How decentralized management can help the bhakti movement flourish, The Monk’s Podcast153 with Urmila M

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Thank you very much for joining today for the Monks Podcast.
I have been, I always, I have had your association on the BTG forum, editors forum, and also on our Shastric Advisory Council. You are the chair. So, but we’re not had too much personal meetings directly.
I mean, hoping that we could have this discussion. So I started the Monks Podcast about since the pandemic started. And I thought today we could discuss on a topic which you had recently mentioned to me on the topic of decentralisation.
So you also have Russell Prabhu here with us. So he is the video editor for ISKCON Melbourne. And he also edits our Monks Podcast.
So many devotees appreciate how we have the two people together and the names nicely edited put together. So I’m grateful that he’s also here today. Thank you very much.
So, this topic of decentralisation, it’s quite an intriguing topic. In the sense that I haven’t heard much discussion about it till the last few years since I started travelling abroad. And then I started, because I saw many different ways of management being done.
And many different concerns were also being raised. But you mentioned that you have been deliberating or studying on this topic for almost two decades now. So how did you start exploring this topic? Was it because of some personal experiences or because of something you read? Or because of certain projects you are working in? Well, I’d say my initial interest came from reading things from Srila Prabhupada and Srila Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati.
So that’s, you know, and I’m not even sure how long ago that was. I mean, we have, if we look, I have this on my own website. Where Srila Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati says that I know mechanical system.
And I want you, you mentioned decentralisation. I’d like to clarify a little bit that I’m looking at two facets of organisational structure and culture. Whether or not something is centralised or decentralised.
And whether something is organic or bureaucratic. So Srila Prabhupada both wanted something organic and decentralised. Srila Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati spoke mostly about organic versus bureaucratic.
And Srila Prabhupada spoke about both. And here we see. How do you differentiate between those two classifications? Yeah.
Well, let me answer the first question first and then I’ll get. Is that right? Sure. That is an excellent question.
But anyway, my interest came from reading these statements. From Srila Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati first. That there should be no mechanical system.
The idea of an organised church in an intelligible form. Indeed marks the close of the living spiritual movement. Now this word living.
Is organic. So this is in direct opposition to bureaucratic. And the great ecclesiastical establishment.
So here again, he’s talking about bureaucracy. The dykes and the dams to retrain. The current and cannot be held by any such contrivances.
They indeed indicate a desire on the part of the masses. To exploit the spiritual movement for their own purposes. They also unmistakably indicate the end of the absolute.
Unconventional guidance of the bona fide spiritual teacher. So. It’s heavy.
It’s really. I mean. Srila Bhakti Siddhanta here is very heavy.
He says no stable religious arrangement for instructing the masses. Has yet been successful. He says that.
Mechanical adoption of the unconventional life by any person. Will not make him a fit teacher of religion. Regulation is necessary for controlling the inherent worldliness.
Of conditioned souls, but no mechanical regulation has any value. Even for such. So then also reading things.
Which perhaps. Are better known. This this one was Gopi Pranayana Prabhu’s one of his favourite.
Our leader shall be careful not to kill the spirit of enthusiastic service. Which is individual spontaneous and voluntary. All of us should become expert managers and preachers.
That’s decentralised. Always a challenge. A great achievement to be gained by a voluntary desire to do it.
That’s talking about decentralised. Forget the centralisation and bureaucracy. And things must be done very nicely by cooperation.
That’s both organic and decentralised. This is one of the funniest ones. Well, they mistake.
You say they mistake. Who are they? You say you do mistake. Don’t say they.
This is bureaucracy. They you are all they. So that’s a very decentralised concept.
And then, of course, this is the big one. That, you know, Sheila proper wrote this in 1972. They plan for centralisation of management.
I do not at all approve of such plan. Do not centralise anything. If I did not interfere, the whole thing would have been killed.
Do not think in this way of big corporation, big credit centralisation. These are all nonsense proposals. The movement is for training men to be independently thoughtful and competent in all areas of departments of knowledge and action, not for making bureaucracy.
Once there is bureaucracy, the whole thing will be spoiled. So, you know, it’s those sort of statements that that sparked my interest. But I must admit that, like many other devotees that I’ve spoken to and that, you know, consider these things.
I basically dismiss them because I had the mistaken belief, which many people have, that an organisation by definition had to be bureaucratic and centralised, at least to some extent. I just thought those were synonyms. The organisation and bureaucracy were synonyms.
So I didn’t really do much until I entered graduate programme when I was getting my master’s and Ph.D. My master’s is in school management. I have an essay. So a master of school administration and my Ph.D. is a speciality in leadership.
And then we were studying different organisational forms. And the head of the School of Education specifically, separate from class, said to me, you know, I really think you should read this book by Mintzberg. I mean, you’re talking like a big, thick, highly academic, highly technical book where he said this is the Bible of organisational theory and organisational culture.
And there Mintzberg describes five different organisational structures, defines what is centralisation, defines what is bureaucracy, and describes how you can have an organisation that is neither bureaucratic nor centralised. And then this was like the big eureka moment where I went, oh! Chilabhakti Siddhartha Sarasvati and Chilaprabha knew what they were talking about. What a surprise.
And, you know, I mean, I’m sorry to admit that up until that time, I didn’t understand it. And then I was like, oh, you can have a decentralised, organic organisation and movement. And then I became very enthused to try to share that vision with others, especially since both Chilabhakti Siddhartha Sarasvati and A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada are so heavy about it.
They don’t say, oh, it’s not such a good thing or it might be difficult. It’s going to kill everything. It’s going to spoil it.
So that’s my answer. That’s quite striking. So two, three thoughts.
First is that even you, when we discuss the topic decentralisation or centralisation, that the thought that comes is normally we don’t think about the, with respect to Krishna consciousness. We don’t so much think about the managerial structure. We think about the authority structure and there is the spiritual master whose authority.
And in one sense, it’s a very centralised structure. The disciple is supposed to obey the spiritual master. And now, of course, there is this tension between the relationship with the spiritual master and the disciple.
And of course, the managerial authorities and the members of the organisation. But in principle, the spiritual master-disciple relationship, it is organic and centralised, you could say, isn’t it? Because the disciple. No, I highly disagree.
So you’re falling into exactly the same thing that I fell into. OK. And the same thing that I see so many devotees, even very scholarly, very intelligent, very thoughtful people that.
You have to have some sort of centralisation or bureaucracy in order to have a disciple relationship, in order to have management, in order to have an organisation that those terms are equivalent. But it’s interesting. I’ve been studying now, I guess, for the last close to a year, maybe half a year, a year, whenever it’s come out.
There’s a Christian book called The Starfish and Spirit, which is a Christian take on the very famous book, Starfish and Spider, about centralisation and decentralisation. And these are people. I read the first book.
I didn’t know what the second book. The second book is more recent. So they did it with help of the original authors.
And these are Christian leaders. Who said, OK, how can you know what does it say in the Bible? And they were like, well, it says decentralised. So one of their key principles for decentralising a Christian movement.
And it’s really funny. One of their their flagship decentralised movement is called the KC Underground. It doesn’t stand for Krishna Consciousness.
It stands for Cancelled City. But, you know, it’s funny that their book is KC Underground. And one of the key factors is having guru-disciple relationships.
So one of their key principles is making disciples who make disciples who make disciples. And they say you don’t really have an established movement until you have at least four generations of people making disciples who then make disciples who then make disciples who then make disciples. So discipleship is is key.
And yet they’re very decentralised. So those things are there. It actually isn’t a tension or an opposition between them.
Because when Chulabhati Santasaraswati and Srila Prabhupada were talking about having an organic decentralised movement, they certainly weren’t trying to mitigate the guru-disciple relation. OK. So then Prabhupada set up the GBC.
Now, in one sense, those courts and that famous incident where Prabhupada actually very strongly stopped the devotees who wanted to centralise and may centralise the finances. So when Prabhupada set up an organisation and Prabhupada also, there’s a famous incident when he said Krishna Consciousness was spread by organisation and intelligence. So when he’s talking about organisation, was he talking more in terms of planning and implementation and not so much in terms of organisational structure for doing so? What did he mean? You’re still running into it.
And again, I have so much empathy for this because this is what I had for decades. If this underlying assumption that an organisation means something that’s centralised in America. That if you’re going to say we have to be organised.
OK. Let’s look at an example. The Quakers, which are a kind of Christians.
Yeah. They’re an organisation. But they’re almost entirely decentralised.
I believe that they have their sermons. Anybody who feels inspired by the by the Lord or whatever, the spirit, they speak. They’re an organised speaker.
So, yeah, I mean, they’re completely decentralised, probably much more extreme than we would want to be. But they are very organised. And another example is alcohol.
What do you mean by organised in the sense that they’re organised means they have specific rituals and specific. What does organising mean over here? Well, let’s look at another example. You may be familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous.
I assume that they’re in India as well. OK, so they’re all over the world. They’re very, very well known.
They’re very effective. But they’re like 98 percent decentralised and non-bureaucratic. They do have some central offices and some home offices that handle some legal affairs and things like that.
Some minor things. But they have a seven page guide. For starting your own chapter.
Really? OK, seven page guide of their what are their principles? What are their values? What is the basic structure of an AA meeting? And then you can go and you can start an AA chapter. So they’re organised and they do have, like I say, they have some central offices with information and they take care of especially like legal questions and things like that. And, you know, but it’s it’s a highly successful organisation that’s existed for a very long time.
And it’s almost completely decentralised and it is almost completely organic. You know, another example, of course, is Wikipedia. Yeah, that Wikipedia is a highly decentralised, highly organic organisation, but it’s organised.
It’s not that it isn’t organised. So or an organisation, there are certainly people who take different positions and certainly people take different responsibilities. You know, there are some sort of principles, there are some sort of rules, there are some sort of values.
It’s, you know, people think, well, if it’s decentralised and organic, it’s going to be chaotic. But, you know, it’s it’s alive. I mean, certainly something that’s alive is is somewhat more chaotic than a machine.
