We were in the country driving from Durban, South Africa, and there were some big, long, white buildings some distance from the highway.  Srila Prabhupada asked, “What are those buildings?”  I responded, “They are chicken coops that belong to a large chicken farm. They use them as slaughterhouses.”  Srila Prabhupada said, “Why do they buy chicken?  Let them make a chicken.  Let them take some egg, put some liquid on it, incubate it, and hatch a chicken.  But those rascals can’t because they don’t understand that life is not the egg but the spirit soul.”  He carried on in an animated way talking about that.”

-Pusta Krishna das, Memories: Anecdotes of a Modern-Day Saint

By Madhava Gosh dasa

Astottara sata dasa is Alexander Petroff (Asto), who was raised at the ISKCON Gita Nagari Farm in Port Royal, PA.  After studying economic development at Hampshire College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College, he worked as an intern at the Namalu Ox Hire and Ox Training Center in Uganda.  Furthermore, as an intern at Tillers International in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he trained others how to work with horses and oxen.

In college, Asto wrote an 80-page thesis called Village Of Hope: A Model for Self-Sufficient Village Development In Africa. In that paper, he took the ideas of Srila Prabhupada, Gandhi, and E.F. Schumacher, and formulated a step-by-step economic plan for transitioning an economy from the current capitalist model, to a varnasrama model based on the grain-based currency and ox power model suggested by Srila Prabhupada.

His work in Africa is an incredibly hard struggle, but step-by-step, progress is being made. Asto is taking his inspiration in particular from a lecture of Srila Prabhupada’s on January 11, 1977 on a train ride to Allahabad, wherein he indicated that if we offered work, people would be attracted, and thereby we could introduce them to Krsna consciousness.

Since 5.5 million people have died in Congo due to war, they are more open to accepting new ideas like this, as they have nothing. The people in Ruzizi Valley are very hard workers and have a natural love of cows, as evidenced by the fact that although starving and malnurished, they have hunted all the snakes and rats in the area while entire herds of cows remain protected.  Asto named the project “Working Villages International” to keep in mind the central role of work in the project. The basic philosophy is centered on a verse in the Bhagavad Gita (18.46) that advocates making your daily work your prayer to God. 

Check here to visit Working Villages International.

Every autumn the Food For All team travel around the sacred land of Vraja in Northern India, distributing books, pencils and bananas to thousands of children. Each evening the crew arrive in a new village on a bull cart which becomes transformed into a mobile cinema, showing traditional Indian movies based on the ancient histories, as well as short awareness-raising documentaries about animal and environmental protection.

Click here to watch their documentary.

“The wind carries the clouds to different parts of the globe, and the clouds distribute rains, to the satisfaction of the people in general, just as rich kings and merchants distribute their accumulated wealth, inspired by religious priests.”

-Light of the Bhagavata, Verse 21

(c) The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc.

One morning we were walking on Juhu beach while birds were flying overhead in perfect formation.  These birds would fly in a line or make a u-turn all together.  So I asked Prabhupada, “How do these birds fly in a perfect formation? How do they communicate with each other?”  And Prabhupada’s response was, “They are not less intelligent like you are.”        

-Lokanatha Swami, Memories: Anecdotes of a Modern-Day Saint

One question that people have been trying to answer for thousands of years is whether God exists or not.  Science is approaching the point where we can begin to deal with this question, particularly with molecular biology.

Click here for the full video lecture.

“Fierce torrents of rain break over the strands and the partition walls of the paddy field. These disturbances resemble those created by the seasonal opponents of the standard principles of the Vedas, who are influenced by the age of Kali.”

-Light of the Bhagavata, Verse 20

(c) The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc.

Srila Prabhupada said, “We should always be considering, “What is my duty?’”  I thought, “Duty.  Okay.”  I was hearing-impaired since I was young, and between Prabhupada’s accent, my inability to hear, and the psychedelics residually floating in my brain cells, I was having a hard time understanding.  Prabhupada pointed to his coffee table and said, “Do you see this ant?”  I looked carefully.  I knew that Srila Prabhupada was the external representative of Supersoul, and if he said there was an ant, then there was an ant.  But there was no ant.

