Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Krishna Consciousness VS: Science

Hridayananda and His Dogs BY: GEORGE A. SMITH

"In contradicting the principles of modern psychology and sociology, which have been proven scientifically beyond any doubt, Srila Prabhupada has exceeded his authority." Hridayananda.

Over thirty years ago, people like Hridayananda and the other 11 Zonals jumped for joy at Srila Prabhupada's disappearance, imagining that they were free at last of his authority over them and the International Society for Krsna Consciousness. Over thirty years later, Srila Prabhupada is still, however, the leader of the Krsna consciousness movement and is still telling them what to do through his books. You cannot imagine their frustration.

Over thirty years ago they forgot the most important thing, vani and vapu. That before you can kill a great man, you must first kill his name. So over thirty years later they are still trying to get rid of him, still trying to get rid of him by editing him out of his own books. They are still trying to kill his name.

In the above noted excerpt from one of Hridayananda's lectures we see a continuation of this effort to remove Srila Prabhupada by calling into question his education, by claiming that he was ignorant, by implying that Srila Prabhupada simply did not know what he was talking about in his books but that he went on talking anyway, the characteristic of the worst type of ignorance.

Hridayananda always imagines himself to be very clever, very intelligent, and he thinks that he has figured out the perfect solution to ISKCON's dilemma, that solution being to divide Srila Prabhupada -- to make on the one hand a Srila Prabhupada who, when he speaks on Krsna, is always accurate, and another Srila Prabhupada who is just a normal man, one who speaks out of ignorance and makes many claims when in all actuality he simply does not know what he is talking about. 

By doing this, both Hridayananda and ISKCON can go through Srila Prabhupada's books with a pen knife and cut him out every time the country bumpkin opens his mouth. They only have to retain Srila Prabhupada's claims in regards to Sri Krsna. Unfortunately for Hridayananda, this clever little trick will not work because:

"I didn't write these books, Krsna wrote these books."

According to Hridayananda's logic, statements made by Srila Prabhupada about Sri Krsna are supreme authority and beyond question. Statements made by him that conflict with the principles of modern day science and psychology can, however, be dismissed as simply being the errors of an old man who was poorly educated, the product of his conditioning, and who simply did not know what he was talking about in respect to modern day science.

The problem for Hridayananda and for all of ISKCON that has adapted this tactic is that if Srila Prabhupada's statements concerning Krsna are supremely authoritative and beyond question, as they maintain, then this statement and many others similar to it must be accepted as being absolutely true. Krsna, not Srila Prabhupada, is the author of the books that they are tearing the pages out of to replace with their own scribbling.

The disciple encountering such statements by Srila Prabhupada as this one, where he claims that Krsna is the author of his books, has of course the same choices as Hridayananda and his new found friends, the disciples of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, the modern day psychologists have when they encounter them.

He can accept them as literal and then choose whether to accept them as being true or being untrue based upon his own beliefs, prejudices, or position of knowledge, real or imagined; he can simply skip over them, deferring judgment to some later date when he feels more comfortable, more informed; or he can choose to interpret such statements.

Such a statement as this one, for example may be interpreted as being hyperbole or some other sort of poetic manner of speech. Rameswara, however, did this once. He tried to explain what Srila Prabhupada actually meant when he claimed that he saw Krsna to some guests. He did this while Srila Prabhupada happened to be in the same room. Srila Prabhupada overheard him and immediately corrected him in front of the guests, telling them "No, I see Krsna." Telling him, telling them, telling us and telling Hridayananda's new found friends, the modern day scientific psychologists, that Srila Prabhupada sees God and that God is even controlling him, moving his hand to write his books, moving his feet, making him dance.

Clearly, interpreting Srila Prabhupada's claims regarding Lord Krsna to be other than literal is not an option. Therefore one can only accept that he was lying or speaking the truth as he was experiencing it when he said that he was seeing God, that God was writing his books, moving his feet, making him dance.

Hridayananda's new found friends, the authorities that he brings in to the movement now to take away Srila Prabhupada's authority over us (and over him) do not, however, have the same options as we do. They can only accept that Srila Prabhupada was either lying or that he was mad.

Modern day psychology, unaware of or despising of its humble origins and predicated philosophically upon a world view which accepts Locke's assertion that God is unknowable by definition, can only accept Srila Prabhupada's claim to be true from the viewpoint that while yes, he may have been experiencing some vision of Krsna, that the cause of that vision was only in his head.

