To practice bhakti strictly is it better to be fanatical?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
if you know that when devotee becomes mature in bhakti automatically behave sensitively and in the beginning stage one needs to be a little fanatic just to protect himself knowing that it is not a higher standard please clarify so is it that when we are new we should be fanatical and we become sensitive afterwards it depends on what we mean by fanatical, I will give an example from my life at least not I, there are several of my brahmachari friends, when we look back at our life and the way say I joined my temple one of my devotee friends he told me now that I have a I have a child the way I behave with my parents if my son behave with me like that I would be totally heart broken so now he is a devotee and he wants his son to become a devotee but he says that if my if I had behaved like this if my son behaved like this the way I had behaved with my parents I was terribly insensitive so then I talked with several of my brahmachari friends also and I also look back at my life I realized that I was very very insensitive in the way in which I dealt with my parents with my father, with my brother so about a maybe a month or a year ago I actually went and apologized to my father not that I regret becoming a brahmachari but I regret the way I did that another of my friends he actually went to a whole assembly of all his relatives and all his relatives he collectively apologized to them and he said that you know you all loved me so much but I just rejected all of you it’s not that we are saying that we regret becoming a brahmachari another devotee, his brahmachari his father was having, was almost like on the verge of death so at that time he went and apologized and then his father told him that actually now I can have emotional closure, he says now I can die peacefully he says my heart was burning not because you became a brahmachari I thought that how could a son whom I had raised be so heartless as to have rejected us like this do you know how much hurt you caused your mother so he said that now that you apologized now I can die peacefully so it’s not that why am I giving all these examples this is actually to illustrate that we may say that for our practicing of bhakti that we may have to be hardline but in the process of being hardline we often end up hurting a lot of people and it’s not just hurting people actually people may also counter back and hurt us actually I am writing a small book about why I became a monk and the reason I wrote this book is that when we are insensitive people also become insensitive so I was in one temple and there was one brahmachari who was very jittery, very insecure so I wondered what had happened why he was so jittery and insecure so then I found out I talked with other senior brahmachari in the temple they told me that he was a very dynamic student in college and he became a devotee and he became a student preacher and then when he decided to join the temple his parents were so upset that actually they hired some gundas had him kidnapped and not only they had him kidnapped after that they took him to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist started giving him shock treatment and actually for this brahmachari one year he was given shock treatment and that one year is a complete blank for him total blank he doesn’t remember anything but after one year he suddenly remembered I was a brahmachari, I joined the temple and when he got back, the first opportunity he got he ran away from his home and he again joined the temple and then his parents realized that now he is not going to come back so they never came back but when he came back to the temple at that time what happened is that the devotees, they were happy to have him back but then they found his personality had significantly changed and then they took him to a devotee psychiatrist and the devotee psychiatrist said that actually that shock treatment that he was given, that has caused permanent psychological damage not that he has become mentally disturbed in a sense of being diseased or something but that he has become very jittery and insecure so now when I heard about this whom do we blame for this now parents love their children and no parent will want a son to become permanently psychologically damaged but what is happening? why did the parents do something like this then? because they felt that my son becoming a brahmachari is such a disaster that even risking shock treatment is okay it’s worth it I have to save my son from this disaster and whatever it takes, I will do for that so now, whatever it is I mean, becoming a brahmachari is not such a disaster so now the problem is why do parents think like this? my understanding is, it’s simply lack of communication many times when parents actually come to ISKCON temples and they see what brahmacharis are doing and then how they are living and how they are actually doing something constructive for society also so then certainly they are disappointed because their sons are not pursuing the kind of career that they had dreamt for them but they accept it so the point is, here I am talking about our insistence on following strict standards and our becoming fanatical it unnecessarily creates too many misconceptions in people’s minds and then, either we can become too hard-hearted or others can become too hard-hearted and that is undesirable so personally, I am afraid of this word fanatical so I would say that we want to protect our bhakti and how we protect our bhakti will vary according to time and circumstance but in general, it is good to communicate what we are doing we cannot obviously go around and tell everyone why we are doing what we are doing but people who are important to us, we should try in some way see, there are three levels there is intelligible, there is acceptable and there is laudable laudable means, people appreciate us for doing something now say, for most of us, whether we become brahmacharis or grahastas our relatives may not praise us, oh you have become a devotee if they are from a very cultured background, they may but laudable, it may take a long time for them they have to actually understand devotional values then they will appreciate then there is acceptable means, they accept it ok, this is what you want to do, you do it but intelligible means I don’t accept what you are doing but I at least understand how you think why you think like this, I don’t accept it but I understand what you are doing so, actually we cannot get people as devotees, when we become devotees we cannot get people to laud us for what we are doing their values are often very different but at least we can try to be intelligible that means, at least explain what we are doing some people may not be ready to understand at all then that is their problem, but at least we should try to explain sometimes we may be writing a letter because sometimes in speaking it becomes very difficult, there is too many heart emotions or in some cases, speaking might be better than writing, whatever it is so, on one level, we want to follow bhakti strictly but following bhakti strictly doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to go about unnecessarily hurting others so, we can at some level try to explain to people what we are doing and in general over a period of time people don’t trouble us too much if people say that this is what you are going to do and you are happy in doing that you go ahead and do it so, I would say that we can be strict but strict, being strict doesn’t necessarily mean being insensitive strict means it refers to our practice insensitive means it refers to our behavior with others so, we can try to explain as much as possible to others what we are doing and that way, we can at least our practices can be intelligible to them and that way we can avoid an unnecessary rupture between us and them and there will be at least some relationship and eventually, maybe later the relationship will improve actually, for many brahmacharis, over a period of years their parents become devotees or at least they become favorable so, in that sense things change over a period of time when they see that actually, this is not such a disaster but initially also we can try to communicate as well as possible but without compromising our principles so, we can be sensitive but we don’t have to become sentimental sentimental means, oh, my relatives my colleagues, they don’t want me to practice so, I’ll give up the practice only that will be being unnecessary sentimental