Yesterday morning we had our first ashram meeting for a while. Vision leaks. Two weeks is plenty long enough to lose sight of the bigger picture and become increasingly involved in the minutiae of day-to-day operations.

We are working on version 2 of our Mission Statement. We are in a new facility, we have new staff, and we are continuing to evolve individually and as a group.

Constructing a mission statement is a process. It takes time to fully explore everyone’s values and discover where the common ground lies. Trust needs to be built up so that people feel confident that they can be themselves. Although we do all have common goals such as “Going back to Godhead”, “becoming Krishna Conscious”, “distributing Krishna Consciousness to others” and other such ideals, we are all eternally individuals, and we have our unique paths and styles in getting there.

We used a value exploration exercise that I got from the Franklin Covey online Mission Builder. Everyone raises their hand (this creates a time limit and a visual cue). Then everyone thinks of someone that they admire and puts their hand down when they have it. They then raise their hand again, and think of one or two qualities that they admire about them, putting their hand down once they have it.

These are people’s values: “things that they value”.

We then constructed a list of our major stakeholders - “who do we serve?”. Of course it’s easy to say: “Everyone”, but that’s not a terribly useful sankhya, or elemental analysis, if it’s the only one we have, unless you’re already at the topmost platform of devotional evolution.

In order to help gain clarity on this point we added another column: “How do we serve them?” Since we don’t serve everyone the same way, it makes sense to categorize our stakeholders according to their necessity and our responsibility to meet those necessities in a particular way.

So we broke it down starting from the “inner circle” - the others in the ashram - and going out to the wider devotional community, the Loft Guests, the Sunday Feast Guests and so on.

We spent about an hour or so on this exercise, and then adjourned it for later. The rest of the meeting was a review of the new accounting system that Tri Yuga has sent us that is being managed by Alison. It looks like it will bring more clarity to our operational planning. We count people because people matter….

Here is a nice article on public speaking by Kaunteya das, a man after my own heart.

I’ve been copying what I saw John Maxwell do when I went to see him in Sydney. Before his program began he rocked out from backstage and walked straight up to the front row, introducing himself to the first person he encountered.

I spend the last ten or so minutes before the program begins introducing myself to people and speaking to them. This Sunday at 5:10pm we had twenty or so people. Creating compelling content and value throughout the program enables people to respond by arriving promptly. First time guests generally come on time as well, and we want them to make that a long term habit.

Anyway, this week a first time guest made a comment to me: “What’s the show tonight?” and “$5 for a meal and entertainment is a pretty good deal!”. That was her perception and what brought her along.

I watched television while I was in the hospital recently, waiting while my wife was in the operating theater. It’s interesting to see the level of sense stimulation. It’s very high. I haven’t lived in a house with a television for over ten years now, so things have changed without me being immersed in them and changing along with them.

A talking head for an hour is pretty low stimulation, and can easily provoke a disconnect in the audience. If the goal is to reach out to and engage the general public then “message complexity”, or the sensory stimulation level of a message, needs to be increased. You need to communicate the same thing in a number of interesting and interactive ways in order to engage and involve people.

Giving people things to look at, things to hear, things to touch, and things to do, all contribute to getting and keeping their attention.

Think of the Sunday Feast as a channel, and then think of programs to show on that channel. Publish the equivalent of a “TV Guide”. Maybe people will come for their favorite shows. Maybe some will come all the time.

A program is a format. Think of it as a container. You plug the content into the container.

The first program that we have developed:

Hare Krishna Network

It’s a television talk show. You have a host who interviews an interesting guest. The first one we did here was with Mr Cooper Ali Shabazz (Abhilasa ACBSP), warrior, author, and gentleman’s etiquette advocate. The next one will be with Taraka Tee, author, cow protection advocate.

Here is an idea for a second program:

If Hare Krishnas Ran the World

This program examines social policy and organization, and presents a Krishna Conscious take on “the way things should be”. Srila Prabhupada’s purports in the First Canto are full of this kind of talk.

And a prototype for a third:

This weekend we are going to experiment with a presentation style with two people, like the Academy Awards presentation ceremony or morning radio. The interaction between the two stimulates interest, and the uncertainty of the situation keeps people slightly off balance and interested. I don’t know what you’d call this program. In the case of Hare Krishna Network it gets its identity from the presentation style. In the case of If Hare Krishnas Ran the World the name comes from the angle. What about: “When Hare Krishnas attack”, and then lay down the smack on the mic, tag team style… I’ll use that name for illustration purposes.

Let’s throw in one with drama and puppet shows. Maybe you do the whole thing as a drama, or a puppet show. Let’s call it Sunday Theatre. Of course, you can also add a drama element to each week and make it more of a variety show, but keeping a strong brand identity and keeping it tight, fast moving and engaging.

