195 Pursuing writing as an art in bhakti, The Monk’s podcast 195 with Urmila Mataji

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Hare Krishna, Aurobila Mata ji. Welcome to the Bronx Podcast once again. Hare Krishna.

Thank you so much for sparing your time. And Rasul Prabhu, although it's midnight for you, thank you for adjusting your schedule and joining here. Feel free to chip in whenever you have to share any thoughts.

You have been doing editing of my videos quite tirelessly and competently, and this is additional service in this video. I'm grateful for that. So in general, when as a brahmachari, I interact with Mata ji's, it's usually in a physical room, I won't do it alone.

So we are following the same etiquette here. And I'm grateful that you're helping me in that. Thank you.

So Mata ji, today I thought we could discuss broadly on the topic of writing and more specifically about pursuing writing as an art in bhakti. Mm hmm. So how I got inspired about this topic is that we have worked as BTG review editors.

And when you are reviewing some of my articles or reviewing various articles, you often pointed out the use of literary devices and the poetic aspect of writing, apart from poetry, the aesthetics of writing. I had not seen that much discussed among devotees. In general, I was inspired.

I always liked to write. And when I came to bhakti, I had so many ideas. I had actually a message to share.

But in general, I'm not saying this in a mood of criticism. It was just my experience at that time that for most devotees, writing was a craft. That means it was just a tool to preach.

OK, I'm giving classes, but let's have some notes and let's put them in a systematic, organized way. Not that the writing didn't have its virtues, including sometimes some artistic aspect also. But that was never seen as something to be cultivated.

So writing was more of a tool. So in that sense, it was like a craft. We use it to communicate a message.

But the idea that it's not just a tool, it is definitely, but it is much more than that. It is an art and as devotees, we can pursue that. So that was something which I found both revealing and encouraging.

And since then, whenever I write articles, I try to come up with the rhyming titles for the articles or do some kind of wordplay. And I found that it also has its appeal. So it becomes memorable.

It becomes attractive. So in that sense, of course, wordplay is just one aspect of the beauty of writing and art of writing. But that was, I thought that we could discuss this topic.

We have discussed, I have had podcasts on writing earlier with Jayadvait Maharaj and Guru Prabhu. But I thought this particular aspect has not been focused on. So maybe you could start with how you explore writing and especially the art aspect of writing.

Well, I started really enjoying to write when I was a student in primary school, elementary school. And my teacher in the fourth grade, when I was nine, she introduced the idea of writing with a cartridge pen, which is kind of like a fountain pen. Okay.

So instead of dipping the pen in the ink, you have a cartridge of ink that you put in the pen and then it has a nib, kind of like for calligraphy. The only problem is that the ink gets on your fingers. You basically always have, this finger always has ink on it all the time.

And if you're not careful, it can smudge. And for many, many, many, many years, actually until I started traveling full time, I always used cartridge pens. And there you loved the physical act of writing and you were writing, the thing you were writing was a piece of art, literally.

Like Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu says that, Avrupa Goswami, that his handwriting looks like pearls. Yeah. So you focused on the fact, the paper you were using, the pen, the ink, you were creating a work of art.

And I'm not sure at what point I got introduced to poetry. I really don't remember. But certainly from a very young age, writing poetry became one of my main means of journaling, although I didn't think of it as journaling.

I wrote poetry primarily for myself, although I certainly, I was happy when my poetry was published in the school's newspaper and things like that. And I continued that habit until the present day, particularly to write poetry. And it approached writing when I was young.

Okay, this one, you also said poetry. Yeah. So you write it, just for you, I said, journaling means you write it for your self-expression and for your personal glorification of Krishna.

I know you have published one book, but you're talking about poetry more as a form of journaling here. Is that so? Well, Krishna Kanta Devadasi, Gurudev Prabhu's wife, she published a book on poetry and she included some of my poems there. So I've also had some of my poems published, although I haven't published a book of poetry per se.

I published some poems on my website, but it's primarily been for me, journaling is, it doesn't really communicate what I want to communicate, but it's the closest word that I can pick to what writing poetry does for me as a person. And what it does for me, both spiritually and materially. I mean, it's on every level.

I mean, I no longer write with cartridge pens. It took me years to transition to writing poetry on a computer. That was, it was extremely difficult.

But at this point, I can't, but it's something that's very satisfying emotionally, mentally, intellectually, and spiritually. And when I used to write on paper with a cartridge pen, it was very satisfying aesthetically and physically as well. Okay.

And so within your bhakti journey, was it natural for you to start writing and journaling, especially journaling to poetry? Or because in some ways, our devotee life is quite busy and writing is not always prioritized. So many other services, which are considered more important and which can very easily be more quantified in terms of… Yes, yes, yes. When I first moved in the ashram in Chicago in 1973, they kept us so busy, which was good in some ways.

But I think as a model of what spiritual life is, it was in the long run harmful. I think it was well-intentioned and it was what was needed and it had some benefits. But one also needs time for introspection.

You know, Prabhupada has this phrase, the introspective sage. And writing, and for me again, especially poetry writing, is a primary form of introspection. That's why I say journaling doesn't really capture what I'm trying to express.

It's a mirror. It's an expression of self. And anyway, in those early days, the only time that was unscheduled was after the Sunday feast.

That was my only time that I didn't have a specific schedule. I'm sure I was expected to help clean up after the feast, but I didn't. I would sit on the fire escape and either I would read Prabhupada's books.

It was my only time I could read other than in the formal classes or I would write poetry. Oh, okay. And I had to sneak on the back fire escape to do it.

You know, if anybody came and found me, they would have said, oh, come and sweep the floor. Come and wash the pots. Yeah.

I think that's a big challenge. And because at one level, the notion, especially in the moment, I think to some extent was that, you know, idle time means idle mind is a devil's workshop. And it is true to some extent if a person is in Rajoguna and Tamoguna, then the idle mind can be quite dangerous.

But then that doesn't mean that we are always going to be in those lower modes. And even then also we could be productive privately. So over a period of time when you started writing, when did you start writing in a major way and how did you manage the time for that? In a major way.

I've been writing in a major way my whole life. Okay. So, you know, I was, so much writing was done, of course, for school.

And I'd say it was… The syllabus writing, syllabus course material writing means? Well, just so many. Yeah, there's so many things you have to write for your school assignments. And then I'd say more that there was a break when I joined the Hare Krishna movement because it wasn't so much part of what we were being taught to do.

That I definitely had some years when my writing was much less. And again, it was almost entirely poetry. Where whatever unstructured time I had, I was spending primarily reading.

So I would be spending my time reading Karl Blitz books, taking notes on Karl Blitz books, listening to Karl Blitz classes. But the idea of using unstructured time for writing, I mean, I did write letters to people who wrote to the BBT, but I wouldn't call that writing in the same sense at all. Of course.

I mean, we were encouraged to write articles for Back to Godhead, and I got a couple of articles published back at that time. But again, it wasn't… It just wasn't what was going on. That nobody said, make sure you have some time to write every day.

Although she will probably said that. But that wasn't something coming from the devotees. It wasn't something talked about in the classes and so forth.

And by the way, I think my own understanding is no matter what mode of nature you're in, it's important to have some time for introspection. And it's important to have some time of quiet and some time when you're not just running around. That busyness can be a kind of intoxication and it can be a way of avoiding, taking care of things that we need to take care of.

Yeah. There's this whole concept of spiritual bypassing also. Yes, yes, yes.

Or it can be a form of procrastination. I mean, even technically, like there's something you really need to work on. And instead, you clean your house that doesn't need to be cleaned.

You do a lot of laundry that doesn't need to be done. You bake something that doesn't need to be baked. They call it proclastic cleaning.

