The Monk’s Podcast 84 with Madhavananda Prabhu – From Sentimentality to Spirituality

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you very much Madhavanthru for joining once again. It’s been a long time since we had our last podcast and we’re looking forward to your association once again. So thank you for sparing your time and joining today.
Thank you Krishna. Nice to see you. Nice to be here with you.
So shall we go ahead? Yes, please. Thank you. So I was thinking today we could discuss on the topic of sentimentality and spirituality or from sentimentality to spirituality.
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between the two. Yes, bro. So I had thought of three things, a broad three structure.
If you have a structure in mind, I’ll be happy to go along with that. I could suggest mine and then we could take it forward. And I’m going to take inspiration from you this time.
I’ll also be making some notes. I saw last time you made noted some points. So so I thought of one thing is that now how sentiments are first a part of spirituality.
So we affirm that. But then when sentiments can take us away from the spirituality, especially we are talking about Bhakti spirituality naturally. And then lastly, how we can analyze our sentiments.
So are these taking me closer to Krishna or are they taking away from Krishna? So I had some concerns about the second situation when sentiments seem to be might be taking people away from Krishna or. But then it could just be me that I am a little more intellectual and analytical. So it could be that I am.
I’m a little less receptive to sentiment that might actually be authentic, but I might be seeing them unnecessarily critically. So I probably share with you maybe because I also have a little bit of a scholarly nature, not like you, but something that I have a hard time with sentiment and certain parts of the world, especially certain former Soviet areas. And as you said in the beginning that that can be good, it can be actually beneficial, but it can also be very, very detrimental to Bhakti.
Another point in that regard, I’ve had several people, ironically or coincidentally, in the last few weeks asked me what I thought about, you know, about this thing. When devotees leave their body, everybody says, oh, they went back to Godhead. Just because they’re devotee, they must have gone back to Godhead.
And this question was asked to me in a class just a couple of days ago. And I thought for a moment before I replied and I told them, well, sometimes that can be beneficial for very sentimental new devotees. There may be some benefit in that.
But that’s not our general mentality. I dug out this letter from Srila Prabhupada to Jayananda Prabhu. And let me read a little of that to you.
It’s very sweet. It sounds sentimental. But Prabhupada’s also a little sober.
This is a letter Prabhupada wrote to Jayananda after Jayananda left his body. My dear Jayananda, please accept my blessings. I’m feeling very intensely your separation.
In 1967, you joined me in San Francisco. You were driving my car and chanting Hare Krishna. You’re the first man to give me some donation, $5,000 for printing my Bhagavad Gita.
After that, you’ve rendered very favorable service to Krishna in different ways. I so hope, I so hope at the time of your death, you’re remembering Krishna. And as such, you’ve been promoted to the eternal association of Krishna.
If not, if you had any tinge of material desire, you’ve gone to the celestial kingdom to live with the demigods for many thousands of years and enjoy the most opulent life of material existence. From there, you can promote yourself to the spiritual world. That even if one fails to promote himself to the spiritual world, at that time he comes down again on the surface of this globe and takes birth in a big family like a yogi’s or brahman’s or aristocratic family, where there is again a chance of reviving Krishna consciousness.
But as you were hearing Krishna kirtan, I’m sure that you were directly promoted to Krishna loka. Janma karma ca me dhirbhyam eva myo viti tattvata chakta deham punar janma naiti mamiti sorjana Krishna has done a great favor to you not to continue your diseased body and has given you a suitable place for your service. Thank you very much.
Your ever well-wisher, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. Now, I found this letter significant. I feel this letter, Srila Prabhupada’s teaching all the devotees that their guru will always remember them and whatever service you do is never lost.
And that when you leave your body as Jayananda did, Jayananda was considered to be the most advanced devotee in ISKCON by so many devotees at that time. Prabhupada loved him very openly and appreciated him so much. He did such very important, significant service for Srila Prabhupada with Ratha Yatra where he was a temple president in San Francisco.
He did so many things for Srila Prabhupada. Not to speak of what Prabhupada mentions, giving his life savings of $5,000 to print Prabhupada’s Gita. But Prabhupada’s saying that I hope you’ve been promoted to the spiritual.
He’s not, to me, this is what he’s teaching us as a society that we don’t just just because someone’s a member of ISKCON doesn’t mean that, okay, now definitely they’ve all gone back to Godhead, which I feel is a very Christian kind of mood. I grew up in a Christian family, and that was always the mood. If someone’s been, quote, saved, which just means they said a prayer, please, Jesus, accept me in your heart and forgive me for my sins.
If they just said that, and in some branches of the church, they have to give money also regularly to the church. If they’ve just done that, then they consider they’ve gone back to Godhead. Okay, as you were expressing, we have some sentiment in the beginning, and that sentiment may be favorable for some very neophyte people.
Oh, anybody who joined ISKCON, anybody who’s been chanting Hare Krishna, they all go back to Godhead. But as we begin to study the books more and we come to verses like which Prabhupada quotes here, then we develop a little higher understanding, which Prabhupada is indicating he wants us to do. So, for me, this letter sets the tone of mood that we should have in our society about devotees going back to Godhead.
Okay, makes sense. So, the two things are there over here. I was thinking about that death is probably the time when we have to be the most sober and it’s a matter of our destination afterward.
And what you’re saying is, especially considering Prabhupada’s quote, to Jayanand Prabhu, who is considered, as you said, an exalted devotee. So it does mean that we sometimes think that if somebody has not gone back to Godhead, it’s almost like a disaster. But maybe it’s our over expectation.
It’s a progression and a devotee is always in Krishna’s shelter and moving closer to Krishna. So, if we have set the expectation that we’re going to go back to Godhead, then that expectation not being fulfilled is disturbing. But if you understand that spiritual journey is more of an evolution and it may take multiple lifetimes for a person to actually attain Krishna.
So, it’s almost like sometimes we treat not only heavenly planets, even Vaikuntha like our backyard. Oh, he went only to Vaikuntha. We’re going to go to Goloka.
So I think there is a presumption of two things, superiority and simplicity. Superiority because we are Gaudiya Vaishnavas, we are following Srila Prabhupada. So, we are going to get elevated.
And the simplicity that, ok, if I just do this, then this is going to happen. So, I think that, so this sense of superiority and the sense of, now simplicity I am not saying in a positive sense, I think simplicity in a simplistic sense. Yes.
