Udayananda Dasa
IN JANUARY last year a woman in her early seventies came into my art shop at the local shopping mall. She bought several paintings for her home and while I framed them we talked. She told me her name is Harriet Barret, she is the mother of three children and the grandmother of seven, and she had been married for thirty-six years before her husband passed away in 1984.
Somehow we got to the subject of reincarnation. When Harriet mentioned that she believed in reincarnation, I replied, "It's not a question of belief but a matter of fact." I told her I've been a student of Vedic literature, specifically the Bhagavad-gita, for more than twenty years. I explained some of the Gita's teachings, and she was very receptive to the philosophy. At the end of our conversation I asked her to come again.
"There's a book I want to give you," I said.
When she came back two weeks later. I gave her a copy of Bhagavad-gita As It Is. She took the book and thanked me enthusiastically.
Every week since then she has been coming to my shop asking questions about vegetarianism, material attachments, the three modes of nature, and so on. One day she asked if I knew anything about meditation.
"Oh, yes," I said. "I've been doing mantra meditation for many years. Someday I'll show you how to meditate with beads."
A few weeks went by, and Harriet kept coming to my shop. "When are you going to show me how to meditate?" she would ask. But because of my busy work schedule, I just couldn't find time to show her how to chant Hare Krsna on beads.
Then one day she called me on the phone. By then she had read more than four hundred pages of the Bhagavad-gita.
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