Jan Olof Bengtsson

I call him Da Avabhasa here because that is what I think he called himself at this time (although it may still have been Da Free John). See also the essay in which I explain what I find to be his significance. I hope to be able to add more comments on this later.

See also my short comments on Tolle. I plan to add further comments in future posts.

I call him Da Avabhasa here because that is what I think he called himself at this time (although it may still have been Da Free John). See also the essay in which I explain what I find to be his significance.

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I still have some problems with this term “Hindu” in cases like this. In Western academia it is probably unavoidable for the foreseeable future. But for representatives of the Vedic (in the broad sense) tradition, and not least those who insist on the centrality of the term sanatana dharma? Despite its long history, its use in some (relatively late) traditional texts and by prominent representatives and proponents of sanatana dharma since then, it seems to me it cannot properly be said to come - as a term in the logical sense of concept + word - from within the Vedic tradition. The word’s etymology makes for misleading connotations even when we try to keep them out of the conceptual definition. Saying “Hindu” and “Hinduism” is like saying “Indian” and “Indianism”. Why can’t he just keep to sanatana dharma? But I will perhaps have to change my mind about this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu  (see the Etymology section)

http://www.dharmacentral.com/

© Jan Olof Bengtsson

aka Bubba Free John, Da Free John, Da Avabhasa, and Adi Da Samraj

Franklin Jones, now known as Adi Da Samraj, is not really a vartma-pradarshaka guru but rather one of the figures I noticed when I had already found the path, and because I had found it. I came across his book The Enlightenment of the Whole Body in the late 1970s. By that time, he was known as Bubba Free John. This name was derived from the meaning of the name Franklin and the fact that Jones is derived from John; Bubba, which Jones said he was called from childhood, means, according to himself, ”brother”. 

He was already a controversial figure, partly because of his spectacular claims regarding his own status, and partly due to his early use of drugs and the sexual practices he had introduced at one stage as part of his “crazy wisdom” teaching, purportedly in order to shake his students out of their limiting, conventional ego-identities and patterns. Jones himself obviously came to realize how much opposition these hippie practices, similar to those of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (subsequently Osho) at the same time, would provoke. He decided to withdraw the book in which he and his followers described an impersonalistic antinomianism which may have been reminiscent rather of the Esalen Institute and one strand of Western Gnosticism than of anything in the East.  

The hippie generation to which his first followers belonged displayed an often truly bizarre (in view of their alleged anti-authoritarianism), uncritical belief in new authorities, which made them treat such authorities – even quite regardless of what the authorities themselves claimed - in an often “cultic” manner. They wanted their gurus to be divine beings and treated them and presented them accordingly. And some of the gurus complied. The most extreme and spectacular example of all of this is probably Prem Rawat’s (Guru Maharaj Ji’s) early years in America. But it was extreme also in the case of Rajneesh/Osho. Indeed, it probably affected to some extent all Eastern teachers who gained a substantial Western following in the 1960s and 70s. 

It must also be kept in mind that the charges of abuse, deception, exploitation, and cultism of various kinds are almost always, and systematically, even professionally (i.e., as a profession) made, with motives quite different from that of the truth, against spiritual teachers in our age, particularly in the West, who challenge the statistical normality and the conventions of a social and individual life adapted to the standard functional patterns of a materialistic civilization. While there were clearly some hippie - and also Christian – cults that were more or less debased, that normality and those conventions are today themselves ever increasingly so. 

At the same time, it must be noted that Jones was different from Prem Rawat and Rajneesh/Osho in that he was himself a Westerner (he placed much emphasis on his being the first to do what he did in the West) and indeed himself to some extent, as it seems, a hippie. And his own claims were certainly extravagant.

Through a young German woman, Ruth, whom I met in Heidelberg and whom I discovered was a follower of Jones (she had a huge portrait of him in her home and we immediately started talking almost exclusively about him), my study of his teachings was later renewed and deepened. By this time, Jones had published what was considered another of his major works, The Dawn Horse Testament, using the name Da Free John, and I learnt he was now known as Da Avabhasa. Later, Adi Da Samraj was to become his ultimate or definitive name.

