The Monk’s Podcast 39 with Madhavananda Prabhu – Nourishing our individuality within a bhakti institution

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the monks podcast today it’s been a long cherished desire to have you here in fact it was our meeting in puri when we had a discussion in front of some of your students that actually was the seed of the idea of having this podcast because i thought there could be candid discussions between devotees others can also learn from it so i am indebted to you and you are known entirely in all over the devotee world for the krishna katham with bindu and the many magazines that you are writing many in the magazine that you publish as well as the deep devotional research you’re doing i was impressed and inspired by the library that you have made in jagannath puri with lots of rare books so you know i feel that you are extremely if i may use that word extremely rare species of a devotee who has become very scholarly but most of the devotees scholars are those who have chosen to go into the area of academic academy and then become a scholar over there but you have stuck to the path of traditional scholarship and being able to carve out a niche for yourself where you are able to do something substantial for the tradition as well as to make the tradition accessible to to devotees in general so maybe you could tell me we could start by briefly telling your story of how you gravitate toward it toward the service of going deeply into our traditions cortex and sharing them and then we can move forward to discussing the institutionalization of tradition well our topic today is my inspiration for my life and staying and living in the institutionalization of shilpa’s movement mahaprabhu’s movement has inspired me to go in a certain direction uh we’re we’re we’re living and we’re trying to be a contributing member of mission but at the same time we want to be an independent thinker as she’ll probably wanted which as far as i understand as i can see like shastra notorious is needed we’re actually supposed to think and be individuals and create but it’s important for vaishnavas to be independent and uh we can go ahead and start off with with the point i was thinking of to bring up a little later about our society once one devotee i was telling some devotees this recently one devotee came to our groomers voted in the munch and he said mirage i just can’t live in the temple anymore it just drives me crazy in the temple and grandma’s response surprised him when i looked at him and he said how long will you go on living in kindergarten so and coming from our grandma she was very dedicated was a gbc member and a very dedicated member of prabhupada’s mission for him to say something like that and hearing that story stopped me and made me think you’re an educated person and any educated person knows that every school has an alma mater and they encourage you to have reunions and to give regular donations to the school and to be faithful to the school but how many schools expect that the students are never going to leave the school and they’re going to stay in the school for the rest of their life that’s really strange now of course some of the students will after they graduate they’ll go on to be managers in the in the school some of them may go on to be teachers in the school but the vast majority of the students won’t be under the control of the institution the best school anymore but they’ll take what they’ve learned and they’ll apply it in their own personal life at the same time ideally generally we’ll see that they have some feeling that they belong they have some appreciation for that school and then they always go back to the the meetings and whatever and they support it but they’re no longer the same as a student who’s in the school and i that’s the traditional system of guru cool one of your questions was about institutions in godi avaishnavism which as you must well know there’s been no such thing as institutions in godi avaishnavism in the way that shiva prabhupada and shiva bhakti siddhanta did it however there there have been institutions in the form of guru kula but that guru kula was was more the way we’re speaking now that’s something that you you attend for some years and then you graduate and then you’re always faithful to your guru and he calls for you he wants help or something you go over there but it’s not that any brahmachari or students is expected to live in the guru kula for his whole life unless perhaps he becomes a teacher assisting his guru or a manager in the group okay now this is maybe you were looking for something more personal i guess this is good let’s go in this direction so you know your your words are likely to shake a lot of pillars for so let’s backtrack now so when you’re talking about moving out of comparing to a school is it specifically living in the temple as a brahmachari is what you’re comparing or is it affiliation with iskcon that you’re comparing to a school it’s what yeah shiva prabhupada established iskcon primarily i feel as an educational institution to teach people about the science of bhakti and to facilitate a movement where there’s brahmacharis and preachers going out and to give facility in the way of temples for festivals and education and preaching like that but as far as the what’s the best word to use in this regard the kind of control or the kind of guidance perhaps is a more gentle word the kind of guidance that we offer to young devotees in the temple who need someone looking over them constantly because even you know very well being from mumbai living in mumbai it’s not that sometimes devotees in the west they think that everyone in india is completely invaded culture but there’s so many people in mumbai who are practically the same as new york or whatever that i’ve seen and so when they come to the temple they need someone to help them to to solve their doubts to pacify their anxieties to show them how to clean themselves after they pass and you take bath and to be regulated and so many things like that that’s important but bhakti bhakti is the culmination of all the arts and for an artist or for a brahmin to function properly it’s absolutely required that they have to have some independence now in our society that that may sound uh disturbing if someone wants to be independent but we’re not speaking about in a spiritual sense we’re speaking about in the material sense that devotees especially grahasa should be independent economically and if someone is a preacher if someone is an artist and they’re controlled by the temple president or by the gbc or something if they’re dictating to that person what to say what kind of paintings to make then where is your creativity where is the spontaneity it kills everything and bhakti an important aspect of bhakti is spontaneity we’re aspiring for radh bhakti which is spontaneous bhakti spontaneous devotion i would liken a temple to a university of art now you have a school of art and maybe you have 1 000 students in the school out of those 1 000 students 998 will learn how to be good craftsmen they’ll learn how to make a round circle and how to draw a face and do this and you know how to copy some artwork or something but out of those 1 000 students maybe two will actually become real artists and so in the same way that a devotee of the krishna is a very very rare thing so in our temple i would suggest that out of a thousand persons in the temple 998 will learn to be religious and that’s very good they’re following writing bhakti and it’s needed but what we want is the true persons who are going to become pure devotees like that that’s that’s the purpose of chaitanya mahaprabhu’s movement if we think that our the purpose of our movement is just to collect money to make buildings to amass followers then we don’t really understand very much about chaitanya mahaprabhu in his movement this last point is perfectly fine prabhupada even says in the bhagavad-gita introduction that if i if you can make one pure devotee i’ll consider my endeavor successful so that’s that’s perfectly valid now i just want to clarify a few things so are we talking about uh grahasthas or brahmacharis or both so because in a sense grahasthas are already to a significant extent independent they are financially independent they are socially independent and brahmacharis they are of course dependent and unless of course they become spiritual masters or something like that then they or they become very senior devotees they start their own temple or they start their own organization something like that so now you are in a very distinct situation you are a grahastha but you are able to write your books and take people on tours and you could say if we consider the circle of this is circle of bhakti you have been able to create a space for yourself where you you give spiritual nourishment and you are also able to do uh get some level of financial support through that most devotees are not likely to be in that situation so when we talk about let’s take this in three