20251222 Evening Address

mūkaṁ karoti vācālaṁ paṅguṁ laṅghayate girim
yat-kṛpā tam ahaṁ vande śrī-guruṁ dīna-tāraṇam
paramānanda-mādhavam śrī caitanya īśvaram
Harihi oṁ tat sat

Jayapatākā Swami: What should I speak tonight? This is the holy dhāma of Navadvīpa and here every spiritual activity is multiplied by one thousand times. And even lying down is the same as offering your praṇāma. So someone said to Śrīla Prabhupāda, then can we just sleep all day?! Can we not do any more, he said. So, Śrīla Prabhupāda was training us that Māyāpur should be neat and clean. Śrīla Prabhupāda walked around and when he saw some dirt or paper, he would immediately call us and ask what is this? So Śrīla Prabhupāda was trying to train us to keep everything neat and clean. Some of the temples we go to, they don’t keep it well maintained – non-ISKCON temples. So Śrīla Prabhupāda wanted us to take good care. There was some water dripping by the roadside, our internal road. He said, “Who is responsible?” They all pointed at me. “He is responsible for everything,” Śrīla Prabhupāda said. “Who is the specific person responsible for plumbing?” He was saying that I should see that everyone does their service, but every service should be assigned to someone. So, like this water dripping, any little thing, he was very conscious of this. When he walked out the back, he saw a little triangle of land and nothing growing there. He said, “Every piece of land should be cultivated – flowers, vegetables, something should be grown.” So, everything was an instruction.

Someone would be walking on the back, the bund road that keeps the Jalāṅgī River water from entering Māyāpur. One villager came with a basket of vegetables on his head and Śrīla Prabhupāda stopped him. He said, “You spend the whole day in the Navadvīpa market. Show your basket, I will buy your whole basket, tell me how much you want.” So like that he was trying to bargain with the guy, to cut the price down. He told one devotee to accompany him to the kitchen, and he would give the vegetables and get the money. So Śrīla Prabhupāda told him you can do some work in your house. Why would you waste your whole day sitting in the market.

So Śrīla Prabhupāda was very spontaneous. So every day he was teaching us different things. He said how we should build the Temple of the Vedic Planetarium, TOVP. He said that it should be higher than any other temples. So, Ambarīṣa Prabhu took it up as a service and he started it. Devotees around the world are donating and it is almost finished!

But the West Wing is the Vedic Science Museum. And so for that we had one consultant, he was very expensive and did not spend the time to understand the topics. So now we have the new consultant. He is from India and there is a whole group. So they have understood the topic very well. So, we are working on that. We normally meet on Sundays but yesterday there was no agenda so were meeting generally. The first floor is ‘Consciousness’, second floor is ‘Evolution’. So we are trying to defeat Darwin’s theory. We are trying to establish that we are not the body we are the spirit soul. And the whole universe is consciousness based. AI is the buzzword! But, machines do not have consciousness. They are programed. Therefore, they know numbers. You are all conscious beings and Kṛṣṇa is the Supreme conscious being – cetanaś cetanānām. You are eternal and Kṛṣṇa is the Supreme eternal. Nityo nityānāṁ. So there is a big difference between Kṛṣṇa and you, you and the machines. You have consciousness, therefore the whole first floor is dedicated to the idea of consciousness. Very important. Scientists had met at the Science and Religion Symposium – His Holiness Svarūpa Dāmodara Mahārāja was at that symposium One of the guest speakers was a Nobel prize laureate in Physics. He said that 20 years if you told me I would be sitting with religionists, I would have told you, you were crazy! But now we don’t what consciousness, what is it, where it begins and where it ends. Maybe the religionists know consciousness, so I am here. So this consciousness is a major thing. Like that, we are developing the subject of consciousness.

So, the fourth floor is the spiritual world, so we know a lot about Kṛṣṇa and His avatāras, His pastimes on the earth and the universe. But we don’t know that much about the spiritual world. We know that in the spiritual world there are no demons. They don’t have the entry pass! Jaya and Vijaya, the doorkeepers keep them out! So anyway, we are trying to explain Maheśa dhāma, Hari-dhāma and Goloka dhāma. Do you know anything about Maheśa dhāma? Śrīla Prabhupāda said very little about Maheśa dhāma, but he told us that in the West Wing we should show Maheśa dhāma. So we are searching, we are trying whatever we can. It is very interesting.

