Thread: How I ended up in Krishna Consciousness

Hello,

I want to tell you the story of how I ended up in Krishna Consciousness.

I was going to Parkzicht every week from 1983, it was a discotheque situated in the Euromast park in Rotterdam, I met all of my friends there and one day between 1983 and 1987, I was walking with a group of friends towards Parkzicht and we came there to drink beer, smoke weed, hit on girls and listen to the awesome music of that time, so we were walking on the road just before we entered the park and suddenly I saw something flying in the air in the distance, I stopped to watch what it was while my friends were walking towards Parkzicht, it was on the road in front of the Dijkzicht hospital, now called Erasmus MC and I stopped to see what this flying thing was.

It was flying towards me while I stood still and my friends were all walking towards the small hill to enter the park and suddenly I realised that what I saw was a UFO!

I called my friends to come and watch this with me, but they were not interested and they were already walking on the small hill, I decided to watch the vehicle and was standing on the road and I saw this amazing machine flying towards me, it was black, church bell shaped and had coloured rotating light on the bottom of the machine, I was so amazed, the machine flew without making any sound above my head some 50 feet in the air and I watched it dissapear next to the building of Dijkzicht on the right side of me.

With this experience I quickly was running after my friends and enjoyed a good night out, Parkzicht closed at 8 am every weekend, so we couod enjoy us the entire night.

But I never forgot this experience and the days after I read in the newspaper that more people had seen this UFO and the newspaper explained that it was a traffic plane and I just didn´t buy that, I knew what I had seen and I was not drunk or high at that time, that came later in Parkzicht.

So, a few years later, I was becoming a small time criminal because of new friends and Parkzicht changed in early 1990 into a house, techno house discotheque, and I was doing drugs, took ecstacy pills and so on, and I was very much into materialism and something happened in September 1993 and I lost all interest in going out and lost also all interest in aquiring large amounts of money, I rented a house with my brother Patrick, I lived upstairs and he lived downstairs and entered a life with no stress, I smoked weed every day and one day I read a book of Erich von Danicken with the Dutch name: ¨Waren de Goden Kosmonauten¨ which translates: ¨Chariots of the Gods¨ and in that book was written that the UFO story was real and that it was in Indian mythology very common and in India the UFO´s were called Vimanas.

So I got excited about all of this, can you imagine, the UFO I had seen was mentioned in the Indian scriptures which dated back at least 5.000 years!

I lived together with Patrick in that house, Pleinweg 165 a and not too long after that I had rented the neighboring house, Pleinweg 157d, and one day in the spring of 1997, I was walking towards the metro station Zuidplein and passed a house on the Pleinweg and I looked into the house and saw that it was a sort of store and I stopped to check it out and saw all kinds of Indian books, I thought back to the Vimanas mentioned in the Mahabharata and went inside the store,

There I met the temple president of the Hare Krishna temple in Rotterdam, Sri Hari and his wife Laxmi and i asked them about the vimanas, and they told me that it was a common thing in Indian scriptures and i was happy, see, i didn´t question what I saw a decade ago, or longer, and we were having a good talk about spirituality and Krishna, I left the place with a rosary, the Hare Krishna mantra and the Bhagavat Gita as it is by Srila Prabhupada and one day in May 1997,it was on May 4th or 5th, i was in my bedroom upstairs in my house on the Pleinweg 157 d and it was around 09.00 am and i was sittiing on a small pillow and decided to chant this mantra for the very first time, so I sat down and whispered the mantra, Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Ram Ram Hare Hare and after a few seconds I experienced this:

¨Suddenly I was in another realm, another dimension, there was no time, there was no heat and no cold and I was moving around my axis and was moving up, and then I saw every letter which I chanted passing before my eyes, I saw the letter H and it was a square meter and on that letter were thousands of little lights which were exploding, it was a magical sight, I saw the next letter, the letter A and the same thing happened, and then I thought:"¨Where am I?¨

and then i was back in my body and opened up my eyes, I was puzzled and amazed and the only thing I wanted to do is to go to India to get to know more of this stuff.

Not too long after this I saw an episode of Lonely Planet on Discovery channel which was about Northern India. I saw in the documentary that Rishikesh was the yoga capital of India, and even the world, and I watched the makers of that documentary filming an Ashram, the Ved Niketan Ashram in Ram Jhula and saw a Swami in the documentary, Swami Dharmananda, he was teaching yoga in the ahsram to western students and I was so amazed by this that i decided to go to that place in India.

So I did, i gave away my house to a friend of mine, Patricia, and went to India on October 6th 1998 and stayed there for 4 months, learning about yoga! When I got back from India I went to live with my brother again on the Pleinweg 165 a and I started to work in construction because i wanted to go back to India again, i left Holland on June 15th 1999, my birthday and stayed for 6 months in india, i had the greatest time back then.

Then something not so pleasant happened in 2002 and I went to india for the 3rd time, from October 2002 to January 2003, it was a tough time. And one day, in the spring of 2005, I met Sri Hari again as I was biking around and he told me to go to Radhadesh, that is a Hare Krishna community in the Belgian Ardennes and I went there, out of curiousity, in March 2005, but I didn´t like it there, I was still addicted to smkoing weed. But not long after that I got addicted to smoking crack cocaine and then I went to Radhadesh again on July 10th 2006, just after the Wolrd Cup Soccer final and I have to say that Krishna got me off the drugs because i really like it there and I stayed there for a while, sometimes Rotterdam, sometimes Radhadesh.

So this is how I came to Krishna Consciousness, all because of a UFO!