Coming to Krsna by reading books
On my way to take prasada at a devotee's house, I asked him how he joined.
"When I was seventeen, I started asking the big questions about life and reading books on philosophy. My father observed this and told me that he'd gotten a book ten years ago from the Hare Krsnas — it was in the attic. So I went up there and found the Bhagavad Gita, very dusty. I brought it down to my room, wiped off the dust, and started reading it. I was thinking it was from another dimension, the most amazing book I'd ever read. Then I moved to Czech Republic. While in Czech I met a devotee, and he distributed to me the abridged version of the Lilamrta. When I read that, that was it — I just wanted to be a devotee. So I found out where the temple was and joined. A year later I asked my father where he got the Gita. He said he had worked as a carpenter and the devotees hired him to build a stage for a festival. After the job was finished they gave him a Bhagavad Gita. He put it in the attic and it was collecting dust for ten years. Like a transcendental time bomb, it was ticking away waiting to explode when I picked it up.” When I went back to Ukraine to visit my father I told him about what I had read in the Bhagavad Gita. He liked what he heard and also started chanting 16 rounds.
Another devotee in Czech got a book somehow. His kitchen table was not properly balanced so he put the Science of Self Realization under the leg to make the table level. It was under a table leg for eleven years until he was moving to another place. When he picked up the book, he read the cover and thought that it sounded interesting. So he read it, and he is now a brahmacari in the temple in Brno.
The moral is: Just get the books out, because we don't know how, when, or where Krsna's mystic directions are going to change people's heart and bring them to Krsna.
Your servant,
Vijaya Dasa
