Betrayal of the Spirit

My Life behind the Headlines of the Hare Krishna Movement

Nori J. Muster

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252094996
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Combining behind-the-scenes coverage of an often besieged religious group with a personal account of one woman's struggle to find meaning in it, Betrayal of the Spirit takes readers to the center of life in the Hare Krishna movement.

Nori J. Muster joined the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON)--the Hare Krishnas--in 1978, shortly after the death of the movement's spiritual master, and worked for ten years as a public relations secretary and editor of the organization's newspaper, the ISKCON World Review. In this candid and critical account, Muster follows the inner workings of the movement and the Hare Krishnas' progressive decline.

Combining personal reminiscences, published articles, and internal documents, Betrayal of the Spirit details the scandals that beset the Krishnas--drug dealing, weapons stockpiling, deceptive fundraising, child abuse, and murder within ISKCON–as well as the dynamics of schisms that forced some 95 percent of the group's original members to leave. In the midst of this institutional disarray, Muster continued her personal search for truth and religious meaning as an ISKCON member until, disillusioned at last with the movement's internal divisions, she quit her job and left the organization.

In a new preface to the paperback edition, Muster discusses the personal circumstances that led her to ISKCON and kept her there as the movement's image worsened. She also talks about "the darkest secret"–child abuse in the ISKCON parochial schools--that was covered up by the public relations office where she worked.

1

ISKCON: The Krishnas’ International Society

The Hare Krishnas’ Western world headquarters is on a residential street in West Los Angeles called Watseka Avenue, just off Venice Boulevard near Culver City. Every weekend the temple holds a gathering, the “Sunday Love Feast,” for the congregation. It was a warm summer evening in 1978. I was twenty-two and had been a Hare Krishna for about a month. Dozens of people milled on the sidewalk and more cruised Watseka Avenue for parking places. A loudspeaker atop the temple gift store broadcast the rhythmic, fast notes of an Indian raga over the congregation. I walked up the block, beginning at the church on the corner, past the green, yellow, white, brown, and brick red apartment houses and bungalows. ISKCON owned buildings on both sides of the magnolia-lined street.

Beyond the Krishna community, Watseka Avenue was quiet. Non-devotee neighbors generally ignored the temple. I waited in the shadows at the last Hare Krishna apartment for two old friends, Pam and Diana, who said they would visit. Then in the darkness I spotted a blue Mercedes-Benz with diminutive, blond Pam behind the wheel. I'd known her since 1970. The other woman was Diana, a friend since junior high. The last time I'd seen her was the previous summer, when she invited me to her acting class in Hollywood. Diana's classmate, the yet unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger, imitated a roaring lion at the instructor's request. His performance was one I'll never forget.

I flagged down the Mercedes and directed my friends into the driveway, saying, “Park back here.”

I met them under the building, and Diana hugged me and looked me over. “Is that a sari?” she asked. The traditional garment was a single piece of cloth draped all around, covering my head.

“I knew you would like it,” I said, noting her soft brown curls falling over her black velvet vintage dress and black leather vest. Pam was barefoot, wearing cut-off jeans and a skimpy halter top, and she looked like an underfed model.

“Let's go to the temple,” I suggested, hoping to show them the Radha-Krishna deities I worshipped. My friends were vegetarian and they both liked music and art, so I felt sure they would appreciate the temple. As I led them down the crowded sidewalk, the music blared louder, many hearty conversations adding to the clamor. The services had ended, and people poured from the temple to locate their shoes and go off to look around.

“Do you want to see inside?” I asked my friends.

“Not if I have to take my cowboy boots off,” Diana said. “You don't know what a hassle that can be.”

“I just want to sit down somewhere,” Pam said, turning away from the crowd.

I didn't want to force my new enthusiasm on my guests, so I led them back to the building where they had parked. My office upstairs was a convenient, quiet place to talk. We went up the steps in a narrow hallway, and I loosened a key from the chain around my neck to let us in.

“Does someone live here?” Pam asked, glancing inside one of the rooms as she followed me to the kitchen.

“No one's here,” I said, turning on the lights. We stopped at my desk, which was wedged into the hall. House plants hung everywhere and sat on all the tiled counter tops. My boss liked to keep them around for atmosphere.

Pam and Diana sat in comfortable conference room chairs, while I sat on the edge of my desk. “How do you like it? This is where I work,” I said.

“I don't get what you do here,” Diana said.

“This place is creepy,” Pam said. “You don't belong here.” Her usually dreamy eyes had become serious and compassionate. “Did they make you give them your money? What about your car?”

“I use my car for my service,” I said, my heart suddenly pounding, “and money is material. They didn't make me give it to them—I wanted to because they use it to serve Krishna.”

Diana and Pam looked at each other. “Oh sure,” Pam said.

