'Angkor Wat' was originally 'Visnuloka' a wonder of the world seen in Cambodia whose history was what historians call 'Greater India' and traditionalists call 'Mahabharata'.

 

Vedic gods 'Visnu' 'Siva' 'Brahma' were the main deities and courtyards were ornamented with 'Garuda' 'Surya' 'Indra' 'Airavata' and 'Apsaras' dancing girls of heaven.

 

Cambodia has a history of Vedic kings and Vedic place names as in 'Hariharalaya' 'Yasodharapura' 'Mahendraparvata' and a Vedic culture also seen within its rivers.

 

 

 

'Mekong' the sixth largest river in Asia journeys from the Tibetan plateau through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and into the South China Sea.

 

'Mekong' means 'mother of all rivers' as seen in 'Mae Phra Kongkha' a deity worshipped in Thailand where 'Mae' means 'mother' and 'Kongkha' means 'Ganga'.

 

'Mae Phra Kongkha' a river goddess who travels on a crocodile as Ganga travels on the back of a crocodile and so 'Konga' within 'Mekong' is none other than 'Ganga'.

 

'Mekong' produces 'Bassac' a river whose Sanskrit name is composed of 'sakti' meaning 'power' and 'pa' meaning to 'protect' one with powers ( sakti ) to protect ( pa ).

 

'Mongkol Borey' a river within Cambodia which flows throughout 'Mongkol Borey' a name composed of Sanskrit which means the auspicious ( mangala ) city ( puri ).

 

'Boribo' a river in Cambodia journeys across the district of 'Baribour' and possesses the same name whose origin is Sanskrit as in city ( puri ) of abundance ( bhara ).

 

 

'Saen' is a river within Cambodia whose name is composed of 'sena' a word from Sanskrit meaning 'soldier' hence this river is said to mean the river of the soldiers ( sena ).

 

'Tonle San' a river in Cambodia and Vietnam and tributary of the 'Mekong' its original name 'Sesan' is seen in Sanskrit describing the celestial naga 'Sesa' and 'Sesan'.

 

'Pursat' is a province within Cambodia and a major river whose name is composed from the language of Sanskrit meaning an enlightened ( buddhi ) being ( sattva ).

 

 

"Indian art accompanied Indian religion across straits and frontiers into Sri Lanka, Java, Cambodia, Siam, Burma, Tibet, Khotan, Turkestan, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan. In Asia all roads lead from India.” Will Durant.

 

"2000 year old ties uniting us with India is not hyperbole, 2000 years ago the first navigators, Indian merchants and Brahmins brought to our ancestors their gods, techniques and organization." Prince Sihanouk - King of Cambodia.

 

"This was the time of the great Indian expansion, when seafaring merchants fanned out across the Indian Ocean and brought to Southeast Asia a seething ferment of new ideas." National Geographic Society.

 

 

 

 

Srila Prabhupada said, He (Krishna) asked me to come here and I said that I did not want to go because it was such a dirty place. He (Krishna) told me if you go I will arrange so many nice palaces for you to live in. I said but I do not want to go. He (Krishna) said you just go and write these books and I will make it comfortable for you. So Srila Prabhupada said because He asked me to write these books I came.

 

Once in Bombay Srila Prabhupada ordered me to come to his room and listen to him preach to some life members. I sat there and listened for almost an hour. After they left he started to chastise me. Why are you not coming here every day to listen to me preach? You are one of my leaders if you do not learn how to preach from me then what will happen? Then he quoted a verse in Sanskrit from Bhagavad Gita and asked me if I knew this verse in English, where it was in the Gita, and what the meaning was. I unfortunately had no answers. Are you reading my books everyday? He asked. I admitted my neglect. If you do not read my books everyday then how will you learn? You are going out to make life members and collect big donations but you are not reading my books. You must read my books every day!

 

Then he said, even I read my books every day. Do you know why? I proffered no answer and waited for the revelation. Because every time I read these books even I learn something! I sat in stunned silence. Then he asked do you know why I learn something every time I read these books? Now I was completely bewildered. Because I have not written these books. What transpired next was simply amazing. He looked at me very intently making strong direct eye contact. He spoke with great authority but with a mystical mood bordering on the ecstatic as he began to describe how his books are written.

