u/StayEmbarrassed4593

I’m a very logical and rational type of person.

So, I met two of my friends yesterday — well, not exactly friends, they’re more like brothers. They were talking to each other about how many times they had been chanting God’s name that day and all that. Of course, I wasn’t saying anything.

Then one of them said, “He doesn’t know about any of this, right?” And the other one said, “Yeah, he’s different. He probably won’t understand these things.”

Basically, they were making it sound like I’m missing something because I don’t believe in all this. They were telling me, “You don’t know how much power meditation has,” and all that.

And honestly, I know that meditation can help calm your mind and stuff, but when they start talking about “power” and all that, I just don’t really believe it.

So I asked them, “Okay, then tell me, what are the benefits of chanting God’s name?”

One of them said, “What a stupid question. The question itself is wrong. Do you do everything just for the benefits?”

And of course 😭 I was like, bro, yes? I literally do things because there’s some benefit to them.

Then the other guy said, “Look, if you start doing this, initially it’ll be very difficult. You’ll feel like some negative force is stopping you from doing it, and you’ll feel like quitting. But slowly, you’ll start enjoying it and your mind will get used to it.”

That part honestly sounded really weird to me.

Then he said, “As for the benefits, eventually you’ll forget words like ‘benefit’ and ‘loss.’” 🥀😭

And I was like, “Bro, I don’t want to forget the difference between benefit and loss. What am I supposed to do after forgetting that?” 😭

And then they started comparing me to some uneducated guy and saying, “You talk just like him.”

At that point, I was honestly getting really irritated. 🥲

Greetings. In this post I wish to open the conversation to those familiar with yogic texts, philosophy and practice.

If you are familiar with Yogic traditions and the scriptures of many like Hatha Yoga Pradipika or the Shiva Samhita you will find that there is emphasis on having a guru and that this aspect can not be overlooked in Yogic initiation. It is an absolute necessity within many Indian Traditional Yoga systems.

If you are in the west, you will not find a guru. Simple as that. Although it would be nice and amazing to have a guru to help and oversee the process of pranic and kundalini awakening, such a person with dedicated Yogic wisdom is highly unlikely to be bred here in America.

The reason I am typing this however is that this view of “Needing a Guru” is useless to those practicing in the west yet much Yoga material available to read is geared towards the Westerner to understand. Which makes me believe that many swamis who write these books perhaps desire the Westerner to fly to India to receive the diksha from a Guru to embark on their Yogic journey.

I understand the reasoning behind a guru, however in this day and age if one is on the path of Spiritual Liberation, it is futile and inane to wait for or to seek a guru, when the theory and practice is described within the material. However I’m also aware that the typical westerner looks at Yoga in only 1/8th of its capacity(Asanas).

With that said, reading some of this literature has made me ask myself some interesting questions. What are your thoughts surrounding the idea of a Guru being necessary in the practice of Yoga?

So, I’ll tell you a story.

There was this private teacher of mine who was a big Krishna bhakt and a very kattar Hindu. He used to visit ISKCON very frequently. Whenever he came to my house to teach me, he would always talk about Krishna ji, his lilas, and Vishnu ji’s avatars. I really liked listening to him because I was a kid and found all of it very interesting.

One day, he told me the story of Hiranyakashipu, which I found really interesting. But at the end of the story, he said, “Krishna ji always takes an avatar to save dharma in every yug. In this yug, we have BJP, which is like God, and Congress, which is like the asuras. And as asuras never win congress should also never win”

At that age, I really didn’t think much about it because I didn’t have any political opinions of my own.

Then, about a year later, my classroom teacher, who was also an ISKCON devotee, said almost the exact same thing in almost the exact same way. She told us the same story of hiranyakashapyu and then said almost the exact same lines.

And their political opinions were not just similar—their WORDING WAS almost EXACTLY the same. They used the same words and explained it in almost the same manner.

Also, whenever my father used to pass by while that teacher was talking about these things, he would suddenly stop talking immediately and start teaching normally and in that 1hr of tuition he used to waste like 30mins on politics alone.

