Damodara Das

“Pure devotees know that they are meant to serve the Supreme Personality of Godhead and that all things that exist can be means by which one can serve the Supreme. Because a devotee has been blessed by the Supreme from within his heart he can see the Supreme Lord wherever he looks. Indeed, he can see nothing else.”

Srila Prabhupad, Teachings of Lord Caitanya, Chapter 23

( 2003 )

Why did I, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male Mayflower descendant born in Massachusetts in 1941 become an active member of a Hindu religious movement from 1966 to 1978 and after that include elements of Hinduism as major aspects of my spiritual life?

The precursors were both idiosyncratic and sociological. My personality started it. Then, cultural currents reinforced it.

As a child, I displayed certain tendencies. A recurring metaphysical dream of obscure meaning but vivid imagery and tactile sensations would wake me up. I recall going to my mother afterward one night and reporting to her, “There were thousands of them but there was only one!” This I proclaimed when I was just beginning elementary school. Poor Mom. Every mother wants her boy to be normal. It was not to be, at least until years later (when I learned how to pretend to be half-way normal). I also would spend long periods of time whistling along with the birds in the trees – now it was the neighborhood adults who were puzzled. A mystical chapter from The Wind in the Willows, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” haunted me. I returned to it often, hearing the strange music.

Later in youth, I became secretive. I felt the truth was not to be shared openly. Only a special few people could be entrusted with it. Those people would form a secret club outside ordinary society. The truth we shared would be ancient, passed through a chain of enlightened sages who sheltered it from mundane view. The sages would communicate the message telepathically. Perhaps the message originated in outer space, or in some mythological realm. I told no one about this.

I walked rapidly around in a circle inside our house, repeatedly for five or ten minutes at a time. Studying and designing magic symbols occupied me while alone. I meditated, without knowing I was doing so. My mother asked me, “Daniel, why are you just sitting there without doing anything?” I replied, “I’m feeling the blood run through my veins.” Bless you, Mother, for your patience.

The persona of the Nature Boy intrigued me. Nat King Cole sang of him, and there was a recluse in our town by that name. I wondered if I would dare to live that way, maybe as a naked wild man in the woods. Then a Natural music, doo-wop, transformed me into a creature of ecstasy. I said then that it “changed the molecular structure of my blood.” On a dark night when the others were asleep I left the house and walked naked through the tall grass in the back field.

At summer camp a slide show of astronomy photos revealed cosmic star-cloud splendors to me. I felt it was a divine explosion. I yearned for a direct vision of God. I heard the song of the Earth, the voice of the forest. Following my urge, I chanted nonsense syllables while arranging sticks and stones on the ground, hoping to construct a key to open a passageway into an essential, perhaps eternal, world.

Those experiences, intrinsic and spontaneous, were supported by outside influences.

Growing up in the Unitarian church, I learned how to find the truth in any religious tradition. Christianity was never the only way. Buddhists, Jews, American Indians — they all possessed pathways to God. The menu was spread before me. Which sacrament would I choose?

Science fiction expanded my horizons to the cosmic limit. Both the physical universe and the universe of mental speculation welcomed me as a native son.

Rock ‘n’ roll thrilled my soul. Any religion of mine would have to accomodate that bliss.

Nudism as a way of life appealed to me. I considered it often. Back to basics! Back to Nature! Cast off all artificial social labels and dwell in Eden! The God-created human body is the best instrument for transmitting and receiving divine knowledge!

Psychedelic herbs and drugs transported me into a world of powerful sensations and meanings. For two or three years that was my yoga. Hashish, periodically brought in from Morocco by a friend, was my staple. But I came to see that my mind was just being conditioned by the chemistry of the ingested substances. Mind was not in fact “manifested,” but merely being led through experiential sequences. Each herb or drug had its own pattern. I was learning, not about God or myself, but about chemical structures. Still, the energy released by the substances stood as a benchmark for testing the depth of any enlightenment.

Writers inspired me to pursue my quest. Among my favorites were D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Nikos Kazantzakis, Henry Miller, Stan Brakhage (the film maker), Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and Alan Watts. Watts’ book Psychotherapy East and West convinced me to take the side of spirituality against materialism. (I can credit Watts with probably saving my life. By quoting from his book Joyous Cosmology, I got my local draft board to grant me Conscientious Objector status. I never went to Vietnam.)

