(from a Brijabasi Spirit dated 1984, titled “New Vrindaban Mud” in the table of contents. I forget the name of the mule on the left but the one on the right is Tapapunjah)

by Madhava Ghosh dasa

New times bring changes, but no matter how much things change, it’s amazing how much they stay the same. To one who only perceives the external, New Vrindaban may seem to be greatly changed. Even to someone who has lived here for a while the transition from the ideal of a simple rural village complete with animal powered self-suf­ficeint agriculture to a mecca for motorized Americans has been a little bewildering.

As those of you who have been fol­lowing our progress can easily under­stand, someone coming here after an absence of ten years might wonder if he had returned to the same place or taken a wrong turn my mistake. How could the few people living in some old farm buildings separated by large ex­panses of mud have been transformed into a small city with its own hard road system?

Whv do I mention mud? New Vrin­daban used to be famous for mud. Sidewalks? Didn’t exist. Lack of sidewalks coupled with no vehicles meant that getting from anyplace to any -place else consisted largely of a struggle to overcome the inhibitory effects of the mud. The sucking sound of mud as it reluctantly relinquished its hold on my I boots is indelibly etched in my memory. The other sound associated with mud is the splash that immediately preceded the realization that my boot got stuck and I just put my bare foot into nearly freezing mud up to my ankle. Jogging? We didn’t have to jog: traversing the mud at a snail’s pace required at least that much energy.

Where once teams of horses and yokes of oxen provided the energy for transportation and agriculture, now diesel trucks and tractors predominate. The pick and shovel have been replaced by huge bulldozers, loaders, and ex­cavators. Milking the cows is now done by vacuum pulsaters rather than by hand.

What to speak of printing presses, a typesetter, a bus system, an accredited school, a summer camp, a radio show, a fiberglass and metalizing shop, a res­taurant, a gift shop, an elaborate water and sewage treatment plant ( I remember when I thought that the new sidewalk to the outhouse was the biggest ad­vancement in material comfort I’d ever see)—the list could go on and on. As a matter of fact, there is so much going on that it takes a computer to keep track of it all. And not even one, more like a dozen!

The most extraordinary thing is the visitors. Sometimes we used to go months without any visitors at all. Now they are coming everyday by the hun­dreds and thousands—busloads even! In the face of all this, how can I say things haven’t changed? Let’s look at my own motives for being here first.

My original attraction was more that of a refuge from the fast lane of sensory overload, jaded on the attractions of the crass consumer society, fleeing from the spectre of nuclear inevitability to a romanticized vision of a nineteenth cen­tury pastoral lifestyle. The New Vrindaban that I found most matched the set of material conditions that I had been seeking: abundant rainfall for the pro­duction of crops, headwaters above the sources of pollution for drinking water, plenty of woods to yield a renewable fuel for heating and cooking, as wide a diversity of naturally occuring medic­inal herbs as will be found anywhere in the USA, an easily defensible ter­rain, and no primary targets within 50 miles. All this added up to the neces­sities of life in a postholocaust world.

Even better, there was an existing community of highly individualistic people functioning in what I perceived to be a tribal unit, a distinct advantage in the contemporary corporate domi­nated landscape, as well as during and after a collapse of the larger orders of society. Of course, New Vrindaban wasn’t the only community that emerged from the sixties that had these attri­butes, but it had other attractions as well.

While the Vietnam war was going on, I had taken a vow to not eat meat until it was over as a means of dramatiz­ing the suffering of the innocent non-combatants. At the time, concerned family and friends had tried in dissuade me, convinced that a meatless diet would not be sufficient to maintain my health. They were all surprised when I didn’t gradually weaken and die; I was pleasantly surprised myself. When the end of the war came, the thought of starting to eat meat again had lost its appeal. Not only had I begun to think of animals as living beings just like my­self, but I felt much lighter on my feet. So I decided to remain vegetarian. As there were few others around so in­clined. I had to do my own cooking, or just eat what everybody else did minus the meat. Coming into the association of devotees and discovering delights like sweet rice, puris. halavah, kacoris. burfy, pakoras. gulabjamins, and laddus was like coming out of a culinary desert into an epicurean oasis.

These conditions still exist, and that alone makes New Vrindaban an attrac­tive place to me, but it just scratches the surface. The biggest thing that hasn’t changed is Srila Bhaktipada.

His Divine Grace Srila Klrtanananda Swami Bhaktipada is the founder and driving force of New Vrindaban. He had the desire to make Srila Prabhupada’s dream of a transcenden­tal place of pilgrimage in the West come true. His faith in the order of his spiritual master, despite what seemed to be overwhelming difficulties, was the inspiration that pulled us out of the mud and into the limelight of a culture suf­fering from the slow starvation of spiritual stagnation.

Solhenitszyn said that the only way that the communist threat could be countered was by spiritual potency. The problem with contemporary American culture, he said, is that it has become spiritually weak because of too much sense gratification. The original settlers had firm spiritual vision, and were will­ing to perform austerities to create a society that looked to Krsna for gui­dance and fulfillment. A vestige of this is the slogan on American money, “In God We Trust.”

Today, Americans have given up their trust in God, and have just kept the money. You don’t see any politi­cians asking everyone to pray for peace, but you do see plenty of them trying to decide how much for weaponery. The more we spend on defense, the safer we’ll be, right? Then why are we so frightened?

Material solutions just aren’t the an­swer. Even if there isn’t a nuclear war, everyone still laces inevitable death. That never changes. The solution also never changes: Krsna consciousness. Srila Bhaktipada, received this greatest of gifts from Srila Prabhupada.