Typing His Words

In February 1966 Prabhupada spoke, over the space of two lectures, what later became the introduction to his Bhagavad-gita As It Is.  He recorded these lectures himself and we typed them later.  In a 1968 letter to me, Prabhupada wrote, “You have to meet many opposing elements in the matter of preaching work; therefore, you should always be careful to follow the principles in Bhagavad-gita As It Is.  You will be glad to know that our arrangement with Macmillan for publishing Bhagavad-gita As It Is, is already complete and the manuscript has been handed over to them.  We should clearly preach that our Krishna consciousness movement is purely based on Bhagavad-gita As It Is.  Any other movement which does not tally with the principles of Bhagavad-gita As It Is, is considered unauthorized by us.” 

I was still typing for him in 1968 despite many opposing elements.  Typing is yoga.  You sit on the floor cross-legged in front of the typewriter.  Instead of performing pranayama and raising the life air in the cakras, you type the words of Swamiji from the Bhagavad-gita manuscript.  If you make a mistake in typing, then stop and correct it.  Everything is concentrated on looking at the message and making it right.  Thinking of typing as yoga gives a nice spirit to the work, but the most important thing is that it is in connection with the Swamiji.  It is his words of Bhagavad-gita.  Besides the recorded lectures, he had bundles of thousands of pages that he had typed, wrapped in saffron and lying on the floor in his closet.  When he first took some typing out of this mass of material and gave it to me, I remarked, “I think you have enough work to last me a whole winter.”  Swamiji laughed and said, “I have many lifetimes of work for you.”