NOT EVERYONE changed right away. “I’m higher than you are!” a wide-eyed, bearded youth told the Swami after one evening class.

“Please accept my humble obeisances,” the Swami replied, bowing slightly as Bruce Scharf showed the bearded guest to the door.

“Do not let in any more crazies,” Swamiji requested. “If you tell such people they are in the grasp of material nature, they will not understand. They are so accustomed to suffering that they mistake their suffering for happiness.”

Allen Ginsberg apparently missed that instruction and one Sunday brought the rock group the Fugs to a kirtan at Matchless Gifts. The Fugs were the anti-Beatles: a drug-ingesting, liquor-swilling crew of chaos-and-shock musicians. The regulars could not imagine what Ginsberg was thinking, since the group’s raw lyrics about radical sex hardly fit with their teacher’s insistence on self-restraint. “Kill for Peace,” “Slum Goddess,” “Skin Flowers of the Lower East Side”—these were some of the songs on the Fugs’s albums.

“Sex pleasure binds us to this material world of birth and death,” the Swami told his audience that evening. He quoted the tenth-century philosopher Yamunacharya: “Since becoming Krishna conscious, whenever I think of sex—I spit at the thought.”

The Fugs never returned.⁸¹

ALLAN KALLMAN, A RECORD PRODUCER, read the East Village Other article and showed up at Tompkins Square Park to hear the chanting for himself. Kallman’s company, Happening Records, released spoken-word recordings by celebrities of the day such as LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, human rights advocate Malcom X, and civil rights activist Mark Lane. Kallman calculated that a recording of the Swami and his group chanting, along with a spoken-word explanation, would fit his catalog. He called Matchless Gifts and made an appointment to see the Swami.

“Alan told the Swami about his plan to make a recording of the chant along with an explanation, and he loved it,” remembered Kallman’s wife, Carol. “The Swami explained that the chanting is important but that the philosophy behind the chanting is equally important. So he would be happy to do both on the album.”⁸²

In December, the Swami and his followers traveled to Bell Tone Studios on Broadway and 51st Street. Inside the studio, the Swami and his students were offered cushions on the floor of the recording room. Engineers positioned microphones, then they signaled the chanters to begin. Students played kartals, and the Swami sang, keeping time on a two-headed wooden drum that a temple guest had volunteered for the occasion. An hour and several takes later, the chanting came to a resounding conclusion.

“Are you tired?” Kallman asked the Swami.

“Not too tired,” he replied. Engineers again turned on their recording equipment, and the Swami leaned into the microphone.

“This chanting of ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare’ is the sublime method for reviving our dormant Krishna consciousness.” He spoke carefully, knowing that his accent might be difficult for some listeners to follow. “As living spirit souls,” he continued, “we are all originally Krishna conscious entities, but due to our association with matter from time immemorial, our consciousness is now polluted by the material atmosphere. Krishna consciousness is not an artificial imposition on the mind. When we hear the transcendental vibration, this consciousness is revived. This chanting is directly enacted from the spiritual platform, surpassing all lower strata of consciousness, namely sensual, mental, and intellectual. As such, anyone can take part in the chanting without any previous qualification and dance in ecstasy. We have seen it practically. Even a child can take part in the chanting, and even a dog can take part in it. No other means therefore of spiritual realization is as effective in this age as chanting the maha-mantra—Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.”

Then he sang Guru-vastakam, a prayer honoring the lineage of spiritual masters. After another half hour of performance, he stopped. “You have made your best record,” he said to Kallman. The group gathered their instruments and prepared to drive back to the tiny storefront temple.

Unexpectedly, the engineers played back the recording of Hare Krishna over the studio sound system. The Swami looked up, elated by the mix of voices and instruments, and the slight echo engineers had added for effect. He smiled, raised his arms and danced, dipping slightly from the waist and swaying back and forth. His sleepy followers came alive, set down whatever they had been carrying, and joined him, right foot over left, left foot over right. The group pointed to engineers behind the glass booth and smiled. The studio technicians had raised their arms and were also dancing back and forth to the music. The first recording of “Hare Krishna” was already a hit.

THAT YEAR, interest in the Hare Krishna chant and the philosophy of Krishna consciousness expanded in a variety of ways. While visiting the United States, the Beatles heard a broadcast of the Kallman record on radio. Of the four superstars, George Harrison was most taken by the chanting. He asked the band’s road manager to order copies of the album, and back in London Harrison distributed them to friends.

