IRM: A spiritual Fulfilment in Hungary

Govinda-Priya Devi Dasi: Hungary's long-time top female book distributor

By Govinda-Priya Devi Dasi
Budapest, Hungary

I was born in a small town of Hungary called Siofok. It is a very calm and peaceful place to be, but in the summer time it’s very busy because it’s the main tourist and holiday destination in the shore of the Hungarian “sea”, the lake Balaton. We had a holiday house on the beach of the lake and I spent all my summers there, and from a material viewpoint I had a real calm and peaceful life there.

I have a sister who is 5 years older than me. We were never raised by our parents to believe in God, but despite that, I always knew that there is God, and I also had some faith in reincarnation ever since my childhood. I very often talked with my friends about the matters of going back to our previous lives via regression hypnosis, ghosts etc.

It was in 1997 when my sister received a Bhagavad-gita from one devotee in the street and this was the time when I first came across Krishna consciousness. The devotees could see that my sister was really interested in the book, so they gradually gave her all of Prabhupada’s books, which were available in Hungarian at that time. These devotees came from a nearby town called Pecs, and they started to hold programs in my sister’s flat, which I also visited sometimes.

I read the books and found the philosophy very interesting. I liked how Srila Prabhupada explained the philosophy in a way which was really easy to understand, even though I wasn’t very philosophical at all. My sister gradually became vegetarian and took to Krishna consciousness seriously.

At that time I was not practicing anything spiritual and my life was not really about renunciation, but rather doing the opposite. Because I was a teenager, my friends and I were only interested in enjoying life, and I was deeply involved in taking part in all-night parties and all the other crazy things we try to enjoy to derive pleasure and happiness from our senses. I even took part in two beauty competitions, in 1997 and 1998, and I ended up in the third place in both years.

Thus my ego became even bigger and I was expecting a successful material life!
However, in 1999 something happened which completely changed my future. My mother had got cancer at the age of 44 and this was a turning point in our family’s life.

At that time I could see how suffering and death are present in one’s life, and it is not all happiness and enjoyment. I was dragged back down to earth and started to look at things differently.

Even my father started to get involved in Krishna consciousness, and he and I followed my sister in becoming strict vegetarians and chanting Hare Krishna. We tried to preach to my mother, however she just could not accept it. All three of us tried to get her to chant Hare Krishna but she was resistant.

In March 2000, she left her body in a painful condition. All of us were present and we tried our best to create a kind of auspicious atmosphere. Srila Prabhupada’s bhajans (devotional songs) were played, we sprinkled Ganges water on her and put Tulasi leaf in her mouth, and we loudly chanted the Maha-mantra and prayed to Krishna to give her a chance in her next life to do some devotional service.

After the death of my mother I regularly visited the programs in mv sister’s flat and realized how useless my life was. Having understood the importance of spiritual life, I very soon moved into the Pecs ISKCON temple, and became a full time devotee.

After a few months, my sister followed and also became a temple devotee. At that time in Hungary, the Pecs temple was very famous due to the successful book distribution the devotees were doing.

That was a unique place among the other temples because the leader of the temple stressed book distribution very much. So my Service with my sister from the very beginning was book distribution.

We liked doing it very much because we were free to travel to different places, mainly to the capital city Budapest, and therefore we did not really spend much time in the temple. We became completely absorbed in this service. At this time, other than sleeping and eating, we would only distribute books, and do nothing else.

We mainly did the distribution in the parking lots of big hypermarkets and stores. It was a constant war between the security guards and us. They knew us very well and they were chasing us away as soon as they saw us arriving. We accepted all kind of difficulties like the extreme heat or cold. We were well treated in the temple and because we were doing our service successfully, the whole yatra (community) celebrated us in the yearly book distribution festivals.

(From 2000-2004, I was no. 1 female sankirtana devotee [book distributor], and no. 2 overall, for all years, in terms of both books distributed and money collected, even though in Hungary we had many sankirtana devotees – up to 350 for the Christmas marathon – and in total I donated around $300,000 during this time, which was not easy in a relatively economically deprived country like Hungary).

The Hungarian yatra, especially the farm community in Somogyvamos, known as “Krishna Valley”, was very famous throughout ISKCON worldwide, and attracted many devotees from all over the world, including many ISKCON gurus.

When we had some festivals in the farm, devotees gathered from all over the country for the different celebrations, and I worshiped the many ISKCON gurus who visited, as I had been taught to do so by the devotees.

When the devotees told me that it was time to choose a spiritual master it was natural for me to choose the one person to whom I had become attracted to more than the others, and this was Bhakti Bringa Govinda Swami.

In 2003, I received first initiation from him. Significantly, I remembered that at the time, the initiation did not result in any change in my life, either spiritual or material. Everything went on exactly the same as before, and I just carried on
doing the same service as before, with the same results.

Indeed, the only difference was that when my spiritual master came to Hungary, I had to collect some extra money to pay for his plane ticket!