In regards to the science of psychology and its principle object of study, the human brain, Dr. Carl Sagan several years ago very elegantly stated the fundamentalist materialist position for popular audiences in his book, Dragons of Eden. This position, which is generally accepted as having been proven scientifically, beyond any doubt by all psychologists, is that the brain can be understood entirely in terms of molecular chemistry. 

Thus they can accept that while yes, Srila Prabhupada may have been experiencing something that made him think that he was seeing God, throughout the centuries men (and women) have been experiencing things which they experienced as being visitations from God, Angels or Aliens, but according to Hridayananda's new found friends, these topmost authorities of Science and Psychology, all of these various persons, Jesus, Mohamed, Srila Prabhupada were simply hallucinating. And if their hallucinations were directing them, writing their books, moving their feet, making them dance, in the eyes of Hridayananda's new found friends that he brings in to help us "understand" Jesus, Mohamed, Srila Prabhupada, Lord Chaitanya too, all of them were psychotic.

People in general, not just the devotees, find themselves to be intimidated when people come in talking science. As products of our conditioning, we in the West have been taught to revere science, and not God as the ultimate authority. Thus when science speaks there is no appeal to its conclusions. In addition to this most people do not have the benefit as Hridayananda has had of being able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go away to school and get such a big, big education and thus they are afraid of appearing ignorant or stupid, of being mocked and ridiculed if they open their mouths to object to the assertions being made by such men as Hridayananda and his new found friends. And in cases where people have actually, or think that they have actually experienced some experience of the divine they are generally afraid to open their mouths to tell about their experiences for fear of being labeled as crazy.

Both ISKCON and Hridayananda have long been demonizing devotees in order to misappropriate their service, etc., or to get rid of them, but there was one devotee that they could not employ this tactic against. That devotee was, of course, Srila Prabhupada, who they would have immediately been themselves thrown out of the movement by had they tried to employ this tactic against him. Thus they had to find some other way to remove Srila Prabhupada, since such things as mere death seemed inadequate to remove him.

Nowhere within the entire content of Gaudiya Vaisnavism or within the whole of Vedic literature could they find anything that was adequate to their destined aim of reducing Srila Prabhupada's authority over them. They had to find some other way to remove him. They had to think. "What do the people revere above even God?" Slowly the answer dawned in their primitive cerebral cortexes. Science. And so it was decided that they would send the best of them, their best minds, back to their roots, back to the places that they had gone away from, back into the Demonic civilization of the West to learn from its pundits the one discipline which they could use to reduce Srila Prabhupada to the status of simply a mascot, removing him completely from his status as the supreme authority over the devotees: Science.

But let us examine this science Hridayananda has brought back to us, the vision of modern day psychology that Hridayananda claims that Srila Prabhupada was so ignorant of. How unassailable actually is it, how founded upon scientifically proven things? Let us look at this megalithic structure that Hridayananda presents to us that he thinks that we poor primitives can only scratch our heads at as we wait for him to throw us a bone and let us see just how ignorant Srila Prabhupada really was of it, as Hridayananda claims of him to be. Let us look first at its origins, which we can infer from Hridayananda's presentation are completely free of anything that might even resemble the things that Hridayananda sneers at so contemptuously, the magical view of reality.

"Spare sent a copy of The Book of Pleasure to Sigmund Freud who described it as one of the most significant revelations of subconscious mechanisms that had appeared in modern times." Kenneth Grant, O.T.O.

While Kenneth Grant isn't exactly himself someone who is considered to be a scientist by the scientific establishment, Jack Parsons, the founder of J.P.L., (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and one of his peers and co-workers in the hermetic discipline that he follows certainly is, and Grant himself is nonetheless someone who is well enough acquainted with the person that he is speaking about to have written several books about him. What we can be sure of is that Spare was given quite a recommendation from the father of modern day psychology. Freud was considering Spare to be the most significant revelationist of subconscious mechanisms appearing in modern times and was furthermore being educated by Spare and familiarized with his most significant contributions to modern day psychology. But who was this person Spare, and more importantly, what was he, what were his credentials, what type of scientist was he?

"Although Spare had no specific teacher where his art was concerned, he did have a teacher – or perhaps guru would be a more appropriate term – in a "magical" sense. During his most impressionable years circumstances led him into the company of a self-confessed witch, a mysterious Mrs. Paterson who befriended him and initiated him into the mysteries of her craft. He was extremely reticent about Mrs Paterson. All that I was able to elicit from him during the eight years of friendship was that she was very old when he met her and that she claimed descent from a line of Salem (New England) witches that Cotton Mather had failed to eradicate."
Kenneth Grant

Spare wasn't a scientist at all. This person that the founder of modern day psychology Sigmund Freud appreciated as being of the greatest value to modern day science and psychology was, in fact, a Witch.

