What does it mean for a prominent American politician to come into power as the sleeper cell of an eccentric Hindu-American cult? Does she act independently, or has her God-man got her on speed-dial? Can she bridge the divide between left and right with the radiant glow of Krishna consciousness?
Joining us today to help answer these questions is Nitai Joseph. He shares some heritage with Gabbard, because he also grew up in a Hare Krishna sect. He holds an MSc. in the Psychology of Coercive Control and has worked across a range of issues connected to ideology and manipulation, including cultic awareness, child sexual abuse prevention, adverse meditation experiences, and organizational ethics and accountability.
Show Notes
Gopala Govinda Rama Chant by Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa Chris Butler
QAnon Anonymous Episode 211: Tulsi Gabbard P1 (The Cult) feat Mike Prysner
QAnon Anonymous Episode 212: Tulsi Gabbard P2 (The Fascist Turn) feat Mike Prysner
Tulsi Gabbard Had a Very Strange Childhood
What Does Tulsi Gabbard Believe? | The New Yorker
Chris Butler Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa: on “freedom”
An Insiders Perspective on Tulsi Gabbard and her Guru | by Lalita | Medium
Tulsi Gabbard 2016 Janmashtami Message
ISKCON Abuse Timeline
Definition of Betrayal Trauma Theory
Archived ex-Hare Krishna message board
Nitai can be reached via LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You can follow us at ConspiratualityPod on Instagram, and you can subscribe at Patreon and Apple Podcasts.
Now, this past week on Patreon, Matthew, you did a really great Ask Me Anything live stream that ended up being about RFK Jr.
and astrology and surviving the cynicism of being immersed in conspiracy and cult subject matter as we are.
Yeah, I did do that and it was great.
I really love the questions that we get.
They're very, very thoughtful from our supporters.
I really like this format.
I'm looking forward to continuing it.
Yeah, and then this past Monday, Derek dropped a bonus episode for our Patreon supporters unpacking how wellness rhetoric employs apocalyptic themes.
And he also explores in that bonus how perhaps secular Buddhism could be an effective antidote to that kind of fundamentalism.
Please remember that you can pre-order our book either through the link at the bottom of the show notes here, or if you can't find those, just go to our website, conspirituality.net.
We got this endorsement from our friend, yoga teacher Sean Korn, who was one of the early industry leaders to realize that QAnon was ripping through the yoga world.
Yeah, she was.
And she really paid for it, too.
You can read about that in the book.
Anyway, Sean says, Conspirituality is a fascinating, straightforward, well-researched, and sobering unpacking of the complex history and present-day phenomena of distorted beliefs within New Age yoga and wellness spaces.
These beliefs, when devoid of magical thinking, expose the deep fears and distrust that often lead well-intended and vulnerable folks to embrace conspiracy as fact, Value feelings over critical thinking and recognize intuition as the ultimate guide for reality.
A reality that often mitigates science, evidence-based research, or even common sense.
Having had a front row seat to the ways in which conspiracy theories and misinformation divide communities and the impact these beliefs have had on valued relationships, I highly recommend reading Wow, that is a comprehensive blurb.
Thank you so much, Sean.
have come to this place in our collective awareness and the profound effect it has proven to have
on our emotional, mental, and physical health and wellness.
Wow, that is a comprehensive blurb.
Thank you so much, Sean.
♪♪ Conspiratuality 152,
Tulsi Gabbard's Krishna Consciousness with Nittai Joseph.
♪♪ Dear listeners, these are the dulcet tones of Jagadguru Siddhaswaroopananda Paramahamsa, Chris Butler, backed by a chorus of voices from his cult, the Science of Identity Foundation in Hawaii.
These are the soothing, ethereal, immersive vibes that enchanted Mike and Carol Gabbard in the late 1970s as they found themselves in Butler's Divine Grace and built their lives around his every whim.
These are the vibes that lulled their daughter, Tulsi Gabbard, in her cradle, that attended her homeschooled and ashram education, serenaded her rise to fame as a representative of her guru's mission, and likely haunt her dreams to the present day.
Because Gabbard remains a close devotee of Butler.
And the relationship isn't just one-to-one, it's more like a network.
Many of her staffers are Butler devotees, as is her husband, who films her as though he's filming a goddess.
And as we'll explore in this episode, this whole scene may tell us a lot more about her choices and directions than any political analysis can offer.
After all, Chris Butler does not hold your typical political objectives.
According to former group members, to be devoted to Him is to seek the divine path away from all worldly concerns and impurities.
It means serving Him hand and foot.
And while you're in the group, it evidently means never mentioning how weird and dominating he is.
How secretive, controlling, germophobic, puritanical, obsessed with his followers' sex lives, and, like the Hare Krishna leaders he learned from, burning with hatred for gay people.
Today we ask the questions, what does it mean for a prominent American politician to come into power as the sleeper cell of an eccentric Hindu-American cult?
Does Gabbard act independently?
Or has her godman got her on speed dial?
Can she bridge the divide between left and right with the radiant glow of Krishna consciousness?
Joining us today to help answer these questions is Natai Joseph.
He shares some heritage with Gabbard because he also grew up in a Hare Krishna sect.
He holds a Master of Science in the Psychology of Coercive Control and studies manipulation, cultic techniques, child sexual abuse prevention, adverse meditation experiences, and organizational ethics.
All right, Julian, just pretend for a moment that you don't know anything about Tulsi Gabbard.
Nothing about her politics, nothing about her background.
You click on a YouTube link and she's center screen speaking directly to you.
What's your first impression?
Well, I mean, the obvious first impression is she's very beautiful.
She comes across as strong and very confident in what she has to say.
I agree with that.
Now Natai, as we're going to hear, I think this is a more complicated question for you.
It's a little bit closer to home.
But if you can just eke it out, imagine that you forget that Tulsi Gabbard grew up in an offshoot cult from the cult that you grew up in.
If you saw her giving a speech on the steps of your state capitol, what would your first impression be before you even grasped what she was saying?
She's always reminded me a little bit of Storm from X-Men, because at least when I was a kid, the cartoon that was on, they had, like, a gray strip in her hair.
And I know she says that's to, like, commemorate battle and those lost in battle now.
That's, like, how she explains it.
Beyond that, I...
I think there's a confusing array of subjects that get grouped together, and then also sort of a blend of very passionate proclamations with what seems like really scripted Statements and like again, it's just that that contrast is confusing Depending on the blurb one heard her saying it could sound pretty appealing to me at least especially in years past you know, that's becoming less and less the case, but you know, there's a lot of issues and She doesn't necessarily fall where you'd assume on each one And so depending on what she's talking about a lot of different people might find something that they're like, oh, yeah a good point, you know and
Right.
Well, there is something of kind of like a universalist sheen to her.
And the word that comes to me is darshan, really, which is, you know, kind of what people in Indian religious traditions talk about when they're in the presence of somebody who's, you know, giving some kind of discourse, especially if it's Philosophical or religious.
She's meticulously put together.
I mean, many celebrities and politicians are, but there's something on top of the really tight wardrobe The perfect hair, the calibrated lighting.
It's like she presents as a kind of icon in a religious sense.
