Vaisnavas C.A.R.E.

Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada. I am searching for tape and video recordings of my dear friend Sriman Bhakti Prema Prabhu. Sriman Bhakti Prema passed away in Sri Vrindavan Dham on Monday the 29th of November 2004. At the time of his departure, Sriman Bhakti Prema was only 36 years old. Raised in the UK in a pious Indian family, he came to India to take shelter of Sri Srimad Gour Govinda Swami. Bhakti Prema stayed in Bhubaneswar for several years and during that time he received a lot of merciful attention from HH Gour Govinda Maharaja. After Maharaja’s departure, Bhakti Prema received the mercy of HH Bhakti Svarup Damodar Maharaja and took initiation from him. Since 1996, Bhakti Prema kept the ISKCON Gadeigiri temple in Orissa as his base. There, he rendered various services as a kirtan leader, preacher, and laksmi collector for Sri Sri Radha Gopal Jiu, the beloved deities of Sri Srimad Gour Govinda Swami. He was a well known traveling brahmacari preacher and gave many classes in Europe and South India.

Please dear devotees, if you happen to have any recordings of my dear friend Sriman Bhakti Prema Prabhu, please contact me on my e-mail: srivanarasena@yahoo.co.uk.

Srila Prabhupada Vyasapuja Offering – “I Am Next.”
Written by: HG Hari Sauri Das (www.lotusprints.com)

Please go to the following link to read this entire heartfelt offering to Srila Prabhupada and appreciation of the departed devotees: http://www.lotusimprints.com/new/blog/2010/09/02/srila-prabhupada-vyasapuja-offering-i-am-next/

...Looking at a collection of videos today about early ISKCON I realized that a good portion of those joyful enthusiasts whose forms of matter, frozen brief and fleeting on film, I took as their eternal selves and whom I took to be my immutable confederates in the samkirtana of Caitanya’s lila, are now gone, retreated behind the screen of matter, unmanifest to those who remain.

Where is Padmalocan, blest of vision beyond the ordinary and with special sight, who refused a chariot of the gods, now to be seen?

Where is Vicitravirya, whose last desire was to dance and chant down the hallows of Oxford Street harinama one more time with his co-conspirators of youthful exhuberant defiance all for the love of his guru and Krsna, now residing?

Where is the zestful Rasajna, beautiful and sparkling as she strode on stage to project to thousands the images of immortality and grace from the Ramayana and Puranic lore?

Where is the Goswami, Prabhupada’s Tamal, the preaching commander, the dutiful ever-watchful secretary and watchdog of his spiritual master’s last days on earth?

Where are Upendra, Gauri, Bali Mardan, Sudama, Amekhala, Hemanga, Nirguna Krsna, Lokamangala, Sridhara Swami, Jayananda, Mulaprakriti, Samjnata, Dhami, Kusakratha, Grahila, Lohitaksa, Rudrani, Aindra and all the many others, known and unknown, whose convivial embrace of ISKCON’s creation we thought would carry us together, ever-forward, ever-lucid, ever-linked, arm-in-arm, into the indestructable clime of transcendence?

A dying patient is not a battlefield
Submitted to VCARE
by: Savitri Devi Dasi
ISKCON Philadelphia?

Editor's note: Theresa Brown is an oncology nurse in Pennsylvania. She is a leading contributor to The New York Times' blog Well. She is the author of "Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between."

(CNN) -- The patient, in his late 70s, had survived prostate cancer and had a new diagnosis of leukemia. A few days before, he'd been healthy and fine, but now his white blood cell count was so high that it was clogging his circulatory system, making it hard for him to breathe.

We brought his white count down and relieved his shortness of breath. At that point, he could have opted for palliative care and gone home on hospice with a decent enough quality of life to enjoy what little time he had left. However, the patient, encouraged by his family and urged on by his oncologist, chose aggressive treatment instead.

This is a hard case. In his recent New Yorker article "Letting Go," Dr. Atul Gawande explains how the first impulse of doctors, patients and family members to "fight" cancer or other serious illnesses makes it very difficult to have honest discussions of what treatment can and cannot do.

I understand why physicians find these conversations difficult, why it's preferable to focus on the good we can possibly accomplish rather than the likely futility of the struggle.

But there's another story to be told in these cases, and it's usually the nurse who's the observer of that narrative: the suffering caused by these well-intentioned treatments. Chemo was risky for this patient because of his age and medical history, and the damage done was unbelievably bad.

The problems began when cells killed by the chemotherapy spilled their contents, overloading my patient's kidneys and throwing him into renal failure. The intravenous fluids he'd needed had been too much for his circulatory system, and he developed heart failure, too.

One morning, I came in with his pills, and he said, "You're doing too much. I can't take it." The next week, he was on dialysis, but it wasn't working, and his entire lower body was hugely swollen with fluid. That day, he accosted me with, "What the hell are you doing to me?"

Both times, I told the medical team what he'd said and asked whether it was ethical to continue chemotherapy. Several members of the team shared my concerns, and as a group, we talked the situation over with the attending doctor. Our view was that the treatments were eroding the patient's quality of life with little promise of good in return.

The attending physician, whom I know to be conscientious and caring, disagreed, as did the patient's family. When the doctor prodded the patient, saying, "You want to keep going, right? Right?" the patient himself concurred, "Yes, let's keep going."

So the chemo finished. Then, blood began to appear in the patient's urine. His bladder was brittle because of the radiation treatments he'd had for prostate cancer, and because of the chemo, he had too few platelets. Without enough platelets, that fragile tissue would not stop bleeding, but it also formed blood clots in his bladder that caused excruciating pain.

Watching this patient suffer, not from his disease but because of what we did to him in the name of helping him, was agonizing. He'd wanted to "keep going," to "keep on fighting," but what did he really mean?

Always when I hear these phrases applied to oncology patients, I think of Peter Weir's 1981 film "Gallipoli." The film portrays two Australian sprinters, Archy and Frank, who enlist together during World War I and end up fighting the Turkish army at the Battle of Gallipoli.

A lot of soldiers died during the Gallipoli campaign, and the end of the film dramatizes a real battle in which four brigades of Australian soldiers were sent out of the trenches to certain death.

Frank is chosen to be a runner, a deliverer of messages during the battle, and he gets an order to call off the assault once it's clear that it's not a fight but a massacre. However, Frank can't run quickly enough to get the hold order to Archy's trench in time, and the signal to attack is given. Archy comes up out of the trench running as fast as he can, alone, chest forward, until the Turkish machine guns mow him down.

The wasteful sacrifices of war and the pointlessness of my patient's suffering share some obvious parallels here, but there's a deeper lesson as well. Archy and Frank were soldiers; my patient was not. They made a choice when they enlisted, but my patient was never given his real choice, between aggressive treatment that might do more harm than good and getting just enough treatment to keep him stable and allow him to go home to be with the people he loved.

The very real benefits of such a focus on palliative care were documented in the August 19 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Patients with newly diagnosed lung cancer who received palliative care in addition to chemotherapy claimed an improved quality of life and lived more than 2½ months longer than than those who had no such care.

My patient's decision to "keep fighting" seemed to be based on a misperception of what medicine could accomplish and of what the personal costs of our treatments would be. Indeed, a month after being admitted, swollen, breathless, bleeding and in pain, with his leukemia as robust as ever, he went on hospice in the hospital and died.

In "Letting Go," Gawande says we don't want Gen. George Custer as a model in medicine but more Robert E. Lee. But I would argue that conjuring a general to guide patients faced with serious illness is an embrace of the wrong ideal. Patients are not battlegrounds, and practicing medicine is not a war. This patient needed thoughtful supportive care, not our ineffectual treatments that tore him up from the inside out as surely as any machine gun.

Bhaktivedanta Hospice Inauguration in Vrindavan, India -- August 26, 2010
Photos submitted by Lilavilasini devi dasi Terne, Italy

Doctors' Religious Beliefs Can Color Their Care of Terminally Ill Survey found agnostics, atheists almost twice as likely to make choices that hasten end of life

By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter
Submitted by: Savitri Devi Dasi
ISKCON Philadelphia (U.S.)

THURSDAY, Aug. 26, 2010 (HealthDay News) -- Doctors who are atheist or agnostic are almost twice as likely as their religious counterparts to make medical choices that can end a terminally ill patient's life more quickly, a new British study reveals.

"The religious beliefs of British doctors influence how they provide care for dying people," concludes study author Clive Seale, a professor of medical sociology at the Centre for Health Sciences in Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry at Queen Mary University of London.

For example, "religious doctors are less likely to report having taken decisions which they expected or partly intended to shorten patients' lives, such as withdrawing life-sustaining treatments," Seale noted. "[And] in the few times they do take such decisions, they are less likely to say they discussed this with the patient."

Seale reports the findings in the Aug. 26 online edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics.

