Raganatha Bhatta Dasa: If Krishna is the Supreme Controller, then why would He or His pure devotee need protection? Surely they are here to protect us, not the other way around? All we have to do is chant Hare Krishna and Krishna will arrange everything, it is His plan after all. We must never forget, not a blade of grass stirs without His consent…
If good or bad happens in ISKCON it is all arranged by the sweet desire of the Lord, so there is no point in doing anything. We waste so much time in arguing and complaining when all we need to do is chant Hare Krishna and everything will be automatically fixed. We have amongst us pure devotees that are on the exact same spiritual platform as Srila Prabhupada. What do we have to worry about?
This is Lord Caitanya’s Sankirtan Army and the Lord has sent us great Generals like Srila Prabhupada and all the other ISKCON Gurus who are here to lead us to victory. Whatever our Spiritual Leaders do is all good. They can do no wrong. We just don’t have faith. We are not pure enough to understand these high spiritual truths. What may seem wrong to us is a mere illusion brought about by Maya.
We are so full of complaints and criticism we cannot see the spiritual reality of what is truly happening in ISKCON. Many devotees complain about our Gurus being bogus. This just shows how much in Maya they are. The position of a guru in ISKCON is given by Lord Krishna Himself for how else can they be appointed? How else can they make so many nice disciples?
Our spiritual leaders have over the last thirty nine odd years kept the amount of disciples they can manage to small numbers purposefully. You must remember they only choose Brahmans as disciples and Brahmans don’t come cheap. They expend gallons of blood personally training each and every disciple to become Brahmans and pure devotees of the Lord and that takes time.
Other religious organizations like the Church of Scientology has over five hundred thousand followers, Sathya Sai Baba has 1200 centers in 114 countries and well over five million disciples but who cares? Why worry about numbers? Many devotees say after all these years our pure spiritual leaders should have created a huge movement with millions of devotees but you will never understand we are after quality not quantity.
We really must stop all this arguing and complaining for this is what Kali wants. He wants us all to argue and quarrel. If we simply accepted our leaders are pure devotees and they are trying their best to make us pure but it is we who refuse.
We must never forget, we have come to this movement to change. We always want things done our way. When will we learn to leave this in the hands of our gurus? They have our best intentions at heart. They have been sent down by Krishna Himself to save us. It is only when we truly accept that Krishna has personally sent them to us that we can make true and honest advancement in our Krishna Consciousness.
Srila Prabhupada led the way. He prepared the path so Lord Krishna’s Representatives could walk this earth and shower us with their divine wisdom. So please we must stop this bickering and simply accept whatever they do as being divinely inspired for there is no fault in them, it is only in our unworthy filthy hearts.
All this talk about changing ISKCON books is another misunderstanding only a handful of troublemaking neophyte devotees have. Each and every devotee who sits on the BBT and the BBTI have been personally chosen by Lord Krishna and nothing, absolutely nothing they say or do is mundane. It is all divine inspiration. But some of us run around complaining they have no authority to change a word.
You see how our perspective on true spirituality is so very wrong. They are not changing the books they are adding to them. Embellishments. All of them are from Krishna directly, Srila Prabhupada included. All gurus are one, they are Krishna’s via medium.
We quibble about Srila Prabhupada not being noted as the author of these books. This knowledge is the purview of all our spiritual leaders. Srila Prabhupada is after all only a servant of the Lord the same as our leaders are. They are all hired writers! Hired by Krishna Himself! To think they are not on the exact same spiritual platform as Srila Prabhupada is just showing our lack of Krishna Consciousness.
In fact some of the many pure devotees in ISKCON may even be more advanced than Srila Prabhupada. After all, I remember HG Hari Sauri Prabhu stating on the Vyasasana in Mayapur in the late nineties that the title of “Prabhupada” is given to someone for their level of spiritual realization and there is nothing stopping other “Prabhupadas” being named as such. So here again, we have validation from a pure devotee who has worked alongside Srila Prabhupada.
The only thing that stops us from referring to our advanced spiritual leaders as “Prabhupada” is our pride. We cannot tolerate the fact someone else is just as great or many times even greater than Srila Prabhupada.
