Mad After Krishna

My Life in a Destructive Cult

Copyright © 1994 by Paul Ford

CHAPTER 1: TRANSCENDENTAL HIPPIEDOM

It was on a Saturday afternoon in the late spring of 1969 that I first saw the Hare Krishna people. I was walking with a former schoolmate in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, New York. Dressed in ankle-length orange robes, the Krishnas danced and sang. One was playing an oblong double-headed Indian drum while others clanged hand cymbals. Their odd dress and behavior repulsed my friend, but I was intrigued. It was as if I were seeing something from another world. Most of the passersby simply ignored them.

I had arrived in New York the previous winter, after dropping out of college and taking a job as a mail clerk in an advertising agency. A rock-'n'-roll fan, I often attended concerts at the Fillmore East theater on lower Second Avenue, and other venues around the City. Later that summer, some friends and I drove to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in upstate New York. Due to logistical problems, the breaks between acts were long. During one such quiet break, a robed Hare Krishna member stood at the rim of the natural amphitheater and released a long, loud French horn-like blast from a conch shell, as if to bless the vast gathering of tribes.

On my lunch hour one day the next fall, I again saw the Hare Krishna people. This time they were chanting and making their special brand of Indian music near where I worked on Fifth Avenue. Back in the office, some of my coworkers complained about what they saw as the Krishnas' outlandish eccentricity. I replied that whatever their dress and behavior might be, at least they had the right to do what they do.

In December, I quit my job and traveled with a friend named John to Berkeley, California, a center of the burgeoning "counterculture." As we strolled along Telegraph Avenue, the commercial center of the area, we came across many political and religious groups as they proselytized the passersby. We stopped to talk to a shaven-headed Hare Krishna devotee who was selling books and incense from behind a cloth-covered card table. The center of his forehead bore a marking that consisted of two thin vertical white lines joined at a point between his eyes in a pattern resembling a tuning fork.

John asked him why he shaved his head. With calm assurance he replied, "Because it has transcendental beauty." His deep-set eyes squinted slightly as he spoke. After a pause, he went on to say that his sect was part of a 5,000-year-old Indian spiritual tradition. Holding up a book entitled Bhagavad-gita As It Is, he pointed to an endorsement on the back cover by the popular beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The devotee declared, "You know, all the really hip and intelligent people are reading this book these days." He made buying a book seem like a natural act. I bought it and took it home, but not being much of a reader — and especially not a reader of books about religion — I never opened it.

Back in New York, I resumed work at my former job and moved into an apartment in a barrio on the Lower East Side. I began to play bass guitar in a garage rock-'n'-roll band. Its leader was a wooden flute player and songwriter from San Francisco named Roberto. He introduced me to Zen macrobiotics, a Japanese philosophy and religion that promotes a strict diet of brown rice and vegetables as the way to physical and spiritual health. I experimented with the popular street drugs of the day, including marijuana, LSD, and magic mushrooms. They gave me what I took as religious or consciousness-expanding experiences.

I mentioned to Roberto my encounters with the Hare Krishnas. He replied that he had seen them often during the heyday of the Flower Children in San Francisco. Their generosity in distributing free food — mainly white rice and Indian sweets — in the city parks had impressed him. He mentioned that for a time they had even passed out free LSD in Golden Gate Park. The drugs posed no problem for us, but we did wonder about the white rice and sugar they served, as neither food was recommended in the macrobiotic diet. Roberto concluded, "If you're going to get it together, you might as well get it together on all fronts."

Having grown up in the Quaker tradition of nonviolence, and being bitterly opposed to the vicious war in Vietnam, I applied for, and received, draft status as a conscientious objector. At a massive peace march in Washington, DC, on May Day, 1971, my friends and I watched as the Hare Krishna people distributed vegetarian food to scores of hungry demonstrators.

When the warm weather arrived in June, I became restless and longed to leave the big, gray city. I decided to travel to Vancouver, British Columbia, which I had heard was a "happening" place for young people. I bought a secondhand Volkswagen stationwagon with some money my father had given me. The first night of my trip, I crossed the Canadian border near Montreal, parked at the roadside, and slept in the car. I began my westward journey the next morning on the Trans-Canada Highway, sharing the driving chore with three Canadian students who were hitchhiking across the country at the start of their summer vacation.

After about three days of near-constant driving, we arrived in Vancouver. There I rented a room in a two-story house in the Seventh Avenue hippie district, and settled in with my new Canadian housemates. I bought my groceries at a natural foods store and took classes in hatha yoga and macrobiotic cooking. I continued to take occasional trips on LSD.

One afternoon, as I played my acoustic guitar alone on the sidewalk at a busy intersection in the heart of the downtown business district, a double column of robed and sandal-clad Hare Krishna devotees marched past, chanting and playing their Indian instruments. The "ching, ching, chi-i-ing" of the brass hand cymbals pierced through the city noise. Five or six shaven-headed Krishna men led the procession. Two or three women with covered heads brought up the rear. A man was carrying a placard displaying the Hare Krishna mantra in large, Gothic script:

HARE KRISHNA

HARE KRISHNA

KRISHNA KRISHNA

HARE HARE

HARE RAMA

HARE RAMA

RAMA RAMA

HARE HARE

I declined their invitation to join them in their chanting.

On another occasion in downtown Vancouver, a devotee told me that they lived together in a temple under strict vows of poverty and chastity. I admired their single-mindedness of purpose, but they made me feel a bit selfish. Perhaps it was true that something was missing from my life, I thought.

While eating lunch one afternoon in a natural foods restaurant, I enjoyed listening to an album of Hare Krishna chanting that George Harrison of the Beatles had produced. I had already heard some of these chants on Harrison's solo records.

That first year in Vancouver, I befriended a thirty-year-old former Chicago police officer by the name of Larry. He smelled like incense and shared my interests in guitars and vegetarianism. He practiced hatha yoga, standing on his hands for hours at a time or cleansing his stomach by swallowing medical gauze.

Most of my other hippie friends were suspicious of older people and rarely did anything that was, strictly speaking, legal. Therefore, they took his advanced age and former occupation with some skepticism at first.

In any case, Larry, too, had seen the Krishnas on the street corners. He once complained, "They're always relating to their guru." Most of our friends "did their own thing," even when it came to something as structured as religion.

On one occasion, as Larry and I were playing our guitars on a street corner in downtown Vancouver, a Krishna devotee walked by with an Indian drum strapped around his neck. He was tall and stocky, with a big, round head that was shaved except for a small tuft in the back. We gave him one of our guitars. He played and sang a spirited, up-tempo version of the Hare Krishna mantra. The beauty and conviction of his voice impressed me. I took mental note of the simple three-chord sequence he was playing. Captivated by the hypnotic simplicity of the song, I often played and sang it at home.

On another occasion in downtown Vancouver, I spoke to a robed and sandal-clad devotee who was selling incense to earn money for a pilgrimage to India. "I'm depending on Krishna to send me the money I need, fifty cents at a time," he said serenely, before inviting me to a "free vegetarian love feast" on Sunday afternoon. I remembered once seeing an ad for a free Hare Krishna feast in the East Village Other, an underground newspaper in New York. He said I would understand more about "Krishna consciousness" if I came to the temple. He added that there I would be able listen to "far-out tapes of Indian music — the kind George Harrison is into."

Several weeks later, a young Hare Krishna woman named Joanie approached me as I walked on a downtown sidewalk. She was wearing the traditional Indian sari, a full-length robe, one part of which covered her head and hair. She spoke to me about their lifestyle, which she called "spiritual communism." She spent her days chanting and serving God, or Krishna, as she called Him. The tone of her remarks seemed unexceptional to me. In those days, young people often spoke openly about their ideals. She had joined the Hare Krishna Movement after attending a ceremony at the temple. It seemed that she was in the state of "bliss" she spoke of so often when describing Krishna consciousness. Listening to her speak, I became concerned that perhaps it was true that my life was a bit too materialistic and self-centered. She sold me a booklet called Easy Journey To Other Planets, by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, for fifty cents.

On my way home on the electric bus, I glanced through the booklet, thinking at first that it might be about astral travel, the ability of advanced yogis to travel through space by way of mind power. Although the first few pages were about travel to other planets, the remainder was about a "cowherd boy" named Krishna who lived in ancient India, and the modern International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), which the Swami Prabhupada had founded in the mid-1960s. Discouraged from reading further by the many foreign words in it, I put the book down and looked out the window at the sunset above the residential and light industrial landscape of Vancouver.

In my conversations with the devotees, I discovered that many of them were like me. Most were young, middle-class people who had dropped out of college or jobs in an attempt to find greater meaning in their lives. They maintained that the chanting of Hare Krishna had given them a continuous drug-free high. A laudable goal, I thought. It seemed that the growing Krishna Movement was striving toward world peace and harmony. There were, however, no East Indians among the devotees I had met. I wondered why the Swami Prabhupada had failed to attract any members from his own country. Would not their cultural and religious experiences predispose them toward his ideas and programs?

One Sunday in the late summer of 1972, I decided that, after several years of procrastination, it was now time to attend the much-advertised Hare Krishna feast. I arrived at the temple on time at 4 p.m. It was similar to many two-story, single-family houses in that part of the city. Except, that is, for a sign above the front door that read, "SRI-SRI RADHA-KRISHNA TEMPLE."

I removed my shoes, placed them next to several other pairs outside the front door, and entered. The sweet smell of incense permeated the front hallway. It and the other rooms on the ground floor were nearly devoid of furniture. Pictures of multi-armed Hindu gods hung on the walls. Not knowing what to do, I sat cross-legged on the bare, wooden floor. Meanwhile, two barefoot devotees dressed in robes and wearing beads talked to each other in what sounded like a foreign language.

Along with several devotees and another guest, I climbed into the panel van belonging to the temple, as the feast was to be held at another location. No one said much. Perhaps the presence of us outsiders had inhibited the devotees' conversation, I thought. Then another devotee stuck his head into the van and said, "This can be just waiting, or it can be an opportunity for spiritual advancement!" I recognized him as the one who had played guitar on the street a few weeks before with Larry and me. The devotees in the van reached into the cloth bags that hung around their necks and began to mumble like transcendental bumblebees. After a few minutes, we started out for the Vancouver Free University, stopping along the way at a grocery store, where a devotee bought some frozen orange juice.

In the main auditorium at the University, the ceremonies began as a devotee lit a fistful of stick incense and waved it at a poster-sized, full-color picture of Krishna in his form as a blue cowherd boy. I watched from the sidelines as the other devotees began to chant in unison. The tempo, which was slow at first, gradually picked up until they were all jumping about wildly and singing or shouting at the top of their lungs. They were a bit on the fanatical side, I thought, but it was clear that they had committed themselves wholeheartedly to their religion.

After the chanting was over, the devotees served a spicy Indian vegetable dish, some Indian candy, and a sweet, cool, yellowish drink called "nectar." I learned later that it was made from buttermilk, orange juice concentrate, sugar, and ice. I enjoyed the foods and drink, even though I suspected that they contained sugar and food coloring, both of which were anathemas to a natural, organic, macrobiotic eater like me. On the other hand, they were vegetarians who mainly used grains and fresh fruits and vegetables in their cooking. Moreover, Krishna consciousness was similar to macrobiotics in that both philosophies attached great spiritual or metaphysical importance to food.

I spoke little as we ate. On my way home, I thought that this meeting with Hare Krishna devotees was mystical, to be sure, yet innocent enough.

Intrigued with Krishna consciousness, I decided to attend a second Sunday feast a couple of weeks later. This one was held at the temple building itself. In the "temple room," a converted living room that the devotees used for their daily religious services, they presented a short skit involving a devotee and a pair of drunken young men in Sixteenth-Century India. At first, the pair threw rocks at the devotee, but he later converted them to Krishna consciousness. The actor who played the devotee was the same one who had played music with Larry and me on the street several weeks before, and who had urged the devotees in the van to chant.

After the skit, he introduced himself as Bahudaka, the temple president. He was wearing the white robes of a "householder" (married) devotee. He lived near the temple with his devotee wife and their young son, Jacob. Married devotees were not permitted to live in the temple.

After the play, a devotee directed us to sit on the floor in straight rows. I sat next to a young woman devotee who had long, beautiful, reddish-brown hair and refined, angelic features. Her name was Gita-devi. "Gita" means song and "devi" means goddess or saintly person. A lovely name, I thought. As we ate, we talked about Krishna consciousness. I asked, "What were you doing before you became a devotee?" She answered, "Nothing." I wondered how this was possible.

Bahudaka, always the perfect transcendental host, entered the room, carrying a plate of food. A tall man, he was surprisingly light on his bare feet. When he saw me, his face lit up and he handed me a sugar candy known as a "sweet ball." I happily accepted the offering. His round face seemed to glow. He had what the devotees called "effulgence." He said to me with a slight lisp, "You have a blissful face."

A few weeks later, I revisited the temple on a weekday evening. The devotees were performing a ceremony known as arotik, a ritual during which the devotees chant Hare Krishna and other mantras, and offer flowers, water, and incense to the Deities. (The latter are representations of Krishna who are sanctified by the spiritual master and worshiped as God by the devotees.) In this particular temple, the three wooden figures on the altar were known collectively as the Jagganath Deities. Spotlights illuminated a flower-bedecked altar in the otherwise darkened temple room.

I watched as the devotees, dressed in well-pressed orange or white robes, swayed back and forth to the beat of the drums and hand cymbals. The men stood on the left side of the room and the women on the right, as one faced the Deities. Not feeling much like a member of either group, I ended up in the back of the room on the women's side. One of the men took me firmly by the arm and led me to the men's side.

After the ceremony, the curtains in front of the Deities closed. We sat on the floor, and Bahudaka addressed the assembled devotees. As he did so, he often looked at me. I wondered why he wanted so much for me to join the sect. In a way, I enjoyed the attention.

After the lecture, he talked to me alone in the hallway outside the temple room. He said, "Krishna is God. You are a part of Him. You must serve Him, as the part serves the whole. He wants you to become His devotee." He added, "Only Krishna can satisfy your desires. If you join this Movement, all your desires will be fulfilled." His lectures stressed that Krishna consciousness was the answer to all of one's questions and problems. I said little or nothing — his great size and enthusiasm for Krishna consciousness overwhelmed me. When he finished talking, he smiled and said, "You are a good listener."

An inner light seemed to illuminate the devotees, the altar, and everything else in the temple room. On my way home that evening, the grass, the trees, and the sidewalk outside the temple seemed to glow with an eerie, transcendental light. Or was I simply imagining it?

In the late summer of 1972, Larry and I packed our belongings in my car and set out for Gabriola Island, where several of his friends were living on a small commune. We took a two-hour ferry ride to Nanaimo, a small town on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island. From there we took a twenty-minute ferry ride to Gabriola Island, where we pitched my recently bought twelve-foot canvas teepee.

Hal and Ann, one of the couples who had cofounded the commune, were followers of an Indian swami named Shama. His headquarters were in Montreal. Clayton and Ann, the other cofounding couple, often read from the I Ching (also known as the Book of Changes), an ancient Chinese book of divination, and Baba Ram Dass's popular contemporary yoga primer, Be Here Now.

Another man known only by his alias, Tom Jones, had allegedly been involved in the first LSD consciousness-raising experiments in Northern California. He was on the run from the authorities. Michael from Ontario was also an advanced meditator and a devoted follower of the Swami Shama.

Shortly after our arrival, Marguerite and her three-year-old son, Lyle, joined us on the commune. The previous year, following a breakup with Lyle's father, she had nearly joined the Hare Krishna temple in her home city of Montreal. John and Kim, who were from Southern California, joined us later in the fall. They were followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental Meditation (TM), guru to the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and other celebrities. They began to build a cabin using logs salvaged from the beach. We also built a makeshift Native American sweat lodge at the beach. Every week or so several of us purified our bodies in its intense heat.

We transcendental hippies and assorted "freaks," as we sometimes called ourselves, followed many different religious and philosophical paths. We agreed, however, that many different methods, including drugs, meditation, and chanting, could rid a person of ingrained, ignorant habits of thought and action and would lead to the goal of enlightenment and personal fulfillment.

On one occasion, a group from the commune attended a meeting of the Swami Shama's group at the suburban Vancouver home of one of his followers. The disciples meditated silently, chanted together, and cooked Indian-style meals for the middle-aged, silver-haired, turban-clad swami. They believed that he was self-realized and perfect in meditation. His ability to travel outside his body fascinated one disciple in particular. She told us, "When Shama goes up, I go up." Michael added, "Meditating is like sitting there and blowing your mind."

I understood by then that yogic enlightenment involved the renunciation of worldly pleasures. I was, therefore, somewhat surprised and disappointed to see that between, and sometimes during, meditation sessions, the swami was making romantic advances toward some of his young female followers. Unlike the Swami Prabhupada, he neither enforced strict rules of personal conduct nor formally initiated his disciples.

I joined the others in the group meditation sessions. Whenever I tried to meditate, however, nothing happened. I was unable to sit still for more than a minute or two. It was clear that silent meditation was not for me. I left early the next morning and hitchhiked a few miles to the Krishna temple, arriving in time for breakfast. The devotees gently chastised me for having spent time with the man they called "the Swami Sham."

Back on the island again a few days later, I moved from the teepee into a cabin for the upcoming winter season of rain. After settling in, I read a copy of the Krishna Movement's Back to Godhead magazine, which a Vancouver devotee had sold me. The magazine's legend was, "Godhead is light. Nescience is darkness. Where there is Godhead, there is no nescience."

In it, I found a full-page color picture of the young cowherd boy, Krishna, and tacked it onto a cabin wall. I looked out the window at the thick woods and then at the brightly colored picture. It occurred to me as I did so that the Hare Krishna philosophy must indeed be right: Krishna did seem more beautiful than nature. Another photo in the magazine showed the Swami Prabhupada, the guru of the Hare Krishna Movement, wearing a fancy watch. This seemed to me somewhat worldly for a person who was supposedly in touch with Transcendence.

Nevertheless, I wrote a letter to the Swami Prabhupada in which I said that bhakti yoga (the yoga of devotion to God) interested me and that I wanted to know how to become more involved in the Movement. A few weeks later, a letter from Prabhupada arrived. In it he invited me to chant Hare Krishna on beads, to follow the rules and regulations, and to visit the temple in Vancouver. He had signed the letter, "A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami," with bold strokes. At the temple a few weeks later, the devotees showed mild interest in the letter, but others warned me never to write him again. They said it was selfish to demand personal attention from a man who was responsible for thousands of devotees, not to mention the fate of the world. I learned later that a devotee asked for nothing of the guru except to serve him obediently.

I wrote a letter to an aunt in which I told her about the wonders of Krishna consciousness, and invited her to chant Hare Krishna. I never received a reply.

When on the island, I ate brown rice, vegetables, and fruits, as I continued to follow my macrobiotic diet. In an attempt to purge my body of poisons, I once fasted for ten days on water and fruit juice.

In February 1973, I flew to New York City, using some money from a trust fund. Walking through midtown Manhattan after my trip in from the airport, I saw the Krishna devotees. Some were showing the passersby a laminated sheet of paper containing endorsements of their Movement by prominent politicians including Mayor John Lindsay and Senator Kenneth Keating. With their round, smiling faces, the devotees looked as blissful as ever. Though the day was brisk, one of the women declared, "We don't feel the cold when we're serving Krishna."

A devotee sold me a set of wooden prayer beads known as the japa-mala. Roughly comparable to a Roman Catholic rosary, it was used to count the repetitions of the Hare Krishna mantra. Another devotee gave me some spicy cooked eggplant, which I ate and enjoyed. A third invited me to the temple, which was then in Brooklyn. When I replied that I had already made plans to visit my mother in Connecticut that evening, she declared, "You don't want to go to your mother's — you want to come to the temple!" Nevertheless, I did not change my plans.

After New York, my next destination was Paris. My first morning there, I played guitar in the Metro. Later, at street level again, I saw what was by now becoming a familiar sight: the Hare Krishna devotees. They were chanting and marching in the streets and selling their Back to Godhead magazines in French and English. Apprehensive at first about chanting in public, I nevertheless quickly succumbed to an impulse to fall into step and sing with them. It felt liberating to sing, chant, and, figuratively speaking, to thumb my nose at the capitalistic, materialistic world.

After the devotees had finished their chanting for the afternoon, they took me with them on the Metro to the temple. They even paid my fare. As we rode, a devotee talked to me about the virtues of the Hare Krishna Movement and the vices of other religions. He criticized other gurus and mystics, calling them "opportunists," "rip-off artists," and "false prophets." Prabhupada, however, was the purest and most humble servant of God. Unlike other gurus, Prabhupada concerned himself only with spreading God's Name, not his own name, my devotee friend said.

To the devotees, the world was a frightening place. It was filled with sinful meat eating and rampant drinking, smoking, drug taking, and illicit sex. Most of what they said seemed a bit exaggerated and farfetched, but it was obvious that I was not going to change their minds. If anything, they would change mine, I concluded.

The temple was in a château in the outskirts of the city. As we passed through the gate, the devotee with whom I had spoken on the Metro sighed heavily and flopped face-first to the ground in prayer. Upon entering the temple grounds or the temple building, and upon entering the temple room itself, a devotee was expected to offer his humble "obeisances" by kneeling or prostrating himself, touching his forehead to the floor, and repeating two short mantras. The first addressed the spiritual master and the other addressed what they referred to as the "disciplic succession" of masters from Krishna to the present. This is similar to the Roman Catholic and Anglican conception of the Apostolic Succession from the Apostles to the current bishops.

Inside the temple building, women devotees served the returning men some hot, runny tapioca pudding on squares of wax paper. A few minutes later, after washing up, we all crowded into the temple room, which was in an outbuilding, for arotik.

When the ceremonies were over, a devotee took me upstairs to a room cluttered with typewriters and papers. He said it was there that the devotees translated Prabhupada's books and magazines into French. He showed me how to chant the sixteen-word Hare Krishna mantra once on each of the 108 beads of the japa-mala. They symbolized Krishna's highest devotees, the cowherd girls (Gopis) who played transcendental games with Him in the spiritual world.

The devotee said, "The mantra is God Himself. By chanting Hare Krishna, you will link up with God. You must control your mind by chanting." A devotee who chanted the mantra once on each of the 108 beads was said to have completed one "round." All devotees chanted at least sixteen rounds each day, he said.

As he talked about Krishna and the Gopis, his eyes glazed over and his voice trailed off. It seemed that the devotees were always talking about Krishna. That was why people called them Krishnas, I thought. Although they could be rational when they wanted, they seemed to prefer being blissed out.

To make conversation, I asked a devotee who spoke English with a North American accent how she liked Paris. She replied, "I'm not in Paris; I'm in heaven." Touché, I thought. When I mentioned that I liked health foods, she said, "Oh, Prabhupada doesn't like health foods, and we don't eat them, either." It was clear that the devotees took seriously not only the master's religious teachings, but his personal likes and dislikes as well.

A few minutes later, a senior devotee entered the room and placed a garland of scented carnations around my neck and the tuning-fork-shaped clay marking called tilak on my forehead. He asked me pointedly, "What are you doing here in Paris?" Suddenly, all my hippie "trips" seemed insignificant. I answered weakly, "I'm looking for musicians." He gestured toward the other devotees and declared, "Well, here we are!"

Leaving the temple that night, I felt uplifted. Walking from the Metro to my hotel, however, it seemed that Paris, which I loved, was a bit drearier, dirtier, and more morally degraded than before, just as the devotees had suggested it was. The neon signs glared a little more than usual and the pedestrians seemed a bit more robotic than before. In my tiny, sparsely decorated room, I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate and chant on the beads, as the devotee had instructed me. I was sure I would never reach the last bead.

While chanting, I remembered that Prabhupada had written that Krishna consciousness was not an artificial imposition on the mind. Rather, it was the natural, original consciousness of the living entity, he wrote. I eventually finished a full round — one complete cycle around the string of 108 beads.

A fortnight later, while passing through downtown Vancouver on my way back to Gabriola Island, I joined some devotees on the sidewalk as they chanted. Bahudaka lead the singing with his clear tenor voice, while accompanying himself on a harmonium. It might be described as a cross between an accordion and a small piano. He played the keyboard with his right hand while operating the bellows with his left hand. Some other devotees played karatals, polished brass hand cymbals about three or four inches in diameter.

As usual, the passersby tolerated our strange behavior without comments. We thought that this was so because they were interested only in materialistic pursuits, as opposed to God consciousness. When we finished chanting, I announced that I was going home. Bahudaka, referring to the company of devotees, replied, "But this is your home!"

The devotees told me that God had chosen me to help Him carry out His Mission on earth. Being among the chosen few felt flattering, but at the same time, saving the world did seem like a heavy burden. Nevertheless, I became passionate about chanting Hare Krishna over the next few weeks and months. Although chanting on beads was hard at first, I persisted and in time was able to complete two, three, eight, and finally the prescribed sixteen rounds per day.

The more I chanted, the more I wanted to become Krishna consciousness. Eventually, I wanted it more than anything else in the world. I had accepted much of the philosophy of Krishna consciousness: the guru (or spiritual master) was not only benevolent and knowledgeable but perfect and infallible; I had been in ignorance of the Absolute Truth before meeting the devotees; constant chanting and service to the spiritual master would reveal the Truth to me. I felt humble and grateful for having met the devotees.

About once a week, Larry and I traveled across the water to Nanaimo, the nearest town, for provisions. On one occasion, as we were driving on our return trip from the ferry to the commune, he spotted a hitchhiker and insisted that we stop and pick her up. A young Gabriola islander named Heather and her black Labrador retriever, Jack, climbed into the back seat.

A few months later, Larry and Heather married in a brief ceremony at the commune, and he moved into her house several miles up the island. After Larry left, I spent most of my days in solitude in a cave high above a rocky beach. On one dreamy and memorable LSD trip at the cave, I briefly became the Universal Teacher and the Source of Spiritual Knowledge.

Though I was spending most of my days on the island, I did visit the Vancouver temple several times a month. As a concession to the ultra-clean-cut devotees, I trimmed my shoulder-length hair to a short ponytail.

On one occasion, I arrived at the temple on a natural high after having chanted for many hours at home and on the ferry. I hoped that Bahudaka would notice that I had been chanting "like a madman," as the devotees would say. He said, "Krishna has sent you here. Soon you will move into the temple and serve Him with His devotees." I told him that I preferred life in the country to life in the noisy, polluted city. He replied that the sect had a big farm commune in West Virginia, and that I could take a Greyhound bus there for about $100. Nevertheless, I liked living in British Columbia and decided not to take his suggestion.

The curtains at one end of the darkened temple room opened, revealing a brightly lit altar and signaling the start of the evening arotik. Three wooden, jewel-bedecked Jagganath Deities, each about three feet high, and each surrounded by a colorful floral arrangement, stood on the altar. The devotees fell to their knees and offered their obeisances to the spiritual master. Some even prostrated themselves. They then rose and, led by Bahudaka, chanted Hare Krishna and other mantras in a ceremony known as a kirtan.

After the ceremony, Bahudaka lectured for fifteen or twenty minutes on the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred dialogue between Lord Krishna and His devotee Arjuna. Bahudaka then played a short tape recording of one of Prabhupada's speeches. I understood little of it because of his thick accent.

Meanwhile, I noticed that one of the devotees was dozing off. I thought it ironic that people who espoused God consciousness were sometimes unconscious in class. Nevertheless, having enjoyed the chanting, I asked a devotee after class if there would be any more chanting that night. He replied, "No, just be patient and wait until tomorrow morning." Another devotee gave me a scented garland that the Deities had worn. I remarked to some devotees, "If everyone else in a group believes something, then soon you will, too." They agreed.

I was becoming more of a regular at the temple services, and some of them even began to refer to me as a "devotee." I knew, however, that I was a long way from being a full-fledged devotee.

A senior devotee took me to an upstairs office, where he typed up the words to some daily prayers for me to take home. Another devotee explained to me that, being a part of the "material nature" (matter), drugs and chemicals, could never lead to God consciousness. I had to admit that this did make some sense, because after several years of intermittent LSD use, I was having increasing difficulty getting high. I decided to quit drugs and to pursue natural forms of consciousness raising, such as chanting.

At about 9:30, a devotee served everyone hot milk and sweet balls. The latter were made with butter, flavoring, and confectioners' sugar. I later learned that devotees called them "ISKCON bullets" because of their effectiveness in bagging new members. I was still dubious about eating sugar, but a devotee reassured me, "You're not eating sugar — you're eating Krishna."

Being accustomed to sleeping outdoors, I asked a devotee for permission to sleep on the roof outside the upstairs bedroom that served as the men's ashram (dormitory). He replied, "It's better to take rest inside, so you can jump up early with the other devotees." I slept inside. A devotee showed me how to point my sleeping bag to the East, the direction of Krishna's birthplace in Vrindavan, India.

I was in a deep, dreamless sleep when a devotee woke me at 4 a.m. and instructed me to shower and prepare for the morning program. A sign on the shower stall read:

Turn on cold water.

Get wet.

Turn off water.

Soap up.

Turn on cold water again.

Get out of shower — another devotee is waiting!

I attended the morning program of ceremonies, which included arotik, followed by the chanting of Hare Krishna on beads and a class on one of Prabhupada's books. After the program, I felt wide awake and highly sensitive to everything going on around me. The chanting of Hare Krishna had given my life a sense of purpose and meaning. I was now on a spiritual trip that was genuine and, as the devotees would say, bona fide.

At the same time, I resented what I thought was a feeling of superiority among some devotees. They were clean cut and highly disciplined, and I wore a beard, lived outside the temple, and often inadvertently broke their rules. I felt spiritually dirty around the devotees.

After the morning program, the devotees "took" (ate) breakfast prasadam (foodstuffs offered to Krishna) in a small room next to the kitchen. Servers placed cooked cereal and pieces of fresh fruit onto one-foot squares of wax paper. The squares were arranged into two straight rows, one at the front of the room, and one at the rear, near the kitchen. Bahudaka sat at one end of the front row next to the vice president. Next to them sat the other senior men, the junior men, and finally the guests. Meanwhile, the women took prasadam at the rear of the room.

A few weeks later, my friend Michael from the commune and I were grocery shopping in Nanaimo when I noticed that Bahudaka and some other devotees from the Vancouver temple were selling books on a street corner. When he spotted me, he demanded, "What are you doing out here in the material world?" I thought, "This must be the 'material world' if he says it is." Then I thought, "Yeah, what am I doing out here in the material world, anyway?" I listened as he talked. He sold us each a hardcover book containing full-color pictures of Krishna and stories about Him. The devotees offered us some food, which we ate. Meanwhile, a black devotee in the back of their van chanted on his beads, his head bent over his bead bag. It seemed that he was psyching himself up for a few more hours of selling books and preaching Krishna consciousness.

Later that evening, sitting alone before the fire in the teepee, I decided to accept the Hare Krishna philosophy. It was around April 1, 1973. I thought, "What do I have to lose by joining, even if they are wrong? If they are right, don't I have everything to gain?" Besides, I had concluded that because I was already chanting Hare Krishna all day, and because I had a desire to purify myself spiritually, it made sense to associate with others who shared the same goals. The devotees' frequent assertion that the material world presented too many distractions from spiritual life seemed true.

Still, I hesitated to move into the temple, because life there seemed too regimented and restrictive for me. I often felt like the proverbial bull in a china shop. It seemed that I was always committing one "offense" or another, as the devotees would say. Shoes and sandals always remained outside the temple building; hands and mouths were washed after eating; foreheads touched the floor and prayers offered upon entering or leaving the temple room; books never touched the floor; the kitchen was off-limits to all but initiated devotees, and so on.

Besides, I enjoyed my life on the island. Nevertheless, I decided to chant at least sixteen rounds every day and to spend as much time as I could at the temple while maintaining my home on the island.

Over the next several weeks, chanting highs replaced drug highs in my life. I often chanted while walking on the beach or standing in a meadow near our teepee. Some days I completed as many as sixty rounds. At fifteen minutes per round, this was about fifteen hours of chanting a day, nearly every waking minute.

On one occasion, Hal and Ann from the commune joined me at the temple for the evening arotik. Later, Ann went upstairs to sleep in the women's ashram, while Hal and I went to sleep in the basement. It reeked of strawberry incense.

A devotee woke us at 4:00 a.m. We showered, dressed, and went upstairs to the temple room. Ann looked quite natural in the sari the women had lent her, I thought. Although to my knowledge she had never chanted before, she seemed to have little trouble completing her quota of sixteen rounds of Hare Krishna before breakfast.

After the meal, Hal and Ann left to visit friends in another part of the city. Later, Hal told me that he, too, disliked the great number of rules in the Hare Krishna temple.

I watched in envy and fear as young devotees ran up and down the stairs and chanted at full volume, while preparing for another day of nonstop devotional activities. On one occasion, a devotee who had observed my idleness asked me to sweep the temple room. As I prepared to do so, he told me, "When you clean the temple, you are cleaning your heart. Devotional service is absolute."

Meanwhile, another devotee looked out the window at the grass, shrubs, and trees in the front yard. He was looking at what they called "Maya," the material energy or material nature. (In Christian terms, Maya is the Devil, the personality who lures the soul away from God.) I wondered what the outside world would look like to a devotee who was advanced in Krishna consciousness.

Then Bahudaka entered the room and said, "Okay, everyone outside for a little sacrifice." We went outside and pushed their van, whose battery was dead. Not wanting to perform menial tasks all day at the temple, I hitched a ride downtown with what they called the sankirtan devotees (those who sold Prabhupada's literature in public places).

On the way, a woman named Anala told me what it was like to take the message of God consciousness into the streets. She said that atheists had spat on and cursed her as she tried to spread the word. I wondered how someone who was doing so much good for the world could provoke such hostility. She added, "All my transcendental realizations come while I'm out on sankirtan."

Until then I had assumed that chanting alone inspired any realizations a devotee might have. When we arrived downtown, I climbed out of the van and walked to Stanley Park, the largest park in the city, where I took a much-needed nap.

A few weeks later, I attended a Hare Krishna wedding ceremony and feast in the park. As at other Krishna festivals, the devotees chanted loudly and danced energetically for several hours before taking prasadam. Bahudaka became so absorbed in leading the kirtan that he had forgotten to eat. Luckily for him, his wife had saved some food for him. For the first few minutes of our trip back to the temple, everyone in the van was silent. Although most of the devotees were tired after a long day, I still wanted to chant some more. For a few minutes I led, if tentatively, the group singing for the first time.

A few days later, I was back in the temple. Not caring to attend the class then in session in the temple room, I stood in the hallway outside the temple room. Chanting quietly before an idyllic painting of the youthful Krishna with a calf, I felt peaceful and contented, as if I were "at Home with Krishna in the Spiritual World," as the devotees would say. I understood why the devotees called pictures of Krishna "windows into the spiritual world."

I found the classes boring and hard to understand. When Bahudaka saw me after class, he encouraged me to attend the lectures, declaring, "You must get this philosophy!" Eventually, I did attend all the classes whenever I was at the temple.

During almost every visit to the temple, I put a ten or twenty-dollar bill into the donation box in the front hall. I also bought several recently published hardcover books that the devotees were reading and studying. These books contained color reproductions of pictures of Krishna that some devotees at other temples had painted. The sect had published a three-part paperback series called the Krishna Book, which contained stories about Krishna in His incarnation as a cowherd boy in the village of Vrindavan, India. George Harrison had contributed the introduction to the series.

In late May, several of us from the commune on Gabriola Island went on a month-long tree-planting expedition to the mountains of west-central British Columbia. On the drive home, I chanted Hare Krishna. While I was away, Stephane, a new member of the commune from eastern Canada, had accidentally set my teepee afire. Luckily, no one was hurt, but my summer shelter was gone. I made plans to leave the island and return to the temple for more chanting, ceremonies, and association of devotees.

On one occasion at the temple, I saw Jose, a man I knew slightly before he joined the sect, when we were hippies. Janaspriha, as he was known in the group, invited me to drive with him and his wife to San Francisco for the annual Ratha-Yatra festival. He described the it as a weekend of chanting, dancing, and feasting in Golden Gate Park with many hundreds of devotees and guests. This sounded like fun and I accepted the invitation.

The first night of our trip we slept at the Portland, Oregon, temple. We camped the next night in an abandoned building somewhere in Northern California. In the morning, his wife, using a propane stove, cooked us a breakfast of halavah, a cake-like preparation made from butter, sugar, and toasted cream of wheat.

Around noon on Friday, the day before the festival, we arrived at the San Francisco temple, which had once been a morgue. I joined a street chanting party of about two dozen devotees from various West Coast and mountain state temples. Meanwhile, the local devotees were preparing for the festival. Except for a short lunch break, we sang and danced all day on the streets of San Francisco. On our return to the temple, most of the devotees showed signs of fatigue. I was, however, full of energy and ready for more ecstatic chanting.

The devotees gathered after nightfall in the high-ceilinged foyer of the temple. Among them were various dignitaries from around the Movement and two swamis clad in orange robes. They had taken the sacred order of sannyasa, or renunciation, which meant that it was their duty to travel from temple to temple preaching Krishna consciousness.

Dina Bandhu, the Portland temple president, and his wife, both of them immaculate in their flowing white robes, descended the grand, curved staircase, as many other devotees rushed to greet them. This was my first taste of the high social life among householder devotees in a big-city Hare Krishna temple.

The events of the day had left me too excited to fall asleep, especially not on the wooden floor of the men's ashram. I did fall asleep eventually, but in the middle of the night, I reawoke, my remembrance of the robust chanting of Hare Krishna and the haunting sound of the karatals reverberating loudly in my head.

The next morning, the swamis lectured and led an ecstatic kirtan in the temple. One looked like a shaven-headed California surfer, but spoke with a thick accent much like Prabhupada's. The other looked like a pug-nosed amateur boxer in incongruous ecclesiastical robes. Both exuded supreme confidence while speaking and answering questions. They and the other devotees impressed me with their sincerity and enthusiasm. I was excited about joining the sect and dedicating my life to the pursuit of Krishna consciousness.

At the festival, hundreds of devotees chanted and danced before three large wooden Ratha carts, each of which carried a Jagganath Deity. A devotee approached me and applied tilak to my forehead. Apparently, he was spending the afternoon decorating the faces of guests who wanted to become devotees of Krishna for a day.

The devotees and guests pulled the carts several miles through the park to a bandstand situated at the end of a large field. Some of the best singers and instrumentalists in the Movement took the stage and led the group chanting and dancing. I was standing in front of a large loudspeaker when a black swami named Sudama began to sing. I wept. He sounded like a child crying for its mother. I had never before heard anyone as "surrendered" as he. The term was used to describe someone who had given heart and soul, mind and body to God.

On Sunday, the day after the festival, Janaspriha and his wife left for the LA temple and Mexico, where his relatives lived. I stayed another night at the San Francisco temple, because there was no room for me in the van belonging to the Vancouver devotees. On Monday morning, however, a San Francisco devotee told me that if I wanted to remain at the temple I would need to "shave up" (shave my head) and become a full-time devotee.

I hitchhiked to Portland and stopped at the temple for the night. There I saw a couple I knew from the Vancouver temple. Also returning to Canada from the Ratha-Yatra festival, they offered me a lift. They were carrying in their car a small, green bush resembling a basil plant. It made the car seem crowded, because one needed to take care not to touch its leaves. For reasons that were unclear to me, the woman fussed over it all the way home. It seemed that the air was always too hot or too cold for Tulsi-devi, as they called the plant. We opened or shut the windows for its comfort, not for our own.

Back in Vancouver my voice was hoarse and my legs were tired from the singing, shouting, and dancing at the festival. Most of the other devotees who were there also had little voice left.

At the temple, I met a young woman who had been hitchhiking around Canada. The free meals at the temple had drawn her there, I speculated. After talking a bit, we walked together to the bus stop. On the way, I said little, preferring instead to chant on my beads. We took the bus to my cheap downtown hotel room. She seemed bewildered when I offered her the bed and got ready to go to sleep on the floor at the early hour of nine p.m. The next morning I rose at three o'clock as usual and walked through the dimly lit, deserted streets of Vancouver and into the bright lights and hum of activity at the temple. I would spend much of the fall there.

CHAPTER 2: INITIATION INTO BHAKTI YOGA

At the end of August, I left my guitar on the island with Marguerite and moved into a rented room in a house near the temple. Every day for the next few months, I attended morning and evening services at the temple. It seemed at first that I would never be able to memorize all the words to the common prayers, as most were in Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Hindu scriptures. After a few weeks, however, I had managed to memorize them all.

A devotee always lived with other devotees and always followed a strict code of personal conduct known as the "four regulative principles" — no illicit sex (sex outside of marriage), no intoxication (including cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, or tea), no meat eating (including fish and eggs), and no gambling or "mental speculation." The days of handing out free LSD in the parks of San Francisco were over. Prabhupada had never approved the practice, the devotees maintained. Prabhupada prohibited radios, televisions, and newspapers, as well as all magazines and books not published by the Movement itself. I began to follow the "four regs" in September.

Some devotees rose as early as 2:30 a.m.; all were up by 4:00. Despite the hours, they possessed a surprising amount of energy, I thought. They seemed to run, not walk, from one activity to the next. Some even said they had pleasant dreams about Krishna at night. The lack of "rest" (sleep), however, made life challenging for a novice like me.

To encourage us, the leaders told us that we were lucky to be able to "take" even six hours of rest a night, because, as a "pure devotee" of the Lord, Prabhupada himself took just two to four hours each night. (A pure devotee is one who had achieved perfection.)

The spiritual master expected each disciple to chant Hare Krishna twenty-four hours a day. This was hard to accomplish, as we all needed to sleep, eat, and otherwise care for our material bodies. We were "materially covered," which meant that we were engaged in sinful, worldly activities. For a devotee, a free minute was not free in the usual sense of the word. Rather, his time, like everything else, belonged to God, or Krishna.

Devotees greeted each other with "Haribol," which meant, "chant the Holy Names of the Lord," or "Jaya" ("Hail" or "Victory"). I never heard, "Good morning" or "Hello." A devotee might say, "See you in the spiritual sky [roughly, heaven]," but never "Good-bye."

One evening, as we gathered in the foyer, a senior devotee chastised a junior devotee for talking with a woman. The spiritual master prohibited all contact between males and females, except in marriage. For a man seeking a spiritual life, woman was Maya, the Lord's illusory energy and the force that binds the soul to the material existence.

Many stalwart devotees served at the Vancouver temple. For example, the hardworking woman in charge of the cooking and sewing for the Deities would probably be serving Krishna for millions of years to come, according to Bahudaka. I heard, however, that the men and women who went out on sankirtan book distribution were the dearest of all to Prabhupada. He emphasized the importance spreading of Krishna consciousness through the worldwide sale of his books.

In late September, a new brahmachari (single celibate student) named Patraka arrived in Vancouver from the Portland temple. He chanted in a soulful bass voice and, like Bahudaka, played the harmonium. While not chanting, he was always serving Krishna or reading Prabhupada's books. He was "fixed up" (advanced in the practice of Krishna consciousness). A fugitive from the law at a time when many young American men were fleeing the draft, he stayed with us for the next several months.

Patraka told us the story of how he joined the Movement: "I was at a low point in my life. My choice was to jump off a bridge or join the Hare Krishna Movement. I decided to go to the temple. There I saw Lord Jagganath and surrendered right on the spot. I have been blissful in Krishna consciousness ever since." Such stories were common. I learned that Bhaktin Joanie, as she was known in the group, had also fallen under the spell of the merciful Lord Jagganath. On her first visit to the Vancouver temple, He had smiled at her with his large features, she said.

In early October, several brahmacharis prepared to drive to Seattle for a one-day Hare Krishna festival. Patraka asked to borrow my driver's license for use at the international border, as I had chosen not to accompany them that day. To further the Movement, the devotees sometimes needed to bend the law a little here or there.

On one occasion, I was talking with a couple of devotees in the second-floor brahmachari ashram (sleeping quarters for single male devotees), when Bahudaka entered. After glancing at us with an annoyed look on his face, he asked, "Is this where all the miscreants hang out?" Engaging in idle conversation was Maya (a state of forgetfulness of Krishna). For the evening ceremonies, the devotees lent me a dhoti (an unstitched cotton robe covering from the waist to the ankles), which they taught me to tie. They also lent me a kurtah (a lightweight, long-sleeved cotton shirt). Prabhupada had ordered the devotees always to wear clean robes while worshiping in the temple room and while preparing the Lord's foodstuffs in His kitchen. Single devotees like me wore saffron-colored (yellowish orange) robes; householders wore white.

I sometimes accompanied the devotees when they drove to the Vancouver campus of the University of British Columbia. Dressed in our temple garb, we performed sankirtan there by chanting, selling our magazines and books, and trying to recruit the students.

Nevertheless, male devotees usually wore conventional shirts and pants, and women wore conservative blouses and skirts when they went out into public places to collect money for the Movement. The men hid their shaved heads beneath wigs, and the women exposed their heads. Prabhupada had approved the changes in the dress code after learning how much more money they were collecting while wearing street clothes.

One morning after the ceremonies, Bahudaka told me that the temple had bought a shotgun for self-defense. It seemed that some gun-wielding "demons," as he called them, had attacked the devotees on the farm in West Virginia. Prabhupada ordered all centers to prepare to defend themselves. Bahudaka explained that "demonic" supporters of the materialistic status quo will often go to any length to frustrate the efforts of the God-conscious devotees. I also learned that some of the male devotees in Vancouver had signed up for martial arts classes.

Bahudaka had instructed all the devotees to memorize one verse from the Bhagavad Gita each day, or else take no prasadam at the noon meal that day. Some were able to repeat the verse correctly just minutes before mealtime. I managed to squeak by only because I had more time to study than most devotees.

In October, Bahudaka instructed me to accompany a junior devotee named Bhakta Gary as he went about his duties, which included maintaining the temple building and buying food and supplies. He and I once painted the bedrooms in the new temple, a larger house in the same neighborhood. I opined that there were many different paths to spiritual enlightenment. He responded that the spiritual master's teachings were the Absolute Truth. While staring blearily for a moment at the freshly painted white walls, I pondered the idea of a single Truth crowding out all other truths. Was my dizziness the result of the ponderous metaphysical discussion or simply the paint fumes and artificial, incandescent light?

While shopping one afternoon, Bhakta Gary and I spotted two young men who were passing out leaflets for a competing yoga center. Bhakta Gary asked them, "What time do you guys get up in the morning?" They said proudly, "Six o'clock!" We turned to each other and chuckled. To us, that was sloth.

After I had worked with Bhakta Gary for a few weeks, Bahudaka decided to assign me some duties of my own. For example, I ferried the sankirtan devotees to and from their book distribution locations downtown or at the shopping malls.

