Hansadutta - Gunman and Guru

When I arrived the next day Hansadutta was resting and Chakravarti explained that Hansadutta's condition was that of being "overdosed" on several drugs and alcohol. This was creating a toxic condition whereby he was sleeping most of the day, and in fact he was only awake about one hour a day. In other words, Hansadutta was close to dying. The Berkeley temple was spending several thousand dollars per week on a professional "detoxification center" near Golden Gate Park for their "guru," but it was not working. I asked, "Why is he taking so much intoxication"? And Chakravarti said, "It is those constant chronic migraines. He just can't take them anymore. And that is why we came to Mount Shasta, for the health spas."

A short while later Hansadutta emerged from his rest and we all sat around a large table. "I think I should just die and get it over," said Hansadutta. I said, "No! You cannot just die right now, you will leave behind so many confused people, especially your followers. You have to set them straight." "I can't," said Hansadutta, "I've tried to tell them that I am not their guru, that their guru is really Srila Prabhupada, but they will not listen. They insist on continuing to worship me." Of course I was not convinced that he had really tried to convince them effectively.

"We have to start by dismantling the bogus guru appointment," I said. "This is the first level of illusion that needs to be corrected, the GBC's saying that they were 'appointed' by Srila Prabhupada as his guru successors." Hansadutta agreed and he added, "That is right. The eleven of us held secret meetings after Srila Prabhupada departed where we hammered out this whole bogus appointment thing. Ramesvara and Kirtanananda wanted to leave the meeting right away, saying that they already had tons of people waiting in line for initiation. But Satsvarupa said, 'Wait, you cannot go yet. We have to make sure we all give the same answers to the same questions, or this appointment thing will fall apart in two weeks.' So, Satsvarupa played 'Devil's advocate' and he mock debated us until we all got this whole appointment idea worked out solidly. It is all a big scam."

I further told Hansadutta that the cause of his headaches was probably from taking the karma of disciples. Srila Prabhupada had told us not to even let people touch our feet casually, or we would get some karma. And we would get sick and have to suffer. Yet your GBC's gurus have hundreds of people washing their feet? Moreover, sitting in the seat of the pure devotee is very offensive, so you will all get a negative reaction for that as well. All considered, constant chronic migraines is probably just a warning for the reactions that you will get if you do not stop this now. Hansadutta shook his head knowingly and said, "Yes, this is probably all true."

So then I detailed a plan of action. We would have to stop all forms of his being worshipped and re-establish the worship of Srila Prabhupada. He seemed to be very happy and relived at this prospect and he said, "OK, let us do it. We can start in the Berkeley temple." He said he would give me a facility to stay there, and a plan was made for me to go there in the near future.

A short while later our little family landed on the Berkeley temple's doorstep. Hansadutta was there at the time, but he seemed very surprised that we had actually finally made it as agreed. Most of his followers were very stiff and tense, since he had apparently not told them that we were coming. I already had a reputation for "challenging the gurus," "being an offender to the eleven appointed pure devotees," and so on, thus some of his followers looked a little grim. He held an emergency meeting right then, but I was not invited. I am not sure what he told his followers but he at least told them to be polite, and perhaps, not to beat us up, which was the fate that some dissidents met there.

Our presence there was of course quite a shock to his followers since I would walk around and say, "Oh these gurus were never appointed, Hansadutta admits that they all lied." Many of them were very angry, yet they were forcibly restrained from taking steps to silence me due to Hansadutta's order. Meanwhile, all this was turning out to be too much for Hansadutta himself. Our presence was reminding him of the whole bogus platform of his "guru" post. So after a few days I heard him shouting in the temple foyer, "Tell a lie so big no one will believe that it could be a lie," and he was saying this repeatedly. A few of his followers finally came to his rescue and they had to lead him away to his room.

He was having a sort of nervous breakdown ...due to my presence probably? This culminated exactly one week, to the day, later. Hansadutta went out in his Toyota Jeep with four loaded guns and he shot out the Cadillac dealer's plate-glass windows, and then he shot out the windows of Ledger's Liquor store. Both buildings were occupied at the time and the patrons "hit the deck." A policeman stopped Hansadutta's Jeep shortly thereafter. And officer Joe Sanchez told me later, "That officer shit his pants when he saw four guns in the front of that Jeep. He thought this guy in the Jeep is whacked and he has another gun hidden somewhere and he is going to use it on me." A bottle of liquor was found on the floor of the Jeep, and Hansadutta was carrying nearly eight thousand dollars cash on his person. Hansadutta was arrested for firing a gun at occupied buildings.

And that was our introduction to the Berkeley temple!

--to be continued--
---------------------------------------------------------

Hansadutta's Guns

Hansadutta was arrested for shooting at an occupied building.

