Important

[Guest guest]

>Better give up being a GBC... honestly. No offence intended. But GBC is a

>managerial post and that necessitates dealing with the issues that you have

>shown a great eagerness to avoid...

 

>But I don't blame you one bit for avoiding them. It seems to me too that

>people are just not sincere and therefore they want to quarrel with the

>"unstated" aim of increased sense gratification... in various ways...

 

Give up being a GBC... To give something up I need to know what

that thing is. What a GBC member is and does isn't clear-cut

even on the GBC Body, although many ISKCONians speak of "the GBC" as

if it would be a well-defined position. It *is* well-defined,

but in Srila Prabhupada's simple terms. Simple, because "By all means

we must preserve our spiritual status, that is the point. Not that we

are mad after big buildings, many devotees, life members, this, that."

 

But now in ISKCON we are so complicated. That's the old story of this

sad material world. Government. Politics. Public relations. And

what are these really? They are all abstractions, flickering conceptions

of the mind. It's just that a lot of people on this planet insist on taking

these conceptions seriously, as if they would be concrete, dependable

realities. Even intellectual karmis know this is not true. The ironic

thing is that many ISKCON devotees think that ISKCON government should

be more like the karmi government: "clearly established." These poor

bhaktas are just idealistically striving to attain a greater height of

disappointment than they are suffering now.

 

Srila Prabhupada said "Krsna consciousness means we should always be

satisfied and happy, not that we must work something impossible, become

overburdened and then, because we are unhappy by so much trouble, we lose

enthusiasm and give up all hope." And so the world staggers on its way

to its appointed fate. Fortunately the fate of ISKCON is in the hands of

a higher authority than those whom are imagined to be running everything

by politically-minded COM-wallas.

 

The report I get from Vrndavana from a female disciple, whom I know

well and trust, is that the incident itself was minor...the world-wide

excitement is all a creation of COM. That's what she told me, and I

believe it. Her account matches nearly 30 years of my experience

in ISKCON. There is a class of devotees who crave the sensational.

To that end, politics flourishes on the mental platform, nourished

by our own "media." The same thing goes on in the karmi world.

 

My point is that in this political din, the real and only right of a

human being is lost. I'm surprised the combatants themselves don't see

this. Is the sweet taste of Krsna-katha so unappreciated in ISKCON that

we think these passionate debates about tottering mental constructions

are the real nectar for which we are always anxious?