As in the earlier work, there were in The Dawn Horse Testament some things, pertaining to the more technical aspects of yoga as expounded by Jones, which I did not fully understand. They are very complex in themselves, and even more so through the way they are coordinated with the stages of life and the stages of membership in his spiritual community. And they contain things which it is less than clear precisely from where in the tradition of yoga Jones has taken them. Jones also represented the onesided understanding of Vedanta (with the familiar, inevitably ensuing ambiguities and contradictions) and the adaptations to Western modernity characteristic of the Neo-Vedantist tradition to which he belonged - he expressly situated himself in the line from Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and also in relation to Ramana Maharshi, Nityananda, and Muktananda, the latter being his immediate, personal teacher. He differed from the Neo-Vedantists, and indeed from the whole of the advaita tradition, in speaking consistently of the absolute (beyond the exoterically conceived God of Abrahamism as well as advaita‘s personal God as a product of maya) in personal terms, as the absolute person. But he denied any ultimate distinction of finite personal beings from that personal absolute within their spiritual unity, i.e. he denied the ultimate reality of finite beings.

Still, The Dawn Horse Testament was a remarkable book. The important and interesting thing about Jones was his innovatively creative Western articulation of some of the Eastern spiritual teachings. Ken Wilber’s praise clearly seemed to most knowledgeable readers to go too far: “The event of Bubba Free John is an occasion for rejoicing, for, without any doubt whatsoever, he is destined to become the first Western Avatar to appear in the history of the world. His Teaching contains the most concentrated wealth of transcendent wisdom found anywhere, I believe, in the spiritual literature of the world, modern or ancient, Eastern or Western”; ”The Dawn Horse Testament is the most ecstatic, most profound, most complete, most radical, and most comprehensive single spiritual text ever to be penned and confessed by the Human Transcendental Spirit.” But others’ positive assessments seemed reasonable.

I have problems with Jeffrey Kripal’s postmodernism and postcolonialism, and his somewhat predictable PC reinterpretation of Ramakrishna, but there is truth in his account of his darshan of Jones, in his suggestion that Jones was ”a contemporary religious genius”, and in his account of Jones’s “spiritual effort of cultural translation and transformation” - all in Kripal’s foreword to Jones’s autobiography, The Knee of Listening. According to Kripal, Jones “succeeded in making the nondual spirituality cherished in the traditions of Asia relevant to the Western mind”. Presenting an important ”‘esoteric history’ of the siddha-guru in the present age”, Jones’s ”penetrating questions about traditional Asian forms of spirituality and their teachers are animated by a spirit of deep concern, existential commitment, and profound love”. “No reader”, Kripal continues, “professionally or personally invested in Asian forms of spirituality and concerned about their effective (as opposed to dysfunctional) translation into Western culture can afford to ignore” Jones’s textual corpus, which “constitutes the most doctrinally thorough, the most philosophically sophisticated, the most culturally challenging, and the most creatively original literature currently available in the English language”.

It “stands in a long modern Western textual transmission” that “begins with Charles Wilkins’ translation of The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon”, ”develops and deepens through Max Mueller’s Sacred Books of the East series”, and “extends into the previous century primarily through such spiritual classics” as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, The Collected Works of Swami Vivekananda, the collected works of Sri Aurobindo, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Swami Muktananda’s Play of Consciousness (which, Kripal points out, ”Adi Da (as Franklin Jones) helped to edit”), and the works of Krishnamurti, Yogananda, Alan Watts, and Chogyam Trungpa. More works could of course – and, in my view, should – be added to this list.

Kripal rightly stresses that the importance of Jones’s corpus lies not least in its use of the English language, that the “English idiom has been enriched by a kind of hybridized English-Sanskrit, and that a new type of mystical grammar has been created, embodied most dramatically (and, to the ego, jarringly) in Adi Da’s anti-ego capitalization practice, in which just about every grammatical move is nondualistically endowed with the status once imperially preserved in English for the non-existent ‘I’”. Jones’s autobiography, The Knee Of Listening, can, Kripal says, “be read…as an esoteric history of the embodiment, in the West, of a remarkable type of nondual consciousness that was first discovered and cultivated in different forms and tongues in Asia”. 