To gain insight into the issue, Seale analyzed nearly 4,000 survey responses regarding end-of-life care and religious beliefs, completed between 2007 and 2008 by working doctors residing in the United Kingdom.

Those polled included representatives from a wide range of fields, including neurologists, general practitioners, public health physicians and specialists in elder care and palliative medicine.

Each doctor was asked to reveal his or her religious background and beliefs, ethnicity, opinions regarding the use of sedation, and stance regarding the ongoing legal debate concerning assisted dying. Each was also asked to discuss their experience with the most recent patient who died while under their care.

Seale found that those doctors who focused on elder care were somewhat more likely to be Asian and to identify as Hindu or Muslim. Those in palliative care were more likely to be white, identify as Christian, and describe themselves as "religious."

General practitioners, Seale noted, did not appear to be more likely to hold strong religious beliefs in general. This finding stood in contrast to prior research that focused on the backgrounds of American general practitioners and found that as a group they were more likely to be "religious."

Although ethnicity did not seem to play a significant role in the decision-making process regarding controversial ethical issues, in general white physicians (who were the largest group) were the least likely to describe themselves as having strong religious beliefs and the most likely to support legal changes that allow for physician participation in assisted-dying scenarios.

Non-white and non-Asian physicians were more likely to stand in opposition to assisted dying, as were palliative care doctors as a whole.

Regardless of specialty, those doctors who described themselves as "very or extremely" non-religious were generally more likely to have incorporated sedation into the treatment of dying patients, and twice as likely as religious doctors to have been involved in decisions intended to hasten the end of life.

Doctors in hospital specialties were about 10 times more likely to say they had been involved in a decision that was expected to hasten the end of life than palliative care physicians were. In fact, the latter group, irrespective of religious stance, was the least likely overall to have engaged in such decisions, Seale found.

As has been observed in American research, Seale observed that very religious doctors of all ethnicities were less likely to discuss options intended to help hasten the end of life for their patients, even if the patient was capable of having such a discussion.

Seale suggested that all doctors, whether religious or not, should make a greater effort to consider how their personal perspectives might impact both doctor-patient interactions and the overall decision-making process regarding treatment.

"I believe doctors and patients need to be more aware of the part played by care providers' beliefs and values when they plan care towards the end of life," he said.

Dr. R. Sean Morrison, president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and director of the National Palliative Care Research Center, agreed that a doctor's personal perspective matters.

"Physicians have feelings," he said. "Physicians have beliefs. And those feelings and beliefs can influence some of the advice and decisions they make. But the key is not to let those feelings and beliefs guide your care, but to recognize when it's happening and how it might be in conflict with the patient's best interests."

In that regard, Morrison, who is also vice chair of research in the Brookdale department of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, noted that medical schools have begun to address this issue, to sensitize physicians to such conflicts of interest.

"It's a recent phenomenon within the last 10 years, within the growth of palliative care," he said. "But now it's one of the things we are taught, how to recognize our own feelings and beliefs and recognize when those feelings and beliefs may be controlling our actions. And recognizing how to cope with that so that the patient becomes the sole focus. And that requires training."

We waited. And waited. It was a sweltering summer day in the Florida panhandle. The morning sun glared through the expansive windows of an airport departure gate. There, a young blond haired lady, neatly uniformed with a blue vest over a pressed white shirt and matching blue pants, stepped up to the counter, timidly surveyed the room, then announced a one hour delay. Passengers sighed, edgy to escape from the heat and travel north. With cellular phones pressed to their ears, they persistently glanced at their wristwatches.

Among them stood a middle-aged woman. She had nicely coiffed reddish-brown hair. Her dress and demeanor hinted that she was a lady of wealth and taste. Suddenly, she flushed red, flung her boarding pass and screamed, “No! You can’t do this to me.” Her outrage jolted the assembly. Everyone stared as she stomped to the counter, stuck her finger in the face of the receptionist and shouted, “I warn you, do not anger me. Put me on that plane, at once!” The airline hostess cowered. “But ma’am, there’s nothing I can do. The air conditioning system of the plane has broken down.”

The woman’s lips quivered. Her eyes burned and she screeched louder, “Don’t you fight with me, you stupid child. You don’t know who I am. Damn it, do something. Now! I can’t take it.” She ranted on and on.
After finishing her verbal lashing, she fumed and scanned the lounge. Her eyes landed on me sitting alone in a corner of the room in my saffron colored swami robes. She stormed toward me while everyone looked on. Now, standing almost on top of me, her face distorted with anger, she yelled, “Are you a monk?” Oh God, I thought, why me. I really didn’t need this. After an arduous week of lectures and meetings, I just wanted to be left alone.
“Answer me,” she persisted. “Are you a monk?”
“Something like that,” I whispered. The whole room watched, no doubt delighted that I got to be the lightning rod and not them.
“Then I demand an answer,” she challenged. “Why is my flight late? Why is God doing this to me?”
“Please ma’am,” I said. “Sit down and let us talk about it.” She sat beside me. “My name is Radhanath Swami,” I said. “You can call me Swami. Please tell me what is in your heart?” I have asked this question thousands of times and never know what to expect.

She said her name was Dorothy, that she was a housewife, fifty-seven years old, and lived on the east coast. She had been living happily with her family until…then she started to weep. She pulled tissue after tissue from her purse, blew her nose, and wept some more.

“It was tragic,” she said. “All at once I lost my husband of thirty years and my three children. Now I’m alone. I can’t bear the pain.” She gripped the handle of her chair. “Then I was cheated. The bank put my house into foreclosure and kicked me out on the street. You see this handbag? That’s all that’s left.”

Looking more closely at her face, I noted that beneath the well coiffed exterior her complexion was pale, her eyebrows tense, and her lips slanted down in sadness. Dorothy went on to explain that, if all that sadness were not enough, she had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She had one month left to live. In a desperate effort to save her life, she had discovered a cancer clinic in Mexico which claimed they might possibly have a cure. But she had to be admitted today. If she missed her connecting flight in Washington, D.C., her chances of survival were finished.

One of my duties is to oversee spiritual services in a hospital in India. I have ministered to victims of terrorist bombs, earthquakes, tsunamis, rape, trauma, disease, poverty and heartbreak of all sorts, but I cannot remember more anguish written on a human face than Dorothy’s. “And now this flight is late,” she said, “and there goes my last chance to live. I tried to be a good wife and mother, I go to church, I give in charity, and I never willfully hurt anyone. But now there is no one in the world who cares if I live or die. Why is God doing this to me?”

Minutes before, I had been cringing at her obnoxious behavior. How easy it is to judge people by external appearances. Understanding what was below the surface flooded my heart with sympathy. When she saw tears welling in my eyes her voice softened. “It seems maybe you care,” she said.
What could I do? I felt too weak to do anything. Closing my eyes, I prayed to be an instrument to help her. “Dorothy, I do feel for you. You’re a special soul.”
“Special.” she huffed. “I’ve been thrown out like a worthless piece of trash and I’m going to die. But I believe you think I’m special, and I thank you for that.”
“There may not be anything you can do about what has happened,” I said, “but you can choose how you will respond to what has happened. How you react can affect the future.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can lament how cruelly the world has cheated you and spend your days cursing life, making others uncomfortable, and dying a meaningless death. Or you can go deeper inside those experiences and grow spiritually.” I remembered her comment about going to church.

“Doesn’t it say in the Bible, ‘Seek and ye shall find’ and also ‘Knock and the door will open’? Would you rather die in depression or in gratitude? You have that choice.” Her hand trembled and she grasped my forearm.

“I’m so afraid, Swami. I’m so afraid of dying. Please tell me what death is.” Her face had all but wilted. What could I do? I felt so incompetent. If only I had the power to heal her disease. But I didn’t. Still, my years of training in Bhakti had taught me that we all have the power to soothe another person’s heart by accessing the love that is within ourselves. I felt like a surgeon in an operating theater and silently offered a prayer before speaking again.

“In order to understand death,” I said, “we must first understand life. Consider this question: Who are you?” “My name is Dorothy, I’m American…”

“Dorothy, when you were a baby, before you had been given a name, were you not already a person? If you were to show me a baby picture today, you would say, ‘That’s me.’ But your body has changed. Your mind and intellect and desires have changed. When was the last time you craved your mother’s milk? Everything about you has changed, but yet here you are. You can change your name, your nationality, your religion, and with today’s technology you can even change your sex. So what part of you does not change? Who is the witness of all these changes? That witness is you, the real you.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you are saying,” Dorothy said. “What is the real me?”

“You are the conscious person, the life force, the soul within the body, who is having the experiences of this lifetime. You see through your eyes, you taste with your tongue, smell through your nose, you think with your brain—but who are you, the person receiving all those impressions? That is the soul. The body is like a car and the soul is the driver. We should not neglect the needs of the soul. We eagerly nourish the needs of the body and mind, but if we neglect the needs of the soul we miss out on the real beauty of human life.”

