Jagat

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 ...

When Mr. Shenkar started his little anti-Vrindavan Today mission , in a rather grandiose fit of hubris and malevolence, possessed by the spirit of some other kind of self-righteousness, he decided to "out" Jagadananda by reprinting a 20-year old letter I had written to Nirmal Chandra and Bhaktimati Devi Dasi, both of whom I had known as devotee children when they were babies and I was just a new devotee in Toronto. To see their pain about the abuse expressed in such a public way brought out many reflections that had come to me as a result of my experiences in Iskcon and the various Iskcon Gurukulas I had been involved with for most of my time in the movement. This was also after five years of living in Nabadwip and spending another eight or nine years in university in Canada and London, so I had had plenty of time to reflect on these matters. The letter thus reflects my state of mind at the time, and it is quite true that the experience in Iskcon's Gurukulas had been ...