Prabhupada life-story 12 – Through serious difficulties to serious seekers

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much.
Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna. Welcome back to our discussion on Prabhupada’s life story.
We were at the point where Prabhupada was in America, in the Bowery, staying with David Allen and suddenly David went crazy and attacked Prabhupada in a drug-induced mania attack and Prabhupada had to leave, running down those four flight of stairs, coming out on the streets, being in a condition as derelict as many of the derelicts lying on the streets everywhere. Prabhupada was still determined. Although he had passage from the Sindhiya shipping company to go back to India whenever he wanted, he still wanted to persevere and he was always dependent on Krishna and dependence on Krishna is not just an abstract conception, it is an inner conviction that brings calmness and clarity by which one can act in the best possible way.
So, for Srila Prabhupada, he considered a situation and he decided that he would call one of his well-wishers. There was a young man, Carl Juergens, who would come for Prabhupada’s programs. In fact, he and some others had been so interested in India and Indian history and languages and Indian religion that they had wanted to learn Sanskrit and Prabhupada had started teaching them Sanskrit.
Now, of course, Srila Prabhupada had not gone to America to teach Sanskrit. He had gone primarily to give the wisdom that was there in the Sanskrit text at that time, in the Sanskrit text to people who needed it at that time. You know, people were going to present it in that way for them.
But still, at that particular time, Prabhupada thought that if this is what people are interested in, that is the time, that is the way I can connect with them and by connecting with them, he can, they will, he will get to interact with them and talk about Krishna also. He spiritualized his grammar lessons. So, Prabhupada was ready to use any opportunity to connect with people for getting them come closer to Krishna.
So, even if it required teaching Sanskrit, he was ready to do that. And while teaching Sanskrit, what he did was that he made all the lessons spiritual. He used verses from the Gita to teach Sanskrit.
He talked about noun rules, conjugation rules. And now, of course, Sanskrit is quite a difficult language. And according to traditional scholars, it takes 10 years of one of the most learning phases, right, starting from childhood, for one to actually gain mastery of Sanskrit.
And certainly, Karl and his friends had no intention of spending that much time to learn Sanskrit. For them, it was more like a hobby. And once their interest had waned, when they saw that it requires so much commitment to learn Sanskrit, then their interest waned.
And when their interest waned, Prabhupada also discontinued the classes. For him, he knew that his time was limited. And if people were not interested, he had no reason to spend his time in teaching Sanskrit.
He used his Sanskrit knowledge to unlock the timeless wisdom that had till then been locked in the Sanskrit text so that the world could benefit from it. So, although the Sanskrit classes had not been going on, but still, Karl had connected with Swamiji. And he would come for Prabhupada’s programs, which he would hold in the loft where David Allen was staying.
So, Prabhupada called him. And when he heard Swamiji’s voice on the phone, he knew that it was an urgency. Now, Prabhupada was not a person who talked much on phone.
Even after he started the movement, after the movement became wide and globally spread, even then Prabhupada preferred correspondence through letters rather than through phones unless it was an emergency. And when Karl heard Prabhupada’s voice on the phone, he recognized it was an emergency. And when Prabhupada explained to him what had happened, he immediately came and he said that, Swami, you can come and stay with me.
Now, Prabhupada moved into his house, but he also had a cat. It is common in American households to have cats. It was trendy, especially among the younger generation at that time.
Now, Karl was African American, and he had an interracial marriage. So, his wife Eva was a feminist, a liberated woman. She was having a good job.
And they had married recently. So, now, Eva was not at all interested in Swamiji and in his philosophy and especially his prescriptions of how to live. So, their relationship, her relationship, Eva and Karl’s relationship was just developing.
And they also did not have a big place. They also had a loft, like all artists and people in that area had a loft. And that was meant for both of them to live together.
And they would smoke, and they would drink, they would eat meat. And they knew Swamiji’s views on this. Karl knew it, and he had told Eva about it.
So, although Prabhupada lived there, and Prabhupada was an entirely unobtrusive guest. Now, Prabhupada, when he had been living with Sally Agarwal and Gopal Agarwal had told him, think nothing about the smell of meat. But still, his spiritual presence itself was very imposing.
And Eva started resenting that presence. And she started complaining to her friends, saying that here I am working at a job, and I am earning money, and I am paying for the rent for this place. And then the Swami is coming here, and he is telling us how we should live.