I was in the "stool room" (bathroom) one morning when a senior devotee asked me to shave his head. I agreed, and as I worked, he said he was concerned that I had failed to attend the program the previous evening. He added, "You do get some spiritual benefit from occasionally chanting and attending temple functions, but if you live outside the temple, you cannot receive the same benefits as those who live in the temple." Then, seeing how slowly and cautiously I was working, he protested, "Don't be sentimental!" By this he meant that a devotee should not concern himself too much with temporary, earthly concerns like hair.

In late October, the weather turned rainy and cool, as is usual in Vancouver. Frankly, I did not mind too much because going outside into the cool air tended to wake me up. The devotees stressed that it was only by Krishna's "mercy" (blessing) that we were not serving in frigid Edmonton or Winnipeg.

Tape-recorded kirtans played in nearly every room of the temple building and in the van as the devotees drove to and from their sankirtan destinations. In addition, whenever a devotee needed to place a telephone caller on hold, he made sure that the caller heard a kirtan while waiting.

I never missed a meal at the temple, partly because I had little money, and partly because of the delicious Krishna prasadam. I enjoyed the curried vegetable dishes, the chapatis (a flat, unleavened wheat bread), dahl (mung bean soup), and above all, the sweetmeats. Normally a moderate eater, I was now eating embarrassingly large amounts of prasadam. Delighted, the devotees encouraged me and the other guests to take as much as we wanted. Bahudaka declared, "Only a devotee relishes prasadam." Anyone who took prasadam advanced in his Krishna consciousness, but a "nondevotee" who partook voraciously was likely to become a devotee, according to the spiritual master. Preparing foodstuffs for offering to Krishna and taking their "remnants" as prasadam were acts of love and devotion. In addition, devotees regularly offered water and clothing to the Deities, and accepted the remnants of their offerings as the Lord's mercy.

By November, I had been visiting the temple daily for about two months — a long time to be a prospective devotee. Chanting Hare Krishna, taking prasadam, and associating with devotees were pleasant activities, but I was still unsure about becoming a full-time devotee. I feared the nonstop schedule that began well before dawn and continued after nightfall.

The others took a dim view of my doubts. Most of them had surrendered to Krishna within weeks if not days of their first contact with the devotees. In their eyes, I was being selfish for refusing to surrender. After all, I had heard the truths of Krishna consciousness, unlike most nondevotees, or karmis. (The term derives from the word karma, the results in this life of one's sinful activities in previous lives.)

In their view, I now needed to act on those beliefs. Bahudaka challenged me, "Who are you that you don't have to surrender to Krishna?" On the other hand, I felt much warmth and acceptance at the temple. The devotees were the nicest, most sincere, and most dedicated people I had met. Clearly, they wanted me to join for my benefit, not for theirs.

In late November, I moved out of my rented room and into the temple. My reasoning was that doing so would force me to lead a spiritual life, even if I still had some doubts. I believed that, in His house, God would provide for my body and protect my soul. Furthermore, I would have the constant association of others who were serious about making spiritual life a reality.

I again left behind some favorite possessions: a handmade pair of suede boots, a floppy leather hat, and a pair of blue jeans. I brought my beads, Krishna magazines and books, provincial driver's license, US passport, a sleeping bag, a pair of baggy canvas pants I had bought in Mexico, and a shirt Heather had made for me. The clothes went into a communal barrel in the ashram, and other devotees sometimes wore them. I soon lost track of most of my non-Krishna friends.

My beard and mustache gone, it was now time to shave my head. Bahudaka diplomatically selected my comrade Bhakta Gary to perform the honors. After he finished, I noticed in the mirror that my head was not perfectly round. Rather, close inspection revealed several previously hidden bumps. In the temple room that evening, the women tittered at the sight of this former ragamuffin now beaming in his clean, well-pressed saffron-dyed robe, the bright lights reflecting off his shiny head.

The bottoms of my feet were blackened from many months of going barefoot on the island. I was convinced that they would never again become clean. In contrast, the devotees, who always wore sandals or shoes outside the temple building, and who bathed daily, had spotlessly clean feet. After about a month of daily scrubbing with pumice (volcanic glass), a staple in stool rooms around the Movement, my feet turned pink and clean again. The devotees wore clean clothes every day. This represented a real change for me, because on the island I had often worn my jeans day and night without washing for months at a time.

There was much speculation about when Prabhupada might return to North America from overseas. Wherever he went, he stayed at the local ISKCON temple, because he considered hotels to be brothels and because he preferred the company of devotees. Ironically, only one week after I shaved up, we received word that he would soon arrive in Los Angeles. Bahudaka ordered all the devotees to prepare immediately for a trip to California. Devotees who had seen Prabhupada in person before made remarks like, "Wait 'til you see him — he's so pure!" or "He's so transcendental!"

It is hard to overstate the importance of the spiritual master in the lives of the devotees. They often said, "The guru knows the heartbeat of his disciples." He knew everything we did, said, or even thought. Furthermore, everything we knew about spirit and other matters, we learned from him. Meanwhile, because of their inability or refusal to listen to him, the karmis knew nothing.

Just as the devotees offered foodstuffs to the spiritual master's picture before offering them to the Deity of Krishna, they first prayed to the spiritual master before praying to Krishna. Before receiving Krishna's blessings, devotees needed to receive the spiritual master's blessings.

Krishna Himself demanded spiritual perfection of a devotee, but if the spiritual master chose, he could bless a person whom God was unlikely to forgive. In this sense, the spiritual master was more merciful than God. It followed that disobedience to him was worse than disobedience to God. A disciple should prefer death to the disfavor of the guru. The saying was that a disciple should commit suicide rather than disobey the spiritual master's orders.

The next morning, we brahmacharis boarded the van and departed for Los Angeles. Patraka was the leader. A caravan of women, children, and householder men followed the next day. A karmi guest who was riding with us pulled out of his knapsack a version of the Bhagavad Gita other than the one the Krishna sect had published.

For a devotee, the only authorized version of this most sacred of Hindu scriptures was Prabhupada's translation and commentary, the Bhagavad-gita As It Is. Patraka accused the young man of being "in Maya." He ordered the young man to put his "unauthorized" book away and chant Hare Krishna for the rest of the trip, which he grudgingly did.

We spent the first night of our trip in a motel room — a luxury, I later discovered. Supper consisted of peanuts and raisins that Patraka had mixed in a paper bag and offered in prayer to a picture of Prabhupada, as is the protocol when one is away from the temple.

The next morning, we again hit the road, after a makeshift program consisting of a subdued kirtan and a shortened class. After a few hours of driving, we pulled into the parking lot outside a shopping center. Patraka ordered a devotee named Mahesh to go out and collect some Lakshmi (money). An experienced sankirtan devotee, Mahesh was familiar with parking lots. A woman who was walking to her car stopped dead in her tracks when she saw him running toward her, his arms flailing. He asked her for money, and she gave him five dollars, as we watched from inside the van. At a roadside stand a few miles down the road, we bought a case of apples with the Lakshmi. Patraka offered the apples to Prabhupada and we took the remnants as prasadam.

We spent the night at the San Francisco temple, and drove the next day to the temple compound at 3764 Watseka Avenue in Culver City, Los Angeles. The rest of the world may have known Culver City for its motion picture studios, but we devotees knew it as the home of the largest urban temple in the Movement. Devotees called it the "Crossroads of the Movement," because of its strategic location with the Hawaiian, Japanese, and Indian temples to the west, the fast-growing Latin American temples to the south, and the other North American temples to the north and east.

Devotees knew the LA temple for its many householders and for its large contingent of devotees who had been in the Movement for five years or longer. In addition, the brahmachari ashram was one of the largest in the Movement. Looking for ways to raise Lakshmi in a Krishna-conscious manner, some LA householders started the Spiritual Sky Incense Company. Using devotees as workers, the company manufactured and distributed incense in many flavors, with the profits going to the sect.

At the LA temple, we joined scores of others who had arrived in busses and vans from all over the western United States. In addition, many Movement leaders from all over the world were present. We went to the ashram, where we "took rest."

We attended the morning program the next day. After entering the temple room, I offered my obeisances and looked up to catch my first glimpse of Prabhupada. A smallish, dignified, elderly Indian man, he sat alone on a raised platform, wearing a simple saffron-colored robe and a printed shawl over his narrow shoulders. His complexion was yellowish-brown, almost golden. The sacred tilak marked his forehead.

As he sang, his eyes closed and his body shook. All the devotees knew that his chanting was especially blissful. I had to agree that he had the most spiritual singing voice I had ever heard, even though he sang in a foreign language.

When the kirtan was over, several hundred young devotees also wearing robes and tilak sat on the floor in front of him and turned their fresh, angelic faces up toward him. When he spoke, the veins on his neck and forehead stood out.

His stare was intense and his language was uncompromising. In a thick accent, he hammered home a few simple themes: Krishna is God; Krishna consciousness is the original, natural condition of the living entity; we devotees were to always chant His Holy Names: Hare, Krishna, and Rama. He emphasized that his English translations of, and commentaries on, the Hindu classics such as the Bhagavad Gita would cause a worldwide spiritual revolution.

We were the foot soldiers in this revolution. He ended his speech with: "You American boys and girls are so good looking and intelligent, now you must perfect your lives by becoming Krishna conscious." He always called us "boys." If he liked someone, he said, "He's a nice boy."

A devotee served God by serving the spiritual master. We were honored to present Prabhupada the most opulent gifts money could buy, including silverware, expensive watches, and a rented Rolls-Royce.

I understood that Prabhupada spent most of his time translating the Hindu scriptures and attending to Movement business. His personal servants offered him tropical fruits and other foodstuffs on ornate, well-polished silver plates about eighteen inches in diameter. I heard that the devotees at other temples had bought him gold plates, and that the cooks sometimes wrapped his favorite milk sweets in gold foil.

The devotees believed that it was highly auspicious to take even one morsel of prasadam from the spiritual master's plate. His servants were, therefore, awarded the first opportunity to take the remnants of his prasadam. Personal service to the spiritual master was a special honor that rotated among a select group of top disciples. Bahudaka confided in me, however, that transcendental jealousy and intrigue was commonplace among Prabhupada's servants, causing a high turnover rate.

Posted in the foyer outside the temple room was a letter Prabhupada had written a few months before. In it, he gave the devotees his permission to use "white lies" when selling his books to the public.

I learned that, like their counterparts in Vancouver, most devotees in Los Angeles had been in the Movement for five years or less and had been between eighteen and twenty-five years of age when they joined. Nearly all had a high school education and many had attended college. In addition, many had dabbled in altruism, art, communal living, music, psychedelic drugs, yoga, or other eastern religions.

I heard that Prabhupada was preparing to initiate those new devotees who had lived in the temple and followed the rules and regulations for at least six months. Bahudaka's decision to include me among the initiates came as a mild surprise. I had been a shaved-up devotee for only a week or two. He asked me if I had followed the rules for the past six months. I said yes, except for the no-illicit-sex rule, which I had been following for only three months. He said, "That's good enough." The spiritual master said that, more than any other activity, sex life bound human beings to the worldly existence. Humans, unique among the life forms, were free to choose celibacy, the chanting of Hare Krishna, and the philosophy of Krishna consciousness. In contrast, Maya forced the animal species to have frequent and indiscriminate sex life.

I understood the gravity of a vow of lifelong obedience, poverty, and chastity. An initiate did whatever the spiritual master told him to do, chanted Hare Krishna at least 1,728 times a day, and followed the four regulative principles: no illicit sex, no intoxication, no meat eating, and no gambling or mental speculation. He took only the prasadam the spiritual master provided, and, unlike our guests, only in moderation.

On the subject of obedience, a swami once explained, "If you are in a boat and the spiritual master says, 'Turn right,' you turn right. If he later says, 'Turn left,' you must not say, 'But you said, "Turn right."'" The spiritual master alone had the right to change his mind, because only he was in touch with God and His desires.

In return for the disciple's faithful obedience, the spiritual master took him "back Home, back to Godhead." For the sinful, "fallen" disciple, the spiritual master was the "only hope" for escaping the miseries of the material world. One who surrendered to him was finally safe in a relentlessly dangerous world.

The philosophy held that the soul migrated from one species to another, passing through all the fish, plant, reptile, and mammalian bodies, until the material nature ultimately awarded it the highest form of life, the human body.

A soul that failed to achieve Krishna consciousness in his human lifetime again became a lower species in his next life. Thus began another slow ascent through the species by the process of birth and death. This transmigration of the soul from lower to higher species repeated itself as long as he failed to become Krishna conscious while a human being.

If, however, he succeeded in becoming Krishna conscious as a human, he left behind his material body and returned to the spiritual world. There he took an eternal spiritual body and lived in bliss and full knowledge with Krishna.

In early December, several dozen devotees from various centers took initition into the sect.

The ceremony began as the pujaris (senior devotees who were trained in the performance of devotional rituals) threw sesame seeds and ghee (clarified butter) into a small fire in the center of the temple room. We initiates sat in rows on either side of the fire. A pujari wrapped a string of tiny hand-carved wooden beads around the neck of each new initiate. All initiated devotees wore these beads day and night. Informally, we called them our "dog collars," because we were now the guru's faithful and obedient dogs.

The men rose one by one and stood before Prabhupada. He asked us if we knew the rules and regulations. We answered, "Yes." He asked us how many rounds of Hare Krishna we would chant daily. We replied, "Sixteen." Then Prabhupada gave us each a japa-mala on which he had chanted before the ceremony. Finally, he told us our sect names.

After the men, he initiated the women. When it was Bhaktin Joanie's turn, she stood before him looking dazed and awed as she answered his questions and accepted the beads. A brahmacharini (single celibate female student) vowed to accept Prabhupada as her spiritual father and Krishna as her husband.

Exhausted from the early hours and the grueling schedule, I drifted off to sleep several times during the ceremony. My sleepiness embarrassed me, because a devotee was expected to think of initiation as the most auspicious moment of his life.

Bhakta Gary became Pundarikasam and Bhaktin Joanie became Jayabhadra. I quickly forgot my new name, but later read on a bulletin board that it was Pujana. All the names meant servant of Krishna or one of His devotees. Mine meant "servant of the process of temple worship of Krishna."

Along with chanting His Names and hearing about Him, temple worship of Krishna was one of eight forms of devotional service, according to the literature. Most devotees recognized my name from Prabhupada's books. This proved something of an advantage in my career as a devotee. The correct pronunciations were pu-JOHN-uh or pu-JOHN. (A final "a" in Sanskrit is sometimes silent.) Nevertheless, most devotees Anglicized the accentuation and said PU-john-uh.

Despite my difficulties surrendering to authority and staying awake during the morning program, I still felt that I was growing daily in my devotion to, and love of, God. For example, after a "fired-up" japa class or a blissful kirtan, I was usually "receptive," as we said, to the lecture. At such times, the philosophy of surrender and obedience to God's representative made perfect sense. "Just chant Hare Krishna and you will become perfect," seemed an obvious formula for spiritual success.

A Sixteenth-Century devotee provided us with an example of the bliss that resulted from devotion to the Lord. According to Prabhupada's books, this devotee's atheistic persecutors had whipped him in twenty-two marketplaces, and tossed him into a river, leaving him for dead. Nevertheless, he survived the ordeal. After emerging from the river, he danced in ecstasy, intoxicated with the chanting of the Holy Names. Prabhupada emphasized that dancing in the performance of kirtan was a spiritual exercise, while the dancing of the material world was no more than "dog dancing."

The Radha-Krishna Deities in Los Angeles had been five-foot-high statues of polished white marble before the spiritual master installed Them several years before. We understood that so long as we devotees served Them with love and devotion, They were Krishna, or God, never mere statues. One morning during kirtan, I positioned myself where I could see Their eyes as I danced enthusiastically for Their pleasure.

I concentrated hard on hearing the Hare Krishna mantra as we chanted it. As the kirtan reached its crescendo, Radha (Krishna's eternal consort in the spiritual world) and Krishna came alive, looked back at me, and, for a brief but memorable moment, danced with me. Perhaps unseen by the others, They moved their arms and bodies with the music and with my own body. They seemed to be in control my movements.

After a few weeks, Prabhupada left Los Angeles, and the visiting devotees, including the group from Vancouver, prepared to return to their home temples. I had grown to like Southern California because of the warmer weather and because the cold morning shower felt lukewarm by Canadian standards. I knew that, wherever I was, my superiors would ask me to sell books and collect Lakshmi for the sect. Los Angeles, however, had a much bigger and more sophisticated sankirtan program than did Vancouver. I told Bahudaka of my desire to remain in Los Angeles and become "trained up" in sankirtan book distribution. He disliked my request because it meant that he was losing a devotee. He did grudgingly give his permission, however, and I stayed in Los Angeles.

A few weeks later, I received a letter from Bhakta Gary, under his new name, Pundarikasam. On behalf of Bahudaka, he invited me to return to Vancouver. I did not answer his letter, nor did I return to Canada. Thereafter, I rarely saw my Vancouver god-brothers, except when they came to Los Angeles for a visit.

The brahmachari ashram in Los Angeles was a large room on the second, and top, floor. Each devotee was assigned a metal gymnasium-style locker in which to keep his possessions. Unlike their counterparts in the smaller centers, such as Vancouver and Portland, the LA devotees had a reputation for stealing almost anything that was not locked up.

Shoes, which we left just outside the entrances to the building, were especially vulnerable to theft. Someone once stole the temple president's shoes, even though the scriptures said that a person who stole from a Brahmin (member of the priestly class) would become a lizard in his next life. The only possession a devotee could be sure never to lose was his japa-mala, which was considered sacred.

The ashram was off-limits to women and children. Similarly, the brahmacharini ashram, which was located in another building, was off-limits to us.

Although I enjoyed the group activities such as chanting and taking prasadam, much of the philosophy seemed dense and obtuse, perhaps because of the many Sanskrit terms. In my first few months as a full-time devotee, I needed to learn a new way of living, speaking, and thinking. The leaders assigned me to kitchen duties, such as cutting vegetables and washing pots. Every morning we helped the cooks to prepare the main meal of the day by cutting up cases of vegetables such as cauliflower, squash, tomato, and green pepper.

Cleaning a large pot was sometimes a chore, especially when one's arms barely reached the bottom. On one occasion, as I struggled with a burned pot, a devotee explained, "If you leave a spot, it means you have a spot on your heart."

On another occasion, a devotee accidentally cut himself. A supervisor told him, "Be grateful that your cut was a small one, because if you weren't a devotee, you would have lost your whole finger." Krishna was always kind toward, and protective of, His devotees. The supervisor ordered the devotee to leave the kitchen and not return for the rest of the day. Although the soul was pure, the body and all of its byproducts were contaminated.

Other jobs for new devotees included cleaning the temple room, the ashram, or the stool room. A devotee who was able to make the metal fixtures shine earned a reputation among his god-brothers as a mahatma (great soul).

The spiritual master taught that as a devotee became serious about his Krishna consciousness, qualities such as regulation and service to the spiritual master would become more important than eating and sleeping. Nevertheless, as in Vancouver, many devotees in Los Angeles, including me, sometimes disobeyed the spiritual master's wishes and took more prasadam than necessary.

Many of us had been vegetarians before joining the Movement, but some of the more athletic types who were accustomed to eating steaks had a hard time adjusting to the meatless diet. In any case, devotees often gossiped about which temples served the best or the most prasadam. I even heard rumors on more than one occasion that the temples in Hawaii and Santa Cruz, California, served three meals a day, instead of the usual two. Aware of this situation, Prabhupada once declared that ISKCON was in danger of becoming the "International Society for Eating Consciousness."

Guests and friends of Krishna Consciousness from around the city and beyond often attended our services and took prasadam with us. Some of them, however, were more interested in the free meal than the Krishna consciousness. Impatient with the freeloaders, Jayatirtha, the temple president, declared that henceforward no one should receive a meal unless he had worked a full day for the Movement that day. Furthermore, he ordered the karmi guests to sleep outside in the sankirtan vans, rather than in the ashram.

The Sunday afternoon feasts attracted the largest crowds. On one occasion, as I served the yogurt punch, known in the group as lassi, a guest who had concerns about eating sugar — as I once had — asked me about the ingredients in the punch. Another devotee suggested that I tell the guest that it contained honey, though I suspected that it contained sugar.

Before I arrived in Los Angeles, a devotee named Karandhar had risen through the ranks to become the Governing Body Commission (GBC) member for the Southern California region and a top aide to Prabhupada. The GBC was the equivalent of a board of directors. Its members administered the various geographical regions around the world and reported directly to Prabhupada.

I heard that before joining the Movement, Karandhar had been in a motorcycle gang. Although he had recently "blooped" (quit the Movement), devotees still spoke of him in reverential terms. I heard that as a devotee he had exemplified "gravity," a quality that devotees valued highly. When someone asked him why he was always so grave, he replied, "Because I see death all around me." A devotee knows that all living beings suffer repeated births and deaths. That is, until they meet the spiritual master, who takes them back to Godhead.

Karandhar did, however, occasionally visit the temple. Trudging across Watseka Avenue in his heavy work boots and overalls, and wearing a full head of hair, he looked clumsy, earthbound, and materially contaminated. In contrast, the devotees, with their sandals, robes, and clean-shaven heads, seemed light-footed, graceful, and spiritual. Prabhupada insisted on more than one occasion that Karandhar would return, though to my knowledge he never did. I later heard that he had become a Buddhist.

Most, but not all, of our guests were curious and respectful. On one occasion, a karmi tried to moon the Deities during a Bhagavad Gita class. Before most of us realized what had happened, some devotees had quickly hustled him out the side door and into the alley behind the temple. I was afraid of what they might have done to him.

Krishna Kanti, a devotee who had once worked as a sound technician for a major TV network, wired most of the rooms in the temple with loudspeakers. During the morning and evening programs, one could hear throughout the temple complex the live chanting and lectures originating in the temple room. Devotional recordings played at other times.

In my conversations with other devotees, I learned some of the history of the Movement. Prabhupada once followed the Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, but left his movement due to a disagreement over Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. Prabhupada considered nonviolence to be materialistic and, ultimately, anti-spiritual. Never referring to Gandhi by his usual title, "Mahatma," which means, "great soul," Prabhupada asserted that one cannot be "rubber stamped" as a great soul. Rather, one must earn this title by serving Krishna.

Many years later Prabhupada left his family to spread the Krishna consciousness in the West. In 1965, he secured the sponsorship of a wealthy Indian patron and traveled alone by boat to Boston. In 1966, he started the first Hare Krishna temple in the West in a seedy storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The same year, he and his young disciples held their first public kirtan in Washington Square Park, the same place I first saw the devotees about three years later.

He initiated his disciples into Krishna consciousness and gave them Sanskrit names. Soon thereafter, he legally incorporated ISKCON, which grew rapidly over the next few years, spreading first to San Francisco and Montreal, and then to other cities in North America and Europe.

In the late 1960s, Prabhupada instructed Kirtanananda Swami and Hayagriva, two of his first disciples, to found a rural commune where devotees could practice the Hindu ideals of cow protection and what Prabhupada called "simple living and high thinking."

A small but hardy group of devotees, most of whom were city dwellers who knew little or nothing about agriculture, moved onto some acreage near the town of Moundsville in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. Prabhupada named the commune "New Vrindavan," after Krishna's birthplace. The devotees endured a tough first winter with little food or firewood. Working with determination and without pay, they were able after the spring thaw to grow many of their own vegetables and flowers. In later years, they even obtained some cows and produced surpluses of some crops.

Prabhupada permitted his young disciples to marry, because many were unable or unwilling to maintain a vow of celibacy. At first, none of the couples bore children, because of Prabhupada's insistence that spreading the Movement should take precedence over personal and familial concerns.

Later, however, Prabhupada changed his mind and ordered them to reproduce, which they did. At his insistence, the devotees raised the children, who also took Sanskrit names, by the same strict rules all devotees followed.

Meanwhile, Prabhupada established an administrative hierarchy consisting of, in decreasing order of power, himself, the dozen or so members of the GBC, the temple presidents, vice presidents, treasurers, and temple commanders. (The commanders assigned daily duties to the rank-and-file devotees.) A parallel and overlapping ecclesiastical hierarchy, again in decreasing order, consisted of Prabhupada again, the other sannyasis, the Brahmins (second initiates), the first initiates, and the bhaktas (uninitiated devotees).

Like the military, the sect was pyramidal in structure. Novices like me always took instructions from everyone, it seemed. Prabhupada emphasized that an instruction from any superior was as good as an instruction from Krishna. A devotee learned to be happy with whatever Krishna gave him, and never to ask for more. The sect taught that a person is sinful and undeserving, and that austerity and obedience to the spiritual master were his ticket to the next world. Devotees had an expression for this: "Work now, samadhi [heaven] later."

By the end of the decade, Prabhupada had dispatched North American devotees to Africa, South America, and Australia, where they started temples and brought the message of Krishna consciousness to the fallen souls.

In merry England, some devotees had become friendly with George Harrison. He chanted Hare Krishna, wrote and recorded several songs with themes taken from the Hare Krishna philosophy, and produced an album of devotional songs sung by the London temple devotees. I had once heard this record, which the devotees knew as the London Temple album, in a Vancouver restaurant. Wealthy after his success as a Beatle, Harrison donated a mansion near London, which the devotees renamed "Bhaktivedanta Manor." I also heard that they tried but failed to recruit Ringo Starr, another Beatle.

When I joined the sect, it claimed more than 100 urban centers and about a half-dozen farms worldwide, with a total membership of about 10,000. Prabhupada said that the Movement would soon have 100,000 members, and then one million. Soon everyone in the world would be chanting Hare Krishna.

CHAPTER 3: SANKIRTAN PARTY

My superiors in Los Angeles assigned most of the other new devotees and me to sankirtan duties. For the next few years, my life revolved around selling magazines and books and spreading Krishna consciousness. "Krishna's Army" of sankirtan devotees had declared war on Maya, according to Prabhupada.

Some devotees took readily to sankirtan, but the rest of us needed to force ourselves to go out. We all, however, understood the importance of duty in Krishna consciousness. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna instructed Arjuna, a warrior and a devotee, to kill the enemy, even though his own family was among them. We took this to mean that a devotee should do whatever Krishna and the spiritual master wanted, no matter how difficult.

The dozen or so regular book distributors took breakfast prasadam with Ramesvara in the sankirtan room, which was in the basement. We received more and better foodstuffs than did the other devotees, who took upstairs in the ashram. Our breakfast consisted of curd or yogurt, cereal, dried fruits, and as much fresh fruit as we wanted.

These mornings with Ramesvara, the top sankirtan administrator, provided me with much of my education on the importance of book distribution to the spreading of Krishna Consciousness. Every month he read aloud the recent monetary rankings of the top-scoring devotees, temples, and regions in the world. Australians, Europeans, and North Americans usually scored best.

Devotees went on sankirtan — and everywhere else — in groups. We called this "keeping the association of devotees." My first assignment was in Watts, a large black ghetto, now called South Central. Hasyapriya, the sankirtan captain, selected a brahmachari named Bhubanesvara as my partner for the day. Short and hunched, he often averted his bugged eyes while talking to me. Ramesvara once sarcastically called him "charming."

Before we left, Bhubanesvara asked me if I had ever worked with black people before. I told him that, no, I had never even been on sankirtan book distribution before. He showed me a black brotherhood handshake and advised me that blacks liked our incense.

Dressed in temple garb, we arrived at the drugstore that would be our site for the day. Pointing out the car window at some karmi shoppers, Bhubanesvara said, "Remember, they're all suffering out there." They looked like normal shoppers to me, but I remembered a story a devotee told about a conversation he once had while flying in an airplane. He was chanting quietly on his beads when the karmi businessman seated next to him asked, "Must you do that?" The devotee replied, "Yes, because of you, I must do this."

The outside world was filled with people engaged in activities that implicated them in karma, the cosmic force that binds the soul to a materialistic, earthly existence. So long as there were any fallen souls left in the world, we devotees had more work to do.

We spent most of the day passing out sticks of strawberry incense and selling copies of Back to Godhead (known internally as the BTG) for a donation of fifty cents to a dollar each. Devotees in New York wrote and edited the magazine, which closely followed Prabhupada's teachings. Since the early days of the Movement, the BTG had been an important way of delivering the message of Krishna consciousness to the public. It is in some ways more important for public relations purposes than are Prabhupada's more scholarly writings.

We told them we were collecting money for charity. Our thinking was that, because we were doing so much good for so many people, whatever we said about the Movement would be true. Bhubanesvara insisted that I not spend more than one minute with any one karmi. This left little time to discuss religion, even if it interested them, which it most often did not.

In an attempt to distract us from God's work, some karmis tried to engage us in theological discussions. In short, recruitment and religious education were not the duties of the lowly magazine salesman. I later learned that trained recruiters stood by at the temple, ready to come and talk to a prospective devotee.

Around noon, we took a break for lunch prasadam, which consisted of two or three chapatis, a piece of fresh fruit, and a vegetable preparation that we had put into half-gallon milk cartons with sawed-off tops.

I sold seventeen magazines that first day for a total of eight dollars and change. This score was paltry compared with those of the more experienced devotees who regularly sold hundreds of books and magazines every day.

For example, a devotee named Tripurari had become legendary around the Movement for his success at sankirtan. I heard, probably with some exaggeration, that some karmis even took out their wallets and gave him Lakshmi before he even said anything. I also heard, again with exaggeration, that the police had arrested him in nearly every parking lot in Southern California. His notoriety had compelled him to adopt multiple disguises. Our lawyers argued that any attempt to hinder book sales was an infringement of free speech and free religious expression. They always succeeded in having him released from jail and having any charges dropped.

For my first few weeks on sankirtan, I worked at various locations in Watts. Novice devotees like me usually worked the inner-city neighborhoods, which contrasted sharply with the idyllic and harmonious suburban temple compound. While on sankirtan, we were far from the safety of the temple, and a typical parking lot offered few reminders of Krishna.

Before we left for the day, Hasyapriya sometimes gave us duties at the temple, such as packing books, incense, and candy into the cars and vans, or straightening up the always messy sankirtan room. With Prabhupada's books, a miserable karmi could live a life of eternal bliss and knowledge, but without them, the material nature would condemn him to eons of suffering.

No matter how much our feet hurt after a day of sankirtan, or how much we were "in anxiety," we still knew that we were infinitely better off than any karmi. Spreading Krishna consciousness was the most important activity on earth, and the best way to do so was to engage in book distribution.

On one occasion, as I was packing the book boxes, I asked Hasyapriya for permission to go to the stool room. He replied, "Finish what you're doing first." Later I asked him again and received the same answer. One quickly learned to demand, not simply ask for, whatever one needed.

In the car or van, we chanted and read from the books. Occasionally, a senior devotee spoke to the group about the glories of the worldwide Sankirtan Movement. We avoided daydreaming or looking out the window, both of which were Maya. If men and women needed to ride in the same van, the women sat in the back, where the men did not need to see them. Later, the women drove their own cars so that they did not need to see us, either.

I hated sankirtan at first, but later learned to adjust to it. I usually tried to obtain a quick donation and then move immediately to the next karmi, forgetting about those who had rejected me. Krishna always provided another one to "hit up" and it was my duty to reach as many as possible. For my first few weeks, they gave change but no dollar bills. Later, I learned how to solicit bills, too, and my scores improved to thirty magazines a day, then fifty.

A few weeks later, I started to sell the Krishna Book for one to two dollars per volume. We also passed out a pamphlet entitled Krishna Consciousness Is Authorized, which contained statements from well-known scholars and politicians attesting to the authenticity of our religion.

If the weather were good, most karmis were in a communicative mood. If, however, the weather in Southern California were foul, as it sometimes is in the winter, we had to work hard to persuade them to give anything. We sometimes competed in the parking lots with karmi groups who were collecting money for research on sickle cell anemia or for other charitable causes.

The Christmas season was the most lucrative time for sankirtan. Nearly all the devotees went out during the holiday season. Most of the year, devotees needed to work hard for their donations, but at Christmas, many gave generously and without hesitation. Almost any devotee could achieve a big score, and if he were expert at sankirtan, the sky was the limit. One devotee called December "harvest time" for ISKCON.

On an ordinary Saturday, the busiest day for sankirtan, about twenty men and an equal number of women went out. In the fortnight preceding Christmas, however, about seventy-five of each sex — that is, virtually all the full-time devotees in the temple — went out every day. Devotees of both sexes dressed in Santa Claus costumes and passed out candy canes for donations at the malls and toy stores. Sometimes devotees mispronounced the words "Hare Krishna" to make them sound more like "Merry Christmas."

On one occasion, another devotee and I were passing out candy canes and selling magazines outside a K-Mart, when we noticed some Christians who were also proselytizing there. One of them was announcing to the karmi shoppers, "Those candy canes have hooks in them!" At first, we ignored the Christians. Then one of them told a woman I had sold a magazine to, "You don't want that — that's just some Buddhist thing." He took the magazine out of her hand. It seemed that, in the cosmic struggle for souls, we had lost one. Outraged, I grabbed the demon by the neck. He turned pale, but offered no resistance. He must have been a pacifist Christian, which to us was even more contemptible than an ordinary Christian. We believed that if a person believed strongly in something, he should be willing to fight for it. My god-brother pulled me away from him, however. After a phone call to the temple for instructions, we drove to a new location.

I heard that late one night, a few nights before Christmas, a devotee named Vamana had fallen asleep while driving a van filled with devotees. The van had veered off the road and flipped over. It was a miracle that no one was seriously hurt. I also heard that Krishna had not been as merciful to some women devotees in San Diego. They had recently suffered broken bones and other serious injuries a similar accident.

The mellowest time of the year in the parking lots was late on Christmas Eve at the toy stores. On Christmas Day, some devotees went door-to-door with Prabhupada's books.

After the New Year, 1974, I continued to distribute magazines in the store parking lots in the black and Hispanic neighborhoods, of which there were many in Los Angeles. The sankirtan there was steady but unexciting. I even became acquainted with the shopping-cart boys at the Ralph's and Von's supermarkets where we worked.

Devotees said privately that Hispanic Americans, most of whom were Catholics, gave readily in charity because they were pious in the material sense. Some devotees even insisted that the wealthier the neighborhood, the less likely they were to give what they had.

The bad neighborhoods had their challenges as well. Late one afternoon, as I worked the out door of a drug store, a couple of young, demonic neighborhood toughs sneaked up on me from behind, knocked me down, and ran off with my book bag. It contained all the Lakshmi I had collected that day. Shaken but unhurt, I learned not to keep Lakshmi in my book bag.

Distributing in Watts gave me a lesson in the economics of poverty. The supermarkets in the ghetto were less spacious, less clean, and less attractive than those in the suburbs. Nevertheless, the prices in the ghetto were the same as or higher than those in the suburbs.

In March, Hasyapriya began sending me to middle-class neighborhoods, but I first needed a proper outfit. Bhubanesvara took me to buy a cheap fifteen-dollar wig, and I scrounged some street clothes from a communal barrel of clothes in the ashram. If a devotee who had no karmi clothes of his own failed to arrive early at the barrel, he would often need to settle for torn clothes or unmatched socks. If he did not look presentable, he would have a hard time collecting Lakshmi.

A profitable location for sankirtan had steady foot traffic. Prime sites included grocery stores, drug stores, department stores, record stores, and banks on a Friday. On arrival at a site, I usually stashed my boxes of magazines and books in the bushes. (Sometimes a box or two would mysteriously disappear.) A typical day began slowly, with few karmis giving Lakshmi. As I watched and intermingled with them, I cast about for a line or an approach to use. I tried to focus on what was unique about the particular day, the location, or the group of people. Meanwhile, I chanted and prayed to the spiritual master for the strength and intelligence to continue distributing and to meet my quota. If no one were giving Lakshmi, I felt fallen — that is, sinful and unworthy.

If, however, I continued to ask everyone in sight, then they would begin to give Lakshmi. By trial and error, I would discover a line that clicked, that elicited a response. I usually stayed with that approach as long as it worked. If the line became stale, if I became stale, or if the situation changed, then I would try to find a new approach. Krishna, we often said, saw our sincerity and desire, and sent us people to give donations and take books. After we had given of ourselves, mind and body, for several hours, the karmis often began to respond to the tone of genuine sincerity and commitment in our voices, if nothing else.

Another technique was simply to approach everyone in sight without discrimination. A devotee in a prime location could approach up to 1,000 karmis a day. Even if only a third or a fourth of these gave Lakshmi, he could still achieve a big score.

Some devotees used lines about programs for the needy. For example, mentioning disaster relief worked well if the TV news had recently shown pictures of a disaster. If a karmi were black, we might emphasize our missions in Africa; if she were a mother, we might mention our programs for children; with young karmis, we might mention the mass starvation in Bangladesh, a cause George Harrison and others had brought to the attention of the press and the public. We later received word, however, that we were no longer to use the term "Bangladesh" on sankirtan, apparently because of legal problems.

Other devotees preferred to use a vague, generic approach. For example, "We're helping people all over the state [or country, or world] to lead a more productive [or peaceful] life" or "We're helping people right here in Los Angeles to solve their problems [or be happy]." An older devotee once counseled me always to make my pitch sound bubbly and inoffensive, like a Seven-Up commercial.

We knew that a karmi who had been solicited before entering the store was likely to complain to the manager. The malls were privately owned, and if a devotee were careless, the security officers would kick him off the property. In addition, it was hard to speak with most karmis once they had entered the safety of their cars. Therefore, we usually approached them after they left the store but before they entered their cars. It was Maya to solicit store or mall workers, because they were often unreceptive to our repeated requests for Lakshmi.

Sometimes Hasyapriya sent us to downtown Los Angeles or Long Beach, where it was legal to solicit on the street corners. To our chagrin, we were in competition with several noisy, demonic preachers, some of them with bullhorns. Most cities, however, required solicitation permits. Although the sect had secured permits from some of the cities, we went out whether or not we had them with us.

Working the streets or parking lots gave me a ferocious appetite. After taking too much lunch prasadam, however, I usually became sluggish and had a poor result that afternoon. Therefore, I usually set myself a quota to meet before my noon meal.

All devotees had their moments of glory on sankirtan. When fully absorbed in sankirtan, we often stopped the karmis dead in their tracks when we spoke to them. At such times, we were electric, like a "hot" basketball player who was sinking all of his shots. Krishna moved our arms, legs, and tongues, and we discovered to our delight that virtually everyone — even children — carried cash. It seemed that few left home without it, even in the age of credit cards.

While riding back to the temple, we usually chanted or read a book. On one occasion, a devotee asked the others, "What were you collecting for today?" The answers were a camp for boys, a missionary project, and disaster relief. Then everyone laughed derisively at how gullible and stupid the karmis were. A devotee once bragged that he had taken five dollars from a child. This was okay, we believed, because all money belonged to Krishna.

After an especially long or hot day, we sometimes bought juice or fresh fruit on the way back to the temple, and offered them to Prabhupada and Krishna, even though the rules discouraged this.

On weekdays, we usually returned to the temple for the evening program. On Friday and Saturday, however, we often stayed out until 10 or 11 p.m. Saturdays were lucrative all day at the malls, shopping centers, and downtown shopping districts. I hated to go out on Sunday after a long week of sankirtan, but we usually distributed for a few hours on Sundays before returning to the temple for the feast. Hasyapriya gave us a "day off" — meaning a day of temple duties — on Monday or Tuesday, the slowest shopping days of the week.

After returning to the temple, our first stop was the sankirtan room, where we counted our Lakshmi, put it into plastic bags, and put the bags through a narrow slot above a padlocked closet door. A brahmachari turned over to the sect every cent he collected. Hasyapriya chastised any devotee who turned in a check, because all karmis were dishonest and their checks were likely bad.

We then wrote our tallies of books distributed on a large blackboard in the sankirtan room. It was a thrill to post a high score and an embarrassment to post a low one. A sankirtan devotee's reputation depended on how much Lakshmi he collected and how consistently he collected it. On one occasion, a devotee who noticed that a certain team had done exceptionally well was felt moved to ask, "I wonder what they were telling them?"

If we returned to the temple in time, we would usually attend the evening program already in progress. After a big day, we danced and chanted "like madmen." The contrast between the impersonal, chaotic, outside world and the harmonious atmosphere of the temple repeatedly struck me. Although we were outwardly dirty, we felt inwardly clean — a feeling we called being "beyond your body." Those who took book distribution seriously advanced rapidly in their Krishna consciousness.

On one occasion, after a long day of book distribution, we drove to a department store parking lot to pick up a brahmachari named Urjasvat. He was distributing up a storm that night. Far from feeling relieved that his day was over, however, he ran to the van and begged us for another bag of lollipops so he could continue distributing.

I heard that the sankirtan devotees in New York were hitting up the vast subway system there. A devotee would dramatically enter at the front of the car, make a loud pitch at all the startled karmi riders, and then put the collection bucket in front of each of them. If one person gave Lakshmi, then, like sheep, the others would follow the leader and give.

When a devotee was fixed up and fully involved in sankirtan, he was able to ignore the demands of his body, but when he was burned out, or when he simply forgot Krishna, his bodily aches and pains returned. At such times, life as a sankirtan devotee was challenging.

On a good day, when I was "fired up" and eager to confront the demons, I was able to distribute upwards of 100 pieces — a respectable, but not at all record-setting, score. It helped to think about the spiritual master, about how many souls we were saving, and about how lucky I was to be able to serve him, even in such a humble way. On such occasions, I sometimes choked up and had trouble delivering my lines. I then needed to pray to Krishna to let me finish my pitch so that I could accept the donations.

One morning in the book room, Ramesvara leaned over a city street map as he prepared so send his parties on sankirtan. He looked up at me and said, "Let's see where we should send you, Pujana ..." I said, "I'll go anywhere." He did a mock double take, smiled, turned to Hasyapriya, and said, "What a great attitude!"

During the summer of 1974, we sold books and magazines at the Ontario Speedway, an auto racetrack, and on college campuses like Pomona and UCLA, besides the usual parking lots. I had one of my best Saturdays at a Zody's discount department store about an hour from the temple. In ten hours, I did about 175 Hare Krishna newspapers in English and Spanish at a quarter each. This made me an instant celebrity back at the temple as the most improved devotee of the week.

On another occasion, I had been working hard in a parking lot for several hours when I approached a middle-aged karmi man sitting in a parked car. While making my well-rehearsed speech, the pitch of my voice rising and falling with precision, I searched his eyes and those of his female companion for a spark of interest that might indicate a willingness to give a donation. He interrupted me in mid-sentence and said, "You're good. How would you like to work for me?" I quickly declined the offer and looked for the next karmi to hit up.

Sometimes when I was having some success, I wanted to stay out on sankirtan for the rest of my life. At such times, the parking lot felt like my real home and the temple merely a place to take rest, take prasadam, and recharge spiritually before coming out again the next day. I was confident that Krishna would protect me from the demons and the police.

We often floated on air as we drove to the temple after a successful day, but along with the successes came doubts, feelings of burnout, and the results of confrontations with demons. Sankirtan was often a struggle to stay a step or two ahead of the police and store security guards. More than once I needed to duck behind a building or a dumpster to stay out of sight of the cops.

The police usually let us off with a warning. If, however, we were still there when they returned, they would usually ticket us for peddling without a license. Sometimes the police even arrested a devotee. Most sankirtan captains assumed that if the police ticketed or arrested a devotee, it must have been the devotee's fault. He had been sloppy and inattentive to his duties and had allowed some stupid, meat-eating karmi cops to catch him. The police never caught a devotee who was thinking only of Krishna.

Every major shopping mall and many of the larger stores employed their own security guards to take care of people like us. On one occasion, a demonic department store manager asked us to leave his parking lot. I decided to challenge him, however, and stay, in God's Name. After all, the karmi shoppers deserved the chance to escape the miserable material world, regardless of what the manager or anyone else said. He approached us again, this time with a goon at his side.

I screamed something about Lord Chaitanya's (Krishna's) Mission at them and at whoever else was within earshot. My partner, however, insisted that we leave, which we did. Ordinarily, we stayed if the local rent-a-cop were old or not fearsome.

The doctrine stated that if a demon challenged the supremacy of Krishna or the authority of the spiritual master, then we were to chant loudly. Demons fled at the sound of the Holy Names. If the chanting failed, however, we were to leave the scene.

On one occasion, I was selling in karmi clothes outside a post office when a karmi asked me if I were in the Hare Krishnas. I denied it, but he continued to ask questions in a loud and persistent voice. I became angry and took a swing at him, but missed. I felt that it was about time that God's devotees prevailed against the demons. To my amazement, he backed off even though he was bigger than me. Wanting to avoid further trouble, I drove to another location.

On another occasion, we drove to a golf course that we had heard was especially promising. Before we could even get out of the car, the demonic grounds crew spotted us and told us to leave.

I was often quite sleepy on arrival at my destination. Sometimes, the first thing I did was to look for a place to lie down. I slept under trees, in the bushes, on rooftops — anywhere I could find. It was easiest, however, to nap in the car. We often argued, therefore, over who would keep the car after everyone else had been dropped off. No devotee wanted the others know he was napping. I found that — contrary to doctrine and orders — taking a short nap was often profitable. I did some of my best distributing when I was well rested.

Nevertheless, I was a below-average money-raiser. It seemed that for every good day, I had a bad day when I fell into Maya and did little more than pray for the van to come and take me back to the temple. I felt guilty for looking into the store windows or for buying something to eat in the supermarket. Such activities were Maya.

The karmis made many excuses for not giving us Lakshmi. Believe it or not, some even said, "I gave at the office." Maybe they had, as some devotees distributed our books in office buildings. In the mid-1970s, every sankirtan devotee in the US heard complaints from karmis about higher energy prices and declining real wages as the middle class felt its first serious economic pinch since World War II.

Some karmis told us, "Get a job." My comeback was, "This is my job." I knew that many disagreed with our views, but I also knew that I was working hard to earn my keep.

Devotees sometimes worked Hollywood Boulevard because of its proximity to the Culver City temple and its steady foot traffic. Most of the time, however, Hollywierd, as we called it, was not a profitable place to work. It seemed that every freak, drug addict, prostitute, and bum in Los Angeles lived on Hollywood Boulevard. In addition, the devotees' frequent requests for handouts had long since alienated most of the local merchants.

Young karmi women in short skirts and pretty blouses posed a special challenge to a devotee who had taken a vow of chastity. When I had difficulty keeping my mind on sankirtan, I simply avoided talking to women altogether. Other devotees, both male and female, were, however, able to use their sexuality to their advantage.

Beginning in the fall of 1974, all regular sankirtan devotees attended training sessions every weekday after breakfast. Some mornings we walked through mock encounters where each devotee demonstrated his techniques. The group then evaluated them. Among other pointers, we learned how to answer various objections a karmi might have to buying a book. A brahmachari named Chitraka demonstrated his well-practiced and highly successful technique of placing a couple of sticks of incense under the noses of unsuspecting karmis. The devotees applauded his exemplary combination of forwardness and finesse.

