H.H. Bir Krishna Maharaja will be in town, and at the temple!

A concerned reader wrote to me about Pandu's recent posts on Planet ISKCON, and referred to them as "ritvik stuff". Here is the reply I sent:

"You know the truth of religion, and you are speaking according to the principle that the destination intended for the perpetrator of irreligious acts is also intended for one who identifies the perpetrator."

- Srimad Bhagavatam 1.7.22

It is a mistake to identify with any -ism. When someone has personal difficulties in their relationships with other persons or with an organisation, sometimes they may take shelter of a pre-packaged philosophical position. All -isms are fossilized thought. Although they may identify with that, we do not help them by identifying with it ourselves.

How many times have you been on sankirtan and you start to describe something, and a Christian says: "Oh, I know what that is, it's 'idol worship'", or some other stereotypical conception.

It would be a mistake for him to identify with an -ism such as ritvikism, and it would be a mistake for others to draw up battlelines by saying: "Oh, I know what this is - this is that", and casting Pandu in that role.

Pandu is having difficulty integrating his personal experience, his expectations, and his understanding of the ideals of the organisation.

If someone wants to address this situation, then my suggestion is that the "anti-ritvikism" people, whoever they may be, need to start by explaining exactly what happened with H.H. Bhakti Tirtha Swami's disappearance, the participation of H.G. Vakresvara Pandit, and the Child Protection Office ruling against him.

Instead of giving a public, reasoned explanation of that, "the organisation" responded to Pandu by using coercive methods. Everything has followed from there.

Call me a heretic, but I think that the issues around H.H. Bhakti Tirtha's disappearance pastimes and the participation of HG Vakresvara Pandit should by explained. I have not seen an explanation. What is the difficulty? Where is the brahminical response?

What are you advocating to me now? That I should also respond to Pandu with censorship, threats, ostracism? I think that someone should step into the obvious leadership vacuum around this issue and explore the issues around what happened at Gita Nagari, and the way it was handled.

Along with Pandu, I also think that an explanation is due. However, I'm not going to take shelter of any -ism as a result, and I'm not sure if that is what he is doing. But he has to maintain his integrity somehow in the face of the reaction to his requests for explanation...

Lock step conformity with the prevailing organisational mindset leads to Nazi Germany and 80's ISKCON. Sorry, but Planet ISKCON is not a propaganda piece - it's about real people having a real experience of Krishna Consciousness.

"Why give an explanation when you can use organizational pressure and name-calling to silence people" is an extremely dangerous position to adopt. If someone blows a whistle and there really is nothing to see, then just explain the situation transparently. When the response appears to be a massive shutdown of all dialog, it creates the impression that actually there is something wrong.

And Pandu, just be careful about how you present things, because "ritvik" is the new "commie", and the issue risks transforming away from what happened at Gita Nagari to how you are becoming a public exponent of a particular organizational ideology.

Oh yeah, and if you want to know why ritvikism arose as an ideology, you're looking at a microcosm of its birth right here. It's a reaction to this organizational dynamic.

...I do believe you mean "Satan's Slave". #apostrophefail

Madhava in Sydney.

Friday April 2, 8:00 pm
Body Mind Life Yoga
55 Foveaux St
Surrey Hills

More details and tickets for the concert at www.bodymindlife.com.au.

More details of the tour at www.kirtanaustralia.com.

On the "featured in Mayapura" theme - Namahatta.org have put together an online compilation of analyses of debates that I did. It features an overview and analysis of five of my favorite debates - four of them involving Richard Dawkins, one with Bill O'Reilly.

You can check it out here: Sita-pati Analyzes Examples of Live Debates.

Rhiannon (Carana Renu) tagged me a photo on facebook. I took a look at it, and was a pull-up banner outside a seminar in Mayapur, West Bengal, India called "Happy Families Happy Communities". I wondered why she had tagged me in it, until I looked at the image at the bottom:

I remember taking that photo - I'd just returned from a business trip to the United States a couple of years ago, and we were all happy to see each other again. We took that photo on the deck at Red Hill.

I published it on my blog under a Creative Commons license.

"At roadsides, temples and sanctuaries He would chant in sweet tunes, 'Krsna,krsna, krsna, krsna, krsna, krsna hey!' Sometimes carried away by some indescribable divine exultation, He would sing 'Rama! Rama!' and dance sweetly in ecstatic rhythm. He would deliver one and all, irrespective of time, place orcircumstances, by magnanimously inducing them to chant the Holy names of Lord Krsna. I sing with joy the unending glories of my golden Lord Gauranga-sundara; the divine abode of pure love.

- Prema-dhama-deva Stotram 22

Just arrived in my email inbox.

On the left, the Warrapa dam during the drought. On the right, the dam at 9am on Wednesday.

Brisbane has received half its annual rainfall in the first two months of 2010.

Dams are at 80% of capacity now, the highest since 2002. Water restrictions introduced in 2005, and ramped up over the next three years to "extreme", have now been relaxed to allow residents to use water for activities such as watering their gardens.

More information.

Recently a god-brother of mine, Vidyapati (Mikey), has been writing about his experience of Krishna Consciousness in ISKCON over the past 7 years. His blog is at xkrishnax.blogspot.com.

