I had decided to spend this year's Gaur Purnima Festival in Sofia/Bulgaria and came already ten days earlier in order to visit other small devotee communities in Burgas and Varna. The devotees also drove me to a privately owned farm project three and half hours away from Sofia. Here, two twin brothers have a commercially set up farm with a huge area of greenhouses for growing all kinds of vegetables and flowers which they sell in the nearby cities; a farm project starting off with serious farming.
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My three months' stay in Mayapur was a busy, dynamic and blissful time, with lots of preaching engagements and programs - 6 weeks of courses, then various classes and interviews for youtube channels, and above all: the 4-day ILS, the ISKCON Leadership Sanga. I was invited to offer a presentation to the participating leaders on the Vanaprastha Ashram which was well attended and received; I also had a stall presenting the Institute for Spiritual Culture offering the 6 books I published. By Krishna's mercy my new book "The Vanaprastha Ashram - Meeting Death With Joy" came out three weeks before the ILS took place which was a great opportunity to launch it. On these four days, I was from early morning til evening on my stall, meeting devotees from all around the world, getting their contacts and distributing lots of books. Book distribution to the practising devotees is by far more satisfying to my heart than distributing books to non-devotees. Srila Prabhupada's famous letter he wrote in 1972 to Hamsaduta comes to mind:
"Now we have got so many students and so many temples but I am fearful that if we expand too much in this way that we shall become weakened and gradually the whole thing will become lost. Just like milk. We may thin it more and more with water for cheating the customer, but in the end it will cease to be any longer milk. Better to boil the milk now very vigorously and make it thick and sweet, that is the best process. So let us concentrate on training our devotees very thoroughly in the knowledge of Krishna Consciousness from our books, from tapes, by discussing always, and in so many ways instruct them in the right propositions." |
Devaki Devi Dasi's Traveling DiaryDevaki Devi Dasi is sharing her realizations and adventures in her Traveling Diary. Welcome to relish this nectar! |
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