Monday Morning Greetings 2026 #29 – The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Rise

Sometimes we see very senior Vaiṣṇavas — devotees who go back to the roots of ISKCON, with decades of steady service, and sādhana — still struggling in various ways in their twilight years of Krishna consciousness. They sometimes even question their taste for the holy name, or struggle, and temporarily fall. The doubt then naturally arises: “If even such long-standing practitioners have these problems, does the process of bhakti-yoga even work?” This post is dedicated to answering that question. First, I think it’s worth putting Śrīla Prabhupāda’s līlā in a cosmic perspective. Sri Caitanya appears once in a day of Lord Brahma, which lasts 8.64 billion years. In terms of Brahma’s time that would be 11:29 AM. Śrīla Prabhupāda then appears less than a second later. And mystically, in that same miniscule cosmic sliver—a few milliseconds later, also within 11:29 AM — a few souls appear to assist Śrīla Prabhupāda The universe is filled with unlimited conditioned souls, many of them…