A Man Between Worlds

From his earliest days he felt a stranger in this world — as if he were watching life through invisible glass. Later he would call this his first experience of living “between worlds”.

The family broke apart early. His mother drove his father out, and the flat became a thoroughfare: alcohol, cigarette smoke, strangers. The boy learned to be invisible. His father helped from a distance — with money, protection, the mere fact of being there. Inside grew a child’s vow: “I will never be like this.”

He prayed the way children in trouble pray: “Let it stop. Let Dad come back.” There was no answer. God seemed a stern warden from the church half-light, where incense smelled of funerals.

In 1995 his mother died. The child did not shed a tear — his heart turned to stone. He stopped asking for miracles and made a decision that shaped the next twenty years: “Nobody will help. I must help myself.” So the future businessman, builder and leader was born.

His father took the three sons away. Five years at their grandmother’s became a “golden age” — a home that smelled of pies, not liquor, where it was not frightening to fall asleep. In 2000 she passed away, and for the first time the boy saw his father weep. He would put that day’s lesson into words much later: to love is to be ready for pain.

The street taught simple rules: trust no one, fear no one, ask no one. In front of the mirror he practised a “wolf’s stare”. Ashamed of being poor, he invented another biography — the son of a secret millionaire. The storyteller’s gift that later helped him “sell” himself in business began with lies.

In Moscow, in 2003–2005, for the sake of a friend who was losing money on slot machines, he began taking money from his father. Once he took the whole wallet — with the documents and the employment record book inside. Layoffs were underway at his father’s work, and without the record book he was not hired for a new post. His career collapsed. His father never said a word of reproach — he only looked at him with endless sadness.

School became a “court of the crowd”: the label of a difficult teenager, public humiliation, open rebellion. He skipped his graduation. He silently collected a certificate full of C grades — and went to look for other teachers, those who would teach him to be strong. “But God was still very far away. First I had to find Money.”

With the last of his strength his father paid for his first year at university. Among the “golden youth” he was ashamed of his old jacket, fell in with accomplices, and at twenty had “easy” money — schemes, resales, clubs. His father stopped speaking to him.

He was arrested and charged with robbery — an episode which, by his own account, he did not commit. Yet he says it honestly: outwardly innocent, inwardly he had “deserved this cage a thousand times”.

In the detention centre a Muslim cellmate spoke of God not as a punisher but as the Merciful: “Brother, God loves us. Even here. Especially here.” Then came the first confession of his life, to the prison priest, and a letter to his father: “Dad, forgive me if you can.” His father came.

The sentence was five years. During a terrorist attack in the Moscow metro, his father was due to travel to him on that very line. He fell to his knees and for the first time prayed not “give me” but “save him”. Soon a parcel arrived: his father was alive. Half a year later the case was reviewed and he was acquitted.

Out of prison he had an “allergy to crime”: old ties cut, number changed. He swore to his father: “I will build an empire and lay it at your feet.” A wife, children, his own house and a thriving business followed.

After six stable years his partners betrayed him. Debts, threats from creditors, a house sold — and thoughts of ending it all. In those months his father brought buckwheat, milk and bread, and gave away his pension and savings. “My father became a living embodiment of God on earth.”

Selling his last car, he invested in building SIP-panel houses — and the company took off. On Sundays he went to the liturgy; “Thy will be done” became his survival mantra. At the same time a search for “firm ground” began — a rebellion against familiar pictures of the world that would later lead him to Vedic cosmology: “If there is a House, there is an Owner.” He did not yet know the Owner’s name.

In Moscow he met Nityananda Ram, a videographer who filmed his projects. To him alone he confessed that he was searching for God — and he did not laugh.

Later, in Phuket, where he worked in resort real estate, Nityananda Ram played a recording of Srila Prabhupada’s japa on a condominium rooftop at night. “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna…” — and time stopped. “Remember this moment. It will stay in your heart forever.” So the seed of bhakti fell into his heart. Lectures on Vedic knowledge followed — along with a double life, for now.

