Prabhupada in the Loft

The loft was a fourth-flight walk-up, and the only entrance, usually heavily bolted, was a door in the rear at the west end.  From the outside, this door opened into a hallway that was only lit by a red EXIT light over the door.  The hallway led to the right a few steps and into the open area.  If a guest entered during the kirtana or lecture, he would see the Swami about thirty feet from the entrance seated on his dais.  On other evenings, the whole loft would be dark but for the glow of the red EXIT light in the little hallway and a soft illumination radiating from the other side of the partition where Prabhupada was working. 

Prabhupada lived on the Bowery, sitting under a small light, while hundreds of derelicts also sat under hundreds of naked lights on the same city block.  He had no more fixed income than the derelicts, or any greater security of a fixed residence, yet his consciousness was different.  He was translating Srimad-Bhagavatam into English, speaking to the world through his Bhaktivedanta purports; his duty, whether on the fourteenth floor of a Riverside Drive apartment or in the corner of a Bowery loft, was to establish Krishna consciousness as the prime necessity for all humanity.  He went on with his translating and with his constant vision of a Krishna temple in New York City.  Because his consciousness was absorbed in Krishna’s universal mission, he did not depend on his surroundings for shelter.  Home for him was not a matter of bricks and wood, but of taking shelter of Krishna in every circumstance.  As Prabhupada had said to his friends uptown, “Everywhere is my home.”  Without Krishna’s shelter, the whole world would become a desolate place.

 Often he would refer to a scriptural statement that people live in three different modes: goodness, passion and ignorance.  Life in the forest is in the mode of goodness, life in the city is in passion, and life in a degraded place like a liquor shop, a brothel, or the Bowery, is in the mode of ignorance.  But to live in the temple of Vishnu is to live in the spiritual world, Vaikuntha, which is transcendental to all material worlds.

And this Bowery loft where Prabhupada was holding his meetings and performing kirtana was also transcendental.  When he was behind the partition working in his corner before the open pages of Srimad-Bhagavatam, that room was as good as his room back at the Radha-Damodara Temple in Vrindavana.