This thread is intended for those who wish to bolster the fact that they have left the mentioned communities and their offshoots. It can also be used by those seeking to educate themselves on the abuse that happened and is potentially still happening right up until today.. whichever date it may now be for you, the reader.

Anybody can feel free to share relevant materials here, though be sure that it is not intended for the advertising of any joining, or for those who wish to remain pious - I respect that one must not mix with those of lesser class, I would most surely come into the lesser classes tier if you are still practicing, for your own awareness.

Some of the materials will contain disturbing accounts of abuse, all types - physical, verbal, emotional, sexual, psychological and any other method not mentioned here, including the lack of protection of minors, and the whole protection of abusers.

Please feel free in adding your own materials, accounts, and those that you know of that you find helpful.

Accounts by leavers:

The hare krisna thing

An account detailing various racial and homophobic material via the Hare Krishna thing:

[harekrishnathing.com]

YouTube documentary

The Cost of Silence

Personal account by Daniel Lutz

My Karma My Fault

Documentary YouTube:

Faith Fear and the Children of Krsna

- an interesting note in the comments section states that all has been done to clean up sexual abuse within krisna consciousness, where a reply three weeks prior to the date of this forum post states that a known sexual abuser still is working with children today.

Misogyny article from the UK newspaper:

[www.theguardian.com]



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2021 01:58AM by facet.

FARRELL v. WOODHAM, (M.D.Fla. 2002)

(The same Carl Woodham AKA Kalakantha Das speaking on misogyny in the 2019 UK Guardian article above).

[www.casemine.com]

Can you share Krishna?

Krishna alone has been around well before the man made conceptions of Hare Krisna, Krsna Consciousness, ISKON groups, which are actually very far from the day of Krsna, before Christ.

Krishna is shared across Buddhism, Jainism, and was even a source of focus for well known occultist, Aleister Crowley.

Quote
Krishna was canonised by Aleister Crowley and is recognised as a saint of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica in the Gnostic Mass of Ordo Templi Orientis.

Quote via Wikipedia

I know that many people consider this to be mythology.
However Krishna supposedly appeared on this planet 5000 years ago. He is an avatar of lord Vishnu.
He has always existed and is unborn. I know it is all quite far out but I am just repeating what I have learned. It is not like he just appeared out of the blue thousands of years before Christ.
This is when he had the conversation with Arjuna on the battlefield. So we have the Bhagavad Gita. The song of God.
They have a holy Trinity made of Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva.
I don’t think that Iskcon has an exclusivity on Krishna. otherwise they would be at war with the whole population of India.
Krishna is very beloved in India and everybody knows about his past times. Most of those people are Hindus therefore they worship many demigods for material benefits.
Krishna was even mentioned in the X-Men the apocalypse movie. They made the chatacter blue.
Another avatar descended close to 500 years ago.
His name was lord Chaitanya Maha Prabhu. also known as the golden avatar.
We are now in the age of iron a.k.a. Kaliyuga.
It is the age of chaos and quarrel. spiritual practice such as silent meditation and other austerities are more difficult than the previous ages.
Lord Chaitanya appeared in order to establish the congregational chanting of the chanting of Krishna’s names.
It is considered to be the easiest method for this age.
The process that Bhaktivedanta Swami presented to the West is not man made.
It is a process that has been handed down from one spiritual master to next in an unbroken chain of disciplic succession going way back.
Nobody has to be part of Iskcon in order to chant the Mantras or worship Krishna.
Bhaktivedanta was asked by his spiritual teacher to bring the process to the West to help people.
And the rest is history. When the founder left this planet, it all went South.
I usually don’t like to jump on other people’s posts to contradict them.
However this is an extremely simplified and not correct description of what Krishna consciousness is.
As I said it, it does not matter if a person thinks it is mythology.
This is a personal choice.
My explanation is also very incomplete and condensed.
I believe that as an ex student I may have a better understanding.
The intention of bringing this process to the west was to help people. It was not meant to turn into such a mess.
People can hate religion as much as they want and we all have the right to do so.
There are souls that are attracted to following a process.
Worshiping Krishna is not much different than worshiping Allah or Jehovah...
The only difference is that you’re dealing with a person and not an impersonal form.
There are also many versions of the Bhagavad-Gita including the one that Paramahamsa wrote. as you can see, even the scripture is not exclusive to the
International society for Krishna Consciousness.
The process itself is not dangerous. It has a lot of good values to offer.
Many people got off drugs, alcohol and other destructive habits by entering into this process.
It also usually helps a person to cleanse their hearts and become better people.
One cannot blame the process for the pedophile or abusive gurus as well as some nasty Devotees.
It does not really matter if scriptures are accurate or not if God as we have been presented is real or not.
Spiritual practices usually help people elevate their consciousness and every soul will be attracted to a certain process according to their journey.
This place has definitely many different philosophies and practices to offer.
It is like a Costco for spirituality.
Can people blame Christ for the action of those who killed so many in the name of Christianity?
At the end of the day even if you have the most perfect scripture, process, you cannot have only perfect people.
After the passing of the founder, the fake gurus really brought the movement into the gutter.
I don’t think that the founder could imagine such an outcome.
I say it is completely fine to have an aversion toward this process as well as the organization.
We must present the facts correctly.
I am sorry again if I intervened but this explanation is not something that I could just ignore.
Because I always do my best not to spread misinformation.
I am also very careful not to be misinformed.
Gaudiya Vaishnavism is a very vast subject.
I myself know nothing.
Iskcon did not invent this process. Iskcon is a name Bhaktivedanta gave to his organization in the West.
He was a spiritial teacher in the line going back to Krishna himself.
He was just passing down the information as he was supposed to do so.

