Censorship

There is an all-out confrontation between the ironic and the literal mind: between every kind of commissar and inquisitor and bureaucrat and those who know that, whatever the role of social and political forces, ideas and books have to be formulated and written by individuals.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS




Great art has an eternal quality. It is as if it has always existed. It´s hard to think of Egypt without the pyramids or the Louvre without the Mona Lisa. It’s hard to conceive of painting without Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Picasso´s Guernica; of Hollywood film without Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Bogart and Bacall. I personally cannot conceive of India without the Taj Mahal or music without the defiant cello of Pablo Casals playing the Bach Cello Suites which had been lost to human memory before he resurrected them.

In hindsight it feels like each of these works has been around forever, that the cultural fabric of our lives would be threadbare without them. But these great works of art didn´t always exist. At one point they were only a figment in the architect’s imagination. And there was a great struggle between imagination and execution to bring these works of art into existence as physical reality. There was a confrontation between the artist and writer and the commissars of culture. Given Michelangelo's stormy relationship with Pope Julius, it is a miracle that his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel were ever finished. And yet we can barely conceive of  God without them.

Each of these ephemeral works involved a great struggle not only against the critics and the commercial mob of their time, but also against their public audience, and even the personal demons of the artists themselves. 

Many works we consider essential today were censored or ridiculed in their time, from the paintings of Da Vinci to the impressionism of Gauguin and the music of the Beatles. I remember when John Lennon's "Imagine" was considered scandalous since he imagines a world with "no religion too." Now his music is played in the church. With time heretics become saints. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the very church who later canonized her as the patron saint of France.

Great books are no exception to this dynamic. Without Shakespeare there could be no modern drama, but many of his plays were flops in his own time or were censored. Shakespeare’s work was considered seditious for a time by Queen Elizabeth herself when Lord Essex ordered Richard the Second to be played in the theatre during an insurrection he had staged. Richard the Second is the story of a weak king, deposed by the popular Henry. But after some study, it was decided that Shakespeare himself was innocent and he resumed his work.  His plays went unpublished during his lifetime, revived only by the players after his death. 
After a failed career as a playwright, his Spanish counterpart, Miguel de Cervantes invented the modern novel, when at the end of his life when he wrote the Quixote in prison. These men invented the very forms that are studied and criticized today. Sometimes they are considered inadequate representatives of the very forms they invented.  Miguel de Cervantes was persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition, since they were often the butt of jokes made by his fictional character Don Quixote de la Mancha. He simply pointed out that he identifies the eccentric knight-errant as insane at the beginning of his book: "Del poco dormir y del mucho leer, se le secó el cerebro, de manera que vino a perder el juicio" From little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up and he lost the use of reason. In short, he was a madman. In his defense before the Inquisition, Cervantes pointed out that If a madman criticizes the church he can’t be taken seriously. In fact, if the Quixote’s criticism of the church is merely the raving of a madman, it may be argued that Cervantes has given evidence that only a madman would criticize the church.  The representatives of the Spanish Inquisition withdrew their complaint and approved the publication of the work without applying censorship.

In my own lifetime I have seen many curious manifestations of these principles at work. In the 1980s some friends of mine found a great teacher in India: Bhakti Rakshak Shridhar.  He was virtually unknown. We sat at his feet and recorded his talks on philosophy, spirituality, divine life, and monastic austerity.  While the 1970s saw a great influx of gurus and cults based on Indian teachings, the boom had pretty much ended. Undaunted, we set up a small press and began to publish. I spent countless hours listening to lectures and parsing them into small sections that could be sewn together into paragraphs, ordered into chapters and organized as a book. 

The yoga group that we had belonged to was enraged. "You must show chastity to the institution," they told us. Our work was criticized as heresy. We had gone against our guru. There was incredible opposition, both from these former friends who felt betrayed that we had strayed from the goals of their yoga organization as from other critics who felt we had gone too far.  We found much of this criticism as "cultish" and sectarian and said so at the time.  The yoga organization went to draconian lengths to punish our work. 
We were attacked by Christians as well. Sometimes the opposition was organized: we were confronted outside the press by religious fanatics armed with baseball bats and weak arguments. Unknown arsonists set fire to the building that housed our press, where we slept at night. Our book was criticized, laughed at, reviled, slandered, and finally, pirated. Where the slander hurt, the piracy killed our project.

As soon as we printed 3,000 copies, “friends” decided the book was good enough to pirate. They printed another 10,000 copies in Singapore, ignoring any mention of our work, effectively stealing the book. The same thing happened in London, where a “friend” bought 10 copies of our book and used those to print his own version.  Our economic model fell apart. 

We were in good company. Even Cervantes found his work pirated in his own lifetime. Crippled economically, and working against the clock, we continued to publish.

Ours was a labor of love. Even as we lost money on the printing and our press went into bankruptcy, our guru in India was happy to see his words given order and form. He gave us his blessings, even going so far as to say that we had done the work of Vyasa and Ganesh.

The book in question was called “The Search for Shri Krishna.” We printed others as well. One in particular that was interesting was called “Shri Guru and His Grace.” It was very controversial at the time and sparked a lot of criticism and calls for censorship. If we had heeded the calls for censorship and "chastity" that book would never have appeared. Now it is often quoted to solve disputes.

