Vyasa-puja offering 2009
nama om visnu-padaya krsna-presthaya bhu-tale
srimate bhaktivedanta-svamin iti namine
namas te sarasvate deve gaura-vani-pracarine
nirvisesa-sunyavadi-pascatya-desa-tarine
om ajnana-timirandhasya jnananjana-salakaya
caksur unmilitam yena tasmai sri-gurave namah
mukam karoti vacalam pangum laìghayate girim
yat-kripa tam aham vande sri-gurum dina-taranam
nama-srestham manum api saci-putram atra svarupam
rupam tasyagrajam uru-purim mathurim gosthavatim
radha-kundam giri-varam aho radhika-madhavaçam
prapto yasya prathita-krpayasri-gurum tam nato ‘smi
“There must be more to life than this,” I thought, as I lay on my back, eyes closed, studying the effect of the mantra I had been chanting. According to the manual, a bell-like sound was supposed to appear from the “seventh stratum of consciousness.” All I could hear was the buzzing of my brain. “Ding.” As I strained to hear it again, elated with the prospect of approaching perfection after only a month of chanting om, a suspicion crept in. “Ding,” confirmed my doorbell.
Hope, our landlady, was at the door. She was a seventy-year-old Christian mystic prominent among the hundred-or-so residents of Frazier Park, a high-desert mountain community at the summit of the range between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, California. My wife Lynne and I had moved from the Bay Area earlier that year, 1972, to this remote place, along with Clint, a childhood friend of mine, in order to distance ourselves from the madness of materialistic society.
“I think these are for you,” Hope said as she handed me a small book and a magazine. “A young monk sold them to me while I was shopping in Bakersfield this morning. I rarely go down off the mountain; and, you never see a monk in these parts. I didn’t want the things, but somehow you came to mind, and I thought these books just might be for you.” The titles: Sri Isopanisad and Back to Godhead.
I thought I had perceived a thread of similar truth running through the books I had collected on self-improvement and spiritual life, and so I was systematically going through them. Without looking at the new book and magazine I’d just received from Hope, I put them at the end of the shelf and continued following the meditation manual.
A few days later my wife and her friend Tracy returned from a tour of Mexico. While looking for local places of interest in the interior, far from the coastal and boarder towns frequented by most tourists, they had stopped at a used bookstore. The only book in English caught her eye. “I thought you were into things like this,” she explained as she handed me the book, “so I thought this might be meant for you.” Again, without examining it, I put the new book on the shelf next to the book and magazine Hope had given me. The new title—Bhagavad-gitä As It Is.
I was working the graveyard shift at a gas station just to make ends meet. I finished the meditation manual in a couple of days and decided to take the two new books to work. Just before dawn, when business was quiet and I was alone, I brought out the new books to check them out for the first time. It was then that I noticed that both books were by same author, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. A powerful feeling came over me. Tears welled in my eyes, and I shivered. This was too coincidental to be an accident. Someone was reciprocating with me for all the prayers I had been offering God for guidance. I was very eager to know the purpose of my life.
As I read the Bhagavad-gita As It Is, I found answers, one after another, to the questions I had been asking for as long as I could remember. I had come to wonder whether God existed at all, because in none of the books I’d been reading had the authorities of those various traditions come to any concrete conclusion about God’s identity or whereabouts. As I read I felt my eyes opening. I could see clearly that God really does exist—and the tears kept coming. I skipped to different places and found this passage: “…Thus the process of devotional service, of Krsna consciousness, is the king of all education and the king of all confidential knowledge. It is the purest form of religion, and it can be executed joyfully without difficulty. Therefore one should adopt it.” I shut the book and resolved to find out how to do just that.
We lived seventy miles from Los Angeles, which was billed in the magazine as ISKCON’s world headquarters. Being partial to San Francisco, however, Clint and I opted to drive more than four hundred miles to visit the Frederick St. center. We arrived at the address in the magazine only to find a boarded-up storefront. I was disappointed but undaunted. I felt as if I were being reeled in like a fish. Hadn’t I lived four doors from this place, up Stanyan Street, just two years ago? We walked around the corner and saw a devotee distributing magazines. “The temple was moved last year to a new location,” he explained. Then he said, “You must have come to hear Srila Prabhupada speak tonight.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I had never read or heard the word “Prabhupada.”
