u/Successful-Law-72

I am so done. I don't even care anymore. Today we had a convention at the temple and I was asked to present. I left satsang a few years ago but was invited due to the relevance of my work and the topic of the event. National sant deadass spamming the n-world hard r, f word, every curse word in the book, as well as poking fun of kishores/yuvaks for having a dark skin complexion. He was looking at our screen times to try to get us to do more of the niyams and everything and when we saw his scren time he had 6 hours daily average on clash royale. I thought he played the game just to relate to fellow kishores and yuvaks but turns out this is all he does as a sant. How are you supposed to bow down to someone like this? I don't understand please drop experiences of this guy below:

List of all common experiences from the three mandirs I used to go to:

1. Treatment based off of how far satsang goes back in your family

2. Judgement based on how much money you donate

- Everyone is a millionaire in SV, toxicity and standards are higher lol Some of the wealthy devotees really think they are all that

3. Instead of gaining rajipo and doing seva/bhakti with right intentions, people (especially youth) tend to climb the ranks of "prestigious seva"

- Very common during NSC, huge celebrations, or events

- people often focus on how they look in the eyes of santo/admins than the actual work they need to accomplish

4. Devotees with "higher" sevas or wealthy devotees cut ties with lower/middle class devotees and seek attention/suck up to saints or admins for various reasons other than genuinely trying to get to know them

- Again, ties back to #3

5. Admins/Santo are very contradictory to the beliefs and values. I get that they aren't perfect but we are expected to look up to them because of the whole worshipping higher status devotee environment. If they are racist, curse, do literally the opposite of what has been said in the shikshapatri and by gurus, why should we give them any respect?

- Youth admins constantly curse, are racist and homophobic, have favorites,

6. Devotees (especially youths) contradictory to their beliefs and have double standards

- smoking/drinking during shibirs, getting intimate in mandir parking lots during shibirs, satsangi on weekends do whatevery they want on the weekdays,

7. Kishoris at EVERY CA center tend to be very submissive and toxic

- gatekeep the smallest things for no reason: school advice, relationship advice, even satsang exam scores

These are my experiences. I honestly felt worse after coming back from mandir every week. I am not saying everyone is like this, there are genuine people there, but the vast majority, at least at three of the california centers I've been to I've experienced all of this.

I am an ex-BAPS devotee. From my personal experiences with the organization, one societal/environmental aspect that stuck with me til this day was how everyone was so status driven at least at my local center. Everyone was doing "seva" with the intent of gaining external validation from santo/big shot devotees, wanting to get more prestigious sevas, or to get involved in more national/international work. This honestly used to piss me off so much because I've seen people literally limit or cut off people they used to talk to just to be in the vicinity and talk to santo or national level volunteers. Anyone else see/used to see this?