Hansadutta / Berkeley Temple / Sulochana pt.2

http://krishna1008.blogspot.com/2017/02/hansaduttas-history-part-1-and.html

PADA: I was encouraging Sulochana to leave New Vrndavana and come out to visit me in California, where we could work together. He was still not yet convinced that it was the ripe time to make an uprising against these GBC's gurus. Sulochana even sent me a tape of Kirtanananda's lecture, saying that the drug and illicit sex GBC "guru" Jayatirtha is not the real Jayatirtha, its the maya one, just like Mother Sita has her real form and maya form. The real Jayatirtha is serving Krishna purely on another plane. What!

I told Sulochana this is the worst explanation for an alleged guru's drugs and illicit sex problems ever recorded in history, and its an insult to Mother Sita too, and said to him I was surprised he was sending me this as a good explanation for these guru's shenanigans.   

He said, yes its off, but New Vrndavana is a good place for his wife and family and so he needed to stay there, mainly because his wife was very attached to being there for "devotee association." However he later called me and said he was now leaving officially, he was finished with Kirtanananda Swami, and he was taking his children, packing up, and he was going to get out of New Vrndavana even without his wife. 

He said he was going to come to out to see me California, and that was the plan. Unfortunately, what happened was that the New Vrndavana leaders sent a van load of goons out to to stop him. And these goons basically kidnapped his children by gunpoint. The goons then took his children back to New Vrndavana and then they assisted Sulochana's wife to file divorce papers, and they got various members of the community to falsely testify against Sulochana Das and tried make it look like he should not have custody of his children because he was an unfit parent. 

In other words, the Temple aided the wife of Sulocana to get official legal custody of his children. Sulochana was very worried that his children might be abused there, because he said there was an atmosphere of child abuse in that community. 

In any case, he had to get out of there. Sulochana then said he's coming to Berkeley to meet with me, but on his way he wanted to stop in Los Angeles and pick up some documents from the Bhaktivedanta Archives, and he said we needed to get started researching into what Srila Prabhupada had actually said about the future of his movement. 

For example, was there any evidence he had appointed these 11 guru successors? And if he really did appoint the 11 successors, then wouldn't we see evidence from his letters or lectures? So Sulochana stopped in Los Angeles and he bribed the archives people to give him a microfiche of the letters and a copy of the audio of the so-called May 28th 1977 "guru appointment tape." 

At the time, the letters and the so-called appointment tape audio were not being circulated, and people like Satsvarupa Das Goswami had said openly he opposed having Srila Prabhupada's letters being circulated. He said these letters should not be publicized because they are private instructions, and they do not apply the overall society. 

Anyway, Sulochana Dasa finally got up to Berkeley where he met with me in a little motel, the Flamingo Motel in Berkeley. And we then purchased microfiche readers so we could read the letters. Many people do not realize how difficult it was in those days to get something like Srila Prabhupada's letters, because they were only on microfiche, and you'd need a special reader to view them. That is, if you could get the microfiche ... Sulochana also told me that Ramesvara had phoned his motel room and warned him to return the microfiche or become "dead meat on a hook."

Gradually, we were gathering materials which would eventually challenge the so-called guru appointment. Hansadutta was beginning to panic, he saw that we were eventually going to be a major threat to his claim of being the guru of ISKCON Berkeley. At the same time, we finally got a copy of Srila Prabhupada's will, which was actually hidden in Hansadutta's safe. A devotee got it out of there for me. In the safe was also a copy of the Topanga Talks where Hansadutta and Tamal were admitting that there was no guru appointment.

Why was Hansadutta hiding these documents in his safe?

At one point Hansadutta became more and more paranoid about our creeping up on his big guru appointment lie, and one of his reactions was that Hansadutta went out in his Jeep with four loaded guns, and he then shot up various OCCUPIED buildings in downtown Berkeley. The people inside were panicked and ducking down on the floor, thinking they could have been shot and killed, and they could have been. Luckily, these bullets missed the inhabitants. One building he shot at was an auto dealership, which had the giant plate glass windows shot out. Yep, the temple had to pay for all these fines and damages.

When the police finally stopped Hansadutta, he had the four guns inside his vehicle so they knew it was him. And he was arrested for shooting at occupied buildings, and there was an open bottle of alcohol in his vehicle. In addition he was carrying $16,000 in cash on his person. 

OK notice, Hansadutta had already had the Berkeley Temple raided by federal authorities. And the farm was raided by federal authorities. And all this created horrible media publicity for the Krishna movement. Now he is shooting at occupied buildings, and he expects what, good publicity? 

What is evident is that he had no concern for the bad publicity he was creating for the ISKCON movement, its devotees, or the image of Krishna in general. And shooting at occupied buildings shows, no concern for the lives of others either. How did you guess, then Hansadutta's folks took a tremendous amount of temple money to hire the best lawyers in town, to save him from the charges of shooting at these people in these buildings. 

So once again, Srila Prabhupada's movement has to pay to bail out this criminal for his criminal behaviors. At the same time, some poor devotees who were struggling with their rent payment were appalled that Hansadutta was carrying around $16,000 cash as his pocket change expense money. In other words, he was sucking the life out of ISKCON with his money spending extravaganza lifestyle. 

Thus, (A) on the one hand Hansadutta is taking away the devotees by banning and removing them -- which reduces the income, and on the other hand (B) he is creating giant extravagant legal expense bills for the temple with his criminal actions, ok he is basically trying to bankrupt the society, and he nearly did. Of course in a normal society the guy who is shooting at occupied buildings full of people is fired and removed, but the GBC could not muster up any process to get rid of him. So they share in the karma of creating all this mayhem in the name of Krishna. 

Part three in the works -- stay tuned!