As a result i was brainwashed into thinking that "hindu khatre mei hai because of congress and we need to vote for bjp"

It feels like ki ye bjp ka kuch it cell something hai idk why

This is a worthwhile read. It gets at a problem I have with the term “Hinduism”: it covers a huge range of beliefs and traditions, including groups many of us would consider cults. Those groups don’t suddenly become unrelated to Hinduism because other Hindus disagree with their interpretations.

What I keep seeing here is people who dislike ISKCON but get upset when the criticism extends to Krishna, the scriptures, or the mythology. Some people leave ISKCON and keep those beliefs. Others come away thinking the whole thing is bullshit. Both will come up in an ex-Hare Krishna forum.

For some of us, the problem wasn’t just a bad guru, institutional abuse, or a mistranslated verse. It was also what we were taught to believe. Explaining that another sampradaya interprets something differently might be relevant, but it doesn’t answer why someone should believe the story in the first place. ISKCON isn’t the only Hare Krishna group, and not everything we’re criticizing is specific to ISKCON.

I’m not arguing that Shiva is better than Krishna or that we should follow some other supposedly authentic tradition. I’m talking about the cult thinking wedged in many of these traditions: circular logic, baseless authority claims, and treating a scripture or guru as the final word on everything. Changing the god or the lineage doesn’t necessarily change that.

There’s also a difference between enjoying these stories as part of your culture and growing up in a cult where they govern your life. I get that they may remind you of family, festivals, and good times. For some of us, they bring back years of having this stuff forced down our throats as unquestionable fact. We’ve heard it all before, and we’re sick of it. What you find sacred, someone else now finds childish, contradictory, or simply unbelievable/unnecessery. Also, claiming that Hinduism is any one specific thing is erroneous. Sure, there is a broad idea that the gods represent or are stand-ins for "Brahman" or other seemingly secular concepts, but the reality is that most of the time these ideologies ask us to subscribe to a very sectarian idea and culturally closed system of beliefs, rituals, scriptures, and authority figures.

That isn’t automatically hatred. If somebody is attacking Hindus as people, address that. But finding a Puranic story/God ridiculous is not the same thing. Explain why the criticism is wrong. Point out what someone has misunderstood. Just calling it “Hinduphobia” because it offends you doesn’t get us anywhere.

This is an anti-cult forum, not simply an “ISKCON is bad, but Krishna is great” forum. The gods, gurus, scriptures, stories, and rituals are all part of what some of us are questioning. That doesn’t mean everyone here has to reject them. It means those of us who do aren’t necessarily looking for a better religious explanation.

I’m not interested in swapping one guru or set of beliefs for another. I’m questioning why I was expected to believe any of it in the first place. And any critique of a god is part of the process of leaving cults. I am sure the god can take it.

The dominant issue with all of these personalities we've been discussing here is that we simply don't have much substantial, verifiable information about them. We just don't. What ends up forming around them is a kind of personality cult wrapped in fanatical rhetoric, and over time that rhetoric becomes ideology.

We start assigning people titles and roles: this person was the guardian of this truth, that person embodied humility, another represented perfect surrender, tolerance, austerity, or whatever virtue the tradition wants to emphasize. That's hardly unique to Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Nearly every religion has its saints and exemplars whose lives gradually become mythologized until they're treated more like symbols than actual human beings.

The problem isn't that qualities like humility or compassion aren't valuable. They obviously are. The problem is that we have very little reason to believe the people we attribute those qualities to actually possessed them to the degree we're told they did. We have no clue if Gaurakishor was a nice guy and was equally kind or generous when something/someone pissed him off. We can't really know what Vamsi Das babaji was like on any given day. We have all seen our guru's be one person in public and another in private. We also know that many of these past "acharyas" were born and raised in the very sectarian culture and religious ideology they ended up promoting—give or take. So it's not like they practiced other religions or believed in other gods or whatever—they were born Hindu and died Hindu, for all intents and purposes. Their conclusions and opinions were riddled with bias.

To be honest, when I hear many of the stories about Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati and similar figures, and I remove the devotional goggles, what I see isn't especially inspiring. I see someone who often comes across as pessimistic, unrealistic, arrogant, lacking common sense, and deeply fanatical. There was very little tolerance for alternative viewpoints or genuine curiosity about the world outside the movement. The mindset was fundamentally authoritarian. Bhaktivinode just seemed like a normal Indian man of his time who took a late-life fanatical interest in Chaitanya Vaishnavism and felt compelled to call himself an authority on it. We all know he took Siddha Pranali, and we all know he spent a good deal of time essentially meditating on his "manjari" form and "service"—essentially fantasizing—nothing tangible to actually follow in terms of a process or verifiable path.