There are very few Psychologists who are aware of Freud's connection to Spare, with the influence of Salem Witchcraft and the Jewish mystical tradition upon the founder of modern day science of psychology. This was generally not presented in the history section, so Hridayananda's lack of familiarity with it can perhaps be forgiven. The co-founder of modern day scientific psychology, Carl Jung's penchant for using astrology on the other hand is notorious, and was definitely included in the historical presentation, usually accompanied with a sneer or a snigger from whichever low brow college professor just happened to be teaching the class.

"While studying astrology I have applied it to concrete cases many times..."

Witches and Astrologers.

Lions and tigers and bears. Oh My!"

That Hridayananda shares this attitude of contempt and general ignorance towards the foundations of the citadel of the modern science of psychology is evidenced by the following:

"…before this the Europeans lived in a world that was basically permeated by hobgoblins and spirits and evil beings (witches) and trolls under bridges and is was really sort of like this fairy tale world full of superstition full of irrational fears and so on and so forth…something like certain sectors of ISKCON do."
Hridayananda, July 10th, 2007 Dallas, Texas

"Certain sectors of IKSCON…" Hmm, whichever might he mean?

Lets see, Hridayananda doesn't believe in Witches, probably not in astrology either, as it has also been proven to be beyond any doubt unscientific by his new found friends, so which sector of ISKCON is so out of touch with reality that they continue to believe in all of these ridiculous things (at least ridiculous by Hridayananda's estimate and by the estimate of his new found friends)"

Wait a minute. Srila Prabhupada believed in Witches, didn't he? And Lord Krsna, He believed in them too. Why, it is even claimed in the Bhagavatam and Krsna Book that Lord Krsna even killed a particularly mean and nasty Witch: Putana, that bitch.

So then obviously the sector of ISKCON that Hridayananda is referring to so derisively and contemptuously is the sector of ISKCON that Srila Prabhupada, Srimad Bhagavatam, and Lord Krsna and I are in, and not the sector of ISKCON that Hridayananda belongs to.

Whew! What a relief, he had me scared for a moment, fearing that I might be in the sector that Hridayananda is in.

So this modern day science of Psychology that Hridayananda brings to us is actually beholding to Witchcraft, magick, such things as Hridayananda is so obviously contemptuous of and we are to assume that Hridayananda knows what he is talking about, or that they do, the modern day psychologists who are just as ignorant for the main (there are some exceptions) as he is of the foundations of their faith and the elements that contributed to its development and are still contributing to it.

During and around the middle of the 20th century some clinical experiments were conducted using a derivative of a fungus extract that is now, by many, considered to be responsible for the Salem Witch craze. The Fungus was ergot which grows on Rye, one of the grains that was a staple of Colonial America and the derivative was a drug abbreviated as LSD. The purpose of these experiments was to determine whether or not this drug could be used to do what psychology had been as yet unable to do, which was to provide liberation to those persons who were suffering from the effects of an imprint, or, I think you refer to them as samskaras, or impressions. The drug had been clinically proven to be able to break an imprint.

During the course of these experiments there was an unexpected development. The subjects of the experiments were hallucinating about past lives. People who were not French, who didn't speak French, who had never been to France were recounting past life experiences of being in France and singing songs, in French. People who had never learned how to play the piano were hallucinating that in a previous lifetime they had been Mozart and playing Mozart on the piano. The experiments were shut down and all further research banned and criminalized. It is illegal today in every country in the world.

One of the questions that came up during the course of this was, "How many imprints does a person have?" Prior to these experiments psychology thought that it was only dealing with the imprints or impressions that each individual had acquired in this single life, because by now it had completely forgotten Freud's consideration of Spare and had never investigated him. Had they, they would have encountered what Freud deemed to be so remarkable in Spares works -- a technique of magical invocation by which these past lives and their powers could be accessed. In the experiments with LSD, science had come up with something that called into question its established facts, that suggested that it, as it was, really had no idea of what it was talking about, that suggested that rather than being the affair of a lifetime, that the living entity is part of a continuum in which he exists eternally, going from body to body, life to life, and bringing with him the spirits of the dead and whatever was associated with them.