On his posthumous album Om, recorded in 1966, jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and fellow musicians opened and closed the improvised tracks by quoting Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita: “Rites that the Vedas ordain and the rituals taught by the scriptures, the oblation, the flame into which they are offered—all these am I.” That was also the year Jimi Hendrix released his album Axis: Bold As Love, with his own face superimposed over the image of Krishna’s Universal Form. Soon after, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s television talk show Firing Line and sang the Hare Krishna mantra to a nationwide viewing audience. Not long after that, folksinger Tom Paxton referred to the Hare Krishna chant in his song “Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues”: “So we all lit up and by and by / The whole platoon was flyin’ high / With a beautiful smile on the Captain’s face / He smelled like midnight on St. Mark’s Place / Cleanin’ his weapon / Chantin’ sumpin’ about Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.” Author Tom Wolfe added to the momentum by including a description of the mantra in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Before coming to America, had the Swami imagined what success would look like, he might not have foreseen such assimilation of the maha-mantra, “the great mantra for deliverance,” into pop culture. If he had been told, he would not have objected. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu used to tease children into chanting by covering his ears and pretending he would not listen. Whatever it took to get people chanting was acceptable, and through a combination of jazz albums, pop songs, talk shows and divine plan, the Hare Krishna mantra spread, and the Swami’s following grew.

IN SEPTEMBER 1966, THE SWAMI announced to his American followers that soon he would hold an initiation ceremony. Students interested in formal initiation were expected to follow the basic rules of Vaishnava behavior and chant sixteen “rounds” of the Krishna mantra each day on their beads. “I’m being 80 percent lenient,” he said, “since my guru instructed his disciples to chant sixty-four rounds.” There were other qualifications, he said, that he would explain in time. None of the students was sure how initiation would change things.

The day before initiations were to take place, the Swami gave class as usual. “And now,” he said at the end, “I will tell you what is meant by initiation. Initiation means the spiritual master accepts the students and agrees to take charge of their spiritual life. And the students accept the spiritual master and agree to worship him as God. Any questions?” No one dared raise a hand. So the Swami stood up and left.

“What did he just say?” everyone asked in shock. Wally Sheffey turned to Howard Wheeler. “My mind has just been blown,” he said.

“Everybody’s mind had just been blown,” Wheeler replied. A small group went up to the Swami’s apartment. “Does what you told us mean the spiritual master is God?”

The Swami shook his head. “No,” he said. “God is God. The spiritual master is his representative. Initiation means the spiritual master is due the same respect as God, because he can deliver God to the sincere disciple. Is that clear?”

As members of a generation that deemed most authority suspect, they were relieved to know the Swami was not positioning himself as equal to Krishna. Still, their impression from books on India was that gurus were revered as all-knowing. Did he claim to be omniscient, like Krishna?

“If you say you have full knowledge,” somebody challenged, “then how many windows are in the Empire State Building?”

“How many drops of water are in a mirage?”⁸³ the Swami shot back. When the Vedic texts described a spiritual master as “all-knowing” or “perfect,” it meant that a guru knows everything needed to be Krishna conscious, not every detail of the ephemeral material world. And a guru was perfect in the sense that his teachings were not invented.

“A spiritual master does not concoct anything,” the Swami explained. “Whatever he teaches has come from shastra and guru,” from scripture as passed down by predecessor teachers. “That makes him perfect.”⁸⁴

His explanations calmed the waters, and for students committed to Krishna consciousness, the prospect of honoring the Swami as Krishna’s representative did not pose a problem. They were already doing that. What did pose a problem were the rules he expected them to follow after initiation. The behavioral restrictions for initiates—no meat, fish, or eggs in the diet; no drugs or intoxicants; no gambling; and no sex with anyone other than a life partner and only for having children—would require difficult changes of habit. If they agreed to sit before the fire and take the initiate’s vows, would they regret it? Would they break the vows after some time and then have to live with that hypocrisy? Even the Swami doubted whether Westerners could follow the guidelines for initiation.

“When I first came,” he recalled, “I was thinking that as soon as I say they have to give up meat-eating, illicit sex, intoxication, and gambling, they will say, ‘Please go home.’ But I thought, let me try.”

Despite their hesitations, Michael Grant and his partner, Jan, concluded that they were already committed to the Swami and that initiation was the natural next step. So, on a crisp September evening, they walked to Matchless Gifts, crossed the small courtyard, and mounted the stairs to apartment 2-C, where the ceremony would be held. Nine other regulars were already seated on the floor around the Swami.