“Animals and other non-human species react to situations according to their instincts. Lions don’t decide to become vegetarian on ethical grounds, and cows don’t become carnivores. Essentially, beings other than humans are driven to satisfy their needs of eating, sleeping, mating and defending according to the instincts of their species. A human being is entrusted with a priceless gift, which can be utilized for creating the most profound benefits or the worst disasters. That gift is free will.
“But with the blessing of free will comes a price, namely responsibility. We can choose to be a saint or a criminal or anything in between, and we are responsible for the consequences of those choices.”

“You’re talking about karma,” Dorothy said. I was surprised by her knowledge of the word. “I’ve never really understood that idea,” she said.

I explained that karma is a natural law, like gravity, which acts irrespective of whether we believe in it or not. As ye sow, says the Bible, so shall ye reap. Or as they say back in Chicago where I come from, what goes around comes around. If I cause pain to others, a corresponding pain will come back to me in due course. If I show compassion to others, good fortune will come my way. Dorothy didn’t seem encouraged, and I began to feel like I had taken the conversation in the wrong direction.

“That sounds like a justification for becoming callous and judgmental about suffering,” she said. And she was making a good point. Sadly, I had witnessed within myself as well as in others a tendency to do just that.

“Dorothy,” I said, “the devotional tradition in India teaches that karma and other mysteries are not intended to discourage us into thinking we are helpless victims of a cold and cruel universe. Rather, we should feel encouraged to take responsibility for the choices we make knowing that how we live can make a difference. For myself, I have discovered that spiritual truths lead me to the joys of compassion and devotion, starting first of all with myself. Charity begins at home. Once I can forgive myself for not being perfect, then I can begin to look upon others with similar compassion. Bhakti has taught me that we are all related, in our happiness and our distress.”

“So just what am I supposed to take away from that?” Dorothy asked. “If everything that has happened to me is my fault, my karma, I don’t see how I can avoid drowning myself in guilt.”

Dorothy was emotionally starved and I felt that meeting her was a test of my own spiritual realization. “Instead of drowning yourself in guilt, you have a precious opportunity to bathe in grace. The philosophy of karma is meant to lift us up and encourage us to make the right choices in both joy and suffering. Depression impedes our progress. In whatever situation we find ourselves we have the opportunity to transform how we see that situation. Devotional life doesn’t make every crisis disappear, but it can help us to see crises with new eyes, and often that deeper vision leads to a more content frame of mind. I’ve been practicing that for many years, and I know it has helped me to see the hand of God in all things…”

“Swami, don’t give me any religious dogma. I had enough of that as a kid. In church they taught us that the good go to heaven and the bad go to hell. The last thing I need is more of that. Tell me what is really in your heart.”

She was doing a good job getting me to explain things that can’t be physically seen such as the soul, the law of karma, and reincarnation. “Tragedies in this life can sometimes be attributed to things done in previous lives. Because the soul is eternal, we carry those consequences from this life to the next.” That really got Dorothy angry.

“It shouldn’t matter what we did in some other life. Why should we believe that God is merciful when we see in this life that good people suffer and wicked people prosper?”

“Years ago,” I said, “an old recluse in the Himalayas shared with me an interesting analogy. It is quite simple but it sheds some light on the subject.” Mentioning that I had spent time in the Himalayas must have captured her fancy because for the first time I noted the trace of a smile on Dorothy’s lips.

“The yogi gave the analogy of a farmer who puts excellent grains into his silo but then adds rotten grains on top. The silo empties out from the bottom, so when the farmer goes to sell his grains the healthy grains come out first and for a while he wallows in prosperity. But with time his prosperity will end and poverty awaits him.
“Then the yogi gave the analogy of another farmer who fills his silo with rotten grains. Eventually he learns to do better and begins pouring only fresh wholesome grains into the silo. He may be presently suffering from his past deposits, but a glorious future awaits him. “We humans create our own destiny. We are free to make choices. But once we act, we are bound to the karmic consequences of what we have done. You may choose to get on an airplane to Washington, D.C., but once the plane takes off you have no choice about where you’re going to arrive…”

Suddenly, the voice of the airline hostess came through the speakers announcing a further delay of another hour. Dorothy whimpered. I gave her a sympathetic smile.
“Here is that choice again, either to focus on the miseries of our fate or transform how we see our fate. Most of us have a huge mixture of karmic seeds of fate waiting to sprout. But the most important teaching of the Bhagavad Gita is that we are eternal souls, transcendental to all karmic reactions. That’s a very reassuring thing to know. Even in the midst of great distress, people who live with awareness of their eternal nature can be happy. The Bible tells us that the kingdom of God is within. True happiness is an experience of the heart.

What is it the heart longs for?”
Dorothy’s sad eyes searched mine. “My heart aches for love,” she said.

“We all do,” I said. “Our need to love and be loved originates in our innate love for God.” I quoted words that Mother Theresa from Calcutta had spoken to me years before. “The greatest problem in this world is not the hunger of the stomach but the hunger of the heart. All over the world both rich and poor suffer. They are lonely, starving for love. Only God’s love can satisfy the hunger of the heart.”

“You’re a Hindu and I’m a Christian,” Dorothy said. “Which God are you talking about?”
I looked out the window at a blazing summer sun. “In America it is called the sun, in Mexico, sol and in India, surya. But is it an American sun or a Mexican sun? The essence of all religions is one, to love God—whatever name we may have for God—and live as an instrument of that love. To transform arrogance into humility, greed into benevolence, envy into gratitude, vengeance into forgiveness, selfishness into servitude, complacency into compassion, doubt into faith, and lust into love. The character of love is universal to all spiritual paths.”
Dorothy really didn’t look like any of this was reaching her.
“Someone told me,” she blurted, “that the reason I’m suffering is that God wants to experience the world’s suffering through me. What kind of a God is that?” “People have been inventing ideas about God for a long time,” I replied. “In the Bhakti tradition we have three checks and balances for true knowledge of God: guru, sadhu, and shastra. Guru means spiritual teacher. Sadhu means holy people. And shastra means scriptures, wisdom revealed by God. Throughout history different scriptures have been given according to time, place and the nature of the people for whom the teachings were intended. The ritual parts may differ, but the essence of true scriptures is always the same. However, because people tend to invent meanings, followers of Bhakti receive their understanding of scripture from a guru or teacher coming in an authorized succession of teachers. The Bhakti lineage traces its origin back before recorded history, a succession of realized souls who have preserved the original spirit of the teachings throughout the generations. The company of sadhus is important because with people who are also on the path to God we can share our understanding and realizations…”
Dorothy was not convinced. “What do your Bhakti teachers tell you about why God gave us free will when it makes so many people suffer?”
“In order for there to be love,” I said, “there must be free will. You can force people to obey but not to love. Without that freedom there would be little meaning to love. When we choose to turn away from God, we enter the material world and forget our original loving nature. We become covered by a cloud that camouflages the real nature of things.”
“Like a veil?” she asked.
“Yes, like a veil.”
“Well, I think I’m wearing many veils.”
“We all are. The veil is called maya, illusion, in which we forget our true identity and wander birth after birth chasing superficial pleasures. The real substance of happiness is within our own hearts. Please understand, your situation is an opportunity…”

“May I tell you the story of a famous lady saint?”
“Yes, please.”
“Her name was Queen Kunti a most pious and devoted lady. She underwent unbearable miseries. Her husband died when she was very young. As a widow she raised five small children. The eldest was meant to inherit the throne when he came of age. Because her children were so popular for their virtue and skills, a rival burned with envy. That wicked man seized the crown and ruled. All of Kunti’s property was usurped and her children were banished. They faced repeated assassination attempts and constant persecution. In the end, her persecutors were brought to justice and her eldest son was enthroned. At that time she prayed to Lord Krishna, ‘In those calamities I had no one to turn to but You. In that condition I had no other shelter but to call your name, and calling out to You meant I was remembering You at every moment. Thank you, my Lord, for my suffering was also the source of my greatest happiness.’
I mentioned the work of a famous doctor, who said that sometimes patients come to him to say that having a heart attack was the best thing that ever happened. How is that? Because it took a crisis to get them to rethink their appreciation for life, their habits, their priorities, and see the blessings that they had always undervalued. That seemed to register with Dorothy.

