He received a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to study American history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he remained for three years.

Later Kīrtanānanda acknowledged that, before becoming a Hare Krishna, he had a homosexual relationship with Wheeler for many years, which was documented in the film Holy Cow, Swami, a 1996 documentary by Jacob Young.

He enrolled at Columbia University in 1961, where he received a Waddell fellowship to study religious history with Whitney Cross, but he quit academic life after several years when he and Wheeler traveled to India in October 1965 in search of a guru.

After attending Bhagavad-gita classes at the modest storefront temple at 26 Second Avenue in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Ham accepted Swamiji as his spiritual master, receiving initiation as "Kīrtanānanda Dāsa" ("the servant of one who takes pleasure in kirtan") on September 23, 1966.

[5] Kīrtanānanda was among the first of Swāmiji's western disciples to shave his head (apart from the sikha), don robes (traditional Bengali Vaishnava clothing consists of dhoti and kurta), and move into the temple.

In March 1967, on the order of Swāmiji, Kīrtanānanda and Janus Dambergs (Janardana Dāsa), a French-speaking university student, established the Montreal Hare Krishna temple.

In the San Francisco Oracle (an underground newspaper), Kīrtanānanda saw a letter from Richard Rose, Jr., who wanted to form an ashram on his land in Marshall County, West Virginia.

Over time the community expanded, devotees from other ISKCON centers moved in, and cows and land were acquired until New Vrindaban properties consisted of nearly 2,500 acres.

In time, the plans for the house developed into an ornate memorial shrine of marble, gold and carved teak wood, dedicated posthumously during Labor Day weekend, on Sunday, September 2, 1979.

A "Land of Krishna" theme park and a granite "Temple of Understanding" in classical South Indian style were designed to make New Vrindaban a "Spiritual Disneyland".

The ground-breaking ceremony of the proposed temple on May 31, 1985, was attended by dozens of dignitaries, including a United States congressman from West Virginia.

"[13] On October 27, 1985, during a New Vrindaban bricklaying marathon, a crazed and distraught devotee bludgeoned Kīrtanānanda on the head with a heavy steel tamping tool.

On March 16, 1987, during their annual meeting at Mayapur, India, the ISKCON Governing Body Commission expelled Kīrtanānanda from the society for various deviations.

[18] On August 16, 1993, he was released from house arrest in a rented apartment in the Wheeling neighborhood of Warwood, where he had lived for nearly two years, and returned triumphantly to New Vrindaban.

[18] The challengers eventually ousted Kīrtanānanda and his supporters completely, and ended the "interfaith era" in July 1994 by returning the temple worship services to the standard Indian style advocated by Swami Prabhupada and practiced throughout ISKCON.

At the time of his death Kīrtanānanda still had a significant number of loyal disciples in India and Pakistan, who worshiped him as "guru" and published his last books.

[25] Kīrtanānanda Swami's former disciple, Henry Doktorski, is currently working on a ten-volume biography of his former spiritual master and a history of the New Vrindaban Community.