Ravindra Svarup Kirtanananda New Vrindaban Jonestown

Letter from Ravindra Svarupa dasa

ISKCON,
41 W. .Allens Lane
Philadelphia, PA 19119
January 14, 1989

TO: All GBC

Dear Maharajas and Prabhus,
Please accept my most fallen obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada

Ravindra Svarupa dasa

Ona recent string of national television shows dealing with the Kirtanananda problem, I have said in response to questions that Kirtanananda is dangerous and that something like the catastrophe at Jonestown could happen in West Virginia. On "The Reporters" (Fox Network) I said: "This [the disagreement between ISKCON and Kirtanananda] is not just some obscure theological feud. They're dangerous--and we're worried. We've done everything we can to warn the public and the police about them, so that if some final horror goes down in that place, we're on record: We warned you."

I have said these things because I am convinced they are true. In this letter I want to set before you the precise reasons for my conviction. Unfortunately, television only effectively communicates feelings and simple ideas, so the data and the reasoning supporting my judgment have not appeared. But I'm basing my conclusion on a well-established body of data from religious history, not merely on intuitions or gut-feelings. I hope by making these facts available to you, all of us, will fully realize the danger of the situation and take whatever steps we can to prevent or minimize bloodshed.

The media thought of Jonestown as unprecedented and inexplicable. The anti-cult movement made Jonestown a paradigm of all the groups they called "cults." Both are mistaken. Jim Jones's People's Temple is easily identifiable as a very specific kind of group: it was a Christian (or quasi- Christian) millenarian sect. And its violent and bloody end was merely a re-enactmen of the way such millenarian sects have been ending up for 2,000 years of Christian history. It is simply the latest of a long series. So "cults" don't end up like Jonestown, but millenarian cults typically do, as history shows.

The historical case is succinctly set out in the enclosed. article, "The Suicides of the Temple" by the eminent Italian scholar and writer Umberto Eco. Famous in America for the bestseller The Name of the Rose, he's also recognized as one of the guiding lights of the philosophical discipline called semiotics and is an authority in Western medieval religious history. (I had lunch with him Once, by the way, in the New York temple in 1985. He's very smart.)

"Jones's cult ... had all the characteristics of the millenarian movements throughout Western history from the first centuries of Christianity down to the present," Eco writes. He offers a list of such groups with some capsule descriptions, and then pulls out the generic characteristics. One of them is violent death.

(If you're interested in seeing some of the research Eco bases his article on, you should look at Norman Cohn's fascinating, illuminating, and horrifying study, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. The revised and expanded edition of 1970 is available from Oxford University Press in New York.)

Now the most astounding feature of New Vrindavan today is the way in which Kirtanananda has changed it precisely into a Christian millenarian sect. Indeed, the thoroughness with which Kirtanananda has re-created a medieval heretical Christian millenarian cult I find not just a little spooky. But in light of the history of such groups, Kirtanananda's innovations are much more than astounding and spooky: they are extremely sinister and ominous. If Jonestown was simply the latest in a long series, there is good reason to fear that New Vrindavan will be the next.

In its Christian form, millenarianism is the eager expectation of an imminent cataclysmic destruction of the satanic world-order; after this apocalyptic purification, the "millennium"--a thousand year kingdom of God on earth preceding the resurrection and last judgment--will be established; in that kingdom only the most purified, such as (resurrected) martyrs, will be qualified to live.

Of course, Vedic teaching--with history moving in endless cycles of immense duration--is far from millenarian, but Kirtanananda has taken the predicted 10,000 year gold age of Krishna consciousness in Kali-yuga as the functional equivalent of the Christian millennium. But first: the apocalypse. In 1986 I stood with a group of professors in New Vrindavan and heard Murti dasa, New Vrindavan's spokesman, explain how the demonic materialistic civilization will soon be brought down by nuclear wars, economic collapse, environmental destruction, social chaos, AIDS, and so on.

The spokesman's eager anticipation and deep satisfaction at this prospect were disquietingly transparent. The hatred and resentment that fuels this vision, as well as its intense focus on the idea of purification through violence and destruction, are symptoms of the tamasic spiritual disorder that animates millenarian cults. Murti went on to explain how the Walled City of God will be the only refuge of the godly during the time of the pouring out of the wrath of God.

Kirtanananda's fantasy of the Walled City of God is actually modeled on the "New Jerusalem" of millenarian tradition. He now claims to be planning to construct twelve such cities, each to hold 12,000 of the holy. According to Revelation 14, 144,000 is the number of the millennial Elect "redeemed from earth." ("These are they which were not defiled with women.") Kirtanananda sees himself as the messiah who will gather the saved into the Walled Cities of God, where they will safely ride out the apocalypse, and afterwards inherit the earth.

