MISSION STATEMENT

Enlightening readers about the beliefs and practices of the Hare Krishna (ISKCON) cult is the sole purpose of this blog and its companion, The ISKCON Cult Unveiled, at https://iskconcultunveiled.blogspot.com. Many of the essays I have written over the past ten years deal with controversial issues and others deal with basic philosophical concerns.

Like most cults, ISKCON is two-faced: it has a private side that it reveals to its adherents and another is reserved for the public. Exposing the truth about both aspects of the Hare Krishna movement is vital for a number of reasons that I will summarize shortly. Before I continue, however, let me introduce myself.

Back in 1967, my sister and I (we were 16 and 14 years old, respectively) saw a group of Hare Krishna devotees dancing and singing at one of the famous Central Park “Be-In” hippie events in the “Summer of Love.” One of the devotees approached me and invited me to the group’s “love feast” that they held every Sunday. (For more details about our actual visit, please see my blog essay, https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2010/07/reductive-thinking-and-cult-propaganda.html) I began high school that September and in December, my sister and I were initiated by the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (also called “Srila Prabhupada”). My initiated name was Ekayani and my sister’s became Indira.

Ekayani “married” at 17 years old!

Our guru had come to New York only the year before, so I became at that time both one of the earliest and youngest initiated devotees. We certainly were sincere and stalwart devotees, going to school during the week and worshipping our deities at home and living for the weekends when we would take the subway train to the temple and help prepare the Sunday love feast. We also carefully read all of the scriptures our guru translated (or so we thought) and for which he also prepared commentaries (“purports”), such as The Bhagavad-Gita As It Is and the multi-volume Srimad Bhagavatam (Bhagwat Purana). We also created oil paintings of various scenes in the Krishna legend in our spare time.

After two years, my elder sister married a devotee and moved to St. Louis to start a temple there. Her loss left me to pursue my devotional service in near total isolation, but I persevered. Tragically, just after I graduated from high school, I was told by my sister, her husband, and Srila Prabhupada’s personal secretary that our guru had ordered me to marry one Gopal Krishna dasa, an Indian (now the guru Gopal Krishna Goswami) then living at the Montreal temple. I was only 17 years old and a virgin. (As it turns out, Srila Prabhupada told me himself that he had never given such an order.) For me, that horrific event ended the honeymoon phase of my involvement with the Hare Krishna movement.

But I digress. I do, however, want to make it perfectly clear that I knew the founder-acharya of the Hare Krishna movement personally (in fact, he never failed to greet me whenever we met, even when there was a crowd of other devotees present). I also wrote many letters to him, all of which he answered, sometimes at length (see one very influential photocopy of one at the end of this blog page). Critics of my views, all absolute strangers who never met me or my guru, think their fanatic adherence to his now-thoroughly discredited views entitles them to diagnose me as an insane person and recommend that I seek professional help. Such persons are themselves delusional and, should they ever find the fortitude to reject the nonsensical beliefs they slavishly follow, will find themselves on a therapist’s coach for years to come.

It is a daunting task to summarize the truly bizarre beliefs that our guru held and that he insisted we accept without any investigation on our part. As I and many others have written elsewhere, the problem seems to have its source in his belief that Gaudiya (Bengali) Vaishnavism is the ultimate expression of devotion to Lord Krishna, despite the fact that the philosophy of the character of Bhagwan Sri Krishna in the Gita and the Indian folk stories about the antics of Krishna and his cowherd gopis cannot be compared. He also held that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, a Bengali Krishna enthusiast, was an incarnation of both Radha and Krishna together, ignoring the obvious: read the Chaitanya Charitamrita and a picture emerges of a cross-dressing Brahmin whose ”devotional” proclivities are better left unstated.

How could I, a woman who, after leaving ISKCON after wasting 13 years of life there, manage to earn a B.A. and M.A. while raising my son alone and working a demanding, full-time job (I have worked for a total of 33 years), if, as Srila Prabhupada insisted, women have half the brains of men and (I quote) “there is no very great scientist, mathematician, philosopher among woman.” In these and other laughably ignorant comments about so-called Vedic science— coming from a one-time chemist who, by his own admission, never read the Vedas—A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami proved that he lacked the authority by education and common sense to represent the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita to the West. How could we naively sit by and listen to this man state that the moon is farther away than the sun and the astronauts could never have gone to the moon since it is a “heavenly” planet and they never worshipped the moon-god Chandra in the first place?

Rather than continuing to hide their fundamental beliefs under a cloak of secrecy, ISKCON leaders and members should adopt a full disclosure policy immediately. Your lives--your souls--deserve no less. We  are all reminded from the lethal building collapses in the news that to live in a building with a faulty foundation is to court disaster.