Like, I feel like clasping my hands in prayer when I see her, you know, as though she's rendered in plaster and encased in varnish or something like that.
I feel, though, that I also could spend a lot of time sort of contemplating her and never really have the sense of who she is in herself because it feels like she's there to manifest something abstract.
So, I don't know, I have this uncanny sense that she's not a politician, a typical politician with typical political goals, that something else is happening.
Okay, so who is Tulsi Gabbard really?
Hawaiian?
Samoan?
Hindu?
Pro-level surfer?
Her name is the Sanskrit word for holy basil, a pungent herb used for millennia in India for spiritual clarity and subtle body healing.
Gabbard is a military vet who is against foreign military action, but also a huge Islamophobe who's fond of dictators.
Her dad is a Democrat state senator, most famous for being one of those homophobes who's so obnoxious and single-minded about it, you have to wonder what's really going on for him.
Yeah, old man Gabbard is just a little bit obsessed with what the boys are consensually doing with their penises, I think.
Tulsi became the first congressperson to be sworn in with her hand on the Bhagavad Gita after winning her seat in 2012.
In 2016, she endorsed Bernie, even though they align on almost nothing but reducing or avoiding foreign military intervention.
As a Democrat, also ran presidential candidate in 2020, she eventually dropped out to endorse Biden, which really threw her growing MAGA fan base for a loop.
In Mike Prisner's great overview for QAA, he dubbed her a political chameleon.
Yeah, and I would strongly encourage all of you to listen to those two episodes with Preissner.
It's super comprehensive in terms of Gabbard's background and orientation.
We've also got really good profiles from New York Magazine and The New Yorker, but I think that Preissner's chameleon tag is perfect because Gabbard is famously slippery, and this has led to all kinds of speculation that we can't falsify.
You know, things like she must be a Russian asset, or she's on the payroll of Narendra Modi, or she's a chaos agent who's attempting to fuck up Democrat minds and solidarity, including through her latest move of just breaking her affiliation with the Democratic Party and declaring herself as an independent.
Natai, when you hear these takes, I suspect that you hear something is missing.
Is that fair, do you think?
It's oversimplified to think of her often in those ways.
I think that she is a true believer, to the best of my understanding and assessment, and with that comes ends justifies the means mentality serving this Transcendental Aim, ultimately, as she would see it.
And then with that, And with being sort of the face of her sect, in a sense, like, you know, Butler's very private.
I think there can easily be a sense of, like, being empowered to act on stages larger than she is and use that to their advantage rather than be used by it.
Perhaps naive, in my view.
And then I think that When someone talks about someone being an asset, it's sort of, it's a little loaded, it's sort of clandestine, and implying one party's aims being executed through the other, but you know, in some instances, like a lot of stuff with Modi, I imagine her true views align with his.
Yeah, I mean I've formed the impression over time that she may be even more available to letting ideological concerns take a back seat both to her ambition and perhaps to the higher calling she may be driven by in terms of achieving those ambitions.
You know, Natalya, you pinged Chris Butler, and that's getting ahead of ourselves a little bit because we have to sort of get into who he is.
That's fine.
That's fine.
But, you know, and we're going to be pinging her record throughout the episode, but you have this background that gives us the opportunity to imagine our way into what it might have felt like to grow up and to still be in, as is the case with Gabbard, her entire life in the science of identity cult and how that might play a, you know, a continued but difficult to see role in her current actions.
And I think the reason that we're doing this is that We're in a particularly strange political moment where there are now, I would say, three challengers to top positions who are presenting a very scrambled and religiously inflected politics that doesn't align with material realities or the potential for real coalition building.
And, you know, there have always been waves of religion in politics, and especially American politics, but today these religions are novel, they're not well-known, they're volatile, and they're volatile because they are governed more by charisma than by strong and diverse communities of faith.
Yeah, so for example, we have Marianne Williamson coming from the left with regard to her policy proposals and posturing, I would say, but still compromised by the bootstrap metaphysics of the love alone is real gaslighting of A Course in Miracles.
And then we have RFK Jr., perhaps a little more centrist, but squandering his family's social capital on anti-vax messaging.
Photo ops with Mike Flynn and speaking at evangelical churches about the coming apocalypse.
And then here we have Tulsi Gabbard, whose fluidity can best be understood through the infinite resilience she's been trained to exhibit by the high-demand group that surrounds a white, Hawaii-based surfer dude named Chris Butler, who founded an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in 1966.
Let's just plunk our thesis down at the top here.
I think what we're going to present makes an argument that the fluidity of Gabbard's political identity reflects her true commitments to a charismatic religious movement and its grandiose reactionary ideas.
Do you think that's fair, Natai?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that the fluidity is really this ends justifies the means mentality that I think appears in all sort of totalistic ideologies.
And we see it a lot with certain Christian politicians already, like Dominionists.
And there's kind of these two core aspects of that.
The first being like democracy is an impediment to their ultimate aims, but also the second being like democracy just isn't a good system.
It's not.
You know, we often speak about something being anti-democratic with the assumption that everyone in the discussion puts a negative on that.
And that's just not necessarily the case.
And a strong example of that is the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, of which Tulsi's in an offshoot, is often quoted and on record as referring to democracy as demon crazy.
The wordplay is popular, you know, with the gurus.
Wow.
I hadn't heard that.
Had you heard that, Julian?
No, I had not.
That's pretty phenomenal.
I want to say that I think that's a really astute observation.
And what we see here is a kind of the emergence of very similar themes on both the left and the right in terms of a kind of revivalist political religion that, you know, like like with with a lot of the evangelicals, people spend a lot of time trying to make sense of how they could endorse someone like Donald Trump.
So Natai, if we're asking you for insight into Gabbard's inner life and motivations, let's just run down your own life credentials first, because you grew up in ISKCON, so can you tell us a little bit about that?
what we want, and lo and behold, the stacked Supreme Court, right?
So, Natai, if we're asking you for insight into Gabbard's inner life and motivations,
let's just run down your own life credentials first, because you grew up in ISKCON.
So, can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, and I wanna also acknowledge that anything we'll say that I'll say at least, you know,
is speculation as to her internal experience and motives, but with some additional background.
So, I just wanna acknowledge, and hopefully I'll provide the appropriate caveats throughout.
Yeah.
For myself, I was really raised on the fringes of ISKCON and within ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Fringes is kind of the term they have for the lapsed members, the people who kind of show up on high holidays, so to speak, or things like that.
And so that's kind of how I grew up.
But my parents had both joined in their youth, so obviously their entire adult lives had been shaped by it.
It was basically an arranged marriage for my parents.
My mom was given an option of two men who were interested in her.
My name is a Hare Krishna name, etc.
So despite, you know, me personally going to public school as a kid, it was always sort of threaded there in the background.
And then more kind of systemic ways, you know the impact of that ideology on a family So my father left when I was a baby and that is encouraged as you know, a form of renunciation, etc.
Oh Like men are actually encouraged to take not take leave of newborns You know, there is some notion of I could go into it at length, you know, any any like monastic environment, and maybe this will come up a bit later, makes family household status second class to some extent.
Right.
So for a lot of people in my parents generation, the men had been Brahmacharis, you know, celibates.
