Krishna consciousness is meant to spread all over the planet.
Vilnius
24th April 2016

hare krsna hare krsna, krsna krsna hare hare
hare rama hare rama, rama rama hare hare.

In the country of a population of only three million people in this country, there are so many devotees here in a country of not many people.

manushyanam sahasreshu kashchid yatati siddhaye (BG 7.3)

Translation

Amongst thousands of persons, hardly one strives for perfection

Krishna says in the Bhagavad gita that one out of a thousand would be interested in Him. They will endeavor for some spiritual perfection. So you are those rare, one out of a thousand thousands who are present here. So that Krishna conscious time has come for you or in your place. I was just thinking that fifty years ago it was just the one Srila Prabhupada in New York.

During kirtan there was no big hall like this with hundreds in the audience and the microphone system and the guitar also and the deities. None of this was there and it started with one person on the footpath. You understand footpath? I mean I am sitting on a big cushion here and there was someone to invite me and offering me a seat but in New York no-one was offering Prabhupada. And with one pair of kartals he would do kirtan.

hare krsna hare krsna,
krsna krsna hare hare
hare rama hare rama
rama rama hare hare

So that was fifty years ago and there was but one person, the founder acarya of the international society of Krishna consciousness. There was but just one temple in New York where Prabhupada gave the name ‘International society’ to this society. This is a local society in one of the states, New York which is one state in America.

So he was thinking that in the future this society is going to be international society for Krishna consciousness. Even one day in Lithuania, Krishna’s name will be chanted. Srila Prabhupada had that confidence; he had full faith in the prediction of Sri Krishna Chaitanya Mahaprabhu who predicted

prthivite ache yata nagaradi grama
sarvatra pracara haibe mora nama

Translation

“In every town and village, the chanting of My name will be heard.” (Caitanya-bhagavata, Antya 4.126)

‘My name will be chanted in every town and every village of this planet.’ So Chaitanya Mahaprabhu appeared and then He disappeared after the forty eight years that He was on this planet. God was on this planet, Haribol! God is not some light or some concept but he is a personality, solid, spiritual, eternal.

He had a name, and you could put the name and the face together and that is Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. And His activities and His associates and His abode and we all, His parts and parcels. It doesn’t matter where you are from or where I am from, it doesn’t really matter. So the Lord said

mamaivamso jiva loke
jiva bhutah sanatanah (B G 15.7)

Translation
The living entities in this conditioned world are My eternal, fragmental parts.

‘All the living entities are my parts and parcels.’ Okay fine you are born in Lithuania now, but fifty years ago you were not Lithuanians and in the next life what would be your nationality? This keeps changing all the time. There is not much dust here but it’s like dust particles which keep floating, coming in and going out.

Sometimes the window is open and you see some dust particles just moving around and going in and coming out. Like that all of us living entities are moving round and round and down. Two thousand years ago Christianity existed since two, three thousand years only. But what about before that?

It was Vedic culture, Krishna consciousness that pervaded the planet. Christianity is two, three’s thousand years and Islam is fourteen hundred years, Sikhism is five hundred years and like that. Before that there was just one family all over the planet, Bharat Varsha. And that’s why there is a concept, a thought in Vedic literature that says

ayam nijah paroveti ganana laghu chetasam
udaracharita vasudhaiva vutumbakam

(Sanskrit subhashita)

Those who think ‘oh, these people are my people but these are some outsiders, some others’ those who think like this are counted as laghu chetasam.

Their chetana, their thoughts are narrow. Small minded think like this. Narrow minded people think in terms of ‘ours and theirs and my country and their country. Those who are kind hearted think in terms of the whole world being one family

Those who are udaracharita, who have chetana or broad minded consciousness, they are big hearted. So if the Lord is in the heart then the heart becomes big hearted. They think that everybody on this planet is part of my family. So these are all man-made countries and also they divide. This country, that country and this religion, that religion, but the soul is transcendental to all these designations and boundaries and divisions and fragmentations.

So, Sri Krishna Chaitanya Mahaprabhu ki jai!

He is the Lord, He is the Lord. Jesus is the son of the Lord and a good son of the Lord. A good son, a very good son but how could god have only one son and how could we limit god? How many sons do you have, you sir?

One, two? Okay. So this gentleman could have two children, is there someone with three or four children here? Yes so here we are, here they go, so many of them. Someone has half a dozen? So human beings have two, three or four. In India to have or in Mauritius to have one dozen children is not a big thing (laughter).