Of course, Prabhupada did not instruct them at all. Prabhupada just kept to his way of living. Now, Prabhupada had already got a program going on.
At the loft of David Allen, there was regular programs going on where young people would come and Prabhupada would do kirtans and speak. So, he did not want that program to stop. And some of Karl and Althas, they had gone and met David Allen.
David was still, he had come down from the drug high, but still he had locked all the doors and locked all the windows, and he was not even ready to open. Finally, when they knocked repeatedly, they wanted to get at least some of Prabhupada’s possessions back. Then they saw that David was still mad.
Although he had recovered from his mania, but still some amount of madness was there. And although he regretted having charged at Prabhupada to attack him, but still Prabhupada’s friends felt that, and Prabhupada himself had felt that it was not safe to live over there. So, Prabhupada had dreams to have converted that loft into a temple in future, the first Radha Krishna temple in the west, and now those dreams were shattered.
Because, so just as he had lived earlier in Jhansi, and there he had started the League of Devotees, and there he had wanted to make it a center, but he had been evicted from there. There, of course, it was a clique which had evicted him, but now here he had been evicted practically by one maddened young man. And Prabhupada continued his programs in the house of, in the loft of Kaal, and people were coming, but soon the situation became intolerable for Eva, and Prabhupada was also astute enough to pick up on the vibrations over there.
So, he decided that he did not want to impose on them. So, of course, he was ready to leave, but he needed some other place, and Kaal himself had been looking for some other place, but nothing was working out. And then Prabhupada, he took the initiative himself.
Especially, what Eva was fearful was, she was not going to follow Prabhupada at all, and Prabhupada was not making any inordinate demands from them, but she could see that Kaal was quite getting close to Prabhupada, and she was afraid that if Kaal became too attached to Swamiji, then Kaal would leave her, and Kaal was torn between his wife and Swamiji. And although Kaal was interested in India and in history, and he saw Swamiji as a very valuable teacher, repository of the knowledge that he was seeking, but still for him, now, his interest in India was not as important as his relationship with his wife. And Prabhupada sensed this, and Prabhupada himself took the initiative.
And he said, let us go and meet Michael Grant. Now, Michael Grant was a young man who had come to meet Prabhupada. He had come up the four stories to the loft, and he had attended, he was a musician, and he had seemed quite respectable.
He had spent time talking with Prabhupada, and one of the things that Mike had been surprised was that Prabhupada was having abundant time to talk with anyone who wanted to talk. Prabhupada had not been in a hurry, and Prabhupada had seemed genuinely interested in him, and he had asked questions, and Prabhupada had given very good answers, and he had felt impressed by whatever Prabhupada had said. So, now, when Karl called Mike, now, Prabhupada would get up early and would go for walks, and the hippies often would sleep very late and wake very late.
So, when Karl called Mike and said that Prabhupada is coming to meet you, now, Mike had just, he said, it is very early. He said, no, anyway, Swami, we are just close by, we are coming in a few minutes. So, Mike immediately dressed himself and he waited, and then Prabhupada explained the then Prabhupada, when Prabhupada told about the situation, Mike realized that Prabhupada was asking him for help, and he said, yes, surely, I’ll help.
And he said that, actually, I’m a musician, and I have a lot of musical instruments here, and there’s a lot of noise over here when I practice on the musical instruments, and also, I have a cat. This will not be a right place for Prabhupada to stay, but he said, I will look for and I’ll arrange for a place, and he started looking in classified ads, and he shortlisted a few options, and then he eventually found one option where the rate was affordable. So, there was a 26 2nd Avenue.
There had been earlier a shop which had been called the Matchless Gift Shop, and they had, those people had left, but they still kept the name Matchless Gift, and when Prabhupada came to see that, Prabhupada liked it. Now, the landlord of that place said that he had another small room behind which could be used for Swami’s residence, and this could be like his temple hall, his hall where for lecturing, and the two together was not a very big amount, and Swami’s friends felt that they could provide that much amount to him on a monthly basis, and then when Prabhupada met the landlord, Prabhupada said that, I am planning to form a society, and I would like you to be a trustee of the society, and Prabhupada, he had his three volumes of the Bhagavatam which he had got, and he used that, he offered that as a gift to the landlord, and he said that, actually, you, I invite you to become a trustee, and he said that to a member of the trustee board, basically, of the organization, and he said the charge for that is $20. So, Prabhupada got $20 waived for the renting of the house, and the landlord felt honored to have the books autographed by the author himself, and he agreed to become the member.
