The Artificial Imposition of Belief: A Story of Cultural Download
Natural state? me thinks not...
A few years back, I took my teenage daughter to the LA Hare Krishna temple. I thought it’d be an interesting experience for her—maybe even a little window into my past, a bit of cultural immersion and exposure. She had been to a Ratha Yatra as a kid, but that was just a festival—food, music, some dancing. Walking into the full temple experience, though? That was a whole different story.
The moment we pulled into the neighborhood, she started looking around. “Uh… why are they dressed like that?” she asked, eyeing the devotees in flowing robes, clutching little bead bags, some with shaved heads and tilak markings on their foreheads. I told her, “Those are devotees.” That didn’t exactly clear things up for her.
Then we stepped inside.
She immediately stopped in her tracks, staring at the life-sized plastic replica of the Swami sitting in the corner. “Why do they have a creepy statue of that guy just sitting there?” she asked. I explained that he was the guru who brought all of this to the West. She wasn’t buying it.
Then the altar doors opened.
The smell of incense thickened, bells rang, conches were blown, and a wave of ritual chanting filled the air. And then there they were—life-sized statues of Radha and Krishna, over-dressed in layers of extravagant fabric, draped in garlands, their faces stark black and white with fixed, painted expressions. On either side, there were paintings—Narasimha ripping into Hiranyakashipu, Krishna surrounded by gopis, multiple-armed gods holding weapons and lotuses, and Chaitanya’s followers frozen in a state of trance, arms raised in devotion. =
My daughter just stood there, taking it all in. But there was nothing to explain. None of it registered or made a lick of sense. Not because she was closed-minded. Not because she was ignorant or spiritually blind or buried under layers of karma and sin.
But because none of this is self-evident to an outsider. You don’t just walk into a Hare Krishna temple and get it. There’s no natural, intuitive connection to any of it.
Because the truth is, the only way it ever makes sense is if you’ve been inside the system long enough for it to override your previous sense of normal.
We bounced.
The Illusion of Universality
One of the most misleading claims Hare Krishna (and many similar groups) make is that their philosophy is “universal”—that Krishna consciousness isn’t just a religion, but the natural state of every human being, buried under layers of material conditioning. They claim that accepting it isn’t “conversion,” but a return to one’s original spiritual nature.
This is nonsense.
Religious shifts have never happened this way. Historically, large-scale religious change has only ever taken root through:
• Slow blending over time – New religions mixing with older traditions.
• Enforcement by rulers – Kings and governments deciding what people believe.
• Being raised into it – Most people follow the religion they grew up with.
What doesn’t happen is people suddenly abandoning everything they’ve ever known to take on a completely foreign religious system. That’s not how human belief works.
The Real Artificial Imposition
Ironically, the Swami used to talk about material life being an “artificial imposition on the mind”—the idea that our desires, ambitions, and attachments were unnatural distractions, while Krishna consciousness was our true nature. But the reality is the opposite.
There is nothing artificial about living in the culture you were born into, speaking your native language, and having a worldview shaped by the life you’ve lived. What is artificial is forcibly adopting an entirely foreign belief system, changing how you dress, what you eat, what music you listen to, how you speak, and how you think—all based on an ideology that had no organic connection to your life before.
Hare Krishna theology only becomes real through deep social conditioning—through daily rituals, constant reinforcement, and a system that convinces you that everything outside of it is an illusion. It does not stand on its own as an obvious, self-evident truth. If it did, my daughter wouldn’t have had that reaction. She would have just felt it. She would have intuitively connected to it. But she didn’t.
Because outside of the cult structure that reinforces it, it doesn’t make sense.
How Belief Systems Actually Take Hold
The history of religious conversion has always been slow, deliberate, and usually tied to political or cultural forces. Societies don’t suddenly drop their belief systems overnight. Even when rulers enforced new religions, it took generations for those beliefs to fully replace older traditions.
Yet ISKCON claims that anyone can simply “wake up” to Krishna consciousness and immediately erase their past conditioning. That’s not spirituality. That’s a total mental and cultural overwrite—a belief system that only “works” when it is deeply embedded into someone’s life through immersion, repetition, and controlled association.
So when my daughter walked into that temple and was completely bewildered, it wasn’t because she wasn’t “ready” for Krishna consciousness. It wasn’t because she was “too conditioned” by material life.
It was because, to the average person, this stuff doesn’t make any sense at all.
And that’s the point. You don’t “discover” Krishna consciousness. You don’t just wake up one day and decide to take on an imported obscure Bengali medieval Indian religious system.
It has to be downloaded into you, piece by piece, until your previous reality is no longer accessible.
And that is the real artificial imposition on the mind.