“Initiation means purification,” he told the group. “We are all impure in this material world and therefore we suffer from birth, death, old age, and disease. To overcome these miseries, we must voluntarily accept some tapasya, sacrifice—some rules and regulations.”

Keeping disciples to the proper standard, he said, was the duty of a spiritual master. “To accept a spiritual master is not a hobby,” he cautioned. “One who is interested in hearing about the transcendental subject matter—for him, a spiritual master is needed. Not for all. We must accept a spiritual master who can teach us about God. And who is such a person? That is stated in the Upanishads.⁸⁵ The spiritual master comes down in disciplic succession and must be fully, firmly fixed in brahman.” His words were sobering. This is serious, he was telling them. Study me. If you find me authentic, then fine, ask me to be your guru. And if I find you authentic and sincere, then I will accept you as my disciple and I will guide you in your spiritual life. Without our wholehearted commitment to one another, why bother?

“This initiation is called harinam initiation—first initiation,” he said, using the Sanskrit word meaning to chant the names of Krishna. “The spiritual master gives the disciple harinam to become purified. Later some of you may receive second initiation, Brahmin initiation.” His guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, had insisted that anyone properly trained in devotional service was de facto a Brahmin. Following that principle, the Swami said, he was prepared to institute a “second initiation” for those disciples who qualified, in essence transforming them into Brahmins regardless of their caste at birth.

“Along with chanting Hare Krishna,” he said, “you must follow some rules. The rules are no illicit sex life, no intoxication, no meat-eating, and no gambling. Anyone indulging in these four things cannot understand who is God or become free from conditioned life.”

Many initiates considered the restriction on sex harder than the other regulations, even though his explanations for it were convincing. The soul was by nature pleasure-seeking he described, being part and parcel of Krishna. When souls forget that relationship, they looked for pleasure in relationships with other conditioned beings. Healthy partnerships could be created in this world, but without a shared sense of life’s spiritual purpose, they would never be completely satisfying. Sex in this world, Bhaktisiddhanta had once described, appeared both beautiful and ugly: beautiful in terms of its promise, ugly in terms of its failure to deliver unending love.

The Swami’s students admitted that was indeed their experience. How often had their hearts been broken and their mornings-after filled with regret? Still, he was asking a lot from them. They trusted his insight into their well-being, but did he expect them to change a lifetime of habits just by going through a ceremony? If what he taught them was true, then their karma, their addictions and egos had been cultivated over many lifetimes. What made him think they could change now?

“Your karma is like a revolving fan,” he said. “By chanting Hare Krishna and giving up unwanted habits, you turn it off. The fan may still revolve for a while, but since it is getting no more electricity, it will soon stop.”

Do not even attempt to fathom where such residual spinning originated, he advised, since karma could be very old, possibly the consequence of actions from many lifetimes before. Those lives were over and gone, and there was no point wishing for a better past.⁸⁶ Move on, he encouraged. Karma may be old, but it was not incurable. Change was possible with sincere effort because the soul was by nature spotless, unblemished by material nature. That original consciousness simply needed to be revived. How? By chanting. No need of yogic gymnastics or miracles, just sincere chanting. And he would help them. He would be their link to Krishna, as long as their effort was sincere.

These newly initiated disciples, the first Krishna devotees in the West, reached out, accepted their beads and their future, and touched their heads to the floor in appreciation.

THERE WERE THREE INITIATION CEREMONIES that month and nineteen initiates. Wally Sheffey became Umapati Das: servant of Shiva, husband of goddess Uma. Michael Grant received the name Mukunda Das: servant of Krishna, the giver of mukti or liberation from birth and death. Judy Koslofsky was now Jadurani Dasi: servant of Krishna who appeared in the Yadu dynasty. Steve Guarino would from now on be called Satsvarupa Das: servant of Krishna, truth personified. Jan Campanella received the name Janaki Dasi: servant of Princess Sita, daughter of the great Vedic king Janaka. Keith Ham was now Kirtanananda Das: servant of the joy of chanting Krishna’s names. Charles Barnett would now be known as Achyutananda Das: servant of the bliss (ananda) of infallible Krishna (Achyuta). Bruce Scharf received the initiated name Brahmananda Das: servant of Krishna, who is the bliss of brahman, being its source; and his brother, Greg, was now Gargamuni Das: servant of Garga Muni, the guru of Krishna’s Vrindavan family. Howard Wheeler received his beads and the initiated name Hayagriva Das: servant of the horse-headed avatar of Vishnu.