parts if i understand right and you can correct me see there is one side is the educational aspect then second type second is the applicational aspect and third is the financial aspect so as far as education is concerned most of ISKCON doesn’t have any kind of courses that you do and you graduate from them so in a sense the satsang if we consider ISKCON to be like a forum for satsang then it is a lifelong activity then if you consider the applicational aspect that okay this is what you should do this is what you should not do then as a movement if people are staying in the temple there are certain standards to be expected although there is some flexibility now coming up in that also and my wife and thirdly if people are as far as the financial is concerned then of course grahasthas and brahmacharis have difference in and of course a fourth thing probably could be which is maybe important for us intellectual or like you put it artistic creative or artistic so can maybe is this classification making sense to you because I am trying to maybe you could deconstruct what you are saying in more specific terms sure sure yeah I am sorry I maybe I did not follow all of that so well I am trying now I think if we consider the matter carefully okay look at your own life or here I am in Mayapur right now we look at the brahmacharis but let us use them as an example because the grahasthas as you pointed out by nature should be independent that is a big topic about the independence of the grahasthas and how they should be independent actually maybe we can come back to that if you are interested but let us just say something about the brahmacharis here in Mayapur we have that there is a new bhakta program and the new devotees are taken around I was a new bhakta leader for some years in Los Angeles and I used to take care of I had a group of little babies who are like my children and we had a policy and we would work there that no one was allowed to give instructions to them except the bhakta leader or the temple president because everybody would want to chastise them and tell them do not eat with that hand and take your shoes off and do this and this so only the bhakta leader could do that so those persons were like little babies and they needed constant attention I would sleep in the same ashram with them I was with them like 24 7 they required that now as they progress over the years as we see here in Mayapur there is a new bhakta program and there is a bhakta ashram a brahmachari ashram but there is also now a senior brahmachari ashram and that’s for devotees who are more or less independent and as we see here in Mayapur these brahmacharis they’re maintained by the temple many of them and they’re doing services for the temples it’s convenient for them but many of them now are writing books they’re doing research they’re giving their own classes and what they’re doing is not dictated or controlled by a leader now I’m not just encouraging that everyone blindly run out and do that everything would become chaotic requires there’s some system required but when someone becomes mature and someone is well versed in the philosophy then it should be expected that they’re going to do something really should be empowered now maybe they’ll stay within the temple their whole life and be an assistant pujari or whatever service it is that they do that’s fine but at a certain point especially if they’re artistic it’s required that they’re going to have to go out on their own we’re a little bit friends with Janati Harrison and the devotee musician wonderful devotee and I’ve seen in her development over the years she’s been an ISKCON devotee and she was in the bhakti center in New York and we visited her there and I told her this was a few years ago I said you know I think at some point you’re going to need to be more independent and now she’s practically completely independent but what she’s doing is amazing she’s doing things devotees can’t do we look at the example of your Guru Manj, Radhnath Manj and how he’s not just giving classes in the ISKCON temples but he’s going to big corporations in different places speaking and he’s completely out of the box from the institution and I appreciate that because what he does we use him as an example he’s contributing to the institution he’s not just taking from it when we’re younger devotees we may just be taking from the institution be like a baby who can’t walk and the mother needs to help but after some time we get our legs and maybe we’re a little more mature then we can do something more for the institution we can be a little bit independent and it’s actually required for bhakti because bhakti and art have a lot of things in common both bhakti and art should be spontaneous both bhakti and art should be original if you’re an artist and you copy some other painting even if it’s an expert copy we don’t consider that to be art we say that’s craft in a similar way if you as a devotee if you follow someone very expertly you follow exactly Prabhupada’s daily schedule you may be religious but it doesn’t mean that you’re a pure devotee just because you’re doing the physical same things that he’s doing although I don’t know who could actually do it sleep for two hours a day like Prabhupada but it’s not just a question of doing those external things and bhakti art art if you copy someone else’s thing it’s not art similarly if I copy the ideas and feelings of someone else that’s not really ultimately bhakti because bhakti is an expression of the individual soul and it has to be original it has to come from the soul but in our neophyte stage inviting bhakti we can’t and we don’t understand that and if we start trying to imitate that then this phrase sahaja comes and there’s so many problems and such a person may be considered benadric as the the 29th chapter benadric or separatist okay we have some separate desire from the lord yeah and we’re not understanding so we should come to the point we understand the desire of guru krishna and then as a society I strongly feel we need to to give faith to give trust to those people I there’s there’s four maxims that I see I mentioned this to you when we had our nice talk let me just uh yeah something about what you said just now because then no we may leave the points behind what you’re saying speaks to my experience also as a writer there are so many uh there are so many devotees who uh tell me sometimes right on this topic right on this topic and somehow it’s not so easy for me to write a book on any subject just because it is needed and just because somebody tells me to write it it has to come from the heart and unless unless it doesn’t come from of course I can take suggestions from others but unless it connects with something within me it’s it becomes writing becomes a torture over there just can’t do it so I can relate with this yeah in the room listening to our discussion and some of them don’t know you for those of you who are here in the room don’t know chaitanya charan was a real thinker he’s an artist in his own way in writing and thinking and I very much appreciate it and that’s why you’ve done so well because you stimulate thought and interest in people it reminds me some years ago we were in one eastern european country and someone asked me if I’d like to meet a famous devotee artist I said yes I’d like because I love to meet artists and so we went to see this artist and she showed us a whole series of paintings that she’d done for a bbt project and I was looking at all of them and she asked me so what do you think of them and I did something which I generally don’t do with artists the artists don’t say anything discouraging you want to just say oh it’s really nice but this time I said well to tell you the truth I’m not so inspired by them and she looked at me and she said really I also don’t like them she said you know why because they told me what to do and they practically controlled my hand they said it should be like this and this kind of color and this kind of style and then she said I have some other paintings would you like to see them and I said yeah she said but they’re not devotional I said well I’d like to see them and she brought out this other stack of paintings and I was in ecstasy and I told her looking at them they were paintings of Indian villages and a sadhu in a village and or some old lady in a village or a hand pump or a tulsi plant and different things like that and looking at the paintings which were very I found very inspiring and really spoke to the heart I suggested to her that if no one should criticize you for these kind of paintings if they want to preach about vegetarianism or reincarnation because that is further away from bhakti than your paintings you’re in the same way that vegetarianism and reincarnation are things which may encourage people to come to the mode of goodness to become closer thereby to understanding what bhakti is so her paintings also were like that anyway let me get back to my formats that’s a very good point that you know in certain areas even and