No better than a drug crazed animal, I stumbled across the North American Continent looking for the truth. It was summer, 1971 and I'd only just barely survived the psychedelic sixties. Barefoot and clothed in tattered corduroy pants and a torn shirt that were literally rotting off my body, I held out my thumb and offered passing cars a dazed but friendly smile. I was on my way from California back to the east coast.
In 1968 I'd seen the Founder Acharya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, His Divine Grace, A.C.Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. This proved to be a crystallizing moment in my then frantic and bewildered life. Before that I'd seen the Hare Krishna devotees from time to time in places like Fisherman's Wharf and on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park and always my reaction was one of revulsion. It was a good example of the kettle calling the pot black. There I was in my disintegrating filthy rags and grungy beard and there were the Hare Krishnas in freshly laundered dhotis and with clean shaven heads.
Seeing Prabhupada put a whole new slant on things. Here was an authentic and genuine sadhu or holy man. He was, as it turned out, more than that. He was a fully liberated, pure devotee who could free others from the cycle of birth and death. It was the San Francisco Airport and this time the devotees were with their guru, Srila Prabhupada. This put a whole new light on everything for me. About a half dozen on each side of Prabhupada were performing Hari Nama, or chanting the Maha Mantra, hare krishna hare krishna, krishna krishna hare hare, hare rama hare rama, rama rama hare hare.
I became transfixed. I couldn't move. Then I started in their direction. Suddenly a hand was pulling me back and someone was saying, "Come on Anders, we have a plane to catch, where are you going?" I said, "Hang on. I gotta check this out. Hang on a sec." I started moving in the direction of the Hari Nama party again. Suddenly the voice was definite and firm and the hand holding mine pulled me around and redirected me. A year later we were married and had a baby daughter. I had no business getting married and even less fathering a child. At some point my wife came to me and said, "That's it, I'm going back to my family. I've had it." I have to give her all credit. If the roles had been reversed, I would have left me much sooner than she did. It was, however, devastating and I became depressed to the point of suicide. Somehow my mind convinced me to either give up my life or join the Hare Krishnas. It didn't seem like anything else would work.
I started visiting and sporadically staying at the Hare Krishna temple on Henry St. in Brooklyn, New York. Leading up to that I'd seen the devotees chanting in Time's Square a few times and also seen them on the late night David Suskind television show. Seeing the devotees bloom and blossom out of a typical dull and grungy cityscape was always a spectacular experience for me. Suddenly out of the humdrum workaday world of people hectically scurrying about at their relatively useless nine to five tasks, a bright and beautiful contingent of Hare Krishnas, mridanga drums throbbing and thumping and kartala hand cymbals tinkling and chinging, would appear and my surprise and delight would practically know no bounds. In a way I didn't fully understand at the time, they were offering an altogether different answer to the question: What to do? How to live? How to be happy?
They were saying, "Chant and be happy." More than that, they even handed out business size invitation cards with the Hare Krishna mantra on it that said, "Chant these names of God and your life will be sublime." It was such a grand and magical claim that it smacked of snake oil and legerdemain. I was intrigued though and when I finally tasted the vegetarian food there was no turning back. Somehow, in my haphazard, zigzag course from place to place, I found myself in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There were the devotees chanting again. I chanted with them and then went with them across the Charles River to Alston where they had a temple on 43 North Beacon St. The temple president sat me down on a chair, spun me around and shaved me up. At that point the mood was that if anyone, by Krishna's mercy, had the great good fortune to find their way into a temple, they should be given all possible encouragement to take up Krishna Consciousness.
As it turned out this was immediately and in the long term the absolute best thing that could have happened to me but the temple almost immediately started having second thoughts. I was clearly quite extremely crazy. One good example of this was my chanting my sixteen rounds during morning japa barefoot while circumambulating the temple. This in itself might not have been so crazy except for the fact that it was December and there were several inches of snow on the ground. The three years of callous built up on my feet from being shoeless made it possible but along with a few other quirky eccentricities made it a bit unnerving for the devotees. Also I had a challenging attitude and defiant mood born of my completely atheistic background and upbringing.
