Back To Prabhupada, Issue 71, Vol 4, 2021
One technique employed by ISKCON's leaders to cover up the fact that they have filled ISKCON with unauthorised fraudster gurus, is to try to dumb down the standard required for being a diksa guru. All emphases added.
We quoted in our BTP 68 article "Becoming Guru in ISKCON" that GBC member Anuttama Dasa ("AD") teaches that a bona fide diksa guru could even technically be an "idiot". AD further states in an interview dated 5/9/21:
"We realised about ten years ago, ‘hey, these wonderful Vaisnavas are coming forward to become diksa gurus and siksa gurus for future disciples, what are we doing to train them? Do they have a chance to survive? We know that a lot of gurus in ISKCON also they get overwhelmed with the pressure, they get overwhelmed with the temptations of that position, they get overwhelmed with, you know, inability to understand how to counsel devotees with particular problems, marriage problems, emotional problems, psychological problems"
Thus, AD states that the GBC's "good as God" gurus are completely fallible, because they get "overwhelmed" by "temptations" and other pressures caused by having disciples. However, Srila Prabhupada specifically addresses such gurus who get overwhelmed or carried away by having disciples, and states regarding such gurus that:
"if a spiritual master is not properly authorized, and only on his own initiative becomes a spiritual master, he may be carried away by an accumulation of wealth and large numbers of disciples."
(The Nectar of Devotion, Ch. 14)
Thus, this proves that:
1) Such "overwhelmed" GBC gurus were not properly authorised. And they were "authorised" to be guru by the GBC.
2) Since all GBC gurus are authorised in the same way via the GBC, then all such GBC authorised gurus are not "properly authorized", regardless of whether or not they end up being similarly "carried away".
"you read in the book the guru's as good as God, without training you start thinking ‘my guru's as good as God, full stop'. You don't understand that this is the culture of how to respect a guru because he, or in the case of siksa gurus, maybe someday diksa gurus, he or she is representing God, I treat them with respect"
Srila Prabhupada taught in his books that treating a bona fide guru "as good as God" is more than just a "culture" of treating "with respect". The bona fide diksa guru is actually qualified to be treated as good as God because he is a pure devotee and liberated:
"The bona fide representative of God is as good as God Himself. [...] a sinful man can very easily approach a pure devotee of the Lord. And if one agrees to put himself under the guidance of such a devotee of the Lord, he can also understand the science of God and can also become like the transcendental pure devotee of the Lord and thus get his liberation back to Godhead"
(SB, 2.7.46, purport)
Srila Prabhupada taught that we should not worship a person as good as God if they are not actually on that level:
"Although Prthu Maharaja was factually an incarnation of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, he nonetheless rejected those praises because the qualities of the Supreme Person were not yet manifest in him. He wanted to stress that one who does not actually possess these qualities should not try to engage his followers and devotees in offering him glory for them"
(SB, 4.15.23, purport)
In the first section, AD admitted that the GBC-concocted guru system is creating a huge problem, with "a lot" of gurus in ISKCON getting "overwhelmed". But, unfortunately, the "training" AD claims will solve this only worsens things by teaching how people must accept the GBC's unauthorised gurus ‘as good as God' regardless of their actual position. Whereas allowing people to accept the actual diksa guru – the Founder-Acarya of ISKCON, Srila Prabhupada, who is on the level of being ‘as good as God' – would actually solve the problem.
Regarding a disciple who has supposedly been ordered by his spiritual master to become a diksa guru, GBC voted-in guru HH Sivarama Swami ("SRS") states:
"if it becomes the order of the spiritual master for whatever purpose, then the devotee has the empowerment to do that. Empowerment doesn't necessarily mean that someone's going to be in the right consciousness [...] Prabhupada in the beginning gave 11 devotees the order to be guru.* Obviously, it didn't automatically mean that by giving the order that they were going to become Krsna conscious. [...] you can go this way, you can go that way. That's always the case."
(SRS Podcast Conversation, 2/11/21)
Thus, further emphasising the "dumbing down" of GBC gurus, SRS amazingly claims that it is standard for a person "empowered" to be a diksa guru to not necessarily even go on to "become Krsna conscious", never mind at least be Krsna conscious at the time they were ordered to be diksa gurus! And that Srila Prabhupada supposedly ordered 11 such maybe non-Krsna conscious diksa gurus, rather than the liberated pure devotees as required (see quote above). But those who are "empowered" will always actually be empowered:
"Narada Muni, Haridasa Thakura and similar acaryas especially empowered to broadcast the glories of the Lord cannot be brought down to the material
platform."
(SB, 7.7.14, purport)
* SRS again repeats the false, discredited claim that 11 devotees who were ordered by Srila Prabhupada to be rtviks were instead actually ordered to be successor diksa gurus. We disproved this false claim in the last issue in the article "Verifying the Guru Claim".
The bar for what constitutes a diksa guru in ISKCON has deliberately been lowered to be so low in order to justify any nonsense they may do. But we do not need to accept the GBC's dumbed-down, fake, unauthorised gurus who merely pretend to be "as good as God" for worship and prestige, when we can accept the real, actual "as good as God" diksa guru, Srila Prabhupada, instead!
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