I put this topic here on purpose, because it's something I've been thinking about outside faith boundaries, although the incentive came from my guru's last letter in which he asks me (paraphrased) how can I live knowing that I gave life-long vows which I decided to break. I must admit I didn't really have any sleepless nights over that one, but I was wondering if you felt that you had in any way damaged your own integrity by going against your word (that you will chant 16 rounds, or whatever)? Have you ever thought about the importance of staying true to your promises, whether given in- or outside of ISKCon?

(If I'm not being articulate enough, please ask for clarification.)

I never had much qualms about dropping some of them, as I saw vows as promises to try to live up to them, nothing more.

I personally consider that my guru dissolved the vows when he "fell down" and dissolved his end of them. And good is that.

It makes me wonder, are not the vows two-directional , that the guru also have to follow some promises, or are they considered one way?

If the guru does not follow properly, and advance properly, or does not teach or care for you properly, are you still considered to follow everything he says?

Some sit on the high horses and say - you should follow ME!
Me: Why?
Sannyasi: Because I have superior knowledge.
Me: Ok, tell me about Radha the Goddess?
Sannyasi: Humph, umph, I don't know her.
Me: So why then should I follow you? What do you have to say to me?
Sannyasi: Prabhupada said....
Me: Prabhupada gave Radha and Krishna, what do you give?
Sannyasi: I give Krishna consciousness
Me: How about Radha the goddess?
Sannyasi: That is too advanced topic (for me)
Me: Ok, then I go to someone else who knows, since Radha is my goddess, and I have no obediance, no honor but to her.

Well, Prinsi, as much as I do understand your point, it never really happened to me. My guru is still "bonafide" and he always gave all the knowledge which I asked from him. (Admittedly, I never went into discussing madhurya-rasa or more "confidential" knowledge, because it was never important for me.)

Also, I don't think that my word of honour has much to do with the other party. It was my decision, and my promise. I can say I was young, inexperienced, unaware of what lay before me -- but these are all excuses. The fact is, I made a promise which I couldn't keep, and nobody forced me to either give it or break it. Just like marriage. I gave my word to stay with the person for the duration of this life, and although I consider now that such promises are preposterous in the today's world, the fact remains - if I go contrary to the promise, it does harm my integrity in some way. Or does it? I've certainly been taught it does, both by my culture and by ISKCon, and so I am now left wondering: were all these people wrong? Or is there a certain power in staying true to your word after all?

I don't agree with that female is an advanced or "confidential" subject matter.
Sannyasi men in celibate should NOT speak about women, about females, that is the restriction. So of course they will call every subject matter in any way linked with the female as undiscussable. For them to discuss Radha and the gopis, they have to almost completely transcend the material platform, to not fall down from their celibacy.
So if they don't, they are obviously not advanced so far.

When we move away from the patriarchic society of medieval and yesterday's India, and slowly into the modern world, the picture becomes different. In the west we MUST speak about Radha. That is also something none of the big major religions deal with, or even know about. The origin and truth of the feminine, and the divine feminine. It is there GV is practically almost unique. To learn about father God, there are so many religions to choose from, but to learn about mother God, where do you go? ISKCON missed that train.
They are nowadays mostly into about money and bank-account god.

This was an interesting question. Is it not so, that once again, this whole dilemma is up to how ones faith has survived?

If I really would believe that an almighty personality is deeply and utterly horrified about me eating garlic or drinking coffee or what not, this certainly should result in me doing something about these issues. Most certainly I would feel disgusted with myself if I also had vowed to follow some certain rules and regulations and had given them up, just like that, out of weakness of willpower or something.

Personally, I do not have that kind of faith anymore. Good grief and thank God!

since god cannot simultaneously be omnipotent and omniscient I feel keeping vows is a waste of time

My understanding is that Krishna understands when the situation changes. I don't know how to deal best with a guru in good standing, it probably depends on the person, but there must be a way to undo or change the vows with integrity.

Interesting question!

I broke one of the principles while still a bhaktin. I took the principles literally -- not that one was supposed to just try one's best -- so I waited a few years before taking initiation. But after a while the problem came back. I was convinced this would be holding me back from making progress and destroying any bhakti I might develop. I prayed, renewed my promises, I was scared and desperate. I won't say I couldn't have tried harder, maybe I could. But I tried very hard. After a while I just couldn't beg for forgiveness and help with the same sincerity any longer. God's silence got louder.