Before ending, I want to restate that my writings are intended solely to educate and inform. Furthermore, I strongly believe in freedom of religion, but still insist that children, who, as the gurukula tragedy taught the public are helpless in such an irrational and abusive world view, are educated in public or private schools with a state-approved curriculum. I also despise and disavow any kind of discriminatory views, whether they concern women, ethnic groups of any kind, races, or religion. Lastly, I want to make it clear that the views expressed in this blog are mine alone and that I labor on them without assistance and have never received any financial help of any kind to support my efforts.

Just out! Please see: https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2016/11/a-note-to-my-readers-voice-crying-in.html

Select Essays on Various Topics in This Blog

Abuse of the Legacy of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and Swami Vivekananda:

https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2012/09/standing-on-shoulders-of-giants.html

ISKCON Pretends to be an Ambassador of India's Cultural Heritage:

https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2011/10/iskcon-cultural-center-hoax.html

Using the Bhagavad-Gita to Advance ISKCON's Ambitions in Russia:

https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2012/03/gita-and-russia-another-iskcon-public.html

Female Infanticide and Selective Abortion:

https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2012/01/sequin-for-mr-al-zahrani-very-short.html

Evils of Arranged Marriage and Treatment of Widows in India:

https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2010/03/widows-and-child-brides-no-more.html

Child Abuse in ISKCON and Organized Religion:

https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2011/08/sex-abuse-claiments-win-big-justice-at.html

Link between Cultural Intrusions in Russia and Terrorism:

https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2011/01/islamic-tribalism-converts-and-terror.html

All rights reserved. No part of this essay can be reproduced in any medium without the express written consent of the author.

"A SEQUIN FOR MR. AL-ZAHRANI," A VERY SHORT STORY.

Mr. Al-Zahrani (as his American nurses insisted on calling him) fumed yet again as the light streaked across the blue of his closed eyelids. Sometimes it appeared to be a tiny comet and at other times, it elongated into a minute, dim torch. “What, am I a superstitious fool or a boy frightened of his own shadow?” he thought. “Worse, why did those murmuring idiots called my family say what I saw is a blessing? What is really a blessing is that since I can’t speak now or do anything except move my eyelids, their inane chatter has finally stopped.” His only regret now was that it had never occurred to him to ask his oncologist whether hallucinations were byproducts of advanced pancreatic cancer.

Just last month he was back in his own country, relaxing with his five sons as they smoked and drank their thick coffee for what seemed to be hours. Looking at the lot of them, he remembered his own youth as one of two boys in a family that included his four sisters. He thought that when he married, he would allow his wife one daughter to be a companion to her and insist that the others be males. Fate and a little medical intervention made it so, but the girl turned out to be just like her brothers, even worse. Sanaa was a bitch, even without the Oxford and Ivy League graduate degrees of her investment-crazed brothers. She married a man in the mold of her brothers, but with ten times the ambition and well-schooled in the subterfuge that had made her father’s financial dealings so effective. “My disciple, my son-in-law,” Fahim mused rather grimly. Then he nodded off again and, feeling the opiate dripping in his veins to be somewhat inadequate, focused on the light as an experiment befitting a man of science in full possession of his reasoning faculties.

“Stop,” he said, and it stopped. Then it hovered above his vision like a contact lens that takes just a few seconds to fully adjust. It was as if he were seeing through a transparent sequin—the colors everywhere seemed almost too bright. He could feel the sun bouncing off what, incredibly, seemed pink sandstone walls and the fuchsia, lemon yellow, and purple of the women’s clothing, which also seemed spangled with tiny mirrors like so many stars. Everyone seemed to be smiling, ignorant, Fahim thought, of the immodest dress of the women, which in his country was forbidden. Then he became conscious that he was not alone.

“What did you promise and what was your gift?” someone or something was asking him, and for a moment, it seemed like a riddle and then the meaning became instantly clear. He felt as if he were surrounded by people who for once were genuinely interested in his well-being. “Fahim," someone was telling him, “answer Shubha, don’t be afraid,” and he again found himself under the loving gaze of she who had died giving birth to his only brother. He then turned to address Shubha and recognized her immediately.

“If you can’t answer right now, don’t worry, you will soon learn what they were and if you truly repent, all will be forgiven," she said in a voice that mingled concern and a touch of regret. Mustering his courage, Fahim asked her what had been her own mission. In response, she quietly embraced him. Suddenly, he found himself back at his hospital room, where the only sound was that of the nurses walking slowly about as they plucked all the wires that had bound him to this world, unaware that he was floating above them, an arc of translucent flame, holding hands with and beaming at his new friend. “In answer to your question,” she was saying, “my gift was to discover the cure for your disease and my promise was to work to overcome each and every obstacle to make it happen. Unfortunately, I was never given the chance.”

Then together they appeared in the night sky above a small concrete house in the city of pink sandstone so lately visited and saw a thin, almost waifish girl who could not have been above seventeen or eighteen years old carefully, and as not to be seen by anybody else, gather a few flowers and pat them to the heaped top of a newly-dug, tiny grave next to three others that had since sunken to the level of the ground.

All rights reserved. No part of this essay can be reproduced in any medium without the express written consent of the author.