Gopavrindapala (also known as Gopa), who led many of these sessions, emphasized the importance of prayer in achieving a big score. Known for his personal touch with the karmis, he once recommended practicing for sankirtan by sitting with a karmi and making friends without trying to sell anything. Some devotees even used humor as a device. Whatever one's style, the most important consideration was the amount of Lakshmi collected. Before each major karmi holiday such as Christmas, Easter, or the Fourth of July, all the devotees in the temple attended expanded, temple-wide versions of these training sessions.

Sankirtan served to keep a devotee's mind sharp. Working the parking lots forced us to learn to live by our wits. Senior distributors emphasized that sankirtan was the inside track to Krishna consciousness. We vied with each other for top honors in book distribution. This was known as "transcendental competition." Krishna and the spiritual master most appreciated those who collected the most Lakshmi.

Even though sankirtan was grueling work, most hard-core distributors wanted no part of less challenging duties in the temple, where, in Ramesvara's words, "You get soft in the head." He also used to say, "If you stay back, you'll dry up." By this, he meant that serving in the temple all day offered little of the excitement, or "nectar," of Krishna consciousness.

We sankirtan devotees thought of ourselves as a crack, elite team who had accepted the most difficult, dangerous — and rewarding — of duties. In a way, all other duties, including cooking, Deity worship, administration, book production, and cleaning the stool room, existed to make sankirtan book distribution possible.

Not all of our efforts to get money for Krishna involved the sale of books. In late 1974, Bhakta Joe, a new devotee and a talented, if somewhat erratic, book distributor, persuaded Hasyapriya to give him $500 of Krishna's money to buy some tickets to an upcoming George Harrison concert. Joe's plan was to scalp the tickets at a profit for the Movement. The tour, which was heavy with Indian music and rock music with Hindu themes, bombed at the box office, however, and Joe was unable to resell most of the tickets.

There was a heavy emphasis on book distribution, but it was not the only way to advance in Krishna consciousness. Prabhupada had elevated Jayatirtha, a former head pujari, to the position of temple president. Ramesvara, the most passionate advocate of book distribution in the Movement, other than Prabhupada himself, rarely went on sankirtan himself. Much to his frustration, he had no knack for one-on-one sales.

It seemed that I was always suffering with a cold and sinus problems, as I had before joining the Movement. Nevertheless, the leaders continued to send me on sankirtan, which they said would cure whatever was wrong with me.

One became sick, they said, because of a lack of Krishna consciousness. Therefore, if a devotee were sick, it was his fault. He had almost certainly been careless in his eating or sleeping habits or in following the spiritual master's other rules of internal and external cleanliness. Furthermore, Krishna made him sick to remind him that this life was miserable, he could never be happy in this material world, and only in his next life could he be free of misery. Sickness was, therefore, a blessing, further motivation to become Krishna conscious and go to back to Godhead.

The leaders often cited examples of devotees who went out on sankirtan despite pneumonia and other illnesses. If they could do that, then who was I to complain about a sniffle?

Nevertheless, devotees did use some Hindu remedies to treat minor ailments. For a cold, Prabhupada recommended hot tea made with fresh ginger root, dried red pepper, and honey. For a headache, he recommended smearing the forehead with a paste made from water and ground black pepper. He recommended fasting for most illnesses, though this remedy was unpopular with most active book distributors. He also recommended cow urine for liver problems and cow dung for external infections, though I never knew anyone who used these particular remedies.

The other novice devotees and I spent most of our time working the parking lots. The more experienced devotees worked the high-priced indoor malls and special events like concerts and sporting events. Some sold home-team buttons at football games. At LA Dodger baseball games, devotees shouting, "Programs! Programs!" sold hundreds of BTG's. They simply turned the magazine over so that the front cover, usually a picture of Krishna, was unseen.

The LA International Airport was the most consistently lucrative spot in town, despite the many legal problems over the years. It seemed that some demons were in the habit of complaining about what they considered heavy-handed or deceptive techniques on our part.

Ramesvara decided that only the best trained and most experienced devotees should work the airport. Those who did so were able to collect up to $500 a day. Disneyland, with its tight security, was also off limits to all but a handful of mostly female devotees whom Ramesvara had handpicked for their experience, expertise, and above all, discretion.

On one occasion, I drove with Gopa from the temple to the airport. He was in the habit of selling five or six books at each of his preselected flight arrivals. Some said that he and others were successful because of their performance skills. That is, the karmis were paying for a performance. Mahatma, another talented sankirtan devotee, told them, "I want to sell you a book so badly, I'll even do a dance for you."

Most of the devotees who worked the international wing of the airport had learned enough Japanese to make a little friendly small talk. Playing on the tourists' inexperience, they said that it was customary for visitors to the United States to give some money in charity. Most were happy to oblige. In addition, devotees often took larger-than-intended donations from foreigners who were unfamiliar with US currency and how to make change.

If the sankirtan devotees distributed too aggressively at a mall, it could easily become "burned out." This meant that few karmis would give Lakshmi and that more than the usual number would complain to the authorities about us. The leaders responded by pulling back their teams from these locations for a couple of weeks. They often blamed devotees from other temples for poaching in our territory.

Other than the police, our biggest enemies were proselytizers and fund-raisers from other groups. We were in competition with certain Christian fundamentalist groups and the Moonies. The fund-raising of the latter group was even more aggressive and better organized than our own. The Jehovah's Witnesses, however, posed little or no threat to our activities. They stood on street corners, displaying copies of their magazine Awake. We joked that the Witnesses were asleep.

While my god-brothers and I were struggling with the demon Angelinos and with our own materially obsessed minds, devotees in other temples were taking Krishna consciousness to the rest of the world. For example, an elite traveling party was selling our books to colleges and universities. Ghanashyam, the leader of the party, and a former president of the student government at Princeton University, often visited professors of religion or eastern studies. After some chitchat, he would say, "I hear you're writing a book." All academics were writing something. Flattered, they would talk about their projects. Then Ghanashyam would pitch them a complete set of Prabhupada's books.

Outside the English-speaking nations, the devotees' attempts at proselytization produced mixed results. For example, in the early 1970s, a swami took a crack team of American sankirtan devotees to Japan. This swami, who was a former US Marine, had earned a reputation for his unorthodox disciplinary methods, such as punching out devotees who failed to make their quotas. His team succeeded in out-hustling most of the Japanese karmi subway solicitors. The sole exception was a group representing the survivors of the atomic blasts. Their motivation even exceeded ours. In any case, the humble Japanese readily gave money in charity. By all reports, the sankirtan in Japan was excellent.

There were, however, some problems. The sound of the kirtans, even subdued ones, bothered the neighbors, because the walls between apartments were thin paper. Wanting to establish a self-sustaining center, the devotees published a Japanese language version of the BTG, and tried to recruit Japanese members. Despite their best efforts, the devotees failed to attract a single Japanese recruit.

Most of the Lakshmi collected in Japan in the early 1970s went to help build Prabhupada's temple in Vrindavan. In the mid-1970s, the Japanese government expelled the devotees for alleged charity fraud. I heard that for a couple of years thereafter, the Japanese authorities denied entry to anyone wearing a Hare Krishna robe.

The situation in Germany was similar. In the early 1970s, the temple there was highly profitable. By mid-decade, however, some demonic prosecutors alleging charity fraud raided the German temple, arrested the leaders, and confiscated the Lakshmi in Krishna's bank accounts.

◊ ◊ ◊

The practice of sankirtan, also known as the "Sacrifice of the Age," was in many ways the most important sacrament in our religion. I heard from various sources within the Movement that, as a young man, Prabhupada, while not himself a communist, had admired the propaganda techniques employed by the Indian Communist Party. It had enjoyed considerable success by airdropping to the villages below thousands of pamphlets printed in the local languages.

Prabhupada met and followed the elderly Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, who was a Vaishnava, or member of the cult of Lord Chaitanya. The latter was a Sixteenth-Century incarnation of Krishna, the apostle of the public chanting of Hare Krishna, and the founder of the modern Sankirtan Movement.

Bhaktisiddhanta encouraged Prabhupada to preach Lord Chaitanya's message in the West. Prabhupada tried to combine in ISKCON the mass propaganda techniques of the Communists with the messianic, proselytizing message of the Vaishnava sect. He wrote that, with the help of American money and Indian theology, his Sankirtan Movement would ultimately "control the masses" and take over the world.

We ISKCON devotees chanted Hare Krishna in public, but even more important to us was the saturation of the world with "recorded kirtans" as Krishna-conscious literature. Book distribution offered karmis their first contact with the pure devotee, the most auspicious moment in their otherwise miserable lives.

Prabhupada's program of sankirtan book distribution accomplished several objectives. First, it gave the conditioned souls an opportunity to meet the devotees of Krishna and begin their journey back to Godhead. A karmi who failed to give a donation or read one of our books endured many forms of torture after his death. The "Angels of Death" ripped his soul from his body and forced him to march in intense heat as dogs and vultures attacked him. In addition, Krishna was sure to condemn him to millions of additional miserable births and deaths.

Second, the performance of sankirtan guaranteed that rain would fall in quantities sufficient for agriculture. A moderate amount of rain would fall each night, when it would do the crops the most good. Without sankirtan, however, there would be no rain and, hence, no harvest. In ancient times, a yogi curried the favor of the demigods by performing severe austerities and by the performance of elaborate, opulent temple worship. Sankirtan book distribution was the modern equivalent of such ancient sacrifices.

Third, street donations and receipts from book and magazine sales provided Lakshmi for the day-to-day operations of the Movement, for the establishment of new centers, for special events including feasts and festivals, and for opulent food and clothing for the Deities and the spiritual master. Prabhupada once declared, "The money is the honey," and the biggest source of honey for the Movement was sankirtan.

Trying in vain to enjoy themselves, the karmis had stolen Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune, away from Krishna. Therefore, a devotee who collected Lakshmi from a karmi and gave it to Krishna were returning the Goddess of Fortune to Krishna, her eternal consort. Prabhupada compared a devotee who took money from a karmi to a parent who took a $100 bill from a child by offering it a piece of candy in exchange. The amount of Lakshmi we collected represented how much we loved the guru and God. Moreover, the more a karmi gave, the more he benefited spiritually. Therefore, it was our duty to encourage them to give the Movement as much Lakshmi as possible.

Like Anala in Vancouver, many of us had spiritual realizations while on sankirtan. Sometimes after hours of hard work and intense concentration, it seemed as if we had at once perceived the entire philosophy of Krishna consciousness. At such times, the teachings came alive all around us: the sun, the moon, and water were Krishna, as the Bhagavad Gita said. Indeed, everything was a part of Him. We realized that Krishna consciousness was the natural, original consciousness of the living entity, even though the "modes of material nature" currently covered its soul. Our duty was to serve God by humbly distributing His message to the faithless.

Tripurari, the expert book distributor, insisted that a devotee should feel different from the karmis to whom he was talking. He should never think of himself as one of them. Some of those who gave us Lakshmi on the street may have been pious in the superficial, materialistic sense. All were, however, demons who were presently incapable of understanding our philosophy. Maya was forcing them to have filthy personal habits, to eat sinfully, to speak nonsense, and to engage in a perpetual but fruitless pursuit of what we called "sense gratification."

The term "sense gratification" referred to the degrading and ultimately futile attempt to satisfy the never-ending demands of the senses and to find real and lasting pleasure here in the material world. All karmis engaged in illicit sex and took intoxicating substances. If they also ate meat, then they were murderers as well. Incapable of love, which we defined as love of God, they were going to hell.

Karmi happiness, which Prabhupada compared to the happiness of a dog with a bone, was fleeting and temporary. The smiles on their faces were painted on. They may not have known it, but they desperately needed to read about Krishna consciousness and give us the Lakshmi they would otherwise spend on sinful activities.

Despite the vast differences between them and us, we nevertheless needed to rub shoulders with them every day. This required the utmost discipline on our part. Krishna — and only Krishna — could give us the intelligence to distribute safely and successfully. The saying was that the more advanced we became in our Krishna consciousness, the trickier Maya would become. For example, she might appear as the temptation to become "puffed up," that is, cocky or satisfied with one's service.

The leaders advised us never to think, "I'm an effective preacher of Krishna consciousness, and they are really picking up on this philosophy." We were never to think that we were reaching them. After all, they were cats and dogs. It was enough to entice them to give a donation and take a book.

If they were giving us money, it was because Krishna had sent them to us. If no one were giving money that day, then He was testing our faith. If they cursed us, it was His way of humbling us. (A devotee always thought of himself as "lower than the straw in the street" or "like a worm in stool.") The devotee did nothing; it was Krishna who was doing everything.

Even though we knew we were fundamentally different from the karmis, we tried to appear as ordinary people much like them. We learned to smile at everyone, no matter how much pain we felt. At the same time, we remained aloof enough never to take a rejection personally or let an insult discourage us. On the contrary, our attitude was that whatever they said to us qualified them more for what we were selling.

Sankirtan devotees understood that exalted spiritual personalities sometimes appeared disguised as karmis. We never knew when the pious young woman who gave Lakshmi might be a spiritual master, or when an ornery old man might be Radharani. The pure devotees of the Lord sometimes visited the earth planet to see how the preaching of Krishna consciousness was coming along, and all devotees wanted to look good before them.

The ingredients of success on sankirtan were conviction, confidence, and singlemindedness of purpose. Spirited chanting — at the temple, in the car, and between sales — helped us to achieve the proper mental focus. When we believed absolutely in what we were doing, and when we were 100 percent confident in the ultimate success of the sankirtan effort, then and only then were we likely to convince others of the value of Krishna consciousness. If we appeared distracted or unsure of ourselves, they would lose interest. If we hesitated, even for a second, they would walk by without stopping. Those devotees who were less than fully convinced needed to rely on charm or an ebullient personality for success on sankirtan. Such gimmicks, however, eventually failed.

Getting a karmi to stop walking could be a challenge. The usual strategy was to attract their attention and then physically block their path. Another strategy was to position oneself where the public could not avoid us, such as at a busy escalator or doorway. Less sophisticated devotees tried walking alongside a karmi and striking up a conversation. This method rarely resulted in a donation.

We presented ourselves as authority figures. After all, we were representatives of the Spiritual Master of the Universe and the Absolute Truth. To this end, we were always to remain in control of a conversation. We did let them talk some, but not too much. We were not to give them too much time to think, because if they had the opportunity to think about buying a book, they would usually say no.

We never asked them if they wanted to buy a book or give a donation; rather, we told them, "TAKE one of these!" and "GIVE a donation!" We never said, "please," a word we considered weak and ineffective. Most sankirtan devotees de-emphasized hard information and emphasized strong eye contact, a sincere tone of voice, and a commanding but not overbearing physical presence. We were most successful when our presentation was so airtight that it gave them little opportunity to say no.

Sometimes I felt bad about taking Lakshmi from a poor karmi. Prabhupada, however, criticized such feelings, calling them "mundane" compassion and mere sentiment for a person's material circumstances. A devotee showed real compassion for others by offering them Krishna conscious. Such compassion addressed the soul within the body, not just the body itself. A truly compassionate person tried to save others by encouraging them to give to the Krishna Consciousness Movement. It did not matter whether the karmis understood what they were doing.

In a similar vein, Prabhupada wrote in a purport in the Bhagavad-gita As It Is that feeding the hungry and opening hospitals for the sick were sinful activities. Furthermore, our superiors instructed us never to comfort a crying karmi child, never to help someone change a flat tire, and never to give Lakshmi to someone in need of a meal. Being directed at the temporary material body, such activities neglected the eternal soul within.

Tripurari spoke of putting an imaginary bubble over himself and the karmis to whom he was talking. From within this bubble, he tried to make them see the miseries of the material existence outside the bubble. In short, he tried to take the spiritual world with him on sankirtan. Then he tried to trick them into engaging in a spiritual act, such as giving Lakshmi to the Movement or reading an authorized book about Krishna.

Selling books was a bit like stage performance. Successful sankirtan devotees looked good. We shined our shoes, and made sure our clothes and wigs fit properly. We learned our lines, especially our opening lines. We also learned how to ad lib as the situation required. We invented and memorized a repertoire of lines, come-ons, and responses for various situations.

As in acting or comedy, timing was of critical importance. We worked hard on delivery and inflection. A false move, a slight hesitation, a momentary lapse in concentration, could mean the loss of a sale or donation. As Tripurari once said, "You never blink."

The crucial moment came when we asked for the donation. Sometimes, a karmi had his wallet out, ready to give Lakshmi, only to change his mind if we said something wrong or lost control of the situation.

In short, we exuded confidence that giving money to the Movement was the natural and proper thing to do. A devotee first convinced himself of the philosophy and then tried to convince others. If we expected them to give, then in most cases they would do so. The intensity of a devotee's desire for them to give needed to exceed their desire not to give. In this way, sankirtan was largely a battle of wills, mirroring the universal struggle between godliness and godlessness.

Prabhupada said that we were to collect Lakshmi "by hook or by crook." One hook was establishing a rapport with the karmis. If, for example, they said they were from Kansas, we would say something like, "I've got a brother back that way." Some experienced devotees tried to create the feeling of an old friendship. If they succeeded, a request for a donation would seem like asking an old friend for a small loan.

Some blissed-out devotees became outwardly friendly with everyone. They were able to have such a backslapping good time that almost everyone would buy a book. Generally, for a devotee to touch a karmi was the kiss of death. Sankirtan, however, was an exception. The spreading of Prabhupada's message took precedence over everything else.

Another hook was to induce them to answer "yes" to a series of innocuous but loaded questions. Then a "yes" to a request for a donation would come more easily. For example, a devotee selling records to a young karmi might begin with, "Do you have a turntable?" Nearly everyone owned a turntable. For another example, sometimes a devotee said, "We're doing a survey." Then he asked a few questions and said, "We have a special deal only for the people we're interviewing today." Sometimes a clipboard-carrying devotee in an airport or bus station firmly addressed the servicemen as "Soldier!" and then ordered them to take a book and give money.

Another successful hook was the come-on to the opposite sex. For example, the women sometimes approached a karmi man, pinned a flower or button on his lapel, told him how big and "dangerous" he was, sometimes even kissed him, and then asked for a donation. Vrindavan Vilasini was a top female sankirtan devotee. Well spoken and convinced of the philosophy, she also had a pretty face and an attractive figure. Mulaprakriti, another top scorer, was less beautiful but was intelligent, strong-willed, hardworking, and highly skilled at sankirtan. The men sometimes accused the women of using their physical attractiveness to their advantage, and the women accurately returned the same charge.

We often said that to sell to a karmi couple, one first needed to persuade the woman. In private, we laughed at karmi men who appeared to be under the control of their wives or girlfriends. In contrast, women devotees knew their place — subordinate and submissive to the men.

Sometimes a householder devotee took a child, not necessarily his own, with him on sankirtan. By all reports, cute children were worth their weight in gold in donations. By about the age of fourteen or fifteen, they were ready to go out and collect Lakshmi on their own.

Besides increasing the amount of money we collected, the cultivation of a tough, unshakeable attitude "dovetailed" well with our philosophy. We had all knowledge; the spiritually covered karmis were incapable of understanding the truth. It was natural, then, to try to entice or trick them into buying into Krishna consciousness.

The "crooks" Prabhupada referred to were techniques ranging from mild deception to full-fledged transcendental trickery. We tried to give the impression that we were a part of what the public was supposed to experience at that particular time and place — especially if it were an illegal location. For example, in store parking lots we sometimes announced, "The manager asked us to come here today."

When a karmi asked, "Is this Krishna?" in a hostile tone, we replied, "No." We answered questions according to how they were asked. For example, if someone asked, "What's this for?" I would give an indirect, vague answer, never mentioning Krishna. If, however, we hit them up hard enough, they would not even ask. They would give Lakshmi or not, and we would move on to the next karmi.

Some devotees collected Lakshmi for Vietnam War-era MIA's (Missing In Action) and POW's (Prisoners Of War). Others said they were collecting for UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) or the Red Cross. Other standard lines included, "I'm from Apple records" (the Beatles' record label) or "I'm George Harrison's secretary." Or, "This book is about chemistry [or sociology, or political science]." A book was about whatever we thought might interest that particular karmi. After all, the Hindu scriptures contained all knowledge on all subjects.

Another line we came up with was, "One dollar feeds one child for one week." Though fabricated, this line worked well with young mothers. Another favorite was, "I painted the pictures in this book." I once heard Jadurani — the devotee who had actually painted many of the pictures in the books — complain that others were using this line. Some more lines: "Everyone is giving ten dollars today," and "The last guy I talked to just gave me fifty dollars!"

Some sankirtan devotees had perfected a technique known to its detractors within the Movement as "shortchanging." Gopa, for example, would tell a karmi, "I've got a bunch of ones I'm trying to get rid of. Do you have a twenty?" He would take the karmi's twenty-dollar bill and slowly give him back one-dollar bills, one at a time. As he did so, he would continue to pitch the book. This technique was effective, because karmis often got tired of waiting for their change and gave up, leaving the devotee with a greater-than-intended donation.

Sometimes, after inducing a karmi to take out his wallet, a devotee pointed to or touched a bill he wanted, say a ten or twenty-dollar bill. I heard that some devotees simply grabbed the money and ran.

Some women devotees dressed up in attractive karmi clothes and sold flowers in bars. If a devotee got roughed up in a bar, it was because of her lack of faith. Devotees always trusted that Krishna would protect them on sankirtan. In addition, the women distributed books on military bases, especially on military payday. The services were then almost entirely male.

Nevertheless, a devotee needed to use subterfuge when dealing with people whose intelligence was at the animal level. Karmis were simply too sinful to understand what we were doing. We accepted no legal, moral, or ethical authority other than our own, because God's law was higher than man's "concocted" laws. The police and the courts were agents of the ruling class of atheists and materialists. Their job was to keep people ignorant of God and keep the present government in power.

When we did obey others' rules and laws, it was with the attitude that for now they were in charge, but that circumstances would be different later. A devotee once told me, "When we take over, we'll demand money at gunpoint." Another devotee named Tarun Krishna called sankirtan a cross between sport and war. Tripurari declared sankirtan a holy war. Prabhupada himself said that book distribution was the equivalent of "dropping bombs on the laps of the conditioned souls."

CHAPTER 4: ON THE ROAD FOR KRISHNA

Some of the larger temples sent traveling parties to college campuses, state fairs, and cities that had no ISKCON temple. Once there, the devotees distributed books, collected Lakshmi, and sometimes tried to recruit new members. The parties traveled in everything from panel vans to full-sized intercity busses. The latter were converted into traveling temples by removing most of the seats and installing a small set of Deities at the rear. For years, an advertisement on the back cover of the BTG referred to these traveling sankirtan parties with a headline that read something like, "Experience Life as a Bhakti Yogi for a Week or a Month!"

In March 1975, Hasyapriya arranged for me to join an LA-based traveling party that was then in Chicago. He told the party leader that I was doing 100 magazines a day. In truth, it was more like fifty to 100 a day. I guess Hasyapriya was reluctant to give up any of his better distributors. In any case, mine was not to reason why, and I caught a midnight flight to Chicago.

At the temple in Evanston, Illinois, which is just outside of the city, I joined the LA party. It consisted of Kavichandra (also known as Kavi), the leader, and another devotee named Locasaranga (also known as Loca), who was an expert distributer.

The temple building had formerly been a YMCA, complete with an empty swimming pool that was used to store blankets and winter clothes. As usual, my mission was to distribute as many BTG's as possible. I found a picture of devotees feeding poor people in India in a recent issue of the magazine, and taped it onto my plastic collection can.

At the morning program, the Chicago temple president read aloud, for the pleasure of the Deities, a list of the top sankirtan devotees and how much Lakshmi they had collected the previous day. After breakfast prasadam, Kavi, Loca, and I drove into the city of Chicago. Kavi abruptly pulled the van to the curb, turned to me, and ordered, "Get out." I grabbed my can and book bag loaded with magazines, jumped out of the van, and faced one of the busiest and noisiest intersections I had ever worked. There were wide medians to stand on and the traffic was backing up as much as 100 yards in every direction. In short, this was a great stoplight for sankirtan.

I took my position on the median strip. The best strategy was to jump into the intersection when the light turned red and immediately start collecting. If I hesitated or thought too much about what I was doing, then I would have trouble getting started. To create an air of urgency and excitement, I ran from car to car. I was enthusiastic and "hot" that day. The karmis were highly sensitive to any doubts or hesitations a devotee might have.

A dozen cars stopped at the light in the lane closest to the strip. I tried to entice the first driver to give a dollar. Meanwhile, I noticed that several drivers behind him were staring curiously at me. I knew that if the first driver gave Lakshmi, then the others would be more likely to give as well. Some devotees even faked the first donation. They turned their backs to the other drivers, whipped out a planted dollar bill, and triumphantly flashed it for all to see.

If a driver's window were closed, I would sometimes motion to him to roll it down. To my astonishment, he usually did. When an eighteen-wheeler stopped at the light, I sometimes climbed the metal ladder on the side of the cab. Several drivers, apparently impressed by my persistence, or dumbstruck by my audacity, rolled down their windows and gave a donation. Perhaps they believed that there was no other way to get rid of me. It did not matter why they gave, so long as they gave.

Stoplights were even more dangerous than parking lots. Several times, I needed to sidestep moving cars as I tried to obtain one more donation or finish a transaction after the light had changed. With practice, I was able to anticipate the changing of the light. When it was green, I took refuge on the median. To drown out the din of the traffic and to prepare myself for the next red light, I often chanted at full voice.

After about an hour Kavi returned in the van. I jumped in. He demanded to see my collection can, which was quickly filling with bills and becoming heavy with change. As we drove to the next site, he grumbled something about how I was "loafing" out there. I knew, however, that Kavi had not meant what he said, and was secretly pleased with my performance thus far that day.

After a few days in Chicago, we hit the road and headed south. While riding in the van, we regulated our time by dividing each hour into fifteen-minute intervals of chanting on beads, kirtan, reading aloud from a book, and listening to a taped lecture. We took turns reading and leading the singing. Short breaks for lunch and an evening snack were the only interruptions to our routine of chanting and hearing Prabhupada's words.

The first night we stayed at the temple in St. Louis. The next day we drove to Oklahoma City, where I was "hot" again at the stoplights. There I found a cute picture of devotee children in a BTG and taped it onto my collection can. This helped me to solicit donations.

One evening Kavi and I parked the van in a parking lot as we waited for Loca to return. Ever the hard-core book distributor, Kavi spotted a young karmi in a parked pickup truck a short distance away. Kavi said to me, "Go sell that guy a Gita." I picked up a book, got out, walked over to him, tried and failed to sell the book, and returned to the van. Selling a magazine for a dollar was relatively easy, but selling a hardcover book for ten dollars was more of a challenge.

A few days later, we stopped at the center in Dallas, Texas, partly because Kavi's wife and child lived there. The spiritual master had located the boarding school for children, known as the gurukula, at the Dallas temple. Meanwhile, Kavi traveled and preached Krishna consciousness for much of the year, giving up his attachments to spouse, children, and home.

Discipline at the gurukula was strict. The boys wore dhotis and shaved their heads; the girls wore saris and pulled back their long hair. They learned that the spiritual master was their father and the cow was their mother. Prabhupada had authorized the use of corporal punishment when dealing with children. Some devotees maintained that he had once said that all children were demons.

Children left their parents and entered the gurukula by the age of six years by Movement calculation or five by Western calculation. (The spiritual master taught that a baby was one year old at birth.) I heard that all parents had signed powers of attorney giving the sect legal guardianship of their children. This was to protect the Krishna consciousness of the child in case one or both parents blooped. Furthermore, parents visited their children no more than once or twice a year. This was especially hard for the mothers, who were more prone to struggle with what we called the "bodily conception of life" than were their more spiritually advanced husbands.

The karmi authorities in Texas had recently tried to close the gurukula. Their pretexts were our alleged failures to meet minimum karmi health and educational standards. Did the so-called authorities not know that learning Krishna consciousness was infinitely more important than learning the usual mundane curriculum? Did they not know that our philosophy of simple living and high thinking was far superior to their habits of killing cows and eating their meat? Despite our strong objections to living under karmi rules, the gurukula had compromised with the authorities and begun to teach traditional subjects such as English and arithmetic.

Several months after our visit, the authorities in Dallas did succeed in closing the gurukula. At first, Prabhupada scattered the children among various centers in the US. He later sent them to India, which had lower health and educational standards.

After a couple of days in Dallas, we departed for Los Angeles, stopping in motels along the way. While driving, we saw a sign that read, "Ramada Inn." Noticing the auspicious word Rama in the name, we thought about the many karmis who must have unwittingly contacted the Absolute Truth in a small but significant way simply by seeing this sign. An unknowing and as-yet ungrateful world was inexorably becoming Krishna conscious.

On one occasion, Loca cooked too much prasadam and Kavi ordered him take all the leftovers. This was standard punishment for wasting Krishna's resources. Occasionally, a cook accidentally substituted salt for sugar in a preparation such as sweet bread. In such cases, the devotees often took the bread anyway. The reasoning was that it was transcendental and absolute, because the devotees had offered it with love to Krishna. Prasadam nourished the soul regardless of its material ingredients. Being spiritual, prasadam was incapable of causing a material reaction like distress or illness. It was an offense to think of prasadam as nothing more than matter.

Back in Los Angeles, Loca and I worked the popular karmi movie The Exorcist. The line in Westwood stretched around a city block. Working a stationary crowd required nerves of steel, but Loca sold many books that afternoon.

In the late spring, I traveled with a different sankirtan party to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first day there, the leader told me, "Do 100 books or don't come back." He dropped me off in a parking lot at ten or eleven in the morning. I was wearing my karmi clothes and a button with my name and the words "ISKCON World Relief Organization." I approached one karmi after another, trying to let Krishna move my arms and legs and give me the intelligence to distribute successfully. By the time the others arrived at sundown, I had sold 120 magazines. I was physically tired but emotionally high.

A few days later, I approached a man in a business suit after he stopped his car at a red light. With calculated breathlessness, I recited one of my lines about our charities. He handed me a five-dollar bill. My biggest donation ever as a sankirtan devotee.

We wanted to do the New Mexico state fair, but we knew the authorities did not ordinarily permit fairgoers to carry large, heavy boxes into the grounds. The leader drove the van to a service entrance, lied about who we were, and smuggled our books into the fairgrounds.

One afternoon the following week, we arrived at a college dorm to pick up one of our distributors. The leader looked at the frustration and guilt on the devotee's face and said, to no one in particular, "He didn't distribute today." The struggling devotee had indeed been in Maya all day.

After a couple of weeks in Albuquerque, I started to do poorly again. Feeling fatigued and frustrated, I often fell into Maya and sat down on the curb or sidewalk. Meanwhile, most of the others were meeting or exceeding their quotas. I had become a burden for the party. After one especially unproductive day, the leader said, "What are we going to do with you, send you back to LA?" This was a threat for a brahmachari like me, because the LA temple had earned a reputation for having more householders and babies — in short, more Maya — than any other temple in the Movement. Space cases like me often ended up cutting vegetables or sweeping the floor in warm-weather or rural temples.

Seeing how poorly I was doing, the leader put me on a bus to Los Angeles. Twenty-four hours later, I checked in with Tulsi-dasa, the temple president. He said, "Get cleaned up for the evening program. You smell like a bus."

After about eighteen months of distributing books and collecting Lakshmi on the front lines of the war against Maya, I was burned out. Noticing my low scores and morose attitude, Hasyapriya asked me, "What do you want to do for Krishna?" I told him I wanted to cook.

For the next several weeks, I spent the mornings helping the cooks to prepare the noon meal and the afternoons downtown or at UCLA with the sankirtan chanting party. On campus, we distributed magazines, put up posters, and invited students to the Sunday feast.

In my prayers, I asked Krishna to engage me fully in His service and to fill my mind with blissful thoughts of Him. Excess in the pursuit of Krishna consciousness was no vice, it seemed. Indeed, the spiritual master expected the devotees to be "mad after Krishna."

As I became more involved in temple-based activities, my feelings of burnout subsided and the bliss of Krishna consciousness returned. One morning, as I rinsed a knife in a large, stainless-steel kitchen sink, my hands seemed to glow with transcendental opaqueness and translucence. The doctrine asserted that everything, including one's body, became spiritualized when engaged in devotional service. I thanked Krishna for the realization and for the opportunity to see the truth of His doctrine.

It seemed that many of the devotees around me, especially the younger ones, were in a perpetual state of heightened enthusiasm about Krishna consciousness. This made me wonder why I was so often in Maya. Someone once asked an especially enthusiastic devotee, "How do you stay so enlivened all the time?" He replied, "I don't — I just fake it."

Perfection consisted of chanting and performing one's service, even when one was not in the mood for it. A devotee never tried to directly achieve knowledge or enlightenment, as these gifts came only to those who had surrendered themselves fully to the service of the guru.

During a particularly intense kirtan, I thought of how ecstatic it was to dance for the pleasure of the Deities and not for my own pleasure. At such times, it seemed as if I had found everything I had ever searched for, and more. When I was feeling morose, I forced myself to dance and think of Krishna. Often, by the end of the kirtan, I had forgotten whatever it was that had been on my mind. Conversely, if I refused to serve, or to dance and chant with conviction, I could make myself even more miserable. In such situations, I felt far removed from most of the other devotees and from God.

A quarter of an inch of water often stood on the kitchen floor near the sinks where the devotees washed the vegetables and cleaned the pots. Though the rules generally proscribed shoes within the temple, the leaders made an exception and allowed us to wear plastic sandals in the kitchen. Nevertheless, many devotees contracted colds in the winter. About once a year or so, I became ill with a cold or the flu and needed to go to the sick quarters.

I also suffered from persistent infections on my knuckles and the backs of my hands. We rarely saw a doctor when we were sick; rather, our medicine was chanting, reading, and fasting. Illness separated a devotee from the mainstream of temple life, though sometimes a healthy devotee would come by and read to the sick devotees. We all knew that any devotee who became separated for an extended period from the other devotees and from devotional activities, would almost certainly fall into Maya.

On one occasion, Gopa became ill. When his condition failed to improve after a few days, the leaders sent him home to his parents. They in turn sent him to a doctor. A couple of weeks later, he returned, well again, to the temple.

Several other devotees and I took second initiation, also known as Brahminical initiation, in a ceremony at the temple. The spiritual master offered this only to those who had followed the rules and regulations for at least one year following first initiation, and who had progressed in their Krishna consciousness. Second initiates were no longer simply students of bhakti yoga. Rather, they were expected to preach the principles of devotion and to perform pujari and cooking duties. Other devotees could cut vegetables or sew garments for the Deities, but only a Brahmin could bathe and dress Them or cook a devotional offering over a flame.

After the ceremony, Jayatirtha gave us a mantra known as gayatri, which we chanted silently every morning, noon, and evening. This was the first and, to my knowledge, only secret or silent mantra a devotee chanted. We received a white string, known as the Brahminical thread, to wear always around our necks and torsos.

I cried as the enthusiastic new devotees took first initiation in the same ceremony. After eons of forgetfulness of Krishna and separation from Him in this material world, they were finally going back to Godhead. Bhakta Joe, with whom I had often distributed books, received the eternal name Jayo.

In July, Hasyapriya sent me to Berkeley to help with the cooking for the yearly Ratha-Yatra festival. The temple compound was on Stuart Street, just off Telegraph Avenue on the south side of the city, less than a mile from the University of California campus. A few days later, I was chanting in the temple room when A karmi worker hired by the devotees to do some repair work trudged across the floor in his heavy work boots. One could expect this from a person who was fully controlled by the material nature and who was always chasing a happiness he could never find. In contrast, the barefoot devotees moved with grace and a lightness in their steps, because they knew it was Krishna who directed and guided their movements.

Like its counterpart in Los Angeles, the Berkeley temple took book distribution seriously. One afternoon, a leader asked me to walk to the bank with the temple treasurer. He carried a heavy knapsack filled with coins and bills the devotees had collected on sankirtan. On another occasion, we went to the San Francisco airport to pick up the sankirtan team. An able-bodied bookseller had been selling from a wheelchair that day. I heard that a devotee using a chair could double his usual score.

After returning to Los Angeles, another devotee and I drove to the airport to drop off books for the sankirtan team. About a dozen nuns in full habit were singing in a corridor as another passed out literature. I wondered, "Where did this idea come from?"

Sometimes a sankirtan devotee from a northern state or Canadian province would flee the frigid winter weather and end up in a temple in Hawaii, Florida, Southern California, or even Mexico. Some devotees argued that the warmer locations, with their large numbers of winter-season tourists, were big for collecting Lakshmi. Most of the leaders frowned on those who moved without authorization from temple to temple. The leaders in the temperate climates, however, held their tongues, as they stood to gain devotees and Lakshmi. Many sankirtan leaders preferred to solicit in tourist destinations, as they had money and were unlikely to remain in the area long enough to testify against the Movement in court.

One morning, Hasyapriya asked me to appear in traffic court in place of a devotee named Pundarika, who was out of town. I pled guilty, because no one had instructed me which way to plead. I also believed that a guilty plea would mean less hassle for me. The judge fined me twenty dollars, which I did not have. They put me in a holding tank with a dozen or so dirty, fallen souls. After a while, a jailer brought us each a ham sandwich and an orange. I refused the sandwich, but offered the orange to Prabhupada and distributed its sections as prasadam to the karmis. Some accepted the mercy and others did not.

By Krishna's mercy, Bhubanesvara arrived at the courthouse the same afternoon to take care of some unrelated business. Devotees spent much time in court because of the harassment we received. He somehow discovered that the authorities were detaining me. He paid my fine and they freed me. That was the first, but not the last, time I saw the inside of a jail cell as a devotee.

Urjasvat had become a minor celebrity at the temple because of his ability to collect hundreds of dollars in a day. Some devotees criticized him for his habit of taking two or three-hour naps in the car each morning. With his numbers, however, the leaders never complained.

Urjasvat had left behind a family when he joined the sect. A devotee should give his women and property to the Movement, according to the doctrine. Urjasvat's karmi wife, however, refused to join. The best solution in such a situation was to abandon one's family, join the Movement, and hope that one day they would also join. A devotee's family, friends, and teachers must all be devotees of Krishna.

One afternoon that summer, a large group of devotees and I chanted, swam, and played water sports at nearby Venice Beach. We understood that winning a water competition was proof of a team's superior Krishna consciousness. This was the only time I went to the beach in the years I lived in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the karmis around us tried to beautify their bodies by jogging, roller skating, lifting weights, playing volleyball, or sunning themselves. Our doctrine stated that Krishna gave each human a fixed number of heartbeats for his entire life span. Therefore, elevating one's heart rate shortened one's life. In addition, Prabhupada considered most games a frivolous waste of time. Although swimming, which was a Vaishnava sport, was an exception, most centers had no pool. For these reasons, devotees rarely exercised or engaged in sports.

The BTG continued to carry articles attacking materialism, atheism, and science. Other articles talked about the worldwide expansion of the Movement and its many humanitarian projects. Another regular feature was entitled "How I Joined Krishna Consciousness." It described how the spiritual master's mercy had saved another fallen soul who had been floundering in the material world. I tried to read the magazines and paperback books we distributed, but I often lacked the time to do so.

On one occasion, my mother, sister, and nephew came to visit me in Los Angeles. We said little to each other. They failed to understand my Krishna consciousness, and their karmi ways interested me little. After an hour or two, they left.

A few weeks later, my father, who had recently divorced my mother, and his second wife visited me. I had not received the message he left at the temple pay phone. (It was the only phone available to most devotees.)

Devotees are unsentimental about calls from outsiders. After my father arrived, the devotee who took the call warned me, "Watch out, they'll stuff you in the back seat of his car and have you deprogrammed." Thinking that my family would never do anything like that, I ignored him. They arrived just before the evening program, and I suggested that we attend it together. When the arotik began, I danced as usual at the front of the temple room, as they stood in the back. When the class began, another devotee brought them chairs to sit on.

After the class, I took them outside again. They invited me to come to dinner with them. I refused, as a devotee cannot eat food prepared in a karmi restaurant. Instead, we sat on the steps of the temple and talked for a few minutes. Whenever I said something about Krishna consciousness, they responded with something like, "But how can you say that?" I was making little progress in winning my father over to our way of thinking. Prabhupada taught that this was a result of my father's absorption in profit, self-adoration, and sex life.

A devotee named Jayadvaita, an editor at the BTG, approached us and introduced himself to my father and his wife. He began to talk to them about Krishna consciousness in a smooth and polished way, as I could not. Soon, however, I became anxious, because my 9:30 bedtime was approaching. When Jayadvaita left, I excused myself, and my father and his wife said good-bye.

Ramesvara asked me to accompany a householder devotee named Baninatha on a weeklong incense run to central California. Traveling by car, we sold incense to college bookstores and record stores in black neighborhoods. We slept in cheap motels.

In the late summer, Hasyapriya gave me thirty dollars and instructed me to take the next bus to Yellowstone National Park, where I was to join a traveling party. A couple of days later, I arrived in West Yellowstone, Montana. Having no Lakshmi for the shuttle bus into the park itself, I hitchhiked the last few miles to our cabin, which was near the main visitors' center.

The devotees were collecting Lakshmi at the tourist attractions, including the famous "Old Faithful" geyser. Every morning at 4 o'clock we went to the public showers, which of course were empty. A hot shower was priced at a quarter, but a cold shower, which was all a devotee needed, was free. For the first day or two, the party leader ordered us to take only bran cereal and milk at all meals. This made my job as cook easy, but the diet quickly became monotonous. We complained to Hasyapriya in Los Angeles, who ordered the leader to change the menu back to regular prasadam.

After ten days in Yellowstone, our next stop was Salt Lake City, where we joined another traveling party at a house the LA temple had rented. I shared the kitchen duties with a brahmachari named Pavamana. Two years my senior in the Movement, he had formerly been the head mechanic for the fleet of sankirtan cars in car-crazy city of Los Angeles.

Every evening the sankirtan devotees counted the Lakshmi they had collected that day. They rolled their coins and placed their one-dollar bills into neat stacks of fifty each, top side up, all facing the same way. On one occasion, another devotee and I were talking to a guest in the front room while the devotees counted Lakshmi in a back room. The other devotee whispered to me, "Never let a karmi see the money."

I was having trouble controlling my eating. Trying to hide my bloated belly, I often wore my kurtah untucked at the waist. As I was taking out the trash one afternoon, Urjasvat yelled from fifty paces away, "Hey, Pu', you're gettin' fat!" This amused the devotees who remembered how thin I had been when I joined the Movement.

One way to burn off extra calories was to dance like a madman during kirtan. When it became intense, however, the floor shook and the Deities rocked back and forth. This delighted the dancers — all devotees lived for the day when they could dance with Krishna in the spiritual sky — but it horrified the pujaris, as it was their duty to protect and care for the Deities. I feared that continued frenetic dancing on our flimsy wooden floor might one day cause Them to fall.

A devotee on the party had donated a new Winnebago recreational vehicle when he joined the Movement. It was equipped with a shower, a kitchen with microwave oven, and a tiny temple room and altar in the rear. One Sunday we rode in the RV to a nearby lake where we swam and took prasadam.

A few weeks later, we left for Berkeley in the RV. Agnideva (also known as Agni) arrived from Los Angeles to lead the traveling party. Blessed with a sweet and sincere tenor voice, he was one of the better singers and kirtan leaders on the West Coast. He had joined the Movement a couple of years before in New York City, after migrating with his family from the Caribbean.

Agni was separated from his wife, as often happened when one's duty to the spiritual master took precedence over a marriage. He was now wearing the saffron-dyed robes of a brahmachari.

Agni assigned Pavamana and me to the Deity worship duties on the bus. Using the tiny on-board kitchen, we cooked two and a half meals a day for Them and the devotees. We also divided the responsibilities for the six daily offerings and arotiks, which stretched from 4:15 a.m. to 9:15 p.m., seven days a week.

One evening, we parked near the University of California campus at Davis and spent the night in the RV. The next morning we rose at 4 o'clock, as usual, and marched into a dormitory to use the showers. On our way, we passed some students who were sitting in the lounge and having what looked like an all-night metaphysical bull session. Remembering my own college days, I glanced at them nostalgically. Neither group, however, acknowledged the other. After celebrating the morning program of worship in the RV, we were ready to hit the road again.

We dropped off the RV in Berkeley and flew from there to Los Angeles, where for the next few weeks I served again in the kitchen. One morning in October, Hasyapriya instructed five or six brahmacharis including me to pack our belongings and prepare for a trip to Las Vegas. We went upstairs, emptied our lockers into cardboard boxes, gathered our sleeping bags, and loaded them into a van.

After lunch prasadam, we left the temple. By sundown, we had arrived at the two-bedroom, one-bathroom ranch house that Tulsi-dasa had rented for us.

Pundarika, the sankirtan captain, took one bedroom; the rest of us took the other. He had joined the Movement a couple of years before, after dropping out of a large midwestern university.

As the others distributed books during the day, I cooked, cleaned, and did the grocery shopping. For the first few days, an experienced cook named Hari Nama taught me how to prepare the meals. A ten-year member and one of the first devotees in the Movement, he had served as the pioneering president of both the Boston and the Denver temples. It was said that Prabhupada had offered him the exalted title of sannyasi, but because of his unusual humility, he had refused, preferring the low-profile life of a brahmachari.

By the mid-1970s, however, Hari Nama was spacing out. His superiors sent him to the New Vrindavan farm, where spiritually drained devotees often went to recharge their batteries. He failed, however, to make much progress while there. Kirtanananda Swami, the local leader, sent Hari Nama to his mother's home in Florida. She in turn sent him to a mental hospital.

After leaving the hospital, he eventually ended up in Los Angeles. He served there as head cook for several months before being demoted to line cook. On our downtown chanting parties, he often chanted quietly on his japa-mala while sitting in a phone booth, as the rest of us chanted and danced on the sidewalk.

Hari Nama taught me how to shop for food at the supermarket. There we spent the quota of one dollar and seventy cents per devotee per day that Tulsi-dasa had allotted us for groceries.

The market in Las Vegas was designed so that an exiting customer was forced to walk a gauntlet of shining, silvery slot machines. What a perfect metaphor for the temptations of Maya and the material world, I thought. Most karmis were unable to resist the lure of instant sense gratification, even though in the end it always failed to satisfy their needs. Similarly, the material world promised happiness but in the end provided nothing but misery.

Most importantly, Hari Nama taught me how to prepare the main meal of the day: chapatis, yogurt, dahl, and a vegetable preparation such as potatoes with eggplant, cauliflower, or broccoli. To make chapatis, we prepared whole wheat dough, rolled it flat to a diameter of five or six inches, fried it in a dry pan, and allowed it to puff up like a balloon over the open gas flame.

