namahatta.org - Congregational Development Ministry

Welcome back Bhakta Corey! I wondered what had happened to you. I hope that you are recovering ok from your bout of malaria.

As Krishna-kirti prabhu is fond of pointing out, we bring our previous conditioning into Krishna consciousness with us when we come, and it can take some time for us to become aware of it and "decontaminated".

My morning meditation while I was sunbathing in the early morning rays today:

ISKCON is filled with conditioned souls... and by good fortune you're one of them.

Krishna-kirti prabhu and I don't see eye-to-eye on everything, but here is one analogy that he brought up recently, that we've been discussing here:

A society without conformity is a collection of people, like that of people who come together at a train station to buy their tickets.

This is the situation that I described as "on their own programs, together".

A collection of people coming together to satisfy their individual desires is not community - it is convenience. And when convenience ends, so does the coming together.

The principle is the same whether you are talking about two people or twenty.

It is always painful to my heart to see people get swept away into ISKCON's illusory sangabhasa - "the shadow of community".

Just to reiterate that point, which should be self-evident, but evidently is not:

A collection of people doing whatever they want is not a community.

You can do whatever you want, or you can participate in community.

You can't do both because they are mutually exclusive.

You can mimic all the externals of belonging - the dress, the language, the mannerisms - but it's the internal orientation that counts - the prioritization. When the choice arrives, what do you choose? You own program, or the common program? Do you really belong, or are you just superficially pretending?

Because that's what it is really all about: "Do whatever you want, or participate in community."

As a professional technical writer I work very closely with both translators and software engineers who deal with internationalization and localization. We can never make the assumption that lang=en-US - everything that we do has to take into consideration the impact on languages other than English.

We have to be careful how we break up terms and sentences in our translation tools, because context can affect gender, in the case of a language like Spanish, and word placement can affect the form a word takes, in the case of a language like Arabic.

The other night at Atma Yoga I had an interesting conversation with two ladies. They are both doing through an existential crisis of sorts.

Around middle age they are wondering what to do with their life. What will happen to them? What are their options?

In a previous age they would not have had many options related to the format of their life, but now they feel overwhelmed with choice, and bereft of guidance, or security.

It's a common situation for people today.

We just returned from the most excellent Nityananda Trayodasi festival at the temple in Graceville.

Shout outs to Gaura Yoga in Wellington, New Zealand. Today marks their tenth anniversary. On this day in history, one decade ago to be precise, Param Satya, Khadiravan, Sudevi, and I opened the doors for the very first program at the Loft at 45 Tory St.

If this post is too long for you, please skip to end and make sure you read the section entitled "Call to Action".

I've received a number of emails about Bhakta Corey's style of posting. I've replied to most of them defending Bhakta Corey (apologies to those who haven't received a reply yet). I've written to Bhakta Corey to ask him to align his blog more with the editorial policy of Planet ISKCON, if he wants to continue to have his feed included. He has graciously complied with this request.