Interview of HH Harivilas Maharaja with Radhika Gopinath das
RGD: I want to know about your childhood and family origin. Where were you born?
HHHVM: Basically you are asking me about how I came to Krishna consciousness. I’ll start with some background information about my mother and father and great Aunt. They were instrumental in instilling the values that made me desire spiritual enlightenment. There were many things in my formative years that led me to K.C.
I was born in January 5, 1946 in Philadelphia into a family of Armenian immigrants. My father immigrated around 1913 and my mother in 1924. My father’s mother realized that there was no future for young Armenian men in Turkey because the situation had become extremely dangerous right before WWI. The Turks planned a government-organized massacre of the Armenian minority throughout the interior provinces of Asia Minor. My father’s mother, my grandmother, sacrificed everything she had to send her two sons to the USA. So my father and his older brother escaped the horrors of the Turkish massacre of the Armenians. But my mother was not so fortunate. Her only good fortune was that she was a six year old child when the massacres began. She was carried by her mother and other relatives from Malatya in eastern Turkey to Del El Zor, which is a town in the northern desert of Syria. My mother was the only survivor of the forced march. Her mother died on the outskirts of the desert town and she was left on a sidewalk alone. All the Armenian men were murdered before the march began in Malatya.
My mother was miraculously saved. Her father and 3 or 4 generations of his family and extended family all lived in one compound and they were somewhat wealthy, but all the men were killed immediately; only the old men, old women, mothers and children marched. She was the only one that survived from her family, and only because she was a little kid. She was just 7 years old. She was picked up off the sands of the desert by a Turkish family who adopted her and brought her up as a Muslim. But because the Turks lost the war she was forcibly taken out of the Turkish family by French Jandarms and Armenian priests and put in to an orphanage. So, I won’t tell the whole story but she survived the whole thing miraculously, eventually she came to the USA and married my father and then started a family.
I was born right after WWII ended. My two brothers were a lot older than me. One was 30 years and one was 16 years, so I was maybe an accident that happened after WWII. So when I grew up, I had an aunt who also miraculously escaped the Turkish massacre. She also marched with my mother but she was kidnapped by the Arabs and forced to join the harem of an Arab. She had a baby with him and then eventually ran away, but he caught up with her and he stabbed her and left her to die. Somehow she survived and got away. Eventually my mother found her. After my mother came to the USA she found my great aunt and brought her to the USA too. My mother was working with my father. They were never rich or anything, they had to work very hard and my great aunt brought me up (pause…choking).
My aunt was a very religious person. She would teach me prayers and take me to church every Sunday. One day she told me that there is a book called the ‘6000 secrets of wisdom’ amongst the Armenians; she said this book contained all the knowledge and if I could ever find that book I should read it. She only mentioned it once but it stuck in my mind. Neither she nor I knew what it was, she had only heard about it. My aunt taught me a lot of prayers and I would say those prayers before I went to sleep at night. They were prayers by a great Armenian mystic persist called Narek. She also taught me other devotional prayers that one should say in the morning, some that one should say at the night and so on. Because of her I had a very… you know… let’s say a spiritual upbringing.
Eventually I went to college at UPENN. When I graduated college, I realized that I didn’t know anything about life! I had some technical training but I didn’t know anything about life. So I decided, I should not continue studying anymore because it didn’t help me that much as far life skills went, like controlling the mind and the senses. At the time, I had become very corrupted with sense gratification like drugs and things like that. Remember, this was in the 1960’s, right in the middle of the hippy revolution. As soon as I graduated, I decided I was going to become a hippy. But on the other hand I didn’t like the US that much because you know, if you got caught smoking marijuana you got into a lot of trouble at that time. And if you bought marijuana, which I did, you ended up meeting all kinds of low class people.
I eventually thought that I should get away from this. I was able to get a scholarship to go and study Armenian in Beirut, Lebanon. When I went to Beirut, I was in an Armenian school, aiming to learn the language and I also took courses at the American University in Beirut. But I got mixed up with a lot of drugs again because Beirut was a hub for hashish and marijuana. Besides doing my studies I also broke into a group of really high roller drug dealers. Many drug dealers would come from the US to buy the Lebanese hashish and because I lived in a modern European part of Beirut I could meet these people very easily. Because I lived there, I could speak some Arabic and I had some contacts, they would ask me to sort of… help them and buy drugs.
HHHVM: No, actually I graduated from college, but I decided not study further in the USA, just leave the country and travel around and learn things. So on my way to Beirut I went to France and then Egypt, Cyprus and then Lebanon. It was my first time travelling in the boat from France to Beirut, I didn’t have that much money so I was living in the gully in a very cheap section of the boat. It was a Turkish boat. At one point I was staying with a group of Muslim, Moroccan Muslim Haji’s. they were a large group of 12 men. They were staying in the lower part with me at that time; we were sleeping next to each other at night. So I was friendly with them. I could speak some French, they could speak some French too. Eventually one of them came and asked me, “Why not come and pray with us?” I said, “sure”. So I went with them and I prayed with them and after the prayers, they said (with a thump in the table), “Now your name is Mohammed”, I said “Ok” and smiled. The entire time, every time I went to pray with them, there was also a group of Armenians on that boat too who knew I was an Armenian. When they saw me with them and I was praying with them, they stopped talking to me.
