pamu wrote:Now I can see, that the "gangster"part of your name did not come from nothing.
Curious to see, how the love ´portion will come about.
gangster of love (from The joker).wav
Before I had taken my first peyote trip I had been frequenting the Iskcon temple where I had lived around a mile from. I would go there for the food during the week and the sunday kirtans. I couldn't relate to the books but I loved the temple ambiance and decor and the wild kirtans on sundays. The food was great during the week. They didn't just put out rice dhal and subji, they had a person whose full time job was growing various sprouts and creating magnificent salads with avocados and all kinds of goodies. They cooked a lot of maha prasad and gave it out at lunch time so that lunch at the temple was a daily feast. They had a couple of great cooks who were serious in their study of Indian cooking and it showed in the great variety and professional quality. Still the best temple food I've ever had were those days.
Anyways, what I experienced when I took peyote with my friends would change my life forever.
It's probably hard to understand if you've never taken it but I'll try and tell you what I experienced. Imagine having your power of perception intensified greatly. And then imagine being in a virtual reality world where you were interacting with virtual people, having conversations with them. But instead of having different conversations with different people, instead you had a single conversation with one person who spoke through the various people you were seemingly speaking with, without their knowing it.
And imagine if the conversation you were having with someone you couldn't see but could easily comprehend through other peoples eyes, words and emotions, was telling you a story, a story about it's control over nature, all the while showing you that reality through your environment i.e through people, through animals, through media, and through your own mind.
I wasn't in a virtual world, but I was shown that this world is in fact a type of virtual reality in a cosmic computer, and that God was controlling everything
After undergoing that experience all night we were all hungry and headed off to the temple to get some food. It was still dark out and must have been around 5 .a.m.
When we arrived there was a sannyasi (acyutananda swami) sitting on a dais playing a mrdanga and singing Jaya Radha Madhava while all the devotees were seated getting ready to hear Bhagavatam class.
Now up to this point I had been having God reveal to me many things for hours on end and it was still going on, the conversation he was directing towards me through other people, using them like puppets, had not stopped. Just as we sat down the bhajan ended and Acyutananda Swami looked right into my eyes for 10 seconds, and he said "This is Krishna consciousness". And then he gave a lecture which explained in detail the basics of Krishna consciousness. Needless to say my mind was blown.
So a few months later after having had some more mystical experience, although without any drug because I had stopped and had started to study and chant intently, I moved into the ashrama.
I never really "surrendered" totally, body and soul, to any Guru. I was in Iskcon for 4 years and most of that time I did what I wanted to do, my "Guru" was not happy with me and I couldn't have cared less. He wanted me to do various things and usually I rejected it or tried it for a very short bit and then rejected it. I was a pariah in his eyes and the eyes of the other disciples and "authorities". It was easy for me to become the first (I think) "disciple" of one of Prabhupada's successors (the eleven) to reject their "Guru" and join the mission of one of Prabhupada's godbrothers ('81). Even then I only stayed a very short time with them (maybe 4 months in toto).
So even though I accepted on principle the ideology being taught in the gaudiya school about absolute surrender to a Guru, in fact I never did, nor even came close to it. When I first joined Iskcon I tried to "surrender" completely, but after a a year I realized that it wasn't my thing. I judged a bhakti activity on the basis of the amount of, or lack of bliss I derived from it, I "followed my bliss". If I was instructed to do something but that activity wasn't blissful I rejected it after trying it. Since I was reading that the result of bhakti activity is bliss, I reasoned that if any bhakti activity I was doing wasn't blissful, then it wasn't worth doing. That's why they gave up on trying to get me to collect money out on the streets and in parking lots. I would just wander off and go do something else with my time i.e read a book, see a movie etc. I would come back with a few dollars and after a short while they decided to change "my service".
They would try and pressure me into trying to collect more money by mentioning that it would please "my guru", that "if you please your guru then Krishna blesses you". But all to no avail, I was stubborn, if it wasn't fun I wasn't going to do it. I joined Iskcon for the fun of it. I expected that my time in Iskcon would be fun because that is what the philosophy promised i.e unending bliss in the association of happy caring loving people. I became disillusioned quickly. I realized that many people were creeps, and that there was little of the caring loving community I had been expecting.
I had learned to cook by working under the two great cooks at the temple every morning and sunday. I had developed a skill that was desired by temple leaders. I had "an attitude" problem in their eyes because I wasn't a totally compliant person willing to surrender to their whims and then devote myself to that, which they expected. So I had something they wanted because good cooks who could cook consistently good food in large quantities, speedily, were always in short supply. Because of that they usually gave me much less of a hard time then they would have had I nothing that they desired. I was a commodity and treated as such, and I exploited that fact.
