The Monk’s Podcast 17 with Brahmatirtha Prabhu – Intellectual outreach

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
So thank you very much, Brahmateerthapur, for joining us today. It’s a pleasure and honor to have you. And I was thinking we could discuss today on the topic of intellectual outreach in our movement or intellectual and within that we could discuss various initiatives that are that happened historically and what are the opportunities now.
OK. And of course, you could talk about your role in currently especially helping devotees recover or recreate to some extent a framework for Bhaktivedanta Institute. OK.
So, you know, I came to know about you, of course, through most like most of the devotees for the perfect questions, perfect answers book. And that was one of the most appealing and accessible intros to Krishna consciousness because the question answers are so attractive. And over the years, as I came to came to America and I met you, it’s I just appreciate how multifaceted you are.
So how did you mean, were you a part of the Bhaktivedanta Institute from the beginning or because currently you are working to recon to revive or restructure the Bhaktivedanta Institute to some extent. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about your role and involvement and then we can go forward. Sure.
When the BI was formed in the mid 70s, I was the absolute best geologist in the entire Krishna movement. I can say that because I was also the worst geologist in the Krishna movement because I was the only geologist. So I can claim that with no humility.
And I, Swaroop Dharmadhar Maharaj, a brahmachari then approached me and said, we’re doing this BI work and there was Sariputta and Madhava and Jnana and Rabindra was working with Rabindra Swaroop Prabhu and said, we’d like your help. So I said, I started working with Sariputta, preparing a talk for the first international conference on life comes from life. That was in 1976, Vrindavan? Well, that was in October 77 in Vrindavan, but we started working on this in 76.
Okay. And I wasn’t sure what to do. In fact, I had no idea what to do.
And we’ve all been in that circumstance where we’re given a challenging service and we just don’t know what to do. And I was, you know, so young then, just in my 20s. And the topic of the conference is life comes from life, what is consciousness? And I was asked to speak on evolution.
Because evolutionary theory says that there was a primordial soup. And in the soup, there was a lightning bolt. And then after that lightning bolt, amino acids formed and amino acids, then evolved into whatever’s little tiny one cell things.
And eventually, it came into us. And so that’s the materialistic paradigm, because there’s no consciousness is a material creation. So Prabhupada wanted us to respond to that.
So here I am, a young geologist whose specialty was hard rocks, not fossils, asked to write something. So at the same time, in those days, anybody who’s read Shyama Sundar’s book, Chasing the Rhino, or Yamuna’s biography, or Mukunda Maharaj’s Miracle on Second Avenue, understands that in those days, things were very miraculous, because it was something that sometimes we forget. And that’s called Krishna magic, as that’s a term Yamuna coined.
Like one day, Shyama Sundar and Malati were in LA, in London, they didn’t know how to pay the bills. And they’re walking down the street and money starts pouring out of the sky. And we threw money out of a window, they don’t know what happened.
So they gathered the money and paid the rent. That’s called Krishna magic. And sometimes we lose our connection with Krishna magic, in which we really come very, very dependent on Krishna.
So at that point, I had to become very dependent on Krishna, I didn’t know what to do. Damodar asked me to help, we knew this was dear to Prabhupada. So I met Sariputta, and then we became, you know, lifelong best friends after that until he passed on.
And I had a job at an oil company. I was a young geologist in Houston at an oil company. So then Krishna magic took over.
So I went, I told the company, I was researching some geological theory for an oil well, which is sort of true. But that was easy part. So I spent hours at the Rice University Library, ostensibly, to research something to come here, really trying to figure out what do I speak on? And out of the corner of my eye, to the library, a magazine caught my eye.
And I grabbed the magazine, and it was an article by Stephen Jay Gould, the famous paleontologist, and Eldridge Niles, the famous curator of the Museum of Natural History in New York, has an article on punctuated equilibrium, their new way of looking at evolution. And they were trying to solve this problem. They came out with the original article in 72.
And then in 77, they said, we’ve had this out for five years, and no one’s defeated us. So we declare victory. So this was their victory run.
And the article dealt with a problem in evolution. And the problem was this, we find virtually no missing links in the fossil record. Yet, we find that you see in the record one species, and then another in the geological record, but you don’t find the in between.
And it was always, well, we just need to look harder. Well, after looking harder for 150 years, we still didn’t find it. So they had to respond to this.
So they responded to this in a clever way. They said, evolution occurs so fast, it takes isolated geography with strained environmental conditions. That’s when evolution occurs by a process called speciation, which means all of a sudden, a lot of species appear.
And then one of those species will become the survival of the fittest. So it’s not survival of the fittest of individuals, survival of the fittest of species. And it happens so fast, it’s not preserved in the geological record.
And it happens so slow, though, in geological time, in our time that we actually can’t see it happen. So we never see it, because it’s too slow, but it’s too fast to be preserved in the geological record. So it’s that in between.
So I said, there’s something wrong with this. So Sadaputa and I started applying math to it. He was the math genius.
And that was the paper I gave at the first International Conference of Life Comes from Life. And that’s how I got involved in the Bhaktivedanta Institute. And it was a great honor to be there one month before Prabhupada left the world in Vrindavan, in our suits and ties.
There’s a famous iconic picture of us scientists in suits and ties. And at night, Prabhupada was too sick to go to the conference. But he’d call us into his room and say, what did they say? We had some very famous, world famous scientists come there.