RGD: Is it because Armenian were Christians?
HHHVM: Yes, Armenians were Christians and I was praying with the Muslims and they were calling me Mohammed. And then I remember when we got out of the boat when we visited Alexandria, Egypt, I walked around and I bought one of these fest you know the traditional Turkish hat, that Turkish Muslims wear and started wearing that too. That might have accentuated the fact that I looked like a Muslim now. So anyway, when I got to Beirut…they wanted me to go them to mecca, but I refused to go. I didn’t know whether I could trust them. Being on a boat is one thing but going with them to Mecca is another thing and that was not my purpose so I separated from them and then I went to Beirut.
So I really got mixed up with the drug trade and it interrupted my studies a lot. Then I realized after being there almost a year that it was a dead end, the same way America was because of the drugs and bad habits. Although I did learn Armenian at that time and got something out of it, I was not really happy. And then one night, the Israelis attacked Beirut airport and blew up 8 or 9 Middle Eastern airlines jets and a state of emergency was declared. You couldn’t go out, there were tanks and army all over the place.
I had a friend, Ramsey, who was an Arab. He and I smoked together quite often. He was a nice person. One day ramsey said to me, “Harry, Look what I’ve got,” and pulled out a gun. It had a solid silver handle and carved ivory body. I said, “Ramsey, Why did you get that? What are you going to do with it?”
He said, “I’m going to kill someone.”
“You are going to kill someone?”
“Yes.”
“Who you are going to kill?” I asked.
“Oh, I know who I’m going to kill.”
“But why are you going to do it, Ramsey?”
“Because I don’t like them.”
“Who are they?”
He said, “They are a Christian family and I’m going to kill all of them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because, this place is going to explode and when it explodes I’m going to kill people.”
I then realized that this was not a good place to be. My friend was a nice guy but he had that craziness about him. Then I realized that Beirut was a very nice place in many ways—very cosmopolitan like Saudi Arabia and people could speak 3 or 4 languages—but the whole idea of Beirut was sense gratification. It was the Switzerland of the Middle East. People would go there for sense gratification. And I realized that there was something wrong. Although I had started to make new friends, I realized that this was a dead end. So I decided to leave. I left and so I went to France where I had an uncle living in the mountains in south of France. He was an ordinary guy, but he was a nice man and let me stay with him and his wife. But after sometime I realized that although this was nice and peaceful, it was not what I wanted. So I decided to go to Paris on my own. I didn’t have a lot of money or anything…
RGD: And how long did you live in Beirut?
HHHVM: Beirut, almost one year.
So I went to Paris. Luckily I was able to get a room in the Armenian Student house in the City University housing complex. I lived with very little money, every once in a while I got some money from home. I tried to get odd job. I studied French in ‘alios france’ which is a French school for foreigners. At that time I became a macro biotic. Meaning, I followed a macro biotic diet. Which was real simple, you just eat brown rice and few vegetables and that’s it. And the vegetables I ate… they were thrown away at the end of the open market. There was an open market almost every day and the vendors would always throw leftover things away. I had made friends with some people, out of pity they gave me some vegetables. The rice was cheap then. So with the little money I had, I would buy brown rice. I had a little pot in which I would cook it.
And then I got a job with some kind of a volunteer service at the American center on Boulevard Raspie. At a certain point they gave me the responsibility of renting out a certain number of rooms. So one day I got a phone message at the office and the message was that from a lady named Jyotila Dasi. I asked, “What kind of a name is that?”
They said, “it’s Indian.”
I said, “oh, ok. What do they want?”
“It’s some kind of religious group, some Indian religious group and they want to rent the rooms that you oversee.”
So I called up the number; I was expecting to speak to an Indian but the girl had a perfect American accent. I asked her, “Are you Indian?”
She said, “I’m an American.”
“Then how come you have an Indian name?”
She said, “My spiritual master gave me that name.”
“Your spiritual master?”
“Well, look we want to rent the room that you are managing, can I come and take a look?” she said, probably tiring of my questions.
Now I have to say one thing, Beirut was the first time I saw a picture of Krishna. He was Gopal Krishna, with a cow. I saw it up on the wall in some restaurant where they served meat. I had walked into the restaurant to get something to eat and I saw this picture and I could not take my eyes off it. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t ask anyone, I just kept looking at it, you know… I was thinking, “Wow, there is something about that picture that I’m attracted to and I don’t know what it is. Maybe looks Indian or something.” So that stayed in my mind.
