Psychology on Light of Dharma Publishing

Anatomy of a Psychopath: The Spiritual Predator Behind the Saintly Mask

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Priya had been a devotee for eleven years. Every morning at 4:30 she rose for mangala-arati, chanted her sixteen rounds, read from the Bhagavatam. She had given up a career in biochemistry. She had given up her family’s approval. She had given up the kind of life her college friends were living – the brunches, the vacations, the casual freedoms. She had done all of this willingly, even joyfully, because she believed she had found something rare: a genuine spiritual teacher, a living saint, a soul so surrendered to God that simply being in his presence could purify your heart.

The Possessed Devotee

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

May 22, 1986. Steven Bryant, known within ISKCON as Sulocana das, was living out of his van on a Los Angeles street. He had been tracked across the country for weeks. He knew it. He kept moving anyway, because he had decided that what he knew mattered more than what happened to him.

What he knew was this: the New Vrindaban community in West Virginia had become a criminal operation. Children were being sexually abused in the community school. Drugs were being manufactured and sold. At least one man had already been murdered and buried in a pre-dug grave on the property. Bryant had published his allegations, named names, and contacted law enforcement. He had made himself into the one thing a closed community cannot tolerate: a witness who will not stop talking.

The Imaginary Guru: When Devotion Falls in Love With a Figure That Isn't There

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:51:00 +0530

She found me after a lecture, still glowing. Years before, she had spent an afternoon in a room with a certain guru. The air felt charged. She wept and could not stop. It was, she said, the most transcendental thing she had ever felt.

Then, almost in the same breath, she told me it had all turned out to be a lie. The man was not what he seemed. And yet the feeling was still there.

Loved on Condition

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Vrinda had been preparing for the home program for two weeks. Her guru was coming, and she wanted everything right. The flowers. The fruit. The cushions. Her son Madhav was twelve, and she had spent the morning going over his part with him. “Just one verse from the second chapter. Anyone you like. And finish your eight rounds before they arrive.”

He had stood in the doorway and asked if he could play his Switch later, if he did everything she asked.

Smoke Is Not Fire: When Sincere Faith Settles for a Glow

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:40:00 +0200

Raghav can tell you the exact afternoon he found his guru. A borrowed room above a shop, twenty people on the floor, the teacher speaking softly about love of God. Somewhere in the second hour Raghav started crying and could not stop. The air felt charged. He walked out a different man, certain he had touched something real.

That was eleven years ago. He still tells the story the same way, and the feeling still comes back when he tells it. He learned the songs. He learned the words. He can hold a room now too, talking about surrender and the mercy of the holy name.

The Peace She Stopped Giving

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:22:00 +0530

Devin came home from a twelve-hour shift on a Tuesday and knew, the moment the door opened, that he had lost a fight he had not known he was in. The dishes from breakfast were where he had left them. Clara was at the table with her phone, and she did not look up. He had stopped at the store for the thing she liked. He set it on the counter. She glanced at it, then at him, and said, “So now you think a bag of mangoes fixes everything.”

Karma, Unfair Suffering, and the God We Keep Blaming

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:29:00 +0530

Elena sat in the back of the temple after the Sunday program, dry-eyed, which was worse than crying. Eight months earlier her sister had died at thirty-four, leaving two small children. Elena had done everything right. Sixteen rounds. Morning program. A photo of her guru on the dashboard. And when she finally said out loud what she had been thinking, that it was not fair, that her sister had been kinder than anyone she knew, the responses arrived like a reflex.

Religion That Repels: Piety or Performance?

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 01:50:00 +0530

Rahul stopped going to the temple six months ago. He did not stop chanting. He did not stop reading. He just could not sit through another Sunday program.

It was not the philosophy that pushed him out. He still believed every word of the Gita. It was the people. The way the senior devotees spoke about newcomers when they were not in the room. The way a visiting sannyasi spent twenty minutes talking about the glories of surrender while a teenager in the back row was clearly having a panic attack and nobody noticed. The way the temple president’s wife posted Instagram stories of her morning puja setup – artfully arranged, good lighting – while the pujari room itself was falling apart and understaffed.

The Map Without Roads: The Damage of Selling Instant Victory

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:42:00 +0530

When the ignorant preachers reduce the devotional path to a one-liner, they hand seekers a map with the destination marked and no way to get there.

The idea is correct. The packaging is not.

The Bhagavad-gītā (2.59) teaches that material taste isn’t torn out by willpower — it needs a higher taste to replace it. That higher taste is Kṛṣṇa. So far, orthodox. No Gaudiya Vaishnava would disagree.

The problem is the jump.

Recognizing and Overcoming Envy in Spiritual Communities

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 05:41:00 +0530

Madhava das had spent four years building something small and good. A Bhagavatam class in a rented room above a hardware store, three people the first night, then seven, then thirty. He paid for the chairs himself. He learned to cook for a crowd. On the night the room finally filled, he drove home with the windows down, lighter than he had felt in years.

At the next festival he mentioned it to a godbrother he had known for a decade. He expected nothing. A nod, maybe. What he got was a smile and a question.

