by Nori J. Muster
In 1978 the Hare Krishnas told me that if I followed them for the rest of my life, I'd go back to Godhead with them. To follow, I had to move into a temple, wear Indian clothing, learn hundreds of customs and taboos, and cut myself off from the outside world. They forbade commercial media and criticized outside relationships, unless the outsiders might join, donate, or do service. They said that anyone who left ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, would fall back into the material ocean and be lost. They called it "blooping," the sound of a rock when it hits the water and sinks. I booped in December 1988.
I was just one of many who left disillusioned. In the decade following the death of ISKCON founder Srila Prabhupada,1 ninety percent of members left.2 ISKCON turned into an organization with many more ex-members than current, full-time members. One ex-ISKCON member shared his thoughts about it in his essay, "On Leaving ISKCON."3 Steven J. Gelberg, known in ISKCON as Subhananda, said:
It's hard to imagine an experience more wrenching, more potentially disorienting, than leaving a spiritual community or tradition to which one has devoted years of one's life. To lose faith in a comprehensive system of ideas that have shaped one's consciousness and guided one's actions, to leave a community that has constituted one's social world and defined one's social identity, to renounce a way of life that is an entire mode of being, is an experience of momentous implications.4
Gelberg addressed "On Leaving ISKCON" to his "brothers and sisters who have shared the ISKCON/Krishna consciousness experience." Referring to ex-membership he said, "There exists, therefore, a substantial and growing body of people who share what can only be described as a traumatic experience."5
Approximately four thousand people shared the collective experience Gelberg described, but in addition there are about a thousand others who had a different experience. For example, several hundred original members are still involved with ISKCON. They remain in the group, willing to overlook the problems, and do not share the feelings of disillusionment that made the majority leave. Second, there are several dozen people who left because they were deprogrammed.6 Their themes would depend on whether they feel grateful or resentful that someone else made the decision for them. They are tangled in themes of self-determination that are outside the scope of this paper. In addition, deprogrammed individuals are much more likely to reject all aspects of their ISKCON experience. Thus, their identity crisis is more complex than the collective experience described in this paper.
Finally, the remainder are people who perpetrated abuse inside the organization. They will not be able to relate to the themes presented here. Abuse perpetrators have psychopathic, or sociopathic, disorders. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV), abuse perpetrators may be diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder, Conduct Disorder, or any number of pathologies.7 Since perpetrators generally have diagnosable disorders, they would need to go into treatment and enter recovery before they could relate to the issues under discussion here.
Gelberg identified the things that made him leave: practical and ethical failures, intellectual dishonesty, disrespect for followers, hypocrisy in the demand for celibacy, condescending attitude toward women, and scriptural fundamentalism.8
Similar themes play out in myth. Carl Jung said that story and myth link the inner and outer human experience. Rollo May said myths are "like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it."9 In this essay, I will offer stories and dreams that reveal the psychic beams of the ex-member experience.10 The main themes are post-traumatic stress and identity crisis.
Post-traumatic Stress
According to the DSM-IV, post-traumatic stress may progress to a diagnosable disorder:
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating condition that follows a terrifying event. Often, people with PTSD have persistent frightening thoughts and memories of their ordeal and feel emotionally numb.11
Post-traumatic stress follows an experience of intense fear, horror, or helplessness. The onset may occur at the time of the event or it may develop months, or even years after the event.
All ISKCON members (past and present) were at least subliminally aware of ISKCON's history of traumatic stress and abuse. Only a few would warrant a DSM diagnosis, but many suffer from lesser degrees of stress. Most of the stress in the organization came from the top, especially the hierarchy's power struggles in the years following the death of Srila Prabhupada. The leaders fought over money, power, and territory, and there were several murders, as well as untold incidents of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Anyone closely involved with the hierarchy during those years probably sustained emotional scars of betrayal, grief, anger, frustration, and a loss of trust in authority figures, especially religious authorities.