This emphasis on the linguistic side of Jones’s work seems to me important. It is a central aspect of the significant new phenomenon, stressed not just by Jones himself but by Wilber and others, that he was a Western - Western-born -guru making claims similar to those of the Eastern ones. Indeed, his claims went beyond theirs, as Muktananda (himself not uncontroversial) pointed out. By now, there are many other Western gurus, who claim strict guru status in virtue of their Eastern gurus’ authentication or certification. But it is interesting to note that Jones did not claim authenticity only on such traditionalist ground, but - while acknowledging tradition  broadly and perennialistically conceived, including Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhists, emphasizing its importance, and encouraging its study - partly disagreed with Muktananda and his other teachers, and pointed also to the further, original revelatory elements he claimed to have added himself. 

The richness and precision of the traditional Sanskrit literary corpus seems to me to be only in the beginning stages of the necessary translation into adequate, corresponding Western terminologies. Not least, the problem caused by the fact that many of the Western terms inevitably used have connotations related to the specific Western historical, intellectual settings in which they emerged, still remains. The confusion produced by some of the specific Abrahamitic connotations of the term ”God” (and despite their impersonalism and radical monism, the Neo-Vedantist Indian transmitters were themselves guilty of this through their own adaptations to Abrahamism) is but one example of this; the less obvious cases of common Western philosophical terms need to be closely studied too. The subtle differences introduced by the factor of the specific Western meanings have to be more consciously and explicitly sorted out, and removed, in the continued process of translation in the future. Only in this way can the Western terminologies reach the same level of precision and nuance as the original ones.

The rich development of the Western languages throughout the centuries, and the potential for further development that it makes possible, should make this quite feasible. The only problem is that this development, or at least the modern part of it (which is not the least), has taken place in the context of the exploration of subject matter different from that of the traditional Eastern ones. This makes adjustment, redefinition, and creativity of a kind which calls for deep and historically new hermeneutic reflection necessary. The terms must be dislodged primarily from the modern rationalist references, but also to some extent the pre-modern ones, e.g. some Aristotelian ones, and transposed to and reconceived in terms of a proper, intra-traditional conceptual understanding of the Sanskrit (etc.) ones.

At a particular historical stage, Jones seems, as Kripal claims, to have made a contribution to this centrally and decisively important process of textual transmission which began in the late eighteenth century. Although he was not specifically occupied with the questions of translation in a narrow sense, he did to a considerable extent creatively develop a vocabulary and language of his own for the Western expression and communication of some of the truths of Vedanta and Yoga. In his writing after The Dawn Horse Testament, which has recently been collected - together with some older material - in The Gnosticon, The Aletheon, and the forthcoming The Pneumaton, whose Greek titles, like that of his 1982 book Eleutherios, emphasize the specifically Western aspect of his spiritual agency, this language can perhaps be said to be developed further still, although he there becomes preoccupied primarily with the meaning of his own avatarhood. A kind of heroic, kataphatic exuberance characterizes Jones’s work. Regardless of substantial doctrinal (and other) objections in light of a more complete and historically informed understanding of Vedanta, it is historically significant, and important on the formal level, as it were, that his Western followers now use or at least have access to his new synthesizing English-Sanskrit language which partly incorporates, partly modifies, and partly translates (mainly) Sanskrit terms and expressions in new and creative ways - and perhaps even that they consider themselves to have in him their own Western avatar. 

This contribution should also, I think, be distinguished from the peculiarities of the early hippe context and reception (Jones was, significantly, endorsed by Alan Watts, for instance – in characteristic manner: “It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all about…One who knows that he is the Godhead from the beginning doesn’t have to use any kind of force to be that – whether spiritual, moral, or material…a rare being”; ”It looks like we have an Avatar here. I can’t believe it, he is really here. I’ve been waiting for such a one all my life.”  Watts was of course among the most influential senior authorities in the counterculture.) George Feuerstein’s Holy Madness: The Shock Tactics and Radical Teachings of Crazy-Wise Adepts, Holy Fools, and Rascal Gurus (1991), and the collection of scholarly essays he edited, Humor Suddenly Returns – Essays on the Spiritual Teaching of Master Da Free John: A Scholarly Tribute (1984), seem to me important for the understanding and assessment of the Jones phenomenon. Quite a few scholars keep endorsing him.