So, and what you said about Christianity, it very much applies that since we are saved and this is all we need to do and then we will be delivered. So, at one side, we want to give consolation to devotees and reassurance that the process of Bhakti works. But then how it works, especially at the time of death, if at that time we can’t even really say categorically that somebody didn’t go back to Godhead.
Because how do we know? So, maybe that is not the time to actually give like a philosophical clarification or education. Maybe it’s at the other times in our regular classes where we need to provide this appropriate understanding of things. Because that is the time when people are emotionally vulnerable and death can be very traumatizing and disturbing.
So, again, this also raises the issue, somebody dies in a, a devotee departs in a surrounded by other devotees, chanting the holy names. In contrast, if somebody dies in an accident, many devotees feel that that is a huge difference. But in this world, just as some devotees may have healthy bodies and some devotees may have sickly bodies, some devotees may become very famous and some devotees may not become very famous.
So, similarly, some devotees may die in a very peaceful, serene kind of setting and some devotees may not die in that kind of setting. I don’t think that itself predicts the kind of destination a devotee is going to go to. So, let me conclude this point.
So, what I’m saying is that sentimentality, in a sense, associates, usually gives a lot of value to externals. Say the deity smiled at me when I went into the temple. I saw the, like one devotee told me that when I came to the temple hall, I saw Krishna winking at me today.
So, there is an over-emphasis on externals and even going back to Godhead is also seen like an external achievement. Okay, you’re here, you went back to Godhead. So, those are my thoughts about this sentimentality.
Yeah, I was just, there’s a verse that I was thinking about. I don’t know if I can find it or not. There’s two verses I’m thinking about, but one I won’t find so quickly and easily.
Rupa Goswami speaks something about chanting in the Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu and Jiva Goswami in his commentary mentions, he says that if Krishna’s really kind to someone, then he makes that devotee take birth again and again, even though they may be chanting the holy name for many, many births. This is our philosophy. He says, and the reason is that so that that person will come to the stage of prema.
Otherwise, if we just chant the holy name, then we may go to Vaikuntha, which is not such a hard thing, but to be able to go to Goloka Vrindavan, to enter into the pujas of Vrindavan, that’s a very, very big thing. And there’s a nice verse too, again, not finding it, that I think Bhaktivinoda Thakur quotes this. Oh, it’s right here.
It’s from Adi Purana. It’s quoted in Hari Bhakti Vilas in 11.464. In my heart, I always chant the names of those who with faith or contempt chant my name. And there’s another statement that I recall in Shastra too, that even if a devotee has been chanting his whole life, if he forgets Krishna at the time of death, Krishna will remember him.
So I’m just mentioning this to underline your point that it’s not such a cut and dried thing. On the other hand, going back to the comparison with Christianity, I think that’s a very important point, because in Christianity, some scholars have said that the teachings of Christ are more similar to Bhakti than any other tradition in the world. And there’s so many similarities between the two.
But as we see what Prabhupada called churchianity, as that developed and things became more mechanical and people felt a need to make things more easily accessible, or let’s put it bluntly, cheaper for people, then they would encourage that everybody goes back to heaven who dies and whatever. It’s very convenient. It’s very useful for them.
And that tendency is what I fear in our society, that this tendency of making something being convenient and useful for the institution to collect members and they get money to just promise them some kind of cheap salvation, that very much concerns me. Yeah. You know, again, this is with respect to Christianity, what you said about Jesus, when I read the Bible and then I read the Bhagavad Gita, I found that the Bible itself doesn’t talk much directly about Jesus saving people.
In fact, just believing in Jesus saving people. The whole Bible is more about living lives ethically devoted to God. So, it does seem that, as you said, many Christian scholars say that there was one of the later Apostles, St. Paul, he shifted the focus from Jesus’ teachings to Jesus’ saviorship.
That’s a matter of controversy within Christianity. But the idea that living is important, but just believing is even more important, that is something which is a problem. Now, of course, we can say within our tradition, there is a significant emphasis on sadhana, that you have to do this, this, this, but that can also become mechanical.
So, overall, if we consider that the process of bhakti, so there is, like you quoted one thing, that Krishna will remember even if somebody doesn’t remember. So, there is one side, the assurance of Krishna’s protection. And that is important for every devotee, even if the devotee be a neophyte devotee.
What to speak of that? God’s grace is available even for those who are not even devoted to Him. But it is more, I feel, the expectation that God’s protection or reciprocation will come in particular ways. Like the deities will smile at me or I will go back to Godhead or say particular things that happened.
So, I think we at one side need to emphasize that God is always there. Krishna is in our hearts and Krishna loves every one of us. So, that message shouldn’t be also downplayed.
But at the same time, we can’t demand that Krishna show his love to us in particular ways that we think are special or that we think are transcendental. So, any thoughts on this? There’s a topic that my Guru Maharaj used to speak about sometimes, which I’d never heard any devotees speak about. And more recently now, I’ve been hearing Bhakti Vigyan Maharaj and Shivaram Maharaj making some presentations on this.
It’s described in Madhuri Kadambani by Vishnu Chakravarti Thakur and also Jiva Goswami’s Bhakti Sundarba and some Prabodhananda Saraswati’s Chaitanya Chandra Doya, Chaitanya Chandramrita, that Bhakti is independent and it’s not even by our sadhana. That’s a radical thing. A lot of devotees think, well, if I just do my sadhana, then I’m going to be guaranteed everything.
But Jiva Goswami says, no, Vishnu says, no, Bhakti is independent. And you may do sadhana for thousands of lifetimes and not get the sadhya unless you’ve gotten the mercy of the devotees. And Jiva is very clear about that in Bhakti Sundarba, that Krishna himself doesn’t give mercy, but that mercy comes through the devotees.
So that is Krishna’s mercy, Krishna Kripa Shri Murti. So I also find that conception to be very similar to Christianity, that although the Christians, that I find generally my Christian friends, they, one thing they don’t like about devotees, they say the Bible says it’s not just by works only. Actually, we also agree with that, too.
Just recently, we finished the month of Kartik and Vishnu Chakravarti Thakur says there’s significance in Dwi Angola, two fingers short, that the rope always works. One is that it indicates that there has to be endeavor from the devotee to bind Krishna. And the second is there has to be divine mercy.
Otherwise, we can’t do it. I find that I’m not so inspired by the Christians’ comments who say that it’s not just by work only, it’s by mercy. But then they say, so you say, what do you do then? Well, you have to say this prayer.
