IDOL WORSHIP: ISKCON'S GIFT TO THE WEST?

Idol worship is to religion what the Stone Age is to the 21^st century. Whether caveman or computer programmer, the general motivation is the human tendency to get something one desires with as little effort as possible.Typically worshippers offer flowers and incense accompanied by repetitive chants or prayers with the ceremonies led by a high-born priest. If conducted in what is believed to be a holy place of pilgrimage, the pious effect is generally held to be magnified exponentially. In general, attendees are taught from childhood to believe that worship in such a place will cleanse them of sin and grant them direct communion with the deity. Many also exhibit a type of religious euphoria akin to possession and display passionate and violent displays of emotion.

On the other hand, ISKCON uses the uneasy familiarity of its Judeo-Christian converts with religious notions of pilgrimage sites of their own heritage to get them to engage in worship of deities without having the slightest knowledge of what they are worshipping and for what reason. In fact, their introduction to the whole business is the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra as a kind of group hysteria punctuated by loud singing before any deity whatsoever. Then they are fed food offered to the deities ("prasadam") and are read a few snippets of the Gita and Bhagavad Purana, a,ll translated and with commentaries by the ISKCON founder guru, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Insofar as actual Hinduism is concerned, they know very little and the scope of their knowledge is kept deliberately minimal. My own experience in this regard is instructive:

When I first entered a Hare Krishna Temple, I hardly noticed the small Radha Krishna deities, but found the animistic Jagganath group charming with their huge eyes and colorful abstract representations of form and feature. Soon my sister and I learned to create more of them ourselves and wore them around our necks like amulets.[i] As the saying goes, we had no idea of what we were getting into.

In a few years as the ISKCON cult grew and attracted more gullible, opportunistic youth, our daily lives centered around worshipping our guru and the temple deities, the latter which we addressed as “their lordships” as if they were not idols of brass and wood, but the Godhead themselves. We never regarded them as symbolic representations of Krishna and his associates in material form, but as purely spiritual, transcendent entities.

So mornings starting at 4:30 (after sleeping six hours, later reduced to four) and evenings we would prostrate ourselves before them and sing their praises like star-struck teenagers infatuated with their latest heartthrobs. Afterwards, we would vie for the remnants of the delicacies offered to them with all the avidity of a pack of starved vultures.

Imagine spending with best years of your life dancing and chanting before a group of extravagantly dressed idols garlanded with gorgeous flowers while devotees lived like the homeless, sleeping on the floor, underfed and exhausted by hawking our guru’s plagiarized books on the street and in airports.

The fate of the children deposited at the infamous “gurukula” schools—or rather, hellholes—was worse: starting from the age of four or five, these innocents were cut off from any semblance of family life and, in many cases, sexually abused and tortured by the lowlifes who were recruited as their teachers. By order of our guru A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, parents were expected to send their children away, which was simply a practical application of his belief that “the ends justify the means.”

Who can forget the sight of those near-skeletal kids reciting the slogan beginning with “this body is a lump of ignorance” before sitting down and eating a plop of ill-prepared gruel or other cheap vegetarian fare that had been offered to the deities? To make matters worse (and unhygienic), it was eaten off wax paper or paper plates placed directly on the floor and the famished kids gobbled it down with their fingers as their only utensils.

ROCKS, BATS, AND THE LIMITS OF IDOLATRY

When I recall my first pilgrimage to the town of Vrindavan, the awe-inspiring 16^th century “old” Govindaji temple looms into view. Situated between a temple in the South Indian style and the “new” Govindaji temple, it is a marvel in red sandstone as well as an architectural triumph with a rich history. When we arrived it was twilight and an arati ceremony was in progress. I still remember the chill I felt when I looked inside and before I saw anything, heard a rasping, squeaking sound and looking up, saw that it was produced by a massive swarm of bats circling around the high ceiling.

After stepping back in horror, I walked out of the temple and headed right, where I was told the “new” Govindaji temple was situated. At the time, the deities of the temple were lined up in an open plaza of sorts at the base of the main temple. Another shock soon followed the last when, near the feet of the typical brass Radha Krishna deities, I saw what appeared to be a piece of smooth black river rock, onto which had been painted a pair of lotus eyes and tilok. Now, this struck me as plainly idolatrous, even though by that time I had spent years worshipping brass and wooden deities. A piece of rock? This was way too much!