But Jones’s largely standard radical monism also makes it necessary, it seems to me, to problematize and reject some of his concepts and terms. (This may sound like this is all about philosophy and metaphysics only. But it is certainly not so: There is also the whole dimension of actual spiritual realization beyond that, as is always understood in Vedanta, for instance, which is not, despite some parallels and overlappings, philosophy and metaphysics in the Western sense. And it is primarily there that we find the partial truths Jones conveyed. The concepts and terms can contribute to that too.)  The problem with the understanding and assessment of postmodernists and postcolonialists like Kripal, New Agers like Wilber, and general liberal, romantic counterculturalists like Watts and Feuerstein, however, is that they fail to see the extent to which, far beyond hippiedom, the textual transmission as a whole, not just Jones’s, has taken place in the context of the distinctly modern Western rationalist-romantic setting, that it is always more or less – and often more than less - shaped by it, and why, and in what respects, this is problematic. This often applies to Vivekananda and Aurobindo quite as much as to Jones. Specifically modern Western pantheism, as it emerged in the West in the course of the development of its distinct cultural dynamic and dialectic of rationalism and romanticism, and with its typical implications in various fields, is a constitutive element of their work. It is what draws them all to one specific strand of Vedanta (and sometimes to what they perceive as equivalents in Buddhism and Taoism), and makes them present that strand in a similar way. There are of course more strictly traditionalist representatives of Vedanta even in the West, but because of the dominant modernist dynamic they are not the ones who have become well known even here.    

On his art website, we learn that before he emerged as a spiritual teacher, Jones, in addition to his general hippiedom, wrote a master’s thesis at Stanford on “the core issues in modernism focusing on Gertrude Stein and the painters of the same period”. The art which he himself produced in his later years bears witness to lasting modernist sensibilities. Of course, he seized on the spiritual intentions of some of the early abstract artists – successfully, according to one critic cited on his art website: ”[Adi Da's] pursuit of the spiritual paths found in early abstraction, from Kandinsky to Mondrian, and [his] translation of that pursuit into the digital age, restore a transcendental spirituality to the materialism of the machine aesthetic”. Others would point out, however, that this aesthetic is congruent only with a certain onesided understanding of spirituality.

In some respects, it does seem Jones may well have remained to the end the modern liberal hippie he sometimes looked like and his antinomian practices signalled that he was, even as a spiritual teacher. But there is also a higher side to hippiedom. He may have appeared with his spiritual transmission in and for, and thus with the specific adaptations to, a particular generation. It remains to be seen how those adaptations will be perceived in the future, and whether or not the modalities of his spiritual agency will appeal to future generations. Right now, it is at least clear that gurus with positions and claims like his – not to mention avatars - are not as appealing as they were to the purportedly anti-authoritarian hippie generation.

Ruth, who was much too young to belong to that generation, now significantly rejects male gurus sitting around in rooms, and treated as absolute authorities by submissive followers. When I first met her, it was I who asked questions about the legitimacy of some of Jones’s claims, and she who defended it. Now, I became a little disappointed by her disavowal of him. Although I did have questions, and still do, I had become aware of the significance of Jones long before I met Ruth. At the very least, it is the case that the general things Jones talks about are not only the centrally important ones, but ultimately also the only truly interesting ones. And, after all, gurus are and always will be needed (and women can be gurus too). Real spiritual authorities are absolutely necessary. 

It is impossible for outsiders to ascertain what is true and not in the various allegations against Jones. And it is wrong, I suggest, to simply dismiss all transmitters of his kind because of them, without investigating the really interesting thing, namely whether or not they convey some at least partial spiritual and philosophical truths. Abrahamists, for instance, do not in general hold any moral high ground in doing so, and atheists even less.

I would recommend that those who have doubts about Jones bracket and suspend judgment on everything else about him, and study exclusively his main books (in addition to the titles mentioned above, these include The Method of the Siddhas). One must sometimes be able to ignore the endless debates among former followers, scholars, and others about real or alleged problematic aspects of figures like Jones and the peculiarities of their times, and to glean instead whatever is - quite independently of what is true in the various complaints – objectively of real and lasting value in their contributions. Although he too exaggerates, I think Kripal points to what that is in Jones’s case.

