When today spiritual masters can’t personally instruct disciples about their services, how can we best serve Krishna?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
The question is that Prabhupada usually defines success and satisfaction of the spiritual master but in the present day Sikon scenario we don’t have access to the spiritual master and our spiritual followers may not be able to exactly understand what our nature is accordingly and nor will we be able to understand very quickly what our nature is so how can we be best engaged and how will we define success in such a situation whenever any religious culture is transplanted from one cultural scenario to another there are always unique challenges that come up so now Prabhupada in one sense transplanted the Gaudiya Vaishna culture from its pre-modern setting to a modern and a post-modern scenario and there are unique challenges which came up in that and those challenges will keep re-emerging in different ways as we live in an ever-changing world so first of all that yes Prabhupada in one sense gave one thing in his books but at the same time even when Prabhupada was there it was not that he was personally instructing all his disciples Prabhupada chose consciously since after he formed the GVC to cut down his contact with the disciples so that he could write his books and he could travel and he focused on empowering his leading disciples to take over that responsibility now the problem which we are talking about now was there at that time also because even then they were not necessarily competent enough so there is as a sadhaka we need to have that faith that beyond the circumstantial and the institutional there is the transcendental hand of Krishna that is guiding us so beyond the circumstantial circumstantial means I joined a particular temple at a particular place and this temple has a particular focus the institution has this kind of priority that’s why I am giving you these services that may be true but beyond it all Krishna has an individual relationship in front of us so Krishna has been guiding us for so many lifetimes when we were actually doing nothing for him also and if we see that way from the point of view of probability of arriving at the correct result the probability of our coming to Krishna itself is very low among the millions of living beings we could have been in millions of places and so many things happened so the very fact that something which is so improbable Krishna has arranged for that and Krishna has enabled us to come to his lotus feet that same Krishna who has brought us to his movement will also guide us onwards to him through his movement so Krishna has already done something big and miraculous without our playing any role in it or even our playing an obstructing role we don’t know what our disposition was in the past but Krishna has already done that that same Krishna who has guided us till now will guide us onward also we should focus on how far we have come then how far we have to go will not seem too difficult or too disheartening so first is we need to have this transcendental vision otherwise we will just be disheartened by the circumstantial situations that we will find in our life so they are realities but Krishna can act through those situations also for our good overall now ISKCON’s leadership is moving more towards a fraternal mode of functioning as compared to paternal mode of functioning paternal means father-son fraternal means brotherly so especially most of ISKCON’s spiritual masters in America and in the West they almost always have a fraternal mode of relationship Bhaktivedik Maharaj was very fraternal with his disciples Indraprabhu Maharaj was also like that to a large extent and India because there is a forthcoming if you see many spiritual masters, Radhanath Maharaj if you meet him in America and especially the way he deals with Americans is quite different from the way he deals with Krishna over here so to some extent in India there are certain cultural expectations of Gurus and the Gurus also have to conform to that to some extent but overall what is happening is that the instead of thinking that it’s like Krishna is here the spiritual master is here and the disciple is here and the spiritual master is going to connect us to Krishna but then Krishna is here, the spiritual master is here and we then have a network of people in between there is the counsellor, there is the temple departmental head the temple president, there is the person now it is not very easy for a devotee to have faith the same kind of faith in our immediate spiritual authority as we have in our spiritual master now we can try but it is not possible it is not realistic so one devotee who recently the temple took some disciplinary action against him so he asked him this question is it really true that the temple president’s decision is Krishna’s will for me it’s a loaded question first of all so I told him rather than trying to find out whether the temple president has done Krishna’s will or not what we should think is whether I am doing Krishna’s will that means in this situation what will please Krishna the most if I keep my Krishna consciousness centered on evaluating someone else’s action then that will only create a sense of powerlessness and resentment so if I keep my Krishna consciousness centered on what will be the right action for me then there will be a greater sense of empowerment a greater capacity to choose and make the right decisions in the right consciousness so overall what we should focus on is first recognize the transcendental agency of Krishna and in general I believe that the leaders will unless there are some extreme situations where they have to take some snap decision this or this overall the leaders will also move towards communicating properly and explain why they are doing this why they are not doing that and that way the devotee can understand so it is more of a cooperative endeavor that the devotee is spiritual guide both together try to find out how best can the devotee engage in Krishna’s service so in the initial stages of our life it is good to follow the instructions but along with that we observe and then over a period of time we answer Krishna guides us and it’s it’s something which naturally happens in life that we will gravitate towards something towards a situation that we are most comfortable in that’s not wrong, it’s not seeking a comfort zone if what we are trying to do is by being in that position we can move close by move fastest towards Krishna so rather than worrying too much how I will find my particular nature and how I will find a particular service we focus on trying to do the best service that we can in whatever given given and also to learn, learn more about ourselves and learn about the requirements of different services and then by that we gradually move towards a particular service which is best suited for us so that way rather than expecting see one problem with the idea that I should just that I should, the spiritual master will give me one revealed instruction and then that will become my mission statement for my life so then the problem with that is that that shifts the onus the responsibility for spiritual advancement from us to our spiritual master the spiritual master has not given me an instruction, so what can I do see Devamukh Maharaj told me that he said that I often think that I used to work so hard when I was in my college, he told me I asked him how he wrote the Searching for Vedic India he said he wrote a very classic book and he is a travelling preacher and I asked him how he managed to get the time he told me that what I used to think is that when I was in my college in Delhi I used to work