Yes, that’s a fact. That is a fact. You know, if you have like in Starfish and Spirit, they say instead of thinking about a factory, think about a garden.
So there is definitely going to be more chaos in a garden than in a factory. Sorry, if you have a personal assistant and if you have a robot who does the same work, there’s definitely definitely a little more complexity. Yeah.
Chaos. Yes, it’s definitely there’s there’s some element. And it’s interesting, my friend Rukmini, she and I are co-authoring a book called Career Dorma.
And she made the point that people who say that the universe is completely operating according to firm laws in a mechanical way, that that’s, in one sense, a demoniac view because they’re thinking, well, if I could just figure out all the laws, then I could run the universe. She said, but there’s some randomness in the universe because ultimately it’s run by people. And therefore, like you can pray to the demigods and they can adjust your karma somewhat.
Oh, you know, like you can just like you can appeal to an ordinary judge and he can adjust your sentence somewhat. And Krishna can. That’s one of Krishna’s qualities is he’s independent.
You know that he can say, OK, you know, I bless you even if you’re Kaliya. So there there’s some but that doesn’t mean the universe isn’t extremely organised. That’s true.
So that means, see, Newton had a clockwork universe model. But then as science went forward, we had quantum physics and relativity that clockwork universe model is not entirely rejected. Gravity still works, but our understanding of how it works does become more nuanced.
And there’s a significant level of uncertainty and unpredictability in our in quantum physics and other places. So it’s it’s maybe it’s a whole big subject to discuss. But for many people who were naturalist and they use the design argument, other things for the clockwork nature of the universe was pointed to the existence of God.
But what you are saying is that if you presume that all that is all that is there and then we can control it, then that becomes demoniac. Right. Correct.
It also mitigates against the concept of God being a person. Yeah. A person is not entirely predictable by definition.
I mean. Oh, yeah. OK, that’s very true.
That’s the beauty of a person. And that’s how miracles also become possible then. Exactly.
Yeah. I mean, you like, you know, there are people they’re so lonely that they just, you know, buy a doll and pretend it’s their husband or their wife. But that’s that’s not satisfying, you know, or if you can have a robot.
I mean, how satisfying is it going to be to have a relationship with a robot? Even people who have a relationship with an animal, you know, the animals are somewhat unpredictable. Yeah, they’re a person. And that’s what makes them interesting.
Do it. Yeah. I mean, that’s the fascination and the mystery of relationships between people so that there is some element that’s not totally anticipated and regulated.
Is is what makes things personal? It’s which is which is why, in my understanding, I’m sure there’s many, many reasons. But why Shilabhakti Sinhaji Saraswati uses this word living. He uses the word living and mechanical.
That the organisation has to be living. Yes. That’s just to reiterate your point.
It’s almost like when I travel across the world, there are some temples which are small and they grew big. And many devotees say that the temples, when they were small, we had like an intimate family atmosphere in the temple and we were connected with each other. But now it has become big and things have become more bureaucratised.
So that’s such a good point, because according to Mintzberg, who’s like the management guru in the world on organisational structure. Can you tell me about this book once? Mintzberg, is it? It’s like five structures. I’d have to look it up.
OK, fine. But it’s the book. OK.
It’s the book by Mintzberg on organisational structure. OK. And it’s it’s the Bible of organisational structure.
There’s a lot of articles also, I think, in my on my website. I think you’re giving me the link. We will share that link.
I link to some articles of his and things like that. Anyway, what was I saying? So you’re saying an organisation become big, they become I would say they become bureaucratic. Yes, yes, yes.
So what bureaucracy, one of the hallmarks of bureaucracy is a set response to a certain stimulus. Again, if you think about a machine, you know, if I push a certain button, it does a certain thing. So a bureaucracy isn’t it isn’t flexible for an individual.
It can’t adjust for an individual. This is the rule. This is how we do it.
There’s set procedures. So the most bureaucratic system is where you have, you know, set processes and a set result. Everybody has to do things the same way and all the products look the same.
It’s like a factory. You know, if you think about a factory that makes chairs versus an artisan that makes chairs. OK, so everything’s done the same way.
Now, why do organisations tend toward bureaucracy? Well, as organisations exist over time, they are likely to encounter similar situations over and over again over time. And as organisations get bigger, they tend to encounter similar situations over and over again over space. So as an organisation tends to encounter similar situations over time or over space.
It’s the organisation tends to solidify its response to those situations and will tend to codify their response. And so the rule book gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And if you haven’t noticed this happening in ISKCON, you know, we have ISKCON laws.
And after a while, the rule book gets so big, which is what’s happened in ISKCON, that the rule makers don’t even know what the rules are. Many years ago, I spoke to a person who was at that for that year, chairman of the GBC. And I said, you know, the GBC has this resolution, which is which shouldn’t be there.
And he said, oh, we have that resolution. So this is typical. You know, there is no way that every member of the GBC can know all the resolutions of the GBC.
And most of the general members have the foggiest clues to what the GBC resolution. And this is but this is a result of an organisation existing over time and space. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable.
Just like in our room, our room gets dirty. But it doesn’t have to get dirty. We can periodically clean it.
We can periodically straighten it up. I mean, you have to make a deliberate effort to keep a living space neat and clean. If you don’t make a deliberate effort, it will become messy and dirty.
The same with our clothing, the same with our bodies. But that doesn’t mean that messy and dirty is inevitable. Or, you know, in disrepair.
It simply means that there has to be some corrective action that’s taken on a regular basis to prevent bureaucracy. That’s interesting. The normal conception is that things go into disorder and the normal that we have to make conscious effort to make things orderly.
So but orderly doesn’t necessarily mean bureaucratic. So, in fact, OK. Things can be very orderly without being bureaucratic.
But the way they can be orderly without being bureaucratic is if they’re based on principles, just like in our Shastra Advisory Council hermeneutics. That’s a really good example where the initial thrust of the CBC created hermeneutics committee was to ask specific difficult questions and come up with specific answers, which would then be the answers for all the members of the Hare Krishna movement on those particular questions. You remember that? Yes, yes, yes.
Yes. So it’s like, OK, Prabhupada said this. What does it mean? How do we see this thing? And here’s the answer.
The problem with that was, you know, it ended up as a 250 page book of here are the answers. And it was such that not even the members of the GBC could agree on all of those answers. The original hermeneutics committee, which was like five or six people, could not agree on all of those answers.
What to speak of a 30 member GBC, what to speak of hundreds of thousands of members of the Hare Krishna movement. And that’s it. That’s a bureaucratic way of dealing with things.
So then we took a different tack and we said hermeneutics is about qualities. It’s about values. And this is really what we’re going to discuss today.
It’s about values, principles and tools. And if you train people in those values, like humility, like service, like allegiance to guru. And if you train them in principles such as any explanation has to put Krishna as a supreme personality of Godhead.
And you train people in tools like asking about context. Then what you do is you set a boundary. And within this boundary, all explanations are OK.
And out of this boundary, explanations are not OK. But within the boundary, you have university, unity and diversity. So you created an organisation, but it’s a very organic organisation based on values, principles and tools rather than a catechism.
Rather than this is the answer to this. And this is the answer to this. And this is the answer to this.
And we’re going to have an ever increasing book of all the required. You have to accept this particular answer to this. OK, that makes sense.
So if you consider principles in from a devotional perspective and devotee’s life. What as a movement, we all at one level agree that we are trying to serve Srila Prabhupada. And we have.
How would this work in practical terms? Because, you know, ISKCON purchases land and we have we have properties and we have so many things. So can you give some examples of what decentralisation could mean in tangible ISKCON terms? Hmm. Well, let’s look, there’s something I compiled with Krishna Prabhu some years ago, which was we looked at the instructions from Srila Prabhupada as to what was the role of the GBC.
What was the GBC’s, shall we say, job description? And I don’t think this was ever used, but we put it together. We put it together for the GBC succession committee so we can take a look at this. And.
This is all just pulled pretty much word for word out of Srila Prabhupada’s instructions in letters and conversations and so forth. So the mission was to formulate solid programmes for advancing Krishna consciousness all over the world. Constantly think of how to improve ISKCON, carefully make a broad programme.
Notice the word broad for implementing Krishna consciousness in every sphere of life. Make a plan of how to introduce Prabhupada’s books in every home. And listen, Prabhupada says this is what we identified as a motto was tactful and respectful.
Which has a lot to do with both being organic and being decentralised. And then requirements, 16 rounds, principles, reading Prabhupada’s books and so forth. Responsibilities formulate solid programmes for advancing Krishna consciousness.
Constantly travel from one centre to another without staying long in any one place. Concentrating on preaching work, preferably travelling with a Sankirtan, engage in distributing books in the holy name. Helping to open new centres, organise Sankirtan parties, start educational centres for children, organise festivals.
Know everything and anything about the condition of situation with all manners within the zone. Being always informed of financial matters, becoming expert in all areas of management. Personally inspect each project or centre regularly to see that the highest standards of routine work are maintained.
Deity worship is maintained. Schools for children are developing. Finances are managed properly without debt.
Devotees are making spiritual progress. Remember chanting 16 rounds, regular principles, morning programme. Receive regular reports.
Help the local devotees and leaders through suggestions, teaching, educational programmes, enlightenment, a spirit of cooperation, and personal example. This is a decentralised way of starting a temple. So you’re getting reports, but how are you managing? Suggestions, again, this is pulled word for word from about 200 or so instructions.
We pulled all of Srila Prabhupada’s instructions about how the GBC should operate. Suggestions, teaching, educational programmes, enlightenment, a spirit of cooperation is very decentralised. Personal example, be careful not to kill the spirit of enthusiastic service, as we said before, individual, spontaneous, and voluntary.
Always generate an atmosphere of fresh challenge for the devotees. Care for the devotees, highest standard of education. Leave general management to local leaders.
Recognise the temple presidents and local leaders are not under the control of the GBC. This is, again, word for word. And ensure that major local decisions such as spending money over a certain limit and buying, selling, or mortgaging properly is only done with GBC approval.
So the GBC would get involved over a certain boundary, but otherwise it was left to local leaders. Work with local members to get their approval for any changes in local management. So not dictating local management.
