760616 - Conversation - Detroit

Conversations by Date, 1976

His Divine Grace
A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

760616R1-DETROIT - June 16, 1976 - 12:13 Minutes

(several devotees conversing about doctors and hepatitis) (Prabhupāda enters, offer obeisances)

Prabhupāda: You can make little chewra.

Pālikā: Same way Hari-śauri is making?

Prabhupāda: Hmm.

Pālikā: Same. Turn it off? Or on?

Hari-śauri: It's on now, Śrīla Prabhupāda. It's on.

Prabhupāda: On.

Hari-śauri: That priest was very responsive. It's very nice.

Prabhupāda: He wanted to become student.

Hari-śauri: (laughs) He was becoming very enthusiastic. He was very enlivened. Anyone with a little intelligence, as soon as you begin to speak to them, they, immediately, they become so much enlivened. He's obviously . . . he's had some idea about organization and whatever, but he's never seen it practiced. And now he's come here and seen it practical.

Prabhupāda: Yes. This is practical training. That is wanted. Simply theoretical knowledge . . . that is helpful, but training, that is the greatest need, that we have to create a set of first-class men. Then the world will be all right. That is an attempt of the Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement, to make first class, ideal. Why they'll be attracted? They are seeing that "The priests are doing the same thing as we are doing." So how they will be attracted? Therefore Christianity is failing. They are also having the meat, illicit sex, drunkard—and they're priest.

Hari-śauri: They've watered down so much, there's no value left to what they're doing. They're exactly the same as a man in the street, except he says he believes in God and the man on the street says he doesn't believe. And they have no ability to convince a man that God exists. They have no scientific knowledge or whatever.

Prabhupāda: Simply by the position—"I am Cardinal," "I am Pope," "I am priest," "I am that." How long it will go on?

Hari-śauri: It's not going on very much longer anyway, there's so many . . . it's falling apart. There's so many branches. Just the fact that there's so many divisions now of Christianity, that this man was speaking about this charismatic movement. Now this is the young people. They're feeling a need for God, so they're trying to express it through another concocted form of Christianity. But that will also be a failure.

Prabhupāda: Let us try honestly, that's all.

Hari-śauri: As long as we can preach very purely, then the effect will be there.

Prabhupāda: So by this time, we shall be in Toronto tomorrow.

Hari-śauri: Yes. Three quarter . . . 5:45 the plane leaves. So we'll be there by 6:00, 6:40, something like that. They don't have a garden there, though.

Prabhupāda: Time difference the same? No time difference?

Hari-śauri: I don't think so. Oh, we'll have to go through Customs though. It's Canada, so we have to travel through Customs, what have you.

Prabhupāda: We require passport? Visa? You've got?

Hari-śauri: I think so. Puṣṭa Kṛṣṇa Mahārāja already has it sorted out. My U.S. visa allows me to travel outside the country and come back in unlimited amount of times. I don't . . . (laughs) In Toronto also, one boy there was telling us that the priest that was selling that church, he said that he would rather burn it down than sell it to us. But because this Indian man bought it for us, then we were able to get it.

Prabhupāda: Ah, yes. It was sold to somebody else. But because it is an old church, the government municipality would not allow to break it. Then the man who purchased, he was obliged to sell to us.

Hari-śauri: That's an exact duplicate of the situation that happened in Melbourne. That place was sold to a property developer, and then the National Trust put a classification on it, so he was not able to break it down, and neither could he utilize the extra space in the yard for building flats, because the Council would not allow him. So then we . . . they wouldn't . . . originally they would not sell to us.

Prabhupāda: Same thing here. Nobody would purchase it on account of this black quarter. Nobody was purchasing, ready to purchase.

Hari-śauri: So Kṛṣṇa is saving some very nice places for us.

Prabhupāda: That is Kṛṣṇa's trick. (chuckles) Everyone talks of this, "We Eastern, we believe in this," and "We Western, we believe in this." You remain peaceful, everyone. Everyone is thinking like this. We have no such thing, Eastern, Western. It is fact. For everyone, it is good. Eastern, Western, we don't take. Several times, this question . . . I talk . . . I spoke in the American Embassy in Calcutta. They gave me the subject matter, "East and West." So I, in the beginning, I began to speak that we have no such dual, East and West.

Hari-śauri: Hmm. Needs a higher consciousness.

Prabhupāda: If she can make samosā . . .

Hari-śauri: With the chewra.

Prabhupāda: No, chewra may be avoided. Samosā. One will be enough.

Hari-śauri: Either chewra or samosā, or both?

Prabhupāda: No. Either of them.

Hari-śauri: One or the other.

Prabhupāda: Yes. But I shall prefer samosā.

Hari-śauri: Oh, I'd better go down before she starts, then. (end)