The Ideal Reader

Srila Prabhupada, you teach Krishna directly, but it takes much patience to hear and read.  We’re so distracted.  Therefore, if someone simply reads your books with patience and submission, that’s a first-class service.  The ideal reader of your books comes to know Krishna face-to-face as the Supreme Personality of Godhead.  And that reader lives with you as His best friend.

The ideal reader doesn’t have to be one of those who associated with you personally in your vapu form, although he (or she) likes to hear such Prabhupada pastimes.  But he likes best of all the times when he reads your books.  Then he is with you and Krishna.  Even we who associated with you knew that your essence was in your writings.

This reader of your books is humble about his connection to you.  He keeps the books in a bookcase and protects each one of them with a transparent book cover.  He tries to associate with devotees, gives money to the Krishna Consciousness Movement, preaches in some capacity, worships the Deity, chants the holy name.  And he particularly excels in relishing the reading.

He has read everything you’ve written several times, but his enthusiasm for rereading never diminishes.  He thinks, “It’s about time I started reading the First Canto again.”  And so the transcendental saga of Vyasa speaking to Suka, Suka to Pariksit, Suta to the sages at Naimisaranya—unfolds before him again and again with new wonder.

He especially likes to be reminded of the importance of reading and he treasures verses like, “Paramahamsas, devotees who have accepted the essence of life, are attached to Krishna in the core of their hearts, and He is the aim of their lives.  It is their nature to talk only of Krishna at every moment, as if such topics were newer and newer.  They are attached to such topics, just as materialists are attached to women and sex.”  (Bhag. 10.13.2)

He has very little attraction for other books.  He can’t get interested in other topics of conversation.  He’d prefer to stay home with your book.  Even when he goes to a holy dhama like Vrindavana, he likes to read there.  He can’t explain it, but he knows that he’s starting to glimpse the darsana of the Supreme Lord in the pages of your books.  He knows he’s not a special person, and yet you promise—”The transcendental pastimes of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krishna, are so powerful that simply by hearing, reading and memorizing this book, Krishna, one is sure to be transferred to the spiritual world, which is ordinarily very difficult to achieve.”

Srila Prabhupada, I wish I were that ideal reader.  I wish I could at least meet him.  He wouldn’t have to preach to me that I should read more, but I would naturally want to do it, just by seeing him do it.  He would remind me where to find you in the best way.  I want to learn Prabhupada meditation from him.