we even if we go say beyond the devotional ambit we are quite comfortable with that but in certain areas we say no no you shouldn’t go in this direction so vegetarianism you can’t make a painting like that everything has to be like renaissance style that’s the way we know that they did it with the bbt right but there’s so many styles of painting and we see in the history of Vaishnavism and patachitra art in Orissa’s Rajasthani art there’s so many different types of paintings and art is an expression of the heart which which moves the heart it’s something and that’s what bhakti is also bhakti is meant to move the heart so yeah i i contemplating on Prabhupada’s mission and his mood years ago i was mentioning this in Puri i came to the conclusion that Prabhupada had four principles which are the basis of our movement those are love trust responsibility and empowerment and probably spoke a lot about love and trust if you love someone you trust them if you want to gain the trust of someone you have to earn that trust and then the next stage is you have love trust then you have responsibility if i’ve earned the trust of gurudev of shiva prabhupada of the devotees then they’ll encourage you as they’ve done with you write books go and travel and preach because you gain their respect you gain their trust they see that and then they give you responsibility and the result of responsibility is empowerment and this is what we want to see for all the members of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s movement Bhaktivinoda Thakur in the beginning of his Harinam Chittamani he says that this is synonymous with Mahaprabhu’s movement empowerment he says he spoke through the mouth of Ramananda Roy about sadhya sadhana tattva he spoke through the mouth of Rupa Goswami and he heard from Rupa Goswami about what is Rasa Tattva he heard from Haridas Thakur about Naam Tattva he heard from Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya about Mukti Tattva and although he’s a supreme personality of godhead he empowered those persons and listened to them that’s the basis of this movement but if our movement is going on and we’re just wanting people to stay in kindergarten forever and ever and just do what the authorities tell them then we’re crippling those people how are they going to achieve their full potential bhakti and if they as individuals don’t achieve their full potential how will our movement achieve full potential but to accomplish that trust is required and trust is something which i think you’re kind of intimating at in an indirect way trust is something which has to be earned so this is a this love trust responsibility and empowerment is such a we could say a human way of looking at the interaction it is a non-formal personal way of looking at the interaction now taking this forward see our when our movement started we grew up with certain institutional definitions of success say for example how many books distributed i would say three main definitions how many books distributed how many temples built and how many devotees made so we grew up with those and to a large extent uh individual devotees were seen as human resources for fulfilling the institutional goals and i’m writing it down i really like this for achieving institutional goals yeah so so now this is i would say not necessarily a bad thing because you know not everybody not everybody has either that need or the ability to be independent now if for some people okay you just do this and they’re happy doing it and they grow through that but those who cannot fit in this quite often the what is considered like what you talk about now the word which i grew up with was whimsical you know that if somebody is not following the authority that person is considered to be whimsical and to be whimsical is almost as as bad as being a deviant as bad as being on the border of say looping over yeah so so then it the individuals as they grow they will some at least some especially those who are creative they will need some space for themselves and then the challenge would be if how does the institution give people that space while pursuing its own goals so maybe you would like to speak something on this cool boy um first of all i i’d like to reflect on some of the things you’re saying uh i’d like to share with you some thoughts from a mutual friend of ours krishna abhishek prabhu who’s a scholar phd from uh chicago university of chicago who did his thesis as you may know in i think in hinduism and particularly on on talker bhakti studies and talker bhakti and as part of his research he’s a native bengali speaker from cocutta he uh had somehow got access to letters exchanged between and his younger brother lalit prasad thakur okay and when i heard that i became very curious because maybe some of the persons who are listening this don’t know about lalit prasad should say a few words with in iskcon we don’t really know much about him we don’t say much but within the gaudiya mutt he’s considered to be something of a bad personality like there was some problem between him and shiva bhakta siddhanta they treat him like a demon or something shila prabhupada went to birnagar bhaktivinoda thakur sripad here in west bengal and he met with lalit prasad and they were going to help take care of that project that’s a whole nother different topic but anyway when i heard from krishna abhishek that he’d studied some of the correspondence between these two brothers i immediately asked him i said i’d like to know what was the problem what was the controversy between the two this has great relevance to our discussion in the same moment and he laughed and the first thing he said was he said that my immediate impression was i was surprised because i was also expecting some big controversy but they were so loving and so affectionate i said okay so then what was the difference and he said the difference of opinion was a very simple the shiva bhakta siddhanta saraswati uh was putting forward a system of preaching and propagating krishna consciousness which was based on a template of the ram krishna mission with temples and brahmacharis and printing books and sannyasis and people going out and doing harinan and preaching and like that whereas alit prasad thakur was saying no no no no no that’s not the best way to practice bhakti bhakti should be done at home on an individual level and later krishna krishna abhishek recently told me that one of the last instructions alit prasad gave to one of his senior disciples was after i pass away don’t build a temple don’t build a temple it’ll spoil everything don’t build a temple for me or what birnagar at the birnagar project that don’t build a temple but with the devotees should come together every day for krishna kata and kirtan and like that but don’t make a big formal structure like that now i’m not going to suggest that uh which you’re about to sit down today was wrong hari krishna i couldn’t say that and that’s our life and soul but i wouldn’t suggest either that the leap of sad taco was wrong either and i think there’s something relevant for both of them we have a series of talks we’ve given sometimes we coined a phrase we call it living alone in the crowd living alone in the crowd okay and that that’s the short answer to your question that we need to learn to live alone in the crowd and for me i feel this is one of the essential qualities that we can learn from mahaprabhu’s pastimes in the gambira in jagannath puri as you may have heard me speak before we consider that jagannath puri is like the jagannath puri university abridged pram it’s like a school in each different tirtha sthali is a different classroom with a different lesson to teach us how to go to vrindavan because the mahaprabhu’s purpose was to go to vrindavan and puri he’s showing us how to do bhajan to go to vrindavan so each is a lesson we see in each different place and sometimes more than one lesson in the jagannath mandir which is the first classroom in puri the lesson there is that is about organized religion and it’s a little bit of an unpalatable teaching because whether we like it or not god always supports organized religion even though haridas thakur can’t go inside their temple even though rupan sanatan can’t go inside the temple and even though there’s so many smart brahmins there who are spoiling the mood of things still chaitanya mahaprabhu didn’t argue with them he didn’t insist that haridas thakur be allowed inside the temple he cooperated with organized religion and in fact srila lochandas thakur in his uh chaitanya mangal he states there that mahaprabhu was going three times a day to the jagannath mandir but at the same time in puri there’s another classroom which is not far from the jagannath mandir and which has a very very different sort of teaching uh and that is the gambira and by that mahaprabhu was teaching us that we should support organized religion but we need to have a gambira we need to have a quiet place where we can be creative where we can be individual where we can associate with like-minded