I bounced around all the temples in Southern California and Hawaii as well the satellite temples for short stints.
I became one of those devotees who made friends with the older cynical (realistic) devotees, I liked their way of looking at Iskcon because it mirrored my own. They instructed me on the sordid side of the leaders and the various hidden "naughty" things going on in Iskcon. Maybe those types of devotees were unique to the huge Los Angeles community, I dunno. I remember the temple president of the first temple I lived at warning me about Los Angeles; "They're in maya" he warned me when we went there for a festival. But there were two distinct types of devotees there. There were the ones who disdained authority and were cynical and realisitic at the same time, and were not the gung ho rah rah slaves like the other type. One type essentially saw Iskcon as something to enjoy and exploit for whatever reason, not in a bad way though, and the other type saw Iskcon as a place to give themselves to, to surrender to completely, body, mind, and soul, regardless of what was asked of them. They lived life with blinders on, really believing that they were supposed to be the menial slaves of the leaders whom they saw as "authorized", and whom I and the others saw as being exploiters and egotistic creeps.
My days in Iskcon ended in San Francisco. I had gone up there because I had gotten bored of the southern california temples, things had changed since when I had joined, 4 years had gone by and the temples had become less communal and more Guru centric and fanatic and unpleasent. Boring people fanatically slaving away to make money was the new Iskcon from my expereince. It wasn't like that when I joined, to a degree it was, but it just got exponentially worse as the years went by.
San Francisco was different. It was run by a wealthy Iranian devotee who did as he pleased because he was wealthy and a GBC and wasn't dependent on others. Ambarisa (Alfred Ford) lived a few blocks away with his roomate and was officially the Temple President, although he rarely came by. The Iranian devotee was in charge, he was kissing up to Ambarisa obviously for financial reasons by giving him the temple president title. It was not like your usual Iskcon temple. It was an expensive home in an expensive neighborhood with only a handful of devotees, and besides the mornng program there was nothing else going on at the temple. They did have a restaurant a few blocks away which I cooked at, and eventually they bought the house next door to the restaurant and turned that into the new temple.
I had a lot of fun there because the devotees were cool and Haight Ashbury back then was a fun place to be. That is where I met the ex-president of the Los Angeles temple Dhira Krishna Swami and his partner in crime Brahma Das. They were both living there having just arrived before I did from India where they had stayed at Sridhar Maharaja's ashrama in Navadvip.
They had come there with the stated intent on buying some property and starting a temple outside of the jurisdiction of Iskcon and also to buy a printing press to print Sridhar Maharajas lectures into books.
Well this did not sit well with the GBC, except for Atreya Rishi (the Iranian) who gave them a place to stay at the temple. A handfull of GBC flew in to try to convince Dhira Krishna not to start a schism. This would be the first schism (not counting siddhaswarupa) with the backing of a major Iskcon personality that Iskcon was to experience. I knew Dhira Krishna from Los Angeles from when he was temple president. For a few months I had brought him his lunch in his apartment every day, all the while earning the wrath of the matajis who used to gather the maha for whatever purpose. They were upset that I took so much maha prasad under the pre-text of serving the temple president sannyasi his lunch, in fact I took also enough for me and a few of my friends to gorge out on everyday.
I remember when Jayapataka flew in to speak to Dhira Krishna when we received a phone call telling us Hansadutta was coming over from Berkeley to see Jayapataka. I think Jayapataka was afraid because when Hansadutta came he wanted him to say his peace in the temple/living room with the various devotees present. So I got to see Hansadutta accuse Jayapataka of stealing over 1 million dollars worth of gold from him when Jayapataka took over Hansadutta's Philippines temples. Hansadutta was angry and demanded his gold back. Jayapataka claimed ignorance, it was kinda funny to watch.
Anyways I had listened in when the various GBC tried to convince Dhira Krishna to not start his own temple. My room was adjacent to theirs and our windows were open and I could hear them speak. Dhira Krishna seemed to me to be much more intelligent and easliy rebuffed their attempts. I was impressed with his arguments. So I joined up with them.
When I finally left Iskcon and joined up to help start the first Sridhar Maharaja temple in San Jose california, I at first thought that it would be different then Iskcon. Here were a couiple of Guys who saw through the bullshit of the leaders in Iskcon and who were definitely not the gung ho rah rah slave types. They were, I thought, like myself i.e realistic and without the pompous holier then thou pretense of Iskcon leaders and devotees. I thought it would be something much more familial where people were treated as equals and respected and cared for.