I also learned to make dahl with mung beans, vegetables, and spices. To make yogurt, we cooled boiled milk until it was just above body temperature, mixed in the culture, covered the closed pot with a towel, and let the pot sit overnight above the pilot light in a cool oven. Each morning, we offered Their Lordships Gaur-Nitai a pot of fresh, thick yogurt.

After Hari Nama left, I ran the kitchen, which I kept clean, orderly, and up to the highest Brahminical standards. Unlike the larger temples, no one in the Las Vegas center was likely to enter the kitchen unannounced and disrupt my service. The focus in Las Vegas was on book distribution, the service that most pleased the spiritual master.

Besides learning how to cook the meals, Pundarika gave me other duties to perform. I arranged to have a phone installed at the temple by dressing in karmi clothes, driving to the downtown office of the telephone company, and untruthfully telling a representative that I was employed in a karmi job.

On one occasion, a devotee who had once been a sankirtan leader made a suggestion concerning a decision involving the group. He used the words, "In my experience...," which prompted Pundarika to say, "I don't care what your experience was." One never offered advice to Krishna's bona fide representative.

Like most other busy airports, the Las Vegas airport was a lucrative place to collect Lakshmi. Hrdayananda Swami, who was known for his humorous asides, once called Las Vegas a "place of pilgrimage for demons" because of its legal gambling, booze, and sex shows.

A devotee selling hardcover books could collect at least $100 a day, even on a slow weekday. Some returned with nearly as many silver dollars as paper dollars. It seemed that some gamblers liked to give silver dollars in charity for good luck. Some customers threw our books into the trash soon after buying them. The janitors would pick them out of the trash and sell them back to us. After a long day at the airport or the Strip, the devotees swam in our backyard pool.

On one occasion, Tulsi-dasa visited. On hearing the sound of the devotees counting the day's Lakshmi, he exclaimed, "That's music to my ears!" Every week I deposited at the bank the cash that the devotees had collected on sankirtan the previous week. Sometimes, the satchel that held the Lakshmi was so heavy I could barely carry it. Only Tulsi-dasa and the other officers in Los Angeles could withdraw money from the account.

For the first time since joining the sect, I was spending several hours a day alone. In a way, I welcomed the relative freedom. Before Las Vegas, I had often felt frustrated when there was no leader around to tell me what to do. For company, I played tapes of Prabhupada's lectures and kirtans.

It was, however, hard to remain Krishna conscious for long periods without the association of devotees. I often loudly chanted or even screamed scriptural verses at the top of my lungs when thoughts of eating, sex life, or any other kind of enjoyment came into my mind. I hoped the neighbors could not hear me, but wondered what they would think if they had. I remembered that, in any case, the ignorant were incapable of understanding us and unjustified in judging us. When the devotees returned at the end of the day, I pretended that everything was okay. Just before we took rest at night, Pundarika played tapes of Prabhupada's lectures so that we could hear the blissful philosophy of Krishna consciousness as we slept.

On Sundays, while the book distributors were at the airport, I sometimes cooked a miniature feast consisting of a vegetable preparation, halavah, lassi, and poppers. Lassi, also known as "nectar," was a drink made from fruit juice, sugar, ice, and yogurt or buttermilk. Poppers were like big, ultra-thin deep-fried crackers. No karmi guests attended our Sunday feasts, as recruiting was not a part of our mission.

One evening, some neighborhood boys broke one of our windows. We ran after them in our bare feet, but they managed to escape. They probably thought that we were some bizarre cult. In the degenerate karmi culture, devil worshipers earned more respect than God worshipers.

On one occasion, as we were chanting downtown in our temple garb, the police arrested us, handcuffed us together in a human chain, and marched us to the jailhouse. The charge was disturbing the peace. Before we entered the lockup, two sick officers of the law ordered us to strip and made lewd comments about our naked bodies.

We spent the night in jail with some drunks and gamblers who had failed to meet their financial obligations. Perfect examples of men in this age of ignorance and quarrel, Chitraka observed. The next morning our lawyers in Los Angeles arranged to have the charges dropped, and we went free. A few weeks later, we returned to Los Angeles, allowing the women's sankirtan team to use the house.

Over the next several months, I returned to Las Vegas several times, each time with a different party and leader. On one such occasion, we had an eleven-year-old boy with us, at Tulsi-dasa's request. A well-behaved and personable young man, he lived with us for about a month. I heard that his parents were involved in a custody dispute.

A stalwart sankirtan devotee named Bopadeva served with us for several weeks. Much to his consternation, he sometimes inadvertently chanted, "Hi, here take one of these!" on his beads during morning japa class, instead of the usual "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna."

Kripanidi, whom I had known in Vancouver, also served with us in Las Vegas. He had spiritual problems. Formerly a fierce and dedicated sankirtan devotee, his numbers had recently dropped. He had always been a special friend to younger devotees like me, but now he rarely spoke to anyone. Rather, he preferred to sit alone in the back of the temple room, or even in the car, and read his favorite book, the Nectar of Devotion, a book of Vaishnava philosophy. At first, I thought that he had decided not to talk to me because I had committed some kind of offense, but I later heard whispers that he had gone crazy. We all prayed for him.

In the late fall the presidents of the southwestern temples arrived in Las Vegas for a week-long meeting with Jayatirtha, the GBC member for the region. During japa class, he would sometimes spray a dozing miscreant president with a water bottle he kept at the ready. In a way, it was satisfying to see that our leaders had the same faults that we lesser devotees had, and that, at least occasionally, they, too, needed to live by the same rules we did.

I disliked having guests, because their presence added extra work and upset my daily routine. Most of the presidents were experienced cooks, however, and, seeing my distress, they volunteered to help in the kitchen. On the last day of their stay, they held a kirtan at the airport, where Jayatirtha displayed the wild and ecstatic dancing style for which he had become well known.

On one occasion, I took the car and bought a tape recorder with the quarterly distribution check from my trust fund. I gave the rest of the Lakshmi to the Movement. This was the only occasion on which I did not donate the entire check to the Movement. Alone during the day, I played kirtans and lectures on the tape player. I even left the player behind for the next group, because, in theory, at least, a brahmachari kept no material possessions.

A traveling party visited us in their refurbished Greyhound bus. They put the Lakshmi they had collected onto our altar for offering to the Deities. The sankirtan onboard the traveling temples was intense, but they also had a reputation for offering more freedom and fewer rules than the stationary temples. I heard that on one occasion, after a store security guard had caused trouble for the devotees on the bus, a husky devotee had put him upside-down into a trash can.

My mother telephoned from the East Coast. Feeling that her call was a distraction from my duties, I told her not to call me again. She agreed to write letters instead. Around that time, I heard that we were to write home once a month, saying that everything was okay and speaking highly of the Movement. For the next few months, I wrote regularly, sometimes signing my letters with both my sect name and my karmi name.

My mother was a "favorable" parent. She did not seem to object to my membership in the sect. Rather, she thought that as an adult, I should make my own decisions. I sent her a subscription to the BTG. A year later, she renewed her subscription. I concluded that I must have been getting through to her. She visited me briefly in Las Vegas and brought me a sweater I had asked for.

Every spring several hundred devotees from around the world made a pilgrimage to Mayapur, the birthplace five centuries earlier of Lord Chaitanya, and Vrindavan, the birthplace of Lord Krishna. Many devotees told me how inspiring and enlivening it was to go to India and see a whole society in something like Krishna consciousness. I heard that fifteen percent of the Lakshmi collected in North America and Europe went to India, where the sect was buying land and building temples. The recently completed ISKCON temple in Vrindavan was the most opulent building in town, and the proposed temple in Mayapur would be the most lavish building in all of India, Prabhupada said.

In February 1976, my mother sent me $1,500 to pay for my round-trip plane ticket to India. I thought of how easily I had put one over on my materialistic mother and how her money belonged to Krishna, anyway.

I obtained a passport and received my shots. The leaders warned us that not all Hindus accepted Krishna as God. This turned out to be true, strangely enough, even in the sites that are holiest to Krishna's followers. To some Indians, He was one of many gods; to others, He was little more than a mythological figure who was famous — or infamous — for his ability to keep 16,000 wives. In addition, many Indians were desperately poor. Ninety percent of the Indian population was rural, whereas only about ten percent of the US population was rural, the leaders told us.

In early March, I and about two dozen other India-bound devotees rode a chartered bus from the LA temple to the airport and boarded a flight to New York. There we and about 100 other devotees from across the United States and Canada boarded a wide-body airplane to India, with short stopovers in London and Kuwait.

Leaders, sannyasis, and top-scoring sankirtan devotees from all over the Movement made the pilgrimage each year. The sankirtan devotees had bought their tickets with Lakshmi they collected above their regular quotas. The leaders, of course, had access to Movement Lakshmi. We devotees were in the majority on the plane, a heady feeling. On the last leg of the trip, a brahmachari named Ushika told me, "Drink the milk they're serving on the plane — it's the last cow's milk you'll see for five weeks."

We arrived in Calcutta (now called Kolkata). It's on the Bay of Bengal in the delta of the sacred Ganges River. There we boarded busses for the eighty-mile ride to Mayapur. To us it was a spiritual center of the Universe.

Having slept little in the preceding two days, I was exhausted, but many of the others were in a state of bliss. Ushika shouted "Haribol!" at every farmer and pedestrian we passed along the way. When we arrived, some of the devotees rolled on the sacred ground until the dirt covered them from head to foot. Others collected clay in little plastic film canisters, which they took back to the States to use as tilak. We understood that the dirt of the holy cities was sacred dust from the Lord's Lotus Feet.

While some roads were macadam, most were dirt. All modes of transportation were found on the same narrow thoroughfares: trucks, cars, taxis, bicycles, carts, pedestrians, and farm animals, beasts of burden. A melange unseen on US highways since perhaps the 1930s. India was fifty years behind the West and navigating its primitive transportation system was a challenge.

We arrived at the ISKCON temple compound in Mayapur, where we set up camp under a canopy on the roof of a partially completed dormitory building. The leaders collected our passports for safekeeping and warned us against taking unauthorized, freelance sightseeing trips, which were Maya. I heard that over the years, many devotees who had taken side trips in India had blooped.

The next day, the news of the drowning of a much loved and respected devotee swept through the camp. Vishnujana Swami, a former lead singer in a San Francisco rock group, was a popular and charismatic leader in several West Coast temples. His feats were legendary. In the late 1960s, he had led all-day chanting parties in downtown Los Angeles, where his intense pounding on the mridanga had often left his hands bloody. When visiting the LA temple, he often played rock star to his hyperventilating female devotee fans.

The details of Vishnujana's suicide were sketchy. According to the rumors, Prabhupada had severely chastised him for having sex with a woman. Invoking the scriptural requirement that a sannyasi must always remain celibate, Prabhupada advised him to jump into the nearest river. Vishnujana had apparently done just that. Most of the devotees I talked to felt that he had done the right thing by adhering strictly to scripture.

Across a barren field from the dorm was the temple building, also under construction, where we celebrated morning and evening arotiks with loud and long kirtans. The sanitary conditions, however, were poor. Some wells provided potable water; others did not. We learned to tolerate the flies that swarmed everywhere, because a person who killed a fly would become one in his next life.

Local men cooked and cleaned for the largely North American and European group of devotees. They also offered rice and vegetables to the beggars who gathered every afternoon outside our front gate.

Indians were in the habit of making pilgrimages, usually traveling on foot or by ox cart, sometimes from great distances and at great personal sacrifice. They paid their respects at the ancient temples, as had tens of generations of ancestors, leaving behind whatever Lakshmi they could afford — usually a few worthless coins.

We, too, were eager to see the temples, especially those at which the people chanted Hare Krishna. At one Bengali temple, a group of elderly women chanted every day from morning until night. A devotee remarked, "They're here for the duration."

Many Indians wanted to touch our feet, apparently because we were dressed like traditional Hindu holy men. The leaders, however, instructed us never to allow a common person touch us. We feared that doing so would cause us to take on their karma and become one of them in our next lives. Our leaders warned us that strict local customs prohibited such activities as eating or sleeping in public.

The leaders gave us each a token amount of Lakshmi to spend on rickshaw rides and souvenirs. (This was the only time in the Movement I legally had discretionary money in my pocket.) We often argued with the rickshaw and taxi drivers who charged us the rate for Americans, which was several times the rate for Indians. We thought we deserved the lower rate, because we had taken a vow of poverty and had limited Lakshmi. They thought that all Americans were rich and that we were being untruthful about how poor we were. In America we brahmacharis felt as if we were at the bottom of the economic scale — if not entirely off it. In rural India, however, a few US dollars in one's pockets made a person feel reasonably well off.

The street barbers in Mayapur were unable to offer much more than a rusty blade, a brass pot filled with water, and a curb for the customer to sit on. To my knowledge, no Western devotee ever bought a shave from such a barber.

It seemed that wherever we went, small groups of local men followed us. It was necessary, therefore, to take care never to walk alone. Some of them wanted to buy our watches. The more gadgets a watch had, the higher its price. A few enterprising householder devotees had brought American and Japanese digital watches with them to sell on the Indian black market. They used the proceeds to buy fine clothes and musical instruments for resale, at a substantial markup, to other devotees back home in the West.

Even in March, it was hot in tropical Mayapur. In the late afternoons we cooled off in a muddy river that flowed nearby. Prabhupada wrote that the waters from the Ganges and its tributaries, where pilgrims had bathed for centuries, were pure and purifying.

According to Scripture, the Ganges originated at the feet of Lord Krishna and flowed throughout all the planets of the universe. Prabhupada wrote that certain yogis were able to travel throughout the universe by entering into the Ganges on this planet and emerging from it on other planets. We neither boiled nor treated the water before drinking it. It tasted sweet to me. Some devotees even filled their canteens with river water for transportation back to the States.

As we were enjoying the transcendental atmosphere in Mayapur and seeing the local sights, the GBC was holding its annual meeting at the temple compound. For several weeks, rumors had flown about the activities of some of the leaders of the Movement.

For example, Jayatirtha had recently left his GBC post in Southern California, a highly lucrative and rapidly growing region, for the GBC post in Britain, a less lucrative region. I heard that Prabhupada had ordered the change after becoming concerned about the negative publicity surrounding the investment of sect Lakshmi in illegal businesses. Ramesvara complained that US customs had recently searched him as he was returning from overseas. The karmi authorities had apparently become suspicious of anyone wearing a Hare Krishna robe.

Ramesvara, who had recently taken sannyasa and become the new GBC member for the Southern California region, never missed an opportunity to lobby his peers on behalf of his latest transcendental business projects. A fast-talking New Yorker in his late twenties, he wore out most other devotees with his relentless energy. Referring to one of his rivals, a devotee quipped, "I don't see how Tamal [Krishna Swami] can beat him." One could sometimes see Ramesvara and other top devotees walking to or from the river, obviously making a deal. Jayatirtha, who was as laid back as Ramesvara was intense, once quipped after the latter had outmaneuvered him on a deal, "Et tu, Ramesvara?"

After a fortnight in Mayapur, we flew to New Delhi, the Indian capital. There where we boarded chartered busses for the one-hundred-mile-long trip to Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh state. This was the village on the Yamuna River where Lord Krishna was born 5,000 years ago.

The construction work on the spacious new ISKCON temple and adjoining guest hotel had been completed the previous year. Its exterior was of white marble, and its internal courtyard was graced with a banyan tree, an auspicious species. The Deity worship, with its beautiful costumes and exotic flowers, lived up to its reputation as the most opulent in the Movement.

The hotel portion of the compound even had electricity and running water, which were rare outside the major cities. Only Prabhupada, other top ISKCON leaders, and some rich Indian guests stayed there. The rest of us stayed about a mile down the road at the Fogel Ashram. It was better known to the devotees as "Frugal Ashram," because of its bare, concrete floors and single-story, open-air design.

The biggest attraction that year for the devotees in Vrindavan was Prabhupada himself. Every day hundreds attended his lectures in the new temple, many of them recording his words on tape cassettes. In one lecture, Prabhupada declared that he was more successful as a guru than his compatriot, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental Meditation.

Like Prabhupada, the Maharishi had attracted an extensive following in the West, and had built a lavish, multi-million-dollar center in India. Prabhupada said that the Maharishi once admitted paying a salary to his worker-disciples. Prabhupada bragged that his disciples worked twenty-four hours a day for him and then paid him for the privilege.

I found it odd that, although the theology of Krishna consciousness emphasized cow protection, it was hard to find cow's milk in India. We took buffalo milk at the ashrams. Many devotees, especially the older ones who had been in India before, bought fresh fruit at the local outdoor markets. The bananas, oranges, and other fruits seemed about half the size of their American counterparts.

We visited the Vrindavan temple of the late Bhaktisiddhanta, but only for a short kirtan. The leaders warned us not to associate with the devotees — Prabhupada's god-brothers — in the temple, because they were in Maya.

On any given day in Mayapur and Vrindavan, a half-dozen devotees were sick with dysentery. Their digestive tracts unable to handle ordinary prasadam, they needed to take a special breakfast consisting only of plain boiled white rice. Some also suffered from hepatitis. By Krishna's mercy, I stayed healthy for the rest of my stay in India.

CHAPTER 5: BACK IN LOS ANGELES

After a fortnight in Vrindavan, we boarded busses for New Delhi. From there, we flew to New York by way of Bombay (now Mumbai), Kuwait, and London. At Kennedy International, the karmis seemed to have gnarled, mean-looking faces. I was surprised to see that their teeth were not pointed, and that they had neither claws nor horns.

On the flight to Los Angeles, the final leg of the trip, I felt weak and queasy. On arrival at the temple on a Sunday evening, I immediately took rest, thinking I was suffering from a bad case of intercontinental jet lag. The next day, however, I was too weak to rise for the morning program. I spent most of the day in my sleeping bag. One minute sweat soaked my bag; the next I shivered from the cold. Having no appetite, I took no prasadam. I only rose from the floor when I needed to go to the stool room. To keep my balance as I walked down the hallway, I needed to hold onto the walls.

At first, the other devotees paid little attention to me; they had their duties to perform. A devotee who had spent some time in India told me I probably had malaria. I remember thinking, "This is it — I'm going to expire right here." At the same time, I knew that whatever my illness, Krishna was giving me only a fraction of the suffering I deserved. An illness was Krishna's blessing, because it showed you the misery and temporality of this body. I thought that if I could barely move, then He must like me a great deal.

The next day, Tuesday, the leaders became concerned that I was living in the ashram without attending the daily programs. Sarvadarshana (also known as Sarva), the temple commander, drove me to the nearby UCLA Medical Center. He parked near the emergency entrance and fetched a wheelchair. I climbed into the chair and he pushed me to the emergency entrance. He gave me a quarter and a dime so I could call the temple after they released me, and then left.

Like most other devotees, I had no medical insurance, but the hospital workers gave me emergency state medical coverage on the spot. In the examination room, I described my symptoms to the doctor and told him I had recently returned from India. I weighed in at 108 pounds, about twenty-five pounds under my usual weight and not much for a person who is five feet, eleven inches tall. Noticing my robe and shaved head, a nurse offered, "Oh, you are in the Hare Krishnas. You aren't getting enough vitamin B-12." I thought, what does this karmi know about spiritual life? Concerned that I might have a dangerous, communicable disease, the doctor placed me in isolation.

Lying in bed, I remembered that some devotees had warned me to expect culture shock on our return from ancient rural India to the high-speed chaos of modern Los Angeles. Looking around my room, I saw an intercom, a TV with remote control, a radio, and electrical controls for the bed. My hospital room contained more gadgets and machines than I had seen in a month in India.

They gave me intravenous fluids for the first few days. I must have been dehydrated. The arrangement was awkward because I needed to take the bottle, tube, and apparatus with me whenever I went to the bathroom, which was often, because of the extra fluids. Every day or two, an older doctor leading a group of younger doctors came into my room to examine me and ask me a few questions. The only other people I saw were an occasional nurse or doctor and the orderlies who brought my meals. No one stayed long. Not that I blamed them. Anyone who wants peace and solitude should arrange to be admitted into hospital isolation, I concluded. Meanwhile, the doctors ran what seemed like every test known to medical science.

I was unable to eat most of the hospital food, because of our strict dietary rules. I was dying for some temple food, but no one at the temple accepted my collect calls. On Sunday, my last full day at the hospital, some devotees brought prasadam from the feast, which made me feel better. Before I left the next day, a doctor promised me that if I called him back in two weeks, he would have the test results. I never called back.

After a couple of weeks of light duties at the LA temple, the leaders again sent me to Las Vegas, where I resumed cooking and caring for the devotees and the Deities. One morning, a man from the local department of public health came to the door and asked for me by my karmi name. I told him that he did not live here. The man said that I had tested positively for amoebic dysentery. He added that the disease was contagious and might pose a threat to others in the household. I thanked him, went back to the kitchen, and continued to prepare the next offering of foodstuffs. The knowledge that prasadam could never become contaminated comforted me.

About a week later, I felt weak again. One afternoon, I simply lay down on my sleeping bag, despite intense feelings of guilty about my inability to perform my duties. The leader sent me back to Los Angeles, where I heard that in my absence the Department of Public Health had taken stool samples from all the devotees who had traveled to India that year. A total of about a dozen of us had tested positively for dysentery.

A few days later, my stool turned whitish, my urine brownish, and the whites of my eyes a sickly yellow. I understood that these symptoms were compatible with hepatitis. I had heard that hepatitis and dysentery were among the most common maladies suffered by devotees who had drunk bad water while in India.

Ramesvara ordered me and two other devotees with hepatitis to move into an unused bedroom in the back of his private apartment, which was located in an ISKCON-owned building across Watseka Avenue from the temple building. To avoid infecting the healthy devotees, the three of us sick devotees used the same stool room, because that was where hepatitis was often transmitted. Ramesvara himself had recently recovered from hepatitis and was in no immediate danger of recontracting the disease. His apartment doubled as the administrative headquarters of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT), of which he was the equivalent of general manager and chief executive. Owned by ISKCON, the BBT published Prabhupada's books and the BTG, which was written by devotees. Ramesvara had recently transferred the editorial and production offices of the BBT to Los Angeles from its longtime home in New York.

Hence the presence in Los Angeles of Radhaballavha, one of my fellow hepatitis-stricken roommates. He was Ramesvara's print production manager and right-hand man at the BBT. The third patient was a top sankirtan devotee who had come to Los Angeles with his wife as the result of a swap of devotees with the Denver temple. Such swaps, which resembled player trades in professional sports, happened frequently. This devotee often leaned out of our second-story window so he could talk to his wife in the parking lot below. Ramesvara Swami allowed no women in his apartment.

I lay flat on my back for most of my first week in the apartment. Every day, Bhubhrita, Ramesvara's servant, brought us boiled white rice and mung broth, both prepared without salt. This was the standard diet for devotees with hepatitis. After a few days, he added an occasional fresh papaya to our meager menu. The second week I was able to rise and walk around the apartment. A devotee brought us fifty pounds of rock candy, which cured hepatitis, according to Prabhupada. In the beginning, it tasted terrible, as he said it would, but later it tasted sweet, signaling our recovery.

Living in Ramesvara's apartment gave me a glimpse of the life of a top leader. He was known throughout the Movement for his fierce and unrelenting advocacy of book production and sales as the most effective way to spread Krishna consciousness worldwide. He seemed to see himself as a high-powered transcendental entrepreneur and manager. He was in charge of the temples in Southern California, the worldwide publishing businesses, and a significant portion of the book and magazine distribution in the US. This made him one of the top two or three financial and administrative officers in the Movement. At any given time, one could see many devotees waiting to see him in the reception area of his apartment.

Ramesvara hated to waste Lakshmi. On one occasion, after he and Radhaballavha had talked to a paper salesman in Ramesvara's office, Radhaballavha left the room thinking that Ramesvara had already closed the deal. Several minutes later, Radhaballavha stuck his head into the sick room and said, "I can't believe it! Ramesvara's still trying to squeeze him for a couple of bucks!"

Ramesvara hired expensive lawyers to attend to Movement business such as the frequent lawsuits filed against us over alleged charity fraud. He once complained sarcastically about how much Lakshmi it cost every time a lawyer who charged by the hour removed a staple from a piece of paper.

Ramesvara was then involved in a struggle for control of the Movement. One of his rivals was Tamal Krishna Swami, the GBC member for the midwestern United States. He was known for his traveling sankirtan party of barnstorming young brahmacharis.

The balding, fortyish Tamal was an effective leader, but his personality was somewhat bland, prompting Ramesvara to refer dismissively to Tamal's region as "middle America." Ramesvara loved above all to beat Tamal — to recruit more devotees than Tamal, to have more traveling sankirtan parties than Tamal, and to collect more Lakshmi for the spiritual master than Tamal. It seemed that Ramesvara was winning the transcendental competition, much to the delight of the LA devotees.

There was, however, another side to Tamal's usually taciturn personality. I heard that he once broke his danda over the head of an envious Indian man who had failed to fully appreciate the uniqueness of Prabhupada's position as master of the universe. Made of bamboo, the danda is a kind of walking stick about six feet long, three or four inches in diameter at the base, narrower at the top, and tightly wrapped in strips of saffron-dyed cloth. It symbolizes the position of a sannyasi or maharaja.

At one meeting in Ramesvara's apartment, a sankirtan leader named Jiva spoke at length about the considerable financial successes he had achieved with his traveling party of women devotees. Ramesvara commented approvingly that Jiva's ultra-strict disciplinary methods resembled those of the Marine Corps more than those of most ISKCON temples.

Ramesvara stayed in close touch with the other top leaders in the Movement. In the middle of the night, one could sometimes hear him shouting on the phone to someone in India. He kept the other leaders around the world informed of current happenings in the Movement. For example, he once dictated a letter warning that a certain swami had left the Movement to pursue sense gratification in Hawaii.

Living in Ramesvara's apartment, I was able to see the fallen as well as the transcendental aspects of his personality. He usually showed stoic restraint when it came to the morning and early afternoon prasadam placed before him by his servants. At night, however, he often took too much mahaprasadam, foodstuffs taken directly from the Diety plates. Such prasadam, which was usually prepared and taken in small quantities, was of the highest quality available and was highly coveted by the devotees.

The morning after such overindulgences, he often complained that it was nearly impossible to rise. During a phone call to his parents in New York, he confessed to an incipient spare tire around the waist. Meanwhile, he and the other leaders refused to allow ordinary devotees to call their material families.

Although Radhaballavha admired Ramesvara and served with him loyally for many years, Radhaballavha once confessed that Ramesvara sometimes acted like "a little kid." Radhaballavha was the only devotee I knew who could get away with talking back to Ramesvara.

In preparing Prabhupada's books for publication, Ramesvara picked several stories or scenes in it for his artist devotees to illustrate. He assigned each scene to one or another of the three or four full-time artists in the Movement. Knowing from experience how long on average it took each artist to paint a picture, he assigned a fixed number of days to complete the work. All artists performed other duties as well, including book distribution.

An artist named Pariksit painted a picture of Krishna tearing open a demon, with bloody internal organs fully exposed. The original hung in the temple room, and a full-color reproduction appeared in one of the books. Although the picture may have appeared violent to karmis, the devotees found it spiritually enlivening and deeply satisfying. Prabhupada wrote in a purport in the Bhagavad-gita As It Is, "Violence has its utility and how to apply it rests in the hands of the enlightened." We took this to mean that under certain circumstances, devotees should use violence to further the ends of the Mission.

While I was ill, Prabhupada visited Los Angeles. Every year from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, he toured most of the major European and North American centers. As his health declined in the mid-1970s, however, he traveled less, preferring instead to rest and write books in the warmth of the Hawaiian Islands or his native India. We devotees had caused his illness by failing to always faithfully follow the rules and regulations and by failing thus far to make the whole world Krishna conscious. Nevertheless, we understood that Prabhupada's mind was always in ecstasy, even as his body suffered. In the meantime, he instructed the GBC to run the day-to-day affairs of the Movement.

Whenever Prabhupada was in residence, the women cooked him his favorite preparations, including milk sweets and huge, eight-inch-diameter chapatis. They offered him fresh tropical fruits, including pineapple, banana, papaya, and his favorite, mango. We understood that whatever the spiritual master liked, Krishna liked, and vice versa. Often, Prabhupada's servants offered the remnants from his plate to the other devotees. As a matter of honor, a devotee accepted at least a taste of the spiritual master's prasadam. Some of the women spent weeks making shawls or other garments for their beloved master. If he wore their garments, they were thrilled.

I heard that when a reporter asked Prabhupada when he had achieved perfection, he replied, "By about three or four years of age." Nevertheless, senior devotees assured us that Prabhupada had always been perfect. He had no need to achieve anything or prove anything. Simply put, he was not one of us. Another reporter asked him about his Rolls-Royce. He replied that a "tin car" such as a Rolls was not good enough for God's representative. According to the Scriptures, God rides in a gold car.

On another occasion, Prabhupada called a press conference, but no one from the press attended. Nevertheless, Prabhupada declared a victory, saying that all the important demigods, including Lord Brahma, the Creator of the Universe, had been present. Demigods were powerful inhabitants of higher planets who had a keen interest in and affection for the earthly Krishna Consciousness Movement. Prabhupada maintained that they attended our arotiks as well. A pure devotee, he could see them, but, because of our material covering, we could not.

The pujaris decorated the altar with many flowers, especially when Prabhupada was in town. In the city temples, devotees bought most of their flowers from florists. I heard, however, that some LA devotees had cut and removed rare lotus flowers from a city park, and that the police had arrested some San Diego devotees for removing flowers from a public park.

The devotees vied for the opportunity to accompany Prabhupada on his morning walk, which consisted of a drive in his car followed by a stroll in a park or on a beach. Ramesvara, who was in charge of making the arrangements, gave preference to those who were involved in book production and distribution. If it rained, Prabhupada would take his "walk" in the Rolls-Royce with fifteen or twenty male devotees piled in the back seat, their dandas sticking out of the windows like oars from a boat.

One morning, a BBT devotee who had many important duties to perform that day was debating whether to accompany Prabhupada on his morning walk. Ramesvara asked him, "What would you do if you were a Christian and Jesus came to town?" The devotee went on the walk.

Devotees believed that the spiritual master as pure and perfect in every way. For example, his stool smelled like roses. I heard that sometimes devotees on a walk with Prabhupada dove after his spit, scooped it up, and ate it.

Those who wanted to approach God needed first to approach His most confidential servant, the spiritual master. He was the only person on the planet who was in personal touch with Him or who could put others in touch with Him. The doctrine stated that although God was situated within everyone's heart, they were unable to hear Him from within because of their impurities and sinfulness. Therefore, we all needed to listen to God's external manifestation, the spiritual master, who was "the sum total of the 33 million demigods." He had the power to create, maintain, and destroy the worlds. We believed that he could annihilate a person with his glance.

According to Ramesvara, Prabhupada believed he was the greatest author in history, except for Vyasadeva, the incarnation of Krishna who dictated the shastras (scriptures) about 5,000 years ago. It was Krishna who pushed the point of Prabhupada's pen back and forth across the page as he wrote. Perhaps sensing that his earthly days were numbered, he devoted most of his energies to the completion of his writings.

Every year, the top leaders from around the world offered one or two-page tributes to Prabhupada. Imitating his style, they praised him for making the world Krishna conscious, and expressed their gratitude to him for accepting fallen Americans such as themselves as his disciples. The leaders read these tributes aloud to him at a celebration held on his "appearance day" (birthday). Later, the devotees chanted and feasted, and the BBT editors compiled these appreciations into a paperbound volume for distribution within the Movement.

Prabhupada feared assassination. Bodyguards stood at his sides every morning as he lectured in the temple room. After one morning lecture, I saw one of them take a handgun from under his robes as he undressed in Ramesvara's apartment. I heard that Prabhupada had canceled plans for a worldwide tour because of his fears, even though his bodyguards and his personal secretary assured him that he would be well protected.

Devotees loved to tell stories about Prabhupada. One of his servants told of an incident that occurred after Prabhupada returned to India from the States. As he walked to the shower after disrobing, $10,000 in cash fell from his underwear. The servant picked the Lakshmi up off the floor and placed it in a safe.

In mid-June, 1976, a piece of excavation equipment accidentally ruptured an underground gasoline line beneath Venice Boulevard, causing a massive explosion with flames leaping scores of feet into the air. I heard later that the operator had instantly been killed. The heat was so intense that the devotees feared for the temple building, which was less than a block away. I watched in horror from the front steps of our apartment building as devotees carried the Deities' fancy clothes and jewelry, and, finally, the marble Deities Themselves onto the sidewalk in front of the Watseka Avenue entrance to the temple.

Security forces patrolled the block with long guns, presumably to protect against looters. After a few tense minutes, the authorities succeeded in turning off the gas. By Krishna's mercy, the fire did no damage to the temple, although it did damage and temporarily close a Laundromat on Venice Boulevard. The incident reminded me that the spiritual master expected us to give our lives, if necessary, to protect the Deities.

After two or three weeks in Ramesvara's apartment, we were well enough to leave, though we had all lost weight. Radhaballavha, who was normally of medium build, complained that sitting on the front stairs was like "sitting on two sticks."

Trying to get some sun and relaxation, I sometimes climbed to the roof of the temple building after lunch. On one occasion, I saw a devotee named Bahulashva, who was also a leader, giving Tulsi-dasa a back rub. This was a violation of the rule against service to one's body. I was in no position to complain, but it seemed that the leaders, who always talked about constant engagement in Krishna's service, did not always practice what they preached.

After a couple of weeks, I returned to my morning duties in the kitchen and rejoined the afternoon chanting party. Since my bout with hepatitis, however, I had trouble digesting regular temple prasadam, especially if it were cold or made with butter or ghee. This meant that someone needed to cook special prasadam for me, or I had to subsist on fruits and salad. Luckily, I knew most of the cooks and was able to arrange for butter-less chapatis, vegetables, and rice. Every month or so, curious about whether my digestion was improving, I tried to take ordinary temple prasadam or even the extra-rich Sunday feast. Each time, however, I suffered painful indigestion and vowed again never again to deviate from my restricted diet.

The wealthy LA temple was opulent in comparison with most of the other centers in the US, but it was especially so when compared with the temples in India. For example, the devotees in Los Angeles bought ghee in five-gallon tins at restaurant supply stores, where it was called "popcorn butter oil." They even used it to grease the woks after cleaning them. This amused those who had spent time in India, where ghee was a delicacy and a luxury.

While recuperating, I learned that in the spring of 1976 some devotees had gone out on sankirtan in clown costumes and make-up. Besides the usual books and magazines, they sold smiley-faced "Have A Nice Day" buttons. During the summer of the bicentennial year, some devotees dressed in Paul Revere costumes, pinned small American flags on the karmis' lapels, and collected donations for various patriotic causes.

I volunteered to take part in a scientific experiment. I drove with two other devotees to the laboratory of a local psychologist who was favorable to us. We each in turn entered a small, soundproofed room where we chanted on beads as the researchers observed and videotaped us. When it was my turn, I fell asleep in mid-round, which amused, but did not totally surprise, the other devotees. A couple of months later, the BTG carried an article on the beneficial effects of chanting. It quoted the writings of the researcher we had visited.

On another occasion, a devotee named Jadurani gave the morning lecture in the temple. This was one of only three occasions I heard a woman give a lecture. To be considered qualified to lecture, a woman needed to know the books better than the men. Indeed, Jadurani knew the books as well as anyone in the Movement. She was among the first devotees to join the Movement in New York, and she was the first brahmacharini. A legend on sankirtan, she sometimes collected as much as $2,000 a day at the airport.

A well-respected, longtime devotee named Jayananda became ill with cancer. Known far beyond his home base of Berkeley for his eighteen-hour days, his genuine humility, and his relentless cheerfulness, Jayananda put the rest of us to shame when it came to service, dedication, and faith. Though he was not much of a scholar or public speaker, all the devotees wanted to hear him talk about devotional service. Prabhupada himself praised Jayananda's service, adding, "Krishna is being kind to you by discontinuing your body."

Jayananda's parents had sent him some Lakshmi for his medical treatment. Tiring of Western medicine, however, he walked out of the hospital one day in his gown and took a cab straight to the temple. Several weeks later, he left his body as the devotees played his favorite kirtan tapes. Soon thereafter, the BTG published a letter from Prabhupada stating that Jayananda had achieved purity and now lived in the spiritual world. Meanwhile, the temple authorities put his big, worn-out work shoes on the altar, as devotees considered the feet of a great soul to be sacred. Ever the transcendental businessman, Ramesvara auctioned Jayananda's other personal effects to rich householders.

Tulsi-dasa called me into his office and informed me that I was to marry one of the brahmacharinis. It was his and the spiritual master's prerogative to arrange marriages. Torn between obedience to authority and attachment to my uncomplicated life as a brahmachari, I asked him whom he had in mind. The woman in question was a loyal devotee, but was overweight. I thought that her size would be an advantage in marriage, in that I would not be tempted to have sex with her. Not knowing what to do, I reluctantly agreed to the marriage and left the office.

Nevertheless, I resisted the idea of marriage, even the highly controlled Krishna-conscious version. I took seriously the idea of celibacy for higher spiritual purposes. I scrupulously avoided women. In the temple room, I sometimes found it necessary to close one eye in order not to see the women on the other side of the room. The thought of sex life sometimes revolted me, as doctrine said it should.

Prabhupada advised most brahmacharis to avoid marriage. He once compared marrying to falling into a "blind well full of snakes." He compared a man who had sex life to an insect that dies after sex. He likened becoming involved with a woman to putting your head in the lap of a witch, who then cut it off. If a person had too much sex in this life, then he might become a woman in his next life. If he were promiscuous, then he might become a pigeon, a dog, or some other animal that had frequent sex. Prabhupada wrote that, as punishment for illicit sex, Krishna forced a person to embrace the molten form of a woman.

I had seen many brahmacharis marry and move out of the temple. It was well known in the group that those who complained the loudest about what Prabhupada called "abominable sex life" were the most likely to marry. If possible, I wanted to avoid the association of women and the bondage of material existence.

Doing something that was highly unusual for me, I went back to Tulsi-dasa the next day and asked him to reconsider his request. I emphasized how easy it was for a married devotee to fall down from Krishna consciousness. Understanding the seriousness of my concerns, he relented and said he would find the woman another husband. At the time, I felt guilty about contradicting a direct instruction, but I was relieved never to hear about marriage again.

In traditional Hinduism, a woman could become Krishna-conscious and go back to Godhead only by devoting herself to the service of her devotee-husband, whom she accepted as her spiritual master. Soon after founding ISKCON, however, Prabhupada began initiating female disciples.

I heard that in traditional Hindu society, a girl's family arranged for her marriage by her sixteenth birthday. Women lacked the intelligence to understand the philosophy of Krishna Consciousness, because their brains weighed only thirty-six ounces as compared with sixty-four ounces for a man's brain, according to Prabhupada. One could not trust a woman, because she had the discretion of a twelve-year-old boy. In addition, women were nine times lustier than men, because of their sinful activities in the past. They enjoyed rape, notwithstanding their outward protests.

No woman devotee, no matter how experienced, ever gave instructions to a man, no matter how inexperienced. The leaders occasionally placed a woman in charge of other women, but more often, they placed a householder man in charge of women.

Prabhupada expected a woman devotee to wear the traditional sari, five yards of un-hemmed cotton cloth that covered her body, including head and hair. Unlike the dresses that women wear in the West, the sari tended to conceal, rather than reveal, her figure. Krishna-conscious women wore their hair long and straight, parted in the middle, and pulled and tied neatly in the back. In public, a woman exposed only her face, hands, and feet. If she exposed other parts of her body, including her hair, then she was regarded as a prostitute. To us, all karmi women were hookers.

Some of our satellite temples, such as Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, were single-sex. In the medium-sized temples, like Seattle, Portland, and Laguna Beach, brahmacharis and brahmacharinis lived in separate ashrams in the same building. In the larger temples, like Los Angeles and Berkeley, men and women lived in separate buildings. Prabhupada forbade householder couples to live together in the temple. Men addressed women of any age or marital status as "Mother." For example, if a woman's name were Yamuna, then men would address her as "Mother Yamuna."

Krishna-conscious marriages existed as a regulated outlet for those who were unable to remain celibate. A family gave fifty percent of its income to the Movement. Marriage, however, was no guarantee that a couple could live together. The spiritual master or his representatives often separated couples for duties in different centers or even in different countries. He said that one should avoid spending time with one's family, which he called "service to one's body." Instead, he asked his disciples to serve Krishna. Divorce and remarriage did not officially exist in the Movement, though Prabhupada and his representatives sometimes made exceptions.

Householder women sometimes wore nose piercing jewelry, long before it became a popular fashion among karmis in the West. Some devotees also wore a red dot, or bindi, in the center of their foreheads. It was an auspicious sign for her marriage and family. She vowed to serve her husband, whom she addressed as "Master." He vowed to act as her protector and teacher. The most important qualities for a married woman were her faithfulness to her husband and her expertise at cooking, according to Prabhupada.

Sex with Krishna in the spiritual world was the highest and purest form of spiritual enjoyment. All devotees were "female in relation to Krishna," meaning that they were always subservient and submissive to Him. A devotee was to be enjoyed by Krishna; never did he himself ever become the "enjoyer." On the other hand, the sex act in this material world was abominable and disgusting. Householder couples could walk, talk, and take lunch together, but the spiritual master prohibited touching or sex for the first six months after marriage. If he gave permission to conceive a child, then they could have sex once a month until conception. Otherwise, they remained celibate.

The sect published a booklet called the Householders' Manual, which detailed the issues of Krishna-conscious sex, pregnancy, and infant care. We brahmacharis were prohibited from reading or discussing this booklet. Nevertheless, I gathered that Krishna-conscious couples used a kind of reverse rhythm method intended to minimize sexual contact while maximizing the possibility of conception.

Unlike their pleasure-seeking counterparts in the outside world, devotee couples had intercourse only on the one day in the woman's menstrual cycle that Hindu scriptural science said was the most opportune for conception. Prabhupada banned artificial contraception of any kind, as well as sex between conception and the sixth month following birth. He prohibited touching between spouses except during the one hour a month set aside for sex. Before intercourse, the couple purified themselves by each chanting fifty rounds of the Hare Krishna mantra. This takes about five hours. Prabhupada discouraged kissing because the mouth was the filthiest part of the body — filthier even than the anus. Thus, the ideal Krishna-conscious couple had sex only once for each child conceived.

According to the shastras, if at the time of conception the mother were sexually stronger than the father, then the child would be a girl; otherwise, it would be a boy. In either case, the child's soul originated in the man's body; the woman simply provided a place for its body to grow. Furthermore, the baby would grow up to become a devotee only if its parents had been in a Krishna-conscious frame of mind at the time of conception, and if they had followed all the rules and regulations. The spiritual master often said that the children born to devotees were demigods who had fallen temporarily into earthly existence before completing their trip back to Godhead. They were the future leaders of the Krishna Consciousness Movement and of the rest of the world. If, however, their parents were merely trying to enjoy themselves sexually, then the child would be a demon.

A fetus stayed in the womb for ten months — not nine, as is taught in the West. Meanwhile, worms ate the fetus and the spicy foods in the mother's diet burned it. The child's spiritual education began in the seventh month of pregnancy, when it was first able to hear the lectures on Krishna consciousness that its mother attended. Its first three words were Hare, Krishna, and Rama.

A child belonged to the guru and God, not to its biological parents. It was to be seen and not heard. Discipline, therefore, was strict. Devotees charged with child-rearing duties often used sticks to punish an uncooperative or complaining child. I even heard that Prabhupada had once said that children were no better than urine.

For years, householders from all over the country had flocked to the LA temple, where they had built successful Krishna-conscious businesses, such as the Spiritual Sky Incense Company and the BBT.

Householder culture and brahmachari culture often clashed. The brahmacharis considered the householders' daily business activities to be laudable but less demanding than the grind of book distribution. Brahmacharis saw some householders as weak, unregulated, sexually obsessed, and materially attached quasi-devotees who failed to rise regularly for mangala arotik, or who went back to bed afterwards if they did.

A stretch of sidewalk across Watseka Avenue from the temple had become a kind of outdoor transcendental singles bar. Every morning after the program, some of the householder men and "fringies" (part-time devotees who sometimes embarrassed the Movement with their unauthorized behavior) chatted with the women devotees as they walked by, despite Prabhupada's prohibition of such activities. The lecturers, most of whom were brahmacharis or sannyasis, often aimed their preaching at the householders.

The householders countered that they followed the rules and regulations as faithfully as anyone else. They worked hard every day to support both the Movement and their own expanding families as they and their wives raised the next generation of devotees. They resented insults about slacking off from what they considered freeloading brahmacharis.

No one could lead a spiritual life outside the Movement, as the material world was not a person's real home. On the contrary, his real home was in the next world with Krishna. He should not, therefore, aspire to have a home, a family, or a nation of his own, nor should he aspire to be materially free, healthy, prosperous, or happy while here. Only in the spiritual sky could he be satisfied. A person could prepare for entry into the spiritual world only by becoming the humble servant of the spiritual master and by preaching Krishna consciousness.

In the end, a devotee did not choose to join the Movement. Rather, it was Krishna who chose the devotee, as a reward for his pious or saintly activities in a previous life, or simply out of His causeless mercy. In these fallen times, the Age of Kali-yuga, the latter was likelier, as few people were pious. Either way, a devotee who gained the mercy of the spiritual master was getting in on the ground floor of a movement that would soon take over the world.

Although the doctrine asserted that everyone was spiritual in essence and a potential devotee, we most often recruited the young and able. The world was to end soon and it was impossible to save everyone. Prabhupada offered the analogy of a battlefield physician who wastes no time with the mortally wounded. Rather, he attends to those who have the best chance of surviving and returning to battle.

The devotees often tried to recruit the wealthy and powerful, or their sons and daughters, because of the good that their Lakshmi or influence could do for the Movement. For example, in the early 1970s devotees recruited a member of the Ford family of Ford Motor Company. (He is no relation to the author.) I heard that devotees were in touch with Bob Dylan, who was then involved in a highly publicized search for religion and spirituality.

Recruiters befriended potential devotees, pointed out problematic areas of their present lives, and attracted them to one aspect or another of our philosophy. Recruiters told prospective devotees that they would find in the Movement whatever they were looking for. Prabhupada compared ISKCON to a "desire tree," a kind of wishing well that always granted one's desire. In short, the Movement was all things to all people. Whatever a recruit had done before the Movement was a waste of time. Only when he engaged himself in chanting Hare Krishna and serving the spiritual master did his life have meaning.

The cooks prepared special sweetmeats just for the guests. (For obvious reasons, the sweetmeats needed to be kept under lock and key.) Devotees often said, "If you feed them enough sweet balls, eventually they'll join."

