Ability (Conversations)

Expressions researched:
"abilities" |"ability"

1968 Conversations and Morning Walks

Interview with LA Times Reporter About Moon Trip -- December 26, 1968, Los Angeles:

Prabhupāda: No, can you inform me... Recently you told me that they're within sixty miles from the moon planet? Is that a fact?

Reporter: I'm afraid I don't know. I don't know what the mileage was.

Hayagrīva: They circled it. They circled the moon at sixty miles.

Prabhupāda: So if they're, I mean to say, circumambulating within sixty miles, how they could not land? They could not go further sixty miles?

Reporter: Well, they didn't want to land at this time.

Prabhupāda: Why this?

Reporter: That was to test their ability.

Prabhupāda: Why didn't?

Hayagrīva: They didn't have the mechanism ready.

Prabhupāda: But for sixty miles, fifty miles, if they could stand sixty miles off from the moon planet, they were already on the atmosphere. Suppose if I am sixty miles away from a city, I am in that atmosphere. So if I could stay that atmosphere, how it is possible that, how it is wonderful that they could not go further sixty miles? I don't believe these things, these statements, that they were within sixty miles area. This is simply imagination.

1971 Conversations and Morning Walks

Room Conversation -- August 21, 1971, London:

Haṁsadūta: And another thing I wanted to ask you about, Prabhupāda, is that Maṇḍalībhadra, he wants to make your literature perfect, which is natural because we want to make the nicest presentation. But the devotees are saying that the translation... For instance, this Easy Journey to Other Planets, has been in the process so long, it has so many times been reworked, that it's no longer palatable to them. They don't even read it. They'd rather have the English version. So I know that Your Divine Grace has said you have full faith in his ability to do the work...

Prabhupāda: No, no. If you... you find out somebody else. He can also do.

Haṁsadūta: Because my opinion is that he's becoming overworked, it's becoming strained, so much so that we're not even able to bring it to the printer because he insists on making every time more and more corrections.

Prabhupāda: (chuckles) It never comes to perfection.

Room Conversation with Dr. Weir of the Mensa Society -- September 5, 1971, London:

Dr. Weir: That's where your line is so very good in saying that the real evolution of man's mind has been his ability to produce more and more the functions of whatever the mind may be. But the mind is just as indivisible as God. We know what the brain is, but we don't know what the mind is. Yet more and more of it under conscious control instead of being irrationally eruptive(?).

Prabhupāda: But there is the summum bonum of that realization. That is explained in Bhagavad-gītā: bahūnāṁ janmanām ante, jñānavān māṁ prapadyate (BG 7.19). After many, many births of this mental evolutionary process, when actually he becomes wise he becomes God conscious and surrenders to God. That is real evolution(?). That evolution will go on. But when it comes to the summit, that is God realization. Vāsudevaḥ sarvam iti (BG 7.19). God is cause of all causes. That is final realization. Unless one comes to that point he has not come to the perfection of evolutionary process of the mind and intelligence.