Stress spread throughout the organization. Members outside the hierarchy clashed over moral, ethical, and practical issues. For example, people fought each other for apartments, control of temples, budget dollars, and for positions in the organization. Some members participated in crimes like drug smuggling, petty theft, and assault.12
The organization also practiced psychological manipulation intended to cause stress . In the days when I joined, the leaders taught us to see the outside world as a place of misery. They said people who left would never make it to the Godhead on their own, because maya (illusion) would drag them down to "repeated birth and death." Insiders used unflattering labels like "snake" and "prostitute" to describe ex-members. They said that people who blooped would turn into drug addicts, end up poverty stricken, or die of a degenerative disease. These fears became self-fulfilling prophecy for some ex-members.
Further programming held that the "material world" was "illusion" and there was "nothing out there." They said people who left would become lonely and come back to the organization seeking "association." Ex-members who still came around admitted that they were "fallen" and that everything the leaders said was true. Broken ex-members work in the hierarchy's favor, as long as they remain broken.
ISKCON also programmed members to be ashamed to work for "non-devotee meat-eaters," since that would make them lower than sudras, the lowest rung of the caste system. This notion increased the probability that ex-members would experience stress upon re-entering the work force.
Stigma
You can't always tell ex-ISKCON members by how they look, but most of us carry an invisible stigma. For me, stigma is the most prominent theme behind my post-traumatic stress. I investigated ISKCON's crimes for ten years to write my book13, so I am acutely aware of the history. In the early 1990s when I started my research, I began to feel extremely guilty. I had participated in cover-ups as a member of the organization's P.R. office. Writing my book was a catharsis that gave me a chance to process ISKCON's history and my role in it.
I did not perpetrate crimes like some, but I definitely too part in the cover-up. It's a chore to have to admit that I did P.R. for ISKCON. It's not the first thing I tell people about myself, but it has the potential to completely change people's opinion of me. It has happened many times. For example, in 2002 I contacted an old high school friend. She was enthusiastic to hear from me, since we had traveled in Europe together in 1973 and had not talked since that time. However, when I told her about the child abuse in ISKCON, she quickly terminated the conversation. Apart from a few emails, we have not spoken since. I didn't abuse children. I helped expose the child abuse, but some people would say I'm guilty by association.
At times I have felt the weight of ISKCON's crimes hanging like an albatross around my neck. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written in 1798 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the bird is a good omen.
At length did cross an Albatross,
Through the fog it came ;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
The bird flew ahead of the ship, guiding it through fog and floating ice. Unfortunately, the ancient Mariner killed it.
'God save thee, ancient Mariner !
From the fiends, that plague thee thus !-
Why look'st thou so ?'- With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
When the bird died, the winds died too and the boat stopped moving. As punishment, the ship's crew hung the dead bird around the ancient Mariner's neck. To atone for his sin, the Mariner had to search his soul and do penance. It took more introspection than he thought it would, but at the end of his meditations, the ancient Mariner's consciousness changed:
A spring of love gushed from my heart . . .
The self-same moment I could pray ;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
This breakthrough was his return to humanity, humbleness, and gratitude. The wind picked up and the ship sailed to safety. Ex-members may identify with the ancient Mariner's struggle. It takes more than wishful thinking and denial to throw off the burden of stigma. An ex-member who suffers from guilt must go through a transition of emotional healing. When I left ISKCON I was filled with rage thinking that the organization had victimized me. It took about ten years to finally realize that I was not a victim. Through publishing my book and talking about it, I realized that I was an assistant perpetrator in ISKCON; more a Leni Riefenstahl than a victim. It was a shocking perspective that I never expected, but it has helped me heal. Realizing my culpability in a dishonest hierarchy made me understand why I felt so much guilt. When I saw the situation for what it was, I could begin to heal.
Victims get perspective when they realize that what happened to them was wrong. When they finally accept the fact of their victimization, they can stop blaming themselves and start to heal. Perpetrators get perspective when they finally acknowledge that their behavior was wrong and they take responsibility. Most ex-cult members have issues in one or both areas.
Identity Crisis
Identity crisis is a diagnosable psychiatric disorder if it progresses to the level of Dissociative Identity Disorder or Multiple Personality Disorder.14 Dissociative disorders are pathological conditions where the ego splinters due to trauma. It's possible that some ex-ISKCON members experience dissociative disorders, especially those who suffered physical or sexual abuse. However, most ex-ISKCON members only suffer an existential identity crisis in the sense that it becomes difficult to answer the question, "Who am I?" It could be part of an individual's mid-life crisis, especially for those who left the cult after spending eight, ten, twelve years, or more years.
