The Amish and the practicality of varnashrama in today’s world

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
stand and praise.
Hare Krishna. So today we will discuss on the topic of learning from the Amish, the practicality of Varnashram in today’s world. So learning from the Amish will be the first part and then based on that we will look at the practicality of Varnashram.
So firstly what is the Amish refer to? So the Amish are a group of Christians, not very large in number, but they have a significant cultural presence, especially in America and they are very conservative Christians who live lives disconnected from the mainstream materialistic culture and you live without technology and continue on that tradition generation after generation. So first part of the class I will be talking elaborately about the Amish and then I will talk about their practices. In between I will make some comments comparing their cultural practices with the traditional cultural practices found in India and then we will look at what we can learn for the practicality.
So the Amish were basically Pennsylvania and Dutch. They were from Europe where they were persecuted and then they left and came to America and settled in America in various parts and they according to their understanding of the teachings of Jesus they refused to fight in wars. That was one of the reasons also when they were enlisted in Europe they left and in general they married within their community and like most protestants they don’t have the concept of mom culture that is present in Catholics but not in most protestants and similarly Amish they are very family centered culture, family centered people and often they have large families and they take care of their elders, parents and they all live in a close community.
They attend church once a week or once in two weeks where church is often large long service, several hours of teaching plus food is there and it’s a cultural event overall it’s a get together. The Amish also don’t have any health insurance or any form of insurance. The charity that they give at the church is kept in a sort of common account and whenever there is any economic crisis they use that money for dealing with the crisis.
The pastors their Christian fathers they are also Amish they are also like other Amish families only. Generally the Amish they are either farmers or they are carpenters. They generally live by simple work living either by trade not by trade rather by as I said making some woodwork carpentry or by producing from the land and selling the produce.
So their contact with the outer world is minimum in terms of cultural exchanges although economic exchanges they do have. So every culture has a way of referring to itself as separated from the others. So often these Christian groups which live very simple lives they call themselves plain and then they refer to the modernized world as the English chair world.
So English chair world refers to not just people from England or not just English speaking world but everyone who is not living their kind of lifestyle and they have some dealings and they are respectful to them, helpful to them. So because even the pastor does is also having his own job and he has his family. I said there are no monks and then the church does not give any salary to the pastor and in fact the Amish don’t have any church building also.
Actually the church gathering happens in the houses of different families, alternate weeks and it keeps shifting in this way. Everybody gets to host everybody else or at least those who have relatively big houses or even if they have a garage. Now because they live not near the metropolis but withdrawn in farms and fields and America is a big country.
So generally they have quite a spacious residences with ranches around them and if the churches are not held inside their houses then they are held in the barns or the yards and that’s how they meet. Now of course like most Christians they also eat meat and with respect to the marriages even now 60 to 80 percent of the children continue on with their Amish practices and they choose to be Amish. So one aspect of this faith is that joining the faith has to be an individual choice and it’s not that somebody because of being born in an Amish family automatically becomes Amish.
Yes, they are treated like Amish and they are given the in our language you would say the samskaras so that they grow up like Amish children but eventually when they come to their age around 16 to 18 then they have to make a choice. So they can choose to join the faith and the code of the faith is called the Ordung, different words for it. It’s a are also quite strong about avoiding illicit sex in terms of no sex outside marriage or before marriage and when they take that vow then they are considered to be included in the church and then they are expected to live as Amish throughout their lives.
If they do not live as Amish, if they leave the faith after having taken the vows then they are shunned. Shunned means that they are not allowed to mix with their family and anybody who mixes with them is also comes under the action of the church, the disciplinary action. So shunning can sometimes if a young man decides to become Amish but then decides against being Amish, decides to leave the Amish faith later then that person can be cut off from brothers, sisters, father, everyone and it can be quite disrupting, can be quite painful also, traumatic but that is the way they maintain order within their family, within their community.
