Devotee’s question: How to install a beautiful, suitable and worthy throne for His Beautiful Lordships Sri Sri Radha Syama Sundara, Sri Sri Radha Madhava in my heart which is the residence of the most unspeakable offences plus other pieces of dirt similar to that which is found in the open sewer system of central Calcutta road sides? (Crowd laughs)
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HH KKS: Hare Krishna! Yes one can be in Calcutta and see open sewers, but if one looks at the other side of the road one sees that there is some water coming out of some wells in every street everywhere and one should know that this is pure Ganges water…. Pure Ganges water because the British had made a system in Calcutta which was their city….to wash the streets and everywhere in Calcutta in every street this Ganges water is coming through a pipe system out on the street. So Calcutta is not what we think it is. It is something else.I have a lot of experience in Calcutta ….. I was walking in Calcutta and there you have these coolies who were carrying big packs of goods on their heads and they have on their hand they have a hook …so there is this hook coming out of the sleeve of the kurta, you have to be very careful because everyone on the street are having these hooks ..wuttt wushh,,Have to be careful! Quite dangerous! So in this way walking in Calcutta one can be very lost. I was in a very dark street, pitch black, so black there was a black sewage, a sewage you were talking about and now it is called the east canal…. It is pitch black and on the banks of that canal there is black mud and there are huts where people live and the huts are also black…the people wear black clothes and they look very dark, and the whole thing is very dark ……so I was there in that very dark place in Calcutta and it was also getting dark and I was a little bit wondering what was the quickest way to get back home …so in Calcutta you have in the walls you have some sort of hole, there’s a little hole, there is man sitting inside, he has a shop in the hole and underneath this basement there is another shop so there are all these level of shops, holes in the walls…
So I went to one shop in the hole (Crowd laughs) and I asked this man directions in Bengali and I asked him.
And he said ‘Oh are you from ISKCON?’
I said, “Yes”
He said, “Oh… I met …..Prabhupada !”
And this is really Calcutta…. this is Calcutta …that everywhere there are devotees, you would be surprised you would never think so, it’s a city of devotees and when it is the Ratha Yatra millions of people come out, “Our Iskcon Ratha Yatra” and people ask you “What time is it..What time is it .. What time is it at?”
SO……………………..therefore I think that our heart although we may look at it like Calcutta , and we may see our heart as black as Calcutta, we should see look at the other side and we should see the wonderful things that are also in our heart……….You may say well not in my heart…but No No…Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur has this wonderful prayer in Kalayana Kalpataru or the auspicious desire tree and he explains he says my spiritual master gave me this most auspicious desire tree , however because of my harsh mind I have covered the potency of this desire tree and therefore now it is not in it’s full glories …..but by taking the association of the Vaishnavas that desire tree will again be restored in it’s full glories ………………..So this is such a wonderful prayer because it is truly depicting the meaning of humility …of like how a Vaishnava can see himself as the most fallen and at the same time can be a Vaishnava …..Because he is seeing that I have no qualification but I got the mercy of my Spiritual master …..just like Krsnadas Kaviraja is describing that he is lower than a worm in stool and anybody who sees him loses all his pious activities…in two verse he says like that.. but then in third verse which is not often quoted in the same sequence he says that “Well how amazing it is that a person like me got the mercy of Lord Nityananda”
So how amazing it is that we have been touched by Srila Prabhupada and that we got the mercy of this movement ……and therefore Yes… we may have got these kind of hearts ..that maybe a fact..but having such a heart or not, Calcutta type of heart, let us just go forwards with our Calcutta hearts and somehow or other take shelter of Prabhupada’s movement of the great gift he gave us and …….the miracle will take place, the miracle will take place ………and actually after all when all that dirt is taken off you could see that once Calcutta was a beautiful city , it was the crown jewel of the British empire …the houses have beautiful terracotta decorations if you very carefully look… now covered in blacksoot, but once cleansed that terrible, ugly horrible Calcutta heart will transform into a beautiful heart without any doubt , simply by taking shelter …..So we have already got the.mercy..all we have to do now is take advantage of it…. mercy we have already got, we got blessings, we got knowledge, we got association , we got prasadam , we got temples , we got deities, we got festivals, we got shelters in the holy Dhama, we got books, we got everything , we got so many lectures recoreded now on mp3, you can listen to all day and night practically , how much do we really have , we have so much ….so the mercy we have got…all we have to do is now take advantage…