Make regular reports of zonal activities to both local leaders and the GBC body. So the GBC secretaries are also reporting to the local leaders. So the local leaders are reporting to the GBC secretary.
The GBC secretary is reporting to the local leaders. They’re mutually reporting to each other. My God, this is very different from the way ISKCON is functioning presently.
But this is pulled out word for word. My God. And again, we have these strong statements from Shilpa Prabhupada and Shilpa Bhaktisiddhanta that if we don’t do this, we’re going to, he’s using words like killing.
Killing, yeah. You know, it’s, I remember when I discussed this with Nama Rasa and he said, well, you know, if we, if we have centralised bureaucracy, it’ll just not be so comfortable. I said, no, it’ll kill the whole thing.
Now, it’s not that one can change from a centralised to decentralised organisation overnight. That will be chaotic. You know, but to go through a system where we’re actually enlivening and empowering.
Yeah, I think that is the point I was going to ask. See, one side is you’re coming to that point. One side is what Shilpa Prabhupada wanted.
And then there are models which seems to be doing something similar. So, in the current model, the way we are working, what are the problems? And one problem I felt is that centralised, then devotees feel choked. Devotees feel choked and it becomes quite problematic.
So, that’s true. Another serious problem. One of the things they start out with in Starfish and Spirit, and wow, did this resonate, was leadership scandals.
So, they’re talking about Christian churches and they start off with, why are there so many leadership scandals? So, you’re saying if there’s not much centralisation, the scandals won’t matter or they won’t occur. No leader will become so big that even if somebody goes wrong, it won’t matter so much? Both. You know, they’re suggesting in Starfish and Spirit that one of the reasons that there’s leadership scandals is that in a centralised system, there’s far too much weighing on the shoulder of a leader.
That a leader is carrying way too much of a burden, not only of management, but also of expectations. That people are expecting them to be superhuman, and they’re not. And also, they make the point that, you know, if you don’t have peers, if everyone around you is a subordinate, there’s no way that any subordinate is really going to be able to deal with you like a peer.
Your most honest, frank-speaking subordinate is not going to correct you. So, you know, the more centralised things become, the more isolated leaders become. And this is, you know, I’m reading this and thinking, well, they’re talking about ISKCON.
So true. You know, and it puts a burden. I mean, I was speaking with one leader some months ago about some very legitimate questions and complaints.
And the leader said, oh, you just have to have a thick skin. You know, what happens in a highly centralised organisation is the leaders harden themselves to the members and to the members’ concerns. Otherwise, they can’t survive.
They just can’t survive. And they’re under all this tremendous pressure. First of all, they can’t survive, the subordinates can’t survive, the leaders themselves can’t survive.
Leaders themselves can’t survive. Because if they try to solve every problem everywhere, they will be overwhelmed. That’s one thing.
One thing is that they’re managing too much. They’re managing more than they can manage. And when you try to manage more than you can manage, a lot of things don’t get managed at all.
And you stress yourself and you overextend yourself. And it affects your physical health. It affects your mental health.
And it affects your spiritual health. You know, it’s trying to be something that we’re not. So that’s one thing that happens in a highly centralised organisation to the leaders, is that they get cut off emotionally from the devotees in general to protect themselves against criticism.
And, you know, hardening ourselves, like we read about how you can harden yourself through too much austerity. You know, to harden yourself is damaging. And also when things are too centralised, then people at the top don’t really have peers who can correct them.
And we’ve seen it’s very difficult for people in leadership positions to be corrected by anybody. We’ve seen this over and over and over and over again. You know, and another thing is that it puts so much pressure on them to be something that they’re not.
To try to be some kind of perfection when they’re human. That, you know, they break under the strain and then they end up having some kind of fall down. And a lot of times these fall downs are due to just people being stressed to such a maximum extent that they can’t cope with it.
And I found it fascinating that Christians were running into the same problem. That their centralised systems were stressing their leaders. And then, of course, it also really disenfranchises the devotees.
You know, there’s a sign in one temple in North America. I can read you the exact sign if you want. It’s actually a sign.
I mean, I have a picture of the sign. We’re going to talk about really being. See if I can find it quickly.
Really being disenfranchised. I hope we haven’t forced you to take a vow of silence. Please feel free to speak.
I mean, you may have to interrupt us because our conversation is just flowing. But feel free to ask. I’m listening to what you’re saying.
And I keep thinking of the books of the basic programme that’s running. And that’s very much about, from what I can see, that’s steering in the direction of this organic focus on principles. As being what gives it its idea of stability.
Stability to be less affected by management structure. And I’ve got an echo. That’s why it’s hard to talk.
Anyway. Thank you. Yes.
Your point about that things are going in that direction. I wanted to read this sign actually in an ISKCON temple in North America. To all devotees, please, if you have any ideas for voluntary service that you would like to offer.
That is very nice. But first, in all caps, write your ideas down on paper. Then, in all caps, submit those ideas to one of the temple authorities to get your idea approved and authorised.
So we can arrange exactly how that service will be conducted and combined with other services that are needed and being performed or with the overall plan we have for the temple. Now, I have some sympathy as to what was behind the writing of that sign. But, you know, like, imagine you look around and see, I want to sweep the floor and you think, okay, I guess I got to submit that in writing, you know, and approved by the temple board.
So, you know, having this kind of a very bureaucratic centralised system really stifles devotees. And so it damages the leaders. It damages the leaders physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
It is more likely to lead to leader fall down. When leaders do fall down, it’s much more catastrophic for the movement. And it leads to a disenfranchisement of the members where, you know, everything has to be approved by a committee and it has to be, you know, and you can’t move forward with anything.
You know, you feel like I can’t take out a Harinam party or, you know, there was a GBC resolution some years ago that it’s okay to have more than one temple in the city. Yes. You know, and this is because and I know of such cases personally, where devotees started having a programme in their home on Sunday.
And, you know, they started having 300 people coming to their home and the local temple got very upset. And said, you’re competing with the temple. Now, in a decentralised system, you want every city to have 5000 temples.
You don’t worry about competition. You know, you want every home to be a temple. You at least want what the with the KC underground called micro churches.
Yeah, this is this is so true. So, there has to be some training, going back to earlier point of overworking of the leaders and disenfranchisement of the subordinates. That is true.
But let’s consider an example where we have worked together. Say we have worked in BTG, Back to Godhead magazine. So, we do need some level of, I don’t know whether you want to call it bureaucracy, but anybody can’t publish an article in BTG.
In a temple, anybody can’t come and give the Sunday feast class or the Bhagavatam class. So, some amount of regulation is required. But what you’re saying is you don’t need a bureaucracy to have certain amount of regulation.
Correct. Okay. Also, somebody could start, you know, somebody could start their own Hare Krishna magazine.
We’re not saying anybody could publish anything in Back to Godhead magazine. But you could start your own Hare Krishna magazine. You could start your own Hare Krishna website.
Now, if the GBC see that you started your own magazine in Srila Prabhupada’s name and you’re preaching Mayavada philosophy, then they might say, sorry, you know, we have intellectual property rights on the word ISKCON and you can’t be preaching in Mayavada and calling it ISKCON. So, there’s a step at which the local ISKCON legal representatives step in and say, hey, you can’t do that in our name. There is a boundary by principles and values.
And yeah, you have certain requirements in your local legal ISKCON property, who’s going to give the Sunday feast lecture, who’s going to go on the altar. But you can start your own Sunday programme in your home. And you can train other people to go start their own programmes in their home.
And you can start other people to train their own programmes in their home. And, you know, so the reason why we’re terrified to do this, right, like they explain in Starfish and Spirit, is that they say that they fear that the job will not be done properly. It won’t be done on time or it won’t be done in a way that represents the organisation.
If we say, okay, you know, you can just do things. And their conclusion, and they’re very successful. You know, the people writing this book, Starfish and Spirit, they’re writing from having many actually successful models.
They’re saying that the safeguard is values. Just quoting, they say, as a catalyst, your role in stewarding and cultivating culture may be the most important one you play. A unique and distinctive set of core values, a distinct dialogue, and a dialect that celebrate and communicate those values, behaviours, and practises that bring the values to life in tangible ways.
Interesting. You know, if we think about the first purpose of ISKCON, teaching the techniques of spiritual life, offsetting the imbalance of values. So let’s say we train people, again, going back to our hermeneutics.
You know, I know you were the one who did the major work of expanding the value section. So imagine if what we really trained people in was in values, the qualities of a devotee, the values of a devotee. I mean, this is something we particularly see your Guru Maharaj, Radhanath Swami, particularly does this.
Yeah. You know, to have that be the focus, not just information transmission. You know, not just that I can recite a bunch of slokas and I can pontificate on, you know, different minutia of information.
I can tell the stories the right way and not mix up the people in the stories of the scripture and I can explain the philosophy. But that’s not the criteria. The criteria is having values.
Do you think about Krishna talking about how do you gain knowledge, Bhagavad Gita 13, 8 through 12, or we look at Isopanisad text, mantra 11, mantra 10. We’re looking at values. And if we’re going to say, which will be the next objection someone will make, well, how are we going to train devotees in values? Well, then what’s the point of the whole thing? Yeah, of course.
If I can’t train the majority of the members in values and in culture, then what we have is bogus. It doesn’t work. Why are we here for at all? Ultimately, we are here to develop some values.
Otherwise, it’s in Krishna consciousness. Exactly. So it seems there is two things.
Going back to the back to God example or something like that. What you said is that anybody can start their website and we can have certain extremes where some amount of vigilance or monitoring can come up. But if people are trained in values, in general, what people will speak will naturally be more or less in pursuance of those values.
So to some extent, we can say that with the internet coming up and social media coming up, in many ways, giving classes and outreach has become decentralised. Correct. Temples are giving Bhagavatam classes, but anybody can speak online and anybody can join anyone in the world today.
Correct. Yes. And at this point has not only fascinated me, but also given me a lot of peace.
