Where I’m Coming From

Hav­ing been dis­il­lu­sioned by fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tian­ity as a teenager, I became a beat and then a hippy seeker. This led me to A.C. Bhak­tivedanta Swami. I was liv­ing in a com­mune in Haight Ash­bury on Ash­bury Street with a young woman. As soon as I saw Swamiji, I intu­itively knew he was my guru. My part­ner and I were ini­ti­ated and mar­ried by him in Feb­ru­ary, 1967. We broke up in Jan­u­ary, 1968, and I went to Los Ange­les and lived with Swamiji for a cou­ple of months. He tried to get us back together, but she wanted to stay with the guy she left me for.

Swamiji touted renounced life as best for spir­i­tual real­iza­tion. I was dev­as­tated, open, and recep­tive to Swamiji’s advice that I for­get about women and live as a vanaprastha prepar­ing for san­nyas. In 1970, I got a phone call say­ing that Swamiji wanted me to go to L.A. to take san­nyas along with sev­eral oth­ers. I was 23 years old, about the same age Chai­tanya took san­nyas or younger (Sarv­ab­hauma told him he was too young).

I was the pres­i­dent and founder of the Philadel­phia tem­ple. I looked for­ward to san­nyas as an oppor­tu­nity to be freed from man­age­ment and devote my time to preach­ing and spir­i­tual prac­tices. How­ever, after a six month preach­ing tour of Europe, I was called to India to do the PR for major fes­ti­vals in Bom­bay and Delhi, start a press in Vrind­a­ban, build tem­ples in Vrind­a­ban and Hyderabad–when all I wanted was to be a babaji in Braj.

I did a preach­ing tour of Canada and the U.S. for nine months in 1973. I found I could no longer encour­age peo­ple to join ISKCON tem­ples because they were exploitive. Sankir­tan had become dis­tri­b­u­tion, change-ups, wigs, get Lak­shmi scams. I went back to India and received the mercy of Lalita Prasad Thakur. I went to Maya­pur for Gaur-purnim and then to Vrind­a­ban for a tour with Swamiji. There he told us we should con­vert peo­ple at gun­point when we got pow­er­ful enough. I knew it was time to go.

Sudama Maharaj, GBC for the Pacific also from the Haight Ash­bury tem­ple, invited me to Hon­olulu where he kept things mel­low like in the early days. I hand­ily got a tem­ple donated by Alfred Ford. Swamiji imme­di­ately ordered me to Fiji to start a tem­ple. Thrown back into man­age­ment, busi­ness, and pol­i­tics, I lasted less than three months, returned to Hon­olulu, found my friends ready to resign because they were being taken over by main­land ISKCON, and resigned with them in Decem­ber, 1974 giv­ing up san­nyas. Celibacy and the other rules of san­nyas life were not a prob­lem for me to fol­low. What was a prob­lem was busi­ness and pol­i­tics which make san­nyas a farce.

I come in the line of Jah­nava Thaku­rani, shakti of Nityanand Avad­hut, who even as a renun­ci­ate lived out­side the bounds of social con­ven­tion. Then took two wives to show that renun­ci­a­tion was not required for devo­tion. Actu­ally, Jah­nava was not his wife, but part of her sister’s dowry.

So, when I get down on renun­ci­ates, I know what I’m talk­ing about. The things some of them do are dis­gust­ing and crim­i­nal. Their teach­ings are life-denying. They often use their posi­tions to exploit oth­ers at the cost of their spir­i­tual progress.

While I am a uni­ver­sal­ist, some things are just plain wrong, must be labeled as such, and peo­ple warned about the dan­gers. I con­cluded in 1974 that ISKCON was no longer use­ful for spir­i­tual growth or as a preach­ing plat­form. I don’t know how they’ve man­aged to go on attract­ing new peo­ple. How­ever, it’s not just ISKCON that is the prob­lem, but all fun­da­men­tal­ist, life-denying, exploitive sys­tems whether they be Hindu, Mus­lim, Chris­t­ian, or Jewish.

I offer Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism as a pos­i­tive life-affirming alter­na­tive way of spir­i­tual life that is not another orga­nized religion.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 11:57 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.