And proclastic cleaning and procrastinating baking. So one can be busy as a kind of avoidance. And we're not meant to be just crazy busy all the time.

So although we say an idle mind is the devil's workshop and one should not just be sitting around with nothing to do, some of what we should do for everybody should be a quietness. And a reflection. And writing very much helps with that.

It's, I mean, in the last few years, I've gotten more, I've kept a diary, I guess, for about 20 years now. And for the last maybe three or four years, I've done a lot more of reflective at length journaling. And there's a lot of evidence that doing that kind of writing helps us to process things that otherwise we have difficulty processing.

There's just so much evidence for that. That just sitting around thinking or talking to another person is often not as effective as writing. You know, I also, in the last, I guess, two and a half years, I've been keeping a daily gratitude diary.

So this also helps. It focuses me, all of my waking hours that I'm always alert as to what I can, what I can be grateful for. So there's, I see a benefit on all levels for everybody.

This is beautiful. And that writing, it's as, when I talked earlier about tool for outreach, that's important. But you could say writing is also a valuable tool for in-reach, understanding ourselves and then dealing with inner issues.

During this pandemic, I have conducted a few courses on journaling. And I try to bring in Bhagavad Gita's philosophy and perspectives into the activity of journaling, what is going on in terms of the inner dialogues. And it is a concept which those who have tried it, I personally tried it.

It's very helpful. But for some devotees, the idea that, okay, first of all, writing to publish itself doesn't seem, I have had devotees asking, how many people became devotees by your books that were written? I don't think we can quantify like that. But okay, if you're writing and you're not publishing, what are you doing spending so many hours? So maybe there are different kinds of devotees and maybe some devotees don't feel the need for introspection and maybe they don't even need introspection.

You can say everyone needs. But it seems that some people keep functioning reasonably well without introspection. I don't know.

I mean, I don't know if that's actually possible. I mean, what we might say is that it doesn't have to be writing. I mean, one of my granddaughters is an artist.

And what I can see is that she accomplishes through art. And what she's explained to me is that if she doesn't produce any art for a while, that her awareness of Krishna becomes impeded. That if she's regularly creating art, her whole vision of Krishna in the world shifts for her.

And for some people, it's going to be creating music. You know, there's ways. It doesn't have to be the written word.

So the written word may not be. And if we think about that, it wasn't that long ago that people in general didn't really know much about how to read and write. The vast majority of the world didn't.

I mean, it was only a few hundred years ago that books were almost non-existent. They were handwritten and there was no printing press. And so most people didn't need to know how to read because what were they going to read? There was very little to read.

So people's reading and writing was extremely limited. And still there are other ways of expression. I think writing has, it fulfills a similar function to any kind of creative outlook.

And as far as writing for others, my own conviction. Okay, just one minute if you don't mind. So it seems that nowadays there is in spiritual circles, there is this concept of we all need me time.

So me time can sound selfish. But what you're saying is that some people, as you said, they may just take a harmony. We just sing music all alone, sing bhajans or kirtans when nobody's hearing.

So there may be different ways in which a person may have their needs addressed and journaling could be one of the tools in it. I don't know whether we could call that introspection or is a person being introspective when they are actually singing or there could be somebody who's gardening, somebody goes for long walks. Yes.

And so. It is. Yes, that is its function.

And Srila Prabhupada himself said that when he had extra time, he would sit and do bhajans. He would get out his harmony and sing. Okay, so introspection.

You cannot, the me time is not, me time is not selfish. And I can't give if I have nothing to give. You can't give in charity if you don't also earn money.

That is true. So overall, writing is one way in which we can nurture ourselves, take care of our needs. So I had thought of, I had read a long ago in a book on writing there are four broad ways in which we can write.

One is just for ourselves. That is for introspection. The second is for, say, for our sharing with our close friends.

The third is for maybe publishing on some community forum. Then the fourth is for formal publishing to the world. And I found that quite helpful categorizing because every time you think about, okay, this I'm going to write, I'm going to publish to the whole world.

Then that itself can be quite intimidating. And then one may not write at all. So yes, I found that.

In fact, it's interesting when I was working on my novel, Essence Seekers, that at first I was writing the novel for the world and I couldn't get anywhere. And then I decided just to write it for fun. You know that whether I published it or not, I ended up publishing it and I ended up having it as something that I'm hoping that the world enjoys.

But I wrote it for fun. I would suggest that even if one has the world as the audience or a community as the audience or some good friends as the audience, Prabhupada says in the preface of Nectar Devotion that everything we're doing is to have rasa, is to have taste. So the primary purpose is to have a taste of a relationship with Krishna in everything that we do, regardless of our so-called audience.

Our real audience is always the Lord. It's always, and this is true whether instead of writing, we're making music or we're planting flowers, which can again have the same or a similar function for people. Although I think writing has certain aspects of it that are particularly helpful.

But our audience is always the Lord and our relationship with the Lord. When I was writing the Learn to Read books, the children's books, of course my audience was the children. And there were very, very strict parameters.

If you want to talk about children's books writing, we could get into that a bit. It might be a worthwhile topic. For each of these books, according to level, but what I was meditating on with every single book, every single day was Krishna and his intimate associates reading the books and enjoying them.

Oh, beautiful. So when we are writing, it is, Prabhupada also says that writing is shravanam, kirtanam, smaranam. So it's devotional service in one sense and we are doing it for Krishna's pleasure.

At the same time, we do, so earlier you said you're writing for satisfaction, writing for fun. And going back to that novel Essence Seekers, I think that is, you were a pioneer. I don't think anybody has done a novel-length allegory in our movement till now.

Can you tell a little bit more about that? How you got the idea and how it? Well, there are some more. There was actually a book called The Path of Vaishnav Sages or something like that, The Way of Vaishnav Sages that was written. And Bhaktivinoda Thakur, of course, wrote a novel.

Yeah, I was talking about in our movement, not our tradition, sorry, in our movement. Yeah, Bhaktivinoda had two novels. Narada Muni, we have his rather short fictional stories in the Bhagavatam for Anjana, which is certainly in the same genre, although it's not as developed.

And then in our movement, there was The Way of Vaishnav Sages, it was called. Tamal Krishnamurthy wrote a novel. Yeah, allegorical novel.

No, no, it wasn't an allegorical novel. Well, that was in the mood of Narada Muni, that Narada Muni wrote his allegorical novel. So I was picking up from that.

And then the allegorical novel of The Journey of the Soul, which is, again, the parenthesis of the story. It's also, there's a few bestselling books out in the world, Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse and The Alchemist. So those are, and then, of course, Pilgrim's Progress, which was a real classic, which is, again, an allegorical novel of the soul's journey to God.

So there's, within the allegorical novel category, the allegorical novel of the spiritual quest is certainly there. I mean, there's not a lot of books like that in the world, but there are some that are very, very well known and classics. So I was trying to follow in those footsteps.

I mean, the problem with an allegorical novel of a spiritual journey is that it tends not to be a page-turner kind of book. You know, it's not a whodunit. It's just not the kind of book where you're going, oh, what's going to happen next? What's going to happen next? What's going to happen next? It's more of a meditative sort of book that you read a chapter and you think about it and you read a chapter and you think about it kind of thing rather than something that you devour as an exciting plot line.

So that's sort of a peculiarity of the genre. And because it's allegorical, it has many layers of meaning in addition to the apparent one. So again, it was a lot of fun to write.

And I love it if it became as popular as Programs Progress, but that hasn't happened yet. Yeah, it seems that we could say, if you look at Indian history also, the bhakti tradition in India also spread through poetry and through, we could say, the artistic aspect, the cultural aspects. The acharyas were the varamacharya, madhvacharya.

