THE ISKCON EXCUSE FACTORY

Imagine using a credit card, spending $10,000 and then telling the collection agency when they call that not only you have no intention of paying, but that they should “just get over it” and “let it go.” What response do you think you would get?

Sadly, the mothers and children of broken ISKCON(International Society for Krishna Consciousness)marriages, along with suffering extreme poverty, abuse and neglect of all kinds, have had their cries for just compensation muffled again and again by ISKCON apologists for the deadbeat husbands and fathers still hiding under the saffron curtain of “renunciation.” Indeed, a sanyasi who “renounces” his family is actually rewarded by being given the honorific title of “goswami,” while the wife and child/children he left to fend for themselves are brushed aside like so much garbage.

If an ISKCON sanyasi is permitted and even glorified for side-stepping his financial obligations to those he solemnly promised both in his temple ceremony and the civil court system to honor, love, and protect “till death do you part,” why do his associates allow it? Greed? Indifference? Misogyny? No, the real reason is COWARDICE, pure & simple. Perhaps sexual repression (and often, perversion) and blind adherence to irrational belief systems have to some extent diminished their manhood and turned them into knee-scrapers and foot-bathing parasites. However, nothing but a kind of all-pervasive spiritual rot has turned them into the bunch of COWARDS who, instead of eagerly promoting the welfare of women and children, act as the enablers of their abusers.

Gentlemen, remember that what really matters isn’t what you say, but what you DO! Going back to my analogy about unpaid credit card debt, most of us know from personal experience that unpaid bills grow and grow, accumulating interest until what you have is a mountain of debt. The same is true of the vast pile of unpaid alimony and child support that ISKCON men, sanyasi or not, have yet to pay, but mistakenly dismiss, thinking that they can dupe others into believing that their “service” has canceled all worldly debts. Sorry to jolt you fools out of your MAYA, but all you owe to your abandoned family is due and payable, and the longer it is withheld, the more interest it accumulates.

Worse, as I detailed below and in my website, criminal acts often accompany the abuse and neglect of former spouses and children, adding exponentially to the debts their abusers already owe. Make no mistake about it, many of these cases will end up in criminal and civil courts, while the more courageous advocates of these women will find other ways to avenge their honor if all else fails. In the meantime, the embassies and judicial administrations of their abuser’s host countries should be advised of the presence of these miscreants within their borders. And MEN OF ISKCON, try behaving like men and stop cowering before and empowering the saffron-skirted deadbeats whose flowery speeches and fundraising prowess cannot conceal that neglecting their responsibilities has pitifully shrunken their manhood into two useless, foul-smelling withered olives.

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CULT DIETARY RESTRICTIONS: THE EXAMPLE OF ISKCON

One of the most laughable and irrational dietary restrictions I had to follow as a Hare Krishna devotee--beyond the prohibition against eating meat, fish, and eggs--involved shunning garlic and onions. We were told that these naturally pungent bulbs grew only in "dirty" conditions and also have a nasty side effect of making one more passionate. I remember blushing violently when I repeated this nonsense to a Sunday feast guest, who immediately told me that I was talking absolute nonsense. He was right of course, but at the time I repeated this irrational garbage like a sari-clad puppet. Truth is, I never really believed in the prohibitions against garlic and onions, particularly after we were told that a good substitution is asafoetida ("hing" and here's where things get really nasty.

For one thing, asafoetida is a sulfurous gum resin that is usable as a spice in tiny amounts and only after it has been browned. Otherwise, it has a fetid and rather disgusting smell, much like a huge trove of rancid gym room sneakers festering in a hot locker room. This was the stuff we used to season much of our soups and vegetables, which only goes to show what lengths people will go to when deprived of their garlic and onions.

However, that's not the worst of it: the sad truth is that no other plant ingredient has a longer history in the preparation of black magic potions than asafoetida (which is one reason it is also known as the "devil's herb"). It also has medicinal properties, though nothing to compare with the health benefits of onions and garlic. The idea that these foods are non-Sattvic is derived from the conception of the three gunas (sattva, rajas, and tamas, representing goodness, passion, and darkness, respectively). These were originally representative of innate qualities and linked to the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva in their capacities as Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer (Maitrayaniya Upanishad). Furthermore, the Bhagavad Gita (17:2) treats the three gunas as innate qualities of individuals, which is treated by some commentators--Swami Dayananda Saraswati is a famous example--as proof that the spiritual preceptor, ignoring the caste of the parents, should assign a caste to a student upon completion of gurukula training based on his knowledge of the child's innate qualities.