They say that you have a choice whether you want to take the vows or not but after you take the vows you are not expected to leave. So there is this blend of choice and consequence. Your choice is that if you do this and then you don’t act accordingly there will be consequence and they have a culture of dating where young boys and young girls within a community get to meet each other during not in the way that it happens in western culture but during organized gatherings when they have some programs called singings where they sing together they have various activities under supervision and at that time the boys and the girls in the community get to know each other and then after a period of courting then the boy may propose and the boy and girl may get married and that is how it has been going on generation after generation now this part of the courting the dating and the marriage part has caught the imagination of the American mainstream and in fact Amish romance has become quite a staple in Christian fiction in America now Christian fiction itself is a huge genre of literature and unlike mainstream fiction which often uses which has sexually explicit scenes which uses foul words and which is often filled with existential angst with a overarching sense of the aimlessness and pointlessness of life often and that’s why even the stories also end with without any real reconciliation many of the novels just end with a point of anguish or endless tragedies so Christian fiction doesn’t have any of these things it doesn’t have it doesn’t have sexually explicit scenes it doesn’t have any foul words it usually has a happy ending and the same applies to Amish fiction also so Amish fiction is one subsection within Christian fiction and the Amish fiction is largely centered on young boy and young girl meeting and then courting and getting married and then that’s how they discover and continue their faith now why would we be interested in having talking so much about some small community somewhere in some part of the world firstly because they are a religious community now there may be some differences as I said in terms of diet in terms of the way they develop their marriages are formed yes they do take blessings of their elders when they get married but overall they are quite a God centered community and they have been able to maintain their numbers and their traditions even externally and despite having the despite living in America which is quite materialistic and also which is also quite techno centric so for firstly the very fact that they are a vibrant God centered community itself makes them of some interest secondly in a techno centric culture they are still living largely without technology so they don’t have TVs they don’t have iPods they don’t have any kind of music except what can be naturally played with musical instruments in fact they don’t have any sort of recording at all they don’t even click photographs they consider that clicking photographs is like worshipping false idols whatever the reason but they avoid technology and they may use some technology for a few things they don’t even use electricity but they their homes they don’t have even phones what to speak of cell phones and some of their outhouses may have phones if they are required for business purposes and some of them may use tractors occasionally for a few things so firstly because of their god-centeredness which is not just an internal faith but it is also expressed in external cultural traditions and also because of their determined avoidance of technology they are one sample of what living a god-centered and relatively technology-less life could be in today’s world now within ISKCON right now there are many dedicated and committed leaders and they are all striving to find out ways and means by which Krishna consciousness can be most effectively spread so at one extreme our leaders who feel that in the current culture which is centered on technology which is extremely materialistic practicing Krishna consciousness is nearly impossible and therefore our movement needs to focus on developing farm communities and only when we develop adequate farm communities and we show the world an alternative culture and not only we show it but we live it ourselves and we show it in successful ways in which materialistic people can also appreciate it then Krishna consciousness will have a bright future so now the farm communities focus on eco friendly living and they focus on avoidance of technology as much as possible they focus on having everything God-centered they focus on having people living within the community and finding satisfaction by living close to nature and living close to God Sri Prabhupada during his times spent a good amount of time trying to develop the new Vrindavan farm community and he expressed his desire strongly for that on several occasions so if you consider the whole spectrum of culture has brought people will see that there is an alternative for this and they will be attracted to that alternative and eventually this will lead to tremendously effective preaching of Krishna consciousness so through the presentation of an alternative culture we will be able to attract people to Krishna so that is the thinking of one group of devotees there is another group of devotees who feel that the cultural aspect of Krishna consciousness can be unnecessarily intimidating and even alienating for people and that we don’t have to create more obstacles than what are necessary for people to surrender to Krishna that means without compromising the essence of Krishna consciousness we should be able to provide people the facility to practice Krishna consciousness to offer their lives to Krishna within a culture that they are familiar to familiar with in which they have been brought up so for example for people who have been born and brought up in a western culture to wear jeans or to wear western clothes it’s entirely natural and for them to wear dhoti kurta or saree it’s a radical step and it creates a huge distance between them and the rest of the society and is it necessary to do this to practice Krishna consciousness is it necessary that without that if one doesn’t have the external cultural marks markings of a devotee can one not still practice devotional service so some group of leaders feel that this adoption