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".

You can also download them all together in this pdf: Community - Real and Apparent.pdf.

I am personally disqualified in so many ways. I am sharing these thoughts because internally right now in this area I am feeling a lot of pain, and this is cathartic for me. The past two years have held a lot of lessons for me. Trying to help people means that you become vulnerable, and you can be disappointed. At the same time, we are all simply servants of the parampara, and must do our duty, regardless of "good" or "bad" results, and irrespective of the "honor" or "dishonor" that it may bring us.

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".

A person can dress up as a Hare Krishna and even become expert in singing kirtan, chanting slokas, doing yajnas, or any of the other external practices that make them look like an advanced devotee, especially to new people. However, internally they remain committed to "their own program," and at crucial moments when "their program" and Krishna's program (which is the common program for Krishna Conscious communities) come into conflict, they consistently choose "their own program," because that is what they are really all about.

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.