From the last post:

What brands now have to do is say, ‘I’m recognizing you as the complete and incredible being that you are.

We have to be careful about this. Amongst our early attempts to develop slideshows there were efforts which tried to show the “miseries of material life”. What we realized when we ran them is that a common perception of this message can be summed up in two words: “You Suck”.

When the public sees a slide presentation like this, it comes across like a direct attack on them. Practitioners of Krishna Consciousness may look at each other knowingly and nod their heads, but when you show pictures of Joe or Jane Public and say something like: “Just see how much he is suffering. Just see how meaningless her life is”, the audience hears: “You Suck”. Why? Because that’s them you have up on the screen. Joe and Jane Public.

When you show natural disasters and talk about how unstable the material world is and how at any moment we can be thrown head over heels, or killed, people say (or at least think): “Those poor people. How dare you try to profit from their suffering by using it to try to guilt trip / scare us into buying your religion”.

So we’ve been working on some different angles, which communicate the same essential truth, but in a more palatable way.

Instead of “material life is suffering!”, we say: “Modern life is too complicated” (people all nod their heads - “simplicity, yeah!”)

Instead of “wasting your life”, we say: “losing time”

Instead of “look at these people suffering”, we say “stress related disorders are superseding all other forms of physical ailment”.

Instead of “working like asses”, we say “many people are obligated to spend long hours commuting to and from work” (they recognize: “yeah - that’s me!”)

It’s all about recognizing that people r0ck, and they just have a few details that they need to align to fix those niggling discrepancies. As Prabhupada begins his Bhagavatam commentary: “You r0ck, but… there is a pinprick in your otherwise awesome existence, and the Bhagavatam is here to help you address that”.

We can help with those details. After all, religion means proper adjustment.

Of course, if the only audience we’re after is one that consists of people who are completely materially exhausted, then another presentation will be appropriate, but this way of doing it seems so far to have the widest appeal.

Here is the first in our four week series on “The One Thing You Need to Know” - a powerful principle that enables you to deal with any situation with competence and confidence.

Now before I give you the link, I have to say this: I did not know that we would be moving on a new facility right now. I had planned to put all my energy into preparing for this series. I had meetings scheduled with other preachers to discuss the subject matter and do team preparation. Instead all those plans were thrown into disarray, and I spent the week trying to land the new digs.

So I didn’t actually get any time to do any preparation. I worked six days last week, and on my morning off (Sunday) I did the handout - an important communication to allay certain concerns that people had about the move.

So my preparation consisted, literally, of sitting down at the front of the Sunday feast at 3.30 pm on Sunday and hammering out some slides on Bhakticandrika’s computer to try to get a structure together, and then praying to Krishna.

I wanted so much to take shelter of sleep. I just wanted to go to sleep right there and then, and then just get up early the next day for a fresh start chanting the maha-mantra. But of course I couldn’t, so I had no choice but to surrender.

I stood up with absolutely no opening, a bare minimum of a structure, and no illustrations for my points. You can hear me riff off Vraja’s introduction as my opening, and then tell people they are not the body.

Anyway, because Krishna is God, I did my duty and He contributed something of value. If I could do that again I would like to have a story that runs through it, illustrating the points. I didn’t have time to find one. No time to think. Anyway, Krishna preserves what we have, and carries what we lack.

Here it is:

The One Thing You Need to Know 1 (16MB .mp3)
Slideset (including opening bhajans) (3.3MB .ppt)
Sunday Feast Handout (768k, .pdf)

Here are some slide presentations. I made and delivered these slide presentations with OpenOffice.org, a free open source office suite for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Download a free copy now and liberate yourself from Microsoft’s tyranny.

The first one is the presentation that I used to pitch the new facility. I made it on Sunday morning, and gave it for the first time Sunday evening. I then gave it to everyone I met for the next few days.

New Facility Presentation
Slides for OpenOffice.org (20 MB)
Slides for Powerpoint (20 MB)

The second one is the blatant recruiting pitch that I delivered thinly disguised as a report on our activities in Brisbane, at the recent retreat in Taupo, New Zealand 253 slides in under 20 minutes. I’d just put the finishing touches on the presentation the night before so I flubbed it a bit at the end (most people probably wouldn’t notice), but otherwise it went quite well.

Sita-pati’s Report on Preaching in Brisbane
Slides for Powerpoint (92 MB)
Slides for OpenOffice.org (92 MB)
Audio Recording in Ogg Vorbis (10 MB)
Audio Recording in mp3 (10 MB)

I was going to make it into a movie that can play automatically, such as a compressed flash movie, but I haven’t got the skillz or the time. If someone else could do that, that would r0ck! The purpose of this presentation was to inform, entertain, and inspire, as well as allowing me to showcase some of the techniques of slide presentation that we have picked up over 2005.

Sukanthi Radha, our resident photographer, gave a slide presentation this morning at Red Hill and it rocked. She is going to work on it a little more, and then deliver it at the Sunday Feast. After that I’ll put it up along with the recorded audio. Seriously - it’s way better than any of mine so far.