An overall theme can be applied to a month, and the schedule could look like this:

Theme: Friendship, Community, and Love

Week 1: When Hare Krishnas Attack: Friends
Week 2: Sunday Theatre: A puppets’ tale of Friendship and Folly
Week 3: If Hare Krishnas Ran the World: Community Development
Week 4: Hare Krishna Network: Guest: So-and-so, relationships expert

Each program can have its own theme music and background graphics to give it more powerful brand identity. You can also think of “program” in this sense as a brand, in order to distinguish it from the morass of other things that all lumped together under the term “program”.

At the moment we are on text 4 of the Nectar of Instruction in the morning class. Alison gave the first class in the series this morning. We go alphabetically: Alison, Channell, Elliot, Param Satya, Sita-pati, Sukhanti Radha, Vrajadhama, then we go on to the next verse.

The theme for this week is “The Community of Servants”. That’s going to be the program on Sunday as part of the current series there, “Friendship, Community, and Love“.

Today we used the digital projector for the first time. Now everyone has the option to prepare slides as part of their class preparation, or they can just use this slide set, which is my slide set from last Sunday’s program.

In 10 Secrets of Effective Communicators Alan Nelson explains that in seminary the rule of thumb is one hour of preparation for every minute of presentation. In other words, if you are going to speak for 30 minutes, you should do 30 hours of prep. He admits that this may not be practical, but he exhorts readers to begin preparing their messages 6-9 months ahead in order to really percolate them.

The challenge at the moment is getting on top of the week to week situation first, then looking ahead with that sort of long range vision. Previously, I have been asked to deliver the message at the Sunday Feast with 15 minutes notice. We’re working on extending that….

By developing the themes at the ashram we can apply more than one person to the task. If each of us gives three or four hours a week to message preparation, then that represents a potential 21 - 28 hours. Naturally it’s not the same as one person working the message for that long, but it has pluses and minuses. Those people all bring different perspectives to the message preparation, and they all also work on it relatively freshly, rather than in a marathon.

Sunday Feast is about the only thing I can handle outside of work at the moment. I’m focusing on my work situation to bring things back into alignment. Over the past year things have gradually drifted out of alignment and require some attention to adjust them. All my associates there have been steadily advancing around me, and I need to look at where I am going. If you don’t swim, you sink.

Soya milk is the drink of atheists, and constitutes avoidance of caturmasya.

;-)

I have set up email updates for both ISKCONNews.net and Sita-pati’s Virtual Pen. Check into them by entering your email address in the provided box (on the right hand side on ISKCONNews.net and on the left hand side on the Virtual Pen).

You get an email update once a day with all the new articles nicely formatted.

They are handled by Feedblitz, and they look very nice.

Last night I was up until 1.30 am for a meeting with colleagues in the States.

Today we got cupboards for the Loft. Alison found them. Alison and Channell did the bhoga shopping for the Sunday Feast. Alison is going to cook. She looks wiped out already. I’ll give the class I guess, which was going to be Param Satya, but I don’t think she should go out for a while yet.

Sukanthi Radha devi dasi arrives Tuesday to stay with us for a while.

I continue with my study of Srila Prabhupada’s introduction to Bhagavad-gita.

Two things that happened at the hospital:

1. First of all, the nurse looking after Param when I arrived asked me what I do. I told her that I do volunteer work. When she asked me who for, and I told her Hare Krishna, she immediately began to tell me about the two weeks she had spent studying other religions in high school 20 years ago in Melbourne, and about the day she had spent at the temple there: the sights, the sounds, the food.
2. Secondly, as we were leaving, I deviated momentarily and bought a bottle of Coke from a vending machine. Coke is a good appetite suppressant, and artificially boosts your energy if you haven’t slept enough. It’s not so good for your teeth, and can throw you into a cycle of dependency very easily, but anyway, as soon as the bottle hit the dispenser of the vending machine I hear a voice: “Haribol!”

   A random person working in the hospital turns out to have lived on the farm in Murwillambah (New Govardhana). We chatted for a few moments and Param gave him a Loft flyer.

   Krishna sees what you do, everywhere, all the time.

Param is resting up. I’ve been off work for the last three days, two days at the hospital, and today to help with Prahlad and to make sure that Param doesn’t need to go back to the hospital in a rush. Things seem to have stabilized.

Last night we had the inaugural meeting of LUG Vegas, a new Linux user group that a few of us have started here in Brisbane. Check out the website at www.lugvegas.org. I went along to give a 10 minute opening talk and to introduce the speaker, the Senior Director of Red Hat’s Global Support Services, Iain Gray.

Marty, my boss, told me not to go, but Param wanted me to, so I went. It went well. I didn’t get to record it, and I forgot to take along the free tshirts that I have in the office for community events such as this. Had a lot on my mind, you know.