Because as I’ve seen that the legal entity moves more and more towards trying to be bureaucratic and centralised and failing at it majorly. That the main way that our movement is progressing is in an organic, decentralised way. So whatever areas are highly bureaucratic and highly, highly centralised, you’ll find most of the people involved are elderly and most of the programmes are fairly empty.
But the things that are alive and progressing and spreading are organic, decentralised things. And that is already happening. And it used to bother me a lot that the official legal entity wasn’t so much like that.
And I finally decided that it would be nice if it was, but that it wasn’t required. Because Srila Prabhupada’s movement and Lord Chaitanya’s movement is going on anyway. And what’s happened as ISKCON has gotten bigger is that it’s gotten less and less ashram based.
It’s gotten more and more family based. And even people who aren’t married tend to have their own places and their own jobs and so forth. And people do start their own programmes and they do start their own publications.
And some of them are deviant. But that’s always been the case. So even when ISKCON was very ashram based, and even when, you know, I mean, if we think about Kirtananda, New Vrindavan, that was a very centralised, mechanical, bureaucratic structure.
And completely off the rails. So, you know, having some kind of tight control does not guarantee purity or legacy at all. So some people are going to go off the rails.
I mean, that’s just, it just is. Thinking that every single person who claims to represent Srila Prabhupada and claims to represent Lord Chaitanya is going to do so with fidelity is never going to happen. And no matter how tightly we try to control or how loosely we control, that is not going to happen.
To try to have that as a goal is forgetting all religious and human history. So rather what you want to have as a goal is that the majority of people representing Srila Prabhupada and Lord Chaitanya are doing so with fidelity. And that there are systems of mutual coordination and mutual, like Prabhupada saying, the local temple leaders make a report to the GBC and the GBC makes a report to the temple leaders.
Of mutual adjustment and mutual correction, which can much more, is much more likely to take place when there’s not as much of a centralised system. That’s so true, what you’re saying, that in one sense, we can say having a central authority, if that central authority is pure, they may guarantee purity. But sooner or later, even the central authority is going to depart from the world.
And then if the devotees are not being trained, then if that independent thoughtfulness has not been inculcated, then even if there is no trouble during the life of the central authority, afterwards, at least there is going to be trouble. So. Exactly.
And even with training, some people are going to deviate. It does. Yes, that is true.
It just is, you know, some of Advaita Acharya’s sons deviated. Yeah. So Krishna had a son who deviated.
So some people, it’s not that having this kind of control or that kind of control or this kind of organisation or that kind of organisation is going to absolutely prevent deviation. It can’t be absolutely prevented. So just like, it’s a question of kind of accepting that.
I think it’s like, no matter how nicely I take care of my clothes, over time, they will get some stains and tears. They just will. You know, I can’t take care of my computer in such a way that it will have no scratches or worn down spots ever.
It just isn’t the nature of things. So it’s much more. The question is not so much that.
The question is how to have an organisational structure and culture, which has the greatest capacity for enlivening and empowering the members to themselves become Krishna conscious and to themselves become agents of spreading Krishna consciousness to others. So that rather than it exactly being an institution, that it’s a movement, that it’s a very dynamic living movement. And like Prabhupada said, everyone has an extraordinary talent to serve Krishna with our talent means successful life.
So how to have a movement where everyone is empowered and enlivened in their talents, using them in Krishna service, and everyone has the best opportunity for becoming Krishna conscious, according to their own nature and according to their own inspiration. That’s more the question to ask. And rather than saying, how can we absolutely stop all deviations all the time everywhere? Because that that’s not possible.
It’s like, how can I have clothes that will never get a stain on them? You know, well, then you have to stay in a hermetically sealed room and not eat. You know, you’re just not being alive. Life is messy.
And in one sense, you could also say that maybe if a person stays forever at home, or what is that saying that ships may be safest in their dock, but they’re not meant to be in the dock. So we are meant to function and we are meant to grow. There are going to be risks in that.
So another point I was thinking about decentralisation is that for some people who are more creative, artistic, even literary, intellectual, if they don’t have space, they will not only feel stifled, but they will not even come or even if they come, they will go away. And that is exactly what happened. That’s exactly what happens, you know, or people try to start their own thing with their own inspiration, and then they’re criticised for it.
You know, it’s like, like this family, I knew that we’re having these hundreds of people coming to their home on Sunday, and then the local president was furious with them for their success. So, you know, then they’re they’re really given a hard time about it. And also, not everyone is a leader.
So, you know, if you have a decentralised organisation, then there’s going to be many, many different opportunities for service where you live. You know, there may be 20 different programmes or 50 different programmes going on that all have their own flavour, and you can find the one that suits you. I’m just thinking many years ago, here in North Carolina, my husband and I were running a Gurukula.
And some devotees wanted us to hire another devotee as a teacher, but we didn’t have the physical space for him to teach, nor the money to pay him, nor even the students for him to teach. So we said, you know, we can’t engage this devotee. Why don’t you start a separate school where you can engage? And there was a lot of outrage that we were suggesting that one community have two schools.
I mean, it’s primarily my husband that was pushing that. I mean, everyone else was saying, we all have to work together and cooperate and we should have one school. And he said, we can work together and cooperate, but why can’t we have two schools? And eventually, that’s what happened.
Eventually, some devotees started another school. Having this other devotee as a teacher went on for about three years like that. And it was the healthiest community I’ve ever been in when there were two schools.
Because if you didn’t like one school, you sent your kids to the other school. And instead of people criticising the school, which is what had happened before, everybody just glorified their own school. It’s like the criticism just stopped.
The politics, the criticism, it just went away. People just went to where they were happy. And we had maybe two or three families that could never be happy anywhere.
And they’d move their kids back and forth between the schools all the time. We had a rule in our school that anytime you took your kid out and put them in, you had to pay $100 per kid. So, we didn’t really care.
You want to take your kid out for a month and put them back in another month and you pay us another $300. Is that an exceptional situation? Because in one sense, I’ve seen if there are two temples or two groups of devotees, often they criticise each other. Recently I was talking to one devotee and they were telling me that they got introduced to Krishna Consciousness.
And so, there are two centres and one of them was the person who introduced them. And then the other place also, they went there for programmes. And apparently, the place where they were introduced, they had Mangal Aarti in the morning at 5 o’clock.
And the other place, they had Mangal Aarti at 4.30. The second place, they said, they are having Mangal Aarti at 5, Prabhupada said 4.30. It’s 5, so there is no Bhakti. Their morning programme is a waste of time over there. Well, but you see, this very mentality, doesn’t it come from a centralised view? That everybody has to do in a very bureaucratic view also.
You know, bureaucracy has to do with, there is this rule that applies to everybody all the time in the same way. We have a few of those, 16 nouns or principles, you know, but we don’t have a lot of them. And this sort of bureaucratic mood, yes, it creates that there can only be one temple and there can only be one school and there can only be one leader.
Sorry, that’s a very, very striking point. Criticism comes when there is a presumption that there is one right way and then both claim this is the right way. But if we say that there can be many right ways, then there is no reason.
Okay, this is what I find right. This is what you find right. And as long as you present that, as long as you are within the boundary.
Okay, yes, that is true. Unity and diversity. You know, there’s a boundary.
There is a boundary. Like in hermeneutics, there’s a boundary. Outside the boundary, you are apasampradaya.
But within the boundary, there’s diversity. And in order to think that way, you have to think organically. I mean.
Look at a plant. I always give this example on any given plant. There’s no two leaves that are exactly the same.
On the same plant. There’s no two branches on a tree on the same tree that are exactly the same. What to speak of two trees of the same species.
You know, if you have a grove of trees of the same species, each one is a little different. Or, you know, you’ve got a bunch of flowers. But on each plant.
Now, there’s still a boundary. In order to be called a certain kind of plant. In order to be called a marigold plant.
You have to be within a certain boundary to be a marigold. But some marigolds are this big. Some marigold flowers are this big.
And some are this big. And some are bright yellow. And some are two or three colours.
And again, on each plant, each flower is a little different. Each leaf is a little different. And this is how Krishna runs the entire universe.
Krishna does not have. It’s not that every marigold plant looks exactly like every other marigold plant. Or that even every flower on a particular plant looks exactly the same.
And that’s mechanical. That’s our modern industrialised society. You know, that I buy a certain phone and you buy that phone.
And my phone looks exactly like your phone. And we can interchange the parts. They fit exactly.
But that’s not Krishna’s world. Krishna’s world, which is organic and living. It’s just not like that.
Bureaucracy is a lot about standardisation. You know, the ultimate bureaucracy is a factory. Where everything.
I had a real wake-up call years ago. When I was. I had received a Shaligram Sheela.
And I was asking this one devotee expert in Archana. One of the top experts in Archana in the world. Okay, how do I worship? And so he gave me this long system of worship.
And I said, Prabhu, frankly, I’m not going to do this every day. I mean, I’m just going to be honest. There’s no way.
And I thought he was going to say, well, then you can’t worship Shaligram. And he said, well, I can give you another system. And I was really taken aback.
There’s another system? He said, yeah. So he gives me another system. And I said, well, this is much more compatible with who I am.
But I still wouldn’t do this. And he said, oh, you know, Bhaktivinoda has a system. In Bhajanurahasya.
I’ll give you that one. So he gave me that one. And I said, well, this is almost there.
He said, okay, we’ll customise it for you. I’m like, you can do that? He said, yeah. God is a person and you’re a person.
And it just. You know, what do they say in 2021? My granddaughter. It was a mind blow, she would say.
You know, it completely challenged my assumptions about Krishna consciousness and deity worship. I was just shocked. How? I mean, when I say it now, it seems ridiculous.
Deity worship is personal. There’s boundaries. There’s rules.
But within those boundaries and within those rules and within those principles. It’s personal. Because it’s organic, because it’s a relationship between me, Pujari and the Lord.
And we’re both persons. So, again, we have regulations, but it doesn’t mean that we’re a factory. So, a really organic decentralised ISKCON structure would be, there’s lots and lots of schools and there’s lots and lots of temples.
You know, there’s lots and lots of programmes going on. And each one has somewhat of a different flavour. Each one has somewhat of a different personality.
