Writing a blog is much different from writing an essay or a book. A book is a long-term project with constant revisions. Whole chapters are thrown in the waste-bin, never to see the light of day.
Search for Shri Krishna was a long-term project that took two years from beginning to end. It was first published as a 32 page pamphlet. When Bhakti Sudhir Goswami and I saw the success it had we became more determined to go ahead with the project.
We invested in a typesetting machine that in those days was high technology: the Linoterm. Today it would be the Lino-turtle. It was a massive ton of metal and glass with a phototypesetting unit and a CPU. The CPU was the size of a desk and had 16K of memory.
The Linoterm today would be in the museum of Computer History: It held 2 floppy disks: one with the system and font information and the other for storage. Each held 128 K of storage. It took 5 minutes to boot up. The monitor displayed 5 lines of green phosphorescent type on a dark green background. Between 1982 and 1984 I worked 4 or 5 hours a day inputting typed transcripts.
The printout was a nightmare. Linoterm printed a roll of photo-sensitive paper that when exposed could be layed out on boards to be shot, burned into plates, and then the plates would be printed on an offset press. But the paper was exposed inside a light-proof canister. The canister looked like a large stainless steel coffe thermos.
I would then take the canister of burned paper into the dark-room, attached it to a film-processor, and lead the pape through rollers that would drag it through the chemicals. The processor had an exposing bath and a fixing bath. My job was to change the chemicals and keep the levels up. After five minutes or so, the paper canister would disgorge its contents into the chemical bath, fix the paper and spit them out the front in a continuous roll. I still have some of the original continuous rolls from a translation of Navadwip-dham Mahatmyam I was doing back then.
After I printed out a roll, I could look at the galley proofs. This is really where a lot of work was done. I would sit with Goswami Maharaja in conference after conference and we would try to fact-check, give structure to arguments, straighten out some of the most arcane English, Bengali, and Sanskrit from our gurudeva Bhakti Rakshak Shridhar Deva Goswami.
The process of book production and publication took up an entire two years, from start to finish. But it was worth it. Now, "Search for Shri Krishna is read all over the world. It's never been out of print since 1983. There are editions in French, German, Russian, Spanish, English, Hindi, Bengali, even Hungarian and Australian.
Goswami Maharaja and I would go back and forth on the revisions; every time we moved a comma I had to go back to the Linoterm, fire up its ancient boards, stare at the five lines of green type until I caught the mistake, and then more time in our tiny dark room with the chemicals. And yet our discussions were always the highlight of my day.
According to tradition, Vyasa narrates the Mahabharata to Ganesh in a continuous flow that stops only when the elephant-boy pauses to ponder its significance. Ganesh wouldn't write something that he himself didn't understand. He would pause to reflect, while Vyasa had time to compose. Goswami Maharaja and I felt that if we both understood something at least theoretically, it was worthy of printing. If neither of us could make sense out of a line from the book, we had to study it.
For example, once we had a transcription where Shridhar Maharaja was saying, "He is arriving by tooth or nail." We had never heard the expression but thought it might have been a quaint Bengali saying meaning "by any means possible." Still, on further examination we decided to listen to the tape again and again. Finally, we realized he was not saying "tooth or nail" but "Touffant Mail."
Then there were philosophical discussions, where we realized that the received version of an idea was different from what Shridhar Maharaja was saying. We had to get to the substance of his message and be thoroughly convinced that what we printed accurately represented his teaching.
Goswami Maharaja was a perfectionist and wouldn't print anything until he was 100 percent sure that both the substance and form of the book were correct. He taught me a lot about editing. I edited the transcripts and did my best to create a coherent argument from hours and hours of informal talks. Sometimes Shridhar Maharaja would begin a thought only to be interrupted in mid-conversation by some practical matter.
He would reflect on what he said and return to his point days or weeks later. My task was to ferret out the connections and reassemble them. In those days we had typewriters and tape recorders. There was no database or "Vedabase." I had to become a living database of a sort and remember which conversations took place on what day, look up Bengali and Sanskrit quotations and translate them. I edited the transcripts and tried to shape the arguments, Goswami Maharaja edited the concepts and shaped the book.
Book publishing is time-consuming and requires immense patience and dedication. I had a routine. Every morning I would get up early for aroti, do my 16 rounds, and attend class. After that it was 4 or 5 hours with the transcription and editing, or typesetting and printing, and then a session or two with Goswami Maharaja for editing discussions. This practice disciplined my thinking.
Writing a blog is a completely different matter. I sit down in the mornings and write for 2 or 3 hours and then publish what I've written. There is no editing. Sometimes I wish I had an editor, because when I look at what I've done, I can see typographical errors, errors in style, and even substance. Some of my arguments don't hang together as well as I want them to. Writing on a MacBook Air I can type about 60 words a minute and that goes directly into cyberspace as soon as I push publish. I'm using a dictation program called Dragon Nuance and with that I can create text a lot faster. The only problem is that the speech recognition isn't 100% and makes a lot of strange errors that I don't always catch.
I push publish and the blog is instantly sent over fiber optics to India, China, Thailand, Russia, or wherever else it's being read. But just as instantly as it is written and published it is forgotten and dismissed by the universal mind of cyberspace. A book takes longer to produce and much more tender loving care, but while it may reach a smaller audience it is taken more seriously.