VOODOO HEXED GURUS?

Immediately after the "shooting of buildings incident," Rohini Kumar swami started to organize a big "fire sacrifice" behind the Berkeley temple. He was an original disciple of Srila Prabhupada but had somehow strayed into becomming Hansadutta's cheif apologist. I asked Rohini Kumar what the sacrifice was all about and he said that he had to counteract "demoniac curses" that had been placed upon Hansadutta by the other GBC gurus. Haripada dasa also told me that he had been in Mayapura recently and he had heard that two other GBC gurus had hired "black magic tantrics" to curse Hansadutta, and these curses were the cause of Hansadutta's strange behavior.

We were still very new to the Berkeley scene so we could not ask the rather obvious questions: "Why would Hansadutta's ten other Jesus-like co-appointed colleagues curse him in the first place? Why would one Jesus-like saint --curse-- another one to act like a devil? And would a bona fide Jesus-like saint be influenced by the black magic voodoo of a hired tantric ghost exorcist: at all"?, and so on ad infinitum.

Yet I have to admit that it was simply amazing to see firsthand the lengths that these people would take to keep up the illusion that they were still, somehow or other, gurus and pure devotees and that all of the problems they were experiencing were not due to lack of purity but some kind of voodoo hexes. In sum, layers, upon layers, upon layers, upon layers, of lies, more lies, and so on and so forth. Of course even I could see that when you have to say that "the Devil made me do it" you are running out of rabbits to pull out of your hat. So the scene was actually hopeful since it appeared to be getting near the endgame. It was.

DID YOU SEE OUR GURU SHOOTING?

The next problem for Hansadutta's people was actually a legal one. Hansadutta was seen by a number of eye-witnesses shooting at buildings. So, a few of his thugs went around to intimidate some of the witnesses. "Did you see our guru shooting at any buildings, and by the way we know where you live, and we are just like our guru." And the probable reply, "Who me? Well, I did not see anything"! This seems to have helped his case, that and the fact that the temple hired from among the best lawyers in the Bay Area to handle the case, spending what one devotee estimates was "at least $100,000 for the lawyers, $25,000 for court costs, and $10,000 for damages."

Then, a few weeks after the shooting, Hansadutta lost another $12,000 cash he was carrying in a bag. It becomes painfully obvious here why the gurukulis were being starved, beaten and molested. These leaders were spending money like water on themselves while they really seem to have had no idea whatsoever what was happening to the citizens of ISKCON? And nevermind that the temple had also been spending thousands per week for detoxification, percodans, and then there were the guru's vehicles, buildings, gun collections and who knows what else. Even millionaires do not spend money on themselves like this?

As a side note, I noticed a piece of mail one day in the temple foyer, it was a colorful postcard from a Reno gambling hall: "To our valued customer" and it was made out in the legal name of Hansadutta. By the way, Hansadutta eventually lost his case, and he pleaded "guilty by reason of insanity." He asked the judge, "If you have all kinds of drugs, alcohol and women, won't you go crazy too"? And so he was left with some kind of probation. A lot of devotees agreed, unless he had spent a small fortune on his case, he would have gone to jail.

COMMUNICATION WITH THE SPIRIT WORLD

I needed a break to help crack the door open and sure enough Krishna sent one along right away. Hansadutta's girlfriend, actually the wife of another devotee, brought her favorite book to be sold at the temple's book shop. The title was something like "Communication With the Spirit World," and it was a fantastic blend of ghost stories, weird speculations, and an apparent account of how Jesus is influenced by Satanic influences. Even our worst opponents at the temple could not help but break out laughing at some of the crazy passages.

So, I got one copy and walked around the building with my finger in between a few pages, and then I'd open it up and say, "Hey, did you see this page yet"? It was literally a God send since even my opponents would slap their knees and start laughing. His followers would say, "Yes, what a bunch of crap that book is, must be that Hansadutta is trying to please his new lady friend." So, this kind of helped break the ice for me, and it allowed me to go into more elaborate discussions. For example, what kind of guru reads this trash? Then yet another dedicated follower of Hansadutta's told everyone that under the cover of Hansadutta's "Bhagavad Gita" was the book "The Tibetan Book Of the Dead." This caused yet another wave of doubts. That the emporer had no clothes on was getting more obvious.

ROHINI KUMAR FINALLY CRACKS

Rohini Kumar swami was really trying hard to avoid me. For the fist six months he would barely talk to me. Yet one day he invited me into his room and asked me what the basic problem is. I said that there was never any appointment of eleven gurus, even Hansadutta agreed. So we went over and over the May 28th transcript. We had at that time a more complete version than the one I got in 1980, but it was not as complete as the one that was released in 1990. The more we studied it together the more he had to conclude that it did not appoint any gurus. He finally had a complete breakdown one day and he said, "OK fine, you are right, Srila Prabhupada never appointed any gurus." And then he wrote a little paper explaining that the GBC had misrepresented the idea of guru. This helped me a lot since he was quite respected there at the time.

