A Great Weight Has Been Lifted (PADA)

PADA: Interesting how karma works. A devotee who was part of official ISKCON for ten years -- suddenly discovered PADA -- just about a week ago. And this devotee was astonished to start to listen to our materials. In fact, this devotee said that PADA has released a huge stone burden from around their neck. 

This devotee was struggling severely with all sorts of misconceptions, including -- that pure devotee are often debauchees. This was making the whole idea of executing devotional service seem like a huge futile and useless endeavor. The devotee said they were feeling like worshiping their GBC guru was making them have even more material desires, and even ghostly haunted nightmares, and bad consciousness in general. And now they feel like they are freed of all that.

Meanwhile, this devotee's temple was founded by one of the GBC's original hi-jack crew members. But ironically, a competing GBC guru got more of his disciples to become board members -- and then they eventually kicked out the founder of this temple and made the competing guru the new resident acharya. 

In other words -- it was a sort of subtle take over of the manpower and assets using political power plays. And this devotee was very depressed to see so much mundane politics and infighting going on among "residents of Vaikuntha." At the end, the founder was taken to a meeting where he was told he was no longer going to be allowed on the temple property. Total smash and grab job, among residents of Vaikuntha. All this severely shattered the faith of this devotee, as well as other sympathizers with the founder. 

So this devotee was relieved to find out, none of these people are resident of Vaikuntha, they are all motivated mundane men posing as saints. This devotee also said they were concerned how all of this was affecting children, and feels it is sort of child abuse to play with children's spiritual direction by forcing them to worship all of these clowns posing as saints, while they are engaged in vicious dog eat dog political machinations over property, money and manpower.  

Long story short, this person is now an official PADA advocate, who says they feel spiritually supercharged and they will now be able to connect with Srila Prabhupada and Krishna firmly. And now they want to connect others to the same idea. And so -- they are now enthusiastic about preaching this idea to others.

So there are lots of PADA naysayers out there saying -- we are doing bad things, or at best we are wasting everyone's time. Maybe! But if we could help liberate even one single person from all these bad associations, then it is all worth it. This person said they will be eternally grateful, and that is factually true. When we help others along the path to Krishna, we help our own path back to Krishna. It is a win -- win for everyone.

The people who wanted PADA suppressed do not want to see these people being helped. That means they are trying to block people's access to Srila Prabhupada and Krishna. That means they are more or less a conspiracy of Kali Yuga agents in my opinion. 

Of course, we have others coming on board all the time as well, but this was a powerful example to me personally since this person came along so quickly. Anyway, this was quite an encouraging situation and we just thought we should share it, to encourage everyone else to help liberate others from these MIS-CON misconceptions. Haribol. ys pd

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