“I thought you must have known,” he replied. “The author of that book you’re holding is speaking tonight in Golden Gate Park at the Hall of Flowers. He arrived today for a three-day visit on his way to India. And he hasn’t been here for two years.” I could hardly believe what I had just heard. Once again tears came, and I was visibly shaking.
Quickly we drove to the new temple. Each devotee I met seemed strangely familiar. No one had much time to talk, though, because everyone was busily preparing for the program. Fascinated by the atmosphere, I hardly noticed time passing. It was as if I had come home. Soon we found ourselves packed in a van with a bunch of devotees on the way to the Hall of Flowers.
My heart pounded as I sat on the floor in front of the stage. From the right I saw a slight illumination. I thought the lights were being adjusted for the program. Then suddenly the source of that illumination—you, my dearest Srila Prabhupada—walked onto the stage, lighting up the whole room. I fell flat on my face instinctively, sobbing without restraint.
Srila Prabhupada, at that moment I gave my heart to you. Until that moment I hadn’t understood that the bona fide spiritual master you spoke of in those books was you. You were such an ocean of humility. But seeing your transcendental form and hearing the powerful message coming from your lotus mouth, I understood: here is my eternal father.
As you left the stage you plucked a red rose from your garland and threw it toward the audience. It landed in my out-stretched hand. And when I smelled that rose, I felt as though I had been transported to another world. Later I read in your Nectar of Devotion that my mind was being relieved of the burden of impersonal conceptions I had learned from all those other books I had been reading. The smell of that flower would linger on my hand until I returned to Fazier Park, collected my wife and things, and made arrangements to move back to the city to join the temple.
I followed you out to your car. I wanted to jump in and go with you, but shyness nailed me to the spot a short distance from your car. Then our eyes met. You smiled at me with a knowing look, and my life changed forever. Many years later, Bhumna Prabhu told me that you had decided to leave early, and that Jayananda Prabhu, who was cooking in the kitchen next to the stage, had made up a plate and told him to offer it to you before you left so that there would be prasädam to offer the guests.
After you had eaten three morsels from the plate and returned it to Bhümna, he looked for a place to hide in order to honor that holy food. As he turned around, he saw me, radiating, as he put, and decided to give me the whole plate—somewhat of a miracle in itself, considering how much Bhumna was attached to maha-prasadam! Without thinking, without knowing what I was doing, I sat down in the middle of that parking lot and ate that whole plate of your Srila Prabhupada! And since that night, by the unlimited causeless mercy you bestowed upon me, I can honestly say that I have never had a shadow of a doubt about Krsna consciousness, despite the twists and turns your movement has gone through since your physical departure.
Srila Prabhupada, you chased me down and rescued me. Since that day you have continued to save me again and again despite my foolish, sinful nature. Your compassion is unlimited. You never abandon anyone who continues to approach you submissively with faith, no matter what his condition. You taught us to take shelter of the holy names of the Lord, especially during times of duress. You showed us by example that the difficulties and frustrations of material existence are actually blessings because they compel us to seek shelter of the holy names, just as a sudden downpour forces a person to run for the shelter of the nearest tree or overhang. Are you not an expansion of Lord Nityananda’s mercy?
Srila Prabhupada, your books literally chased me down. The dramatic way your books entered my life convinced me that they are not different from you—sentient and completely ecstatic. Reading and distributing your books gives anyone access to your personal presence. Hearing the instructions in your books with unflinching faith is the medicine that cures the materially diseased heart. Following those teachings and repeating them is the diet that nourishes our spiritual health and our growth to maturity. Your words are simple and sublime, yet as deep as the ocean. No additive is required. Your books remove the conditioned souls’ excuses for not accepting the truth of spiritual existence. The piercing logic of your purports illuminates the verses of scripture, exposing the modern so-called advanced civilization for what it is: nothing but a place of misery that separates us from the Supreme Lord and His eternally blissful abode. The objections we hear when we distribute your books are nothing more than the excuses of those addicted to sinful acts in the name of freedom. But having read your books, we, at least, have no excuse not to surrender fully to your mission.
