Kṛṣṇacandra Dāsa – Śrī Vṛndāvan Dham: Due to the huge response on our website to the recent expose on Prabhavisnu Dāsa, it is important to reflect on the direction that we as a society are heading with regards to Lord Caitanya Mahāprabhu’s Sankirtan Mission and serving His Divine Grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda. What happened to Prabhavisnu is indicative of the general state of our Vaiṣṇava society and reflects poorly on the GBC and the Guru system that they are forcing on our society.
To many thousands of devotees the GBC has failed us miserably by not only turning our Vaiṣṇava ISKCON into a corporate bureaucracy and urbanizing our agrarian cultural society, but also by pushing unto us the bogus Rubber Stamped Guru by vote system. Then on top of that and to add ‘insult to injury’ they would have us believe that an unqualified person can hold the role of an initiating spiritual master in our Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava society.
The end result of this is that a nice simple devotee like Prabhavisnu had to cheat his way through his devotional life by serving the GBC contrived ISKCON institution when he should have been serving his spiritual master His Divine Grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda. The GBC ultimately does not care for him or for his disciples all they care for is it that their program is maintained.
Śrīla Prabhupāda while in his seventies began to train his disciples to prosecute devotional service, deal with their problems, write volumes of literature all the while establishing and training his disciples to manage a worldwide institution and Vaiṣṇava society. This activity is only possible due to the direct result of being divinely empowered and inspired.
No mundane man or woman can do such a feat which is why when aspiring Vaiṣṇava’s engaged in mixed devotional service try to imitate a personality such as Śrīla Prabhupāda they fail miserably; as is the case with Prabhavisnu. Now he ends up disgracing himself and our Vaiṣṇava society and utterly betraying his disciples.
The GBC’s cold hearted corporate institution cares little for its members and only for the bureaucratic process which is part and parcel of enterprise or empire building. Numerous aspirants for corporate positions within its infrastructure lie wasted and used by the wayside. The ‘corporate devotee’ operates under the policy that human resources such as the disciples are only useful for 2-5 years as productive members until they burn out and lie like husks on the sideline of their devotional lives. The corporation cares even less for them than they care for their office bearers / managers [GBC] and sales reps [gurus] – who are to all extents and purposes ‘dispensable’.
We must be prepared to see increasingly more numbers of gurus fall by the wayside, victims of their own greed and irresponsibility as much as victims of the power hungry corporate beast known as the GBC. As more gurus fall from grace into disgrace we will see thousands of disheartened, bewildered, naïve and sentimental disciples also fall victim to their unscrupulous gurus and the GBC’s false propaganda and policies.
The ones that loose the most are the disciples, of course, who are sentimentally and emotionally attached to their guru and are trained to follow the party line by using their emotions as opposed to their intelligence. The GBC and gurus need subservient unquestioning followers rather than be what Śrīla Prabhupāda wanted them to be – independently intelligent. The GBC train and need only sudras rather than Brahmans to be leaders and followers and there is no need for Brahmins and Ksatriya’s in [F]ISKCON under the GBC rule.
The acculturation of the unquestioning subservient mood of a sudra lends itself to the disciple’s understanding that the exposure of their guru for amoral or criminal acts as no hindrance to their acceptance of their guru. They determine, in the case of Prabhavisnu, that he was with prostitutes in the past and now this woman with whom he claims to be serious about – as being natural for any man. They don’t seem to care that he is merely an ‘aspiring’ Vaiṣṇava just like them and the only difference is that he accepted the GBC contrived post of a dīkṣā guru / initiating spiritual master and began to take disciples. They only ‘see’ the role or position – which could very well have be held by any of his disciples or anyone for that matter, as it is seemingly independent of any high level of Kṛṣṇa consciousness. The only qualification is corporate ladder climbing ambition and majority vote by the GBC.
In this light any prospective wife of Prabhavisnu no matter if they are a non devotee or whatever would become the guru’s wife and be awarded the respect, honor and worship befitting the wife of a dīkṣā guru! I shudder to think…
They don’t even care for the fact that he was also holding the post of a sannyāsa and had taken a vow of celibacy but what they do care very strongly about is that their decision to chose him as their guru and accept him as a member of the sannyāsa order and a GBC man, is never questioned.
Should anyone question this they are vilified and labeled as vile offensive persons, even if the guru himself rejects them as śikṣā or dīkṣā disciples and openly informs them of his ungentlemanly or criminal activities? They demand that any knowledge of his actual status is kept confidential, secret and forgiven, yet any false claims of his advanced status, mercy, divine inspiration, service rendered etc can be widely broadcast to all and sundry. Yet they completely fail to see the hypocrisy in their thoughts words and in some case deeds…
The Brahman and the Ksatriya manner of understanding what is right and what is wrong is through the eyes of guru sādhu and śāstra and so they see what happened in an entirely different light. To the more intelligent devotee they see Prabhavisnu as an aspiring devotee who was responsible for all the decisions that he made in his life. No one could foist any of the roles onto him, sure they could cajole and coerce but he made the final decision, a decision that lasted decades – not years. A decision that afforded him worship, foot bathing and garlanding, honor, respect, money, power, resources far beyond his wildest dreams and he took it all with a cheeky smile on his face.
What happened to Prabhavisnu was not unknown in the history of our society and the reaction of his disciples is also a well known phenomena. What is troubling is that in a Vaiṣṇava Brahmincial society we have not learned from the past. If we are to move ahead into the future we have to revert back to what Śrīla Prabhupāda has instructed and given us to do with his society. There is no other option. The GBC has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that their rebellious guru and management system has failed.
Śrīla Prabhupāda left us with a perfect spiritual system and a perfect management system – it is we who have failed to implement it. No one can say that Śrīla Prabhupāda failed; for the GBC never once tried it his way, after they seized control of the movement in 1978.
The management system you will find in the minutes of GBC meetings especially during the years 1975 -1977. The management system is also given in the “direction of management” document. The legal set up is given in his legal documents and Will. The spiritual initiation system is given in the July 9th Document. The spiritual system or śāstra is given in his books lectures etc.
There is no need of trying to figure out anything, what Śrīla Prabhupāda has given us is perfect and will work if given the chance, all that is needed is that we reject the present system and institute Śrīla Prabhupāda’s.
Of course this will take time and effort but we simply cannot let the present situation continue. The GBC have proven as a body and as individuals that they have failed to lead our Vaiṣṇava society in a spiritual direction and they need to be taken to task and made to rectify. They are but few and we are many. We must make this stand against them. We must actively educate others to reject and rebuke the present leaders and gurus as there is no other way that we can make the changes needed to get our society back on track.
As we speak the gurus and other ISKCON leaders are swooping in on the ignorant ex disciples of Prabhavisnu in the hope that they can get them to change their allegiances. The gurus will placate them and offer them shelter and the GBC will reinforce their faith in the institution. The disciples simply want to be lead like sheep to the slaughter as they have never been trained to be independently intelligent.
These FISKCONites will never educate the newcomers and neophyte devotees to be independently intelligent or in other words brahminically minded devotees. For Brahmans and Ksatriyas will reject such fools and rascals immediately.