[Ishan das: Many of the "senior Krishna devotees" went on later to do the most horrible things imaginable. Just "being with the man" does not automatically make you a good person.]
ND: "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.... [Connection with people, not things]".
From my experience, i couldn't agree more. It's akin to the difference between getting through to somebody using kindness ie honey, or ramming your ideas through, ie a fly-swatter. As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar [or a fly-swatter]. My conclusion is that you get off your addictions more effectively by examining the root causes of the reasons why you chose medication and consequently addiction in the first place, than you do by artificially forcing yourself to just say no.
I went through this struggle for decades. Growing up in a hyper religious environment, it was always - if you're sinning that means you're not trying hard enough (in my case it was- you're not God conscious enough, you're not remembering His word enough).
And when I self medicated, just to be able to ram myself through another day of trying to be productive in a toxic environment - both internal and external, I would beat myself up just as I'd been beat as a child and look in the mirror and call myself all kinds of names like loser, "you don't want it bad enough" guilt, shame, etc etc.
This process perpetually kept me just under the water line- not high enough to take a breath and gain my strength so I could pull myself up onto the lifeboat, but not low enough that i would sink to the bottom. It was like Chinese water torture, traumatic but not life threatening.
I had to move to another continent to have the space and time to just be able to breathe, look at the root causes and start over. To H, I owe you my life and am forever grateful and will not waste this golden opportunity to finally shine!
As an aside, i perceive that as a society, as the world becomes more troubled, as more and more wars are fought for the finite resources to keep Western countries' inefficient and wasteful high standards of living going, we will all have to go through this process if we want to live and give our descendents the same opportunities we had at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Metaphysical Insight and Intuition
“Put a rat in a cage and give it 2 water bottles. One is just water and one is water laced with heroin or cocaine. The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself in a couple of weeks. That is our theory of addiction.
Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It has nothing to do. Let’s try this a bit differently.” So he built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything a rat could want is in Rat Park. Lovely food. Lots of sex.
Other rats to befriend. Colored balls. Plus both water bottles, one with water and one with drugged water. But here’s what's fascinating: In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use it. None of them overdose. None of them use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. What Bruce did shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory is that it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is that it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.
Now, we created a society where significant numbers of us can't bear to be present in our lives without being on something, drink, drugs, sex, shopping... We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for many of us, more like the first cage than the bonded, connected cages we need.
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of it, is geared toward making us connect with things not people. You are not a good consumer citizen if you spend your time bonding with the people around you and not stuff. In fact, we are trained from a young age to focus our hopes, dreams, and ambitions on things to buy and consume. Drug addiction is a subset of that."
~ Johann Hari
PADA: Correct. Krishna does not want mechanical chanting of His name. He wants real feelings towards Him, and then naturally people will feel real feeling for all other entities, seeing them as His parts and parcels. Mundane religion makes a lot of external show of the ceremonials, but the heart feelings are often absent. One of the worst examples of that is post-1978 ISKCON.
Even the police told me "these [Krishna] people hate you and they want you eliminated permanently. If they think they can get away with killing you, they will." That means, these ISKCON external religionists had become worse than the regular Joe six pack on the street, who does not hate me nor want to eliminate me.
Because? The average Joe six pack is more connected to the Supreme God than these people, and therefore he has more concern for others and less hate for others than these false religionists. And that is why the shastra says, these false religionists are destined for a much worse future than the common man. And if one is a victim of these false religionists, one can suffer very severely, and in and around ISKCON, many have suffered badly thanks to these false religionists. We need to understand that these false religionists are actually not representing God in any capacity. ys pd
Bhakti Vikas swami visiting with Basu Ghosh, evidently, to discuss their secret plan to make -- illicit sex with men, women and children, drunks, porno swamis -- and pedophiles "the eternal servants of God who deserve a samadhi in Vrndavana." Yep, that is where your ISKCON donations are going, to fund these guys flying around to meet on such important topics!
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