“Bhakti doesn’t necessarily make our material situation go away,” I said, “but at the very least it gives us something more than our bitterness to focus on. And more important, when we open up to the possibility of some explanation other than cruel fate, we just may find that there is a loving Supreme Being looking out for us. In your present condition, Dorothy, you can turn to God like practically no one else can do.”
She closed her eyes she asked, “In your tradition, do you have a meditation to help us turn to God?”
“There are many forms of meditation,” I told her. “I have been given one that has, since ancient times, been practiced for awakening the dormant love of the soul. May I teach you?”
“Please.”
“This is a mantra. In the Sanskrit language, man means the mind and tra means to liberate. The mind is compared to a mirror. For more births than we can count, we have allowed dust to cover the mirror of the mind—dust in the form endless misconceptions, desires and fears. In that state all we see is the dust, and so that is what we identify with. The chanting of this mantra is a process for cleaning the mirror of the mind and bringing it back to its natural clarity where we can see who we really are, a pure soul, a part of God, eternal, full of knowledge and bliss. As the mind becomes cleaner the divine qualities of the self emerge while ignorance and all of its cohorts fade away. As we approach that state, we can experience the inherent love of God within us. As love of God awakens, unconditional love for every living being manifests spontaneously. We realize that everyone is our sister or brother and a part of our beloved Lord.”
The speaker system crackled and everyone in the room perked up, staring at the airline hostess almost like prisoners would look at a parole board, yearning to be released.

“I’m sorry,” she announced, “but they haven’t yet fixed the air conditioner, and there will be another hour delay.”

Dorothy slapped her forehead, “Swami, teach me the mantra.”
“Please repeat each word after me,” I requested. “Hare… Krishna… Hare… Krishna… Krishna… Krishna… Hare… Hare… Hare… Rama… Hare… Rama… Rama… Rama… Hare… Hare…” Dorothy shook her head and shooed me with her hand, “I’ll never remember that.”
“Would you like me to write it down for you?”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a slip of paper and a pen. “Yes, but it doesn’t interest me unless I know what it means.”

After writing it, I explained that these were names of the one God. Krishna means the all-attractive, Rama means the reservoir of all pleasure, and Hare is the name of the female, compassionate aspect of God.

Dorothy took the paper and immersed herself in chanting the mantra over and over. I borrowed her cellular phone and walked away to call a friend with news of the indefinite delay.

When I returned and sat beside her, Dorothy had closed her eyes. She was leaning back and taking deep breaths. She looked at me and asked, “Where do you live?”
“I travel a lot, but much of my time is spent in Mumbai, India.”
“How many people attend your lectures in Mumbai?”
“On Sundays, maybe two thousand. During pilgrimages it’s closer to four thousand.”
“Where are you going now?”
“To a temple in Hartford, Connecticut. But like you I missed my connecting flight, so I’ll probably miss giving the lecture.”
“Do you go there regularly?”
“I’ve been invited for several years, but this is my first opportunity to visit them.”
“How many people are waiting for you?”
“I think about a hundred.”

Again she took a deep breath. Then, as if purging anguish through her breathing she released the words, “Now I understand.” To my surprise, her lips stretched out across her face into a blissful smile and her eyes twinkled like a child.
“The flight delay was my good fortune,” she said. “I bet thousands of people would give anything to sit with you for even a few minutes. I have you all to myself—and for hours!”

I have to admit, I teared up. “The delay is my good fortune,” I said. “There is nowhere in the world I’d rather be than here with you, right now. You are a special soul.”

Dorothy wiped a tear from her cheek. “Yes, now I understand. This is a blessing of the Lord.” I moved to another seat to give her some private space. Of course, I really needed it, too.

Finally, after six hours of delays, came the announcement everyone was waiting for. The same young lady in the blue uniform announced, “The flight is now ready to board. Anyone who wants is now invited to board.”

“We’ve been waiting six hours,” a passenger yelled out. “Why would anyone not want to get on?”

The flight attendant looked at us sheepishly and said, “In the process of fixing the air conditioner, the toilets stopped working. There will be no toilet facility on this flight. You are requested to use the airport restroom before boarding. Especially please take your children as this is the last chance until we arrive at Dulles airport in Washington, D.C. But the good news is that the air conditioner is working.”

The passengers jumped up and rushed to the restrooms. A mother pulled the hand of her four-year old boy. “Come on Timmy, let’s go to the potty.”
“But mommy, I don’t have to go.”
“You have to go,” the mother corrected. “Come on.” She grabbed the boy’s hand and dragged him to the toilet.
“I don’t have to pee-pee.”
“You’re going anyway….”

It was a fifty-seat commuter jet. The good news was that the plane flew. The bad news was that the toilets were boarded shut, the lighting did not work, and the air conditioner, after all that time, still didn’t work. It was a ninety-five degree day. The plane was hot, muggy, dark, and Timmy decided he really did need to pee-pee and cried the whole trip. By the time we landed, every passenger was miserable.

As we trudged down the steps of the plane and onto the tarmac, there was Dorothy sitting in a wheel chair that she had requested, smiling and waving as everyone rushed by. The passengers were stunned to see one among them who could be so happy. I stopped to say farewell.

“Swami,” she said, “I chanted the mantra nonstop throughout the flight. I can’t remember being that happy in a long time.” She handed me the slip of paper with the mantra. “Will you write a message for me to remember you?” Taking her pen, I wrote of my appreciation for her and a little prayer. She pressed the note to her heart and smiled while tears streamed down her cheeks. Then she said something that I will never forget.

“Now, living or dying,” she said, “is only a detail. I know that God is with me. Thank you.”

I hurried into the terminal and looked up at a monitor. My airlines had one last flight to Hartford. It left in ten minutes from another terminal. There was still a chance. Have you ever seen a swami galloping across the corridors of an airport? One man yelled at me, “Why don’t you use your magic carpet?”

As I was running, it struck me that I had forgotten to take Dorothy’s cell phone number. How would I ever find out what happened to her? To this day I regret my foolishness. I made it just as they were closing the gate. Five seconds more and I would have been too late.

At the cultural center in Hartford, my hosts had adjusted the schedule to accommodate a late start time. I asked if there was a particular topic I should speak on.
“Anything you like,” was the reply.
“Tonight’s lecture,” I announced, “is called ‘Why I am so late for the lecture.’”

We Can't Save You,
How to tell emergency room patients that they're dying.
By Joanne Kenen Posted on Slate,
August 4, 2010

How should emergency room doctors treat patients with terminal illnesses? On television, the emergency room patients beat the odds. Their hearts get shocked back to life. Their organs get sewn up. They awaken to a handsome young physician's dazzling smile.

In real life, one in 500 ER patients—200,000 a year—dies under the bright lights of the emergency rooms. Another 500,000—3 percent—die during hospital stays following emergency treatment. Countless patients learn, from a doctor they have never seen before and may never see again, that they have fatal diseases. Others get treated, aggressively and repeatedly, for dangerous flare-ups in conditions like heart failure or emphysema without anyone having the time or the skills to explain that the chronic disease they have been living with is now the chronic disease that they are slowly dying from, a scenario Atul Gawande explored in his recent New Yorker piece on what doctors can do when they can no longer cure.

The ER is not an easy place to come to these realizations or assess their consequences. A handful of physicians are trying to change that. Doctors like Tammie Quest, board-certified in both palliative and emergency medicine, hope to bring the deliberative goal-setting, symptom-controlling ethos of palliative care into the adrenaline-charged, "tube 'em and move 'em" ER. Palliative/emergency medicine collaboration remains rare, but it's growing as both fields seek to create a more "patient-centered" approach to emergency care for the seriously ill or the dying, to improve symptom management, enhance family support, and ensure that the patient understands the likely outcomes once they get on that high-tech conveyer belt of 21st-century emergency medicine. Coming on duty for the 4-to-midnight shift at Emory University Hospital's emergency room in Atlanta, Quest noticed a 94-year-old woman with advanced dementia and a black eye. She had fallen two, maybe three, times in the past couple of days. Her nursing home did what nursing homes do reflexively: It called an ambulance. The elderly woman flinched at the gentlest touch. She recognized the "man with the kind face" at her bedside but no longer recalled that William Mitchell was her son. Quest addressed him kindly. "What do you want for her? What are your goals?" Mitchell first replied practically, noting, "I have power of attorney. She's not a person who wants to live forever." The rest came from the gut: "I want her to be back over [at her nursing home] tonight and be OK." Advertisement

Emory is not the only hospital exploring the intersection of palliative and emergency care. At the Bronx's Montefiore Medical Center, a palliative care nurse is now stationed in the ER, where many of the community's poor receive their only health care. At Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital, emergency physicians have learned to summon the palliative care cavalry for complex cases, and they say that interaction has improved their own ability to deal with death in the ER.*

The patients these doctors and nurses want to reach don't all need the technological wizardry of emergency medicine. They need someone who can control pain, delirium, or shortness of breath and who knows how to break bad news. Someone who, as Quest put it, understands the gap between emotional expectations and medical realities and can help the family define—and the medical team understand—the goals of care. And do it fast: "You can't clog up the ER," Quest says.

"The first hours in the [emergency department] are when determinative decisions are made about disposition and plan of care, and palliative care could be contributing to those decisions," Diane Meier, the director of the Center To Advance Palliative Care, wrote in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. Palliative care in the emergency department can shore up pain and symptom control and help the family marshal resources, whether the patient opts for the ICU, hospice, or something in between.