so hard, somehow used to be strong, write my research papers it was one of the top universities in the world so he said that why should Krishna get less from me than what the world has got from me why should Krishna get less from me than what the world has got from me if I had been in India, if I had been a professor I am paraphrasing his words now I would not have depended on my HOD to give me some assignment and then I will do research in that field and then I will become a famous scholar or a famous scientist or whatever no, I will be researching how can I advance my career so now what we have to do is we have to understand that we are advancing our career for becoming better as a person for entering more institutions we should take the responsibility for finding out how best we can serve Krishna and also we should not think that serving according to our subhava is something selfish because I will be more comfortable doing the service actually if we learn what is our subhava what are we doing with that we are actually learning what gifts Krishna has given us and then when we know what gifts Krishna has given us we will be able to use those gifts better than Krishna’s so our self-discovery may circumstantially seem to be like I am withdrawing everybody else is doing the service but I am not doing that service I am taking more time for doing something else or whatever but actually later on we will become more and more competent in that service because we are finding out what are the distinctive gifts Krishna has given us and then we are using those gifts in Krishna’s service so overall even in the past let’s stop at Raghupath’s level if we go to pre-institutional Gaudiya Vaishnavas the institution came with Gaudiya Vaishnavas Bhaktivinoda Thakur he had a very huge institution he gave the vision of the Nama Hatha but he did not have the time to do any follow up on it he just gave classes and actually Bhaktivinoda Thakur cultivated large foundation primarily through his magazines at that time most of the famous authors Charles Dickens books like Christmas Carol now they are available to us as books but at that time actually they were published as installments fortnightly installments like you have TV serials next week watch this so like that they would publish magazines and Bhaktivinoda Thakur wrote his own books like that he took that model from the western scholars all his books most of his books were what he published in Sajjan Toshiri as a harmonist as installments of articles and like that otherwise to write a book is such a huge task for a person who has so many responsibilities in person so it was through his regular writings for which he got a large subscription that he cultivated and followed up so what I am saying is in pre-institutional Kaurya Vaishnavism what was the mode of institutional instruction there were basically two models there were either grahastha gurus or sanyasa gurus now if there were grahastha gurus the grahastha gurus would be like temple priests they would stay in the temple and most of them would have their own family and the disciples would take initiative from the local people over there they would take initiative from the grahastha gurus and then whenever they had any decisions to make they would go and talk with them but if they are all grahastha’s normally in grahastha ashram one grahastha does not interfere with another grahastha too much so they would get some guidance but it was basically primarily a cultural connection based on being in the same village and having a regular interaction so when there are two grahastha’s there is a reasonable amount of reverence but it was not exactly the model of having a sanyasa guru and having that much respect for that the other model was sanyasa gurus now sanyasa gurus they would be travelling and sometimes if a travelling sanyasa would come to a village give initiation and they do not come back for years there is not even a possibility of writing a letter because a travelling sanyasa you don’t even know where he is right now so that’s what we see with respect to Advait Acharya and Madhavendra Puri Madhavendra Puri took initiation but there is no rapport of them having met too many times so in either case so if he is not meeting the spiritual master much then how are they making spiritual advancement because Advait Acharya is a pure devotee already but then that gives an example of what the model was at that time so how would they make advancement it was by participating in the spiritual culture so it’s not that the spiritual master would be there following follow but overall there would be a devotional culture and if a person takes initiation that means the person understands I am making a commitment now and therefore I should follow certain standards so even in those times the primary responsibility for spiritual advancement would depend on the dispassion of the disciple now when Siddharth Prabhupada started to scorn it was with people who were having no conception of authority and discipline and they are highly unregulated and he needed a very rigid structured program for them to curl their passionate and ignorant tendencies so the level of structured program that Prabhupada designed for his scorn is actually more than what was there for Gaudiya Mata that was what was required for training the disciples at that time and channelizing so it is important but a key point here is that we have to move on and recognize that there will never come a time when the spiritual master will give me one instruction which will define my life it won’t work like that we will have to find out how best we can serve this so Dutta Karmaprabhu is not from a scientific background he has a master in sociology so I asked him how he got into scientific teaching so he told me that when he was reading Prabhupada’s books he read all of Prabhupada’s books 13 times and then he felt that Prabhupada wanted very strongly that scientific output he should have and then he found himself inspired that I should do this and then he took it up and then he started something in 1984 and now it’s 2014 30 years he has been in the field and he has made his mark not necessarily in the mainstream science but in alternative science he is a beginner so he told me that he realizes that Prabhupada’s books are filled with the jewels of instruction on how to serve Krishna it is up to the disciple to take one instruction make that instruction one’s own life’s mission and thereby enrich himself so now he is a Prabhupada disciple but still even he did not have direct connection with Prabhupada he does not know that Prabhupada gave direct instruction but he took it up and Dutta had to find himself so right now we are not at that stage we may not find some instruction jumping out of Prabhupada’s books but still to the extent you keep serving Krishna Krishna will guide us on how best to serve him according to Aniruddha so to summarize I would say that beyond the institutional circumstances you should know that there is the transcendental hand of Krishna guiding us secondly overall the movement is now moving towards the fraternal and one aspect of that also is that it is up to us to take responsibility so rather than expecting someone to give instructions and we should take initiative and find out how best to serve not in a mood of defiance of authority not in a mood of wanting to do something which we enjoy but in a mood of trying to find out what special gifts Krishna has given us and then use them for Krishna’s sake and overall the traditional culture was such that the responsibility for advancement was generally on the disciple not on the spiritual master so in the broad Hindu tradition various schools of thought are accepted