Not all of those who came to Krishna consciousness were sincere about spiritual life. Bahudaka classified those who joined as devotees, rebels, and "crazies." The devotees were sincere, submissive, and hardworking. The air of extreme nonconformity that surrounded the Movement attracted numerous rebels, however. The crazies were attracted to the mystical or mythological aspects of the doctrine or the promise of a natural high. Most thrill-seekers and drug burnouts had trouble with the strict discipline of Krishna consciousness. Not surprisingly, the temple presidents only wanted the devotees.

Another recruiting tool was the doll exhibition on the ground floor of the temple complex. Artisan devotees, whom Ramesvara had brought from New York along with the BBT workers, designed and built a series of multimedia dioramas depicting the philosophy of Krishna consciousness. One scene showed the transmigration of the soul through the bodies of an infant, a boy, a young man, a middle-aged man, and an old man. The exhibition was open to outside guests during business hours. There were special viewings of the doll studio for friends of the Movement and local celebrities such as George Harrison and the guitar virtuoso John Fahey.

The Sunday feast was another effective recruiting and public relations tool. Devotees offered opulent feasts every Sunday at all the larger temples and even some of the smaller ones. Though the philosophy stated that foods were for the sensual enjoyment of Krishna, not the devotees, the feast was one of the few hours of sensuous enjoyment a devotee was permitted all week. On Monday mornings, however, many a novice devotee discovered how devastating the rich and heavy feast prasadam could be.

A typical feast program began at 4 p.m. with a lecture on Krishna consciousness. The lecturer usually stressed the problems in the world, such as the high divorce rate, abortion rate, or the threat of nuclear war. Then he stated that Krishna consciousness could solve these problems, and besides, it was enjoyable. A young devotee named Bhaktin Francine, who sang beautifully, sometimes led the kirtan. A male devotee who had formerly been an aspiring guitarist and folk singer sometimes performed original songs about Krishna consciousness for the guests. Ordinarily, women did not lead the chanting in the temple; nor did the leaders ordinarily allow non-Indian instruments.

Following the kirtan, the devotees served a feast typically consisting of batter-fried vegetables, halavah, poppers, and sweet rice. The last was a thick, creamy confection made with whole milk, rice, and sugar. A devotee sat with each guest or group of guests and talked to them about Krishna consciousness as they took prasadam. While the guests and devotees took prasadam, the top sankirtan devotees collected donations from the guests in return for magazines and paperback books. In addition, every Sunday one could see Tripurari in the book room engaging in his favorite activity — selling hardcover books to karmis.

After the feast, the devotees distributed the leftover prasadam in the downtown skid row. The city authorities became concerned after an incident in which the devotees served spoiled food to the bums. They also objected to our dumping of leftover prasadam into the ocean. What we saw as giving prasadam a proper burial at sea, the karmis saw as polluting the waters.

When I joined the Movement, its recruitment and training processes were somewhat haphazard. Most new members entered the mainstream of temple life and sank or swam, with many sinking. In the mid-1970s, however, an LA devotee named Danavir organized a program for bhaktas that upgraded and formalized the recruitment and training processes. A former volleyball star at UCLA, Danavir acted as a combination drill sergeant and den mother to his recruits. The bhaktas, who usually numbered between a half-dozen and a dozen, took rest on bunk beds in their own ashram on the first floor of the temple building. They sat together in their own section of the prasadam room, where Danavir kept a sharp eye on their transcendental etiquette. Prabhupada's devotees compared neophytes to babies.

Danavir classified those who came to Krishna consciousness as hippies, students, and Christians, each group requiring a different approach. He knew when to offer encouragement and forgiveness and when to criticize and correct. He and others who preached frequently had learned which Gita verse, which Prabhupada or Krishna story, to recite in any given situation.

To help in this effort, Danavir wrote the Bhakta Manual, a booklet that detailed the processes involved in the training of initiates. For example, what clothes and food to provide, which books to present, and how to handle visits and phone calls from family and friends. He anticipated and addressed every pitfall and problem. A section explained how to collect a recruit's belongings from his former home. This could be tricky, given that former friends were often leery of a recruit's decision to join the Hare Krishna Movement. Danavir's solution was to read loudly to whoever was present a certain passage from the Nectar of Devotion. This passage explained that everything belonged to Krishna and private property was theft from God.

During the training program, Danavir identified certain recruits as potential leaders. Leadership material or not, the bhaktas tended to form strong relationships with each other. After they completed the program and took initiation, however, the top leaders often separated them. Any attachment, even to a god-brother, was Maya.

Before Danavir, the bhakta was simply thrown into the mainstream of temple life. He would sink or swim in what could at first seem like an intimidating or alien environment. This was especially so at the larger and more impersonal temples like Los Angeles. Jadurani led a parallel but separate program for brahmacharinis at the LA temple, and centers throughout the Movement soon adopted Danavir's program.

Although most brahmacharis at the LA temple were in their late teens to early thirties, several were over the age of forty. Ushika was a member of the temple police force. I heard that he had once been involved in the occult. Some even said that he had been a warlock. Vamana was a gentle soul who had been an alcoholic and a bum in downtown Los Angeles before renouncing intoxication and surrendering to the spiritual master. Another whose name I forget was a hardworking devotee who had lost his wife and children in a car accident just weeks before joining the Movement.

Another brahmachari who was over forty had taught yoga for many years in New York City before joining the Movement. Soon after his recruitment, the leaders sent him to Los Angeles, presumably to put some distance between him and his former friends and associates, and to give him a fresh start in his new group. For the first few weeks, he engaged in the required devotional activities, but he also did an hour or two of yoga by himself on the roof. The leaders gave him an increasing number of duties and repeatedly advised him that his yoga exercises were nothing more than Maya. After about a month in Los Angeles, he stopped doing his yoga exercises.

In addition, one brahmacharini was in her forties and another was perhaps sixty. The former was a professional accountant who kept Ramesvara's books, and the latter was a dignified woman who sat on a chair in the temple room rather than on the floor with the younger devotees.

Much to the consternation of both the leaders and the god-brothers, devotees of all ages and at all levels of responsibility left the Movement with surprising frequency. Prabhupada compared returning to the misery of the material world to eating one's own vomit. Nevertheless, even some of his closest personal servants blooped. The explanation was that the closer a devotee became to God, the trickier Maya became in her efforts to keep him away. Likewise, the more successful the Movement became, the harder Maya tried to thwart the devotees' collective efforts.

Such a fallen or blooped devotee was even more depraved than one who had never been a devotee. One could not trust a devotee who had spent even one or two days away from the Movement. He had surely broken his vows, and was likely to bloop again when spiritual life again became hard. Only the spiritual master himself could fully reinstate him. In most cases, a blooped devotee returned to the Movement with the greatest humility. He knew that the devotees could see the anxiety and lack of effulgence on his face. The leaders usually assigned him duties of lesser responsibility.

I heard that a leader in another city had once tackled a devotee as he tried to leave the temple. The reasoning was that the devotee's body belonged not to himself but to Krishna, and that by leaving he was in effect stealing from Krishna.

I sometimes wondered where blooped devotees went and what they did. I knew that many burned-out, blooped, or fringe devotees from all over the country ended up in or near the seaside temples in California and Hawaii. We used to joke that there were more fringies in Laguna Beach than there were karmis.

Generally, we felt safe in our suburban, middle-class surroundings in Culver City. On one occasion, however, a karmi neighbor fired a shotgun round over the heads of some devotees who were picking flowers in his front yard. He apparently did not know that offering a flower to Krishna liberated its soul, which then went back to Godhead. We were to expect attacks against devotees to become increasingly frequent as the world became increasingly demonic and atheistic.

To protect Krishna's devotees against the ever-increasing number of threats by demons, the sect had trained several devotees in the martial arts and the use of firearms. This security squad was headquartered in a second-story apartment overlooking the temple grounds and several other sect-owned buildings on Watseka Avenue. Under ordinary circumstances, the night watchmen carried nothing more dangerous than a heavy metal flashlight. Several times a year, however, rumors circulated that the security team had scared away or beaten demonic intruders.

Another reason for the security team was the increasing number of attempted deprogrammings. Trouble sometimes occurred when irate karmi parents arrived at the temple and tried to take away a teenager who had become a devotee. One LA devotee even maintained that deprogrammers had kidnapped him not once but twice and that he had escaped both times. I heard that the sect and the deprogrammers were waging war on each other in the press. The BTG carried a picture of two devotees who had been deprogrammed but who had married after returning to the sect. In the early days, many devotees who were married in the Movement neglected to obtain karmi marriage certificates. The situation changed, however, after it became evident that if the devotees were legally married, the Movement could more easily thwart any attempted deprogramming.

I heard that the leaders sent devotees who had survived an attempted deprogramming on traveling sankirtan or even overseas, where they would be hard to find. At the other extreme, some parents disowned their devotee offspring and wrote them out of the family will. We all knew that few parents bragged at their country clubs that a son or daughter had just joined the Hare Krishna Movement.

Prabhupada acknowledged in a lecture that some in the press had accused him of brainwashing his devotees. He said, "Yes, it is true, we are washing their brains." By this, he meant that Krishna consciousness was purifying our materially contaminated minds. The ludicrousness of the accusation of brainwashing made us laugh. We knew that it was found in karmi life in general and most especially in deprogramming.

Despite the problems posed by demons and atheists, our philosophy stated that a life of eternal bliss and knowledge awaited those who chanted, danced, and took prasadam. Nevertheless, the last nearly caused the temporary fall of many a devotee. Many of us coveted fancy prasadam, such as fruits and sweetmeats, which we sometimes kept illegally in our lockers.

I was battling a tendency to take too much prasadam, even though before joining the Movement I had rarely overeaten. Trying hard to regulate my eating habits, I forced myself to be tough and take exactly the same portions every day. This strategy usually worked for a couple of weeks. Then one day — usually a feast day — I would deviate from my routine and lose control of my eating. Some days I took three or four times my usual amount of prasadam. I once took lunch prasadam continuously for an hour. At such times, no amount of foodstuffs could satisfy me.

After overeating, I could think of little other than food for the next few days. This was disastrous for a devotee who was trying to think only of Krishna. Although I could not rest soundly at night because of a bloated feeling, I often fell asleep during the day. Trying to break the habit of overeating, I tried skipping meals. After a couple of miserable weeks of such bingeing and fasting, I often came down with a heavy cold, which would force me to subsist for several days mainly on spice tea.

Any devotee can tell tales of gross overeating, especially at the feasts and festivals. Being in good company was, however, of little consolation. We sometimes speculated that part of the reason for our overeating was that the rules prohibited most other forms of sense gratification, including TV, movies, sports, and sex, and even idle conversation. In addition, it was a matter of honor for a devotee to take prasadam heartily and enthusiastically, especially on feast days. We often forgot that taking in moderation was the key to successful devotional service, and that taking more than one needed was Maya. Another reason for our overeating may have been that the spiritual master expected a devotee to honor prasadam offered by other devotees, especially his superiors. Some of us forgot that accepting as little as a single morsel was spiritually sufficient in such a situation, and that the real enjoyment in life — the real "nectar" — was service to Krishna.

I dragged myself from one activity to another, and laboriously shuffled my feet back and forth during most kirtans. Sometimes, I was barely able to dance at all. It seemed that most of the others were dancing much more enthusiastically and ecstatically than I was. By the fall of 1976, I was burned out.

◊ ◊ ◊

Wherever the spiritual master of the universe went and whatever he did, he was making history. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the devotees audiotaped all Prabhupada's lectures, interviews, and morning walk conversations, to preserve his wisdom for all time. About once a week in his absence, the leaders in Los Angeles played one of his tapes in place of the usual live lecture by a senior devotee.

In his books and on his tapes, Prabhupada articulated the scriptural truths concerning history, science, and the fate of the world. For example, karmi textbooks inaccurately recorded the events of World War II. The truth was that in 1941 the British, disguised as the Japanese, had bombed Pearl Harbor in a successful attempt to lure the United States into the war against Germany. Furthermore, although Adolf Hitler had developed the atomic bomb, he refused to use it. Therefore, he was "humane." The US, however, stole the secrets of the bomb from Germany and dropped it on Japan. After the war, British propaganda experts invented the Holocaust in an attempt to demonize Hitler.

Prabhupada called the devotees "Aryans," a word that appeared in the Bhagavad Gita itself, I heard. Hrdayananda Swami, the GBC member in charge of the South American region, told us that Prabhupada had instructed him that North American devotees should be in charge of South Americans. The former were more intelligent, though the latter could become good followers and ultimate good devotees. Notwithstanding Prabhupada's acceptance of black disciples and even a black sannyasi, he said that long ago Krishna sent all the thieves in the world to Africa. We took this to mean that, except for black devotees, all blacks were thieves. On another tape, Prabhupada asserted flatly, "The democratic process does not work."

The world was rapidly degenerating, Prabhupada said. The laws of God and Nature dictated that all material things must decay, and materialistic civilization, with its many brothels, liquor stores, and restaurants that served meat, was no exception.

A few months after Prabhupada's departure, some tapes of his recent lectures in India arrived by mail. On one occasion, Tulsi-dasa ran into the sankirtan room and announced, "We just got a hot tape in!" On it, Prabhupada announced that in 1980 a Third World War would break out after the Soviet Union and the US became involved in a regional war between India and Pakistan. An immutable law of nature held that any weapon built would one day be used. In particular, all the nuclear bombs in the world would be used.

We devotees could, however, avert a catastrophe by performing well on sankirtan and by making the world Krishna conscious. If we failed, however, then it would be our duty to carry out Krishna's plan for the post-apocalyptic world. This involved forcibly recruiting all those who had not yet voluntarily joined the Movement. As conditions deteriorated further, only meat and liquor would be available to eat and drink, and atheists and demons would attack the devotees.

Prabhupada emphasized that over the short term a devotee had no need to worry, because some of us had trained in the use of weapons. In the glorious future, God-conscious authorities would dictate all aspects of life, just as in the days of the great God-conscious leaders and philosopher-kings of ancient India. They would kill those who failed to follow the four regulative principles — or perhaps Krishna Himself would return to annihilate the unbelievers. Furthermore, these events were not in the future at all. They had already occurred. Krishna was simply waiting to see who joined His Movement and who did not. Time was running out for the materialistic world as we knew it, and Prabhupada's revelations added special urgency to our preaching and money-collecting efforts.

Although everyone outside Krishna consciousness was in Maya, special enemies included most scientists and all other gurus and leaders of "new religions." Prabhupada insisted that a person did not become perfect simply by announcing himself as such. For example, He disliked the Guru Maharaji of the Divine Light Mission, who maintained that he was God. Prabhupada declared, "Anyone who claims to be God should be put to death."

The willingness to die for Krishna was the essence of Krishna consciousness. At the end of a taped lecture, Prabhupada declared, "And even if we die, still it shall be glorious." In unison, the devotees cried, "Jaya!"

Prabhupada's books heavily influenced our thinking about the world. In his recently completed Srimad-Bhagavatam series, he had described the Hindu science of cosmology. The material universe was the mental creation of Lord Brahma. The earth was flat. The moon was farther away from the earth than the sun. During a solar eclipse, it was a planet named Kahoutek, not the moon, that blocked our terrestrial view of the sun. The sun was the only source of light in the visible universe. The stars were planets. Entire civilizations consisting of living beings, rivers, and cities existed on all celestial bodies, including the sun and stars. The inhabitants of the sun planet, for example, had bodies of fire in the same way that the inhabitants of earth had bodies consisting of the earthly elements. The inhabitants of one planet could indeed travel to other planets, but only by first changing their material bodies through the processes of birth, death, and reincarnation. Travel among celestial bodies by way of material spacecraft was, therefore, impossible.

CHAPTER 6: LAGUNA BEACH

In September 1976, Ramesvara sent me and several other devotees to Laguna Beach, a resort town about forty miles south of Los Angeles. The outside world knew Laguna Beach for its sunshine, magnificent beaches, and high rents. The devotees knew it as the place that Prabhupada once said would be the first Krishna-conscious community in the US. Nevertheless, many stalwart devotees in Laguna Beach had succumbed to Maya in the form of beautiful women, plentiful drugs, and a laid-back, hedonistic lifestyle.

The sect was trying to clean up its image there after a scandal involving the temple leadership. For several months the local newspapers had carried sensational stories linking devotees with drug dealing and other crimes. One story alleged that they had hired Mafia members to torture a rival drug dealer. A headline in an Orange County newspaper had read something like "Krishna Murder." The devotees complained that when a Christian committed murder, the headlines did not read, "Episcopalian Murder."

I heard a rumor that the Laguna Beach devotees, including Rshabhadeva, the temple president, and other officers, had cultivated marijuana plants in the sunroom of the temple. They allegedly sold drugs out of a nearby restaurant run by devotees, sometimes using its microwave oven to soften bricks of hashish.

Ramesvara decided that the Laguna Beach temple had become a public relations liability. Agni, Pavamana, two or three book distributors, and I formed the core of the new Laguna Beach temple. All of us were former LA devotees who had had served together the previous fall on the RV in Salt Lake City. Agni became temple president, and Sarva, the former temple commander in Los Angeles, became vice president.

The day we moved into the temple, the former Laguna Beach devotees moved out and joined the contingent of fringies in town. Most held outside jobs, practiced Krishna consciousness to some degree at home, and came to the temple once a week for the Sunday feast.

The temple building was a two-story house on the eastern side of the South Coast Highway, just a block from the beach. Due to limited space, the temple room, formerly a spacious upstairs living room, doubled as the brahmachari ashram at night. The temple president's room was a small bedroom with a sleeping loft; the men's locker room was an adjoining dressing room; and the Tulsi-devi room and brahmacharini ashram (sleeping quarters for female devotees) were located in the downstairs sunroom, which overlooked the ocean.

A few days after we arrived, Ramesvara stressed at a press conference that Prabhupada had replaced the old leadership with new leadership. This was first and last time I ever saw potted plants, tables, chairs, or hors d'oeuvres in a temple.

As we had done on the RV, Pavamana and I shared the duties involving the Deity offerings and arotiks. We also collaborated on the large offerings of foodstuffs at breakfast and noon. Krishna had mercifully provided us with a restaurant-sized gas stove and oven, a pair of deep stainless steel sinks, and much counter and refrigerator space. Nevertheless, cockroaches crawled across the counters and behind the pictures on the wall. Most of the produce we used was fresh, including tropical fruits like mangoes, papayas, figs, and avocados. Sarva was also able to obtain free cases of overripe fruit from wholesalers or aging lettuce from the dumpster at the local supermarket.

I had little difficulty preparing the prasadam I needed, because I was already spending most of my days in the kitchen. I took whatever the devotees were taking, but without the butterfat.

To keep my materially contaminated mind from wandering while serving in the kitchen, I often repeated in Sanskrit and English the two dozen or so Bhagavad Gita verses I had memorized. This was, however, nothing special: I knew some devotees who had memorized entire chapters, and a few great souls had even memorized all 700 verses of the Gita. In a more pious age, a devotee would fully understand the shastras on first hearing them.

Every morning a pujari, usually Pavamana or I, woke the nine-inch-tall brass Gaur-Nitai Deities by ringing a bell, turning on the lights, and touching Their lotus feet. Later in the morning, Agni bathed Them, put scented oils and tilak on Their bodies, dressed Them, and put flower garlands around Their necks. At night, he dressed Them in pajamas and put Them to bed. In winter, he covered Them with a cotton sheet and blanket; in summer, a sheet sufficed.

One morning, Agni ordered me to bathe and dress the Deities. I tried but failed to have Them dressed by the deadline. This inconvenienced the pujaris who were ready to offer the 7 o'clock arotik. Agni never again asked me to dress Them.

A Movement-wide rule stated that a man and a woman should never be alone together in the same room. Anyone in such a situation was likely to fall into abominable sex life. If a man were alone in a room and a woman wanted to enter, then she would need to bring another devotee with her, and vice versa. Agni solved this problem in Laguna Beach by banning women altogether from the kitchen and the altar.

Agni asked me to read aloud each morning from the Krishna Book as the devotees took prasadam. I tried to project my voice across the temple room with as much zeal as possible. Over the next several months, I read the entire trilogy about one and a half times. Every time Krishna killed a demon, which was often, the devotees cheered loudly. When Krishna killed a person, He was saving him. I liked to read aloud because it helped me to learn the stories, and reading silently often put me to sleep.

At the feast, the large crowd of dancing devotees and guests sometimes shook the wood-frame building. Therefore, on Sundays Agni put the Deities' clothes on even more securely than usual. Occasionally, during the height of the dancing and chanting, a Deity dropped a garland that had hung around His neck.

The primary mission of the Laguna Beach temple was sankirtan, and the youngest and least experienced sankirtan devotees were among the most enthusiastic about their Krishna consciousness. Those of us who were more experienced knew the prayers and the rules better, but few of us older folks could match the younger devotees for raw energy.

The Laguna Beach devotees were using a new sankirtan technique called "blitzing." This meant going out with two or three devotees in a car and hitting up various locations for an hour or two at a time. The older method was to remain all or most of the day at a single location. For example, in one evening the devotees might blitz a bar, a restaurant, a bowling alley, and a ball game or concert.

In this way, we were able to talk to the karmis in surroundings that were comfortable to them, and where they might be receptive to a pitch for charity. The advantage of blitzing was that if a store or parking lot became slow, or if the police kicked us out, then we could move to a better location without wasting much time. We could, therefore, take more chances. We were also able to stay in better touch with each other. All of this led to higher scores.

The Laguna Beach devotees, most of whom were in their twenties, solicited donations in the retirement communities by greeting to the women with, "Hi, girls," and telling them how good-looking they were. Some devotees even bragged about going into churches on Sunday morning and taking up their own collections.

The sankirtan devotees usually took a morning walk together on the beach. Early morning was the only time of the day a devotee was permitted to take a walk. Sometimes we saw the surfers in wet suits preparing to ride the waves. On one occasion, the devotees spotted a seagull with a broken wing. Another devotee named Drumila wanted to help the bird, but the others objected, saying that the best way to help it was to chant Hare Krishna and leave it to die. Doctrine asserted that if a lower species heard the Holy Names, then it would take a human body in its next life. With a human birth came the chance to go back to Godhead.

Ramesvara continued to encourage the various temples to compete for top book distribution honors. Every month a new issue of the Sankirtan Newsletter arrived from the BBT headquarters in Los Angeles. Posted in many temples, it featured short items about how many books the devotees were selling at various locations. It listed the top ten zones, the top ten temples, and the top ten devotees of the month, along with their scores in Lakshmi points (one Lakshmi point was equal to one dollar). The combined worldwide figures for gross sankirtan income reached into the millions of Lakshmi points per month.

When Ramesvara was visiting us in Laguna Beach, he often fired up the troops by telling stories of heroism on sankirtan. In one lecture, he talked about an Australian devotee who had pneumonia and whose doctor ordered him to stay in bed. This devotee, however, insisted on going out on sankirtan and collected $400 a day, Ramesvara said. He also praised a South American devotee who often posted big numbers. He ran out on sankirtan after the morning schedule without even taking prasadam or chanting all his rounds. When the distributing became slow, he finished his chanting, according to Ramesvara.

At breakfast, I sometimes read aloud the most recent issue of the Sankirtan Newsletter. Sometimes I would choke up while reading of the dedication, selflessness, and fearlessness of the devotees who were spreading the message of Krishna consciousness in a suspicious and even hostile world.

Ramesvara sent some devotees on a mission to smuggle our books into the Soviet Union. The authorities there quickly and unceremoniously expelled them. Other devotees, however, had preached successfully in the communist block nations of Yugoslavia and Rumania, which were somewhat more Westernized and less restrictive than the USSR.

Meanwhile, Prabhupada had given his disciples permission to run for political office, so long as they accepted the principles of Krishna consciousness and rejected the materialistic notion of nonviolence. In the fall election season, ISKCON candidates ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, and for the US Congress from Southern California.

We heard that in West Virginia the sect was on the verge of obtaining enough land to incorporate and hire its own sheriff and magistrate. The Movement aimed to gain political, economic, cultural, and religious control of the world, and even the universe. To this end, Krishna-conscious police and courts would soon enforce the four regulative principles. All the present politicians and jurists in the world were atheists and criminals, but if a devotee entered politics, then it would become clean and pure. When the world became Krishna conscious, even the judges of the Supreme Court would wear tilak, according to Prabhupada.

When the Movement succeeded, it would rule the world under God's Law for 10,000 years. If we devotees were sincere enough and faithful enough, the Movement could take over the world within eighteen days. In another sense, however, the Movement had already taken over the world. A devotee's duty was to help carry the Mission toward its inevitable successful conclusion, when he would receive his eternal reward.

Several new devotees joined the Laguna Beach temple, and the rules stated that each recruit must immediately surrender his possessions. This meant that the temple usually received a car and a home stereo system whenever someone joined. Sarva installed a large donated stereo in the temple room, and sold the others at the local flea markets. Pavamana repaired the donated cars and Sarva sold them through the newspaper want ads. The latter once complained that he was running a used car lot in the alley behind the temple.

On a couple of occasions, I saw a handgun in an open locker in the ashram. Sarva often bought or sold guns at swap meets, and regularly took target practice at a nearby pistol range.

On one occasion, I was in the ashram when a fringie said something complimentary about Maya. She is to a devotee what the Devil is to a literal reader of the Bible. A regular devotee told the fringie to watch his tongue or leave the premises.

Agni asked us each to sign a power of attorney. It was intended to allow the courts to return us to the sect should our parents kidnap or deprogram us. I signed the papers without reading them. I heard that lawyers working for the sect had drawn up papers making it possible for the sect to cremate a devotee's body in a special ceremony. Agni bought us Mother's Day cards and postage stamps, and later that year, nonreligious Christmas cards to send to our material families.

The popular Lou Grant TV show taped part of an episode at the LA temple. It was about a young devotee whose parents had tried to have him deprogrammed. Overall, the show was favorable to the Movement. Before the taping, a senior devotee shaved the head of the young karmi actor who played the lead part. The evening the show aired, Agni rented a motel room so that the devotees could watch it. I was unable to attend the viewing. This was the only time I ever heard the authorities grant permission to view a TV show.

A fringie who had volunteered to cook the Sunday feast told me that a former peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter had been elected President. It seemed that after he took office, some devotees had given him a copy of the Bhagavad-gita As It Is. The Movement received some free publicity when Carter said on TV that he liked the part that said that the soul was eternal. Several months before, I had heard in a similar manner of the Watergate scandal, President Nixon's resignation, and his replacement by Gerald Ford.

A fringie showed me his new digital quartz watch as we were talking in the ashram. I was amazed to learn that it was accurate to within a few seconds per day, which was far more accurate than any wristwatch I had seen before.

On one occasion, my mother visited me in Laguna Beach. After a quick tour of the temple, we took a walk on the beach, despite the prohibition against being alone with a woman. I wanted to convince her that Krishna consciousness was correct, but in truth, I had recently been having an increasingly difficult time convincing myself. She said, "It isn't good to quit searching." I also wanted to persuade her that I was happy in the Movement, but I was feeling burned out. Referring to the sect, she said, "It doesn't look so wonderful to me."

Later we talked in her rented car. With sorrow and near-resignation in her voice, she asked me to come with her to my sister's house in Northern California. I refused. Her tear-filled eyes stared ahead. Going anywhere without the permission of the sect was out of the question.

My father also visited me in Laguna Beach. As we walked on the beach, I tried unsuccessfully to convince him that astronauts had never landed on the moon and that the so-called moon shots were filmed in the Arizona desert. If a devotee's parents were not Krishna conscious, then Prabhupada expected him to become the spiritual master of his parents. A devotee was responsible for his family ten generations backward and forward. If he gained the mercy of the spiritual master, then Krishna would save his entire family.

On one occasion, Bhavananda Swami, the GBC member for India, visited us at Laguna Beach. In a stirring lecture, he said that the Movement would soon take over Bengal, where it had recently completed the construction of a new temple. Then we would take over all of India, spiritually the most important nation in the world. Once India became Krishna conscious, the whole world would soon follow suit.

ISKCON was influential in India. A devotee could walk into any government minister's office, even without an appointment, according to the swami. Nevertheless, some people remained unreceptive to Krishna consciousness, even in India. One must sometimes force them to accept it in much the same way a parent forces a child to take medicine, he said. The rumor was that some devotees who were dealing in the Indian underground currency market had bought off some government officials. The swami explained the graft by saying, "It's a way of life over there." He added that hepatitis was as common among devotee children in India as colds were among the children in North America.

On another occasion, Brahmananda Swami, the GBC member for Africa, visited Laguna Beach. He told the story of a blooped devotee who had admitted taking intoxication while living outside the temple. The swami, who was cooking at the time, splashed hot ghee on the former devotee. When he protested, the swami said, "That's just a token of what you will experience in your next life if you keep taking intoxication."

We often chanted in downtown Laguna Beach or at the beach. We sometimes carried the Deities with us, until one day some young men dropped their pants in front of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Some of the younger devotees vowed to beat up anyone who tried something like that again.

Although it was never cold in Laguna Beach, it was sometimes cool and damp in the winter. Our building, a large beach house, had no central heating. According to the rules, the pujari for the mangala arotik — usually me — had to go onto the altar without a shirt. I could wear a cotton shawl over my bare shoulders, but the others were able to keep warm by wearing sweatshirts or by dancing and moving about as much as they liked. Later in the morning, our only electric heater warmed the Deities as Agni dressed Them. I was sick much of the time with a cold or the flu.

In early 1977, Prabhupada again visited Berkeley. Many of us from Southern California went there to see him. After a few days, his servants dropped him off at the airport for an evening flight to Los Angeles. A leader then asked another devotee and me to drive Prabhupada's Mercedes-Benz to Los Angeles. We needed to have it there for his walk the following morning. Taking turns with the driving, we arrived at about 3 a.m. After turning in the car keys, we showered and went straight to the morning program.

At 7:00, Prabhupada and several hundred of his disciples noisily greeted the Deities. As he stood before Them in prayer, his lips moved. He was conversing with Krishna in His form as the Deity. Then he sat on a raised platform at the left of the altar and delivered his lecture. The GBC members, sannyasis, and temple presidents sat directly in front of his throne-like seat. Behind them sat the other male devotees. The women and children gathered at the rear of the auditorium and in the balcony.

I heard that the previous night a large group of cheering and swooning devotees had greeted Prabhupada at the airport. Ramesvara informed us that Prabhupada was upset that the devotees had treated him more like a rock star than a holy man.

When in Los Angeles, Prabhupada lived in a private suite that contained the only non-bunk bed and private bathroom I had seen in any temple. His personal servant took rest in the other bedroom of the suite. When Prabhupada was out of town, the quarters always remained unoccupied. When he was in town, the devotees cleaned his suite every morning while he took his walk.

One morning, I had the privilege of helping. We had about an hour to complete the service. While sweeping the floor, I needed to move his danda out of the way. A brahmacharini who was serving there said to me, "You shouldn't touch his stick! Oh, well, it's not so bad that you touched it — you're a man. If I had touched it, it would have been really bad." Women were contaminated.

After a fortnight in Los Angeles, Prabhupada departed for India. About forty of us went to the airport to see him off. He sat quietly in the passenger lounge with his top servants as the rest of us gathered around him in a semicircle. Playing his karatals softly, he led us in a restrained kirtan. Again, the deep spirituality and perfection of his music astonished me. For a long moment, he looked directly at me with a benign and loving, yet inquisitive, expression on his face and in his eyes. I thought of how fortunate I was that he had singled me out from many millions of souls. That was the last time I ever saw him.

After Prabhupada's departure, I rejoined the Laguna Beach sankirtan team in an attempt to revive my flagging Krishna consciousness. Pavamana graciously agreed to perform my kitchen duties on the days I was out on sankirtan.

Most days we went "store to store." This meant that a pair of devotees would hit up everyone in a supermarket, for example, and then leave to go to the next store. During a blitz, everything happened quickly. The karmis — and the managers — often did not know what hit them. Sometimes, we went into the market and took a new paper bag — preferably one with the store's logo — from a checkout counter. We put our magazines and candy into the bag and went back to the parking lot to distribute. We tried to look as normal as we could.

Our team sometimes passed out lollipops in exchange for donations. Unfortunately, Drumila, who was otherwise an expert sankirtan devotee, had a habit of giving into temptation on such occasions and eating as much as a whole bag of pops. This always made him sick to his stomach, of course. His tendency to fall into Maya in this way continued for months, even though Agni chastised him after each such incident.

Drumila and I were collecting Lakshmi one evening in an amusement park called Knott's Berry Farm when we noticed that some security guards were following us. We rushed to our car to make a quick escape, but their car pulled up in front of us, blocking our exit. Drumila started our car and put it in gear. I feared that he was preparing to try to ram the security car. He finally took the car out of gear and waited for the officers to approach us. They warned us never to come back again. We left quietly and without further incident.

Despite my efforts, my scores were usually poor, mainly because of my lack of energy and enthusiasm. On one occasion, Badahari, the sankirtan leader, approached me and asked, "Why are you so morose?" A devotee's thoughts and state of mind were everyone's concern. Agni pulled me off the sankirtan team and put me back in the kitchen.

On one occasion, a devotee named Mukunda Mala had an epileptic seizure in the temple. The rescue team entered the temple wearing heavy boots. I considered and rejected the idea of asking them to leave their shoes outside the temple. The seizure had frightened Agni. At his insistence, Mukunda Mala continued to take the medication he had stopped taking when he joined the sect.

Demons from around the world were becoming increasingly violent toward the devotees. We heard that, during an attack on one of our temples in Africa, some demons had stabbed a former LA devotee named Mahavirya several times. He had been trying to prevent them from smashing the Deities. I remembered him as a good-natured and magnanimous devotee with whom I had often distributed magazines in downtown LA. The good news was that by Krishna's mercy he had survived, though barely, and was recovering in a hospital.

In July 1977, some demons attacked the temple in West Bengal. I wanted to fly there immediately and fight them. After an unrelated incident, also in India later that year, Bopadeva's older brother, who was also a devotee, found himself facing legal charges in the murder of a nondevotee.

These kinds of physical and legal attacks on devotees did not surprise us. Rather, we expected them to increase in number and intensity as the Movement became increasingly successful.

In August, the sect sponsored a festival at an LA city park. In the weeks preceding the festival, we sankirtan devotees handed out flyers advertising appearances by Alice Coltrane and other well-known artists. The flyers mentioned neither ISKCON nor the Hare Krishna Movement.

In the early fall, we learned that Prabhupada's health was worsening. Again, it is hard to overstate his importance to the Movement. He had founded ISKCON, and he alone interpreted its doctrine. As its top administrator, he was responsible for day-to-day operations as well as long-range planning.

In recent years, however, he had delegated some administrative responsibilities to the eleven GBC members scattered throughout the world. Nevertheless, he once complained that the tendency of the GBC to bring him all manner of concerns both large and small made him feel like "Problem-pada."

Because of his failing health, Prabhupada was unable to fulfill his desire to make one last tour of Europe and the Americas. A swami even offered to exchange his young, healthy body for Prabhupada's old, sick body. Prabhupada declined the offer.

Prabhupada was sick because we devotees had failed to serve him well and because Krishna was calling him back to the spiritual world. We believed that to disobey the spiritual master was to kill him, literally and figuratively. It was an offense against the Scriptures to think that he was sick because he was old or because the material nature had allotted him only a finite amount of time on earth. On the contrary, the spiritual master was eternal; he could never die in the mundane sense of the word. He simply transformed himself and continued to serve in another sphere.

Despite the prohibition against mental speculation, many devotees pondered the question of who would lead the Movement after Prabhupada's death. Most devotees with whom I spoke believed that he would select one of his disciples to lead the entire Movement. The sect heavily emphasized precedent, and Prabhupada had written in the Bhagavad-gita As It Is that a single authorized spiritual master had followed each previous master in the chain of disciplic succession from Krishna to himself.

Many devotees, especially those in West Virginia, expected that Kirtanananda Swami would be the new spiritual master. A fiery and passionate speaker, he was the first disciple to shave his head and become a brahmachari, and the first to take sannyasa. Many believed him to be among the handful of fully Krishna-conscious devotees in the Movement.

I heard that out of his mercy Kirtanananda had allowed a nine-year-old devotee, whom he named Bhaktipada-dasa, to become his personal servant and to live with him in his private quarters. Some other devotees wanted to see their own local leader elevated to the position of spiritual master.

As Prabhupada's health deteriorated further, devotees in Los Angeles and other temples performed kirtan for him twenty-four hours a day. Devotees signed up for as many two-hour shifts as they could. Beyond this, we all prayed fervently to Krishna for Prabhupada's health.

Meanwhile, many big devotees including Ramesvara flew to India to be at Prabhupada's bedside. In November, 1977 we received the news of his passage to the spiritual sky. Soon thereafter, we learned that, before his death, he had elevated to the position of guru in his respective region each of the eleven GBC members, including Ramesvara, Jayatirtha, Tamal Krishna, Bhavananda, Kirtanananda, Hrdayananda, and Satsvarupa. In a move that would later prove controversial, Prabhupada allowed them to initiate new members and take them on as disciples.

Our spiritual master in the Southern California region was now Ramesvara Swami. When he visited Laguna Beach, the devotees chanted "Jaya Ramesvara, Jaya Ramesvara," as we once chanted "Jaya Prabhupada." We offered him the same ceremonies we had offered Prabhupada. On one occasion, it was my duty to pour lukewarm water from a pitcher over his feet. A basin caught the bath water, which the devotees then sprinkled over their heads.

Continuing Prabhupada's tradition, Ramesvara passed out cookies to the children. This was a great benediction for them. On one occasion, the cookies arrived late. He quipped with accent and syntax similar to those of the late spiritual master, "You have given so much money to the BBT, there is no money for cookies?" Most of the Lakshmi we collected on sankirtan in Laguna Beach went to headquarters in Los Angeles.

Ramesvara often lectured about the progress the Movement was making in gaining acceptance in karmi circles. He once announced that the sect had hired an advertising agency and a public relations firm. He mentioned visiting Governor Jerry Brown in his office. He also declared that he was cultivating the friendship of several movie stars.

Like Prabhupada before him, Ramesvara considered weekend breaks and other non-working trips to other temples to be evidence of Maya. Nevertheless, various then-middle-echelon editors at the BBT in Los Angeles, such as Jayadvaita and Devamrita, seeking a change of scenery and an opportunity to escape the smog, spent their weekends with us at the quiet, seaside Laguna Beach temple.

The price for room and board, I guess, was that you had to share your wisdom and learning with us. On one occasion, Jayadvaita was delivering the morning lecture when he fell asleep and started to list precariously to one side. We silently looked at each other and at our watches, which indicated that the class would be over in about five minutes. This placed us in quite a dilemma. Should we wake him and save him from Maya or simply let him doze until the class was over? After a minute or two, he awoke spontaneously and continued his lecture as if nothing had happened. We often said that a real devotee could sleep anywhere, anytime, and Jayadvaita did nothing that day to disprove the observation.

A devotee who served as a proofreader and occasional writer for the BTG went every weekend to a nearby convenience store to read the "Milestones" section of Time magazine. This section reported important events in the material world such as births, marriages, and deaths. Reading karmi magazines and newspapers was against the rules for all devotees except those who wrote for the BTG or lectured to outside groups. These devotees needed to be able to quote figures about the divorce rate or the other ills of American society, so that they could write or speak about the decline of material civilization.

Because the Laguna Beach temple was small, Agni permitted all second initiates to lecture from time to time. While I was familiar with most of the main points in the doctrine and had even memorized a few key verses, I had spent little time over the years studying the books. My first few lectures went well, though my delivery style was somewhat tentative.

On one occasion, however, I made a serious error while trying to quote from memory from the books. Agni interrupted the class and made the correction. I became flustered and ended the class as quickly as I could. That was the last time Agni asked me to lecture.

Even after working shoulder-to-shoulder with other devotees for months or even years, I knew little or nothing of their lives before the sect. They in turn knew little of mine. The past did not matter, because we were all devotees of the Lord now. We talked about Krishna, devotional service, and little else. Talking about what one did before the sect was at best a waste of precious time and at worst a cause for a fall from Krishna consciousness.

Pavamana and I continued to spend our days on the altar and in the kitchen. We frequently prepared a few extra servings for the occasional fringie guest who might drop by. They knew us for Pavamana's fresh-squeezed carrot juice and my oversized baked potatoes with butter glaze. These preparations were not a part of standard Krishna-conscious cooking, but they became popular nevertheless among both devotees and guests.

We had so many duties to perform in the kitchen and on the altar that we sometimes flouted the rules and went for months at a time without going to class. To compensate for this, we usually opened the door between the kitchen and temple room so we could hear the classes as we worked. When class was not in session, we played again and again the same tapes of lectures by Prabhupada or Ramesvara.

In the months following Prabhupada's death, my eating troubles continued. After taking too much prasadam, I sometimes purged my body with a quart of prune juice bought at the local supermarket with whatever change I could scrape together. Otherwise, I rarely left the temple grounds.

Occasionally, we put the Deities in the van and drove to Los Angeles to join the devotees there at their Sunday feast. On one such visit, I noticed that Ramesvara was auctioning to the householders various items including used Deity clothing and special Deity prasadam. He was always looking for creative ways to extract more Lakshmi from them. The householders seemed happy with their transcendental souvenirs and goodies, and Ramesvara was pleased to return their Lakshmi to Krishna.

I was surprised to hear that the Vancouver temple now had a new president. It seemed that Bahudaka had blooped several months before, but was now back in the Movement as a part-time public-relations specialist. How could the devotee I had once admired the most, who had been the definition of Krishna consciousness to me, and who sang so beautifully and with so much heart, throw it all away and return to the hated and feared material world?

On one occasion, a brahmacharini "lost control of her senses," that is, had an emotional breakdown. Formerly a stalwart devotee, she had recently become useless to the sect because of her alternating spells of agitation and listlessness. I even heard a rumor that she was "ghostly haunted." To us, a ghost was a disembodied demon, most often a suicide victim in desperate search of a body to inhabit.

Ghosts sometimes haunted the temple to harass the faithful and to take control of a living body. Agni ordered her to attend as many kirtans as possible, because ghosts, like other demons, fled at the sound of the Holy Names. I heard later that she had left the Movement. The leaders instructed us never to mention her name again.

She was not the only one who was having problems. I often dreamed that an evil force was trying to take possession of my mind and body. I chanted Hare Krishna at the top of my lungs in a vain attempt to drive away the demons and to wake myself from this persistent, repetitive nightmare.

One solution to the problem of demonic nightmares was a long, loud blast from the conch, whose spiritual vibrations drove away demonic spirits. The fog-horn-like blast of a conch sometimes woke us in the middle of the night.

Our neighbors may or may not have heard the late-night blasts from the conch, but they did complain often to us and to the police about our kirtans. As a result, Sarva kept the windows of the temple room shut during most kirtans.

One evening, however, the police arrived. We kept chanting; devotees are well trained to always keep chanting, no matter what. At the conclusion of the kirtan, they tried to arrest Agni as he stood before the Deities. Angered, I nearly took a swing at one of the cops. I cared little that he was carrying a nightstick and a gun. I was expecting Gaur-Nitai to give the demonic cop a heart attack on the spot, and was surprised and disappointed when They did not.

After Sarva and his wife had their first baby, she took it into the temple room to allow it and the Deities to see each other. A few months later, I closed the door on Sarva's wife and the baby as they tried to enter the kitchen. All babies and children were contaminated. As a second initiate with responsibility for Krishna's kitchen, I was determined never to compromise its cleanliness, even if it meant an inconvenience for the householder women.

Although many of us had been peace-loving flower children before joining the Movement, we understood as devotees that violence in Krishna's service was pure and purifying. For example, a scruffy, crazy karmi had a habit of sneaking around in the alley behind the temple. Fearing that he might steal something, I begged Agni to let me pound the karmi out, but Agni repeatedly refused my requests. On one occasion, this particular crazy even came into the temple room. Sarva asked him to leave, but if he had not been there, I would have pounded the karmi.

On another occasion, he appeared at the kitchen window and jokingly asked, "Have I been here before?" Enraged by his flippant attitude, which I took for contempt for the Deities, I grabbed a walking stick we kept near the door, rushed outside, threw down the stick, wrestled the crazy to the ground, and tried to get my hands around his neck. I warned him that if he did not stop harassing us, I would rearrange the features on his face. He walked away in a daze, muttering to himself.

A few days later, I looked out the window as I was chanting in the temple room and saw that the same crazy had engaged Agni in a shoving match in the garden below. I ran outside, knocked him to the ground, grabbed his long hair, and bashed his head several times against the flagstones. Later, some god-brothers tied him up and put him in the laundry room.

On another occasion, we were chanting downtown with Ramesvara when some local teenagers started to heckle us. Annoyed, I pushed one of them off the boardwalk. The drop to the sandy beach below was only about three or four feet, but my actions nearly started a rumble. Ramesvara ordered a quick retreat to the temple.

In his lecture that evening, he emphasized that for now words were the preferred method of persuasion. He added, "Ultimately, they may have to appreciate us as good fighters."

I had been involved in enough fights and near-fights to earn a minor reputation in the temple as a devotee who took little backtalk from karmis. On one occasion, I was late for the evening program because I had to go to the city hall to pay a parking ticket. After hearing that I had been delayed downtown, Mukunda Mala asked me, "What happened, did you beat someone up again?"

I cared little about what happened to me in this miserable life. In a real way, I had already received my reward, because in this life, I was a devotee of the Lord, and in my next life, I would go back to Godhead.

Working in the kitchen isolated me from most of the other devotees and led to ideological problems. I simply had too much time to think. In a purport in the Bhagavad-gita As It Is, Prabhupada wrote that a devotee should not doubt. Nevertheless, I had a recurring doubt concerning the question of freedom.

I had learned before joining the Movement that one should aspire to be free, but surrendering one's freedom was the essence of being a devotee. I also doubted the assertion that one should shun the "mode of goodness" (behaviors such as good works that are benign and blameless, but which still fall short of full Krishna consciousness). Viewed in this way, goodness was no better than the other material modes, passion and ignorance. Blame it again on my karmi upbringing, but I had trouble finding much wrong with goodness. I also wondered about Prabhupada's assertion that he knew the location of a mountain of gold in the Himalayas. Why, then, did we need to beg on the streets for paper bills or coins of copper and nickel?

Seeing in me the symptoms of burnout at the ripe old age of thirty, Agni assigned me to simple, repetitive duties. At times, I thought I was losing my mind. Much to my own shock and amazement, I sometimes even stole small change from the other devotees' lockers. I was tired of having to go to the temple treasurer for thirty-five cents every time I needed to do a load of laundry. After all, for several years I had worked twelve hours a day for the Movement. I knew that stealing was against the rules, but I also knew that none of my god-brothers would dare complain, because no brahmachari was permitted to have his own Lakshmi.