Joe Stewart, 73, a lung cancer patient, had complex needs. "I have pain, I can't swallow. Everything I eat or drink tastes like crap, and I've been sleeping two days straight," Stewart told Quest. His fiancee, Starlett Graves, recited all of Stewart's many medicines by name, time, and dosage. ("She's good!" Quest exclaimed to Stewart. "What are you waiting for? Marry her!") His chemo, part of a clinical trial, had ended a month earlier. They were hoping for good news. But that night, tests showed a blood clot in his lung. Quest explained that he would have to remain in the hospital a few days. A fuller conversation about treatment options and implications would wait. This was enough to absorb, for now.

Quest was deeply concerned, too, about a gastric cancer patient, also 73. He had been diagnosed at another hospital a month ago, and either the oncologists had not explained his dire prognosis or the family had not taken it in. Now his kidneys had shut down. If the ER team could restart them, he might have two or three good months. If not, he might not make it until morning. The family expected a cure.

Quest was supposed to be off duty by then, but that family tugged at her. They needed "the conversation." Maybe not the whole, prolonged, complicated version. But a start. She pulled back the curtain and took her patient's hand. "In case things get worse, what do you want?" He couldn't whisper more than an uncertain word or two. She turned to his wife and grown children. "It's even harder if we don't talk about it." She explained the facts of life—or the facts of death—in the emergency room. When a death occurs, the ER rescues, resuscitates, revives. "We want to make sure we're doing what you want. And we're not doing things that you don't want." Quest saw no stomach aches or sprained ankles in Emory's ER that night.

Each of her patients was admitted, at least for observation. The three most critically ill patients—the old woman from the nursing home, who turned out to have had a stroke, and the two men with cancer—survived the night. None was steered to hospice. It wasn't appropriate for her patients on that night. Maybe in the future, after another conversation.

No law passed by Congress, or payment change by Medicare, will change the role of palliative care, or the ingrained responses of emergency physicians. But change has nevertheless begun. Since 2007, more than 140 emergency doctors, nurses, social workers, and chaplains have been through a training program that Quest helps run to inject basic palliative expertise into emergency departments nationwide. Other schools and centers and foundations have started similar work. Pilots and partnerships will arise as health reform unfolds. Doctors in the two disciplines are finding and learning from one another.

The default patterns of emergency medicine are the patterns of much of U.S. medicine writ large. Health reform aims to change not only the financing but, to some extent, the culture of care. Reformers want to move away from a system that rewards the quantity of tests and procedures to one centered on the quality of care. They want a system that does a better job of caring for patients with slowly worsening chronic disease. Palliative care, though maligned and misunderstood during the summer of the "death panels," is part of that culture change. The emergency room is one place to start.

The Lord's Sweet Shelter
Sent by: Adoksaja Das
Philadelphia Vaisnavas Care Team Volunteer

The three things that provided protection for the Pandavas were religion, God, and the brahmanas. As we go along, these three things are the major part of what we need to contemplate when we are considering how we are to conduct our lives. Controlling is Krishna's department and serving is our department. Krishna is in-charge of the outcome of what we do, and we are in-charge of the consciousness that we carry. These are the three areas we need to evaluate in order to make sure we are properly situated in our service in all circumstances of life.

The consciousness behind our acting according to theistic conduct, or religious principles, and following the guidance of brahmanas and Vaisnavas is that it must be done with full dedication to please Krishna. When those three things are in place from our side as servants, whatever Krishna decides in the outcome department is up to Him! Krishna is the master and the controller. What we need to be concerned about is these three things, and when we do those three things, we are protected. Religion protects the religious person. The favor, pleasure, and well-wishing of brahmanas and Vaisnavas gives us protection. Surrendering fully to the satisfaction of Krishna also gives us Krishna's protection. So, there is full protection when there is scripture, Vaisnavas, and Krishna!

From a lecture by HH Romapada Swami on 'Srimad Bhagavatam 1.9.12-24' titled 'Teachings of Bhismadeva Part 3' delivered in Hyderabad, India on March 2005

Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?
by Atul Gawande
The New Yorker
Kindly submitted by: Savitri Devi Dasi, Philadelphia, PA (U.S.)

Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs. Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular; a 1415 medieval Latin text was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe. Reaffirming one’s faith, repenting one’s sins, and letting go of one’s worldly possessions and desires were crucial, and the guides provided families with prayers and questions for the dying in order to put them in the right frame of mind during their final hours. Last words came to hold a particular place of reverence.

These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition—advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn’t. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty—with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost. As for last words, they hardly seem to exist anymore. Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence. Besides, how do you attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying when medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are? Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia, incurable congestive heart failure dying, exactly?...

Srila Prabhupada Tolerated So Much Pain on Our Behalf
Excerpt from a lecture by HH Romapada Swami on 'Srimad Bhagavatam 1.9.1-12' entitled 'Teachings of Bhismadeva-
Part 1' delivered in Hyderabad, India on March, 2005

Submitted by: Adhoksaja Dasa (Philadelphia Vaisnavas Care Team Volunteer)
July 20, 2010

"Grandfather Bhismadeva is in his position on the deathbed and it is said that he was feeling pained by the arrows piercing his body. He was a yogi, but it does not mean he did not know that he had pain. There are so many examples wherein Srila Prabhupada also transcended pain.

When Srila Prabhupada would take prasadam, he would sit on a mat with a little table in front of him. On one particular occasion in Delhi, after taking prasadam, he walked to the place to wash his hands. There was some water on the floor and his foot slipped. His whole body went up in the air and he landed on his back, right on the side of the table. Prabhupada did not make a sound, he looked this way and that way, got up and washed his hands. He was eighty year old at that time! Another time, Srila Prabhupada had a big infected tooth. It was swollen and it was very painful. Srila Prabhupada just tolerated the pain and did not go to a dentist. Some days later, the swelling had gone down and his servant asked if he was fine. Srila Prabhupada then pointed to the tooth in the drawer of his desk and gave to his servant! Srila Prabhupada had trouble with one of his kidneys and had difficulty digesting food. One of his continuing health problems was that the one kidney which was functioning had excess uric acid. So, periodically Srila Prabhupada's hands and feet would swell and he just tolerated it. Part of the purpose for the massage that he took was to let the swelling go down and to relieve the fluids in the body, as it is painful.

Every now and then, unless he had an extreme case of difficulty, he would just go on with his intense schedule of translating and travel. One time, at 1.30 am in the morning, he called his servant and said in a grave voice, "Too much pain that I can't translate". Srila Prabhupada was disappointed because of not being able to translate, not because of the pain. Srila Prabhupada was always in pain, bu

t he tolerated it. It was his transcendental way. Srila Prabhupada had the capacity like that of grandfather Bhismadeva. The next time we have a little ache or pain, we can think of grandfather Bhismadeva and Srila Prabhupada. The technique is to withdraw the consciousness from the temporary and invest the consciousness in the eternal -- specifically Krishna."

A Poem from Braja-Sevaki Devi Dasi on the Passing of Vaisnavas
Submitted by New Vrindavan Communications

There’s a hole left in the kirtan cloud that hovers up above
It sits above our ISKCON world, showering us with love
It’s dark and deep, filled with music notes from Sri Golok
And through its soft white tendrils pass extraordinary folk

One day Gour Govinda that golden path did take
With Tamal Krishna, Sridhara, and two Bhaktis in his wake
Padmalochan, Nirguna, I can only name these few;
Grahila, now Aindra….I think that’s enough, don’t you?

The rain falls from that sweet, sweet cloud, and showers us below
With notes of Krishna’s holy name, a sound that we all know
But now that rain is different, its quality has changed
It carries with it now the tears of the devotees we’ve named

They look constantly upon us and see our hearts break in pain
at separation from them; life will never be the same…
And so we face the future days with choked and heavy hearts
Saturated in the love the raincloud now imparts

And so we come together, looking for that bhakti rain
We step out from our shelters into inevitable pain
We walk into its drenching arms and hold each others hands
Its bitter-sweet addictive taste gives us the strength to stand

We long to fill the earth with our collective kirtan song
Sung with a force that sends those notes right up where they belong
Through the blue-black cloud of love whose contents are so sweet,
To find their way up further, up to Krishna’s lotus feet.

And there we find each other always, nothing is amiss
Our lives entwined, connected by the thread of kirtan bliss
Its Krishna’s form, this holy name, and it’s come to take us home
Because on a day like this we know: that’s where we ALL belong…

For young Kumud Jeendgar, life had never been easy. From the day of her birth
in Jaipur, India in 1972, she had had severe physical disabilities. Her bones were
fragile and their structure crooked, and she was told that even as a fully
grown adult she would stand less than four feet tall.
Local children of her age weren’t very sympathetic to her condition—taller,
stronger, and also crueler than her, they would call her mean names and push
her to the ground when she tried to play with them. So her parents, fearing for the
safety of their fragile little girl, kept her at home with them and away from
other children and a traditional education.