No Matter How You Dress it up, a Stone is just a Stone

Mind you, Vaishnavas (worshippers of Vishnu) regard worshipping their deities as 100% the same as adoration in the presence of the Godhead himself. After feeling my eyes start from their sockets at the sight of this rock deity I soon learned was called a “Salagram Sila,” even I, a befuddled teenager at the time, knew that I had reached the limit of my toleration of Hare Krishna idolatry.[ii]

REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS

"The formless Supreme Spirit that pervades the universe can have no material representation, likeness or image." YAJUR VEDA 32: 3.[iii]

Why, then, do so many ISKCON devotees, most of whom were raised in Judeo-Christian religions, take to deity/idol worship with such enthusiasm? From my own experience, its source is their gullible acceptance of the exaggerated promises of liberation from sin that our guru, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, first attributed to chanting the Hare Krishna mantra and later on extended to deity worship and the strict observance to fasting days such as Ekadasi.

For example, the Garuda Purana states that observance of Ekadasi “removes sins and wards off hell—nay, it enables one to attain Vishnu loka and gives everything desired.” The sheer number of boons for observance and condemnations for non-observance for this one fast are mind-boggling and can be found in any Internet search. Similarly, in the Sri Hari Bhakti Vilas, it is claimed that “merely by touching a genuine Salagram Sila one becomes free the sins of millions of births, what to speak of worshipping by puja of Salagram Sila one gains the direct association of Lord Hari.” 

Claims such as these are the staple of folk tales of every nation and religion, and typically are found in the kind of fairy tales parents read to children as bedtime stories. Adults familiar with the stupendous acts of epic heroes in such works as the Iliad, the Ramayana, and of course the Mahabarata, are or should be well aware that a staple of the epic genre is exaggeration. Whether the purpose is to entertain and/or inspire, taking them literally is mere foolishness and something one would expect from an ignorant buffoon. 

The list goes on and on.  In this way, religions ensnare weak-minded and intellectually lazy people who treat their strict observances as lottery tickets with guaranteed winning numbers as long as you abide by the rules of the game. In practical terms, these so-called “Vedic” rules and prohibitions encourage the faithful to indulge in superstitious practices instead of investigating matters with their innate reasoning powers.[iv] After a while, it becomes clear that acceptance of a pile of rules and regulations has turned what was once an inquisitive soul into a gratified or terrorized dim-wit, depending on what quasi-spiritual fantasy he or she is willing to indulge.

Some protest that Christians are also idol-worshippers because they allegedly "worship" the Crucifix and various carvings or paintings. Nonsense! Venerating or showing reverence is a far cry from worshipping an object as a deity. The difference should be obvious.

Enter the Hare Krishna followers, who in their never-ending quest to appear more Hindu than Hindu, worship deities of brass, wood, and stone, but also include idols representing the 16th c. religious reformer Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and four of his associates. They specifically worship Chaitanya as an incarnation of “Krishna in the mood of Radha,” which is the way they get around the fact that he—while certainly an enthusiastic devotee of Krishna—was a high-born Brahmin who is known for and usually depicted wearing a mix of masculine and feminine attire. If not for his high caste status, there is little doubt that such antics would have not been tolerated by any fellow Hindus of his time and certainly of ours.

Only members of the intersex Hijra or Kinnar transvestites are allowed such behavior and are traditionally featured in religious enactments of tales in which a god or goddess behaves in a sexually ambiguous manner. These performances are characterized by the intensity with which the hijra devotees play their parts and the sheer spectacle of people who appear biologically male dressed in the garish attire and jewelry of professional prostitutes (which many of them are). More on the background of this topic and its application to the legend of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu can be found at https://writingknight.blogspot.com.

When will people stop believing in quick-fix solutions to their problems and in nonsensical transactions that insult rather than respect the deity they claim to worship? As for the priestly classes behind these ruses, now more than ever we have come to realize that their abuse of innocents is an outgrowth of their skills in manipulating and brainwashing.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ESSAY AND ILLUSTRATIONS ARE THE PRIVATE PROPERTY OF THE AUTHOR/ARTIST. The Goya print is public domain.

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[i] See letter dated 1 February 1969 to Ekayani Devi Dasi. https://prabhupadaletters1969.blogspot.com.

[ii] These stones originate from the Gandaki river in Nepal and look like mostly smooth black river rocks with various markings that devotees regard as symbols of specific deities. They are in fact fossils of ammonites, which were mollusks that lived in a spherical shell similar to a snail and died out in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event approximately 66 million years ago. Many varieties are available on eBay.

[iii] http://www.aryasamaj.org/newsite/Light_Of_Truth.pdf. See Dayananda’s Satyarth Prakash for a conclusive refutation of idolatry. Pages 370-375 are especially illuminating.

