© 1999 VNN
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EDITORIAL May 25, 1999 VNN3947 Comment on this story Talking About Personal Relationships BY MADAN MOHAN DASA EDITORIAL, May 25 (VNN) — Dear VNN readers, Please accept my dandavat pranams. All glories to Sri Guru and Gauranga! I can't help noticing - if I'm brutally honest in looking at myself and expressing what I see happening around the "Gaudiya Vaishnava community" - that we spend vast amounts of time talking about personal relationships while spending very little time actually entering into them. In the shadow of the highest, most intimate concept of personal theism, we have confluence in our lives - a vague sense of flowing in the same direction with theoretically the same ultimate goal - but with little or none of the actual heart-to-heart contact which characterises genuine Vaishnava sanga. Our lives are ruled by fear. We are afraid to admit that we see ourselves reflected all around us, that we choose to like only people who reflect what we like about ourselves while despising those who reflect our faults, weaknesses and shortcomings. By this mode of selective prejudice we strenuously avoid personal growth and development - actively avoiding any risk of change - preferring to remain in the false security of "friends" who reinforce our self-delusions and prejudices. Without change and honest, open interaction with others who can help us bring about the necessary changes in our lives, changes which characterise forward movement, the concepts of progressive self-improvement, self-development and self-realisation are rendered meaningless. "Other people" are defined in our lives by our individual, personal and subjective perceptions of who we believe them to be, perspectives which vary enormously between all of us. We are, potentially, hundreds of perceived different people to the hundreds of people with whom we have had contact in our lives, for however brief or lengthy a period. We often appear as many different people, especially to those closest to us. We are not multiple-personality disorder cases but simply conditioned souls desperately searching for our true identities in a confusing world of illusion. Let's face it, beyond a theoretical notion, we just don't know who we are, do we? Association with pure Vaishnavas is what we understand to be the most essential means of making spiritual advancement and actually drawing us closer to our own divine natures and our relationship with the supreme divinity. But when we spend time directly with or near pure Vaishnavas we are bewildered by almost everything they say and do, because they mostly refuse to acknowledge our deluded false egos and instead talk straight to our hearts with pure sound vibration way beyond our mental or intellectual capacity to grasp and understand. They love us purely and unconditionally, yet we don't recognise the nature of that love or even know how to receive it properly. Still, we detect the benefits of that sanga on a very deep, intuitive level and cannot but feel the joyous presence of Sri Krishna, Who has so mercifully appeared before us in the form of Sri Guru. Yet we are as a group almost totally impersonal. Theoretical personal theists hiding behind false claims of renunciation simply to avoid the responsibility and the inevitable growth pains of actually changing and developing into the progressively less deluded and more spiritually centred beings that we must become through the bhakti process. How we exercise our free will simply determines how much mercy we attract and how soon we attain the perfectional state of Krishna-prema, which is already ours by birthright. Sri Krishna appears to us personally in the form of Sri Guru, in whom - if he is indeed the genuine article - we can place our full faith and total trust. Raised in a materialistic, competitive environment we climb over our brothers and sisters and stand on one anothers' heads to get a feeling of being higher, or closer to Sri Guru, all the time disregarding the possibility that our so-called positive attributes, "achievements" and claims of seniority and "advancement" might not actually evoke the mercy we so eagerly desire. Sri Guru also appears to us in the form of the Vaishnavas or any number of unlimited possible forms to gently teach us the lessons we need to learn and show us how we need to change accordingly to put our new-found understandings into practise. Whilst our philosophy, attire, temple rituals and religious prohibitions can give us a strong sense of Vaishnava identity and propriety in our lives, too much dogmatic attention to those things can also serve to stifle the very flow of natural feelings in our hearts that we ultimately seek to achieve through both Vaishnava sanga and sadhana practise, as well as alienating us totally from the very people we want to help and reach. In order to rise above our lower natures it is neccessary for most of us to enter into a very disciplined and sense-controlled environment where we can gradually learn to replace our gross, selfish, animal desires with higher aspirations to give pleasure to Sri Guru and Gauranga. But when we actually attain to human life and set our sights firmly and exclusively on Vraja-bhakti as the ultimate goal of human life we may find that the constrictions of temple environments and rigid adherence to great swathes of sastric prohibitions begin to weigh us down with feelings of