I contemplate my memories of Ananda Nagar the weeks before this incident and remember how there was a humurous, supposedly ex-Marine with a USMC bull dog tatoo giving fitness training to illiterate tribal boys who were employed by Ananda Marga. At the time I really believed that Viirendra, the ex-Marine, was helping train official guards to protect the election boxes of the Indian state for the upcoming elections. It sounded rather odd that the Bengali government would trust its foe Ananda Marga with such a duty, but I didn't criticize this inconsistency at the time because I was so distracted by the humorous environment of the "fitness training." Virendra finally got to be in charge as a drill sargent. He had some sensitive yogi qualities but was really a jar-head at heart.
The trainees underwent rifle training one day with a b.b. gun. All 30 of them took turns with the one and only b.b. gun. It was just like the one I got on my 8th birthday. An old guard of the V.S.S. (the elite guard of Ananda Marga) took pride in being the leading official and decided to instruct the trainees himself. He instructed one boy to point the gun at a nun, who like us, was peering over the fence and snickering at these antics. "Okay, you hit the target, now point the gun at the nun, right between her eyes," the guard said. The nun was laughing and screaming at the same time saying "no, no" while we were roaring with laughter at these Gomer Pyle antics. Viirendra grabbed the gun, invoking the archetypal drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket and screamed, "I'm gonna shove that gun up your ass, soldier." That sweet nun and the Indian boy fortunately couldn't understand these words. It was all too comic and absurd to accept as reality. This is ample proof that Ananda Marga is not essentially a terrorist organization. The system tried to impose it on them with infiltrators like Viirendra, but militant radicalism really wasn't in the nature of the majority of the monks and nuns.
Viirendra disappeared the day before the arms drop and we simple observers were sent to jail. A few years after that I hear that there is a pentagonal meditation room in the Asheville, N.C., in an Ananda Marga community where Viirendra has settled. That is ironic because in my experience, people in Ananda Marga, especially in the U.S., put special spiritual significance in architecture, especially architecture for meditation rooms. Hexagons and hexagrams are more of their style, not pentagons. They chose the design and didn't purchase the building as such.
Prior to this home, he lived in a recluse ranch in Colorado where a proud monk named Krsnananda would visit him. Krishnananda told me himself that Viirendra had to report to the people in the black helicopters that came to see him at his hidden ranch. Krishnananda also told me that his brother, who is also a monk, was in the airplane when the arms were dropped. As a cresciendo I also get news that Ananda Marga made it on the top 10 terrorist list of the FBI around the year 2000. This understanding turned my whole Ananda Marga experience upside down and inside out. All the while that I was lost in deep meditation at Ananda Nagar and beginning my studies at the research institute, these miscreants were planning an international conspiracy with the CIA against Ananda Marga.
The producer of the documentary cites another author that considers it is likely that Kim Peter, or Nirvananda, was aided and protected by the CIA. The producer leaves the question open for scrutiny. Some people in A.M. were informants to the CIA and the senior members of the organization knew of this. Kim Peter worked in North America with a gang of A.M. monks. He is still seen as a Robin Hood type of figure. In the beginning, they only smuggled electronics into India to raise money for orphanages and schools. However, they later moved on to greater ventures. Many members of this underground mafia extended into immoral and dangerous international mafia connections. Some were caught and forced to be informers to the FBI and the CIA. I knew who some of these people were and I think they were used as tools to help frame Ananda Marga as a terrorist organization. After the Purulia arms drop Ananda Marga was placed on the FBI’s top 10 global terrorist groups list for several years. Now, they are practically non-existent in North America. However, we must thank them immensely for showing us a bad example of Ananda Marga. They have made it very clear what Ananda Marga is not and have perhaps liberated this great philosophy from a corrupt international crime family that Ananda Marga has become.
I don't doubt that the fall of A.M. was aided by international intelligence that always protects the global capitalist system. The quick rise of Ananda Marga in India during the 60's and 70's made many people nervous. Neither the Indian CBI nor the CIA wanted this spiritual and social revolutionary movement to spread beyond India, as it quickly did. Nowadays, after the death of the great leader, Anandamurti, this expansion has stopped and the movement falls apart everywhere. I recently heard about an Oxford publication where the author speaks of A.M. as a jihadist movement! Although this is far from the truth, it is true that Ananda Marga is no longer such a vigorous and respectable movement and it certainly isn't an easy task being an Anandamurti apologist! If the social and spiritual ideals of Anandamurti are in fact true and tested, then they will live on, perhaps in better ways and forms, and with practical examples.