And then the move to marriage is like a lessening of their spiritual standard, you know?
And so there's just so much baggage attached to families existing.
It's like the evidence of you not being better.
And so when I say he was encouraged, it was like literally as a well-known speaker and writer, he specifically was praised for Going to India and preaching and speaking and so on.
Right.
I grew up on the fringes, but that really made the space for me to have a conversion experience of sorts when I was a teenager.
And so like my brother had become very devout and preached to me.
And that started shaping my thinking and a few years later, so I got real into it, started participating at the local temple, and ultimately joined a small offshoot sect called Shri Chaitanya Sangha, led by a guy named Tripurari Swami, who had been within ISKCON and had branched out.
How would you say in general the ISKCON experience shaped your brain?
In childhood, it's a lot of these indirect impacts, you know, like the emotional instability
of a mother who's was in a, you know, unhealthy marriage that then ended abruptly too.
And it's beholden to these ideals that don't give you a lot of tools for health, you know.
Right.
And so I think that that had a lot of indirect impacts, the sort of disdain for mainstream
culture, you know, Prabhupada, the founder.
They like to quote him as saying that secular schools are slaughterhouses of the soul.
So when I decided I wanted to leave school at 13, my mom was like, cool, you know?
And so my life began getting very unusual at that point.
Wow.
Right.
And so, you know, that then brings in things, you know, kids who went to boarding schools often were understimulated.
And then in the aftermath of some of these maladaptive childhoods, there's a lot of Hare Krishna kids
getting substance use and things like that young.
So there's that component.
Attachment, you know, it's funny because like, you both are familiar with Eastern thought,
so you understand how extremely loaded the word attachment is in those ideologies.
And then to realize like attachment theory is like one of the most established psychological
models for like interpersonal health that exists.
And it's like, that's a big, big deal.
Golf there.
So so I think that's definitely a factor that comes through even despite my mother being a loving person.
You know, she was like, a hippie prior to joining, she still had a lot of those values.
And nonetheless, you know, she didn't, at times even know What's an okay way to love a child, you know, because of all this rhetoric about detachment and like the enrapturing nature of family life?
Would it be fair, a fair sort of statement on what you're talking about to say that within this religious belief system If you love too much, if you bond too closely, if you are, in other words, too attached to your family members, you're actually hindering both their spiritual progress and your own spiritual progress because the true goal is to renounce the world and to focus, to basically put all your eggs in the basket of the divine.
A thousand percent.
And I would say the slightly trickier layer that gets added in like a bhakti devotional tradition is that they don't just say detach to nothingness, they say redirect all that love to Krishna, to a guru, cook delicious food for them like you would a child, so on and so forth.
And so there's a A form of validating that humanity within that, but then it goes on to basically say the only way that's not exploitation is once you've transcended the material world.
So it then very quickly undermines humanity again.
So it might be cooking food, it might also, like, be the creation of a very, you know, powerful political persona that is actually really appealing to a lot of people.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Alright, so you passed through the period of being devout, and now...
You have gone on to get a really sort of fulsome education in the psychology of coercion, right?
Like, this has become something that you now study.
Yeah, I think that I always had a pull for psychology.
I was in the temple, living in a yurt, reading, you know, Scott Peck and Eric Fromm and things like that.
And, you know, there's a highly appealing to spiritual people type of Sure, but also like humanistic sacrilegious kind of psychologists, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, a lot of great, great stuff in them.
Absolutely.
I think.
And so like, even I'm, you know, reading, if you're familiar, like, A different drum, which is like Scott Peck's book, all about community building and community dynamics.
And he goes into his study of veterans of that awful massacre in Vietnam that he worked with professionally, who participated in this massacre.
And he's talking about the social power of emblems.
And I'm reading this at night in the temple, and we had just made our new logo, and we're getting it printed on things.
And I'm like, hmm.
So I think that thread was in me.
So the answer really is to ban books.
I mean, if you want to keep everyone on the straight and narrow, you're making a good case here.
You're not wrong.
It was the double-edged sword of us wanting to be and appear intellectual and well thought through.
I was given that leash and took advantage of it.
Okay, well, to zoom out a little bit, or maybe even in, I don't even know, I've got queued up a video made by Tulsi Gabbard's team that came out in 2016, and it's a little bit different from what listeners would typically hear from her if you've heard podcast clips or interviews, you know, on Fox or CNN or whatever.
This is a religious address that is dedicated to the celebration of a feast day called Janmashtami, and it runs about three minutes, but I think it will help us get into the vibe of this part of her life and how it plays out.
This is not that long ago, and I imagine that if she was to do a message for Janmashtami this year, it would be somewhat similar.
So let's Let's relax, let's close our eyes, let's take a few deep
breaths, and we'll listen to Tulsi here.
Today is a very special day because it's the celebration of Janmasthami,
Lord Krishna's appearance in this world some 5,000 years ago.
On this day, I'm especially grateful to be reminded that whether we are aware of God or not, and regardless of what name we know Him by, God is our best friend.
He is present in the heart of all of us, patiently waiting for us to turn to Him, and always willing to give us guidance, shelter, and unconditional love.
Krishna tells us that the essence of real spirituality is our personal loving relationship with Him.
In Krishna's Bhagavad Gita, the Supreme Lord says, Abandon all varieties of religion and just surrender unto
Me.
I shall deliver you from all sinful reaction.
Do not fear.
This is true spirituality.
True spirituality means love for God.
It means one's personal loving relationship with the Supreme Soul.
It doesn't mean belonging to a particular group or organization.
In the past, I've described how I was raised in a multi-faith family, but perhaps a better way to describe it would be a faith-inclusive family.
It wasn't as if my Catholic father was on one spiritual team and my Hindu mother was on the opposing team.
It really wasn't until my late teens that I became aware of the concept of sectarianism, the false notion that there are many distinct and opposing religions, each with their own god and each the enemy or competitor of the other.
The true Vaishnava Hindu perspective is not like this.
Rather, it is very inclusive.
We focus on the essence of real religion, which is spiritual love.
According to Vaishnava Hinduism, there's one Supreme Being who is called many names by different people around the world at different times.
It's not that there is a Christian God, a Buddhist God, a Hindu God, or a Muslim God, all competing with each other.
There is only one God, although we may call Him by different names.
It is the loving exchange one has with God that is true spirituality.
And one who is experiencing such love for God is able to see beyond our external differences and designations, and recognize that we are all relatives in the deepest sense.
We are all children of the same Supreme Lord.
This is the message of Bhagavad Gita, the message of love, of how we can achieve real harmony with others, no matter the different backgrounds we come from.
Jai Shri Krishna!
Wow!
I mean, how do you argue with that though?
My heart is really open right now.
It's incredible.
She has such a beautiful voice.
Can we just say that?
Like, incredible.
She could be a voice actor.
Anyway, I guess we're going to kind of get to that, right?
She could be a Siri.
She has a beautiful, very machine-like voice.
Oh, fantastic.
Wouldn't that be great?
Tulsi, can you find me?
Anyway, Natalia, I'm assuming that this language and the affect is very familiar to you.