What did they say? And how did you respond? He wanted to know what our arguments were and their arguments. So every night, we would give Prabhupada our sankirtan report. And he said there was nothing more important than this.
So then I went on to other services, BBT, running a gurukula, different services over the years, I would work on and off with the BBT. But with the BI, I meant to say, but the BI had some problems in that people in the BI didn’t get along with each other very well. As Kali Yuga, we expect this.
And so then I realized the smartest person I know for BI work by far was Sadaputra. And there was no one smarter than him. So, but he, when you have that much intellectual prowess, he wasn’t very good at dealing with people.
So I became his buffer to help him deal with people. And helped him in any way I could for many years. Now, meanwhile, Shukdamadhamaraj, his brilliance is in reaching out to scientists.
He was brilliant at it. No one could make more friends with big shots than Shukdamadhamaraj. He was so talented that way.
I just admire how he could walk up to people, very big scientists, disarm them, and get them engaged in a dialogue and to come to his conferences. So we had Shukdamadhamaraj, who had this incredible ability. You had Sadaputra, who had a great intellectual ability, but they actually couldn’t work together very well.
And so the BI became somewhat splintered. Well, I think the stress was because of their respective strengths itself, if I understand. Sadaputra wanted that more papers should be published and serious research be done.
Shukdamadhamaraj wanted more to have relationships with people instead of getting too entangled in too much of a hardcore research. So it is a different vision of how outreach could be done. Was it more through networking and relationship building so that they appreciate us? Or is it that we enter into their field and we actually do deep research and present? So it is more a matter of vision that caused the differences, isn’t it, to some extent? It is.
I sat down with Shukdamadhamaraj and I said to him one time, how do you see this? It’s so hard for us to get along and manage. And he said to me this very smart analysis. He said, in any organization, we have to have a balance between democracy and autocracy.
In democracy, you have to have, you know, people have to be able to give an opinion. Even Prabhupada said, sometimes we would vote who would be the leader. And then you need autocracy.
Sometimes you just have leadership and make decisions. So he says the balance autocracy and democracy can be very difficult. And he admitted to me, he says, I am struggling to figure out that balance.
He was very, you know, I really am very humble about it and very forthright. He says, and it hasn’t worked so far very well. So he was struggling with how to figure it out.
Shukdamadhamaraj was extremely intelligent. And he understood that this was a hard balance to achieve, especially when all of us were so immature. And people who work in the Bhaktivedanta Institute tend to be Brahmins.
And Brahmins need to be facilitated, not managed. There were cultural differences. We had Indians, Americans, Europeans, and there were cultural differences.
And so Shukdamadhamaraj understood that this was problematic. And he said, you know, Krishna is just going to eventually reveal how we balance all this. And so things went on.
And that was his real forte. And we both live near each other and would meet every week. And so we worked together.
And then he passed on, Shukdamadhamaraj passed on both very sad occasions. Rajaraj Prabhu was a brilliant physicist. He was doing his work in the 90s and up to now on quantum physics and the definition of matter.
So he found his niche for BI work. And what happened here is some devotees, Sunanda, and the late Yamaraj, and Srinidhi Muni, and Prishni, and Tamra Parni, they wanted to get Sadhaputa’s books back into print. So they worked tirelessly for years getting the books back into print.
Sunanda made a YouTube channel of Sadhaputa. And I started working with them. And one day we were sitting together.
And Tamra Parni said, let us make a BI out of this. And I had sort of given up that hope. And I said, okay, let’s think about it.
So we formed a BI branch and started. And I said, okay, I’m going to learn from all the right things Sadhaputa and Shukdamadhar did. And I’m going to learn from what didn’t work.
And I’m going to really take into my heart some of the instructions Shukdamadhar Maharaj gave me, but was figuring out how to make it work, how to balance democracy and autocracy. And so we formed a BI with these principles. One, we’re going to have, we’re not, we’re going to talk everything out, we’re not going to have infighting, everything’s going to be according to Upadesha Amrita, relationships among devotees.
And we were by now mature enough to pull that off. We weren’t 20 years ago, mature enough to pull that off. If anybody really wants to be a naysayer, and we had two that way who were with us, I would take them out to Krishna lunch and suggest they find another service.
Because we didn’t want sniping. Then we decided to follow a very important instruction of Prabhupada. In 1974, Prabhupada sent a letter, I think it was to Rupanuga Prabhu, in which he said, I want all your PhDs, the idea of the BI was forming, send me all your PhDs.
Well, all three of them. There weren’t any. So we decided to do a conference in January 2019.
We got some funding, some from the BBT, some from grants. And we gathered enough funding to put on a conference called Consciousness in Science. What is conscious? This was our follow up to the 1977 Life Comes from Life.
And we had 50 PhDs come from all over the world, like six Russia. And so we’re following Prabhupada’s instructions to gather, we want to see what there was. And we did a three day conference, 400 people came to opening night, the mayor opened the conference was held, began in the facility University of Florida.
So we did what Prabhupada suggested some world famous scientists came, and world famous devotees came. And following the in the footsteps of Shubh Damodar Maharaj on how to meet important people and engage them, we put on a successful conference. What’s that? When was this last year? January 2019.
Okay. I have a video of this that we showed the RGBC. And we invited some of the Shubh Damodar Maharaj followers who were a little disenfranchised with a really sweet, sweet sannyasis from India.
And they came and some other BI branches came. And we tried to see what are the talents we have, that we can engage in Prabhupada’s service of reconciling the issues of science and religion. And so now we developed a talent pool.
