Focus on Prabhupada the Individual 

We sometimes spend so much time going on with our regular duties that we forget about Prabhupada.  We don’t think of him enough to actually stop and focus on Prabhupada as a person.  The person who was here is beneficial.  We have to become still enough, quiet enough, to be able to remember him. 

We tend to be almost arrogant about the fact that we are living now, as if that gives us a superior vision of Prabhupada, as if he is among the dead and we are among the living.  Actually, we have a feeble hold on this life.  In this tiny amount of space and time, we will each disappear.

The consciousness we command and the space we live in – why do we think this is more important than where Prabhupada is?  Is it because we think our world is manifest and Prabhupada’s world is unmanifest?  Prabhupada’s world is not unmanifest.  Prabhupada is with Krishna in Goloka.  That world is the only really manifest world.  We may not see him in the material world, but that is because we are so insignificant in relation to Krishna.  Prabhupada is in the real world, and we are in the kingdom of death. 

Our attitude should be that “Prabhupada has gone to participate in his intimate relationship with Krishna and I have been left behind.”  He came here and developed a relationship with us, gave us adequate instructions and we vowed to follow him, but ultimately he left us stumbling behind.  We are trying to figure out the meaning of his books, how to act, how to get along with one another.  Sometimes we make serious mistakes.  But we are also calling to him, running after him, “Prabhupada!  Prabhupada!”  This is our actual position.  Therefore, don’t be complacent.  Visit his room and try to taste a little of our own deaths, then feel the need to catch up to him, the need to perfect ourselves. 

It is only human to remember Prabhupada as he was in this world.  Not long ago, he enacted his pastimes on the earth.  He was never an ordinary human being suffering under the spell of illusion, although he appeared to us as an elderly Indian sannyasi.  If we forget Prabhupada’s pastimes with us, then where is our connection to Prabhupada at all?  Maintaining Prabhupada’s rooms is meant to help us focus in this way.  We can look at the paraphernalia he used when he was here and worship his murti.  And we can remember how he appeared to us with love.