They were the systematizers. But for the general people, they knew it more through music or through poems. Yeah, I grew up in Maharashtra in India, and we knew many of the saints' poetic verses.

I didn't know much about the acharyas, but I knew a lot about these saints. So in one sense that these various literary genres, of course, music itself is a genre, but poetry and stories and not just scriptural stories, these are also a way in which outreach can be done. But it seems we haven't done that so much till now.

Or maybe we are not attracting the kind of audience who is interested in that kind of reading. Well, especially if you put poetry to music. And if you think about our shastra, so our primary shastras are primarily in poetic form, and they are meant to be sung.

We have the Bhagavad Gita. Gita literally means a song. And I like what you're pointing out.

This is true not only in the Indian tradition or the Vedic tradition, but it's true in every single culture of the world, that the main way of transmitting cultural ideas, taking the revelations and the introspections of saintly persons and putting it to music, putting it in poetic form to music. And we should say poetry is not just prose with a lot of extra line breaks. And just last word rhymes.

Maybe, maybe the last word rhymes. I mean, we get a lot of submissions to Back to Godhead of poetry like that, just prose with extra line breaks. And still people send me samples of their poetry if you took out the line breaks, it's just prose.

But if you have the rhythm, the cadence, our body in our world is actually poetry. Yes? Sorry, our body in our world. Our body in our world.

Prabhupada says the whole world is full of Krishna's singing. The whole world is based on sound. And the sound is poetic.

It's not just some humming sound. It's actually poetry. Krishna says that he is poetry.

And everything, all the systems in our body are going through waves and pulses and beats and cadences. And it's the same with all of the flows in the world, the flows of air and water and the movements of the earth itself. Are all in rhythms and harmonies that are synchronized and are full of ornaments of various types.

So all of existence is like that. All of existence is poetry to music. It is reality.

The ultimate reality, of course, is the rasa dance. The dance to poetry and music. And the dance itself is compared, especially by Kavi Kanipur, to various types of poetry.

So the main way, always, that both philosophical truths and rasa or pleasure has been communicated throughout the world is through poetry put to music or poetry associated with art and often with artistic costumes. So Rupa Goswami has a whole section in the Bhakti Vyasamiti Sindhu about the value of theatre and poetry. And he just, that's all he says, theatre and poetry.

And I'm thinking poetry, poetry. But he's seeing the Bhagavatam as poetry. This is very fascinating.

So in the Chaitanya Charitam, it's said that one of the characteristics of a devotee is Kavi, is Kavya. So now Kavi can also mean philosopher in the Bhagavatam, Kavayo. But it also means poetry.

Because they're together. If you're genuinely a philosopher, not what Prabhupada would call a dry speculator, you know, it's usually dry. What does it mean, dry? You know, it's like if you eat some old, old, old bread and it's dry.

Then there's no rasa. Even Ayurvedically, in order to have rasa, rasa has to do with liquid. We have rasa with us, Mr. Rasa.

Mr. Rasa. Such a nice name. Prabhupada would have liked your name.

So the real philosophers find the rasa. Rasa is liquid, flowing. And something that's liquid and flowing is also dancing.

That's fascinating. I used to think when I look at the body of what Bhaktivinoda Thakur has written, he is quite serious, systematic, logical in many of his writings, the way he builds up Gaudiya Vaishnava theology in Jaya Veda Dharma, especially. But then he has written all these Vaishnava songs.

So I still think that these are two such different genres of literature and how one person is so proficient in both. But we are saying it's natural in one sense. If somebody is philosophical, they will express it through poetry.

Because that is, is. It is what is. It doesn't seem to be so prominent in the Western philosophical tradition, isn't it? At least in the medieval and the recent.

I don't think any of the major philosophers from the West. Dry. They will call it dry speculate.

It's okay. Dry. So is it come back? I'm just speculating.

Is the world real? Am I? Do I exist? How do I experience what I experienced? Let's try. You know, real philosophy. You cannot fully separate tatva, tatva, tatva, that, tva, ness, thatness.

What is thatness? Krishna. Krishna's tribhanga. He's in always in motion.

Beautiful. So, so that is, that is, it's a connecting. With the.

With the real stream of life. And of reality. So the question I had is the twofold.

I mean, you can go back a little bit through Goswami and Kavin are traditionally later. But one is that is overall poetry on a decline in contemporary society. And have we done enough to.

Or have we done anything actually to bring this aspect into, we could say, the contemporary language, which is English, because one of the ways in which I was talking about India, it is Sanskrit. Poetics is beautiful, but it's spread widely through the local languages. And it's Bengali poetry in Bengal.

It's Odia poetry in Odisha. It's Marathi poetry in Maharashtra. Then Kannada poetry in Karnataka.

Telugu poetry. And I was just reading about a. It often needs to be done primarily combined with music and perhaps also with dance and art. So to just spread poetry as poetry is difficult.

And I think that that is definitely on the decline. I mean, when I was growing up, my parents, especially my father, but my mother as well, used to regularly read to me from books of poetry. And they had their favorite poems, which they would read again and again and again.

And I was surrounded with that. I think that that's on the decline. But poetry and song is not on the decline.

So songs are still one of the primary means of entertainment and communication on the planet. Now, the quality, I'm not very familiar with most modern songs. So it's difficult to say to what extent, you know, there's the ornaments of poetry.

And one needs to be careful because if poetry is done merely for the aesthetics of it, if that's the only thing that's done, then it becomes simply sensual. And although sensual pleasure is necessary for a healthy life, our Bhakti idea is that everything should be connected with Krishna. And that writing should be a vehicle for conveying truth, not simply aesthetics.

Now, again, for society in general, pure aesthetics and sensory enjoyment is also necessary. People in general cannot live without some karma. That's not possible.

They will become psychologically disturbed. And that's one of the roles of the shudras in Varnashram. If there's no shudras, there's no mundane rasa in society.

They're the ones who provide all the beauty world of various types. And that's necessary for a civilized society. So we're not saying that people in general should give up all writing and song that has the only purpose of being beautiful, because that would be harmful for people in general.

But our idea as aspiring transcendentalists is that the aesthetic beauty should be an outflowing of the fact that we're connecting with the absolute truth, which is the all-pervading beauty. The absolute truth is the all-pervading transcendent beauty. And therefore, our writing should be an expression of that, which includes, as, you know, Rupa Goswami explains very early in Bhakti Utsavamita Sindhu, that the happiness of the senses and the happiness of liberation are included in the happiness of bhakti.

So just like our prasadam, our food is very pleasing to the senses. There's a statement in, I believe, the sixth canto of the Bhagavatam that one should smell the prasadam. So there's, you know, and Mahaprabhu is talking about the aroma of the prasadam, the taste of the prasadam.

Also, the appearance, you know, that when you cook something, it's visually appealing. It's appealing to the sense of smell. It's appealing to the sense of taste.

It nourishes the body. It's not—the fact that it is a spiritual form of worship doesn't negate the fact that it then includes everything else. So our writing should be properly oriented.

And just like in the Bhagavatam, in one of the injunctions, when Kasyapa is instructing Diti, you stop out of the house without ornaments. So our writing should be ornamented. But it should be, again, a secondary natural result of describing reality, the beautiful, describing the transcendent, all-pervading beauty and gracefulness and sweetness of the ornamented Lord, not sensuality separate from the Lord.

Makes sense. So overall, if I understand right, poetry put in song is very popular. And to some extent— Sorry? And very powerful.

