Krishna Comes Through His Pure Representative

According to Vaisnava philosophy, the guru gives you Krishna.  Srila Prabhupada did that.  We were unqualified to realize Krishna directly, but our association with Srila Prabhupada made us Krishna conscious.  The fact is, Swamiji always gave us double: when we were with him we got both Krishna and Swamiji.  So it’s more than a reminiscence to say, “Anything I know about Krishna, I received from Swamiji.”  It’s declared in all sastras and by all the Vedic sages that the Supreme Lord reveals Himself through guru.

My lord, devotees like your good self are verily holy places personified. Because you carry the Personality of Godhead within your heart, you turn all places into places of pilgrimage. (Bhag.1.13.10)

As Prabhupada’s first Western disciples, we had no knowledge of sastras or sadhus. But gradually, we received the nectar from guru, His Divine Grace.  We learned Krishna is the most relishable of all incarnations, the original form of Godhead.  Swamiji concentrated on Bhagavad-gita, wherein Krishna is both the speaker and the Supreme Lord.  Along with Gita lessons, he mixed in stories of Govinda’s pastimes in Vrindavana, His lifting Govardhana Hill, His best devotee Radharani, and the gopis.   Whatever it was about Krishna, we heard it from him.  As Prabhupada said, “The atheists claim God is dead, but the pure devotee can hand you God”—and as he said it, he held his own hand forward and opened it.

Someone might say, “Since Krishna was foreign to you, did it conflict with your previous ideas of God?”  No conflict for me—I had abandoned God.   Before Swamiji came to the Lower East Side, I would sit with my friends in a dark apartment with just a candle burning, while we shared LSD.  I remember saying, “Why don’t we write in large letters on the wall, ‘LSD is God’?”  That was our misunderstanding, despite a yearning for religion.  It was not that we had a firm hold on the Judaic-Christian or Catholic concept of God, and so, upon meeting Swamiji we were thrown into a religious crisis.  Rather, I had no God, and Swamiji gradually introduced me to Krishna.  (In later years, Prabhupada said Western young people are nice because they had no preconceptions about Krishna and therefore “they accepted what I said.”)

The big step for us was to accept the Swami as guru, and that wasn’t hard.   He looked like a guru and he acted like a guru.  He taught us according to the scriptures that you should accept whatever the guru says: “He is in the chant of His holy name.  The name of Krishna is not different from Krishna Himself.  Krishna is the Supreme Truth.”  And so we learned our lessons from the guru.  The fact that we had fallen out of the mainstream of U.S. society worked in our favor.  We didn’t care about getting a good career or job, and we weren’t interested in politics.  That was our “qualification.”  We were free to give our full time to the Swamiji and to our own spiritual development.  It didn’t take long before we also began to repeat his messages.  When asked a question about Krishna one of Swamiji’s followers would pause, and you could see him thinking back to what he had just heard the Swami say.  And when he remembered it, he would repeat it, because that’s the only way we knew.

After hearing from Prabhupada for years, I still can’t claim to have realization of Krishna or mystic perception of Him.  I’m finding out that I am more conditioned than I thought because of my Western culture.  I have inherited a working-class cynicism from my parents and an intellectual cynicism from professors.  Somehow, I now have a basic, simple faith in Krishna, and it comes from association with Prabhupada.  As described in sastra, the bhakti-lata-bija, the seed of devotion, is planted in our heart by the guru.  And if that seed is watered by chanting and hearing and is protected by fencing against the “mad elephant” of guru-aparadha, then one can proceed quickly in Krishna consciousness.