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Following is a radio interview from 1990, when Betrayal of the Spirit was just a manuscript, sitting in a drawer. - Nori Nori: Hi, Ron. Ron: How are you? Nori: Pretty good. Ron: We're going to go on in just a moment, so stay with me. Nori: I'm with you. Ron: And, as promised, we have on the phone Nori Muster, who is completing, or has completed at this point - I'm not sure we'll find out - a book about the decline of the Hare Krishna in America. She's a former full-time member of that organization for 10 years. She says that with the founder's death things started going a little awry. Let's go back to the beginning. What's your history with the Hare Krishnas? How did you get involved? Nori: Okay, I was in college in Santa Barbara, in my senior year in 1977, and I met devotees there. I was searching because I wanted to get away from drugs and things like that. I'd just moved to Santa Barbara to do my last year of college but I couldn't meet any other kids at the school who didn't take drugs or drink alcohol. Beer is the big thing there. Ron: Hard to find at a college. Nori: Yeah, especially back then. I went to a few of those beer parties - what a drag. Then I met Hare Krishnas and they told me they didn't take drugs, and they didn't eat meat, and they didn't have sex, and they didn't gamble. Those are the four regulative principles. I thought, hey great, here's a whole group of people - it's just what I wanted. So, I ended up joining. Ron: They don't eat meat, they don't drink, they don't gamble, and they don't have sex. Okay, a basic question now, who is the founder? Nori: The person who brought the movement to America is named A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. He was raised in this religion in India - he was born in 1896 and raised in Calcutta. His guru told him to bring the religion to the West because he could speak English really well. So he came to New York in 1965 and started the Hare Krishna movement, as everyone probably remembers in New York, back in the hippie days. Ron: Right. Well, the stereotypical Hare Krishna of the time was the orange robe and the shaved head and at the airport begging for money. When I was talking about the show earlier tonight one of our callers called in and said, "Did you know that a Hare Krishna panhandling in an airport can make $60,000 in a year?" And I said, "No, I didn't know that, but I would ask you." Is that true? Nori: Well, I moved into the Los Angeles temple in 1977 or '78, and at time - they call it "book distribution" because they give books away when they collect money - so the book distribution was at its height, right before it went into the decline. And, yeah, book distributors - some - not all, but the really good ones, could make $60,000 a year. Ron: What was done with the money? Nori: There's temples all over the country and all over the world, and then, in America there's one central book publishing office, which was located in Los Angeles when I joined. The temples would individually send their people out to collect money and distribute books, then they would send the money to the book fund and purchase more books. Then the book trust, called the BBT, or Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, had a semi-truck that had a route all around the country to drop off cases of books at all the temples. Temples could build up book credits by sending money to the BBT and then get the book. So the money was going to the BBT. Ron: You were a member for 10 years. What did you do during those 10 years? Nori: When I joined, or actually before I even moved into the temple, I started working in the public affairs department and I worked there the whole time. Ron: And what did you do in the public affairs department? Nori: For the first four or five years I was a secretary to the minister of public affairs. I helped him do press releases, deal with the media, answer people's questions, publish books, things like that. We also worked to get our public affairs ministry accepted by the leadership and designated as "the" public affairs department for the whole movement. After things really got going, we started a newspaper, called The ISKCON World Review, and I became one of the editor-writer-typesetter-gofers, and I worked for the newspaper for the rest of the time. Ron: Was this a happy time, a good time? Nori: Yeah, well . . yeah, it was a good time. It was a growing time. I had just finished college and it was exciting to be in a public affairs department. We were running the whole thing ourselves. Ron: During that time, was there anything that was wrong? Nori: Yeah, there were a lot of things wrong. Myself, I was really naive and I didn't notice it, I didn't get involved. But there were a lot of things wrong. When I met devotees in 1977, Prabhupada, the founder, had just passed away in November. I met devotees practically the day after he died. Somewhere I had heard that he died and when I met devotees, the first thing I asked them was, "Hey, I heard that your guru died." The people I met had just happened to have been with him in India when he died, so they told