Then came America. In Florida he built a transport company, made it a market leader, opened a university for drivers, wrote books, ran a blog. A house with a pool, boats — and an emptiness nothing could fill. The Bhagavad-gita his friend gave him made no sense to him then.

In 2021 a Vaishnava client explained the four regulative principles. He gave up meat, fish and eggs — and opening the Gita half a year later, suddenly saw: the Vedas are not a theory. They are a technology.

At the end of 2022 the same client invited him to a festival: “If you manage to serve the Vaishnavas, you will receive incredible mercy.” A company owner and millionaire washed floors and carried chairs — and for the first time tasted service.

Srila Bhakti Vijnana Goswami Maharaja walked in and recited the mangalacharana — and the space seemed to melt. “He did not say: ‘I know, listen to me.’ He said: ‘God exists. He is beautiful. Let us look at Him together.’” The ice that had bound his heart in 1995 cracked.

He was given japa beads offered to Srila Prabhupada. He bought every book on the stall and handed them out to his drivers. For the hour and a half home he chanted the maha-mantra and wept — “the tears of a prodigal son who, after 30 years of wandering, saw the light in the window of his Father’s House.” That same day he decided to follow Maharaja.

The path was not straight: spiritual pride, pressure on loved ones, old addictions and falls he later honestly confessed to his family. Every weekend he drove to the temple in Alachua to ask Srila Prabhupada’s murti for courage. In September 2023, at a retreat in Gita Nagari, he approached Gurudeva in person for the first time: “I want to be your disciple. But I am so afraid of all this.” He was accepted.

In August 2023 he prayed: “If this business, this money keeps me from coming to You — take it.” Right after he returned from Gita Nagari, the orders stopped, the insurer broke the contract, the licence was blocked. Four million dollars burned away; on 1 October he filed for bankruptcy. His family flew to Russia.

Inside there was no despair, but a strange freedom: “He heard me. He is setting me free. It hurts, because the shackles come off together with the skin.”

In the month of Kartika he flew with pilgrims to Vrindavan. A man who a month earlier had signed cheques for hundreds of thousands of dollars carried drinking water to a hundred and seventy pilgrims under the Indian sun. “I have never been so happy in my life.” There he told Gurudeva he would not return to America.

In Bali he rented a house free of meat and alcohol and held kirtans. Four attempts to start a new business failed one after another. The marriage did not survive; in June 2024 his family left. He read all twelve cantos of the Srimad-Bhagavatam — and admitted he had understood nothing. He went back to the Bhagavad-gita: “I am a first-grader who has climbed into a university library.”

On 14 July 2024, soon after a lecture by Gurudeva on the Gita as the diamond in the ring of the Mahabharata, his heart stopped. He managed to switch on a kirtan by Aindra Prabhu. Then — darkness, clear consciousness outside the body, and the main discovery: “There is no death. My material body stopped breathing, but I did not die!”

Yet all his fears stayed with him — for his children, his marriage, everything lost. He could not surrender; he begged: “Return me to the body! I am not ready.” A snap of fingers above his right ear — and he was back in the body. The experience tore off his mask of a “spiritual person” and gave the book its name: a man between worlds is the literal state of a soul at the final line.

Today Dina Haridas das lives at the foot of Giriraja Govardhan, at Sri Rupa Seva Kunja. Here, in the hours before dawn, “A Man Between Worlds” was written — not a sermon but a confession, which he leaves on the altar as an offering.

He calls himself neither a guru nor a saint, but “an empty, partly rusted wire” through which another’s light passes: “There is not a single word of mine in this book.” Everything of value in it he considers the mercy of his spiritual master, Srila Bhakti Vijnana Goswami Maharaja.

His lectures on the Srimad-Bhagavatam and the Bhagavad-gita are an attempt to translate the science of returning home “into the language of those who right now stand knee-deep in concrete, sit in offices, love, lose and desperately search for meaning”.