Now, Prabhupada, he had not yet broached the idea of starting an institution to anyone till now, but he had big plans, and these would be revealed in due course, and then they came to 26 2nd Avenue, then they decided to shift all of Prabhupada’s luggage, some of it from Carl Jagen’s place, the other from David Allen’s place, and they all came, a motley group of people carrying Prabhupada’s bags, and carrying Prabhupada’s burner, and his books, and his tape recorder, and his typewriter, and they walked across, and they, none of them, at this point, were at the level of being serious spiritual followers, but they were spiritually interested, and they all saw Swamiji as a spiritually evolved person, as someone who was up there, they were trying to go up there to some higher level of consciousness through drugs, and various, through music, and various other means, and they felt Swamiji was at some higher level of consciousness. So, although they were not ready to commit their life to following Swamiji’s teachings, they were still very much ready to help in whatever small ways they could. So, this was the group that led Prabhupada to the place that would become the first center of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
Now, the 26 2nd Avenue is even now in Manhattan, and this was slightly outside the Bowery, it was not exactly the Bowery, the Bowery was a place where there were saloons, and there were people, it was mostly a place for AIRs, artists in residence. Now, the 26 2nd Avenue was close to the Bowery, not as bad, but here there were derelicts of a different kind, here they’re mostly hippies. It had been a place where immigrants had lived before, and there was a crematorium nearby, there was all kinds of things close by, it was not at all what would have been traditionally considered an auspicious location for a temple to be established.
But for Srila Prabhupada, the most important point, most important consideration in building a temple or in having a center which would become a temple eventually, was whether there were people who were ready to come and hear about God. As long as that was there, everything else would follow. So, Srila Prabhupada moved there, and there he started conducting his classes.
Now, he had his own place, and of course, things were not easy, things were still very difficult, because the audience, although interested, was not at all submissive. One time, sometimes people, Prabhupada would give a talk, and the traditional convention was, and it is even now in any respectful educational discourse, mode of discussion or discourse, the teacher speaks, and then at the end of a class, there are questions. Now, sometimes it may be arranged that the teacher may himself ask if you have any questions in between, but usually it is at the end of the class.
But what happened was here, there was no culture. So, Prabhupada would sometimes be giving a class, and suddenly somebody would get up and want to speak. And Prabhupada would say that, not now, you can have questions later.
No, but I want to speak, Swamiji. No, not now. Wait for some time.
Let me finish. But suddenly that person said, no, I want to speak. Prabhupada said, wait for a few minutes.
And then sometimes Prabhupada would continue his talk, and after he finishes his talk, then he would tell them, okay, speak, what do you want to speak? And sometimes people would just ramble on, instead of asking a question. Many of these people were themselves recovering from drugs, or they had taken drugs and gone high, and they would come to the programs. So, they were not, they were not even asking coherent questions.
And sometimes the person would ramble on and on. So, Prabhupada would say, so what exactly is your question? And sometimes the person would say, I do not know. I am trying to find out what my question is.
And Prabhupada was incredibly patient. And he has to have understanding. And finally, sometimes he would turn to his followers, those who are a little more interested, a little more dedicated, he says, you answer the questions, general question afterwards.
Or sometimes Prabhupada would just pick up his symbols, and he would start doing kirtans. Okay, Prabhupada was extremely tolerant. And as I mentioned earlier, Prabhupada, he would go out for walks.
And that was not just for his health or for recreation, that was primarily for promotion. Prabhupada would himself walk around, and he would meet people, and he would talk with them and tell them about the place where he was, who he was, and what he was doing. He would tell them to come for the lecture.
So, one day, he was just walking along the streets. And then he saw on another side, a tall, bearded, bespectacled young man walking on the other side. This was Howard Wheeler.
He was, he was an English lecturer at the Ohio State University. And he looked, he was just, he was going to another friend of his to have some, to smoke some pot, to have some drugs. And he was looking around here, and then suddenly he saw a saffron clad sanyasi.
Now, Howard, along with one of his friends, Keith, had already been to India in search of a guru. And they had traveled to Haridwar, Rishikesh, and several other places which are considered sacred places, which spiritual tourists from the West would often frequent. And after having gone there, they had seen that they had just not been able to find any guru.