of the culture should be left to the individual devotee according to one’s individual subhava and according to how one is situated in the world and how one can best come closer to Krishna people should be given that freedom and actually Prabhupada when he talked with Allen Ginsberg and Allen Ginsberg was a counter culture poet very famous in his own way but of course scandalously controversial so at that time Prabhupada had said that Allen Ginsberg had said that for Krishna consciousness to spread rapidly it should stop appearing so sectarian in the eyes of people so Prabhupada said what is sectarian we are not sectarian except everybody the soul everybody suffers from old age disease and death so he had identified three things he said the dress the food and the rituals he said you chant Sanskrit mantras western people find it very alienating and he said that you have a particular kind of food which people some people may like it because it is so exotic others may be put off by this do I have to eat that stuff if I become a devotee and do I have to wear that kind of dress that things so now Prabhupada had said people may goes down back to hundreds or sometimes thousands of years you can look at the books what the books talk about so this is itself quite a debatable issue but the important point is that some leaders feel that the cultural aspect is not intrinsic or essential to Krishna consciousness and sometimes it can create unnecessary intimidation or alienation for prospective potential Krishna devotees so now most devotees will be some will live somewhere in between this extremes two extremes one extreme is that we have to reject the whole materialistic technocentric world and withdraw the villages give up the urban settings and only then we can practice that is that we don’t need any of the cultural markings and what we want essentially is to understand the philosophy and practice it according to what one is most comfortable with in one’s own native culture so this may also have advantages people who are born in say Europe Russia they may not be able to adjust to Indian diet they may need a western diet or the diet that is healthy according to what is best suited to one’s socio cultural circumstance what is best suited to one’s psychophysical nature one will decide these things and there is nothing wrong in having individuality in letting choosing these decisions so what we are discussing over here is that if we look at the first model our first proposition I would say that we just cut off from the culture and we focus on developing farm communities and not just farm communities then self-contained self-contained communities self-sufficient village community sort of how practical is it and for that we discussed about the Amish community as a sample so they are living in the world today in their own way and they are practicing and they have been successful for several generations so one striking point of about the Amish is that they are not missionaries they do not believe in proselytizing proselytize means to preach to convert somebody else to one’s own way of thinking and one’s own beliefs basically so there are of course evangelicals there are many Christians who are quite vigorous in their zeal for preaching to others but the Amish don’t preach at all they have their own community and they have their own rules and they live according to that and if someone wants to join the Amish community the person has to go through an elaborate screening process and then has to learn the lessons learn the culture and only after satisfying the priests the pastors and the other bishops and others who are the authorities and this person is truly committed and is truly going to live then only then that person is accepted within the order within the community so they have no they don’t have any programs for canvassing followers into their ranks so that is one significant point that if we withdraw from the world it is very difficult it will be very difficult for us to attract the world so the essence of missionary activity is going into the world now a few serious seekers might themselves come out of the world to some farm communities to inquire about what is God and who is Krishna how can I know him but the number of people who will do this will be extremely few who would seek out on their own and even if they had to seek out on their own it is quite likely that they would seek out by going to some churches or mosques or some temples or some holy places that they would come to a farm community somewhere to inquire about God the chances are extremely less for that so that means first and foremost the focus on the farm communities would mean a significant curtailing of our preaching activities now of course the devotees who are developing the farm communities may well say that yes people will come and people will see and they will become attracted and in the long run these farm community models will demonstrate the will demonstrate the living potency of Krishna consciousness and a God centered culture in such a way that it will do far greater preaching than attracting people individually or in small groups through our temples and our programs there that may be so but that may take a long time and even to attract people to the farm communities there will need some people to be there in the cities who will tell the people in the cities about the farm communities you know it’s unlikely that now the Amish they did not do any publicity but about two to three decades ago around two decades ago mostly two three decades ago somehow there was a upsurge in the bonnet wearing Amish the image of the women in the Amish community dress modestly so they don’t even let their hair be shown to anyone other than their husbands of course close family members small girls may of course show their hair to their parents that’s natural but so they always wear a bonnet around their head so somehow that that bonnet wearing image of Amish women caught the eye of the American imagination and then after that many books about Amish started selling so well that many romance fiction writers started saying that the way to make a fiction into a bestseller was to have the heroine wearing a bonnet so a bonnet became like a equivalent of a formula for success in the sale of romance fiction so now the devotees in the cities.