One of the great brain trust that helped me figure all this out, I couldn’t have done it without him was Akhandadi Prabhu. Because he was doing a similar initiative in England. And we got together, and he became my intellectual mentor to guide us on how to do this.
And, and of course, people like Dhrudakarma Prabhu, who’s one of the foremost Bhaktivedanta Institute scientists and others helped us out. And we put on, by Krishna’s grace, a successful conference. So now our Bhaktivedanta Institute, we’re not the only Bhaktivedanta Institute branch, but we like to work together with others.
And we’re in the process of pulling together about five different books right now. One of them is called Krishna and the Quark by Merle Gopali. Krishna and the? And the Quark.
Quark, okay. That book is in final editing by the BBT. We’re doing another book unnamed, Is the Earth Flat? By the way, the answer is no.
But that’s based on Fifth Canto and Sadaputra’s work in modern science. Another book by Akhandadi Prabhu called the Atma Paradigm, which he’s presenting every Thursday afternoon now from England, that is discussing, can we understand consciousness as a purely material phenomena? Or is it not a material phenomena? And a very thorough scientific and Shastric analysis. We have a series of books that we’re working on.
So that’s what we do at the BI. And any scientists and philosophers who see this little dialogue and want to work with the BI are, of course, very free to contact us. Oh, okay.
Wonderful. So a lot of. That was a paid advertisement.
Thank you. So if you consider scientific outreach, broadly, it would mean that one is doing conferences and others writing books. So these two, both things, you have achieved something significant or about to achieve something.
That’s it. So the momentum is getting forward. I just like to backtrack before we come to this.
When you said Brahmanas need to be facilitated and not managed. That was a profound point. Could you elaborate what that would mean practically? I mean, if you have six Brahmins in the room and ask them what they want for lunch, there’ll be seven choices.
Because it’s the way Brahmins are independent by nature. And what works best for Brahmins is to, like with Sadaputra, for example, the best thing I could do for him was facilitate his creativity by giving him the resources he needs and then encourage his creativity. It doesn’t work well to suppress Brahmins.
And in management, sometimes the Brahmins feel that way. So Brahmins tend not to be the best of managers. So they need some management structure to work in, but that structure has to facilitate them, not stifle them.
So how do we manage Brahmins? By encouraging them and not stifling them. That is the art. And Shukdamadhyamraj, I used to discuss it.
I used to reveal how, what a struggle it is for him to figure that out. He was very humble about things. A real struggle to figure that out.
And he struggled with it. And just as I’m struggling with it, the advantage I have is I have 50 years of being in the movement. So I’ve made enough mistakes to know not to do the same mistake again.
That’s your humility speaking. But I’ve seen in your interaction, the devotee is also how you try to accommodate everyone. And probably your experience from mediation will also help in resolving issues.
Well, I joined ISKCON Resolve in the first mediation class in 2002. Temple president here said, hey, it’s your nature to be a mediator. ISKCON is going to start having mediators.
Why don’t you go for the training? And on a lark, I just went for the training. And from the first moment the trainer spoke, this was in New Jersey, a class organized by Rajiv Bihari. The first moment he spoke, I moved to the edge of my chair.
I was stuck because I had a problem, a personal problem. And I saw my way out of it through mediation. Here, I’ll reveal the personal problem.
In the Gita, we talk about Samadarshana, the self-realized soul we’ll see, you know, the Brahman, the dog, the dog eater, the elephant, all is the same. That wasn’t my life. I saw devotees, I saw karmis, I saw right, I saw wrong.
I was seeing the world more black and white than I knew was reality. And I was very dissatisfied with myself seeing the world like that. I didn’t know what to do.
And I saw getting mediation training as my way to achieve my own internal Samadarshana, less judgmental. So, I took to the training and I did a ton of training, I mean, thousands of hours of mediation training. And now, that’s part of my seva for ISKCON is I do, I mediate complex cases.
And it’s just human nature for there to be conflict. This is discussed, especially in the eighth canto of the Bhagavatam. It’s human nature.
And as devotees, we understand that flaw, and we can do better. And so, ISKCON Resolve, the intention is that we can do better. And we can be less judgmental against each other and try to get deeper understanding.
And about 80% of the time, when some dispute comes to ISKCON Resolve, parties walk away with a solution they can live with. And that papers have been written on this, very few religions take up conflict resolution, because religions tend to have a hierarchy. And the hierarchy can interfere with human relations, it can interfere with the instructions of Upadesa Amrita.
We need a hierarchy. Yet, we also, more importantly, need good relationships. So, ISKCON Resolve is just one little piece to help with that.
We’re not the solution to all the problems of the world, the problems of ISKCON, but in some little way, we’re able to help with that. And so, my own personal struggle with Samadarsana has been helped a lot by ISKCON. I don’t want to judge.
We all do it. But I, you know, myself, I want to work on rising above friends and enemies, because friends and enemies is purely the mode of passion. And just like even the demigods, they have their mode of passion, so they get in trouble, like Indra was cursed by Dvarasa Muni, and they got defeated in battle.
And what do they do? They approach Lord Brahma. And then in that discussion, when they approach Lord Brahma, and then Brahma goes to the causal ocean, approaches Lord Vishnu, who he’s actually never seen, and he offers prayers. And in the prayers, he says, you’re in the mode of goodness.
