Dear Sadhus,
Hare Krsna. Please accept our humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
We are happy to announce that the official videos of Sadhu Sanga 2025 kirtans and classes are now available for all devotees to relish the nectar!
Many devotees are already asking about the venue for next year. We’ll announce it soon once we finalize the negotiations and sign the contract with the new resort we’re working with. Meanwhile, we have something even bigger to announce!! We feel bad that you’ve to read through such a long email, but please do so as an austerity as Sri Krsna advises in the Bhagavad Gita 9.27 “…whatever austerities you perform – do that, O son of Kuntī, as an offering to Me.” 😂
Sadhu Sanga is a demonstration of what wonderful things ISKCON North America can do when all devotees — across geographies and temples, across gurus and disciples, across generations and genders — cooperate together in a large scale as one big, beautiful family to simply perform the yuga dharma of chanting the holy names of Krishna and to serve everyone selflessly.
His Holiness Indradyumna Swami Maharaja, whom Srila Prabhupada personally instructed to “preach boldly and have faith in the holy names” created the Sadhu Sanga Kirtan Retreat in 2012 for primarily strengthening the faith of devotees in the holy names by deep absorption in kirtans. Indradyumna Maharaja has been very successful in preaching in Poland, Rishikesh and others parts of the world through festivals that serve the general public primarily through kirtans. So he always wanted ISKCON to have its own retreat center where we could perform this Sankirtana-yajna on such a grand scale not only for the three days of Sadhu Sanga for devotees, but extended to 365 days a year to benefit the general public. By combining this retreat with yoga and wellness workshops, ayurveda, vegetarian cooking, philosophy classes, marriage counseling, music lessons, arts and crafts, etc., we would be able to offer a fully packaged spiritual vacation for the mainstream Western audience to explore Krsna consciousness in an accessible manner and also help them take home the experience they receive and practice the teachings joyfully in the association of devotees in their local Temples.
His Holiness Jayapataka Swami Maharaja, whom Srila Prabhupada revealed as an eternal associate of Lord Caitanya and is a pioneer in the development of Sri Mayapur Dham, has been encouraging his most beloved disciple His Grace Sarvajaya Madhava Das to develop a spiritual community similar to Sri Mayapur Dham for the benefit of those in the Western world who may not be fortunate to go to the Dham every year. Sarvajaya Madhava prabhu along with a few devotees and friends has purchased a 7,500-acre land in the fertile Rio Grande Valley in South Texas and has earmarked 1,008 acres to be donated to projects such as Sadhu Sanga and several others which directly contribute to the growth of ISKCON North America.
Together, Indradyumna Maharaja and Jayapataka Maharaja have christened this property New Navadvip Dham.
His Holiness Tamal Krsna Goswami Maharaja, whom Srila Prabhupada would count on for things which no one else could do (for e.g the purchase of the land in Mayapur), had given a very detailed lecture some 30 years ago on how he wanted the preaching in Rio Grande Valley to be developed. He had envisioned an Arjuna Krishna Temple which is dedicated to the daily recitation and sharing of the timeless teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. He also wanted a farm community to promote the “simple living, high thinking” goal of Srila Prabhupada.
His Holiness Radhanath Swami Maharaja has already accomplished all these goals in the most glorious Govardhan Eco Village project near Mumbai, India which is now attracting over a million visitors a year and is sharing Krsna consciousness to tens of thousands of westerners through kirtans and retreats. His disciple His Grace Gauranga Das who is serving as the Director of Development of GEV already has the entire blueprint of what needs to be done so that no one else has to reinvent the wheel! Check out his brilliant talk at Google. How fortunate we’re to have Gauranga Prabhu as one of the advisors of the New Navadvip Dham project!
His Holiness Guru Prasada Swami, the most recent GBC Chairman , has been living in Rio Grande Valley and is enthusiastically looking forward to providing his leadership for this project as well. He is so conversant in Spanish and is a great preacher to attract the local and international population.
Is it by chance all these divine stars are getting aligned ? Certainly not. We believe it’s directly the grace of Lord Caitanya to usher in the next era of growth of ISKCON North America by blessing us with this manifestation of New Navadvip Dham.