Ex-members must come to terms with their identity inside the group and their identity before joining. Most members received a new name at initiation, so they have to decide whether to continue using it or go back to their birth name. The change of name is a metaphor for the cult personality change. It may take a while to get the real personality to return.
The leaders told us we were "dogs" before we met our gurus, and that our lives before ISKCON were worthless. We must go back and reclaim our early years, and our value outside the organization. Ex-members must also rework their views about gender and sexuality, because ISKCON offered a set of values that are out of step with the mainstream culture. There are hundreds of beliefs and superstitions to unlearn once a person leaves.
Some ex-members choose to retain their insider identity and set up a lifestyle outside of ISKCON to accommodate it. Some joined groups that resemble ISKCON in every respect, but with less flagrant corruption in the hierarchy. Thus, splinter groups offer an "ISKCON-lite" for some ex-members. However, most ex-members put their group identities to rest and joined mainstream society. Some listed ISKCON on their resume and found a boss who appreciated their background, but most of us went through a period of hiding our history.
When I moved to Oregon after leaving ISKCON, I lived a double life. Between the stigma and identity crisis, I couldn't even tell my new next door neighbors what I did in Los Angeles. I had to be vigilant to know when it was safe to talk about my past and how much to say. I felt like I might as well have been a convict who just got out of prison, because there was a ten year gap in my history that I couldn't talk about. A few of us around that time used the nickname "EX-CONS" to refer to ourselves as ex-ISKCON members.
Home
Many people who joined in the 1960s - 1970s were looking for a spiritual family. ISKCON may have provided a sense of home, but upon leaving, the ex-member has to start this journey again. When I left the temple, I spent six months living in my father's house. It definitely felt like home, since he had lived there since I was fourteen. He died the week after I moved in, following a two and a half year battle with cancer. I remained in my father's house as long as I could before the attorneys sold it.
Sometimes I have dreams that I call my dad on the phone. He invites me over to the house and I say I'll be there soon. Then I hang up and remember that he's dead and the house is sold.
About five years after my father died, I had the following dream:
I go home on a bus. It drops me off at the bottom of Skylark Lane [my father's street] with all my luggage. Two parakeets keep getting out of their cage. I realize I don't live there anymore. I'm alone with nowhere to go.15
The search for home is a universal theme echoed in the world's literature. One of the greatest of these stories is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Running away from an alcoholic and abusive father, Huck Finn was the archetypal orphan. He and the runaway slave Jim were both like orphans, looking for a home they found on the river:
It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. . . . We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.16
Getting "hove out of the nest" is a metaphor for what happens to an orphan and is also a good metaphor for ex-membership. In ISKCON's bible, the Hindu text Bhagavad-gita, Krishna and Arjuna discuss the fate of an unsuccessful yogi. Arjuna asked,
Does not such a man, being deviated from the path of Transcendence, perish like a riven cloud, with no position in any sphere?17
Many ex-members end up in that dilemma. They feel like failures because they have no place in ISKCON, but they are spoiled to the material world too. But how does leaving ISKCON make a person unsuccessful? Family members might see leaving as the best thing their loved one could ever do. It all depends on the perspective. An ex-member must search for a suitable frame to put the experience in a healthy perspective.
ISKCON offered its members a mandatory philosophical system of theology, morality, and notions about what it means to be religious. Upon leaving ISKCON, ex-members face an identity crisis in the area of faith. Therefore, reestablishing a personal belief system is a step toward coming home, and is another common theme of ex-membership.
Some ex-members return to their family religion or a philosophy they held dear before joining. Others integrate parts of the ISKCON (Vedic, Hindu) faith into a new belief system. Some discard religion altogether, or go headlong into another alternative religious path.
