Early Morning Meetings

The next week, which was the first week in a sultry New York August, a time when the air hangs so hot and heavy that it obscures the tops of buildings with a yellow mist, Srila Prabhupada received a box of handbills which had been donated by a friend. There must have been five thousand of them, and they read: "Practice the transcendental sound vibration Hare Krsna, Hare Krsna, Krsna Krsna, Hare Hare / Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. This chanting will cleanse the dust from the mirror of the mind." Then Srila Prabhupada's name was given and the name of the International Society for Krishna. Consciousness, 26 Second Avenue, and the times of the meetings-7:00 A.M. daily and 7:00 P.M. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. At the bottom of the sheet was the invitation: "You are cordially invited to come and bring your friends." "There they are," Srila Prabhupada told us. "Now you simply have to distribute." I took a handful of the bills. "You think they're all right?" he asked me. I told him I thought they were fine. "We will call our society ISKCON," he then told us, smiling.

"What's that?" I asked. "I-S-K-C-O-N," he spelled the letters out.

"ISKCON-International Society for Krishna Consciousness." Then he laughed. He was obviously having fun. It was also in early August that we began attending the early morning meetings. None of us had ever gotten up before ten or eleven in the morning, but the magnetism of Srila Prabhupada drew us out of our dark Mott Street dens at 6:30 and down from fifth floor apartments into deserted Lower East Side streets. I would walk briskly over to Srila Prabhupada's, chanting Hare Krsna and feeling better than ever before. Miraculously the Lower East Side no longer looked drab. The sidewalks and buildings seemed to sparkle, and in the early morning, before the smog set in, the sky was red and golden. I would sing all the way to his front foyer then ring the buzzer marked A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, and the door would buzz and open, and I would go through the hallway on through the small patio between the back apartment and the storefront and up to his small second floor apartment, tip-toeing quietly in order not to awaken the neighbors.

Those early morning meetings were the most beautiful and most intimate. "Softly," he would say, just lightly touching the cymbals together, and we would barely touch our hands to clap. He would chant "samsara-davanala-liḍha-loka" with his eyes closed and sit in the rays of sun that streamed through the windows in the early morning. We would listen, entranced, then join in response to Hare Krsna. Afterwards he would give a copy of Bhagavad-gita to one of us and would have us read the Sanskrit transliterations, correcting our mispronunciations, and then the text. Then he would begin to explain each verse thoroughly. There were only six or eight of us at these meetings, so we had ample opportunity to discuss the philosophy with him. Actually, by Krsna's mercy, I had nothing else to do. I had returned from India with practically no money, and though I hadn't worked for over a year, I wasn't even interested in looking for a job. I did have a feeling, however, that the Bhagavad-gita was a key to a larger consciousness of which I could somehow partake. I desperately wanted a teacher to lead me into a world which I knew existed and which I felt was very near to me, yet somehow could not reach.