Even had science accepted this suggestion, the futility of attempting to use the drug LSD as a means to award liberation would have become apparent, for one was probably dealing with millions of imprints or impressions, not just the ones that had been gathered during the early moments of this one single lifetime. LSD might be useful to a limited degree but this most powerful drug that they'd ever come up with was, in reality, little more than a band-aide, to really give liberation you needed something hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than LSD. You needed Krsna Consciousness. You need the Maha mantra, Hare Krsna Hare Krsna Krsna Krsna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare. That is actually the conclusion of modern day scientific psychology, just most of them are not aware of it yet. Srila Prabhupada was, however, familiar with this conclusion.

Hridayananda and ISKCON have brought to us a Science in denial, a science that is in the employ of an establishment that views all life as soulless and in terms of dollars and cents, a science which is neither objective or curious and which only serves the status quo, the demonic and atheistic civilization that is its master. Hridayananda in his eternal lust for sense gratification has brought us this dog of the atheists to tear away at our faith in Srila Prabhupada.

Dog has brought us dog, one person acting in animal consciousness has brought us others acting in animal consciousness upon the theory that even the greatest lion, by enough jackals, can be dragged down.

I am not a big, big devotee like Hridayananda. I am, in fact, nothing and no one, just something very much like a mean old junkyard dog that Srila Prabhupada was so kind to and on account of that kindness, loves him as much as a creature like me can possibly love.

Dog against dogs, then. You will not drag Srila Prabhupada down as long as I stand.

All glories to Srila Prabhupada
Hare Krsna
George A. Smith


  1. Excellent article. Hrdayananda, from what I heard, said he was retiring to work on a secret plan that would be the greatest contribution to Krsna Consciousness since Srila Prabhupada! Unfortunately nothing came of it. He doesn't seem to do much of anything. At least that is better than what he used to do, which was go around delivering lectures trying to prove how superior his intelligence was to everyone else's. He finally got that karma back when he was faced by a hoard of devotees who now, since he has lost his power as one of the original 11 band of merry gurus, fearlessly direct their questions to him after class, and in his words, "Stump the guru".

    If only HIS words were being directly spoken to him by Lord Krishna then maybe he could answer some of the questions that were being proposed to him. Srila Prabhupada's words were being dictated to him he said when he wrote the Bhagavatam. And never was there a time when he was not Krishna Conscious. From what I have heard Hrdayananda wished he could write the Bhagavatam like Srila Prabhupada did, and we heard as well he was not Krishna Conscious when he was in heat over a female devotee that was around.

  2. HARE KRSNA---Very nice article,very well written.After reading it I would like to say that "I think Hridayananda has exceeded his authority." ALL GLORIES TO HIS DIVINE GRACE A.C.BHAKTIVEDANTA SWAMI PRABHUPADA!

  3. Very good article.
    Death is approaching and the Beverly Hill mansions, Karmi education and millions of stolen dollars cant protect him. With every breath the serpent Kala draws closer ready to bite...what a blunder the pride of a puffed up fool thinking himself intelligent. What apparadha for a lusty dog to place himself on the Vyanasana, excepting worship meant for the Lords Pure and Dear most Devotee. Lord have mercy on his soul his future is surly dark.

  4. Back in the days of the notorious "11", the 11 had the privilege of using the word "Prabhupada" whilst the rest of us had to use the term "Srila Prabhupada". This was to show their higher position. One day Hrdayananda gave class and sometimes, if he spoke provacatively or on a topic that might bring up challenges he would simply speak 'till the end of class so no questions could be asked or else he would cut the class short, thus giving no one the opportunity to question him, if they even dared. He had the reputation that if you ever dared to leave during the middle of his classes he would point you out and ridicule you, and what could you do having less of a position than he did? So on this day one of his Godbrothers posed a question by starting out, "Prabhupada said" and immediately Hrdayananda cut him off by shouting, "That's SHREEEELA Prabhupada, for you!" even though he hadn't used the term Shreela in a coon's age.

    His name is on the rest of the Bhagavatam that was translated after Shreela Prabhupada left as the author, but everybody knows it was done by Gopiparanadhana Prabhu and Dravida Dasa. He just came along and tried to make himself look clever. All he ended up was making himself look stupid. This I heard from a Senior Prabhupada Disciple. By the way, an actual senior devotee should be situated beyond the stage of kanistha one would think by now, so how many actual Senior Prabhupada disciples are there? According to Pada, there are none.