If there are only, how can we have centers functioning without devotees? You know, we may have some brahmacharis within the centers, but along with that, the brahmacharis can preach to the extent that there is a community. Without the community, the congregation devotees are living in the world and who are, by their words and by their examples, attracting people to the temple, attracting people to come forth in temple programs. The brahmacharis themselves will find it difficult to reach out to people.
And the grahasthas play a very important role in the outreach of Krishna consciousness. So, obviously, the grahasthas are going to have their own individual decision about what level of culture they will be able to practice and what level of adaptation they will do with respect to living in the outer world. So, therefore, it is when this point is recognized that for missionary purposes, we need centers in the cities and we need a devotee community in the cities also.
So, entirely avoiding city mainstream culture is impossible. So, in that sense, the farm communities cannot survive on their own, especially not talking about in terms of financial survival or even cultural survival. That might be possible if things are managed properly.
But we are talking about survival in terms of the survival of the mission to share Krishna consciousness with the world. So, for that purpose, it is definitely essential that we need to have our own conclaves. Conclaves means if two armies are fighting, then one army goes penetrates into the other enemy’s territory and then captures the strategic post over there.
From that strategic post, then it can attack the enemy army further. So, that strategic post which has been captured is called the conclave and from there, the troops can rush on into the enemy forces and attack them. So, the temples are like the conclaves within the mainstream materialistic cities, in the mainstream culture in the materialistic cities.
And we see that the temples also need technology. Now, there are computers, there are cell phones, there are nowadays CCTV cameras and all sorts of security checkups are required. So, in this way, it is important that all this will be there.
So, one very strong point with respect to this having only one ashram would be that the missionary activities would stop. Now, another point would be that how would the community run in terms of finances. And now, of course, the vision of Srila Prabhupada was that devotees should be able to produce their own needs locally and use them locally.
And that is actually a very sound and sensible model. And one of the reasons why the Vedic culture was so successful and was able to continue for so long was that the farm communities were self-sufficient. That means that whatever was needed, nearly all if not most or almost all the necessities were produced in the villages itself.
And the self-sufficient communities continued on the civilization even when there were many repeated attackers coming. I mean, the cities in the Indian culture were the centers of prosperity, but the villages were the sources of prosperity. So, whenever the invaders would come, they would come to the cities and they would plunder the cities.
But when they would not go and attack the villages because the villages would not have so much visible prosperity and not in sizable quantities. So, they would plunder the cities. But after that, because the villages were still having self-sufficient, they were acting as self-sufficient economical units.
So, they would generate prosperity again and within a few decades or within a few years or sometimes the prosperity that had been lost because of the plunder during the attack of the invaders, that prosperity would be regained. So, the self-sufficient village community has served as a very important, standard, time-tested and sensible and simple method of economic and social stability, the foundation of not just method, foundation of economic and social stability. And if that could be restored, then also we would have much a lot stability in the world today.
So, as a step towards restoring that, Prabhupada s idea was that we could have the farm communities be economically self-sufficient. And if they are economically self-sufficient, then they will be able to, if they can be financially self-sufficient in terms of producing their own need, that is good. But further beyond that, they can also provide the needs to the temples and provide, send some of their produce to the cities.
So, for example, the grains, the flowers, the fruits, the milk, and other products which are made on the farms, they can be sent to the cities. And that way, there can be financial profitability and financial sustainability also that can happen. So, now till now, the use of technology, avoiding entirely has been quite difficult for most farm projects.
They have had to use some technology somewhere. And avoiding all technology often makes things extremely complex, even simple things become needlessly complex. So, whether the farm community can and should avoid technology entirely, and if it does that, whether it will be able to continue on, these are serious questions for which there are no quick answers.
And as it, while talking about the ambition and see that can they use tractors? Now, generally, they don’t approve the use of tractors. And when Sri Prabhupada was asked, Sri Prabhupada also said that tractors were the cause of the downfall of Vedic civilization. Because he said that when the tractors came up, and one tractor could do the work of 10 men.
And those 10 men became unemployed. And when they became unemployed, then what would they do? They had no other source of, they had no land, so they could not have any other source of income. And on top of that, they may not have other skills also apart from working on the land.
So, it could become a huge problem for them. And so, many of them would emigrate to the cities looking for jobs. And often the cities, when they’re away from their families, they often fall prey to vices.
They fall prey to womanizing, they fall prey to drinking and all such things, and then they become debauchees. They become very unfortunate and tragically degraded. So, this whole thing, Prabhupada said, started with the replacement of the cow with, of the bull with the tractor.
So, that the bull, as it is then, it provided people labor. So, people had to work hard to keep the control, keep the animal under control. And they eventually had to work hard to be able to get the animal to do the things by which the farming would be done.
So, that hard work not only maintained their health, but also kept them gainfully employed. And in that way, society was able to move forward with everybody getting some level of engagement, satisfactory engagement. So, now, whether it is possible to do that in today’s situation, to avoid technology entirely is a debatable question.
And just as the Amish have allowed for technology within regulation. So, that is probably what the farm communities will have to do. And sometimes, making or trying to make the avoidance of all technology in its entirety, as a virtue, might end up becoming a far bigger problem than it needs to be.
So, that is another issue about avoiding technology. It will make things too difficult, in some cases impractical. And that will be a decision that will be individually variable.
Now, coming further, the Vedic culture, at least as it has been present in India, in the recent generations, has been a culture of arranged marriages. Now, how practical that is in today’s world, with its changing trends, is difficult to say. And although it is common that having some marriage boards set up to have arranged marriages, but often, there are issues with them that they may be slow and they cannot just produce devotees by magic so that the marriages can take place.
So, there are understandably some concerns about that. So, devotees will have to find their own way about how best they will be able to do this. So, that cannot be determined in absolute sense.
And generally, marrying within the community, if we have a devotee community, and within the devotee community also, there is economic compatibility, education compatibility, cultural compatibility, all these have to be considered, along with, of course, most importantly, the two individuals compatibility at a spiritual and emotional level. So, all these have to be considered, and then the decision has to be made. So, if there is a marriage happening within the community, then that, in one sense, ensures the continuation of the community.
And one of the parameters of the health of any culture or any institution, religious institution, for example, is decided by how many of the people who are born within that culture or within that religion or within that institution, they choose to continue on within it. So, if, for example, children are born within a culture, the children choose to continue on, and if they choose to continue on, then what does that continue on mean? Do they follow the same kind of standards that the previous generation did? Or are the standards different? And is the difference for good or for bad? And one way of continuing, of course, is that if they choose to marry within the community, that is also one important parameter indicating that they are choosing to continue properly. So, now moving forward towards, there can be a lot of discussions over here on this topic further, but I focus on two points over here more before we conclude, that if there is to be the understanding, now, the Amish have their own way of insurances, as I said, finances, they take care of themselves.
So, in the Vedic culture also, there will be a village, and the village sometimes there will be money lenders. But Prabhupada himself, when he gave the example of Rupa Goswami, he said that one should save 25% for future emergencies. And that indicates that it is important to have some plan at an individual level as well as at a level of community for taking care of contingencies, emergencies.
And beyond that, one of the times when we often have to interact with the mainstream world is with respect to health. So, now, the Amish don’t seem to have any well developed system of health. So, one of the big advantages that the Vedic culture has is that in the Vedic culture, there was both Aparavidya and Aparavidya.
So, the Aparavidya is spiritual knowledge and Aparavidya is material knowledge that is conducive to that is harmonious with the spiritual knowledge. So, the presence of Aparavidya gives a sense of continuity and vibrancy to the whole culture, because then it doesn’t have to borrow too much from others. So, now, they often try to have their own traditional herbal remedies and things like that.
But for many major health issues, they go to the, I’m talking about the Amish here, the Amish, they use medicines and surgeries and x-rays and that kind of sensors. They’re not against using it when it’s required for treatment and V.C. Shreya Prabhupada’s approach was pragmatic. He himself used Ayurveda most of the time for treating himself or for getting treated himself.
But then he was not against the use of other forms of treatment. Allopathy, he did not discourage it too much. He just said whatever is required, whatever works, use it.
So, Ayurveda is in its own way a very well-developed system of knowledge. But whether that system is applicable today, whether it benefits people today and whether it can function as an alternative way of treatment and a superior alternative for treatment in a holistic way, that is something which has to be done at an individual level. So, overall, if we look at the way a traditional life is lived, it has its advantages.
The absence of technology, there may be some amount of austerity, but it also allows a certain level of simplicity and naturally such a life is more in harmony with ecology. It’s more eco-friendly, more in harmony with nature and people live close to the land. That also helps them to remember God better because they’re surrounded by the creations of God.
When we see trees and mountains and streams, when we know that we have not made them, so it keeps us in contact with God much more than when we are surrounded by skyscraper buildings and laptops and cell phones and other products of the human brain which often infatuate us with human intelligence itself. So, no doubt there is a possibility that in a rural setting, one may be able to practice Krishna Consciousness much better and as far as the continuation of existing culture is concerned, a rural setting may be much more conducive than an urban setting. At the same time, it is the centers of influence that influence people, that influence society.
The villages are not the trendsetters in the world. Generally, the cities, the metropolis are the trendsetters and villagers are the followers. Now, a few people who are extremely burned out by the modern civilization or the post-modern civilization, if you have it, they may take to Krishna Consciousness in a rural setting but most other people will be fried out by the very fact that they have to go through so much austerities to practice Krishna Consciousness.
So, we can’t make this as a defining condition and we’ll see the Amish have continued but if Christianity has spread, especially in terms of its missionary activities, that has not been done by the Amish. There are evangelicals, they use all kinds of technology, although they maintain the basic Christian morality, but they use all kinds of technologies and strategies for spreading their message. So, now within the Krishna Consciousness movement, the essentiality of culture and what is meant by the essential culture, these will be issues which will continue to be debated and ultimately every generation is only as good as its living representatives and trusting the leaders and trusting the individual members to make decisions about how best they will practice Krishna Consciousness is important.
Yes, what to speak of the general devotee community, even the leaders may not be entirely qualified, they may not be pure devotees, they may have their problems and one tendency is that because none of the present generation devotees are acharyas like the previous acharyas, so therefore they should not do any innovations like the previous acharyas had innovations. Now, this is a suspect idea at best because when devotees would come up with new plans for sharing Krishna Consciousness, the Prabhupada did not say that you till you become you should not come up with new ideas. The whole idea of book distribution was it just came up spontaneously, it was not something which Shri Prabhupada planned, Shri Prabhupada wanted books to be distributed, but the specific way of approaching people on the streets and distributing books, it just happened coincidentally.
The one devotee, the devotees were traveling around and at a petrol pump, at a fuel station, the devotee, the person who was filling the fuel in the devotee’s book distribution van, the devotee showed him a book and he saw the book, they talked about the book to him, he expressed interest and they offered him the book instead of the fuel charge, he accepted it and the devotees tried that once, twice, similar things and then they got the idea that we can just distribute these books on the streets, approaching people and they did it quite a bit and then they told Prabhupada and he was very happy about it. So now, in the past, in the Vedic tradition, nobody had done like that, distributing books on the streets and Shri Prabhupada himself of course had done it and in India, but India was a very different culture where people respect sadhus and respect spiritual knowledge and that way, what they did, the whole strategy of having huge amounts of distribution on the streets, that was something which just emerged spontaneously during the course of preaching. So therefore, whether purity is the defining attribute and whether purity is something which can actually be quantified, now this argument would in one sense mean that there cannot be any innovation, there cannot be any innovative strategies for practicing Krishna consciousness because how would we know that somebody is pure? We can always say that okay, that person may be seeming like pure now and may have even a spotless track record till now, but may have some problems in the future and the problems in the future are always possible.