Each one might have somewhat of a different structure. But they’re all within the basic framework of principles and values and rules that Srila Prabhupada and Guru Goswami gave us. So, would you, taking this example of deity worship, say in our temples, we are now moving towards more and more standardised rules for how deity worship should be done.
And in some ways, you could say in India, there are lots of devotees. So, it is possible to do it. But especially in America, Australia, other places, devotees love the deities.
But at the same time, the deity worship does take a lot of effort. I remember one temple where they told me that they did some like inventory and it’s, they’re spending out 25 hours for deity worship for every one hour of what they’re doing for preaching. So, I don’t think that was what Prabhupada would have wanted.
No, definitely not. So, then even that could be individualised a little bit, deity worship also. Well, I mean, that was my experience.
Even in an institution, a personal individual, your personal worship, that’s fine. But even within our temples also, that could also be a little bit. That is actually the case.
I mean, you know, I do know of temples where, you know, regular ISKCON temples where there’s various types of adjustment. People do it anyway because life triumphs. If you think about… Life triumphs too.
Life will always triumph. If you think about when you pave a road, you pave a driveway, the little plants are going to… How do they do that? How do those little soft plants, the tiny little soft delicate seeds break through the pavement? How do they do that? I’m not talking about seeds that grow in cracks in the concrete. I’m talking about seeds that break through asphalt.
How do they do that? You know, and I like to burn frankincense for my deities. The frankincense trees grow in rocks. They actually grow in rocks.
How do they do that? So, life triumphs. And what happens is that, you know, I’ve travelled the world way over 20 times and visited so many temples, is they do adjust things according to their particular circumstances. They actually do.
They have to. Otherwise, it just can’t survive. But the problem is, if you have a very bureaucratic system, then when people adjust things according to their circumstances, they may not be doing so within the boundaries of the principles.
So, if instead of teaching values and principles, instead of training people in values and principles, when you train them in rules, when the rules are stifling their being alive, they don’t know how to adjust. But if I train them in values and principles, which is nurturing to being alive and being a person and being an individual, then I can understand how to adjust and stay within the boundary. So, this is something actually I hadn’t even thought about before.
But in this way, a bureaucratic centralised system actually fosters deviation. Because it’s not possible for everybody to adhere to the same 500-page set of rules in all situations. They can’t do it.
And they’re not going to know what they can adjust and what they can’t and how they can adjust it and how they cannot adjust it when they’ve been trained in simply a 500-page rulebook rather than in values and principles. And so, people may be adjusting in a way that really does mess up the relationship between them and the Lord. Whereas the other way, they’re likely not to.
They’re likely to know, oh, I can move this way and I can move that way. There’s space here and there’s space there. This is a very striking point.
Because one of the things I was talking with a devotee who had been in a project and he just left that project. But then his job transferred him somewhere else. And he found that he was so easily able to practise Krishna consciousness in that place.
So, what he told me the experience was that the first place he was there, he was presented Krishna consciousness to be like a 1-0 thing. That you do this or you do nothing. But then when he went to the other place and realised it doesn’t have to be 1-0.
So, he could practise at various degrees. So, what you’re saying is if there is one and you can’t do the one, the person may either give up or they may give up very central components that are important. So true.
You haven’t trained them to be independently thoughtful. And you haven’t trained them what is the basis of the relationship between them and Guru and between them and God. You’ve just given them a series of mechanical behaviours.
So, overall, when you’re speaking this, this seems so practical and relevant at one level. And what you said earlier about as our movement is moving forward, we ourselves are, we are, in one sense, we have naturally become decentralised because the primary demography of the temple has shifted outside, of the movement has shifted outside the temple. So, devotees are taking initiative and devotees are moving forward.
So, broadly we can say that the attempt for decentralisation could be devotees themselves at the individual level can be encouraged. There’s nothing wrong in doing this. Not only is there nothing wrong.
It’s desirable. It’s highly desirable. Yes.
It’s highly desirable. Yeah. So, right now, people feel that it’s wrong.
And a lot of people are stifled or they’re guilty. But instead of this is what’s highly desirable. And then what about training people on how to do it? Well, you know, what about some system where instead of training people in memorising a 500-page book of rules, what about training people in how to be innovative and how to be creative and how to use their individual talents and proclivities, which, of course, is very connected to Varnashram.
You know, if we’re talking about instituting Varnashram, and we’re talking about that people have different natures, you know, one of the main essential principles of Varnashram is you figure out your basic nature in this life. And then you use that within society to contribute to society and worship the Lord. That is, you know, if we want to take like kind of the essence of Varna Dharma, that’s what it is.
But then you have to encourage people to do that. You have to say, you know, what is your talent? What is your inclination? What is your nature? How could you use that nature to live in the world to earn your livelihood and at the same time to glorify Krishna? And how can you use that in the preaching mission? So, and this is, you know, imagine if we gave that kind of training. So a lot of organic decentralisation happens anyway, just like plants break through asphalt and trees grow in rock.
So it happens anyway. Because it is the nature of life. Life triumphs.
It just does. Because it is ultimate reality, is personalism and life and variety and desire. Because that is Tatva.
It will always triumph. But why not facilitate that? Why not have a movement that actively facilitates it? And actively encourages it? And that measures success by to what extent that is happening. And, you know, looks at like this, the KC Underground, they say you want to have at least four different areas.
I forget all the different areas they have. You want to have at least four generations of like disciples making disciples. And that’s how you know you really have a movement.
When you have that kind of spread. That’s striking. So just going back.
Some hesitation about decentralisation would be that in general, Prabhupada didn’t talk too much about, you gave a lot of, quite a few quotes, what Prabhupada wanted the managerial structure to be. But at one level Prabhupada also said that, obey the spiritual master and make the spiritual master instruction of life and soul. And so to some extent does that translate into the spiritual master is represented by the managerial authority.
And one has to obey the managerial authority or the managerial, that chain of hierarchy and the spiritual master disciple. Are they two distinct chains of hierarchy? Hmm. Well, first of all, if I’m going to obey the spiritual master and the spiritual master is ordering me to have a decentralised organic movement.
If that’s the order of the guru. So my obedience to guru is to have a decentralised organic movement. That is my obedience.
As far as local managerial authority, it depends. Am I living in an ashram? Am I living on ISKCON property in an ashram? That is a situation for the minority of our members. Now, if I’m living, it’s just like, let’s say I’m out in the world and I am renting an apartment.
I’m renting a flat. I have to follow the rules of the landlord. That’s just life.
If the landlord says I can’t have a pet, then I can’t bring my dog secretly into the flat. You know, if the landlord says no parties after nine, then I can’t have parties after nine. I mean, that’s because I’m living at the landlord’s place or living in a country.
I’m under the control of the government. So if I’m living on ISKCON property, which is basically for three groups of people, living on ISKCON property is for young people who are in brahmachari training in the brahmachari ashram who are eventually going to move out and get married. It’s for very transient people who are making a brief ashram experience.
Maybe they’re staying for a weekend or they’re staying for a month or they’re staying for two months. And it’s for older retired people in the vanaprastha ashram who are, you know, living in temple property and giving themselves to the mission in their middle age and old age. So those are the people that are living on temple property.
And then those people have to naturally follow the rules of the local authorities. That’s just civilised life. But the vast majority, you know, it’s civilised to follow the rules of the people who own the property that you’re living on.
It’s just life. And that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them or negotiate or cooperate. That’s, you know, a different thing.
But of course, you can’t say, I’m going to live on ISKCON property and I’m just going to do my own thing, whether the authorities like it or not. That doesn’t make any more sense than having a party at 11 o’clock at night in an apartment where the landlord forbids it. And as far as people who don’t live on ISKCON property, they’re following the local authorities.
It involves when they’re physically on the property, when they’re visiting the property. And it also involves any time on their own that they claim to be officially representing ISKCON. So if a person creates a magazine or website or a programme and they want to say this is an official ISKCON thing, then they had better be in cooperation with the local authorities and the GBC.
If they’re going to say this is not an official ISKCON thing, but we’re following Shula Prabhupada and we work in cooperation with ISKCON, then it’s not necessary. You know, they don’t have to coordinate everything with the temple president. I mean, they might do so out of friendship or out of consideration if they have a good relationship.
But it’s not required for them to do that. And rather, the local ISKCON leaders should be hoping that thousands of people in their area are engaged in varieties of preaching with their own money, with their own inspiration, you know, and getting guidance from the ISKCON system. You know, otherwise you have a situation where ISKCON leaders are being forced to control something far, far, far beyond their capacity to control.
Again, you know, so if you have a temple president and the temple president’s in charge of the deity worship in the kitchen and the ashram and the gardens and the buildings and, you know, maybe they have a family and they have to take care of their spouse and their children and then they have their sadhana. And then they also have to take care of a hundred different programmes going on in the community. I mean, they can’t.
And so they end up either breaking or doing a lousy job or both, because they can’t do that. Or then they set up a very hierarchical, bureaucratic system to manage all that, where you have, and a lot of these warnings also from Srila Prabhupada and also in this book Starfish and Spirit struck me how many times they warn about this, is don’t copy a corporate structure a for-profit corporate structure into a church. And this is one of the things, when Srila Prabhupada got very angry about centralisation at one point, it was because they put a devotee who’s a business person over the GBC.
And this devotee business person, wonderful devotee, but he was trying to manage ISKCON as if it was a for-profit business. Prabhupada was furious. He was just furious.
He immediately removed him. So what happens when the local authorities try to have control in the name of legacy impurity over a hundred or a thousand programmes that are going on in their city, they end up trying to do it through this involved structure that mimics some big corporation, like Amazon or Ford or something like that. But, you know, we’re not making cars.
We’re not a car factory. We’re a Krishnaprema movement. We’re a garden.
We’re growing Bhakti Lata beaches. We’re not making cars. So when you try to superimpose this highly mechanistic, highly bureaucratic, highly centralised, you know, perversion of a Vaishya structure onto a brahminical and spiritual organisation, it kills.
Prabhupada says it kills the spirit. It kills it. For everybody.