© Jan Olof Bengtsson

The Dawn Horse Press

Avatar Adi Da Samraj and the Reality-Way of Adidam

Adi Da and Adidam

The Adidam Revelation

About Adidam: The Way of Perfect Happiness

There are a few factual errors in Tolle’s books, and some characteristic and predictable onesidednesses (if I may use that word), omissions, and superficialities in his understanding and presentation, not least of the New Age and politically correct variety. But it seems to me he is basically a serious, authentic, and intelligent spiritual teacher.

I add that, defending an alternative modernity which selectively affirms tradition, and not being a traditionalist in the Catholic or even the Guénonian sense, I do not entirely reject the work of people classified as belonging in the New Age category. It often contains much of obvious truth and value, although it has to be approached with critical discernment.

http://eckharttolle.com/home/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harikesa_Swami

Harikesha Swami was the first initiating guru among Bhaktivedanta Swami’s Western disciples that I came in contact with (in 1980). The “death” suggested in this video is not physical death, but his relinquishment of his formal guru and sannyasi position; it expresses the disappointment of the disciples who made this tribute. He is still active, as a less traditional spiritual teacher and as a musician, and has several websites devoted to those activities. I found him to be often a forceful speaker, and a skilful expounder of the Vaishnava doctrines in his strict vyasasana teaching. He is known for emphasizing the relevance of the varnashrama system, even in the present and in the West, in his book The Varnasrama Manifesto for Social Sanity (1980?); and for the considerable risks he seems to have taken in teaching in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Wikipedia

I disagree with much of Guénon’s historical understanding of Abrahamism (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and with parts of his view of the Renaissance and aspects of Western modernity. But I agree with much in his general conception of tradition, as formulated in Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindoues and elsewhere.

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In this lecture, Bhaktivedanta Swami makes a few somewhat vague historical assertions, and he also uses the term Aryan in both what I understand to be its primary and its secondary, specific, racial meaning, in a way that has obviously caused some confusion regarding their relation to each other.

In 1978, I purchased Bhaktivedanta Swami’s (Srila Prabhupada’s) Gaudiya Vaishnava translation of and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavad Gita As It Is, from one of the female disciples of his disciple Harikesha Swami (or at least I think that is what she must have been) outside the NK department store in Hamngatan in Stockholm.

About a year later, having studied the book, I came in contact with his disciples at the “old” Govinda’s restaurant and temple in Grevgatan, just one block from Maharishi’s meditation centre where I had often been. The first dinner there was a remarkable experience. I was there with two friends who were mildly interested but did not yet develop any deeper and long-term commitment to the spiritual path or spiritual life. The restaurant was in an exquisite 1880s building. The dinner was served at the table, something I have never seen at any other of the Hare Krishna movement’s Govinda’s restaurants anywhere in the world since then. And the table was low, we were sitting on cushions on the floor. The three-course so-called raj bhoga was spectacular. I remember especially the spinach sabji, the chapatis, and the “Simply Wonderful” dessert.

Other books by Bhaktivedanta Swami and his disciples, with tastefully designed covers (I remember precisely which ones they were: the first Swedish editions of The Nectar of Instruction, with pictures of Rupa Goswami’s samadhi, and Satsvarupa dasa Goswami’s Readings in Vedic Literature: The Tradition Speaks for Itself, with a statue of Shiva) , were displayed on a small table, and the paintings on the walls were acceptable too.

The temple was downstairs. There we found Bhaktivedanta Swami’s disciple Dhirashanta dasa, in much incense, dressed in the ochre dhoti-kurta of the brahmachari, and with karatalas.

This temple room was also where, a few months later, I first met Vegavan dasa (Jörgen Sundvall), whom, more than two decades later, another disciple, Tamala Krishna Goswami, told me he thought was the best teacher and spiritual master in all of ISKCON.

In Bhaktivedanta Swami’s books, there were many things I did not understand and did not believe in. But among the things I seized on at this early stage was not least the vision of a spiritually oriented traditional civilization. Bhaktivedanta Swami described the traditional varnashrama system of brahmanas, kshatriyas, vaishyas, and shudras, and how it had been corrupted and abandoned in the course of Kali-yuga. Quite regardless of the questions of historical details and even general historical accuracy, this account felt highly relevant.

With this teaching,  he introduced a standard for the various levels and functions of society which implied that few in the modern world – whether in India or in the West - were even on the level of shudras. The task of his Vedic mission was to gradually train people so that the qualities of the various varnas could be gradually reestablished, at least as far as possible.