The Cultural Gatekeepers
When I studied the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Lacan I was left with the impression that they were entering psychological dimensions that were not just subtle in their understanding of inner, psychological life but also delving into the sophisticated dynamics of how the social world, the symbolic, linguistic forms of meaning enter into, qualify and condition individual psychology at very deep levels. This was especially true with Lacan. By psychoanalytically unravelling neurosis one discovers the whole chain of mental conditioning between the inner, psychological order and the outer, symbolic order, of all of the clashes and conflicts between the two. Lacan’s sophisticated theories of how social symbols and models condition individual psychology are a map to the nexus of how what is outside becomes a part of what is inside.
This seemed like exclusive knowledge. I was in my last year of undergraduate studies and had never even heard of Lacan until I enrolled in this graduate course. To this day, I hardly ever meet psychologists who know of Lacan, except for in the French speaking world. I was left with the impression that this knowledge could be very useful for Big Brother. If we can unravel neurosis with psychoanalytical understanding of the symbolic, linguistic order of of social meanings, could one also learn how to induce neurosis into the symbolic order? Who else besides psychologists might be interested in such a sophisticated analysis of how people get programmed, consciously and unconsciously, by the symbols of meaning in our cultural world?
As a liberal arts student that had just graduated the university, I went to an Ananda Marga ashram to do doctoral studies on tantra yoga when the arms drop occurred. Far from being an mere academic experience, I was becoming deeply immersed in the very high spiritual vibration at Ananda Nagar. It was clear that much spiritual work had been done in this environment. I felt that my meditation was 5 times as strong there! By just closing the eyes, one enters into deep, effortless meditation in such an environment. Despite all that has happened with Ananda Marga, those experiences always help me remember that the philosophy and spiritual practices of Ananda Marga have a very pure origin. Although I admired Indian yogi-revolutionaries like Aurobindu and Subash Chandra Bose, I was personally more yogi than a revolutionary and I thought of these Ananda Marga yogis more as monastic social activists like Vivekananda who practiced and taught yoga to keep themselves and human society physically, mentally and spiritually strong. I never thought of them as the machine gun or grenade carrying types until they made a debacle of an arms drop from a Russian airplane full of machine guns, rocket launchers and grenades over their main ashram in Purulia, India.
After a nice meditation one morning I hear there was an arms drop in a nearby village and then the military arrived. The arms drop was a typical botched-up Ananda Marga operation and the arms fell in the wrong place and it was reported to the local police and military. They discovered it just in time. The simple locals live like people from thousands of years ago. They discovered these unknown objects which had very nice boxes and canvas bags. At the time they were making cob houses and were just about to throw some sturdy hand grenades into the cob mixture.
I was immediately thrown in jail with a few other people but soon released under house arrest. I wasn't allowed to go anywhere, but just to stay within Ananda Nagar and continue to enjoy deep meditation. The public scene around A.M. after the arms drop was all very fun, especially when I was used as a public speaker to defend A.M. in front of the press. It was all a game to me until I realized I didn’t know what was really going on and was unknowingly lying to the BBC and India Times when the A.M. Central press secretary sent me to give interviews. Several months went by before I recognized the faces in the newspapers as those of Ananda Marga monks who had been visiting the ashram with our arrested companion that was later thoroughly questioned by the CBI. They were planning the arms drop at this time. All the while I was helping A.M. to blame their old foe, the communist party of Bengal, of falsely defaming Ananda Marga like they did so many times in the past. I was questioned by the Indian CBI but they weren't interested in my testament. I was never seriously drilled by Interpol because they knew I was innocent. They sent a file clerk to interview me. He was the nicest Bengali who really wanted to know if I liked Bengal and wanted to know all about my family. He was sincerely hurt when I said the vacation didn’t turn out quite as I suspected and that I would prefer not to be in this situation but that I would probably be content here otherwise. He really wanted me to be happy. This was not the case when the interviewed the "Jazz Man," however. They kept him in the interrogation room for hours and had their best agents drilling him. He was obviously nervous. Later, knowing that he needed to give the rest of us some kind of reason as to why Ananda Marga is being framed as a terrorist organization and why we are under house arrest, he decided to give us a story.
