What can brahmacharis do if they feel choked in their ashram?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Regarding legislation suffocating, there are several leaders who are now thinking of reviving the vanaprastha ashram. So, the idea is that vanaprastha is almost not there only. Traditionally it was there.
So, the idea is that, this is one proposal which has not really been seriously discussed. Somebody is a brahmachari for 10 years. They decided to be lifelong brahmacharis.
Then they can become vanacharis. See, brahmachari life has to be very strictly monitored and regulated. But devotees who have dedicated their life for serving Krishna, they need some amount of freedom.
Some amount of facility for serving Krishna. Some amount of freedom. So, not all brahmacharis may be ready for sannyas.
They may not want to become sannyas first. So, right now, if you see, many of the brahmachari leaders of our moment, those who are temple presidents, they are not actually acting as brahmacharis. They are actually acting in some way like sannyasis.
They are travelling, preaching. So, there is a sort of incompatibility in the sense that the ashram which they are in and the role that they are expected to do. Now, they themselves may not be ready.
Others may also feel they are not ready for sannyas. So, if we could create some legislated or structured facility where between brahmachari ashram and sannyas, there is a facility for greater freedom. Sannyasis have a lot of freedom, lot of power, lot of prestige.
That may be too much for most devotees. But if, I think that greater facility and greater freedom is provided, then it becomes, so the level of legislation that they may need is not so much at that time. Then they can move forward better.
And to some extent, that is already being done. Many devotees are given services according to their what they are inspired to do over a period of time. Many of the devotee scholars in our movement, many of them were brahmacharis earlier.
I talked with one of them, very prominent scholar of Hinduism. He told me that he was in the brahmachari ashram for 8 years. And his main service during those 8 years was not main, one of his services was that picking and dropping the Matajis who came to cook Rajbhoga for the deities.
Not Rajbhoga, Ranjhboga, Sandhyabhoga, whatever. Now, what inspiration are you going to get from that service? And there was no vision in the temple, among the temple leaders, for the growth of the devotees. So, the brahmacharis were treated just like free labour force.
If that happens, then the devotees feel there is no growth over here. So, one of the reasons why they changed the ashram was not because they couldn’t live in the ashram, but they couldn’t live as brahmacharis. They felt that there is no growth for them in the ashram.
So, in ashrams where there is a facility for devotees to grow, for devotees to get more and more responsible services, because even if we are brahmacharis, even if we renounce the world, still we cannot renounce the fact that we are young. Young means there is passion. The passion may not be specifically sexual passion, but the passion is also to achieve something, to do something.
There is a drive. We can’t renounce that. So, there has to be a channel for accommodating that.
So, when that is done, Prabhupada writes in that, he speaks in all the lectures of Nectar of Devotion that when Rupa Goswami says that it is the spiritual master’s responsibility to find ways and means by which the disciple can fix the mind on Krishna. That means, in a sense, you come up with services that can inspire the disciple and can engage the disciple in a way that can fix the mind on Krishna. So, that legislation with greater and greater accommodation.
So, as we move forward, initially, Brahmacharya life is very restricted, very legislated, you could say. As we move forward, the legislation’s scope has to decrease so that there has to be more and more facility for devotees to serve according to how they are inspired. That’s how it will organically move.