“Come on, what's happening Nori?” Diana asked.

“You seem so different,” Pam said.

“People are worried,” Diana added. “Think about how your old friends feel.”

“We're going to get something to eat,” Pam said. “Can you come with us? Will they let you out for one night?”

“But they're serving dinner at the temple,” I said, feeling dizzied by their onslaught.

“That food smelled awful,” Pam said.

“Please come with us,” Diana said.

Both of them looked at me, and there was a silence.

“But this is my home now,” I said, gripping my desk. “I'm here because I want to be. I like to start the day by seeing Krishna, and I like to meditate. I don't take drugs anymore, and I have a good job. This is my life now.”

They gazed at me while I talked on.

“Haven't you ever wondered what it's all about, or why we're here? I always wanted to know if life had a purpose. Now I know that I'm a soul, that I'm meant to serve God. I don't have to search anymore because I've found it.” I caught my breath and waited, hoping they might approve.

“It's stuffy in here,” Pam said after an uncomfortable silence. She turned to Diana and said, “Let's go.”

I sighed and hopped down from the desk. As I followed them back to the carport I tried to explain myself again, but they didn't want to listen. I walked alongside as Pam backed the Mercedes out of the driveway. The top was down, so when we reached the sidewalk she stopped and took my hand.

“Call me,” she said. “I hate to see you fuck up your life in a place like this.”

“You don't want to be a Hare Krishna. Think about it,” Diana added.

Pam sat there, the radio blaring louder than the ritual music from the temple, and then she squealed out of the driveway and roared off into the darkness of Watseka. I watched until the taillights faded. I hoped my friends would come back someday, but feared I'd lost them forever.

“I can't believe a nice girl like you has friends like that,” someone behind me said.

I turned quickly to see who was speaking. It was the temple president, who had been standing nearby. I was sure he totally misunderstood me. A lot of devotees thought I was naive and innocent when I joined, but it was just the sari that made me look that way. I'd been on my own for eight years, since my parents’ divorce. When my mother moved to Phoenix, Arizona, to marry my stepfather in 1970, my brother moved with the family. Even though I was only fourteen, I refused.

I couldn't live with my father that year because he traveled continuously for business. As president of Greene Line Steamers of Cincinnati, he and vice-president Betty Blake had to defend the Delta Queen steamboat against congressional Safety at Sea legislation that would have put it out of business. They executed an ingenious P.R. campaign to “Save the Delta Queen” and win a congressional exemption from the legislation. Thousands greeted the Mississippi paddle wheeler when it passed through river towns, its calliope playing. The Delta Queen made headlines throughout the year because it seemed the boat was doomed to retirement. My dad and Betty were always in the news, especially in the river towns. An estimated quarter of a million Americans signed petitions and wrote to legislators, and the boat won a last-minute reprieve, signed into law December 31 by Richard Nixon. The campaign kept my father too busy to pay attention to me.

Rather than live with either parent, I moved in with a family in the San Fernando Valley that was also going through a divorce. The children smoked pot, took harder drugs, and used the house for parties whenever their mother went away. I don't know if it was the case all over Southern California or just in my parents’ circle of friends, but by the time I joined my blended family in Phoenix three months later it seemed as if every adult in the world was getting a divorce. I was glad to be living with my family again but regretted that it didn't include my father.

The 1960s and early 1970s were times of social change and experimentation. Writers Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts and Harvard researchers such as Timothy Leary believed that LSD could open doors to religious experiences. Some people thought their experiments should have stayed in the laboratory, but hundreds of thousands of others tried LSD. At age fifteen I was one of them. The drug opened my mind to questions about the nature of reality, especially the possibility that I had lived before. Unfortunately, I had no one with whom I could talk, and I became confused. For the next six years I pushed the questions out of my mind with antispiritual drugs such as alcohol, cocaine, codeine, and prescription tranquilizers.

When I was twenty, in my junior year of college, a renewed spiritual longing surfaced. Just when my history professor had us read St. Augustine and parts of the Bible, I became fascinated with religion and spiritual identity. Along with my school books, I began reading metaphysical and Eastern philosophies. Then an internal alarm clock went off, telling me to give up drugs, become vegetarian, and practice celibacy to progress on the spiritual path. I left Humboldt State University for the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I believed my destiny would find me.

At first I had trouble making friends because it seemed all the students used alcohol or drugs. Then I met Phillip, a mystic Christian who worked at the Starlight Bookstore. I took a class there and ended up spending time with Phil, discussing God and the purpose of life. He suggested that I look into Krishna consciousness because my beliefs sounded similar to theirs. He met some Hare Krishnas a few weeks later and asked them to open a “preaching center,” a missionary outpost, near the UCSB campus. Soon they did.