He was sincere. I never thought he lied about anything because they were very humiliating confessions. He told us all about the underground A.M. mafia and how they operated. Most of it seemed pretty innocent compared to most mafias. In the early days they were simply smuggling electronic equipment into India to sell on the black market. The money was funding schools and orphanages in India and Africa. Anandamurti prohibited these activities but many people still participated in them because it was very easy and few considered it immoral. I realized that I had even participated in this unknowingly by agreeing to carry a video camera into India for a monk who would later sell it to an Indian contact. If immigration were to ask me what happened to my camera, I was to say that it was stolen and that was the end of the case.
However, I did expect that there were a ton of things that the Jazz Man wasn’t telling us. He confessed that he had been to federal prison twice for his activities with Ananda Marga mafia. He had worked in various counterfeit operations with the great mafia giant and pimp, Karunananda. Hopefully, he had nothing to do with Karunananda’s Love Shack, the monastic prostitution service for all of the celibate monks in Ananda Marga. He only confessed to counterfeiting and credit card scams. This was a step up from smuggling electronics and it was impossible for me to condone A.M. involvement in these activities.
I suspected that he had been compromised by somebody, by the FBI, or some agency. He told me that the FBI came to his house during the 84 Olympics in Los Angeles and spoke to him the whole day about how A.M. are terrorists. He argued the contrary but the FBI agent had all kinds of inside knowledge of A.M. and cited conversations of Anandamurti that were given only in closed circles. The FBI agent argued that followers of Ananda Marga believe Anandamurti is “Taraka Brahma.” They had subtle arguments about how this is a belief system and not some official doctrine, as the agent wanted to argue. This was my first piece to the puzzle of how A.M. got infiltrated, was thoroughly studied, and later disintegrated.
We were under house arrest during this time and so I could begin to see how the criminals of Ananda Marga had been utilized by Big Brother to step up their criminal activities to the next level. The very same people behind the smugglers got involved in an international arms deal that was monitored and controlled by M.I. 5 agents from England.
I began to recall Lacan and think of all of the complexities and dissonance that this whole Ananda Marga experience was creating. Ananda Marga was a very complex world view, an alternative and revolutionary society in all of its aspects, and Big Brother was afraid of them for this. I contemplated the A.M. from the texts and the immediate A.M. culture of which I was immersed in while being under house arrest in their “Mecca” of Ananda Nagar. Now I am seeing that there are so many other voices that could try to define what A.M. is in contrast to the official doctrines and the norms of the movement. The mafia activities were a great contradiciton to the ideology, for example. And now I had to consider that there are now really intelligent and powerful people who are trying to impose and define what Ananda Marga is all about and that they are only interested in its destruction and dissolution.
I couldn’t get to far into such conversations with the Jazz Man. He had already said enough. I did have some intellectual conversations with him about parallel subjects and we discussed the ideas of Lacan. He was very familiar with these ideas, much, much more than I was and told me about Derridas and Foucault as well. He seemed like the perfect, diabolical CIA agent that I imagined in the university, somebody that could analyze alternative movements and study their complexities and understand how to manipulate and control them by very subtle means. I began to ask so many qustions.
It was just after I wrote this article last year that a friend told me about the movie, The Arms Drop. I pasted the trailer into the writing on my blog. Later, I realized that I knew the face of Kim Peter Davies, the suspected arms smuggler-A.M. monKrishnananda I suspected that I had lunch with him years ago at Ananda Nagar, but I was never completely certain until I finally saw an interview with him. After seeing the interview I was certain it was him that I met so many years ago because he had a very distinct, and highly intelligent appearance. He made an impression. It was curious that during the interrogation of the CBI that they never showed me a good picture of him close up. This lunch was AFTER the arms drop and when he mysteriously escaped from Delhi International Airport after an Indian Air Force F-16 forced his plane down after they dropped the weapons at Ananda Nagar. His return to a place under military patrol and to travel in a country where he is a wanted terrorist is what still dumbfounds me.