During this spaced-out period, it seemed that I was spending most of my time in the laundry room, rather than performing my other assigned duties. Violating a fundamental rule of Krishna consciousness, I once ate an unoffered apple. This meant that I was in a very real way no longer a devotee. Being in Maya for so much of the time brought me much anguish and shame. No matter how hard I tried, it seemed that I always failed in my attempts to get back on the track and to serve the spiritual master in a regulated, focused, and blissful way.

Agni may have given up on me, but he had yet to give up on the younger recruits. After a recruit failed on one occasion to follow all of his instructions, Agni yelled, "Who are you going to listen to — me, or your nonsense mind?"

In the midst of my doubts and pain, I developed a special relationship with Lord Nityananda, the Nitai of the Gaur-Nitai Deities. He gave me the strength to persist. No matter where I was in the temple room, it seemed that He was always looking or smiling at me in the most sympathetic way. For many months, He was my only friend.

Agni spent his afternoons sitting around and talking with his devotee friends from Los Angeles — or even with the women. Seeing this saddened me, because the spiritual master had forbidden us to speak idly among ourselves or with members of the opposite sex. In addition, he wanted devotees at all levels to always engage in activities that furthered their Krishna consciousness. At the same time, no devotee could criticize a superior, because he was Krishna's representative. It was clear privilege came along with rank in the Hare Krishna Movement.

Prabhupada had taught that being conscious of Krishna at the time of death was more important than living in a healthy material body. Knowing this, I quit struggling to recover my elusive bodily health, and became comfortable with the idea of dying in the temple. The spiritual master expected an ill devotee not go to a hospital; rather, he should die in the temple, under the protection of the Deities.

In November 1978, while we were chanting in downtown Laguna Beach, I glanced at a newspaper vending machine. The headline said something about "cult suicides" in Guyana. At first I tried to block this demonic propaganda from of my mind. Later I become furious with the materialist press for slandering us by calling every religious group, whether authorized or not, a "cult." A few weeks later, the sect published a booklet entitled, Don't Lump Us In. The gist was that ISKCON was not a cult like the Peoples Temple.

It soon became clear that the newly appointed spiritual masters were in competition with each other for new members and for financial control of the Movement. For example, I heard that on one occasion two spiritual masters had visited the same temple at the same time. The disciples of one spiritual master presented him with a garland of ten-dollar bills. Not to be outdone, the disciples of the other spiritual master gave him a garland of twenty-dollar bills.

In December, the Laguna Beach temple traveled to Los Angeles to participate in the yearly sankirtan marathon. Ramesvara exhorted and rallied the devotees to collect Lakshmi for fifteen hours a day at the local shopping centers and malls. In the fortnight before Christmas, most devotees stayed out until midnight every night. I spent most of my days reading, cooking, driving the devotees to and from their locations, or sleeping.

CHAPTER 7: EXIT FROM THE CULT

The day after Christmas, 1978, a car struck me as I was crossing Venice Boulevard a few blocks from the LA temple. When I regained consciousness, I was lying on my back in the crosswalk. By then the light had changed and the drivers were squeezing into the right lane to avoid running over my motionless body in the left lane. I looked up into the faces of several curious karmi pedestrians, and later into the faces of several devotees who had run over from the temple. None of the motorists stopped to help me.

An ambulance arrived. A devotee named Bhakta Bob, who was a former medical student, accompanied me to the hospital. Besides the head trauma that had resulted in my temporary loss of consciousness, I had sustained abrasions on my back, elbows, and forehead. X-rays showed a hairline fracture of my nose but no other broken bones. Overall, I was lucky. It could have been much worse.

In the emergency room, a police officer asked me a few perfunctory questions about the accident. I answered them to the best of my ability, but I had no recollection of the impact itself. Bhakta Bob left soon thereafter, but another devotee arrived a few hours later and offered me a ride to the temple compound.

When we arrived, he carried my battered body up a flight of stairs to a dormitory space in an apartment building across the street from the temple building. The leader in charge had assigned me to a bunk bed — my first assigned space since joining the Movement more than five years before.

The first week after the accident, I hobbled on a painful left knee and nursed the cuts on my body. My many bandages made showering a challenge. The cuts healed in due course, but I soon suffered a recurrence of jaundice and was again unable to digest fats. Perhaps my already weakened liver had failed to handle the stress of the accident. I tried to arrange with the cooks to receive some butter-less prasadam. Some days I received it, and other days I did not.

In the days and weeks following the accident, I alternated between anger at the driver and anger at myself. At times, I was certain that the so-called accident had been no accident at all. It had occurred in the light of day; the weather was good; I was wearing the highly visible color orange from shoulder to ankle; I was crossing in the crosswalk with the green light; the driver had made no apparent effort to brake or swerve to avoid me; and most damningly of all, he had left the scene, abandoning me like a wounded animal. I thought that either he was intoxicated or he was trying to kill me. At other times, I thought that the accident must be a punishment from God for my deviating from His instructions.

On several occasions, devotees visited me at my bunk and read to me from Scripture. I appreciated the reading, but I needed food, too. Hungry, I tried to call Ramesvara, but failed to get past his secretaries. In frustration, I wrote him a strong letter in which I asked for food and complained about what I thought was poor treatment. I reminded him that I had been a loyal and faithful devotee for many years. Nevertheless, I feared that such a letter would condemn me to hell. After all, the spiritual master knew what was best for me and did not need me to tell him. Shortly thereafter, I wrote a letter to my mother in which I said that I had been in an accident, but that everything was okay. She offered to come to California to arrange for proper medical attention. Caring little about what happened to my body, I quickly refused. A part of me had long since resigned itself to dying in the temple and going back to Godhead, as a devotee was trained to do.

While I was recuperating in the ashram, a mild earthquake shook the building for several seconds. All the devotees immediately reached for their bead bags and began chanting Hare Krishna, as was their habit in moments of fear and desperation.

After a week in the ashram, some devotees drove me to Laguna Beach, where we believed it would be easier for me to obtain the prasadam I needed. I also needed to see a doctor about my painful knee, but the state insurance program that was in place at the time did not cover office visits. The temple treasurer, whose name I have forgotten but whom I will call Bhakta Bill, assured me that the temple's bank account could easily cover the cost of a visit to the doctor. At first, however, Agni refused to give his permission to spend the Lakshmi, perhaps under pressure from his superiors in Los Angeles. I eventually persuaded him to let me see an orthopedist in South Laguna Beach, who put my left leg in a cast from lower calf to upper thigh. At that point, it had been ten days since the accident. The doctor told me that, had I waited any longer, he might not have been able to help the knee. My injury was the kind a football player might suffer. The impact had bent my knee joint in a way it was not intended to bend, tearing the ligaments in the inside of the knee.

Some devotees who had investigated the circumstances of the accident said that the driver who had hit me was the son of a rich man. They added that I should do well with my claim against his insurance company. A devotee who was in law school spoke to me about the possibility of a lawsuit and advised me to run up as many medical bills as possible. To this end, he gave me the name of a physical therapist who specialized in the treatment of accident victims. On two or three occasions, I went to see the man whom the devotees called "Dr Whiplash." The lawyer devotee wanted to aim for a settlement of $10,000, which I would presumably sign over to the sect. When Ramesvara heard about the settlement possibilities, he remarked, "Now the whole Laguna sankirtan team can go to Mayapur next year."

I went to the police station to fill out an accident report. It felt strange to sit in a chair and to write, but a devotee learned to do almost anything in the service of the Lord. A few days later, Agni, Bhakta Bill, and I went to the plush, wood-paneled Beverly Hills office of the lawyer who was to represent me in the accident case. On our way back to the parking lot after the meeting, the other devotees crossed the street in the middle of the block, casually dodging the traffic, as urbanites are in the habit of doing. Still shy about cars because of my accident and slow afoot because of my cast, I hesitated at the curbside. Agni became impatient with me and ordered me to cross the street in mid-block. I refused his command — an unthinkable act just a few weeks before — and crossed carefully at the traffic signal a half-block away as the others waited.

It was well understood, however, that devotees often fared poorly in the karmi health care system. Several years before, a devotee's mother, alarmed about his involvement in the Movement, had had him transferred to a mental hospital from a medical hospital, where he was recovering from a serious digestive disorder. He would remain in the mental hospital for three months. Understanding the importance of Krishna consciousness in his life, the doctors had allowed him to chant, to read Prabhupada's books, and to offer his food to a picture of Krishna while in the hospital. Upon his release, the devotee immediately called his god-brothers, who came and took him back to the temple.

Nevertheless, I called my mother a few days later and asked her to send me to a doctor for my internal problems. She offered to fly me to Connecticut for rest and medical care. At first, Agni agreed to the plan, suggesting that I first recuperate at home before returning to the temple when I was better. I was acutely aware that, being unable to perform much service, I had become a burden to the sect. Feeling too weak to endure a cross-country flight, however, I feared that being separated from the sect for more than a day or two would almost certainly cause me to fall into Maya.

The following week my mother and brother George flew in from New York. It was George who found me in the ashram, as the building was off-limits to women. The three of us took a ride in their rental car. With my cast stretched across the length of the back seat, they again talked with me about the possibility of going east. Hoping that seeing a doctor would improve my poor health, I reluctantly agreed to go.

George and my mother took me to see a liver specialist, who suggested admitting me into a hospital for tests. I also saw a neurologist, who, to our relief, found that the concussion I had suffered had left my motor skills unaffected. Driving in a temple car, Agni and Bhakta Bill accompanied us as we made the rounds of the doctors' offices. Nevertheless, when we pulled up in front of one of the offices, it was George — not the devotees — who helped me out of the car.

That night, Agni, with the law student at his side, visited me at my bunk. He said, "You can't leave. We have a potentially lucrative settlement here, and if you leave we won't be able to collect the Lakshmi." He added that, in any event, a devotee should always remain in the company of other devotees, even if he were sick. One did not need to go out of state for competent, up-to-date medical services. Agni mentioned that the actor John Wayne was then receiving treatment for cancer in Southern California.

That long day was the first in nearly six years that I had failed to chant the required sixteen rounds. I had been around long enough to know that those who failed to chant every day did not remain long in the Movement.

Late at night, I tried in desperation to chant a few rounds and make some sense of the tumultuous events that were going on around me. I felt as if I were being pulled in two directions, and that I might split in half. Soon, however, I stopped chanting, feeling that doing so was futile. I tried to sleep, but my mind raced uncontrollably. How would I tell my mother and my brother that I was not going with them? That night was one of the longest of my life. I felt guilty for being useless to the sect, but I felt even worse for having thought of leaving the temple and turning my back on God.

At wake-up time, I found a devotee and explained to him that I needed help in convincing my family that it was a bad idea to travel today. The devotee found Bhakta Bob. When George arrived at about 7 a.m., I told him that I had had a tough night, was feeling poorly, and did not feel that my body could withstand the rigors of a long plane trip. I had decided to find medical help there in California. George returned to New York and my mother stayed another day. The next day I visited with her in her car, though I felt guilty about doing so.

My father phoned me and complained bitterly about how poorly the sect had treated me. He said accusingly, "They told you not to come home." Remembering that Prabhupada had said that it is better to die in the temple than to go to the hospital and live, I paid little attention to my father. Nevertheless, I told Agni about the call. He said it sounded to him as if my parents might be preparing to deprogram me. He warned me that if they did kidnap me, it would be my fault. I had, as the devotees would have said, "taken shelter" of my parents rather than Krishna.

Excerpts from Prabhupada's letters to various devotees had recently appeared in the BTG, and I was in the habit of reading them before taking rest at night. I found one such letter particularly moving. In it, he wrote that the relationship between the spiritual master and the disciple is real and eternal whereas the relationship between father and son on the material platform is temporary and ephemeral. I remembered that in one of the books, Krishna killed a father who had harassed his devotee son.

Meanwhile, my mother offered to pay for my visits to a chiropractor in West Los Angeles. Agni arranged to have Bhakta Bill drive me there three times a week. In typical karmi fashion, the chiropractor criticized my diet as nutritionally insufficient, and gave me some dietary supplement pills.

On my way home from the chiropractor's office one afternoon, I saw a billboard advertisement for a movie called The China Syndrome. I remember thinking, "That's a funny name for a movie."

An insurance adjuster who was trying to learn my whereabouts repeatedly called the Laguna Beach temple. Whenever he did so, I was in the kitchen or on the altar, unable to come to the phone. After a week of trying unsuccessfully to reach me, he happened on one occasion to call when I was in the ashram. I took the call. He said, "You are a very hard man to get ahold of." I took this as a compliment. He wanted to confirm that I lived at that address. I refused to give any other information. Agni told us that if anyone called the temple, we should always say, "I don't know anything — I'm only the janitor." This kind of statement fit in well with our conception of ourselves as humble servants of the Lord.

The cast on my leg made it hard to sleep comfortably. Before showering, I needed to put a plastic garbage bag around my leg. As a result, I never felt fully clean, a hardship for a strict Brahmin. To my surprise, the doctor had prescribed walking as a way to strengthen the knee. Following his advice, I often went for short walks on the beach or along the Pacific Coast Highway. When in the mood for less stressful activity, I sometimes climbed onto the roof of the temple for reading or chanting.

In mid-February, I arranged to have Bhakta Bill drive me to the clinic to have the cast removed. Beginning at the upper thigh, the doctor cut along the length of the cast with a small, hand-held circular saw. He promised that if I held my leg still, the saw would not cut my skin. By that time, the muscles had atrophied to the point where the knee joint was the widest part of my leg. When the saw arrived at the knee area, it made a painful, though superficial, two-inch-long cut. (I still have the scar.) I winced and complained. The doctor replied, "You flinched."

I was unable at first to bend my left leg at the knee. This was not the result of the saw cut; rather, it was a normal result of having worn a cast for several weeks. For the first day or two, my knee joint was stiff, almost as if the cast were still there. As I mentioned, my thigh and calf muscles had lost their definition. Every night I did some leg exercises prescribed by the orthopedist. Within a week or ten days, the muscle tone in my leg had returned, I was able to bend the knee, and my mobility had been restored.

On a Friday in late February, I drove with Bhakta Bill in the temple's light pickup truck from Laguna Beach to Los Angeles. We were dressed as usual in our karmi clothes. He had errands to run at the LA temple, and I drove the truck by myself, for the first time, to the chiropractor's office.

After my appointment, I walked out the back door of the office building and into the parking lot. Looking up I saw that the late-afternoon sun was casting long shadows across the nearly empty lot. As I reached down to take the keys out of my pants pocket, I thought of how enjoyable it was going to be to take the snack of dried fruit prasadam I had left on the front seat. As I was about to place the key into the door lock, two beefy arms grabbed me around the chest from behind, pinning my arms against my body. Another pair of arms swept my feet from under me. They placed me, kicking and shouting, into the empty back seat of a nearby car. One man took the seat to my left as another squeezed into the seat to my right. My mother was in the front passenger seat. A third man, the driver, pulled the car out of the driveway, onto Wilshire Boulevard, and then onto a freeway.

My mother pleaded with me to stay calm, but her words failed to quiet or reassure me. For a moment, I wanted to kill her for trying to take me away from God. Not knowing what to say, I demanded, "Why all the violence?" After a hard silence, my mother asked, "Does anyone ever leave that place?" Remembering the many god-brothers who had tragically succumbed to Maya, I said, "Sure, they leave all the time." A demon answered, "No, people can't leave — there's too much fear." I had no idea what he was talking about. In any case, this was no time for ideological discussions — I needed to escape, and if that were impossible, then I needed to somehow remain Krishna-conscious in spite of whatever it was they intended to do to me. Frightened, I fell silent.

After thinking for a moment, I realized I was unhurt — thus far, anyway. I tried to negotiate: "Okay, I'll go back to Connecticut with you, Mom." I figured that I could go there awhile, and then sneak back to one of the temples on the East Coast. They did not fall for my ploy. Someone said, "No, not until we've had the chance to talk to you about the Krishna cult."

We drove in near silence in their late-model but otherwise nondescript rental car. I stared ahead at the freeway, occasionally catching in the rearview mirror the eye of the driver, who looked as frightened as I felt. I chanted silently and prayed for all I was worth to Krishna and the spiritual master.

Prabhupada expected a kidnapped devotee to chant constantly. Chanting drove away demons and Krishna never ignored the prayers of His devotees. The books asserted that a devotee should first try to defeat the blasphemers with his arguments. Failing this, however, he should cut out their tongues or flee. In another place, the shastras asserted that it was better to commit suicide by entering into a fire, than to associate with nondevotees. A third reference asserted that it was better to enter into a cage full of tigers, snakes, and alligators than to keep the company of nondevotees.

As we drove east, my abductors said something about getting out of LA County and into Riverside County to the east. The traffic thinned a bit as the Friday rush hour began to subside. Over my shoulder, a reddish sun was setting over the flat LA sprawl. I had not seen this part of the region in months. I thought for a moment about how an urban landscape could simultaneously offer both beauty and ugliness. Then I caught myself, realizing that I was not thinking of Krishna. Though all energy came from Krishna, the mundane energy visible outside the car window was Maya.

Before my kidnapping, I had had no warning that anything untoward was about to happen. Deprogrammings happened to others, I had thought. I had heard the stories — how they tortured you, how they tore up pictures of Prabhupada or the Deities in front of you, how they starved you and then fed you meat, how, if you were a brahmachari, they paraded naked women in front of you to make you break your vows. The only way the deprogrammers could make a devotee leave the sect was to tempt or bribe him with material gifts, or failing that, to coerce, browbeat, or hypnotize him. After all, leaving God was an irrational act. In desperation, I prayed to Krishna to come and save me, and I had every expectation that He would do just that.

Apparently lost, the driver pulled into a gas station to ask for directions. I gathered from the whispered conversations that a car following behind us was a part of the conspiracy. Trying to run away was out of the question, as I was flanked on both sides by large men.

On top of everything else, I was becoming claustrophobic. The five of us had been cooped up together in close quarters for more than an hour. We finally pulled off the freeway and onto a side street with several motels — Best Western, Motel 6, and others. A conspirator said, "Let's try that one over there." I imagined that he had had much experience picking out motels under such circumstances. We pulled into the motel parking lot, and the other car pulled up behind us. The man to my left got out of the car, leaving his door ajar, and went to the motel office.

A few seconds later, a man with dark hair and a droopy mustache sat down next to me and said, "Hi, Paul." I had never before laid eyes on this demon, and he had the nerve to call me by my first name. It seemed that Joe, as they called him, was the ringleader. I instantly hated his cocky attitude and his smirk, and denied him the dignity of a response.

After a long wait, the man who had gone to the motel office returned, and we drove to our rooms. It was already getting dark. After I got out of the car, the men fell into formation around me — one in front, one in back, one to my left, and one to my right. We walked slowly and quietly across the lot and up the staircase that led to the second floor.

They led me into a room that was furnished in typical motel fashion with a couple of double beds, a picture window covered by curtains, and a TV. I sat in the armchair. My fingers fidgeted automatically for my bead bag, which, I remembered, was in my book bag, which in turn was in the truck we had abandoned in the parking lot in West LA. Someone moved a bed in front of the exterior door, leaving an interior door to an adjacent room as the only exit from the room. Joe sat facing me at the foot of one of the beds. He said something about how Prabhupada had died of liver cancer — a vicious, demonic lie. All the devotees knew that he had made the decision to leave his body by himself and that he did not die of ordinary, mortal causes. In addition, Joe mispronounced Prabhupada's name as an ignorant karmi might.

Though I was long in the habit of confronting demons and atheists daily on sankirtan, these attacks on a man as loving, giving, and unselfish as the spiritual master still shocked and disturbed me. I decided to give the deprogrammers the silent treatment. In any case, the rules prohibited arguing with them, because to do so would be to grant a kind of equality to their point of view, which I was unprepared to do. In addition, I was outnumbered. After a few long moments of silence, Joe said, "Okay, you don't want to talk. Well, I don't want to talk about that shit, either."

Someone suggested that I go to bed. A good idea, I thought. When I went to the bathroom, they insisted that I leave the door ajar. I looked out the window to see if it might offer an escape route. Jumping was a stupid idea, I concluded. We were on the second floor. I decided not to try anything too dramatic or too drastic right away. Seeing no escape, I decided that the best alternative would be to fast until death.

I hadn't lain on a karmi mattress for years, and the one on my bed felt like a pile of pillows three feet high. I did more chanting than sleeping that night. Meanwhile, my security guard watched the TV with the sound turned low. He must have been watching a Western movie, because all I could hear was the continuous shooting of guns without any dialogue. Welcome to the violent, destructive, and completely degenerated karmi culture that the Scriptures had warned us about, I thought.

I quietly chanted several rounds of Hare Krishna, awkwardly counting the repetitions on my fingers. I had never before chanted japa without beads. I eventually drifted into a fitful sleep. Awaking just before dawn, I chanted another tortured round or two before again falling into an uneasy sleep. When the others entered the room after daybreak, I hid under the covers, pretending to sleep. I overheard a young woman talking to someone about the tapes she had brought along. I thought, "Tapes? Tapes of what? What would a deprogrammer do with tapes?"

It seemed that everyone was standing around waiting for something to happen. I was happy to postpone — forever, if possible — whatever it was that they had in store for me. My mother entered the room and asked me what I wanted for breakfast. I said, "Fruit." So much for fasting until death. After all, I was hungry and had a long, hard day of forcible deprogramming ahead of me.

Everyone was addressing me as "Paul," which was disconcerting to me because after five years in the sect I had forgotten who he was. My mother returned with some apples and bananas and a cup of orange juice, and then left the room. I mentally offered the food to Krishna, and took some of it. I thought of tossing an apple through the picture window to attract attention and annoy the deprogrammers. I feared, however, that if I did so, they would beat me.

A deprogrammer smacked the bottoms of my feet through the bed covers with a rolled-up newspaper. This is it, I thought. Now the physical abuse begins. He accused me of chanting, which was true, but how did he know? The ease with which they were able to anticipate my thoughts and actions unnerved me. He took out a pair of scissors and cut off my neck beads and sika, my last outward reminders of the sect.

A young man who had not been present the night before sat in a chair and began to speak to me, or, rather, to a lump of flesh and bones lying in my bed. For the next several minutes, I tried to ignore him as I faded in and out of consciousness. After a few minutes, he stopped abruptly and asked, "Well — do you agree with me or not? Are you there?" I remained silent and continued to keep my eyes closed. Unfazed, he continued.

After several minutes of trying not to listen to the deprogrammer, I somehow sensed in the tone of his voice that he cared about me. This was most disconcerting, to say the least, as I had not permitted myself while in the sect to think that anyone outside of it was capable of caring or love. Prabhupada had said that love did not exist in the outside world. I thought, "If Krishna consciousness is the Absolute Truth, then I should be able to walk away from it and examine it, and be sure it will not go away. If I have the Truth, then no one will be able to take it away from me. These deprogrammers won't be able to follow me around forever. If I choose to, I can always rejoin the sect."

I sat up, stared ahead absently, and looked up into a roomful of unfamiliar but sympathetic faces. I rushed to the bathroom and looked into the mirror. I wanted to find out who or what I would see. The person I saw was no longer exactly a devotee of Krishna; nor was he the person who had joined the sect five years before. Staring at the funny-looking peach fuzz on top of my head, I felt what I can only describe as deep relief and deep confusion. It seemed that the Krishna doctrine had been a glass palace, and that a few simple, yet penetrating thoughts had managed to shatter its entire crystalline structure, leaving behind little more than a pile of useless shards. I realized that, for the sake of my survival, if nothing else, I needed to take a chance and listen to what these people had to say about my cult involvement.

It felt as if a long ordeal were now over. Yet I was devastated. After all, the cult had been my whole world. I was now out of the cult, but being out meant that no one would be there to always tell me what to do, what to think, and what to say. I was now free to speak and act on my own behalf. More than free, I was now obliged to take back control of my life. This seemed an awesome, almost unimaginable, responsibility and task. Thinking of my months and years on sankirtan, I thought, "Whatever the future may bring, at least I won't have to lie and steal anymore!"

For the rest of the day, the deprogrammers spoke to me. I learned that Joe was a former member of the Children of God cult (later called the Family of Love). Chuck, who had spoken to me earlier that morning, had been in a Bible-based cult. Virginia was a former member of the Unification Church (Moonies). They encouraged me to think objectively about my involvement in the sect and to look at the information they had on destructive cults. Each seemed well informed. They played me taped testimonials of other young people who had been in other cults. The great number of similarities between their stories and mine — especially the underlying methods of control — surprised me. The tense mood that had pervaded the room in the morning had by evening become much more relaxed.

The security people smoked too many cigarettes and watched too much TV, I thought. I remembered how much I had disliked these activities even before the sect. During a break in my talks with the deprogrammers, Doug, a security person, said that the words "Hare Krishna" were not special. He said, "You can get just as high while chanting 'Coca Cola.'" Still, I was unsure. After talking with him awhile, however, I realized that he was a human being, not a demon.

For the first time in years, I was able to talk about subjects other than Krishna. Questions flooded my mind: What will I do now? What will I wear? What would happen if I ate fish or eggs? If Krishna consciousness were not the Absolute Truth, then what was the Absolute Truth? When I asked Doug the last question, he paused for a minute. His lack of an immediate response surprised me. He spoke in a general way about what truth meant to him. I was again surprised that he was able to do so without referring to leaders, groups, or doctrines.

I was still wide awake at midnight when most of the others had gone to bed. Virginia brought her guitar into the room and serenaded me with a few folk songs. I was happy to take a break from the serious business of deprogramming. On Sunday morning, two of the men chatted about racquetball, a then-popular sport I had never heard of. Later that day, Joe suggested that I go to Doug's ranch in Arizona for a few weeks of rest, rehabilitation, and healthy food. This sounded good to me and I agreed. That night, we watched a TV program featuring silly puppets, which the others seemed to enjoy. On Monday morning we prepared to leave a deprogramming that was over almost when it began.

◊ ◊ ◊

I later learned more about the events that culminated in my rescue and deprogramming. In the fall of 1978, my mother's increasing awareness of and concern about my poor health led her to think seriously about helping me to leave the Krishna cult. She got in touch with other parents of cult members, including a woman who had already arranged for the successful deprogramming of her Moonie daughter. The woman encouraged my mother to have me deprogrammed, too. She learned that former cult members, as part of their therapy and rehabilitation, needed to talk with other former members. Some other parents, however, warned my mother that arranging a deprogramming in California, the headquarters of so many cults, would be a challenge. Still others argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to deprogram a person who had been involved for as long as I was.

Over the subsequent weeks and months, my mother discussed with my brother George her desire to rescue me. George, who was then in graduate school in New York, listened patiently and offered his encouragement. On their first trip to California, they tried unsuccessfully to talk me into coming east. Their idea was that, while recuperating there from my medical problems, I would be able to talk to some former cult members they had met. They considered and rejected the possibility of obtaining a legal conservatorship, wherein a judge places an incompetent or mentally ill adult into the care of his family. The last resort was the deprogrammers.

After much informal networking with the families of former cult members, my mother obtained the names of Joe Alexander, Jr, a deprogrammer from Pennsylvania, and Tim and Donna Lushch, a husband-and-wife team from Ohio who handled security and logistics for Joe. Joe had been an Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam before spending several years in the Children of God cult. Tim ran a trash-hauling business when he was not involved in anti-cult work.

During their discussions, my mother informed Donna that my health was failing. When she heard the desperation in my mother's voice, Donna put my case ahead of several others they were then working on. In mid-February, 1979, Tim, Donna, and Joe went to work full-time on my case, in spite of their reservations about my long-term prognosis. As a rule, the longer one has been in a cult, the more problematic the deprogramming, the longer the rehabilitation process, the more difficult the reentry into society, and the less overall chance of success. Furthermore, no one wanted to work at the ISKCON temple in Los Angeles, because of its large, well-trained, and well-armed security force. The positive side of this situation was that those who did come and talk with me, did so for the right reasons.

My mother booked a flight that was scheduled to leave on a Wednesday. The day before, she had walked into the local branch of her bank and withdrawn $4,000 in cash to cover the team's initial expenses. Late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, she received a final phone call from Tim, who asked her what she would be wearing the next day. As she waited for her bags at a carousel at the LA International Airport, two men she had never seen before walked up to her. One asked, "Mrs Patton?" That was how she first met Joe and Tim.

The deprogramming team initially wanted to try for a pickup the next day, Thursday. After surveying the situation at the Culver City and Laguna Beach temples, however, they decided to call for an additional security person. Doug flew in from Arizona, and Joe and Tim rescheduled the pickup for Friday.

On Thursday, my mother called me at the Laguna Beach temple from a local phone, pretending she was in Connecticut. During our conversation, I told her about my appointment with the chiropractor the next day, Friday. On Friday afternoon, the deprogramming team, unknown to Bhakta Bill and me, followed us from Laguna Beach to Los Angeles. Fearing that there were guns everywhere in the Culver City compound, they decided to do the pickup at the chiropractor's office. The plan was for Doug and Tim to perform the snatch with my mother and a driver in their car, and with Joe waiting in a backup car.

On Friday night, after the team had secured me in the motel, Virginia flew in from San Francisco and Chuck from Georgia. Among them, Joe, Virginia, and Chuck had performed several hundred deprogrammings. Nevertheless, they prepared themselves for a long, tough, verbal battle with a hardened cultist. They even had a backup plan to send in a new team after a week were I not yet deprogrammed by then.

CHAPTER 8: REHAB

After leaving the motel where my deprogramming had taken place, my mother and I, along with Virginia, Doug, and a pilot friend of theirs, flew in a private six-seat propeller craft to Tucson, Arizona. There I became the first guest at Rancho Libertad, a center for recovering cult members, and received the information, food, rest, recreation, and friendships I needed to begin picking up the pieces of my broken life. My counselors were Virginia and another former Moonie named Chris.

I have twice lost all or nearly all of my possessions. The first time was in 1973 when I moved into the temple. I gave most of my money, letters, mementos, musical instruments, and cooking utensils to the cult or to friends, and simply abandoned the rest. The only items I kept with me were my driver's license and my sleeping bag. I even gave up my precious long hair. The cult provided me with clothes and other necessities.

The second time I lost my possessions was during my rescue from the cult five years later. This time I lost everything. In the confusion I lost my japa-mala as well as my driver's license and other identification. At the motel, the deprogrammers wisely took away my clothes, sandals, neck beads, and sika. My mother bought me a new set of clothes including shoes and underwear.

At first, I had difficulty conversing with ordinary people, eating ordinary food, sleeping more than five or six hours a night, making decisions, big or small, and simply relaxing and having fun without feeling guilty about doing so.

After a couple of days at the ranch, my mother prepared to return home. Before leaving, she embraced me for the first time in years, but I felt little or no emotion.

On one occasion, Chris and I went to do some errands in the ranch's pickup truck. We stopped at a convenience store. Chris asked me, "Would you like anything?" I was overwhelmed. I could have whatever I wanted. I thought awhile and then asked for an ice cream sandwich.

Upon my arrival at the ranch, I weighed 120 pounds, about fifteen pounds under my usual weight. People told me I looked pale and thin. Everyone insisted that I take vitamins and put on a few pounds, which I did. Toward the end of the first week, I cautiously ate a boiled egg. My fear that it would make me sick, as we had been told in the cult, proved unfounded. A few days later, I ate chicken and tuna, and then nearly everything in sight, without adverse effects. Each new protein source give me a rush of energy. The protein-rich animal foods made me feel more grounded and less ethereal. I had by then broken two of the cult's four regulative principles — no meat eating and no mental speculation.

At first I disliked Buster, the dog who lived at the ranch. In the cult, dogs were the dirtiest and lowest of animals. Perhaps it was true that most Indian dogs lived in the street, carried diseases, and had bad tempers. Nevertheless, I asked myself if this attitude toward dogs were mine or if it were something the cult had taught me to believe. After a few days, Buster and I became friends. This method of isolating bits of programming — and there were thousands of them in my head — and examining them in the light of information coming from outside the cult, was useful in "deprogramming" myself.

George visited me at the ranch. We went to a San Francisco Giants spring-training baseball game, where we did more talking about non-baseball subjects than spectating.

The first time I went to a shopping mall, the parking lot posed a problem for me. It reminded me of the lots I had worked as a cult member. In addition, the shoppers inside the mall looked demonic to me. I tried not to panic, but it was good that Chris and Virginia were with me that day. It seemed that everyone nowadays shopped in indoor malls. The main reason for the proliferation of clothing stores in the malls seemed to be so that people could have many clothes to wear as they walked around the mall.

I perhaps best enjoyed the physical activities at the ranch, such as weight training, dipping in the pool, and hiking in the desert or mountains surrounding Tucson.

I saw a dentist and a doctor for my first checkups in nearly a decade. The former found two small cavities and the latter gave me a clean bill of health, despite my leanness.

I began to read books other than those published by ISKCON. At first, however, I was unable to do so for more than about fifteen minutes at a time, and I understood little of what I was reading. Containing none of the words or phrases I had grown accustomed to reading and hearing in the cult, these books seemed to be written in a foreign language. It seemed that my cognitive skills had atrophied in the cult in much the same way that my leg muscles had atrophied recently inside my cast. Flexing mental muscles that had lain idle for years proved to be hard work indeed. Thinking did become easier, however, after I began to make a habit of forcing myself to use of my mind, especially the part of it that involves discrimination and decision-making.

The newspaper carried comic strips about cats. I had always liked cats, but I had never before found them particularly funny. I found a political cartoon strip neither humorous nor politically perceptive. The title of the column "Miss Manners" made me laugh. For the first time in my life, however, I read the newspaper thoroughly every day. News, sports, business, weather, gossip, everything. I was as voracious and omnivorous in my reading as I was at the dinner table. I had much catching up to do.

Nevertheless, the mindlessness of television continued to appall me. I laughed and cried with commercials showing people being born, marrying, and dying, all within thirty seconds. These blatant, unsubtle attempts by advertisers to sell junk by distorting reality and manipulating the viewer's emotions struck an all-too-familiar and troubling chord in me. In addition, I began to wonder whether the great number of commercials were meant to fill the gaps between the program segments, or vice versa. Most worrisome, however, was the mesmerized, glazed-over look that appeared on the faces of the TV watchers around me. It bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the characteristic faraway stare I had seen so often in the Krishna devotees.

During the Vietnam War, the military had drafted men up to the age of thirty-six. Still just thirty-one, I feared being drafted into alternative military service. To my relief, however, I learned that President Carter had ended the forcible draft and had even offered a form of amnesty to expatriated draft resisters.

I realized at rehab that, if only for self-preservation, I needed to try to understand what had happened to me. I was most grateful for the help of others, but I knew that my recovery was now my responsibility, and my responsibility alone. It was quite a challenge to face the many unflattering truths I was learning about myself as I read about cults. I realized that the leaders had lied to me and taken advantage of me. What was worse, I knew that to some degree I had participated in my own destruction, even though at the time I did not know what I was doing.

My first co-rehabber was a woman from Long Island, New York, named Lona. She had been in the Children of God cult for seven years with her husband and their young children. Getting down to the real business of rehab, we read and discussed Chapter 22 of Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, in which the author Robert Jay Lifton describes the psychological symptoms of brainwashing. We found the many connections between our experiences in contemporary cults and those of the victims of Chinese Communist thought reform to be uncanny and eye-opening. For examples, the strict environmental controls, the demand for perfection, the manipulation of language, and the elevation of a doctrine above human dignity. [See Appendix.]

Besides the Lifton book, I read everything I could get my hands on concerning mind control and destructive cults. My readings confirmed what I was feeling, namely that without my knowledge or consent the cult had subjected me to a structured and destructive program of what one might call "mind control." It became clear to me that without unfettered access to uncensored information, there was no question of achieving mental or emotional health. I discovered many excellent books written by former cult members like me. I also found poorly written ones by third parties such as journalists, academics, and members of the helping professions.

To my eyes, most of the journalism on the subject failed to convey the feel of a cult and its particular and peculiar group dynamics. It failed to accurately describe the mental and emotional states of its members. It quickly became clear to me whether a piece was written by a person who had spent time in a cult. Similarly, most of the academic literature, with its distant, sterile, and disembodied language, failed to address the important personal and interpersonal issues raised by cult involvement. To their credit, most journalists were reasonably competent when it came to answering the gross questions of who, what, and where, but few of them had the courage to address the subtler and more troublesome questions of how and why.

I learned that in the 1970s and late 1960s the media had not hesitated to report the lurid and sensationalistic details of several tragedies involving destructive cults. In 1969, a loved and feared cult leader named Charles Manson had ordered his young followers to kill Hollywood actor Sharon Tate and six others. Convicted Manson Family member Susan Atkins later wrote, "You have to have a real love in your heart to do this for people" (Atkins, p. 99). Having also lived in a group that interchanged love with hate and good with evil, I had little difficulty understanding her statement. It was painfully clear, however, that the meaning of her statement had escaped the general public.

In February 1974, about three months after I joined the Krishna cult, the press reported that a political cult called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) had kidnapped Patricia Hearst. She was then a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley. The cult held her captive in a closet for fifty-seven days, during which time they repeatedly raped her and subjected her to near-constant indoctrination and threats of further violence (Hearst, Ch. 2-5). Again, I had little trouble understanding how, given the circumstances of her kidnapping and imprisonment, the SLA had managed to manipulate and coerce Patty into committing various crimes.

In November 1978, while I was stationed in Laguna Beach, over 900 members of the Reverend Jim Jones' Peoples Temple died in a mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. I am afraid to think of what I may have done if my cult leaders had ordered me to kill others or myself. I know that at the depth of my involvement, I would have done almost anything, no matter how depraved.

The press vilified the Manson murderers, Ms Hearst, and the members of the Peoples Temple. To me, however, they seemed like ordinary people whom others had succeeded in manipulating. The powerful forces involved in such assaults are stronger than any of us are able to resist alone. To assert otherwise is to deny our fallibility, our finitude as individuals, and ultimately, our humanity.

Back at the ranch, we rehabbers each received some spending money to assist us in the process of reentering the real world. I soon discovered that the prices of consumer goods had at least doubled while I was in the cult. A friend who had been recruited in the early 1970s and deprogrammed in the early 1980s had experienced a trebling of prices. Inflation aside, I had trouble handling money — I was like a child, spending with great abandon and with little thought of tomorrow. One of my first and best purchases, however, was a guitar, the same Japanese-made acoustic model I had owned in British Columbia. Within a month, I had relearned the songs I had known before the cult, and Virginia had taught me some new ones.

Movies about the war in Vietnam and futuristic wars in outer space played at the local theaters. We went to see The China Syndrome, the movie I had seen advertised on a billboard in Los Angeles a few weeks before. It was about a meltdown at a fictitious nuclear power plant. While I was at rehab, the coincidental news arrived that a real nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania had partially melted down.

Virginia and Chris told me about how as Moonies they had accepted the Reverend Moon as the Second Coming of Christ, and had worked tirelessly to save the world from what Moon saw as godless communism. They loved to reminisce about their days of "fund-raising" — that is, hustling the public, in much the same way I had while on sankirtan. The parallels between their experiences and mine were uncanny, but when they chanted their Moonie slogans, my blood boiled. At times, they seemed to think that Moon's "Divine Kingdom" was paradise lost, not hell gained. I realized later that they, like me, were in the relatively early stages of recovery from a cult experience.

I had heard so much about the Moonies from my counselors that one night I even had a nightmare about Moon. In it, I was shouting, "NEVER GIVE UP YOUR FREEDOM!" to several faceless, sheep-like people whom Moon had succeeded in intimidating.

After I had been at the ranch for a few weeks, the number of guests reached four or five. I objected when Virginia segregated the sexes and conducted "consciousness-raising" sessions with the women. I had had enough of forced sex segregation and the manipulation of consciousness in the name of a higher ideological purpose. My objections changed nothing, but it was comforting to know that, unlike in the cult, I was able at least to voice my objection to what I viewed as corrupt institutional policy.

One evening, Doug's wife Elaine cooked a special roast beef dinner for the staff and guests, including the family of a new guest. I remembered that the Krishna cult had said that one who ate meat would become violent or physically ill. After eating the beef without adverse reaction, I realized that, in a tangible sense, the Krishna-conscious chapter of my life was over — I had crossed the finish line.

In mid-April, after seven weeks of rehabilitation, I left the ranch and boarded a commercial flight to the East Coast, where I would meet the rest of my family. After takeoff, while gazing out the window at the flat desert below, I felt like Rip Van Winkle or the Phoenix.

◊ ◊ ◊

Having been out of touch with mainstream culture, I found it hard to understand how certain events of the 1970s could have happened. How, for example, could a former officer of the Nazi Party, perhaps the most violently racist organization in modern history, have been chosen Secretary-General of the United Nations, an institution that was dedicated, or so I had thought, to peace and understanding among peoples?

How could the Nobel committee have awarded its prestigious Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, a man who had supported and helped to perpetrate and expand the genocidal US war in Southeast Asia, along with numerous other human rights outrages around the world?

After learning that Nixon had reestablished diplomatic relations with China, I remembered that in the 1960s the US government had said that we young people needed to die to stop the evil, expansionist Chinese. Now Nixon was having drinks with the top Chinese leaders. The press praised his moves, but they only deepened my conviction that Nixon and the press had cynically used my generation as pawns in their global chess games.

I learned that Nixon's egocentric habit of keeping audiotapes of his official conversations had helped to precipitate his downfall. This episode reminded me of Prabhupada's habit of taping all of his speeches and talks.

Much to my dismay, Christian supremacists had begun to assert themselves in national politics. Such was their influence in 1980 that each of the three major candidates for the presidency — Carter, Ronald Reagan, and John Anderson — maintained that he had been "born again." To one extent or another, each made a public show of his private beliefs. To me, being born once was quite enough. In addition, we former cult members had already seen at close range the monster that a coupling of religion and politics can produce. We feared the use by the religious right of the machinery of modern social and political engineering, including mass mailings, automated phone banks, think tanks, and political image-making.

While I was in the cult, a new brand of so-called conservatives whose chief spokesperson was Reagan had hijacked the national agenda. These individuals had abandoned the historical conservative commitments to the rule of law, to a small, weak, and decentralized government, to tough-minded fiscal responsibility, to learning and the Academy, and to the conservation of the natural resources and natural beauty of the continent that has given us all so much.

It confused and saddened me to learn that the government had passed a Superfund bill for the management of toxic waste dumps across the country. Someone had apparently found a way to pass most of the bill onto the taxpayer, instead of to the companies who had polluted the environment.

In popular music, disco had been the rage while I was in the cult, but to me its mechanical beat lacked feeling. To my delight, however, blues and classically influenced talents such as Mark Knofler of the group Dire Straits and Eddie Van Halen of the group Van Halen had emerged as two of the top rock guitarists of their generation.

On the linguistic front, certain scientific words and phrases, like "clone" and "black hole," had found their way into common language. Some new words in the social sphere included "macho" (I had previously heard the word "machismo") and "hunk," an old word with a new meaning. Ms had become the preferred title for women who did not want others to think of them only by their marital status. In addition, some words from the counterculture of the late 1960s had entered mainstream English. It seemed ironic to me that many of those words, such as "bummer" and "freak out," had to do with drugs. This was happening in a culture that was escalating its war on drugs with about the same amount of success it had had with the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s.

In publishing, some serious writers like David Halberstam, one of the first mainstream reporters to write critically about the Vietnam War, were now writing about sports, of all subjects. Women, enraged at the crass exploitation of their bodies by magazines like Playboy, were now ogling men's bodies in a magazine called Playgirl.

I was bemused the first time I heard the word "fairness" used to describe the sagging trade position of the United States in the world. What on earth, I wondered, did fairness have to do with cutthroat capitalist competition? For decades, when the US was winning the international capitalist game, I never once heard the word "fairness." Not even where US business practices were blatantly exploitative, such as in Central and South America. Now grown men who liked to think of themselves free marketeers were weeping about a lack of "fairness."

Concerning race relations, I discovered that whites in Boston and other Northern cities had succeeded where their Southern counterparts had failed in reversing the historical trend toward the integration of public schools. For the most part, the press had given them a free pass, apparently believing in a self-serving way that Northerners cannot be racists or segregationists.

People took seriously the idea of sex change operations. Although I was not morally opposed to this, I did find it insulting to women to suggest that a man without his penis is a woman.

In sports, baseball players wearing clownish uniforms were playing on what looked like oversized billiard tables. I did not care how many home runs a player hit; if he were hitting under .250, then as far as I was concerned he was a lousy hitter. I guess that I was spoiled growing up in the era of Musial, Mays, and Aaron, home run hitters who each hit at least .300 lifetime.

Tennis, my favorite sport as a youth, had at last been professionalized, ending decades of sham amateurism. Young stars like Borg, Austin, Connors, Evert-Lloyd, and McEnroe now dominated the game. I read with astonishment that a few years before, millions of people had taken seriously a match between a current female champion and a paunchy, over-the-hill former male champ and notorious hustler, as if the outcome proved anything at all about the sexes. The only lesson the match taught me was that PT Barnum was right when he said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

Everywhere I saw people jogging in the streets. Some looked as though they had not run a step in twenty or thirty years, as indeed they probably had not. While growing up, the only time I saw anyone running in public was if he had just robbed a bank. I learned that a former cross-country runner at my school had died of heart failure at the age of thirty while running in Central Park in New York City. Thirty is too young to die. Meanwhile, other long-distance runners my age had gained international fame.

I saw the health craze as an unfortunate expression of our Calvinist heritage. Some people seemed to think that running was good simply because it was more painful than sitting on a couch. For me, it was important to enjoy — or at least not dislike — the basic functions of living, including exercise.

Everyone I met believed in the advisability of cutting down on dietary salt. This puzzled me, as I rarely ate junk food and for years had done my own cooking, moderate on the salt. They all must have been living on sodium-saturated cheese whizzies, I thought.

After having followed restricted diets for nearly a decade, I now tried to eat sensibly and healthfully, but this time without rejecting entire food groups. I now feel that in moderation I can eat almost anything. I'm not wise enough to fathom dietary absolutes. I have difficulty being dogmatic about anything, not just diet and health, but religion, philosophy, and politics, as well.

My cult involvement and my recovery from it have forced me to confront my former drug use. I lived in the cult without my mind and my sanity. Therefore, the idea of sobriety — which to me in its broad sense means freedom from all kinds of dependencies — appeals to me powerfully. Knowing well what the alternative is, I now believe in chemical as well as ideological sobriety. Nevertheless, Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign against drugs struck me as simplistic and naive, but typical of the times. I had learned that addictive behaviors were complex and hard to change.

