Learning from Mistakes

I had an exchange with a devotee on Facebook. He called on me to confess in more vivid detail and with greater honesty, etc., about my activities in the Gurukula. He hinted that my sins were likely much worse than those meager details I had given in my confessions. He hinted that beneath my facade of gray beard and sophistry I was a seething cauldron of wickedness.

I got a bit scratchy with him, a bit annoyed that I cannot be done with these events, and having undergone some public humiliation on account of them, and so on, culpability that I have accepted and have spent my life trying to understand, things that happened over forty years ago. I have been watching a lot of right wing stuff of late, starting with Jordan Peterson, and the self-righteous social-justice warrior type virtue-signaling some kind of moral superiority because he can hold these things over your head and just ignore everything else, often the things that are more important.

However, after learning that he was also a product of the Gurukula system, I thought I would take a little more time for him. What follows is based on what I wrote to him:

You are correct, I acted defensively and that was not really necessary. But you did not introduce yourself. So I found your behavior impolite. I am a believer in traditional values, and consider respect for elders something that should be expected in  social dealings. The sense of victimhood is probably the root of all evil. The accepting of your psychological Shadow (often revealed by your strongest negative emotions) and taking responsibility for it are the pathway to spiritual growth, from which all other growth is possible.

I agree with you entirely--those who have failed to uphold the value system they profess should feel ashamed and guilty. And no doubt, most do.  Shame and guilt can lead to many ills, but they also lead to good, because one who is shamed and guilty normally feels the desire to change and improve.

Some people take it as a lesson to change for the good, the cheaters take it as an occasion to improve their cheating capabilities. I would like to be known as belonging to the former group, and as I think this is the correct and religious way to approach life, I would recommend the same to you.

And with it, you will attain the kindness that comes from humility, that of knowing that you, as a human being, a conditioned soul, have failings. These, which are better called sin, burrow down to the profoundest levels of our conditioned nature.

When someone who knows this sees someone else helplessly riding on the waves of the three gunas and suffering their consequences, it evokes compassion and mercy. That is really what Vaishnava humility is based on. 

Earlier statements are here: Mayapur Gurukul Confessions and here: Confession A Religious Act.

The statements were made voluntarily, in great part because of my natural feelings of guilt at what transpired in the Gurukulas and my involvement in them. I tried to be as honest as possible, pace your suspicions of worse sins than I confess to. But I recognize the defensiveness that is present there, and also the wish to retaliate, which I now find distasteful.

Naturally, everyone is a public figure these days, so from the beginning I expected that the worst criticisms would be levied my way, and from time to time, indeed, my worst deeds are publicized. That is just the fruit of one's deeds and misdeeds. In my theology, that is God's way of teaching you how to be worthy of Him. 

So, hopefully, I have learned from my mistakes and can speak first of all to my personal experience, of which I have at least some first-hand experience, however Shadow-blind it may be. Casting light on the Shadow is indeed the essence of self-knowledge. And is, indeed, the purpose of confession. And it is also only through individual change that societal change is possible.

I have difficulty understanding the psychology of those who make a career of being a child abuse, nor would I be able to ever countenance it. Some say that such people can never be cured, and it may well be so.

Grace is the key and grace comes to those who turn towards it, like a flower and the sun. But not everyone turns towards the grace... and that is due to the darkness of the Shadow.

In my case, I have committed this lifetime to discovering the process of Krishna bhakti and the attainment of prema. It is most natural that by one's mistakes one learns. Krishna allows us our choices, but to what end if not to learn the meaning of prema?

Once upon a time, Prabhupada told me personally that I was to teach the children lovingly, like a mother. But that was after he chastised me for punishing a student by depriving him of a meal. Prabhupada lovingly said of me, "He should not eat."

I was raised a Catholic. I was educated by Jesuits. I had experience of corporal punishment when I stepped out of line. I even had the experience one time of provoking one of the brothers to a sudden rage, that resulted in getting a punch to the solar plexus; another time a frustrated priest gave me a kick in the shin. These events are testimony to my teenage anomie, nevertheless that was the atmosphere where people live in the Catholic spirit of subduing the flesh. Rebel beware!    

The Jesuits are St. Ignatius Loyola's army consecrated to the service of the Pope. My father was of Polish military stock and believed strongly in discipline, which nevertheless was never instilled in me, at least not to his satisfaction. After three years of hippie itinerance, however, I was ready for cold showers at 4 a.m.

The conservative spirit was strong in that early ISKCON, but we were building from scratch, from an idea, from the Prabhupada-driven inspiration that a new world of the spirit could be built, that we could bring to the world and save it from the effects of Kaliyuga. And then we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of the Kaliyuga.

I probably mentioned it in the confessions I posted earlier on my blog that I often wonder in amazement how Prabhupada inspired us to so completely abandon our pretensions to Western superiority. At the same time, however, he wanted that American energy, and he wanted that that this American rajas would get injected into Indian society as well. Which was the only way that Vaishnavism or Hinduism could survive in the coming world order: Institutional and personal discipline...

Just today I watched a short video of a well-meaning Western devotee promoting food distribution in poor Braj villages. She describes a scene that I have seen also a hundred times: the chaos of prasad food distribution in a poor Indian village. Indiscipline. Civilized people know how to stand in line.

I once (around 1984) went to Jessore in Bangla Desh to visit a godbrother for his annual devotional program and feast. While exploring the town, I watched the Muslims praying in their Jamma Masjid. I marveled at the unity of spirit that overcame the faithful even after this 5 or 10 minutes ritual namaaz in unison.

That same evening the program was to take place--kirtan, katha, the usual--but it was absolutely impossible in the midst of the ruckus. It was chaos. Feeling some frustration I chastised the mostly poverty-stricken and uneducated Hindus, the women unable to control their children, the complete absence of any sense of how to behave at a religious program. For the few educated I said, if you want to know why the Muslims dominated for 700 years, just look at yourselves.

Remember, this is the world that modern Bengali Hinduism, and our Vaishnavism, was born in. The is the world that Prabhupada was born in and knew.

What I am getting at is that when we Gurukula teachers pictured making ideal little Vaishnavas, what were we thinking? How do love and discipline go together? What are the limits of discipline? Did we know any of those things? Does anyone? 

Bengali children and their parents considered strict disciple with corporal punishment to be the norm. I do not think that is the road to go down. Anyway, life is long and you go through a lot of changes. The young are often the most puffed up when they make their biggest mistakes. A Bengali zamindar's education in the 1840's 

And what are the limits of indoctrination? What exactly was this ISKCON world into which we were training the next generation? We had no idea. We were creating it from scratch, with only the ideals of Vaishnava character as pictured in Prabhupada's books. But we also had our Western saṁskāras. 

The Catholic Church is really the only model that ISKCON has to emulate. It is the model that impressed Vivekananda and Saraswati Thakur: a celibate priesthood dedicated to evangelization and social leadership. The evidence is clear enough: ISKCON's main temple at world headquarters in Mayapur is meant to be a kind of bigger and better St. Peter's Basilica. Scratch Jesus and replace with Gaura. It is a better imitation than Vivekananda or Saraswati Thakur could manage, for sure! 

And it is Prabhupada's genius is that ISKCON has thus managed to build a pan-Indian appeal. The new India requires discipline, but it requires its Hindu identity. It needs to differentiate itself to preserve itself, but it must live in a tough world with competitors all around. The situation is not funny: people are pointing atom bombs at one another, the tectonic plates in Asia are moving in different directions: a Utopia of Gandhian villages would not survive for five minutes. 

Prabhupada was not a Gandhian, remember.

The patterns of abuse in ISKCON were also very much like those in the Catholic church, though thankfully on a much smaller scale, just as ISKCON is on a much smaller scale, despite its "basilica." Nevertheless, through comparison we may be able to learn the kind of things we should expect in this kind of religious institution dominated by celibate priests. And we can think about what remedies, if any, are needed or indeed possible.

 
Is there anything positive to be had from the institutional model that prevailed in the early days of ISKCON and in the way it has evolved and is evolving?  Should we go to the other extreme and reject the whole edifice of religion itself, of belief in the supernatural, or in any kind of tradition that takes lies and fairytales as historical truth and the basis of morality?

Anything built on a foundation of lies is inherently doomed, since only Truth is Victorious. 

And truth is the end destination of all paths, though the "The truth of what?" might be different for each person. Though I marvel at the wonderful ways in which the neo-atheists construct their anti-religion and anti-theism arguments, I belong to the group that believes in God and believes that one should follow the path or tradition that one is called to, as far as it takes on in the knowledge and service of God, the Supreme Truth.

It takes place through transcending the superficial elements of belief and intelligently understanding the meaning of one's path or tradition. Faith is what keeps you following the path you have chosen. So I trying to make something positive of my experiences and take the major lessons as guideposts to what was wrong in myself and how it needs to be remedied. And, I look for the answers in my tradition?

What are the lessons that I, a completely ordinary jīva, was meant to extract from my life in Krishna bhakti, and would these lessons be useful to others?

So, my first response to the dilemma I found myself in in 1979 in the face of nascent chaos in the Gurukulas was to find a flaw at the very roots of ISKCON itself, in its very institutionality (See Simone Weil.). There has been a flaw in the continuity of the sampradāya. If we were to believe the idea that fidelity to the Guru is of such paramount importance as the doorway to salvation, and the Guru-paramparā is of such great necessity in the preservation of the primordial revelation, then what was this history of guru abandonment in the tradition that makes these very claims? Is that connected to the disintegration that I am seeing around me?

Then when I heard that the only living son of Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur disagreed with the Gaudiya Math because he saw the inevitable worldliness that large, rich institutions in the hands of celibate monks sink into. 

Prabhupada may have mocked Lalita Prasad Thakur for impotence as a preacher, but the Thakur still lived in the Jaiva Dharma world. What were the institutions that existed in Gaudiya Vaishnavism prior to the coming of Europe into Bengal? What was the method of social organization in Bengali society? How did the two fit together? What is the relevance of all that to the present-day situation?

These are all big-ticket questions that can only be answered beginning with exploration on the personal level. First change yourself, then change the world. But we cannot deny that collective human activity requires institutions. We all live and learn.