And I thought that was very significant. His prayer said, Lord, you’re pure goodness, meaning we’re coming here with friends and enemies and passion, so help us raise our consciousness. So, as devotees, just like as devotees, every morning, all of us take a bath.
When I first went to India, I was so amazed to see even the poorest person would pour a bucket of water over their head in the morning. And in America, some people take a bath once a month if they need it or not. And until this COVID virus came, so many times I would see people use the bathroom and not wash their hands.
And in India, that was unheard of, just unheard of. So in this way, if we don’t want our body to smell bad, we have to wash it every day. Similarly, if we don’t want to be dragged down to the mode of passion or even ignorance, we have to constantly do things to bring us to goodness.
So for me personally, working in mediation was a way to do it. Other people have other ways. I mean, I’m not saying this is the only way or the best way.
Just for me, that’s what I needed. Hmm. Yes.
So actually, it’s like Krishna’s plan because in a sense, you have the right set of skills which could help in revitalizing the Bhagavan Institute in many ways. When I was introduced to Krishna Consciousness, I was fascinated with the scientific presentation, especially through Origins and then through some other books. But I never saw any way I could directly engage myself in that.
So I of course studied whatever I could and I used whatever channels I had to write and speak. But in general, it seems that institutions and intellectuals have a difficult time going together. And when I have talked with several of Srila Prabhupada’s disciples who were intellectuals, practically the whole movement was initially living in the temple.
They were all brahmacharis, monks. But many of them left because they felt they saw no scope for intellectual growth in their life as brahmacharis because they would probably keep doing the same services again and again. Now, over the years, if I was introduced in 1996, and even the last 10 years or so, 10-15 years, I’ve seen a significant difference and there is more freedom given, more broadness of vision about how different devotees will need different amounts of space to be able to move forward in their particular services.
So is this, you have also interacted with other religions, this challenge of intellectual institutions, is it there in every religion or every religious organization? Or is it something more related with us? No, it’s always there. It’s always a challenge. It’s a very important question you’re asking.
And there are different, if we go into an ice cream store, there are many flavors. As far as I’m concerned, there’s only, they should only have one flavor, chocolate. But other people prefer strawberry and some people like vanilla.
And so we’re individuals. We have different natures and different flavors. And for us to deny our individuality is kind of dangerous.
I’ll give an example. Let’s say we’re in a big city like Bombay or New York, and we plant a tree on the street. When they plant a tree to get clean air and shade and whatever, the first thing they do is they put a wire mesh around the tree.
You’ve seen that yourself? They put a wire mesh to protect the tree from people bumping into it and dogs hurting it and everything. And that wire mesh protects the tree so it can grow. But as the tree starts growing, if they don’t remove that wire mesh, that same wire mesh will stunt the tree’s growth.
So similarly, when we’re new in the movement, we’re living in an ashram, we have to get rid of so many misconceptions. We cut off our hair, we change our clothes, we change our name. We’re trying to get rid of this bodily conception that I am this proud body.
And that training is so necessary. And that’s like the wire mesh to protect the sapling of our devotional life. But as our devotional life grows, that same wire mesh can stifle us.
So when do we remove that wire mesh? And when don’t we? This requires intelligence. When Giriraj Swami was called into Prabhupada’s room very shortly before Prabhupada passed on, two in the morning, Prabhupada said, I want to see Giriraj Swami. And Prabhupada said, how will this movement go on after me? And Giriraj Swami said, if I remember correctly, we’ll chant, we’ll do this, we’ll do that.
And Prabhupada said, no, by intelligence organization. This is what intelligence means. We have to look at individuals and see what’s best for them.
If we’re ISKCON management, my job, if I’m management, is to find out what your nature is, just like Krishna actually explored with Arjuna what his nature is, and then try to see how to facilitate your nature. That is a perfection of our Nashram management. Instead, we often do it the reverse.
The manager says, my dear devotee, you should do anything for Krishna. And devotee is begging, please, can I do my nature? That’s reverse. The devotee should be thinking, I’ll do anything for Krishna.
And the manager is saying, no, I have to find your nature and engage you that way. That’s the best management. That’s what works.
Of course, we all have emergencies. We have a COVID emergency. So all of a sudden, the temple is shut down, and there’s five devotees left.
So somebody may not be much of a pujari, but that day they become a pujari. In emergency, we’ll do anything. We’ve all done everything in emergencies.
But if we live life in an emergency, that’s not sustainable. It’s just not sustainable. And the same circumstances may dictate different results.
Take Arjuna. It’s a good example. Arjuna received instructions from Krishna.
And what did he do with those instructions? He fought. Many of us have been to Kurukshetra. And he fought at that place.
He got the instructions. Krishna said to him, very unusual for religious literature to say this. Okay, I’ve told you everything.
Now do what you want. Yeah, that’s an amazing. Deliberate, and then do as you desire.
That’s very unusual. You don’t find that in scriptures, other scriptures. So Krishna very soon says, Okay, and then Arjuna said, Okay, I surrender.
I’ll do what you want. I know what to do now. Same circumstances.
Fast forward to the future so many years. Krishna left the earth. Arjuna is practically defeated by some non-warrior cowherd men.
And he’s thinking of the same instructions Krishna gave him. The exact same instructions. He’s remembering what Krishna said.
And he does the opposite. Instead of fighting, he goes off to the mountains. Same instructions.
And he does the opposite thing. That’s called intelligence. Not being mindless.