As we talked further it turned out that he had access to Srila Prabhupada's will, the Topanga talks transcript (where Tamal admits there was no guru appointment) and maybe other documents, yet this was locked in the temple's safe. So I got him to sneak in one day, open the safe, and pull these documents out. I then photo-copied the will and began to circulate copies of it. Who knows if the current copies now in circulation are copies from the one that we got at that time? It was never openly distributed by the GBC, at least not that we know of. "The will" cast more doubt on the appointment issue, since it specifies that Srila Prabhupada wanted his initiated disciples to manage his properties indefinately --after his departure.

-------------------------------------------

3) SULOCHANA: David attacks Goliath, (1985 Sulochana, 04 Apr. 2000)

Sulocana dasa

In fact, officer Joe Sanchez had made 73 felony arrests at the Berkeley temple in a few years because Hansadutta had a tendency to attract the violent criminal and felon type of follower. There was a large poster hanging in different places all over the temple "Guru Means Heavy," with a picture of Hansadutta wearing mirrored sun glasses and a hooded sweater. It looked exactly like the mug shot of the uni-bomber that was later found in the post office. This photo had been in the 1980 San Fancisco newspapers with the caption "The Machine Gun Swami," after Hansadutta had been arrested with a machine gun in the trunk of his car.

Hansadutta was also selling his musical album in the temple at the time I met with Sulochana: "Guru, guru on the wall, who is the heaviest of them all? Whose disciples are the worst? Who could I give my last shirt? --I once saw a guru, a fantastic dancer, Holy gangster, carefree prankster," and so on. At the start of this song is the unmistakeable sound of machine gun fire. In other words "Guru means heavy" really means: he has some heavy gangster or ex-convict followers, and if you disagree with "guru," you can end up being beaten or killed. That was not only the message of 1985, indeed that --still is-- the de facto message even now in the year 2000 from the hard core sector of the GBC's gurus. People are still getting threats of violence and so on, although it has diminished substantially thanks mainly to Sulochana exposing it so widely. Of course, it could be said today, now that it seems evident that members of the GBC party poisoned Srila Prabhupada, we can readily understand why this party hates his followers as well.

Kirtanananda was an even more risky target than Hansadutta. He was highly respected in ISKCON at that time and he was one of the biggest leaders of the GBC. He had a lot more power and no small amount of potentially violent fanatical followers. I told Sulochana that our biggest local problem was that if we attacked Kirtanananda from Berkeley, then Hansadutta might be asked to help suppress us by Kirtanananda. And Hansadutta might be convinced by Kirtanananda to move against both of us since he had not cut his sympathy for the GBC's bogus guru project. That could be a problem. As it turned out, it was a major problem later on.

We noted that both Hansadutta and Kirtanananda had a lot in common. They had both put their pictures on Srila Prabhupada's altars in the mid 1970s and had tried to establish their own worship. This had completely disgusted Srila Prabhupada, making him say that at least in the 1936 Gaudiya Matha they waited until their guru was actually departed before the envious imitator sector rushed in to sit in their guru's seat.

King Kirtanananda

--------------------------------------------

4) 1985 Sulochana part two, (05.Apr.2000)

By the middle of 1985 Hansadutta was getting very nervous about my preaching work in the Berkeley temple. It was gaining ground very rapidly, and we were convincing "one person after the next" to become "disciples of Srila Prabhupada." We had convinced maybe 40 people in the temple and maybe another 40 or 50 people from the visiting congregation by this time. As a side note, most of these people have kept the idea intact that they are still disciples of Srila Prabhupada, even to the present day. When some of them see me they give me the "thumbs up sign."

Simultaneously, Sulochana started hanging around Berkeley with me and he could give a very powerful presentation of quotes from Srila Prabhupada's letters to support our view that the GBC's gurus are bogus. Although Hansadutta had retreated to the Hopland farm, he kept hearing reports that we were gathering momentum. We also heard reports that Hansadutta was simultaneously personally deteriorating in various ways. He was alleged to have had problems such as: Getting very upset and shooting at his pile of beer cans in front of his house; Almost starting the farm on fire by driving around in a tractor with burning rags behind it; A male disciple allegedly wanted to kill him when he discovered that Hansadutta was having sex with his wife, and so on and so forth.