Can you describe the positive or perhaps, I don't know, idealized, the glowing sensations of devotion that ISKCON members feel in their reverie?
And I'm asking because it feels like she's in a state of pleasure in this statement.
Although, you know, who really knows?
Before I answer that, because I hadn't listened to this clip recently, I just have to flag
Julian made a face.
This Bhagavad Gita quote she gave about, Surrender unto me and I'll deliver you from all sin.
This is a really significant verse internally for them, but also externally.
There's a famous case in the 80s where an underage girl had joined the Hare Krishnas, been wedded to an older man who was basically shuffling her around the country so that her parents couldn't find her.
Ultimately, this went to a court case, as the Hare Krishnas know it, the Robin George case, and one of the things that ISKCON Guru had to testify about was, does this verse give you license to do whatever you want?
Wow.
And so he had to specifically explain away I'll deliver you from all sin if you just do what I want kind of attitude.
And so I think that's important to note.
Yeah.
So to your question, I think that Tulsi has access to something that not even all ISKCON members have,
which is when you have a living guru who you're in proximity with and in close relationship with,
the texture of that blissful experience, which comes and goes, but the feeling
of that satisfaction is much richer and more real.
I remember Like specific instances where the sense of how pleased my guru was with me.
How fulfilling that could be and feel, you know?
And I often think of thought control, so to speak, if we're going to use a term like that, in my mind, at least in my experience, was really like this point at which the truest feelings I felt in a variety of circumstances were the ones that the ideology would dictate you to feel.
It wasn't like I was feeling one way and talking myself into feeling another way.
It was like I genuinely, the truest emotion that I possibly had access to was I was happy when I was supposed to be happy because whatever, something good for the collective.
I was ashamed when I'm supposed to be ashamed and so on.
And so at that point, the like, Whatever the leader, the enforcer, whatever you want, is internalized.
It's just, it's seamless, you know?
And so I would imagine that's probably the case for her.
On the flip side, I have to imagine that her life would be exhausting.
I mean, all the jet setting, all the appearances, all the image management.
And then I think Being a leader when you're actually a puppet, for lack of a better word, you're at the behest of someone else, is a really tricky and often unresolvable situation to be in.
I can just imagine she's traveling around and has a better pulse on the public than Chris Butler might, her guru, but is his take The thing that really stood out to me that I actually wanted to ask you about, Nitai, is that it's a very outward-facing message, right?
It's very much a message of, it doesn't matter, it's not about belonging to a group.
really stood out to me that I actually wanted to ask you about, Nittai, is that it's a very
outward facing message, right?
It's very much a message of it doesn't matter, it's not about belonging to a group, it doesn't
matter what name you have for God.
My dad is Christian.
Exactly.
And what really matters is that you have this true spirituality, which is the true essential meaning of all holy texts.
As I'm going to quote you now from the Bhagavad Gita, it's like there's this ecumenical kind of syncretist, you know, it wouldn't be out of place within theosophy or something like that, within like a lot of new age movements where it's like, oh yes, we just draw on the wisdom of all the ascended masters.
It's so disingenuous, though, because, I mean, you're quoting out of the Bhagavad Gita and saying, you know, this is the essence of real religion, which is a combination of all religions.
Come on.
It's like the most sectarian thing you could do.
As the Bhagavad Gita says, all religions are true.
Yeah, exactly.
This goes way back.
I mean, this isn't, you know, novel to them.
This goes back to, in one form, a British India where you have people wanting to legitimize
themselves to a Christian culture.
And so you see in Prabhupada and well before Prabhupada some real feats.
Like there was one person in the Hare Krishna lineage who tried to analogize the avatars
of Vishnu to evolution, because there's some animal complexity moving towards human kind
of thing.
So really, you see a lot of that, I think.
I forgot my other point.
What had you just finished on?
Well, just talking about this outward facing message being really inclusive and ecumenical.
I think that also it's not very different to me.
It's less subtle, but, you know, perennialism As I basically view it, is like a Dueta Vedanta as supposedly the essence of all religion.
And there's a very disrespectful, hubristic, intellectual move in that, which is to say like, you know, okay, extrinsically, like, The Christians can have their version and the Buddhists can have their version but like intrinsically what they're all actually getting at is this thing and the language we're going to use to articulate that thing comes from one of those traditions.
Yeah, so it's all non-dual awakening as laid out in Advaita Vedanta, but actually all of the traditions are referring to that.
But the thing that I also always find fascinating about that too, is that's almost like the do-your-own-research version of interfaith spirituality, right?
Because you can discover for yourself this ultimate truth and then you'll realize that that's what all the religions have been talking about anyway.
The wisdom traditions.
Yes.
Natai, I just want to come back to the exhaustion for a moment, which I find very poignant, because to think about the cultivation of this person's image as being wrapped in a kind of glow of wellness with the surfing, and there's a lot I've seen.
I can't be specific about it, but I've seen a lot of, you know, I was out for a jog this morning, or this is me doing this particular exercise.
She would get on a lot of streams and, like, use my workout.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know if she does food stuff, but I imagine that there's a fair amount of food purity involved with science of identity.
And I guess it's very interesting to think of the person who is cultivating an image of wellness whilst being exhausted working for others.
But it wouldn't work otherwise.
If you did look haggard as the mouthpiece of your particular sect, it wouldn't fly, would it?
Yeah, and I think what I wonder about is, I really believe that people who get to a certain level of Guru-ness, like this like pathological need for control at a scale that, you know, extends even beyond like an abusive family.
I feel like they somehow have just this fountain of energy for that activity.
Like, you know, Trump is an old man who As the former right-hand man to a guru, I saw how much work it takes to meddle in even a small number of people's lives all the time, and always be angling for something.
Really!
So I have to wonder, does she have that?
Has that been cultivated in her?
Or is it like...
I was, which was like falling asleep at the wheel because I'm doing the bidding of the mission and I'm truly, truly exhausted.
How did we get into this?
The chanting of the names of God, right?
They say, oh, you're just programming yourself.
That may be that I am programming myself.
See?
But I'm the one doing it.
I want to do what I know will have a good effect on my consciousness.
I don't want to just hand my consciousness over to you and say, here, you do what you want with it.
I'm saying, hey, I want my consciousness back, I want my mind back, and I'm going to try to make it so that my mind, my consciousness, is of a certain, is a certain way.
And what way is that?
Well, I've received information from great spiritual masters and scripture.
I've received information from God that I can influence my consciousness by engaging in particular activities.
I can hear and chant God's names.
I can study His Word.
I can associate with people who are trying to develop their love for Him.
See?
And I will gradually influence my own consciousness.
See?
It's my freedom to influence my own consciousness as I want to.
They're saying, no, you don't have that.
What you're doing is you're becoming a robot.
No.
It's just that I am gradually leaving your influence and entering into the influence of the Supreme Lord.
I will be influenced by someone.
The question is whether or not I will be the servant.
of the materialistic people, whether I'll be the servant of my senses, whether or not I'll be under the influence of material nature, in other words, or whether or not I'll be under the influence of God.
God's influence.
I want to be under God's influence.
I trust God and I don't trust the materialists.
If I'm going to put myself, put my consciousness, put my heart in someone's hands, it's going to be God, not some materialistic person whose only interest is exploiting me.