persons with two or three associates like like in sri upnamadhara and roy ramananda in the gambira and we can express our inner feelings if we want to advance properly in bhakti and i would even go so far as to say if we want to propagate this movement properly because if we only just propagate the jagannath puri temple side of things then the artists and intellectuals who come the people who feel a strong need for individualism or the mature devotees will become more individual because that’s what happens when we practice bhakti we become more and more individuals as we progress then those devotees will become discouraged and they’ll think everything is just so rigid and so institutional and there’s no spontaneity and i can’t think for myself and and they become discouraged and they go away so we need to have both things in our society and this is one of the big purposes of our project Gopalji publications to facilitate my grandma’s kind of preaching like this he wanted to preach to the devotees we want to do yatras and puri where we take devotees away and there’s no temple president there’s no gbc for one week and you just do bhajan and you sit in front of the deities of toto gopinath wherever and you have long kata for two or three hours and it’s individual it’s very personal and we want to do this with our magazine we want to this with our research we want to do this with our ashram as we were telling you when you came to puri where we can have wonderful guests like yourself there and we can have a core group of devotees who are like family and it’s not such an institutional kind of atmosphere because these are devotees who have earned our trust and who’s shown that they’re mature and we’re not babying them anymore we’re not you know getting on their case because they came late from mongol artique or this is that we understand and respect them and everybody in such a community and community is a big word for me community is what i feel that our society needs to be going towards instead of institutionalism we should be going toward community and community means that each individual is contributing some original artistic offering they’re contributing something in the community and then everybody’s so excited and they’re all working together and everybody’s becoming empowered and the movement becomes very powerful that’s my hope and vision for the society that’s beautifully put and in some ways this is this is going to resonate a lot with the younger generation because one i think one of the biggest challenges for our movement is that those who have grown up in our movement don’t want to associate too closely with it many of them the either the gurukul children or the even many devotee children they would like to keep a little arms distance so just going back to this now i have talked with like a like i haven’t traveled as much as you but the last five six years i have been traveling across the world and most of the time when i travel i stay with grahastha devotees then i see their life and they are i i would say they are as committed to bhakti as i see the best of brahmacharis though they may not be going to the temple so much so now the challenge comes up that our institutional expectations see there are i would say three different kinds of expectations one is the sadhana itself the sadhana itself say chanting 16 rounds and that itself takes a significant amount of time then the sadhana then also there are services in the temple which are expected to do not just go to the temple but a serious devotee is expected to help in the temple services and beyond that there is the devotee socializing so in the devotee community now part of it is spiritual part of it is simply human part of it could be could be gossiping we we can’t avoid the entire human element but with so many things going on and of course nowadays most of our devotees live in cities where the jobs are quite demanding the lifestyle is very fast so with all this where is the time actually for individual development and so is it that sometimes we may have to de-emphasize the institutional goals or from a traditional perspective before i go ahead that how important are these three institutional goals which i mentioned building temples distributing books making devotees do we have any precedents for this in the tradition yes we do it’s called guru seva and that’s that’s the life and soul of the devotee i often like you when i travel i meet so many different devotees and sometimes we meet devotees who had a bad experience with the society or have they’ve gotten a bad opinion about ISKCON for whatever reason and i find it helpful i’ve tried to understand their perspective and i found it helpful to frame ISKCON in a certain way i describe it as Srila Prabhupada’s Seva Sangha Seva Sangha beautiful instead of thinking of it as an institution in a bureaucratic order so it’s the Seva Sangha and that’s why i’m present here because i want to do that Seva Sangha so these three aspects that you mentioned our sadhana our services and the sangha or the social part of the devotees all three of these we can see have a certain scope for neophyte devotees and they have another scope for devotees who are more mature now what does it mean to be a neophyte devotee as you well know it’s not just how long you’ve been in the temple but it’s how much faith you have in bhakti it’s how how how strong you are as an individual how which is a reflection of your faith so if someone doesn’t have very strong faith that they’re not a very strong individual then they really need a crutch one sadhu in Vrindavan once told me said Madhavanandi said the temple being in the temple it’s like living in the temple is like water holding up the boat of your sadhana it’s very good because you live in the temple if you don’t go to Mangalartik maybe they won’t give you prasad if you don’t chant your 16 rounds they’ll kick you out of the temple like that so you have to chant your 16 rounds you have to do your sadhana so that temple is like a boat holding up water holding up the boat of your sadhana he said but what happens if you start taking the water and pouring it in your boat in other words you start mixing up what is what is my personal sadhana with the institution and we start considering maybe the same then your sadhana may sink you’ve devoted your sadhana because it’s no longer your personal expression because our bhakti our our devotional activities should be like our art just like a painter or a musician or someone our art is expressed in the way we do our individual puja and the way that we give class and the way that we write and the way that we cook and the way that we leave kirtan and whatever it is that we’re doing that’s the individual is the artistic expression and that’s needed so for a neophyte devotee because they’re not mature enough they don’t have confidence in themselves they’re just being told what to do they just have a plain vanilla sadhana they don’t read Manasiksha every day or Upadesha and Rita or whatever it may be they just have a plain simple seven that’s good but as they become more mature they’ll want something more similarly with the services in the beginning we just do whatever we’re told Jayananda Prabhu is a very surrendered devotee he just did whatever he was told but at a certain point he started having individual inspiration put on Ratha Yatra festivals and he was engaging people who are drunkards and different things and acting in a very unorthodox way compared to most of the devotees in the temple and the third category you mentioned about our devotee sangha which is social life means again that’s kind of different in I find a lot of younger devotees when they come together sometimes even I once saw a book they said when you have this kind of meeting the first thing you do is you have an ice breaker and you go around the room and you ask everybody what their name is then you make a joke and then you you read from Bhagavad Gita and then we all chant one round of japa all together and when I hear that it sounds very mechanical and very painful but I understand that for some new devotees that may be ecstatic and then that may be really really nourishing and nice for them because they don’t have their own individual desires or spiritual desires or ability to express themselves yet but when they become a little more mature and we can trust them we’ve earned the trust they’ve shown they understand the siddhanta they’ve shown they’re dedicated to Shiva Prabhupada then it’s natural they’re going to want something a little more they’re going to need the Gambhira and let’s remember I’ll just make this final point and show you have some reflections on this let’s remember that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s movement began behind closed doors in Srivasangha with a small group and it ended behind closed doors in the Gambhira with just a few persons it’s not wrong to to be with small groups of devotees it’s necessary to nourish our own individual bhakti and there’s a there’s a there’s a statement