[iv] The practices of Hindus—regardless of their philosophical or folkloric underpinnings—are not the subjects of this essay. ISKCON cultists are another matter entirely.

Please note:

Although holy places of pilgrimage exist in all major world religions, India is a special case because of the great antiquity of Hinduism and the reverence with which its people regard certain of its rivers, mountains, and other geographical elements. Indeed, Hinduism appears to have arisen partly from India itself as a child from the mother and partly as an outgrowth of centuries of philosophical discussion and commentaries. In both cases, as a pearl develops over time from a grain of sand irritating a humble bivalve, contention and criticism have contributed to the durability of Sanatan Dharma. I respect the variety of religious practices unique to Hinduism and regard them as products of its heritage.

ISKCON AND INDIGNITIES: A RATIONAL LOOK AT THE FOUR "REGULATIVE PRINCIPLES"

If you’re thinking about joining the Hare Krishna temple in your area, you’ve probably heard about the “four regulative principles” every devotee is expected to follow. Here’s a objective look at what they involve in practice from somebody who joined as a 14 year old and followed them for the next 13 years:

1. No eating of meat, fish, and eggs. No garlic or onions or mushrooms. According to the ridiculous propaganda that newcomers are fed along with the Sunday Feast, these vegetables “grow in dirty places and increase passion.”  

COMMENTS

Vegetarianism in various forms is practiced by millions of people world-wide for reasons that are religious or ethical, and sometimes both. Buddhists and Jains, for example, are even more stringent in their vegetarian practices than the tiny minority of Hindus who avoid the above-mentioned foods. Other than proscribing the eating of beef due to their cultural reverence for cows, most Hindus include animal protein in their diets. 

The Abrahamic religions follow a similar pattern, excluding certain foods that are deemed unclean or culturally inappropriate and including others some might find offensive. The reason is simple:  both the Vedas and the Hebrew Bible frequently mention animal sacrifice in their scriptures and in all cases, the sacrifice is eaten. Later on, various ethical and hygienic considerations crept in, but, in the main, it is hard to deny that humans are omnivorous by nature. 

Some say that Hindus who follow the Vedic diet do so because they believe in reincarnation and the karmic laws governing actions and reactions. Taking this idea to an irrational extreme has led some to subscribe to the notion that, since all animals contain a soul, killing them without provocation is tantamount to murder. This mistaken equation of human and animal life is at the heart of most religiously-based forms of stringent vegetarianism. 

Here are the facts: eggs sold on the market are unfertilized, so consuming them does not involve taking a life. As for garlic, onions or mushrooms, the truth is all of these vegetables grow in normal conditions and are extremely healthful. Using the foul-smelling resin asafoetida instead of them is unnecessary. Furthermore, passion cannot be increased simply by eating “hot” foods, if that were the case, the chili peppers that are used in most soups and vegetables in Vedic cooking might be blamed by some hot-heads for the continuing population explosion in the sub-continent. For more on this topic, please see: 

https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2009/11/cult-dietary-restrictions-example-of.html.

2. No alcoholic beverages and no tea, chocolate or coffee: all are intoxicants. Tobacco is also out.

COMMENTS

The sheer hypocrisy of this so-called regulative principle coming from a cult aiming to restore the caste system is staggering! No one has condemned these practices as eloquently as B.R. Ambedkar in his unpublished treatise Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India and it is worth quoting him at length:

Drinking was another evil which was rampant among the Aryans. Liquors were of two sorts:Soma and Sura. Soma was a sacrificial wine. The drinking of the Soma was in the beginning permitted only to Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas. Subsequently it was permitted only to Brahmins and Kshatriyas. The Vaishyas were excluded from it and the Shudras were never permitted to taste it. Its manufacture was a secret known only to the Brahmins. Sura was open to all and was drunk by all. The Brahmins also drank Sura. The priest to the Asuras drank so heavily that in his drunken state he gave the life giving Mantra known to him only and with which he used to revive the Asuras & killed by the Devas—to Katch the son of Brahaspati who was the priest of the Devas. The Mahabharata mentions an occasion when both Krishna and Arjuna were dead drunk. That shows that the best among the Aryan Society were not only not free from the drink habit but that they drank heavily

(Chapter 2. The Ancient Regime: The State of Aryan Society.)

Responsible adults don’t need anyone else to tell them that consuming anything in excess can be dangerous to their well-being: moderation is the key and total abstention is a waste of time. In addition, modern science has proven that wine, tea, and coffee when consumed moderately, have great health benefits. It is also patently ridiculous to view the caffeine in coffee and tea as “intoxicants,” what to speak of chocolate (coffee and chocolate were also unknown in the early Aryan civilization). 