When I was first old enough to understand what people were saying to me, my mother and father both explained that God and religion were primitive superstitions and in our scientific and intellectual family we would not bother ourselves with such nonsense. I bought into such thinking big time and even became somewhat of a radical spokesperson for atheism both in high school and even later in college. It is only now that I can proudly and happily say that no one is more fanatic than someone who's been converted. The learning curve was steep and tough but now I claim to be more than a believer. I'm continually drunk on love of God. Over the years I've stood in front of thousands of classrooms full of college and high school students and whenever possible asked them all, "What is the purpose of life?" No one ever seems to have a quick and easy response. Our answer, however, as Hare Krishna devotees, is both quick and easy. It's also very firm and reliable. The purpose of life is to be happy. Then the obvious question is how to be happy? The movies, songs and books nearly all seem to share a common thread and recurring theme: Fall in love, fall in love, just fall in love. If you can fall in love, you can be happy. We also hear that a lot of people seem to be looking for love in all the wrong places. The most powerful thing in the world is love. We'll do nearly anything for love. The most powerful love, however, is love of God. Somehow, in this modern secular world, love for God seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. People seem to have more faith in gadgets and gizmos and science. This is very sad. And so it was that my first attempts to be a Hare Krishna devotee were fraught with confusion and difficulty.
Finally after a two month trial period in the Boston temple I was summarily ejected from the premises. It was January, 1972. I limped eighty miles in a sleeting ice storm from Boston to Ashaway, Rhode Island where my parents informed me that they were leaving the United States. The house was for sale and I was on my own. They helped me get a room in the YMCA in Providence and made sure I had a job driving a cab and they flew to their new house in Portugal. I was gone for two years. One day when I was driving my cab up the hill into East Providence I thought I heard the familiar thump of the drums and the ching ching ching of the kartals. My head spun in that direction only to see a chain rattling on the back of a truck. In addition to the cab driving, I also started taking classes in drafting at night. I never stopped chanting my rounds and this may have something to do with my focus and attention to detail that really seemed to payoff in my coursework. Right after graduation my instructor helped me get a job at a big company that was somewhat well known in that part of Rhode Island. I started working for Brown & Sharpe in North Kingston, Rhode Island. They put me into their screw machine department and in no time at all I was setting up four or five machines to run simultaneously. Typically you had to clamp a twelve foot bar of steel into the machine, set a cam to determine how various blades would impinge on the bar and then set the whole thing spinning at about three thousand RPM. The first few pieces spitting out of the machine had to be measured with a micrometer to determine whether or not they fell within acceptable limits. Not wanting to seem weird or different, I would continually chant the maha mantra under my breath while I was tapping in the blades with a ball peen hammer and setting everything up. Almost immediately this paid off. After only a few weeks I noticed that along with the quality control technician who regularly checked our parts, there were various other gentlemen in suits watching me work. It wasn't until later that I found out that they'd never had someone come in and produce faultless parts at the very beginning of the training period. It was expected that a new man would fill several buckets with scrap metal before he'd get it down. The next thing I knew I was called up into the engineering department and the man who was to become my new boss was pushing a folded up piece of paper across his desk to me. Curiously I opened it and in the spirit of the exercise, wrote a higher amount. He split the difference and that seemed to be all there was to that. In the factory I'd been working five ten hour shifts and five hours on Saturday and bringing in a little over three hundred dollars a week which wasn't too bad for the mid seventies. Now I was making a little bit more and I didn't have to punch in and out on a time clock for two ten minute coffee breaks and half an hour for lunch. I discovered that the standard "upstairs" was to come rolling in around nine or ten in the morning and then more often than not, on the plea of entertaining a client, head on out an hour or so after lunch. The inequities of the workplace became clearly evident to me. The hard working man on the factory floor had some suspicion but no real idea how much he was exploited by the higher echelon cadre in those upstairs offices.
After about a year I qualified for a two week vacation and headed for Hawaii. While there I tracked down the Hare Krishnas, visited the temple and rekindled my interest in Krishna consciousness. When I got back to Boston I took a subway from Logan Airport to Harvard Square with the idea of walking across the bridge over the Charles River and visiting the temple in Alston. Instead, when I got to Harvard Square and emerged from the subway, I saw the saffron robes of Hare Krishnas and about a hundred devotees in an all out Hari Nama chanting party. They were right in the middle of the square and before I knew it I was talking to a couple of them. I mentioned that I'd been a member in the Boston temple and the next thing I knew they whisked me over to meet Tamala Krishna Maharaja and Vishnu Jana Swami, the bus leaders of traveling party of Krishnas called the Radha-Damodara traveling sankirtan party. With eyes cast down and a somewhat self-deprecating tone and demeanor I mentioned that I'd been ejected from the Boston temple a couple years back and Tamal Krishna immediately said, "The administration then was in maya. You're fine. You can come with us." Later he was to regret that decision.
