20160101 A New Years Day Class

20160101_Addressing_on_New_Year_Perth_Australia

Gurumaharaj: In India we have many first of the years. Each state has around first of the year. I was in Karnataka, they observe their first of the year as Ugadi and they give us a sweet and the sweet has a little laddu and it has a neem leaf which is very bitter.

So what kind of sweet is that? They say this is the sweet of life. That... some sweet and some bitter and ah... well that’s true, life is not all sweet although some movies like to tell us that.

And then it is paila vaisakh, and then in Tamil Nadu.....

Every state has some...some same and some different but in the rest of the world it’s generally the first of January. So for the devotees it’s the day the... pratipad after Gaura purnima. So to differentiate we say the Krishnabdo... Krishnabdo means the year of Lord Jesus Christ and...so they have a... the Gaurabda which is the year of Lord Caitanya and they have the Bhaktivinod Abda. 

And so one day we may also have the Bhaktivedanta Swami abda.

Hari Bol

(Applause)

And this is the year of the 50th anniversary of ISKCON’’s registration. Last year was the 50th anniversary of Prabhupada’s departure for the West. So we celebrated that in Calcutta. He stopped in Colombo, they were ready to celebrate there but they were having elections. So they requested to please have it on a later day. 

The party in power lost. No comments.

Then they observed it in Cochin. Prabhupada’s ship stopped in Cochin and there he received some boxes of the first canto- Srimad Bhagavatam and with those we crossed the Swiss Canal, the Mediterrenian, the Atlantic ocean and we arrived in the United States last year.... this year... last year 50 years ago, and this year 50 years ago he registered ISKCON. 

So we going to be celebrating all year long – our 50th anniversary and ah... we hope that each ah... congregational member and each devotee member, each ashram member, everybody will participate in different ways, like ah... one proposal came that every devotee should distribute at least on book a week, so 50 books in the year, and of course there is no limit. 

Some may distribute that 50 books in a week, but the 50 will be brought up again and again. We were doing some brainstorming and ah... here our devotees thought that we could start some prison preaching. I call that Mayapur, now we found out that they are taking a step further, and they are going to send prasadam to the local prison, 1000 plates a day.

Hari Bol.

For one year.

And see how that goes. If the jail keepers like it....they like it, they say that by eating pradadam they will be more peaceful. If they eat meat they are more aggressive. 

So we will see if the prisoners like it. 

Some people would like to establish 50 bhaktivrikshas a year. So ah... you can think what things you like to do this year. If there are anything to offer to Prabhupada, or if it’s in multiples of 50 then it is nice. 

So for us this is a very special year. When Prabhupada, he landed in Melbourne he was asked by a number of Austratlian journalists, “Swamiji you come from a poor country- India, and we are Australian, we are a rich country, so what have you come to take from us?”, and Prabhupada replied, “I didn’t come to take anything from you, I came to save you from a cat and dog’s life.”

“So you are saying that we are living a cat and dog’s life?”

Well, cat and dog they eat, they eat on the beach, anywhere, so eat in a nice restaurant, you use your spoons and forks and knives, so is your eating more stylish that’s why...and they cat and dog’s they will sleep on the stairway, they will sleep anywhere, you sleep on nice bed but sleeping is the same, and mating... cat and dog they mate anywhere, so you have your bedrooms but mating is the same and what else.... 

Defending

And defending...cat and dogs use their fangs and their teeth’s and ah... you use your missiles and bombs. So do you mean that life is just a royal kind of ... more royal animal? 

So I have come to teach you that human life is meant for more. 

So they put on the Age paper, that’s a special paper of Melbourne, “Swamiji has come to save us from a cat and dog’s life- subheading- he has come to hound us.” (laughter)

Aussie humour. 

So Prabhupada sent that to me in Mayapur dham. So if Prabhupada was you know... attacked, he didn’t step back, he stepped forward...ok.

Jay Srila Prabhupada ki........jay

So the Aussies, they liked that, they appreciated that and ah... so Srila Prabhpada, he went around the world, 12 to 15 times and ah... it all started 50 years ago with the registration of the International Society For Krishna Consciousness, and he had this vision that there will be a world-wide society of devotees and they will practice deity worship and chanting, they will educate their youths and children and ah... they will provide the restaurants, so many things, so he had this vision, and he was asked, “what’s your purpose swamiji?”

He said, “I have a very simple purpose. I want to change the way people think.”

People need to think more about Krishna, they need to understand their own eternal existence. So I take this opportunity to wish a happy, blissful, Krishna conscious new year, and on this 50th anniversary year I think what you can do for Srila Prabhupada, for ISKCON, individually or collectively to do something remarkable here in Perth, this will be a good year to start the...the temple movement...temple project. 

Hari Bol. (applause)

I am as anxious to see the skits. Of course after the skits you have to take your prasadam.

No function is complete without prasadam. 

The ah... the ah... one of the ah... ISKCON popular websites saw that in Youtube there were things like why I came...why I came... and conspicuous by it’s absence was why I came to Krishna consciousness, why came to Christianity, why I came to Islam, why I came to Hare Krishna or why I came to Krishna consciousness, no... 

So they took two, three hundred devotees... two minutes, three minutes videos why they came to Krishna consciousness...bum

I heard... I didn’t check it but we are very obvious. Now large quantities are why I took, why I accepted Krishna consciousness, and I think here there must be around 200 devotees. You could find out something which is missing in the youtube and something ISKCON Perth would be the leader around the world. 

It is easy as that.

In the net, social media, you can get on a viral run, unfortunately they usually run after the nonsense things but ah... but not always the case. 

So I am just seeing a problem. Someone told me last night in California they offered cases of Bhagavat Gita for $111 or something and everyone who took a case got a envelope, a card with two pearls and some space to write so they can write their personal message to the deities and the two pearls, go towards offering a pearl necklace to the deities. 

A pearl necklace which is a personification or representation of the Bhagavat Gita. So people were buying cases, and they sold like so many cases in one night, everyone wanted the message to go to the deities and they wanted to be part of the pearl necklace. So in the end of the night they had already distributed thousands... hundreds of cartoons of books and ah... it’s a new idea, so ah... some people took the books to give their work colleagues or their friends, and some gave the books to the local temple but everyone gave their pearls to the deities and gave their message to the deities. So there are a lots of things that we can do.

So I was also impressed how in Bombay, during the marathon, they have this tulabhar, it’s a scale. 

Normally in India, you have your weight in bananas or something, offered to the deities. 

Well on the marathon month, they offer their weight in Bhagavat Gita’s. (laughter)

So that was very interesting to see people weight in Prabhupada’s book, offered to the deities. 

So how to have fun? Serving Krishna.

So I was always told that on the first day of the year we should have our new year resolutions, what we will do this year, we should think, “whatever we do this year it should help us for the rest of the year...on this day.”

So you are all here, you are all in the temple, you chant Hare Krisna, you watch a skit, you take prasadam, automatically your year will be auspicious. 

Thank you very much