I find his writing lucid, reflective, insightful, and respectful.

I would like to point out here that ISKCON is a federation of allied local communities, and is by no means a homogenous entity, so his experience is the personal experience of one person in one particular situation. It has been very useful as a topic of conversation here, and I have had several in-depth discussions about issues around it with my friends here, especially with David Jorm and Vrajadhama.

I posted a comment on a recent post of Mikey's, one in which he talks about difficulties that he and others experienced in reconciling the hermeneutical approach (that means how scriptures are interpreted) advocated in their community, with their own independent thinking and intellectual integrity.

I'm reproducing my comment here on my blog to put it front of a wider audience. Understanding the philosophy of Krishna Consciousness to this level is what works for me. My realization is that to stay interested and engaged in Krishna Consciousness over the long term, you have to find out what works for you. Krishna Consciousness is simple for the simple, but if your intellectual capacity is more complex, then Krishna Consciousness does not lack depth of philosophy; and I wouldn't let someone else harangue you into thinking that it's just for dummies and that intellectuals are evil. When this starts to happen we end up with an organisation that runs on a personality cult (religion without philosophy + guru), and would resonate with statements such as: "When I hear the word intellectual, I reach for my Luger". Just to further invoke Godwin, I'd like to point out that Nazi Germany also ran on the twin principles of guru-bhakti (Heil Hitler!) and "Purity is the Force". It is a very dangerous dynamic - a razor's edge. Independently thoughtful, intellectually honest philosophers loyal to the core values of Krishna Consciousness (brahmanas) are necessary to keep it real. These people derive their validity from their own internal conviction, not from social convention, and thus can be a real pain in the ass, and a valuable counter-balance to excessive swings due to group think.

Below the line is my comment from Vidyapati's blog:

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In terms of epistemology, we had some interesting discussions at our recent retreat, where we discussed the six philosophical systems over three days. One point that came out is that Prabhupada's explicit hermeneutical strategy ("As It Is") is largely rhetorical. For example, he contradicts it in Bg. 3.29, where he renders a purport practically in contradiction to the verse, using an interpretative strategy other than "As It Is".

His rhetorical choice of hermeneutic is linked to a previous philosophical interpretation that he is seeking to refute - Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta had in turn refuted a previous school, Karma-mimamsa, which used exactly the hermeneutical strategy of "As It Is". The Karma-mimamsa epistemology was that scripture was of divine origin, and so everything in it was literally true. Thus, if you perform the rituals in there, since the scripture must be true, the result must come.

Everything there was literally true: "as it is". They de-emphasised metaphysics by saying that anything that wasn't an instruction on how to achieve a result was not important.

To undermine the influence of this school, Sankaracarya accepted the Vedic scripture, but introduced a different hermeneutic.

Sankaracarya stated that pramanas (epistemological sources) have their domain of authority. The authoritative domain of scripture is transcendence. In other mundane areas, such as cosmology, if sastra-pramana (scripture) contradicted pratyaksha and anumana (empirical observation and logic), the description of scripture could be retired. Sankara called these paramarthika (the transcendental part), and vyavaharika (the mundane part)

With this hermeneutical strategy many modern-day ISKCON controversies, such as the relative distances of the Sun and the Moon, or the structure of the universe, disappear.

However, Sankara then applied this hermeneutical strategy to descriptions of Brahman, designating some of them as saguna (mundane) and others as nirguna (transcendental). I personally feel that he overstepped the mark with this, and I'm not the only one.

Rather than quibble over where this distinction should be applied, Prabhupada has opted for the Karma-mimamsa hermeneutical approach. This gets rid of some problems - such as Sankara's characterisation of some descriptions of Brahman as mundane, but introduces others - such as cosmological controversies, and instances where Prabhupada violates his own stated hermeneutical strategy.

Once you understand that, it becomes possible to consider the Bhagavatam using Sankara's hermeneutic, but without his fault of over-extension (ativyapti in Sanskrit - where a definition is so broad that it includes within it things that should not be included). This is precisely what Bhaktivinode Thakur does in his book Sri Krishna Samhita. Bhaktivinoda Thakura also uses Sankara's terms paramarthika and vyavaharika often, while you won't find them at all in Prabhupada's writing.

You can understand why this approach isn't a standard practice amongst ISKCON devotees too - most people would be thoroughly confused just reading this, what to speak of trying to apply it.

However, it is also part of the tradition.

Keep it simple for the simple, but remember - Krishna Consciousness is also complex for the complex.

I have to say that in a number of cases of my godbrothers who have given up on the philosophy, my feeling is that it is because they didn't go deep enough into it. Of course, that is discouraged in some circles, but at some point we have to own our own relationship with the tradition.

Come to chant the Holy Names in at the 24 hour kirtan at New Govardhana, NSW, on the weekend of March 26-27, 2010.

Special guests include Madhava and Sri Prahlada, and bhakti kirtaniyas from New Govardhana and around Australia.

Please contact Radha on 02 6672 8549 to arrange accommodation, and contact Sitapati at sitapati@worldsankirtan.net if you want to be on the roster to lead kirtan.