The link to diet came much later with the concept of the Ayurvedic diet, which advocates foods considered to promote Sattvic qualities and proscribes foods that are considered to encourage lower tendencies. Here we enter into the realm of folklore and magic. It is understandable, given the great antiquity of Vedic culture, but personal experience and reason should step in at this point and assert themselves, for who else can attest to these qualities affecting a person but the man or woman ingesting the food in question? We know for example, that onions are ubiquitous in Indian cooking and that India is the world's leading exporter of onions. If onions and garlic had such debilitating effects on the Indian people, they would have run riot years ago and destroyed themselves in a vast onion and garlic precipitated holocaust.

So much for forsaking garlic and onions; instead of eating these healthful foods, we spent years eating a spice whose use is almost universally regarded as an important part of black magic potions and smells abominable into the bargain. Better eat with your health in mind and judge for yourself what is in your best interests.

Still undecided? Please see: https://iskconcultunveiled.blogspot.com/2016/11/iskcon-and-indignities-rational-look-at.html.

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ISKCON AND THE SIN OF GREED, Pt. 2

Although the whole “Maharani” episode was ridiculous from start to finish, one incident has remained fresh in my memory. It happened on the occasion of a reception I held for Taittiriya (Maharani’s initiated name) and her husband Bali Mardan at our apartment at the corner of Kane and Henry Streets. At the time she sported a fair-sized bulge in her abdomen, which she asserted was a multiple pregnancy. This claim was highly disputed:how could this hag (she could have been anywhere between 40-55, but to me, a 20-year old mother, the thought of anyone her age pregnant or claiming to be pregnant was simply—no pun intended—inconceivable) with her veiny hands and seamed face be slated to become the mother of a bunch of babies? Maybe, I thought, she is wearing a pillow under her sari or has bunched up the part one tucks in to resemble a belly? So, imagine my raised eyebrows when she told me matter-of-factly that our guru Prabhupada told her that the four fetuses she was allegedly carrying were four incarnations of Vishnu, each with four arms. The thought of sixteen arms waving about inside of her was funny beyond words, but I kept a rapt facial expression once I heard that it was Prabhupada who told her that bit of lunacy. Crazily enough, I never doubted the veracity of her account; however, I also knew beyond question that the old bird had been taken for a ride.

Before long it was clear to us that Taittiriya had been initiated by Prabhupada (in Los Angeles in 12/73) and married shortly thereafter by the scheming hypocrite Bali Mardan for the express purpose of getting at her money. Remember, those were the days when ISKCON devotees were ubiquitous in airports, conniving the public into buying literature that was in most cases almost immediately thrown into the trash. So the prospect of tolerating the antics of this shriveled brown monkey--whose effrontery and hauteur were driving most of us into the trees ourselves—was really no big deal. Yet something was profoundly wrong in the monkey house:there were no babies and, you guessed it, no money. How Prabhupada reacted to this state of affairs is clear from his letters. Here’s an excerpt from a letter he wrote to Taittiriya shortly before her ruse was discovered:

I have got very good respect for Japanese people. So far I have met the Japanese boys and girls in our temple here, they are so well behaved that I was astonished that they were more respectful than my direct disciples. (September 15, 1974)

But after it became plain that she was penniless, his reaction was quite different. Here is an excerpt of a letter dated November 28, 1974 that Prabhupada wrote to my spineless ex-“husband” Gopal Krishna in response to letter he wrote acting as if he had discovered Taittireya’s ruse:

She is old, like great grandmother. Because you are a devotee you could not tolerate the nonsense.

In fact, it was only after my continual urging to do something about the scandal at the temple and after the scandal was common knowledge that Gopal—a black-hearted villain if there ever was one—wrote to Prabhupada acting as if the discovery was his. Regardless, you can draw your own conclusions about this account of a cult’s greed and immorality without my pointing out the obvious. One thing is certain: Maharani was clearly an example of one who, to paraphrase Shakespeare, was more sinned against than sinning.

