Prabhupada’s Gift of Intimacy

Aside from age and cultural distances, there is always a distance between two persons until they get to know each other.  In the beginning, you try to see whether you will be able to be intimate with another person.  Prabhupada was able to establish intimacy with hundreds of persons.  He did not merely give us lessons in perfection delivered from a mountaintop.  Rather, his physical association was always nearby.  The awkwardness of not trusting him soon changed, and he also reached forward and pulled us toward him in a spiritual relationship.

Srila Prabhupada removed the awkwardness by convincing us that we did not belong to a different religion than he.  He referred to the transcendental level at which all things come together.  He used to say, “No one should object and say that they can’t chant Hare Krishna because it is a foreign name and it is not one’s own religion.  This is transcendental sound vibration.  We are all spirit souls, part and parcels of Krishna.”  In this way, he established spiritual intimacy.

Prabhupada taught that all souls have an intimacy with Krishna and any feelings we had of alienation were not based on fact.  They were illusion, based on false designation.  Thus he gave a new consciousness and a new way to see reality.

As for Srila Prabhupada’s own unfamiliarity with Western culture, it was a feature that simply made him more dear to us.  One time a devotee told Prabhupada that he might get fired from his job.  Prabhupada was astonished and said, “Fired?  They would fire on you?”  Prabhupada thought the devotee would be fired with a gun.  The devotee replied, “Oh no, Prabhupada!  Fired just means they would release me from the job.”  We would all laugh together about his not knowing these words.  We did not expect him to know such things, but neither did we think of him as a “foreigner.”

Prabhupada knew the transcendental world, the real home.  To be unaware of the material world was just another sign of his detachment.  We did not expect that eventually he would educate himself in such things.  He was not interested.  They were all in the category of ignorance and passion.