Janmastami and Prabhupada's appearance days are still a month away. Yet, out of deep gratitude to His Divine Grace and encouraged by devotees to share, here's an account I wrote several years ago, the story of how I joined the Hare Krishna movement, so not to forget the great mercy shown me, a very fallen soul:
When I was nine, one day my little brother and I unwittingly discovered that year's supply of Christmas gifts hidden in a barrel in my parent's basement. We pried off the lid and happily played with all the toys until Mom came down to see what the excitement was about. Etched in my memory were her cries of disappointment and her explanation afterward, "Kids. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to tell you the truth...There is no Santa Claus."
"You mean...there's no Easter Bunny either!" my brother burst out in tears, his lips quivering.
Although Santa and the Easter Bunny were revealed as false, I cannot remember thinking that there was no God. Quite the opposite was true. By often answering my childish prayer requests, my faith in His presence grew. I was always a theist.
Actually, Mom was my first guru. She taught me how to pray and took me to church regularly. She also gave me a children's bible. Dad, too, sometimes read his bible to me, but he had a broader vision. He talked about "devas" or "nature spirits", something he learned from being raised in what was once the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia, and - after spending a couple years of his childhood in a Japanese concentration camp and experiencing an OBE therein - he was pretty convincing when he'd tell me that I am not my body but a spirit soul or to practice non violence by becoming a vegetarian. I think we were some of the first people in Boulder, CO to eat barbecued tofu. Then there was the collection of yoga and occult books he kept within his basement. Even though I found Madam Blavatsky bewildering, meeting Earlyne Chaney disappointing, and my early attempts at meditation a flop, these and other experiences he brought my way became the backdrop for something I wasn't quite sure I was looking for, but keenly felt that I must.
Meanwhile, a realization had grown from playing with Barbie dolls since girlhood. I'd make them go to school, get married, eat, sleep, play, enjoy family life together, and send them out to make a living. When I grew tired of this, I'd throw them into the closet. After some time I'd take them out again, hoping to achieve higher levels of pleasure with the same bodily activities, but I could never reach any real satisfaction, and so the tossing into the closet continued. This made me feel that something was missing in my own life.
I reached teen hood and the dissatisfaction became more acute. I wondered, "Is my life similar to a Barbie doll? Is death to be the ultimate reward for all my hard work? Why do I have to die? Why should I work so hard? The faith of my mother and father was too vague to turn to.
When I was about 16 I tried to verbalize to my mother the questions that plagued me about my existence:
"Mom, I'm in anxiety."
"Why?"
"Well, what's the use of going to school, working hard and so on, when all I'll end up is dead in the end?"
"Maybe you can talk to a psychiatrist. Would you like to see a psychiatrist?" was her reply.
"No, what good will that do?"
After some silence, Mom came to a decision. She reached into the nearby kitchen cabinet, pulled out a bottle of apricot brandy and set it down before me. "Here", she said, "This will make you feel better", and she left the room.
Some years later I read the following in the 5,000 year old Vedic scripture, Srimad Bhagavatam:
ko 'nv arthah sukhayaty enam
kämo vä mrtyur antike
äghätam niyamänasya
vadhyasyeva na tusti-dah
"Death is not at all pleasing, and since everyone is exactly like a condemned man being led to the place of execution, what possible happiness can people derive from material objects or the gratification they provide?"
That's exactly how I felt! And the translator, a leading disciple of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, commented as follows: "It is customary throughout the world that a condemned man is offered a sumptuous last meal. For the condemned man, however, such a feast is a chilling reminder of his imminent death, and therefore he cannot enjoy it. Similarly, no sane human being can be satisfied in material life, because death is standing near and may strike at any moment. If one is sitting in one's living room with a deadly snake at one's side, knowing that at any moment the poisonous fangs might pierce the flesh, how can one sit peacefully and watch television or read a book? Similarly, unless one is more or less crazy, one cannot be enthusiastic or even peaceful in material life. Knowledge of the inevitability of death should encourage one to become determined in spiritual life."
Another example is given by Prabhupada: One may have some very nice pudding to eat, but if there is sand in it, there can be no real enjoyment. The pudding is the sweetness of life, very attractive since it is the all-attractive Lord's material energy, and the sand is the time factor. Lord Krishna says in Bhagavad gita, "Time I am, destroyer of worlds." Time is what messes everything up. But for a reason.
Also in relation to my above Barbie doll realization, I read this in Prabhupada's translation of Bhagavad gita: "A conditioned soul tries to enjoy material happiness again and again. Thus he chews the chewed. But sometimes, in the course of such enjoyment, he becomes relieved from material entanglement by association with a great soul. In other words, a conditioned soul is always engaged in some type of sense gratification, but when he understands by good association that it is only a repetition of the same thing, and he is awakened to his real Krishna consciousness, he is sometimes relieved from such repetitive so-called happiness."- Bhagavad- gita As It Is, 18.36
Finally, I felt understood! So, how I met Srila Prabhupada will be explained in the next post.