For the leaders, for the followers, for everybody. So that’s not the way. And it doesn’t work anyway, because a person simply cannot control and supervise like that, especially something that is spiritual.
Yeah. It’s not the nature of the thing. Oh, okay.
One thing is that… Do you… Okay, there’s one question I have in mind when you’re speaking that when, as a movement, at one level, we, just because devotees are living outside the temple, there is decentralisation that naturally happened. But at the institutional level, because maybe we are having big pen temples with huge projects or we have had some legal challenges because of which we had to make some strict rules. So it seems both ways things are happening.
Some ways centralisation is happening and some ways decentralisation is happening. Correct. So earlier you also mentioned that to some extent, bureaucracy is inevitable.
But we have to make sure… The tendency towards bureaucracy is inevitable. Oh, okay. The tendency.
As an organisation expands over space, there’s going to be a tendency towards bureaucracy. As an organisation expands over time, there’s going to be a tendency towards bureaucracy. Just like you think in any relationship, there may be a tendency to start taking the other person for granted.
Whether it’s a spouse, whether it’s a friend, whatever. There’s going to be a tendency towards that. So one needs to be aware that there’s that tendency and make deliberate efforts to course correct.
You know, like Krishna says, when dharma becomes adharma, I come in and I course correct. Hmm. And that’s done frequently.
I mean, Krishna himself or some acharya descends frequently to course correct. It has to, you know, it’s like that. So there’s a tendency towards bureaucracy.
Like there’s a tendency towards, you know, contempt in an intimate relationship. There’s a tendency towards dirt and messiness in my home. That doesn’t mean it’s inevitable.
It’s not inevitable that my house become a dirty, disordered mess. It just means that I have to keep course correct. Does that make sense? I mean, I’m just thinking about this.
It is that Krishna comes to, periodically descends to establish order. So it is taking me a little time to comprehend that bureaucracy can also be a form of disorder. It is a disorder.
It is a disorder. It’s a disease. So, because in one sense, the purpose of bureaucracy is to maintain order, but to have orderly dealings.
But it has become excessively orderly, like what you said earlier that a fixed stimuli, fixed response, and the personal element goes out of it. And so the order is not, I mean, Krishna says he comes to establish order. So bureaucracy is a disorder because it may mechanically implement things, but the personal reciprocation that is meant to be the purpose of the mechanical interaction of the protocol or whatever, that is lost.
So, or that gets minimised. Okay. Yes.
So it’s Maya. Maya is something that looks like the opposite of what it is. That is the definition of Maya.
Maya appears to be something and it is actually the opposite. It looks like love and it’s actually lust. Its appearance is opposite.
So, a bureaucracy appears to be orderly, but it’s not. It creates a complete disorder in a personalised universe. So, is this being seen to some extent, say as a, that when you talk about decentralisation, is it seen as a threat or a challenge by ISKCON authorities or overall, leaders are also open to this? If some devotees are interested in taking this forward, what are the ways they can do this? Well, I’ve been working with a very small, informal group of some ISKCON leaders, primarily from North America, in looking at these questions of having a more organic, decentralised society.
We have, you know, we discuss these things every once in a while, we meet and some of these people are temple presidents and regional leaders who are really trying to apply having an organic, decentralised movement in their own realm. And then, while I haven’t met anybody who’s going to say, well, Srila Bhaktisanta Saraswati and Srila Prabhupada are wrong, I have met a number of people, both general devotees and leaders, who respond like you did in the beginning and like I did for decades, thinking that, well, we have to be organised and we’re an organisation and we’re an institution. And so, you know, I don’t know why Prabhupada said this, I don’t know why Bhaktisanta just said it, but we’re just going to kind of put it aside and ignore it and go on.
And certainly there are leaders who have been feeling this highly centralised burden of I have to maintain purity and legacy as if they’re carrying the whole world on their shoulders, as if there aren’t hundreds or thousands of us who also want to maintain the purity and the legacy and we’re all willing to do our part and who feel that, you know, if you decentralise and you have an organic system, that everything would be chaotic. But, you know, a garden doesn’t have to be chaotic. You can have a highly organised garden, but it’s still very organic.
You know, it’s not that a garden means that you just kind of close your eyes and throw seeds everywhere and let the weeds grow everywhere. You know, that’s not a very nice garden, but it’s still a living system. It’s not a factory.
So I do run into quite a few devotees and especially leaders who, you know, just grasping this concept that you can have a decentralised organic organisation and that decentralised organic organisations exist and they’ve existed very successfully. We were giving an example of the Quakers and Alcoholics Anonymous and Wikipedia. Many of them have existed for a very, very, very, very long time.
So, you know, that it is possible. There are models like that. So, you know, it depends.
So some people are like, yes, I’m really going to be the catalyst for this in my area. And then others are like, well, I don’t know, maybe we can try some things. And other people are like, no, no.
I have to control everything. So it seems that you could say that there are some like I also had some conceptions about what decentralisation means. So that itself is the first pitfall that is addressed.
Then other things will gradually fall in place. Yes, this is at least my own conviction. My own personal conviction is that first thing is find out about these instructions of Srila Bhakti Sanatana Saraswati and Srila Prabhupada.
Know them. Next step. Believe them.
Say, I am going to work on the assumption that Srila Bhakti Sanatana Saraswati Thakur and A.C. Bhakti Vedanta Swami Prabhupada when they made these repeated heavy statements that they knew exactly what they were talking about and what they are saying is true. So I’m going to start with that as my a priori assumption. Then the next step is, okay, how? How do I do that? How do I have a movement? And what it probably would say that requires intelligence.
But it also requires some study, you know, to study the people to read and study those who have examined organisational structure and organisational culture and how do they work. And then we have a model. And then to make the plan to go from here to there carefully.
You know, it’s not like you just change everything overnight and send coup d’etat and half the people die in gunfire. You know, you have an orderly transition. But if we can imagine it, you know, if we really went in this direction, we could really imagine a Krishna conscious world.
I mean, I’m still perhaps a naive dreamer that I still believe that we’re going to have a Krishna conscious world. I still believe maybe I don’t know, maybe I’m stuck in my 18 year old self. But I still believe that Mahaprabhu’s movement is going to take over the world.
And I still believe that there’s going to be a golden age of Sankirtan. So I don’t know that’s possible unless we have an organic decentralised way of spreading Krishna consciousness. Yeah.
So when you’re saying Krishna consciousness can take over the world or we can have are you saying necessary that everybody will come to the level of 16 round the four aggregate principles or everybody will chant the holy names and be Krishna conscious at some level. The latter. The latter.
Yes, that makes sense. I mean, we can’t we can’t even get all of our initiated devotees to chant all their 16 rounds and follow. I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s not 100 percent.
I know for sure. Definitely that it’s not 100 percent. So if we can’t get 100 percent of our initiated devotees who’ve taken vows to follow those vows, there’s no way we’re going to get all seven billion people on the earth.
But what we could get, let’s say, you know, most of those seven billion people. I mean, you’re always going to have some criminals and some outliers and like that. But what we could get the majority of people to do would be to be aware of the presence of Krishna in their life, as prophet says, in the second purpose of ISKCON, to have a consciousness of Krishna, Krishna in the taste of water, Krishna in the light of the sun, Krishna in their ability, Krishna in the fragrance of the earth.
They could be engaged in Sankirtan festivals, as I think that’s the third purpose of ISKCON. They could be trained in the techniques of spiritual life, the spiritual knowledge, systematic training and spiritual knowledge, techniques of spiritual life and to offset the imbalance of values that could happen. And breaking of the fragmented principles could be on the margins of society.
So, you know, on the outskirts of the town, there’s a brothel on the outskirts of the town. There’s a place that, you know, you can go hunting and eat your deer that you kill, you know, and the outskirts of the town, you can buy your liquor. So, you know, that those things can go on among a small subset of the population on the outskirts.
But the majority of people, you know, instead of going to regular nightclubs, they’ll go to a, you know, a non-intoxication Kirtan party. And, you know, that things will start to be replaced with that. And people will dedicate their, their occupation.
They’ll understand Varna Dharma and they’ll be working according to their nature and they’ll be glorifying Krishna through their occupation. So, it’s almost like a pyramid, you know, there’s some people who will rise higher, but at least others will have some pathway to keep rising upward to some extent. And everybody can go up to some degree.
So, that will be the norm, a sense of the consciousness of Krishna, as explained in the Bhagavad Gita and Bhagavatam, how Prabhupada put it, would be very prevalent in society. That people would have a consciousness of Krishna, as explained in the Bhagavad Gita and Bhagavatam. Now, whether that’s just in the taste of water and the light of the sun and the moon and the sound in ether, or whether it’s Krishna playing his flute, dancing on the groves of Vrindavan on the bank of the Yamuna, you know, that’s, that would vary by person.
But the norm would be a society of God consciousness. But that can only be done if there’s thousands of, as these Christians call it, microchurches in every city. There has to be thousands.
There has to be thousands of schools and thousands of microchurches. And there needs to be an empowerment. They, it’s interesting, in Star Horse and Spirit, they give an example of how Christianity has spread in India.
And they were saying the main way the Christianity has spread in India is through a decentralised programme where the local Indians become Christians and then they make disciples who make disciples who make disciples and they organically spread out in society among their friends and relatives and associates. So that’s another model. I mean, we’re, we’re not very pleased with the Christian missionary activity in India, but we can look at what are they doing that’s successful in an organic decentralised way.
I know this is something that Jaipur Takaswamy looked at, you know, when Jaipur Takaswamy started the Namahatta and the Bhakti Vriksha, it was modelled after such things. Now, the problem is, again, that in many cases, not all places, but in many cases, those have become very bureaucratic and centralised. So, you know, you have to do your Bhakti Vriksha programme in exactly this way.
And there’s, you know, it never breaks off. And the idea is once you get 15 people, people have to break off and start their own group. But instead of doing that, they’ll just keep the same, you know, 12 people for five years.
So the original idea of the Namahatta and the original idea of the Bhakti Vriksha was that it would act as a decentralised organic multiplying kind of thing. I mean, that’s another thing is that in Krishna’s world, healthy things are multiplying. Healthy things are growing, healthy things are multiplying.
