GBC Meeting 2009: Managing the guru sub-committee

[suchandra]

February 15-16, Days Four and Five of the GBC Meetings

 

 

GBC: "For the last several years, strategic planning has been a major theme of the GBC meetings."

Why exactly are a group of God's direct representatives engaged in "strategic planning" if they are already getting full time dictations from Krishna? That means, either they are over-riding the dictation of God, or else they are bluffing when they say they are getting said dictation. Jesus is busy right now, he had to go to the strategic planning meeting. What is all this?

 

GBC: "Several days of the Annual General Meeting, as well as the second GBC meeting later in the year, is exclusively focused on this important theme. This year was no exception. Days four through six saw all regular work shelved and the entire Body, plus many other devotees, come together to proactively discuss the best way for the GBC and ISKCON to prepare for the future."

 

The acharya is getting direct dictation from God, so he needs to speculate about the future at some planning commission meeting? Take the City of New York which also has a "strategic planning committee to discuss the future of the city," is this what is needed to manage the acharyas, they need to be managed by a planning department? Where do we find that the spiritual master need to be managed by a planning committee? Where is the guru planning department mentioned in sastra?

 

GBC: "He began by asking everyone to take a few minutes to individually meditate on Srila Prabhupada’s vision for ISKCON, and to then analyze how far we have been able to fulfill that."

 

Now we are engaged in some freaky new age mediation miracle classes to get guidance from above? Either you are getting guidance or you are not, you cannot simply meditate for five minutes and expect to get a message from God?

 

GBC: "Topics on which Srila Prabhupada did not give many details, such as managing the parallel lines of authority of the guru and GBC, sizes of GBC zones, and serving the community of devotees that has now become home-based."

Right, there is no instruction for "paralell lines" of managers and pure devotees because: the managers do not manage Krishna's representatives. Where do we find this "managing God's pure devotee" board ever mentioned in the Vedas?

 

And now the community is "home based," no kidding because you kicked all of us out of the temples!

 

GBC: "A major theme of the ensuing discussion, which took most of the day, was the idea of creating an administrative division of the GBC, headed by an executive officer, with mandates such as implementing and following up on GBC resolutions, strategic planning, caring for devotees, etc. To underscore this point, Kaunteya Das of the Organizational Development Team screened a powerpoint presentation entitled "Realigning with Existing GBC Resolutions."

 

The GBC already has five hundred and fifty four various committees such as "women's acharya appointment committee" and so on, and now they are making layers and layers of new committees, but they have the same small handful of folks on the same committees, so that means each GBC is the head of about one hundred and seventy committees. And now they admit, after we have been paying them millions of dollars to be the managers, they have not even been following their previous resolutions from their previous meetings. Why have a new meeting if you never followed the old meeting?

 

GBC: "Several members expressed that better organization is needed for ISKCON to keep up with other religious groups.

The day ended with the GBC members writing down their thoughts on the creation of an executive office. These were collected and typed up for review the following day. The response was overwhelmingly positive in principle. This idea is still in the beginning stages, so many GBC members called for a detailed plan, suggested it be introduced in increments, and expressed concern about the possible cost of maintaining such an office."

After being spiritual masters for 30 years, now they are finally figuring out that they need an "executive body" to oversight and manage their God's representatives, and its just in the beginning stages, "We are God's direct representatives and now we are in the beginning stages of figuring out what that means, and how we can have a committee to manage spiritual masters"?

 

GBC: "The Organizational Development team will meet again in London from June 4-8, and will have a detailed plan ready for the October GBC meetings in Juhu. The rest of Day 5 went in meetings of the various strategic planning subcommittees."

After 30 years of demanding being worshiped as good as God, there is finally going to be a managerial sub-committee to form a strategic guru managing planning sub-committee, which is a sub committee of the acharya board committee, which is a sub-division of the regional zonal development of spiritual master committee, which is trying to form a women diksa-guru by-product committee, and so on and so forth. At least they admit, they are at the beginning, but why insist to be addressed as spiritual master and not as priest?