Bhakti Vikas Swami / ISKCON Poly Crisis / Discriminating Who is Guru 02 11 26

PADA: For some reason BVKS recent videos can only be viewed, but cannot be shared. And he is also making a series of short videos one after another, which seems like he is sort of trying to correct the mess he made on the previous ones. 

Anyway! I cannot listen to all this, but I did catch one glaring mis-representation which needs addressing. He said the major splits in post-1978 ISKCON are the ritviks and the women guru splinters. 

Wrong! The first splinter group was created by Bhakti Vikas swami's GBC gurus, when they announced in 1978 that Sridhara Maharaja is the shiksha guru, and senior most advisor etc. Then Sridhara Maharaja was the ghost writer of many early GBC papers. 

For example Sridhara said there should be the Acharya of the Zone, which is called the Zonal Acharya. Later on -- things soured, and the GBC decided Sridhara was taking over too many people. So they wrote a paper around 1982 condemning Sridhara and saying anyone who associates with him is out of ISKCON.

OK many of the ISKCON senior sannyasas and maybe 500 or more of Jayatirtha's disciples all left ISKCON, and started various splinter groups of competing organizations. There was the Peace Krishnas, Pancadravida in Soquel, Jagat Guru in South India, Sudheer Krishna in San Jose etc. The result for the UK was that Bhaktivedanta Manor went nearly bankrupted -- due to losing all the manpower. 

They even lost Croome Court. However some pedophiles who were using chloroform on children were roaming around Croome Court for some time. So this was the first big splinter, and ISKCON lost almost the whole Zone of Jayatirtha and most of his people as a result. The Sridhara folks are still around in various forms, siphoning people out of ISKCON. But one of their biggest swamis, Paramadvaiti swami, was caught having sexual affairs and his mission sort of broke apart.   

   

 

ISKCON'S POLY CRISIS HEE HEE!

But he cannot participate in any Sridhara Movement either. 

This is another example of following Sridhara's people, but he now says he is not part of any of their organizations. Pranada is promoting him as an authority on her female diksha guru campaign. Does anyone not notice that Sridhara endorsed a bogus guru after 1936, and he endorsed the GBC 11 after 1978, causing havoc and mayhem, and no small amount of banning, beating, molesting, lawsuits and murders? Yeah that is the path we need to follow!

OK after all that then Narayan Maharaja became the darling of the GBC. And he was hanging out in Texas with Tamal and all that, and saying we are ritvik poison. Well yeah, we were having Tamal sued for $400,000,000. Same thing, NM was starting to become too powerful and influence and so the GBC axed him out, and forbade people from visiting him. And hundreds of people, including some prominent leaders, all left and started a competing organization against ISKCON. 

Of course the 1986 murder of Sulochana caused hundreds of people to leave, and New Vrndavana to become a ghost town. The $400,000,000 lawsuit caused many parents to pull out their kids and leave, and so on and so forth. There has been many splinters, spin offs, people leaving in droves, and all sort of things -- apart from the ritviks and the women guru advocates. So BVKS is misprepresenting the actual history. The ritviks are one of many splinters from ISKCON, and as we see, ISKCON is experiencing "a poly crisis" where more splitting is inevitable.

ys pd angel108b@yahoo.com

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NOT STABLE

Thanks prabhu, Yeah Jayamadhava many times disagrees with me, and I do not think he has a stable platform on the issues. He seems to confuse the issues, and sometimes confuses me as a person supporting various issues, which I never supported. 

Garuda is sometimes an ally and sometimes not, but so is Jayamadhava. My kids told me the whole problem is, I was blowing the fire alarm alert starting in 1979, but almost no one cared, rather everyone waited until everything was at a crisis state, the Titanic was taking in tons of water, before they agreed with me. But it was a little late in the game.

OK they waited until the house was burnt to ashes, the gurukula kids were all alienated out, the media was full of scandal stories, books were being changed etc. Then after the house was nearly demolished, they offered to help me with a bucket of water, way too little, way too late. 

I have some friends working on the BBTI legal issue and I hope they can make progress, we have to see. But it is all very late in the game and Garuda should never have been the BBTI issue front man on any other issue, but he became a prominent figure by default because -- everyone else ran away and did not help at all. When no one else does anything, someone doing something becomes prominent, which is also how I became sort of prominent, I was the de facto point man -- by default. ys pd

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Devotion, Discernment, and Shared Responsibility (SRD)

Over the past few years I have given a lot of thought to the nature of the guru disciple relationship, surrender, authority, and conscience.

I share some of my thoughts, not as conclusions, but rather as evolving ideas that I am still striving to discover, grasp and integrate. As far as I understand, in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, surrender to Sri Guru is sacred. It is not optional; it is fundamental. We are taught that grace flows through the guru and that with faith it opens the heart, and that humility and trust allow spiritual transformation to occur.

I do not question that. I have had some personal experiences of transformation and insights through grace and faith. At the same time, I have become increasingly aware of a vulnerability that can arise within a tradition that revolves around the surrender to a vertical authority. I don't see it as a structural flaw in the philosophy itself, but rather something that I have witnessed emerge in practice.

When a teacher’s spiritual authority and guidance become intertwined or dependent on assumptions of moral perfection, acknowledging the possibility of ethical failure can be perceived as deeply destabilizing; not just personally, but spiritually.