me all about it, what his passing was like and everything. Then, when I was getting closer to moving in, the man that I'd been dealing with told me that to get initiated I would have to take initiation from one of the guru's disciples, since he had died. I didn't really like that idea. Ron: Why, what does initiation involve? Nori: Well, the guru - see, when Prabhupada died, 11 men took over the movement. They were supposed to be the most advanced disciples, the best disciples - you can imagine these American kids taking over a movement from an 86-year-old swami. So when Prabhupada died they divided the world up - pieces of pie, right? One guy got Europe, one guy got Australia, one guy got India - it was all divided up. Ron: Was it a sincere thing, to spread the good news of this, or was it a money-making thing, where they saw the opportunity to make big bucks? Nori: I don't know. I think in the beginning they were sincere. They thought it's what he wanted. Maybe there were a few people who were trying to get power, but once they had divided it up, a struggle developed between the different leaders to see who could get more. Who could get more disciples, who could collect more at the airports, who could build bigger temples - and then it became a thing where certain of the gurus were falling down. Then, it was like "who could take over their portion of the pie." It became a competitive thing that got worse and worse. One guy would become a black sheep and then the other guys in the area would want to take over his territory. Ron: Sounds cut-throat. Nori: That was part of it. The conclusion of that - remember the four principles I mentioned before? No meat-eating, not gambling, no intoxication, and no illicit sex? Well, of the 11 guys who took over, something like seven of them broke the principles. It started to cause a real credibility gap between the leaders and the followers. We were following these guys - they were our gurus, they were our leaders, they were supposed to be the great devotees. And here they were, taking LSD, having sex with their disciples, having homosexual affairs with their disciples. Ron: Did you see these things? Nori: Yeah. Ron: You saw them and there's no doubt that this happened? Nori: Right. I worked in the public affairs department. For a number of years I was able to rationalize it, overlook it, understand it, write it off, deny it - all those kind of things. Ron: I'm not sure what the philosophy of the Hare Krishna is. What is the religion, what is the basis of it, besides no meat, no - Nori: It's based on a form of Hinduism called "Vaishnavism" and Vaishnava means "Vishnu." So Vishnu or Krishna is the basis of the religion. They believe in God, reincarnation, karma, and service to God. In other words, serving God is the main tenet of the religion. Also chanting the names of God, which is "Hare Krishna," when you see them singing. Also, following a guru and all those other things, daily meditation. The whole object is to come to a level of realization where you're dedicating every moment of your waking life to God. You do it through serving God and serving the temple. Ron: How does one become a guru? Nori: Political power. Ron: Really? Nori: It's supposed to be based on your purity, but - Ron: Who judges your purity? Nori: Okay, when Prabhupada was still living, as he went along in the years that he was managing the movement, it got to be bigger and bigger. More and more temples were opening everywhere and more and more projects were starting. So he picked twelve of his disciples to be Governing Body Commissioners - that's "GBC." The GBC was supposed to be the governing body, the hierarchy of the movement, to act on Prabhupada's behalf and make sure everything was going smoothly. They're still in existence - they're supposed to be the leaders of the movement. They're the ones who can decide to make someone a guru. Ron: When you were talking about the decline and how all the gurus were involved in these different things, and you just rattled them off and I sort of said, "Yeah, right." I suppose we should be a little more shocked. You mentioned the taking of drugs, the having affairs, the homosexuality, how rampant was this? Was it overt, or - Nori: It unraveled over a period of time. Working in the public affairs department was one disaster after another. I moved in the temple in 1978, in June, right after graduation. Then Jonestown happened in October. I had just joined and all of a sudden we're dealing with this - our newspaper clippings increased by about 500 percent and every article started out, "Dangerous cults like Hare Krishna, Scientology, the Moonies . . ." So anyway, our publicity was horrible from day one, when I joined. Then, the very next thing that happened was the guru from Northern California got busted with a bunch of illegal guns and ammunition at his farm. That was part of a World War III philosophy that had been circulating in the movement that he took to an extreme. He bought a battleship in the Philippines and was going to have it sailed over to America. Ron: He bought a battleship with money that was raised by panhandling? Nori: Yes, from