If the people of Paris would have installed the Deity of Krsna in these buildings, how nice that would have been! People chanting, dancing, and taking prasadam [food offered to Krsna] every day. Then there would have been no maya.
Eating, sleeping, sex, and defense—these are common to both human beings and animals. The distinction between humans and animals is a man can search after God but an animal cannot. Therefore a man without that urge for searching after God is no better than an animal.
Your charge is that they have forgotten God. They will answer, “We have not forgotten God. We are going to church. How have we forgotten God?”
Chanting the holy names of God in congregation raises us to the state of pure spiritual consciousness–a state of joyful awareness of God that transcends all petty prejudices and material distinctions.
There is life—the supreme life—but you have no eyes to see it. Premanjana-cchurita-bhakti-vilocanena. A devotee—he can see that the Deity is alive. Are we fools, rascals, that we are worshiping a dead body?
Srila Prabhupada’s Krsna books directly tell us what God is like in His original, personal form and what He and His liberated associates are doing in the eternal, spiritual world.
When you understand what spiritual life is, you will see that in the spiritual sense also you are subordinate, because your nature is to be subordinate.
Among the hippies in San Francisco were many young people who were sincerely searching for spiritual enlightenment—and who found it when they met His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.