That’s intelligence. Same instruction. Under one case, he did A, and then another case, he did B with the same instructions.
That’s when Prabhupada said to Giriraj Swami, we need intelligence. That’s what it means. That’s profound.
That means, going back to your example of the tree and wire mesh around it. Intelligence means to know when that wire mesh has to be put, and when it has to be removed both. Exactly.
And all of us have been stifled by the wire mesh, and all of us have been protected by the wire mesh. And when to remove it requires us to have knowledge. To have knowledge, Prabhupada said it to me very clearly.
To have knowledge, there’s a step to getting knowledge. And the step is goodness. So, as we cultivate in our own life, there’s no easy way around it.
We cultivate goodness. What do we do? We eat right. We try to sleep right.
And we’re very Buddhist in that sense. Now, what does he mean by very Buddhist? By that, I mean, the Buddhists have captured in the public domain, the middle way. Everyone knows the Buddha as the middle way, not too much, not too little.
The Buddhists in the popular literature have captured the middle way. Krishna advocates the middle way like anything. For example, he says, don’t sleep too much, but don’t sleep too little.
Don’t eat too much. Don’t eat too little. Krishna actually talks a lot about the middle way.
So, I say sometimes we need to be better Buddhists as Krishna taught us to be. Take a middle way. Not be so extreme.
And in religions, it’s very easy to have fanaticism. Because fanaticism means we’re not thinking. Now, let me go on fanaticism.
I’m not bashing, let’s say, people who are on the left or people who are on the right. We are both fanatical. Yeah, and I don’t know which is worse.
But both can be. There was a great book I read that gave me a great inspiration called The Righteous Way by Jonathan Haidt. He’s a brilliant sociobiologist.
I think you might have read that. And in his chapter nine, he really explained to me what was going on in Iskcon. See, Jonathan was a very liberal political person from Philadelphia.
And he won a Rhodes Scholarship or Fulbright Scholarship to go to India to study. And he was sent to Orissa. And Orissa is a very traditional state in India.
Very, very traditional in their ways. And his host family was a well-to-do family that put him up so he could do his sociological studies on his very high honor scholarship. And when he went there, his mind started screaming, because the women would not eat until after the men ate.
And every time a servant would do something for him, he would do what we’re trained to do in my culture, is we would say the magic words of thank you. And his host kept reminding him, we don’t thank the servants. And his brain was screaming at to screaming.
This is horrible. This is horrific. This is exploitation.
And this was going on and on. Finally, after about a month, he had an epiphany. Because he got to know the servants and they were quite happy.
And he got to know the women and they were okay with it. And he realized that one size doesn’t fit all. That his view of the world, there are more than one view of the world.
And then that epiphany led to understand why the left and right can’t understand each other. Because he said, some people are wired, more liberally, some people are wired, more conservatively. So how do we get along with each other? And he came to the conclusion with mutual respect, which is precisely what Prabhupada said in several purports.
I don’t have them in front of me, I can pull them up quickly if need be. And of course, what Rupa Goswami discusses in the Upadesa Amrita, how we exchange our mind and confidence, we give and receive gifts. So these relationships among devotees allow the left and right to exist.
Nowadays, in Iskcon, there’s major schism, like between men, women, between the view in India, the world, and the view in the West. And some people in India call the Western devotees liberals, and some Western devotees will call the India arch conservatives. But Prabhupada built a house we can all live in, only if we’re not fanatics.
And we realize there’s more than one way to look at the world. And my own experience being with Prabhupada, is he definitely saw more than one way to look at the world. Prabhupada was the consummate diplomat.
A diplomat. He was just a brilliant diplomacy. And that was Prabhupada’s real, his tremendous strength, that he knew how to deal with different people, because his goal wasn’t to prove he’s right, his goal was to bring them to Krishna.
Many anecdotal stories of that, you know, I can share and we can read. When I first met Prabhupada, I was kind of a mess. I lived in India.
I lived in the most progressive, modern, least political state in India, where I was a high school teacher. That was Bihar. That was a joke, by the way.
Yeah. And, and, and, you know, I didn’t exactly follow the regulative principle of intoxication very strictly. I did follow it strictly, I got stoned every day.
So I didn’t have a mirror. So I didn’t comb my hair. And since I got to India, you know, you know, the previous year, I was clean, but I wasn’t very groomed.
And then I met Prabhupada. And that day, when I met him, I gave up marijuana, that’s all I was taking. I gave all that up, because Prabhupada told me how I wanted to give it up.
I knew it was destructive, but we have our habits. And I had all my own issues, but Prabhupada saw that I really wanted to know something. I had somehow or other previous life, I don’t know what, I just wanted to know why people die.
I just wanted to know, death didn’t make sense to me. Something in me said, you can’t die. There’s something that doesn’t die, but people are dying, and I couldn’t reconcile it.
I went to India to try to reconcile this. And Prabhupada understood there was a little, I had somehow or other a little sincerity, and that’s all he saw. He didn’t see all my anarchists.
And that vision always struck with me, how Prabhupada could have that vision. And sometimes, Prabhupada would even make a little fun of me. But he did it in such a good way, that it always touched the heart.
So, that was a lesson to me on how, as devotees, we have to deal with each other. And this fanaticism, where I’m right, and you’re wrong, is very, very dangerous. And every religion in the world faces this, faces this issue.
The number one divisive issue right now, among religions of the world, is how to deal with people who are gay. It’s the number one divisive issue, according to the scholars of religion. And now, different times, it’s different issues.
