A thief thinks that everyone is desirous of stealing his ill gotten gains while a cheat sees the world to be full of cheaters and it seems that Krishna often allows us to see others 'faults' just to remind us of the need to fine tune our own approach to devotional life.

 

We should always remember that when we point our finger at the faults of others, three fingers conversely indicate our own faults and this implies that religiously ordained administrators who see fit to correct people should be attentive to their own faults.

 

Those who employ corrective measures to bring about an individual or a factions Krsna conscious cultural conformity should consider it to be thrice their responsibility to address their own shortcomings, misconceptions and reform rather than being obsessed with the reformation of others.

 

 

Any field of management demands responsible assessment of individuals involved, seeing any situation, individual or faction with one bad eye and one good eye, yet care has to be exercised so not to offend others after all bees always delight in finding honey - like good qualities with a view to bring out the best in others.

 

To hell with all our exuberant eating, sleeping, mating, and defending on the plea of keeping body and soul together for the performance of sacrifice! and to hell with following from A to Z all the damn rules and regulations of the International Society for Rules and Regulations.

 

To hell with trying to become a Hare Krishna clone, to hell with our having “advanced” through the fires of years upon years of ordeal in the almost intolerable association of blundering neophytes and to hell with attempting to express our love for guru and Krishna in terms of endlessly bearing the brunt of relentless institutional strife.

 

 

To hell with toeing the party line, to hell with the institutionalism of the institutionalists, to hell with religio-institutional corporatocracy, to hell with being a Hare Krishna yes-man and to hell with trying to reconcile ourselves to the neoteric drift of a movement’s henpecked leadership.

 

To hell with all the superficial role-modeling, to hell with our profiling as advanced devotees when we know damn well we’re not, to hell with grappling for socio-religious eminence and to hell with the institutional rubberstamping of sampradayic supermen.

 

To hell with the “necessary evil” of (poorly) organized religion, to hell with all the meetings, resolutions, revolutions, dissolutions, and no solutions ad-infinitum and to hell with the ever-abounding, all-entangling crisis (mis)management syndrome! What could be expected of an institution that currently runs rather like a decapitated donkey?

 

 

To hell with our having supposedly heard and regurgitated hundreds and thousands of Bhagavatam classes, dutifully attended thousands and millions of mangala-aratrika and guru-puja kirtanas, and perfunctorily chanted millions and billions of rounds of maha-mantra-japa! Shnick, Shnick, Raam, Raam.

 

To hell with all our vehemently preaching about preaching about preaching about how we’re supposed to preach about preaching about preaching about how we’re supposed to preach! What are we “preachers” supposed to be preach-preachidy-preaching about? To what extent have we actually understood?

 

To hell with the profiteering of the cash-covetous, business-brained mongers of transcendental knowledge, to hell with the Hindu-bindu Society for Currency (oops! I mean Krishna) Consciousness! I say to hell with milking the Hindu cash cow and to hell with the cost-effective, vogue-wise Hare Krishna phobia.

 

To hell with the painfully put-on sankirtana smile, to hell with it, like infatuated children, avidly engrossed in the perpetual pastime of competitively collecting rare and unusual coinage, we accumulate the hundreds and thousands of unqualified neophyte disciples under the pretext of perpetuating the sampradaya, i say, to hell with it.

 

To hell with, on the plea of concern for others, becoming so blunderingly bogged down with all the petty little problems of the hundreds and thousands of corporeally attached shisya-praya “disciples” that one fails to oneself find the time and space required to complete even the minimum nama-bhajana expected of a new bhakta; what then of achieving the advanced internal devotional realizations needed to become, for the benefit of one’s disciples, anything better than a half-baked cookie.

 

To hell with the undignified, artfully employed, hard-nosed, cunningly politic, cold-shouldering, dog-eat-dog bureaucratic religio-administrative spin control, has anyone ever achieved prema by this approach and to hell with being a pawn on the chessboard of any mortal being’s religio-institutional managerialism.

 

 

To hell with coyly compromising the truth to kowtow to the cacophonous misconclusions of dull-headed under-enlightened ecclesiastics of religio-executive clout and to hell with all the rubbish, time-wasting, power-politicking religio-institutional / inter-institutional hostilities! Are there not yet innumerable grumblers, intent on being inexorably encumbered by such endless, trivial affairs?

 

To hell with the materially concocted hallucination of having so-called friends and enemies amongst the Vaishnavas and to hell with the perfidiously inflicted, heartlessly top-heavy centralized manipulation of manpower and money! On the threadbare plea of “spreading love of Godhead,” do such scheming preoccupations now indispensably supersede our life’s mission of becoming mad after Krishna?

 

To hell with the deaf ears of the conceited, self-complacent, ivory-towered religio-administrative elitists, to hell with spineless, self-serving ecclesiastico-political correctitude and to hell with our having distributed billions and trillions of transcendental literatures all over the world in scores of languages to give everyone else a chance to become fully Krishna conscious! I say to hell with it all!

 

 

Much of the afore-denounced may be wonderful, meritorious or (de)pressingly important on one level or another, but if in the end, after all is said and done, we ourselves, as individuals could not effectively grasp, take to heart, factually realize, and blissfully relish the deepest essential living import of the Gaudiya Vaishnava siddhanta (learning to love Vrajendra-nandana Shyama by carefully pursuing the bhavas of the supra-exemplary damsels of Vraja), what would we have really gained from the whole affair?

 

Truly speaking, what would be the sense or significance of any other allegedly laudable undertaking or feat? Are we merely amassing sukriti (or duskriti) for another valiant try in some future birth, or what? – an inconversant step in hopefully the right direction?

 

Do we really know what we are doing? Do we want Krishna-prema or not? Kindly do not hastily suspect these questions to be in any way inconsequential. Okay, Krishna consciousness is a gradual process – as gradual as we make it. It really doesn’t have to be that gradual, though.

 

 

Candidly speaking, charity really begins at home. It’s true that the highest realization is to take all risk, to go out of one’s way to save the world. That is our mission, for sure. Even so, still higher than that, ultimately, the very highest realization, the profoundest mission, is to save oneself. First make yourself spiritually fit. Doctor, heal thyself! First chant and dance in ecstasy like a madman, then worry about saving the rest of the world.

 

Higher than becoming guru is to become an accomplished, fully self-realized disciple, and that hardly implies that one should pompously pose as a king with no clothes to passionately impress the little neophytes with how much one might have superficially garnered from the lines of letters on the pages of piles of books. A mesmerizing, ostentatious cerebral miscellany indeed.

 

Nowhere is it mentioned in any shastra that neophytes and intermediate devotees achieve prema by initiating hundreds and thousands of disciples. It is really best not to accept any disciples at all. Better by far we humbly endeavor to chant shuddha-nama via the intent prosecution of yuga-dharma nama-sankirtana with a view to achieve ultimate raga-maya perfection at the feet of Shri Guru. Then we may hope to become truly empowered instruments in the hands of the predecessor Acaryas.