from Shiva Prabhupada I wanted to share in that regard it’s uh Shiva Prabhupada’s letter to Kurundar very famous letter 22nd December 1972 and he began speaking about how instructing him just to paraphrase what he’s saying don’t centralize anything each temple must remain independent and self-sufficient that was my plan from the very beginning why are you thinking otherwise and he said don’t think about this big corporation centralization these are all nonsense proposals the only thing I wanted was that book printing and distributions to be centralized therefore I appointed you and some other devotees to do that otherwise management should all be done locally by local men and then there’s a sentence from Shiva Prabhupada which is one of our Mahavakyas he says the Krishna consciousness movement is meant for training men I think in women also to be independently thoughtful and competent and all types of departments of knowledge and action not for making bureaucracy this is the purpose of the Krishna conscious movement for training men to be independently thoughtful and competent wow and probably later on he says also even if someone is mechanically following gradually from the class they’ll come to the point of spontaneous enthusiasm the spontaneous loving devotional service is not such an easy matter but if one simply sticks strictly to the rules and regulations like rising early chanting 16 nams chanting always keeping clean then his enthusiasm will grow more and more and if there’s also patience and determination one day he will come to the platform of spontaneous devotion beautiful so it’s proper in some way Utsaha and Dhairya over there Utsaha Nisha Dhairyat yeah thank you for sharing this so now this is the aspect of Shiva Prabhupada that is usually not highlighted yeah why not there’s a reason why it’s not because many devotees are not mature enough honestly okay maybe you encourage everybody should be independent and thoughtful then they’re going to say well the heck with you I’m not going to and then how will the temple go on how will the book distribution go on there needs to be some management and some control that is needed especially for younger devotees and mature devotees should understand and appreciate the need for it so what you are saying is two distinct things that in the senior like Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had his own space but he didn’t oppose the Jagannath Puri temple so we did not oppose it he supported it okay he yeah he himself visited it and everywhere supported yeah that’s true so in that sense mature devotees or those who are artistic or mature they need to carve out a space for themselves but do it in a way that is supportive of the movement supportive of the institution or the local temple I remember one senior Prabhupada disciple they told me that you know there is inside ISKCON there is outside ISKCON and there is besides ISKCON so besides ISKCON means you have your own space and then you contribute but then you can do something yourself so going back to this point of what Prabhupada says in this letter then in general the every institution needs certain parameters to see how it is progressing how it is growing and often individual spiritual growth is is quite difficult to difficult to quantify so you know if there is if there is a temple now the temple sets some goals for itself so temple said that we will distribute this many books or we will have this many programs we will raise funds for this particular project and then the whole community gets involved in that now some devotees are able to find their own individuality within the institutional goals some devotees may flourish as say fundraisers some devotees may be able to flourish as as project leaders for particular projects but some devotees may not so then when somebody wants to have that space where does the initiative begin from is it that the devotee has to take a stand this is what I am going to do or is it that the leaders leaders have to recognize that we have to give space for this people so where where do you think this kind of change can begin so very good question in Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s movement it doesn’t become doesn’t begin outside it begins inside it doesn’t begin by building temples or or formal type of rules and things but it begins with our own personal bhajan it begins with what my grandma used to call atma krandhan or the crying of the soul okay when we’re crying out for Krishna that we want association with like-minded devotees we’re crying out to Krishna that I want something deeper I want something more substantial that’s where it begins okay it’s the only place that can begin if we try to begin from the outside it’s it’s just going to stay outside so then this could some there could be some growth pains in this isn’t it that a devotee feels maybe suffocated within the institutionally instructed services and then somehow as you said one wants to serve Krishna but one can’t one doesn’t feel inspired to serve Krishna in the way one is told to then gradually one moves toward creating that space so I’m I really appreciate you of how you are able to in a sense transcend the individual institutional conflict by focusing on the point of the heart that once there is a calling in the heart then things will move forward naturally so going back to the earlier point of say Lalit Prasad and and Bhakti Sanskrit Thakur um we do see that what Bhakti Sanskrit Thakur created the Gaudiya Math it spread if he had 64 centers in India and three across the world now Lalit Prasad his spiritual advancement notwithstanding didn’t leave that kind of legacy so isn’t some amount of centralization essential if a movement is to spread substantially if we consider say the Catholic Church as contrasted with Protestants now Protestants from the last I read there are almost 55,000 Protestant denominations and they keep separating the Catholic Church of course has had some horrendous scandals like child abuse child sexual abuse and other things but still they have also they have like enduring historical legacies there they have a prominent prominent presence in the world so so for a for outreach to be substantial isn’t centralization also required? I would totally agree with that that was Shilobhakta vision and his purpose for for creating an institution is a vehicle but we compare it to a box if someone brings a gift to you and the gift is inside a beautiful box and you get the box and you say it’s such a wonderful box and you look at the box and you hold it up to the light but you never open it and you just glorify the box wouldn’t it be a little ridiculous we should open up the box and see what is the gift inside the institution is just the external box at one point it was called the Gaudiya Mission another time it’s called the Gaudiya Math another time it was called the League of Devotees by Shiva Prabhupada and then later Prabhupada gave it the name ISKCON those are just different boxes but the gift inside is a gift of bhakti and that’s what we have to find if we’re just preoccupied with the box and the box is important the box is there to help keep things in order and we want to take care of the box but we want to take care of the box because of what’s in it not just that we’re preoccupied with the box itself and we think that the box is the gift that becomes problematic so what are you exactly comparing the box to the the box of the institution and the gift inside is bhakti so you can say that institution is the means by which bhakti can be spread far and wide so like if you have to give something precious if it’s not properly packed like say we get a gift from amazon if you get some purchase something from amazon it has to have good protective packaging and the protective packaging will ensure that it goes far it goes far yes so so without an institutional structure we cannot spread but it’s important that we recognize that spreading the institution itself is not our purpose it is spreading what the institution is offering yes we have to open the box ourself and eat what’s inside take part of what’s inside i i in this regard which you mentioned before about the dilemma which is common in our society for thinkers and artists when they come and they feel some they feel like they’re being stifled sometimes if you look at the history of our society it’s very interesting in the 60s and 70s Shiva Prabhupada when these very strong individuals American devotees were coming and they would they would be in a temple for two weeks or two months Prabhupada would oftentimes send them out to open their own center there’d be a devotee literally sometimes for two weeks and Prabhupada would send them out to open up their own center and by having their own center we see if you look at the direction of management that Prabhupada wrote very interesting document Prabhupada wanted those centers to be autonomous and to be independent of the GBC in the sense that the temple president a local leader was the inspiration for the group and