Woodstock Festival -- Poland 2005

The Polish Woodstock Festival has been going on for eight years and our Hare Krishna movement has been participating for seven of those years. Putting on this Woodstock Festival, of course, is a great endeavor. Practically speaking, we plan and we organize throughout the entire year. It's a huge operation, a mega operation.

We begin setting up the festival two weeks before the event. We have a big tent, actually literally the size of a football field or a soccer field, 100 meters long and 30 meters wide. What I found was nice was the big tent because then it was a place of kind of like relief for all the kids that were there because in the whole place there was no place actually they could sit down. They would come sit in the tent and then, you know, so the longer they sit the more they get, take advantage of the program that's going on.

20, 25 different tents around the field depicting different aspects of Vedic culture. Bend the knees, look up towards the ceiling. Everything's very clean, it's very colorful, it's very blissful, it's very entertaining, and it's very educational. We have, you know, our book tents, and we have questions and answers, and a lot of, you know, kids come for different reasons.

So Krishna, he's interested in love. So he's created the soul with free will. They stumble in here because they're drunk or they come just because they're curious. Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.

Hare Krishna twice. We teach people to chant the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra with beads and they'll chant a couple of rounds with the devotees. The devotees will explain the significance of the mantra. We have a culture that is thousands of years old and very rich with singing, dancing, feasting, philosophy, etc.

And when we present it in an attractive way like this, people are impressed. We have our Hare Krishna food distribution. The most popular tent is the prashadam. We're distributing 100,000 plates of prashad.

We have some 250 devotees in the kitchen crew. Throughout the whole day and even into the night, devotees are distributing. Often times there are big lines of people waiting to take the prashad. We distribute it for a very, very nominal fee so that people respect what they receive.

Hare Krishna. We're also very much indebted to our donors who may or may not have been to the Woodstock Festival. Most of them actually don't have the chance. Understanding the significance of this event, they contribute to this event from different parts of the world.

So all together it's a great extravaganza, transcendental extravaganza. extravaganza it's amazing how many people join in with the kirtan the response is wonderful overwhelming people join in the kirtan they dance they chant in great ecstasy and so on this way even people that may not have come to Krishna's village of peace they get to hear the holy name we develop a very strong close relationship with mr. Oshak he's a humanitarian and he raises 10 million dollars a year for his foundation charity organization he does that through a telethon the first week in January national television television gives him 24 hours and he comes on and he speaks to the people he has different groups different entertainment and he requested donations and he raises approximately nine to ten million dollars a year through that one telethon as a thank you to the support that he gets especially the young people who help them he's kind of a folk hero amongst the young people he puts on this Woodstock festival and it's a free festival and every year the number of people who are coming, it grows.

This year, over 400,000 young people have come to the Woodstock Festival. He's helping us and we're helping him to help the people lead a better life and ultimately to get this wonderful process of Krishna consciousness. And we do it in a big way. People come to the Woodstock Festival because people like festivals.

But the festival doesn't mean drinking beer and getting drunk and falling unconscious and becoming degraded and unclean the material world looks seemingly attractive but really it's only a perverted reflection of the spiritual world so we can show the real culture of the spiritual world where every living entity has an intimate loving relationship with Krishna with God then people will be attracted away from this material existence to the spiritual sky we're all walking is dancing, all talking is singing and there's a festival every day. We even have a temple, we build a temple and we have our Radha Krishna deities there, we have continuous kirtans. In that tent there are also kirtans going on 14-15 hours a day and very often big groups of people chanting hari krishna we have a very dynamic program of dances lots of kirtan we have some great kirtanias here this year bhakti bring a govinda maharajas here with his group we have devotees from ukraine and these are artistic devotees and so they're helping us with our stage program I didn't want to break your command, but Sita insisted. also try their best to, you know, put in, you know, very serious time and energy to make the program possible.

It's wonderful to see Lord Chaitanya's mercy being distributed in so many different ways to so many people. I remember one man in particular, a young man, I could see he was dancing and he was really relishing hearing the Holy Name. You could see he was really absorbed in hearing and chanting. You know, a common young boy.

It's a very ecstatic feeling to be able to be a small instrument and getting hundreds and thousands of young people to admire devotees and chant the holy name and dance in ecstasy. It's a wonderful feeling. I've been here many times and every year it's growing and there's an atmosphere of peace, spirituality and harmony, totally. We give thanks to the devotees who have given us the opportunity to sing and do our show here in Woodstock and we hope to come every year that we can.

The third or fourth year when we really started growing, our village was up a little bit before the main Woodstock festival itself and Jurek came down to inspect everything before the event began. And he looked at me and he said, with a smile, he said, are you part of my festival or am I part of your festival? We're tight, we're close with Jurek. We really worked on our relationship.

Initially he was just curious about us, he'd heard about our food, he'd heard about our principles which he appreciated. So that's why we were invited to the first Woodstock Festival. But over the years a very strong friendship has developed. He's Catholic and we're Hare Krishnas, but we appreciate his faith, he appreciates our faith, and this is a good example of how different religions can work together if we see we have the same principles, the same ethics, the same goal.

If we give people the positive alternative of Krishna consciousness, then there's hope, and they can become happy. So they come here and they experience that. They come to Woodstock, they come to Krishna's village of peace, and they don't even visit the other stages. They see that through this festival the superiority of happiness in Krishna consciousness.

People get a strong dose of Krishna consciousness. So this is Krishna consciousness, the Krishna's village of peace, presenting philosophy, presenting culture, presenting an alternative to the miseries of material life. Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna!

Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna! Hare Hare!