07.09.2026
The temple years
I met the Hare Krishnas when I was thirteen or fourteen, and I practised at home as best I could. At nineteen I went to live in a temple.
I didn’t experience it as a sacrifice. It was a calling, and it was what filled me. In a temple, back then, you could forget about everything else and simply practise. A strict spiritual programme in the morning, devotional service the rest of the day, and more programme scattered through the evening and night.
I spent eight years as a celibate monk. Nearly all of them travelling around Spain: preaching, distributing books, talking to people. A different province every month.
I had no bank account. I had no plans of my own. What we made selling books we handed over whole, and we bought the basics and nothing else. I already told you I left home with a toothbrush. For eight years that remained, more or less, the inventory.
And here’s what isn’t understood from outside: we were very happy. With all those austerities on us, we felt we were flying. That our feet weren’t touching the ground.
The text puts it like this:
But those who worship Me with devotion, meditating on My transcendental form—to them I carry what they lack and preserve what they have.
Bhagavad-gītā 9.22. 1972 edition.
That wasn’t a nice line we repeated. It was what was happening to us. Working enormously hard, owning nothing, and being completely satisfied. That marked my life, and the lives of many people of my age there.
You got up doing service, you went to bed doing service, and you slept thinking about service. That supposed lack of freedom, that absence of personal plans, was exactly what kept us content.
And it was what attracted people. They saw a cheerful renunciation and wanted to come closer. New devotees came from that, and they in turn practised the same thing.
Now compare. Today’s renunciants, and the leaders above all, live in luxury. They fly first class. They buy the best computers. They own property and they have bank accounts. They travel constantly, with no real reason behind it. We travelled because next month it was another province’s turn.
Sannyasis and brahmacharis alike. It is an insult to the renounced order, and a disgrace.
That’s why no new devotees are made any more. It isn’t a problem of method or strategy. It’s that there is nothing there to attract anyone. They dress as renunciants, they hold the title, they have disciples, and they have no spiritual substance to pass on.
We weren’t pure devotees. But we acted as if we were. And it turns out that was enough: people came closer, and they wanted to renounce too, because they wanted to be like us.