The rise of the turks.

A few days ago I had dinner with a friend of mine, he was the manager of the monastery when I first arrived there. At the time of our dinner he hadn't seen this blog yet, but he asked me to tell him what he was like during that time. This morning, while I was contemplating the issues of this update, I remembered an event which was relevant to this entry and which also provides some insight he may find useful as well.

Our monastery now had our UK import who was trying his hardest to rectify the problems of our monastery, which were many. Aside from the bullying, the other part of the monastery's issues which I found created a constant feeling of instability was the constant power struggles that went on during this time. This was a difficult issue for our UK friend to solve. The manager wanted to exert his control over the monastery, and the leader had his approach. And they were worlds apart in vision, values and character.

But this power struggle often overflowed from the management committee which was set-up over to the small guys, the turks as we were once called. Once, somehow or other, my room which I shared with two other monks, the turks, started to have a problem with fleas. I'm not sure how it happened, but myself and my roommates started to get covered in these insanely itchy little flea bites. These were a million times worse than any mosquito bite I had ever suffered from, and the lesions would actually last for over a week. They drove us insane!

And one day, while we were contemplating how to get rid of these awful fleas, there was a knock on the door. I answered and it was a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman, who wanted to make an appointment to come back and give us a free demonstration of his vacuum cleaner, by cleaning one room of our house for free. He informed me that this vacuum could even eliminate fleas. What a perfect arrangement, I thought.

For some reason, however, when the manager was approached about this idea, he was adamantly opposed to it. He offered up his arguments, and I offered counter arguments. Others got involved in the issue, which created a fair bit of tension for the monastery. Ironically, years later when I was the manager I made a similar judgement call to his, with a similar result. What happened in this case was that power relationships were emphasized and even publicly declared. We were informed that we were to respect all the decisions of the manager as the manager, and we were to respect the role of the leader as the head inspiration of the monastery. The result of this, however, was an increase of distrust. For starters, we had no faith in the leader of the monastery at the time. And then there started to be greater doubts about the manager of the monastery, rumours of frivolous spending (which to be honest probably stemmed from the awesome lunches we bought when selling books together, the manager and I), and doubts about decision making.

I think anyone who knows me will know that I always have a problem being under someones authority, and I will always speak out when I disagree with something. But during this period of time I had that tendency squashed, with the result of increased health problems and stress for myself.

As all of these internal power struggles occurred amongst the management committee of the monastery, us younger monks created our own mechanism of coping with things, and creating our own stability. In particular, for that period of time, the relationships between myself and the younger monks who I shared a room with, tightened dramatically. Because we couldn't rely on the leaders and seniors for support and encouragement, we started being there for each other, creating our own little scene within a scene.

This had both positive and negative results. I think perhaps everything does if you think about it enough. The positive result was that we became more enlivening in our lives. The negative result was that we had only served to isolate ourselves further and further. Hare Krishnas restrict their associations and friendships to only Hare Krishnas. Monks tend to reduce their socializing and friendships to other monks. And now we had reduced our genuine social interactions to our own small room. For me, being such a social person by nature, this was not a healthy long term option.

I started to feel more and more withdrawn. At the time I was still selling books fulltime on the street, but my outgoing nature started to whither, making each day more difficult. I started to suffer more and more from fatigue, asthma, and I started to contract regular illnesses and lung infections. At one point I had a case of extreme food poisoning which lasted an entire week, where I could not eat anything at all.

Our UK import was also a sickly fellow, and he took pity on my ill health during this time, though he seemed convinced that it wasn't due to mental anguish. The leader of the monastery, however, let me know regularly that I thought my illnesses were do to my weaknesses and psychological lackings, which of course only served to make things worse.

Somehow, I stayed positive through it all. I used my sick days to focus on my studying, reading, and spiritual practices, which kept my spirits high. At that time I loved to read the books, and memorize them, and ponder philosophy deeply, and the time of solitude and reflective thinking kept me strong and working on myself. I was in anxiety because of my situation, but I also felt like a person of growing strengths. I knew that I had the potential to grow through this time and come out better off.