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ISKCON AND THE SIN OF GREED, Pt. 1

“Maharani” is a Sanskrit word meaning “great queen,” and I suppose our middle-aged God sister we called by that name thought of herself as such for the year or so that she lived among us under the pretense that she was an heiress. With her coarse features and stout figure, she was certainly less than regal, despite her gorgeous silk saris. However, since she was evidently the reason why her new husband, formerly Bali Mardan Goswami, had renounced the order of renunciation (“sanyasa”), she was regarded as both a prize and a cash cow. How she led all of us by the nose makes her story one of the most bizarre in the annals of the history of the Hare Krishna (ISKCON) movement.

Anyone who lived in or near the Hare Krishna temple on Henry Street in Brooklyn during 1972-1975 surely remembers the repressive, vehemently misogynistic regime presided over by the temple president, Bali Mardan, particularly before he abandoned the order of sanyasa and married a much older Japanese woman rumored to be filthy rich.  Among other indignities, women devotees had to stand at the back of the temple and could not preach.  In general, we were treated like cattle and insulted at every turn. I remember riding in a van to greet Prabhupada (our guru) at the airport and being forced with the other women to stand while all the men were seated. Only when I informed them that I was pregnant was I able to get a seat. Savages! Never one to tolerate maltreatment for long, I wrote a letter to Prabhupada informing him about the state of affairs at the New York temple and received a reply in December 1972. I was then a nineteen year-old due to give birth in early January 1973. What happened next is contained in the following account that first sent in an email to an ISKCON women’s group back in 1999:

After I received the letter from Prabhupad criticizing the anti-womenpolicies instituted by the New York temple then under the leadership of thesoon-to-be married Bali Mardan Goswami, Gopal [my so-called “husband” at the time, but since 1982 another “sanyasi” and currently a big, infamously corrupt guru with many disciples of his own] confronted me in our mice-infested hovel of an apartment and demanded to know why I did written to Prabhupada without his permission. I told him that I knew he wouldn't agree because he didn't have the guts to confront Bali Mardan, whereupon he picked up the one piece of furniture in the room--a heavy wooden desk chair- -and threw it directly at my eight-month's pregnant abdomen. Had I not instantly stepped aside (the chair put a hole in the wall went it hit), my wonderful son, whom I have raised and supported all by myself, would not be here today.
Remember this when you put your trust in "His Holiness" - the only thing holy about the man are the holes in his moral fabric. He should be serving a life sentence for attempted murder.
Tomorrow: Maharani and the multiple pregnancy and money scams. Stay tuned . . .

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PREFACE TO ISKCON AND THE SIN OF GREED

Let me preface this entry with a few words about the roles that the extremes of perfection and abjection play in the mind control games of cult members. For example, a guru in the Hare Krishna movement, usually also a sannyasi or mendicant who has taken a life-long vow of celibacy, is referred to by his disciples as a “pure devotee,” or one who free of materialistic urges, principally those of lust and greed. In order to perpetuate this fiction, the guru declares himself the lowest of the low, which works to increase the blind adulation of his followers and also to blunt or sidestep the criticism of any skeptics in the audience. Sound familiar?  Yes, most established religions seem to have a similar modus operandi, but there is a crucial difference: cults use the fiction of absolute purity of the guru or other leader as a means to train their disciples to mistrust their reasoning faculties and act according to any and all of the dictates of the cult leader. Terrorists whose zeal for a leader and an anachronistic set of ideals he represents are one manifestation of this the cult of extremism.  In fact, I believe that the only difference between religious cult members and modern terrorists is the willingness of the latter to use women and children as human shields and, if that doesn’t get them killed, to murder them and any other innocent noncombatants at random. But both thugs and cult members have one thing in common and that is a leader whose lust for power and greed for fame are dependent on manipulating the lesser lust for sex and greed for money of their disciples. As you will yourself realize after reading the story about Maharani, even the “purest” devotee is not above the cardinal vice of using his disciples as chess pieces in a game of justifying the end by any means.