guilt, self-loathing and hopelessness that were conspicuously absent before we ever even approached a "higher" way of of living. If we are to be true to Sri Rupa Goswami's foremost instuction to accept what is good for bhakti and reject what is not we must examine the way we live and relate to Sri Guru, Krishna and each other with unfailing honesty in order to make actual progress. We may need to reject institutions, authority structures, temple environments and even sastric injunctions in order to break free of stifling restrictions to the natural flow of love in our hearts and achieve genuine personal growth. "Never go anywhere where love is restricted" I heard, on good authority, "if you want to progress in bhakti". If we want the highest attainable thing we must surely be prepared to not only give everything we have but also to sacrifice all the illusions we cling to so desperately in the name of security and "safe", familiar routines. Fifteen years ago Hare Krishna temples - especially in the midst of chaotic Western society - were for me the most happening and stimulating places to be and I was irresistably drawn to the most sublime and beautiful philosophy and way of life of the Gaudiya Vaishnavas. Nowadays I have an aversion so strong to temple environments that I find myself repelled by almost all of the rituals and rigid dogmas that held such appeal for me back then, what to speak of the vile politics and incessant torrents of Vaishnava aparadha that pour out of every Western temple I know. From the narrowest perspective I may indeed be considered "fallen", "fringey", "out of it" or the subject of any number of similarly humiliating and degrading epithets. But I don't feel like a poor, useless or hopeless person. Far from it. I have just found my feet, just re-discovered my crushed self-esteem to the point where I feel confident to simply assert what is good and helpful and conducive to developing real love in my life and what is not, what I like and what I don't like. Sri Guru and Gauranga are in no way restricted as to how, where, when and through whom they can manifest their unlimited mercy. To think that they can't operate outside of irrelevant dinosaur institutions is to me ignorance bordering on atheism. It is not simply a false understanding of sastra that led me to deny the validity of "material" relationships. I recognise that I have always been practically incapable of establishing, maintaining and developing genuine loving relationships with anyone and that I chose to hide behind the pseudo-religious veils of "detachment" and "renunciation" for many years rather than face the fearful prospect of taking on actual responsibility and changing accordingly. It is certainly neccessary for progress in bhakti to withdraw from the field of mundane attachments relationships, but once we have understood all the relationships in our lives in their proper context it is positively unhealthy to reject and be judgemental towards family members, non-devotees or "karmis". Such superficial distinctions reflect a lack of any basic understanding that we are all equal on the soul level. Our acaryas have displayed unconditional love and unlimited tolerance to all souls, so why should we display selective discrimination and intolerance in claiming to represent them? I now understand that honest affection towards apparently "material" persons or objects can be very easily re-directed towards the proper recipients of love and affection by a caring, qualified guru. A static heart paralysed and entombed in the reinforced concrete casing of fear of "unorthodoxy" or "breaking the rules" and the concomitant self-loathing that accompanies such "heresies" is a vastly more difficult task to set before the best of gurus. Certainly, no nut is too hard to crack for any loving, caring suddha-Vaishnava guru, but we might impede our own progress for many, many lifetimes by hiding behind institutionalised ritual, dogma and false renunciation. I don't want to make gratuitous criticisms of temple environments, regulative principles or religious codes. Well I do really, but my intention is to share feelings, not to be negative or hurtful to others. In my often painful pursuit of my true spiritual identity I have simply discovered that much of what was vitally important to me in an earlier stage of my growth and development is now no longer relevant. What is liberation if not becoming free of all limitations and mundane restrictions that hamper the soul's journey towards perfection? I am not a liberated soul. I know that. But even the merest hint of forward progress is invariably accompanied by a joyous feeling of growth, upliftment and increased faith and awareness of the proximity and unlimited mercy of Sri Guru and Sri Krishna in all His mysterious expansions, energies and munificent forms. What was I talking about? O yes, personal relationships. I am a unique individual person, not a mere unit of production, consumption and conformity assembled in a religion factory and despatched out into the world to march aimlessly among the ranks of so many other blank, characterless automatons programmed to self-destruct through various useless and aimless socio-economic structures. Our acaryas have all without exception been radical revolutionaries in their times, fiercely opposing the downward flow of conditioned souls as they plunge towards the lowest possible sub-human condition spurred on by whole