WIZARD OF DAS
Spiritual rock star
Bhagavan Das hits
NYC this month.
chants
Leave it to
Legendary guru and musician Bhagavan Das alights in
New York City for a month of
chanting and worship By Steffie Nelson
A
s an author, musician, educator and
religious see ke r, Bhagavan Das, 58, has devoted the
greater pa rt of his life to God, enlightenment and good
times. At 19, when he was still called Michael Riggs, the
Laguna Bea ch, California, native began a seve n -year spiritual jour-
ney through India and Nepal. He lea rned from mystics, spent weeks
fasting in caves, and traveled for months wearing only a loincloth and
c a rrying a begging bowl made from a human skull. In 1970, Bhagavan
Das introduced f ormer Harvard profe s s orRich a rd Alpe rt to his
friend and guru Neem Ka roli Baba. The meeting tra n s f ormed the al-
rea dy unorthodox academic into the famous spiritualist Ram Dass.
In fact, the sage’s first book, Be Here Now, took its title from one of
B h a gavan Das’s mantras, and its success pro pelled him into the spo t-
light, where he became a rock star for the spiritual set. He toured with
Allen Ginsberg, re c orded a chanting album, AH (Dharmaware),
and lived in lavish mansions lent by wealthy admirers.
In the past decade, the 6'5" drea d l o ckedguru has focused his
substantial energies on pe r f orming k i r t a n s—evenings of call-and-
response chants—and leading spiritual workshops. In 2002, he re-
l eased the albu m N ow(Karuna), a collaboration with the Beastie
B oys’ Mike D. Though Baba, as he’s affe c t i o n a t e lyknown, is an in-
s p i rational spiritual figure, his path to enlightenment was hard ly
f ree of v i c e. As recounted in his memoir, 1998’s I t ’sHere Now (Are
You?) ( Random House), he romanced groupies, married three times
and pa rtied exc e s s ive ly, which led to a stint in AA.
“He doesn’t put himself on some spiritual pedestal, and that’s why
I look up to him,” says Uma Sara swati, a Jivamukti yoga tea cher who
was married to Bhagavan Das for four yea rs in the late ’90s. “That
real, honest quality is something ve ryhard to find in high people like
him—[most] like to do eve rything that’s un-yogic behind closed
d o ors.”
TONY took the A train to Bhagavan Das’s current digs in In-
REPR IN TED W IT H PERM IS SI ON B Y T IM E O UT NEW YOR K
As seen in
the pages of
ChillOut
wood, where he discussed the spiritual path and his upcoming
roster of N ew York kirtans over green tea.
Time Out New York: I that understand you’re planning to
make New York your home base. Do you feel that the city
is evolving as a spiritual center?
Bhagavan Das: Absolutely. This is the center of samsara—the
realm of birth and death. Money is everything, sex is where it’s at,
who kills the most wins. And this kind of gross consciousness is a
wonderful, fe rtile ground for real spiritual growth. So the audience is
recep t ive because it’s rea l ly hard here. When people come to see me,
they’re gonna rea l lyconnect with me, they’re gonna really chant,
and it’s going to change their lives because they’re open to it.
T O N Y: One of my yoga teachers said that we a re in the
Kali Yuga, the Age of Kali, a time of great change and
rebirth [under Hindu philosophy]. She even said
September 11 was connected to this.
BD: We’re in ve rydange rous times, even on a physical plane. We’re
living in a time of great darkness, spiritually. As Kali Yu ga pro-
gresses, this time of materialism rea ches its zenith. The Kali Yu ga
is the dharma-ending age, when the blackness has come so deeply
u pon us that it just starts accelerating until the whole thing is de-
s t royed. And it grinds you down to a point of excellence in yo ur
own being.
TONY: For someone who senses this darkness and wants
to embark on a spiritual path, what’s the best way to get
started?
BD: I don’t think there ’s spe c i f i c a l ly“a way.” Any path will take
you there, if you have great devotion. The key here is real intention
and the deepest level of commitment; like eve rything in life, you
o n lybecome adept at something that you wholehea rt e d lygive
yo ur attention to.
Wellness for body, mind and spirit
T O N Y: Do you identify with a particular re l i g i o n ?
Obviously Hinduism, but you’ve also studied Ti b e t a n
Buddhism and you were a born-again Christian.
BD: I identify with love, I identify with attention, with consciousness,
with awareness. There’s only one religion, and that’s compassion. I love
Hinduism, I love Buddhism, I love Jesus, I have a lot of connections.
Buddhism is probably the best bet for most people because it’s not a
religion, it’s a science. Science is good, because people don’t have to
believe anything.
T O N Y:Yet you say that the nature of the true self is bliss.
BD: But you see, you have to discover that. It’s not a concept. It’s
l i ke,back off f rom the drama and just be still. Get up ea rly in the
morning and sit for 15 minutes; just look at what we think is real.
Where is our self? Who is our self? My self changes all the time; I
don’t know who I am. We just fl owinto whatever the thing is. I
m ean, what do you identify with? The yoga thing is good, we all
need something to keep us in a satsang,an association of like-mind-
ed souls. So we go to the center and do yo gaand hang out with pe o-
ple who are working on themselve s.
T O N Y: So is it satsang that people who come to your
kirtans are looking for?
BD: Absolutely, ’cause when we’re all together in a room and we’re all
chanting and we’re all breathing together, it’s like we become this
huge deity of breath and now we have a thousand arms and legs and
a thousand heads and eve ryone’s in the same breath. You wanna lose
weight? Great. It doesn’t make any diffe rence what yo urtrip is. The
point is to get in.
T O N Y: Could you talk a bit about the tradition of kirtan?
BD: K i rtan is a form of invoking a mantra or the name of a deity over
and over again so that it takes you out of the conceptual mind and you
fall back into pure awareness and pure sound. And then that invoca-
tion and that praise bring about an ex perience of connecting with yo ur
inner being.
T O N Y: You’ve made an album with Mike D. from the Beastie
Boys, which marries traditional Hindu chants and mantras
with blues, gospel, beats and samples. How did that come
about?
BD: M i keD. is a great yogi; he does yoga, like, four hours a day. He
does puja [ritual worship], he chants, he’s in it. He’d read my book,
flipped out, wanted to meet me, and he came to my workshop on nada
yoga[yoga of sound]. And then the re c ord happened…After I laid
down all the basic tra cks, Mike D. put eve rything around it and turn e d
it into what it is. It was a full collaboration. You like it?
TONY: I t ’s great, I love it.
BD: Yeah, it works. The thing is, the only way to a real mystical con-
nection is to rea l lyfind it where you’re at. This is my job. I’m like a har-
b i n ger of that energy to this culture. Without someone in this culture
who speaks Americanese, who is in an American body, people aren’t
gonna get it. Otherwise, it’s just a foreign thing; it’s an interesting ex-
otic re s t a urant to go eat in.
Bhagavan Das will be leading kirtans at Jivamukti Yoga Center April 5, 12,
19 and 26. 8pm, donations requested. For more i n f o rmation, go to
www.jivamuktiyoga.com.He will also teach a puja intensive workshop a t
Laughing Lotus Yoga Center April 26–30, culminating in a benefit kirtan Fri
30. $450 for a full week, $100 per day; kirtan $20. For more inform a t i o n ,
go to www.laughinglotus.com
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