If things are not growing and they’re not multiplying, you’re sick. You know, there’s some sort of a problem. Yeah, that makes sense.
So, maybe one or two last questions I would like to have, if you have some time, we’ll just complete with this. So, you see that you get an example of Jayapratakam Maharaja and how Bengal I think is probably among the most successful places where Krishna consciousness is spreading very nicely as a state. Even Delhi, it has spread and there also they have many temples and they have a lot of programmes going on.
So now in the Western world, our movement is not really spreading much and there could be many reasons for this. And at the same time, there is a certain level of decentralisation that is natural. Even the hierarchies are much lesser in the Western world.
The approach is more egalitarian naturally. So, isn’t decentralisation to some extent already there in ISKCON in the West? So, do we have examples of, say apart from the Bhakti Bhuksha, decentralisation leading to vibrant outreach or vibrant flourishing of devotees or because generally, quite often we say that if a project is successful, we attribute it to the leader like you mentioned Jayapratakam Maharaja and his Bhakti Bhuksha outreach. But again, still there is one leader who has inspired decentralisation.
But still he is quite a bit the centre for all his disciples. He is very much the centre. So, decentralisation, the spiritual master will always be a leader but then as our movement moves forward and then we will have multiple spiritual masters over several generations.
So, there is the way that I can remember how to understand centralisation is I use an acronym ICE. I start with that. This is my mnemonic.
I know you like mnemonics. And then I added A after each one. So, these are the areas of power in an organisation.
That’s a creative way to create a mnemonic also. Okay. So, these are the areas of power.
I’ll try to make it a little smaller so we can see it all at one time. Okay. So, information, advice, choice, authorisation, execution, plan and action.
So, an organisation is centralised to the extent that these areas of institutional power are in the hands of one person or a very small number of people. So, you know, where does information come from? Who’s providing information? Who’s providing advice? Who’s making the choice? Who gives the actual authorisation? Who makes the execution plan? And who actually does the action? So, the more that these are controlled by one or a small group of people, the more that an organisation is centralised. The least centralised is where the leader is just choice, where the leader only has control over making the choice.
That’s absolutely centralised because you have to have leaders. So, the fact that there’s strong leadership, there has to be leaders. I mean, Varnashram means there has to be leaders and just some people have a nature of leaders.
But that doesn’t mean you have to have a centralised leadership group. You know, another way to look at this is, you know, do I just tell you what to do and you do it? Or do, you know, I tell you, figure it out, let me approve your plan, give me reports and you do it. Or I ask you to come up with your plan and you give me reports.
Or I ask you to come up with your plan and do it. I mean, like here I am in North Carolina and when I got stuck here in the pandemic, I could see that the Tulsi greenhouse was falling apart and I had been given some money as a donation and I said, look, why don’t I take this money that I was given and I’ll give it to the temple towards a new greenhouse. So, they said okay and they got other people to donate and they built a greenhouse.
And then I saw that it ended up that they gave me a place to stay right next to where they put the new greenhouse. That just sort of happened that way. So, then I would walk past the greenhouse every day and I was seeing that the person taking care of Tulsi was not regular, was not dependable, Tulsi’s not doing very well.
And so I started taking on more and more and more and more and more and more and more of the responsibility for taking care of Tulsi. You know, I started collecting money, started spending time, I started putting energy into it. And at a certain point, I just asked the local GBC, you know, can I just be in charge? And he said yes, you can just be in charge.
So, at this point, like, I only consult as far as really big things. Like, I consulted, can we get rid of the electric heating system and put in a gas heating system? But other than that, I’m collecting the information, I’m collecting the advice. You know, the only thing I’m going to the local authorities for is big authorisation things.
Just like when Prabha talked about the GBC and the Temple Presidents, that the Temple Presidents only had to go to the GBC for big authorisation things. Otherwise, they could manage themselves. So, if it’s a really big authorisation thing, I’ll go to the Temple President of the GBC and I’ll say, hey, you know, is it alright if I put a propane heater in here instead of electric? So, if we ever power out, Tulsi’s going to be okay in the winter.
Yes. You know, and other things, I just do it. So, that’s you know, it’s not that they’re not in charge and it’s not that they’re not the leader.
They are in charge and they are the leader, for sure. But I’ve been empowered that this is my area of service and that I can develop it as I see fit. So, that’s… And that’s even on Temple property.
What to speak of if it wasn’t up to me. You know, let’s say that I had my own house down the street and I had, you know, I wanted to build a Tulsi greenhouse down the street and I wanted to bring Tulsi’s to the Temple for my own greenhouse down the street. So, just because there’s, you know, like I said, Guru doesn’t mean that… Because Guru’s instructions is to do things like that.
Guru’s instructions is to do things in a way that honours the individual and that honours the individual talent. I would probably say, you know, always fresh challenges and rising to meet those challenges and always having new… inspiration for the devotees. Or I was like somebody for the first time since we set up this new greenhouse, someone stole one of the Tulsi’s.
It hadn’t happened before. And so, I was thinking to put up a really pretty sign how this is, you know, Tulsi’s greenhouse and something about Tulsi and something about how the Tulsi plants are for the Temple. But, you know, if I’m going to do that, that’s going to be in addition to the Temple problem.
So, I have to ask. And it’s funny, I just, you know, said to the Temple President of the GBC, you know, thinking we had this Tulsi stolen, what about a sign and the GBC said, yeah, put up one of those signs on a poster, which was exactly what I was thinking. And I thought, oh great.
But then, you know, going out, collecting the money for it, going out to get it, what exactly is going to be on the sign, going there, arranging the whole thing, I’m going to do that. I’m not going to be checking with them all the time. You know, that’s… Yeah, you know, I was thinking this, I was also thinking about how Prabhupada actually managed or actually led the movement.
Although he did say always follow the instruction of the spiritual master. But then we have some extraordinary incidents of Prabhupada telling devotees to completely reorder their life and go from one place to another. But after that, Prabhupada was micro-controlling.
At that time there was no internet, there was no phones. So, once he sent, asked devotees to go to London, they were on their own and it was their initiative about. So, to some extent, all of the western movement, all of our movement spreading across the world, largely devotees doing it by their initiative and they would report to Prabhupada, but letters would take some weeks to reach probably and weeks to come back.
And it seems even when Prabhupada was in India, he was hands-on management but that was not because of a desire to micro-control, but that was because the devotees were so inexperienced in dealing with India and he didn’t want them to get cheated. And he also wanted to train them. Also, because Prabhupada, especially in Vrindavan, Prabhupada was much more aware of the local culture.
So, not only just that he didn’t want the devotees to get cheated, but he was much more aware of how to interface what we were doing with the local culture than his western disciples would have been. And so, he was much more concerned that things be done in a particular way. But generally, yeah, he didn’t do that.
And even giving that kind of order was the exception rather than the rule. You know, saying to someone, okay, you go to Tokyo. You know, that wasn’t generally how Prabhupada dealt with his disciples.
Sometimes, for some disciples. Yeah, I think in one sense, only the extraordinary makes news. So, if we hear some stories about like that, they will be the extraordinary stories only.
But most of them… Prabhupada was on a train with devotees in India and this one gentleman said, I want to start a centre. You know, and Prabhupada was one of the devotees to get off the train with him and help him start a centre. But that wasn’t the day-to-day kind of… And of course, you know, if you’re there travelling with Srila Prabhupada as part of his personal entourage, then naturally, he’s going to say things like, hey, do you want to go in the kitchen and learn how they’re doing that? You know, that’s natural when you’re in that kind of an intimate environment with Srila Prabhupada.
But that wasn’t his general way of managing. That makes sense. And if you look back, of course, the history of religion is a complicated thing.
But I don’t see in Indian history ever there being a possibility also to manage micro-control or supervise in a very strict way. So, in one sense, we can say that the decentralised approach is, we are not just responding to human concerns about the leaders being over-pressured or the followers feeling repressed. But maybe, in a sense, we are returning back to the way that things were in the tradition itself.
That’s a very astute observation. That’s a very astute observation. Yes.
So, Russell Prabhu, we said you had a Mounavrat once again. You were to add anything? Yes. Or you want to ask anything to Mataji also? You can do that based on what she has spoken.
The decentralised organic approach is a way of keeping Krishna in control. Whereas the bureaucratic centralisation, you can lose Krishna’s input. And there’s a couple of classes that Mataji did in Melbourne.
One was engaging children according to their natural tendencies. And another one was four key things for raising children in Krishna consciousness. And much of the content of those classes is applicable in this context.
The reasons and the way of engaging children in Krishna consciousness all apply to this decentralisation. It’s giving people an opportunity to serve Krishna in their way. Insertive only.
Yes. You’re really an example of that, Russell. You take the initiative to come to a class and set up your three cameras and to talk to the speaker and say, hey, can you give me a copy of your PowerPoint? And you volunteer that.
You come forward and this is something that I’m good at and that I like to do. And it’s beautiful. And that’s what your class was all about.
Encouraging people to do that. You personify that. And so do you, Chaitanya Charan.
I mean, you’re inspiration for the type of books that you like to write. You have your own particular style. And just the way you’ve grown your service.
I’m not sure how long ago I first met you, but it was a long time ago. I think the first time I met you was in 2014. Yeah.
We met. We’ve been in touch from 2006-2007 on email. On email, yes.
And I’ve kind of seen over the years how you gradually developed your own programme. That’s very much imprinted with your personality and your insight in the type of essays, the type of books, the podcasts. And that’s how it’s meant to be.
You know, no matter what our nature is, no matter what our talents are. If everybody could feel and be empowered according to their talents and their natures, to use it to glorify Krishna and to use it to restore the balance of values in life and bring real peace and unity to the world, as Prabhupada says in the First Purpose of Iskcon. It’s 195 times, Prabhupada says, peace and prosperity.
You know, then our movement would really move. And our movement would really transform the world. You know, Mahaprabhu’s going to do it anyway, Prabhupada would say, but it’s a question of to what extent we’re cooperative and to what extent we’re going to take credit.