For each ceremony, students carried buckets of soil up from the garden outside the Swami’s building and created a two-foot-square earthen mound in the middle of his apartment. The Swami lit a handful of incense sticks and placed them around the square, sprinkled on pinches of colored powder, and arranged a foot-tall pyramid of kindling in the middle. He lit a fire and chanted mantras while pouring out small ladles of clarified butter or ghee. Flames grew, and smoke filled the room. He motioned to his newly initiated disciples to take bananas and place them in the flames. While the bananas cooked, the Swami stood, clapped his hands, and chanted Hare Krishna, and the assembly followed his lead, dancing side to side, arms raised in celebration of their rebirth into the life of Krishna devotees. Mukunda later described the moment as enthralling.

“I’d gone into the initiation casually,” he wrote, “but this had become more than an informal, relaxed event. It was a change from one life to another.”

The Matchless Gifts initiations marked a turning point in Vaishnava history. By traditional Hindu standards, Americans and Europeans were mlecchas or savages who ate meat, drank alcohol, took drugs, and had sex outside marriage. Such outcasts did not qualify for diksha, the initiation ceremony that opened the door to liberation. Custom held they would have to wait until they were reborn in higher-caste families. The Swami waved these objections aside. Krishna consciousness had nothing to do with Hindu customs or caste qualification, he said. All living beings are sparks of God, parts and parcels of Krishna. He cited chapter and verse to prove that, from the Vedic point of view, anyone who sincerely chanted Krishna’s names was eligible for initiation.

TO TAKE THEIR INITIATION SERIOUSLY, disciples needed to know what was expected of them. They were now representatives of Chaitanya Vaishnavism, and their behavior had to be above reproach. The Swami took out a sheet of paper and wrote a list of rules in precise script.

- All initiated devotees must attend morning and evening classes.

- Must not be addicted to any kind of intoxicants, including coffee, tea, and cigarettes.

- They are forbidden to have illicit sex-connections.

- Must be strictly vegetarian.

- Should not extensively mix with non-devotees.

- Should not eat foodstuffs cooked by non-devotees.

- Should not waste time in idle talks nor engage in frivolous sports.

- Should always chant and sing the Lord’s Holy Names: Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.

Thank you

He posted the sheet of paper on the temple room door. The next morning devotees arrived for class and read the list of new rules with concern.

“No tea?” someone asked. “Isn’t that a bit much?”

“It is slow poison,” the Swami replied.

Each student would struggle in his or her own way to maintain the rigorous standards required of initiated disciples. Many considered drugs a legitimate way to expand consciousness and sex a normal human instinct. Instead of indulging those impulses, the Swami proposed, master them. See how much more rewarding life can be when you yourself become “swamis,” masters of your senses.

HAYAGRIVA, UMAPATI, and some of the other initiates sat in the Swami’s room, typing away and filing pages from his manuscripts. Umapati transcribed notes from one of the Swami’s recent classes, while Hayagriva edited pages of a Bhagavatam commentary. He read a few pages and then stopped. “Listen to this,” he said and read aloud the Bhagavatam’s explanation of how the universe came into being.

In the beginning, all was darkness. Vishnu slept in that darkness, floating on an ocean of undifferentiated cosmic elements. From Vishnu’s body, an infinity of tiny bubbles emanated. Each bubble swelled into a universe, and each universe resembled a gigantic coconut shell half filled with the waters of causality. Vishnu entered into each of these newly created universes and reclined on Sesa Naga, a thousand-hooded serpent that undulated with the cosmic waves, while Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune, massaged her beloved Vishnu’s lotus feet. From Vishnu’s navel sprouted an immense lotus flower, and from the whorl of the lotus, Brahma, the first being, appeared.

Brahma stared into the darkness. He did not know who he was, or where he was, or why. He looked at the lotus and climbed down its stem, hoping to discover the source of his being. Brahma traveled past raw, unfinished worlds awaiting completion and found no end to them. Despondent, he turned and climbed back. On the way, he heard two syllables: “ta-pa,” meaning “sacrifice something of yourself.” Upon returning to his sitting place on the lotus whorl, Brahma closed his eyes, and for a thousand celestial years he meditated on the mystery of his existence, shedding ego and surrendering himself to an impulse to serve.

At last, looking up, he watched layers of darkness part. Coverings over the material universe peeled away one by one to reveal the eternal world, filled with light and an infinity of self-luminous planets. On the highest planet, Brahma observed Krishna seated under a tree, and around him were cowherds boys and girls of many colors, some white as snow, some black as cobalt, others opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green—kaleidoscope of children.