The success of Sadhu Sanga is only due to the selfless co-operation of so many talented devotees from various ISKCON North American Temples. The same principles of selfless co-operation can now be applied at scale and the benefits distributed to all our Temples and devotees of North America if we just organized ourselves intelligently as Srila Prabhupada particularly instructed through His Holiness Giriraja Swami in his last days:
The New Navadvip Dham is a Sadhu Sanga initiative to create a permanent home base from which can all together strengthen ISKCON North America throughout the year in a myriad of new ways that has never been attempted before at scale through grassroots efforts. Our main inspiration in this regard is our siksa-guru His Grace Vaisesika Dasa Adhikari who famously says “Think Global, Act Local”. i.e. While serving our local temples with strong commitment, we can also do things in a way that benefits other temples nationally or globally and thus increase the synergy. When the water level rises, all boats rise! His vision of creating a unified global Sankirtan team which is achieving record-breaking results each year is a prime example of this principle. Our intention is to create a similar network effect through this project by organizing devotees such that everyone’s actions becomes a force multiplier and benefits everyone else across the country! Our next email (which will be even longer 😂) will elaborate more on how we can address the apparent concern of “scarcity of resources” to an “abundance of resources” through mutual co-operation.
The key objectives of New Navadvip Dham are to build an all-inclusive devotee community centered around the principles of simple living and high thinking, farming, cow protection, ecovillage, prasadam distribution, sharing Krsna consciousness with the millions of tourists and locals, creating employment opportunities for devotees through the development of a world-class retreat center and other sattvic businesses, providing a platform for devotee entrepreneurship, investment opportunities for devotees, support our global book distribution goals and preaching goals such as the ISKCON NA GBC’s 3/35 vision, support festivals and arts nationwide and last but not least, devotee care.
This property in McAllen checks all the boxes required to serve as a launch pad (pun intended, as we’re just 90 miles away from Elon Musk’s SpaceX 🙂 for a large scale spiritual community with such lofty but quite achievable goals. Check out this stunning introductory video to learn more about the opulence of this property and the vision:
We will be sharing our strategy and detailed plans in the upcoming weeks. We need the involvement of many many people from all walks of life such as from city planners, architects, builders, engineers, doctors, artists, cooks, pujaris, drivers, farmers, kirtaneers, preachers, teachers, economists, researchers, financiers, organizers, marketers, admins and so on and so forth. Of course, we are not expecting anyone to move there immediately or even anytime in the future in order to start this or benefit from this initiative. We’ll be extending our invitation for everyone to join and benefit from this community in several phases.
In his purport to Bhagavad-gita (12.10), Srila Prabhupada writes, “Every endeavor requires land, capital, organization and labor. Just as in business one requires a place to stay, some capital to use, some labor and some organization to expand, so the same is required in the service of Krsna.”
We already have Sarvajaya Madhava Prabhu’s land and Sadhu Sanga’s organization. For the next phase, we’re inviting devotees that are interested in investment opportunities so we have enough capital to develop. Then in the phase after, we’ll generate ample employment opportunities that would provide the labor required across the various skills mentioned above that are needed to implement the project.
The 7,500-acre New Navadvip Dham property has already appreciated tremendously since the time we originally introduced this project in 2023. In fact, there’s already an offer to buy out the property at twice the purchase price! Even though Sarvajaya Madhava prabhu could have taken the easy path of selling it in part or whole to make immediate profits, he wants to preserve as much of the property as possible for fulfilling the long term objectives of this project and benefit everyone involved. This is why Sadhu Sanga is collaborating with such devotees who think big as Srila Prabhupada desired and are ready to go beyond their comfort zone for the Supreme cause.
If you are interested in learning more about this initiative, how we chose this property, how we intend to benefit devotees and the ISKCON Temples across North America through this project, upcoming plans for the development and more details of the investment opportunity (which is available only up to 100 devotees in this phase), please fill out this form or click the button below by July 18 and we’ll follow up with you through a zoom invitation.
Meanwhile, here is a quick overview of this project and the current status.
All glories to Srila Gopala Bhatta Goswami whose disappearance day is today!
All glories to Sri Sri Radha Raman Lal, his beloved deity!
All glories to Srila Prabhupada, the revealer of the holy dham!
your servant,
Govinda caran das.