May 12. ISKCON 50 – S.Prabhupada Daily Meditations.
Satsvarupa dasa Goswami: ’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 …
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