Behind Srila Prabhupada’s appearance on the alien Manhattan streets stand five millennia of planning and effort. The story of it opens one sunrise fifty centuries ago in the Himalayas, where the sage Krsna-Dvaipayana Vyasa sits in trance on the bank of the Sarasvati.
“The Swamiji doesn’t want anyone smoking pot here.” Don denied it: “I have not been smoking. You are not speaking the truth.” The boy then reached into Don’s shirt pocket and pulled out a joint, and Don hit him in the face.
“Much of Africa’s population accepts reincarnation,” he explained. “And because Africans have a tradition of sitting and hearing from spiritual authorities, my lectures were well received.
The other doctors never call him Samika Rsi dasa. Most of them don’t even know he is an initiated devotee of Lord Krsna. In the hospital—St. Joseph’s Hospital, Carbondale, Pennsylvania—he is Shyam Sundar Mahajan, director of the emergency ward.
Sometimes when you’re driving you’re not sure whether you turned in the right direction, and you suspect that you may in fact be going the wrong way. Then every mile you travel is simply anxiety. You don’t know whether to go sixty miles an hour or twenty miles an hour, because if you’re going in the wrong direction you don’t want to go too far too fast.
He was maestro of the chanting, head of the kitchen, and spiritual father to a band of wild, candid young Americans.
In this age of quarrel and hypocrisy, the only means of deliverance is chanting the holy name of the Lord. There is no other way. There is no other way. There is no other way.
our approach is to teach people the purpose of their life. Instead of letting students waste their time carving up their desks, shooting up heroin in the lavatory, and raping their teachers, or leaming atheistic nonsense, why not actually give them an education?
When Lord Krsna appears in the present age His complexion is golden, He is surrounded by various associates, and His mission is to teach people how to make their lives spiritually sublime through the sankirtana-yajna, or chanting of the holy names Hare Krsna.
A few minutes past 6:00 p.m. on March 13, at the ISKCON center in Sridham Mayapur, West Bengal, Srila Prabhupada’s younger sister Srimati Bhavatarini-devi dasi passed away.
1966: The Lower East Side, New York. The building was humble, the membership small, yet Srila Prabhupada’s vision encompassed the whole world.
I was brought up a Catholic. I went to church every Sunday. As a young woman my only understanding of God was fear. I was told I had to do things, but nobody ever explained why. Even when I went away from the church, I suffered from fear.
I had been present at the passing of my beloved spiritual master, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, and my mind was now exhausted from the mixture of appalling sadness and transcendental exultation surrounding that event.
Prabhupada retired through the rear door, back up to his apartment, his guests would disappear through the front door, back into the city. Don and Raphael would turn out the lights, lock the front door, and go to sleep on the floor in their blankets.
A person is said to be established in self-realization and is called a yogi when he is fully satisfied by virtue of acquired knowledge and realization. Such a person is situated in transcendence and is self-controlled. He sees everything—whether it be pebbles, stones, or gold—as the same.
It is a little difficult to understand this movement, because it is a spiritual movement. Unfortunately, people have practically no information about what spirit is and what a spiritual movement is.
His lecture is very basic and yet (for restless youth) heavily philosophical. Some can’t take it, and they rise to leave. Some, upon hearing his first words, have already risen rudely, put on their shoes at the front door, and returned to the street.
Srila Bhaktisiddhanta therefore taught that devotees should be eager to use everything possible for one central purpose: to broadcast the glories of Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
When Lord Krsna speaks in the Bhagavad-gita, He clarifies the ultimate purpose of vegetarianism: “If one offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, fruit, or water, I will accept it.”
In the early summer of 1966, Srila Prabhupada was sharing a Bowery loft with a young American friend. But when the boy went crazy on drugs and drove him out, suddenly Prabhupada found himself in the street, homeless and alone.