Also, before I left the USA another thing happened. I was a musician at that time. I worked my way through college by being a musician and I would go to New York City during the weekend and play in Greek night clubs. I would play belly dance music with my Arabic lute. I played with all professional musicians but I was just a kid, I was 17 or 18 years old. I played enough to keep time with them. Then one day I was walking around the Lower East Side in a stupor… you know, having smoked a lot of marijuana, and I walked by this place and the door was open so I looked in and I saw a bunch of people with pink robes sitting on the floor with shaved heads and I didn’t know what it was and I was kind of high at that time and I just said, “Buddhists” roughly, just screamed it out and walked away. I realized years later I realized that it was the Hare Krishna Temple.
RGD: Is that the Maximus gifts?
HHHVM: It was the Matchless gifts.
So you know, I came close to K.C, I didn’t know it at that time, I was too much in a mental stupor to realize what it was and nobody talked to me so I let it go.
RGD: So I—
HHHVM: I used to hang out in tonken square you know.
RGD: I understand that your family was in the meat business?
HHHVM: Yeah, We had a meat cutting business. I worked there and I learned how to cut meat. I was getting pretty good at it; I could cut a chicken pretty fast, you know, take the legs off and the wings and everything… but they were already dead of course. One day I cut my finger, I still have the scar right here (showing the scar in his finger) and I had to go to the hospital to get stitches. That day I decided I would never do it again because you know I was a musician and I needed that finger to play and I told my brother that I’m never going to do this again. They got really upset with me, but I said, “No way, I’m not going to do it, playing music is more important than cutting chicken.”
So now I’m at Beirut and then I went to Paris. And in Paris I met Jyotila Dasi and I was shocked, she was American, she was a very tall thin American girl. She had a little press book with her and she showed me the press book and said, “This is my Guru…” And that was the first time I looked at Prabhupad.
“But your guru has a flabby chin, does he eat sugar?” I asked because I was a Macro Biotic, right… sugar is like the devil for Macrobiotics.
Jyotila said, “of course.”
“Then he is not a guru.”
“What do you mean he is not a guru!”
“Real gurus don’t eat sugar.”
“But Krishna eats sugar.”
“But who is Krishna?” I asked.
“Krishna is God,” she said. And then she showed me the picture and that was the same picture I had seen in Beirut (Choking) and I was a little surprised when I saw it.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“That’s God.”
“That’s God?”
“Yeah, and he eats sugar,” she said.
“It can’t be!” You see I was so brain washed by macro biotics philosophy… And I said, “Look let’s forget about all this…”
But she insisted, “No no no look at the rest of the pictures.” She showed the rest of the pictures of Ratha Yatra in San Francisco and people dressed up in robes and shaved heads.
RGD: Which year was this?
HHHVM: This is 1969…1968-69. It was around October 1968.
RGD: Rata Yatra was in 1967.
HHHVM: Then it was 1967-68.
Back to the story, I told Jyotila, “Let’s not talk about this… do you want to rent this place or not?”
“Yes”
“Ok, But you’ve got to pay for it.”
“But we don’t have any money,” Jyotila exclaimed.
“I have to charge for people to stay here.”
“You can’t do that…”
“What do you mean I can’t do that? Of course I can do that. But I won’t charge too much. But I have to charge, I have to make some money.”
“How much are you going to charge?”
“I will only charge two francs.” Two Francs you know is nothing…maybe close to a dollar.
“Ok,” she said, “but what if people don’t have any money?”
“Maybe I will let them in, maybe I won’t… it’s up to me. Otherwise I won’t rent you the place,” I said.
She agreed to that.
So the day arrived, it was a Sunday evening. Four of them came early in the afternoon. There was a person named Uma Pati Das, Hanuman Das, Jyotila and her husband Suri Das.
RGD: So Uma Pati Das became Uma Pati Maharaj?
HHHVM: Yes, Uma Pati Das became very friendly and – I hadn’t realized it – he actually worked at the American Center too. I didn’t know him, I would just see him. Now I became friends with him. So after this point he and I became friends and I would see him every day at work. He actually had a job, they actually paid him. I was just a volunteer. He was actually getting a little bit of pay. And then there was Hanuman. Hanuman, I thought was definitely a dope addict or was crazy. Because you know he had this really big head and it was shaved and the face looked strange… and he was always going like this (imitating Hanuman Das Chanting)… as if he was on drugs. He would always chant in a funny way, a very strange way. I actually liked Hanuman because I thought he was one of us.
They started cleaning the whole place. I was a little bit surprised. They made it really clean and then brought in some Indian cloth and then they made an altar and lit some incense. When they were done the place looked nice; before that It was real unclean and dark. They made it a little colorful and nice and transformed it into a little temple. After a while, a lot of people started to come… not a lot of people, but I charged everyone 2 francs and sat outside. So at a certain point they had kirtan, I could hear it but wasn’t so interested in it. I looked in one time and saw Hanuman (again imitating Hanuman Das Chanting) and I thought, “Wow, these people must be smoking marijuana.”