 

Every day he said, when I sit down here to write these books, he was now looking into space waving his hands in the air his voice filled with transcendental emotion, Krishna personally comes and dictates every word. I got the sense that Krishna was present in the room at that moment but I was too blind to see Him. Now Srila Prabhupada returned his eyes to mine. Therefore he said, whenever I read these books even I learn something and if you read my books everyday you will also learn something every time you read them.

 

(Here is the actual interview which this acecdote is based on)

 

 

 

 

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, "Where is that?" If I offer a clue by referring to "Bikini", they say, "You mean the swimsuit." Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 - the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years. Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered "unsafe" on a Geiger counter. Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called "Bravo". The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

 

 

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women's Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: "You, too, can have a bikini body." A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different "bikini bodies", each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers. Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished, the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

 

 

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions" of democratic societies. He called it an "invisible government". How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

 

 

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make "the world free from nuclear weapons". People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was all fake. He was lying. The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

 

 

 

Haridas prabhu first came to Bombay from Bangalore, looking out for a job. When he failed, he started picking pockets. This landed him in Arthur Road Jail. There, in a dust-bin, he found a copy of BTG. While going through the magazine, he saw a photograph of Srila Prabhupada and he was immediately attracted – not to Srila Prabhupada, but to his golden wristwatch. He vowed that when he was released, he'd steal the watch.

 

On release, he walked all the way to Akash Ganga, that was the address given in BTG. There he was told that they had shifted to Juhu. He walked all the way to Juhu, since he had no money. Krishna was actually purifying him before meeting a pure devotee. In Juhu, he met Giriraj Maharaj. Maharaj told him that Srila Prabhupada was in Hyderabad and was expected to be in Bombay very soon. Maharaj then invited him to stay in the temple. He would get free prasad and staying facilities. He did not mind shaving also.

 

After a few days he was exasperated and he asked Giriraj Maharaj if he could go to Hyderabad. Maharaj said okay. He then asked if he would get ticket money or would he have to steal it? Giriraj Maharaj gave him the money and told him to return soon. In Hyderabad, Srila Prabhupada was giving darshan when Haridas prabhu entered. Srila Prabhupada saw him and called him forward. On being asked, Haridas prabhu said that he had got attracted to Srila Prabhupada’s watch and that he wanted to steal it. Srila Prabhupada said, “You want this watch?” and he immediately removed it. Haridas prabhu said “No”, now he had lost interest in the watch, but Prabhupada insisted he keep the watch.

 

Prabhupada asked how long he was staying. Haridas prabhu said that he had promised Giriraj Maharaj that he'd return as soon as he had met Prabhupada. Srila Prabhupada replied, “You must keep a promise, never to break it”. Haridas prabhu liked this instruction.

 

 

 

One morning we were walking over to milk the cows and this big black and white cow, Kalindi, a Friesian, was blocking our entrance. We had tried unsuccessfully to make her pregnant. She had visited a bull several times and we had tried to artificially inseminate her, all to no avail.

 

But this morning she just stood in our way. She was not being aggressive just blocking our entrance to the field. We looked at her and saw that her milk bag, udders, were big and we looked at each other, commenting how unusual this was. For a cow, Kalindi was middle-aged. Kalindi was the leader of the herd. No one messed with her, not the other cows nor the bigger bullocks. She would just head butt them into being submissive to her.

 

So what's going on then, Kalindi, we asked her and she stood sideways, as if to ask us to milk her. So we washed her udders with warm water as we would the others and we crouched either side of her and we milked her. She just stood there as if she had been milking all her life.

 

We milked out two big stainless steel buckets full. And then we rubbed into her udders some Japanese Mint cream and she just walked off. It was astonishing. She never came to the parlour for milking, always on her own and on her terms. And she then milked for another 8-9 years every day until she left her body in the 1990's.