I read in my school's alumni magazine that most of my classmates had already established themselves in their careers and were married with one or two children, a house in the suburbs, and so on. This made me feel as if I were from another planet.

While I was becoming "Krishna conscious," others were rediscovering their ethnic "Roots." Rather than delve narrowly into my own family's past, I preferred to broaden my horizons. As someone once said, it is wonderful to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors, not to us. I believe that the challenge is to do something that would make them proud, not to try to live your life in the reflected glory of their accomplishments.

In short, I viewed the events of the mid to late-1970s with jaundiced eyes. I was unable to buy into any of the smiley-faced fads. I objected neither to temperance (I don't drink or smoke) nor to fitness (I walk about twenty to forty miles a week). I did, however, object to the assertion that one can reduce complex, multidimensional issues like politics, religion, health, or happiness to moronically simplistic formulas. I also objected to the element of moralization in the propaganda. Smoking was bad; jogging was good. There was little in the way of balance and proportion.

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I read voraciously about destructive cults, but I also read about other related topics, such as emotional dependency, substance abuse, child and spousal abuse, and the recent history of religious and political extremism. To discover what others had written on the subject of freedom of the mind, I read Bartlett's Quotations and other reference sources. It was gratifying to learn how many people throughout history have been passionate and eloquent on the subject of human rights and human dignity. Their statements gave me confidence that my opposition to destructive cultism stood on firm historical and intellectual ground.

We Americans are heirs to a long tradition of resolute and determined opposition to tyranny in all its forms. Nevertheless, I was saddened to discover that there is also ample precedent in the literature for the view that people want and need someone to tell them what to do, what to think, and what their rights are.

One delightful byproduct of my reading is that I have learned many things that have nothing to do with cults.

A few months after I left rehab, a friend asked me to participate in the deprogramming of another Krishna member, which I did. Deprogramming gave me an opportunity to communicate to others what I had learned about cults, and in the process to solidify my own understanding of the techniques of mind control. Over the next two years, I received many calls from families of cult victims from all over the country, as well as a few from overseas. I am privileged to have had the opportunity to help about a dozen people to leave the Krishna cult and other destructive cults.

After rehab, I began keeping a notebook of thoughts about my life during and after the cult. At first, I could barely read my own writing, because I had done so little of it while in the cult. Knowing that the cult had programmed me to believe that those who spoke out against it would go to hell, I felt guilty about writing anything critical of the cult. In time, however, I was able to overcome these obstacles.

A little more than a year after leaving rehab, during a break between deprogramming jobs, I felt that I was now ready to fully debrief myself on my cult experience. After many discussions with other former members and with people who specialize in anti-cult matters, and after much reading, I felt that it was now my turn to ask the questions that needed asking, and to try to answer them in my own way. I also did not want to forget the details of my years in the cult. Speaking from a few pages of handwritten notes into a recorder and working nearly around the clock, I made about fifty hours of tapes over the next few days.

A few months later, a friend who is a former member of the Unification Church asked me to write a short essay about my life in the cult for a collection of case histories he was editing. I sent him a draft, which he returned for revisions. I rewrote the essay several times over the next year during breaks in my schedule. My friend never published his collection, but my story summary, along with the tapes, formed the basis of this book.

I felt an obligation to help the media, the mental health profession, and the public to learn more about cults. I believed that if people knew the facts, they would change their attitudes of indifference and denial, and their tendency to blame the victims. While I still welcome opportunities to share my experiences with others, I now feel less responsibility for others' lack of understanding.

It would be months before I was again comfortable with an ordinary life without feeling the need for a supercharged, sensory overloaded, ideologically weighty existence. I was eventually able to enjoy such simple pleasures as going to the park and watching the children play, watching the rain outside my window, or going to a movie — things I could never do while in the cult. Nevertheless, what the Krishnas called the "mundane" world often seemed commonplace and I remained impatient with many of the more trivial aspects of daily life, such as the numbing routines of an ordinary job or the petty games people play.

For the first few years after my exit, most of my friends were other former cult members. I was eventually able, however, to make friends with people who knew little or nothing about cults. At some point in each such friendship, I felt the need to raise the issue of my cult past. For better or worse, my cult experience remains an important part of who I am. It is a delight to meet those rare individuals who are flexible enough in their thinking and who care enough about others to understand the pain of a cult involvement, even though they themselves may have had no such experience.

Relationships continue to frustrate me, however. I have tried to overcome the hatred of people the cult instilled in me, but I continue to struggle with the issues of trusting others and feeling like a valuable and productive member of the larger society. I have also had trouble letting go of the more seductive aspects of the cult, such as the emotional highs and the artificial feelings of togetherness and security in a tightly knit group.

I now know that the cult was corrupt long before it recruited me. At times, however, I still feel, in spite of the evidence, that its excesses were examples of tainted goodness, or that the corruption could not have reached the leaders I once admired.

I have wrestled with the loss of the friendship of my fellow cult members. I would like to believe that most of them were decent, idealistic, and hardworking people before joining the cult. The cult manipulated their thoughts and emotions, however, and their friendship toward me was superficial and conditional.

While in the cult, I rarely thought of leaving it, and I never made a serious attempt to do so. Conversely, since leaving the cult, I have never thought of rejoining it.

When in an airport, I sometimes see the Krishnas wearing their civilian clothes, wigs, and big, fake smiles. I know immediately who they are, even if I have never met them. I remember how distressed I was as a devotee that some people — demons, that is — could spot us at a distance, despite our disguises. I now know that a sankirtan devotee does little more than hustle the public for money, rarely if ever giving anything back to the whole upon which we all depend.

Before entering the sect, I had few well-developed ideas about religion. I can honestly say that I learned nothing about God or spirituality during my half-decade as a monk in the Hare Krishna Movement. One might say that rather than learning who God is, I learned who God is not. At present, I am not a seeker, at least, not outwardly so. I rarely talk about the Truth, or Enlightenment, or such ideas. Although I take as seriously as ever my private search for meaning in my life, I am careful to speak with my actions as well as my words and to direct my energies toward this world, not to the mirage-like promise of a next world.

I confess that, even as a strong supporter of freedom of religious expression, I have little respect for people who advertise their religious faith, make a public show of prayer, or use religion to gain wealth, fame, or influence over others. Twisted words and sick ideologies — what the Old Testament in its simplicity calls "false witness" — have hurt me badly.

I now know that some people of low or absent morality see me as nothing more than a mind, a body, or a wallet to exploit, and will go to almost any length to abuse me. Such persons are not necessarily distant enemies who play the caricatured role of villains. On the contrary, they may appear at first glance to be among the most generous and caring people in the world.

In a way, I hope I never fully accept this frightening reality. One of the challenges facing a former cult member is to learn how to continue to trust and give — but in appropriate ways this time — even if we have lost everything we once held dear. The words of Anne Frank inspire me: "I still believe that people are basically good at heart" (July 15, 1944).

I have lost my innocence, and the world will never again be the way I was taught it was at home, in school, and in church. Some people are evil and some supposedly respectable institutions care little about the people they are charged with serving. In my moment of greatest and most urgent need, no member of any of our public institutions — including the legal, judicial, medical, mental health, law enforcement, social service, religious, and educational communities, as well as elected officials at any level — offered me a helping hand. Inasmuch as any of them had anything to say about the matter, most denied the abuse, and some even went so far as to defend what they believed were the "rights" of my tormentors.

A generous explanation for such behavior might be that, as bureaucracies, our public institutions are too inflexible to deal effectively with situations that appear to be nonstandard or out-of-the-ordinary. A less generous explanation might be that these institutions have failed to resolve their own issues of organizational control, and have allowed themselves to become excessively comfortable with the power imbalances embedded within the status quo.

All professions bear responsibility for the current state of affairs — as indeed we all do — but let me say this about the once-proud trade of journalism. Even today, after so many decades of widespread destructive cult activity in this country and around the world, there is still no regular cult beat in the mainstream press. Such coverage as there is happens only at times of crisis, controversy, or tragedy. That is, after the fact, when it's too late. In addition, the coverage seems to get continually less reflective and freer of context. We need to remember that the phenomenon of destructive cultism is deeply rooted in the human experience — no matter how disturbing that notion may be to some — and that cults affect us all in one way or another.

Forgive me for sounding nostalgic, but journalism was once seen as a keeper, however imperfect, of our culture, our democracy, and our values. Today, too many journalists are little more than the equivalent of emergency telephone operators or gossip columnists.

It saddens me to reflect that my own recovery, which is the ongoing process of reading, writing, study, and reflection that allows me to stay alive and thrive today, has happened at the periphery of, or even outside of, our public institutions and our collective, public lives. Meaningful discussion of these critically important issues is almost nonexistent.

Nevertheless, I would like to think that my experiences have allowed me to become more empathetic toward others and more conscious of the need for a strong but fair and compassionate code of ethics in the conduct of human affairs. I have little or no patience with official secrecy, censorship, or other interruptions in the free flow of information, whether perpetrated by individuals, groups, or governments.

Since leaving the cult, I have had a recurring nightmare in which I am in the Krishna cult, secretly wanting to leave and secretly planning an escape. To obtain the mental and physical space I need for such an escape, however, I must first earn the group's trust. That is, I must submit, or at least pretend to submit, to their program of activities. If my actions or words are in any way suspicious, I will surely attract unwanted attention, which will in turn be followed by lectures and guilt trips from the cult leaders.

To buy some much sought-after privacy, I must pretend to be — and, indeed, be — a good devotee. Every act of submission, however, only involves, implicates, and commits me more, making any further attempts at resistance that much more difficult — and so on, in a vicious circle. Such is life in a cult.

My family has helped me by opening their homes and by giving generously of themselves in many ways. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to complete my college education, to record some of my thoughts, and to plan for a better future.

A BRIEF CULT UPDATE

Almost from the beginning, ISKCON devotees have sold illegal drugs, violated gun laws, abused women and children, and used unethical sales and recruitment tactics.

North American newspapers reported that on July 8, 1977, American devotees in Bengal injured eighteen local villagers with buckshot. The incident occurred after the local ISKCON leader allegedly gave an order to fire on an irate crowd. The dispute was over where village cattle were permitted to graze.

After Prabhupada's death in late 1977, some of his disciples found it hard to submit to the newly appointed gurus, men who had once been their peers. Nevertheless, those who joined the Movement after that year are as fiercely loyal to their gurus as the older devotees were to Prabhupada. I have heard that several of the gurus maintain that they alone are the only legitimate successors to Prabhupada, prompting the others to denounce them as fakes. In addition, some devotees who were not among the original eleven, but who nevertheless aspired to power in the Movement, have staked their own claims to guru status.

In late 1978, more than 900 US citizens, including a staggering 275 children, died in a mass murder/suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. In the wake of this terrible tragedy, ISKCON released a pamphlet entitled, Don't Lump Us In, begging the press not to associate ISKCON with the Peoples Temple. I learned later that the Moonies also released a similar pamphlet to the press at about the same time.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, devotees sold hate-mongering anti-Iranian buttons picturing Mickey Mouse with a raised middle finger. This was curiously disingenuous, given that the cult had applauded the seizure of political power by what it viewed as a like-minded religious fundamentalist movement in Iran.

The sale of items with secular themes as part of a sankirtan effort raises some questions. At its inception in the Middle Ages, sankirtan was the public, congregational chanting of the Holy Names. Prabhupada extended this definition to include the distribution of his books, which he referred to as "recorded kirtans." While a religious organization has every right to raise funds in any legal manner it sees fit, it is difficult to see how the sale of secular items could be classified as a part of the sankirtan effort.

Many devotees have left the Movement over this issue. What they once took as a call to aesthetic renunciation had within a few short years morphed into an obsession with money, real estate, and power.

According to a woman who has since left the Movement, Jiva gave cocaine to and had sex with his female subordinates, to "enliven" them in their devotional service to the Lord. If, however, his subordinates failed to meet their daily financial quotas, he beat them (Hubner and Gruson, p. 216). In 1980, a partner-in-crime murdered Jiva, whom the leadership had by then offered the exalted position of sannyasi (Hubner and Gruson, pp. 242-3).

A former devotee from New Jersey reported hearing that women devotees would eventually become prostitutes. The reasoning was that as the world degenerated, verbal persuasion would become an increasingly ineffective means of proselytization, until finally the only way to reach people would be through sex.

In 1980, police officers in Marshall County, West Virginia, told me that they believed that the Krishnas had for years illegally cremated the bodies of dead infants at the New Vrindavan commune.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 1980 that devotees had beaten Jadurani until she was bloody after she expressed doubts about the legitimacy of one of the newly ordained gurus. She was known for her fierce loyalty to Prabhupada and for her view that some of the gurus were interlopers.

In 1980, the national press reported that police had discovered a cache of weapons and ammunition in a Mercedes-Benz belonging to Hamsadutta, the Northern California guru. A few weeks later, the GBC stripped him of his powers (Hubner and Gruson, pp. 241-3). Also in 1980, police in Northern California raided an underground Krishna bullet factory and discovered anti-Semitic literature, including Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, according to newspaper reports. In 1981, a former devotee who had been in the US military told me that he had been involved in training devotees in the use of firearms.

In 1981 many national magazines and local newspapers around the country carried uncritical stories about the opening of a lavish new temple at New Vrindavan. Parroting the public relations of the cult, some of the headlines were "Almost Heaven" and "Spiritual Disneyland."

At the temple in Hawaii, the cult kept a supply of penicillin for sick cows, but no medicine for sick devotees. A devotee who was treated with cow dung for an infection nearly lost his leg. A Berkeley devotee who had contracted breast cancer refused to go to the doctor until another devotee noticed the tumor while they were in the shower. The sick devotee eventually went to a Western doctor, but the leaders applauded her "stalwart" attitude.

In 1982, the GBC excommunicated Jayatirtha, then the guru for the British Isles. His alleged offenses included taking LSD on the job and seducing his disciples. In 1987, after starting his own splinter sect in California, he was beheaded by a former ISKCON member (Hubner and Gruson, p. 169).

The leaders told the devotees that they must spend every minute of the day performing work for the sect and that exercise is narcissistic at best and life-shortening at worst. Nevertheless, after becoming a guru, Ramesvara regularly jogged. The GBC later expelled him from the sect after he allegedly had an affair with a fourteen-year-old girl (Hubner and Gruson, p. 352). Ramesvara had once bragged to us that he was "beyond sex."

Since Prabhupada's death, the sect has become increasingly fragmented and quarrelsome. ISKCON's public relations team has consistently attributed the problems to a few bad apples. The current revisionist thinking within the cult is that it was idyllic and pure during Prabhupada's day and would have remained so if only the surviving devotees had been faithful to his high ideals. As I have pointed out, it was under Prabhupada's leadership that a wide range of abusive and illegal behaviors became institutionalized within the Movement.

It's important to keep in mind that all destructive cults maintain that discrepancies between rhetoric and reality are always the result of incorrect application of the doctrine, and never the result of a flawed doctrine. Cult logic dictates that all inconsistencies ("contaminations" in Krishna jargon) originate from outside the sect.

Devotees from the New Vrindavan commune have reported that for several years Kirtanananda Swami repeatedly raped Devin Wheeler, known in the cult as Bhaktipada-dasa. In 1985, a disgruntled adult devotee attacked Kirtanananda with a steel rod, putting him into a coma for nearly a month (Hubner and Gruson, pp. 299-300). The same year, an ISKCON hit man murdered a dissident devotee who was sitting in a parked car outside the Culver City temple. According to the police, the killing resembled a Mafia-style execution (Hubner and Gruson, p. 319).

By 1986, less than ten years after Prabhupada's death, the GBC had expelled or suspended six (Bhagavan, Bhavananda, Hamsadutta, Jayatirtha, Kirtanananda, and Ramesvara) of the eleven original gurus. A seventh guru, Satsvarupa, had by then voluntarily resigned his post, though he has remained in the Movement as a propagandist and house biographer of the late Swami Prabhupada. Kirtanananda continued to lead his own cult at New Vrindavan (Hubner and Gruson, pp. 352-354), even while serving a lengthy prison sentence in North Carolina for racketeering, according to newspaper accounts.

More recent information reveals that only two or three of the 1977 gurus are still active in the Movement.

In June 2000, lawyers representing ninety-five former gurukula children filed a $400 million suit against ISKCON. The suit alleged "sexual, physical and emotional torture." Windle Turley, the lead attorney, stated in a press release, "We believe the facts as they are developed will reveal more than a thousand child victims, many of whom have already taken their own lives or are today emotionally and socially dysfunctional." One of the plaintiffs was Jacob Chatterton, son of Bahudaka, who was a young child in the Vancouver temple when I was there.

The parties settled in 2005 for $9.5 million. By then an additional 430 former cult children had added their names to the complaint. Most were expected to receive between $2,500 and $50,000, depending on the severity and duration of the abuse.

THE KRISHNA CULT

Before offering a brief critique of the Krishna cult, let me state my biases. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia and central New Jersey. My father was a business executive and my mother was a homemaker. They enrolled me in public schools through the seventh grade, and then in private schools for boys through the twelfth grade. After the cult, I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

My religious training as a child was in the Episcopal Church, because of my father, and the Quaker Meeting, because of my mother. If, as a teenager, I had any opinions about politics and society, they were liberal, again due mainly to my mother's influence. After I left home as a young adult, however, the Vietnam War-era movements for peace, social justice, and the environment heavily influenced my views.

I considered myself then, and consider myself now, to be liberal to radical left on most social issues. A more recent influence on my worldview is the dual effect of my experience in a destructive cult and my recovery from it. These cult-related experiences have affected every aspect of my life — not only religion, politics, and social philosophy, as one might expect, but my personal relationships and inner life as well.

More than half a century before me and half a world away, Abby Charan was born near Calcutta (now Kolkata). As a young man, he started and ran a pharmaceutical company, which failed. A nationalist in the waning years of British colonial rule, he admired the success of the Indian Communist Party in gaining converts by way of a large-scale leafletting campaign in the local languages. At retirement age, he renounced his wife and family, as is the custom in some Hindu sects.

With an eye toward spreading the message of Krishna Consciousness in the West, he began the task of translating some of the Hindu scriptures into English. In 1965, after obtaining financial support for a missionary trip, he sailed to the United States under the name A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. He hoped and expected to find people who were dissatisfied with what he called the "material advancement of knowledge," and who would be receptive to a different kind of knowledge, that of the Hindu Vedas.

One might say that his timing was excellent, as the guru business was starting to grow rapidly in the West. In 1966, the Swami founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) on the Lower East Side of New York. Through it, he offered what he called "spiritual communism," an idiosyncratic brand of intensive, live-in religiosity that quickly proved successful in attracting young adults. Most of his early disciples were students or young professionals including teachers, musicians, artists, and social workers. Some, but by no means all, were religious seekers.

Prabhupada, as he became known, aligned some of his messages with the economic, religious, and social currents of the day. He offered a frugal form of communalism at a time of widespread anti-materialist sentiment and a heightened interest in collective living arrangements. He offered a lively and colorful version of Hinduism when many Westerners were beginning to look to the East for alternative forms of religious expression. He presented himself as a benign grandfather figure when relations between young people and their parents were under considerable strain.

Not all of Prabhupada's messages, however, were in step with the times. He wrote books in a formal, scholarly style at a time when the influence of popular culture, especially the nonliterary kind, was on the rise. He took unpopular positions on the highly charged issues of love and war, preaching chastity when free love was in fashion, and supporting the US war in Indochina even at the height of its unpopularity among youth.

Even more indicative of his lack of desire to cater to popular tastes were his messages concerning the origins and proper exercise of power and authority. He presented his religious ideas as the last word at a time when popular thinking was becoming increasingly relativistic on a wide range of issues. He also assumed within ISKCON a position of absolute administrative power when all forms of established authority were under attack. In short, he offered young people a highly regimented lifestyle when many wanted to simply "do their own thing."

One can perhaps understand Prabhupada's need for a carrot-and-stick approach. What is puzzling, however, is his emphasis on the stick. No amount of retrospective analysis can easily account for the sudden rise in ISKCON and other contemporaneous cults of the kind of supercharged evangelism and seemingly boundless religious, social, and political fanaticism we saw during that period. Such zealotry, which is now known to be widespread throughout the world, was then believed to be rare, if not entirely anachronistic, in the developed, democratic world.

By their nature, ideologically extreme groups are exclusive nearly to the point of closure. It is paradoxical, then, to observe that, as the events of September 11, 2001, have dramatically and painfully reminded us, toxic orthodoxies and at least a certain segment of the lay public have little trouble in finding each other.

At first glance, the cults seem to offer a relatively free and open form of recruitment. Closer inspection, however, reveals a demand for loyalty and obedience that is quite astonishing in its intensity. One possible resolution to this paradox is that the distance from the one culture to the other is shorter than we may have been led to believe. That is, destructive cultists are not much different from you and me.

Another conclusion might be that cult recruitment and induction techniques are more powerfully transformative of the human psyche and spirit than we may care to admit. That is, those who practice ideological extremism are fundamentally different from you and me.

Neither conclusion is especially comforting. Either way, the existence of cults challenges some of our most deeply held beliefs concerning human beings and their relationship to the world around them.

While it is undeniable that destructive cults often immerse themselves into the swirling religious, social, and political currents of their times, it is equally true that they are somehow able to remain oddly aloof from them. That is, they operate in the world without necessarily being of it. Any discussion of ideologically extreme groups must take into account these and other vexing paradoxes. In this chapter, I will offer a perspective that highlights both the deep, mutual embeddedness of these two worlds and the nearly diametrical differences between them.

One approach to the troubling issues raised by cults such as ISKCON is what others have called "mind control." I will use this phrase to mean a system of powerful social influences that seeks to dismantle and reconstruct the inner and outer selves. The resulting system of control excludes all outside influences while bringing about a form of personal change that is quite exceptional in its speed and depth. Left unchecked, such change can be debilitating to the point of fatality. Brought into check, however, it need be neither fatal nor permanent.

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As I have described, ISKCON grew rapidly in the years after its founding in 1966. By the mid-1970s, it placed its own worldwide membership at 10,000. The mainstream press, however, placed the number more accurately at about 5,000. More recent data published by the cult itself confirm that in his eleven years as guru, Prabhupada initiated a little more than 4,700 devotees. Only a fraction of that number were active at any one time, due to a high turnover rate.

Remembering my own visits to various temples in the US and abroad and my conversations with devotees who traveled widely, I would estimate the number of full-time, live-in devotees at 2,000 to 3,000 at any one time. Perhaps an equal number of part-time members attended services at least once a week. Whatever the exact numbers, however, not only has the membership failed to increase ten or 100 fold since the early 1970s, as Prabhupada once predicted, but it has declined steadily over the decades.

In my observation, ISKCON recruits in the US were somewhat whiter than the general population. Indeed, the GBC during the Prabhupada era consisted almost entirely of white males. The number of devotees of African or Latin descent at the temples I visited appeared to be about five percent each. This was true even in large cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where one might well expect these numbers to be higher.

Most African Americans who joined the Movement had attended racially integrated schools and were already reasonably comfortable in a majority-white setting. Few, if any, brothers or sisters from the inner city joined ISKCON, even though the devotees regularly proselytized and sold cult magazines and incense in inner-city neighborhoods.

In economic terms, most recruits were middle class. By temperament, most were mildly to moderately idealistic. Beyond these observations, however, I find it hard to generalize about the kinds of people who joined ISKCON. In the 1970s, the media portrayed cult members as naive and gullible at best and psychologically unstable at worst, false images that persist today. Having met several hundreds of members while in the cult, and having since met another several hundred former members of various cults, I can only conclude that those who join cults are ordinary people much like those who do not join.

As I mentioned, the structure of the cult was pyramidal. A few devotees at the top held most, if not all, of the power. Meanwhile, the many below exercised little if any independent authority. To his credit, Prabhupada never declared himself God. He even said, in his typically immoderate way, that anyone who made such a claim should be put to death. Over the centuries, India has apparently had its share of upstart gurus and phony holy men who try to gain sway over their followers by declaring themselves God.

Nevertheless, Prabhupada not only permitted, but actively encouraged, his disciples to believe that he, like God, was omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. He insisted that they address him as His Divine Grace. He maintained that he "knew the heartbeat of his disciples," wherever they might be. He declared himself the "sum total of the demigods," the powerful godlike beings who control the forces of nature. He even wrote that the spiritual master was "better than God." No one in the cult was able to challenge Prabhupada's place at the top of ISKCON's power structure.

Prabhupada's claim to authority rested on the assertion that he was the most recent link in an unbroken chain of masters that began 5,000 years ago with Krishna Himself. (The "disciplic succession" is roughly equivalent of the Catholic notion of an Apostolic Succession from the disciples of Jesus to the current bishops.) The only information I have seen that supports this claim came, of course, from Prabhupada himself. I know from my own visit to India that the Indian-born devotees at the grand spiritual master's temple in Vrindavan rarely visited the ISKCON temple, and vice versa. Like Prabhupada, the grand spiritual master translated many Hindu classics into English. For reasons he never revealed, however, Prabhupada prohibited his disciples from reading his master's books. It may be that he did not want them to compare his writings with those of his teacher.

Prabhupada was the sole enunciator of the rules, he was their chief enforcer, and the judge of highest appeal. He wrote in one of his books, "If they disobey me, they must be punished."

Though his organization was based on rules, they apparently did not apply to him. For example, some devotees who were close to him maintained that he chanted only two or three rounds a day. In contrast, he demanded sixteen rounds per day of his disciples, while maintaining that thirty-two was the traditional minimum for Indian-born devotees of Krishna. Nevertheless, he considered anyone who criticized or judged him to be "envious" of his position, and therefore, unworthy of his "mercy" (blessings). Only a handful of servants and assistants spent a significant amount of time with him behind the scenes. This made it nearly impossible for a rank-and-file devotee to independently confirm or deny any assertions about his adherence to his own rules.

Prabhupada offered special privileges to top leaders such as sannyasis, GBC members, and the presidents of the larger temples. Many lived in private quarters with their young wives, drove late-model cars, ate fine prasadam, and even had their own pocket money. The leaders' yearly pilgrimage to India amounted to an all-expenses-paid, month-long vacation. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file led lives of genuine renunciation and enjoyed none of the perquisites of leadership. It is ironic that a cult that praised "simple living and high thinking" and loudly denounced materialism rewarded its own leaders with money, possessions, and women.

Prabhupada told his devotees what to do at every moment of the day. A cliché in the cult was, "One should become like a child before the guru." He also called the devotee "a cog in a machine," "a dog on a leash," and "a sold-out animal." Although he called on his devotees to serve him unconditionally, his concern for them was conditional. He liked them so long as they were in some way useful to him or to the Movement. When they ceased being useful, he stopped paying attention to them. His love for them was contingent on their obedience to him.

The spiritual master expected his devotees to carry out his instructions "without consideration and without hesitation." He promised that if they obeyed his orders, he would accept full responsibility for their karma. People who believe that they are not responsible for their own actions are always at risk for acting in ways that are hurtful toward others.

Prabhupada maintained that devotees who became "Krishna conscious" no longer needed to fear death. Toward the end of his life, however, he surrounded himself with armed bodyguards when appearing in public. In addition, we heard that he had on at least one occasion canceled a trip because of his fears of assassination. I knew of no credible evidence of a plot against his safety.

In short, it was hate and fear — not love and trust — that marked the relationship between Prabhupada and his disciples. He taught them to hate themselves, their families of origin, and the rest of the world outside the cult. He taught them to fear their own minds and what would happen to them if they failed to "surrender" it to him. He viewed the world as a hostile place where only the strongest survived, hardly the inspiring or uplifting view of life that one might expect from a holy man.

Believing that the outside world had nothing positive to offer, the cult leadership distrusted, disparaged, and, whenever possible, avoided outside institutions. The cult believed, for example, that it was above the law. The reasoning was that God's laws were higher than man's laws. The devotees did not need to follow the laws of society; rather, society should obey the cult's laws.

The devotees, therefore, regularly broke the law. Their Sankirtan leaders sent them to shopping malls, sports arenas, and amusement parks where the police ticketed or even arrested them for trespassing or soliciting without a license. The cult violated housing and zoning laws when, for example, as many as fifteen or twenty devotees lived together in a three or four-bedroom house. The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits slavery; yet the cult recruited thousands of devotees to work hard all day every day without pay.

Central to the business of mind control is the manipulation of language, and the Krishna cult held back little in its efforts to exploit language as a powerful method of control. Whether we realize it or not, the words and phrases we use reflect and reinforce our perception of the world around us. We should hardly be surprised, therefore, that totalitarians, whatever their platform, work hard to manipulate language.

Prabhupada used prophesy to control his devotees. In the mid-1970s, he predicted that by 1980 a nuclear war would devastate the world, and that the cult alone would survive. Devotees would then rule by force what remained of the world. He may have made such statements to discourage the devotees from leaving the cult or to give an added sense of urgency and purpose to their otherwise dreary and monotonous daily chores.

The Krishna cult used deceptive recruiting techniques. For example, the leaders in New Vrindavan made various promises to devotees who were former city dwellers looking for an opportunity to return to the land. They offered a place to camp or even build a log cabin in exchange for work on the farm. Within a short time, however, the recruits discovered that to remain on cult-owned land they needed to "surrender" all to Prabhupada and his surrogates and become full-time members of the cult. During its first contacts with potential recruits, the cult usually failed to describe to them the full extent of its expectations of them. Few knew that within a short time the cult would expect them to work the parking lots six days a week in nearby cities and towns.

Another example of deception was the back cover of a BTG from the 1970s. It pictured a man with short hair wearing civilian clothes, sitting on a rock and chanting on his beads, as a mountaintop loomed with heavy-handed symbolism in the background. Most devotees, especially novices, never let their hair grow for more than a fortnight; they never wore street clothes unless they were selling something; they never visited remote or isolated places unless they were on a mission for ISKCON; and they never went anywhere alone.

For a final example, recruiters nationwide promised prospective devotees whose loved ones had recently died that if they joined the cult, they would become "deathless." Devotees rationalized such methods by saying that the benefits of Krishna consciousness outweighed other considerations.

All full-time devotees spent their time collecting money, recruiting other devotees, or supporting such activities. Armed with the Absolute Truth, they sought happiness and relief from suffering. When their efforts succeeded, they often felt an emotion they took as a transcendental high. Spreading joy was, by the cult's definition, a joyous activity, even though in practice this was not always so. Using the same methods, the recruits then recruited other members. In this way, cult recruitment resembled a pyramid scheme, except that the commodity being exchanged was human lives rather than money.

Another recruitment technique the cult employed was to associate itself with popular artists like Alice Coltrane and George Harrison. The celebrities, however, never scrubbed a pot or slept on the floor of a crowded ashram. Rather, the cult simply took their money or property and used their names in its publicity and fund-raising campaigns.

As a rule, the longer a devotee spent in the cult, the more difficulties he met with while trying to leave. While in the cult, he received no formal education and little or no training that might be useful for a job in the real world. On the contrary, the cult went to great lengths to guarantee that most devotees remained out of touch with the world outside the cult. After a few years in the cult, devotees began to ask themselves, "Who would hire us?"

Despite the heavy emphasis on recruitment and retention, the attrition rate was high. In the mid-1970s, devotees sometimes remarked informally that, of the two dozen or so devotees who formed the first temple on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, only a handful have remained in the Movement. Most of these had long since accepted high positions of leadership and the privileged lifestyle that came with them.

The offer of special privileges failed, however, to protect all devotees from the temptations of Maya. Prabhupada's own personal servants left the cult at a high rate. This may have been due to their inability to reconcile his claims of perfection with his less-than-perfect actions. Several Sanskrit scholars who had worked on Prabhupada's books left the cult in the late 1960s and early 1970s, possibly due to their awareness of serious discrepancies between the original Hindu scriptures and Prabhupada's English-language translations of them.

When devotees thought of leaving the cult, they often became listless or erratic in the performance of their duties. They felt ashamed to turn their backs on God, and they were aware that leaving usually meant an inability to take with them even their few meager belongings. Those who did leave often did so in the middle of the night.

Sankirtan

No ISKCON program received more attention from the leaders than book distribution; no program provided the devotees with more interaction with the public; and none better features the organization's moral and financial corruption.

Devotees began their preparation for sankirtan by rising early, chanting intensely, and praying for higher scores. They continued to chant in the car while en route to their locations for the day. While meeting the public, however, they stopped chanting and made an effort to appear friendly and normal, much like the people to whom they were talking.

Devotees typically used high-pressure sales tactics that afforded the person they were talking to as little opportunity as possible to make a rational decision about the sale. They apparently believed that thinking was as bad for a karmi as it was for a devotee. While hustling the public, the devotees' minds rarely deviated from their instructions, and their faces rarely flinched. They failed to question either the validity of cult doctrine or the validity of the claims they themselves were making every day on the street.

Given that most people are likely to ignore a person who they believe is trying to sell them something, sankirtan was a difficult challenge indeed. The devotees, therefore, needed to learn how to turn off their doubts, turn on their sales personalities, and "hit up" as many people as possible. Over time, sankirtan became second nature.

Many sankirtan techniques were deceptive. Most devotees tried to conceal their ISKCON affiliation by wearing wigs and street clothes. Many flatly denied affiliation with ISKCON when asked. Some even wore buttons reading "World Help Organization" or "Children's Charity Crusade" or other nonexistent programs. Others announced that they represented legitimate, mainstream charities. Some even knowingly shortchanged the public.

To its credit, the cult did offer a few small charitable programs aimed at members of the public without regard to their present or future Krishna consciousness. For examples, devotees at the cult compound in Mayapur, India, distributed food to local beggars. Devotees at the LA temple occasionally distributed leftovers from the Sunday feast in the downtown skid row. The leadership apparently approved these programs, however, only after the cult's real or alleged charity fraud resulted in a substantial amount of negative publicity. Except for these few legitimate programs, all the cult's public charity programs had strings attached.

There are poor people in the United States, to be sure, but there are many more in India and they are much poorer. I remember seeing poor people in the Indian villages who did little more than chant all day. Faith and spirituality can be important parts of our lives, but it does not follow that chanting or prayer, however sincere, can by themselves solve serious social and economic problems.

People ask, "Where does all the money go?" Most low-level devotees like me knew little or nothing about where the money we collected went. The leaders considered such a question "idle speculation" at best and punishable disloyalty at worst. Nevertheless, I gathered that some of the money went toward day-to-day expenses such as maintaining the temple buildings, feeding the devotees, and buying flowers, cloth, and incense for the Deities. The majority of devotees ate food made from relatively inexpensive staples such as rice, flour, potatoes, and fruits and vegetables in season. Some money went to pay for the leaders' extravagant lifestyles, and other money went toward the purchase or rental of real estate for the cult's centers.

I heard that fifteen percent of the sankirtan funds collected in the West went to pay for large-scale building projects in India. The cult also hired expensive law and public relations firms at the regional level to deal with the ever-increasing number of criminal charges and negative stories in the press.

Hare Krishna and Religion

The devotees informed potential recruits that Krishna theology conflicted neither with the Bible nor with any other scripture of the world's major religions. They asserted that Krishna was the God referred to in the Bible. The words "Christ" and "Krishna" had a common origin, namely the Greek word kristos. Jesus Christ was a pure devotee, the cult asserted, in the tradition, if not the lineage, of the spiritual masters in succession from Lord Krishna in far ancient India to Prabhupada in the present. Jesus identified himself with the Father, Krishna. Like the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible was a "revealed scripture." On a visit to India not recorded in the Bible, Jesus worshiped Krishna in the temples, according to the cult. Despite these and other claims, however, Prabhupada's teachings were at odds with those of the Bible.

After the devotees had been in the cult for a few months, the leaders gave them a different understanding of Christianity. The Bible was an ethical teaching given to primitive desert dwellers who were unable to accept the more sophisticated teachings of Krishna consciousness. That is, to the Krishna cult, the Bible contained nothing new. The spiritual masters in the line of succession were more knowledgeable and powerful than Jesus Christ, according to the cult.

After a few years, the devotees received yet another understanding. All other religions amounted to nothing more than atheism. There was but one God, and He was Krishna; there was but one path to Him, and that was by way of the ancient Vedic teachings; and there was but one contemporary organization — ISKCON — that put those teachings into practice. All other religious groups had "concocted" a God who did little more than to give his members permission to pursue their selfish desires, according to the cult.

One of the many contradictions of the cult was that although it declared itself the representative in the West of traditional Hinduism, most Hindus rejected it. To most, Krishna is not God; rather, he is a minor god best known for his colorful and ribald adventures with his young, adoring female followers.

For reasons that should be obvious, mainstream Hindu teachers have historically prohibited their disciples from begging for more than their own daily sustenance. Such was the time-tested, mutually beneficial arrangement between the religious order and the wider society that supported it. Prabhupada, however, gave many devotees a daily monetary quota that far exceeded their own personal needs.

In addition, longstanding tradition in mainstream Hinduism prohibited a guru from accepting money or property from a disciple. In contrast, Prabhupada accepted from his devotees a lavish lifestyle for himself.

For example, a former sankirtan devotee from Alberta, Canada, calculated that she had raised about $100,000 per year from for most of the 1970s. This was nowhere near a record, but she kept none of the money. All of it went, tax-free, to the cult. Meanwhile, she slept on the floor every night and lived the frugal life of a brahmacharini.

To my knowledge, no legitimate religious leader, Hindu or otherwise, asserts that he is "as good as God" or permits the worship of living humans as God. No legitimate religion separates children from their parents or wives from their husbands. Nor do they aggressively target adolescents or young adults for recruitment or conversion.

I can say from personal experience that it is difficult for a person born into the Western religious, scientific, and cultural traditions to feel fully comfortable as a Hindu. I concede that some people do appear able to adopt ideological systems that are radically different from those of their upbringing. I have, however, seen in myself and in others how easy it is over the short term to convince oneself that one has undergone such a conversion, and yet how hard it is over the longer term to maintain a steady fidelity to it. This is especially true of those systems that demand the most of their followers.

Without a powerful program of ideological coercion, people tend to grow and change over time, each in their own way.

In much of Asia, reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul are not simply tenets of a particular belief system, or theoretical ideas that one may choose to accept or reject as one wishes. Rather, they are taken as realities, much like the water one drinks, the earth on which one stands, and the sun that beats down daily on one's head.

In Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East, the novelist and social commentator Gita Mehta wrote this about the guru game and the cultural differences between East and West:

The seduction [lies] in the chaos. They thought they were simple. We thought they were neon. They thought we were profound. We knew we were provincial. Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong. (Mehta, p. 5)

At a time of rapid change in both cultures, Americans and Indians believed what they wanted to believe about each other.

At the psychological level, one may refer to the Krishna cult as a juggernaut, which the dictionary defines as "a massive, inexorable force that crushes whatever is in its path." The origin of the word is, ironically, Jagganath, the Hindu deity that the Krishna cult worshiped in many temples and at its yearly outdoor Ratha-Yatra festivals in San Francisco and other cities. In India, zealous worshipers, delirious from chanting and fasting, sometimes achieve what they think of as salvation by fatally throwing themselves under the wheels of the giant carts that carry the wooden Jagganath deities. So it is for the victims of the ISKCON juggernaut.

I do not object to people dressing in robes, shaving their heads, burning incense, and jumping up and down in public or private. I do not care if they study the Bhagavad Gita or the Brooklyn telephone book. I do, however, object when any group, religious or otherwise, uses the destructive techniques of mind control.

Unlike legitimate religions, the Krishna cult used deception and coercion to achieve its ends. When the leaders wanted to recruit new members, they used the techniques of brainwashing. When they wanted to raise money, they used deceptive marketing and advertising techniques. When they needed to fend off a justifiably skeptical outside world, they used the techniques of propaganda. If one is to believe the cult, God is neither loving, nor compassionate, nor forgiving. Rather, God speaks only through a single, fallible human being, and only concerns Himself in a loving way with a tiny, exclusive cult. He judges all people according to a single, rigid system of rules.

The God of the Krishna cult hated peace and had little use for human dignity and the human freedoms. Far from being the only legitimate religion, as the Krishna cult claims, it was not even a religion at all, not at least in the sense of the word I was taught as a child.

A Doctrine for All Times

There are difficulties involved with offering a single teaching that purports to be all-good for all people at all times. One quickly finds it necessary to minister to different peoples from quite different cultural and religious traditions.

To be sure, Prabhupada made concessions to strict Hindu practice after arriving in the United States. He initiated women, he offered the highly advanced status of sannyasa to relatively young and inexperienced men, and he substantially relaxed the traditional standard of thirty-two rounds of chanting per day. Whatever value a religious teachings may have had in its own time and place, it cannot be expected to apply equally well to everyone.

The Techniques of Mind Control

The Krishna cult achieved its influence by imposing a combination of physical, mental, and emotional controls. Taken separately, none of these can account for the total ownership of the individual. Taken together, however, they often proved irresistible. Over the years, writers and researchers have described these kinds of attack on the personality as mind control, coercive persuasion, and thought reform (also known as "brainwashing"). [See Appendix.]

The cult tried to control all aspects the devotees' lives, including their eating, sleeping, and other personal habits. The diet consisted mainly of foods that were high in carbohydrates, such as white rice and potatoes. Mung beans and breads made from bleached wheat flour did provide certain kinds of protein, but the diet lacked other important protein sources, such as whole grains, meat, eggs, and fish. The large amounts of sugar in the diet added little if any nutrition.

I believe that, in combination with other factors, the poor diet led to eating disorders in many devotees. To be sure, most devotees ate moderately most of the time, but many were not so moderate. Perhaps this was because they felt nutritionally unsatisfied even on a full stomach. Or, perhaps, as the devotees themselves often said, eating was one of the few physical pleasures that the cult allowed. The poor diet led them to spend much time in a prison-camp-like effort to obtain, or even hoard, food that was novel or of a higher-than-usual perceived quality.

Besides the strict control of diet, the cult tightly controlled the devotees' sleeping habits. They typically slept for six hours or less per night. They usually performed their duties, including driving, while half awake. Again, the devotees often expended large amounts of energy trying to sneak a little extra sleep.

The message to the devotees was that they were unworthy of a square meal or a good night's sleep. Furthermore, the cult tried to rationalize and falsely spiritualize the mechanisms of control by making such assertions as, "You are not your body," and "Your body belongs to Krishna." Whatever the merits of these statements as religious teachings, it is undeniable that they were convenient for unscrupulous persons who would try to reduce others to the status of slaves.

Another aspect of daily behavior over which the cult tried to exert control was personal cleanliness. There were many rules, such as "Never wear shoes in the temple" and "Always wash your hands and mouth after eating." The implications of the dogma concerning cleanliness were clear: the devotees were clean and godly, and the karmis were dirty and ungodly.

Prabhupada required the devotees to renounce everything associated with the world outside the cult. He instructed them to give up everything he regarded as incompatible with their duties and responsibilities in the cult. These included money, possessions, jobs, religion, and even, in many cases, spouse and children.

When devotees became ill, the cult offered them Hindu home cures or no treatment at all. There were several reasons for this. First, the cult preached the superiority of Hindu medicine over Western medicine. Second, the cult insisted that the devotees' illnesses were caused by their lack of faith, their forgetfulness of Krishna, or the slackness of their devotional attitudes. That is, illness was God's punishment for one's sins, and the way to cure an illness was to "surrender" one's life to the guru and Krishna. Third, the cult was reluctant to suffer the loss of money incurred by removing devotees, however temporarily, from the sankirtan team, and sending them for medical help. The leaders did permit some seriously ill devotees to see Western doctors, but only if their parents agreed to pay the bill.

An outside doctor reported that many of the Krishna women he examined were anemic, and that others had irregular or nonexistent menstrual periods. The cult interpreted the lack of a period not as a sign of potential illness, but rather as a sign of spiritual achievement, of having "transcended" the demands and restrictions of the body. Some sankirtan devotees developed premature varicose veins, apparently from standing for many hours every day. Male devotees often lost some of their facial or body hair, possibly due to the infantilizing effects of the techniques of cult mind control. The devotees' near-absolute dependency on the cult for the necessities of life infantilized them and caused their adult physiological characteristics to atrophy.

ISKCON businesses tended to be labor intensive. This was undoubtedly because of the ready availability of large quantities of what amounts to slave labor. For examples, handmade incense and candle factories, street solicitation and sales, and low-tech farming and animal husbandry. The number of such menial jobs far exceeded the number of specialized jobs, such as administration, public relations work, or magazine and book publishing. Most of the specialized jobs were concentrated at the larger temples such as Los Angeles and New York. Even in these locations, however, the menial jobs still greatly outnumbered the specialized ones.

In addition, even the specialized jobs offered little room for personal expression. For example, while painting the scenes from Prabhupada's books, every artist used the same colors and style to depict Krishna's features, complexion, and clothes.

As a rule, Prabhupada did not allow the devotees to choose their own duties. Once a leader established what it was that he wanted them to do, however, he did give them some latitude in determining how to do it. For example, Prabhupada expected the sankirtan devotees to use their minds and "intelligence" to devise better ways to raise money. No devotee, however, openly questioned the goal of raising money for ISKCON.

The reward for service was more service. No matter how much work a devotee did, still more remained. The devotees responded by working nearly to the point of exhaustion. They simply accepted and tried to live with the guilt that resulted from their inability to do everything the leaders asked of them.

Frenetic chanting and dancing, especially when performed in public, stripped the devotees of their excess energy, caused them to hyperventilate and feel high, distanced them from the memory of their lives before the cult, and increased their sense of commitment to a present life in the cult. In both the morning and evening programs, a long and intense kirtan immediately preceded the lecture, possibly because a person is more suggestible after an exhilarating or exhausting period of chanting.

Prabhupada asserted that the chanting of Hare Krishna was a form of personal communication with the Lord. He expected an experienced devotee to chant one round in about five minutes. A round consisted of 108 repetitions of the mantra, which in turn consisted of sixteen words of two syllables each. This comes to about eleven and a half syllables per second. If people speak at a rate of eleven and a half syllables every second, and if they repeat the same three-word message for hours, should we consider this a personal, intimate communication from the heart? No mechanical technique or methodology can be expected by itself lead to a spiritual end. On the contrary, excessive chanting emptied the devotees' minds. It deprived them of the opportunity to reflect on the reality around them, to maintain a healthy balance in their lives, and to communicate meaningfully with others.

Prabhupada prescribed and ritualized all the devotees' daily activities, no matter how small. At first, he directed them to simply perform their duties. The "practical realization" of the philosophy, he said, would happen in due course. He did not expect the devotees to understand the doctrine simply by reading and studying his books. Rather, he said that by engaging in his ritualistic practices, they would gradually lose their taste for such "mundane" activities as conversing, watching TV, or reading other books.

A philosophy that says, "Don't expect to understand why — just do what you are told," is a convenient one for those who would mislead others. If a universal, all-encompassing truth exists, then one might reasonably expect it to satisfy every part of us, including our intellectual and logical faculties.

