chant. We discuss the sixties and the momentum created during that time. David tells us about his extensive work with Bob Marley. We hear a couple of tracks from the unique Triloka world music label and examine trance as experienced through being open to and listening to music of all kinds from John Coltrane to Ali Akbar Khan.

A dual biographical podcast.  “From our past and your future,” David’s many experiences with Timothy Leary...his film biopic with Tim and his feelings about death and dying.  Ram Dass and Leary.  David’s amazing altered consciousness experience in Tim’s house, a few weeks after Tim died.  Raghu’s magnetization to Ram Dass while a FM program director in Montreal and his progression to India and the guru.  David in Morocco with the Jajouka Master Musicians.  The experiencing of Neem Karoli Baba.  

The first podcast traces the history of the awakening process for the two hosts via culture and intensified awareness - the sixties were the engine of the movement towards consciousness, via the Vietnam War, psychedelics, music, and community.  David and Raghu look back on “going through the changes” and emerging from the repressive atmosphere of the early sixties into the radical, healing effects of the Beat Generation, The Beatles and Bob Dylan.  Early inner and outer encounters with Transcendental Meditation, the Hare Krishna movement and Meher Baba are explored, plus willing aping of the behavior of icons John Lennon, George Harrison and Pete Townshend. This podcast draws parallels between experiences and learning curves of the sixties and seventies and those of the present.