Exchanges

He would listen also, and he heard a wide range of local testimonies.  He heard the dissatisfaction of young Americans with the war and with American society.  One boy told him he didn’t want to get married because he couldn’t find a chaste girl; it was better to go with prostitutes.  Another confided that his mother had planned to abort him, but at the last moment his grandmother had convinced her not to.  He heard from homosexuals.  Someone told him that a set of New Yorkers considered it chic to eat the flesh of aborted babies.  And in every case, he told them the truth.

He talked with Marxists and explained that although Marx says that everything is the property of the State, the fact is that everything is the property of God.  Only “spiritual communism,” which puts God in the center, can actually be successful.  He discounted LSD visions as hallucinations and explained how God can be seen factually and what God looks like.

Although these one-time visitors came and went away, a few new friends began to stay on, watching the Swami deal with different guests.  They began to appreciate the Swami’s arguments, his concern for people, and his devotion to Krishna.  He seemed actually to know how to help people, and he invariably offered them Krishna consciousness – as much as they could take – as the solution to their problems.  A few began to take the Swami’s message to heart.