Satsvarupa Dasa Goswami - Early Years

Early Years

He was born Stephen Guarino, the elder of two children, to Roman Catholic parents in Staten Island, New York. He was educated initially in a public high school nearby and then enrolled in the Brooklyn College, where he underwent an intellectual revolution putting in question his Catholic values. In the college he read Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and associated with students and professors who were religious skeptics.

As soon as I went to college I underwent an intellectual revolution. Any religious sentiments I had gained from my mother were driven away by my college professors, who were dyed-in-the-wool Marxist intellectuals, Americans from the 1930s. They taught me their intellectual and atheistic views, and knocked aside my religious worship, saying it was sentimental. One of them said theology could never satisfactorily explain why evil was present in the world. I was attracted to their philosophy because my parents were not intellectual and had never aroused my intellectual capacity. But my professors opened up a whole new world for me. I became eager to study philosophy and literature. I came to see for myself that the church was hypocritical: in the foyer of our church the priests regularly raffled bottles of liquor (they called them “baskets of joy”). I became dissatisfied with the Catholic Church because it could not provide answers to my questions.

— Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, With Śrīla Prabhupāda in the Early Days, 1966-1969: A Memoir, Introduction

In January 1962 he joined the Navy, where he served for two years on board of U.S.S. Saratoga, a super-carrier. In his introduction to With Śrīla Prabhupāda in the Early Days, 1966-1969 he writes: "A few months after the death of President Kennedy, I was honorably discharged, and without visiting my parents on Staten Island, I went directly to the Lower East Side. By then, the Lower East Side was, in my mind and in the minds of my friends, the most mystical place in the world." "I certainly didn’t think some guru was suddenly going to appear and save me. I was too cynical. Yet I was regularly reading versions of the Bhagavad-gita and the Upanishads. Ironically, one week before the gift shop at 26 Second Avenue changed into Srila Prabhupada’s temple, I was standing in that very doorway with a Bhagavad-gita in my back pocket, waiting to meet a friend. Somehow we had chosen 26 Second Avenue as a meeting place. At that time, I had no idea what was about to happen."

In July 1966 he met and accepted a spiritual instruction from A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami who registered ISKCON a month later. Prabhupada soon began assigning him typing tasks which Satsvarupa understood "to be yoga". On September 23, 1966 he was ordained and shortly became one of the leading figures of the new Gaudiya Vaishnava movement.

After Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's departure from this world he was one of eleven disciples selected to become an initiating guru in ISKCON. Prof. Larry Shinn in his overview of the contemporary state of the Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's movement confirms this while relating his first meeting with Satsvarupa dasa Goswami:

Thing that caused me to correct my initial prejudices about the Krishnas was that those who joined the movement came through several modes of conversion and from many different backgrounds. Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, who later was appointed as one of Prabhupada's guru successors, was one of the earliest devotees I met. He was in his late twenties when I met him in New York City. He had discovered the Krishnas as a result of a spiritual quest which was satisfied within this Indian tradition.

— L.Shinn, The Maturation of the Hare Krishnas in America, 1994

In a typical initiation ceremony as a guru of International Society for Krishna Consciousness he would begin with purification using achamana (holy water) and concludes with a sermon on the importance of chanting of the holy names in the life of a new initiate.