To me, the vows were a means to a goal. I felt the no sex principle was impossible to follow and that the struggle was taking me further away from my goal. Instead of becoming a more loving person, I became a more fearful, irritable and sour one. I thought God must have a solution to situations like this.

When I still had faith in Krishna, I thought that maybe this path is just not for me, maybe there is some karma holding me back, maybe I have do do something else to get purified before I can follow KC.

It was similar with the 16 rounds. My last couple of years in ISKCON I always had a dozen or so rounds to catch up with. My morning sadhana could be better, but also I had a vocal chord problem that made me a slow chanter.

In the end I hated the rounds and decided it could only be better for my KC if I dropped the 16 rounds requirement and just chanted what I managed. That worked fine for a while. Meanwhile more beliefs got reassessed and more vows were dropped.

I never believed I would get eternally damned or be forever failed by breaking the vows.

Thank you all for your thoughts, but I guess I do need to clarify a bit since most of the comments actually go opposite of what I originally had in mind.

The question was not about giving or breaking vows in the context of faith, or religion, or God, or anything metaphysical. That's why I put it here, in Freedom From Faith.
Perhaps I put it wrongly -- or mentioning my guru had something to do with the confusion -- but my reflection on the topic goes more in the direction of personal development. By that, I mean that presently I do not worry one bit about what any transcendent-and-potentially-non-existing-or-not-caring-one bit being has to say on the matter. I do worry about my own integrity -- the fact that I made a huge promise, but quit without the intention to ever fulfill it. I worry about somehow damaging myself, my own self-esteem as a human being, by giving such pompous vows, and then cowarding out (or, better still, running away for dear life).

Hope this somewhat clears my intentions with the topic. Please do keep replying.

I, by nature, am somewhat dutiful (a rather old-fashioned mode of being, I know), and (if I'm honest) feel, at times, a certain sense of, I wouldn't exactly call it 'guilt', but, perhaps, non-completion regarding the abandonment of some of the more personal instructions I received from my Gurus...

Curiously, I have not strayed too far from the simple vows that I took upon my shoulders all those years ago, despite the alterations to my path. Such things help to maintain a modicum of sanity in my life.

I believe it is fully possible to be both a compassionate human being, and to 'live by vow'.

Of course, if one insists on drawing only on the ISKCON experiment...

Great introspective question Amberline! This question does seem to involve the issue of self-integrity, ethics and morality. Just how honest and true to our word are we, both to ourselves and to others?

The promise you are referring to seems to be about the one made to our initiating guru about following the 4 regulatory principles and chanting 16 rounds, then changing our minds about following these rules and the greater faith it is contained within, and how making that change effects our view of ourselves as honest individuals, and perhaps our individual sense of integrity, ethics and morality.

This is so heavily tied to our worldview and beliefs at any given time in our lives, and when those worldviews and beliefs change due to personal reflection based on further growth in knowledge, maturity and experience, then it makes sense that we will not follow a former belief and all its inherent rules and regulations.

The first vow we should always have is being true and honest to our self, for following and believing something out of past obligations that do not ring true anymore can be as much or more harmful to ones well-being as making a break with past promises.

The world and nature is so full of change, so it seems rather natural that our minds and thoughts are as capable of the same change as the seasons and the time of day. We can’t hold on to March 5th at 7pm forever, for life is in constant movement and change, which includes us as human being too.

Our minds are extremely powerful; thoughts can create wondrous things or can destroy just as well. If we believe that a promise based on spiritual belief is eternal and incapable of change, then we will feel regret, a sense of betrayal and a reduced sense of self-esteem. If we believe that our personal beliefs and worldviews change with time according to our personal growth as individuals, then we are more flexible and understanding that we cannot hold on to things that do not serve us anymore. We have to give ourselves some toleration and room to grow in life, which allows for change without guilt.

Perhaps thanking our past and all those individuals within it for the lessons and experiences we have had is a good way to say goodbye and move on. Leaving our past with regrets and bad feelings seems to just leave baggage that we have to carry in the back of our minds and hearts, debilitating the new realizations and knowledge coming our way. I have a hard time seeing change in our beliefs as cowardly for leaving the old ones behind, no more than I should feel guilty for leaving footprints in the sand of a beach as I walk through it, for the wind and waves will eventually wash my footprints away, they won't stay there forever, just as my past beliefs, vows and promises are washed away through the force of nature that is our own mental, physical and meta-physical selves.