This confirmed the understanding I had already acquired from the other Vedic teachers I had already studied that the optimal work that could be done in our age was simply spiritual realization itself, with everything that it entailed in terms of lifestyle and the formation of congenial habits in various areas – and to teach this to others. Even if one was still oneself far from brahminical intelligence, one could gradually approach it, work for its establishment, and thereby bring gradual, real enlightenment to the world.

Bhaktivedanta Swami‘s much more explicit teachings on this made it clear to me that my leanings towards academia and politics should not obviously be indulged to the extent they almost certainly would have been without it. Having understood the higher, more essential, and indirectly and in the long term more effective task, one had a kind of obligation to prioritize it. Since few did understand it, few undertook it. But again, this did not imply a self-understanding in terms of being a brahmana rather than a kshatriya, or superior to those who chose an academic or political career, since all were still far below the traditional standards not only for brahmanas and kshatriyas, but even those for vaishyas and shudras.

But it did correspond to the insight of many Western thinkers of the kind I soon began to study, for instance the “New Humanist” Irving Babbitt’s understanding that the highest form of work was an “inner working”. Although he conceived of it only in ethical terms, he did accept also the level of “meditation” above that of ethical “mediation”, and other Western thinkers focused directly on the inner working of the former.

The deep teaching regarding guna-karma which is part of or underlies the teaching of the varnashrama system, also corresponded in some respects to the loose, imaginative reassertion in broad outline by leading contemporary conservatives like Russell Kirk of the values of the traditional, hierarchical society of the West, and their account of the different kinds of men and their different kinds of work.

In other words, its truth seemed universal; it seemed to convey a vision of traditional human ordered society whose clarity, consistency and depth – not least when coupled and coordinated with the life-stages of the ashramas - had the convincing power of primordiality, of an integral part of the Ur-tradition.

The essential thing was the vision of a society ordered in accordance with a real, spiritually based hierarchy of values, and the sharp light it threw on the perversions, or inversions, the inverted hierarchy, of contemporary Western liberal and socialist democracy.

It was not for me a matter of simply emulating the Indian caste system even in a non-corrupt form. The varnashrama system cannot of course be unhistorically implemented in the West as an abstract, ideological blueprint. The distinct cultural and historical characteristics of the West must be taken into account and selectively adapted to. But to introduce the hierarchy of values and the differentiation of natural work, social function, and duty, the differentiation of dharma, as a normative standard more flexibly applied and not least imaginatively grasped in the way partial equivalents were suggested by the kind of Western thinkers I mentioned – this seemed reasonable, desirable, and feasible. The varnashrama vision supplemented and reinforced that of the Western thinkers.

I also picked up immediately, through the sheer force of his message and its presentation in his organization, the power of mala-japa meditation, and the importance of vegetarianism as an essential part of brahminical culture.

Then there was, of course, the way in which the Vedic tradition was connected to the pre-Christian Western and Nordic culture. The basic conceptions and the Sanskrit language appealed to and stirred something deep within me. In many ways, I felt immediatly at home in this tradition. And not just in the “philosophical” aspects, but in some of the outer forms and practices. In this respect, the transcendent dinner at Grevgatan was the same kind of experience as the initiation ceremony at the transcendental meditation centre (which I describe in the post ‘Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his Commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita’).

During the first half of the 1980s, when I was primarily absorbed in the academy and to some extent politics in the form of theoretical political analysis, I did not have much outer contact with this movement, but I read its books occasionally. It was only in the second half of that decade, when I got to know Vegavan and his friend Ajit (Willy Pfändtner) better (they and Smita Krishna Swami were Bhaktivedanta Swami’s first Swedish disciples, and together established the movement in Sweden in the early 1970s), that I became to take part more regularly, not in the main organization, but in Vegavan’s and Ajit’s own semi-separate group, the Bhaktivedanta Society (Bhaktivedantasällskapet), to which also belonged some who were followers of Bhakti Rakshaka Shridhara, another disciple of Bhaktivedanta Swami’s spiritual master, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, and thus not really members of Bhaktivedanta Swamis’s organization.

This was a group of intellectuals, artists, and musicians, and the meetings consisted to a considerable extent of discussion. Vegavan and Ajit were parts of what seems to have been a circle primarily of senior religion and indology scholars, such as professors Åke Hultkrantz and Siegfried Lienhard, who met in the Swedenborgian leader Olle Hjern’s home library in Banérgatan. They were also among the editors of the journal Gnosis. There were often meetings more than once a week. The group was often visited by leading figures in this branch of the Vedic tradition from around the world, and not exlusively from Bhaktivedanta Swami’s movement. I thus had the opportunity to learn much, in many respects, about this branch and indeed the Vedic tradition in general.

Not least, there was ample opportunity to discuss the issues that were of central importance to me: the issues of cultural integration and bridgebuilding, of historical connections and affinities, of saving Europe and the West by means of selectively introducing the Vedic tradition, the needed historical, cultural, and other analyses, the understanding of the pre-Christian traditions of the West, etc.

This all continued well into the 1990s. Then Vegavan and Ajit left Stockholm, the former moving into hypnotherapy in south Sweden, the latter into academia at Uppsala, and the activities of the Bhaktivedanta Society petered out. Again I no longer had any regular - or rather, regular and frequent - contact with the movement and its tradition, except through the literature. Never having left the academy and the “political” circles entirely, I again became absorbed in them. A new circle of intellectuals brought together mainly by Jonas De Geer had formed around Tage Lindbom, whom I had known and stayed in contact with since the first half of the 1980s, and whom I had been pleased to note Vegavan and Ajit too had not only read, but had on one occasion invited to speak to members of the Hare Krishna movement; Vegavan had also reviewed one of his books for Gnosis.

But instead, I established contact with another group within Bhaktivedanta Swami’s movement which resembled the Bhativedanta Society, namely ISKCON Communications, which organized annual conferences, the Communications Seminars, at the movement’s centre in Belgium, Radhadesh (Château de Petite Somme), in the Ardennes. Throughout the rest of the 1990s, this was my main contact with the organization, and it was a highly rewarding one (it also made me rather intimately familiar with Brussels, since I normally stayed there for a while on the way to and from those meetings). The representatives of the tradition were here supplemented by scholars who studied it or the organization.

The leading figure behind the Communications Seminars was Shaunaka Rishi, and the nature of those seminars was such that his next career move, the impressive establishment of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, was not surprising. When I moved my own doctoral work to Oxford, I again had frequent association with, by then, many old friends among the followers of Bhaktivedanta Swami, who were in various ways – mostly of course as students and researchers - associated with the centre in its early years. I was in the philosophy and theology faculties, my work was on Western personalism and idealism, and I was not affiliated with the Centre, but I often attended the latter’s seminars, and also the meetings in the little ashram where most of those friends lived.

During this period, I also taught Western philosophy at the Bhaktivedanta College which, through the Oxford Centre and in cooperation with the University of Wales, had been started at Radhadesh. But after returning to Sweden, I found no group comparable to these, or to the Bhaktivedanta Society, for frequent association. I have continued however to attend international conferences, not only what is now called the ISKCON Conventions, but also one organized by a new institution, the Bhaktivedanta Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most of my own contributions, however, I have made in the moderated academic internet forum called Vaishnava Advanced Studies, VAST.

© Jan Olof Bengtsson

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ISKCON Vrindavan

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi also speaks, at the beginning of this video.

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“The task before Vedic India is to nullify the destructive forces of the British and American policies of NATO, by raising the nourishing Vedic influence in India and in world consciousness.”

Science of Being and Art of Living, Appendix A in the 2001 edition.

Note the non-hippie appearance of the Westerners in this video, which is characteristic of the transcendental meditation movement. Note also the absence of Indian bazaar kitsch.

“A general feeling has overtaken civilized society today that they should not infringe upon the feelings, likes, and dislikes of other people. This has gone so far as to create a widespread belief that even children should not be told what to do. It is said that they should not be told what is right and what is wrong, should not be guided to do good and to steer away from bad. This probably comes from the field of psychology, which brings out the principle of growth in freedom. But it is fundamentally unfortunate to let this criterion of freedom overshadow all the basic fundamentals of advancement of life. If one does not know that the thing that he is doing is going to harm him either now or later, then someone who has that knowledge must tell him, in a spirit of love, kindness, sympathy, and help, that this action is not right.

