By Audrey Lin
Nori Muster was recruited by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) when she was a sociology senior at UC Santa Barbara in 1978. The Krishna movement had opened a preaching center in Isla Vista and Muster was quickly drawn in by the devotees’ generosity and non-materialistic philosophy.
The 2024 feature-length hybrid docudrama Monkey on a Stick, about the Krishna movement, was screened by UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center.
She wore a sari to her graduation and she drove to the Krishna Society headquarters in Los Angeles the very next day, where she worked in the organization’s public relations department for the next 10 years.
“I did not want to get a higher degree,” Muster recently told a UCSB audience. “They could see that I was confused and young, and I did not know what I wanted to do. They came in and gave me a purpose, friends, a place to live and a job.” It was not long after the Vietnam war and the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. She remembers thinking, ‘There must be some other way. There must be some better way.’
Muster ultimately resigned from her position as an act of protest in 1988, when the dark side of the Hare Krishna lifestyle became undeniable. She struggled to reconcile her integrity as a media professional with the consistent censorship expected of her, to hide the group’s misdeeds.
Flash forward and Muster became a historical advisor and a key subject in the 2024 feature-length, hybrid docudrama Monkey on a Stick, which investigates the Krishna Consciousness organization and its criminal activity.
Last month, Muster joined filmmaker Jason Lapeyre and moderator David Gartell, a religious studies expert in the UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections, for a screening and post-screening discussion of Monkey on a Stick hosted by UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center. The film is an adaptation of the bestselling book of the same name by John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson.
Nori Muster, left, a UCSB alum and ex-devotee of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), with filmmaker Jason Lapeyre, right.
“I read the book well before I was a professional filmmaker and was shocked by my superficial understanding of what the Krishnas were,” director Lapeyre said. “To read about how they had essentially acted like organized crime for a long period of time was just unbelievable to me, and I thought it would make a great movie.”
Moderator David Gartell, a religious studies specialist in the UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections.
Lapeyre felt a major flaw in the movement was the belief that men were superior to women, so he particularly wished to feature a former female devotee, which led him to Muster.
The film combines archival footage, interview clips and dramatic scenes to create a story that reveals how Krishna Society laundered money through drug smuggling to fund the multimillion organization.
In one scene, we see drug smugglers removing their goods from hollow typewriters in a Laguna Beach safe house.
Several high-ranking gurus were also accused of child sexual abuse and murder. UCSB alum Muster’s job as associate editor of the Krishna organization’s World Review newspaper was to conceal these allegations and distribute only stories that portrayed the Krishna movement’s leadership in a positive light.
“I still have a lot of deprogramming to do with my own brain,” Muster said at UCSB, adding that working on the film has helped her. “[It gives] me a purpose out of this horrible mess that I made from my younger life — that I can help people to either not join a cult or get out of a cult,” she said. “I had that experience and now I am getting things back from it by being able to help other people.”
Audrey Lin is a second-year Writing & Literature major at UC Santa Barbara. They are a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts