Devotees need to always create a demon/demigod narrative. It helps fortify their weak position. Realty is not black and white.
Gabbrad/Butler/SIF and other Gaudiya groups create hysteria the moment they can do it. When Y2K happened, they were some of the first to start spreading misinformation and hoarding cans, water and toilet paper. Same with COVID and now with this war assault on Ukraine. Guess narashingha is not around to pop out of a pillar any more, tulsi is the next best bet (it's just a matter of time they tout her as an avatar). Or is it that god helps those who help themselves?
Devotees LOVE conspiracy, prophecies and unfounded trumped-up talking points that they will then use ad nauseum to try to support their grand solution to life of chanting some random mantra and asking everyone to read their fairy tale books and worship their purple god and gurus.
Devotees love to immediately try to show some grand vision in so-called "vedic" culture and the so-called prophesies of the veda and naive ideology of imagining yourself as a little 12 year old manjari girl. Their number one solution to everything is "let's sing and play pretend!". Tulsi is starting to sound more an more like Sarah Palin as the air fills her head.
The devotees are quick to try to show some grand past of vedic civilization. No proof other than fantasy stories. Because otherwise, the recorded history and present-day clearly show that no vedic age flourished or had any profound impact on people's happiness and quality of life, in India or abroad. They will quickly blame the "demons" for its lack of success and the dreaded "age of kali" as the reason. Always an excuse. Trump was sent by krishna, if we can only get trump to eat vegetarian food and chant hare krishna we would have a new age of varnashram dharma! If we elect Tulsi we will all unify under her illustrious leadership as one loving aloha family singing and dancing for eternity!!!!
Gabbard and all Butler bots are weak mindless automatons who are afraid of their own shadow and live their life-supporting a total nut job and offering allegiance to their long line of nut jobs parmapara. All afraid of their own mothers and anything outside of their bubble bhajan kutir mental circle jerk. That not a single one of them ran like hell when he started asking them to line his rooms with tin foil is total bonkers and indicative of the level of intelligence these guys have. Like Bhaktivedanta claiming the sun was closer tot eh earth than the moon based on the Roman calendar of the days fo the week. Fucking bonkers. How can you trust anything they say after such mindless statements of complete arrogance and unabashed stupidity. The guy left his wife over her drinking tea. Think about how low and mean that is.
Up to date some $5.6 million has been spent on tin foil alone in Butler's assorted kingdoms. If an ant farts in Burtler's vicinity he will catch the AIDS-On-CRACK variant and die while blaming his disciples.
Bhaktivedanta translated a bunch of fairy tales and gave long-winded purports that shed no real light on anything except that he was nuts and still needed tobacco snuff even though his base principles stipulate no intoxication. Jai. Propaganda material for his cult ideology. Bhaktivedantas totalitarian opinion of his cult is such that he has been documented in lectures that in the future his followers will shoot anyone who does not take the name of krishna. Such stalwart advice, among many such nonsensicle idea. Really no shortage of them.
Bhaktisiddhanta was afraid of being in the same room as his sister and mother. I don't even know what to say about that. Grow up? Get a life? Join and local tennis league? Instead, he surrounded himself with petrified male followers who fed into his ego-tripping about the grand glory of his brand of Brahmanism, where he gave himself sanyas, brahman initiation and made all manner of justifications for his aggressive preaching style that basically left him with an all-boys club of men who think they are 12 year old farm girls in some spiritual cow land in a universe far far away. He spent his entire life finding fault with other gaudiya vaishnava groups and their lineages and practices and blaming the lack of successfully spreading krishna to western countries as the fault of his weak disciples. He was not invited to any debates and discussions after establishing a firm reputation as being a high and mighty preacher of his specific cult as the "one size fits all" totalitarian dictatorship religion for all mankind. Anyone who did not agree with him was deemed a demon/karmi/atheist/mleccha/out-caste or "mayavadhi". He was critical of even his fathers guru and once chastised his fathers guru for accepting obeisances from his father and in a childish way admonishing him by saying "do you know who my father is!!!". What a total joke frat-club daddies boy syndrome. The first chance he got he gave himself initiation to several posts of esteem such as sanyas and brahman diksha. He then established and fought tooth and nail to establish his brand of brahmins as superior to all others and in fact called all other brahmanis who did not subscribe to his ideology as "false". His level of totalitarian arrogance is pretty unmatched. There have been many strong preachers in history of this cult, but he takes the cake as the most intolerant and outspoken against other groups. He was known for going to vrindaban and saying "there is no real devotees here", insinuating that he was the only one. Maybe Butler is a close second. Butler spent most of his preaching days talking against other religions and even his own godbrothers.
Bhaktivinode and all the others before him were basically delusional religious fanatical nutjobs with such a heavily distorted view of reality it is really surprising they were not locked up in lunatic asylums (they did lock themselves up in a bhajan kutir, for better or worse—at least they did not spend their time preaching far and wide. Bhaktivinode tried sending a few propaganda pamphlets to western universities but they fell on deaf ears). Grown men mumble to themselves some mantra on repeat to create a docile brain that cries like a baby every time their guru's name is mentioned. I still recall the days I sat like a total loser crying and groveling at my guru's feet on vyasapuja calling myself a worm in stool and blubbering on about doing shit for him lifetime after lifetime. Holy holy shitcakes. So thankful that I woke up from that mentally retarded stupor.
There is such a deeply rooted promotion of personality worship in this cult that it often even trumps the underlying message and ideology. Temples abound in pictures (imagined interpretations of divinities and saints), plastic replicas of the gurus and all manner of gaudy, cheesy over-decorated statues and glitz and glamour. Apparently, god and guru need thrones, jewels and all manner of material comforts to be happy just like any other human. There is a complete lack of simplicity in the process and any asshole can see in a matter of moments that it is not just about chanting and dancing and eating vege food. Yet that is what their sell point really is. They even admit that their main goal is not philanthropic or generosity. All religions glorify "god", yet somehow hare krishna feels they have some higher conception by virtue of a bunch of made up ideas with zero backing, practical examples of it's success and realistic expression.
In recent times devotees have come under criticism by other religious groups and people in general for their lack of using the funds they raise to actually do practical good in the world. Instead, the money often goes to useless projects, expensive endeavors, the printing of propaganda material and fairy tale books and supporting a guru and his assorted whims. Butlers group hides behind assorted philanthropic activities like saving fucking turtles. In all my time as a brahmachari in this cult and in ISKCON we went out to "feed the needy" maybe 6 times in total. And by feed the needy I mean throwing some spoiled sweet-balls at village children while we disturbed the peace banging on drums and kartels.
Butler has not traveled in years to preach anything yet his upkeep alone is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. What with expensive boats, air filtration systems, bodyguards, cleaning crew, cooks, massage therapists, doctors, medications etc etc. So on point with the fundamental message of the gita, for sure.
For years, devotees slaved for this man telling themselves they are somehow "purifying" their mind and senses. They tell you that they are serving god, but really they are simply addicted to virtue signaling and pretending that they are doing important "work" and are better than everyone else. Most of them are on welfare and public assistance (a go-to for devotees since the days of Prabhupada), suffer all manner of mental health issues and in recent times are addicted to sitting on social media "jai prabhupad"ing for good measure. They are no more less afflicted by their mind and body and senses and society than the next guy. Sunday roles around and they use the temple visit as a type of "confessional", not much unlike any other religious cult.
In the end, countless devotee kids are robbed of any sense of social normalcy, and often reject or chose not to go to university or better their education. and who cares if they do better in their education since they will reject half of it in exchange for "vedic" edition, i.e. mythical cosmology and "ayurvedic medicine", fascist manu samhita dictatorship and brahmanism.
Look at what happened with Tusli Gabbard. She was born and raised and trained/educated in Butler's hare krisna schools and is basically a brainwashed automaton with barely an original thought in her skull. Her whole schtick reads like a script in a play: She knows "first hand" the cost of war, shes the whistleblower on so-called regime change wars, aloha this and namaste that... she claims to be "open minded" yet has the same conservative, closed minded talking points of her guru varga.
For those who care, looks like Chrissy Gralow is back on twitter exposing the silly ideological bullshit of Gabbard and Butler: [
twitter.com]. Like Butler, Gabbard plays the "victim" role any time it suits her idiotic claims and they are exposed as such. In fact it's the basic MO of most devotees in any position of power. They squawk and cry that everyone else is the bad one, the false one, the envious one, the demon etc. Look in the mirror and do the world a favor, shut the fuck up and stop spreading naive bullshit in a day and age that reveals you for who you are in a matter of moments. You look like fools. As soon as a devotee starts to claim that such and such "veda" predicted this or that or that such and such guru "really meant" this or that, they are revealing their child-like ignorance. There is no science in the vedas and no, Swami prabhupada WAS that ignorant when he claimed that the sun was smaller than the moon and that women like rape and Africans are low-class mlechaas to be enslaved and controlled. And my favorite: Hitler was not so bad. Fucking genius here, translating fictional story books for the welfare of brainless minions. India is well-versed in all these stories. The average citizen is a walking encyclopedia of "vedic" lore. Fat load of good it's done their country. A land that still struggles to this day with basic human rights issues and all manner of ills the rest of the world has seemed to unravel and fix.
Ironically it's essentially what brahmins did hundreds of years ago as they wrote these stories to enslave ignorant masses into a singular mode of thinking that has done fuck-all for India. Like literally, the most ass-backwards country both economically, socially and politically. Every day in Hindu India is a day in the dark ages of human evolution and development. Replete with superstitious idiocy, daily rape, clown-like behavior by fanatical religious believers, total governmental and politcal corruption. And the sad part is they will never give it up because they somehow have brainwashed their culture to putting "vedic" hogwash on some sort of eternal pedestal of glory. And now people like Tulsi are the result. Queen of Tucker Carlson brainless fox news taking to the stage. Even her mindless followers are starting to reject her and see through her charade bullshit shit show. The biggest hurdle to progress in hinduism is attempts at nationalizing the assorted faiths/cults. There is no need to spread every local village idiot cult around the globe. Sometimes it's ok for a small group of idiots to stay a small group of idiots.
If you ever look up Chaitanya online, you will see him variously listed as the propagator of the so-called Hare Krishna Mahamantra. Yet the entire biography of the so-called saint (chaitanya charitamrita) does not even mention the mantra in full once. There is scattered mention of the "maha-mantra" but many mantras in the vedas are called "maha-mantras". Nowhere in the biographies of Chaitanya is it mentioned that he explicitly preached the "hare krishna maha-mantra".
Chaitanya is also listed as a scholar and a poet, yet writing (if he even wrote it) one poem does not make a person a "poet". And leaving ZERO scholarly works does not make a scholar. The point is that all this stuff is blown out of proportion, and has very little, if any, scriptural backing to support any of it.
What we do know is that Chaitanya was a religious fanatic who had epilepsy. That is documented in several biographies in a very obvious way. You call it devotion, I call it mental illness. There is also zero mention or instruction by Chaitanya about the so-called goal of "manjari bhava", yet, here we are.
That is the quintessential spiritual and philosophical offering of the Gaudiyas: Chant this Hare Krishna Mantra (mentioned in NO REPUTABLE scripture), Worship this radha goddess (not even mentioned in their own major scriptures), and realize your true form as a 12 year old farm milkmaid servant of the erotic couple Radha and Krishna (not mentioned in any vedas or even more recent scriptural works and effectively synthesized in perhaps the love poems of Mirabai and Jayadev and eventually Jiva/Rupa goswamis). A through and through totally made up religious doctrine, ideology that has so little footing in reality that it's no wonder that it's increasingly becoming nothing more than another fanatical religion at best.
Use you brain folks. It's all evolution gave us to make it through another day. Use it or lose it. Most devotees have completely lost all their brain processing power and instead sit in a zombie-like state pretending they are communing with a little blue god or his assorted "representatives". Just listen to how that actually sounds. Blue cowboy god and his "earthly reps". Geez. Total mental soup. It's three sheets to the wind after that. A guru can ask you to do just about anything and sweep it under the rug of "krishna consciousness".
The self-proclaimed epilepsy of the Chaitanya saint, and India's long history of making saints and gods out of disabled people, go hand in hand. I firmly believe that the Chaitanya saint was an epileptic (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170308131158.htm) and majority of his seizures were of the ecstatic kind. There are several types of seizures and some of them have a profound sensory overload effect that feels like a orgasm and blissful state. Some of these, especially taking place in ones 30s and 40s (the years Chaitanya started to claim that kirtan has some bliss-inducing qualities and he would often fall in a seizure and then collapse in "ecstasy") are revealing. Also, epilepsy brought on by music/loud sounds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicogenic_seizure) fits very well into this characters life.
Again, Chaitanya did not leave behind ANY scholarly works. He left at best a string of a few "poetic" instructional verses that are suspect of even being his writing or words. In fact, it can be said that there is literally NO direct writing or commentary by him yet he is portrayed as a scholar and poet and "undefeated"/innovative saint. Yet, the method of chanting, kirtan, sankirtan and use of "mahamantras" (every cult in India has their own "mahamantras" is not unique by a long shot in the history of hindu cults). And nothing every attributed to him is unique to his person. The so-called incarnation of god could not even get his brand of bhakti popularized beyond bengal. It took other preachers like Yogananda to set the stage and the hippie movement to open the mind enough of people to take swmai prabhupada seriously. And even that fell apart even while he was alive. No one ever took this cult seriously. Ever. It was always a laughing stock faction religious fanatic group.
The first recorded mention of the so-called radha goddess and her relationship with the krishna god was in a poetic love book called the gaha sattasai. It was a collection of sentimental love poems that describe "love in seperation", longing for a lover other than ones spouse, unrequited love etc. Sound familiar? It was the building blocks of modern day gaudiya vaishnava cults. Bhaktiviniode, raghunatha and Chaitanya all wrote such "poems" and made their focus the radha krishna myth. Gods, invented by humans as mental comforts and distractions in a bygone age of superstitious mythology and story telling. Nothing wring with that. We still do it today. It's called Netflix and any number of novels we read. Humans love stories and language allows us to create worlds, form ideas and express hopes, dreams and desires. The difference is that now, as modern humans, we know the difference between a story and fact. And while we can still learn a lot from stories, we certainly do not have to start shaving our heads and bouncing in the streets chanting to feel "whole" or purposeful in life. Life may not always be fun, and our purpose and path not always clear. But that goes for atheists and believers alike (and everyone in between). There is no getting around the paradoxes or existence and what we are meant to be doing on this little blue dot floating through space. That's entirely up to us. If we like kirtan and it gives us hope and meaning, by all means, but lets not fool ourselves there is some magic powers in it or some charlatan guru peddling the latest and greatest "promise" of eternal life.
All puranas have been shown to be amalgamations with noticeable structural and compositional differences as they were added to, re-written, re-interpreted and adjusted as time went on (Bhaktivedanta sure as heck adjusted the versions he translated to act as propaganda for his ISKCON cult). NOT A SINGLE PURANA or so-called vedic text has to-date been attributed with any seriousness and sobriety to a so-called blue Vyasa dev who wrote the text down via the elephant headed god Ganesha on the behest of the Veena playing Narada Muni cosmic spaceman. And if that is the case, and you rationally can see that it is the works of men, over time, then logic dictates that nothing in the books can be accepted and taken as any sort of "gospel"/Absolute and final transcendent "word". They are assorted opinions at best, cultural advice and stories as found in any culture throughout the world.
So when some guru like Bhakitisiddhanta gets on his high-horse and starts blasting other babjis and stating that his cult is better than yours, by modern standards, it is akin to two kids arguing on a playground about the superpowers of their plastic He-man toys. It's grown men arguing about pure fiction. Like comic book nerds arguing if Marvel or DC comics is better.
With that said, a god may or may not exits, and you may all feel you either know for a fact or have some relationship with your particular idea of god/guru/sastra/a plastic/metal/stone deity etc. That is fine, that is your prerogative. But no kid should ever have this crap tossed in their skull and mixed up. No person who is getting abused in these groups who have these naive beliefs should feel an iota of shame, guilt or reluctance to leave as soon as they see through the mirage of bullshit.
While life is certainly a mystery and we have much to learn and the riddle may never be fully revealed as to why we are here and what we are to do, we can rest assured it's not to put on robes and bounce around in the streets. We may choose to do that, and it may make us feel happy for a while, but by no means should it be touted as "the way, the truth and the fucking light". Nothing to surrender to by any means. It's at best something to "try out" like stretching, craft beer, and swimming with no clothes on. It's a vague ideology with questionable functional benefit to anyone. Likely more damage than good, both in the long run and short run.
I have always viewed preaching in this cult as actually being indicative of a lack of faith on the part of the preacher. If the message is so "all attractive" and self evident and one gets to this path by "mercy", "sukriti" or some "good karma", then why the need to preach? Do they not have faith in these mechanisms they preach about? Why preach if a person is destined to come to this path by virtue of karma? If the path is all-attractive, it should be so uniformly and universally. Otherwise we can admit that it is just attractive to sentimental seekers of feel-good culty bullshit. If it is by some sort of mechanism of "gods mercy", then it will be awarded to whoever god chooses, not ever of our own effort or accord. No need to preach and spread the nonsense like a disease.
This cult is RIDDLED with such voluminousness piles of bullshit it is hardly worth reiterating it here. Both Butler, ISKCON, Gaudiya Math and off-shoot groups are riddled to the brim with gross misconduct, immoral and unethical practices, abuse of followers, kids, and peoples general trust. They are liars at every step. Starting from the naive notion that the stuff they teach is from some "unbroken" lineage and over 5000 years old etc etc. All lies. Even the so-called mahamantra of their is written as "Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hari Hari" and then followed by the "hare krishna" part. Everything they teach is based on sentimentalism and wishful thinking: Idealism.
