harsi wrote:Janus wrote:
Only my mother was human. Now why did I write that all knowing one?
Hard to say, it is not easy for me to assess the motivation behind what you just wrote, as well as behind many of your comments here in this forum. First you make an assertion, like "don´t tread on my devotees", than you admit yourself that what Prabhupada did and said, may have to be seen and examined also in the context of the particular time, place and circumstances he said it, which may well have changed somehow since than. Some persons may consider this to be also a kind of doing, what according to what you wrote "before, whould not be good to do, at least I understood it in that way. Since that would, according to them, diminish in their concept the vallue of that person, as be-ing someone spiritually fully perfect and faultless.
But I would say however it may be, I consider your presence here in this forum and discussing with us this issues for our all better understanding as a great enrichment. Of course, I don´t know how others would also see or consider it to be.
I don’t know that I’m capable of absolute faith, but I sure know that I have an absolute aversion to blind faith, but I seem to have been one of the few persons who accepted Srila Prabhupada who took to heart the instruction of Sri Jiva in the Nectar of Instruction (before I ever read it,) and actually tested him.
I have always accepted the principle that Guru is One and my test of Srila Prabhupada was based upon that principle, and he passed that test with flying colors in the most remarkable way which ruled out all chance of coincidence and related to me in such a personal meaningful and life affirming way that despite my absolute aversion to much of his presentation I accepted him, as Guru and I have never lost that faith.
Others may see it another way, but I can only think that thier trouble stems from a mistaken identification of the material with the spiritual. We are all familiar enough with the oft repeated admonishment that one should not regard Guru from a material perspective, that we should not accept any physical manifestation, such as a crooked back, blindness or any other physical imperfection as a sigh of spiritual imperfection. But we forget that there are two levels of physical manifestation, the subtle and the gross, mind and matter.
So according to this a Guru can have both gross physical imperfections and emotional problems, that just as he might need a back brace or some eyeglasses, he might also need a psychologist, and still be spiritually perfect and perfect also in his apparently imperfect presentation.
There is however such a stigma associated with mental problems that although most devotees can look at physical debilities manifested in their Guru’s body and not regard them, we still have a hard time with even the Guru can have be less than perfect in his mental presentation. The mere suggestion that Srila Prabhupada was influenced in his presentation by his conditioning, let alone viewing him from the perspective of a psychoanalytic profile isn’t just a taboo to some, they are so fearful that that it wil compromise them that anyone who might care to evaluate him in this way becomes a demon to them in their conceptual universe.
That doesn’t bother me. What they might not see however id that my evaluation of Srila Prabhupada is from a perspective which knows him to be Guru and which believes him to be an eternally liberated associate of Sri Krsna, presenting perfectly in accordance with time, place and capacity! an imperfection. In their minds it simply isn’t possible because Guru can never cheat and Krsna can never ask His devotee to misrepresent the truth, to tell a lie, even when it is in their disciples and devotees best interest that they should. But both Srila Prabhupada and Sri Krsna contradict this consideration with what they themselves have both said that they do and have also done..
Any apparent imperfection in Srila Prabhupada’s materially apparent presentation, both gross and subtle were controlled and brought about by Krsna. Imperfect they were perfect according to time, place and capacity.
So I am not seeing him at all as a conditioned soul, just examining his presentation which includes him and understanding it from the nearest thing to absolute faith in Guru that I can mange. Far from being debilitating it has been enabling. I actually understand a thing or two and have been empowered to do some very odd things in Srila Prabhupada’s and Krsna’s service.
We needed to examine certain aspects of his presentation and call him on them. Had we done so at the time, since his presentation was according to time, place and capacity, we might have gotten a very different presentation than the one that has come down to us, one that would have had a snow balls chance in Hell, and one that would have been acceptable to any progressive human being.
For instance,the most of us are familiar with Srila Prabhupada’s consideration that the slaughter of animals violated the Biblical Commandment not to kill.
Even a slight familiarity with the Old Testament in which God prescribes animals (including cows) as acceptable food stuffs to human beings contradicts Srila Prabhupada’s assetion and makes him look very uneducated upon a topic that he is pontificating upon. Just a few pages back from the Commandment not to kill were dietary rules of God’s children which prescribed animal food for human consupmtion.
His disciples shouldn’t have been ignorant of this, especially considering how many came from Jewish and Christian backgrounds, and should not have protected him from appearing ignorant in the eyes of educated representives of both these religions.
No one said to Srila Prabhupada that the rope that he was grasping was actually a snake. That should have been done when Kirtananada first crawled up on his lap begging for forgiveness, but the responsibility for policing the movement, so to speak, was ours. Instead he was made to carry everthing.
On this and on many other things the devotees themselves were responsible for the presentation not being advanced and for its horrible failure to provide for us an example of anything except of something that no man, woman or child should ever become a part of, for Srila Prabhupada could have adapted it at any time and at any place to our capacity should have chosen to test Srila Prabhupada in a spirit of relevant, submissive and eager enquiry and to insist that Krsna was also ours.
