Context is everything

On the day I left the Krishna community for good I remember saying to a friend of mine, "I hope you're ready for the roller-coaster ride". Obviously leaving a tight and closed community I had been part of for 7 years, which had been my primary, even sole, focus for a quarter of my life was going to involve a very rocky transition period. Of course, over 7 years there were good times and bad times, to deny either would be ignorant. And I am happy to accept and acknowledge my own personal shortcomings within that community, as well as acknowledge the shortcomings of the community itself. To ignore those would not be healthy at all.

I knew when I left the community that people within the community would need to reconcile my leaving in some way that allowed them to continue with faith and confidence in the religious community they wished to remain within. And when I started this blog, I also assumed that the members of this community would eventually also find a way to dismiss anything negative I had to say about my experiences within that community. And they certainly seem to have done that. Though perhaps in a way that I think has the potential to be rather negative, even destructive, for their community.

I think, when you take these two things into consideration you can understand why this has happened. I started writing this blog to explain to my wide range of friends what I've been up to over the years, and my reasons for leaving. I also started writing this blog as a way for me to deal with specifically the more negative experiences and impressions I had within the community, because, strictly speaking, these are the ones that are most negatively affecting me still, they are the ones which I found slowly eroded my usually high self confidence. Therefore, my blog had a certain mood to it. When you combine this mood with the tendency for a religious community to attack anything it sees as criticism, with increasing attacks depending on the nature of the perceived criticism, then it is no wonder this religious community has created an interesting illusion in order to dismiss the contents of this blog, and my personal description of my experiences within that community.

Despite this, when I was sent a link last week to blog by a prominent Hare Krishna leader I was still struck with surprise, and a bit of hurt, to read just how this community has gone about dismissing me. The full article can be read here, but below is the specific part of the blog which relates to me:

Recently, somewhere in the ISKCON world, in the southern hemisphere, a monk apprentice suddenly, without a word, departed the ashram for full material life, and then astonished his comrades by launching an Internet campaign of, shall we say, creative writing, depicting his brahmachari years as emotionally coerced suffering. Later he revealed to a lady devotee that prior to his devotee years, his gender inclinations had been elastic. Commonplace today, gender variables are no barrier to a bhakti practice, at home. An ashram, however, is a special niche. The brahmachari comrades of this former monk apprentice, still deeply valuing this person, were saddened more by the unnecessary stress and pain their friend had inflicted upon himself, than by the glaring lack of disclosure and interpersonal honesty. Hiding and bottling up such significant psycho-physical tendencies for some years popped the cork in such a regrettable and immature manner.

I plan to address the issues and claims of the above statement in a later blog update. Personally, I'm not willing to entirely speculate about the motives behind these statements. Nonetheless, I think it's fair to comment on the likely effects of such statements.

I do not think that my blog was/is an internet campaign to oppose something. I hope that it doesn't sound like my past 7 years were filled with emotionally coerced suffering. I do, however, think that my experience within the Krishna community has the potential to highlight some areas within that community which I feel that community needs to address if it is going to become an example of a healthy community. And the community has two options. It can either completely dismiss anything I have to say as being an angry internet campaign propagated by a closet sexual deviant. Or it can acknowledge in a humble way that perhaps things aren't 100% perfect and there are areas that need addressing. I think the fact that they have opted to instead take second/third hand conversations out of context, speculate upon that to come up with a fantastic tale of my real reasons for leaving the monastery and Krishna consciousness in general, and then laid this out for public airing is sad, and almost scary.

Another effect that a story like this has is that it make everyone start to second guess every interaction they have had with me in the past. How much of it was fueled by a 'repressed sexual identity'? The opportunity for people to speculate after being given a sudden surprise based on next to no real information or background, or even context, means that the doors are wide open to come up with a multitude of theories and speculations, all the while being distracted from the reality that the community is not sparkling clean and shiny, but has serious social issues to deal with, and a hierarchy of people who really don't have the qualities to occupy positions of power over every aspect of other people's lives. And I think this is a problem. It is also a symptom of an unhealthy community. Which in one sense is ironic. While trying to protect the community from a perceived risk of criticism, the community has instead risked making a spectacle of its inability to acknowledge any internal lackings.

But I think the average reader of this blog can make up their own minds about this based on what they have available to read.

The statement made in relation to me carries four specific claims I will deal with in my next blog update. Those are 1) that my blog is an internet campaign, 2) that my blog is an exercise in creative writing, or in other words that it is fictional, 3) that I have elastic gender inclinations, 4) that these elastic inclinations are something that I bottled up, struggle with for years, and eventually popped because of. I will probably work on my next update over the weekend, and into next week, so expect an update sometime early next week.