 

We all loved Kalindi so much; she was a real character among the cows. And in the straw barn, which she regularly broke into, she would lie down for a good afternoon siesta. And on Sunday afternoons we would go and play with her with the children and lie on tummy and rest our heads and she was as gentle as a baby.

 

One day Kalindi had broken through the wooden fence. We had put up an electric fence as well, but she just walked straight through that one too. Right next to the pasture were some tunnels of plastic to grow flowers indoors. And she had pushed the door open and walked right down the middle of the tunnel and eaten all of the marigolds.

 

When we found her in the morning she was back in the pasture lying down, just smelling of marigolds and burping marigold smells. We looked at the tunnel and saw the marigolds had been eaten and Kalindi has passed stool all over the place. So we laughed. But Kalindi was not laughing this morning, she had gorged herself on marigold flowers and plants, cows sometimes have the propensity to gorge, and she looked bad. A bit like the "morning after the night before" when too much alcohol is consumed.

 

"Okay girl you're gonna have to get up to be milked", and she knew exactly what was going on. So she struggled to her feet for milking. When she got up she was just shaking badly. And when we were milking her we kept looking to see when she was going to fall on one of us. We finished milking quickly and she fell down exhausted. We looked at her wistfully and said not to raid Krishna's flowers anymore and she never went into the greenhouses ever again.

 

We had moved to Wales before she left her body, but I was on a festival preaching programme in Hungary when the message came through that she had left her body and we had a wonderful feast in her honour. Kalindi was a great cow, so friendly and loving and so independent and naughty. And because you can have such a wonderful, moving relationship with cows it made me cry when she had departed.

 

But that's the magic of Cow Protection, it's all so personal. And based on my experience and other devotees' stories with cows, I want to encourage all devotees to make some effort to have a personal relationship with Krishna's cows because you just don't know what will happen. And you never know, you just might become enthralled and taken in by the magic of Cow Protection.

 

This article has originally been posted in the Sampradaya Sun, where you can read it in its full length.

 

 

We are all in Transit

 

 

Please visit our Blog to read more on the humanitarian crisis of immigration and the actual background of it from the spiritual point of view.

 

Here is a short video from Budapest's International Train Station highlighting the refugee crisis which no one seems to be able and willing to handle.

 

 

 

The following is an article by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, published in Back To Godhead magazine Vol. 14, No. 14, January 1, 1979.

 

The Vedic literatures are full of references to God's form. For example, it is said that God has no hands or legs, but that He can accept anything you offer: apani-pado javano grhita. Also, it is said that God has no eyes or ears, but that He can see everything and hear everything. So, these are apparent contradictions, because whenever we think of someone seeing, we think he must have eyes like ours. This is our material conception. Factually, however, God does have eyes, but His eyes are different from ours. He can see even in the darkness, but we cannot. God can hear, also. God is in His kingdom, which is millions and millions of miles away, but if we are whispering something conspiracy He can hear it, because He is sitting within us.

 

So, we cannot avoid God's seeing or God's hearing or God's touching. In the (Bhagavad-gita 9.26) Lord Krsna says,

 

patram puspam phalam toyam
yo me bhaktya prayacchati
tad aham bhakty-upahrtam
asnami prayatatmanah

 

"If somebody offers Me flowers, fruits, vegetables, or milk with devotional love, I accept and eat it." Now, how is He eating? We cannot see Him eat, but He is eating. We experience this daily: when we offer Krsna food according to the ritualistic process, we see that the taste of the food changes immediately. This is practical. So God eats, but because He is full in Himself, He does not eat like us. If someone offers me a plate of food, I may finish it, but God is not hungry, so when He eats He leaves the things as they are. Purnasya purnam adaya purnam evavasisyate: God is so full that He can eat all the food that we offer and still it remains as it is. He can eat with His eyes. This is stated in the Brahma-samhita. Angani yasya sakalendriya-vrttimanti: "Every limb of the body of God has all the potencies of the other limbs." For example, we can see with our eyes, but we cannot eat with our eyes. But if God, simply sees the food we have offered, that is His eating.