Logical Result (RE: Sridhara Maharaja and ISKCON gurus)

We need to meet with these "acharya board" folks?

Logical Result

BY: PRAHLADA NRSIMHA DAS

The last report in the Sun about the 1980 meeting with Sridhara Maharaja is significant of the ISKCON situation at this time, and shows us how quickly things changed after Srila Prabhupada's departure. The discussion is already about a kind of ultimatum which devotees should present the big leaders with. Only 2 ½ years after November 1977! ISKCON appears already to be in a desperate and very urgent situation. 

We can see that 40 years later, things are very little different (which does not mean better), but the worries of many devotees are more or less the same. And ISKCON authenticity is discussed exactly the same. There was not any real improvement in this matter. It is even maybe possible to think that today, it is worse than in 1980.

Sridhara Maharaja's advice in this meeting, about what to do in such a case is maybe valuable by itself in any other situation. But is completely illusory in this particular one! Just useless words and hopeless plans situated under illusion.

[PADA: Right, the devotees should meet with the acharya board. Fine except, they are not acharyas? Sridhara Maharaja fails to address the root issue, these people have hi-jacked the acharya post. What is an "acharya board"? Its a concoction, plain and simple. The acharya board was made to over ride the GBC concept, there is no longer a GBC, there are now acharyas who are the overlords and overseers of the GBC.]

Personally, I feel exactly the same with what he says than I felt decades later in our Movement. And exactly the same as what appears sometimes during the night in my dreams-soft nightmares about ISKCON: we turn around and around, without ever anything decisive and with only double talk. 

[PADA: Exactly, no matter how much lipstick we put on a pig, its still a pig. No matter how many meetings, and contrived "rules for legislating the guru" people come up with, the original root issue -- the GBC are not qualified to be gurus, is not being fixed. The GBC / Rocana / Torben / Ajit Krishna / Hanuman Croatia program are busy making a "constitution" with layers and layers and layers of more "rules for administering the acharyas," but its all double talk. The GBC was never meant to "administer" the acharyas.]

The leaders' plans about devotees unsatisfaction and complaints and about our Movement problems is only to win time, through easy promises and illusory so-called strategies. That, in order to keep devotees/manpower within ISKCON and under their control. It is actually very exasperating. We did not come to Krsna Consciousness for that!

Sridhara Maharaja's advice in this meeting is completely illusory in the sense that first, I suppose that all the "acaryas", at this time, were also GBCs. So, there was, first, an obvious big conflict of interest. Moreover, those "acaryas" got already huge amounts of money, which gave them automatically much power. And also they got many of "their own" new disciples who believed those "acaryas" were bona fide and were almost ready to die for them. 

Therefore, those "acaryas" were already almost self-sufficient. Consequently, why should they have to care about a coming threat from other Prabhupada disciples that they may leave the Society and go out independently? The "acaryas" certainly even encouraged that in order to get rid of devotees who were questioning their way to conceive ISKCON and Krsna Consciousness. Stalin did the same and worse with old Lenin "disciples"!

In conclusion, what Sridhara Maharaja proposed can work only in a society where there is, first, no conflict of interest. And second, where people are at a minimum honest. It cannot work in a society where persons put their personal desires and ambitions before the collective interest. Democracy or collective discussions can work only if people are mainly honest. All that shows us the insoluble problems generated when we give the title and position of guru to persons who have still personal desires and so, are not qualified: demons, kanistha-adhikaris and even at best madyama-adhikaris.

Even if the Society sets rules, the position of guru naturally gives, through name, fame, title, money, disciples, prathista, illusion etc... those gurus the power to be, somehow, situated beyond those rules. They will follow those rules only when they are convenient to them. The Society and devotees are therefore taken hostage by this reality.

[PADA: Right. Rocana's plan to make more administrative rules and a constitution to manage and govern his self appointed acharyas is simply more double speak. Acharyas are not managed by the kanistha leadership of an institution, this is simply a big illusion. My friend Adiyajna dasa was telling me, the GBC is getting better because they are "learning from their mistakes." 

Well there you have it, Krishna's successor gurus are people who are in training and they are: making mistakes, they are in illusion, they are cheating, they are embezzling, they are sexual predators, in sum -- gurus are ordinary conditioned souls. To say gurus are conditioned souls is the mad elephant offense, of course then Adiyajna das said he has nothing further to discuss and he ran off. 

There is no such thing as "acharyas in training" who are "learning from their mistakes." They are not gurus, that is the problem. Anyway, the point is, almost everyone saw the defects of the GBC guru sabha early on, and the same defects are still there, i.e. they are not fit for the post of acharyas. ys pd]