Kumud wished for a normal childhood, in which she could go to school and play
with other kids. “I spent 24 hours a day hankering and lamenting,” she says
now.

“I even dreamt of staying back as the other kids went to school, of sitting on
the sidelines while they had fun. I had no peace of mind.”

One day in 1988, when she was 16, her father brought her some books that he had
gotten from a travelling ISKCON devotee. They were by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami
Prabhupada, whom she had never heard of—at the time there were no devotees and
no ISKCON center in Jaipur. However, she looked through them, selected
Bhagavad-gita As It Is, and began to read.

“Gradually I came to know that I was not really the temporary material body
that I had been lamenting for 24 hours a day, but a spirit soul, part of the
supersoul Lord Sri Krishna,” she says. “And I realized that lamention is not
worthwhile for human beings—as Krishna says in Bhagavad-gita, the wise man
laments neither for the living nor for the dead.”

Kumud began to deeply rethink the way she was approaching her life. But if she
was not to lament, what should she do? What was the purpose of life? Continuing
to delve into the Bhagavad-gita every day, she found out: “Having come into
this temporary, miserable world,” Krishna explains in Bhagavad-gita chapter 9 verse
33, “Engage yourself in loving service unto Me.”

Kumud was thrilled: she was not this body that gave her so much pain, and now
she had a purpose. But then she began to lament and feel sorry for herself
again. She didn’t have the physical ability that other devotees did—what
service could she do for Krishna?

Yet again, Bhagavad-gita came to the rescue: “One percent done in Krishna
consciousness bears permanent results, so that the next beginning is from the
point of two percent,” Srila Prabhupada explains in the purport to verse 40 of
chapter two. Reading this, Kumud gave her heartfelt thanks to Srila Prabhupada
for the happiness and solace that his words gave her.

“Reading Bhagavad-gita changed my life completely,” she says. “I was not able
to go to school like other kids, but the Gita gave me all the knowledge I needed.
I was not able to play with other kids, but every day I worshipped a deity of
baby Krishna as Laddhu Gopal at my home altar, and unlike the other mean children,
he was very kind to me. I had finally found the purpose of my life. I was relaxed,
happy and blissful, thanking Srila Prabhupada every day.”

Joining Srila Prabhupada’s Family
Kumud began to develop a desire to connect with Prabhupada’s family, ISKCON.
But it had no presence in Jaipur, so how could she? She didn’t know where to find
devotees and was worried that if she did, they wouldn’t take her seriously—all
her life she’d been looked down on by society because of her physical
condition.

And besides, she was only seventeen.
“I would pray, Prabhupada, please show me where and how I can connect with your
family,” she recalls. “And Srila Prabhupada, the savior of the suffering souls,
mercifully answered my prayer. When I wrote to New Delhi temple asking for more
books, one devotee, Jitamitra Dasa, wrote back saying that he wanted to see me
helped on the path of Krishna consciousness, although I hadn’t said anything
about my predicament. He advised me to visit New Delhi temple and meet his
Holiness Lokanatha Swami.”
Hearing about Lokanatha Swami, Kumud began to worship him as her spiritual
master with faith that he would become her guru, although she didn’t even know
what he looked like.

Finally, one day in 1990, she was able to visit Lokanatha Swami at the New
Delhi temple with great effort. Entering his office and paying her respects, she
said, “I came from Jaipur to get initiation from you, Guru Maharaja.” He looked at
her. He knew nothing at all about her, yet this little person was calling him
her guru and asking him for initiation. He laughed kindly. “Okay, just try to
come visit me here more often, and after some time I will consider giving you
initiation.”

“I came here just to get initiation from you, and I will not leave you until you
accept me as your disciple,” she said, determined. Lokanatha Swami looked at
her, more seriously now. He knew of her physical challenges, and that she had
been born in an Indian Vedic family, and deduced that as such, she had probably
led a clean, pure life. “Are you chanting Hare Krishna?” he asked.
She replied that she was chanting sixteen rounds a day, and following the four
regulative principles. Finally, he accepted her as his disciple on the spot,
giving her the name Krishna Priya Dasi. She received formal initiation by
fire sacrifice two years later.

Srila Prabhupada to the Rescue
Now Krishna Priya felt she no longer had any reason to lament—she had
Laddhu Gopala, Srila Prabhupada’s books, and a spiritual master in Prabhupada’s
family. In 1996, she married Gopal aDasa and moved to the United States, where she
lived near the Hillsborough, North Carolina temple amongst other members of
Prabhupada’s family. Her life was happy and blissful.

But there was one other thing she wanted to do to make it whole. She had always
been fond of writing poems, and the Bhagavad-gita As It Is had inspired her and
changed her life. She wanted to write poems based on the Bhagavad-gita, to
share its wonderful message with others.

But in 2004, Krishna Priya succumbed to a strange illness that no local
doctors could identify. She returned to Jaipur, but although doctors there
tried hard, they could not figure out what was wrong with her either. Her health
deteriorated every day. Finally, doctors conducted an MRI, and found that her
brain had been dislocated and had slipped down towards her spinal cord.

Most sufferers of this extremely rare disease had passed away during surgery.
Those that survived had been left completely mentally and physically
disabled—vegetables that couldn’t leave their beds.
Krishna Priya’s family were distraught. And although she had often thought
about karma, one of the central messages of the Gita, as a way to explain her
difficult lot in life, Krishna Priya now thought desperately, “Oh Krishna,
what have I done to be put in this situation?”

But her brother was determined to save her life. “I want you to live, and to
live in good health,” he said. “Because I know that you have a special desire
in your heart, and I want to help you fulfill it.”

Searching all over India for the best surgeons, he finally narrowed his
findings down to two. Krishna Priya met both and talked with them about Srila
Prabhupada.

“One of the surgeons seemed very respectful towards Prabhupada, and I told my
family, I want this man to do my surgery,” she recalls. “If I’m destined to
leave my body during brain surgery, then at least I want it to be at the hands
of someone who has respect for Srila Prabhupada.”
Her family accepted her decision. Later, they discovered that the other
surgeon, whom she had rejected, would purposefully make mistakes during brain surgery so
that his patients had to stay in treatment for inordinate amounts of
time—sometimes over a year—thus making him more money. Krishna Priya’s parents
were shocked, but they realized that, in a way, Srila Prabhupada had saved
their daughter.

Then the time for surgery came. A group of nurses arrived to put Krishna
Priya on a rolling cart and take her to the surgery room, from where she
would probably never return. Lying down on the cart, staring up at the ceiling,
she thought about how Vaishnavas spend their whole lives preparing for the
final examination that is death—how they always hope that at the time of death,
they’ll be surrounded by other devotees, chanting the Holy Name. But here she
was, about to leave her body in an unconscious state during surgery.

As the nurses began to pull the cart out of her room, her family broke down in
despair. They knew they would never see her again. Only her sister controlled
her mind and consciousness, and began to pull the cart with the nurses.
Then something happened that Krishna Priya would remember forever. Her
sister turned on the TV. If there was ever an inappropriate moment to turn on
the TV, this was it. But that’s what she did.
And as she did, Krishna Priya heard a familiar voice in her ear. She looked up.
There, on the TV screen, was Srila Prabhupada.

“My sister still asks me, ‘How could that have happened? Why did I turn on the
TV, and when I did, how could Prabhupada have appeared on it at that exact
moment?’” Krishna Priya says now. “And I tell her, ‘Don’t be surprised. Srila
Prabhupada has a Master’s Degree in saving suffering souls. And he came to save
me.”

On the TV screen, Prabhupada was dancing and singing for Lord Krishna. “The
moment I saw him, I completely forgot that I was about to die in a few
minutes,” Krishna Priya says. “I thought, Prabhupada is giving me some
instruction—perhaps the most important instruction of my entire life. So I joined him.

I started to sing and dance for Lord Krishna too. I didn’t care what the nurses or anyone
thought of me. I was happy. I went into the surgery room with a big smile on my
face.”

Krishna Priya’s family waited for hour after agonizing hour. Finally, a doctor
emerged and told them the news: she was alive; but they didn’t know what her
mental or physical condition was.

“My sister came to see me in the Intensive Care Unit,” she recalls. “I was only
half-conscious, but I was calling out ‘Prabhupada, Prabhupada.’ My sister was
delighted because the fact that I remembered his name proved that my brain was
in good working order. She asked me, ‘What do you want to do for Prabhupada?’
Still half-conscious, I replied that I wanted to teach for Prabhupada. This
made my sister even happier, because it showed her that I had drive and focus.”

Krishna Priya recovered fast, getting discharged from the hospital in just one
week. “Everything is working fine, and there are no complications,” the doctor
told her family. “But be careful—her immune system is very weak, and if she
gets any kind of infection, it will not be easy to control.”

