Prabhupada life-story 10 – How Krishna set the stage for Prabhupada

Audio Podcast :

Video :

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Welcome back to our series on the life story of Srila Prabhupada. We are right now at the stage where Srila Prabhupada has come to America and is in New York City, is trying to share Krishna’s message but is constricted because the place where he’s staying, the person with whom he’s staying is a monist, impersonalist. He doesn’t want Prabhupada to speak his personalist message and he has got no support from India to establish his own place.
So Prabhupada is now going to concentrate all his efforts on America, to get resources from America, to share wisdom with America. So when Prabhupada came to America, actually America was in a state of enormous cultural flux. To understand what caused this cultural flux, we have to consider the history of America a little bit.
From the 18th century onwards, 18th, 19th, 20th and even to some extent before that, that was the era of colonialism where primarily Britain and to some extent other countries like France, Portugal, Spain, they also colonized the rest of the world. Both America and India had been colonized by Britain earlier and of course South America had been colonized by the Catholic countries Spain and Portugal and America had got its independence through a war long before India had got it and Britain still remained a very prominent, even a predominant power in the world. But in the Second World War, Britain was severely battered because France fell to Germany and German bombs showered on Britain and Britain lost much of its wealth, lost much of its resources and America on the other hand prospered during the war in many ways.
Primarily because although there were casualties of American soldiers, but America itself being a distant land away from the landmass where the war took place, the war took place primarily in Europe, Africa and Asia. So the only direct attack on American territory was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor which was what got America involved in the war in the first place. But even before that America was involved in the sense that America was supplying weapons and by selling weapons America gained wealth and further because America came out as the victor in the war and it suffered far less infrastructural damage, there was human loss was there as compared to the other countries.
So it emerged relatively prosperous from the war and the world became divided into two powers, the USA in the west and USSR in the east. UK’s power diminished substantially and especially after it lost India, its influence became very much lesser. So one reason for Shri Prabhupada choosing to go to America was that America had become much much more powerful in the world.
USSR was also very powerful but USSR was behind the iron curtain and although India and Indians were friendly with USSR, USSR had helped India and India although officially it had led and acquired the position of non-alignment, India was a pioneer of the non-alignment movement when the world was bipolar but India was relatively closer to Russia. Although there were politically close relationships between India and Russia, somehow Russia never captured the Indian cultural imagination. So whenever Indians thought of progressing, they thought of going to the west and going to the west initially meant going to UK.
I mentioned Prabhupada’s family members when he was a child, when he was a young man, some of his family members wanted him to go to UK, to Britain to get barrister’s education over there. Over a period of time that had shifted, that admiration had shifted towards America. Although so much immigration to America had not happened at a time when Prabhupada had gone in 1965 but still there was a fascination that the west is progressive.
So because it was America that had become primarily powerful, much much more powerful than UK, in the new world order that had emerged after the second world war, Prabhupada chose to concentrate his western outreach efforts on America. Of course there are other factors also. We see that Prabhupada’s spiritual master Bhaktisiddhanta Ithakur had sent followers to UK and they had not been very successful there.
They had established a center in UK, another center in Germany, in Montreal but they had not been able to make a substantial impact in terms of getting committed followers. So Prabhupada in a conversation said that I thought that my god brothers they could not succeed. So if at all if I also go and I’m not able to succeed let me at least try at a different place.
So that was his humility combined with his sourcefulness. Another practical point of course was that Prabhupada got sponsorship to come to America. So anyway, for Prabhupada his coming to America was both circumstantial as well as intentional but along with that there was a transcendental plan at work.
A transcendental plan manifested through the peculiar socio-cultural situation that was there in America at that time. The socio-cultural situation was that after America emerged victorious and prosperous through the second world war, the generation that was born and brought up after that, new prosperity since its childhood and most of the things that previous generations of Americans and indeed previous generations of people all over the world had dreamt for, that given their life to have a good house, to have good education, to have a good job, to have good facilities and luxuries for living. Basically it was the great American dream.
So this dream, these young people were living right from their childhood and into their youth and they found that there was nothing really great about that dream. They felt that enjoying the material pleasures, the material goods of life, it was not really fulfilling and they wanted something more. The most people in life struggle throughout their life to just get the basic material goods and if they get a few, they’re so elated by that, that they just live parading those goods to others, see I’ve achieved this, I’ve achieved that.
But once that becomes commonplace, if practically everybody has the material goods and luxuries of life, then there is not much pleasure for the ego in parading it also. Then either one has to get some extraordinary material goods, extraordinary from that particular culture’s perspective or one needs to look for something other than the material. So these young people in America, they felt that whatever material life was glamorized by their culture, by their even their tradition, they felt there’s nothing really great.