They carried this blind faith acceptance of absurd propositions, etc over into acceptance of the Zonal acharya’s and of ISKCON today’s presentation.
None of these entities however share with Srila Prabhupada a position of spiritual perfection so they cannot adjust a spiritual presentation from the perspective of a eternally liberated soul, they can only point to Srila Prabhupada as being mistaken, sexist, whatever, a well meaning person certainly, but not at all the expert upon everyting that he claimed expertise on, they can only point to him as being mistaken.
You have to go back to Srila Prabhupada to adjust. He isn’t dead and as Guru he can still adjust his presentation at any place and at any time according to your capacity, through his personal relationship with you.
What I was trying to communicate to A was that you cannot be Srila Prabhupadas disciple and the disciple also of anyone who was once Srila Prabhupadas disciple but who has lost their faith in him as perfect.
I haven’t questioned Hari regarding his personal attitude but he has stated that he is no longer a disciple of Srila Prabhupada/ Perhaps I misunderstand him but this seems to me to mean that he no longer has faith in Srila Prabhupada, that he has transferred some imperfections in Srilla Prabhupada’s presentation into the consideration that Srila Prabhupada was less than what he once considered him to be.
Of course I had a human father as well as an Otherworldy paret, that transforming energy from another world or plane, and besides my human mother there is also my psyche, that self in me which has come up the ages.
Perhaps I sound less lunatic now that I have explained it thusly, but don’t you believe it simply because I couch the explanation now in more Jungian and clinically acceptable terminology.
Jungian therapy has long been dismissed as ineffective by members of the psychological community and his thoughts regarding archetypes as being a bit to far out, beyond the pale of what is real. Discussion of archetypes has however leant an aura of respectability to the New Age and Occult communities who restore to the term its original meaning which Jung misinterpreted.
Jung did not go far enough. Even though Jung commented to his friend Carl Kereny that the subjects of his studies, the Olympians might have a personality, might be personal, might be persons, he stopped at declaring that the archetypical world was an actual spiritual dimension which interrelated with our own in his exposition, perhaps fearing that instead of being remembered as one of the two founding fathers of psychology he might instead have been dismissed as a lunatic.
Although interestingly enough Jung maintained the practice of corroborating his psychoanalytic profiles by casting his patients natal charts Psychologists today seem not to notice that the citadel of their science was built by men (Freud had a backgroung in Hebrew mysticism) whose personal considerations went beyond the realty of material fundamentalism into another realm where the Gods, Deva’s and Daimons might be perhaps real.
The consideration that human beings have other parents besides those of their birth bodies is not unfamiliar to the Hare Krsna’s. One of those other sets of parents includes one’s guru and his spouse, which may be translated in a continuum from life to life here as one’s guru and that guru’s relationship with his disciples psyche, or soul. There is the external relationship an an internal one in which Guru is interactive in a dynamic, way with his (or her) disciple in a continuum that goes from life to life.
In Bhagavad Gita Arjuna asks Lord Sri Krsna of the fate of the "failed" transcendentalent, fearing that one who does not complete his path towatds perfection in a single life might utterly perish, like a "riven cloud."
Lord Krsna sets Arjuna straight. But in the West there simple aren’t any families of learned transcendentalists in which to be born in, so does that mean that in the West they aren’t to be born? Not at all, but instead of into a family of learned transcendentalists they are born into a life situation that will facilitate their development and their service.
My friend the Lady Morwyn, Priestess and Witch, explained that once you are dedicated to the service of the Gods, if they need you to serve them some place they will get you there. Such an arrangment doesn’t always entail first class accommodations. Indeed if you are living confortably in some place like Kansas they may occaision that a Tornado picks up your house and drops you wherever you are needed.
When a person who has been initiated by a guru dies and when his master dies, does that relationship continue? Many disciples of Srila Prabhupada and of other guru’s believe "yes."
The relationship between Guru can continue, life after life and is independent of time and place, it goes on.
Death is no barrier in the relationship between guru and disciple, even when the master is dead and the disciple lives.
Was Srila Prabhupada eternally liberated only when he was alive?
A disciple who takes birth again is more so the product of the union of this "marriage" than he is the product of a biological birth. If one accepts that we are not these bodies it should not require to much of a stretch to grasp very, very ancient theme. Prabhupada was not my initiated Guru, I had been initiated long, long before to this life I was ever born. That is at least what I believe, so it is at worst a harmless lunacy, that and a very, very, very enabling one.
I guess what you want to say is the following: The characteristic of Vedic philosophies is that they are not merely intellectual exercises, but instead they should also lead one towards having or becoming aware also of some direct spiritual experiences, like Krsna tells Arjuna in the Bhagava-gita, and thus they are rightly called darshana or vision.