Quote
I believe that as an ex student I may have a better understanding.

This is true, but it is for you.

I have read about the mythology of Krishna, but I don’t look too much into it. What people believe is entirely free and up to the person it is no business of mine.

The system presented by the groups is man made, apparently given by divine intervention, it is understood that people went with it because it was the best as far as their belief system was concerned, and trust in the deity.

The part that is manmade is the systems presented, the ones that absolutely failed (and still fail) adults and children.

Separation of parent from child is not easy feat with healthy bonding attachments.

Anyone who wants to separate child from parent or caregiver is someone to run from in my book :D Run fast.

Religion is often handed through generation to generation you are correct, though some social scientists recognise that today is becoming more secular, religion is not being passed down as much or even with much fervour (in the west at least).

A system permitted only to have male to female intercourse for the purpose of making a wave of children that would adhere to the groups alone, it is creepy. It comes to me like a misuse of humanity, but this should never be mixed with Krishna alone.

Do I have problem with beliefs in any deities?.. no, I myself still have the shiva screensaver. There are groups around in more than one country that believe that the all of the deities are planted disempowering symbols that are actually alien weaponry (heeehee, what?) I can assure this is not my stance either.

Groups who try to turn people from their own healthy beliefs in their culture get no green lights from me. It is disgusting to witness.

The manmade groupings aka cults are the source of disillusionment and pain for many. That is the point.

Thank you for taking the time to post some Krishna history, it is lovely to read Im sure others will find so too.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2021 05:06PM by facet.

[youtu.be]

Why there is No Way Back for Religion in the West explains a little bit about how religion and it’s practices are handed from generation to generation, that is how it works.

Abusive groups such as these and the rest attempted to do the same by creating a specific wave of children, allowed to be bred through intercourse because they will be immediate adherents and carry on the groups strict agenda.

The system speaks for itself in what it was trying to achieve.. purity from those who did not share the same way of life as the cult.

It gets close to those models of people in history who believed in the cleansing and segregation of inferior people and races, with the caste system needing no introduction from me.

