In2-MeC

Amsterdam, the Netherlands
31 May 2004

In the years that Srila Prabhupada, with the help of a few adventuresome Western disciples, pioneered ISKCON preaching in India, he saw that Indians were only willing to offer his mission money and other such material assistance. They were reluctant to offer themselves to become full-time devotees. (I should mention that this is no longer the state of affairs. ISKCON temples in India are for the most part manned by Indian brahmacaris.) Srila Prabhupada said,

The young Indian ladies and gentlemen are not interested in Vedic culture, they are interested in becoming lawyers, doctors and engineers, going abroad and getting a job. Our government ministers beg for rice, money and alms. They should not beg; they should give. They should give Krsna.

If an engineer goes to New York and tries to get a job, nobody cares for him. There are millions of doctors, lawyers, engineers and physicists. But if one man comes, sits down and speaks on Bhagavad-gita, immediately one hundred men will sit down to hear and offer him all respect.

Anyone can become a spiritual master. It does not depend upon mundane scholarship or any other qualification.

In America, Srila Prabhupada's first field as a preacher was the state of Pennsylvania. There he met a Ramakrishna Mission "sannyasi" named Nikhilananda who, in the name of being a "guru" (teacher), had accepted an academic post in a university. This Nikhilananda was thoroughly Westernized and even tried to instruct Srila Prabhupada that it would be necessary for him to similarly adopt American ways if he at all hoped to make an impact on society. "You had better change your dress," he told His Divine Grace, "and learn to eat with knife and fork, because these Western people are not going to take to such old-fashioned Indian customs." Srila Prabhupada's firm response was, "No. I will teach them how to eat with their hands."

We shouldn't think that the success of our preaching is only to be calculated in terms of number of devotees joined, books distributed, money collected, and the construction of opulent temples. Srila Prabhupada once expressed the goal of the ISKCON mission in this most instructive manner:

The success of my movement will be when my devotees are glorified and worshiped.

This glorification and worship of the devotees, Srila Prabhupada made clear, has to start within ISKCON itself. Outsiders will only take it up by following the example of the devotees themselves. If the devotees are not doing, why should anyone else? Therefore Prabhupada taught his disciples to offer their obeisances to one another in the morning. He said that a disciple, when greeting another first thing in the new day, should say:

My dear prabhu, please accept my most humble obeisances.

Not only that, Srila Prabhupada said this etiquette should be observed at the end of the day, before the devotees take rest.

Sunday feast program in Amsterdam temple.

After the program we took a walk in the part of town around the University of Amsterdam. That's Bhakta Michael on the left and Pandava Prabhu on the right.

Now this is interesting--in this window of the university theater house we spied this small Indian figurine that seems to be Srimati Radharani. Unfortunately Krsna isn't next to Her in His personal form, but He has made His presence apparent in the Om symbol on the wall outside.

This morning disciples Dharmaksetra and Pitambhara arrived from Groningen with their 3-month-old son Jagannatha Varsneya. I am looking at the astrology reading they had done for him. I did a numerology reading; the two readings matched! The boy is very spiritually-natured, energetic, and will be successful in life.

Hero-Citizen Cow!

A New Zealand lady dairy farmer named Kim Riley, 43, was tending a herd of cows last February when she was swept away by the floodwaters of the Manawatu River that flows through her land. One of the cows that was also caught in the flood helped the woman get back to dry land. The woman told the press she would henceforward take special care of this cow, called only by the number "569," who saved her from drowning.

She should start by giving the cow a nice name like Surabhi or Kamadhenu.

A few days back I wrote about the case of Jesper Bood, a Swede whose apparent past-life memories recovered by hypnotic regression match up to the century-and-a-half old records of a Scottish fisherman. I mentioned that in general memories recovered by hypnosis are suspect at best; Bood's memories may be an exception.

Here's a summary of a news report from the dark side of the memory retrieval business. In February a lawsuit in Chicago was settled when two therapists, a hospital, and a clinic, agreed to pay 7.5 million dollars to a former patient, a 52-year-old woman named Elizabeth Gale. She had sued the therapists for brainwashing her by their method of memory retrieval therapy at the hospital and the clinic. The news report doesn't state whether Ms. Gale underwent hypnosis while being so treated, but it is a fact that hypnosis is a standard practice in such cases.

Lest the reader think that the two therapists were merely some smooth operators not really qualified, their names are Dr. Bennett Braun (a psychiatrist) and Roberta Sachs (a psychologist). Through the '80s and '90s Dr. Braun and his staff, to which Sachs belonged, were nationally recognized in the USA as experts in the treatment of multiple personality disorder and the uncovering of repressed memories of childhood abuse.

The "memories" they dredged up from Ms. Gale's subconscious had her convinced that she was a victim of a Satanic cult that used her body for breeding babies. The cult ritually sacrificed her children as soon as they were born. To spare her sanity, her mind had supposedly repressed these traumantic impressions. With the "help" of Braun and Sachs, Ms. Gale able to "see" that her very ordinary life, in which she had been childless and troubled by mild depression, was actually a grotesque nightmare.

Braun and Sachs advised her that, in order to stay clear of the clutches of the cult and to recover from the trauma of the abuse she had suffered, she had to quit her job, change her name, abandon her family, sell her possessions and get a tubal ligation (a operation that made her incapable of bearing children). All this she did. In the meantime the two therapists were being handsomely rewarded by payments from Ms. Gale's medical insurance.

All bogus.

To settle a similar lawsuit in 1997, Braun and Sachs paid millions to another former patient, Patricia Burgus.

Harpeet Devi, a taxi driver in Bhatinda, India, once had to drive 56 kilometers (35 miles) backwards because his gearbox got stuck in reverse. He liked it so much he decided to always drive that way. For the past two years he's chauffeured his passengers at speeds up to 40 mph (25 mph) in reverse gear only. He's covered 12 000 km (7500 miles) going the wrong way. Now he has a vision of driving on a peace mission from India into Pakistan--backwards.

Oh no, not a parrot story again!

A man named Li Yong from Zhengzhou in the Chinese province of Henan strangled his pet parrot because it kept calling him names. He tried for eight months to teach the bird to say "hello" and "goodbye" but it refused to speak. Li Yong eventually lost his temper at the bird and called it an "idiot" and other such names. That's when the parrot started to speak--repeating the ill names back to its owner.

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