The cult controlled the devotees' sex lives. It encouraged them to feel guilty about their sexual thoughts — not to mention their sexual activities. The cult considered the physical part of love — even kissing — to be dirty and motivated by the basest of instincts. The emotional part of love was nothing more than sentiment, the sworn enemy of spirituality. The highly restrictive rules for married devotees effectively precluded any possibility of tenderness, spontaneity, or genuine affection. The married devotees' sex lives, such as they were, must have been mechanical and lacking in feeling. Yet, at the same time, the cult labeled as animalistic the sex and love of the outside world. Who was without love?

The cult discouraged and even tried to eliminate family life as we usually understand it outside the cult. The leaders usually determined who married whom, as well as the number and timing of children. When children reached the age of five years, the cult sent them to its boarding school. There it limited parental visits to two per year. Like their parents, the children had little or no contact with the world outside the cult. There stimulation was limited to such activities as painting pictures of Krishna and hearing stories about him and his mythological friends.

In her memoir Betrayal of the Spirit, former Krishna member Nori Muster notes Prabhupada's abuse of the institution of sannyasa at the expense of the nuclear family. No matter how steady in the faith a twenty-five or thirty-year-old may be, few are fully prepared to commit to a lifetime of renunciation. Indeed, many have long since fallen away not only from their duties within the cult but from the cult itself. Even worse, however, were the devastating effects of such premature initiations on their wives and children, who were often left with no means of support other than the temple. (Muster, p. 85)

As the strict controls over their bodily functions weakened them physically, the psychological controls weakened the devotees mentally and emotionally. For example, Prabhupada granted his "mercy" — that is, his spiritual blessing or, in the Christian term, his forgiveness — to a devotee only at the end of a lifetime of continuous, unwavering service. This was the carrot at the end of the stick. He linked his idea of "mercy" to his ideas of duty and service. Just as service was a one-way street, so was mercy. The disciples followed the spiritual master's orders "without hesitation and without consideration," and only he could bless or validate their efforts. That is, the price of forgiveness was obedience and servitude.

Besides controlling the devotees' bodies and emotions, the cult made a great effort to control their thoughts as well. Often-heard directives included, "Always think of Krishna" and "Always remember the spiritual master's instructions." The leaders often accused new or rebellious devotees of "thinking too much" or of being "in their minds." The solution to any ideological problem was to chant or engage in service to the cult. The doctrine itself was above criticism.

The devotees vowed at initiation to fully accept the philosophy and never ask a challenging question. Working twelve to fifteen hours a day, they had little time or energy to even formulate such a question. That is, the cult succeeded in creating an environment in which the devotees policed their own thoughts. Knowing from their own experience how problematic for their Krishna consciousness a free moment could be, the devotees worked hard toward the goal of having no free time at all. After all, an omniscient and punitive God knew and recorded all their thoughts as well as all their actions.

Many aspects of the doctrine were hard for a novice to accept. For examples, a blue boy is God; a plant is a pure devotee of God; God likes cows more than humans; Hitler was humane. These kinds of statements served an important function, however. They were ideological loyalty tests. They provided the leadership with a quick and ready method of determining who was fully committed to the cause and who was not; who was willing to believe the unbelievable and accept the unacceptable and who was not; and who was willing to go the entire distance in achieving the mission and who was not.

The leader insisted that the devotees give up all happiness and enjoyment derived from sources outside the cult. These included personal achievements, family, friendships, and even an appreciation of the natural world. The devotees were required to channel their natural sense of mystery, wonder, and imagination into a narrow, rigid ideological and doctrinal system. Although they sometimes felt a temporary sense of relief after giving up problematic "attachments" to the world outside the cult, the devotees also felt pain after losing the positive aspects of their previous lives. In this way, pain and happiness tended to replace each other, leading them to become highly disoriented.

The cult controlled all the devotees' personal habits to the detail level, and forced them to sever all ties with the outside world. These efforts at control made it easier for the cult to narrow their perspectives, isolate them from others, and manipulate their feelings. All devotees had a variety of feelings while chanting, in much the same way that anyone inside or outside the cult is likely over time to have a variety of feelings while not chanting.

One of the more seductive aspects of the cult was the promise that, while chanting, a devotee would experience "transcendental ecstasy" or "bliss," the feeling of having risen above ordinary, mundane existence. This often-repeated assertion fulfilled itself whenever the devotees had intense feelings, whatever their actual nature or origins. They interpreted these emotions as the "transcendental" emotion of which Prabhupada spoke so often.

For an example, the devotees might feel lightheaded after chanting at high volume for an extended time. For another, in winter they might feel a shivering in their bodies due to an open door or window in the temple room. Following instructions, however, the devotees interpreted these feelings as "transcendental ecstasy." Similarly, the leaders labeled as "anxiety" or "agitation" any feeling that was untoward or bothersome. In this way, the cult interpreted the meaning of the devotees' emotions, carefully and conveniently attributing all positive feelings to itself, and all negative ones to the world outside the cult.

If a devotee were thinking of leaving, the leaders usually found out about it before long. No one can fake an attitude forever, not even those who were in the habit of hiding their emotions. Furthermore, one's fellow devotees considered it their duty to tell the leaders about the struggles of a deviant devotee among them. Such information gathering was supposedly done for the sake of the troubled devotee. The leaders reminded the devotee of his vow of obedience, and repeated the assertion that outside the cult he would be unable even to survive, let alone be happy.

Whether for the sake of institutional advancement or simple survival, the devotees ended up spending much of their time trying to maintain outward appearances even as they struggled with their lack of Krishna consciousness. Former member Steven Gelberg has called this, "carefully ... stage-managing one's self-presentation to one's fellows." Robert Lifton calls it "self-protective playacting." A devotee quickly learned that the outward and the inward are closely connected, especially in an environment that places a high value on both external ritual and the quest for inner purity.

One may also see a cult experience as a form of extended hypnosis. At prearranged cues, devotees did, said, and felt no more nor less than what the cult told them to do, say, and feel. The trappings of the Krishna cult — the costumes, decorations, incense, music, and vocabulary — became triggers or cues that reminded them of the imputed divinity and their duty to serve it. In addition, the leaders subjected the devotees to many posthypnotic suggestions. They were saying, in effect, "You will join the cult; you will surrender to Prabhupada; you will give everything to the cult; you will go out on sankirtan; you will be blissful; you will not leave the Movement." Lacking any sense of control over their environment, or even a clear boundary between them and it, the devotees soon found themselves unable to act independently.

Suppose for the sake of argument that one subjected a group of persons to stage hypnosis twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year. Suppose that the hypnotic suggestions covered every aspect of life, from bodily functions through theology. Suppose even further that the hypnotist never removed these suggestions but only reinforced them through constant repetition. Such persons would eventually face grave difficulties in distinguishing their own thoughts from those of the hypnotist.

Prabhupada wrote that you and I have just two choices: to serve Krishna, or to serve Maya. In another place, he wrote that the will of the individual and the will of Krishna should be one. Furthermore, any act that is considered bad in a narrowly ethical or moral context would be good if performed under the order of the spiritual master. Conversely, if Krishna disapproved, then any act ordinarily taken as good would be bad.

So long as individual will and group will were taken as identical, the devotees remained unable to act on their own behalf. Furthermore, so long as the leaders made no distinction between a moral or ethical act and an immoral or unethical one, the devotees remained unable to verbalize any objections they may have harbored to group activities. This was true even when the devotees knew of or suspected serious problems.

Scientists speak of the importance of genetics in determining who we are and how our lives will unfold. Most would agree, however, that nurture, or the totality of our experiences, is equally important in making us who we are. The genetically determined part of our makeup aside, we are largely the sum of our experiences. They are, in a manner of speaking, the raw materials out of which we create our lives. A cliché holds that we are what we eat. To extend the metaphor, we are what we take in through all of our senses. It would follow, then, that to a large extent those who control our experience, control us. It should not surprise us, therefore, that a leader who is interested in controlling others would go to great lengths to try to micromanage their day-by-day and minute-by-minute experiences.

Mark Twain wrote, "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." No closed, totalitarian system can ever fix what is wrong with me, my community, or the world.

In sum, the devotees learned to fear the natural functioning of their bodies and minds, and to direct their love and affection toward an externally imposed system of verbal and physical controls. Constant stress, emotional manipulation, broken families, a poor diet, and a lack of sleep and proper medical care combined to produce an unhealthful, if not life-threatening, experience.

A LETTER FROM A FORMER MEMBER

Soon after leaving the cult, I corresponded briefly with Cheryl Wheeler, who was known in it as Syama. One of the first devotees on the West Coast and one of the first women in the Movement, she had recently walked away from the cult after nine years of involvement. Her warm and thoughtful words helped to smooth my transition from slavery to freedom. Here are some excerpts:

Dear Paul,

I am glad you are out of the Hare Krishna Movement. It is time now to celebrate life and thank God you saw the light. I know these first few months will be somewhat shaky, but it is time now to hold on to yourself and develop your conviction and steadfastness on a truly personal relationship with the God inside your heart. You will grow stronger daily. ...

I hope that you are well and happy and relieved, and I wish you all the patience and self-reliance at this time. It is time now to remain grounded in what you personally believe to be the truth. Be grateful for the support of your loving family and for your own desire to really know yourself. And know that you are not alone. ...

Face it — Hare Krishna is a negative power and I'm glad you saw your way out of it. The Hare Krishna people destroy Intuition — it is a gradual process to regain it. We made a mistake in the first place to ever join up with such a group. Remember, God is not limited to any movement, group of people, or rules, dogma or indoctrination. ...

Remember in the Bible it says, "Honor thy mother and father." Just look at that for a minute. Family love is so deep — as you know how your parents helped you to get on your feet. I honor my parents with great respect and humility now, for I know my mind was not my own. I was being manipulated. ...

I feel it is our duty to let the public know what the truth of the Hare Krishna Movement is. ...

Love to you and your family. Keep your chin up.

Cheryl Wheeler

AFTERWORD

Those who aspire to write about an alien reality often grope for words to describe it. Readers, too, faces challenges, for a destructive cult is a far darker place than most of us can easily imagine. Cult language and doctrine are dense, intimidating, and all but inaccessible to anyone but a True Believer. Being literarily sterile, cult language tends to numb, rather than excite, the imagination.

As a person who has had one leg in the cult and the other on the earthly planet, I'm aware that to some my credibility in both worlds is compromised. I believe, however, that my experiences give me a special opportunity to bridge the gap between worlds that have so much, and yet so little, in common.

I've refrained in this book from quoting extensively from cult literature. Instead, I've tried to use the same words an ordinary cult member may have used in conversation. This is partly because I found informal conversation to be as revealing of cult mentality as the dry written word, and partly because I'm not a scholar of the Swami Prabhupada's books. I leave it to others more knowledgeable than me to do an exhaustive study of his writings.

The spellings of terms and names in this book are the same as those used by the cult, except for a few words I spelled in a way that is more phonetic for a reader in the English language.

As noted before, Prabhupada encouraged his followers to be "mad after Krishna." Each of the various meanings of the word "mad" — insane, angry, rabid, frantic, irrational, foolish, infatuated, and wildly exuberant — apply all too well to the Krishna Consciousness Movement. I hope that hearing one person's story will help us all to move toward a better world, a world of sanity, wisdom, and peace of mind.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For their help in the preparation of this manuscript, I thank Loretta Chardin, Erica Heftmann, Ermyn France King, Elizabeth Shirey, Allen Tate Wood, my aunt, Joanne Mott Kilpack, and my mother, Barbara Patton. Thanks also to the formal and informal anti-cult networks, without whose help I could not have escaped from the Krishna cult, and to all former cult members who have written and spoken about their cult experiences. They are men and women of courage.

APPENDIX: BRAINWASHING AND IDEOLOGICAL TOTALISM

In the mid-1950s, a young US Air Force psychiatrist named Robert Jay Lifton traveled to Hong Kong to investigate the "brainwashing" of Westerners and Asians by the Chinese Communist revolutionaries. In Chapter 22 ("Ideological Totalism") of the resulting work, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Lifton described eight psychological symptoms of this previously unstudied and poorly understood phenomenon.

Thought reform has its roots in the extraction of confessions during the 1930s-era Soviet purges, and in Chinese culture, particularly the Confucian emphasis on strong family connections. Nevertheless, as I read and reread this chapter, I was struck by the close relationship between brainwashing and the Krishnas, an Americanized version of a Hindu splinter sect. Other observers have concluded from these parallels that contemporary destructive cults may have borrowed certain techniques from the Communists. While it is true that manipulators in any period use whatever technology may be at their disposal, it is equally true that abusive systems of one kind or another have always been with us.

Here are Lifton's eight symptoms of thought reform:

Milieu Control

"Milieu control" (p. 420), the control of communication, is the most basic feature of the thought reform environment. The Krishna cult controlled not only everything the devotees read and heard, but everything they said and wrote as well. They were to read only Prabhupada's books, listen only to taped lectures by him and his top disciples, speak only of Krishna or Krishna consciousness, and chant or sing only Hare Krishna and other approved mantras. In my five years in the cult, I watched no TV, heard no radio, and read no books, magazines, or newspapers that originated outside the cult. In addition, the leaders discouraged the keeping of diaries or notebooks. Devotees had little time to write much more than an occasional letter, and they assumed with good reason that the leaders opened and read all mail.

Likewise, the control of information coming from outside the cult was tight. For example, the press often carried stories about crimes that devotees had committed and the struggles between parents and the cult over the custody of minor children. The general devotee population heard little or nothing about these events through official cult channels. As I wrote, outsiders I spoke with on the street often knew more about external cult affairs than I did as a full-time member.

Nevertheless, as pervasive as milieu control might be, it never becomes complete, Lifton wrote. Rather, outside "noise" (p. 421) inevitably leaks into even the most tightly controlled environment. The cult used the term "mundane sound vibrations" to refer to any sounds other than the Hare Krishna mantra or the spiritual master's words of instruction.

Milieu control is based on the assumption of unique access to the truth (p. 421) and a further assumption that truth and reality are the same. That is, doctrine and objective reality are the same. Milieu control thereby succeeds in dividing the world into two mutually exclusive worlds: the "real" and the "unreal" (p. 421). According to the cult, everything associated with it was real, or in their words, "eternal, blissful, and full of knowledge." All else was Maya, that is, characterized by impermanence, suffering, and ignorance.

Further, those who believe that the group possesses all knowledge may adopt a "God's Eye View" (p. 421) of the world. In a similar vein, Prabhupada wrote that his books revealed the Absolute Truth by way of a kind of infallible sixth sense called shastra chaksus, or the "eyes of scripture." Indeed, the devotees did come to believe that, unlike the karmis, they uniquely saw the world as God saw it.

Under the constraints of milieu control, the devotees lost meaningful contact with the world outside the cult and became convinced that they alone had access to what is true and real.

Mystical Manipulation

Thought reform environments "create a mystical aura around the manipulating institutions ..." (p. 422). As "a branch of Lord Chaitanya's tree," the Krishna cult was more than simply God's Movement; it was God Himself in an earthly manifestation. Similarly, the chanting of Krishna's names was tantamount to Krishna Himself; as were His books, the Deities, and the ritual of sankirtan fund-raising. The altar, the temple building, and its grounds, were part of the spiritual world. Prabhupada was no ordinary man. As a "pure devotee of God," he was in a perpetual state of transcendental ecstasy. His feces smelled like roses, according to the cult.

Another important feature of mystical manipulation is "planned spontaneity" (p. 422). Krishna devotees sometimes cried, shivered, or even fainted while chanting and dancing. They viewed these emotions as spontaneous expressions of "transcendental ecstasy," even though they arose only after the devotees engaged in chanting and dancing for several weeks or months, all the while hearing the philosophy of Krishna consciousness.

Mystical manipulation is marked by "extremes of idealism and cynicism" (p. 422). The Krishna cult professed a belief in the importance of God's love and God's mercy in human affairs while simultaneously engaging in large-scale charity fraud and other crimes.

Those who had been exposed to thought reform felt that they had "directly perceived" (p. 422) the Communist dogmas of social progress. Using the same exact phrase, the Krishna cult maintained that knowledge is "directly perceived" through obedience to the spiritual master.

Under the enchantment of mystical manipulation, the devotees believed that a spiritual aura surrounded each of the cult's instruments of personal and interpersonal control.

The Demand for Purity

The "demand for purity" (p. 423) is a rigid standard of perfection in behavior and thought. The cult imposed many rules concerning the physical cleanliness of the body, the altar, the kitchen, and the temple building. Other rules enforced rigid standards of doctrinal purity. A devotee was never to "deviate," even for a second, from the teachings. The standard of purity was, for practical purposes, unattainable.

At first, the devotees heard, "All you have to do is chant." After doing this, they heard, "All you have to do is chant and cut off your ties to the outside world." Then it was, "All you have to do is chant, cut off your ties to the outside world, and go out on sankirtan." Then, "All you have to do is chant, cut off your ties to the outside world, go out on sankirtan, and collect more money this week than you collected last week." And so on. The list of demands never ended, and we all knew that no flesh-and-blood devotee ever achieved the mythical state of pure Krishna consciousness. Yet devotees insisted on believing in the divinity or near-divinity of the spiritual master.

Almost every devotee I knew, from low-level members like myself to the top leaders, fell badly from the regulations from time to time. For example, most of the sannyasis — not to mention us lowly brahmacharis — have long since broken their vow of celibacy, often despite their often superhuman efforts.

To achieve such purity, "all 'taints' and 'poisons' which contribute to the existing state of impurity must be searched out and eliminated" (p. 423). In the Krishna cult, everything that was impure or imperfect in the individual devotee was a result of previous or current "contamination" by the world outside the cult. The purpose of devotional service was to eliminate such contamination.

Lifton wrote, "anything done to anyone in the name of this purity is ultimately moral" (p. 423). In this vein, a verse in the Bhagavad-gita As It Is reads: "Even if one commits the most abominable actions, he is considered to be saintly, if he is properly situated." That is, the devotees were to do whatever the leaders asked of them, without considering the rightness or wrongness of the action in question. Prabhupada wrote in a "purport" in the same book that if Krishna wants, the devotee may do anything one would ordinarily consider undesirable. That is, the cult is an amoral place where the dictates of the leader transcend ordinary notions of morality and immorality.

Due to the demand for purity, "each person is made vulnerable ... through his existential guilt" (p. 424). According to the Krishna cult, if one had a body, he was "caught red-handed"; that is, he was guilty of past sins. People were sinful, according to the cult.

Lifton wrote, "the universal psychological tendency toward projection is nourished and institutionalized, leading to mass hatreds, purges of heretics, and to political and religious holy wars" (p. 425). Krishna doctrine used projection (ascribing to others one's own thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, especially when they are undesirable) in many ways:

• "Karmis are slaves." Yet the leaders told the devotees what to do with every minute of their time. Devotees freely admitted their servitude to the leader and to Krishna; they were proud to be a "dog of God."

• "Karmis are miserable." Yet devotees scorned happiness as a goal and led lives of harsh physical, emotional, and moral renunciation.

• "Karmis are materialists." Yet devotees spent most of their time selling things and collecting money.

• "Karmis are brainwashed." Yet the leaders controlled all media and communication within the cult and manipulated the devotees' emotions of love, hate, fear, and shame.

• "Material consciousness is artificial." Yet, to maintain their Krishna consciousness, devotees needed to spend several hours a day chanting and listening to lectures.

• "The [outside] world is an illusion." Yet mythology and idolatry were important parts of the Krishna program. Devotees often imagined that they were dancing with the Deity of Krishna, that He was smiling at them, or that a visible aura surrounded the altar or the temple grounds.

• "The [outside] world is a place of death." Yet Krishna doctrine emphasized the paramount importance of the afterlife and the moment of death.

Under the relentless demand for purity, the devotees strove in vain for a form of perfection no human can achieve.

The Cult of Confession

The thought reform environment employed forced confession as a technique for attaining ideological purity. Krishna leaders insisted that the devotees "reveal their minds" to their peers and superiors. Devotees never knew when others might inform on them. On the contrary, they believed that informing on another devotee helped both to advance in their Krishna consciousness.

The cult used a twist on the idea of confession to rewrite the devotees' personal histories. The spiritual master said in effect that everything the devotees had done before joining the cult was misguided and evil. Trying hard to conform to cult demands, devotees openly talked — or even bragged — about how "fallen" they had been before joining the Movement. All devotees wanted to achieve the mythical status of "the most fallen," presumably so that the distance traveled in becoming a pure devotee of the Lord was the greatest. Thus, selflessness became a form of egotism.

Devotees at first overlooked and then forgot all instances of love, caring, or compassion in their previous lives. Meanwhile, the cult encouraged them to remember the fights, the problems at home, and the other troublesome times, which it labeled as a typical or even necessary aspect of life in the world outside the cult. For example, devotees tended to recall occasional use or abuse of alcohol or other drugs as full-fledged addiction. Likewise, a series of failed relationships became in retrospect full-blown sex addiction.

Under the spell of the cult of confession, the devotees rewrote their life histories to conform to the expectations of the cult.

The Sacred Science

Not only does the prevailing doctrine in the thought reform environment have strong mystical elements, it has pretensions of scientific accuracy. The key to the enormous appeal of the "sacred science" (p. 427) is its seeming ability to answer questions that are unanswerable by science or religion alone. Besides its theological statements, the Krishna cult offered many pseudoscientific pronouncements. For examples, a woman is nine times lustier than a man; there are exactly 8,400,000 species of living things; and the moon is farther away from the earth than the sun. Science, of course, verifies none of these claims.

Under the seductive dogmatism of the sacred science, a devotee believed that cult doctrine answered all of life's ultimate questions.

Loaded Language

Lifton wrote, "the language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché" (p. 429). A familiar or often-repeated phrase or expression quickly and decisively concluded any discussion. For example, devotees often began their sentences with "Prabhupada said ..." This ended any possibility of disagreement on a given subject. Doctrinal disputes as such did not exist. The devotees needed only to concern themselves with what Prabhupada had said on that subject. Devotees commanded, "Chant Hare Krishna," the panacea for any ailment. Yet another cliché was, "It's all Maya," which devotees used to dismiss all thoughts or ideas associated with the world outside the cult.

In much the same way, the Sanskrit mantras, such as Hare Krishna, functioned as thought-stopping clichés. One may look at a devotee's day as a long sequence of mantras for every occasion. Ordinary speech, which consisted mainly of English-language mantras in praise of Prabhupada and Krishna, was another collection of clichés.

Some of the clichés were true simply as a result of the definition of the terms involved. For example, "God is in your heart." Surely, if God is everywhere, then He is in your heart. The truism, "God is great and you are small," relegates the listener or speaker to a position less than that of God's representative.

Loaded language also consists of categorical and pejorative statements about the world outside the cult. For examples, "The whole world is demonic," and "The whole world is a burning forest fire."

Loaded language includes "ultimate terms," including "god terms" and "devil terms" (p. 429). Examples of ultimate terms include absolute (as in "the Absolute Truth"), eternal (as in "eternal bliss and knowledge"), perfect (as in "perfect in Krishna consciousness"), and supreme (as in "Supreme Personality of Godhead").

Here are some of the "god terms" and "devil terms" used in the Krishna cult:

A devotee was Aryan, austere, blissful, ecstatic, effulgent, expert, first-class, grave, humble, Krishna conscious, obedient, receptive, sincere, and stalwart. He was advanced, determined, enlivened, fixed up, God-intoxicated, Krishnized, properly situated, regulated, surrendered, and trained up. He was a child before the guru, a cog in a machine, a dog on a leash, a sold-out animal, and a worm in stool.

Those who were not devotees were demons, flapping dead bodies, fools, "fruitive workers," karmis, miscreants, prostitutes, prostitute hunters, puppets on a string, rascals, robots, slaves, sleepwalkers, walking corpses, and witches. They were animals, snakes, "cats and dogs," and "dogs, hogs, camels, and asses."

Nondevotees were asleep, delirious, envious, independent, insane, last-class, morose, rebellious, sentimental, useless, and whimsical. They were agitated, attached, conditioned, contaminated, diseased, entangled, fallen, ghostly haunted, and puffed up. Furthermore, they were in a trance, in illusion, in Maya, in the modes of material nature, and under a spell. This was because they longed to be the controller and the enjoyer. Being situated on the mental platform, they were filled with false ego, ignorance, and nescience. Always engaging in concoction, economic development, word jugglery, and mental speculation, always hankering after sense gratification, and always engaged in "eating and sleeping," they felt only anxiety and misery.

On the other hand, the spiritual master, guru, or pure devotee, was authorized, bona fide, and merciful. He preached the Absolute Truth, Krishna consciousness, and love of God. He engaged his disciples in devotional service, which was auspicious and favorable. Part and parcel of his message was love and devotion for the Deities, who were opulent and transcendental. Meanwhile, big, big "impersonalist" cheaters, bogus yogis, and so-called masters preached unauthorized, dualistic, and many-branched nonsense. They engaged their followers in artificial, hellish, mundane, and offensive activities.

A language that consists entirely of ultimate terms offers no opportunity for analysis from within. Rather, meaningful criticism and analysis are possible only from without.

Krishna language is notable as well for the words it does not contain and the ideas it does not convey. In ordinary conversation, devotees used a vocabulary of perhaps a few hundred words and phrases. They were, therefore, unable to express subtlety in human affairs or describe in depth anything other than Krishna or devotional service. Absent from their vocabulary were words concerning:

• Amusement. For example, diversion, entertainment, fun, game, hobby, humor, joke, laughter, leisure, recreation, relaxation, sport, vacation, variety, and weekend.

• Bodily functions. For example, eating, exercise, fatigue, health, sleep, and stress.

• Thought and imagination. For example, ambiguity, analysis, comparison, creativity, criticism, discovery, dream, education, intellect, interpretation, learning, perspective, and subtlety.

• Logic. For example, premise, deduction, and conclusion.

• Communication and interpersonal relationships. For example, affection, agreement, attention, caring, concern, dignity, help, hug, intimacy, kiss, need, and tenderness.

• Democracy and human rights. For example, citizen, consensus, difference of opinion, election, expression, freedom, individual, liberty, majority, mediation, minority, negotiation, people, privacy, speech, tolerance, and vote.

Paradoxes pervade the doctrine, as Prabhupada had a habit of equating opposites. Paraphrasing him:

• Knowledge is ignorance; ignorance is knowledge. One who sought knowledge from ordinary books was cultivating ignorance. Conversely, one gained real knowledge simply by chanting Hare Krishna.

• Education is propaganda; propaganda is education. Karmi schools trained people to be stupid. Conversely, the cult removed the insidious programming a person had received from the schools. One received a real education by reading Prabhupada's books and chanting.

• Giving is taking; taking is giving. If the devotees gave money or ordinary food to karmis, then the devotees would only be perpetuating their miserable earthly existence, thus taking away an opportunity to become Krishna conscious. Conversely, the more the devotees took money from the karmis, the more the devotees were giving them in spiritual terms. Whether or not the karmis knew it, and whether or not they accepted cult philosophy, they advanced in Krishna consciousness in proportion to how much they gave the cult.

• Selflessness is selfishness; selfishness is selflessness.

• Freedom is slavery; slavery is freedom. One became free only by submitting to strict cult discipline. Conversely, material existence bound and enslaved all those who acted on the mistaken belief that they were free.

• Pleasure is pain; pain is pleasure. The pursuit of earthly pleasures led to an eternity of pain. Conversely, the pain of undergoing strict, unwavering obedience to Prabhupada's instructions led to eternal pleasure in the next world.

• Life is death; death is life. That which people in the world outside the cult called living was actually dying. Before each meal the devotees repeated the saying, "The senses are a network of paths to death." Sensory enjoyment, or attempted enjoyment, hastened death and perpetuated the miserable cycle of birth and death. Conversely, a devotee who died in Krishna's service attained eternal life.

The cult used the power of loaded language to announce the truth of its own assertions and the falsity of all other assertions.

Doctrine Over Person

The Krishna cult emphasized the importance of doctrine, even going so far as to elevate it to the status of divinity. The cult simultaneously downgraded ordinary human experience, comparing it to that of a puppet controlled by an evil puppeteer.

The thought reform worldview is like a morality play wherein good always triumphs over evil (p. 431). The Krishna devotees sometimes staged plays at the Sunday feast wherein karmis first cursed the devotees and later became devotees themselves.

Under the crushing weight of doctrine over person, the devotees became less than fully human. Rather, they became little more than human extensions of an ideology.

The Dispensing of Existence

The final feature of the thought reform environment is "the dispensing of existence" (p. 433), the belief that some people have the right to exist and that others have no such right. Krishna blessed the devotees with eternally blissful lives, and condemned the karmis to innumerable miserable deaths.

Krishna philosophy emphasized death, which it linked closely with the highest level of spiritual attainment. The world was a "place of death." When people were born, they began to die. A cliché was, "If Krishna wants to kill you, no one can save you; if Krishna wants to save you, no one can kill you." Devotees tell the following story: The guru holds a disciple's head under water for two minutes. The guru tells the student, "You must want Krishna more than you just wanted air." Not surprisingly, devotees felt dependent on Krishna for their lives.

Devotees spent their lives preparing for the "moment of death," because the perfection of life was to die in Krishna consciousness. If, however, one were unable to give one's life to Krishna, the next best thing would be to be killed by Him. In the literature, Krishna often killed the demons, thereby liberating them.

Devotees aspired to be chanting, serving Prabhupada, or simply thinking of Krishna at the moment of death. The leaders expected them to think, "Today may be the last day of my life; let me spend it in Krishna consciousness." Devotees believed that if they were not serving Prabhupada at the time of their death, then they would go to hell.

Everyone harbors some fear of death and a skilled manipulator can exploit that fear. Yet, even among destructive cults, the Krishna Movement has a reputation for extraordinary violence.

Under the deadly requirements of the dispensing of existence, the devotees relinquished the greatest responsibility of all — the responsibility for their own lives and for the lives of others.

Conclusion

Several closely related, mutually reinforcing psychological themes characterize and define the totalist environment. In its most extreme form, everything one reads, writes, hears, and speaks is subject to heavy-handed censorship. Language consists of god-terms and devil-terms; expressions of ambiguity are almost entirely absent. Issues large and small are analyzed by way of discussion-ending slogans. Hard-to-obtain standards of ideological and behavioral purity are rigidly enforced.

The prevailing doctrine presumes to offer a unique combination of the accuracy and predictive powers of modern science, along with the insight and intuition of age-old, time-honored wisdom. Constructed as it is by fallible humans and deeply imbedded in the complexities of a modern post-industrial world, the doctrine is nevertheless offered as all-good for all people at all times. It is implemented in their lives by any means necessary and without concern for the welfare of the individual. These and other similar themes in place, the cult asserts the final, godlike right to determine who among its membership and non-membership alike shall live and who shall die.

The above themes are by no means exclusive to full-blown cults; many are found to a lesser extent in moderate, mainstream environments. Above all, the totalist environment is known for its extremist tendencies, its willingness to carry an idea all the way to its logical conclusion without the constraints imposed by commonly accepted notions of ethics, morality, or decency.

Lifton states in his memoir that the above psychological symptoms are relevant not only to Chinese Communist thought reform, but to individual and group psychology as well.

GLOSSARY

appearance day: birthday

Arjuna: the warrior/devotee to whom Krishna dictated the Bhagavad Gita

arotik: a ceremony involving devotional offerings to the Krishna Deities

ashram: a dormitory or sleeping quarters for devotees; literally, place for religious exercise

Back to Godhead (BTG): a monthly magazine founded by Prabhupada and later written and edited by ISKCON devotees

Bhagavad Gita (literally, song of God): the primary Hindu scripture; a conversation between Krishna and His devotee Arjuna that took place on a battlefield

Bhagavad-gita As It Is: the Swami Prabhupada's translation of and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita

bhakta: an uninitiated male devotee

bhakti yoga: the yoga of devotion to Krishna

bhaktin: an uninitiated female devotee

bindi: a red dot worn in the center of a householder woman's forehead; an auspicious sign for her marriage and family

bloop: to leave the Movement (so named because the soul was thought to make this sound when falling into the material world)

Brahma, Lord: the demigod who created the material universe

brahmachari: a single, celibate male devotee

brahmacharini: a single, celibate female devotee

brahmachari(ni) ashram: sleeping quarters for (fe)male devotees

brahma-muhurta: the quiet and auspicious hours just before dawn

Brahmin: a member of the priestly class; ISKCON second initiate

Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT): the publishing arm of ISKCON

Chaitanya, Lord: the Sixteenth-Century incarnation of Krishna who began the modern Sankirtan Movement

chapati: flat, unleavened wheat bread

commander (or temple commander): a devotee whose duty was to assign daily duties to other devotees

conch: the coiled, spiral shell of a marine animal; considered pure and uncontaminated, it was used in temple worship and other rituals

dahl: a soup made with mung or urd beans, vegetables, and spices

danda: a bamboo walking stick that symbolizes the position of a sannyasi; it is about six feet long, three or four inches in diameter at the base, narrower at the top, and is tightly wrapped in strips of saffron-dyed cloth

Deities: representations of Krishna who are sanctified by the spiritual master and worshiped as God by the devotees

demon: a nondevotee

dhoti: a men's robe that covers from waist to ankles; usually made from about three yards of un-hemmed white or saffron-dyed cotton cloth

disciplic succession: the unbroken chain of spiritual masters from Krishna to the present; similar to the Roman Catholic "apostolic succession" of bishops from the Apostles to the present

fixed up: advanced in the practice of Krishna consciousness

four regulative principles [also, four regs]: no illicit sex, no intoxication, no meat eating, and no gambling or mental speculation

fringie: a part-time devotee who sometimes embarrassed the Movement with his unauthorized behavior

Ganges: a sacred river that has its source in the Himalayas and empties into the Bay of Bengal

Gaur-Nitai: a temple Deity form of Krishna, usually made of metal

gayatri: a mantra silently or quietly chanted by Brahmins every morning, noon, and evening

ghee: clarified butter used in ceremonies or as a cooking oil; sometimes called "popcorn butter oil" in the United States

Gita: see Bhagavad Gita

Governing Body Commission (GBC): ISKCON's equivalent of a board of directors

Gopis: cowherd girlfriends of Krishna who played transcendental games with Him in the spiritual world

guru: spiritual master; literally, venerable or heavy

gurukula: a school for the children of devotees

halavah: a cake-like preparation made from toasted farina, butter, and sugar

harmonium: a hand-pumped keyboard instrument used in the performance of kirtan

Hare Krishna mantra: the most sacred of all mantras ("Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare")

Hare Krishna Movement: informal name for ISKCON; see ISKCON

Haribol: an interjection meaning "chant the Holy Names of the Lord"

hatha yoga: a form of yoga that emphasizes body positions and breathing exercises

householder: a married devotee

in Maya: living a worldly life; living in sin; a state of forgetfulness of Krishna

ISKCON (International Society for Krishna CONsciousness): the official, legal name of the Krishna cult; sometimes called the Hare Krishna Movement

Jagganath: a temple Deity form of Krishna, usually made of wood

japa: the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra on beads

japa-mala: the sacred beads on which Hare Krishna is chanted

Jaya: an interjection meaning "Victory"

Kali-yuga: the present age, the Age of Quarrel and Ignorance

karatals: brass hand cymbals used in the performance of kirtan

karma: the results in this life to one's sinful actions in previous lives; the cosmic force that binds the soul to a materialistic, earthly existence

karmi: nondevotee; one who works only for the fruits of his labors

kirtan: congregational chanting, usually with instruments and dancing

Krishna: God; literally, black or dark

Krishna Book: a trilogy of stories about Krishna in His incarnation as a cowherd boy in Vrindavan, India

Krishna prasadam: see prasadam

kurtah: a long-sleeved, collarless shirt made of lightweight cotton fabric and worn by male devotees

Lakshmi: money; the Goddess of Fortune, eternal consort of Krishna

Lakshmi point: a dollar

lassi: (also known as nectar) a drink made from fruit juice, sugar, ice, and yogurt or buttermilk

mahaprasadam: high-quality foodstuffs prepared especially for the Dieties, usually in small quantities and highly coveted by the devotees

maharaja: (literally "great king") a title given to sannyasis or other exalted leaders

mahatma: great soul

mangala arotik: an early morning ceremony; the most auspicious of arotiks; see arotik

mantra: an ancient form of prayer in which the names of God or scriptural verses are spoken or sung in a repeating pattern

Maya: the material energy or material nature, represented by a seductive woman; the personality or force that lures the soul away from God; in Christian terms, worldly temptation, mammon, or the Devil

mercy: in Christian terminology, blessing or forgiveness

modes of (material) nature: see mode of goodness, mode of passion, mode of ignorance

mode of goodness: behavior that is benign and blameless, but that nevertheless falls short of Krishna consciousness

mode of ignorance: sleep or sloth

mode of passion: behavior that is directed by one's emotions, rather than by God

mridanga: oblong double-headed Bengali drum used in the performance of kirtan

Nectar of Devotion: a book of Vaishnava philosophy translated by Prabhupada and published by the BBT

New Vrindavan: ISKCON farm commune near Moundsville, West Virginia

Nityananda, Lord: eternal companion of Lord Chaitanya

obeisances: the humble act of kneeling, touching the forehead to the floor, and repeating short mantras addressed to the spiritual master and to the disciplic succession of masters

poppers: large, ultra-thin, deep-fried crackers

prasadam: foodstuffs prepared for and offered to Krishna, the remnants of which are later taken by devotees and guests (also Krishna prasadam)

puffed up: cocky or satisfied with one's service

pujari: a senior devotee who was trained in the performance of devotional rituals in the temple

pure devotee: a devotee who has achieved perfection, such as the spiritual master

Radharani (also Radha): Krishna's eternal consort in the spiritual world

Radha-Krishna: a temple Deity form of Krishna, usually made of marble

Ratha-Yatra: an annual outdoor festival in honor of Lord Jagganath, held in San Francisco and other cities

regulative principles: see four regulative principles

rest: sleep

round: the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra once on each of the 108 beads of the japa-mala

saffron: a flower whose orange or yellow-orange stigmas are used to die cloth or to add color to a food preparation

samadhi: complete absorption in love of God; roughly analogous to the Christian conception of heaven

sankirtan: the public chanting of Hare Krishna; by extension, the sale of Krishna-conscious books or magazines in public places

sannyasa: the spiritual order of renunciation and itinerant preaching

sannyasi: one who has taken the order of sannyasa

Sanskrit: the ancient scholarly language of the Hindu scriptures

sari: a women's robe that covers from head to ankles; usually made from about five yards of un-hemmed white or saffron-dyed cotton cloth

sense gratification (also, sense grat): the spiritually degrading and ultimately futile attempt to satisfy the never-ending demands of the body and its senses

shastra chaksus: "the eyes of scripture," a kind of infallible sixth sense that allowed a devotee to realize the Absolute Truth by way of the revealed scriptures

shastras: the revealed scriptures

sika: a tuft of hair worn at the back of the head by male devotees

spiritual sky: the place of eternity, bliss, and knowledge where devotees who have achieved purity go after this earthly life

Srimad-Bhagavatam: scriptures detailing the life and pastimes of Lord Krishna

stool room: bathroom

surrender: to give heart, soul, mind, and body to the guru or Krishna

swami: a holy man; literally, lord or master

sweet rice: a thick, creamy confection made with whole milk, sugar, and rice

take shelter (of Krishna or the spiritual master): to seek the protection of the Lord or of his pure devotee

temple commander: see commander

temple room: a room within the temple building or compound where the worship of the Deities takes place

tilak: clay markings worn by devotees on the forehead, upper body, and arms, marking the body as the temple of the Lord

Tulsi-devi: a pure devotee of Krishna in the form of a small green bush

Vaishnava: a devotee of Krishna

Vrindavan: town in north-central India where Krishna was born about 5,000 years ago

Vyasadeva: the ancient incarnation of Krishna who first compiled the Hindu scriptures

Yamuna: a sacred river in central India that flows near Vrindavan and empties into the Ganges

yoga: a school of philosophy and religion that advocates a course of physical or mental discipline aimed at uniting the self and the supreme; literally, union

yogi: one who practices yoga

Note: I have not italicized those words of Hindi or Sanskrit origin that have entered into common usage in the English language.

ISKCON NAMES

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami: see Prabhupada

Agnideva, or Agni (Alfie): New York, Los Angeles, and Laguna Beach brahmachari and householder, noted kirtan leader, leader of a traveling sankirtan party, president of the Laguna Beach temple

Anala: Vancouver brahmacharini, sankirtan devotee

Badahari: LA brahmachari, sankirtan leader

Bahudaka (Peter Chatterton): householder, president of Vancouver temple, noted kirtan leader; later an ISKCON public relations officer; father of Jacob Chatterton

Bahulashva: Berkeley and LA householder

Baninatha: LA householder, incense salesman

Bhagavan (William Ehrlichman): sannyasi, GBC leader of the European region; later a guru

Bhakta Bill (pseudonym): Laguna Beach brahmachari, the temple treasurer, right-hand man to Agni

Bhakta Bob: LA brahmachari, former medical student

Bhakta Gary: see Pundarikasam

Bhakta Joe: see Jayo

Bhaktin Francine: LA brahmacharini, talented kirtan singer

Bhaktipada-dasa (Devin Wheeler): son of Hayagriva and Syama; constant companion of Kirtanananda Swami in New Vrindavan

Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati: the grand-spiritual master; spiritual master of Prabhupada

Bhaktivedanta Swami: see Prabhupada

Bhavananda (Charles Edward Bacis): sannyasi, GBC leader of Indian region; later a guru

Bhubanesvara: LA brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Bhubhrita: LA brahmachari, served as Ramesvara's servant

Bopadeva (Barry Stein): LA brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Brahmananda (Bruce Scharf): sannyasi, GBC leader of the African region

Chitraka (Costas): LA brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Danavir (Dane Holtzman): LA devotee, former volleyball player at UCLA, head of Bhakta Program; author of Bhakta Manual

Devamrita: LA brahmachari, editor at the BBT, frequent weekend visitor in Laguna Beach

Dina Bandhu: householder, president of Portland, Oregon, temple

Drumila: Laguna Beach brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Ghanashyam: LA brahmachari, leader of a traveling book distribution party

Gita-devi: Vancouver brahmacharini

Gopavrindapala, or Gopa: LA brahmachari, noted sankirtan devotee

Hamsadutta (Hans Kary): sannyasi, GBC leader of the Northern California region; later a guru

Hari Nama: LA brahmachari, cook, former president of Boston and Denver temples

Hasyapriya: LA brahmachari, sankirtan captain

Hayagriva (Howard Wheeler): former editor of Back to Godhead; husband of Syama, father of Bhaktipada-dasa

Hrdayananda (Howard Resnick): sannyasi, GBC leader of Latin American region; later a guru

Jadurani (Judy Koslofsky, also known as Judy Gaurino): LA brahmacharini, noted artist, noted sankirtan devotee; first brahmacharini in the Movement

Janaspriha (Jose): Vancouver householder

Jayabhadra (Joanie): Vancouver brahmacharini, sankirtan devotee

Jayadvaita (Jay Israel): LA brahmachari, editor of Back to Godhead magazine; frequent weekend visitor in Laguna Beach; later awarded sannyasa

Jayananda: San Francisco/Berkeley brahmachari, one of the first devotees on the West Coast; well known for his exemplary work habits

Jayatirtha (James Immel): householder, head pujari in Los Angeles, president of the LA temple, GBC leader of Southern California region, GBC leader of British Isles region; later a guru

Jayo (Joe): LA brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Jiva: Berkeley householder, leader of a traveling sankirtan party

Kavichandra, or Kavi: LA householder, leader of a traveling sankirtan party

Karandhar (Kelly Smith): former GBC leader of Southern California region

Kirtanananda (Keith Ham): the first of Prabhupada's shaven-headed brahmacharis; first to take sannyasa; GBC leader of the New Vrindavan farm commune in West Virginia; later a guru

Kripanidi: Vancouver and LA brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Krishna Kanti: LA householder who recorded many of Prabhupada's lectures and morning walks

Locasaranga, or Loca: LA brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Mahavirya: LA brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Mahatma: LA householder and brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Mahesh: Vancouver brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Mulaprakriti: LA brahmacharini and householder, noted sankirtan devotee

Mukunda Mala (Mike): Laguna Beach brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Pariksit: LA householder, artist

Patraka: Vancouver brahmachari, noted kirtan leader

Pavamana (Paul McCloud): LA and Laguna Beach brahmachari, head of LA motor pool, cook and pujari on traveling sankirtan and at Laguna Beach

Prabhupada (A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami): the founder and spiritual master of ISKCON

Pujana: the author

Pundarika: LA brahmachari, sankirtan devotee

Pundarikasam (Gary): Vancouver brahmachari

Radhaballavha: LA brahmachari, production manager at the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust

Ramesvara (Robert Grant): LA brahmachari, top sankirtan leader, BBT president, GBC leader of Southern California region; later took sannyasa and became a guru

Rshabhadeva (Roy Richards): former Laguna Beach temple president

Sarvadarshana, or Sarva: householder, LA temple commander, vice president of Laguna Beach temple

Satsvarupa (Steven Gaurino): sannyasi, GBC leader of the Eastern US region; later a guru

Syama (Cheryl Wheeler): wife of Hayagriva and mother of Bhaktipada-dasa (Devin Wheeler)

Sudama: sannyasi, popular kirtan leader

Tamal Krishna (Thomas Hertzig): sannyasi, GBC leader of midwestern region; later a guru

Tarun Krishna: LA householder

Tripurari (Tom): LA brahmachari, noted sankirtan devotee; later took sannyasa

Tulsi-dasa: brahmachari, president of LA temple

Urjasvat (Eugene): LA brahmachari, noted sankirtan devotee

Ushika: LA brahmachari, member of security force

Vamana: LA brahmachari, former skid row bum

Vishnujana: LA-based sannyasi known for his energetic kirtan singing; drowned in India in 1976

Vrindavan Vilasini: LA brahmacharini, noted sankirtan devotee

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cult Memoirs and Biography

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About Cults

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Camus, Albert, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage Books, 1956)

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Frank, Anne, The Diary of a Young Girl

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FitzGerald, Frances, "Rajneesh Puram," The New Yorker, September 22, 1986, and September 29, 1986

Kennedy, Kate, and Kennedy, Tom, "The Devil's Work," Penthouse, March 1982

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"Scientology: The Cult of Greed," Time, May 6, 1991

"The Krishna File," The Sacramento (CA) Bee, June 22-25, 1980

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Ford (Pujana dasa) lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He maintains the websites cactuspear.org and fudakowski-krajewski.com, which highlight his interests in mathematics, computing, music, photography, autobiographical writing, blogging on contemporary issues, and family history.