’66 Kaleidoscope

A kaleidoscope is a tube-shaped optical instrument that you rotate to produce symmetrical designs by means of mirrors that constantly change patterns made by bits of colored glass.  Memories of being with Prabhupada sometimes appear like that.  This seems to especially happen when you travel a lot, because you tend to shake up your identity and your consciousness.  It is different than when staying in the same place and following the same routine.

But a kaleidoscope is abstract.  When you look into it, you do not see a meadow and cows; you see all the fragments of light, diamonds, and swirls and chips and sparks.  When you shake it up again, hold it to the light and look in – there is another beautiful combination of fragmented colors.  Similarly, I tend to get a jumble of images when I shake my “1966 kaleidoscope.”

A little flash of the movie, Happiness at Second Avenue – Prabhupada playing the drum there … the artificial colors of that film.  You see yourself also with shaved head.  Everyone looks young, but not so pretty or handsome.  It is realism, or maybe the nature of the film that makes you look a little funny.  There you are, and there is Swamiji playing the drum, reaching forward to get his karatalas.

When you look into the kaleidoscope, you see a lot of memory reels.  You can look at them if you want.  It is not an actual memory but a memory can that contains facsimile messages.  It is something like that TV film, Happiness on Second Avenue, but this is your own film …

Here is a reel of going into Swamiji’s worship room.  You go in there, sit down, and Swamiji sits down.  He puts on his tilaka and you put on your tilaka … Say it tenderly and lovingly, even if it is “just words.”  The scriptures are also words.  Vaisnavas do not say that words are inadequate.  Even if they cannot completely capture something, words do a service.  So have a respect for them.  Have a respect for the words in the memories of Prabhupada.  And accept what you see in the kaleidoscope.

The floor of the storefront … Prabhupada playing the drum … I am being lifted out of the tragedy I was in.  I am wearing an aquamarine shirt, which I later cut up and made into a beadbag.  With him we could sit on the floor with our shirts of the past, our minds becoming cleansed by the cosmic sounds he described as “transcendental sound vibration,” delivering the mind from all that Lower East Side stuff and all the hurt of our previous lives …

We had grown up and broken away from our parents, got out of our country’s conformity and the US Navy and all that, but the new freedom couldn’t deliver us either.  The new jazz couldn’t deliver us.  We were still homeless, unhappy.  But Swamiji was delivering us with the cleansing, cosmic vibration we barely understood.  All we knew was that it was Krishna, and Krishna was far out, and you could sing with Swami leading on the drum, Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare.  Leave everything else behind.

Is it fiction or magic to think that we can go back?  No, it is the truth, and yet it is not just mere newspaper reporting.  The past cannot be spoken of, except by metaphors, just as Krishna’s lila can only be described by the metaphors of Rupa Gosvami …

And so we are sitting on the floor and Swamiji is above us.  We are leaning toward him, taking from him and giving back our voices in chant, and being delivered, getting high and becoming devotees under his care.  His permissible, liberal, fatherly, motherly care. 

Do not be afraid to say it again – how he walked across the floor with his bare feet.  Wherever you go, tell them that Prabhupada said, “Eat more!  Eat more!” and how you ate more than you ever did.  Rejoice in your association with Prabhupada; tell everyone about his glories and don’t be contaminated by anyone who doesn’t appreciate what he did.  Rejoice in the memory from the floor where you sit as you chant Hare Krishna.