Yes, and to some extent, the kirtan world, in some ways, we as a movement, probably Prabhupada was among the first major spiritual leaders who brought kirtan to the West. But we are not that prominent in the kirtan scene now. That could be one aspect of music also.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And kirtan, you know, there's nam kirtan, guna kirtan, lila kirtan. Yes. And we have, you know, the Hare Krishna mantra, which is the topmost expression of poetry in music and poetry in motion.

But all of the other bhajans and the songs, and Prabhupada said we could also sing them in the local language. So we have some devotees who've taken the Sanskrit and Bengali songs and verses and translated them into poeticized English. Perhaps that's been done in other languages as well.

Yeah, but I don't think Prabhupada wanted that to replace the main liturgy in the temple. No. Well, there's many reasons for that, for not wanting it to replace.

One reason is practical. So I can go to a program in Turkey and I know all the songs because they're not singing them in Turkish. They're singing them in Sanskrit and Bengali.

You know, I can go to a program in Bolivia and anywhere you go, it's the same liturgy. So that's a very practical reason. Also, the original words of the Shastra and the Acharyas have power.

But Prabhupada wanted us to understand what we were singing. He didn't want us to just sing songs, to just sing sounds that we didn't understand. Just like I remember one of my students saying, why do we offer our obeisances to groceries every morning? To groceries? Groceries.

Vande Grocery. So they were asking, why are we offering our respects to groceries? So we need to, Prabhupada wanted us to understand what we were singing. And it struck me very strongly one time in Soganj, at Bhaktivinoda Thakur's house, where there were these Bengali ladies singing Bhaktivinoda's Bengali songs.

And I thought, for them, they're singing in their own language. Like you were saying, you know, having things in different languages. And I thought, for me, this would be like singing in English.

So that can also be done. I mean, Protestant Christianity has really made great strides by having musicians have poetry to music about Jesus and about Christianity, which becomes very popular. And I would say that, you know, the world is starting to turn from the written word to the visual and the audible.

You know, more and more people are hearing their books instead of reading them, or watching their books instead of reading. And this should be kept in mind, too, as writers, if we're going to be writing for the public. That's interesting.

Yeah, it's very true that audiobooks were almost unknown maybe 10 years ago. But now audiobooks have become huge. Yes.

And just think, originally, wasn't that how people read before the printing press? Most people were reading by hearing. Somebody else read. There was one book or two books of the Ramayana in your village, because they were handwritten.

And somebody would read from them every evening, and you would come for your audiobook reading. Or they'd be dramatized. You know, there'd be a drama on the Ramayana or a drama on the Mahabharata.

So this concept that people have that the move away from reading towards video and towards audio is some sort of degradation, I kind of stretch my head about it and say, well, before the printing press, that was the way that people read. It was visual and audio. So in one sense, it's a return to tradition.

Correct. So at least in some ways, yeah. Yes.

So when you say as writers, you have to keep it in mind, what would you mean by that? They to be more conscious of how our words sound or not use very long sentences, which people can't understand when they're being read out or what would that mean? That's certainly part of it. But also, if we're writing for a general audience, we do want to think about the fact that our writing is going to be translated into somebody reading it or translated into a video. And of course, one can write for that purpose directly.

Now, the number of people sitting down with a book is definitely decreasing. That is very true. And it's just processing a lot of things you said, that especially about the poetry coming out in the form of poetry itself.

People don't sit and read, but poetry is still there. Now, with respect to writing also, you talked about writing in various genres. So one of the genres, of course, is fiction.

So not many devote as compared to the number of nonfiction books we have written. I don't think that many fiction books have been written. So is it partly because Prabhupada didn't explicitly write anything about fiction or write fiction? Or is it that just… Perhaps.

I mean, I was just listening to a lecture this morning where Prabhupada was talking about something and he was saying, these are not stories. These are actual fact. Prabhupada often used the word stories as synonymous for fiction.

Whereas, generally stories can be in English, it can be either fiction or nonfiction. And I would hazard a guess that there was a, and perhaps still is, a pejorative concept of fiction. That fiction is not true and therefore it cannot be proof.

However, those two things are not the same. I mean, let's say that I write a factual biography of some politician or some movie star. What I write can be true, but it could have absolutely nothing to do with truth.

You know, a lot of the nonfiction books that are on the market today have no relationship to truth whatsoever. Although they are true in the sense of being a proper rendition of historical fact. And truth being conveyed through fiction is eternal.

Beautiful. So when you say that the books which have been in one sense grounded in facts, but they may not be true in the sense that the way the whole facts are brought together, the narrative that is being told through that may be serving a particular agenda that may not be true. Is that what you're saying? That could be the case.

In fact, it probably almost always is the case. But I was thinking more that it's not propounding absolute truth. It's not propounding tattva, thatness, sattva, existence-ness.

It's propounding an illusion. And something that's teaching truth can be fiction or nonfiction. Right, okay.

So you could write, you know, like if I write a biography of a saintly person, and if I tell a fictional story, like the Puranjana story, they can both be teaching truth. And then the biographical story doesn't necessarily teach truth better than the fictional story, or the fictional story wouldn't be a staple of conveying truth eternally, which it is. Yes.

And now we might ask, why? Why ever use fiction? All fiction is to some extent, if it's teaching truth, metaphorical. It's standing in for something that is historically factual. Or it's standing in for some kind of concept.

It's symbolic. It's representation. It's representative.

Fiction often bypasses our ego more. The fact that it's a story about something that didn't happen, or that couldn't happen, relaxes our inner defensive mechanism, which is normally quite strong. We are generally in a mood of defending our false ego, and our pride, and our social status, et cetera, 24-7.

But when we are involved in something that's fictional, we tend to relax that. We tend to consider something fictional to be entertaining, to be relaxing, and not to be aggressive against us. And one can communicate very strong truths through fiction that are extremely difficult to communicate through nonfiction.

And it's the ability to really hit people's faults and ego, and to really challenge people. Again, to be introspective and to improve is much easier in fiction, because people are more receptive to it, just naturally, just kind of by design. Yeah.

So it has its use. At the same time, you don't want everything fictional. The basis of nonfiction is it's much more of a template.

So if I'm writing something that actually has happened, then it's much easier for me as the reader or the listener to assume that what's being put forward is possible. Now, then you have nonfiction is not narrative. You have nonfiction that's explanatory.

And that has quite a different purpose in society. I mean, we also find that the majority of scripture, especially that's designed for the people of Kali Yuga, is in both the narrative and poetic format. It's narrative poetry.

Poetry? Most of it is not. That the writing of the Bhagavatam, the Chaitanya Charitamrta, it has a meter, it has an external-internal rhyme, it has various poetic ornaments like consonants and assonance and personification and hyperbole. So there's parts of the Bhagavatam, of course, that are written in prose, but the majority is written in poetry.

And that's true for the most of the Vedas. It's written as poetry. The Ramayana is all written as poetry.

But it's a poetic narrative. It's not descriptive poetry. It's not describing, you know, a cherry blossom trees or something.

It's telling a, generally, an historical narrative, a non-fictional story. So the value of that is that, again, there's a real template. And of course, when what you're describing are the pastimes of the Lord and the devotees, so Rupa Goswami says very clearly that one actually will experience or can experience the emotions and the rasa of those previous devotees by either seeing a drama or by reading poetry, which is the Shastra.

So as writers, what we want to do, we want ourselves to be experiencing rasa while we're writing, and we want our readers or listeners or viewers to have that experience as well. That is really the entire purpose of the thing. And when we're glorifying the Lord and the Lord's devotees, then if we're doing it in a way that the audience, the readers can enter into the emotions of those persons, then they will also experience rasa.

It is possible to write about the truth in a dry way. One kid, that's possible. It's difficult.