Krishna rose, came before Brahma and took his hand. Thank you, Krishna said, for your sincere searching. Then Krishna imparted the Vedic wisdom into the heart of Brahma, making him the first in a lineage of teachers charged with safeguarding the wisdom that frees souls from the cycle of repeated birth in the material world.

Ages passed. Brahma completed the work of creation and populated the many worlds with living beings according to their karmic allotment. His work done, Brahma next conveyed the Vedic teachings to his son, Narada, who in turn taught them to his disciple, Vyasadev. It was Vyasadev who compiled the teachings into written form and entrusted various divisions of those writings to his disciples. Those disciples in turn taught their disciples, and the teachings were passed down through the ages.

The Srimad Bhagavatam answered the “who” and “why” questions asked by children before education dulled their curiosity. Who are we? We are eternal souls living in temporary bodies. Why does the world exist? Because we wanted it. We eternal souls harbor dreams of glory, and we transmigrate from body to body, from planet to planet, universe to universe until we realize the futility of those dreams and reawaken to immortal selves. The initiates at 26 Second Avenue were learning that the world was a playground where souls acted out fantasies until the day when they met a guru, set out on their yoga path, and prepared to go back to the spiritual world. See the world, the Swami taught them, not with telescopes or mathematical calculations but with the eyes of your soul. It is more mysterious than it seems.

As he listened to this brief history of everything, Umapati reached a conclusion regarding their guru’s identity: A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami was no ordinary teacher but the current link in an unbroken chain of enlightened beings, dating from the dawn of creation, when God revealed the deepest secrets of the universe to Brahma—and those secrets had now arrived in America, in the Swami’s books.

“If that’s true,” he said with a very straight face, “it’s far out.”

“This goes way beyond the book of Genesis,” someone else volunteered.

IN NOVEMBER, THOMAS J. HOPKINS, professor of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, arrived at Matchless Gifts with a question burning to be answered. Could it be that the Swami he had read about in the East Village Other actually belonged to the Chaitanya lineage? Hopkins had done his Ph.D. thesis on the Bhagavata Purana (what the Swami called Srimad Bhagavatam) and knew something about devotional movements. But the Chaitanya tradition with its emphasis on public chanting and dancing was obscure even by Indian standards. He stepped into Matchless Gifts, and there on a table by the front door he saw three books titled Srimad Bhagwatam.⁸⁷

“This may not warrant excitement today,” he commented years later, “but when I did my dissertation research in the late 1950s there were only two English translations in any U.S. library, one at Yale and the other at Harvard. I had come to assume that translations of the Bhagavata were rare and precious items—and here was one sitting on a table in a storefront where anyone could come in and pick it up.”

Hopkins flipped through one of the volumes and admired its thorough presentation of original devanagari Sanskrit verses, English transliterations, word-for-word synonyms, English translations, and elaborate commentaries. It was masterful. But the undisputed glory of the book was its jacket. The image was at once idealized and highly realistic. Information on the jacket flaps explained the image’s various elements. The top half of the illustration consisted of a lotus flower with pink petals, representing the highest place in the eternal world: Vrindavan, Krishna’s village. Inside the lotus-like village, the artist had painted Radha and Krishna dancing as Krishna played his flute. In the background, Hopkins noticed a second Krishna, this one sitting with the cowherd women of the village, called gopis. Krishna, it seemed, could be in more than one place. The lotus-like planet emitted rays of light in all directions. In that light were other planets, and within each was a Krishna with four arms. These, the jacket copy explained, were Vishnu “expansions” from the original two-armed Krishna. In the lower right corner of the jacket floated a dark cloud. This, the jacket said, was the material world, and it occurred to Hopkins that he was staring at a visualization of the entire creation in a single image.

By the time of Hopkins’s visit, Brahmananda and his brother, Gargamuni, had assumed a large share of the administrative duties of the Matchless Gifts storefront. Brahmananda was now the official temple president and did paperwork at a desk by the front door. Next to the display window sat two mimeograph machines on which his brother, Gargamuni, printed the Swami’s Back to Godhead magazine. This was a hand-stapled version of the magazine the Swami had written and printed periodically in India between 1944 and 1960. The New York version contained transcripts of the Swami’s classes along with articles and poems by students. One disciple typed the transcripts onto thin paper stencils, and another disciple aligned the stencils onto pegs across the top of the press. He then added ink to a recessed well that distributed the ink evenly across the stencil, threw the on-switch, and supervised while printed pages came out the other end. Gargamuni stacked the pages in numerical order, collated them one by one, and stapled them together. Then he loaded copies into bags hanging from the handlebars of his bicycle and rode around New York, delivering finished copies of Back to Godhead to neighborhood shops where they sold quickly at fifteen cents each. Collections after the Swami’s classes rarely amounted to more than a few dollars, and the additional income helped cover the costs of rent and groceries.