So there's a little bit of Chris Butler on YouTube talking about how all he's doing with these followers is helping them get free of their programming to get away from those who would exploit them.
What a guy.
All right, as we've established, Gabbard grows up in a parallel world to your world, Natai.
But as the founder of Science of Identity, Butler, Chris Butler, the leader that Tulsi Gabbard has had this relationship with for her entire life, is described by many ex-devotees as You know, a megalomaniac, control freak, who's, you know, the head of a very secretive organization.
He's a germophobe, he's obsessed with sex and sexual deviancy, and he positions himself beside God, really, in terms of the respect he demands and all of the titles and, you know, the multiple Sanskrit names.
You know, followers need permission for really everything.
What to eat, when to fast, whether they can hold jobs or have relationships outside of the group.
Children born in the group were isolated in ashram schools, which of course failed to provide adequate literacy skills.
And they report an immersive context of complete obedience and surrender, but also of being terrorized by Butler's constant catastrophizing about homosexuality and perversion.
Yeah, and famously there's a butler school in the Philippines where his followers would be pressured to send their kids, and Gabbard actually went there for two years in high school after being homeschooled.
And funding for the group in general is coming from various businesses that the devotees run, so there are vegetarian food shops and farms.
And then also, there's got to be income from the yoga accessories company founded by his wife, Ylena.
And so, Julian, do you remember the Ylena company as kind of like a fixture in the, you know, brochures and the catalogs of yoga supply companies?
She was just very well represented.
I feel like her image was everywhere for a while, right?
When those catalogs were the way to sell those kind of products.
Very colorful, wearing like this headdress and always smiling and there's just the beautiful scenes of nature behind her.
She's ubiquitous.
Yeah, she was on my TV as a kid growing up on just basic TV, on public broadcasting.
There was a show, I think like five days a week maybe, where she's doing yoga on a giant rock in the ocean and like the waves were crashing against it.
And I didn't know until years later that that was the case.
Yeah.
I also want to mention that Tulsi's father, I believe, at least for some time, ran the school in the Philippines as well.
If we are looking at Gabbard as being the child of a high-demand group who's risen to political power, let's imagine the most generous and non-polarizing intention we could have for that discussion.
What do you think, Natai?
Yeah, I tend to come at this kind of through the lens that I come at a lot of my different work now around manipulation, influence in different settings, which, you know, one of the core frameworks that I lean on is really the betrayal trauma and betrayal blindness frameworks that then, you know, also evolve into institutional betrayal, etc.
But, you know, really at the core of that, what's being said is that when Harm, abuse, hurt is coming from the same source as love, safety, spiritual guidance, whatever.
Being able to understand that harm accurately becomes very difficult, if not impossible.
And if we become aware of it, there in this theory, you know, you either have to confront it or get away from it.
You can't just live in ongoing awareness of betrayal indefinitely.
And so that's where Freud proposes like betrayal blindness, which is like the mechanism That makes the intolerable tolerable when there's no perceived escape.
And so she has this like very beautiful poetic phrase, you know, that betrayal blindness occurs when the stakes of knowing are too high.
And so my view would be that Tulsi was born into this kind of deal where the stakes of independence are life and death socially.
And when you're a child, actually often physically, you know, there's no option there.
And so I think I certainly can have sympathy for that.
Yeah, I'm glad that you're referencing.
Freyd will put those resources into the show notes.
Well, I want to say too, Natai, because you mentioned attachment theory earlier, there's significant kind of resonance here.
Yeah, and of course, Alex Stein's book delves into this great terror, love, and brainwashing.
that people developed a disorganized attachment where there is that association
between the person you're relying on for survival also being the person you're afraid of.
Yeah, and of course, Alex Stein's book delves into this great terror, love, and brainwashing.
I find that really goes well with the betrayal trauma theory.
Okay, so let's look at some overlaps and contrasts between ISKCON and Science of Identity.
We've gotten into it a little bit so far, but let's go a little bit farther in the tie.
What would you say the main overlaps and contrasts would be?
I think a lot about scale, because as a group grows, its relevance to the society beyond it also grows.
And so the potential eyes on it, accountability on it, may increase.
And so, you know, the Catholic Church ultimately at least feels or should be, you know, more accountable to the public than some obscure Little group who's who's relatively unknown.
And so I think in that secrecy and smallness a lot of Unhealthy things can flourish even more than in large-scale Organizations and I mean we we don't need to get into it.
But you know science of identity has historical connections to huge drug smuggling right, you know international heroin rings.
This is mentioned in QAnon anonymous and episode. One thing they don't mention was when two
followers killed themselves building a bomb for a slaughterhouse because this extreme extremism
vegetarianism. This was in New Zealand.
And in the process of that, they killed themselves.
I saw the newspaper clipping.
I was a bit in disbelief myself.
So I think that the sort of secondary, tertiary effects of size and secrecy are one of the differences.
And also related to size is the whole group can take on the leader's idiosyncrasies, which in this case include Covering stuff in tinfoil and checking for toxins in the air.
And so, you know, it's a much smaller dissemination pool to get everyone to be weird in those ways.
And this was certainly the case in my experience.
The guru in a small group can really meddle in every person's life in a pretty personal way.
They can be in their marriage details.
They can, you know, tell them where to send their kids to school and that just becomes harder at scale.
There's a real sort of echo of Dunbar's number here, right?
Where we have, you know, at around 150 or 300 or whatever it is, the leader has the capacity to, as you say, know everybody interpersonally.
There's nothing abstract about the connections.
And I like what you say about, you know, it's easier for the leader to actually disseminate their oddnesses and have them be mimicked by the entire group, whereas in a larger group, those effects would be more, you know, dissipated.
Yeah.
It's really interesting.
And I also would say, I mean, I should have mentioned this at the top, the huge distinction is ISKCON is no longer led by one person.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, so the person that holds the most faith and authority is no longer alive and couldn't be local to you, even if they were.
And so that requires, like, people to submit to people whom they have less faith in.
And so you could probably speak to how the Catholic Church tries to manage this.
To what extent is your local priest considered a one-to-one representative of the Pope?
I don't know.
Very small, actually.
Okay, yeah, I thought so.
Yeah, very, very low.
Very low.
Like, I mean, the parish priests that I grew up with were really kind of administrators in a larger structure.
There was no sense that they had individual personalities or their own ministries or anything.
They read out of the same missal.
They were bureaucrats, really.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, that contrast that you're talking about, Natalya, I think is really fascinating, right?
Because you had Prabhupāda, Sort of originally as the figurehead with millions of devotees around the world, I would imagine.
Oh, that's very effective propaganda on their part!
Just for the listeners, I want everybody to know that Natai really cracked up there.
As soon as he heard a million, he's like, oh, you bought it.
I can't recall exactly.
I feel like he had somewhere around 10,000 formally initiated followers.
You know, probably half of those were gone in years and, you know, nowhere to be heard of ever again.
They'll claim like 90,000 globally I think now, but then there's one number which is like how many different people crossed the threshold of the temple this year, which is much larger.
Oh, it's huge!