You've got to work at it because the absolute truth is not like that. But if you really put your mind to it, you can dry-ify it. Like, you know, you can take, you can, you can, you know, just like I like to purchase dried fruits to offer to my deities because they keep for a very, very long time.

So I can travel with that, you know. But if they're too dry, then they're not edible. They just become almost like paper, right? You have to reconstitute them with water.

So you're taking this very juicy, like we have dried mangoes, right? Mango is so juicy, you know, it gets all over your face and your clothes. It makes a big mess, right? But you can dry it out. So it is possible to take the descriptions of the Lord and the Lord's devotees and the descriptions of the philosophy of Krishna consciousness, which is very juicy and dripping and dry it out so that it becomes chewy and difficult to assimilate.

That is possible. But generally our writing should be like that. And when the basis of our writing is poetry, then our prose will be also infused with that.

Our prose writing will be infused, although it won't be, you know, technically at a particular cadence. The feel of poetry, the feel of motion and rhythm and ornamentation and beauty will be pervasive. That the writing itself, the topic should not be dry.

The way of approaching the topic should not be dry and the language should not be dry. So this is an amazing point that ultimately we are not just convincing the head. We are ultimately trying to appeal to the heart.

So that's the essence of our tradition. So there could be logic and all those logic and structure has to be there. But we also need to connect, help people enter the world of bhakti.

And that means experience. Yes, it's interesting, you know, in Rupa Goswami giving what is the qualification for Vaidhi Bhakti, bhakti according to the regulative principles. And he gives three levels of qualification because the regulative principles are coming from the Shastra.

So if you're going to practice bhakti out of faith in Shastra, your qualification is how much faith do you have in Shastra? If you have a little bit of faith, then you're not very qualified for taking up bhakti according to Shastra. If you have strong faith, although you can't necessarily convince others, then you have a medium qualification. And if you have strong faith and you can convince others, any argument that comes up, oh, I have a verse for that, I have a verse for that.

Hari Parshad Prabhu is visiting here and he's like that. Any question that anybody asks, he immediately, he had his computer hook up to the monitor and he immediately goes to his computer and within two minutes, he has the corresponding verse to answer that doubt. So if your knowledge of the Shastra is that strong and your faith in the Shastra is that strong, then you have the highest qualification for taking up bhakti based on the regulation of the scriptures.

However, Rupa Goswami says that the only qualification for taking up bhakti is a taste. That's all. So in addition to that, you are more qualified if you know the scriptures and you have faith in the scriptures.

But the only qualification is taste. There's a friend of mine who drives an Uber and he's always playing kirtan in his car. Plus he keeps some books, some Prabhupada's books.

And if anybody says to him spontaneously, oh, I really like that music. What's that music? Then he says to them, do you like to read? And if they say yes, he gives them a book. So he's looking for taste.

Does a person say, I like. So of course, some of the stimulus for having taste is definitely the descriptions of the Shastra and the descriptions of philosophy. And one of the Anubhavas is discussing the Shastra and reaching logical conclusions based on Shastra.

Those are exhibitions of taste. But just convincing somebody intellectually in my experience is useless. If a person has no taste, the intellectual conviction doesn't translate into anything at all.

And if a person has taste, even if their faith is very and their knowledge is very low, they're still qualified to begin. So certainly we want people to have faith and knowledge in the Shastra as a qualification for taking up Bhakti. But we want to teach the philosophy mostly because the philosophy is also sweet and beautiful.

And full of poetry. The philosophy itself is, it's simply beauty and movement. And again, rhythm in a form of logic.

And logic is also like that. If you think about, you know, if you study logic and I've been teaching logic for decades, you know, where you teach mathematics and I never did get that high in mathematics. But those who are mathematicians, like my good friend Mukmini, who's got a PhD in mathematics.

And mathematics is also like that. It's full of rhythms. It's full of patterns.

It's full of beauty. It's full of ornaments. You know, we think of mathematics as something dry, but it's not at all.

And I'm not even just talking about the geometric aspect of mathematics, but just how the numbers work together. It's full of grace and it's full of beauty. So to think, to think, well, am I aiming for the head or the heart? I mean, that's probably useful in trying to organize what we write and what we put together.

But I would say, although it's useful, it has its uses. It's something like saying, this is material and this is spiritual. Sarva Kalmi Dham Brahma.

That in the beginning, one may need to distinguish this is material, this is spiritual. That's useful. It is useful.

However, at a certain point, one can also come to see that everything is spiritual. So this dichotomy between the intelligence and rasa is, again, it's a useful construct in the beginning. But ultimately, that kind of duality is not, is not real.

Okay. Yeah, ultimately, we as human beings can't be separated from head and heart. We are also… And even if you think Sanskrit, the terms for mind and the terms for heart are basically the same.

Yes, that's true. More than Man Vrindavan, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu says many times. And Prabhupada translates that as the heart.

Yes. Yeah, it's true. Actually, this is a whole universe of bhakti and the whole dimension of bhakti in terms of poetics.

Which is usually appealing. And I hope that, that more and more, for me, it's also is a… Many of the things that you said, I have read them in scripture, but I never consciously dwelt on them. It's beautiful to contemplate it that way.

You talk about math. Yeah, there is rhythm. Definitely.

I studied science. So physics, the whole universe has rhythm to it. Even the planets move in their orbits.

So if we consider that Krishna has ultimately fashioned the universe, then he will bring not just, we could say, a coherent order, but also an aesthetic order to it. Yeah. So maybe a couple of concluding questions.

Unless, of course, the discussion you want to take it in particular directions, which I have not addressed. So one is that, is this poetic aspect something we consciously strive for? Because not everybody seems to have the same level of poetic ability. And I don't want to leave our readers with the impression that writing is more difficult.

Writing in bhakti has to be more difficult than what it already seems to be. Because writing itself is hard work, putting, sitting down and organizing my thoughts. And when someone starts thinking that writing, I had to also make my writing poetic.

I had to also bring rasa into my writing. So that might make things seem much more intimidating. So is this something which we, which some people will naturally be blessed with this ability? And of course, there's always, I would say everyone has some extraordinary talent.

So, and some people have rare talents and some people have more commonly distributed talents. So certainly, a beautiful way of putting it. Now that some people are less talented, but some people have talents which are common.

Exactly. But they may not be noticed. Yeah.

Exactly. Just like there are so many people who are very good cooks. I know thousands of people who are very, very good cooks.

But how many people are, you know, Olympic gymnasts? But being talented is a very good cook. Even if there's, you know, a hundred people in every block, it's not less valuable in society. In fact, we might say it's more valuable than being an Olympic gymnast.

Although each of them have their, their value in society. Everybody can write a gratitude doc. And it doesn't necessarily have to be poetic.

You're writing it. It should be poetic in the sense that it is a beautiful expression of love. It doesn't necessarily have to be written in rhyme and meter and with literary ornaments.

But to write something every day. I mean, I have a little app on my phone called Presently, which is as simple as you could possibly have. It just gives you a place to write something every day.

And there's a little inspirational quote or something just to give you a little, a little pat on the head. But everybody can do that. I mean, this takes two or three minutes a day maximum.

Changes your whole quality of life is proven medically to improve your health and very much connects you with Krishna. You know, it's in its business and it also brings your day into a meditative state. You know, just I'm grateful today for the, for the sun, for the water, whatever.

And the more specificity you can have, the better. So you don't, not just, I'm grateful for my, my mother. I'm grateful for my mother.

I'm grateful for, you know, I'm grateful I got to spend time reading Bhagavad Gita with him. I'm grateful I got to take my mother to the store today when she needed it. You know, something that's specific.

