How do we help people hurt by insensitive behavior of devotees?

Transcript

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yes does it answer the question yes thank you very much for such an enlightening class, i had a question that if we come across somebody who has actually faced an insensitive behaviour by for example Ketan is going on somehow it disturbs them or whatever so how do we deal with these people we personally have not had any insensitive behaviour but they have seen on their own and then they are commenting negatively about that so how do we deal so if people have seen people have been hurt by insensitive behaviour from some other devotees then how do we deal with such people in general we have to tell that ISKCON is an open organisation and different people are at different levels of spiritual growth so we have a particular standard and actually the standard is devotee is the well wishing friend of all living beings so very sensitive very kind, very gentle but different people are at different stages in that so in general what we observe is that in any movement there will be 4 different kinds of people many but 4 broad categories people who are actually nearly reach the standard so that means for us pure devotees they are exemplary practically always then second is those who are serious sadhakas who are trying to imbibe that kind of behaviour and to some extent their behaviour is also attractive third is those who are really very struggling sadhakas and often because of their conditionings they behave insensitively and one big problem is that sometimes the whole idea that I am right and I am pure and I am uncompromising what happens is our religion becomes the inflator of our ego our religion becomes the inflator of our ego I already have a ego that I am a great person and now when I understand yes I have got the truth from the parampara then I will speak the truth, all of you are niggeruns so what happens actually it boosts our ego further so then the third kind of people are those whose anarthas and whose religion is all mixed up and that’s why often they end up misrepresenting their religion and the fourth category are people who actually have come to a path not to practice the spiritual path but to just misappropriate the facilities and they have come itself with ulterior motives now in general because in Krishna consciousness the standards are quite high so the fourth category of people don’t survive for very long they are now following four aggregates and chanting sixteen rounds that is itself quite difficult so now when I say these four categories these are not watertight categories today I may be in second category tomorrow I may fall to third category also if I don’t guard myself from pride or arrogance then I may fall back so the point is we have a standard and we have devotees who are aspiring to be according to the standard so we can tell people also that yes there are different kinds of people and some people may misrepresent and actually we can apologize for that we can apologize for that, it’s not wrong in that sense so but even if some people are behaving like this we have our scriptures and we have our standards and you can meet other devotees and you can try to connect them with other devotees so it’s not that actually what to speak of new people getting hurt by insensitive behavior, even devotees get hurt by insensitive behavior devotees sometimes even within the devotee community also we may find that there are some devotees whose association inspires us and other devotees we find their association just takes away our enthusiasm devotees like this how can we really want to be a devotee we start feeling sometimes like that so we need to understand when such a thing happens that different people come from different conditions so therefore what the background of a particular person is what the situation of a particular person is we don’t know so if we find that certain devotees behavior certain devotees too insensitive that devotees behavior is not very not inspiring for us then we keep a distance from that devotee now if we have to work with that devotee only, if we have given some service where we have to work with that devotee then we may have to bring that to the attention of some senior devotees and make some arrangement by which we can continue so in general we have to protect our bhakti and we have to give a positive presentation of bhakti to others and some people have got some negative perceptions then we can do what we can to correct it but recognizing that one or two impressions coming from devotees do not represent the whole gamut of devotion and we can’t expect that every devotee in a devotee community very very gentle sensitive loving and nor can we say that you know every devotee can be insensitive and still we have to practice bhakti that will also not work so we find out which sangha inspires us and we keep ourselves in that sangha Bhaktivinoda Thakur says in Jaiva Dharma and Rupa Goswami also says in Bhakti Saamsindhu that we should associate with Sajatiya Asha Snigdha Sangha Sajatiya Asha means those devotees who have the same category of desire that we have Sajatiya Asha, so those devotees who inspire us we associate with them and we share their association with others and that way people can come towards Krishna One last question Yes Swamiji