After much reading and probing for the truth, I’d reduced my bookshelf down to two volumes: the Bhagavad-gita and a Zen treatise, On the Transmission of Mind. The Gita represented Love. The other, Knowledge. I didn’t know if Love or Knowledge was the source of everything.

Knowledge, or intellectual inquiry, was the aspect of my personality that other people considered predominant. I wanted to gather knowledge about everything. Why? In order to sift out the non-essentials to arrive at the basic reality of everything. I constructed meaning-systems as attempts to describe the basic reality and the relationships of its constituent parts. The goal was The One. As I approached the end of this journey, I felt the goal had no qualities, no form, no name. It was the Void. Or, as I used to say, “Nothing is everything, and everything is Nothing.”

On the other hand, there was Love. In contrast to the dry theorizing that occupied me, this was juicy. I enjoyed the state of ecstasy, being possessed by the other, the obsession with a hypnotic vision of beauty. I felt that surrender to the overwhelming energy emanating from the beloved swept me away into a world of primal delight, of vitalizing emotion. To give love was to energize and create a world of pure personal bodily life. A life of service to the beatific Blessed One. Whereas Knowledge had something to say about God, Love took me to God. And Love said that God was something, not nothing.

Of the two books, the Gita was winning on points. But it was Swami Bhaktivedanta who finally tipped the scales in favor of Love over Knowledge. (His name itself means “love is the goal of knowledge.”) I attended a couple of meetings at the little storefront where he held forth. At the time of the next scheduled meeting, I found myself on 7th Street, on the sidewalk across from Tompkins Square Park. I was headed for the apartment of a friend of a friend to buy some mescaline. I stopped and compared the two possibilities. The lure of drugs had faded. I went to the storefront to experience Love.

And so my career in Hinduism began.

You may notice that none of this had anything to do with faith or belief, nothing to do with moral codes or being an upstanding member of society. Those things I associated with Christianity. I had nothing against them. They were admirable. But they didn’t reach into the core of my consciousness. Because of my psychology, I moved in the direction of immediate, intense experience that engaged the physical as a vehicle for the spiritual. The Swami’s pitch about Krishna being “the reservoir of pleasure” and about “spiritualizing the senses” by immersing them in devotional service to God appealed to me. The long singing sessions with energetic dancing to a tribal beat appealed to me. The Swami’s lectures, spiced by stories featuring India’s villagers and jungle beasts, appealed to me. The importance placed on vegetarian food (I was already vegetarian) offered to God as a means of liberation also appealed to me.

I might as well end it at that. There were many more things that appealed to me. But you get the point. That’s how a Protestant New Englander became a Hindu. Still, that transition happened in 1966. Now, in 2003, I don’t think of myself that way. Oh, I’m so much more normal now!

A year before meeting Srila Prabhupad, this is how I expressed my religious convictions in a letter to my parents. It was November 1965, the war in Vietnam was raging, and I was applying to my draft board for Conscientious Objector status. I post this not to confirm any part of it, but just to show you where I was coming from.

God is Supreme Being itself – Supreme Identity – Final Identity – my identity and yours, joined in oneness. Other words might be Eternity, Energy, Beauty, Love. God is the eternal energy of unity, of beauty, of love. God is one aspect of all humans, of all existants, equal to all.

The force of God’s unity strives to create beauty, to love, but is thwarted, finds itself in the universe with ugliness, hate, separation. The interplay of the two is the universe. Good cannot exist without evil.

Each of us must choose: beauty or ugliness, love or hate, creation or destruction, peace or war. The choice must be made – now! I believe the way of humanity must be the way of love – that must be my way. I am committed to total peace. Heaven itself commands me – in these matters I hear no other voice.

“Heaven is high, the earth is low; thus the Creative and the Receptive are determined. In correspondence with this difference between low and high, inferior and superior places are established.” – The Book of Changes

For peace to exist an immediate decision must be made at this very moment. No practical round of reforms or revolutions is going to move us any closer.

At the same time in admitting the necessity of evil, the whole demand for peace is put in its place. But there can be no doubt that evil, although in some instances may appear attractive, is ugly. And as an artist I am committed to beauty. That’s where I find myself in the world. That is the way I see my most fundamental reason for existing.

It’s more Buddhist than Christian, perhaps (but maybe that’s splitting hairs), and that’s why Michele and I got married in a Buddhist church – it seemed the closest thing available. Though of course I’m not a practicing Buddhist.

I hope my presentations here will serve the Krishna Consciousness mission of my beloved Gurudev, His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.