You have to do this thing. And which is a kind of work also that I surrender and I do this. But we find that very beautifully described in our Gaudiya understanding that Bhakti is Swarat, Bhakti is independent.
And we do this Nambhajan because it will attract the mercy of the devotee. It’s not that I’m chanting the Hare Krishna mantra and Krishna’s dancing with Radharani and the gopis and the Rasleela and all of a sudden he stops and Radharani says, what is it? And Krishna says, Madhavananda is chanting Japa. Krishna is completely absorbed.
But through Krishna Kripa Shri Murthy, through Krishna’s form of mercy, through his devotee, I’m chanting and the devotee becomes very happy. And that devotee is Krishna’s manifestation and Krishna’s inside man, so to speak, or inside woman. And that devotee, Sri Guru, can go and grab Krishna’s ear and say, this devotee is so special and they please me by this kirtan.
And definitely by that kirtan, we purify the heart. And by that kirtan, we develop Bhakti. But through the stages that Rupa Goswami has given, a do-shraddha, the first we have faith.
And faith in what? In sadhu. And this, I think, is also crux of the point you’re, we’re both expressing concern about with the sentimentality, which is not based on serious faith. And we see that there’s a beautiful conversation.
Let me share something with you again. This is something we printed before in our Bindu magazine. And from our issue 25, in an article we called it, these are called sahajiyas.
Oh, I saw that you were sharing the screen at that time. That was the next article below. Yeah.
So it was a conversation from the 28th of January in Bhubaneswar, India. And Prabhupada is responding to some comments from some of his disciples about devotees having all these fantastic visions. And Prabhupada says, the first thing is, if this man who had the vision, is he attached to woman? And if he is, then everything bona fides finished.
As soon as he’s attached to woman, either legal or illegal, all of his qualification is finished. So in other words, someone may be saying all these very far out things, but what’s the value of that if you still have material desires? There’s another story I heard once that someone came to Shilobhakta Siddhanta and he said, Guru Maharaj, there’s this devotee and he saw Krishna. He’s so elevated.
And Shilobhakta Siddhanta said, that’s very good. He said, you should ask him, does he still see Maya? Because if he still sees Maya, it means he hasn’t seen Krishna. So this, I think, is a real important consideration when we talk about this sentimentality.
Let’s go on to this very beautiful conversation. Prabhupada is disgusted very clearly with what he’s saying. No one else has seen, only they saw.
Prabhupada is being sarcastic. The other devotees, they could not see. He’s so advanced and only he could see.
This is bogus. You should never encourage this. This is bogus.
That’s all. If someone comes, everyone will see. And if only I see, nobody else can see.
It’s bogus. Don’t encourage these bogus things. He’s so advanced.
Only his eyes are fit to see and no one else. This is bogus. Others also have eyes.
But, oh, he’s got transcendental eyes. And Prabhupada goes on and says, many life members, big, big men, they come and they tell me things like, Swamiji, I’ve experienced this. Some boy came to me.
It means the real purpose is they want to prove they’ve already connected with a higher planetary system. And Prabhupada goes on. He says, one big barrister, lawyer friend of mine, he’s now dead, Mr. Chatterjee.
He used to charge 16,000 rupees for an appearance in court. He was telling me that he went to Vrindavan. He met a boy and the boy was asking him for some sweets.
He said, so I gave him a sweet. Later on, when I was coming back to Delhi, he said, I saw that same boy running on the train. So he’s thinking that Krishna’s become a coward boy and he’s running after you on the train.
And it probably gives you another example. These are very beautiful. Another friend’s wife, she came to Puri, Jagannath Puri.
In Jagannath Puri, rich men are allowed to go near the deity. So that lady said, when I was circumambulating, Jagannath was snatching my cloth. Oh, God.
Very sarcastic. He’s saying, Jagannath became so attached with that blackish woman, he began to snatch her cloth. So many nonsense stories.
Why didn’t you? I want to ask you, why didn’t you stay with Jagannath? Why didn’t you? Why did you come back? And Prabhupada says, these are very poisonous things. And Prabhupada very humbly says, I was never fortunate enough to experience these incidences. Now, we could go through, there’s a number of examples that Prabhupada did experience such incidences like this.
But Prabhupada was hiding that. And finally, in this conversation, Prabhupada said, these sahajis will come out of so many devotees. What can be done? From my Guru Maharaj’s disciples, so many sahajis came.
These are called sahajis. Very easily they capture something. My Guru Maharaj used to say, when my disciples become sahajiya, it will be more dangerous.
Now, you’re a Hindi speaker and you know Sanskrit something, I think, and Bengali. For those persons who are listening who don’t know, the word sahajiya means easy. And sometimes even the path of bhakti is described as sahajiya by our Acharyas because it’s a very easy path.
You just chant, dance, be happy. But here Prabhupada’s using that phrase, which sometimes I find, we use it as kind of a prerogative term to anybody who wears white and lives at Radhakund or anybody that we don’t agree with, just like we use the term Mayavadi to mean pretty much anybody who’s not a Vaishnava. And it’s not always so simplistic.
Sometimes those terms may work like that. But we use them in a simplistic way sometimes in our society. Yes.
So these are very striking quotes. And I would say that let’s look at it at two, three different levels. Anybody who has really studied Prabhupada’s books and has understood Prabhupada’s mood, it’s unlikely that those devotees will say that Krishna came running to me when I was leaving for a train in Vrindavan or Krishna was snatching my cloth.
So you would say that that is definitely, it is easy for even a general devotee to understand that this is a little bit going too much in a sentimental direction. But I would like to take two, three specific cases where many devotees say that Krishna came in their dream or Prabhupada came in their dream. That’s one case.
And second is say devotees feel the hand of Krishna in their lives in particular ways. And then later on they find that, you know, they did that thinking they were being led by Krishna’s hand and then things don’t work out right. So, you know, there can be many things in this.
I said somebody wants to get married to somebody and they feel that some devotee astrologer tells them something and then they experience some remarkable coincidences and then they get married and then they find the marriage doesn’t work out. They thought, was this Krishna’s plan? What happened? So, you know, devotee sees Krishna’s hands in certain events, which I’m not really sure whether we can really see Krishna’s hand over there. So one extreme example I remember was one devotee told me that his computer crashed.