the GBC their job was just to make sure that everybody was churning 16 rounds and distributing books and like that but not try to micromanage things and not try to to get involved with the mood of things in India we see a reflection of this and also in Vaishnavism like like in Orissa there are many different villages as Brahmin assassins there’s Brahmin villages there’s villages of artists there’s villages of people who make brass pots and things and those people more or less think alike and they congregate together and then they work together and in a similar way Shiva Prabhupada encouraged the devotees he told Jamuna yes you should open some center up for the ladies he told Satsvarupa Maharaj in one letter he said yes the black-bodied devotees they can have their own center for black-bodied persons and we can have… Prabhupada said that? He has a letter like that. So this is remarkable that I when I was in New York I visited a very very popular a Christian church and I was observing you know how they do things so they have sorry Andy Stanley yeah anyway so okay so so what I noticed is many of these churches like they have three distinct services one for say wasps for white Americans another for blacks other for Latinos and then the music is different over there the food is different of course the the either the language is itself different or at least the way the pastor speaks is different you know each group has its own individual individual culture so in a sense what they do is they customize their Christianity to harmonize with the culture of the group that is coming over there to some extent so another you might another way you might put it is that those individuals the leaders within the different groups you’re mentioning when they become more empowered and understand Christianity they have their individual expression of Christianity which resonates with people come from a similar psychophysical background in itself yeah you know I like that how what what could be phrased as a institutional strategy which sounds so very cold and calculative that could also that could also be phrased as a as an expression of individual autonomy so it just we don’t know how it is but that’s nice yeah so so it’s significant that Prabhupada also recommended this that because I sometimes feel that we as in a devotee community a lot of effort goes in trying to resolve conflicts and one reason for that is I think we are trying to impose too much control and so it’s maybe just giving us some autonomy like a what you said like you know in Prabhupada’s time if two devotees couldn’t get along Prabhupada would just tell both of them go to different places and start temples start your own center over there so in a sense giving more individual space for individuality could actually also decrease institutional conflicts isn’t it yes and it creates community because community let’s use a Sanskrit word which we may be more comfortable with community sounds like a new age word sangha sangha yes create sangha sangha means community you want to create a very intimate sangha devotees which is based on krishna katana and based on like-minded devotees when we have a sangha which is based on I bought some bought a flat here in this place and because you also bought a flat then therefore we’re communities because we bought something in the same place or because we join in the same temple and we have to maintain this temple and that’s the that’s the unity of our sangha that may be weak but if the unity of the sangha is there because we we both love a certain preacher we both love a certain vision that he has maybe that person’s bhakti tirtha mara he has a certain kind of sangha there or my Guru Maharaj or your Guru Maharaj or whoever we’re inspired by a certain person’s vision and then we come together and that’s that can be very very sweet and we can love the devotees more we can interact with them more it becomes less controlling you’re saying let me let me read you another something from Prabhupada’s letter to it’s it’s really powerful let’s see here he says we should be careful not to kill the spirit of enthusiastic service which is individual spontaneous and voluntary yeah i remember i was giving a lecture in the Gambhira with the Vaisheshiva group and i read this letter and y’all became really ecstatic and he said this is ISB individual spontaneous and voluntary that’s their they call the ISB and it was based on this letter he said and probably goes on let me read a couple more sentences he said that is the art of management to draw out spontaneous loving spirit of sacrificing some energy for Krishna.
Krishna conscious movement must always be a challenge a great achievement to be gained by voluntary desire to do it and that will keep it healthy so you big managers now you try to train up more and more competent preachers and managers like yourself but forget the centralizing and bureaucracy it’s one of my favorite letters from Prabhupada. yeah it’s a so when you talk about about individual expression like i earlier mentioned about say the protestant so splitting endlessly based on their own ideas of how they should approach they accept Jesus as the savior but they keep splitting so i’m now going to the other side we acknowledge the necessity for individuality but at the same time there has to be if you are part of a movement part of a tradition there has to be certain level of conformity so where do we draw the limits say i’ll give some examples for no say for example in i i have certain intellectual needs so i bond with devotees who have similar intellectual needs so for example i used to read western authors in the western literature i used to like that and now i know some devotees who also like that there are some devotees i know who were from a nationalist background previously so they were and then they came and they just rejected the nationalism and they started practicing bhakti but now they feel that they would like to do something uh more for raising say the broad consciousness of dharma within india not so much directly they sometimes feel that sharing krishna consciousness is too elevated for most people and people people may sometimes uh we may get a few number of people over there but most people maybe are becoming atheistic they are becoming leftist they are getting converted to christianity they become hostile to sanatan dharma so they want to do something at that level now some devotees may start doing outreach say by giving motivational talks where there is not much krishna consciousness in it and they may get a lot of success over there some devotees may do more humanitarian work where we feed the poor and things like that so now this now sometimes these kind of devotees they receive a lot of criticism because they they say you’re not you’re doing something which rabhupada did not do you’re not you’re not actually sharing devotional service so this the question i’m making is that can if somebody’s life is devoted to krishna but the way they are expressing themselves may not be directly connecting people with krishna then where do we draw the limits for individual expression or we really can’t draw the limits well the first thing i i think we really it’s a very sober statement but we need to understand we don’t own people the people who come to this movement they come here and we’re we’re we’re guardians we’re people who are here to preserve and try to pass on something we’ve from shiva prabhupada that gift doesn’t belong to us it’s prabhupada’s gift mahaprabhu’s gift and those people who come they also don’t belong to us just as any parent understands at a certain point the children have to leave the nest they’re going to have to we’re going to have to let them make their own mistakes and things we need to empower people i’ll tell you a short story in this regard some years ago quite often devotees bring people to puri asking us to take them on and some years ago one of the schools came from mayapur it was a girl’s school and there were a bunch of young girls like i don’t know the ages of seven or eight or maybe 12 and we went to the temple of toto gopinath and we gave a talk and it worked out good the girls liked it i could see and afterwards we’re walking together on the road and one of the girls was looking at me with this admiring kind of look and she says prabhuji when i grow up i want to be just like you and i stopped and i said no and they were all a little shocked and i said you should be better than me because you all come from a better background than i come from and i’ll never forget the look on that little girl’s face when i said that and all of a sudden her back became straight and this is what we want for this movement we want to empower people otherwise who wants to join this movement it’s a fact that we do need conformity we need conformity because there’s a lot of people who want conformity there’s a lot of people who want to be told what to think what to do and that’s okay there’s no harm in that and they can practice and they can become exalted