We know even Bhakti Vinod Thakur had a close to a dozen children. So how could god have just one son? God must have unlimited sons and we can see that we are all sons and daughters of the Lord. Maybe we were all bad sons but now it is the time to become good sons and good daughters of the Lord.

And the Lord is Lord, He is everybody’s Lord like the sun is everybody’s sun, it’s the same sun in the sky. It doesn’t become Lithuanian sun and ‘oh no it’s the Japanese sun and oh no now it’s the Russian sun or now it is the American sun.’ The sun is sun of all of us and this is a common thing that everyone understands that the Lord is but one for all of us, one god.

One only difference is that the Vedic literature or Krishna consciousness or sanatan dharma or Bhagavad dharma has so much detailed information about god. Srila Prabhupada used to say that we even know the phone number of god. What is that number, he would say

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare

So if you are in difficulty don’t call the police but call out for mercy and chant the holy names of the Lord and He will respond. So Krishna consciousness is something that’s meant to spread and spread till it reaches every town and every village of this planet. How will this happen?

Some impossible thoughts like that may come, but if this much could happen, if someone was told in India or even here in your country say even fifty years ago, that in 2016 in the month of April on the 24th in this hall there is going to be a house full and all of them would be waiting to have the holy name, who could have believed this fifty years ago? Who could even have believed that?

What is this Hare Krishna? Fifty years ago nobody would have believed such a thing, this is impossible. So if this much is possible then the rest of whatever is also possible. So many in the last fifty years- this is the fiftieth year of the ISKCON golden jubilee celebration of Iskcon which is at the moment celebrating just like a victory celebration.

Param vijayate sri Krishna sankirtan, this is the victory. In ’66 we had one temple and now in 2016 we have seven hundred temples (shouts of Haribol)! There are now a countless number of followers, chanters of the holy name. Many now study the Bhagavad Gita and millions of copies of Bhagavad Gita have been distributed in the last fifty years.

I was in Czech Republic where the population is ten million but you would be amazed to hear that the devotees there have distributed two million copies of Srila Prabhupada’s books. In a population of ten million, two million books have been distributed in just the last twenty years or so. So in another twenty years or in another fifty years or in another hundred years you can imagine how it is going to spread.

There was also a report in a magazine called news week, the cover story that said ‘the fastest growing religion in the former Soviet Union is the Hare Krishna religion.’ Haribol! They also said, I don’t know where they got that number from but they said that there were seven hundred thousand followers of Hare Krishna in the former Soviet Union.

So spreading of Krishna consciousness and spreading of the holy name all over the world is just a vision of the Lord, a plan of the Lord and a prediction of the Lord. There is no power on the earth that can stop this from happening and it doesn’t matter how super that power may be. Super duper, they say ‘super duper’ power and so it doesn’t matter how much it is.

If the Lord wants this to happen then this must happen and we are seeing it happen. There are so many good results and the Hare Krishna’s are good people, good human beings. They are well behaved and very pious and they love their neighbours. Just like the bible says ‘love thy neighbour as thy self and thou shall not kill’ the bible says.

We are the ones following that and so our devotee, he was asked that question in India ‘why did you give up your religion? You were Christian and now you have become a Hare Krishna, Hindu.’ He said ‘no no no I have not become a Hindu! I have become a better Christian. Before this I had heard that thou shall not kill but I was killing or someone else was killing for me.

Turkey on thanks giving, but I don’t do that anymore. Our bible says ‘love thy Lord with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy strength. And now I know the Lord and I am loving the Lord and serving the Lord with all my heart and all my strength. So I was Christian in name only but now I have become a better Christian.’

In the Quran you will find ninety nine names of god, Allah. So their rosary, so their japa beads has ninety nine beads to chant the names of Allah. Hallelujah, no? So this Hallelujah has made their name be hallowed or glorified, so like that. So all religions talk of chanting the holy names of the Lord. Allah Akbar, you have heard this?

In the mosque they pray five times a day and they say ‘Allah Akbar, god is great.’ Allah means god who is great. So that is fine that the Lord is great. Prabhupada said that ‘yes they say that god is great but how is he great? What makes him great? They cannot say so much.’ A Muslim also means one who is surrendered unto god and if that is the understanding then we are Muslims also as we are surrendered unto God.

Hari Hari
Nitai Gaura Prem Anande Hari Haribol.