In 1968 I'd seen the Founder Acharya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, His Divine Grace, A.C.Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. This proved to be a crystallizing moment in my then frantic and bewildered life. Before that I'd seen the Hare Krishna devotees from time to time in places like Fisherman's Wharf and on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park and always my reaction was one of revulsion. It was a good example of the kettle calling the pot black. There I was in my disintegrating filthy rags and grungy beard and there were the Hare Krishnas in freshly laundered dhotis and with clean shaven heads.
Seeing Prabhupada put a whole new slant on things. Here was an authentic and genuine sadhu or holy man. He was, as it turned out, more than that. He was a fully liberated, pure devotee who could free others from the cycle of birth and death. It was the San Francisco Airport and this time the devotees were with their guru, Srila Prabhupada. This put a whole new light on everything for me. About a half dozen on each side of Prabhupada were performing Hari Nama, or chanting the Maha Mantra, hare krishna hare krishna, krishna krishna hare hare, hare rama hare rama, rama rama hare hare.
I became transfixed. I couldn't move. Then I started in their direction. Suddenly a hand was pulling me back and someone was saying, "Come on Anders, we have a plane to catch, where are you going?" I said, "Hang on. I gotta check this out. Hang on a sec." I started moving in the direction of the Hari Nama party again. Suddenly the voice was definite and firm and the hand holding mine pulled me around and redirected me. A year later we were married and had a baby daughter. I had no business getting married and even less fathering a child. At some point my wife came to me and said, "That's it, I'm going back to my family. I've had it." I have to give her all credit. If the roles had been reversed, I would have left me much sooner than she did. It was, however, devastating and I became depressed to the point of suicide. Somehow my mind convinced me to either give up my life or join the Hare Krishnas. It didn't seem like anything else would work.
I started visiting and sporadically staying at the Hare Krishna temple on Henry St. in Brooklyn, New York. Leading up to that I'd seen the devotees chanting in Time's Square a few times and also seen them on the late night David Suskind television show. Seeing the devotees bloom and blossom out of a typical dull and grungy cityscape was always a spectacular experience for me. Suddenly out of the humdrum workaday world of people hectically scurrying about at their relatively useless nine to five tasks, a bright and beautiful contingent of Hare Krishnas, mridanga drums throbbing and thumping and kartala hand cymbals tinkling and chinging, would appear and my surprise and delight would practically know no bounds. In a way I didn't fully understand at the time, they were offering an altogether different answer to the question: What to do? How to live? How to be happy?
They were saying, "Chant and be happy." More than that, they even handed out business size invitation cards with the Hare Krishna mantra on it that said, "Chant these names of God and your life will be sublime." It was such a grand and magical claim that it smacked of snake oil and legerdemain. I was intrigued though and when I finally tasted the vegetarian food there was no turning back. Somehow, in my haphazard, zigzag course from place to place, I found myself in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There were the devotees chanting again. I chanted with them and then went with them across the Charles River to Alston where they had a temple on 43 North Beacon St. The temple president sat me down on a chair, spun me around and shaved me up. At that point the mood was that if anyone, by Krishna's mercy, had the great good fortune to find their way into a temple, they should be given all possible encouragement to take up Krishna Consciousness.
As it turned out this was immediately and in the long term the absolute best thing that could have happened to me but the temple almost immediately started having second thoughts. I was clearly quite extremely crazy. One good example of this was my chanting my sixteen rounds during morning japa barefoot while circumambulating the temple. This in itself might not have been so crazy except for the fact that it was December and there were several inches of snow on the ground. The three years of callous built up on my feet from being shoeless made it possible but along with a few other quirky eccentricities made it a bit unnerving for the devotees. Also I had a challenging attitude and defiant mood born of my completely atheistic background and upbringing.