They had read Buddhism, they had read some Indian literature, but they had not been able to connect with it. They felt it was interesting, but they couldn’t connect with it. So, Howard later became Hayagriva Das, and he wrote a whole book about his life experience with Prabhupada called the Hare Krishna Explosion.
And therein also he describes how his experience of India was. Now, we, it is interesting to think about what peoples, the western conception, western peoples, or in the western hippies conceptions of India was, so that we can better understand how they appreciated Prabhupada. He said that, you know, he just couldn’t make sense of why eastern literature so often say that the world is a place of distress.
The Bhagavad Gita, for example, says in 8.15 that this world is the Khale Mashaashvatam. So, why say this? You know, because in the western world especially, there seem to be a lot of comforts available and quite easily available. But he said, when I came to India and I saw the slums of India, I saw the crowded locals of India, this was even 1960s, I understood what it means that this world is a place of misery.
Many of us have seen maybe in movies and in the past how people would travel in the trains in India. The trains themselves would be chock full and people would sit on top of the trains also. And even buses like that, people would sit inside the bus and people would sit, hang outside the bus and people would climb on top of the bus.
And that is how they would travel. So, the scarcity of resources and the huge population that made the misery, the distress of material existence very apparent. And then one spiritual truth, which he had learned from the spiritual traditions, he could see over here.
But then, as he moved forward, he went to the sacred places, he saw there were many people whom he might have considered as spiritual teachers. But he found most of them did not speak English. Those who really seem to have some spiritual substance, those who seem to be having some spiritual wisdoms and spiritual insight, those who seem to be in their hippie jargon, those who had seem to have it, they seem so otherworldly, they seem so, they seem, there is no way to communicate with them because they just did not know English.
And those who did know English, he felt they were more like, more like religious administrators or religious entrepreneurs than spiritual seers. Though these people were more interested in getting donations, in selling some, peddling some products or religious products or whatever. And they, to him, did not seem to have much spiritual insight.
So, despite having been in India in search for a guru, he had come back disappointed. So, actually, for somebody at that time, American immigrants, American tourists to India were also not so many at that time. And for someone to have gone all the way to India and come back, that indicates substantial level of spiritual seriousness.
And as Howard and his friend Keith, and they had another friend Wally, these would become the core of the first dedicated followers of Shila Prabhupada. And how did they meet? It was Krishna who arranged for them to meet. So, when Howard was walking along the street, he just chanced and he saw Swamiji over there, and he was surprised, am I already got into a drug-induced hallucination? I have not yet taken drugs also.
He just closed his eyes, opened his eyes and he saw that Swamiji was still there. And then a big truck passed by along the way and he wondered whether that Swamiji was a vision who had disappeared. But he saw Swamiji was not only there still, but Swamiji was looking at him.
Swamiji had noticed him and he seemed to be waiting for him. Eagerly, he crossed over. And when he reached Swamiji after crossing over through the traffic, he was almost wondering whether still this is a vision that will disappear.
But then Swamiji himself asked him. So, he asked Swamiji, are you from India? Yes! And what about you? Now, obviously, Howard was not from India, but Swamiji could see that he was very interested. So, Prabhupada reciprocated with this question.
He says, no, I am not from India, but I have been there and I have been looking for a Guru. And there they sat and talked with each other. And Howard realized that this is someone special.
So, actually, that Lord, the Bhagavad Gita says in 18th chapter 61st verse was that, He says that Krishna is situated in the hearts of all living beings and He is guiding the wanderings of all living beings. So, it was that Supreme Lord who had promised Prabhupada that you just go to America, I will make all arrangements for you. So, what arrangements Krishna was going to make, that is slowly getting revealed.
Krishna was going to send spiritually sincere, spiritually serious souls to him. And here, while just taking one inconsequential seeming walk on the streets of New York, Prabhupada had encountered a person who knew a group of people who would all become his dedicated disciples and who would help him to share Krishna’s message far and wide. Mysterious indeed are the ways in which the Lord acts.
And especially when the Lord wants to fulfill His mission, how He will do it, through whom He will do it, when He will do it, it all is inconceivable and yet it is all wonderfully relishable. So, how Prabhupada’s first dedicated followers took up the mission that accepted what he was teaching and then started assisting him in sharing that, that we will just look at in our future sessions. Thank you.
Hare Krishna.