money raised from the book distribution. He didn't - see, that was another thing. Not all the gurus thought they should turn their collections over to the BBT. They wanted to keep it for their own projects, and this guy's project happened to be battleships and guns. So he got busted twice for having the guns on his farm, so that was our next publicity thing we had to deal with. This story was all over in California. Ron: And you're trying to do damage control. Nori: Exactly. Everything that happened, we weren't ready for it. First we had Jonestown, then we had our own Jonestown. Then we had to do press conferences and press releases and say, "Guns isn't the official policy. It was just this one guy." At first he got a little slap on the back of the hand because he was supposed to be a pure devotee, you know, chosen by Prabhupada as a leader, a guru. How could this happen? Everyone just went into denial. Then, finally they had to expel him because it kept happening. He kept getting busted and one of his disciples would take the rap for him. That was the first guru to deviate and everyone else thought it would just be him - no one else would deviate. Then, about a year later, the guru for England started flipping out on LSD. I mean, really flipping out. He was having some heavy psychotic breaks with reality. Ron: Was this the guru that George Harrison was involved with. Nori: No, the guru George Harrison was involved with was my boss. He [Mukunda Goswami] is still in the movement, he's kind of middle-of-the road, he hasn't done anything very controversial. Ron: When he was your boss, was he a guru? Nori: No, he became a guru much later. Ron: But he was the guru that George Harrison followed? Nori: No, George Harrison only followed Prabhupada. Actually, one time George Harrison came to our temple in L.A. He came there a few times, but one time we had a dinner for him and he met my guru, who is this guy from New York. He speaks with a New York accent, you can picture him, he's a little fuss-budget. He has a bad temper, very dogmatic, and hard to get along with, and he's made a guru. Just the most unlikely person to be a guru. So they had this dinner and the big thing was that George Harrison was to meet the new, pure devotee-guru for Los Angeles, and have dinner together. Well, they did not get along. On the way back to the airport, George told my boss that he didn't like the idea of having gurus, that Prabhupada should be the only guru, none of these other guys should be gurus, they don't know what they're doing, they're going to wreck the movement. He could see it - he could see it so clearly, but none of us who were in the movement could see it. Ron: I don't want to be sensationalistic, but I want to go back to some of this debauchery we talked about. But before we do that, let me give out our phone number in case anyone out there has any questions. The number is 692-0973. If you have any questions about Nori Muster's 10 years in the Hare Krishna movement, give us a call at 692-0973. Now, you say this degeneration happened slowly. Nori: At first it did. From 1978, when the gurus took over, only those two deviated, the guns guru and the LSD guru. And everyone thought that would be it, because we were all in denial. Then, in 1986, all the godbrothers of the gurus - in other words, there's a guru and his disciples, all the disciples are godbrothers - all the godbrothers of the gurus were tired of being put down. They were being dominated by these gurus and no one else could become a guru except these 11 guys. Actually, I think they made three more gurus at the time. So the godbrothers had an uprising and they threatened - they almost overthrew the gurus - they called it the "guru reform movement." At this meeting in 1986 they decided more people should be allowed to be gurus and the gurus can't have absolute power, they can't have zones where only they can make disciples. So the guru reformers were successful and they made about another 20 gurus at this meeting. That was when "you know what" hit the fan. That was when the other four or five gurus were exposed, at those meetings. Another one resigned, so that only left about three who were still in power - and they're still gurus. Ron: Now what kind of power do they have, exactly? Nori: Okay, when Prabhupada was guru, in the very last years of his life they were honoring him with different kinds of worship. This is permitted in the religion, but you only do it for very respected people, very holy men - it's a very high respect where they do ceremonies, like bathe their feet, offer incense, offer them a big throne-like chair to sit on. It was a form of showing respect and worship. Well, when these gurus took office they immediately demanded this kind of respect. So every disciple had to bow down every time they saw their guru. They had ceremonies every morning where the gurus were worshiped - put up on a chair, bowed down to, throw flowers on their feet, offer incense, and other worship. It was pretty elaborate. Ron: Was this voluntary, or was it mandatory, and how was it enforced? Nori: It wasn't coercion, but - like for me - at first it was really