A friend recently asked me what my attitude is towards the people to whom I distribute Srila Prabhupada's books. I explained the attitude that I have developed as a process. Anyone can follow this simple formula.
First, I think that because conditioned souls are lost, they are looking for happiness while following a path that will guarantee their distress. Anyone who helps them by providing them with a clue about the right direction is their benefactor. I am approaching them with not just a clue, but a transcendental literature that is itself a doorway to eternal happiness. All the answers to how to avoid distress and gain eternal happiness are within the pages of the sastra in my hand. In this way I cultivate the feeling that I am the best friend of the person I am approaching.
How do you feel toward your best friends? And if you see one of them in difficulty, how do you feel and act when you approach them? This meditation awakens compassion. The more compassion is felt in the heart, the more one is drawn into preaching.
But one must see through the eye of sastra, because the conditioned souls may not present an outward appearance of suffering. By awakening one's own Krsna consciousness, one comes to realize the hellish experience of the conditioned souls, and how their predicament is a state of constant suffering and anxiety, which they are attempting to deny and run from at every moment. It is a most pitiable condition; not at all what Sri Krsna had in mind when He expanded Himself into these, His precious parts and parcels. His plan was for them to experience ever expanding bliss in His direct association. Instead they are worried about the economy, and their health, their children's health, and on and on. The worries and anxieties are unlimited.
When one is firmly convinced that the only solution to these problems is Krsna consciousness, then he or she begins looking, consciously and unconsciously, for opportunities to preach and distribute books, and to facilitate both.