Just before I left Māyāpur, I was reading Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura’s book – Caitanya-śīkṣāmṛta. So he described rasas. Kṛṣṇa is enjoying rasas. And so, I was saying in the fourth floor, to make the whole thing understandable we should discuss the rasas. In Hari-dhāma, they have 2½ rasas. They are very much conscious that the Lord is all powerful, and everything. We go to Kṛṣṇaloka, Goloka dhāma, there they either don’t know or think it is not very important to know, they love Kṛṣṇa for what He is – His beauty, His knowledge, His humor, His dance, everything. So like that, some people say we should skip through minimally Dvārakā and Mathurā and concentrate more on Vṛndāvana. We were discussing this. So eventually you will see the final product. I thought I would tell you this. I think twice a day they have tours of the TOVP. You all are visiting Māyāpur, have you seen the TOVP? How many have not gone for the tour? While you are here see the TOVP if you haven’t.

When I first came, all that was in Māyāpur was the grass hut. So, Śrīla Prabhupāda said, “Keep the grass hut, this is where all started!” This is all that was! So I started there and then sometimes there was floods and during the floods, we were distributing prasāda and we had boats. Accidentally I put my hand on a narrow tree when going on the boat. The tree was above water, the ants which were on the tree climbed off the tree and I had all kinds of ants on my hand ahhhhh… So sometimes there was water deep four feet or so deep, and something was floating, and a snake came up on the water. On a wooden board or banana tree or something. He was showing his fangs. So we had to deal with that. So we haven’t had a flood in a long time. Usually, every six years or so we would have. Now, I don’t know for a long time we haven’t had.

Anyway, Navadvīpa dhāma is known as the audārya-dhāma that means dhāma of Mercy. The nine islands are there. Each island is connected to one of the nine processes of devotional service, bhakti-yoga. Sīmantadvīpa, Madhyadvīpa, Godrumadvīpa, Koladvīpa, Ṛtudvīpa, Jāhnudvīpa, Modadrumadvīpa, Rudradvīpa and Antardvīpa.

The central island, the birthplace of Lord Caitanya is Antardvīpa. So the Pañca-tattva Deities are in Antardvīpa. And the Rādhā Mādhava Aṣṭa-sakhi Deities, Rādhā Mādhava Māyāpurcandra are in Rudradvīpa. Lord Nṛsiṁhadeva, is on the border, I don’t know which!

So in ancient land maps they have Rudrapāra. Śrīla Prabhupāda said that Rudrapāra means Rudradvīpa. So, Balāldighi is Antardvīpa. So anyway, Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura in his Navadvīpa Bhāva-taraṅga, he said that he saw the Harināma saṅkīrtana dancing and then turning into a rāsa-līlā party! All of you must have many times engaged in saṅkīrtana. This is a special līlā of Lord Caitanya Mahāprabhu. Any questions?

Question: We have a lot of information about Goloka Vṛndāvana and Kṛṣṇa’s pastimes but not much information of Lord Gaurāṅga’s abode in Kṛṣṇaloka? Could you please tell us about it?

Jayapatākā Swami: We have Vṛndāvana, Mathurā and Dvārakā, and there is also the Śvetadvīpa and Lord Caitanya is in Śvetadvīpa. One pastime where Lord Caitanya was seated with all the gopīs on one side and queens of Dvārakā on the other. They were all bathing Lord Caitanya. Nārada Muni came and told them the situation in the universe of the four headed Brahmā. Did you hear that? You see, every universe has a Brahmā. Our universes has a four headed Brahmā. This is the smallest universe! Teeny weeny! So we cannot imagine how big some of the universes are! So like that Nārada Muni told the situation here and Lord Caitanya in Goloka, He said He would descend and He asked for volunteers. So some of the associates volunteered to come. Haribol!

Hope you all enjoy Māyāpur, see our Lord Jagannātha temple, see the birthplace of Lord Caitanya. Śrīla Prabhupāda said that Lord Caitanya was born there that is His janma-sthāna and ISKCON is His karma-sthāna. So here all the devotees are busy doing seva. We hope you enjoy Māyāpur, transcendentally! Hare Kṛṣṇa!

One of my servants Vrajeśvara Gaura dāsa is in Kolkata hospital and diagnosed with meningitis brain fever. So he needs prayers. Meningitis is life threatening. Maybe we can chant the Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra for him

Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare/
Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare!

śrī-kṛṣṇa-caitanya prabhu-nityānanda
śrī-advaita gadādhara śrīvāsādi-gaura-bhakta-vṛnda

We offer this to Vrajeśvara Gaura dāsa.