Happy Janmastami!
Happy Janmastami! Here's a nice book distribuiton pastime about a mended relationship . We were at Ohio State University, in a town called Bowling Green. The campus is like a beautiful park. Most college campuses in the USA are like that. It is a joy to walk around, and it is ecstatic to distribute Srila Prabhupada's books. Every book distributor knows the various types of "sweeties." There are scores of them wherever we try to distribute Srila Prabhupada's books. It was early in the morning, between classes. It was...
read moreBook distribution at Universities in Southern California
While distributing at a university, I showed the Gita to a Muslim man who approached my table. I was showing pictures to him and giving him some explanations. When I finished explaining the five horses as the senses, he asked me, “How much do you want for this book?” I said that we ask for a donation for it, and he gave a nice donation, and I gave him an invitation to the temple. I'm finding that more and more Muslims are taking Srila Prabhupada's books. Now we also have his books translated into Arabic. Another day, a...
read moreThe Girls’ First Time Out in Durban
We may be silent with our mouth, but what’s happening in our mind? So many voices, so many things. Real silence is when the mind is quiet. Scriptures describe silence in different ways. One is material silence. When we are chanting God’s name, when we’re speaking about God, when we’re speaking for the benefit of others, we’re not speaking things that bind us to material existence. Therefore that is also considered as silence; we’re not gossiping, we’re not fault finding, we’re not talking just...
read moreBook Distribution on the Azores islands
For a couple of months every year, for the last ten years or so, I've visited the Azores islands, an autonomous region of Portugal, in the mid-Atlantic. On one of the islands, where just five hundred inhabitants live, I was giving out books one day. A lady who stopped to talk began to take something from her purse, which I thought might be an offical government document identifying her, and that she'd ask me to stop my book distribution. But in her purse she had the maha-mantra written a paper. She kept it there because the chanting...
read moreOvercoming a Big Assumption
One morning I was standing just outside a main train station in Melbourne, at a busy location where professionals and uni students exit the station. I spotted a girl a few metres away, who had a crumbled McDonald's package, indicating that she'd probably just eaten a burger and fries for breakfast. I thought, Let her be the proof of Lord Caitanya's and Srila Prabhupada's mercy. I began chatting with her and placed a Coming Back in her hand. She is a student and, being straightforward, she told me, "You know, I don't...
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