Furthermore, the issue shouldn’t be intoxication, but what causes the tobacco or marijuana addict to seek escape in the first place; in other words, a rational person should first humanely inquire after the cause of an addiction rather than simply condemn the effect. No religious belief is necessary to inform you that tobacco and recreational drugs are poisons. Also keep in mind that the founder/acharya of the Hare Krishna movement, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, regularly took snuff and never hid his habit from the disciples close to him.

3. Only sexual intercourse between married couples is allowed and even then it must be strictly for procreation.Unmarried men and women must live as monks in ashrams.

Please note: I have dealt with this issue elsewhere and recommend that you read it to get a fuller picture of how this prohibition impacts the lives of the disciples of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. 

See:https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2012/01/hare-krishna-mating-ritual-revealed.html.


COMMENTS

This extremely reductive treatment of human sexuality has nothing to do with Vedic culture and was in fact an experiment the founder of ISKCON created to further his ambitions to open temples all over the West as well as facilitate the selling of his books. For a man who entered into an arranged marriage to an eleven-year old girl when he was 24, and who begot six children with her, this prohibition reeks of pure hypocrisy. Much has been written about how he openly discussed his dislike for her and how he came to believe that his dislike of her made it easier for him to abandon his family and become a sanyasi. Frankly, his own experience was the product of a culture that keeps both men and women in a state of perpetual adolescence. 

All of us remember what is was like to be around twelve or thirteen years old and just beginning to feel attracted to the opposite sex: in most cases, the ignorance of biology in the early teens results in mixed attraction and revulsion, both of which subside and are transformed when the boys and girls gradually learn “the facts of life” as well as learn mutual self-respect for each other’s intellectual capabilities. This process of growing emotionally is as important as achieving legal adulthood, but it takes time and patience. 

Unfortunately, the so-Vedic system our guru propounded disturbs this process by marrying off girls just after the onset of puberty, on the ridiculous plea that they are so lustful (nine times as lustful as men, to be exact) that they must get married to a much older man to control them. Legally speaking, this practice is nothing more than the crime of pederasty. No adult male has the right to compel a child to engage in a sexual act (the so-called “consent” of the child is a moot point). Moreover, even if the child you married is now a legal adult, your keeping her as your sexual partner is compelling her, meaning that your so-called wife is actually your sex slave. Requiring unmarried men and women to live as celibate monks in ashrams is a confirmed pervert-making machine, whether you replace ashram for convent or cave, the results are the same. 

Srila Prabhupada used to say that of all the human propensities of eating, sleeping, mating, and defending, mating was optional. Sorry to say, he was mistaken in this respect, but, as we all know, he was in good company: this idea is behind most restrictions on the personal lives of monastic individuals in many faiths. As I have said before, no adult needs another adult to tell him or her how to govern their intimate lives. The notion that celibacy is better than the alternative is fundamentally wrong: men and women have strong emotional needs and these cannot be suppressed and then transmuted into a fit of “ecstatic” chanting in front of the deities or whom they believe to be a “pure devotee.” 

Furthermore, you cannot brainwash a normal adult into “renouncing” their sexual selves by treating love as a category of feeling that has been purged of “lust”: that is both puerile and self-serving. You only have to read about the horrible rapes and other perversions that accompanied the gurukula experiment to see what monsters are created when repressed, immature individuals who have themselves been denied a modicum of privacy and dignity gain access to a group of terrified innocents. Worse, many of these abusers were sannyasis, who are supposed to be exemplars of renunciation. 

4. No Gambling. 

COMMENTS

Another example of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s attempting to create a “Vedic” society in the West that never existed in India or even in another of his Krishna-conscious fantasies. Here again I must express my gratitude to the great B.R. Ambedkar for his illuminating descriptions of the gambling habits that typified Aryan society during the lifetime of Buddha (583 BCE-483 BCE): 

Every king had a hall of gambling attached to his palace. Every king had an expert gambler in his employment as a companion to play with. King Virat had in his employment Kank as an expert gambler. Gambling was not merely a pastime with kings. They played with heavy stakes. They staked kingdoms, dependants, relatives, slaves, servants. King Nala Paskkar and lost everything. The only thing he did not stake was himself and his wife Damayanti. Nala had to go and live in the forest as a beggar. There were kings who went beyond Nala. 