I think today morning I chanted my japa inattentively. That’s why Krishna crashed my computer. So it can be in a positive sense, but it can also be in a negative sense where, you know, when I see problems coming in my life, I start seeing them as Krishna punishing me.
So that would be a second level. And third level would be, say, some devotees say that the Deities perform some pastimes with them. That this happened when we went into the Deity room and there are sometimes devotees may talk about that with their home Deity.
Sometimes they talk about the temple Deities. So would you like to talk about these three things maybe one by one? You just pressed some buttons in my heart. I know this could be a provocative question.
I remember now, I was telling you in the beginning that maybe I don’t have so much passion for this topic. Because you have to have passion. A writer has to have passion.
A speaker has to have passion. An artist has to have passion. I remember I have a lot of passion.
And let me share with you for a moment my background, why I have this passion. When I was 17 years old and I was a big troublemaker at that age, I went and lived with my grandmother who was in her 70s. And she was a born-again Christian.
And she was a very enthusiastic born-again Christian. And she was always trying to convert me and get me to follow her practice. And she would watch some television shows and she tried to get me to watch them.
Actually, those television shows and her preaching had a very adverse effect on me. There was one show she used to watch, a lady named Kathryn Kuhlman. And she had her hair kind of straight up.
It was a little funny. She would begin the show. The show was called, I Believe in Miracles.
And she would start the show with, I believe in miracles. And every show there would be people who would come and they would get healed of some tragic accident or illness or they were crippled or whatever it was. They would get healed of that.
And once my grandmother forced me to go to a program of this lady. And it was held at the Oakland Coliseum in Bay Area. And Oakland Coliseum, I don’t know, probably holds maybe 50,000 people or something.
Huge amount of people. And it was, I don’t know, as I remember, it was practically packed. It’s full of people.
And she’s down on the stage. And there’s all these people with crutches and wheelchairs, different things. And they would come up on the stage and she would touch them.
And all of a sudden they’d start crying and they’d jump out of the wheelchair and they’d jump up and down and hallelujah. And she’d be crying in the name of Jesus, you know, like this. And then I remember very distinctly also they had these very big guys who worked for her going around all the different rows.
And he had huge buckets. You see my hands like this big, which they would pass down each aisle for donations, for money. And she’s telling everybody, if you give more money, then it’s going to be very, very auspicious.
So that really scarred me. Aside from that, my grandmother, God bless her, she’s a simple lady. But she had her miracles that she would share with me.
And I’ll just share briefly two of them with you. She told me once she said, I was driving the car and all of a sudden it ran out of gas and I was in the middle of nowhere and I was praying. I said, Jesus, please help me.
And all of a sudden it was a miracle. And the gas gauge started going up and the car became full of gas. It was just a miracle.
This old lady telling me like this. And another time she told me that she went shopping or something. She had something to get out of the trunk, the boot of her car.
And she went to get it back in the car. And the key wouldn’t work. And she kept trying.
And then she started praying, dear God, please help me. The key won’t work. And what am I going to do? And then she told me, she said, I heard a voice from the sky.
And the voice told me, Beulah, that’s my grandmother’s name, Beulah, try the trunk key. And my grandmother said, but that won’t work. And the voice said, try the trunk key.
So she said, so I tried the trunk key and it opened the door. Oh, it was a miracle. So I grew up with this prabhuji and it really disgusted me with all respect to my dear grandmother who loved me.
And she helped me in so many ways. It very much disgusted me. I found it very cheap, very sentimental, a little crazy.
And so when I see sometimes devotees in our society, even writing books to be a little controversial, writing books about deities and saying, you know, some Muslim had a dream and the deity came to him in the dream and told him that you should marry your daughter to such and such person. And it was a miracle. And they’re writing these things in a book.
For me, the way that I grew up in spiritual life, you hide your guru, you hide your bhajan. In Hari Bhakti Vilas, it says repeatedly that if a devotee has some wonderful dream or vision, he shouldn’t advertise that. And this is what you’re pointing out.
This is the danger, what Prabhupada’s pointing out. Even if you have something, once a devotee came to my Guru Maharaj and he said, Maharaj, I was chanting Hare Krishna and I saw Lord Nrsingadev. It was amazing.
And my Guru Maharaj looked both ways and he kind of whispered to the devotee. He said, very good. Don’t tell anybody.
Oh, God. That devotee must have been disappointed. The whole point is I want to tell something.
And this is the problem. I may have some vision or some dream. Maybe I had too much pizza before I took rest at night and maybe that’s why I had that dream.
I don’t know. Or maybe it’s something transcendental. But if it is transcendental, I won’t tell everybody about it.
I’m going to keep it secret. Like Madhavendra Puri, who had an amazing experience, where Kirchar Gopinath stole sweet rice for him. But Madhavendra Puri left in the middle of the night because he didn’t want that respect.
When devotees want to tell me about wonderful stories and one devotee told me once, he said, I saw Gurudev Swaroop and he’s Balaram. He is? Balaram. Oh.
Big eyes. Oh, OK. I don’t mind.
Really, I don’t mind. Maybe you had that vision. But why are you telling me about it? I feel a little hurt.
That’s something you should keep secret. And if Krishna wants to reveal that in some tricky way, he’ll do that. The real problem is not that somebody has a vision or that they’re inspired by what they think is a vision.
Maybe it’s not real, but they have inspiration. That’s good. But if we go and tell everybody about it, then we’re going to end up with a society like this lady.
I believe in miracles. And by the way, I did some research about her years later. And they said something like 90 percent or more of the people who were healed within a few days or a week or two, their ailments, their problems came back again.
And the scientists who examined it, their opinion is that it was just because they had strong faith in that lady. So what kind of faith is that? That’s not Shastriya Shraddha. Hmm.
Yeah. So, you know, faith healing is a big thing in Christianity and it just puts off thoughtful people. I saw one video about an evangelical Christian.
There was this lady who could use the money she had to buy medicines for her sickness. But she believed that if she gave it to a preacher, she would be miraculously healed and eventually she died. So it seems her son has become one of the most prominent atheists in America.
So he told what he writes about like how we write, how we came to Krishna consciousness. They write how they became atheistic. So what he’s saying is like you also use the word disgusted.
It’s a strong word, but I understand. So faith healing is. So from the specific, I think you made a universal point.
I don’t think within our tradition we talk about faith healing as a sign of faith. But what you are talking about is if you have had special experiences, keep them private. There’s no need to talk about them.
