Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #38 – What I Learned from the Sad Story of David Seigel

He was about five foot three inches and almost 200 pounds and that was in 10th grade! Tough karma for a young boy growing up in Brooklyn in 1964. America is perhaps more than any other country built on the superficial ideal of “I am successful.” Imagine the challenges placed on David’s psyche to find his self-worth in that setting.

But David tried.

More than anything David wanted to star for the high school basketball team. We thought he was crazy. Canarsie High School played in arguably the toughest basketball league in the country at the time. The conference even became known as the “suicide division” because it was so incredibly competitive and stacked with talent. It had produced the likes of NBA Hall of Famers Connie Hawkins, Lenny Wilkins, and Billy Cunnigham. The players were that good. But a short and heavy-set Jewish kid?

When we passed the outdoor public courts every day after school, we were amused to watch David by himself taking shot after shot. He was determined to make the team. The coach, however, was not amused. He cut David on the first day of tryouts. His dream was crushed!

We didn’t see much of David for a few months. Then one day we spotted him across the street on Seaview Avenue on our way home from school. It was a cold, miserable December day, but David was wearing only the shorts and thin jersey of the Knicks, New York’s NBA team! We quickly crossed the street to meet him. David began to ramble:

“Ate ‘em up! Ate ‘em up![1] Scored twenty points.” He began to describe the previous night’s game and the players he went up against and “ate up” or thoroughly outplayed. He went on and on about his exploits, “Ate ‘em up! Ate ‘em up! Twenty points!” He actually thought he was on the Knicks. David had gone mad!

Years later when I joined ISKCON and began to lecture, I realized that what happened to David was perfectly analogous to how we fell into illusion in this world. I would explain it something like this:

“We are eternal servants of God by constitution. When we desire, however, to be separate and independent controllers, a position we can’t have by our own constitution, it can only be fulfilled in illusion. Therefore, God, who fulfills the desires of the living entities, covers us by maya, or His illusory energy. Then instead of thinking ourselves to be part of God and meant for His service, we become mired in the illusion that we are our bodies meant to independently enjoy and control. There is an important principle illustrated here. When one intensely wants something that exceeds reality, it can only be fulfilled in illusion.”

Lecturing like thus, I inevitably thought back to my teen years and related the sad story of David Seigel.

But are our own stories any better? We are tiny sparks of the Divine. Somehow, we intensely wanted to be God and we have worked intensely on that since time immemorial. We became increasingly immersed in the illusion that we are our temporary body and the designations it embraces. Today we also walk down the streets of New York, or any town in the world, posting our profile on Internet, posing ourselves as the enjoyer, and announcing our exploits to the world. What a joke!

And that is the sad story of David Seigel and sadly our story also!

[1] “Ate ‘em up” is a slang expression used in sports, contracted from “ate them up.” When I grew up it was used to indicate that you dominated or utterly defeated the competitors.