The Mahabharata tells how Dharma the eldest of the Pandavas gambled and staked everything, his brothers and also his and their wife Draupadi. Gambling was a matter of honour with the Aryans and any invitation to gamble was regarded as an injury to one's honour and dignity. Dharma gambled with such disastrous consequences although he was warned beforehand. His excuse was that he was invited to gamble and that as a man of honour, he could not decline such an invitation. This vice of gambling was not confined to kings. It had infected even the common folk. Rig-Veda contains lamentations of a poor Aryan ruined by gambling. The habit of gambling had become so common in Kautilya's time that there were gambling houses licensed by the king from which the king derived considerable revenue.

This restriction against gambling is also particularly entertaining since obtaining money by sleight of hand is an ISKCON specialty: have you ever been to the airport or another public place and witnessed first-hand what the Hare Krishna devotees term “book distribution” or “sankirtan”? As someone who spent years participating in this charade, I can tell you that it is nothing more than a campaign of misinformation and theft. No wonder so many of these books and magazines end up in trash bins almost immediately after the unwary traveler realizes the foolishness of his or her purchase.

Let me give you a great example of what this can lead to by referring to an incident in my past: When I lived near the Los Angeles temple in the later 1970’s (just before I finally left ISKCON), I worked in their Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT), fulfilling orders for a scam they advertised in the National Enquirer: they had an ad that told people that they would sell them a talisman that would guarantee them good luck, all for $39. When the orders came in, I would send the poor fools a picture of the Jagganath deity pasted onto a round metal badge and also include a slender ISKCON pamphlet: can anything more degraded and cruel be imagined? I remember complaining about it, only to be told that it was approved by the BBT leadership.

ISKCON, truly a society of the cheaters and the cheated!

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

THE HARE KRISHNA "BLISS" ADDICTION

The primary method the founder of the Hare Krishna (ISKCON) movement used to quickly gain disciples in his quest to disseminate Gaudiya (Bengali) Vaishnavism to the West relied on confusing the gullible with promises he could not possibly fulfill. A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s arrival in New York in 1966 coincided with the hippie phenomenon and its participants’ experimentation with LSD and other psychotropic drugs and a general disillusionment with what they deemed an excessively restrictive social order. 

Conditions were ripe for taking advantage of the hippies’ flirtation with Eastern mysticism. The guru, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, quickly attracted many such followers, as did numerous other Indian gurus. Disgust for materialism of all kinds remained a feature of his new disciples, but the agent of escape from it was shifted from mind-altering drugs to a mind-altering mantra. Specifically, the chanting of the “maha mantra” or Hare Krishna mantra was used as a means to induce dissociation to the point where fantasy and reality became virtually indistinguishable. 

In this guru’s dualistic world view, the material world is an inverted and debased version of the spiritual world and chanting of Lord Krishna’s name offers an instant way to directly contact the Godhead. For initiated and would-be devotees alike, this practice appeared to transport them mentally to a timeless void that the swami filled with a contrived and often ludicrous broth of half-truths, prejudices, and a “Vedic” culture that never existed.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

Freeing oneself from the delusions brought on by years of evading reality is at the root of the struggle drug addicts and other substance abusers face every day. Whether traumatized by abusive parents and/or the destructive effects of growing up in poverty made worse by crime and social indifference, many who turn to drugs and alcohol are simply anesthetizing themselves. Waking them up and shaking them out of their stupefaction requires sustained effort and generous funding, both of which are in short supply in most neighborhoods.  

When all else fails, religion seems to work. In place of substance-fueled delusions, religion supplies an alternate reality that quickly supplies some glimpses of joy at the cost of self-denial and privations. Far from being the end goal of existence, it generally functions as a transitional state that can help a person learn to curb destructive behavior and join society as a productive member.

Unfortunately, as the Hare Krishna (ISKCON) movement and other religious groups with an extreme agenda have shown, it is easy to lead people deeper into an alternate universe by convincing them that self-control is achieved by an ever-increasing withdrawal from worldly distractions. Far from encouraging them to become productive members of society, the initiated disciples of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami wasted their lives laboring to sell his books at any and all costs to their personal lives and responsibilities. 

Today the many gurus and GBC members who succeeded their guru after his death in 1977 continue his legacy of attracting seekers of bliss and truth and using the typical cult brew of “instant” bliss and perfection to use them until they either leave or are ejected after questioning ISKCON tactics. Fools that they are, these power-mongers continually betray their real agenda by targeting people with the money or gullible mindset to further their aims. They might engage in any number of "feeding the poor" programs, but these are merely diversionary tactics that underlie their schemes to rob the affluent in order to build ornate and enormous temples

The hippies who joined the Hare Krishna cult in the late 1960's are perfect examples of the tendency of ex-drug addicts to embrace an alternate reality. I personally observed this transformation and my memories in this respect are, after more than 40 years, crystal clear because I--unlike most of the other early initiates of the cult--joined as an innocent 14 year old. So, it was rather fascinating to see the jumping, gyrations, and other antic behavior of devotees who just a few months earlier were stoned out of their minds on LSD, marijuana, and heroin. 

Furthermore, many came from affluent families and had attended or graduated from college.  To say that they were looking for a free ride intellectually seems an understatement: in truth, many of the devotees I knew who seemed to be so interested in spirituality were just looking for a "transcendental high" as an easy, safe, and cheap replacement for their once drug-induced euphoria. The repetitious, formulaic Hare Krishna mantra seemed to serve the purpose since our guru assured us that its words were identical with the deities Radha and Krishna and that chanting them instantly wiped out our bad karma. It seemed as if we were all winners in some kind of spiritual lottery!

Others who were sincere seekers of the truth were initially quite skeptical about the claims of the swami, but their doubts were often mitigated by the typical cult indoctrination process, which, in general, peeled away their rationality by appealing to their baser instincts. In this way, the chanting and dancing reduced an educated, fundamentally decent human being into an irrational, superstitious, saffron-clad caveman. It did not help that very few of these inquisitive souls had ever even bothered to study the Judeo-Christian scriptures they were now so eager to decry. 

Indeed, they thought that following the rules and regulations of ISKCON elevated them into Brahmins who, with the ability to quote a few lines of the Gita and wear tilak, gave them the right to teach the Indian visitors they encountered Gaudiya Vaishnavism as if Hindus by birth and culture know next to nothing about their own religion. Little did they know that, as the says goes, they were trading the frying pan for the fire: ISKCON, so welcoming at first with its love feasts and colorful decorations and deities, soon proved to be a scorpion’s nest of rabid lies, exaggerations, and prejudices.

It was tragic to see how many educated people fell for A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s sexist rants (e.g., women are nine times as lustful as man and possess half their brain matter) and his so-called “Vedic” cosmology (including fantasies such as the idea that the sun is nearer to the Earth than the moon and that the Apollo astronauts could have never gone to the moon because it is a “heavenly” planet controlled by the demigod Chandra). Like so many before us, trusting a charismatic person and not examining the basis of our trust dealt a catastrophic blow to our quest for true enlightenment. To say that we were naïve is an understatement: it is one thing to extol a culture that protects cows, but it is altogether another matter to blithely accept an undereducated and manipulative swami’s inane and backward views concerning the fundamentals of science and human relations. 

Still, many of us who have long since left the cult, fondly remember times when our chanting and camaraderie seemed to mitigate some of the doubts and distress we were laboring under. Had we not been living in such profound isolation and ignorance, we would have poked our heads out of the ashram-burrows in which we lived and realized that most of the Eastern (Buddhist and Hindu) gurus active at the time taught their followers to chant various mantras and also insisted that they live in ashrams or communes where, they too were more or less cut off from the outside world. ISKCON was clearly not the only faux-Hindu cult in town. However, our guru was a shrewd businessman and knew that he had a system and that it worked.

The cult’s modus operandi was and is unmistakable: once the interested party arrives at the temple, alienation from Western culture and indoctrination into the swami’s version of Indian/Vaishnava culture begins in earnest. Intellectual inquiry based on fact and objective evidence is actively discouraged: in its place, the new bhakta is offered the swami’s translations of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Bhagavad Purana (“Srimad Bhagavatam”), and the Chaitanya Charitamrita. [i]  No other scriptures, Vedic or otherwise (the swami, by his own admission, never read the Vedas, so there was a good reason for his restrictions) are allowed, what to speak of literature, magazines or newspapers. A little knowledge is certainly a dangerous thing and this was true of both the spiritually curious followers of A.C. Bhaktivedanta  Swami and the guru himself.

Lacking the academic credentials and training necessary to tackle as prodigious a project as translating the Gita, he directed his American disciple Howard Wheeler to create a pastiche of translations from other editions. He clearly had no idea of the notion of intellectual property and so cheerfully plagiarized without giving the matter another thought. What he valued were the “purports” he wrote for all of these texts, which were in fact interpretative commentaries that, lacking advanced knowledge of Sanskrit and the Vedas (at the very least), he simply had no authority to foist on an unsuspecting public in the first place. In this way, the swami tried to repress any scriptural interpretation but his own, as if his followers lacked the intelligence to think for themselves.

