Many years ago a great Krishna Bhakti teacher, Bhakti Tirtha Swami, penned the following 4 principles of community building:
1. Treat everyone you encounter as if the success or failure of your spiritual life depends on the quality of your interactions with them.
2. Think of the person you love the most and aspire to treat everyone with that same quality of love.
3. View all conflicts as your own fault first.
4. Realize that people in your present environment might very well be the people with whom you will live out your life and who are likely to be with you at the time of death.
How interesting that community building starts with our own internal work. How we show up, how we set our minds, how we hold radical responsibility, and how we value those around us. A good exercise is to read these principles daily and let them soak in our consciousness. Reflect on how they influence our interactions with others. There is an intentionality about all of them and they can deepen our spiritual growth, and the vibrancy of our life, if we make room for them.
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About Gauranga Das
Gauranga Dasa is a B.Tech graduate from IIT Bombay and is serving in various capacities at national and global level in ISKCON organization. He is a Global Duty Officer for the ISKCON Governing Body Commission (GBC), trustee of ISKCON GBC College, member of the GBC Organizational Development Committee and GBC Nominations Committee, Divisional Director of Devotee Care and Temple Development, Systems & Administration departments of ISKCON temples Worldwide.
He is the Director of the Govardhan Ecovillage, a United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) award winning Eco-village community and Co-President of the ISKCON Chowpatty temple. He is also serving as Trustee and Administrative Director for Bhaktivedanta Research Centre (BRC), Kolkata.
He is an inspirational speaker for by his expertise of presenting Vedic Knowledge in a contemporary and enticing way, he is making spirituality accessible to all. He has represented ISKCON as a speaker in various conferences and has given more than 10,000 discourses in last two decades on Srimad Bhagvatam, Bhagavad Gita amongst other scriptures
Hare Krishna.
Its good that there are devotees wiling to address this very complex issue of Community.I think it is easy to underestimate what Community is and how difficult it is to Build Community. Unless the true path of Community is well understood it is easy to miss the target of Community. And conversely it is even easier to build a false-community and deconstruct and destroy what little Community has already been undertaken and established.
Also the title of the piece appears to be the opposite of reality. What i would say is that Building Community strengthens Vaisnava relationships. Just as in the 6th Purpose of Iskcon the concept is to live a more natural simple way of life so that it brings the devotees closer together. Not the other way around.
Just because devotees may share many commonalities and share many philosophical and Theistic principles does not mean we are either close together nor a Community. Those relationships have to be worked on in parallel maybe even separately and this may strengthen Vaisnava relationships.
The bottom line is that Community creation and building must be guided by devotees who know what the goal of Community is and what its very singular inherent nature is.
Otherwise its so easy to make things worse.