When I was first old enough to understand what people were saying to me, my mother and father both explained that God and religion were primitive superstitions and in our scientific and intellectual family we would not bother ourselves with such nonsense. I bought into such thinking big time and even became somewhat of a radical spokesperson for atheism both in high school and even later in college. It is only now that I can proudly and happily say that no one is more fanatic than someone who's been converted. The learning curve was steep and tough but now I claim to be more than a believer. I'm continually drunk on love of God. Over the years I've stood in front of thousands of classrooms full of college and high school students and whenever possible asked them all, "What is the purpose of life?" No one ever seems to have a quick and easy response. Our answer, however, as Hare Krishna devotees, is both quick and easy. It's also very firm and reliable. The purpose of life is to be happy. Then the obvious question is how to be happy? The movies, songs and books nearly all seem to share a common thread and recurring theme: Fall in love, fall in love, just fall in love. If you can fall in love, you can be happy. We also hear that a lot of people seem to be looking for love in all the wrong places. The most powerful thing in the world is love. We'll do nearly anything for love. The most powerful love, however, is love of God. Somehow, in this modern secular world, love for God seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. People seem to have more faith in gadgets and gizmos and science. This is very sad. And so it was that my first attempts to be a Hare Krishna devotee were fraught with confusion and difficulty.
Finally after a two month trial period in the Boston temple I was summarily ejected from the premises. It was January, 1972. I limped eighty miles in a sleeting ice storm from Boston to Ashaway, Rhode Island where my parents informed me that they were leaving the United States. The house was for sale and I was on my own. They helped me get a room in the YMCA in Providence and made sure I had a job driving a cab and they flew to their new house in Portugal. I was gone for two years. One day when I was driving my cab up the hill into East Providence I thought I heard the familiar thump of the drums and the ching ching ching of the kartals. My head spun in that direction only to see a chain rattling on the back of a truck. In addition to the cab driving, I also started taking classes in drafting at night. I never stopped chanting my rounds and this may have something to do with my focus and attention to detail that really seemed to payoff in my coursework. Right after graduation my instructor helped me get a job at a big company that was somewhat well known in that part of Rhode Island. I started working for Brown & Sharpe in North Kingston, Rhode Island. They put me into their screw machine department and in no time at all I was setting up four or five machines to run simultaneously. Typically you had to clamp a twelve foot bar of steel into the machine, set a cam to determine how various blades would impinge on the bar and then set the whole thing spinning at about three thousand RPM. The first few pieces spitting out of the machine had to be measured with a micrometer to determine whether or not they fell within acceptable limits. Not wanting to seem weird or different, I would continually chant the maha mantra under my breath while I was tapping in the blades with a ball peen hammer and setting everything up. Almost immediately this paid off. After only a few weeks I noticed that along with the quality control technician who regularly checked our parts, there were various other gentlemen in suits watching me work. It wasn't until later that I found out that they'd never had someone come in and produce faultless parts at the very beginning of the training period. It was expected that a new man would fill several buckets with scrap metal before he'd get it down. The next thing I knew I was called up into the engineering department and the man who was to become my new boss was pushing a folded up piece of paper across his desk to me. Curiously I opened it and in the spirit of the exercise, wrote a higher amount. He split the difference and that seemed to be all there was to that. In the factory I'd been working five ten hour shifts and five hours on Saturday and bringing in a little over three hundred dollars a week which wasn't too bad for the mid seventies. Now I was making a little bit more and I didn't have to punch in and out on a time clock for two ten minute coffee breaks and half an hour for lunch. I discovered that the standard "upstairs" was to come rolling in around nine or ten in the morning and then more often than not, on the plea of entertaining a client, head on out an hour or so after lunch. The inequities of the workplace became clearly evident to me. The hard working man on the factory floor had some suspicion but no real idea how much he was exploited by the higher echelon cadre in those upstairs offices.
After about a year I qualified for a two week vacation and headed for Hawaii. While there I tracked down the Hare Krishnas, visited the temple and rekindled my interest in Krishna consciousness. When I got back to Boston I took a subway from Logan Airport to Harvard Square with the idea of walking across the bridge over the Charles River and visiting the temple in Alston. Instead, when I got to Harvard Square and emerged from the subway, I saw the saffron robes of Hare Krishnas and about a hundred devotees in an all out Hari Nama chanting party. They were right in the middle of the square and before I knew it I was talking to a couple of them. I mentioned that I'd been a member in the Boston temple and the next thing I knew they whisked me over to meet Tamala Krishna Maharaja and Vishnu Jana Swami, the bus leaders of traveling party of Krishnas called the Radha-Damodara traveling sankirtan party. With eyes cast down and a somewhat self-deprecating tone and demeanor I mentioned that I'd been ejected from the Boston temple a couple years back and Tamal Krishna immediately said, "The administration then was in maya. You're fine. You can come with us." Later he was to regret that decision.