personalities and we love them Prabhupada he said we should have uh what is it um the phrase famous phrase oh gosh philosophical speculation versus mental unity and diversity okay and so you’re mentioning this fact that there’s so many devotees you’re going to have different expressions now i can go and i can criticize someone who wants to build a hospital and i can say what in the world do you want to do that for you should focus on pure bhakti but maybe that person wants to create a hospital because he’s a doctor and he doesn’t want to work in a non-vegetarian hospital and he has some inspiration he feels if i have a hospital then i can i can expose outside people to bhakti in this way let him have his expression and someone else wants to distribute free food someone else wants to preach about the mode of goodness and health so i have no problem with those things as a society though what is our unity and diversity that’s all those are all expressions of diversity but where is the unity the unity has to be there in our kirtan and on our krishna katha and our focus when we come together on suta bhakti it’s not that when we’re outside maybe we speak about vegetarianism and we give a great class about that we can inspire people to give up eating meat and that helps them come to the mode of goodness and it’s so nice in so many ways but when i go to the temple in chokpati or juhu or someplace it’s not that i should give a lecture to the brahmacharis there that you should all quit eating eggs and fish and be vegetarian that’s insulting rather one of the the six uh elements which are necessary to nourish bhakti in our exchanges is guhyam apyatiprikshati we should have some confidential exchange it’s very very important and if we think about that that’s see that’s the idea of art art means something confidential it’s from my heart and and i’m expressing this thing in a way that can touch your heart and that’s something confidential and amazing that’s bhakti and and we should it should be astonishing it should be chamakar chamakar chandrika right vishnu chakravarti tapora describes there should be something astonishing about bhakti and that is how we should come together as devotees so some devotees will feel some inspiration to preach in a kind of nationalistic way and why not there’s some people who relate to that as we’ve been discussing something from the 10th verse in the 29th chapter of the third canto for the last four or five class sessions we’ve had it speaks about bhakti in the mode of goodness and vishnu chakravarti talk on this sarita darshani he says the symptom of someone who’s practicing the septic of bhakti which is saguna bhakti it’s bhakti in the modes of material nature one of the symptoms is they can’t distinguish between their duties of dharma vanasham dharma varnanasham they can’t distinguish that between bhakti they think that the two overlap and they think the two are basically the same thing that’s the symptom of mundane bhakti in the mode of goodness we don’t want that but at the same time someone as a preacher they may be on the platform of nirguna bhakti free from the modes of material nature and practicing pure bhakti but they may put it in a particular box the box of nationalism or the box of a devotee hospital or the box of feeding the poor or the box of this or that but if inside the gift is there pure bhakti if the motivation is pure bhakti and they’re ultimately giving that to people not because as bhakti dhyanmars once commented to me in russia he said there’s a lot of bridge preachers bridge preaching means you go from one side of a river to the other side yeah on this side we have people interested in bhakti when we go to the other side where they’re interested in astrology or vegetarianism or health or something and so that’s good we go over and we meet them but the problem is if we stay on the other side we don’t come back the problem is we start speaking about astrology or health or this or that and we don’t speak to them about bhakti and then people come because they like astrology not because they like bhakti in this regard uh the bhakti center in new york i think is a shining example they have classes in ayurvedic cooking they have classes in vedic management they have classes in hatha yoga but the whole thing is being done by the hardy christians and everybody knows that and they make friends with the people and after they’ve been coming taking hatha yoga or whatever maybe it’s only hatha yoga no preaching for a few months or something a few weeks they make friends they say hey you know you should come to our thursday night care talk program they go there and they’re finished an amazing wonderful care talk program that to me is a shining example of how we can do this and how we can have unity and diversity we have the diversity where some people preach through through nationalism some people preach through yoga this or that but we have the unity and the sense of pure bhakti that’s beautiful i think we will need more sessions to discuss this because there’s a lot more to discuss yeah yeah so maybe i will uh we’ll conclude we will i’ll summarize this uh what you said we’ll conclude this thread and let me just give a little let me just give a little pitch for something we’ve done before you’re a writer you understand this we made a magazine some years ago called putana false gurus institutions in the holy name and i wrote a long article which kind of the invisible letters the invisible title is why i’m still here in the society by the same title putana false gurus institutions in the holy name and there’s a lot of extensive thought and quotes from shivabhakti siddhanta from his article about putana and different things about institutions in that magazine that’s my little pitch thank you yes thank you is this magazine article available online or maybe we could put that in the description i haven’t put it online but i but i’ve been thinking i should do so and yeah maybe yeah maybe we could put it in the youtube description here so that devotees can go to the link and read it also if they need it so just reflecting on the last point that you mentioned about the bridge so if devotees feel inspired i like that point as you said a profound point we don’t own devotees and even if somebody is a brahmachari in a temple and they are even if they are in the temple still they are individuals on their own and they are here voluntarily so if somebody is inspired to serve in a particular way and as you said they are framing the message for elevating people’s consciousness through a particular box and the in the heart one’s inspiration should be coming from krishna but the challenge is that what happens if we build a bridge so normally the number of people who will cross the bridge and come over is is not much there will be a small say if you compare the bhakti center the people who are interested in say physical yoga or astrology or ayurveda are naturally going to be much more than the number of people who are interested in bhakti so now the the opportunity is that there are some people who are there in that circle who will come to bhakti if they get connected with devotees and if they if the devotees are not in that field then they would go to some other astrologer who will just give us some astrology or ayurveda or yoga where they will not get anything else more so they so i was talking with my guru maharaj anath maharaj and he said that rather than he said what we need to see is that whatever a devotee is doing like whether it is yoga or whether it is ayurveda basically it is an opportunity for people to associate with devotees and it is through that association that the spiritual journey will begin so about the bhakti center one thing i have seen is their model i have also been quite inspired that the model is very non-intrusive somebody could just come and do yoga and leave and they they are not pressurized but they just get such a sweet experience over there that they want more of it and as you say the kirtans are brilliant over there so people just get dramatically lifted so then if we take the bhakti center example what we could say is that a devotee while expressing one’s individuality in a particular way to reach a particular set of people there should also be some mechanism by which people can come forward when they want to in the bhakti center has that if this is all you want fine take it but if you want more we have this here so in that sense if i’m not mistaken in bhakti sanskrit thakur also had a i think like an ashram for people who were suffering from leprosy and things like that isn’t it so it’s not unprecedented isn’t it yeah we always have to bear in mind what our goal is our goal is for people to become individuals and to develop bhakti and regimentation is not bhakti some regimentation is required for new people they march in unison things and we may preach through yoga and whatever and i quite agree with your assessment that the vast majority of people who come and take those yoga classes they may not become devotees but