However, I was convinced that I was in a safe position spiritually, because I knew Srila Prabhupada liked very much that his books were distributed, and I always just followed what the senior devotees had advised me to do.

Also there was a big, rundown building we had bought in Pecs and we had a great plan to renovate it and turn it into a nice temple and preaching centre.

Thus I was very excited to take part in creating a nice temple for Krishna and Srila Prabhupada. However, after over 4 year of doing this service, chanting 16 rounds of japa (meditation beads) and keeping the four regulative principles, I did not really experience any big change in my heart or understanding.

The mood of the temple also changed a lot when we experienced that the leaders of the Hungarian yatra did not really support us in our plans, but rather took advantage of our ability for collecting money.

This led the devotees to experience some kind of lack in their spiritual life and they began to start caring more and more about their own situations, in particular getting married and being situated nicely materially, and therefore many of them planned to move to the farm for starting their household life in a nice, peaceful situation.

In this way the temple started to fall apart and the devotees were not so united any more. Naturally the temple’s income reduced and finally we had to give up our plans to develop the temple.

I also felt the same way, and started to think about my own situation, and how I could be fulfilled in married life, since having served in ISKCON for a number of years had not brought any spiritual fulfilment.
So like others, I also made plans to leave and get married, and have a peaceful householder life.

Though I had not experienced any spiritual result or realization despite having given the best years of my life to ISKCON, it was the public fall of Bhakti Ballabh Puri Goswami (Balabhadra Das), who had been promoted in Hungary by HH Sivarama Swami, which made me seriously question ISKCON.

It emerged that this “guru”, who was my husband’s guru, had been deviating for a long time. How then, I questioned, did my husband render any service at all, since this service was supposed to be rendered via the bona fide guru?

So my husband and I were now determined to try and discover the truth about who was the bona fide guru and what constituted real service, as we did not wish for all our years in ISKCON to have been a waste.

So we did some research on the Internet, and we quickly discovered that there were many groups critical of ISKCON. But we found all of them had some agenda or axe to grind. However, when we came across the ISKCON Revival Movement (IRM) website (www.iskconirm.com), we found only facts and philosophy, which could not be challenged.

We saw on the site a “Who’s Who” of all the great scholars and gurus in ISKCON, and yet every single one of them had been thoroughly exposed and defeated. So we decided to check further and started reading BTP and The Final Order.

However, due to what had happened in ISKCON, we were skeptical of anyone claiming to provide “the answer”, and so we next put many challenging questions to Krishnakant, the leader of this organization, to test if it was all genuine. He painstakingly and patiently answered all that we threw at him.

I was at first shocked when I discovered that actually we should have been the disciples of Srila Prabhupada as this was his final order, and that his real movement had not existed since 1978.

So yes, we sadly found that we had both wasted all our years in ISKCON, and instead of rendering service, we had simply done a disservice, helping mislead others, and supporting a deviant society. But at least now we could finally make a fresh start and begin serving Srila Prabhupada.

We invited Krishnakant and some of his associates to come to Hungary to consider us for formally joining the IRM and make a commitment to dedicating our lives to Srila Prabhupada.

Since then my life has really changed, because there is nothing more inspiring than getting answers to all the questions I had over the years and knowing the truth. And the truth really does set you free!

Thus my enthusiasm for spiritual life has returned with renewed vigour, and I have been able to resume my chanting and my other practices which had waned over the years, due to the disappointments I had experienced in serving in ISKCON Hungary.

We have set about trying to spread this information to others in Hungary, and we have already managed to contact a number of devotees. Whilst my husband and others have been responsible for translating the most important materials into Hungarian, my service has been to help raise the funds to pay for all the printing and distribution.

To this end I decided to donate a small fixed percentage of my income for this, since I now had a regular job. But since jobs in Hungary do not pay well, I thought it would take me very long to raise this money, but I was still committed to doing it.

Krishna then intervened, in that shortly afterwards I came into a large sum of money by way of a family inheritance, and just by donating the small fixed percentage I had pledged, we were able to pay for the printing and distribution of both Back To Prabhupada and The Final Order in Hungarian.

I feel Krishna’s presence and my real spiritual master Srila Prabhupada’s support. I also understand why I, and all other devotees, have suffered in ISKCON. I am very thankful to the IRM, especially Krishnakant prabhu, for giving us the truth and leading us out of the darkness. The present ISKCON doesn’t function the way it is supposed to, because its so called leaders and gurus are more after power and money than actually following Srila Prabhupada.

Therefore, all devotees currently joining this movement are just wasting their valuable life and getting the opposite result to that which they came for. They become arrogant, proud, materialistic and frustrated when they realize this. I know this is true because I went through all this myself, and I see it in other devotees too. So I wish to help the IRM in saving as many souls as we can from this unfortunate situation.

All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

Krishnakant, editor Back to Prabhupada: Readers are cordially invited to follow Govinda-Priya Devi Dasi’s example by sending us your story of just how you came “Back to Prabhupada” (irm@iskconirm.com).