35 years after the publication of the Search for Shri Krishna, the book lives on. Ashrams have been formed internationally, and the disciples of the disciples of my teacher preach its message.

I myself am involved in other projects now, for example this blog. 

And yet it is ironic to me that the same forces that were at work trying to stop us from publishing books like Search for Shri Krishna and Shri Guru and His Grace continue to call for censorship. Similar voices demand "chastity" to the institution that was created on the basis of the books we published. But I am not a member of any organization or institution. I have great respect for the message of my teacher and do my best to honor his teachings. But I recognize no such "chastity" to an institution, since institutions depend on organizing and the latest party line is merely a question of politics. This was pointed out in Shri Guru and His Grace, where the position of Guru and teachers is explored at length.

The calls for "chastity" demand censorship and silence from those who would stray from a school's "party line" and voice their own realizations and personal truths. When I hear these loyalists scream for silence, I remember the words of Bhaktivinoda Thakura, words that inspired us to reprint his lecture on the Bhagavat when we were in the middle of trying to bring out the works of Shridhar Maharaja.

Censorship was criticized by no less than Bhaktivinoda Thakura as a superficial solution in the search for truth. The true critic, he asserts, will give order to different ideas without the need for burning books or bullying the artists who produce them.

“The student is to read facts with a view to create and not with the object of fruitless retention. Students, like satellites, should reflect whatever light they receive from authors and not imprison facts and thoughts just as the magistrates imprison convicts in the jail. Thought is progressive. The author’s thought must have progress in the reader in the shape of correction or development. He is the best critic who can show the further development of an old thought, but a mere denouncer is the enemy of progress and consequently of nature.”







“the useful student…will read an old author and will find out his exact position in the progress of thought. He will never propose to burn the book on the ground that it contains thoughts which are useless.  




No thought is useless. Thoughts are means by which we attain our objects. The reader who denounces a bad thought does not know that a bad road is even capable of improvement and conversion into a good one. One thought is a road leading to another. Thus the reader will find that one thought which is the object today will be the means of a further object tomorrow. Thoughts will necessarily continue to be an endless series of means and objects in the progress of humanity. The great reformers will always assert that they have come out not to destroy the old law but to fulfill it. Valmiki, Vyasa, Plato, Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu assert the fact either expressly or by their conduct.” 


 Bhaktivinoda Thakura 1869

There is no doubt in my mind that the teachings of Shridhar Maharaja as found in the Search for Shri Krishna  are timeless insights into spiritual reality. In this sense it is a master work. In hindsight it seems that the Search for Shri Krishna must have always existed. How could it not have existed? Truth has a way of revealing itself, of appearing before us and making itself known. And yet, if we hadn't gone to India with a tape recorder, if we hadn't sat for hours listening carefully to his lectures and putting questions, and if we hadn't carefully archived the taped lectures, The Search for Shri Krishna would never have existed.  If we had listened to the voices that demanded silence and censorship we would never have founded a Press to print these works. 
The publication of The Search for Shri Krishna was published on the basis of sacrifice, blood, sweat, and tears of a team of individuals whose talents were unique and who dedicated themselves to financing and producing the project against all odds. Without their talent and dedication the book would never have come out. 

In one of his short stories, Jorge Luis Borges argues that if Cervantes hadn’t written the Quixote it would have had to have been written. Others point out that if a hundred million monkeys are given typewriters, sooner or later one of them will type out Hamlet’s soliloquy. I’m not so sanguine. I know what it took for us to publish the Search for Shri Krishna. We had to battle economic depression, religious repression, and even self-censorship to come up with a good first draft. And then we argued over every period, comma, and semi-colon, before struggling to actually print the work.

Today it is available in at least 15 different languages. It has even been translated back into Bengali for readers in India. Had we heeded the call for silence and censorship we would have been unable to produce such a work. Our guru, His Divine Grace, Bhakti Rakshak Shridhar dev Goswami, the founder-acharya of the Shri Chaitanya Saraswat Math, would have been silenced and forgotten. As it is, his name and teachings live on. If I played some small role in that, I am grateful that my service was accepted. Still, my point is that any artist or writer must struggle to overcome the constant opposition that would silence his or her voice. 

Just as we faced opposition in publishing the Search for Shri Krishna and other books, I am currently facing a certain amount of opposition in publishing this blog. So far, I have written and published over a thousand blogposts and the blog has been seen over 250,000 times in terms of page-views.  But it’s hard to write something every day only to face the endless negativity of anonymous internet trolls. Constant criticism takes its toll. I face criticism from atheists, hedonists, right-wingers, leftists, Christians, Hindus, and scientists. Still, I have done my best to avoid offending others. I'm simply trying to examine reality on the basis of my personal realizations and the teaching and training I received from my gurudeva. I have done my best to avoid speech that offends, to speak the truth sweetly, but to speak the truth as I was taught to see it by my teacher.

We are told to avoid idle speculation as it distracts the mind from one’s true self-interest. Many gurus teach a spiritual discipline; my own teacher went beyond mere exercise when he provided me with a framework for interpretation, opening my eyes. I was blinded by the darkness of ignorance, but my gurudev taught me how to see and think things through. Some people have encouraged me to continue writing in this space, so I am taking up the challenge once again and will do my best to keep the conversation alive despite the social, political, and ecclesiastical pressure to silence.