In the writing I try to argue that it was just a minute fraction professional criminals in A.M. that got the entire A.M. into trouble with Interpol, the CIA, and the FBI. However, this new realization makes me aware that this international criminal was at large and hunted for all over the globe with his 30 alias names and passports but he went back exactly to the scene of the crime at Ananda Nagar. I was under house arrest at the time for what he did, yet he comes back during our house arrest with police all around Ananda Nagar and has lunch with us! I fear that the circle of complicity in this affair is much, much greater than I had thought before. Why didn’t the police recognize him? The other monks of Ananda Marga certainly didn’t single him out. This is probably why Dada Chidghananda told me frankly, “your work is done, just go to the Himalayas and get away from this mess. Serve through sadhana. The guru already told you this.”
He was right, but one still has a desire to resolve interesting, unsolved mysteries, especially those pertaining to such an intriguing revolutionary organization and their struggles against both the communists as well as the capitalists since the 1950’s.
I think we need to hunt down the “Jazz Man” and have a conversation with him. I should have known it was Kim Peter Davy, a.Krishnanandaa Nirvanananda, that had lunch with the “Jazz Man” and I because the Jazz Man made a joke with me just a month later, after the court case and the deportation to the U.S. He said, “Have you seen Nirvananda’s new face yet?, he looks great” I asked him: “Have I ever seen Nirvananda?” He just laughed and walked away.
Later, after discusssing his translation work about the life of Anandamurti, he tells a story of how Madonna and Ricky Martin had a love affair. Was he “littering” our symbolic order with contradictions on purpose or was it just his own worldly part escaping him? I probably would have never pondered it that deeply if I didn’t know who he was and what he knew.
Should the Jazz Man be the dedicated historian of Ananda Marga? He writes the books now. Are they reliable texts? In the past he worked for Karunananda the Pimp and Kim Peter Davies, and now he hangs around with the “Pentagon in Asheville,” the same cult as "Shamitananda the CobraKiller", the "Monk Dude, (Nabhanilananda, the Google and Facebook insider as well) and other unsavory figures. Are these figureheads designed to make Ananda Marga a failure? Were these dirty figures purposely promoted as leaders and voices because Big Brother knew they could be easily discredited? They could indeed make the movement a frivolous scandal without a doubt, but they could never make it Ananda Marga.
The most rebellious group of people on the planet are disciplined monastics who are celibate, practice meditation, and are devoted to helping humanity. This is especially true when they promote co-operatives as an alternative to corporations and prefer democratic socialism over capitalism. Tantric meditation has the secrets of spiritual reproduction, of transmuting physical energy into psychic stamina, and then transmuting psychic stamina into spiritual cognition, to use Anandamurti's terms. Celibacy, properly practiced, produces tremendous mental force, clarity, and will. Such minds have an invisible power that influences other minds in very positive ways. Anandamurti combined these ancient tantra yoga practices with a modern, progressive and revolutionary paradigm for social activism. This cannot be accomplished by playboy monks that commonly use prostitution or other outlets. I hear the confessions from ex monastics who tell me that when they were having troubles with their vows, the rest of the monks told them to go to a prostitute. Celibacy is celibacy and vows are vows and they are so for physical, mental, and spiritual reasons. One is entirely free to live a normal life and express sexuality, but not in a monastic uniform.
Chastity is required for the practice of yoga, but one does not have to be celibate to practice chastity, or responsible sexuality. The closer one is to absolute celibacy, the more mental power one has. Divided, hypocritical minds are not lasers, they cannot guide the revolution or inspire others to change. A unified mind is a laser that burns right through all lies and distortions yet is loving and luminous and infuses grace in others. People like Karunananda created a death spiral by making prostitution part of the accepted norm for monastics. They lost their spiritual and ideological force. For that very same reason the U.S. military forced Guantanamo prisoners dedicated to chastity to watch pornography in order to break their stamina.
