I have attempted to understand all the emotionally surcharged writing in Gokulananda dasa's article of today. He has informed us that I misunderstood his use of the term "patient revolutionary", which apparently was meant to refer to Srila Prabhupada's "actual empowered followers", and not to Gokulananda himself. I've re-read his previous article, The Patient Revolutionary, but I'm afraid his real meaning escapes me, hidden as it is in the verbiage of the article.

I can only conclude that Gokulananda dasa has not read everything that has been written on the subject of New Vrindaban and Radhanatha Swami, or at least he hasn't read my contributions. Either that, or he has some sort of personal blinders on. If he was following my train of thought on this subject he would understand that I'm not really concerned so much with Radhanatha Swami himself, or New Vrindaban as a particular place. I'm far more concerned about ISKCON, which is our Spiritual Master's spiritual preaching legacy, and ISKCON's adherence to bonafide philosophy.

In the sordid and hidden history of ISKCON, it is a fact that time and time and time again, high ranking personalities have fallen down and in doing so, have seriously negatively impacted our Spiritual Master's movement. In every such instance, most of the devotees in the movement revered the soon-to-be fallen personality, thinking him highly advanced and fixed-up in his Krsna consciousness. For the same reasons that Gokulananda dasa holds Radhanatha Swami in high esteem, the devotees have assumed that anyone with lots of disciples and lots of money, and who seems to be successfully preaching, must be spiritually advanced. Period. End of discrimination.

While we hesitate to bore, let's again go through the list, in chronological order, of the Zonal Acaryas who fell. We start with Hansadutta, then Jayatirtha, then Bhavananda, Kirtanananda, Rameswara and Bhagavan (the last two were in close proximity). Then we had Harikesa. Two more are sidelined for the most part, and another has left his body.

Now here we have Radhanatha Swami, who is like a phoenix rising from the ashes of all these charred remnants of the Zonal Acarya system. And as the saying goes, if it looks like a peacock and sounds like a peacock, then perhaps it is a peacock. In other words, so many of the symptoms that I observe in Radhanatha Swami today, I also observed in all these other personalities. The only difference between then and now is that now I'm saying something, and before I didn't. And I feel very badly about that. I think I've let my Spiritual Master down in the past by doing the same thing Gokulananda dasa is doing now. And he represents a huge number of sentimental devotees who refuse to take our philosophy, our science of Krsna consciousness, and apply it to our actual circumstances with today's ISKCON leaders.

Now why would I say that Radhanatha Swami is like his mentor, Kirtanananda? One of the first telltale signs is preaching style. Kirtanananda's preaching was completely unlike Srila Prabhupada's style of preaching. Similarly, Radhanatha Swami's preaching style is 100% different from Srila Prabhupada's. Listening to Radhanatha Swami's lectures is like sitting in on a thespian performance. They are surcharged with dramatic emphasis and sentimentality. Srila Prabhupada, the pure devotee we are all supposed to be following, was not even remotely in that mood.

If Radhanatha is so advanced and he's not a Zonal Acarya, then why doesn't he put his temple in ISKCON's name and invite all the other gurus to come preach and initiate there? Instead he manages his exclusive zone in the same manner as Kirtanananda ran New Vrindaban, acting with total impunity. They don't allow any other guru competition in to initiate, they keep their assets secret and separate from ISKCON and, they basically use ISKCON as a way to achieve their own ambitious agendas. They also consider any kind of critical or analytical analysis of them to be political. You're not allowed to criticize them at all, and if you do then you're instantly out. OF course, in Kirtanananda's case, you could also be dead. For these and other reasons, I believe that Radhanath and the other maha-gurus in ISKCON are setting dangerous precedent right now. They're impacting the direction of Srila Prabhupada's movement, which I think is going in the wrong direction.

I've spoken at length on the GBC's newest focus phrase, the "parallel lines of authority" in ISKCON. Radhanatha Swami personifies the eastern style of religiosity. I disagree that this is the direction Srila Prabhupada wanted our movement to go, considering the way he felt about how his godbrothers acted after his Spiritual Master's departure, which was very similar to what we've seen in ISKCON. That same philosophy was adopted by the Zonal Acaryas, and Radhanatha Swami is behaving exactly like a Zonal Acarya.

Aside from the many questions about Radhanatha's long participation in Kirtanananda's cult and the preaching deviations he carried on even after leaving New Vrindaban, this is really about how Radhanatha Swami operates today. Gokulananda dasa may not like my critical commentary on the matter, and he can call it whatever he likes: vindictive, obsessive, surcharged, severely intolerant, disjoined logic, etc., etc. That's fine, if he wants to write it off by using such terms without really addressing the points I've made. And while Gokulananda avoids addressing the whole issue of Radhanatha acting and sounding as if he's a Zonal Acarya, he doesn't outright deny that it's taking place. So what explanation does he have for why Radhanatha is operating in this fashion?

Radhanatha Swami obviously feels that he doesn't need to have any explanation for anything he does. He doesn't have to explain why he went and visited Kirtanananda and had his men staying at his New York Sanctuary. He doesn't have to explain why he visited Tirtha in prison, and gives him so much support despite the fact that he's guilty of multiple murders that happened under his watch. He doesn't apologize for what happened to victims like Sulocana and Chakradhari under the regime that he was so actively involved in. According to Radhanatha and Gokulananda, we're supposed to put all this behind us, buried along with the dark history no one wants to dig up. Unfortunately, we just can't escape the truism that if you don't know what your history is and you don't study it, then there's a strong likelihood you're going to repeat it. And this, of course, is what we've been doing for the last 20 years.

I listed above many of those repetitious errors, in the form of fallen Zonal Acaryas. One of the things we should learn from history is that our society must adopt the principle of allowing the truth to be told and the history to be written, as it is. The devotees should be free to express themselves and get some justice for violations that have been perpetrated against them. Today that justice can only be found in the court of public opinion, because you're certainly not going to get it in the court of justice in ISKCON.

By maintaining this site, I'm allowing Gokulananda dasa to have his say, at great expense and effort to myself. So that's my contribution and my idea of being a patient revolutionary. In my mind, this is very much following the mood Srila Prabhupada demonstrated for us. He wrote like anything while his godbrothers sat in their mathas and did whatever they were doing. Srila Prabhupada was constantly writing, and much of his writing was journalistic. I'm obviously not an advanced devotee, so instead of me writing on some of the subject matters Srila Prabhupada focused on, which are the business of the Sampradaya Acarya, I'm writing on what I feel is wrong with ISKCON and trying to apply the philosophy to these problems.

I don’t mind living in a community or a society with persons like Gokulananda dasa or most anybody, as long as they're not fanatics. What I disagree with is that devotees like Gokulananda don't want me to be in their society. They think I should be excluded, and I am excluded. Not surprisingly, Gokulananda never stood up for me when Hari Vilasa kicked me out of the temple, although Hari Vilasa should have been challenged on the principle of the thing.

In his article, Gokulananda has depersonalized all the New Vrindaban victims by characterizing them as "morbid facts". But I wonder if he'd be doing that if it was his child had been abused at New Vrindaban, either by Kirtanananda or by the other predators he protected, who flourished there under Radhanatha's watch? Rather than support his son to get initiated by Radhanatha, as is the case, Gokulananda prabhu might feel very differently if it had been his child suffering at New Vrindaban. Gokulananda lived in Montreal during Kirtanananda's reign, so it could easily have happened that his son might have gone to the New Vrindaban gurukula. If that had been the case, and if Gokulananda had trusted Kirtanananda in the same blind fashion he now trusts Radhanatha, his son might well have become one of the "morbid facts" he now so callously writes about.