I spoke about Elvis, LUG Vegas, and getting involved and making a contribution to open source. It went well, although my sermon preparation was disrupted by the events of the past few days, so it didn’t go as well as I would have liked… still, the peeps were happy, and that’s the main thing.

In other news, the web design team have updated www.sundayfeast.com.

It’s a work in progress at the moment. The first step was to get the monthly program on there. The next step is to work on the things that go around that, such as “Plug into a team” “Children’s program” etc.

And to do something about that color scheme….

Anyway, we’ll keep promoting it each week at the Sunday Feast program, and do something to it each week to bring it up to speed.

I spent 14 hours yesterday at the hospital, and am going back today, hopefully to bring my wife home. Param had to go into the emergency unit because she had severe abdominal pains. We knew that she was pregnant, and we were worried that it would turn out to be an ectopic pregnancy, which she has had before. Well, that turned out to be the case. She went down to the operating theater at 5.40 pm and had an operation to remove the fetus.

This is the second time this has happened to us, so we were a lot more aware of the risks and the symptoms, which is why we went straight in to the emergency room.

Sometimes while discussing Krishna Consciousness the subject of abortion comes up, and people raise the question: “what if the mother’s life is at risk?”. In the case of ectopic pregnancy the fetus has implanted outside the womb, and its chances of developing to a normal birth are nil. At the same time the risk to the mother is very high, because the fetus will grow to a point where it will rupture her internally and cause massive bleeding. So this is not considered in the same category as abortion where the mother simply does not wish to be burdened with looking after a child, or even the austerity bearing it to full term for adoption.

At the same time, even breathing is killing living entities, so reaction is there for everything that is done in material consciousness, even when it is not “your fault”. Only by dedicating our life and all our life’s energies to the transcendental service of the Lord can we be protected from reaction.

Param remarks on the irony that so many women are killing their children in the womb through abortion, while others wish to bear children, but are unable to. Perhaps one is a reaction for the other. Who can say. The ways of karma are very complex and hard to understand. The essential point is that every action has a reaction, which causes another action, and so on… Only by dedicating the fruits of action, and our acting itself, to the service of the Supreme Lord, can we transcend this cycle.

This was the last time that we were going to try to have another child. Each attempt is a lot of anxiety, and also high risk, if not of death (that is always present), then of health complications and chronic problems arising from them. At the moment our shooting odds are 1 in 4, so if you’re a gambling man it’s not a good bet to try again. If on the other hand you believe in destiny and divine will, then the writing is on the wall…

OK, so the wp-hashcash thing didn’t seem to work so well. I’ve changed the commenting system so that you have to create an account and login to comment. Sorry for the additional steps, and hopefully no-one will let it dissuade them. I’m just sick of wading through literally hundreds of emails each day of comment spam…

from Amogha’s presentation:

Srila Prabhupada wrote all his books “in one take”, recording them into a dictaphone. No second takes. No revision. No endless massaging. One take.

Saktyavesa-avatara - sakti of Vyasadeva. Vyasadeva did the same thing with the Vedas, dictating them in one take to Ganesh. Also sakti of Sukadeva Goswami, because by the touch of his lips the knowledge has become sweeter, and more easy to digest.

Also, your consciousness elevates or degrades according to whether you serve or indulge.

Two cool things I bought in the weekend:

Rubber skid protectors

These are self adhesive rubber pads that you stick on to the bottom of your harmonium to stop it sliding when you put it on a table (or on an uncarpeted floor), for example, if the audience is seated on chairs and your kirtan leader stands up so that people have something to look at other than the head of the person in front of them (if you have no stage).

Felt pads

These are self adhesive felt pads that you stick on to the bottom of the chairs in your house so that they don’t scratch the hell out of your floor. We’re still negotiating with the real estate agent over the scratches on the floor of the White St ashram….

This week we changed the physical layout, in order to facilitate the program, which was a slide show and video presentation about Srila Prabhupada, and also to keep people guessing about what will happen next week.

At the moment we have two focuses:

1. Expand the team of committed, accountable active volunteers.
2. Create a committed crowd.

We need the committed volunteers to power the program, and that’s the next step for people to take as they want to get involved.

We need the committed crowd in order to have steady and predictable numbers, and also in order to develop the programming over time. If we have a committed guests who come steadily we can do multiple week presentations that add progressive value.

At the moment we don’t really have another program to move people over into, so we need to do contact and cultivation through the one program. We need to interest people, and take them deeper in the same program. We’ll do this by varying the program. If you do “Introduction to Krishna Consciousness” each week you can hardly expect large numbers of people to keep coming back. If you do a 16 week exposition on the Bhagavad-gita you are going to miss the new people who come each week (and unless you have a steady crowd everyone else too…)

The tactic right now is to vary the program from week to week to try to encourage people to come each week to see what will happen. We are working on creating valuable content.