So everybody can do that. You don't have to have any particular talent to do that. And everybody can write some, write something every day as what have they realized in Krishna conscious philosophy that day.

And again, it can be, you know, we're talking a minute or two, right? A sentence, two sentences. It doesn't, and you could publish it if you want to and share it if you want to and not if you don't want to, it doesn't really matter. And it should be poetic in the sense that it should be an outpouring of affection and love and appreciation, not necessarily technically, but that's also part of the dance.

Prabhupada says the aim of this Krishna consciousness movement is to join the pleasure dance of the Lord. But he also says in Krishna book in regard to Rasalila, that the whole world is full of Krishna singing and the whole world is full of Krishna's dancing. So when we write something like that, we're actually contributing to that dancing and singing of the Lord.

We're adding our voice to it. And it can be something quite, quite simple. It doesn't have to be complicated.

And again, it doesn't take much time. And doing that changes your whole perspective all day because you're thinking about it. What am I going to write today? One of the most interesting things I did in that regard, it was, it was a Facebook challenge, which I usually ignore, but it was a Facebook challenge of 10 days of writing about something you love, not people or animals.

And then every day challenge somebody else. So every day I'd be thinking, okay, I've got to post something today. This is one of the benefits of writing for others, by the way.

It gives you an impetus to do it. And okay, I've got to write today about what I love. And so I'd be thinking, what do I love? What do I love? I think we've talked about this before.

And yes. And I realized how much by doing that, I was constantly looking for the positive in my life. All day long.

It was always there. It was a running thing. What is it that I love in my life? And it just changed how I was.

My natural joy so much increased. How my life is full of things that I love. Because one can easily see one's life in another way.

And it helps to hone that. You know, if you just say to somebody, just say, well, think about what you're grateful for. Think about how you've realized Krishna or think about, you know, but if I know I've got to put it in writing, if I know at the end of the day or sometime during the day, I've got to write down.

What do I love? What am I grateful for? How have I had some realization of Krishna? Then you're, you know, this is going to sound terrible, but it almost feels like a school assignment, you know, okay, I got to do that. But it's something that's so joyful that you're glad you have to do it. It pushes you to do what you want to.

And it changes everything. You know, on a material level, it can be, I got to do the laundry again too. Wow, I'm so grateful.

I have enough clothes that I can wear some clothes and wash some clothes and have some clothes drying. And I've got enough sets of clothes to have that. How grateful I am.

And it can go to, oh, wow, you know, the water is purifying. Krishna is the purifier. And I'm hanging my clothes outside.

Purifiers, I am the wind. And Krishna is the wind. And he's the light of the sun, drying my clothes.

He's the heat and fire, drying my clothes. You know, it can lead to that. And again, if you know, you've got to write something.

Okay, every day I've got to write something. Then it pushes that. Now, if you're writing like that, at a certain point, you may decide, hey, this is something I'd like to share.

Again, do I want to share it with friends? Do I want to share it with community? Do I want to share it with the world? I think if we start out from the platform of, I should write something to share with the world, it may not be as effective. But anyway, getting back to your original question, do you have to be a master of the craft? No. However, it behooves us to try.

This is one of the 26 qualities of a devotee is daksha. It behooves us to try to develop some expertise in what we are doing. If you're planting tomatoes, my granddaughter's growing a garden.

One of my granddaughters, and she's becoming expert in what kind of soil to use for growing tomatoes. You know, if we're going to cook, should we just throw something together? Or should we develop some expertise? What goes with what? What, you know, don't boil eggplants. Eggplants have to be cooked at a high temperature.

You have to bake them or fry them. You don't boil them. Same with plantains, you know, and then other things, something like carrots.

You can have it raw. You can have it steamed. You can have it baked.

You can have it all different things. So some level of expertise. So anything we work on, we should aim for some level of expertise.

We might not develop enough expertise in writing that we're going to win some kind of award for it or published in the millions of copies. That's beautiful. So actually, if we keep doing something, we will, to some extent, improve at it.

Oh, no, I'm going to interrupt you. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That's not true.

Because you could keep doing it wrongly. Well, most likely what I meant by that. No, oh, no, oh, no.

Let me complete what I'm saying. Okay. If we are doing something and if it is something which we are seeking some kind of meaning and purpose and fulfillment through it, then we will be like, I feel the dhami buddhi yoga and Krishna will guide us to improve it.

Like somebody may not have read anything about journaling, but they start writing down their thoughts and they're not writing them simply to as a ritual, but they're not writing it necessarily so that the whole world will applaud it. So the point I was making is, I fully agree that just automatically doing something will not lead to improving it mechanically. It's not that somebody to journal has to necessarily read a dozen books on journaling.

That's also true, yes. But having some guidance and especially getting some feedback Yes. So having some guidance that can give you feedback.

I mean, just like, you know, you've sent me things that you've written and asked me for feedback. Yes. Right.

And this is… In general, I find that without that writing is… It's like almost we are lost inside our own head. Because, okay, I have written my thoughts, but it's very difficult to be self-critical. At least immediately.

Maybe after a week or a fortnight or a month, if you read something, then you can have a more objective way of looking at it. So I find that immensely helpful. But I would also say that, like some people may just write something and take some feedback and just leave it at that.

In one sense, one has to practice writing. Yes, one has to imbibe the feedback and incorporate that, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. And I have benefited immensely from that.

So when I was saying that, that there is no substitute to practicing. Is it practicing alone will improve? That's not my point. That we may take feedback, we may read books.

But all those, like you said earlier, those all could become excuses for not writing. Because I'm not skilled enough. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

I can't write because I have to read another book about writing. But it's also, you know, and you've had experience with this also as a Back to Godhead editor, that writing is perhaps one of the areas where people resist getting any negative feedback most strongly. You know, writing is so much an expression of oneself that negative feedback is really hard to take.

I remember we had a person whose article we approved for publication in Back to Godhead, but we wanted the author to change three sentences, I believe in the article. So months were going by and the person hadn't resubmitted it. And I finally, I ended up seeing this person in my travels.

And I said to this devotee, why haven't you resubmitted your corrected article? And the devotee said, well, you didn't like it. None of you liked it. I said, we all loved it.

There were three sentences that we wanted to have changed. And the person said, I can't, I can't do it. I can't change my writing.

You change it. So this resistance, or we've had people submit articles for Back to Godhead, and you ask them to change some things, and they just say, oh, nevermind. Just don't even publish it then.

Right? You just forget it. I withdraw it as a submission. I run into that.

People send me their writing. And I usually just say, oh, very, very nice. I don't usually give them any feedback, because I know that most people are highly resistant to getting any honest feedback on your writing.

But if we want to really become expert, that's what's required, to solicit honest feedback, and to honestly solicit honest feedback. So if that happens too, people will say, you know, here's my essay or my poetry of this. What do you think? And I've had experiences, they don't really want to know what I think.

They really want me to say, yes, yes, very good. But anything else that I say is not digested. So if we want to improve, that's the way.

That's the way in everything. You know, to honestly solicit honest feedback, and then to be receptive to that, and to take it on board. So I think that is something, which at least from BTG writing, I learned immensely from that.

And now it's not always possible to have senior devotees give feedback. But I found even our equals, or sometimes even our younger devotees, if we are open, they can give some feedback. And that also helps if you are open to taking it.

And one reason I find that some devotees are very resistant to taking feedback is that it's almost like a one zero thing for them. Either it is good or it's not good. Like even that particular article you mentioned, it's good and you accept it as it is.

Otherwise, just forget everything. We never approach anything else in life like that. Why should we approach writing like that? I think because it's such a manifestation of ourself.