Worshipping Krishna can happen outside of such groups in ones on personal life alone, as a deep connection without a big “trendy” ( not that it is anymore) group to bolster it.. they do not need it because their faith is trusted. These are the type of people who very correctly in the world, immediately mistrust abusers.

I would not ever trust any person or group with a history of sexual abuse with the responsibility of a child or young person.

Asking, and even expecting people to do so is insanity. To be asked to change personal trust over like this is a violation of personal boundaries, and can only be seen as a predatory venture of self interest.

Facet, I personally am at a very different place now. I have gone way too deep into everything and sometimes talking about all the things I do in here is boring to me.
I do it only because I want to shed light on the spiritual traps, the abuse....
It will help whoever it is supposed to.
When I look at my own journey, I see that the soul’s evolution is like an Avalanche that noone can stop.
I am not sure how I was thrown into much deeper and fringe material. How I become a dot connector...
It is truly like Alice in Wonderland thrown down the rabbit hole. Even though I decided to enter the hole, I still don’t get how it all happened.
I trust that there is much I will never understand and one of them is the soul’s unique trajectory.
Not every single person will realize that they are in a Truman Show and try to escape the show like Truman did. There is much security to be found in the fabricated reality. Many people feel safe in those strict group regimen, strict rules...
I have realized that some humans love to turn pretty much everything into a cult and a religion.
It is not just about the well-established religions.
we can have our own opinions about everything and anything.
What is important is how a person feels on their own path. I know that many people find happiness in what we may see as a prison.
Being in a cultish setting is like being in a marriage. For better or for worse.
People compromise a lot in order to stay in a setting that offers both positives and negatives. Most marriages are not perfect and yet not everybody is getting a divorce.

[m.youtube.com]

Henr Jolicoeur exposes cults.

Quote
Even though I decided to enter the hole, I still don’t get how it all happened.

.. and I agree, we cannot know everything, though with many experiences of life the penny will drop where and when it needs to.

For anybody interested in realisation of dynamics, here are some clips from YouTube.

“How music works, what happens to your brain when you sing”:

[youtu.be]

“How singing together changes the brain”:

[youtu.be]

There are many more clips about this subject that can be found, these are just a few.

If anyone knows more about what happens with brain chemistry and singing, especially toward a crowd, it is the musicians and lyricists who do so.. the stage performers. They are beautiful creative people, offering solace, comfort, enjoyment and more - the following should not be taken as a statement to say otherwise: they offer a fine example of how fanaticism can be achieved.

Chanting is a form of singing, and as the saying goes “you can have too much of anything”, I think it is quite apt to mention it here.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2021 04:20PM by facet.

Most cults offer a space that provides a place to feel superior over others, Krishna Consciousness provides such a space most obviously by separating meat eaters as “karmies”, this is just one example.

One is superior, the other is inferior - yes there is another, please discount any notion of oneness in this explanation.

Spotting superiority complex is easy when reading a little bit about it.

One of the tell tale signs not mentioned in many places, is that such a person, or scheme, will not take kindly to being stood up to or receiving similar treatment, they react badly and make it their lifelong mission to attempt to eject the person from their surroundings via grudge holding, cheap shots, and maltreatment. The threat to the existence of their complex is too great to accept in what would be an otherwise peaceful unity.

In Krishna Consciousness (and associated groups) terms, this is presented as a rule on non mixing.

Quote
Whether a superiority complex is a way of covering up your own feelings of inferiority or just an unsupported belief that you’re better than other people, having one is not good for your mental health. Having a healthy sense of self-esteem is important.

Superiority complex is inadvertently taught to others through modelling the behaviour and its traits from a place of perceived authority.

In cults and manipulative groups, many of us hand over far more personal authority than is healthy.. and become consumed by a complex we may not notice either in ourselves or others.

The above quote is taken from:

[www.webmd.com]



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2021 05:00PM by facet.