Friendly Fire

Author: From the Mediator’s Sanga Conference

In my years of trying to help solve disputes in ISKCON, I find that the most painful experience for a devotee is what I call “friendly fire”, being criticized and minimized by another devotee.

Devotees can tolerate many difficulties from those “outside.” If fact, some devotees thrive on the challenges they face while trying to spread Krishna Consciousness to those who don’t understand us or want to see us go away. That’s to be expected in this world.

But what is truly discouraging is criticism from within. Sometimes we say other’s are “off”, or we say the program they are running is ineffective/bogus/just hype, and so on. That is terribly painful to the devotee doing that service.

The only real possession for a devotee is whatever sincerity they can muster up in Srila Prabhupada’s service. And even though the person criticizing may not be questioning the other’s sincerity, it is often taken that way. The result: We feel discouraged, we sometime lash back at the critic, and often we think: “I’m doing all this hard work, and all I’m getting is questioned and criticized. Is it worth it? Is serving in ISKCON worth it?”

Of course there are times when what we do is bogus or wrong. There are cases of absolute right and wrong. Such instances should be dealt with properly.

I’d suggest, however, such instances are a lot less often that we may suspect. We should be aware of that. Rather, we are often going about our activities according to our abilities, our conditioning and our realizations of how to apply Krishna consciousness according to time, place, and circumstance. Another devotee who has different abilities, conditioning and realizations observe us and criticize because they do and think differently than us. We and the others may think it is a question of absolute right and wrong-that we are right and they are wrong-but that is debatable. At least we should err on the side of safety, and not jump prematurely to the conclusion that the other Vaisnava is deviating.

Instead of absolute right-ness and wrong-ness, what generally occurs is that one party sees the good in their own viewpoint and the error in the other’s. They fail, however, to see the weakness in their outlook and the strengths in the other’s. Thus, what they see is correct (the upside of their views and the other devotee’s downside), but it is not complete. And because there is some correctness to their view, they are convinced they are right even though they are missing out on the whole picture.

In this regards, I suggest that we avoid “triangling”, gossiping to a third person about the alleged shortcomings of another. It is such a drain on our consciousness, it may be an offense, and it’s certainly a misuse of our concern about the other person. Better we either talk directly to person. Perhaps something like this: “Prabhu, could you help me understand why you are doing such-and-such?”

Or we can talk to an authority about our concern. Or we can approach an ombudsman.

But, at least those who have taken mediation training and have learnt some theory about conflicts should not contribute to friendly fire, but rather be instruments in putting such fires out. Certainly there are causes for differences. They may be due to miscommunications, disagreements over allocation of resources, differences in culture and upbringing, and personality clashes. But regardless of the cause, keeping devotees inspired and cooperative in Krishna consciousness is paramount and the importance of our conflicts generally should pale before these lofty goals.

Your servant, Braja Bihari dasa