So like you said, if somebody has dreams of Krishna, who knows, you know, we don’t know how advanced they are. We don’t know how Krishna is going to reciprocate with them. So maybe they have a dream.
Maybe as you said, they ate pizza too much, whatever. But by talking about these things in public, what happens is that everybody starts thinking that if this happens to me, then I am special. And if this doesn’t happen to me, then something is missing in my life.
Maybe there is something deficient in my devotion. And I would say that is where things become problematic. So there is a standard process for practicing bhakti and growing in bhakti.
And there could be exceptions that happen to individuals. But the more the exceptions are propagated, the more the exceptions will be considered the standard. And then if the exceptions don’t happen, then we may even, there is a psychology, a phenomena called honest lies.
Honest lies means what they say is that this happens, especially when somebody writes memoirs. They may write their life story and they may believe that something happened a particular way. But it happened in an entirely different way.
So nowadays, I think there’s one famous memoir, somebody wrote about the Chicago fire in 1940, something like that. How this person said, I was trapped in my home and then the fire workers came and rescued me. And then that book became a big bestseller.
And then his sister or someone wrote to him saying that, wrote that he was not even in that city at that time. He was in another city at the time of Chicago fire. But he says, I remember it.
So the point I am making here is that, this is what psychologists call as honest lies, that we start believing our lies. We start believing our memories. So sometimes it may happen that our devotees, somebody claiming that I saw Krishna or something special happened to me.
Is it something really happened? Is it something which my mind concocted because I want to believe in it? I want to believe that it happens. So that whole genre puts us in a very dubious territory. So in that sense, with respect to dreams, it’s best to not talk about it in public.
The same you would apply to say, if somebody talks about deities having special pastimes, like you talk about the Muslim thing. So if you put both of these aside, and what do you think about seeing Krishna’s hand in one’s life? So it reminds me of a comment Bhaktivinand Gyanmaraj gave in a lecture I was attending in Ukraine one year. And he told the devotees, he said that neophyte devotees, they like miracles very much.
It gives them some inspiration. Devotees who don’t have strong faith. But we should develop Shastriya Shraddha, faith which is based on Shastra.
And somebody may get some inspiration in the beginning. And if it inspires them to chant Hare Krishna, it inspires them to worship the deity and practice Krishna consciousness. I think we should support that and be in favor of that.
Sometimes at book distributors, we meet someone on the street who’s been around the devotees before. It’s happened to me a few times. And they said, oh, I was chanting Hare Krishna, and I saw this light or this thing or that thing happened to me.
And you guys are so amazing. And what they’re saying is very, very sentimental. But there on the street, I always encourage them, really? Oh, my God, you had that experience? You’re very special.
Just as you’re saying, because people want to be identified as special. And Srila Prabhupada pointed this out in this letter to Jayananda. I think indirectly to all of us, that any service you do makes you special.
Prabhupada is speaking about how special Jayananda is because he did these services. But then Prabhupada goes on in the letter to be a little more rigorous and a little more Shastric. And we should see according to what someone’s state of consciousness is at the time of death.
I also like your point about how when there’s always needs to be exceptions. And I find personally in my life that I just my nature is I always like to point out exceptions because I don’t like it when things are black and white. Bhakti is not just gray, but bhakti is multicolored.
And there’s so many different variations. And we’d like to point that out. But there is some principle, there is some importance to black and white also.
Bhakti Vinod, my Guru Maharaj once cited Bhakti Vinod from Sajjanatoshini or something. He said that the definition of an Upasampradaya is when you take an extraordinary act of a great devotee and you make it a standard procedure. That’s the definition of an Upasampradaya.
And this is our concern. That’s beautifully put. I think it’s wonderful if someone has a dream of the deity.
And I’m not going to say the dream was real or not real. Only Krishna can say that. But it certainly must be inspiring for the devotee.
Here’s a little exercise you can do or anybody watching this can do. I do sometimes with small children. If they’re a nice devotee, they like to go to kirtan, they really like Krishna.
And maybe they’re six or eight years old. I ask them, have you ever had a dream about Krishna? And almost every time those little children say yes. And I say, really, tell me what was your dream? And one little girl told me Krishna was dancing with me.
Krishna was holding my hand. Beautiful, beautiful dreams. I never had a dream like that where Krishna was holding my hand and dancing.
It’s amazing. But so many of these children, at least in this lifetime, end up leaving Krishna consciousness. So I would be a little shy to conclude that she’s a Mahabhagavata devotee and this dream is necessarily real on a higher level.
Maybe it is real on some level. But as Srila Bhaktisiddhanta said, if you see Krishna, do you still see Maya? That’s the real standard. And for me, as a preacher in ISKCON, I feel this is a very, very important principle.
One thing I found sometimes when you look at our Gaudiya tradition, something devotees aren’t aware of always, there’s a tradition of rolling on the ground as a type of sadhana. It’s mentioned, and I was trying to find the verses just now. I could send them to you later if you’d like.
If someone wants, they can ask me, but I could send those to you. Actually, I know in Krishna how I could maybe find them. But that’s a kind of sadhana that some devotees observe.
And you can imagine that there’s some utility to that by rolling on the ground. And what was being expressed was rolling out of humility. Prabhupada was also very discouraging about people who very cheaply want to roll on the ground and advertise something.
There’s a famous story you may know that there was some man who came to a kirtan in Krishna Balamandir in Vrindavan, and he started rolling on the ground suddenly in the kirtan in apparent ecstasy. And here I found it. This is from a book called Babasindhu’s Taranga, and it speaks about the mrdanga drum and the kartals, and also ludana, or rolling on the ground.
And let me see. We’re going to hear about ludana. Okay.
He says, Alas, I’ve passed so many days engaged in fruitive activities that are bound in karma, acting according to my own intelligence. By that, I’ve fallen far away from the father of the universe and have not been able to put an end to my misery. Therefore, today I behave as a child and dance with abandon as I raise my arms aloft.
Then I cry and I roll around in the dust. Just see, will he not be merciful and take me into his own lap? So there’s a tradition, a Gaudiya tradition, at least among some Gaudiya Vaishnavas, that raising the hands in the air is an expression like a child calling out for the father and crying and rolling on the ground in humility as being favorable to bhakti. But some people use that rolling on the ground to advertise like their kind of ecstasy.
And again, I wouldn’t say they’re not ecstatic. Maybe they are. However, Srila Prabhupada at that time in the Krishna Balaramandir told the devotees you should have kicked him to see if he’s really ecstatic.
