Guest guest Posted September 17, 1998 Report Share Posted September 17, 1998 > The point is that if you have 400-500 temples with 20 persons in each all > over the world there will be only 20 persons which have to take care of > all the societies needs. In other words everyone is fully engaged in doing > the needfull all the time. Everyone is put on constant emergency and are > still not able to do all the things which are needed in a normal society. We have seen in ISKCON before, that when too many devotees are put in one temple, or area, the whole thing tend to crash. It has been tried over and over again. Maybe it is because it is tried like trying to play more and more music instruments on the same musician. My suggestion was that to enable to put more devotees in the same "orchestra" there has to be a teaching institution to learn them to play the same tune. Otherwise it would just be like a convention of street musicians all beeing together, playing their instruments, but not together. The individuals must take different roles, playing different musical instruments. It will not work if they all try to play independently and with the same instruments. > > To have a society where everyone can concentrate on their specific > occupation you have to have at least 2000-3000 persons in on place. This > is my point. I thought it was obvious. It has been attempts to build bigger communities of devotees, but they always seems to fail. Therefore, I meant, we have to change something to enable everyone to live together and cooperate. > > I am not speaking about getting a perfect director. I am amazed that what > I am saying is taken like that. Simply amazed.... I was thinking some steps further, sorry if I did not make it obvious. For example the Almvik community was an attempt to build something bigger, but devotees were just not interested to settle down in a community with others. Most devotees stayed a while, then they would to off to *do something real* like preaching, or go start their own preaching center of whatever. We are thought that just living together building a society is nothing for a *real* devotee, and as every bhakta tries to become a *real* devotee. The problem, I think, is in the teaching process. What values are thought to the new devotees. If we teach that everyone should go off preaching and on sankirtan, then everyone will have that as a goal. I don't meant that is wrong, but we have to understand that if that is the goal we will not be able to build communities. Our aim has been that devotees go and live in small groups, in remote preaching centers, and do preaching. The street everything-in-one-person musician. The obvious solution is that some devotees go preaching, and others go build communities. We thus arrive att some kind of dividing up what devotees should do. Fortunately, the dividing up business is already determined by Krsna. It is called four varnas and four asramas. Because we missed that point at our first step, nothing will just not work at later steps. -- your servant Prsnigarbha das > > Ys > Svarupa das Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted September 19, 1998 Report Share Posted September 19, 1998 > As we were conditioned to believe that sadhana was all important and our > desires for economic development were material (dharma more important than > artha), and he was a paragon of sadhana who chanted his rounds in public > every morning BEFORE mangala arotika, we accepted it. If you missed > mangala arotika because you were working hard, you were immediately > considered unfit to be involved in management. Better to go hide after > the program and sleep until noon, then to miss mangala arotik. And the > worst possible thing was sex life, even in marriage, which immmediately > disqualified you from any sort of recognition or credibility in important > matters. This sounds like the normal ISKCON preaching put into exemplary practice. If we just have good sadhana, everything else will be solved automatically. Sadhana is not a bad thing, but it would be interesting to get an analysis why sadhana did not work. I assume you refer to the NV situation in the past. If this system failed in the past, why have we not changed it? For surely the preaching is still that improving the sadhana will solve all problems. Are we repeating the same mistakes over and over again? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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