Why, then, do we make so many excuses? Why do we sometimes reduce our efforts, or even go away? Why do we stop distributing your books? Why do so many conditioned souls refuse to accept the obvious? And why do we tend to blame others for our problems?
While taking Srila Jiva Gosvami on parikrama of Navadvipa dhama, Lord Nityananda gave us the answer. Sri Jiva inquired how it was (as he had just observed) that so many people engage in sinful acts in that holy place, despite the dhama’s power to deliver the soul from sinful reactions. The Lord replied that a person who has developed too much faith in the power of his own intelligence is empowered by maya to reject the mercy of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu—the most powerful thing—even if he is a resident of the holy dhama. How does that work? Such prideful material intelligence distorts the hearing process. Lord Kapiladeva has explained that intelligence is the rationalizing feature of the subtle body. It is the intelligence that permits the embodied soul to apprehend or misapprehend things. (Bhagavatam 3.26.30)
You go on to explain in your purport:
Doubt is one of the important functions of intelligence; blind acceptance of something does not give evidence of intelligence. Therefore the word samsaya is very important; in order to cultivate intelligence, one should be doubtful in the beginning. But doubting is not very favorable when information is received from the proper source. In Bhagavad-gita the Lord says that doubting the words of the authority is the cause of destruction.
Persons with too much faith in their own intelligence thus rationalize their own mistakes, blame others for them, and in that way perpetuate their own faults. Such persons reject good advice and thus cannot own their own problems. Such unsubmissive persons commit the same mistakes again and again. Srila Prabhupäda, as the representative of Lord Nityananda, you therefore repeatedly warned us, “Don’t be over-intelligent.”
His [the Supreme Lord’s] existence can be realized by one who has the single qualification of submissiveness and who thereby becomes a surrendered soul. The development of submissiveness is the cause of proportionate spiritual realization, by which one can ultimately meet the Supreme Lord in person, as a man meets another man face to face. [Caitanya-caritamrita, Adi-lila 1.55 purport]
Why, then, do some of your followers stay? How can we be submissive after all we’ve seen and gone through? Srila Sridhara Svami gives the answer in his commentary to Srimad-Bhagavatam (10.14.8), translated by your disciples for the BBT edition:
Although a devotee has surrendered to the Supreme Lord, until he is completely perfect in Krsna consciousness he may maintain a slight inclination to enjoy the false happiness of this world. The Lord therefore creates a particular situation to eradicate this remaining enjoying spirit. This unhappiness suffered by a sincere devotee is not technically a karmic reaction; it is rather the Lord’s special mercy for inducing His devotee to completely let go of the material world and return home, back to Godhead.
A sincere devotee earnestly desires to go back to the Lord’s abode. Therefore he willingly accepts the Lord’s merciful punishment and continues offering respects and obeisances to the Lord with his heart, words, and body. Such a bona fide servant of the Lord, considering all hardship a small price to pay for gaining the personal association of the Lord, certainly becomes a legitimate son of God. . . . Just as one cannot approach the sun without becoming fire, one cannot approach the supreme pure, Lord Krsna, without undergoing a rigid purificatory process, which may appear like suffering but which is in fact a curative treatment administered by the personal hand of the Lord. (Bhagavatam 10.14.8 purport)
And in your own words, Srila Prabhupada:
Coming again to the point of pure devotional service, the Lord is describing the transcendental qualifications of a pure devotee in these two verses. A pure devotee is never disturbed in any circumstances. Nor is he envious of anyone. Nor does a devotee become his enemy’s enemy; he thinks, “This person is acting as my enemy due to my own past misdeeds. So it is better to suffer than to protest.” [Bhagavad-gita 12.13–14, purport]
Dearest Srila Prabhupada, please empower me to follow these timeless teachings. Please continue to administer the necessary treatment to purify this time-worn heart. Let me not deviate from proper Vaisnava behavior on the plea of protecting you or your movement. Then, when my heart is sufficiently purified, please sit down there comfortably and allow me to serve you.
Begging for any place in the shade of your lotus feet, I remain
Your eternal servant,
Kesava Bharati Dasa Goswami