Yeah, it's huge because there's kirtan, there's usually a vegetarian restaurant with like really sweet desserts.
And all of the Western Hare Krishna world primarily is composed of, you know, Indian Americans, British Indians, etc., like the diasporic.
And so that's also mellowed out some of the dynamics, I think, in certain ways, but it creates much larger numbers than there are people who are initiated, have received a name, have taken formal vows, things like that.
Billions and billions.
But you have this figurehead over a larger group.
And then this is contrasted then with these breakaway groups that we were saying.
You have a smaller group, they can all sort of be more deeply under the sway of the personal idiosyncrasies of a particular leader.
And then there's also the interesting historical stuff around after Prabhupada dies, you have these multiple appointed leaders, right?
And you were just describing some of the stuff that Science of Identity has been involved in, in terms of criminality.
But it's my impression that that's pretty well distributed amongst all of these different leaders that came into being, whether mainstream or breakaway, right?
They carved up the planet into 11 sections, and if you joined the Hare Krishnas in this section, this was your guru.
And that was their initial attempt.
And of those 11, yeah, I mean, there was stockpiling weapons, theft, breaking into stores, stealing horses in Northern California.
There was one of the branches, you know, they all were taking a ton of acid, which is like not not the tenant.
And the guru began sleeping with or a relationship with one of the followers wives and the follower killed one of those gurus, one of those 11 gurus.
And then that's not even to speak of, you know, the financial scam.
There were people over in Asia faking heart attacks in high-end jewelry stores and robbing them.
And like, truly, truly, there's like, you know, some of the temples are built on money from these kind of efforts.
Wait, wait, wait, let's back up there.
So Dave Otey's would go into diamond shops in India, fake heart attacks, and in the hubbub, they would grab the jewels?
Look, I don't know the hustle in detail, but it was at least a two-man job.
And it's like, it wasn't in India.
I, from what I remember, like Japan maybe.
Okay.
And so what I've imagined is, you know, you pull out the tray of nice stuff and it's being looked at and one, you know, there's an evolution of selling books to people who don't want them.
It's like, As you walk in, and then you fall over on the tray.
It goes everywhere on the floor.
And you've got one of your kids there to pick up the jewelry?
Unbelievable.
Yeah, I don't know the exact, but you know, my former guru was the person who invented what they call the change-up.
And was flown around the world to train other book distributors on how to do it.
And if I understand it correctly, because I didn't do any of this stuff, it was basically a way to use interpersonal domination to get people to end up giving you more money than they had wanted to.
By like not having the exact change and then sort of like pressuring them into like, just, Oh, just keep the 20 or what?
I can't remember the exact sequence, but you know, they wear wigs, they wear suits.
I'm getting, I'm getting like a, like a Hare Krishna Oceans 11 kind of vibe here where there's an elaborate set of, of grifts that all have, you know, code names.
This is the change up.
This is the, the, the heart attack, right?
Except that it's all for 20 bucks at a time, Julian.
Not the diamonds, that's the natural evolution here.
There has to be a more comedic, less successful heist movie to compare them to.
It's more like Johnny English or something like that.
Okay, so that's enough of the hilarity because I want to go back to this eyewitness account, this testimony from a woman named Lalita who's got this amazing article up on a medium that Julian can read from and it really gets into what is the sort of day-to-day psychological reality of living within this group.
I also remember Chris Butler held this larger-than-life presence in my childhood.
Everything I did, I had to think about how it benefited him.
He was my parents' spiritual master, and they looked to him for guidance on everything from what to eat to how to raise their children, and they did it all without question.
When I talk to people about the lack of questioning, they find that aspect odd.
It is odd, but to put it into perspective, I was raised to believe Chris Butler was God's voice on earth, and if you questioned him or offended him in any way, you were effectively offending God.
And because we believed in reincarnation, that meant you would be reborn as the lowest life form imaginable and then have to spend eons working your way back into God's good graces.
So questioning the leader was spiritual suicide, which was seen as worse than death.
So no one questioned.
Chris Butler also would ridicule the intelligence of anyone he didn't like, belittling anyone he felt was questioning his authority even slightly.
He demanded the utmost dedication and loyalty from his followers, and if he didn't get it, the punishments were swift and severe.
I remember hearing stories of people who were told they weren't allowed to eat because they didn't make food to his liking, who were not allowed to sleep, Because there was a light making a buzzing noise in the house, and the follower didn't have the foresight to fix that issue ahead of time.
Literally everything we did had to go through Chris.
If you wanted to work outside of the group, you had to ask his permission.
No one could get married without his consent.
From the late 80s, all of us kids were removed from public schools because he didn't want them influencing our minds away from our service to him.
So from that point, we were homeschooled until there were schools established in the Philippines.
After that, all the children were sent to the boarding schools there for intensive schooling.
From the small pieces of information that made it out of the schools to me, a lot of the kids were traumatized by the environment, as it was almost prison-like.
Classes were on hygiene and cooking and all the ways that they would need to serve Chris Butler best.
This is only speculation, but I'm certain that this was because places like the US and Australia had standards of education that the homeschools have to meet, and they just weren't.
They could avoid scrutiny by having the kids in boarding schools in the Philippines.
I can't even imagine how dreadful it was for my friends who got sent there.
I was lucky to avoid it.
I didn't avoid the lack of schooling, though, and by the time I officially left the Science of Identity Foundation in 1997, just before I turned 20, I had only received up to a fifth-grade education.
Oh, it's tragic.
My God.
From a young child, I remember one of the main features of my life was the lectures that were sent to us via tape for us to listen to.
Basically, these were one-hour-long sessions of Chris talking about his beliefs.
How evil and out of control gay people were.
How women were inferior and subhuman and should be controlled by their husbands.
How messed up and evil the outside world was.
And how his relationship to God was so special, only he could lead you back to Godhead or Heaven.
That he had so much control over his existence on Earth, he could choose the moment of his death.
We worshipped him.
Loved him even.
Another part of his teachings was that all life is an illusion and because of that all relationships were an illusion.
We were encouraged to not invest in any relationships other than with him.
So we were in effect isolated from our parents who did their best to not love us as per his recommendation and instead looked at him like a surrogate father messiah figure.
He was this imposing force in our life that we weren't supposed to offend, which is frankly terrifying when you're a small child.
I remember having many nightmares and a condition called sleep paralysis, which can be brought on in times of great stress.
My sister developed stress-induced epilepsy during the time when we were supposed to be taken out of school.
For my parents' part, they did try to keep us in school for as long as they could, but when Chris heard parents were resisting him, his directive was clear.
Get them out, or else.
Every time my parents would try to take us to school, my sister would become hysterical, and then she started having seizures.
That was the power he had over us.
I really wanted to paint this picture of my childhood because Tulsi Gabbard grew up in the same group that I did.
She was subjected to the same environment I was.
She's still surrounded by this group and calls Chris Butler her guru.
This is why the increased interest and her rise to power concerns me so greatly.
I want to be very clear.
I have no issue with Tulsi.
As far as I'm concerned, she's as much a victim as I am.
More so because she was groomed from an early age specifically for the path she's now on.
What I'm concerned about is the control I know Chris Butler has over her.
The influence he has over her ability to make decisions, decisions that could become law and impact a whole lot of people.
I know what an abusive, misogynistic, homophobic, germophobic, narcissistic nightmare Chris Butler is, and I know what kind of relationship he has with Tulsi.
If I could put it in a way that maybe more people could understand, look at the relationship between Ivanka Trump and her father.
It's very clear to me that Ivanka walks a very fine line between trying to do and be her own person and trying not to piss off her father by doing so.
Donald, by many accounts, is a person who demands utmost loyalty, who will attack anyone who doesn't give it, and remove them swiftly from his life.
So you can imagine Ivanka, while being her own person, would immediately shut down her own feelings and opinions if she knew her father would see her as disloyal.
She would get cut off if she lost favor.
There's a lot she has to lose if she opposes her father.
Tulsi Gabbard is in the same position, only the stakes are higher.
Not only would she lose the support for the position she holds, but she would lose her family, all of her friends, and this messiah father figure if she opposed Chris Butler.
She would be outcast from the only existence she has ever known.
That's a hugely powerful reason to continue to please Chris Butler without question.
Incredible.
Natai, what goes through your mind when you hear Lolita roll it out like this?
A lot of sympathy, first and foremost.
She's someone I know personally via the internet over some years, and I can think about the ways this has impacted her, but also for me, the life that she leads despite it.
She's a bit older than me and left at a young age, and so she's been a source of inspiration to me at times.
I think that I agree about Tulsi being a victim, but I think as Lalitza touched on, At a certain point, you know, like the backstory of a villain ceases to have much relevance in terms of like, at least like,
Explaining what they've done, what they do.
And this is a unique instance where, yeah, she truly is so much more powerful, Tulsi, than her guru ever has or will be in tangible, real senses.
And so that must be a complicated dynamic.
And then I think the other thing that Lita doesn't mention, maybe because she didn't spend some of her adult life as a believer like I did, it's not just all these costs in the present life that are potentially to be paid.
You're talking about This is the necessary portal to eternal transcendence and God.
And on top of that, losing that connection, the rhetoric around offensiveness and specifically offensiveness to the guru or offensiveness to other members is the strongest, most dramatic kind of prohibitions that exist.
There's rhetoric about offending Another.
Uh, member being like letting an elephant into a like young garden, like an angry elephant into a young garden, you know, devastation.
And so that serves a really powerful function against thinking, you know, like a thought, like the most thought stopping cliche that could exist, which is like, that's offensive and could kill your spiritual prospects, essentially.
Julian, how did, what came up for you as you go through that story?
I really appreciate the comparison she drew at the end.
I feel like very often this is kind of like an unintended side effect of living in a relatively free kind of democratic society where for the most part there's not overt force applied in terms of the religion that you have to believe in and belong to.
One of the unintended side effects is that I think there's a taking for granted that is present for Most people within this kind of society and outside of, you know, controlling religious groups, that like, yeah, you can get into therapy and offend your parents by telling them the truth about your emotions.
You can.
Leave a religion you used to belong to and there's life on the other side of that, you know, and there's a sense of being able to sort of move with some fluidity in and out of these different structures and to sort of forge your own path.
But I think it's very easy then to underestimate the power of belonging to a group in which You really believe that the leader is the voice of God, is the only doorway into God, and your eternal salvation or damnation depends upon being loyal and obedient and not offending.
It's hard to grasp, you know, but it's so much more powerful than I think many of us can imagine.
That was actually the other thought I had when you were reading that is like, I really wanted to underscore, like, these are the stakes in a lot of different environments, you know, like, this is what children are experiencing.
As someone who spent most of my last few years working in child abuse prevention, more specifically, like, This is going on in a lot of places all around us and sometimes in connection to groups that we are aware of.
A lot of people have a positive bias when they hear Hare Krishna, a lot of liberal people, you know.
And so it can be hard sometimes to convince someone that you know, for every well-balanced, you know, Hare Krishna
who might, like, be your co-worker at a normal job, there might be one or five who are greatly
disadvantaged in their life because of how they were raised in it, you know?
Natai, I want to turn a little bit to social policy, which is something that is becoming very,
you know, prominent in Tulsi Gabbard's profile.
What would you say discussions of sex and sexuality feel like in ISKCON and ISKCON-related spaces?
Yeah, I want to acknowledge as a blanket that there's a lot of variance, unlike some groups that manage a lot of ideological conformity, I think, like maybe Jehovah's Witnesses.
I think there's even more variation in the Hare Krishnas.
But with that said, on balance, disdain is the word that comes to mind.
Like in Buddhism, there's rhetoric about the body being a bag of blood, pus, stool, urine, kind of, and like, you know, sexual desire being akin to Lusting after those things, you know, it's just this very like sort of gross visceral attempts to associate sexuality with viscerally nasty things.
Right.
I think I mentioned earlier just that any time, I believe deeply, any time that celibacy is a trait of spiritual authority in the culture, any time that that's the case, Non-celibacy is going to become a second-class status because you're less pure, less devout, and so that has those effects that I mentioned before about householders being second-class citizens, children being sort of the product of your lesser devotion, and all the negative effects that that has.
And then... Right.
Historically, the dominant standard has been sex for procreation only.
Rarely, I think, has that been followed.
Some gurus may have tweaked that.
Mine did.
I don't know about ISKCON to, like, sex within a committed relationship.
But often that was the case.
Sometimes they would say, you know, sex within marriage only.
But obviously, sex only for procreation implies heterosexual sex only.
But then also Prabhupāda is intensely misogynistic and homophobic, is that right?
Yeah, yes.
And I'll acknowledge that like many people who spoke and write a lot and are recorded extensively, there's contradictory statements in the record and there's examples people will point to of like, but really he's a feminist.
On balance, I don't think that holds.
There used to be a website still in the Wayback Machine, PrabhupādaSaid.com, that a friend of mine had compiled a lot of the most objectionable statements and organized them by tags.
And it's all, you know, you see things like butlers talking about women as like slaves to their husbands.
But also, you know, he was from India, and he believed that women in America kept big dogs so they could sleep with them.
You know, this is like on record as him saying that because he probably like heard it on the street somewhere once upon a time.
Wow, right.
And then, you know, women are always sort of responsible for and at fault for the sexual downfall and improprieties of the men and the celibate men.
It's a very anxious and tense sexual environment, and I imagine that all of this pressure very likely contributed to the widespread sexual abuse scandal within ISCON.
Can you give us a sense of how big it was, and was there any resolution to it?
Resolution, kind of.
I'll acknowledge child abuse goes on everywhere.
Yes.
But the rates and the response greatly vary.
And so the classic instance, which was like children of ISKCON versus ISKCON class action lawsuit for people older than myself who were raised in boarding schools.
There was a $10 million settlement.
Ultimately, you know, people received a very small amount of funds.
And in that case, ISKCON pioneered a legal maneuver of declaring bankruptcy to sort of undermine the discovery and civil process.
Right.
The Catholic Church has followed suit using that technique in lawsuits there as well.
So there was some version of slight resolution, but right now the ISKCON world is ablaze with child sexual abuse issues and renewed attention due to certain activistic members really keeping it online in the forefront.
