Dear Anuttama dasa(Iskcon communications minister)
Pranams
All glories to Srila Prabhupada
Recently I received news that iskcon is now holding and giving guru seminar classes for its “gurus”. Just when I thought it could not get any worse, and now this new bit of more bad news and concocted philosophy from the GBC of Iskcon.
Anybody who has read Srila Prabhupadas books even at a cursory level, will understand that he tells us and shows us from the sastra (scriptures) that a bona fide spiritual master is no less than a liberated soul and has been deputed by the Supreme Lord to take disciples.
What does it take to be a liberated soul? That is explained in the scriptures as one who is free from the four defects-imperfect senses, illusions, making mistakes and the propensity to cheat.
So unless one possesses these basic four items, he cannot be a liberated soul, which means he cannot give perfect knowledge, nor can he even save himself, what to speak of others. And then to give diksa-initiation as a spiritual master, one must also be a pure devotee of the Lord on top of that, which Krsna tells us in His Bhagavad Gita is very very rare to find such a mahatma.
BG 7.14 purport....Another meaning of guṇa is rope; it is to be understood that the conditioned soul is tightly tied by the ropes of illusion. A man bound by the hands and feet cannot free himself-he must be helped by a person who is unbound. Because the bound cannot help the bound, the rescuer must be liberated. Therefore, only Lord Kṛṣṇa, or His bona fide representative the spiritual master, can release the conditioned soul. Without such superior help, one cannot be freed from the bondage of material nature.
And yet in iskcon it has now become their common practice to even arrogantly admit it is not they who are releasing/liberating their so called disciples from birth and death but it is Srila Prabhupada himself.
So any reasonably intelligent person would then ask, what do we need these people for if they admit they are not liberated and furthermore and worse still, cannot free their so called disciples from the cycle of birth and death?
Reasonable question, right? Not for these people in iskcon who have lost all their intelligence that Prabhupada originally gave to them. Here is how that happened...
SB 4.22 Translation-–When one deviates from his original consciousness, he loses the capacity to remember his previous position or recognize his present one. When remembrance is lost, all knowledge acquired is based on a false foundation. When this occurs, learned scholars consider that the soul is lost.
This verse from Srimad Bhagavatam clearly gives us the answer why people concoct the original philosophy of Krsna Consciousness as given by Srila Prabhupada in his original books. It is because they have deviated in so many ways from the original consciousness and siddhanta as given by Prabhupada. Before Prabhupada came, very very few in the world had a clue as to what was religion, what was liberation, and more importantly who was a bona fide guru. Then Prabhupadas books came out, and we could then understand who was Krsna and what was all the rest—better know as illusion or Maya.
So now getting to the good part- here is what Anuttama das the director of Communications in Iskcon says about his guru seminars.