Finding Solace in Lord Krishna’s Song
The happy family returned home to Jaipur. But disaster struck again. Every day,
visitors crowded into their home to see how she was doing, and despite her
family’s best efforts to have them keep their distance, she got an infection.
Spreading throughout her body, it finally burrowed deep into her brain. Doctors
at the local Jaipur hospital could not control the infection and at last
declared: “All you can do now is wait until she passes away—it’s impossible to
save her life.”

Once again, however, her brother would not accept it. He took her back to
Bombay hospital, where doctors struggled to save her. They could not re-operate, and
without re-operating, how could they get to her infection and heal it?
Meanwhile, Krishna Priya was tottering between life and death; every day felt
as if it were her last. Yet through her suffering, she thought of her mission to
write poems on Bhagavad-gita As It Is. “I never told people about how this
transcendental literature changed my life,” she thought. “And now I’m going to
leave without fulfilling my life’s purpose.”

With deep sadness in her heart, she began to pray to Krishna. “Oh Lord, please
give me one last chance,” she said. “I promise that if I recover, the first
thing I’ll do is write my poems on the Bhagavad-gita and to tell everyone how
this special book helped me to overcome all obstacles.”

She prayed every day. Her family, her family’s friends, and her fellow devotees
back in New Goloka prayed along with her. And finally, doctors decided to try a
new treatment they’d never tried on her before. There was no guarantee that it
would be successful, but there was no other hope—it was a last resort.
The treatment involved giving Krishna Priya heavy steam therapy several times a
day. It was May, one of the hottest months of the year in India, and every time
the steam touched her fragile little body, the pain was almost unbearable.

But Krishna Priya remembered the Bhagavad-gita’s teachings in chapter 6, verse
19: “As a lamp in a windless place does not waver, so the transcendentalist,
whose mind is controlled, remains always steady in his meditation on the
transcendent self.”

These words from Lord Krishna Himself gave her the power of
tolerance she needed to endure the therapy. And finally, her infection cured,
she was once again discharged from Bombay hospital and returned to her family
home in Jaipur. This time, her family was very careful—no one was allowed into her room apart
from one nurse. But the dark times weren’t over yet.

“I was so fragile that I couldn’t open my eyes because even a tiny bit of light
was too much for them,” she says. “My ears couldn’t tolerate any sound—even
someone entering the room was unbearable. I could not eat food, and survived on
a liquid diet. The doctors said they didn’t think I would recover. Even my
family were losing hope—how could I recover if I could not tolerate any light,
sound or food?”

But Krishna Priya herself did not lose hope. She thought of Srila Prabhupada
and Krishna’s words in the Bhagavad-gita, and one particular verse, 2.14, stood out
in her mind. “O Son of Kunti,” Krishna says to Arjuna, “The non-permanent
appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course,
are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise
from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them
without being disturbed.”

Meditating on this one verse over and over, Krishna Priya had faith in
Krishna’s promise that the darkness and doom would pass just like winter and summer
seasons; that she would be able to see Lord Krishna’s beautiful form once
again, and to listen to her Guru Maharaja’s kirtan again.

Sharing Krishna’s Message With the World
Gradually, she recovered. She could see, listen, and eat once again. And
emerging from the darkness, she remembered her promise to Krishna, and her
mission to write a poetry book based on the Bhagavad-gita.
Staying in Vrindavana, India between December 2006 and March 2007 with her
husband, she decided to try to write poems in the holy land where Krishna once
appeared.

Despite still suffering from dizziness and other health issues, and despite
doctors’ orders not to read or write, she stayed firm in her mission. “Maybe my
situation will get worse again,” she thought. “Now is the time.”

Writing a collection of heartfelt poems in Vrindavana, she enlisted her
mother-in-law, Nancy Rosenberg, in editing the book and her brother in helping to
print it. Upon her return to North Carolina, Krishna Priya added more poems and
illustrated the book with drawings of lotuses, lily pads, conches and Krishna’s
flute to create a second edition. Srila Prabhupada disciple Madan Mohan Mohini
Dasi edited, with Mayapriya Dasi designing the cover. Lotus Lryics: Poems
Inspired by Lord Krishna’s Bhagavad-gita garnered appreciation from the general
public as well as devotees, with the local Herald Sun newspaper publishing an
article about Krishna Priya’s life and book.

Today, Krishna Priya continues to live near the New Goloka temple in
Hillsborough, North Carolina, where the devotees and her mother-in-law Nancy
care for her. She spends her time dressing Giriraj, making garlands for the
deties of Sri Sri Radha Golokananda, cleaning the temple room and cooking Vedic
sweets. She is currently working on a Vedic sweet cookbook featuring recipes
offered to Jaipur’s Sri Sri Radha Govind dev Ji, and has nearly completed
illustrations for it, including a painting of Krishna’s eternal consort Srimati
Radharani.

“I’m not a very qualified person, and my ignorance is very deep, but I was
eager to do something to please Srila Prabhupada,” Krishna Priya says with real
humility. “I feel that I’ve achieved my life’s purpose, in sharing Krishna’s
message with the world in my own way. And now that my work is done, I feel that
whenever I do eventually pass away, I can leave my body peacefully.”
Krishna Priya's artwork and her book, Lotus Lyrics, are available to buy here:
http://krishna.supersoul.com/index.html

With sincere prayers for your well-being and dandavat pranama,
Your humble servants at,

Devotee Care
By: HH Radhanath Swami
Submitted by: Sumati Devi Dasi, Alachua, Florida (U.S.)

Srila Prabhupada Vyasapuja Offering – “I Am Next.”

Bhaktivedanta Hospice Inauguration in Vrindavan, India

Doctors' Religious Beliefs Can Color Their Care

The Tale of Dorothy

We Can't Save You

The Lord's Sweet Shelter

When Medicine Can't Save Your Life

Srila Prabhupada tolerated much pain

Poem on Passing of Vaisnavas

Krishna-Priya
Saved by Krishna's Song

Devotee Care
HH Radhanath

Protection of Our Elderly
Niscala Dasi

Home

“Although the foundation of a building cannot be seen, it holds up the entire building. Without a strong foundation, in time, even the most glorious palace will crumble. The foundation of our communities is in our spiritual practices, our moral values and in our personal relationships.

It is a tendency to prioritize those endeavors that bring quick tangible results. However, those results are soon to crumble unless we balance our priorities with the foundational personal needs of our devotees.

Effective spiritual leaders are responsible to provide mature vision to assure the welfare of our devotees in the present and for the future. People need to feel loved, cared for and appreciated. Creating this environment is foundational to a Krishna Conscious community. Without such relationships few people will continue to chant the holy names with sincere feeling.
Modern corporate farming aims at immediate results with little concern for how it affects the environment in the future. Srila Prabhupada condemned it. He stressed sustainable farming wherein we are very sensitive toward living in harmony with Krishna’s natural plan.

Lord Chaitanya compared Krishna Consciousness to cultivating the seed of bhakti in the field of the heart. It is important that we cultivate devotee’s hearts in a sustainable way wherein they will remain faithful and enthused throughout their lives. Too many times we push devotees to get the fruit of some result but as time passes the tree of his or her enthusiasm dies. Srila Prabhupada would call that ‘penny wise and pounds foolish.’

Srila Prabhupada was a perfect leader. He could push his devotees to get big results but at the same time his love, compassion and care would nourish, sustain and bring the highest joy to our hearts. He profoundly cared for each devotee who came to his society and expected his leaders to do so on his behalf. He expressed his concern again and again for our sadhana, and service attitude but also our health, the quality of our Prasad, our children and he was especially concerned that we felt happy, protected and inspired in our devotional service. We felt nourished and empowered by his love and care even from thousands of miles away and even if we only personally saw him every couple of years. Once when stressing the importance of caring for the devotees, he exclaimed, “I have shed buckets of blood for each and every devotee.

When I was serving in a previous ISKCON community, the priority was given to projects with little vision toward sustaining a quality spiritual life for the people giving their lives to build the project. There was little priority given to educating or encouraging healthy family relationships. Everything was focused on work and sadhana. Any other consideration was labeled as maya. I began to realize that our so-called hard work and strong sadhana is superficial if we are neglecting or causing pain to Krishna’s beloved devotees. It appeared that the devotees were seen as disposable tools to build the project. Grand accomplishments were achieved in that place but without a healthy, caring community it was a building without a solid foundation.

In the course of fulfilling those incredible projects, many devotees’ hearts were broken. They felt uncared for and gradually the morale of the once thriving community disintegrated.

Over the years I witnessed too many people who had come to Srila Prabhupada’s society with innocent faith and enthusiasm only to later suffer emotional anxiety due to neglect, feeling they had been cheated or rejecting ISKCON in bitterness. What I saw broke my heart. I believed that our leaders needed to take serious responsibility, on Srila Prabhupada’s behalf, to be caretakers of his beloved children.