However, as new devotees soon learned, the chanting produced a brief euphoria that could not be sustained without spending hours at the practice in a group ("sankirtan") or on one's japa beads. The trance state it produced was a fundamentally dissociative or impaired psychological state that threatened to evaporate outside of a paranoid view of the non-devotee ("karmi") life. This meant that relationships with family were often abruptly terminated (even though many retained some communication, often for the purpose of begging for money). The swami furthered this disassociation process by insisting that the aspiring disciple (”bhakta”) move into a same-sex ashram and renounce connections with the outside world to the extent possible. 

This “us and them” mentality is characteristic of most cults and ISKCON was and is no exception. New devotees found themselves effectively cut off from the outside world.  Those who joined were often so gullible that they gave the cult everything they had and soon found themselves sleeping on the floor (often with vermin crawling about the room) that they shared with strangers. Our guru often reminded us that our so-called austere living was an example of "simple living and high thinking," but, in reality, it was simply a living hell.

Our personal liberties as rational beings were stripped away as a matter of course: the four "regulative principles" treated us like animals in a farm whose choices about diet and sexuality were closely monitored in an effort to make us mere cogs in the wheel of the cult's progress. If the swami said that an idol (or guru) was a god or as good as God and that such and such a Hindu scripture was authoritative, his word was accepted without giving it another thought. The chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra often resembled the group ravings of a group of saffron-robed lunatics and in individual practice on our prayer beads, was usually a rapid, incoherent hiss or mumble. Like all addicts, our “bliss” could only be sustained as long as we could keep the depressing realities of daily life from interfering with our delusions.

When thinking of those days, one memory stands out as a wry, if unintentionally hilarious observation on how matters really stood. While attending the Sunday love feasts back at the storefront temple at 26 Second Avenue, we often noticed a young man who often peered inside at our antics, but usually kept outside. One day we asked him why and he said that he wanted to go inside, but he just couldn't understand why we were jumping up and down yelling, "horrible, horrible." After we stopped laughing hysterically, we told him that we were actually shouting, "Hari Bol" (chant Hari/Vishnu’s name). The young man, who later on became an ISKCON sanyasi, initially had it right: the "bliss" we experienced was manifestly a form of group hysteria and the simplistic philosophy we so naively imbibed was, in one form or another, a snare for the unwary used by opportunistic Indian gurus who were busy seeking out gullible Western youth in order to use (and abuse) them.

This chanting of the “maha mantra” (Hare Krishna mantra) was carried out in parks and on the street and was often accompanied by pamphlet distribution and an invitation to attend a feast on Sunday at the temple. Typically a saffron-clad, shaven-headed youth would earnestly accost a passerby with a copy of a pamphlet and a packaged set of comments about the evils of society and an assurance that the solution was as easy as chanting and eating free vegetarian food. This appeal is the classic half-truth: yes, evils exist in the world, but what relation do they have to the solution you are presenting? It is catnip to lazy, gullible people and it remains as appealing today as it was to the earnest hippies of yesteryear. 

This “book distribution” was nothing more than an organized campaign of harassing the public into buying a publication that most of them promptly threw in the trash. Afterwards, the exhausted devotees would return to the temple, shower, and don Indian attire (saris and dhotis), and then spend the evening chanting and playing hand cymbals while pacing back and forth in front of a collection of idols that typically include a brass or marble Radha and Krishna and the Bengali Vaishnava saint, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (who is worshipped as a combination of Radha and Krishna), and the animistic Jagannath idols.  

To Indian visitors (who generally found the proceedings as alien to their culture as non-Indians did) the scene must have been ludicrous: the idols were dressed in a manner of Bollywood actors on the set of a cinema reenactment of the Bhagavad Gita or another Indian religious epic. Moreover, the con artists in ISKCON have continued to use a remarkably stable set of brainwashing techniques to the present. For example, back in 1975, a young college student lured into the cult recounted his experience as follows:

You don’t have time to think, to be bored.  . . . It’s like being high, but worse. Chanting is a form of escapism. The more confused the mind is, the easier it is to be manipulated. Everything was so structured: rise at 4 a.m., cold shower, meditate, class, meditate. Everything starts slowly and builds up to a fever pitch—dark, bright lights; music, dancing—it’s very powerful, and you’re confused. You don’t quite know what you’re experiencing. [ii]

We paid a steep price for our “bliss” as the foreign became familiar and reality receded to the background. While there is little doubt that many truth-seekers of the hippie era were infatuated with Eastern mysticism due to their intellectual laziness and desire for instant gratification, what led many to waste their youths in cults was a carefully scripted program that exploited their vulnerabilities and fears. Clearly, there is a high price to be paid for dropping out of society for the best years of one’s life. Our intellectual and cultural lives were virtually nonexistent. Cultural appropriation of all things Hindu seemed to be the rule of the day, as Westerners who had only recently repudiated their own cultural identities adopted what they thought were the attire of both Vedic India and the Krishna loka of Vaishnava tradition, striding about in bindi, saris, and dhotis.