If a child is going to pick up a burning coal, thinking that it is a lovely bright toy kept there for him to enjoy, it is only right for the parents to stop the child from going to it, even if the child resents not being permited to jump into the fire. Such a freedom is ridiculous and dangerous to the development of man, to the development of the younger generation, and to the development of the innocent, ignorant people who do not have this wisdom and the experience of life. It is the responsibility of the elderly people to advise the young. Even if the young people resent their directions and do not obey, it is good to tell them. They will find out for themselves the result of not obeying their elders, but if the elders do not speak out at all and leave the child to find out for himself that it was wrong, then they have wasted the child’s time and have been cruel to him. Knowing that it was not right for the child and not helpful for his life, they did not keep him from going that way. it is a very wrong tendency in parents to believe that whatever they say must be followed by the child, but if they see the possibility of the child resenting their advice they keep quiet and do not give it. it is not kindness; it is not live; it is not right for the parents to take this attitude. The child is young and inexperienced and has not that broad vision and experience of life. In all freedom for the child, the parents should tell him in love and kindness that this is wrong and that is right. If he resents it, the parent should not much insist, because if he does not obey and does that thing, he is naturally going to come across an experience which will tell him that his father or mother was right. That is the way to cultivate the tendency of the child to obey and act according to the wishes and feelings of the parents. If the child is resentful and does not obey, the parents have at least done their duty in informing the child. And then again, it is also their duty to have the child informed of the right action by their friends, teachers, and neighbors – from someone whom the child really loves and obeys. It is the duty of the parents to see that the child is brought up on all levels of wisdom and good in life. The responsibility for not having told the child what is right and wrong and not trying to change his ways if he is going wrong lies with the parents. Children are the flowers in the garden of God, and they have to be nourished. They themselves do not know which way is better for them to go. It is for the parents to make a way for them that is free from suffering. It is also part of the parents’ role to punish a child if he does not obey and does wrong, but the children should be punished in all love.

It is the foremost duty of parents to see that their children are brought up on a constructive scale of wisdom and right action in the society. And the modern tendency of putting the fate of the children completely in their own hands is highly detrimental. It only leads to uncultured growth of the younger generation.

There are schools in some countries which advocate complete freedom for children, but these schools are basically the result of a policy sponsored by those whose sole purpose is to make the nation weak and who therefore want the younger generation to grow up without traditions and without any cultured basis in life, devoid of the strength of character. It is cruel and greatly damanging to the interests of human society not to guide and shape the manner of behavior, thinking, and action of the younger generation through simultaneous love and discipline. The same idea has crept up even in the schools for very young children where the teachers are forbidden to punish the children. The result is found in the growth of child delinquency, leading to juvenile delinquency and to great uncertainty in the minds of youngsters about the right and wrong of an action, thought, or mode of behavior. Today’s youth does not understand and does not have any comprehension of the standards of traditional decent behavior of his nation. This is just the wild growth of undeveloped minds without the background of any traditional culture.

It is a shame that education in many countries has been influenced in such a manner, in the name of growth in freedom. There have been disastrous results from not shaping and directing the modes of thinking and behavior in the lives of the younger generation.

It is up to the statesmen, the patriots, and the intelligent people of the various nations to look into the disastrous results of such a pattern of education, perperated in the name of child psychology, and to amend the ways of education and the raising of the children. Children should be loved and they should be punished. They have to be loved for the growth of their life, and they have to be punished if they are wrong. This is just to help them to succeed in life on all levels. Each nation has a tradition of its own, and its people have their religions and faiths. The children should be given the understanding of their tradition, their religion, and their faith.

It is a great mistake on the part of educators today to find an excuse in the name of democracy not to give any traditional understanding to the children. Such ideas necessarily originate with those whose motive is to weaken the nation and rob the people of their national traditions and dignity. And to root out the traditions of the society is the greatest damage that can be done to the welfare of a nation. A society without tradition has no basic stability or strengh of its own; it is like a leaf left to the mercy of the wind, drifting in any direction without any stability and basis of its own.

In the name of modern education, the societies of may countries are drifiting away from old tradition. The result is a wild growth of faithless people, without tradition, whose society exists only on the superficial gross level of life.”

Science of Being and Art of Living, 1963 (2001), 225-8.

Note the absence of Indian bazaar kitsch in this video.

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