And he noticed, yeah, I wouldn’t suggest the devotees take that literal and kick someone, but Prabhupada’s point was, I think, that if the person’s actually in ecstasy, they won’t notice being kicked. They’re going to be completely in and out. Really? You can be sarcastic, bro.
Good one. Prabhupada’s concerned about this. He’s very concerned.
He doesn’t want these things to be taken very cheaply in our society. It’s a serious concern. So, therefore, it’s said that gopayad nijamalakam.
We should hide our bhajan. Gopayad nijadavitam. We should hide our Easter today.
We shouldn’t advertise ecstatic dreams. These are injunctions given in Hari Bhakti Devas. Oh, beautiful.
Okay. You know, these are very pertinent examples. So, could you maybe give some examples of what would be a valid seeing Krishna’s hand in one’s life? So, at our stage, what would be? Yes, I have a very quick, very appropriate answer, I think, for that.
I see COVID epidemic as Krishna’s hand. Really? Okay. He said you should look for Krishna’s hand.
And we said, well, Guru Maharaj, how do you know it’s Krishna’s hand and not my Maya? Guru Maharaj said when there’s something that you can’t control, that’s beyond your control, you should see it as Krishna’s arrangement. And that’s how I see this COVID thing. And some people will say, oh, it’s this conspiracy.
And maybe they’re correct. But those conspiracy, those persons who are doing the conspiracy, maybe it’s the World Health Organization, or the American government, or Bill Gates, or whatever it is, they’re secondary causes. And the primary cause, the ultimate cause, is Krishna.
And I want to see that. As we spoke in a previous session with you, we told the story about Gaurakishore das Babaji and how once in Navadvipa, some children were throwing stones at him. And suddenly he stopped and turned around and started shouting in the direction of the children.
But what did he say? He said, Krishna, you stop this right now or I’m going to tell your mother. So he’s not seeing the children. He’s seeing Krishna doing that.
Now, that’s a very high level. And it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t judge those children and correct them socially. But even though we may correct them, we should still think Krishna is sending those children.
Krishna is inspiring those children. Why is he doing that? What is he trying to teach me? There’s another example I could give. Here in Mayapur, at the Chaitanya Math, once there’s heavy storms that come every year in Mayapur, and there was a heavy storm, and the chakra broke off the top of the temple, and there was some damage to the temple.
And when Srila Bhaktivedanta found out about that, his immediate response is, some of the pujaris are doing something wrong. He said, this is Krishna’s arrangement, and we should see what is the purport behind this. There’s something behind it.
So we can speak in ecstasy about how I saw Krishna, and you’re the next acharya. That is very convenient. But let’s be a little more pragmatic.
Are we doing the same thing with COVID? Are we doing the same thing when I fall down and break my leg? Or when there’s an accident and somebody pulls out in front of me, and because of that I break my leg, and I blame that person and I’m very angry with that person. Do I see Krishna’s hand behind it, or am I seeing that nonsense person? And this is a test for all devotees, and this is an opportunity for all devotees to go deeper in our bhajan. It doesn’t mean the person’s not at fault for pulling out of the stop sign at a wrong time or something, but we should ultimately see Krishna’s hand in everything.
And that’s not sentiment. That’s there. Krishna’s controlling everything.
This can help us practically avoid so much negativity, vengefulness. There are times when sometimes we have to hold other person culpable, but in most situations in life it is best to just forgive and move on, unless we have either the power or the responsibility to actually do something about it. So you’re saying that when something, especially when something bad happens, rather than getting caught in the circumstantial causes and then going into either blaming somebody or even blaming oneself too much, we see Krishna’s hand and move forward.
Well, let me elaborate on that a little more. It doesn’t mean that, for example, if we see some person molest a child in the gurukula, that we say, oh, anyway, it’s Krishna’s arrangement. What we should do in such a case is call the police and turn that person over to the police for going to jail.
But then we should also think, what is Krishna trying to tell us? Why has Krishna arranged this? Why has this happened? What is Krishna’s hand in this? We should always be looking for Krishna’s hand. And that doesn’t preclude, that means we’re not going to turn someone over to the police, that we’re going to be sentimental and throw our hands up in the air and anyway, I’m just going to accept whatever happens. COVID is there and some people are saying, the United Nations are saying, that there’s going to be an economic crisis and there’s going to be world famine.
Recently, the United Nations coming out and saying that. That doesn’t take a genius to figure out. So we can just say, anyway, Krishna will take care of me.
But maybe Krishna is going to take care of me by informing me through the United Nations that it’s time to grow some grains. So we could put it that, again, knowing when to deal with a thing at a practical level and when to let it go, that also requires one to be somewhat unsentimental. If one is sentimental, then, in a sense, you talked earlier about being, if we are controlled by sentiments too much, we may see Krishna where it may not actually be there.
But then those same sentiments or emotions may control our perceptions and prevent us from seeing Krishna also. So if I’m too emotional by nature, then I get too caught in, this person did this to me, how dare they do that to me. And then again, we can, so we could say because of our emotions, sometimes we may see Krishna where he is not there.
And sometimes because of our emotions, we may not be able to see Krishna where we need to see him. So this is a very significant dynamic. And I think this is the mood of the Bhagavatam repeatedly.
Parikshit Maharaj doesn’t talk about Shringi doing it to him so much. He says Krishna has given me this opportunity to become detached. So, and yeah, so also that Gurukul example has come up repeatedly in the last maybe one month, although I’m not travelling.
Some of that question comes up that we are not, it’s not that we just simply forgive our overlook. But as you said that we do the needful, but see Krishna’s hand. What is Krishna teaching us through this? Maybe Krishna teaches that we should be more careful with the Gurukul, be more careful who we hire.
What is Krishna’s message? Doesn’t mean that Krishna arranged for that child to come because Krishna is demoniac or something. But it means that we’re stupid and we hired someone as a Gurukul teacher who we should have done. This is an important part of our theology.
In Chaitanya Charitamrita, there’s a story of, I can’t remember, I don’t think it was Kali or Krishna. Anyway, Mahatma was serving when he was in Vrindavan. One day he said, can I have permission to go because everybody is going to see Krishna dancing on the hoods of Kali at night, you know, the story.