We have to remain flexible, warm and loving to ourselves too, though it may sound corny to some and rather new-agey in some respects, I’ve yet to find a better alternative dealing with the past, especially concerning vows, personalities and institutions that just do not fit my personal belief and world-views anymore.

As I see it, vows are intrinsically tied to their context, and have no validity or scope of existence beyond their environment. When the context dissolves, the vows have no basis, and as such have little impact on your internal integrity. It would in fact be contrary to your integrity if you were to insist on such vows after discovering issues that bring the entire basis of the said vows into question. Integrity is nothing but being honest to the reality you face and experience, and evolution is an integral part of our existence.

This of course also brings into question the entire concept of taking lifelong or eternal vows; they are harmful for your progressive evolution, as they lock you into a box from which you have no escape, and no prospects beyond. I consider it no different than signing an illegal contract that ties you up for the rest of your life, restricting your options and curtailing your natural potentials as an evolving individual.

There's also the fact that a choice and a commitment must be a duly informed and a realistic one, not something you were led into accepting under the premises of attaining spiritual goals that are hardly delivered. Basically the ISKCON 4/16 contract was piggy-backed into our lives under the claim that it was the only means to make spiritual progress. As most of us have discovered, that was a rather misleading marketing line there, and in fact a blatant even if possibly inadvertent lie. If you become the victim of misleading marketing by a company, it's generally the company whose integrity is called into question.

While someone may have given the contract for you to sign in good faith and with the best of intentions, the entire agreement was ill-founded to begin with. Moreover if it turns out that holding up your end of the bargain can actually end up damaging you both physically and psychologically (vocal chord damage, prostrate cancer, malnutrition, chronic stress, psychosis, etc.), I don't see why breaking such vows should have any impact on your personal integrity whatsoever. In my view, upholding an illegitimate contract is antithetical to your personal integrity.

I notice that Kalisurfer has said much of the same in slightly different words.

I didn't read your original question carefully enough. If a promise is given in full sincerity and after due consideration, and if it is then broken after one has come to understand it was better to break it, then breaking it cannot do any harm to one's integrity. Rather keeping it would be harmful. (I am not talking of vows taken to protect someone, for example committing oneself to one's children.)

What a broken vow can damage is perhaps our underlying belief in a world of no change, where things that were once good will always be good. It may also damage one's belief in one's own unchanging identity. To realize that I once thought and felt so differently, means I have on some level become a different person. It also means I cannot be too sure of what I presently hold for true and good. It can damage one's trust and make us more reluctant to commit again. Our old identity and worldview disintegrate, making space for new ones. It is not bad. It is a challenge. Positive disintegration.

That's how I feel too.


Prostrate cancer -- a very contextually meaningful slip of the tongue...

And I forgot to add that prolonged prostrate cancer can lead to brain paralysis and give rise to uncontrolled desires of autolobotomization.

Taking a wow sometimes involves wanting something in return. The Maha-Bharata and the Puranas tell lots of great wow stories. It is sooooo eulogized there. Remember Gandhari of the MBh? That chick blindfolded (blind-fondled?) herself and got this super powerful blessings heap piled up on herself. Later she asked Duryodhana dude to come before her with his pants down. In any case, wows are a great way to make one believe one deserves rewards. Of course, other people are seen getting rewards too, without keeping wows. Karma, what else. They just deplete their good karma. But the great keepers of wows reap piles of rewards. Keeping one's wows can also make one feel good and self-righteous. As if one were in control, à la The Triumph of Will as celebrated by Leni for Adolph.

If nothing else, one can develope some interesting patterns of compulsive obsessive thoughts and ways to act. Been there done that.

*
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Good one!

Thank you all for responding; I especially enjoyed posts by Kalisurfer and ananda, but then, I always do (that is, when I can understand them )
I was thinking somewhere along those lines, but not with such clarity.

And this is something I definitely will think more about,

Thanks Amberline, FYI, there is a “Deciphering Kali 101” book available in the GR gift shop, Ananda’s comes with an accompanying DVD due to his extensive stays in India and ability to translate Sanskrit, Iskconese, Forumese with its inherent Postmodern Posting Englishese.

It's actually a multidimensional modular databank encrypted between the microscopic bumps of the DVD, also starring my masterplan for a hostile takeover of major world religions by means of escalated redudance. I am working on a Vulcanese translation and telepathic download options.

