I first met Srila Prabhupada in San Francisco in 1970. He was coming for Ratha-yatra. The temple room was as half as big as this, maybe smaller, but it was packed with about 150 devotees. Kirtana was going on and began to build up to a huge crescendo. So here I was with the other devotees, anticipating with great excitement; we all knew that we had been wandering throughout the universe for millions of lifetimes, and now after millions and millions and millions of years we were getting a chance to meet Srila Prabhupada, a pure devotee of the Lord, who is a messenger from the spiritual world to uplift us and take us back home, back to Godhead, where we will live eternally. So we were prompted.

Then the door opened, and Srila Prabhupada came for the seven o’ clock class on Friday evening. And almost like a mystical experience, I saw that we were in a bubble. All of us were in a literal bubble, a bubble of illusion. I saw a bubble; we were inside, trapped. But wherever Prabhupada walked, the bubble receded. It didn’t touch him; he was outside. We all offered our obeisances, and it felt so good to be in the association of someone who is so pure, who glowed, and radiated purity. And for those few moments I felt a little taste of what it might be like if my heart were clean of all the lust, anger, and greed that reside there even today. But at that moment I felt something so sublime that I couldn’t pull back my emotions. And then when Srila Prabhupada walked, it was just like poetry in motion; he got up to the vyasasana, he sat down, we sat up. It was so beautiful to behold him, a lotus-like person.

Then he spoke and then he coughed and then he quoted a verse but couldn’t quite remember it all. And then my mind began to find faults, and my faith broke. I began to criticize: “Why?” And then immediately the bubble burst, the vision disappeared.

But just that meeting nurtured my devotion for years afterwards. Some people may say that it was due to being psyched up. Maybe there was something there, but to me it was a real experience.

Told by ISKCON’s Sridhara Swami from “The Jolly Swami” by Adbhuta Hari Dasa