But a huge scandal just happened where the headmaster of the boarding school In one of the two pilgrimage places of the whole religion was abusing children and having sexual relationships with an adult woman or something for decades, and multiple reports internally had been done, etc.
And so They're kind of reeling.
I've been able, I actually spoke to the global leadership of ISKCON a few months ago and gave a training on child abuse prevention and like culture change in an organization that is not in a good position to protect children.
So ongoing, I guess, is the summary of their child abuse issues.
Would you say that against this general, you know, social backdrop of ISKCON and its abuse crises, is the rise of Tulsi Gabbard as a strong, you know, female figurehead, is that a challenge to the gender roles of the culture, or is it a validation in some way?
Does it mark some kind of turning point?
Is it a positive thing?
I think that there's some portion of conservative members who would see it as inappropriate for there to be a stateswoman, but that's pretty far on the kind of conservative end of the spectrum.
I think more so the attitude is opportunism, like whoever we can get into power, cool.
As long as they're kind of one of us, then that's okay.
Of course, she's taken a turn and gone all in on anti-trans policy, so is that surprising to you?
Not at all.
I mean, especially if we didn't delve into the really well-documented history of her and her father's campaign, you know, following in Prabhupada and Chris Butler's footsteps, comparing homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, all of those things.
Are in the mix for all of them.
And so the fact that she would end up here is not surprising, but also she seems to be doing the, you know, mistreated Democrat to conservative wealthy influencer ditty.
And if you're doing that today, I don't know how you can leave out this issue because it's like, you know, it's there like rallying cry right now.
Wrapping up, Natai and Julian, I get the sense in our conversation about Tulsi Gabbard.
I get this image of, like, bubbles within bubbles.
That, you know, ISKCON is this mother bubble, and then it has these surface bubbles that pop off, and some of them are fragile, and some of them are more resilient, but they're still within the sphere of this larger influence.
And we know that Gabbard has never left.
Science of Identity.
And we know that even when she travels to Washington or anywhere else, she's surrounded by Science of Identity members.
Like her husband was also born in the group.
He's the video film person who helps make her look really good.
And so I have this sense that her political ambitions are supported by this network of devotees, but also kind of hemmed in by that network.
Not because people on the outside are going to, you know, tune in to who Chris Butler is because, you know, that's been exposed already.
That's not suddenly going to change anybody's perception, I don't think.
But I do think that this series of bubbles might make her a little bit incoherent as a public figure.
Like, it scrambles the constituencies and what people would want from her.
And I doubt that she is often in a world in which she can feel herself kind of unmediated by Chris Butler.
And that, of course, is gonna limit anyone's ability to connect and build coalitions.
So, what do you guys think about that kind of summation?
I think that's absolutely accurate and kind of gets at some of what I was touching on earlier,
which is like, how can you be an authentic leader when you're ultimately under the sway?
It's like, well, before I respond to you, let me like make sure what I'm gonna say is approved.
And it really undermines the ability to bond and like you said, like build coalitions.
And for me, I don't, you know, in one hand there's no point in speculating
like what could have been, what would have been.
But I don't assume that she would have aspirations like this, were it not for the existence of Chris Butler, you know?
And so how much we can tease apart Those things at this point I think is like very limited.
I think what might be interesting to see is like when he's gone what what happens to and what she does specifically.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, when you were just talking there Natai, it made me think of her sort of being on assignment, right?
She's on assignment from, she's on a mission from God, she's on assignment from Chris Butler.
It makes me actually quite sad to think of this little girl who was really groomed for this destiny, embedded in this cultish community, following in her father's footsteps politically.
Loyal to her religion, then she goes into the military, which is equally demanding, right?
Of a submersion of self in the waters of duty and chain of command.
It's hard for me to imagine how someone with this background, who's also of so much value to those behind her, whatever they perceive that value to be in terms of her position in the world, how she could find a way into her own political or even personal identity as distinct from all that.
I mean, I guess I want to ask Natai, what does the faithful ISKCON or Science of Identity devotee ultimately want?
And how do you think Gabbard will continue to pursue her goals?
Is she just going to keep going like Arjuna or some other mythological hero?
Ultimately, they want an oddly specific Eternal, transcendental life in a North Indian pastoral setting.
Having transcended the cycle of birth and death.
So, ultimately, that's the aim.
That's fairly abstract and esoteric, and most people aren't working on that directly.
So, in practice, it often becomes distilled down to pleasing the guru, advancing the mission.
This is the highest form of devotion in this age, they believe.
evangelizing, that is, and so therefore evangelizing as your own spiritual progress is basically a given.
And so in practice, it's more like they want to serve without any ego or be totally selfless or, you know, stop lusting
after chocolate.
A lot of different things. Or like chant with pure focus, you know.
And as far as Tulsi goes, I assume she'll just keep plugging along.
I mean, the death of the Guru brings a really unique circumstance where people are kind of freed up to decide what the Guru actually wants from you now, like, and start being a little more interpretive, which means autonomy.
And so I don't know what directions it could take, but I agree with Julian that, like, A wholesale re-evaluation along the terms that I've done would be even more arduous, wrenching for someone like her.
And it was rough for me, don't get me wrong.
I feel very melancholic actually thinking about this succession issue because, you know, when you're in the position of really shining on behalf of others.
I have this image of like an altar light at the end of a long and twisting wire.
And you know how if one of the lights before the one at the end goes out, that it will kind of impact the next one down the line?
I just can imagine how strange it will be when those anchors just evaporate.
And yeah, it will give her a chance that I'm sure will be very harrowing to maybe provide a clearer picture of who she might be on her own.
Natai, thank you so much for your time.
Can you give us just a little bit of what you're doing now and where people can find you?
Yeah, I'm currently taking a few months to sort of plot out my next move.
Studying interpersonal influence pulls you in every direction that exists, because it's everywhere.
And so I'm sort of taking a little time to decide if I'm starting some project on my own.
But a lot of what I want to move more into is My cult was a 501c3 nonprofit.
I've worked in nonprofits, and I really am interested in basically helping causes that I value avoid or address these issues, which are very human pitfalls, ultimately.
It's not about evil.
It's not about, you know, a uniquely awful situation. It's like these things develop
interpersonally without much effort to counteract and structure systems to avoid them. So that's
really what I'd like to move more toward.
But people can find me on Facebook or LinkedIn if you want to connect and I certainly welcome that.
One other thing I want to say when you're... When you played the Tulsi Gabbard audio,
aside from feeling very long, I was reminded that often listening to your podcast, which I follow,
or Decoding the Gurus, I have this experience where I'm like, I hope nobody can hear what
I'm listening to right now because they don't understand that this is an excerpt
of some really awful ideas.
You know, I lived in a row house until recently and, you know, Jordan Peterson clip would come on for two minutes and I'm like, oh, I really hope my neighbors don't think this is my thing.
So I actually have that exact experience.
Every time I walk the dog, every time I'm exercising out of the backyard here and I have my phone and I'm listening to all of this source material for the podcast, I'm like, oh, my God, my neighbors must think I'm this total right wing nutcase.
Exactly, exactly.
Natai, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you, everyone, once again, for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