And what I found when I was getting feedback for Back to Godhead articles that I had written, that often the editors wanted me to remove or amend the sentences that I loved the most. The sentence I'd written is like, this sentence is the jewel of the universe eternally. The construction, the language, the concept.

Look at this beautiful sentence. And that would be the first one that the editors would go, this is awful. Then you would just do.

They say, murder your darlings. Yes, you've murdered my babies. But it's often like that.

And if we want to become skilled in the craft, that that is, you know, I mean, sometimes I'll keep an older version of an article to read it so I can hold on to that sentence that was murdered in the published version. But I also found, and this is quite interesting when you work with a good editor, is that, you know, the editor will point out to you, hey, this needs to be fixed and that needs to be fixed. And some of the things you can readily agree to.

And other things you're like, what's wrong with this editor? Why are they commenting like this? Such a situation almost always points to the fact that you weren't communicating clearly. That the editor was responding to what they thought you said instead of what you actually intended to say. And that therefore you need to change your way of communicating.

So as far as improving our craft, you know, honestly soliciting honest feedback. And especially from those more skilled in the craft. And that's true for everything that we do.

And if we want to make nice offerings to Krishna, then that's our responsibility. You know, it's not like, I love you, Krishna. So I can, you know, just give you any old thing.

That's, you know, I'm not gonna just throw some old torn cloth on the deities or some improperly cooked offering or something that's, you know, and Mahaprabhu was so careful. He would have Swarup Damodar review all of the writing before he would read it. And it said that Swarup Damodar was looking for rasa-bhasa.

So I think that this is, this concept is not well understood. When we look at, that's part of the Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu. Rasa again is taste.

It is, it's pleasure. It's what we're living for. Anandamaya Vyasat, we're pleasure-seeking.

And pleasure means rasa, some sort of experience. And this rasa has five parts to it. The basic relationship, what is an impetus for that relationship, the transitory emotions that nourish that relationship, and the voluntary expressions of that relationship and the automatic expressions of that relationship.

When those come together as separate ingredients, they form rasa, just like when you put together the different literary ornaments, you have a piece of writing. Now, some things go together well, and some things don't go together well, right? Like you're not going to mix bitter melon and honey, you know, and you're not going to mix red cabbage and eggplant. Now, certain things just don't mix.

You're not going to put chutney on top of your sweet rice. And if you mix things improperly, your taste either disappears, either there's no taste, there's no pleasure, or your taste becomes a semblance. And a rasa means a semblance.

It means a shadow or a reflection. So if you mix things improperly, you get a shadow or a reflection of taste instead of taste, or you get no taste at all. And what's an improper mix depends on what the predominant mood is.

You know, like laughter and sorrow are an improper mix. You're not going to, you know, you don't start laughing at misfortune. Someone's, you know, laughing at a funeral.

It's the karuna rasa becomes disturbed. So the main idea of feedback is that what we write needs to be full of rasa. And so that means how we mix things, how we explain things, what goes with what should be producing a genuine taste of spiritual life, not the absence of taste and not a shadow of taste or a reflection or a semblance of taste, which is what rasa bhasa means.

So the way you have brought the concept of rasa bhasa from a transcendental level, something which you can easily relate with, that's nice. Yeah, I've seen that sometimes. It's one thing too, when we are reading something and it's like sometimes somebody is not a very good writer, their tone suddenly changes, they use words inappropriately and suddenly from, I mean, it's not exactly rasa bhasa, but something from gentle, suddenly it becomes harsh and one part of it is very open, non-judgmental and suddenly it becomes… That is you are describing rasa bhasa.

Yeah. That's what you're describing. That things, that the different elements of taste or the different types of taste have mixed wrongly or inappropriately, which then causes you to either lose the pleasure in the thing or to get just a semblance of pleasure in the thing, to get just a shadow of pleasure.

So that is exactly what you're describing. And that is the essence of the craft of writing or speaking. But writing, because we're focused on writing, is not even so much the literary ornaments, which are important, but to know how to help people actually develop a taste in the service of the Lord and not something that is distasteful.

I mean, look, we've all been, I'm sure, to classes in the Hare Krishna movement that left us discouraged and diminished our taste rather than nourished us. Isn't it? I mean, we've all had that experience. That we'll hear some kind of preaching or some kind of explanation, and instead of giving us encouragement, it gives us discouragement.

Instead of giving us happiness and Krishna consciousness, it causes us to have doubts. It causes us to have difficulty. So that was some improper mixing, something that was inappropriate that then either destroys or diminishes the experience of relationship with the Lord.

True. So I think this is something which we can, if somebody is not having great poetic sense, this is something which you can easily relate with and you can fix this. That itself will at least not impede the flow of the message and the mood of the message which we are giving.

We won't be at least, the way we are presenting, it won't come in the way. So let's see. Prabhupada said once, how did you attract everyone? Prabhupada says Krishna is at all attractive.

I just presented him. Yes. So in some ways we can say that's our service also.

It's through writing or through poetry or through whatever way we use. Any concluding points you would like to say? Rasul Prabhu, would you like to also comment anything? No, I think it went very well. Thank you.

Madhuri, any concluding points you'd like to share? You mentioned about your books. So if you want to share something about your books, we'll put links to your books also online in the YouTube description. Well, I've done on Amazon, I have two books that I've written myself.

One is The Great Mantra for Mystic Meditation. It's a fairly simple book about fairly simple, fairly short, about how to avoid the 10 offenses in chanting. And it was originally back to God, separate back to Godhood articles.

And then there's the allegorical novel, Essence Seekers. And I would ask, that's also available in Spanish. There we go.

Look at that. All right. Essence Seekers is also, it's won an award.

So Essence Seekers, both of them are available as print in Kindle. Essence Seekers is also available as Audible. And Essence Seekers is available, print English, Kindle English, print Spanish, Kindle Spanish, and English audio.

Oh, okay. So and then. One of the things I noticed about The Great Mantra is you've got very beautiful illustrations in it.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Well, I like to follow in Prabhupada's footsteps of having illustrated books.

So then there's also some books that I've contributed to and produced. There's the illustrated Bhagavad Gita book. That's really become a big hit.

That seems to be one of the best-selling books. So that's a book with many, many contributing authors, although I produced it and I contributed parts of it. And then there's Raghunath Das Goswami's Manishiksha, which I produced that book.

And again, I contributed to it. I wrote a chapter in the beginning and I wrote commentary on each of the verses. So that has 120 black and white illustrations and 12 color pictures, all that were commissioned for that book.

And that's Raghunath Das Goswami's step-by-step guide to attaining spontaneous devotion with the commentary of Bhaktivinoda Thakur and also commentary of contemporary Vaishnavas such as Jayadritya Swami, Bhaktivinoda Gandhara, Satyamanda Maharaj, myself. So that's Sri Ramaswami. So that's it.

It's only 12 verses, but the book is this big with all the illustrations and all of the commentaries. And those are all available on Amazon. That's the life's magnum opus, I would say.

Or maybe something will come up more. So that's available as print in Kindle and somebody did make an audio book, although it's not available on audio platforms, but on my YouTube channel, you can get the audio book of Manishiksha. So somebody did turn that into an audio book.

And then the other books that I produce right now, they're only available from Mantralingua Publishing in the UK, unfortunately. And this is a series of children's books. Actually, I would like to say something about producing books for children before we end, if that's all right.

So that's a series of books to teach how to read English. And there's 42 color books and 41 activity books. And together, it's a complete literacy program at world-class standards.

We work with the Institute of Education in London. We work with the Nelson Thorns PM Publishing, a major publisher of literacy books. So it's very, very systematically done.

Each book is following very, very rigid standards of what constitutes a particular level of difficulty in English reading. So the phonetic construction of the word, the spellings of the word, the lengths of the sentences, the type of punctuation, the size of the font, the type of font, how many sentences per page, the relationship between text and picture, the number of sentences in the story and the concepts of the story, all of these are tightly regulated as to level of difficulty. And what this means is that the children will constantly feel a sense of success.

They won't be presented with anything that's out of sync with what they're able to do. And the stories all being about Krishna, of course, are fun to read because Krishna is fun. So one thing I would like to add about children's books, because when our own children were young, there were not very many children's books about Krishna, and now they're being produced in large quantities, is that often the people producing books for children have not studied leveling of books.

So they just think, well, this is the children's book. And the problem is, if your sentence structure is at one level and your vocabulary is at a different level, it's very unpleasant to read. So the child that can read the higher sentence structure is not going to enjoy the vocabulary level.

And the child that can grasp the vocabulary level will be intimidated by the sentence structure. So there's this mismatch in most of the books I'm seeing that are produced for children. The authors have not taken the time to study how to produce books for people who are at different levels of reading and how to integrate all of those elements.

And the very sad result is that a lot of those books, the children don't read. You know, we buy the book, we spend money on the book, we have the book and the children are not, they're not interested to read it. Because it doesn't correspond to any particular place of where they're at.

Or the use of very strange fonts, very, you know, swirly fonts, which are difficult for children who are learning how to read, to read the letters in those fonts. Putting fonts on a colored background, we see this very commonly. That the fonts, the writing is merged with the illustration in such a way that makes it more difficult to read.

So that all of these, also when you're writing for children, you want to know how to write a good story. So when I met with Beverly Randall, who has written 800 children's books for Nelson Thorne's PM, and she was telling me, make sure it's a real story, make sure that all your stories have a beginning, middle and end, and make sure the children are always the heroes of the story. Don't have the adults be the heroes while the children are the fools.

The children like to see themselves as heroes. Or some other, you know, children's heroes. So these are some things that are certainly, it would be helpful now that people are producing so many children's books.

And if you're producing activity books for children, again, study something about education. Study something about, you know, I've asked many devotees who advertise I'm teaching this or that, and I'll say, what is your pedagogy? And they don't even know what I'm talking about. So when it's going to do like, my what? And so if you're going to produce children's books that have activities for children, then it would be wise to spend some time understanding what are effective and what are ineffective teaching methods.

And again, what are effective and ineffective teaching methods at different levels, so that you're not having a mismatch between the content part of the book and the activity part of the book. Hmm. That's true.

I see this level. It matters for everyone, but for children, it will matter a lot. Because yes, because they haven't mastered.

Yeah, exactly. They haven't mastered all the skills. And therefore, if you're if you're simultaneously giving them things that are far too easy for them, along with things that are far too hard for them.

There's doesn't work. They won't need it. Yeah.

I can sense this sometimes when I'm traveling. Devotee, the congregation asked me to speak to their children, but then there are children from five year old to 20 year old. Very difficult to speak.

We don't want to insult the intelligence of the 20 year old. But at the same time, we don't want to exhaust or overwhelm the five year old. So that's just for one talk for half an hour, 45 minutes, one hour.

But if a whole book is definitely a significant challenge. And it's one of my great sorrows because, you know, for so many years, I wanted there to be more children's books. And now that they're being produced more and more and more, the majority of them, the children don't like.

You know, you buy them and you think, oh, I'm buying a children's book. And the children don't like it. They won't read it.

And then it's very easy to actually guilt or shame them for not wanting to read. Yes, yes. It's also to say today's children don't read books.

They just want to play video games or something like that. But that's not true in one sense that there are there are a lot of books being produced and not just like trashy books, but books people are reading. It's not that they're not reading.

So that's also very true. Well, thank you very much for asking me to speak on this topic. I'm so happy we learned a lot.

If you're OK, I'll just try to quickly summarize. It was very broad. So we discussed the topic of writing as an art and bhakti.

And we started with your experience of calligraphy writing and how that was itself with what you produced with writing itself artistic. And from there, within our movement, we had to squeeze out time to write. And especially then as a teacher, as a teacher and educator, pioneering a school, leading a school, you had you had to write a lot.

So with respect to writing, we discussed primarily or one of the things is what everyone can do is write privately as a journal. You said you talked about how in poetry could also be used for expressing one's heart and through its journaling. Everybody needs some way that they rejuvenate themselves.

Some me time. It could be through walking in nature. It could be through music.

But journaling is a powerful way. And later on, you talked about writing a gratitude journal can help us see how our life is already so rich. Otherwise, it is easy to feel resentful or negative.

And throughout the day, we can be looking at what we are writing. So we don't have to have necessarily poetic skills for writing. But what we express in writing could be a expression of our love, our affection.

And if we want, a devotee is also Daksha. So devotee will want to improve and improvement doesn't come just by simple practice. It comes by practice with guidance and the diligence to incorporate that guidance into one's practice of writing.

And then the point about how philosophy was traditionally also conveyed through poetic means. That's why the two meanings of the word Kavi, philosopher and poet, they are not too distinct meanings. Those two categories overlap in many ways.

And that kind of philosophers are distinct from the dry speculators as Prabhupada calls them. And so our writing, ultimately, the purpose is to help people experience rasa, enter into Krishna's message, Krishna's pastimes, Krishna's presence. So, of course, we're not separating the head and the heart because the person is integrated and what is written can appeal to both.

So then with respect to poetry, although just reading poetry may have gone down, but poetry put to music and song is, sung as song and put to music is immensely popular and it's powerful also. Prabhupada also wanted the traditional songs to be put in local languages in the world. And while we are writing, we could write for the world, but when we write for, in one sense, write to express ourselves, write for fun, then we can actually bring ourselves into the writing more and better.

And then that can reach the world in a more authentic way. So with respect to writing and writing in various genres, there is fiction. Fiction is sometimes seen pejoratively because it's all just false.

But fiction can educate one more about truth and sometimes true facts may not actually take one toward the truth. So it's the content that is important or the content in the objective that is important. So Bhaktivedanta Thakur wrote fiction and then there are others who have written and then you also wrote Essence Seekers and it's a full-length allegory.

And you also discussed about when we are writing, it's important to be able to take feedback because it's so personal. So it's difficult, but if you can take that, that's very helpful in improving. And then while personal writing for ourselves is good, one advantage of writing for others is that if we are, like you say, a 10-day challenge or something like that, then there is some deadline, some extra pressure that makes us write and that forces us to think also.

And with respect to the, especially toward the end, you talked about writing for children. Now the books that, series of books that you have written, they are a landmark in, for educating and bringing Krishna into what could be mainstream education, a resource for mainstream education. So for writing for children, especially a level appropriate is important.

Otherwise, it can be painful for others. They'll just not want to read. So I think that the last point about level appropriate writing is something which also applies for everyone.

But at the same time, that difference is not so much, but for children, it becomes a huge difference. So, of course, you mentioned how the whole universe is filled with poetry, with poetry put to music and song. Ultimately, it's Krishna who is, Krishna in the spiritual world, it's Katha, Gaana, Natyam, but in the material world, there is Krishna's song going on.

And when we try to glorify Krishna through our abilities, then we are participating in Krishna's song, Krishna's dance that's happening in the material world. And some of us, everybody has some special talents, but some of us may have extraordinary talents and some of us may not, may have a lot of new talents. But still the talents are there and we use them to glorify Krishna in our own way.

Of course, there are many other points to discuss, but anything you would like to add to the conclusion? I think that's all perfect. You've got everything. Thank you very much.

Wonderful to have you and look forward to your SOC Thank you. Hare Krishna.