The World is a Waiting Lover

The Story of Krishna

We’re going to finish with a holy story that I will read you from my heart, from the mirror of the heart. It’s the great story of the goddess Radah.

You know that many mortal women make love to Krishna, and Krishna is the sensuous God, the child, the lover. He was often caught stealing butter. He would walk among the villages in the hot, moist, Indian land, and he called the women to join him for an afternoon of lovemaking. Age didn’t matter, the rolls of the belly didn’t matter, gray hair or black hair didn’t matter, curve of the breast didn’t matter, marital status didn’t matter. Krishna loved all women and all men, and Krishna wanted to be loved in turn.

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And any lover… if they had any erotic curiosity at all, would answer the call. How could you possibly choose not to? And Krishna’s alluring invitation to open up as love, would interrupt whatever their task happened to be at the moment: the mother might have been in the middle of preparing dinner for her children, the husband in the middle of his work, the young daughter in the middle of doing her school work, the old men sitting and reading, the old women writing some new chapter. Whoever they were, lawyers, gardeners, doctors, spiritual teachers, cooks, bottle washers, truck drivers, traders, they all felt Krishna’s alluring invitation. (And this year we’re going to love outrageously, we’re going to bring the invitation of Krishna and we are going to be Krishna.)

They felt the invitation of possibility, and they awoke. They smelled perfumed skin and fresh mangos. They heard bells tinkle, and felt long grasses tickle their legs. They experienced, maybe for the first time, the dark touch of the sun lighting up their dark, hidden places, that they had forgotten themselves. And suddenly, something that had once burned in them, something precious and bright, began to call them again. They remembered that it had been quite a while since they had thought about this elusive thing, and maybe even longer still since they tended to it, since they experienced that small shiver lightening up their spine.

They began to feel regret: How could I have forgotten that, and allow it to fade? And they began to awaken, to answer the call of Krishna. The Gopi, the cowherd girl, left her animals browsing the hillside, and the obedient daughter paused and came to listen, and she stood and left the loom, turned and melting in the doorway, the servants set their spoons in their cooking pots, the mother walked past her children playing under the jasmine bush, the elder withdrew her thoughts and gathered up the hammock, all of them went off to the green slope, with flapping robes, where Krishna awaited them.

And there, my friends, and the only way that I want to come to you is as Krishna, and there the dance began. And the women raised their eyes, the men raised their eyes, and the sky twirled and laced their arms together and moved as winemakers, pressing out the luscious juices of the Cosmos. They danced with a band and Krishna danced among them, and at some point, they scarcely knew how to distinguish when it began, the God made love with each of them. With each and every one of them in the way they liked best. So intoxicating Krishna’s touch, so attentive his presence, that each woman felt herself to be the full recipient of his passion, as did each man. Each woman he loved, each man that he loved in that moment. Beloved of the Holy One and no jealousy existed.

And then it ended, no one after all can remain for long in the embrace of a God. Waves of orgasm smoothed into ripples of contentment. Each woman fluttered down, each man fluttered down from their ecstasy, and recalled their humanness, and the God, lighthearted and lightfooted as ever, moved on. The women stood up, the men stood up. Arranged sari’s and trousers went back to their houses, their looms and work and duty. But they were not the same! They were transformed! From that day, from that moment forth, they listened with their whole being for the call of Krishna to summon them back into his Grace. And their yearning, their longing became a source of an exquisite, delightful torment, formed in them a hole, shaped like the Divine one himself, and able to be filled only by him. When they would sit in the hole long enough, the unique quality and configuration and texture and taste of their unique, gorgeous incandescent shimmering self, receiving everything the moment had to give, filled them up. And their yearning was fulfilled, even as they long.

The yearning, the lovemaking, had broken them open so utterly that they found they remained open expectantly, like a clay urn, just before it’s dipped into a rushing stream. Every experience of prayer, every gesture, every piece of business, of relationship, that passed through them, molded to the longing that shaped the unique quality of their embrace by Krishna. Every act they undertook became a beauty and readied them for the next encounter with Krishna.

And thus they began to walk in the world as one walks into the arms of a waiting lover.

Walk in the World as if Walking into the Arms of a Waiting Lover

This is the year of loving outrageously. So gently, I finish by asking your forgiveness, because I’m sure that something I said, or maybe the tone of my voice in a particular moment, wasn’t clear enough for you or wasn’t pure enough for you. I ask forgiveness for that. I do my best, and I’m sure I fail a thousand times, and I’m sure I make mistakes. But I promise you, with all my heart and soul that I am trying to make mistakes in the right direction, and to give you the transmission in the most pure and clear way I can.

And I love you, every single person in the room, whether we know each other’s name or we don’t, or we’ve met or we haven’t. I know who you are, and you know who I am. I look forward to meet all of you in person and embrace you in person; some I will see again, maybe one or two people for the first time.

Do you think you are going back into reality, when we finish in a minute? This is reality. Take it with you.

Walk into the world knowing that in every minute, you walk into the arms of the waiting lover. Let every moment fuck you open to God, fuck every moment open to God. God is a stranger in the land, you’re a stranger in the land, I’m a stranger in the land. Together, we liberate each other from loneliness to loving, and we create a new possibility and a new future, of evolutionary consciousness that we, and the world that is us, desperately yearn for.

And it’s already here, it’s already so, as we loved each other today.

Amen.