The Washington Conversations

In July 1976 Srila Prabhupada was visiting Washington D.C. to see the celebrations of the 200th year of American Independence. Again, Rūpanuga Prabhu requested that all the scientists should come to Washington to see Prabhupada. So we all went and stayed there for about a week. The 1975-Atlanta and 1976-Washington discussions are two important events in Bhaktivedanta Institute history. At the Washington discussions we focused on the moon landing issue: whether the 'astronauts' went to the moon or to the desert in Arizona! Srila Prabhupada pointed out that all media reports about moon landing were comparing the moon to desert in Arizona.

"That means", he said, "they are in Arizona. Just like one man was stealing from the room, and there were some sounds and the master of the house said, "Who is there? What is that sound?" The man said, "No, no I am not stealing. It is like that. … Who asked them to speak of Arizona? You are speaking of Arizona … that means they are working in Arizona." [Room Conversation, Washington D.C., July 6, 1976]

We also spoke about the nature of life, and Sadapūta Prabhu and I made slide presentations to Srila Prabhupada about some ideas that we wanted to put together in the form of a book to be called "What is Life? What is Matter?" We showed through these slides how even granting that life has arisen out of chance mutations it would not be possible to arrive at a living form in the time scale that present scientists attribute to the universe. Chance theory cannot explain the variegated nature of different living forms.

Srila Prabhupada suggested that we must start a scientific journal for publishing papers defeating the atheistic conceptions of science. He even named the journal 'Sa-vijnanam' based upon the quotation from Bhagavad-gita verse [7.2] which he translated as 'In Scientific Knowledge.' This was in the Baltimore temple.

"Yes, you can title sa vijnana. … Yes, nothing further to be known. … it must be very sa vijnanam, it must be very scientific. … It will be published by BBT, but coming from Bhaktivedanta Institute." [Room Conversation, Baltimore, July 7, 1976]

Everyday we would go for morning walks and we also had a group photo. Then on the Independence Day we went to seen the fire works at the Capitol. A number of devotees had come for the festival and even the police joined in their chanting and dancing. Srila Prabhupada was very happy seeing the police dancing to the tune of the Hare Krishna mantra.