they may say you know i i becoming a hari krishna that’s a little too weird but those people are really nice if they come to that point if they just say but i really like those hari krishna people i think i’m good food then it’s not just we shouldn’t just see externally that they’re liking yoga their consciousness is at a certain is not developed enough yet where they can begin to practice bhakti but if they come to the point where they can begin to appreciate the devotees that’s an amazing thing can i quote a couple shlokas my grandma’s always liked us to quote verses and this is a important point krishna describes a famous verse in the 10th chapter the bhagavatam chapter 88 probably quotes often krishna says yes that i give my anugraha or my blessing to someone by taking everything away from them now i remember when i first came in touch with that verse i thought to myself that doesn’t really make much sense because if krishna’s mercy the manifestation of his mercy is that someone becomes poverty stricken then there’s so many drunken bums on the streets of new york and in mumbai who don’t have anything who haven’t gotten krishna’s mercy it’s not just that someone is poor but they have mercy in the next verse which is not often quoted krishna explains further again he uses the phrase anubraha he says this is he says when they lose their money and then everybody deserts them nobody likes them and to be really brutally frank i’ve seen that in our society sometimes too someone comes and they’re giving lots of money and everybody gives them the flower garden and they love them but then they lose their business after some time and then we no longer care for them or they’re a brahmachari doing big collection we love them when they’re doing that but then they get married and they’re no longer giving money to the temple and we say that guy is a nonsense he stopped his service and this and this we criticize them so when you lose your money krishna’s indirect point is in this verse you can understand who your real friends are that’s who you make he says at that time when all your family and the external people leave you then you make friends with my devotees and he says it’s by making friends with my devotees that my anubraha is really there my real mercy and so when we speak about all these different uh different all different aspects of preaching and moods amongst the devotees if they bring people to the point where they actually love devotees and love devotees for being devotees it’s beautiful if i understand what you’re saying is that in the in the institutional context also now who is really caring for us as devotees and who is caring for us as like a human resource for service that we will come to know in times of adversity deprivation yeah that’s true and uh so what you what you were saying previously about uh is when we practice bhakti we have to like our purpose is to develop our individuality and grow in bhakti or we could say offer our individuality to krishna in a sense so i feel that this itself is a subject which we could maybe in a future discussion they will discuss about how now there are what all forms of developing one’s individuality are acceptable within the parameter of bhakti say if somebody wants to say that i want to become a rock musician if somebody says there are various things some if somebody just wants to learn music and sing that’s relatively easy but there may be some things where developing individuality and practicing bhakti sometimes it may not be contrary to bhakti but it may be contrary to the institutional conceptions of bhakti so that also will need to be considered so you know would you like to maybe speak something concluding before we move to the next i don’t want to hold you because i told you for one and a half hours i don’t want to hold you for too long so do you want to speak any concluding words or i can summarize well just said that i i feel very blessed to be able to have this kind of association and thoughtful discussion commentary on the gita in the 12th chapter he speaks about three stages to bhakti abhyasa manana and smarana and in the beginning abhyasa yoga yuktaena we practice abhyasa means to practice and it may be mindless i’m just sweeping the floor because they told me to sweep the floor and while i’m sweeping the floor i’m thinking of my favorite nandavidi movie i’m thinking of my old girlfriend their favorite song but something happens after some time of practice the heart becomes cleansed and then we become more thoughtful why am i doing this i’m doing this because prabhupada would be pleased because the deities would be pleased because their persons because people when they come they’ll be so joyous to see how clean and how what a wonderful atmosphere the temple has so then that all of a sudden our bhakti is changing gears and then from that platform of manana will naturally come smarana where we would remember krishna in a natural way krishna comes to our mind in a natural way it’s not so artificial so these three very philosophical terms we could also apply in terms of the institution in terms of the seva sangha of shiva prabhupada which i like to think of it i didn’t want to join the institution but i want to be part of the seva sangha of shiva prabhupada to be with like-minded thoughtful devotees like your good self thank you very much thank you i’ll quickly summarize we went in many different directions but you started by talking about how as devotees we need a certain level of independence independence so that we can develop our individuality and offer ourselves to krishna and you talked about how as devotees initially a certain amount of discipline is required it’s just like somebody goes to a school then they eventually graduate from the school not that they stay eternally in the school so similarly devotees need to learn the principles of bhakti and then see how they can express it in their own lives so as you quoted that the institution is primarily like a prabhupada seva sangha and each one of us has to find out how we can serve the best so some devotees may be able to they may be able to find their individual inspiration for service in a way that harmonizes with the institution’s goals some devotees may be happy to be told what to do lifelong some devotees may not find somebody like especially those who are creative and artistic they will need to create the space and the beginning of the space is not so much by say trying to agitate against the movement but actually a call of the heart for krishna and when it begins from there we can move forward and then you made a beautiful example of how the water in a river or a ocean is what keeps is there below the boat for it to float but that water comes in then it becomes problematic it will sink so like that the institution offers as a means by which we can individually move forward in bhakti and in some extent organization is required for widespread outreach it’s like a packaging for a gift to survive and go far but it’s not just to preserve we don’t want to spread the package we want to share the gift which is inside the package that’s important and then within our tradition itself you gave some very significant examples is actually chaitanya mahaprabhu supported the jagannath puri temple but at the same time had his own space in gambhira and bhaktisanshu thakur and lalit prasad both of them they had their ways of practicing bhakti and although it was different and institutional level differences but they had very friendly relationships and prabhupada also you shared several letters two letters primarily of prabhupada to karandhar where prabhupada says avoid bureaucracy and what is it isv individual spontaneous and voluntary that is beautiful and also very beautiful and then you also said that when prabhupada prabhupada in encourage love trust responsibility and empowerment and if we could actually give people devote devotee space to grow individually then the institutional conflicts could decrease individual devotees will feel less choked and we as a movement will grow and if sometimes some individual expressions seem to differ from the the way the bhaktis shared in the institution then we need to know that we don’t own devotees and different devotees according to their inspiration they may build bridges and it’s up to those devotees to take care that you know it’s that they don’t cross the bridge and stay on the other side but that they create a pathway for people to come on the other side to come toward krishna and you concluded by talking about how sometimes when we are within an institution we may seem to be comfortable but we don’t really know who are our well-wishers that was a fantastic interpretation explanation of the s jahamanubrani was that when at that time we come to know who our real friends are and vishwanath chakradhakur you quoted toward the conclusion so this was a very illuminating discussion and i look forward to continuing this in the great inspiration i hope it’s you are an inspiration and i’m blessed to have your association