Speakar: Srila Prabhupada
Source: On the Bowery
His duty, whether on the fourteenth floor of a Riverside Drive apartment building or in a corner of a Bowery loft, was to establish Kṛṣṇa consciousness as the prime necessity for all humanity. He went on with his translating and with his constant vision of a Kṛṣṇa temple in New York City. Because his consciousness was absorbed in Kṛṣṇa’s universal mission, he did not depend on his surroundings for shelter. Home for him was not a matter of bricks and wood, but of taking shelter of Kṛṣṇa in every circumstance. As Prabhupāda had said to his friends uptown, “Everywhere is my home,” whereas without Kṛṣṇa’s shelter the whole world would be a desolate place.
Often he would refer to a scriptural statement that people live in three different modes: goodness, passion, and ignorance. Life in the forest is in the mode of goodness, life in the city is in passion, and life in a degraded place like a liquor shop, a brothel, or the Bowery is in the mode of ignorance. But to live in a temple of Viṣṇu is to live in the spiritual world, Vaikuṇṭha, which is transcendental to all three material modes.
And this Bowery loft where Prabhupāda was holding his meetings and performing kīrtana was also transcendental. When he was behind the partition, working in his corner before the open pages of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, that room was as good as his room back at the Rādhā-Dāmodara temple in Vṛndāvana.