You sound like a rogue Vorlon!

Yes. In time.

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Oops! You have already moved on. I am still thinking about this: .

May I come back to it once more? Staying true, as amberline writes above, is what it is all about. Unfortunately that may also result in causing a disappointment to some people, strange as it may sound.

When I left the movement I can clearly remember how some people felt upset/disappointed with my decision. It was as if they felt hurt because I gave up my promises to stay forever in the ranks. First I felt sad for causing a disappointment to others but after awhile I understood what it really was all about. They were upset because of their own sake. It was not about them being worried about my future or anything of that sort. It was their faith that they felt was being violated and by an ex-devotee of all people. Double wham!

Even this question about integrity by your guru falls in the same line of odd, even if understandable, behaviour.

As far as the "the importance of staying true to your promises, whether given in- or outside of Iskcon", I think that is ultimately ruled by the "staying true" (to yourself) part. Staying true to something that is no longer "true" to one, ends up in something horribly artificial and ultimately hypocritical.

I reserve the right to change my opinion of things and my beliefs. I also think that it is not just an human right, but an absolute need to evolve, stay sane or what ever. Those of us who are broadminded do understand and accept it and try to stay true to that, even if it sometimes hurts.

In the early days I was troubled by going back on my word to Prabhupada. I still idealized him to some degree, even once I no longer believed in all of the doctrines. Eventually I got enough distance from it all to recover from that guilt and realize it was more important to be true to myself and my understanding of reality. It made me wary of taking vows unless I really believed I would follow through, though, and I had a brief period during my engagement to Dave where I got cold feet as I contemplated the enormity of marriage vows. (We wrote some of our own and used some of the traditional version.) I snapped out of it, though, and took another leap of faith, so far with great success.

Looking back I think that a teenager has no business taking lifelong vows, though, so in a legalistic sense I don't believe I should have been allowed to. I currently have strong objections to anyone trying to convert a teenager.

So true, and well expressed.

Some years into my ISKCON career, when Indradyumna Swami started initiating disciples in Poland, I was very uncomfortable to hear that he asked his disciples to make an additional vow at initiation: to never leave ISKCON. I wondered by what authority he added another vow. But above all, despite all my faith this one spooked me out. If I vow to chant or refrain from certain activity, this vow is about something I do myself. I know in advance, at least moderately well, what kind of life I am vowing to lead.

But to vow to never leave an organization, one I cannot control? What if ISKCON changes, becomes corrupt? What if Krishna himself appears to me in a vision and asks me to? Or whatever.

It smelled of a mafia vow. And an easy way out for the guru.

I remember a spirited class by Hari Vilasa Das ACBSP in Mayapur in the spring of 1997; "If the GBC orders us to eat hamburgers, I will not leave ISKCON! I will [i]stay in ISKCON and work to repair it from within!"[/i]. This ideology ties in with Prabhupada's "ISKCON is my body; the BBT my heart.", which reminds me of Jesus and "The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink." (1 Cor 12:12-14). Suhotra would say on his classes (paraphrasing from a 1997 class I remember) that "We will also have our ISKCON in the spiritual world.". While you were obviously thinking of ISKCON in more mundane terms.

To me, nothing could be more simple: Vaisnava initiations have absolutely no spiritual authenticity or authority at all. Therefore we are under no obligation whatsoever to adhere to the vows.

Isn't that easy?

We give our promises not only to God and the guru but also to ourselves. That part takes some soul-searching too.

That's an important factor which, if overlooked or taken lightly, can create havoc in our lives.

Another point - not entirely disengaged from the question of soul-searching - is the phenomena of bigotry and/or small-mindedness: It often appears to me that some devotees move from ISKCON (a movement which positively cultivates the notion of religious superiority) to a philosophically differing, yet attitudinally equally haughty conception of living...

In such cases, has there been any real progress?

I suppose all that depends on how one defines progress, and what the premises of each individual's attitudes (haughty or otherwise) are. Others picked up from ISKCON (a movement that seeks to make its followers maximally subservient) the attitude of being timid as a tickling blade of grass, and suffer from low self-esteem coupled with constant uncertainty in face of situations where they don't have a big brother to tell which way to put the socks on. I don't think that's a healthy approach to life either.