If we take HH Narayana Maharaj, for example, we will see how he has descended directly from the spiritual world to give us even more intimate knowledge of Krishna. How close to the Lord is someone like this? We will never understand. His disciples are ready to take the next step and he helps them take it. We are here to change and grow. HH Narayana Maharaja is a very pure and intimate associate of the Lord who has personally advented to give to us the most confidential knowledge of Krishna. Not even Srila Prabhupada knows how advanced HH Narayana Maharaja is. Srila Prabhupada came here to prepare the way. Now devotees such as HH Narayana Maharaja are handpicking new recruits for the Divine Couple and we criticize!
We criticize the glorious babas who reside at Holy Govardhan Hill and Radha Kunda, saying they are all nonsense. How do we know that? How can we judge them?
Many of our spiritual leaders have shared many nectarian pastimes with these babas. We see this as evil or wrong. We don’t understand the pure devotees know each other and love each other’s company, blissfully sharing their realizations. After all, our Gurus mainly spend their time looking after us and they miss hearing about Krishna from other pure devotees like themselves. This is why they go to them, especially the Govardhan babas, because they need to hear about Krishna from other pure devotees like the Govardhan and Radhakund babas, so they can give us exactly what we need to grow our love for Krishna.
We do not understand why our spiritual leaders spend so much time with our Indian life members. They know that every single Indian is a pure devotee of the Lord and each one of them has the divine right to spread Krishna Consciousness. This is why they want them to take over our Temples. We – they know are not a part of the varna/ashrama system so we can never take on this responsibility. The Indians know this and so do our spiritual masters. Yet we complain and criticize them, proclaiming that we must not hand over the control of our temples to the Hindu community. Vaisnavas are Indians. Not us westerners. We will only become part of Dharma when we are born into Vaisnava families, and not before. So we must relax and let go of these misconceptions of ours. Being a Vaisnava is no simple thing and it will take lifetimes to achieve.
Then there are our children, poor lost souls. They are seeing this all wrong too. The Lord has arranged all of this to burn off their past karma. They see what happened to them as being rape, torture and abuse, but really they were getting bucket loads of mercy from these devotees. It is all good nothing bad.
It is all a matter of perspective. The children want the spiritual leaders of the Vaisnava society to help them, but they must help themselves. Not understanding this they don’t understand why they are now the ones who are torturing themselves. The iron that has been in the fire of purification does not realize that all their impurities have been burned off and they are complaining that it was too hot!
All this talk about how Srila Prabhupada wanted us to do like this and he wanted to do like that. What you don’t realize is that Srila Prabhupada only had the mandate to do what he did from Krishna. Why would he do otherwise? So, if now other pure devotees are mandated to emphasize other ways by the Lord, then what is your problem? It is again the same old story of not seeing things in their right perspective.
We have to simply accept that our spiritual leaders come directly from the Lord. They are all the same. They are one. All the stuff we complain about is not change, it is embellishments. We must take personal and loving shelter of our gurus. Even the Prabhupada disciples who are not qualified to be guru need to take on a living guru. They must see their God Brothers for the advanced souls who can shelter them. They need a living guru now that their Prabhupada is gone. So they need to become humble and take shelter and stop criticizing, for they are lost without another Prabhupada to guide them.
We are a huge organization, how else are things going to be managed so nicely? What is wrong with using modern business techniques to manage our movement? Why do you think our spiritual leaders have made our movement into a corporation, if not to improve our lives? They know what is best for us; they know how to organize this movement.
We must remember Srila Prabhupada was here many years ago and people in those days did things differently and thought differently. The average person now is so much more informed than he was about how to do things properly. Our spiritual leaders know this and so they are trying their level best to make these embellishments work for our own good! Yet all we do is complain! How ungrateful are we?
The pure devotee gives us knowledge on how to become more Krishna Conscious according to time, place and circumstance. This is 2009, after all, and there are so many new ways of doing things. We must let go of our small-mindedness and embrace the love that our spiritual leaders are showering upon us. Bathe ourselves in their transcendental blissful association and cleanse ourselves of our wicked, wicked minds…
Can you imagine what it would be like if they weren’t pure devotees? It is simply not possible that anyone could get away without being a pure devotee in such an incredibly enlightened spiritual movement. It is all a trick of Maya to make you believe they are deceiving us. She is tricking all of you who are criticizing, to be made to look like a number one fool.
My spiritual master, His Holiness Satsvarupa Dasa Goswami, is a pure devotee and he can do no wrong!
All glories to Guru! All glories to Gauranga!
Raganatha Bhatta Das