I know how Prabhupada dealt with it. I saw it. And… There’s several points.
Yeah. Yeah, several points in what you said. First is that, like the universality of this conflict and your example of how Sri Prabhupada dealt with it.
So, that also means that, I was struck by one point, hierarchy interferes with the six-fold loving exchanges. That’s such a vital point. As soon as somebody is, I have several friends, and they told me that, as soon as they got a managerial position, their friends stopped opening up to them.
And their managerial positions started interfering with their friendships. So, it’s a… So, it’s not just for intellectuals, it’s for almost every one of us, but probably for intellectuals, it becomes quite easy to justify one’s own views using the intelligence or the intellect. And then, that makes… So, there is a moral dimension to one’s righteousness, and there is also an intellectual dimension to one’s righteousness.
And both can get reinforced when somebody is an intellectual, or at least thinks that they’re an intellectual. And… Yeah, just a few thoughts. I mean, I was just reflecting and then you could reflect on that.
And so, I would also like to discuss, because you recommended that righteous mind to me, and I also went through it, and I would like to discuss some specific points from that book to how they could apply to our discussion, our moment’s context. But any responses on what I spoke just now? What hierarchy, interfering, and friendship, and everything? We have to be Buddhist again. I know it would take a middle way.
I mean, it’s obvious somebody becomes a manager. You know, management means there’s a pie, and the pie is never big enough, but you have to divide it. I mean, it’s never big enough.
And if it’s a cheesecake, I can assure you it’s never big enough for me. Elan cheesecake pie, freshly off the altar, is never big enough for me. So, nevertheless, managers, yeah, the relationship can change a little, but what makes management work is the emotional bank account of the manager.
Like, for example, I work very closely at times with Rod and Aswani, and we’ve been friends for decades. And I work with him at times on different projects, and I noticed he always invests a huge amount of effort into his relationships. So, he has a huge emotional bank account.
And when he needs to press a management button, he has the emotional bank account to make a withdrawal if it needs to be done. In other words, let’s say taking somebody, a disciple who has some issues, but there’s such a strong relationship that he can go and even necessarily chastise, and the disciple will accept it because there’s a good emotional bank account. He’s made so many deposits, he can make a withdrawal.
But if we become a management, and we have a zero emotional bank account, and we keep making withdrawals, and we go into deficit, we end up bankrupt. So, it’s important any of us that have to manage that we invest a lot in the emotional bank account, even more so than before. And we relationship, because sometimes we’re going to have to make withdrawals, because we have to make decisions and do things.
We have to decide what to do with this pie. There’s eight pieces, and 16 people want some of it. What do we do? It’s never easy.
And sometimes as managers, we can actually figure out what to do. And sometimes as managers, we have to do the Draupadi management style. You know what that is? It’s up to you, I can’t do anything.
Then we have to have intelligence to when to know when we’re in the Yudhishthira management style, or when we’re in the Draupadi management style. They’re both different. And we have to have the intelligence to know which one is appropriate for the time.
To get that intelligence, again, it goes back to doing everything we can to keep our mind clean, just like we work every day to keep our body clean. We have to every day work to get our mind closer to goodness. And I assure you, I can say from personal experience, that it takes a lot of work.
And if I forget to do that work, I experience the symptoms of the mode of passion. I see distinctions that aren’t there. I’ll get angry, all these negative things might come.
Yes. So, I like the pie example also. And it really succinctly conveys the problem of management.
So, sometimes management forces us to do things which will be displeasing to some people. It’s just the way it is. Now, going on to this point of, because we’re discussing two distinct topics about, say, the intellectual aspect and the liberal conservative.
So, you mentioned how you found Prabhupada was quite accommodating, so that devotees would be encouraged to practice bhakti. So, now, there is also this aspect that, when I studied Jonathan Hedges’ book, he mentions that there are certain things which everybody values, for example, fairness, kindness. But there are three things which he says that, which there’s a difference.
There is authority, morality and purity. So, these are relatively much more important for conservatives. And often those who are liberals have a more, you could say, utilitarian view of this.
That, you know, okay, we have authority structure. If it works, use it. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.
And similarly, sanctity. So, with respect to sanctity, after having been in India and I traveled abroad, I’ve seen one significant difference that, say, for many Indians, just the physical body of the text, the Sanskrit recitation of the verses, that has, you could say, a lot of sacramental value. But for many devotees who come from the West, it is more of the wisdom in the books.
You know, okay, recitation of verses is good, if you can do it, that’s fine. But it’s more of a, some of the word utilitarian has a negative connotation to it. But the point is that the considerations of purity and also the consideration of authority, that I remember one of the, I mentioned this to another devotee also that, in India, the spiritual master and the disciple, it’s a very vertical discussion, vertical relationship.
Often the disciple will sit on the floor, the spiritual master will sit on a chair. But in the West, even the spiritual master and disciple, it’s a more very horizontal kind of interaction. So, there are certain cultural differences.
So, when I went to America and I saw this difference, the spiritual master and disciple, that’s why I had met one spiritual master and he wanted some book and he went to the room, another room where his assistant was sitting and in India probably the spiritual master would have rang a bell or something and the assistant would have come running. But he went to the assistant’s room and when he went to that room, the assistant kept sitting on his chair and the spiritual master was standing and they were talking. So, it was quite jolting for me.