They wanted something higher in their life and thus they started exploring spirituality. They started exploring alternate ways of living, alternate ways of thinking, alternate ways of looking at the world and one rich source of alternative ways of thinking, living and viewing the world came from the East, primarily from India. China also, but India had a series of spiritual teachers who had come in the past and they had created intrigue and fascination about India in the West.
So of course, while exploring spirituality, many of these young people, they started embracing what was called as the counter culture. So there was the mainstream culture, just live a good life, take care of your family, have a good job, have a good house and that’s success. The counter culture was the idea that all this has no meaning, it has no value, there’s no fulfillment in that, we want something more in our life and how do you get that? They’re ready to explore anything and everything for this and this generation somehow got the idea that they could get high through drugs, that they could reach higher levels of consciousness through drugs and they started getting into drugs.
Initially, they started getting into drugs for the purpose of getting some spiritual experiences, but the nature of psychedelic drugs, of mind altering drugs is such that they are addictive. So in the 1960s when Prabhupada went, this counter cultural movement which later on came to be known as the hippie movement, that was in its nascent stage, its formative stage and at that time it had not yet become so contaminated by drug addiction. Yes, the people who were adopted this lifestyles of spiritual exploration, they themselves were already living lives which could be considered degraded.
They rejected conventions, conventional ideas about education, about family, about employment, about hygiene, about eating, even about health and they were just exploring alternate ways of living and they were exploring drugs to see if this could lead to higher consciousness. But the point was, they were not enamored by materialism and they were open to spirituality and it was to this audience that Srila Prabhupada turned and Srila Prabhupada focused on them. Initially, when he was with Sally Agarwal, their social circle was of respectable middle class people and they were mostly interested in the good life.
The good life means the good materialistic life and for them Swamiji was simply a curiosity. When Prabhupada came to the Mishra Yoga studio and there he started speaking, for them, the people were practicing yoga primarily for health and there were often elderly people who were already respectable in society, had achieved something and they were looking for some something more to their life but it was not like a passionate search for the truth. It was something which they felt, okay, that could improve their health, that could help them, make them feel a little good about themselves, help them physically and mentally.
So, there was not so much a spiritual search. It is a search for how something which seemed like spiritual would help them physically and mentally. But when Prabhupada got his own place and then some young people started coming to him, some of the people who were coming from the yoga crowd, the yoga crowd at that time was more of the upper class people, they started feeling a little uncomfortable when these young hippies who were often treated with great suspicion and condescension by the American mainstream.
He said, what are these people? They are completely irresponsible. They don’t complete their education. They don’t do a job.
They don’t take care of themselves financially. They don’t take care of themselves hygienically. They are like a blot on America and on our neighborhood.
So, they felt very uncomfortable being in the same programs as these hippies were coming. But when Prabhupada was there, he saw that the spark of spiritual interest was deep and genuine among these young people as compared to these more upper class elite kind of crowd who were there only for more sentimental or superficial purposes. So, Prabhupada shifted his full attention, large part of his attention at least, towards these young people.
And here we see the arrangement that Krishna was making. Actually, this counterculture phase lasted for about a few years, not even really a decade if you see. So, what happened during this period? Before this, Americans were mostly enamored by the materialistic way of living.
And after this, as the movement stayed on, but it became more and more into drugs and people became addicted to drugs. And whatever spiritual exploration was there, that just became sidelined and drug addiction became the defining characteristic of this movement. So, it imploded.
But there was this phase in which it was in its formative and authentically, somewhat authentically exploratory stage. And Prabhupada came by Krishna’s arrangement at that time. So, for Prabhupada to come and perform the dance of devotion and attract people to Krishna, Krishna had created the stage.
The stage was of the socio-cultural environment, wherein people were receptive to spirituality, people were ready to explore new means to spirituality. And Prabhupada offered them the way to go high through devotion, through chanting of the holy names, through kirtans. So, Prabhupada sang the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra and inspired people to chant the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra.
And by this chanting of the holy names, he inspired them to rise upwards, to experience sublime spiritual emotions. So, they had a desire to go high. They were thinking they could go high through drugs.
But Prabhupada told them that you can go high and stay high through the power of the mantra. And his message caught on. So, there was an audience who was receptive and Prabhupada was perceptive.
Prabhupada could sense the opportunity here and he took that opportunity. So, for Krishna to arrange for Prabhupada to come just at the right time, when there was a receptive audience, that was remarkable. Now, this was from the socio-cultural perspective.
But there were other factors also at work through which Krishna was arranging things. The other was the religious perspective. For almost two millennia, the church, the Christianity had been the main religion in the western world and in the westernized world.
Even now, Christianity is the most populous religion in the world. So, most Christians had adopted this exclusivist ideology that Jesus is the only way and no one can go to God except through Jesus. So, some or majority of Christians, especially Christian teachers, had this idea that all other paths are simply the ways of the devil.