I began writing this blog almost a year ago in November 2014. In November 2013, I got a call from Goswami Maharaja inviting me to Thailand. There I met Avadhuta Maharaja who encouraged me to continue writing. Avadhuta Maharaja has been a great inspiration to me, and I consider him to be genuine friend, the kind you meet once in a lifetime.
At his invitation I visited Kyiv, Ukraine and Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia at this time last year. My trip from Mexico took me to San Francisco, Tokyo, and Bangkok in Thailand, to the yoga ashram in the north of Thailand. Returning to Mexico, I began working on various literary projects when I was called to visit Ukraine and Russia. By this time last year I had been around the world twice in less than 12 months.
So when I was again invited to travel around the world, I decided to begin writing a blog in part because what I was doing was so unbelievable that I couldn't believe it myself. I knew if I didn't write some of this down I would forget it forever. In Thailand I was to begin writing a kind of a memoir or spiritual biography of my old friend Goswami Maharaja.
Over a period of six months we conducted a number of interviews. At last Goswami Maharaja put the project on hold. We had begun with great optimism and the idea that through the story of his life we could touch on a number of profound spiritual issues. He has a great fascination with vaishnava ontology and was convinced that this might be an appropriate forum. And yet, as the project advanced, he lost enthusiasm for telling his story. He became concerned that autobiographical efforts end only in vanity. He said "If you're interested in a memoir you might as well write your own." Just before I left for Moscow in December, I decided to take his words seriously. But instead of writing about the past, I began in the present.
My journey took me from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I live and teach in a small university, to Cancun where I saw my sister-in-law, Lourdes who I haven't seen since my brother's death. From there it was Frankfurt Germany, and St. Petersburg Russia Where I spoke on the birthday of Govinda Maharaja. I visited yoga centers in Moscow, and Kiev Ukraine spoke on the books that we had published.
I flew back to Moscow and then traveled from Moscow to Bangkok, to Chang Mai Thailand, to work on a documentary film to be shot at Angkor Wat the largest Vishnu Temple in the world. So we flew back to Bangkok and from there to Siem Reap Cambodia. After a three week film shoot at Angkor Wat I flew to Bangkok Thailand from there to Quan Zhu China, Los Angeles California, and Mexico City. This story alone is worth telling, although I haven't been able to do it justice here.
In this blog I began by writing about my adventures; and then began including fragments from my retelling of the Mahabharat story. I began to include the story of Mahabharata for two reasons: I was interested in allowing readers to participate in the creative process. Those of you who read this blog may go on to read the finished book. In that case, you will have followed the entire creative process from beginning to end.
My other reason was a little more personal. Goswami Maharaja warned me that a personal memoir may lead only to vanity; I felt that he had a strong point. I'm not interested in telling people about how great I am. That would indeed be a worthless exercise in vanity.
And yet by telling my own story I'm keeping alive memories that would be otherwise lost. Younger generations are curious as to how my generation lived and struggled with its own problems. Perhaps by looking at my mistakes others might learn. And in sharing the wisdom of my teachers, mentors, and my beloved guru, I keep his memory alive. Even if I'm unable to follow his teachings I may be able to pass along part of his message. I am a flawed vessel. And yet if I am able to carry a drop of the divine message I received from my guru, that drop may benefit some one.
Self-realization involves self reflection and part of the task of self reflection is to ask ourselves where we stand in this world. Self reflection means understanding who we are; what is our place in history? At the end of my life I confront many fundamental questions. While it may be vanity to tell my story, silence is another kind of vanity. In the end my life is the only life I have known completely, and so writing about myself and my life is in an attempt to come to terms with my past. An attempt to confront the burden of my memory. In trying to understand who I am, I'm looking at who I was, who I have been, and what I have become.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it."
Having outlived some of the people in my story, I have now the opportunity to rewrite history, to tell the story my way. Getting the last word is a bizarre form of revenge. But I'm trying to avoid revenge in recounting my life. I can't say that my motives are entirely pure or free from revenge or vanity. But I feel that my story is worth telling; that others may profit from my triumphs as well as from my mistakes.
I began this piece by discussing the difference between writing a book and writing a blog. A book is well structured. A blog tends to have a freer form. Once again I've gone off course, And moved outside the scope of a comparison between books and blogs thus demonstrating the very nature of the blog itself. But in the future I hope to gather these fragments together and give them organization. The product will be published in some future book, no doubt.
My point was while books have a long shelf-life, a blog is ephemeral.
Ephemeral is from Greek, meaning "short-lived," "lasting but a day." So the fragments that I post on this blog last but a day or two. The future I hope to join them together, to edit them.
So far the blog has been reached over 29,000 pageviews. I'm not sure if the same person has obsessively clicked on the page 29,000 times or if I'm really reaching thousands of viewers. That's another aspect of blogging that I find exasperating. But if you've been reading this page, I thank you for your efforts.
For now my plan is to continue my summary of Bhagavad-Gita and so much as it forms an important part of the Mahabharata story. After that, I shall go back to telling to the story. And perhaps even include more fragments from my own journey to surrender.