But neither the spiritual master nor the disciple seemed to make any issue out of it. It was just normal for them. So, it seems that the idea of how exactly one should relate to the spiritual master, the how there is acceptance of authority but how the dynamics within the authority and the subordinates play out, that is significantly different.
So, would you say that broadly speaking, although of course India is more than a million billion people and America is also huge and there will be diverse mindsets, but is there something like a civilizational ethos which makes Americans more liberal and Indians more conservative? Well, I mean we have many conservatives in America too and this is discussed in the Bhakti Rasamrita Sindhu, the topic you brought up. And in the fifth chapter, it’s discussed that there are details and principles of devotional service. So, the principle is very simple.
One has a guru. It’s one of the top principles given. The detail is the relationship between the guru and disciple.
That’s a detail, it’s not a principle. Respect is there, but exactly how it’s done. In a more traditional place, every time the disciple sees the guru, he may offer obeisances.
I know many gurus who find that quite distracting. I’m talking to you and now I can’t understand what you’re saying because your head’s on the ground. No, just offer obeisances in the morning and be done with it already.
Come on. Or let’s say we’re preaching on a college campus and somebody comes out there and all of a sudden people are hitting the dirt. It turns students off like anything.
What’s our real point? Is our real point to bring people to Krishna or is our real point to show that we can follow rituals? Now, it depends on time, place and circumstances. There’s a saying, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. So, when I’m in India, I would expect, because it’s the culture and we would be a little more traditional.
Prabhupada always authorized women to go on the altar every place in the world except Vrindavan. Because in Vrindavan, he said, we’ll just get criticized too much. So, he didn’t.
So, Prabhupada wasn’t concerned about making a statement about women’s liberation, nor concerned. That wasn’t his concern. His concern was what will best give us the opportunity to present Krishna.
So, in a traditional place, we might do more traditional things. In a liberal place, we might do more liberal things. Prabhupada was very liberal.
When the devotees went to Prabhupada, everyone who joined the movement in the early, very early days was in their 20s, still growing and milk, Prabhupada felt was very important for the brain. So, one devotee went to Prabhupada, Prabhupada, the only milk we can get, and there was no other choice, was milk that had vitamin D in it. At that time, vitamin D came from fish oil.
You might know this story. So, Prabhupada, we no longer can have milk. Prabhupada said, what can you do? You’re growing brains, you have to have milk.
He knew he needed the protein. So, Prabhupada was very traditional and very liberal all at the same time because his overriding principle was he made a clear distinction between the principles and details of devotional service, and the details can be adjusted for whatever is favorable for spreading Christian consciousness, as Rupa Goswami says, and discard what’s unfavorable. That was Prabhupada’s overriding principle.
To understand Prabhupada, the worst thing we can do, I asked one very senior member of the movement, so what’s the worst thing ISKCON can do? What’s the biggest danger for ISKCON, I asked, and he gave me, without even thinking, gave me the smartest answer, and it still rings in my ears, and the answer was, the greatest danger for ISKCON is Prabhupada says, just quoting Prabhupada without context, without intelligence, because Prabhupada, on almost any issue, said more than one thing, sometimes opposite, just like Arjuna, he took Christian’s instructions, and one time fought, and one time ran off to the mountains, same instruction. So, Prabhupada was very nuanced. Prabhupada wanted us, he wanted us to drink milk because he wanted good brains, so we can make good decisions.
Well, in order to make good decisions, we have to think about things, and if we just say, well, Prabhupada said this, Prabhupada said that, and quote each other, then we’re leaving out hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a science of how to understand scripture, and Prabhupada gave us hermeneutics called Guru Shastra Sadhu, but he gave a whole hermeneutical system of how to understand things, when to contextualize, when to accept as actual statements. In every single volume of the Bhagavatam, Prabhupada says in the very beginning, of every single volume, in the preface, he refers to that verse, in the first canto, I think it was 15th chapter, I’m trying to remember, said, though imperfectly composed, thoroughly honest people will accept what I’m saying, just like in a fire brigade, you don’t have to speak the same language, you just know to pass the buckets of water.
So, I’m writing in a foreign language, so please excuse any problems. What did Prabhupada mean by that? And it’s in the preface to every volume of the Bhagavatam, so when something’s repeated that much, it’s important. What did he mean? Well, to me, Prabhupada’s English was fine.
When he says he’s writing in a foreign language, Prabhupada’s English, his vocabulary was more expansive than most of us. He went to Scottish Church College, he had a very good education, Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati saw how, you know, his English was quite erudite, I need a dictionary to read Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati, and I do, and so he recognized right away that Prabhupada was very erudite, he said, okay, you go to the West, he said it from the very beginning, his very first instruction, last instruction of Prabhupada. So, Prabhupada’s English was fine.
So, what does it mean when Prabhupada says I’m speaking in a foreign language? To me, it means in a cultural foreign language. He’s speaking culturally different, because Prabhupada understood it, that it’s culturally different. So, he said some of the things I say may not come across clearly because of cultural differences.
Prabhupada recognized it, he spoke about it, not just in a preface at other times. So, that means it takes some intelligence to understand what Prabhupada is saying, and if we just quote Prabhupada to each other, then we don’t understand each other. I’m not saying we don’t quote Prabhupada, I quote Prabhupada all the time.
I hope everyone in the movement is quoting Prabhupada, but to throw quotes at each other, try to solve an argument, is not what Prabhupada intended for us to do, because that’s not an intelligent way to look at it. When I said to Prabhupada, discussing some philosophical issue, and I said, Krishna says, he says, leave Krishna out of this, discuss philosophy. And he said that to other people too, not just me.