So, all other gods are actually forms that Satan has taken to allure people away from God. So, their attitude towards other religions was of condemnation. But in 1965, that the Vatican Council, which is the main body of the Catholic Church, which is the main branch of Christianity, they had a significant breakthrough in their approach to interfaith.
And rather than condemning other religions, they passed a resolution, where they had an understanding, the Notre Dame, the understanding by which they said that, actually, we value all that is good and noble in other religions, and that Jesus can work, and he is paraphrasing over here, that Jesus, that people can progress towards deliverance, even through paths outside those which are directly given by Jesus or associated with the church. So, this created, from the religious perspective, an atmosphere of openness. And many Christians became more open to explore other religions.
And we will see later that because of this, when Prabhupada started sharing Krishna Bhakti, there were many Christians who came and they met with Prabhupada and they met with the Hare Krishna devotees. And although they were initially perplexed, even put off by the strange ways, culturally speaking, of these devotees, but eventually, when they got beyond that strangeness, they could see the seriousness, they could see the devotion, they could see the sincere, fervent spirituality, and they appreciated. They said that these devotees have the same sincere devotion that is described in the Bible as being had by the early followers of Jesus.
And later on, as the Hare Krishna movement became more influential, there were people who opposed it, and there were some people who tried to demonize it by calling it a cult, and there were many Christians who came and supported at that time. And they said that this was an authentic movement. So, the religious environment, it also had become more receptive.
And Prabhupada had many fruitful interfaith dialogues with the pastors and preachers of Christianity also. Prabhupada’s approach was also very broad, where he said that Jesus is also the son of God, and we respect Jesus as our guru, because he gave up his life for the service of God. So, both from the openness from the church’s perspective, and the broad-mindedness of Prabhupada’s vision of God consciousness, both of them gelled.
And similarly, a third factor was that America also opened up its immigration policies. In the early part of the 20th century, several immigrants, especially from South America and other places, had disruptive effects. They had been violent, and there had been some riots, and America had clamped down on immigration.
It would not give visas very easily. But around 1965, the American government opened up. It recognized that it needed people from other parts of the world, especially talented, educated, dedicated people to come, who would help build its economy.
And that openness in terms of immigration proved to be a significant factor for Prabhupada in being able to repeatedly extend his visa, so that he could stay in America. He would visit America repeatedly and stay in America for a sustained amount of time, by which he could shelter the seekers who came to him, and he could further the bhakti movement, which he was going to start. So, Krishna was arranging the stage through these huge movements at the socio-cultural level, at the political level, at the religious level, and he arranged for Krishna, for his devotee Prabhupada to come at the right time.
Now, this is not meant to imply that because Krishna arranged everything, there’s no speciality about Prabhupada. No. Prabhupada’s determination was extraordinary.
The bhakti tradition understands that certain souls are empowered, and empowerment means that there is divine facilitation for their service, for their accomplishment. But the divine facilitation does not mean that there are no obstacles. We saw how Prabhupada faced so many obstacles in America, and we will see in due course how Prabhupada faced obstacles.
We saw how Prabhupada faced obstacles in India, and we will see how Prabhupada faced many obstacles in America also. The hippies were interested, but they were not a submissive audience. In fact, a more unsubmissive audience would be difficult to imagine.
In many ways, the hippies were the antithesis of the traditional submissive student who came to guru in traditional Indian or in any traditional spiritual context, and Prabhupada won over that audience. So, empowerment doesn’t mean that obstacles were absent. Empowerment meant that arrangements were provided by which Prabhupada could even amidst obstacles persevere and perform.
So, somebody might provide a very good stage for a dancer to dance, and that good having good stage is important, but ultimately if the dancer captivates the audience, that is not because the stage is so good. It is because the dancer is so good. It is only because the dancer is skillful, because the dancer is exquisite, that the audience will appreciate the performance and audience will be won over by the performance.
So, Prabhupada was a consummate dancer. He was a dexterous dancer who took an ancient tradition and presented it in a way that was just suited for the ethos of his times and attracted hundreds, thousands, even millions of people all over the world. But Krishna was there with him, helping him by creating a stage.
So, Krishna and the devotee worked together to fulfill the mission of dharma. Indeed, this is the concluding promise of the Bhagavad Gita. Wherever there is Krishna, who is supreme mystic capable of doing extraordinary miraculous things, and wherever there is Arjuna, here the determined devotee, Arjuna represents the determined devotee and Prabhupada was such a determined devotee, there there will be victory.
So, how that victory manifested with Krishna making this mystical arrangement and setting the stage and Prabhupada being the determined surrendered dancer on that stage, that is a wonderful story, which we will discuss in our future episodes. Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.
Hare Krishna. Welcome back to