David Allen 

Prabhupada wrote to his friends in India, describing his relationship with his new roommate in the Bowery loft, David Allen.

He was attending the class at 72^nd Street along with others, and when I experienced this theft case in my room, he invited me to his residence.  So I am with him and training him.  He has good prospect because he has already given up all bad habits.  In this country, illicit connection with women, smoking, drinking and eating of meats are common affairs.  But by my request he has given up 90% of his old habits, and he is chanting Maha-mantra regularly.  So I am giving him the chance and I think he is improving.  Tomorrow I have arranged for some prasadam distribution, and he has gone to purchase some things from the market.

When David first came to the Bowery, he appeared like a clean-cut college student.  He was twenty-one, six feet tall, blue-eyed, handsome and intelligent looking.  Most of his new friends in New York were older and considered him a kid.  David’s family lived in East Lansing, Michigan, and his mother was paying $100.00 monthly to sublease the loft.  Although he did not have much experience, he had read that a new realm of mind expansion was available through psychedelic drugs, and he was heading fast into the hazardous world of LSD.  His meeting with the Swami came at a time of radical change and profoundly affected his life.  

David:  It was a really good relationship I had with the Swami, but I was overwhelmed by the tremendous energy of being that close to him.  It spurred my consciousness very fast.  Even my dreams at night would be so vivid of Krishna consciousness.  I was often sleeping when the Swami was up, because he was up late in the night working on his translations.  That is possibly where a lot of the consciousness in dreams just flowed in, because a lot of that deep relationship.  It also had to do with studying Sanskrit.  There was a lot of immediate impact with the language.  The language seemed to have a strong mystical quality, the way he translated it word-for-word.