But that was wishful thinking. It quickly became a place where the same head trips found in Iskcon became common. A lot of that had to do with their thinking of themselves as superior to the devotees in Iskcon because they had "seen the light" i.e Sridhar Maharaja was a "pure devotee" whereras the devotees in Iskcon were blind and or stupid and offensive to the vision. Exploiting people as slaves for the financial gain of the leaders was the modus operandi, as it was in Iskcon as well. They didn't see anything wrong in exploiting sincere people for their personal solitary financial gain. They were really no different then Iskcon leadership i.e out for themselves at the expense of the people who took them to be "authorities" worthy of "surrendering" to. I was not so blind.
So I took my leave and headed for Maui. Even though I also saw Sridhara Maharaja as a "pure devotee" at that time, though I knew little of what he taught, I never had the inclination to subsume my ego and goals to another person unless that person was going to share everything he had with me. The way I looked at it was that if the Guru was supposed to be like a father whom the children were supposed to love, cherish, give money or service to and be obediant to, then the Guru had better share his wealth, love, etc, fully, with those who "surrendered" to him, like a real father. Since I never once saw that anywhere in Iskcon or outside of Iskcon, I never felt anyone deserved my surrender.
To me a real Guru is one who gives back to his following from what he gets from his following. If his followers give him palatial homes, lots of money, cars, control over a wealthy organization, then a true Guru, a real Guru, will share it all, freely. A true Guru is a person who doesn't treat his followers as things to be used and gives back more then they give, materially and emotionally as well. That is my standard. That is what I gleamed from my philosophical studies of the qualities of a "pure devotee". So since I never saw that from day one, I never took the position of a slave to another, I never "surrendered" to anyone. From my very beginning in learning about gaudiya vaisnavism, before I ever joined up, I had read what the "bona fide" Guru was supposed to be like. i.e Selfless and without exploitative tendencies.
So I walked away from the whole shebang without any mental damage. I viewed all of what I experienced as destiny, a learning experience that I was put through by the fates.
I tend to see things philosophically when it comes to why we do the things we do and how our lives unfold over time. To me it is destiny which is the only factor which decides why we do what we do, and what path our lives go down and what we go through both physically and mentally and emotionally. It's all written in the stars in my understanding. Life is a learning experience, whether you know it or not doesn't matter.
I lived in Hawaii for almost the next 20 years. I had more mind blowing mystical experiences, different from before. I remember one where for 24 hours straight everytime I closed my eyes I would be in a virtual world. The things I saw changed quite a bit during that time. For a while I could walk around with my eyes closed and I could see another world that I was walking in. With my eyes closed I could see that I was near a beach cliff, so I started to walk off the cliff, in reality I was just walking around my yard with my eyes closed, but what I saw was myself walking off a cliff without falling, I couldn't see myself in that virtual world, I had no form, but other people would see me and walk up to me, they were dressed in fantastic costumes. I couldn't hear anything there, but I could see it. Most of that time I wasn't walking around, I just layed down and let the show go on. I was shown all variety of interesting things. At one point God showed me how he manipulates matter in order to create things, at another point God showed me what he looks like, not the human form he takes, but what he actually looks like in the realm of the cosmos.
Later I had other mystical experiences where God revealed his form as young Krishna to me. It was like seeing a hologram floating 10 feet in front of you. It was at night on a secluded beach on maui, the hologram was shimmering brilliantly and easy to see because it was dark out. He was Krishna, dressed up as a 12 year old cowherd boy, although different from any painting I had ever seen. His face was painted in a criss cross pattern of green and red on his light chocolate skin. After maybe 30 seconds of this he started to grow, and grow, and grow, until he rose to encompass the sky. And then it ended.
I've had other mystical experiences, but if I told you everything about them you would think me mad. Gradually I was taught how to perceive God conversing with me everywhere, through everything, and everyone, including my mind, at any and all times. At first it was exhausting and very confusing, but after a couple years it became normal.
My idea of what God is changed greatly over that time. I had been thinking that God is Krishna, Vishnu etc. I related to God treating God as a male. I was emphatically disabused of that notion. What I learned was that I was mistaken. Krishna is a persona God takes on, like Rama or any other avatar. In truth God is female. Or rather God's inner self conception is that of being a female. Radha or Devi or whatever name you want to use, that is God's inner self definition. Radha, Krishna, etc, there is only One God, it is a She. And She doesn't like to be treated as a male. Krishna means nothing to Her. Krishna is just a persona she puts on, a costume, thats all. She looks for male companionship elsewhere.
