"Do not think, 'This is my house,'" I recently wrote to a disciple. "You should always think, 'This is Krishna's house, and I am living here as a servant.'"

I hit the key and sent off the e-mail. Then I began to reflect on what I had just written. "Why don't you take your own advice?" I asked myself.

I got up and walked into the living room of my apartment and looked out the window at the awful city around me—the smokestacks and the dirty, gray apartment buildings.

"This is not my house," I said to myself. "It is Krishna's house. It is Prabhupada's house, and I am living here as a servant. I have to use everything in this house the way Srila Prabhupada would want me to."

Suddenly I felt as if I were in Vrindavan. The big window seemed to become an open veranda and the ugly, drab city turned into the trees and grass of Vraja Dham.

I still knew where I was, of course, and I could still see the smokestacks, but now Vrindavan was just a thought away.

"It's so easy," I said to myself. "Just see what a thought can do. Now I have to try living it."

© Umapati Swami, January 16, 2007

Photo: Deities in a Hong Kong apartment