A Nap that Nearly Lasted Forever!

In 1984 I was travelling with one other devotee and we were doing full time paintings, collecting to buy a new temple in Northern Ireland. That temple we still have today – Govindadwipa, Inis Rath.

Anyway we were in a place called Rostrevor in County Down, Northern Ireland. Our program in those days was pretty intense, (fanatical really!) we used to rise at 2am and have all our rounds finished by 4.30am.

On this occasion we were staying in a small guest house, so we decided to drive to a nearby forest park to chant our rounds. On the way there it started to rain (we are in Ireland after all so when we got to the forest park we decided to stay in the car to chant, which was even more cramped than the guest house! As it was cold outside we turned on the heater in the car. So there we were at 2.30am, sitting in the car in the middle of a pitch black forest. Within minutes we were out for the count zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

The next thing we remember was being woken up by an absolutely blinding white light shining right into the front window of the car. Then, we could hear what sounded like a helicopter or two overhead. Still groggy from sleeping we were quickly realising that something weird was going on. As our peripheral vision began to come into focus we could see army tanks and soldiers and policemen crouched all around our car, with automatic machine guns pointed right at us. At that point I copped on as to what was happening – they thought it was a terrorist alert! (Northern Ireland in the early eighties was a pretty hectic place to be).

In true ksatriya spirit I immediately said to my partner – don’t move, don’t move, don’t move, don’t even breathe! One false move and we’ll be riddled with bullets.

After what seemed like an eternity – 3 or 4 minutes I guess, gradually one policeman and one army officer edged their way to our car. They indicated for me to roll down the window, which I did EXTREMELY slowly making no sudden moves.

One of them then leaned over and said in a thick, loud and strong Northern Irish accent “What are ye doing here? I tried my best to explain “Well officer have you ever heard of the Hare Krishna’s?” He shook his head in the negative, I continued “Well we are like monks and we rise early in the morning to meditate by chanting the holy name of the Lord on beads” I showed him my beads and continued “So we were chanting” At this point the other officer realised that we weren’t terrorists and that everything was cool. He then leaned over and responded to my last comment “We were chanting” and said “No you weren’t you were sleeping!”

We all started laughing and I thought boy doesn’t Krishna go to some interesting arrangements to make sure that we don’t space out while chanting our rounds!