How can we engage more conditioned souls in Krsna-consciousness?

Dear Srila Prabhupada!

Please accept my most humble dandavats at Your lotus feet. All glories to Your Divine Grace!

As the waves of insanity raise towards the Kali Yuga skies, Your transcendental ISKCON hospital is the only shelter. How wonderful is the medicine You brought in form of the Holy Name, how wonderful the diet for the diseased conditioned souls in form of prasadam and how wonderful are the prescriptions preserved in Your books.

And how glorious are those diseased souls who do take shelter in this hospital and follow the prescribed cure carefully. Sometimes even the doctors get infected and their fever is rising. Sometimes in their feverish frenzy the patients declare themselves healthy and parade proudly along the corridors.

In some areas the hospital may assume even the features of a lunatic asylum due to the deranged ideas of the intoxicated inmates who believe to be equal to the Founder of this medical institution.

But everybody who finally takes the medicine is extraordinary in eyes of the Lord and never excluded from Your mercy. But the patients have to follow the rules of the treatment and "rest assured", as You often proclaimed, "they will be cured".

The blind can see then stars in the sky, the lame start to walk and the dumb can finally speak. Such are the results of Your treatment. Without You madness prevails, without You day turns into night. Nevermind our deranged shapes, nevermind our occasional attacks of madness. As long we despite our feverish state reach out for the shelter of Your lotus feet there is a hope.

Dear Srila Prabhupada, when I walked 1972 into the door of Your temple, I was drawn in instantly by the preaching enthusiasms of Your disciples. I never dreamt to be one of them, but they pushed Your books in my hands and left me in the shopping street fighting for my survival. Still feeling like in a dream I started to distribute them. The dream turned quickly into ecstasy and for fifteen years, day by day I simply counted my blessings. Initiation meant to be part of Your mission and the part I was introduced to is most nectarean. The result of thousand of years of austerities by advanced yogis can be achieved in one week of Your book distribution sankirtan. Benefiting both, the distributor and the receiver, Your books are the most powerful medicine in Your transcendental hospital. They remain as permanently opened pharmacies in peoples homes. They cure and they inspire new doctor candidates to cure others. Opening and reading them, sanity prevails. Closing them, madness starts to spread around. Distributing them, transcendental inspiration arrives. No distributing them misfortune will be at our door and the world turns into a place of arguing antagonists.

Thank You, Srila Prabhupada, for this wonderful service You gave me and thank You for keeping my memory intact, remembering its value. You gave me diamonds and I brought simply dust. Even some parts of Your hospital may be abandoned or populated by lunatics, other parts are illuminated and occupied by blissful patients who taste daily Your medicine in full gratitude. Please Srila Prabhupada let me to be there where most of Your medicine can be found and avoid places where its replaced by water.

Thank you Srila Prabhupada for operating our eyes and healing our wounds. May so many others enjoy the benefits of Your never ending mercy.

All glories to Your book distribution sankirtan!

Your still heavily diseased patient,

Manidhara das

It is not easy to answer this question without irritating somebody. As Srila Prabhupada demonstrated during His pastimes on this planet, He could involve an immense variety of individuals within the mission of Lord Caitanya. In the very early days, to start somewhere, He , considering every soul walking into the door being a gift of Srila Bhaktisiddhanta maharaja, initiated even the most confused ones in a very liberal way. Very few understood by that time that initiation is the beginning, not the end.

However, studying His preaching path, we may easily discover that soon He raised the standards, not facilitating the "automatic" brahmin initiation and indicating that not all ISKCON devotees might live in the temples and be directly engaged in preaching. Soon he revealed the "next part" of His mission, farm communities being based on varnasrama dharma social structure, congregational preaching based on the principle that instead "us" accommodating "them" in the temples, its "them" becoming "us" by becoming more and more involved with Srila Prabhupada’s mission in any situation they find themselves due to their karmic destiny.

With more and more devotees leaving the brahmacary ashrama for grhasta ashrama, Srila Prabhupada kept on engaging them in preaching activities, but simultaneously making clear what the future of preaching has in store.

But NEVER he advocate the philosophy of oneness, making clear that devotees have to take place within the devotee society along their varnas which will indicate automatically the ashramas they should be serving in.

In name of pseudo paramahamsa vision, some preachers tried after Srila Prabhupada’s departure to establish the idea that "we are all transcendental" to the social system given by the Supreme Lord and proceeded to introduce unqualified public to the most intimate spheres of Krsna-conscious philosophy. Imitating Srila Prabhupada, Who indeed made the impossible possible and raised us to levels of service performance which were never seen before in terms of book production, book distribution, temple construction and management, etc. , sentimentality was introduced, producing too often sahajia type of enthusiastic individuals who totally ignored their mental conditioning by declaring themselves to be transcendental. Soon temples started to fill up with most deranged persons, often in urgent need of some sort of medication or due to their criminal actions in need to be corrected by legal prosecution. Along the vacuum created by the fall downs of those who still somewhat maintained the structure given by Srila Prabhupada, such misplaced renegades found plenty of space to spread their often deranged non-sastric ideas. Seeing this onslaught of "common sense" and violation of even basic human standards, the saner part of devotee started to retreat in some sort of underground.

Some explained their return to hedonistic life style as an "honest way of living" in comparison to the hypocritical leaders, some truly maintained in full faith to Srila Prabhupada what was initially given to them, maintaining higher spiritual and moral standards as their critics established as ISKCON representatives.

According to the offering written above, patients became doctors, ignoring their still raging fever and hospitals became "lunatic asylums", something Srila Prabhupada used to warn us about.

All this due to the dogma of oneness and the sentimental concept of mercy without brain. The emotional part prevailed and the original Srila Prabhupada’s system of management (organized attempt to spread the mission of Sri Caitanya as Bhaktivinoda Thakura used to call it), became designated as being "fanatical" and "abusive" to the emotional needs of sentimentalists and opportunists.

As the sentimental calls of sudra-men can never be satisfied, its not difficult to see that this kind of "movement" is doomed to vanish. Meanwhile the movement based on Srila Prabhupada’s loving, but firm preaching policies will prevail. There is absolutely no need to leave ISKCON officially as too often much worse can be found in name of other groups and movements which are powered temporarily by a personal cult fanatic only. There is still a healthy part of the ISKCON tree Srila Prabhupada planted and one can see it on the green leaves sprouting from that part. Then there are dry branches as well, being by now disconnected from the roots. Any sensible person will make sure to be in touch with the green part and avoid the dry one.

Srila Prabhupada’s hospital is open 24 hours a day for those who are ready to accept the wonderful medicine He has given, follow the instructions of obviously experienced doctors who don´t imitate the Founder of the hospital, but follow Him faithfully. Even a patient can become a doctor once his fever is diminished and if all, doctors and patients alike, glorify the Founder for this wonderful hospital institution they may find themselves being equally ecstatic and blissful.

But when the diseased ones declare themselves healthy, ignoring all the symptoms of the raging disease and the doctors leave in despair, being attacked by the fever tormented patients, then the very same hospital turns into "lunatic asylum", a place where no peace can be found.

As "fools dash in where angels don´t dare", one should always try to regulate the fools, facilitate the angels and keep Srila Prabhupada’s transcendental hospital in a clean state, both internally and externally. Only then it can serve its real purpose.