weird, because I knew they did that for Prabhupada. But I didn't think they would do it for Ramesvara because he was only a - he wasn't that much older than me. He was only about 27 at the time - just a young guy. He looked more comfortable in a business suit than a Hare Krishna robe. He was a publisher, he had been publishing books for Prabhupada - he really wasn't the guru type. Then, all of a sudden we were asked to worship him. But then I just got used to it because that was what everyone else was doing. That's one of the points I bring out in my book - Ron: Was it brainwashing of a sort? Nori: I don't know what they mean by brainwashing, but it seems like a certain kind of codependence, or something. You go along with it just because the whole group is. It's kind of like peer pressure. Ron: Do you feel - did you feel silly when you first started doing it? Nori: I had to lie to myself to be able to do it. "This is my guru, this is my eternal master, I have to worship him," you have to tell yourself all these things. And the godbrothers - his equals in the movement - did not like it at all. For a while all the gurus were making it so even their godbrothers and godsisters had to worship them. That - it was practically like a mutiny when they finally overthrew them. Ron: In it's heyday, how big was it? Nori: Well, in its heyday - it peaked in about 1977, just about the time Prabhupada died, and then went down. Probably, in America, about 5,000 full-time members, living in temples, or very near temples. Ron: It wasn't really that big of a group. Nori: No, it was visible, but it wasn't big. But then, if you consider all the Hindus - this was their regular religion, so . . . Ron: Right, but in the United States there was an over-reaction, probably, considering the size of the group. Nori: Um, well, they were in every airport - you couldn't really get away from it. Ron: That's true. Is there anything left of it in America today? Nori: Yes, surprisingly, there is. There's a temple in New York, there's a temple in L.A., there's Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Denver, something's happening in San Francisco - it's kind of died out. I've named most of the big cities where it still is. Ron: You're not involved in any way anymore? Nori: No, I've moved about as far away from a temple as I could get. Ron: Why? Nori: Remember the GBC that I mentioned before? the leaders? They are really hung up on what they call "purity" and they want everyone whose going to be practicing Krishna consciousness to adhere to their standards and be part of their group. In other words, if you try to have a Hare Krishna temple but the GBC doesn't like you or doesn't accept you, then they do their best to get rid of you. They're doing this right now to a group in Mississippi. There's a farm down there and the people were excommunicated from ISKCON for not following the GBC. They're all Prabhupada disciples and they want to have their own community, and they publish their own newsletter, and the GBC writes them threatening letters telling them not to call themselves "Hare Krishna" and not to call themselves "International Society for Krishna Consciousness." And the GBC has to have their nose in every single thing that's going on in the country. Ron: Is there a trademark on Hare Krishna? Nori: There's the International Society for Krishna Consciousness - ISKCON, their acronym. They say that they have that copyrighted and they say they have "Hare Krishna Movement" copyrighted. I don't know. Ron: According to them you can't go around calling yourself Hare Krishna unless they recognize you as such. Nori: Right, you have to be part of their group, recognized by them. And anyone who tries to have a temple or whatever, without their sanction, their full participation - they get on your case. Ron: Sounds like a business. Nori: That's been criticized. But I ran into my own problems with the GBC. When I worked in the public affairs office, my husband and I were editing and publishing a newspaper. In 1986, when things broke loose, we wanted to print articles about it. These things would be in the newspapers - about our gurus falling down, this and that, and murders - then our newspaper would come out and it looked - blank. There was nothing there about it - it was kind of a "good news" sheet. We wanted to start doing articles and interviews to show what was really happening, and have articles and be objective. Well, the GBC didn't like that at all, so I had my run-ins with those people. Ron: What are your feelings now about the movement, and, can I say, are you religious today? Nori: I still feel the same way about Prabhupada - to me, Prabhupada was a saintly person and a guru, who was sincerely following his religion and his orders from his guru. I'm okay with that, I think that's good. Also, I believe the philosophy and read the books of the movement because I think it's a nice philosophy and I like it. It answered a lot of questions for me. At the time I met devotees in Santa Barbara - I was 21, or so - and had a lot of spiritual questions. I found this philosophy really satisfying and I still feel the same way. |