Jagat

One of ISKCON's senior acharyas, Hridayananda Dasa Goswami, who has been teaching at the prestigious Berkeley Theological Union for many years, is  promoting a movement within the movement called " Krishna West ." His proposal has met with controversy, especially since the GBC at its annual Mayapur meetings effectively " quarantined " him. Rank and file members of the movement have been commenting copiously on the meaning of Hridayananda's proposals, which primarily center around issues of the distinctive Hare Krishna dress, showing that he has definitely struck a nerve. Hridayananda vehemently protests that he remains true to the teachings of Srila Prabhupada without compromise and that he is using the issue of dress to make Krishna consciousness more palatable to a wider range of people whose prejudices are awakened by strange appearances. In other words, he claims that he is using the dress issue as a kind of subterfuge to bypass people's bias in...

I left ISKCON in 1979, which is a good long time ago. In the intervening 33 years, I have had plenty of experience with life, but for the most part I keep a healthy distance from the institution in which my spiritual life had its beginnings. There were numerous steps in my development that made me a very different person today than I was as a young Hare Krishna brahmachari. Recently I was invited to participate in a Facebook forum for Srila Prabhupada disciples. I thought this was intriguing, an opportunity to feel the pulse of this interesting segment of the world's population, the 4500 or so people who took initation from Prabhupada between 1965 and 1977, all of whom are now at least 50 years old, many in their 60's and even older. They are, in other words, in the latter stages of life; indeed, many are approaching death, some after living their entire lives in dedication to the movement and in service to Sri Chaitanya. There are many who left ISKCON to take initiation a...