So how will we ever avoid the possibility? The only time a person will not have problems in the future is after the person has departed from the world. Then if the person has gone back to Godhead, then there will be no more problems, but if the person has gone back to Godhead, then that person is not here to guide about what any preaching strategy is. So this argument is basically an argument to freeze Krishna consciousness and once we go in that direction, then soon we end up with the rhythmic argument that oh, none of us are qualified, so let none of us be gurus.
So starting from nobody can innovate to share Krishna consciousness, to ultimately no one can initiate. It’s just a slippery slope where one will eventually lead to the other and then we again have the same point of the parampara being frozen. So trusting the individual leaders to know what would be the best way to present Krishna consciousness according to time, place, circumstance and giving the individual the freedom to decide how much I want to adopt the culture along with the principles of Krishna consciousness.
That is something which is very important to ensure that the people who practice Krishna consciousness don’t have to go through unnecessary austerities. For people who have been brought up in cities and have lived an urban life from their childhood, how to put it more emphatically, from their womb because their mothers were also living an urban life, to expect them to start living a rural life and to go through all the adjustments required for that and to say that is the way Krishna consciousness can be practiced is unnecessarily demanding and we don’t have to do anything like that. So better that one focus on the individual practice of Krishna consciousness and let the individual decide and let the individual leaders decide how they will be able to implement the Krishna conscious principles in their own lives.
And as far as implementing Varanashram is concerned, the essence of Varanashram is to is Haritoshanam. So it’s the arrangement of society in such a way that Lord Hari can be satisfied and that is a massive task. The essence of Varanashram is not dividing people into different Varanas.
The essence of Varanashram is engaging people in according to their material natures and talents in such a way that it is spiritually harmonious, that it helps them in their spiritual growth. Now how this can be done in different situations will vary according to time, place, circumstance. So till some clear models about how Varanashram are to be implemented emerge, we cannot stop the progress of Krishna consciousness till that point.
So therefore it will be important for us to move forward steadily in our practice and let individual leaders and individual devotees decide. This is something which everybody should live according to their quota. Now the quota of a Kshatriya is different from that of a Brahmana and it’s different from a Vaishya and other Varanas like that.
So what would be the quota? How much should a devotee work? How much should a devotee earn? How much should a devotee save? What kind of house should a devotee have? A middle class house, upper class house? What kind of lifestyle overall a devotee should have? Generally devotees don’t want to make their material life too complicated but what would be complicated for a say a middle class person will be different from what will be complicated for upper class person. Similarly what would be complicated for a person for a devotee in a rural area would be different from what would be complicated for a devotee in urban area. So therefore the important thing is that that devotees be inspired to practice Krishna consciousness with sincerity and if they continue practicing Krishna consciousness with sincerity eventually Krishna will guide about how best they can apply the principles of Krishna consciousness in their own lives and how they can effectively share it share those principles with others and certainly the attempts to present Krishna consciousness in alternative culture through the development of farm communities are an important part of Srila Prabhupada’s mission and those devotees who are pioneers in this their efforts definitely need to be appreciated and lauded and the determination the courage required along with of course the innovativeness and creativity required even for that because many of the traditional ways of doing things are no longer known for example with respect to farming or with respect to cow protection so there also for example how to drive away scarecrows or things like that there also innovations may be required and innovations may be used so this is an important part of the overall mission of sharing Krishna consciousness and those who are engaged in this are doing an invaluable service and they need to be appreciated very much at the same time it’s not that any one project can monopolize Krishna consciousness and nor should it be allowed to do that because Krishna consciousness is transcendental and therefore it cannot be monopolized by anything material um and the establishment of Varanasi culture ultimately is a material activity it’s a division of material society into material divisions based on material criteria so it’s not that it’s unimportant but it should not be made all important either and what can be the focus of a devotee’s life is the increasing the individual sincerity and the individual intensity of the practice of Krishna consciousness according to one’s individual nature internally and according to one’s time place circumstances externally thank you