It's an ideology of pastoral idealism at best. They reel you in with grand promises of the "all powerful" name of god and then 40 years later devotees are sitting in lectures asking why their senses and mind are still agitated. Nothing they say can be take as undisputed fact. Nothing. They promote vegetarianism not for the welfare of animals, but simply because their blue god is said to like cattle, specifically, more than say, goats, pigs and Lamas.
Their claim that if you follow some 4 regulative principles and chant 16 rounds that your mind and senses will become purified and you will realize your true "identity" is false. It has and does not happen for anyone, ever.
Some devotees like Butler try to describe the true "identity" as some small abstract "soul" living randomly in the heart or whatever. Everyone imagines some "super-soul" sitting in their heart next to the "real you". Other more daring devotees like bhaktivinode describe the true "identity" as your eternal "manjari" form. All this talk about "not being the body" and "we are all equal" and yet I have seen fewer cults that emphasis differences and hiearchy in dress codes, mens superiority over women, social roles (varnashram) and other obviously "body-centric" hierarchies. Talk about cognitive dissonance. The average devotee nowadays is glued to social media and feels they are doing "seva" by giving a "like" on a picture of some statue or abstract naive words of some guru.
Have you guys read any of the posted articles I have put here written by Bhaktisiddhanta and other verses and purports I posted from Bhaktivedanta and Bhaktivinode? Total hogwash. None of it has any value, functional, tangible or otherwise let alone make any cohesive sense. Blabberings of religious sentimentalists bordering on psychosis. Complete loss of connection with reality. Afraid of being in the same room with their mother and sister because they fear getting sexually aroused. WTF?! If the so-called stalwart and "advanced" devotee (nitya siddha) is afraid of getting influenced by the "maya" energy in such a base, low way, what actual purifying power does this path have?
You would be hard-pressed to find any consistent scriptural support for even a fraction of their beliefs. Maha mantra? Mentioned in one questionable vaishnava text composed in recent times (traceable to 500 years ago roughly—coinsedence?). Not ancient by a long shot. Any other text that hint at it are heavily interpolated or, you guessed it, recent vaishnava texts. Even their own major scriptures barely mention the mantra. And as I have said, all hinud cults have their "maha mantras" backed by their assorted sciptures only taken seriously by their own cults. Jains, Shaivaits, Sri Sampradhaya, etc etc.
Same for the so-called long unbroken chain. Not so. The so-called 5000 years old line we always hear about the age of the vedic and post vedic texts. Try 1000-3000 years MAX. None have been shown to be older. We have more clear proof of dinosaurs and distant planets than we do of the compositional date of any so-called vedic vaishnava text.
The evolution and popularity of the krishna god and eventual radha worship are all very recent in the world of "vedic" ideas. Vishnu is hardly even mentioned in the Rig veda and subsequent vedas simply show a social evolution of theistic ideas adding a god here, a god there, and promoting and demoting other gods as they had less popularity over time.
Wake up people. No need to confuse your brain about what to do. Live you life. Be a good person. Eat well, exercise and avoid pain as much as possible. This is what "life" has always been about and will always be about. Organisms trying to survive. If you have some great insight along the way, keep it to yourself. It's likely nothing anyone else can relate to in any authentic way anyway. We are all alone in our interpretation of life as we know it. No veda or guru can spell it out for you. Ever. Your access to knowledge and truth is not limitless. You access to love and happiness is not unlimited. If someone tries to sell you that line, run. We know only what is manifesting in front of our nose. The past is gone, the future is not here yet. Any attempt to imagine a future world, souls, gods, mystic experience is futile. Completely based on unreality. One foot in front of the other. As it has been, so shall it be. Even the rig veda creation verse admits:
Whence all creation had its origin,
the creator, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
the creator, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows — or maybe even he does not know.If that is the case, what is the use to even contemplating so-called "higher" subject matter? If the so-called epitome of earthly knowledge, the Veda, admits that it can never be known. Why spend time on something that cannot be known or may not even be the reality?
Is it not more rationally probably (stay with me here folks), that the origin of vedic hinduism, its eventual evolution in to hindu vaishnaisim, and the resulting hare krishna mumbo jumbo, is all a load of bullshit? Shrouded in pointless rituals, mantras, gods, gurus, saints and myths? Like every other faith on the planet?
Here is a fun video of your crazy-ass, male-centric, "imagine yourself as a 12 year old majari cowheard girl" cult in 2022 celebrating the birthday of epileptic religious zealot Chaitanya: [
twitter.com]
Fin.
Run amigos.