In such atmosphere, raising a concern is sometimes viewed as a form of betrayal. Questioning is discouraged as offensive and ethical discomfort can begin to feel like a threat to faith itself. It is my understanding that the Gaudiya Vaishnava philosophy, is more nuanced than this.

On one hand the guru is described as Sakshad Hari, but on the other, the guru is also clearly distinct from Svayam Bhagavan.

The guru is a via-medium; a representative, but not the Absolute Himself. We speak of the need for guru, sadhu and sastra to be coherently aligned, but the guru is not isolated and immune from evaluation. We are encouraged to engage our intelligence in order to surrender, not to discard it.

Disciples are rarely prepared to tackle the possibility that their guru may be fully aligned sometimes, and act as a transparent conduit and misaligned at other times and act in ways that are destructive.

We have all witnessed instances where surrender to the guru drifted into something more absolute and beyond scrutiny, something perilous that is not in line with the teachings of our Acharyas. An extreme example comes to mind. A few years ago a respected Gaudiya Vaishnava teacher was credibly accused of sexual misconduct with some of his young male students. 

This teacher was not a guru, but to this day he has a large following of dedicated supporters. Attempting to defend the teacher, one devotee argued that his behaviour could not have been motivated by lust for he really wanted or needed to believe that his teacher was a fully liberated Maha-Bhagavat.

He suggested that perhaps his actions must have been motivated some form of selfless intervention of a higher spiritual or esoteric nature, something that lesser evolved devotees could not understand. He tried to argue that the teacher's only motive must have been to cure the students of their own lust.

Aside the fact that there was no evidence presented to support such an outlandish proposition, what unsettled me was not only the extreme nature of the claim, but what seemed to drive it.

If the supporter admitted moral failure on the part of his teacher, his entire spiritual narrative surrounding that teacher would become fractured and incoherent. Preserving the narrative of sanctity seemed more urgent than examining a conduct that to me was so obviously harmful.

It is easy to dismiss the example and the reasoning as extreme. But I cannot simply point outward. I have witnessed subtler versions of the same ideology at work in myself. When something sacred to me feels threatened, I felt a strong pull to reinterpret, soften, or spiritualize what disturbed me — not necessarily out of malice, but out of fear that the authenticity of the transmission, its meaning and my identity itself are at risk.

This acknowledgment has forced me to ask uncomfortable questions.
Does devotion require that discernment and moral concern take a secondary place?

Is faith strengthened by suppressing doubt, or by learning to examine it honestly?
If acknowledging human limitation destabilizes me, what does that say about the foundation of my faith?

What happens to the tradition, the teacher and the students, if the teacher is expected or attempts to live up to a superhuman ideal of perfection; one that requires a metaphysical justification for abuse of power, immorality and harm?
If spiritual teachers are placed beyond ordinary ethical evaluation, it can create a burden that is not humanly sustainable. If students equate surrender with silence, this will gradually erode discernment. In the long run, I don’t see how either of these outcomes can serve the individuals or the purity of the tradition.

Bhakti does not ask us to abandon intelligence. We are encouraged to take full responsibility for our spiritual lives by exercising our discernment before we surrender, not to surrender our discernment. Conscience/discernment (Vivek) is not an obstacle to devotion. It may in fact be one of the ways Sri Guru protects us from harming ourselves.

Devotion without discernment can drift into unhealthy dependency. Discernment without compassion, love and devotion can harden into counterproductive cynicism.

I am now of the view that a genuine and transformative spiritual experience, however meaningful, is not an automatic guarantee of absolute purity and perfection of the teacher or settle questions of responsibility, abuses of power, or impact.

Personal transformation does not erase the need for shared ethical clarity. I hope to learn how to hold devotion and discernment together without dismissing one in favor of the other. The work, as I see it now, is not to choose between them but rather to find a way to integrate them; especially when doing so is uncomfortable.
If my faith depends upon the impossibility of moral failure of my teachers, then it is more fragile than I may wish to admit.

I like to believe that a mature spiritual culture should be able to withstand truth, especially the most painful truths, without feeling that transcendence itself is threatened. But rather recognizing that honoring the truth, however devastating that may be, may be what brings us a little closer to Krsna.

I do not offer these reflections to weaken faith or to cast suspicion on authority itself. I offer them because I hope they may be of some value to the devotee community.

If we can find ways for love to coexist with accountability, and surrender with discernment, then what we preserve will be more valuable and stronger, not weaker.

I do not have any conclusive answers, I do not know how the guru as Sakshad Hari can coexist with the guru that is also human, but I am looking the possibility that Grace may operate through a person without erasing their humanity.
These are unsettling questions and observations that I am learning to live with.

PADA: Yep. I said in 1979 that Jayatirtha is a predator. And Srila Prabhupada says -- when a guru has amorous affairs with his own followers -- is the same as a father having an affair with his own daughter. So if we worship a predator, as a society, we will become what we worship -- and there will be many other predators attracted to the predator worship magnet. And predators will be allowed and protected, just like he is. And worse, we are offering food to a predator, and people eating it are getting the predator beeja, or contamination. Well as we know, they removed me and kept the predator guru. We become what we worship, and worship of predators will make a society that protects them, that is really common sense. And as a matter of fact, ISKCON became a magnet for predators and protecting them and etc. ys pd