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Message From Bhagavān Das

I want to thank close friends of mine for helping me put this part of the website together. It has been offered to me by them as an avenue to better understand how I saw things in the past and how I see them today.

Letter to Devotees – Gaurapurnima 2000

To the wonderful devotees of Radha and Krsna who were disciples and students of mine, and to my guru godbrothers and sisters who I served with to accomplish many good things for God and Guru, and to the international family of Krsna bhaktas, I offer my greetings and respects.

To Srila Prabhupada, who has been the largest, deepest, longest influence upon my life in every way;

To the Supreme Personalities of Godhead, the Origin of my existence, I offer this communication and ask for Your blessings to heal where healing in needed.

It has been fourteen Gaura Purnimas since I removed myself from you.

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To the wonderful devotees of Radha and Krsna who were disciples and students of mine, and to my guru godbrothers and sisters who I served with to accomplish many good things for God and Guru, and to the international family of Krsna bhaktas, I offer my greetings and respects.

To Srila Prabhupada, who has been the largest, deepest, longest influence upon my life in every way;

To the Supreme Personalities of Godhead, the Origin of my existence, I offer this communication and ask for Your blessings to heal where healing in needed.

It has been fourteen Gaura Purnimas since I removed myself from you.

Doors on every level – physical, emotional, and dharmic that once opened into rooms of tremendous activity and energy suddenly slammed shut. But along with forgetfulness, Krsna is also remembrance and in that territory I have never been separated from you, albeit through reminiscences of bliss we once shared or through recognition of the pain caused my unannounced, callous departure and the feelings of betrayal and deep lost love that still demands to be healed because of it.

Ultimately as God is Mother and Father of all, we remain forever brothers and sisters who can inherit Their divine grace to replace negativity with friendship and good will.

At times I have inspired and strengthened many of you. I have also disappointed, shocked, angered you to the point of rage, shook your faith, confused and abused your love.

At times I have protected and guided you and led you to many victories.

I have also left you weak, vulnerable and defeated.

At times we shared the greater sense of family and at other times that infinite and eternal family has seemed in practice, to be a fantasy or even a myth.

At times we had high minded dreams of each other but many nights and days I tormented you in sleep and waking.

At times both before and after Prabhupada’s disappearance I have strengthened and unified his house and at other times I have caused it to scatter.

At times you were my life air and at times I felt my prana going out to so many that I had not the strength to breathe.

At times I have felt so much light coming through me that I thought I had no darkness and at times I felt such darkness I thought I had no light.

The Bhagavat says that a truly compassionate man feels the suffering of others as though it is his own. You have suffered because of me and I have lacked the compassion to own it. To all of you and especially my children, their mother and all those in the Yatras in my charge, I express my regrets at the silence I have maintained until now.

I have in effect exiled myself from you over these fourteen years. I have a responsibility to share my life with you for all that you have done for me and for all we have been through together. The pen has always been near but the understandings, strength, will, honesty, clarity, sensitivity, and humility have been in want to integrate. The times, with the arrival of this new millennium, portend an end to this exile. I pray that we can breathe in the Lotus fragrance of God and become competent to heal.

I have received letters from so many of you. In response to your inquiries, doubts, affection, criticisms, accusations, well wishes and overall desire to understand what happened, I endeavor here to be real in sharing myself with you, repentant to all who have suffered because of me and open to releasing us from the bondage of being frozen in time.

For the terribly long time that it has taken to write to you

For the times I interfered with your love, devotion and service to Srila Prabhupada

For the times I minimized your devotion and service

For the times I interfered with your personal relationships as husband and wife or parents to your children

For the times I confused your identity

For disturbing Prabhupada’s awesome achievements

For the times I minimized you, thinking my feelings more important than yours

For the times I failed to acknowledge the importance of feelings

For the times I minimized you thinking my intelligence superior to yours

For the times that I judged you or those close to you

For the times I was sarcastic, abrasive or proud towards you

For the times I was arrogant towards you when you needed kindness

For the times I coerced instead of inspired you

For the times I asked you to engage in activities I did not do myself

For the times I was impatient with you

For the times I did not allow you to rest

For the times I lived more comfortably than you

For the times I did not give you my full attention

For leaving you with so much responsibility to hold together giant yatras, full of wounded hearts, without looking back

For imprinting the young children in the yatra, including my own with the shock of my departure

For putting my needs over yours

For not recognizing the ways you were all my teachers

For the times I made you surrender to my will against your own

For arranging marriages not done out of love and full consideration

For creating fear, guilt and uncertainty between women and men

For demanding and expecting worship and service

For expecting you to consider me without faults

For thinking of myself to be without faults

For stressing your dark sides more than your divinity

For seeing only divinity in myself

For not being more conscious protecting the children against abuse

For the times I shamed you into feeling fallen

For the times I talked at you

For the times I wasted, neglected, or lost opportunities, money, facilities and friends

For thinking the blessings went out only from me to you

For laughing at you and not with you

For not seeing where you were hurting

For desiring, demanding and controlling you in ways that led to a disempowering dependence on me

For making you take up space in the temple with exclusive seats

For inhibiting the natural flow of students and preceptors finding each other

For not better examining my own internal spiritual status

For the times I made you feel inadequate or insufficient when you tried your best

All of these transgressions of humility, honor, and position I now bring to conscious awareness. I offer this ocean of faults into the purifying fire of compassion and forgiveness of the high minded devotees, Sri Guru and our Divine Parents-Sri Radha and Sri Krsna.

I can’t expect that the following responses to your inquiries will satisfy everyone or anyone. I am only sharing with you how I have processed my life’s experiences so far, being as real as I am able.