I had seen the saffron-robed men chanting on Hollywood Boulevard and in Trafalgar Square in London and had bought an occasional Back to Godhead magazine at the airport. Their books were in the UCSB library, and I read one passage that said that just by seeing a pure devotee one could experience “ecstatic symptoms” such as standing of the hair, shivering, laughing, and rolling on the ground. I wanted to find out whether that was true. I couldn't wait to meet a devotee face to face.

When the preaching center was about to open with a Sunday feast, Phillip asked me to go early and make the Hare Krishna visitors feel welcome. Their place was half-way between my apartment and campus, so I walked to the address and knocked. A man with white Indian clothes and a shaven head answered. He had a steady, strong gaze and a contented smile. “Yes?” he said.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I felt an inner excitement, a recognition, a deja vu that filled me with expectation. He told me his name was Radha-vallabha, but I could call him Radha. Then he asked me to wait in the living room while he finished preparing the food. The apartment was almost completely bare except for a makeshift altar draped with cloth, a bookshelf with Hare Krishna books, and a wicker basket of tambourines and brass cymbals. Although it was ordinary and empty, light filled the apartment along with the smells of food, incense, and fresh flowers, and harmonious music played on a portable cassette player. I listened to the gentle conversation and joking of the men in the kitchen as they worked.

Several cars full of Hare Krishna men and women pulled up, then Phillip and his friends from the bookstore arrived. Suddenly the bare apartment was alive with conversation and laughter. Radha-vallabha sat down in the living room and started playing brass cymbals, chanting Hare Krishna. Everyone joined in, singing responsively. I had heard the mantra in the musical Hair, in George Harrison's song “My Sweet Lord,” and on another album called The Radha-Krsna Temple, so I happily chanted along. After the meditation came food and a philosophical talk.

The women in my hatha-yoga class had warned me that Hare Krishnas were chauvinistic, so during the question-and-answer period I made sure to ask how women were viewed within the group. Radha-vallabha, who gave the lecture, enthusiastically explained that because men and women were eternal spirit souls, sparks of God's energy, they were completely equal. I believed that too, so I was glad his explanation was so simple. After the lecture he told me that he was the general manager of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT), the organization's publishing arm. Everyone I met that night worked for the BBT Press as proofreaders, Sanskrit experts, production managers, secretaries, typesetters, or graphic artists. They told me it was a multimillion-dollar enterprise and gave me one of their paperbacks, a lecture by their guru.

The devotees got out a movie projector and showed a film about the worldwide International Society for Krishna Consciousness (known by its acronym of ISKCON) organization's temples, schools, and rural communities. Their guru Prabhupada had become a fixture of the hippie scene in New York in 1966, and from there ISKCON spread all over the world with more than 108 branches. Prabhupada, a descendant in a line of gurus in India, carried on an ancient tradition of Krishna worship and already had disciples in his homeland. After the movie I talked to Radha-vallabha and Phillip for another hour. Radha-vallabha said he'd been wanting to open a preaching center for some months, but it took that extra nudge from Phillip to make him do it. We all agreed that the center would be successful because of the university nearby.

Walking home that night, I thought about the devotees and decided that they were great. They seemed serious about their spiritual practices and happy in their alternative life-style. They told me they followed four regulative principles: no meat-eating, no intoxication, no illicit sex, and no gambling, which meant they were the friends I was hoping to meet. I was also interested in the BBT. Their publications were completely professional, with color illustrations of oil paintings produced by devotees at the BBT art department in Los Angeles.

Radha-vallabha and his friends drove up every weekend for the Sunday feast through the fall. I didn't know why, but they stopped coming in November. I thought it could be a lack of interest from the college students, but then I read in the newspaper that their guru Prabhupada had died.

Whenever I walked to class I stopped at the preaching center to knock on the door and p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Foreword
• Preface
• People in This Volume
• 1 - ISKCON: The Krishnas’ International Society
• 2 - Unexpected Requirements
• 3 - Going Solo into ISKCON
• 4 - My Zonal Guru
• 5 - Jonestown Fallout
• 6 - A Spiritual Disneyland
• 7 - Drug Busts, Guns, and Gangsters
• 8 - Who's Watching the Children?
• 9 - The Gurus Start World War III
• 10 - The Storm Within: The Guru Issue
• 11 - P.R. Publications Promote ISKCON
• 12 - Ramesvara Crashes
• 13 - The Revolution of Guru Reform
• 14 - P.R. Bails Out of L.A.
• 15 - 1986: The Year of Crisis
• 16 - The Budget Axe
• 17 - The ISKCON World Review Crosses the Line
• 18 - Six Months Out of Print
• 19 - Women's Lesser Intelligence
• 20 - Moving On
• Appendix: Status of People and Things in this Volume
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors