Can abuse of power occur in spiritual organisations?
So now I said that in an organization if there is some abuse of power people should not stay passive especially leaders have to be responsible to take action and remove such people so this can apply in a material organization how would this apply in a spiritual organization actually here you have to recognize that when you talk about organization and spiritual what makes the organization spiritual is its purposefulness its purpose is spiritual or atleast its purpose should be spiritual but at times even in a spiritual organization there can be people who come up who don't have spiritual purposes they want to use the resources that are there in a spiritual organization for gaining position, for gaining power for gaining prestige and that vigilance is required everyday in fact there is a great opposition in today's thought towards institutionalized religion religion is good but any kind of institutionalization is bad that idea is there now there is some truth to it but that is not the only truth to it ultimately what is an organization or institution when we talk about spirituality see all of us have some spiritual interest some spiritual urge and we may act on it to some extent but our spiritual urge is often quite moderate so there is this famous metaphor in the Upanishads of how water from the skies falls down, goes through the mountains to the plateaus, through the plains and reaches the ocean so we are all like the drops of water and now a drop of water from a top of mountain for it to go all the way to the ocean then the several drops have to come together to make a tributary several tributaries have to come together to make a river and then that river will move much faster to the ocean so what is a spiritual organization essentially is that there are a number of people who have spiritual urges and they pool together their spiritual urges so they are like drops coming together to form tributaries and tributaries coming together to form a river and then they all by their cumulative momentum have a much greater chance of reaching the destination so spiritual organization means that there are a group of people who are spiritually inspired and they come together and for moving forward they create whatever resources are required just like if a water keeps moving along towards the ocean then it creates a bed for itself now what may happen is when the bed is made, when the river is flowing there are some people who may come and they may dam the river because they want to use the water for their own purposes so like that even in a spiritual organization sometimes people may come up and they may want to take all the resources that are there, they have no interest in going towards the ocean, they have no interest in spiritual growth they have they are interested primarily in material aggrandizement and they want to misappropriate the spiritual organization resources for their own purposes and there has to be vigilance to prevent this see that's why in one sense when I wrote responses to both the movies OMG and PK I appreciated the point that there is that there is a lot of wrong that goes on in the name of religion and spirituality the problem is with especially PK and to some extent OMG also was the problem was blanket generalization now the whole movie PK was based on there is a romance and there was a religious exposé in that movie the romance was based on the premise that we should not consider all Pakistanis as bad you know all Pakistanis all Muslims as bad and that was the presumption that all Pakistanis are bad and by the end of the movie it was shown that this particular Pakistani was not bad that was the presumption of the movie so I said don't have stereotypes don't make stereotypes that all Pakistanis are bad or all Muslims are bad but then that same movie imposes a stereotype that all spiritual leaders are bad because it depicts only one kind of spiritual leader who is opportunistic and exploitative so essentially they are the movie protested against generalization in one area but it perpetuated generalization in another area so the mistake is if people just have a very naive view of religion or spirituality where they think everybody in this field must be good only that is not good, that is not healthy because we may get exploited there are people who are power hungry and who can disappropriate things even in the religious spiritual realm so vigilance is required but blanket generalization is not that's why when Shila Prabhupada who is the founder Acharya of ISKCON he said that when we approach a spiritual teacher there is a process of mutual testing the disciple or the aspiring the seeker should test the spiritual teacher to gain to see what is their understanding what is their living and then based on that decide to adopt or not adopt a particular path and similarly the spiritual master also tests how is the sincerity of the disciple and then that is how when through intelligent scrutiny when one adopts spirituality then the chances of a person getting misled are far lesser so there can be blind faith which is sadly present in wide pockets of society today but movies like PK or OMG they go to the other extreme and they recommend blind faithlessness that means blindly rejecting everything which is in the name of organized religion but the organization has a purpose and if there are people who are aware of that purpose then they can use the infrastructure of the organization for effective purposes so organization is simply a tool and that tool can be used it can be abused and spiritual organizations to the extent the leaders and the members are vigilant the tool of the organization will be used properly does it answer your question? yeah but concept of remover okay exists in terms of sidelining rather than in terms of removing okay that's a good point.