Typing for the Swami 

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 chakras, you type the words of Swamiji from the Bhagavad-gita manuscript.   Concentrate and type, incorporating all the editing marks made by Hayagriva.  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 your 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.  I kept pounding them out.  When I was supposed to be calling on welfare clients, I would often drop in at my apartment and do an hour of typing, always pushing it on.  The Swami was aware of what I was doing.  He asked about the progress, and when I handed the work in, he handled it and said it was nice.  We were both interested in these clean white pages with typing marks on them, his work.  It was very dear to him.

He had bundles of thousands of pages that he had typed, wrapped up 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.”

After I’d been doing it for some months, Swamiji started using a dictaphone.  One day I stopped in at his apartment in the middle of my office workday to put in an hour on his manuscript.  Swamiji kept the dictaphone covered in his room, except when it was in use.  When I went in and got it, he noticed that I was dressed in shirt and tie from the office.  He remarked, “You are still at your office work?”  I replied, “Yes, but I go out to see clients.  Right now, instead of seeing them, I’m coming to do this work.   I’m like Sanatana Gosvami who stayed away from work in order to read the Srimad-Bhagavatam.”  As I said that, I was holding the dictaphone and heading for the next room where Jadurani was painting, where the clotheslines were strung with Swamiji’s clothes and where the jar of ISKCON bullets was waiting in the corner.  As I left his room, Swamiji smiled and said, “You are Sanatana.”

Sometimes when I was typing in his second room, he would walk in and see what I and the others were doing.  One time I stopped and said, “Swamiji, you just said on this tape that the four Kumaras are eternal brahmacaris.  How is that, that they could be eternal brahmacaris?”  He’d reply, and then I’d go back into samadhi, locked into hearing his phrases and hearing the philosophy while typing.  The typing work didn’t go through any secretary of Prabhupada’s, but direct from him to me.  When I returned a batch he asked, “Is everything all right?”

“Oh fine, Swamiji,” I said.  “I’m really enjoying typing the sixth chapter of Bhagavad-gita.  It’s wonderful how Krishna consciousness is the same as the yogis except that we have more facility because the yogi can see Krishna only when he sits down and gets deep into meditation.  But a devotee can see Krishna in His picture or chant His holy names.”  It wasn’t artificial for me to engage in krsna-katha about what I’d just been reading because I was filled with it by the typing.  At least I could read something and then repeat it exactly as I had heard it.

In a practical way, I was connected to him, and my mind was saturated with Krishna-thought.  You knew that you couldn’t do nonsense because you had to type.  Your time was taken up; you had to get up early, chant your rounds, type, go to work.  A full life.

Swamiji said never be idle.  He had written an announcement and posted it on the wall: Always be engaged, and if you don’t have any work, then chant Hare Krishna.  This is how we worked for the Swami; different boys did different things.