Misfits

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them.

But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Jack Kerouac

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Maybe we shuld just go mad - and change the world!

I would say that Srila Prabhupada was such a person, in a spiritual sense. I read briefly yesterday a talk he gave to some international student society in 1969. He started of by speaking about the meaning of 'international', in that we want to bring people together, in e.g. the UN, but that we can only do that when we put God in the centre. That's a truly revolutionary thought, isn't it?

When you throw a stone in the water you get rings of ripples expanding from it, without them colliding with each other. But the opposite happens when you throw in a few stones at the same time. Real harmony can thus only be there when we place God is in the centre.

We expand our concerns from ourselves to international matters, like the expanding ripples in the water, but it will only work when the centre is right. It's such a simple concept, but, O so deep.

Some say that religion is the cause of all the troubles in the world: that we have too many people putting God in the centre and thus we have so many conflicts. I would say that we have too few putting God in the centre - far too few.

Sometimes we use the name of God for our own self-interest, or to justify our feelings of hatred and desires for revenge, but then we've strayed away from the centre. God is a not a baseball bat, nor a ladder for wealth and power - He's so much more sublime and wonderful than that.

A devotee of the Lord (Prabodhananda Sarasvati) compares the highest achievements in this world with a flower in the sky (akasha-pushpayate); i.e. they are imaginary or without real substance. A flower in the sky is not tangible, nor does it have any fragrance - it's just an idea. You can't enjoy it because it doesn't exist. This is how this devotee feels about wordly goals, because he's tasted some of the beauty of God.

This does not mean that such a devotee feels contempt for the world - no, he'll just remind us again, and again, to put God in the centre of our lives, just like Srila Prabhupada did. And that's maybe how we can change the world...