societies that know nothing beyond the lowest urges of animal existence. I only want to know who and what is helpful and relevant to me in my daily search for deeper and higher connection with my own true self, my Gurudeva and my prospects on the plane of absolute reality. My greatest inspirations might come through art, music, nature or my simple endeavours to make an honest living. Maybe even through chanting Harinama and hearing Hari-katha from qualified Vaishnavas! The greatest obstacles to my spiritual development may well appear in my life in the form of religion, scriptures, gurus, temples and my efforts to serve and survive in so-called religious communities. That has certainly been a recognisable pattern in the past. Beyond my own selfish interests I want make the best possible use of my time and to be as effective as possible in helping to relieve the suffering of lost and bewildered jiva souls in this world. At one time I was confident that as soon as anyone entered a Hare Krishna temple, saw the deities, heard the Gaudiya philosophy, joined in some kirtan and took a little prasada their lives would be filled with auspiciousness and joy from thereon in. If I meet any eager aspirant for spiritual truth nowadays I would be more inclined to advise them to go dancing barefoot on broken glass than to go anywhere near any official Hare Krishna temple I know of outside India, of any denomination. Temples have become less than irrelevant in Western countries. They have become magnets for abusers and victims, losers and dropouts, the most hopeless and least functional members of society looking for somewhere to hide from reality rather than actually pursue it. (I couldn't hold that in). Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's vision will never manifest through rigid, formal, dogmatic religious institutions. We've done the temple thing. It's homes we need to get into if we are to carry forward the pioneering spirit of the sankirtan movement. Lord Gauranga didn't bring a mundane product to be cynically re-packaged and sold out wholesale to support useless hierarchies of parasitical ecclesiastics and pseudo-saints with 5-star lifestyles and 6-figure bank accounts. He gave us a love so sweet, so irresistable, so pure and perfect that any jiva soul could not possibly resist such a gift, from the moment of even the merest contact. And the perfect process for receiving that gift. Religion is dead. Institutions are irrelevant. Our so-called Hare Krishna temples are little more than slaughterhouses where innocent aspirants are immediately dragged down into mundane politics and even the suicidal course of Vaishnava aparadha before seeing the barest glimpse of the potential beauty and joy to be found at the lotus feet of Sri Sri Nitai Gauranga. Gratuitously expressed, but we all know it's horribly true. Where we can receive pure inspiration and give a little to others are our true contact points with reality. First in our hearts and homes and then in all possible arenas of human contact; be it the workplace, TV, radio, cinema, newspapers, the internet, festivals, pubs, clubs, concerts or whatever. We must break out of the useless "come to the temple and join us" syndrome. It just doesn't work any more. Most temple newcomers are abused, not honoured. If we cannot be respectful, tolerant, loving and caring in all our dealings with all others at all times we have not understood one word taught by the Gaudiya Vaishnava acaryas. If something is not done with love, it is not worth doing. 5 billion or so suffering jivas need to know the sweetness of Sri Krishna and that all problems will be immediately solved once the primary problem of forgetting Krishna has been overcome. No suffering jiva needs to be exposed to the poisonous bile that oozes out of the institutions which our supposed Gaudiya Vaishnava communities have somehow created or more likely allowed to manifest through our combined apathy and dysfunctionality. Our positive attainments, achievements, positions, salaries, reputations and social status are all useless - none can attract mercy. Our "negative" characteristics of service, submission and surrender are all we need to develop to invite the very highest mercy into our lives. Sri Guru and Gauranga cannot but respond to us with their unlimited munificence if we open our hearts to them. This isn't really news, just a few shared thoughts. I've just been bottling up my writing urge for a few months since my Gurudeva wrote and personally requested me to stop bashing the ritviks on the internet as it wasn't good for my bhakti (however satisfying it might have been in the testosterone department). I simply felt like writing down a few ideas and etching them into cyberspace to see who might respond. I hope it touches a chord with one or two hearts out there. Any serious pursuants of Vraja-bhakti, revolutionaries, rebels, radicals, free-thinkers or anyone who is just plain sick to the teeth of being embarrassed to death to be associated with the Hare Krishnas but loves the genuine Gaudiya Vaishnava experience and sees the real revolution unfolding right now, please drop me a line and share your views. You can e-mail me at: 106650.1421@compuserve.com Your servant, Madan Mohan dasa. About the Author | Other Stories by this Author Comment on this story | Contact VNN about this story | Send this story to a friend
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