Conclusion
The Ancient Mariner's and Huckleberry Finn's stories provide a mythic frame for the ex-ISKCON member's experience. When ex-members find a story that resonates, the story can help them put their experiences into perspective. The story offers a denouement, giving ex-members clues about the resolution of their own histories. Mythic stories offer ex-members a sense of justice, and may help them reach a stage where they feel the cult experience is finally over. Any negative experience - once complete and put in the past - may offer lessons about maturity and personality responsibility. It is the same for a negative experience in a religious group. When ex-ISKCON members can finally look back on their experiences from the perspective of completion, they can see the value of the ordeal. Resolution helps put the post-trauma stress and identity crisis to rest.
This paper offers a brief look at the themes of ex-membership and stories that illustrate those themes. Not every individual will identify with the two stories I have identified for this essay, but they may find another mythic story that speaks to their situation and emotions. I offer these stories with the hope that they will help scholars and others understand the depth of emotion in the ex-member experience.
End Notes
1 Srila Prabhupada died November 14, 1977, in the ISKCON temple in Vrindavana, India. Some of his disciples allege that a cabal of disciples poisoned Prabhupada with arsenic and ground glass. The exact cause of death was never determined. He was eighty-two and is buried beneath a memorial on the property.
2 The original version of "On Leaving ISKCON," by Steven J. Gelberg, opens with the statement: "When Prabhupada predicted, once, that ninety percent of his disciples would eventually leave his movement, we, his disciples, were shocked that such a thing could be possible. In time, the overwhelming majority of his followers did indeed leave ISKCON, and it now appears the same will hold true for his grand-disciples." See: http://www.vnn.org/editorials/ET9812/ET25-2737.html
3 A revised version of "On Leaving ISKCON," by Steven J. Gelberg, was published in The Hare Krishna Movement: The Post-charismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant, by Edwin Bryant, Ph.D., and Maria Ekstrand, Ph.D., eds., Columbia University Press, 2004.
4 "On Leaving ISKCON," by Steven J. Gelberg, revised version, part one, see: http://surrealist.org/betrayalofthespirit/gelberg1.html
5 Ibid., part one.
6 Deprogramming was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Concerned parents hired professionals to physically remove their child from the group, then apply counseling to prevent the child from returning. It was sometimes successful and sometimes not; some deprogrammers used methods that got them into legal trouble. It is usually not practiced today, as most professionals have turned to "exit counseling," which is similar to family therapy.
7 DSM-IV codes: Antisocial Personality Disorder (code number 301.7), Conduct Disorder (code number 312.8). Other variations are Adult Antisocial Behavior (code number V71.01), Adjustment Disorder With Disturbance of Conduct (code number 309.3), Adjustment Disorder With Mixed Anxiety and Depressed Mood (code number 309.28), and Adjustment Disorder With Mixed Disturbance of Emotions and Conduct (code number 309.4). Abusers might also suffer from a dual diagnosis, such as antisocial behavior plus one of the following: schizophrenia, mood disorders, personality disorders, bi-polar disorder, etc.
8 Ibid., part one and two.
9 The Cry for Myth (New York, 1991), p. 23.
10 For a similar analysis of archetypal themes, see "Take Charge of Your Health: The Grand Archetypal Themes," by Caroline Myss. See: http://www.beliefnet.com/story/84/story_8453_1.html
11 DSM-IV, code number 309.81.
12 To learn more about the dishonest and traumatic events in ISKCON, see my book, Betrayal of the Spirit: My Life behind the Headlines of the Hare Krishna Movement (University of Illinois Press, 1997); Monkey on a Stick: Murder, Madness and the Hare Krishnas, by John Hubner and Lindsey Grueson (Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1988); Hare Krishna in America, by Burke Rochford (Rutgers University, 1985), and other published accounts.
13 Betrayal of the Spirit: My Life behind the Headlines of the Hare Krishna Movement. For reviews, see: http://surrealist.org/betrayalofthespirit/reviews.html
14 DSM-IV lists the following identity disorders: Identity Problem (code number 313.82) and Dissociative Identity Disorder (code number 300.14). Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) is one aspect of Dissociative Identity Disorder.
15 Dream recorded March 24, 1994.
16 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, Chapter 3.
17 Bhagavad-gita As It is, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, (Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1978) verse 6.38.