In my judgment, Kirtanananda's adoption of Christian dress, liturgy, paraphernalia, and symbols is not really a matter of preaching strategy or ecumenicism but rather a sign of his wholesale conversion to this very specific form of Christian millenarianism. The symbol of the City of God has entirely replaced Krishna in the center of the preaching of New Vrindavan; this indicates the vital place this fantasy holds in Kirtanananda's thinking. Eco notes that a number of these millenarian groups were gnostic or had strong gnostic elements. This also seems to be the case with New Vrindavan. Gnostic groups began appearing about the time of Jesus, and they have continued to pop up throughout Christian history. Presently there is a revival of gnostic beliefs and practices in the New Age movement.

Gnosticism is a specifically Western form of mayavada philosophy. In its undiluted form, gnosticism sees the material world as the evil fabrication of a malevolent creator-god who envies the original source, the uncreated light. This envious creator has trapped fragments of that original light--the living souls--in his vile creation, where he and the other higher powers maliciously conspire to keep them in darkness. Gnosticism is cosmic paranoia. The gnosis (i.e. jnana) which brings escape requires drastic physical and mental abnegations--for one's environment, gross body, and subtle body are all under the total control of hostile, demonic powers. This strong dualism, this irreconcilable split between spirit and matter, results in contradictory extremes of behavior. Gnostics pursued prodigies, heroic asceticism or--paradoxically--practiced an extreme libertarianism, systematically breaking all moral and social rules. In this way, the liberated demonstrated their transcendence to worldly good and evil or, as Eco mentions, purged themselves of all evils by ritually performing them. (We see the same union of mayavada philosophy and debauched behavior, of course, in India among the tantrikas and sahajiyas.) Sometimes extremes of asceticism and license were found side by side in the same group; sometimes a single group would abruptly flip-flop from one to the other.

We see a similar juxtaposition in New Vrindavan. A strong and overt culture of purity and self-denial bizarrely coexists with a powerful sexual underground. From this we are likely to see future development along standard gnostic lines. Kirtanananda's male and female sannyasis are already officially designated as "liberated souls," and at the same time the teaching that liberated souls are beyond regulative principles and the judgment of the unliberated receives increasing emphasis. If this develops true to form, there will be (and maybe there already is) an esoteric elite, a secret inner circle of the Liberated, who regularly and freely indulge in debauched activities. (Recall also Prabhupada's statements about women sannyasis and prostitution.) This degraded activity receives a spiritual sanction and justification. In this way, Kirtanananda may reconcile in his own eyes his elevated position with his debased activities, and secure himself by implicating many others in the same duplicity. Here is another sign of gnosticism. The Christian groups Kirtanananda has closest ties to, and with whom he works out his plans for the Cities of God, are not normal, mainstream Christians at all. They are "New Age"

Christians--that is to say, heretical groups with gnostic leanings. Further, I received a report that Kirtanananda at one time contemplated installing deities of Jesus and Mary--not Mary His mother, but Mary Magdaline. Another Glue, for in the gnostic gospels, Jesus and Mary Magdaline are said to have engaged in a sexual relationship by which Jesus transmitted gnosis to Mary.

There is a standard spiritual pathology at work in such groups, and, as I understand it, it is rooted in an enormous guilt, in the unbearable secret conviction of the member that he is not actually qualified as the Elect of God, even though he has gone. to such extremes to secure his position there. These people are enormously divided: on the one hand they preach a radical rejection of the doomed world and are obsessed with becoming totally decontaminated from it, yet at the same time, they find themselves full of that very contamination and foulness. As a result, a compulsion toward martyrdom develops in these groups, as Eco notes. The theme of purification through violence becomes applied to themselves as well. In the blood of martyrdom all impurities are finally washed away (and, on an unconscious level, one also gets the punishment one deserves). Martyrdom Is the final radical solution to the divided self. There, one finds final justification and purification even in the face of defeat.

Devotees recently in New Vrindavan report seeing a martyr's psychology developing in Kirtanananda and his closest followers. Given the historical precedents noted by Eco, I think we ought to consider it a strong possibility that if Kirtanananda feels his back against the wall, he may well seek final justification and vindication in martyrdom--for example, by provoking a suicidal shoot-out with the police. We should realize that consciously or unconsciously he may actually aim at such a climax and manipulate the situation to bring it about.

I have already written a letter (with a copy of Eco's article) to Tom Westfall of the Marshall Co. Sheriff's office putting these things before him, in the hopes of encouraging law-enforcement people to act with extreme care and circumspection, especially in the face of what may be deliberate provocation.

On our part, we should make a concerted effort to enlist all devotees who still have friends in New Vrindavan to persuade them to leave, if only for their own safety. Perhaps the presentation in this letter and Eco's article will prove persuasive. And we should brainstorm to see whatever else we might do to forestall or minimize some final cataclysmic shedding of blood. Not only may people be killed and injured, but no matter how far away from ISKCON Kirtanananda deviates and no matter how much distance we publicly put between us, if there is, say, some climatic shoot-out, it will be always remembered as the "Hare Krishna Shoot-out." Let's do what we can to prevent it.