ISKCON as Disorganised Religion

A correspondent (who wishes to remain anonymous) writes:

Regarding devotees having a hard time understanding certain organizational principles, that was not a reference to you but to one of my previous projects. To this day in many places we still separate “devotees” from “congregation” – and one defines a relationship with Krsna and one with an organization. They are not mutually exclusive. ISKCON in general has not understood organizational participation. And then to try to distinguish we use terms like “temple devotees”, but devotees cannot be categorized according to where they live or even how dedicated they might be to a particular organization. Sastric categorizations are acceptable, kanistha, madhyama, etc. So we’ve been going the direction of the typical church or religious institution for the last 30 years or so and there are implications. Srila Prabhupada never used the term “congregation” as a noun as used by western religious institutions. From the time we started doing that, the counterpart of “clergy” was inevitable, and in the meantime “devotee” became the default counterparty, to great detriment. In the early 90s I predicted that we would eventually see the use of the term “clergy” yet I was still surprised when the NA GBC very recently used it in the legal paperwork mandated for use by all NA temples.

I’ve read Sita-Pati’s online writing so I know he understands these things – he uses the term ISKCON staff, as I have since around the late 80s. I’m just touching on the tip of the subject above. The result of all this is that there has been an identity crisis in ISKCON which continues to this day, in some areas of the world more so than others. Identity is based on relationship, in fact the two cannot be separated, yet we’ve not understood this as an organization and in fact have often organized ourselves against that principle, despite the fact that it is quite possibly the core principle in our siddhanta. We should understand it better than anyone. We can see that society is fully based on this principle, even in the material world – yet we ourselves have apparently not understood it.

Outside of India, ISKCON had an international monopoly on Krsna consciousness until we started all this, not that ISKCON should have a monopoly but if this had been understood and people had not been mistreated but rather ISKCON had offered appropriate identities in relationship to the organization we would be in a much better condition as an organization. “Devotee” means surrender to Krsna, not an organization, because the other identity in relationship with “devotee” cannot possibly be an organization. But we used to put the organization in between (possibly trying to usurp Krsna’s position?) and demand that the devotees surrender to their ISKCON authorities. It has taken a long time for the members of ISKCON to understand these things, if we even do understand, because the leaders did not understand. Srila Prabhupada filled multiple roles, as the Founder Acarya, as diksa guru, as siksa guru, as sadhu, as sannyasi, and practically as the source of sastra also. His first generation followers did not have to distinguish between those roles – Prabhupada was very simply everything for them - but in carrying things forward we naturally have to. Such confusion practically could not have been avoided after his physical departure.

And now we have some focus on parallel lines of authority issues, for example. But there are not two parallel lines of authority. We have at least 6 lines of authorities, if we are devotees and ISKCON participants. Krsna, guru, sadhu, sastra, societal, and organizational. The only way to understand how they are meant to work together is to understand the identity of the individual in relationship to each of them – and not violate or cross the relationships. The other identities are devotee, disciple, one who accepts sastra, sadhu, our varna and ashram; and organizational will be along the lines of staff, volunteer, student, member, congregation – which can change according to the amount of time we have and our desire to dedicate it to the organization at any particular point in time. So then it gets confusing if we have a diksa guru who is also our GBC zonal secretary, who is also a sannyasi. When he speaks to me, is he speaking to me in my role as a disciple, a member of ISKCON, or a grhastha, for example? Our spiritual, societal, and organizational leaders need to understand these things very carefully, be very clear in their dealings, and work together. Limiting the ability for one person to have multiple leadership roles is not the answer, education is the answer. Real society is meant to be a wonderful tapestry of these multiple relationships, and all of them are ultimately meant to help us advance spiritually.

Last night in a meeting between various leaders here in Brisbane we discussed some of these points. There is great confusion from the top of the organisation on down, and we were discussing how we can deal with that locally, so this is quite timely.