Forgetting the Audience

Writing Sessions at Castlegregory, Ireland, 1993Start slowly, start fastly, offer your obeisances to your spiritual master, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. You just drew his picture with your pencils. He appears carved out of wood, the picture of the murti of the picture of the murti, how many times removed from the actual Swami who came to us? Yet by doing it, you draw close to him. You have to smile at your drawing rendering. It doesn't look like him, it looks like a drawing, like a carved wood rendition of a seafarer, a fisherman kind of thing you could buy in a tourist shop, but in this case it is your Swami and he smiles back to you from the murti form as if amused at your devotion to draw him as yet another way to serve and come close, yet another way to be childishly proud of your own so-called prowess.