Better to be an upright individual and have a bit of flavor and flare in what you do, if you ask me. I don't think it's antithetical to being a good human being per se, if that's a measure of progress we choose to go by. At least it holds higher entertainment value to being a minuscule part and parcel sitting quiet in the corner, cultivating timidity and ambivalence; that sort of spirituality is about as appealing as a cold plate of oatmeal to me, nor is it a measure of ego unless you take things at extreme face value. Progress and evolution are not brought about by idealizing pusillanimity.

What I was trying to say, in my halting, pusillanimous manner, was, to move from one 'faith' wherein one is ignorant of the fact that one's practice is tinged by the psychological need to feel spiritually superior, to another conception that serves (or is distorted to serve) the same purpose, indicates a lack of introspection. That's all.

(Not to detract from the valuable points you raise regarding some of the other consequences of the ISKCON experience.)

I propose to replace religious superiority by spiritual superconductivity. Thereby becoming a conduit of the spirit which then flows through one without resistance as it were, like electrons through a superconductor. This is the way, tra-la-la-la, tra-la-la-lera. Good for the environment too. No heat from friction. Can spirit have friction when interacting with the celebrated humans? Looking at today's (and yesterday's) religion it would seem so.

Funny that you should mention resistance, friction and spiritual superconductivity, as all of that has been in works in my little universe for quite some time now, and almost in those very words. On Friction and Performance, first in the series of my Reader's Digest mode writings on the basic elements of smoother existence.

(Is this a coincidence, or have you been spying on my secret websites? )

I have been seeking for an approach that isolates the personal ego from the functional ego, since the factor of personality is an integral aspect of our existence inasmuch as we intend to interact with anything, its good and evil being a question of our attachment to its particulars, and our inflexibility when the environment forces it to change. I believe most religious traditions share the concept on some level, even while the divide gets obfuscated a tad bit too often when someone's authority is challenged.

For example, where religions tend to emphasize submission, the heart of what submission aims to accomplish is receptivity, but there's a world of difference between the two and their potentials for hazard of every variety. Receptivity is an opennes born of free will, while submission is more often demanded and enforced, and the complications with matters of authority, power, and abuse thereof become much more rampant.

ISKCON (and GV in general) really is a curious mix, as at the same time it seeks to make you humbler than that blade of grass, and at the same time it instills in you this very mood of extreme existential superiority (even while you'll no doubt hear a hundred arguments on how this actually is not so). For me, the whole of the GV world was one strange continuum from ISKCON to GM to babajis of many flavors, and I followed the thread without asking twice if that was the thread I was actually meant to follow.

Breaking that continuum is breaking your long-cultivated mental patterns, and more often than not they just seek to find a new avenue, as the whole model has become deeply ingrained as a part of our being. Even when you cross over the worst of it, the momentum you cultivated with hell-bent determination is still there, and you will see -- such as in my case -- a strange display of fireworks of different flavors. It runs out of its own accord, and the less you fight it one way or another, the more you are in tune with the nature of existence. At least that's how I feel about it.

How funny, indeed!
No, I have not been spying on your secret websites. Didn't even know there were any. Coincidences are dangerous. When they occur too densely clustered even sane people can turn believers of sorts in some form or another of meaningful beingness that I presently consider imaginary.

I suppose we are all products of our times (and an overdose of science fiction), and existence itself has its own course that leads us by the no(o)se onward to wherever the hell it is that things are rolling. Enjoy the ride on the tide, dance with the random phantom, and watch the mirages flow by in the sky; I suppose that's all there is to it at the end of the day when all is said and done, and it's plenty enough as it is.

And that was a serious load of cliché right there. Did you ever notice that cliché is supposedly pronounced klē-ˈshā? Freudo-Aryan linguistic links never fail to amuse.

The less we believe and project, the better off we are, from where I look at the whole dang grand shebang anyway. If there is a meaning to life, I like to think it has to do with the process of natural assimilation and integration of our minds and environments, embedded in the very nature and being of the consciousness we experience.

as in ādhibhautika-kleśāḥ ?
the Vedic pain cliché according to which we all suffer ?
and if we didn't know we were suffering we suffered from that ignorance ?
(the not knowing about one's suffering is deep ignorance). there you have it.

As a matter of fact I was thinking more along the lines of the nAstika-klezA, emanating from an unwholesome root and appropriately englished as defilements that smear one's bodily and mental states, but the Vedic version is also a veritable ArSyepiThau when push comes to shove. As for the darkness of ignorance, it's natural when one is covered over and deep in the material condition.