Prabhupada: “Prasadam is the most important thing to bring people out of darkness.”
Sravanananda: In Vrindavan, we would go every morning in the early days when it was just huts and a little bit of cement and steel going up.
We would take a mat and Prabhupada would sit on the side of the road, call over mayavadis and then get into a heated debate with them.
They were always respectful, however, but Prabhupada was showing us the fierceness of challenging mayavadi philosophy.
I once asked, “Srila Prabhupada, people are so stuck in darkness.
How do you tell a person who’s blind, that there’s vision, that there’s light even though they’ve never experienced it.”
Prabhupada said, “Prasadam.”
He said, “Prasadam is the most important thing to bring people out of darkness.”
That hit home for me because that pretty much was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me joining the temple because the prasadam broke my attachment to anything.
It was Govardhan Puja.
Prabhupada’s program of prasadam cannot be found in any other yoga group.
In those early days in the temples, the prasadam was just amazing.
The devotees had so much love and devotion, and it was opulent.
We were violently sick at the Mayapur festival in either 1974 or 1975.
In those days, they were using very bad oils to cook with.
Literally everyone was so ill that we could barely pay obeisances to Prabhupada.
Prabhupada walked around where we were sprawled out and he was very disturbed that everyone was so sick.
He immediately ordered that the homeopathic doctor be called.
When the doctor arrived, he put a pill in everyone’s mouth as Prabhupada walked with him and watched over the process.
Literally within minutes after the pill went in our mouth, we woke up out of a slumber of unconsciousness and a horrific disease to being almost fully conscious.
We were bewildered and thought to ourselves, “What just happened?”
I never thought about it too much until decades later when I really felt that Prabhupada was performing a miracle.
To this day I don’t believe that one little white pill could have made us go from such a state of diseased consciousness and dysentery to be standing up and ready to do service again.
It was such a short time frame from being so bad to so good that it had to have been a miracle by Prabhupada’s grace.
There was a time in Mayapur that I remember with Srila Prabhupada that I can only describe as transcendental.
Prabhupada sat on the vyasasana and became very grave.
It was very bright outside but in a short period of time, the light in the temple seemed to be disappearing and dissipating, almost like a cloud covering the sun.
Everybody became very sober.
Instead of singing “Jaya Radha Madhava”, Prabhupada started talking and as the light changed within the temple, Prabhupada’s color also seemed to change.
Prabhupada said, “In your previous life, you were all associates of Lord Chaitanya.
He said, “Somehow or other, I have been designated or assigned as the captain of this ship.
But you have actually done everything to spread this Krishna consciousness.”
Then Prabhupada went into ecstasy.
He just sat there, went into ecstasy, and the whole room was frozen in time.
Everybody was feeling it because everyone was looking at one another and whispering, “Are you feeling this?”
Prabhupada didn’t speak for a long time.
I don’t think anybody wanted this experience to stop.
All of a sudden off to the right side of the temple, I remember Hamsadutta picked up a mridanga and he started to chant Hare Krishna.
His chanting seemed to break the almost samadhi like ecstatic mood.
I felt some anger towards Hamsadutta for breaking the ecstatic wave that we were all feeling together in this boat with our captain.
Later the devotees went to Prabhupada and asked, “Prabhupada, when this happens to you, is this what we should do?”
Prabhupada said, “Yes, that’s okay, but it doesn’t happen so often, does it?”
I can’t grade every experience but I would say this was one of the most directly ecstatic, powerful experiences that I have ever felt.
—Sravanananda