Today blogs and websites maintained by ex-ISKCON members tell the same story with few modifications. The irony of these responses is that they all originate with mantra chanting, a practice that has been used in India for centuries as a means to “awaken the higher potentials of the brain and change the flow of energy in the nervous system.” [iii] (It is also notable that the Rig Veda, very possibly the oldest religious text of the Vedic period, is a collection of various hymns.) The potential of mantra chanting for regulating breathing and other brain functions usually held to be strictly involuntary in nature is a fascinating subject worthy of greater attention and study. It captivated early yoga practitioners in the West, who most often combined it with yogic postures (as in Kundalini Yoga) or used various mantras as meditative aids. However, in virtually all cases, the sacred nature of mantra chanting requires that the atmosphere in which it conducted is as free from distractions as possible and that the syllables are carefully and reverently pronounced.

While other mantra practitioners in the West were instructed to pay attention to breathing patterns as a means to reduce anxiety and stress (“mindfulness”), we instructed to chant while contemplating the deity with all of the rapt adoration one usually associates with an object of unrequited love. Our guru, who held the illicit passion of Krishna, Radha, and the gopis as described in the Chaitanya Charitamrita to be the highest form of Bhakti-Yoga, viewed the chanting of the Maha Mantra as a form of adoration, a direct conduit to the deity, and the Godhead himself in one convenient package. 

In effect, he encouraged a certain “mindlessness” in the emotional excesses of the kirtan, believing them to be self-evident proof that the devotees were indeed possessed by holy ecstasy. (We might have indeed been possessed, but there was nothing holy about it.) In this way, young men and women in the flower of their youth wasted it worshipping idols of brass and marble at the direction of a guru whose edicts were directed to spreading the thinly-veiled eroticism of Gaudiya Vaishnavism under his self-assumed mantle as the only living genuine guru in the line of disciplic succession from the androgynous Bengali saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.

CONCLUSION

In so exploiting these gullible, damaged young souls of an alien culture, the swami foisted on them numerous indignities in addition to utterly disregarding their health and mental and emotional wellbeing. For him, his disciples were simply a means to an end. Far from introducing the Gita and Hinduism to the West—an achievement that properly belongs to the genuine saints Sri Ramakrishma Paramhamsa and Sri Vivikenanda—he presented the beliefs of the tiny Gaudiya Vaishnava sect to the West as representative of a non-Hindu “Sanatana Dharma.” He then initiated legions of grossly under-qualified and misinformed Americans and Europeans, gave them new Hindu names ending with “das” or “devi dasi,”and sent them out on the streets of their countries to preach his message. 

Most of these one-time Hare Krishna devotees have long since left the ISKCON movement and tend to look back with bewilderment as to why they joined it in the first place. To help answer that question has been the purpose of this essay.  Keep in mind that the method by which Srila Prabhupada (as we called the swami) used to keep his initiated disciples from learning the truth about his essential beliefs was a practice he brazenly called “gradually revealing the truth.”  
Today the deception he practiced on his disciples has been transferred to the Hindu public (both in India and abroad), as a number of his one-time disciples have assumed the mantle of the guru and have diligently worked to deceive them. They have the audacity to present ISKCON as not only genuinely Hindu, but also claim that its practices and members aspire to the highest standards of religious conduct. None of these claims has a basis in fact, as this and other essays both in this website and my blog (https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com) endeavor to prove. ISKCON was and is a cult.

Keeping disciples in the dark about the guru’s core beliefs and strictly controlling their contact with the outside is more than enough to qualify the ISKCON sect as a cult, but using our thirst for knowledge and joy to coerce us into to a world of deprivation, personal indignities, and cheating others is diabolical fraud by any definition of the term.

i] Little did we know that, as Howard Wheeler (“Hayagriva Dasa”) recounts in his book, Hare Krishna Explosion,      pp. 210-211 that A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami never translated the Bhagavad Gita; rather, he asked Wheeler to "just copy the verses from some other translation,” adding that “the verses aren’t important.”

ii] Markoutsas, Elaine. “Krishna Converts Who Fled the Cult: Personal Story Krishna Converts Struggle Against the Spell.” Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1975.

 Iii] Bengaluru, Satguru Bodhinatha, et al. “Mantra Yoga,” 36-51. Hinduism Today. 34.1 (Jan.-March 2012).