I didn’t want to say “No” and appear stupid to not see the spiritual or whatever ant that was there, and I didn’t want to say “Yes” and be proven a liar because I couldn’t see the ant.  Srila Prabhupada looked at me intensely, as though the ant issue was now solved.  He wanted to get on to real business.  He said, “My job is to understand, “What is my duty to this ant?’”  Not only was there there an ant that I couldn’t see, but now I had a duty to it.  Prabhupada looked at me almost beseechingly, “Somehow I have to help this ant.   Maybe I can chant Hare Krishna to it or feed it a little prasadam.  If we can help one ant become Krishna conscious, then our whole movement is a glorious success.”

-Nara Narayan, Memories: Anecdotes of a Modern-Day Saint

Among those who see the need for fundamental change in human consciousness are the deep ecologists.  “Deep ecology is a process of ever-deeper questioning of ourselves, the assumptions of the dominant worldview of our culture, and the meaning and truth of our reality,” say two prominent theorists of this movement, Bill Devall and George Sessions.

We agree with the deep sociologists that modern civilization raises obstacles to this process of inquiry.  “In technocratic industrial societies there is overwhelming propaganda and advertising which encourages false needs and destructive desires designed to foster increased production and consumption of goods,” say Devall and Sessions.  “Most of this actually diverts us from facing reality in an objective way and from beginning the ‘real work’ of spiritual growth and maturity.”

Deep ecologists would like to see much of the world returned to wilderness.  They also speak of the “biocentic equality” of all living things.  By this they mean that “all things in the biosphere have an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual forms of unfolding and self-realization within the larger self-realization.”

Members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, while sympathetic to some of the goals of the deep ecologists, differ with them about the ultimate sense in which all creatures “reach their own individual forms of unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization.”  For the deep ecologists, this process takes place solely within nature.  The “larger Self-realization” is simply that of nature unfolding according to its own laws.  As far as humanity’s self-realization is concerned, this would amount to humans as a species taking a more humble position relative to nature and other living things.  But this holistic vision, although an improvement over humanity’s present exploitive behavior toward nature and other living beings, falls short of a genuine spirituality.  It fails to take in account the eternal identities of all living things beyond their situation in material nature.  These eternal identities become revealed not simply in relation to nature and other living things but in relation to God, who is present both in nature and beyond nature and who is the source of both nature and the living things in nature.

An equality of vision more satisfactory than that of the deep ecologists was possessed by the ancient sages of India, whose teachings the members of the modern Krsna consciousness movement follow.

“The humble sages, by virtue of true knowledge, see with equal vision a learned and gentle brahmana, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and a dog-eater [outcaste],” says the Bhagavad Gita (5.19).

A Krsna conscious person does not make any distinction between species or castes,” comments Srila Prabhupada on this text in his Bhagavad Gita As It Is.  “The brahmana and the outcaste may be different from the social point of view, or a dog, a cow, and an elephant may be different from a species point of view, but these differences are meaningless to the learned transcendentalist.  This is due to their relationship with the Supreme.”

Each living thing is not simply a material form that finds its proper place within material nature.  Each living thing is also possessed of a soul, which has an eternal relationship with God , who exists beyond material nature.  Of course, nature is the energy of God, and God is present in His energy as well as beyond it.  So it is possible for those who properly align their souls with God and with the souls of other living things to also properly align their material bodies with God’s material nature and the material bodies of other living things.  This is a more complete self-realization than that of deep ecology.

Applying a vision of the theocentric equality of all living things, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness addresses the deep philosophical and spiritual issues that touch on the self and nature, while it simultaneously introduces a way of life that situates the self harmoniously within nature.

-excerpt from Divine Nature by Micheal A. Cremo and Mukunda Goswami

“A crane stands on the edge of a pond that is always disturbed by flowing water, mud, and stones. The crane is like a householder who is disturbed in the shelter of his home but who, because of too much attachment, does not want to change his position.”

-Light of the Bhagavata, Verse 19

(c) The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc.