Writings » to Srila Prabhupada » Vyasa Puja offering to Srila Prabhupada 2012
Vyasa Puja offering to Srila Prabhupada 2012
(view 2012 offerings by disciples)
Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,
Please accept my obeisances in the divine dust of your lotus feet.
There is a land where we’ll never, ever grow old. Nongeographical in the ordinary sense, this place is not situated in time or space. To attain it, we don’t have to travel to another continent or planet. This land of agelessness obviously can’t be physical, since the time factor deteriorates anything material. So where is this land of ever-freshness and newness? It’s the spiritual world that’s contained in your service. The more our expertise in your service seems to increase, the more we realize how much better it could be. As His Holiness Bhakti Tīrtha Mahārāja commented to me before his departure, the more service we do, the more we realize there’s so much more service to be done. Our service cravings multiply, while simultaneously our abilities to recognize service opportunities expand.
Undoubtedly the body will end, but devotional service to your mission keeps snowballing, whether quantitatively or qualitatively. We may take for granted (considering them elementary) Rūpa Gosvāmī’s teachings on artificial and real renunciation of the material world—lessons you so vividly confirmed. But Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura, in his Eleventh Canto commentary (11.7.12), calls this knowledge of phalgu-vairāgya and yukta-vairāgya “confidential purports of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam meant for the understanding of fortunate living entities.”
Surveying your devotees, with their multifarious scintillating aspects of bhakti skills, I can easily remain humbled. How amazing it is that whatever service we may perform nicely for your pleasure, we can be sure that at that very moment, somewhere in the huge world of ISKCON, someone is doing it better—whether the devotee is celebrated or unsung.
I have learned that it’s the non-neon devotees in your ISKCON one has to especially watch out for the prabhus faithfully serving “behind the scenes.” Somehow they seem to enter the ultimate scene, back to Godhead, via the most amazing final moments.
Please accept this personal anecdote, submitted for your pleasure, since you would often spice your morning walks and lectures with striking tidbits from the cultish realm of māyā.
Four years ago, after the USA elected a president with a partially different body color, my youngest brother, at significant expense, packed up his beige-skinned family of five and scurried all the way from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to attend what the media touted as a historic inauguration. “Why did you do that?” I queried. “So much time and money just for such a hyped affair with such flickering, superficial consequences.”
“Can’t you see it?” he exclaimed incredulously. “I want my children to know there are absolutely no limitations! Don’t you understand, big brother: no limitations!”
Oh, really?
This, Śrīla Prabhupāda, is just a small sample of the ignorance you saved me from—the pretentious little world of mundane sociopolitical variations and their hallucinogenic effects. The Yamadūtas, in their conversation with the Viṣṇudūtas in the Sixth Canto of the Bhāgavatam (6.1.52), explain:
The foolish embodied living entity, inept at controlling his senses and mind, is forced to act according to the influence of the modes of material nature, against his desires. He is like a silkworm that uses its own saliva to create a cocoon and then becomes trapped in it, with no possibility of getting out. The living entity traps himself in a network of his own fruitive activities and then can find no way to release himself. Thus he is always bewildered, and repeatedly he dies.
Without the guidance of Your Divine Grace, I would have known nothing about the omnipresent cosmic low ceilings—limiters far more stringent than class, race, and gender. I would have lived my whole life oblivious to the three modes and karma. Perversely seeking knowledge and pleasure through my distorted senses, I would have surely disregarded time, manifesting as the consummate barriers of birth, death, old age, and disease. Echoing King Mucukunda, I was habituated to forgetting about time, yet time would certainly not ignore me.
After the U.S. presidential hoopla, one of my senior relatives remarked to me: “Just see the successes, all around. Your middle brother, the doctor, is CEO of a medical foundation backed by investments worth 200 million dollars; your youngest brother, the Harvard lawyer, is a board member for Toyota. And you . . . er . . . uh . . . well . . . you could have been up there too . . . but . . .”
Up where?
Horse eggs . . . sky flowers . . . as the śāstra says.
Gandharva-nagara: the fantasized sight of palaces or cities deep in the dense forest.
I can just see you on a morning walk at Santa Monica Beach, suddenly stopping, turning to the devotees, planting your cane, and issuing an all-conquering commentary, protecting your devotees from such well-intentioned yet utterly hollow quests for fulfillment and wholesomeness through material acclaim, corporate climbing, and social mobility.
Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 4.12.15 states: “Śrīla Dhruva Mahārāja realized that this cosmic manifestation bewilders living entities like a dream or phantasmagoria because it is a creation of the illusory, external energy of the Supreme Lord.”
How is it that I am chanting Hare Krishna more and still loving it more, with each passing day? Why is it that for almost forty years I’ve read Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam and especially Śrī Caitanyacaritāmṛta over and over, and still I think I’ve barely touched their depths?
What kind of hankering is it, that I beg for intelligence from the Supersoul to better serve you any way you want?
Where does the mercy come from, that a formerly self-indulgent New Yorker can look at your devotees and think, “How would Prabhupāda see him or her? What delight Prabhupāda would take in this devotee’s devotional service!”
And to top it all off, before you rescued me I had embraced as the highest realm, the supreme abode . . . Manhattan! Frenzied, maddened, I saw it as the inner whorl of the lotus flower known as New York City. Now, by your dispensation, I long for the divine intimacy of Māyāpur and Vṛndāvana: śrī-kṛṣṇacaitanya rādhā-kṛṣṇa nahe anya. Let us proclaim it to the three worlds: your devotional service has no limitations, in either this world and body or the next.
Your devotees are truly “up there” as long as they endlessly strive to please you. In your purport to Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 4.30.33 you write so beautifully:
Out of humility, a devotee considers himself unfit to be transferred to the spiritual world. He always thinks himself contaminated by the modes of material nature. Nor is there any need for a devotee to ask to be freed from the modes of material nature. Devotional service itself is in the transcendental position; therefore there is no question of asking for this special facility. The conclusion is that a pure devotee is not anxious to stop the repetition of birth and death, but is always eager to associate with other devotees who are engaged in chanting and hearing about the glories of the Lord.
May that be my standard, and when this present body has done its dash, I look forward to starting off from the very beginning with you, wherever you want, however you want it.
Your insignificant servant,
Devāmrita Swami