It took Hopkins a while to adjust to the idea of a Vaishnava temple replete with a printing operation in the middle of the Lower East Side of New York City. “It’s an astonishing story,” he reflected. “If someone told you a story like this, you wouldn’t believe it. Here’s this person, seventy years old, coming to a country where he’s never been before. He doesn’t know anybody, he has no money, no contacts, none of the things you would say make for success. He’s going to recruit people not on any systematic basis but just picking up whomever he comes across—and he’s going to give them responsibility for organizing a worldwide movement? You’d say, ‘What kind of program is that?’ There are precedents perhaps. Jesus of Nazareth went around saying, ‘Come follow me. Drop your nets, leave your tax collecting, and be my disciple.’ But in Jesus’s case, he wasn’t an old man in a strange society dealing with people whose backgrounds were totally different from his own. He was dealing with his own community. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s achievement, then, must be seen as unique.”⁸⁸

IT WAS A QUIET OCTOBER night, and some of the initiated devotees decided to chant in the courtyard between Matchless Gifts and the Swami’s apartment building. They sat on a bench and looked up into a clear night sky.

“It’s a beautiful moon,” said one devotee.

“That’s maya,” said another, “an illusion,” sparking a debate about whether anything material could be beautiful. The group decided to bring the question to the Swami.

“For devotees,” the Swami explained, “this world is as good as Vaikuntha,” using the Sanskrit term for the eternal world: the place that is without (vai) anxiety (kuntha). “In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says the sun and moon are his eyes. When a devotee looks at the moon, he sees Krishna.”

Nonetheless, a disciple suggested, the perceivable world was subject to change, so there had to be some differences between matter and spirit. “Is it our consciousness, then,” the disciple asked, “that determines whether something is material or spiritual?”

“Yes,” the Swami acknowledged. “For one who has attained higher stages of spiritual realization, there is nothing material. Such a person sees everything as brahman. Still, Krishna speaks of having ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ energies. How is that? Because without the touch of spirit, matter cannot work. Therefore, it is called ‘inferior.’ But in a higher sense, it is not inferior, because matter also emanates from the Supreme. Just like electricity can run a cold refrigerator or a hot stove. One who knows the nature of electricity knows that the same energy is working, whether hot or cold, inferior or superior. So on the platform of real knowledge, there is no distinction between matter and spirit.”

The world itself, from that perspective, was spiritual, and he had come to America to teach how to see Krishna, the Supreme Spirit, in the details of the everyday world. “Krishna consciousness” meant recognizing that commonplace minutia held as much importance as peak experiences—that Krishna could be found in everything. He dwelled not only in a faraway eternal realm but in each atom and between each atom.⁸⁹ That one lesson could radically change the way people related to the world around them, since respecting the earth and the environment, from this Krishna-conscious perspective, became a spiritual imperative.

Everything was God’s energy. Hayagriva remembered being in the Swami’s apartment recently and making room by shoving the typewriter aside with his foot.

“Don’t touch that with your foot,” the Swami scolded. “It is spiritual.”

“Well, aren’t my feet spiritual?” Hayagriva asked.

“Yes,” the Swami acknowledged, “in the service of Krishna everything is spiritual. But even with your spiritual foot you should not disrespect a spiritual typewriter. You will understand this in time.”

THE SWAMI RESTED FROM 11 p.m. until 2 or 3 a.m. Then, while the city slept and before his students woke, he rose and spent several hours commenting on the Bhagavad Gita using a handheld Dictaphone. His schedule reminded students of Krishna’s teaching: “What is night for others is the time of awakening for the self-controlled. What is the time of awakening for others is night for the introspective sage.”⁹⁰

Later in the day, Satsvarupa typed out the dictated tapes and handed the pages over to Hayagriva. “Edit for force and clarity,” the Swami told him. “You are a qualified English professor. You know that grammatical mistakes will discredit us with scholars. I want them to appreciate this Bhagavad Gita as the definitive edition. All others try to take credit away from Krishna. Therefore, I am presenting the Gita ‘As It Is.’ ”

Hundreds of pages were piling up, ready for publication. Meanwhile, collections were negligible. There was no money to print anything.