Although Anandamurti left us a mystical yet practical, lucid and rational non-dual philosophy (Advaita), his followers too often blindly focus on the relative, human form of Anandamurti. Anandamurti never propounded himself as the one and only savior of humanity nor the one and only guru. Instead he created a very universal and rational social and spiritual philosophy for all humans to share and understand. It is always the priests and spin doctors that emphasize the form of saviors, messiahs, and gurus and not the true teachings themselves. I can’t recall anything about how Buddha spoke about himself as the one and only spiritual giant on the planet. Even the most rational of the A.M. teachers are dogmatic when it comes to the form of their guru being the only way to liberation. It is no different than the Christians or Muslims that say Jesus or Mohammed is the only way. It reflects not just spiritual immaturity, but a very dangerous dogma and obvious spiritual vanity by those who propound such dogmas. I left Ananda Marga for this reason long ago. Sometimes I thought I was just too lofty and idealistic but I knew that the lack of understanding of subtle spiritual ideas will eventually narrow the spiritual outlook and social vision. I think I was right about that, but I underestimated how truly dangerous dogma really is. Instead of becoming more narrow and sect-like, they became very immoral and perverse. I am afraid it would be all to easy to consider A.M. in N. America, or “The Path of Bliss,” to be a sinister cult in that they have leaders who are murderers and perverts, participated in international mafia, dealed drugs and smuggled weapons, and eventually ended up number 8 on the FBI’s top ten terrorist organizations. What is funny is that most of the members are well-educated bourgeoisie “bogie yogis” that would never participate in such activities but apparently are too cowardly to demand that their leaders desist from these crimes. To be part of this society requires intellectual, moral, and spiritual “suicide” in that one simply must stop using reason and discerning intellect to question all of the hypocrisy and incongruity.
One should not worry about the fall of AMPS (the social organization of Ananda Marga). Ramananda, Anandamurti's personal secretary, himself told me personally that Anandamurti had created 21 decentralized organizations to accomplish the tasks that he wanted accomplished. I had full confidence in certain people within A.M. like Ramananda, Chandranath, and Chidghananda. These people would have never sold out to the Communists or whatever relative, mundane society that they were contending with at a particular time in a particular place on the planet. Nor would they have ever fallen into any mafia activity. The various factions of A.M. eventually did make dirty sell-out deals with conventional ideologies because they were already condemned as international criminals and so the law had this power over them and could more easily infiltrate and disintegrate the organization. The A.M. mafia started out as Robin Hood criminals that only smuggled electronics on the black market, something that could be more easily justified with revolutionary logic and complex two-sided arguments. However, it is much more difficult to condone drug and arm trafficking along with other clearly immoral activities. Such clandestine activities make them just as dirty as the CIA or KGB. Ananda Marga was meant to be a spiritual revolution.
Most of my Christian friends realize that they have a plethora of institutions in the name of Christ yet Christ is probably not an actual historical figure, but a representation of a sublime perennial philosophy. Anandamurti lived, taught and died in the twentieth century, yet the organization that Anandamurti personally created has been totally destroyed by his own disciples. In the case of Anandamurti's movement, Ananda Marga, is the opposite of Christianity in that we have an enlightened personality as an historical figure with texts written in his name, yet we have no valid organization to carry on his teachings.
Yet this is alright and probably part of the larger plan. AMPS was but the outer surface, the teenage fan club, for our great Person. (my expression here, not Ramananda’s.) Ananda Marga as a social movement is but a cult of personality in which few people really understand the ideology and actually perform the spiritual practices with insight. A.M. is a great place to for tasty Indian food and talk about Anandamurti’s legacy. However, Ananda Marga is essentially a pacific revolutionary movement and it simply doesn’t work very well without the revolutionary elements. The priests have even started to censor his texts, which should be considered “sacred” if the guru were indeed omniscient and omnipotent, as they propose. Meditation with progressive social activism eventually gives way to fixed social conventions, to all to chubby yogi priests who dogmatize about an omniscient and omnipotent guru while they bask in the guru’s glory and fall deeper into hypocrisy and scandal for manipulating these pure teachings. Anandamurti loved all and was truly a sublime mystery, but we just can’t let the teenage fan club with their selfish and immature attachments to his form direct the movement as a whole.