That’s true, actually. To some extent it is my writing ability. I got the space to develop that, whatever little I have developed.
And the way I tried to present, because I got some space, I was able to do that. Otherwise, I was quite suffocated. So, I am grateful for the space that I got, but I thought that my authorities were being exceptionally kind to me by giving me that space.
But in one sense, what you’re saying is that, that is the space which different people may need different degrees of space, but actually everybody needs that space, especially as they find their own way to serve Krishna, as per their inspiration, as per their intelligence and as per Prabhupada’s extraordinary ability that they have been given. So, this is… Another thing they say in Star Version Spirit is not to privilege the rare talents over the more common ones, that all talents are valuable. Oh, okay.
To see everyone’s talents as being valuable and giving everyone the space to develop their talents. Another thing, and maybe we should end with this, but this is kind of highly explosive, I suppose, is they were saying that you know, we’re supposed to be servants, and the servants don’t have all kinds of perks over the masters. If all of us really think that we’re servants, then we won’t have a hierarchy of perks.
We won’t have a hierarchy of facility. But everybody will be in this mood of being a servant, and that I don’t want to take more facility and I don’t want to take more perks than those that I’m serving. Like when Srila Prabhupada gave a class and he said, you know, he was talking about first class, second class, third class, fourth class persons, and one of the reporters said, so, you must be the first class men.
I said, no. I am fifth class because I am serving even the fourth class person. So to really go to decentralisation is very much in harmony with having this mood of seeing the devotees as Prabhus and seeing, you know, not just some word, not just that we’re saying word Prabhu and we don’t know what we’re saying, but to have this mood that then I am a servant, and I am meant to, even if I appear to be externally taking some leadership role, my mood is always that of Prabhu.
And that is also at the heart of a decentralised organic movement. That’s beautiful. So even so, in one sense, the leader’s mood is also to facilitate the service of those who are working with them, rather than simply I think that I will engage you and you obey me, but rather what do you want to do, and how can I facilitate you in that? And that was very much Srila Prabhupada’s mood.
Yeah, that’s true. That was very tangible. Yeah.
Srila Prabhupada. Towards the end of the podcast, I tried to summarise. Of course, today we discussed a lot of things.
So you started with your own journey about how you encountered Prabhupada’s course and Bhakti Sanath Sudhakar’s course, and then you did your PhD. At that time, you found that what they were saying was actually not only doable, but it has been talked about in the world that we could have organised system, organised way of functioning without necessarily having a bureaucracy. So you talked about centralised, decentralised and then bureaucratic or was it non-living or living? Organic.
Organic, yeah. Bureaucratic or organic? Living. So the whole theme from there, as you started exploring, you said that Bhakti Sanath Sudhakar and Prabhupada are both very strong in their statement that bureaucracy will spoil everything, that it does not happen, it will kill.
So then with respect to how to implement it, you gave several examples. The first part was a little more theoretical about how it works and you gave several examples, Alcoholics Anonymous or even the Wikipedia and then this KC underground. So the examples like that which and even the Quakers.
So they are extremely decentralised. But when we said they are still organised in the sense that when Prabhupada said organisation and intelligence, so that you talk more in terms of values that there are certain values which as followers of Prabhupada, we have to follow. But beyond that trying to micro control that is going to be difficult both for the leaders as well as for the subordinates.
For the leaders, they have too much pressure and then when you try to manage everything, you end up managing nothing and then because of that pressure eventually the leaders themselves feel drained and then they may fall and if they fall, if they have been elevated to a very high position, then their subordinates also get traumatised by that and along with that the subordinates also, they feel choked. So you want to encourage individual initiative. So from that perspective, it’s vital that devotees feel inspired and Prabhupada said that Prabhupada said that create some challenge for devotees to use their extraordinary ability in Krishna’s service and then you also showed that quite a illuminating document of what Prabhupada wanted the GVC to do and it was almost even the GVC and the temple management was more horizontal rather than vertical and then later we discussed about what would this mean in today’s ISKCON world.
So to some extent it’s already happening because we have moved from a temple-based movement to a congregation-based movement and even ISKCON also has made officially also has moved in some directions like that that in one place there can be multiple Krishna conscious programmes without necessarily needing sanction from one central authority and the decentralised programme overall is something if we actually are going to spread across the world and we are going to make the world Krishna conscious then we will definitely need to decentralise and then if we have the fear of deviation then that is anyway going to happen. You have the example of Nirandavan also highly centralised and that also got deviated. So deviation is to some extent inevitable just like clothes are going to get dirty but what we can do is rather than worrying too much about the extremes of those who are going to get deviated if the majority we have devotees, they are trained in values then they will follow in their own way and they will attract different people according to the way they practise and they share.
So extremes need to be monitored. Say for example somebody is in ISKCON website and they say they teach Mayabad. That has to be monitored but broadly speaking if somebody is sharing Krishna’s message.
Nowadays with the internet that has already happened to some extent and you said that is a sign of positivity and hope for you also. So both from the demographic shift in ISKCON’s structure membership as well as the technological change. Decentralisation is naturally happening to some extent and if there is training for decentralisation that means rather than having to go rebelliously or having to do everything independently if how to do, if you want to do on your own, how to do that is provided then there will be, then things then your devotees will feel empowered and of course there is the example that is the striking example of how if we try to have something too law based too rule based then it saps out the personal aspect out of it and then so although things may be functioning in an orderly way in the sense that this stimulus, this response but that simply mechanical functioning of things will be a deviation because the personal interaction is not happening.
So for us the personal interaction means there is some amount of unpredictability but that is not necessarily a bad thing like universe works according to the laws of nature but there are also some things which don’t work according to laws and that’s where the Krishna’s personal agency comes in so similarly we don’t if we aim for having a very rule bound thing, first of all it’s impossible, like you said life always breaks, life always finds a way to move ahead and we cannot prevent, we cannot, from things from happening but better we try to equip and train so that it can happen in a in a more productive way so devotees don’t feel guilty but feel enlivened and empowered and then toward the end we discussed this point about how as our movement is spreading into future generations then it’s natural that as devotees come up with more and more creative ways especially devotees who are of artistic, creative, intellectual orientation they need that space and to the extent they are given the space then in many different ways Krishna consciousness will spread so it’s like a garden, garden is not disorderly but a garden is quite different from say a factory so Krishna consciousness we want that personal spontaneous aspect to be there and that is that can be nourished by the decentralisation aspect and lastly you said that I mentioned this point about following the order of the spiritual master so that I see that acronym which you mentioned that is quite a mnemonic that is quite striking that the spiritual master gives an instruction but the most important instruction of the spiritual master is you could say to be Krishna conscious and to spread Krishna consciousness and how to do that when Prabhupada didn’t micro control that and so we could say that everybody whatever the particular managerial structure might be there in particular place the important thing is not just to follow a particular structure but to actually become Krishna conscious and then with that focus as decentralisation happens so decentralisation doesn’t have to lead to destabilisation so we can have we can have organic organic order rather than an organisation based order and that will happen if there is training in values and the devotees assimilate those values and then practise on their own so that’s quite independent thoughtfulness excellent well see I could have done this whole podcast in 10 minutes I missed a lot of points but lot of beautiful examples so if devotees want to read more or study more about this there is a link on your website for the article will give that have you also done any courses or something like that on this topic or some not very often I mean I have a list of I don’t know 50 60 seminars that I give I don’t get asked for these very often okay so I have seminars in organisational culture I have seminars in organisational structure I remember in Mexico City I was asked to give that presentation and it was I think a Tuesday morning at 10 o’clock in the morning and we had I don’t know over 40 devotees were there at a Tuesday morning at 10 o’clock in the morning to have a seminar in organisational culture and organisational structure but it’s not something that I get asked for very often I mean the kind of things people ask me for a lot are you know how can I improve my sadhana and how can I have time for sadhana in my busy life or that kind of thing much more often than they’re looking at these but I feel that that fact is also a symptom that my own personal conviction is that the when the mission is not prominent then our concern starts going much more to our own personal practises whereas when the mission is prominent our own spiritual practises happen much more easily because we’re inspired in general you know if I’m inspired in general that I have a mission for Srila Prabhupada and I have a mission for my language and I’m going to be much more likely to chant attentive rounds and read and because I’m preparing myself for that mission and when we lose the mission and we lose our place in the mission and you know what are we trying to achieve and what’s my role in it and what can I do then it becomes so much more of a struggle than just to okay how am I going to chant 16 attentive rounds today so that is my own personal conviction and I think that we’ve lost some of the focus on mission when we go to a mechanical centralised vision because then I become a cog in a factory and even if that factory has a mission I don’t internalise that sense of mission so much yes I’m not inspired by it whereas when there is an organic living decentralised organisation then my place in the mission is inspiring me and it’s colouring everything that I’m doing and it’s naturally inspiring my personal sadhana just like you know the person who’s I have a grandson-in-law who’s in the military and you know if you’re going to be in the military of course you’re going to work out you have to work out you got to carry this I don’t know he has this backpack that weighs twice as much as he does that he has to carry so you know if I’m just working out to impress the girls then maybe I’m going to get bored of that after a while you know it’s going to be hard to maintain my exercise programme or I’m just doing it for my cardiac health or something you know but if I’m doing it because it’s part of my mission it’s part of my job then you know we’re ghostly nandis we’re not bhajan nandis and our enlivenment for bhajan is based very much on our seeing our challenge in the mission and our seeing our challenge in the mission is based very much on having as you say that space so how can I contribute how can I use my talents if it’s a common talent or it’s a rare talent doesn’t matter how can I use my talents in the mission in a way that I have that space to develop it that individual spontaneous and voluntary beautiful this is very I would say both illuminating and a vindicating talk for discussion for me in many ways this is how I felt I was most I got the space and I was nourished at the same time you opened quite a few new perspectives outdoors you could say I’m looking at things which I thought I knew so thank you very much for your time and sharing your wisdom I look forward to having you again on some podcast in future thank you very much and the opportunity thank you thank you very much Hare Krishna Hare Krishna