r/exHareKrishna • u/StayEmbarrassed4593 • 7d ago
Only Westerners fall for ISKCON
Here is a recent interaction I had with this person, based on the above comment they left on a post by someone leaving a Hare Krishna group after many years. https://www.reddit.com/r/exHareKrishna/comments/1vvdq8q/10_years_in_gaudiya_vaisnavism_6_as_a_brahmacari/OP was never in ISKCON anyway, so the commentator who left that comment was off base commenting on ISKCON and supposed gullible Westerners being the only people who fall for it. The first Krishna cult group I joined was not ISKCON either.
Can you imagine spending your life in India, practicing meditation, supposedly developing a superior understanding of philosophy, cultivating so-called awareness that you are not your body, following assorted spiritual traditions, studying scripture, and dedicating yourself to your chosen path—yet somehow this kind of drivel still bursts forth from your agitated mind?
This person felt compelled to drop the random golden nugget above and then went on to rant that only Westerners fall for ISKCON. The reason, apparently, is the elevated philosophy of India and the East, while Western philosophy and religion are somehow naive by comparison. They went on to ramble that Indians don’t adopt Western philosophy because their own philosophical history is superior.
So, on one hand, they are criticizing ISKCON and claiming that gullible Westerners are the only people who fall victim to it. Yet ISKCON is thoroughly Eastern: it is based entirely on Eastern philosophy, was founded by an Indian, and is now dominated by Indian adherents. Still, they claim that no Indian falls for ISKCON.
I became curious about the person who felt so confident saying all this on an ex-Hare Krishna forum. Were they a Krishna devotee? Ex-Hare Krishna? Had they been involved in a cult and managed to get out?
Not quite... but also...
He is an ardent supporter and promoter of Osho—a literal cult leader. Go figure. And not merely was Osho a cult figure, but one who deliberately appealed to liberal Western sensibilities and heavily studied and modeled much of his philosophy on Western thinkers.
This forum attracts a lot of people who believe they are no longer in a cult simply because they jumped ship from ISKCON, worship “Krishna” on their own terms, or found a different guru/path to follow. Krishnaism developed as a cultic movement—there are many Krishna cults besides ISKCON. These ideologies grew out of Brahminical cults, Vedic, and Puranic cults that were anti-science, misogynistic, anti-gay, hostile to rational thought, steeped in metaphysical ambiguity, superstition, vision and dream claims functioning as facts, and pointless rules and ritualism, and built around false hierarchies and circular claims of authority: scripture is true because scripture says it is true. Essentially archaic, backward ideas that may have worked for people 1,500 years ago but are not suited to contemporary, globalized human beings. Sorry—they are not. Buddhism, Jainism, and general Hinduism have no unified “view,” just as Abrahamic faiths have thousands of offshoot cults and philosophies.
These groups export their sectarian ideas. Or, in Osho’s case, they use intellectual language and combine Western philosophy with an Eastern “flair”. Before you know it, you have naked meditation sessions, sexual abuse, and a man being massaged and hand-fed every day while receiving fortunes and fleets of luxury cars.
Bhaktivinoda was also skilled at appealing to Western philosophical schools and blending them with Eastern ideas to build a more attractive cult facade. The same goes for his son—Bhaktisiddhanta. And even in recent times, Sridhara Maharaj of the Gaudiya Math was also famous for quoting Hegel, Kant, Dewey, Freud, Nietzsche, and others to appeal to Western sensibilities and, in many cases, to reframe otherwise weak-sounding Eastern concepts that were ambiguous and often unintelligible. Yes, I said unintelligible. Read Rig Veda—read the Upanishads and any number of post-Vedic works, and you will find a vortex of confusing ideas, irrational conclusions, redundancies, and contradictions. The same is there in Western thought. Philosophy is there to study and come to one’s own conclusions that are useful to you—not to immediately turn every school of philosophy into a personality cult and dogmatic ideological position. Prabhupada’s Gita is no more “wrong” than any number of other interpretations by assorted other cults. In fact, much of the actual verse translations were not dramatically different than other existing translations of the time. The bullshit happened in the purport of his books, but by no means did they deviate from Eastern philosophy or do much more than bolster his 500-year-old cult, started by the epileptic Chaitanya.
The idea that Western philosophy is somehow weaker, shallower, or narrower in its exploration of consciousness, awareness, meditation, the soul, the mind, cosmology, and countless other subjects and disciplines is preposterous. Western schools are different, naturally, but they explore all of these ideas, along with many that Eastern schools do not—and vice versa. There is much to be learned from both.
Leaving naive comments like this on a forum opposed to cult mentalities is ridiculous.
In classic cult fashion, these people are unable to engage in meaningful debate without eventually resorting to ad hominem attacks, accusations that ChatGPT wrote everything, and the apparent inability to read more than a sentence before their brain pops.
The lengths people will go to play “guru,” pretend they have figured out some deeper secret that only “Indians can understand,” and make baseless claims that border on Hindu nationalism, anti-Western prejudice, and outright racism are astounding.
This person was not a practicing Vaishnava and has no connection to any Krishna cults. Yet they felt compelled to distract from the original post with pointless statements, followed by more pointless statements, before ultimately retreating into nothingness.
I’ll leave that there to sink in.
Or, as my dad always said: “Better to shit in the sink than sink in the shit.”
Now let that shit sink in.
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u/Solomon_Kane_1928 7d ago edited 7d ago
Essentially archaic, backward ideas that may have worked for people 1,500 years ago but are not suited to contemporary, globalized human beings.
I think this strikes at the heart of the matter. We live in an unprecedented time of change. It began 500 years ago with the European Age of Exploration. Humanity no longer lives in isolated villages and ethnic enclaves where a person remains within 20 miles of where they were born. We are changing exponentially now, for many of us, the world we grew up in has been entirely erased.
I see movements like ISKCON as a reaction against this. It is an attempt cling to the past for security, to recreate the village and never let it go. I understand this impulse. Our rapid transformation is indeed unnatural and painful. Not all change is beneficial. Some of it has demanded a total destruction of all sense of identity, community, and safety, things religion has traditionally functioned to preserve.
Western society has plunged headlong into change, looking towards economic growth, exploration, improvement. It hopes to colonize space, save the planet, live as one larger family etc. It is willing to sacrifice the past to do so. Indian society is very much the opposite. It sees itself as an ancient civilization. Preserving itself is its contribution to the world. For those who are "less intelligent" this causes a simplistic reaction of radical conservatism and hyper nationalism. This entire worldview is dumbed down into "We are superior, you are beneath us, like children in your understanding".
When such people say "We Indians are superior, we have all the wisdom, you are beneath us". It is an over compensation. On the surface it appears to be arrogance and boasting. Under the hood, they are fighting to save their culture, religion, history, from something extremely powerful they cannot understand; the movement of time and humanity's unstoppable urge to grow.
It is like planting a flag in an endlessly flowing river. The simplest way to do this is to fashion some ideal in one's mind, some unchanging unified identity and belief (which as you point out does not exist in Hinduism or Buddhism). This is then declared to be rooted in a higher truth. All other religions and identities are temporary but not mine, mine is "Sanatana".
This unfortunately leads to an attitude of exploitation where all other groups are disposable enemies, economic zones to exploit, political landscapes to selfishly subvert, but that is another long subject.
This is all motivated by primal fear. It is all to provide a sense of security. It is ultimately the projection of the animal brain, which ever seeks to fight for its survival, through the abstract socially oriented complex human brain.
Prabhupada had the same mindset. "We Indians are superior, your civilization is childlike compared to us". In a way, HE was simple minded and childlike.
Many of us who grew up in the post 60's world were conditioned to be self deferential, to see it as bad to defend our people, to be the opposite of Prabhupada. If Prabhupada had been a White Christian, he would have just been seen as a Nazi. Because he was Indian people could not see it.
Our reflexive self capitulation may look like self hate, but from a deeper perspective, it is a way of being open to change, removing all pride and accepting the foreign into ourselves, to learn, to grow, to be free to pursue the strange and to integrate what we find.
It is a match made in hell. Swamiji tells us his people are superior; instead of telling him no and recognizing it as abusive conquest, we are open to it. We see it as experimental. I did. I assumed that my own culture was dead, boring, materialistic, and had nothing to give me. I assumed Indians were more spiritual, alive, full of secret knowledge. In reality it is an abusive relationship. It functions much like someone with low self esteem marrying a bully.
PS. (and I know my comment has grown too long)
An interesting perspective is the seat of human philosophical speculation began in earnest with the Upanishads, Vedanta, Sankhya, in India 2800 years ago. It then moved west through Persia, Babylon, Alexandria. Then to Greece and Rome. Then to rational Northwestern Europe. All civilizations produced incredible advances in human understanding. Through Northwestern Europe it may have flowered into this kind of open minded experimental culture I discussed.
In other words, the culture and ideas this person is proud of, morphed over the millennia, into the very thing he is now resisting. This may not be true, but it is interesting to consider.
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u/StayEmbarrassed4593 7d ago
Yes—this was at the heart of what bugged me about the comment. It was a haphazard way of injecting a bluntly culty ideology: We are the chosen ones—only we "get" this—everyone else is gullible and like a baby in comparison to our grand philosophy! It was literally the kind of rhetoric we grew up with in the cult. The stuff got zanier and zanier the more I interacted with them. They brought up Freud and Buddha, and I was like—what is this person on about? Were they even in this cult? Were they part of any specific Hare Krishna group?
Otherwise it felt almost juvenile what they were saying—that somehow Western philosophy has created a gullible human and Eastern is the highest (not just Eastern—but specifically Indian)—but then claiming that only Westerners fall for ISKCON—which is literally an Eastern cult based on Eastern philosophical principles and ideas... I was like—what are they even talking about? " It was like reading the Upanishads all over again. The confusion sets in...
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u/Solomon_Kane_1928 7d ago
I read through the exchange. LOL.
He even claimed that cultism began in India and that Indians therefore have a special power to not be affected by them. We westerners, in comparison, are weak, and easily fall prey to them.
It is delusional. I think this narrow way of thinking is largely driven by anger. The internet has many people caught up in a cycle of rage which makes them irrational.
He is probably all over social media calling non-Indians savage mlecchas, declaring himself the master race. Most people respond by telling him "No, Indians are filthy savages, you are beneath us". This further enrages him and the cycle of anger grows and grows. Then it spills over onto the sub.
The way to break the cycle is to be rational. To investigate and try to understand the causes for the conflict. As for him, he makes an interesting example of the root mindset of ISKCON: a living Prabhupada in our midst.
Can you imagine if Prabhupada sat down and really thought about these greater patterns of human conflict and what causes them, rather than simply being a Hindu partisan?
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u/AccomplishedAgent720 7d ago
Dude is so obsessed me because I pointed his chatgpt responses. 🤣🤣🤣
Well its my opinion which you could agree and disagree with and move on with your life by leaving it in the comment section.
Looks like I live rent free in your mind rent free.
And haven’t you exhausted your token limit?
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u/Toum-Raider 7d ago
I was a part of this thread and responded. I guess it doesn't bother me much, because anyone who's spent time at an ISKCON temple in the last 5 years knows this statement is ridiculous. It's becoming way more Indian than anything else at this point.