Anyway, what we did this week:

We set the chairs up with a “deep” audience, rather than a semi circle type arrangement. Feedback from the audience was that it created a more focused environment with less distraction from people entering.

At the front of the room we set up the screen and a lounge type area where we did the opening kirtan. It looked like something you’d see on MTV unplugged, with lounge chairs, plants, and a rug.

Elliot and Channell lead, Janardana played mrdanga, Uttal das ACBSP played cartals, and I played bass.

Amogha das ACBSP showed a couple of slide presentations and gave an overview of Krishna Consciousness with a powerpoint presentation.

At the moment we are restructuring. I am having to focus and invest energy into my job in order to keep my identities and activities aligned. I am estimating that this will take two months of focused involvement. I’ve been working at my present job for over a year now, and it’s worked well. It’s time to generate some more movement there, in order to go for another year or whatever, in a similar fashion.

If you’re not moving forward, you’re going backwards. So I have to make sure that everything is taken care of there too.

So over the past two days we have been meeting and discussing the implications of this period of focus on my part. The others will have to practise more leadership and self-leadership. I’ll focus on only one program outside of work, the Sunday Feast, and apart from that my own sadhana and our morning program, family life, and connecting with the wider ISKCON community here.

Connecting with a wider community is not in my strength zone. My strength zone is going to a city where there is nothing and then starting a Krishna Conscious preaching organization from scratch, but anyway, you have to spend some time in your stretch zone, or you won’t grow. I’m more suited to be a SEAL combat unit commander than an admiral. That’s why I passed up applying for the temple president position here in favor of remaining a front line preacher.

You have to recognize your limitations, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t try to overcome them, or at least push them out a little further.

I’ll be starting another blog where I will be blogging about work related stuff.

I caught up with Dhruva yesterday before the Sunday feast and we had a chat. Dhruva is a great source of detached, brahminical advice. He gave me some good advice, which mirrors the advice I got earlier from another source.

It’s not that I don’t care what other people think, it’s just that I don’t care what other people think…. wait, that didn’t come out right…

I have to be careful that a personal quality that can manifest as the power of conviction and the courage to initiate, doesn’t manifest as arrogance and insensitivity. It doesn’t even have to be arrogance or insensitivity on my part - it can easily be perceived that way by others, and I have to be more conscious of that.

I become aware of that when people say things like: “We need to be less critical and not focus on the faults. We need to appreciate others and learn to see the good in them.” That’s what a lot of people hear when I speak.

I read something interesting on the web the other day in someone’s sig:

I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I am not sure that what you heard is what I meant.

Kali yuga is the age of misunderstanding and miscommunication.

Here’s something that Maxwell says:

Information is giving out; communication is getting through

Relationship is the moderator. I think if I spend some more time “connecting with the back lines” then we’ll all be able to keep it more in perspective. I’ll be able to measure the impact of my presentation on people and their perception of me, and adjust things accordingly, and people will have the opportunity to experience the fact that I am focused and determined, but not a raging fanatic or fruitless critic, as anyone who has met me in person can attest (but easily forget). Otherwise my tendency is to do what we did in Wellington, full focus on the future and the path forward, and no energy on maintaining contact with the existing organisation. Especially with the limited time and energy I have left over after a 40 hour working week my tendency is to want to dedicate what I have to forward progress.

More complex situations require more sophisticated responses. In an environment with an existing culture I need to give more energy to change management, otherwise the front line will advance so far forward that it will begin to be perceived as an entirely different organization, and that causes complications.

One reader commented that what I am doing is excellent. This morning I was thinking to myself: “Sita-pati is interesting to watch from a distance, but can be very uncomfortable to be around.”

I make a lot of changes and reframe things so that the existing loses value in face of the potential - “we’re getting 100 people? What are we doing, or not doing, that is stopping us from getting 1000?” I don’t devalue the 100, and the effort it took to get it, but I am focused on moving forward. Some people like that, some don’t. Dhruva’s point was that he could probably take it if it was presented a little more tactfully.

Good advice, and given in a way that it can be assimilated. It’s a waste of time to move forward losing connection with the base.

Here’s a track (Nrsimhadeva .mp3, 6.6MB) from my Jagannatha Reggae album. Jagganatha are a reggae band in Perú. They’re recording their second album at the moment.

I found this this morning while hunting down a CD of Gurudeva’s lectures in mp3 for Alison.

I just installed the wp-hashcash spam filter plugin. It’s a transparent challenge / response thing that uses javascript. The reason I installed it is because although you hardly ever see spam comments on the blog, I get hundreds of moderation messages each day in my email. I’d like that to stop, and wp-hashcash reckons it has a 100% efficiency, because bots don’t have javascript (yet).

Let’s see how long it remains effective. My recent test of it posted a comment, but left me at a blank page after I posted, so be warned.