As for the lesser-known babajis sitting in huts somewhere, what do we really have? A handful of unverifiable stories. Someone supposedly had a vision. Someone dreamed something miraculous. A deity in a temple allegedly performed a miracle. These stories get absorbed into the mythology and eventually become accepted as historical fact within the movement.

Even if some of these people had profound spiritual experiences, those experiences were, at best, meaningful to them. Someone claiming to have seen Krishna in a vision or attained some mystical realization tells me almost nothing about whether the underlying beliefs are true or whether the same path is valuable for everyone else.

That's my biggest issue with building an ideology around personalities. We're rarely asked whether these experiences have any practical value outside the person who supposedly had them. Just because someone believed a certain mantra, worshipped a particular deity, or entered an unusual psychological state doesn't mean that path is universally meaningful, or even beneficial, for anyone else.

This becomes especially obvious in cults. Grand claims are constantly made about gurus and saints, but the practical results for ordinary followers are usually negligible. The guru remains the one extraordinary individual who supposedly attained something no one else ever quite reaches.

When followers inevitably fail to achieve the same realization, the theology expands to explain why. You're told you weren't surrendered enough, pure enough, humble enough, or that you lacked mercy. The goalposts keep moving. Instead of questioning the claims themselves, the blame is placed on the practitioner.

If God truly wants everyone to experience this reality, why is it always accessible only to a tiny handful of people, usually people from the distant past whose stories can't be verified? Why do we have virtually no contemporary examples that withstand serious scrutiny?

And when we do have modern figures like Bhaktivedanta Swami, we don't find infallible saints. We find ordinary human beings with very ordinary human limitations, anti-scientific views, cultural biases, failed predictions, and all the other flaws that accompany being human.

Likewise, slogans like "the holy name is all-powerful" or "Krishna is all-attractive" simply don't hold up under observation. Human preferences are obviously shaped by culture, psychology, personality, and upbringing. People around the world are attracted to entirely different gods, philosophies, and religions largely because of where and how they were raised. That's an observable fact.

At some point, it really doesn't matter which babaji you trust more or whose opinion you elevate. We simply don't know.

If all we're doing is repeating what someone else told us to believe, are we actually making personal progress or having genuine realizations? I don't think so. Everyone's claimed "ultimate reality" ends up looking dramatically different, while the realities we can actually observe- our relationships, history, science, psychology, and everyday experience- are often dismissed or minimized by the cult.

That's the catch-22. You're expected to make enormous leaps of faith almost immediately. Ancient mantras supposedly possess hidden powers. Rituals supposedly transform consciousness. Sacred names supposedly control the senses. None of this is demonstrated. You're simply expected to accept it because an authority figure says it's true.

Before long you're pulling carts carrying googly-eyed wooden deities through the streets of Los Angeles, chanting in public, convinced you're progressing toward becoming a twelve-year-old manjari in Krishna's eternal realm after death. Step outside the belief system for a moment and ask yourself how this differs from any other elaborate religious speculation.

Whether it's Islam, Christianity, Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Advaita Vedanta, or countless other traditions, the pattern is remarkably similar. Every system develops elaborate explanations built upon assumptions that ultimately can't be demonstrated. And the hallmark is always a personality that has some grand claim to the "truth". Any modern human who falls for this with all we have access to is shooting themselves in the foot.

I'd much rather admit the limits of my knowledge than invent an elaborate metaphysical certainty to fill the gaps. We don't know everything, and perhaps there are things we'll never know. That's perfectly fine. There is zero practical value in knowing more than is necessary to live a decent life. The idea of "absolute" knowledge is arrogant by default.

What we do know today is vastly greater than what our ancestors knew. Science isn't perfect, and we'll probably never possess a complete "theory of everything," but it continually corrects itself because it's grounded in evidence rather than authority. As the comedian Gervais has said: If you took all of human religious thought and threw it out, 10,000 years later you would have totally new religions and cult form. If you took all of human scientific knowledge, we would arrive at exactly the same truths and theories 10,000 years later. Truth and facts are fixed, falsifiable, and grounded in pragmatic, objective, observable (within the limits of tools of observation) reality. What is happening in a babaji's head is not—and so should not by any measure be used to dictate how others should live.

For me, that's a far more honest way to live than continually feeding myself stories because they're emotionally comforting or because generations of believers repeated them before me. I'd rather live with uncertainty in reality than certainty in mythology. I'd rather access what has real value, right here, right now, than go down the rabbit hole of useless ideology and personality worship. And it is useless. There is no real pragmatic value in 90% of what they teach and stand for.

I ain’t mad at cha, Prabhu

Change... yeah

I guess people hold onto whatever gives ’em meaning

Whatever helps ’em survive the confusion

Temple walls, beads, gurus, incense, promises of liberation

If that’s what keeps you breathing, I ain’t mad at cha

Yeah...

This one’s for all the people I grew up with in that world

All the devotees I ain’t seen in years

Still chantin’, still servin’, still tryin’ to hold it together

’Cause I ain’t mad at cha

We was once little kids in the same halls

Half asleep at mangala arati against them cold marble walls

Same shaved heads, same lectures, same fear

Same old men tellin’ us Kali-yuga’s here

You was just a little younger but we both believed

Thought the suffering meant Krishna was pleased

Wake up at four, scrub pots, mop floors

Hand over your life while they preached about “more”

Letters from home barely meant a thing

Family faded out while we worshipped a king

And every time somebody questioned the script

They’d say your consciousness slipped

Or Maya got you, now you dangerous somehow

Funny how they always got an answer ready now

Some of y’all stayed in, got deeper in faith

Married in the movement, still servin’ to this day

And honestly, I can’t even hate

We was shaped in the same machine at the same age

Tryin’ to make sense outta fear and control

Tryin’ to fill that empty hole

I remember cousins I no longer know

Aunts and uncles slowly lettin’ go

They watched my mother send her ten-year-old son away

To religious schools across the world one day

Couldn’t stop it

Couldn’t reach me

I came back speakin’ like a stranger

Eyes full of prophecy and danger

Whole personality rebuilt from scratch

Every thought filtered through some guru’s patch

And while everybody else was buildin’ memories and lives

We was chantin’ for hours just tryin’ to survive

Tryin’ to become “pure”

Tryin’ to erase desire

Meanwhile the people runnin’ things

Was burnin’ everybody else in the fire

Years later I’m still untanglin’ knots

Anxiety, therapy, reconnectin’ dots

Learnin’ how to talk normal

How to trust

How to exist without cosmic threats hangin’ over us

But I ain’t mad at my parents

I ain’t mad at the devotees still inside

Most of ’em were lookin’ for certainty

Community

Some kinda light in a hard life

And the cult knew exactly how to package that need

What I’m mad at is the system

The narcissists at the top

The men who built kingdoms outta guilt and obedience

Used broken people to keep the machine alive

Free labor

Free money

Free devotion

Till whole families disappeared inside the cultic ocean

Still...

To the old friends still chantin’ somewhere tonight

Still wearin’ kanthi beads

Still bowin’ to the same pictures on the wall

I honestly hope you find peace someday

Even if it ain’t the same path as mine

’Cause I ain’t mad at cha.

Left: Humans in their unnatural state cosplaying medieval Bengalis and worshipping an archaic Indian god. Right: An average secular modern family enjoying their individuality and time together with friends.

Every Hare Krishna guru I followed in this cult had basically the same fantasy at the core of their belief: that every human being on earth should think, chant, worship, behave, eat, dress, and live exactly as they do. Their tiny sectarian worldview was delusionally believed to be some grand universal solution to human suffering, even though it constantly failed inside their own communities. And whenever it failed, the system itself was never questioned. The blame always got redirected somewhere else. Usually onto the disciples, often one of the more sincere and committed devotees. Or onto “material society” out there, corrupting people beyond the cult walls. And if that explanation stopped working, then the invisible boogeymen came out: Maya, karma, offensive mentality, demonic influence, gunas, sukriti, lack of surrender.