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HUMILITY: THE HARE KRISHNA VARIANT

We are all familiar with self-deprecating individuals who put themselves down before others as a means of “fishing for compliments.” An insecure or vain man might describe himself as an “ordinary-looking guy” when in reality he is a regular Adonis. He knows, of course, what he looks like, but he also knows that his false modesty has the effect of putting his gorgeous figure on a pedestal. Such a man might be an adult in years, but in behavior he retains much of the insecurity of an adolescent. In most religions, this false modesty wears the mask of extreme humility and is also used as a con game, but the stakes are much higher. Moreover, it is far more insidious because the reverence the faithful feel for these fanatics, be they monks or sadhus, is often transformed into a rage that turns them into the faceless components of a mob. They are the arms and legs of a person whose life of “self-denial” in a cave or tent is a clever ruse to attract and then pervert the sentiments of people who either cannot or will not see that they are being used to entrap other susceptible individuals. Today the fruits of this demon-think are visible in the Middle East, where tribalism compounds the problems of Western military allies who seek to build national unity where war between various religious and ethnic factions is an ancient pastime. However, what I wish to explore in this blog are the roots of this behavior. I have already touched upon way humility is regarded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Now I want to turn my attention to some ways humility affects the religious practices of Hinduism, whose mixture of animism and anthropomorphism I regard as the ideological feeders of the Eastern forms of mysticism.

I will begin with an anecdote from my waning days as a Hare Krishna devotee. The year was 1979 and at the time I was living in Los Angeles near the temple at Watseka Avenue. Our guru, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, had died in 1977, and we were still adjusting to life without our “Spiritual Master.” Many of us felt like we were in a whirlpool clinging to the sides of our boat. Years of unquestioning obedience to our guru and his hand-picked inner circle could not be sustained in his absence and so, like cave dwellers suddenly exposed to sunlight after years of semi-darkness, we were left rubbing our eyes in disbelief. Because access to our guru (whom we called ”Prabhupada”) was severely limited in his final days, information concerning his plans for ISKCON (the “International Society for Krishna Consciousness”) after his death was shrouded in mystery. However, as a senior devotee, I had access to numerous sources of information that I considered and still consider to have been highly reliable. Prabhupada was apprehensive about the future of ISKCON after his demise and, in retrospect, justifiably so. I suppose he thought that the devotee he imparted the following information would keep his mouth shut, but that was not to be. Evidently Prabhupada believed that large numbers of his disciples would “bloop” (that is, leave the movement) when they found out that he believed the Vedic tenet that the Earth is in the shape of an upside-down saucer that is supported in space by four elephants. He then said that he believed that it would eventually become necessary to kidnap children in order to keep up the number of devotees. Crazy, you say? Oh, please, this is nothing to what we passively ingested and spewed out for years. How on earth did we get this way?

It was a kind of seduction into the irrational by way of false humility. A prized technique to entrap interested parties (usually people who came to our Sunday “love feasts”) would be to declare the greatness of our guru, who came to this country virtually penniless and yet succeeded in widely disseminating Bhakti (i.e., devotional) Yoga in just a few years. As we sat cross-legged opposite our guests, we would further appeal to their emotions by describing the method he used as extremely simple and natural: just chant the Hare Krishna mantra, dance ecstatically, and eat delicious vegetarian food. Prabhupada also stressed how chanting would rid one of bad karma accumulated over lifetimes. In our gullible eyes, this was the equivalent of winning a spiritual Lottery. Instant liberation! What we couldn’t see in the fog of incense was the fogging of our reasoning faculties: none of these claims made any sense. Before I begin demolishing these arguments one by one, let me begin with Aristotle’s definition of man as a reasoning animal. If this is the principal quality that distinguishes mankind from the rest of the animal creation, it follows that those who have been persuaded to let their emotions overwhelm their reasoning powers will gradually lose this distinction. Extravagant displays of humility accelerate this process:one of the favorites was the ascetic Haridas Thakura and his claim that “I am lower than a worm in stool.” This claim, is of course, patently absurd, but it is also typical of the philosophical reductionism that taints religious fanatics of all creeds. Admiration or emulation of a humble person also breeds a high tolerance for personal indignities. Initially we visited these on ourselves by allowing the edicts of ISKCON to control every aspect of our personal lives and then, as the recent lawsuit of the Hare Krishna children brought to light, we inflicted them on the offspring of our micro-managed couplings. To indulge in worshipping deities of wood and stone and circumambulating holy plants was bad enough, but teaching our children to do the same was positively diabolic. Why on earth did we believe anything the swami told us concerning the “Absolute Truth” of the Vedic scriptures and the “pure devotees” who formed an allegedly unbroken chain of “disciplic succession” from antiquity to the present? Furthermore, it surely does not take a student of comparative mythology recognize that Hindu cosmology is accretion of pseudo-scientific curiosities and folklore. The answer lies in the fact that we were victims of an unusually persuasive series of argumentative fallacies that were reinforced by living and studying arrangements designed to stifle our reasoning faculties. Here is a short list of these arguments:

1. Appeal to Authority: This is the basis of the claim that the four ancient Vedas are a perfect compendium of all knowledge of the universe. In this case, Hare Krishna devotees raised as Jews or Christians would be expected to reject the Bible based on its “inferiority.” When I was a member of ISKCON, our ignorance of the vast commentaries on the Bible by the Church Fathers and others made us sitting ducks for the rubbish we were fed about the “superiority” of Hindu scriptures. We were told, for example, that the antiquity and immense volume of the Vedas and the Upanishads made them vastly superior to the Bible, which was held to be vastly inferior because of its relatively puny size and its apparent philosophical inferiority.This argument is invalid because (a) the Hindu scriptures have no scientific validity, (b) are polytheistic in nature, and (c) therefore cannot serve as an infallible source of universal knowledge. I have no quarrel with Hindus who revere their scriptures, but it is absurd to claim that devotional literature filled with an anthropomorphism so patently based on the fauna and flora of the Indian Subcontinent is superior to the monotheistic scripture and commentary of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The same goes for the idea that an unbroken chain of pure devotees is the only genuine sources of spiritual guidance. It is not for nothing that the Vedic literature is peppered with stories about cave-dwelling sadhus being seduced by apsaras (enchantresses sent by demigods) to get them to “fall” from their exalted positions. Judging devotional perfection based on a religious absolutism with “all or nothing” standards is irrational because inhuman.
2. Hasty Generalization or Unrepresentative Sample: This is the fallacy behind the claim that chanting the Hare Krishna mantra produced unique effects that surpassed those of other religious prayers. A hasty generalization occurs when evidence necessary to the argument is suppressed or absent. For example, how could Prabhupada know that chanting or praying in other faiths could not produce the near mania the chanting and cymbal playing produced in his adherents? Even if other participants in other religious practices did not behave in a similarly “ecstatic” manner, what relation does their behavior have to do with their enlightenment? There is no way to know, of course. I know of what I speak because my wild enthusiasm and that of my elder sister in during the first months of my initiation into the Hare Krishna religion were pretty impressive performances from any standpoint. The enduring success of the Transcendental Meditation system developed by Maharishi Yogi (whose opportunism and degeneracy is the stuff of legend) shows that repetition of a mantra or prayer can have a dramatic effect on the subconscious. Nevertheless, the effect is less transcendental or “spiritual” than a highly predictable method of altering brain chemistry. It is interesting to note in this regard that chanting the Hare Krishna mantra to ourselves on our prayer beads was done so fast that the words usually sounded like a hiss or a inarticulate garble.

An excellent contrast to the Eastern form of mysticism and its abuse of rationality is found in John Milton’s description of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. It is also significant that they are being observed by Satan, who, though evil and full of envy, could appreciate how they stood in comparison to the other creatures in Eden:
          Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,
          Godlike erect, with native Honor clad
          In naked Majesty seem’d Lords of all,
          And worthy seem’d, for in thir Looks Divine
          The image of thir glorious Maker shone,
          Truth, Wisdom, Sanctitude severe and pure,
          Severe, but in true filial freedom plac’t. (4.288-294)


Milton’s Adam and Eve, with their “erect” stature and command over the creatures in Eden gives us a picture of the occidental or Judeo-Christian idea of man as a rational creature with his feet on the ground and with a mind fit to explore the earth and the heavens. The antithesis of this state is the situation of the sadhu sitting in a lotus position chanting his life away, locked in a state of perpetual adolescence and self-incapacitation.

Next: The apprehension of the sublime in the vast and complex natural world.

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