Vyasa-puja offering to Srila Prabhupada 1996

Dear Srila Prabhupada,

Please accept my most humble obeisances at your lotus feet.

Your Divine Grace, it is 1996, and the flags outside the United Nations building are still increasing! Today, as before, you are the only peacemaker who can effect actual change in this world of strife and slaughter.

Even the ordinary peace achieved by animals is now but a utopian dream for mankind. The animal kingdom boasts species that can easily live together without attacking one another. Yet the pack of humans currently inhabiting the globe cannot attain even this most rudimentary, bestial freedom from hostilities.

Noble peace workers implore us, "Just try to visualize: what if world peace suddenly broke out!" They hope that this exercise in creative thinking will help "free up" everyone’s latent capacity for brotherly love.

You taught us never to accept this saccharin–or any other. Real human life, you lucidly explained, is meant for more than just the cessation of societal strife. Cows and swans, for example, automatically live that kind of peace. Humans, however, by design, have the intelligence to choose real peace–a dynamic spiritual existence far beyond mere animal niceties.

With the advanced manifestation of consciousness the human body provides, we can settle up with Godhead–we can end our insurrection against Krsna. Then we can taste that peace meant for human beings: the replacing of temporary, material sense objects with eternal, spiritual sense objects.

You have covered the globe with opportunities for this divine sensory activity. Your world-wide Krsna consciousness network is a mechanism for the mass distribution of spiritual sensual experience. Indeed, you have unfurled a whole civilization of liberated sentience, far from the maelstrom of madness that purports to be human society. As you once said, "Don’t mind me saying so, but this Krsna consciousness is perhaps the first attempt at making these people into human beings."

Material resources are always limited. Material relationships prove always deficient. "If you’re a human being you must be pessimistic about material life!" you thundered, the first time I saw you. I sat before you, with my materialistic fiancie anxiously breathing down my back. You continued to roar, "If you are optimistic about material life, you’re an animal!" Out the temple door she ran–and out of my life. "But in Krsna consciousness, everything is always optimistic!" you concluded with a smile.

Amazingly, your books are able to convince readers that even if one does become a human by understanding the futility of material progress, still there is no great cause to rejoice. Like lifelong substance abusers that are both physically and psychologically addicted, conditioned souls can never restrain themselves. Without Hare Krsna sense objects, they have no other choice: they must squeeze the dry rag of promissory materialism.

But the pursuit of material happiness automatically accrues greed, envy, anger, conflict, and distress–even in just the planning stage. Therefore the conclusion is that without the spiritual sensory gifts of Your Divine Grace, there must be war and disaster.

Trying to be an unconditional servant,
Devamrta Swami