Yeah, I think so. It was a fisherman with some fish and some reflection and like that. So why is that story told by Krishna Das Kaviraj Goswami to help protect our Sampradaya from sentimentality? So Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, he himself exhibited exalted sentiments and Chaitanya Charitamrita showcases those sentiments.
At the same time, in that very book, it cautions where the sentiments can actually, can mislead us. So, you know, we could also in a sense talk about the tension between Dharma and Bhakti or we could say ethics and devotion that if our Bhakti or what we think of as Bhakti is interfering with our Dharma. Dharma can be morality, ethics or it can be just dutiful execution of what we are meant to do.
Then that is what is to be stopped. So Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, even when he was in ecstasy, when he heard a woman singing Geetha Govinda, he was attracted and he ran. But then his servant Govinda told him that, no, it’s a woman and he stopped.
He said, thank you, stop me. Otherwise, I would have died. I would not have been able to live.
So that means although he was in the highest levels of Bhakti, he also didn’t want to transcend the Sannyasa Dharma. So could we say that that is the boundary that Bhakti has sentiments, but if Bhakti, but whatever sentiments come in Bhakti, if they start making us, if they start diverting us from our basic Dharma, whether it could be, here I am using Dharma in terms of ethics or duty. So in the case of say the Gurukulis who were sometimes abused in Gurukul, if you say it’s all Krishna’s plan.
No, that would be irresponsible. That would be sentimentally irresponsible. On the other hand, like Prabhupada also saying that, I remember another person, Prabhupada said that, some person came and told Prabhupada that, I saw Krishna in my dream yesterday.
And Prabhupada in nonchalant, he said then serve him today. So, it’s more like emphasizing on your duty rather than on being driven by sentiments. Yeah, therefore we have Vaidhi Bhakti and therefore we follow the order of Guru.
And therefore, when he speaks about these things in Hari Bhakti Vilas, Sanatana Goswami, he, there’s one verse which I could look up actually. He says that if somebody has some kind of amazing dream or something, they should have it confirmed by Guru. Let me share the screen here again for a moment.
There’s another astonishing verse. You like controversial stuff. This is really a controversial verse.
This is quoted by Jiva Goswami. It’s from Hari Bhakti Vilas. It’s also quoted in Bhakti Siddhartha.
It’s from Padma Purana. This is Krishna speaking to Arjuna. And he says, manimitam kritam papam api dharmaya kalpate.
That if someone does pop or sin, they do it manimitam for me, then that pop, api dharmaya kalpate, becomes dharma. Whereas mamanaditya dharmopi, if they neglect me, mamanaditya, then dharma becomes pop. dharmopi papam shama prabhavata.
This is indicating a superiority of bhakti. But we have to follow this under the guidance of Sadhu Guru. Otherwise, it becomes very, very dangerous.
It is a dangerous kind of verse. But this is bhakti. And we see Jiva Goswami, when he quotes this, he tells a story of Tirumangalwar, who you may be familiar with.
I think that’s the same story, yeah. He had a gang of thieves, and he stole money to build the temple in Srirangam. And that was his bhakti.
But we should also point out that that was directly ordered to him by the Lord in his heart. He had that real, I have to do this thing. So we can’t, there’s a danger in self-appointment.
That, oh, I’m inspired by this. I want to go out and just save the world and stop, you know, chastise all the demons and things. And as you mentioned earlier, I really appreciated your comment.
You said, depends on our power or our responsibility, what our position is. We can act according to that. That’s Vaidhi Bhakti.
That’s reality. Somebody who’s on the platform of Raghunuga Bhakti, they don’t even, they’re not, they don’t decide, well, I think I’m going to roll on the ground in ecstasy. The story in Chaitanya Bhagavat, when Haridas Thakur started rolling on the ground in ecstasy, when he heard the snake charmer glorifying Krishna, he didn’t, it wasn’t a mental calculation.
I think I’ll do this as part of my sadhana. There wasn’t a, but he was just ecstatic. It just happened.
But when that envious Brahman saw that, that was a calculated act on his part. So until we’ve come to that spontaneous platform, we have to follow the guru and sadhu. So, you know, you talked about how bhakti can take us beyond dharma or ethics, but that is again an exception.
And Vaidhi Bhakti means bhakti, we stick to dharma in general. Dharma defined inclusively, not just as like mundane dharma, but even devotional duties. So, you know, there are some incidents which, now if I look at Prabhupada’s first person accounts, say for example, what happened on Jaladuta, now what Prabhupada himself says and what devotees have built around it, there is a significant difference.
You know, what Prabhupada says is actually quite modest, that, you know, now, of course, I had talked with Satsvarupa Maharaj and he said that writing the first canto of the Leelamrut was the most difficult, because, you know, that there are so many people who are coming and saying, I was the postman who told Swamiji you should write books, not magazines. Like I was the person who did this, I was the person who did that. So, you know, Prabhupada, in a sense, never claimed, although Prabhupada said that Krishna came in a dream and told him that when he was on Jaladuta that he has arranged things, Prabhupada never claimed that dream as his authority for preaching.
Prabhupada said that his preaching authority came from the instruction of his spiritual master. So, in that sense, even when a devotee as exalted as Prabhupada had some special dreams, he didn’t emphasize them as the basis of his authority. He didn’t use them ever to claim like privilege or special position.
It was Prabhupada’s, in a sense, Prabhupada’s defining characteristic was his dedication more than anything else, not his claim to special experiences. So, that is the example which possibly we can all focus on when we talk about Krishna’s, about, so we can see our, that devotion is seen more in dedication than through some special experiences that somebody might claim to have had. The famous story was Srutakirti and Prabhupada.
He was traveling with Prabhupada and wherever they went, the devotees would cry when Prabhupada arrived and they cried when he left. And Srutakirti was feeling sad and one day he expressed his feelings to Prabhupada. He said, Prabhupada, I have no love for you.
And Prabhupada said, well, what do you mean? And he said, well, Prabhupada, I don’t cry, these devotees like. And Prabhupada then said, do you like to serve me? And he said, yes, Prabhupada, very much. And Prabhupada said, that is love.
I strongly think that the real dividing line in this, the real deciding factor is that these kind of things should be hidden. They may be encouraged, even with young devotees, because it may be something encouraging. I know I can tell you something secret.
When I was a brand new bhakta, I had a dream and Prabhupada came to me and it was a very realistic dream. And Prabhupada said, stay away from this woman, Maya. So now I don’t know, was that a real dream? Was it actually Prabhupada or was that just some too much pizza at night or what? But that was very encouraging for me.