When I came to India, I thought, let me try to do the opposite of what I had seen, projects before people. If I fail, let me fail in this way. Therefore our mission became – If the devotees are cared for spiritually, emotionally and physically, Srila Prabhupad and Krishna will be pleased and the projects will naturally flourish. .”

As lifespan increases, and as the “baby boomers” near retirement age, many countries of the world, who think it is important, are straining under the weight of supporting their elderly. We also have our “baby boomers” – those who joined ISKCON at age 17-25 in the boom time of ISKCON: Prabhupada’s time, and shortly after. A huge number of devotees are now entering their sixties, and are reaching a very vulnerable point in their lives. If they have achieved a position of authority in ISKCON, their financial security is assured. If they left ISKCON while still young, and pursued education and career, again, they are assured of financial security, and may even be quite wealthy, as their superannuation matures... But a great number of devotees gave up all chance of career to surrender to this movement and to do humble and menial services, being not ambitious. They are now at the mercy of various temples, not all of which are compassionate to the needs of the elderly, and even fewer, ready to give them practical assistance. Usually they demand either rent, or full-time active service, which devotees as they age, having never had a career, find less and less possible.

Why did such devotees make no plans, whatsoever, for their retirement, and what is it about our movement, that we feel no responsibility for them? Is there any justification, in our philosophy, for such a situation?

Many devotees, in their vibrant and gullible youth, were preached to that “if you just surrender, Krsna will take care of you!” They believed it, and we believe it, but how does that care-taking happen? Is it like in the Bible- as in manna, falling from heaven? Or maybe, it is like what happened to Sudhama brahmana- you just walk back home and voila’, a palace is there!

Of course, sometimes Krsna does act personally in His devotees’ lives, through a miracle or by divine intercession, but more often, in the normal course of events, He acts through His devotees- those souls on the planet whose will is lined up with His own. Such devotees do not pass on their own responsibilities to the Lord, until all their own energy is exhausted in carrying out His will- His service. Arjuna, before the war of Kuruksetra, wanted Krsna to do the fighting for him- but when enlightened by Bhagavad gita, he took on the responsibility himself, without personal motivation… executing His mission of “vinasaya ca duskritam”

In the manner of “paritranaya sadhunam”, Yuddhistira after the Kuruksetra war, did not have the attitude towards the war widows "Krsna will take care of them" but arranged for their maintenance, meticulously… Arjuna, when escorting Krsna's widows, did not think "Krsna will take care of them" but did everything he could to protect them. Ksatriyas are extremely protective of the vulnerable and defenseless, of women, children and the elderly. They saw themselves as instruments of the Lord- His arms. They knew the Lord could protect anyone personally, who surrendered, but they wanted to act on the Lord’s behalf. It is like seeing someone cleaning the house, and you pick up a cloth to do their work for them. This is service in friendship.

Why then does the Lord declare that He will protect His devotees? Judging from the examples of vaisnava behavior, described above, the stress is not to encourage us to avoid taking responsibility for others, but to challenge oneself- to test one’s faith in the Lord. When the Pandavas were elderly, they left home and, completely unprotected, they headed for the dangerous slopes of the Himalayas, and left their bodies in that way. So a devotee doesn't care for material arrangements for his own protection, trusting in Krsna, but when it comes to others, especially Krsna's devotees, he is very careful to make all arrangements for them.

There are two situations here- Krsna’s protection of oneself, and Krsna’s protection of others. For us, the first situation is about faith, the second about service. Instead, we often use claims of faith to avoid service. When it comes to our own security, we make all arrangements, forgetting that Krsna will protect us, but when it comes to the security of others who have surrendered their lives to the Lord’s service, we then like to quote “Krsna will protect”, thereby exhibiting a lack of service attitude, what to speak of vaisnava compassion, and all the while using “faith in Krsna’s protection” as a way of shielding from guilt and responsibility. As far as Krsna's protection is concerned, following the Pandavas, we should never say "Krsna will take care of you/them" but only "Krsna will take care of me".

Such an attitude pleases the Lord, whereby we can be assured of His protection. On the other hand, why should Krsna take care of us, now or at the time of death, when we do not take care of others? When we are so helpless on our deathbeds, will we remember all those occasions when we neglected those in a helpless situation? Even if we do not remember, Krsna certainly will, as the Witness within. Even if we are calling out to Him, He will surely hide from our sight, because in the past we neglected those who needed us. One needs to be a fish, a creature of the water, to enter water. Similarly, one needs to be godly, like God, to enter God's kingdom. Krsna is known as the shelter of surrendered souls. We have to be so, too.

It may be argued that temples are transcendental shelters for the fallen souls, and therefore ensuring their financial security by demanding rent or full-time service from all the residents, regardless of circumstances, benefits the world, even if it forces those who are devoted- but too poor to give money, or too old to do active service- out on the street. So it may be argued that we are not putting our own security before others, but “seeing the wider picture”. The wider picture, however, includes people’s perceptions of us, and they perceive much more than just the opulence of the temple. If people visit the temple and see a caring dynamic going on there, with the elderly and vulnerable respected, honored and cared for, they are more likely to appreciate us, listen to us, imbibe the philosophy, become devotees themselves, and thereafter, maybe for a lifetime, support the temple through contributions from their wages, as our Indian congregation do, or by selling books and paraphernalia. On the other hand, if we are cold and exploitative of people who have offered their whole lives to this movement, how much more so will we be to the people we are preaching to? They will certainly perceive that our words are nothing more than empty rhetoric, devoid of sincerity. People may be ignorant, but they are not stupid.

A short term solution is to expose the injustice and make devotees aware of the extent of the problem, so that we each feel responsible for our elderly and senior devotees . That is practical compassion- an essential vaisnava quality. A medium term solution is to pressure the GBC to pass a resolution that no devotee who has given their "best" years to ISKCON- i.e. the years they could have spent in economic development and sense gratification- be neglected in time of need. There is now a hospice in Vrindavan for the terminally ill, at least we have that. We also need facilities for those not quite at that stage- for those who can no longer do active service or give money to ISKCON. It should be enough that the elderly chant the Holy Name, which is active service, but not one we benefit from! They can also greet guests and be friendly to them.

There needs to be a GBC resolution that every temple offer facility to elderly devotees, regardless of whether they can presently give active service or money, and the only thing required of them is that they be friendly and talk to guests, and chant. If the temple does not have facility, then the temple leaders should be required -by GBC resolution- to canvass the local devotee community for someone with a spare room, or if not then make inquiries from other temples. Providing facility for senior devotees should be seen by every community as important as chanting 16 rounds, distributing books, making festivals etc. We need to value our elderly devotees.

The long term solution is to have varnashrama, because protection of old people is enshrined in the responsibilities of the ksatriya leader. As Krsna cares for the even the devotees’ material needs, as well as providing inspiration within, so in varnashrama, the ksatriyas act as the Lord’s arms, providing shelter, and the brahmanas act as the Lord’s mouth, providing guidance. In varnashrama, material needs for every member are provided by the sudras, vaisyas and ksatriyas, and in respect to ashrama, the elderly are honored as vanaprasthis and vanaprasthas- a stage just before sannyasa. As a temple would offer all facility to a sannyasi- even one who wanted to stay permanently- so it should offer all facility to a vanaprasthi. It has always been part of vedic culture that husband-less women are taken care of, even if it is at a huge strain to the economy, such as after a war.

Ideally, the son should take care of the mother in his house, but not all women have sons, not all have sons who can afford it, and many do not have devotee sons who think it is important, being influenced by western culture…if the devotee mother had lived in India, neglecting preaching in the west, she might have been spared this danger, but she took the risk- that is surrender. The fact is, however, both in the East and in the West, many of the grown sons of devotee women think that their mothers should be taken care of by ISKCON, as the mothers were probably dedicated more to ISKCON than to family matters, and the sons may be bitter towards ISKCON due to past childhood abuses.

Besides, all men in ISKCON are required to view women, other than their wives, as mothers, so they are behooved to support them . Viewing all women as mother is required to avoid sexual exploitation, but there are other types of exploitation that no mother should be subject to, such as profiting from her dependency. It appears that the loving and respectful terminology of “prabhu” and “mataji” that Prabhupada introduced has now lost all meaning, and the lessons of the sastras, such as Mahabharata reduced to merely entertainment, with nothing learnt.

We have the philosophy, and the examples of the acaryas in how to execute the philosophy, translate it into practical action. This is so we do not misuse the philosophy for our personal motivations. Prabhupada described us as apprentices. An apprentice does not stop with knowing that his master uses a certain tool, say a spanner, he needs to know how the master uses the spanner. He does not use the spanner to hit heads, or knock teeth out, for example. So the apprentice must carefully observe how his predecessor uses his tools. Our acaryas never used the concept of Krsna’s protection to be callous to senior devotees or even vulnerable citizens. It is only to be used on oneself- to try to please the Lord, even if doing so will threaten one’s security. Throwing mundane calculation to the wind, we need to take risks so that others are protected from risk, and given shelter.