And the ideology/dogma conditions you to believe you cannot question the guru, the scriptures, or your own perceptions, and cannot safely step outside the framework without risking spiritual disaster.

Your rituals and daily practices get fused to your sense of survival and meaning. The outside world gets framed as spiritually dead, dangerous, empty, degraded, toxic. Ordinary friendships, sexuality, ambition, creativity, curiosity, even individuality itself is framed as negative. You're part of the devotional "glob".

I remember my mother sending these insanely long fanatical letters and stacks of devotional books to extended family and old friends when I was a kid. Some of these letters were like twelve pages long. Endless warnings about wasting human life, karmic consequences, rebirth, suffering, all the usual Hare Krishna apocalypse language. Years later I visited some of those relatives and they showed me the Hare Krishna books still sitting untouched on shelves next to those bizarre letters from another reality. Looking back now, the whole thing feels surreal and embarrassing.

A lot of these groups attract people who are hurting in some way. Lonely people. Young people searching for meaning. Confused people. Traumatized people. Addicts. People are overwhelmed by life or existential fear. And the ideology does provide a naive certitude and temporary relief by providing a structure, identity, routine, purpose, belonging, etc.

But once you’re deep enough inside it, the joy starts evaporating. Chanting and dancing eventually stop being spontaneous expressions of happiness and start functioning more like emotional maintenance rituals. Escape hatches. Coping mechanisms after hours and years of dogmatic reinforcement.

You sit on hard floors listening to endless boring lectures. Repeat the same phrases and dogma points. Hear the same stories. Perform the same motions. Same rituals. Same songs. Same thought patterns over and over until most of it becomes automation instead of genuine feeling.

You’re brainwashed into reinterpreting normal human instincts and emotions as spiritual obstacles. Desire becomes dangerous. Doubt becomes dangerous. Ambition becomes dangerous. Sexuality becomes dangerous. Individuality becomes dangerous. Your own mind becomes dangerous.

And meanwhile, the promise of “advancement” is always dangling somewhere off in the distance while you vividly see devotees burn out, disappear, loosen up, mentally collapse, or secretly stop following half the rules. How many devotees honestly chant sixteen rounds every single day for decades? How many even chant four consistently? Most people already know the answer.

Eventually, you realize a lot of people stay because the fear structure has gone fully internal. This is the part outsiders often misunderstand. If you've not been in a cult dynamic, this is what no one ever really understands—it wedges itself very deeply into your day-to-day thinking, to the point where it's simply your directive and your whole operating system.

When older devotees start looking emotionally flattened, withdrawn, hyper-serious, disconnected, younger devotees interpret it as depth or renunciation. But what you’re actually seeing is exhaustion, suppression, depression, learned helplessness, fear, and decades of emotional self-policing. And fear. Fear of desire. Fear of individuality. Fear of freedom. Fear of trusting themselves. Fear of life outside the movement.

So aging devotees sit and eat extra sweets, get fatter, and start telling old stories about the "good old early days". You know who else does that? Soldiers who have been traumatized and have their lives completely remolded by warfare and the threat of war. Same ideology. The psychology starts resembling institutional trauma. Their world gets smaller. Their emotional range narrows. Their identity fuses completely with the cult dogma controlling them. The fear of leaving becomes greater than the suffering of staying. Cult conditioning.

And yes, devotees will immediately respond by saying, “But we had so much joy.” Of course you did. Any environment built around communal bonding, music, shared purpose, food, structure, identity, and emotional reinforcement is going to create feelings of connection and satisfaction. Human beings are social animals. We naturally romanticize periods where we felt emotionally connected to other people. People remember laughing in the kitchen together while cooking. Singing together. Traveling together. Staying up late talking philosophy. Working side by side on something that felt meaningful. Those moments were "real"—but the cult then takes those very normal human experiences and reframes them as proof that the ideology itself is divine. That’s false.