The Cliff Made of Good Works

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:36:00 +0530

Gauranga das had given Krishna everything. Forty years of book distribution, ten thousand mornings of walking up to strangers in parking lots and airports with Prabhupada’s books under his arm. He had raised funds, trained crews, weathered the politics of three different temples. And now, in his sixties, he had started his masterwork: a campaign to place Prabhupada’s books in every public library, school, and university in the region, standing orders and donated sets that would sit on shelves for generations, so that long after he was gone some student would pull down the Bhagavad-gītā As It Is and never be the same.

The Russian Vaishnava Who Speaks Like a Dostoevsky Character

Tue, 26 May 2026 21:33:00 +0530

The old man sat on a low cushion in a seminar room somewhere in the Russian winter, a microphone clipped to his sweater, and said the thing that froze everyone listening. Almost fifty years of chanting. Decades of service. And looking back, he said, it was all nothing. Imagination. A long, elaborate self-deception. When that realization came, he admitted, it did not humble him into peace. It pushed him to the edge of taking his own life.

The Critics' Bench

Sat, 16 May 2026 13:06:00 +0530

A man I know lost everything at forty-eight. His business folded, his savings evaporated, and he started again from a borrowed desk in a friend’s office. He worked two jobs for three years and rebuilt — not what he had before, but something. The loudest voice in his life during those three years was a college friend who had inherited a steady salary at twenty-two and had never started anything in his life.

The Farewell

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:12:00 +0200

How a dying man’s last words revealed what he had been worshipping all along.

There is a moment, in every life given to a cause, when the cause finally speaks back. It speaks in the grammar of farewell — in what a man reaches for when the body is failing and the mind knows it. Not what he has rehearsed. Not what the position demands. What comes out, unbidden, when he is looking at the door.

Uncontrolled Mind

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 08:38:10 -0500

Lisa’s trying to meditate.

Eyes closed. Legs crossed. Back straight. Breathing—in, out, in, out. She read the book. Watched the video. Set the timer for ten minutes. This is supposed to help. Calm the mind. Find peace. All of that.

In. Out.

Did I respond to that email?

In. Out.

No, back to the breath. Focus.

The breath. Right. In.

Out.

God, my knee hurts. Is it supposed to hurt? Maybe I’m sitting wrong.

False Vaishnava Gurus and Psychopathic Behavior Patterns in ISKCON

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:00:00 -0500

False Vaishnava Gurus and Psychopathic Behavior Patterns in ISKCON

Narcissistic Personality and Cult of Worship

False Vaishnavite gurus within ISKCON reproduce with disturbing precision the psychopathic behavior patterns described in clinical psychology. They build their identity around the adoration of their disciples, perverting ceremonies such as vyasa-puja — which should redirect devotion toward Krishna — to feed their own ego.

Figures like Kirtanananda, Bhagavan das, and Harikesa cultivated genuine cults of personality within the institution, demanding seva, dakshina, and absolute obedience while offering no genuine spiritual guidance in return. They lived parasitically off the labor and money of devotees, enjoying luxuries while their disciples endured hardship, in a complete absence of reciprocity and empathy.

Beyond Machismo and Feminism: The Power the World Forgot

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0500

There are two ways to destroy a woman. One is to oppress her. The other is to convince her that liberation means becoming a man.

The twentieth century saw both in action. And the twenty-first still hasn’t found the way out.

The Old Oppression

Machismo needs little introduction. It’s the story of millennia: women treated as property, excluded from education, subjected to domestic violence that society tolerated or ignored, relegated to a silence mistaken for virtue.

The Internal World of the False Guru: Why Charlatans Fear Authentic Saints

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a revealing pattern in spiritual circles that repeats across traditions and centuries: false gurus invariably oppose, undermine, and attack genuine spiritual teachers. This isn’t coincidental—it’s psychologically inevitable. To understand why, we need to enter the internal world of the spiritual charlatan and examine the peculiar prison of their own making.

The Con Artist’s Fundamental Assumption

The non-bonafide guru operates from the same materialistic consciousness we explored earlier, but with a dangerous twist: they’ve discovered that spirituality itself can be commodified and exploited.

Hippie and Beatnik Conditioning in ISKCON

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Madhava raised his hand during the temple board meeting, cutting off Raghunath mid-sentence. “We need to decide this together, as a community. Everyone should have input on how we teach the philosophy class.”

Raghunath’s jaw tightened. He’d been explaining why the teacher needed demonstrated competence in shastra, not popularity. “This isn’t a democracy. Would you let everyone vote on whether gravity exists? Either someone knows the siddhanta or they don’t.”

The Invisible Wall

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Maria found the temple at thirty-four. A coworker had mentioned the philosophy during a difficult time: divorce, custody battle, the whole mess. Something about it made sense. The idea that suffering had meaning. That she could find peace even in chaos.

She started coming on Sunday afternoons, straight from her nursing shift. Still in scrubs sometimes. She’d sit in the back, listening to the lecture, trying to follow along.

The philosophy clicked. She bought books. She started chanting in her car during her commute. She asked questions after class. Good questions, the kind that showed she was actually reading.

Demanding Humility, Avoiding Accountability

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sarah joined the temple at twenty-two. The philosophy made sense. The community felt like family. Her teacher seemed genuinely wise. He’d helped her understand texts that had confused her for years, guided her through grief when her father died.

Three years in, she noticed something odd. Money was tight for the community kitchen, but leadership had just bought new cars. She asked about it at a meeting. Not accusingly, just curious about the budget.