As a new devotee, it really helped me. So why can’t as a new devotee, can’t I embrace that? But if I were to go to the temple and start telling everybody, hey, Prabhupada came to me in a dream, there’s something wrong with that. Let’s turn to, I want to share this.
This is from Hari Bhakti Vilas. Swapnivatsi samaksham va ascarjamati harshadam akasmad yadijayit na akhyadattam guro binam. The devotee may have some swapna, which is ascarj, a very astonishing thing.
But he shouldn’t show that to anyone. That should be hidden. That’s a very important principle in bhakti, both for us as individuals and for our society.
Because as a society, if we start doing this, then as Prabhupada said, then this sahajiyism is going to go everywhere. It’s going to be such a great problem. There’s another excerpt from a lecture.
This is a very direct verse. Now what we’re talking about as a principle, it’s very clear and direct. It’s very instructive.
It’s a very important thing. Let me share one more point with you. This is from Mishra Bhakti Siddhanta.
He’s quoting Narottam Das Thakur. The acharyas have ordered us, apana bhajanakata na kahibe jata tata. One should not disclose his confidential bhajan to anyone.
And he goes on to explain, because if we do, then pride may come. And moreover, then other people will see, oh, this is the pathway. Madhavananda became so famous, because he started talking about how Krishna came to him in a dream.
So I’m going to tell the same thing, just like that envious Brahmin in the past time with Haridas Thakur. It’s a very dangerous thing for society. We have to be very careful.
Maybe we can wrap up something now, Prabhuji. Yes, I know. So this is quite, I think, a sobering discussion.
I would say a very unsentimental discussion about sentimentality. You’re the scientist, the spiritual scientist. I felt that you have clinically operated, like performed a surgical strike today, on this aspect of sentimentality.
So let me see. We discussed a lot of things. But basically, we started by talking about, when we talk about sentiments, it can easily divert devotees from the serious practice of bhakti.
And then you gave a variety of examples. First, you also mentioned the article that, maybe you could share that article. This is Sahajiyaism.
And you started with, before that, a very sobering, the death, which is the most crucial thing, Jnanan Prabhu’s departure, and how Prabhupada is affectionate. At the same time, he’s not sentimental. I think that’s an excellent model for us as devotees.
Prabhupada expresses, he’s writing to a departed disciple and he’s expressing his affection, gratitude for the service. So Prabhupada is focusing on all facts, that you did this service, you did this. And then Prabhupada very nonchalantly speaks about the various pathways.
What may happen if you were here, you were here, you were here. So sometimes we create over-expectation. And then we make it, like you said, it becomes very Christian.
You have done this, then you will get this. So we need to avoid that simplistic conception of bhakti. And there is also the possibility that there could be a sense of superiority in it.
And then you talked about your experience with your grandmother. So how this faith healing, it just alienates thoughtful people. And as you said, studies actually show it doesn’t even work also.
So we discussed about the extreme examples, Prabhupada refuting the idea that Krishna came running after somebody and they were leaving Vrindavan. But within the devotee community, we talked about say dreams or special interactions with deities. So, or especially Krishna acting in one’s life.
So you said that the basic principle and later on you quoted it toward the end is that this can happen, but there’s no need to speak them in public. That we can get them confirmed from our spiritual teachers. You talked about that experience with your Guru Maharaj.
You said don’t tell anyone. And also while we are doing this, the important point is, you quoted Bhaktivinoda Thakur also, that the exceptions are possible, but the exceptions are made standard. That’s when Aparasampradaya begins.
So we don’t deny the possibility of exceptions. But in the way bhakti has been taught in our tradition, going back right to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s times, when Chaitanya Mahaprabhu refuted the idea of this fissure and seeming to be God, seeming to be Krishna, as well as he hesitated when he was attracted to, he was attracted to the singing of Gopi, of the Gita Govinda by a woman and he was stopped at that time. He appreciated that.
So the overall idea is that in general, we want to practice Vaidhi Bhakti. That means we focus on our duties. Whether they are ordinary duties or whether they are devotional duties, we focus on that dutifulness rather than some special visions.
If they come, like you gave the example of Krishna, Prabhupada came in a dream and said stay away from women, that is beneficial. So in a sense, that is a dream that inspires us to do our duties better. Then that kind of dream we can accept as Anukul.
But many times they can be Pratikul. If that becomes the talking point and that’s the way we try to claim superiority, then everybody will start claiming that. And then Prabhupada never did that.
Although Prabhupada had the vision of Krishna in the Jal Lutha, but he didn’t claim that as his authority. He claimed the spiritual master’s instruction as his authority. Then also, there is a lot of, I feel maybe you could share links to the articles that you quoted.
Many quotes are very valuable. And where can we validly see Krishna’s hand? That is also very instructive that when something beyond our control happens, then like the COVID epidemic or somebody getting an accident, then we can see what is Krishna trying to teach me through it. That doesn’t mean that we passively accept that whatever has happened.
If say somebody’s child has been abused in a Gurukul, then we have to do what we can to correct it. Especially if we have the position of the responsibility. But even while doing that corrective thing, we don’t get obsessed in that particular situation.
We see what is Krishna trying to teach me. And for that we need to have a little more unsentimental thoughtfulness. So emotions can sometimes make us see Krishna where he may not be there.
And sometimes emotions can block us from seeing Krishna’s hand where he is there. So when somebody has hurt us, we become so resentful that we may not be able to see what Krishna is teaching through us. And I think that concluding point which you made about not being, I think that was a consistent theme which was also quoted in the conclusion that don’t talk about your private experiences in public.
I think that would be the key takeaway. Sentiments may be there. We don’t know whether they are there or they are authentic or not.
If don’t talk about them in public and if they reinforce your practice of bhakti, that’s good. Is that anything you want to add as a conclusion Prabhu? Yeah, that’s great. I’m always impressed Prabhuji.
You have such an ability to remember everything and give such a nice synopsis. I have a link here for that issue of Bindu with Prabhupada’s statements about this is Sahajiya. It’s inscribed.
It’s on ISKCON Desire Tree, I guess. Is that where I should give you? Either one is fine. We’ll just do a cut paste from there.
Thank you very much Prabhu for your association. Wonderful and illuminating talking with you. It’s a very important topic also.
So look forward to your Sangha again in future. Hare Krishna. Take care of yourself, Prabhuji.
Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.