As a result, one day while taking a lunch break with a fellow monastery members, I discussed the issue with him. It was definitely a relief to talk about it with someone, and to hear that I wasn't imagining that I was being treated in such a harsh way, as others were also becoming concerned about it. He suggested I talk to the monastery manager about these issues as well, as he was also concerned about it.
That happened sometime before the end of year festival, where I was initiated and received my new name. Then we traveled together down to Christchurch for the festival. On our return to Auckland, I had arranged to travel to my to my parents place, for a late Christmas celebration. Before I left for my parents the monastery manager informed me that he had a plan on how to deal with the leadership issues that were taking place in the monastery. He was writing a letter to higher authorities about it, with the hopes of having the leader removed from his position, possibly even from the situation altogether. This is the stage of the monastery I often refer to as the mutiny stage. I went to my parents with hopes that it would be successful, but also with a definite feeling on instability, knowing that the leadership and management of the place I lived was such a shambles.
I had a nice visit with my family at that time. There were also a few other family friends visiting during that time, and it was nice to catch up with them. I chanted my rounds either alone in the early hours of the day in the garage, or sometimes I would talk to an old bus stop down the road, and chant in the bus shelter. I cooked big meals for the family, because Hare Krishnas refuse to eat any food cooked by someone who is not a devotee, as their lower consciousness would affect the eater in a negative way.
Then I returned to the monastery. What happened on my return made the whole situation I was living in seem even more of a shambles. I arrived by at the monastery, and attempted to turn on our communal computer. For some reason, it was not working at all. I don't even know how it happened that is was so completely SNAFU, but NOTHING worked on it. I know enough about computers to fix them in most situations, and but this time, although the fan turned on, and the lights were going, the computer completely refused to boot up at all. There was nothing I could do with it.
I approached the monastery leader about the problem, and I said "There is something wrong with the computer, what happened?" His response was a complete surprise to me, he said "Don't worry about it, we're looking into how those pictures got on there, and when we find out who has been looking at these websites we will tell their Guru." I was taken a back, as this both felt like an accusation AND an admission of guilt simultaneously. I replied by saying, "No, I don't even know what you're talking about. The problem with the computer that I'm talking about is that the computer is broken, it isn't turning on at all. Do you know anything about it?"
To be honest, I suspect that the computer had been destroyed in some crude way to protect the porn spying culprit. I mentioned this issue to the monastery manager, who then acknowledged the issue, that some porn had been found on the computer. He also pointed out that there was also porn found on the laptop computer. The laptop was a computer which was seldom allowed to be used by anyone other than the manager and the leader of the monastery. He recruited my computer nerd skills to find evidence of who had in fact been looking at porn. Before the communal desktop had stopped working, he managed to get the files off the computer which would help incriminate the offender. As we looked at it closely, it was clear that the person responsible was in fact the monastery leader.
This made things increasingly more difficult for me. For starters, I was already being mistreated by this person who exercised their superiority over me at any given opportunity. Then, I had started talking about this person behind their back as an attempt to get some relief from the mistreatment. There was the attempted, but failed, mutiny and coup. And now I was one of only two people who was aware that our exalted leader, who was a long-term and well respected monk, had been looking at porn online. I felt simultaneously sorry for him, yet at the same time, I hoped that this would mean a down-fall for him, that either his position would be taken from him, or his behaviour would radically change. As we sat chanting together in the same room, I could see that he was feeling the pressure of someone about to be caught out in a lie. It was stressful, every interaction was pressurized for me during that time. This is when I started to suffer from increasing health problems.
Then, one day, the manager had decided he had enough evidence to confront the leader about the porn issue. At first, the leader denied it. Then he said he was just testing the computer monitoring system, to ensure that if someone had looked at porn in the monastery it would be detected. Then he acknowledged the reality, that he had been distracted and purposefully downloaded the porn.
The monastery manager then decided it was time to bring this issue up with higher authorities again. He still hoped to have the leader removed from his position, and he hoped that the porn issue might be sufficient to do the job. In one sense, it was. Though not directly as a result of these issues, a more senior monk came to stay with us a week or too after the higher authorities were made aware of the porn issue. He took on the role of leader for the time being, for the 9 months of his stay in NZ. And under his care the monastery turned into a sane place for once.
As a result the leader was made to apologize to me about his looking at porn, and the issues that had caused in our relationship. Our relationship did change from that point on. I think partly because of a sense of embarrassment on the part of the monastery leader. He was a very emotionally lead person. Although he still had his mean and nasty streak to him, which he seems to carry to this day, from that point on he seemed to approach me with a mood of low self-esteem. It was hit and miss though. And it was still a constant source of stress and anxiety for me.
Not long after this, the stress had taken it's tool on me, and I started to get sick regularly. I didn't want to tell anyone at the time when they asked, but I do think that the primary reason I suffered from sickness was the stress of having to deal with a bully 24 hours a day. I started dreaming of leaving the monastery in Auckland, ideally for another monastery elsewhere, just to escape this situation. And I often had to hold back tears while the mistreatment continued. And so I started my period of ill health in the monastery.
No comments:
Post a Comment