Dear Devotees,

Please accept my most humble obeisances. This Vaishnava assembly consists of some very highly qualified devotees, and certainly Bhagavan Prabhu and Bhakta das Prabhu are amongst them. Bhakta das’ comments are very mature and insightful, and I also appreciate much of what Bhagavan has said in his short discussion. It is true you cannot wake a person who is pretending to be asleep, and the argumentative self-righteousness is self-defeating. However, the last paragraph, the short discussion on the guru, troubles me. It reminds me of discussions that I had so many years ago with my former husband Goursundar.

Since I am not really a part of any of the various “camps” of today, either ritvik or non-ritvik, I really don’t claim to know what Krishna has in mind for His movement, other than the absolute certainty that it will go on as predicted by Sri Chaitanya Dev. Just as we could not foresee everything 35 years back, so also we can’t foresee everything now. How it will all unfold is beyond our ability to foresee. I think we should remain open to possibilities, and faithful to our guru.

What concerns me is the great similarity between this perspective on the guru with that of my former husband’s view. With all due respect to Bhagavan Prabhu, who has done much to spread Lord Chaitanya’s movement and who we all know was one of the “chosen eleven”, still I feel uncomfortable with this perspective on the guru. 

My former husband Goursundar was also as charismatic and as brilliant as Bhagavan Prabhu. He wrote books, had a following, devotees adored him as a “pure devotee” long before the days of Iskcon gurus. No doubt if he had stayed around, he would have been one of the “chosen.” Of course, he did not actually take disciples, as Prabhupada was still very present, and he did not misuse his power in many of the ways that later gurus did. But the potential was there.

Fortunately for him, he left the movement some years before Srila Prabhupada left this world, and gave up his GBC and leadership roles. He didn’t want it. It was burdensome to him, and he also foresaw much of what was going to happen. He was a brilliant scholar and a mystic as well. Srila Prabhupada often said “he suffered from the disease of too much intelligence”, the flaw that led to his falldown, “thinking he knows more than his guru.”

What I find troubling here is that the last few sentences of Bhagavan Prabhu’s article sound very much like the philosophy espoused by Goursundar so many years ago. The focus is on the connection with Supersoul in the heart, rather than on the guru; truly this connection does exist, and it sounds really good. But please let me tell you my personal experience with this.

Prabhupada was the only Guru at that time, so it was more about focusing on Supersoul rather than on Prabhupada as a person directly. Not making a guru cult in other words. So because Goursundar was so brilliant, and such an excellent speaker, (and my former husband as well), I became very confused by what he was speaking. I was quite attached to Prabhupada, the person Prabhupada, like a father, a master, my guru, all of the above. So I felt frightened, for my simple love for Prabhupada as the personality he was, felt threatened. I believed my relationship with him was eternal and I did not wish to believe otherwise. Mine was a perspective of utmost simplicity, and since Goursundar was my husband of many years, though estranged at the time (he had recently left Prabhupada, left Iskcon and me as well), I was very susceptible to whatever he spoke. In a sense, he was like a guru to me.

So when Srila Prabhupada came to Hawaii soon after, I went to his quarters at the Honolulu temple and privately asked him about this exact same philosophy. I told him what Goursundar was saying, that we should connect with Supersoul, that the eternal guru was Supersoul, that making a guru with a personality cult was not as it should be, and so forth. It was a very good argument. But Prabhupada’s response shocked me.