After people leave, they often struggle at first to feel the same emotional intensity doing the exact same human activities outside the framework of the cult/ideology. They can still laugh with family, cook meals together, go to concerts, raise kids, build routines, create memories, have friendships, enjoy ordinary life. In many ways those experiences become healthier and more authentic outside the cult. But psychologically, they’ve been conditioned to downgrade ordinary human life unless it’s filtered through the theology. Inside the cult, cooking becomes “service to Krishna.” Chanting becomes "transcendental sound". Sweeping a floor becomes "devotional service". Every activity gets inflated with metaphysical significance. You’re told over and over that these acts carry eternal meaning because they’re attached to guru, God, and devotional service. Meanwhile, normal life outside the movement gets subtly framed as shallow, materialistic, selfish, temporary, and spiritually empty.

So the exact same human experiences end up feeling psychologically different depending entirely on the ideological story wrapped around them. That’s why ideology concerns me so much.

Ideology can completely hijack perception itself. It changes how people measure meaning, value relationships, interpret emotions, and experience reality. It can make ordinary life feel spiritually empty while making ritualized group behavior feel cosmically important. And humans are extremely vulnerable to this because we are an ideological species. For most of history, our survival depended on tightly bonded groups, shared myths, tribes, religions, identities, and collective narratives.

But we also know far more now about psychology, conditioning, trauma, emotional dependency, cognitive bias, and social reinforcement than people did hundreds of years ago. And meaning is not magically injected into activities by sectarian theology. Meaning comes from attention, connection, emotional investment, relationships, purpose, and lived experience itself. You do not need an invisible cosmic surveillance system hovering over your life to experience love, meaning, beauty, connection, depth, or joy.

Ordinary life can be meaningful. The cult just trained people to distrust those experiences unless they are tied to their ideological beliefs. And that's dangerous, unsustainable, and unnatural.

https://www.eurasiareview.com/27012026-iskcon-and-the-modernization-of-traditional-religion-oped/

Collective effervescence is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim, describing a phenomenon where a community comes together to share the same thoughts or actions, creating a sense of unity and excitement among its members. This experience often occurs during rituals, celebrations, or gatherings, leading to a heightened emotional state and a feeling of connection with others.

——————————

The article correctly observes that religion in modern India has not disappeared under urbanization and rising incomes, but has instead adapted itself to modern consumer expectations through branding, efficiency, hospitality, aesthetics, and institutional professionalism. ISKCON is a strong example of this. The movement has successfully transformed what was once a fringe cult movement into a globally recognizable spiritual lifestyle with restaurants, bookstores, digital donations, tourism, polished temple environments, and emotionally immersive communal experiences. The author is also right to point out that many urban people seek emotional structure, belonging, rhythm, and certainty in fragmented and stressful modern environments. ISKCON provides those things effectively, and concepts like Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” help explain why synchronized chanting, ritual, music, group emotion, and communal participation can feel deeply meaningful and spiritually convincing to participants.

However, the article is ultimately limited by its overwhelmingly institutional and surface-level perspective. It treats ISKCON primarily as a successful adaptive religious organization while almost entirely ignoring the psychological, ideological, and authoritarian dimensions that ex-hare krishna members often identify as central ideology in the movement. The piece romanticizes commodification as “institutionalizing the sacred” without seriously examining how emotional co-dependency, conformity, guru absolutism, fear-based theology, social isolation, anti-scientific beliefs, and childhood indoctrination can operate beneath the seemingly pleasant exterior. In doing so, the article risks confusing emotional effectiveness with philosophical validity and pragmatic value. Collective emotional experiences are real and powerful, but they do not inherently verify the metaphysical claims attached to them. The same social and neurological mechanisms that produce "transcendence" in kirtan can also be found in political rallies, nationalist movements, concerts, and revivalist religious groups. The article, therefore, succeeds as a description of how religion modernizes operationally, but fails to critically examine whether the modernization of presentation necessarily reflects intellectual, ethical, or psychological maturity within the belief system itself. Something that successful cults with good PR have been doing for a while.

Incidentally, the Science of Identity foundation—an ISKCON spin off of Siddhswarupananda Paramahamsa, defunct disciple and self-made guru/god of Bhaktivedanta, has been using Scientology lawyers to cover their asses and sue vocal ex-members. One cult is not that different from the next one when all is said and done. Same basic playbook. Nowadays, they can adapt quickly, distract, and feign "progress" all the while not really changing anything of substance in what they actually believe and teach.