That we were making progress while he was slipping had become intolerable for him. So I was not too suprised to hear the big announcement one day that Hansadutta was going to visit New Vrindavana to "take shelter" of Kirtanananda swami. That means that he and Kirtanananda had decided to try to put a halt to our preaching that Srila Prabhupada is the guru for ISKCON and thus: to squash me and Sulochana. Hansadutta started to say that Kirtanananda is the only pure devotee in ISKCON, and the Berkeley followers should join him in taking shelter there.

Of course Hansadutta was well aware that Kirtanananda was not pure at all, but a highly dubious person at best. He had tried to take-over ISKCON in the early days, and he had defied Srila Prabhupada in so many ways. And he was alleged to have defied Srila Prabhupada once to run back to his homosexual friends, which had upset Srila Prabhupada. And Hansadutta must have known this because he too was an early devotee. In short, Hansadutta knew that Kirtanananda held a grudge against Srila Prabhupada and so to him, that was pure? This was what I would sometimes call "The Homosexual Guru Pharisee's Club." And of course Srila Prabhupada refers to the "sinister movement being within our movement," as early as 1970, which refers to these take-over minded fools.

In short, it seems that Hansadutta wanted to make the maverick homosexual guru Kirtanananda into an ally and eventually bring him back to Berkeley, and then fully establish their homosexual pedophile worshipping cult there as a means of driving us out. And as it turned out, that was the plan. Yet we had made enough allies in Berkeley by this time to thwart Hansadutta's plan, including the then GBC for San Francisco, Atreya Rsi. Atreya hired a lawyer to stop Kirtanananda's people from getting their names on the legal papers of the temple. As such, Atreya Rsi saved the building from being a homosexual pedophile cult worshipping project, which it would have been to this day. As a matter of interest, Berkeley is still one of the few temples in the world which allows and encourages Prabhupadanugas to visit at the present time. You could say that we tried to liberate it?

Kirtanananda's boys

Worse, Hansadutta knew all about the violent kidnapping of Sulochana's boys and other horrors going on there. Yet, when cult leaders become desperate they will stoop to almost anything, even if it means supporting a homosexual's being worshipped as good as God. Of course, Hansadutta was also made into a Krishna devotee in the later 1960s, so he probably knew all about the "Mott Street Boys" alleged gay house that Kirtanananda had come from. Sulochana used to call Kirtanananda and his allies like Hansadutta, "Faggot-pada and his boot lickers."

So I told this all to Sulochana and we had quite a good laugh over it. Sulochana said, "Well at least Hansadutta now admits he would rather see people worship a homosexual than Srila Prabhupada." I replied, "Well not only that, but most GBC would rather see people worship a bucket of dog stools than worship Srila Prabhupada." Sulochana argued immediately, "What? You kidding me? The GBC would never recommend the worship of a bucket of stools! Can a bucket of stools kill any devotees? Nope! Can it molest followers? Nope. A bucket of stools is WAY too advanced, WAY too high class, for them. It is WAY out of their league prabhu, it is WAY! ...too pure." And then we would slap our knees and laugh for five minutes.

Anyway, by December 1985, Hansadutta officially backed Kirtanananda and moved to New Vrindavana. Then he made an effort to totally black-ball and scuttle the Berkeley temple by telling everyone there that they should move to New Vrindavana, and essentially abandon the Berkeley temple. Sink the ship after we pirates have pillaged and raped it --that was the policy. And if the temple was totally incapacitated, then Hansadutta and Kirtanananda could come back later and attack it more easily, as they actually tried to do later on.

This is of course very typical of some of the GBC management thinking. Will there be anyone left to care for the deities? Who cares, we only care that there will be enough people around to care for the "guru." The people in the temple are not Krishna's servants, they are Hansadutta's servants. And worse, Hansaduutta de facto said that all of you should quit serving Krishna and start serving --a homosexual pedophile posing as Krishna's successor? That is the superior method of service? Quit serving Krishna so you can start serving a violent pedophile worshipping cult's leader --who thinks he is as pure as Krishna? This was the type of insanity that we faced in the year of 1985 with the "pure as Jesus leaders" of the Krishna movement.

Please also read:

Oh I remember you
Hansaduttas Defense
Hansadutta versus Gupta
The 644,000 Dollar Question
The Fate Of Krishna Books Inc.
Just What Is Jayadvaita's Point?
Hansadutta to rescind the BBT settlement agreement
Akruranath's Challenge to Hansadutta
Ritvik Initiation by Hansadutta das
Hansaduttas contempt and self-hate
The Preaching Spirit and the Institution
Hansadutta on Narayana Maharaja Gopimania
Shriman Hansadutta Das Suffers Heart Attack
Hansadutta's Apology Letter to all the Devotees
Hansadutta's so called Excommunication - a Myth only