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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 \u2013 Govindadwipa, Inis Rath.<\/p>\nIn 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 \u2013 Govindadwipa, Inis Rath.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 they thought it was a terrorist alert! (Northern Ireland in the early eighties was a pretty hectic place to be).<\/p>\n
In true ksatriya spirit I immediately said to my partner \u2013 don\u2019t move, don\u2019t move, don\u2019t move, don\u2019t even breathe! One false move and we\u2019ll be riddled with bullets.<\/p>\n
After what seemed like an eternity \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
One of them then leaned over and said in a thick, loud and strong Northern Irish accent \u201cWhat are ye doing here? I tried my best to explain \u201cWell officer have you ever heard of the Hare Krishna\u2019s?\u201d He shook his head in the negative, I continued \u201cWell we are like monks and we rise early in the morning to meditate by chanting the holy name of the Lord on beads\u201d I showed him my beads and continued \u201cSo we were chanting\u201d At this point the other officer realised that we weren\u2019t terrorists and that everything was cool. He then leaned over and responded to my last comment \u201cWe were chanting\u201d and said \u201cNo you weren\u2019t you were sleeping!\u201d<\/p>\n
We all started laughing and I thought boy doesn\u2019t Krishna go to some interesting arrangements to make sure that we don\u2019t space out while chanting our rounds!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Hare](\"http:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Praghoshaza_prabhu.jpg\")
By Praghosa dasa<\/strong><\/p>\n