What is needed for sharing bhakti in the West?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
I think that here there are many devotees who may be externally, culturally, in very different ways from what I have inhabited in India. And still they are as devoted to Krishna as we are the devotees in India. So for me, firstly, this whole conception of Krishna Bhakti, as my conception of Krishna Bhakti is expanded just by interacting with devotees here.
And when I see outreach happening, what my spiritual master told me about 10-12 years ago, to start learning to write for a Western audience, I started looking at how other religious teachers, other spiritual teachers present themselves. So the main thing I noticed is that in the West, people are interested in spiritual individuals. They are not interested in religious organizations.
Because they have had so much bad experiences with religious organizations. So if we come off as an organized religion, then that itself is a stopper for them. So how exactly we can… Actually, although we are a religious organization, we are also filled with very spiritual individuals.
Not just in a self-congratulatory sense, but we have many devotees who are very spiritually advanced, and we also have many devotees who are serious spiritual seekers. So in terms of the spiritual frame of consciousness, we do have a lot of people who are capable of attracting a lot of people. But once the perception of organized religion comes in, people just, their alert goes up so much, red alert, they just stop.
I don’t want to go there. So somehow, the organized religion, people see it immediately as sectarian. And when they see it as sectarian, then they can’t take it.
So in the postmodern times, we are living in what is called postmodern times, so people want to see authenticity. So it is broadly seen in pre-modern times, people consider religion as a scripture of authority. In modern times, people consider science as authority.
But in postmodern times, even there have been philosophers of science, they pointed out how science is, there are scientists who are material, who are self-sacrificed, they do manipulate the society. Many of the counterproductive effects of technology have come out. So people in the postmodern times, have faith neither in scripture, which they had in pre-modern times, nor in science, which they had in modern times.
The only thing that they have faith in is an experience. If something works for you, I want to see that. So basically, three ways, if I say, this is the truth, people will say, oh, how do you know? Different people have different ideas of the truth.
You should do it, get lost. But this is what I do, and this is how it works for me. I want to know about it.
So if you present it as, we want to be based on the Vedic scriptures, but people don’t have faith in not just the Vedic scriptures, but in scripture in general. They feel that, okay, there’s so much historical analysis of religious texts done, and people think this is not relevant. They have a lot of questions about it.
But if something works for you, then I will, because what is happening in this postmodern times, nothing works for people. So then everything is collapsing. So if something works, I want to know how it works.
And then you leave it to me whether I’ll practice it or not. So an example is given up there, how to communicate to a postmodern mind. So say, if a middle-aged couple says to a group of young couples, we have been married for the last 25 years happily.
So if they follow it up with saying, all of you, when you get married, you should never divorce. Or if you say, divorce is a sin against God, you’ll get lost. You say, this is the truth, or this is what you should do.
But the same thing they present that, we’ve been married for the last 25 years, and we would like to share how we made it work. Oh yeah, please tell us, we want to know. So the idea is that if we can present Krishna consciousness as something that works for us, and how it works.
So this is what I mean by spiritual intelligence. People see that, okay, this is a spiritual individual, and this is how they are being spiritual. I want to know about it.
So if you could present it that way, then we have a lot of spiritual potency. People’s lives do get transformed in the practice of bhakti. But we need to avoid the perception of organized religion, and avoid the perception of dogmatism.
We can still be telling what scripture says, but we need to present it in as less dogmatic way as possible. So if we can do that, that’s my small understanding of basically the postmodern mind, and how to communicate with that mind. So there can be three broad visions of spirituality.
One is spirituality as requiring the rejection of material life. Second is spirituality as a complementation of material life. Material life is good, but you need the spiritual also, otherwise you won’t be satisfied.
And the third is spirituality as a tool to improve material life. Your stress will decrease, your bad habits will go away, you will become a better performer. So most of the spiritual organizations that are popular, they present spirituality in third category.
Mindfulness meditation is big because it improves health. Yoga is big because it improves health. Now of course we could say the question is how much spiritual it is.
That’s a valid question. But the point is how spirituality is presented. So ISKCON has traditionally presented spirituality in the first category.
Spirituality is requiring the rejection of material life. Whereas most popular spiritual organizations present it as spirituality as improving your material life. Now obviously that is not our goal, but that may be what is initially required.
Prabhupada also did that sometime. When he came to India after being in America, he met a group of businessmen in India and he said, oh I went to America with 40 rupees, now I got temples worth 40 crore rupees. So doing business for Krishna is very profitable business.
So we may sometimes have to, that world rejecting concept of spirituality gets rejected by the world. So we could be in the start with the first. And it does improve one’s material life also, not necessarily in terms of a person will earn more money.
But if we become more spiritual, we become more tolerant, we become more considerate, our relationships improve, our bad habits go away. So we could present that and then present spirituality as a complement to material life, not as a replacement for material life. Because for rejecting materiality, what happens is people want to know what are the solutions you offer to problems here and now.
Whenever there are problems in the world, we say the solution is this world is dukkhal and get out of this world. But getting out of this world takes a whole lifetime. How do I live during this lifetime? So if we could present spirituality as a complement, not just as a rejection, then we have much more scope of reaching out to a large number of people who are actually interested spiritually.
But because of the perception of organized religion and dogmatism, they are put off. That’s my small understanding. Okay.