In other words, don’t just quote something, give me some good philosophical. Devotees are very good at knowing the philosophy, but we need to train devotees, myself included, I need to be trained in understanding philosophy, which means how to think, how to know hermeneutics, and teleology, and epistemology, so that we can present Krishna consciousness to the intelligent class of people. We have to know these skills.
Our mission at the Bhaktivedanta Institute is to combine philosophy and science, and by philosophy, I mean epistemology, and teleology, and ontology, and all these branches, and combine them together so that we can present Krishna consciousness in a way that people have, wow, that’s worth thinking about. And once we get there, then we’re successful. Amazing.
I like this, it’s profound that Prabhupada said, leave Krishna out of this. That means Prabhupada said that just discuss based on reasoning. The time when quoting authority is important, and there is a time when doing reasoning could be important.
Both are important, and you’ve written on this topic very, very well. I mean, I love your writing, Chaitanya Jain, I think you’re one of the best writers in the movement, because you’re clear, you’re focused, you say what you’re going to say, you say it, and then you say what you said, so we understand what you’re doing. It’s a really, anyway, I just wish I could be as clear as you are in your presentations.
I mean that, I mean, I really do. And there are times to quote Shastra, and there are times to do philosophy, and Prabhupada was brilliant at knowing time, place, and circumstance. None of us will ever be as good as Prabhupada was at that, but we can try.
Amazing. Thank you for your kind words about me also. I try to just organize thoughts as well as I can.
So, maybe I will summarize what we discussed today, and we could continue in the future also. This is a lot to discuss, but I don’t want to. So, we discussed about the history of intellectual outreach, and how during Prabhupada’s is very vibrant, then there’s a, you made the point that we learned over the years how to facilitate Brahmanas rather than manage them, and how we could, we need to balance of autocracy and democracy, and then within that, we discussed about how for devotees, it’s like growing a tree, initially you need a wire mesh, and then it needs to be removed, and when what is to be done, that requires intelligence to understand, and we discussed also about conservatism and liberalism, and broadly, we talked about how Prabhupada knew when to focus on the principles, and he adjusted the details accordingly, and your experience with Prabhupada also, and he concluded by talking about how Prabhupada stressed on knowing in context, not that the, it was quite a, I would say a radical statement to say that Prabhupada says can be a big danger for our movement, that the authority quoted without context can actually be counterproductive in other contexts.
So, Prabhupada wanted reasoning, thinking. So, we could say that scripture provides us for the, provides the content of thinking, but we need philosophical training to know how to actually go about doing that thinking, and I think the academic outreach through Bhaktan Institute is providing opportunity for that. Maybe in future, we can have a discussion about, because a large community of our devotees are Indians, either in India or in the West also, so how they, and we have a lot of devotees who are from an engineering background, and they would like to do something in the area of science and spirituality.
So, what are the opportunities open for them? Maybe we could discuss that in a future session, if you would be willing to. I would love to. I would love to.
I get emails two, three times a week now because we’re starting to get some traction on our BI outreach, and devotees that want to engage. We have something called BI Connect, which is an online forum that has biology, engineering, different divisions where devotees can break out into groups and discuss topics. And there’s another conference I started, and I moderate along with Arya Devi, and that is VAST, Vaishnava Advanced Studies.
These are mostly for devotees with advanced degrees or devotees who have, like yourself, were very well studied, and it’s a confidential place where devotees involved in academics can discuss very hard issues in a private way. So, we have the VAST resource, we have the BI Connect, which is where we’re going to start. We’ve been practicing it.
Ramananda in England is doing this, and we’re going to start rolling it out more publicly within the next month because now we got the kinks out of it, where devotees like this can engage. We’re looking for writers, editors, many devotees who are involved in the sciences, especially Indians. I see this is what they often do.
They build a firewall, and they have my day job and my devotional life, and they don’t mix. Because in day, I’m very scientific, and at night, I’m very devotional, and there shouldn’t be a mixing. Part of the BI’s mission is to knock that wall down because it doesn’t have to exist.
But to knock that wall down, we need good understanding of science, good understanding of philosophy, good understanding of Shastra. And with that, and that was Prabhupada’s intent for the BI, for his devotees, that we can gradually bring that wall down. And it’s hard work.
And so, I love the opportunity to… Prabhupada once said about Indians, and I don’t know if this applies now, but he said it back then in the 70s, he said, Indians, they’re only one step from Krishna, facing the wrong way. He said, the Americans, you’re 10 steps, but you’re facing the right way. Now, sociology has changed, and I don’t know how much that applies now as it did then.
But Indians do have a special birth, and as Lord Chaitanya says, a special mission. They have a special mission. And Prabhupada, when he was with Indians, always reminded them of that special mission.
So, the idea, and when we create this artificial barrier, oh, Indians are better than Americans because they’re more conservative, or Americans are better than Indians because they have broader vision. I hear people say this, these barriers are based on the false bodily concept that I am American and I am Indian, and that ruins the whole movement. Bodily concept doesn’t help the movement.
Okay, but we’ll talk about that in the future. I think our time is about up, because you have another interview coming, but you’re a great interviewer. You bring out things that I didn’t even know I had inside me.
Thank you. It was very insightful, and I look forward to having future discussions. Thank you very much.