It’s well documented that Prabhupada wanted all his disciples and followers to write regularly. This includes both men and women. Disciples of both genders were encouraged to write regularly about Krsna Consciousness and try to publish these articles not only in the Back to Godhead magazine and internal publications of our movement but also in newspapers and other media. When we take into the current context this obviously includes the internet and social media.
Of course, the problem when devotees start to write is that often the false ego grows a little and we start to fight. The ones who were around during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s can surely remember extremely long debates and battles of quotes going on on PAMHO, Dandavats, and other lists and forums. Such discussions created lots of disagreements, splits, and issues that remain unresolved. As a result, many of the devotees who went through it started recommending devotees to stop writing about any potentially polemic topics (which means basically anything) and just keep their heads down to avoid problems. This is an understandable reaction to past problems, but it’s not a viable long-term solution. If we stop using our brains for fear of hurting the sensibilities of others, our movement will not have much of a future.
This brings us back to the initial point. Prabhupada wanted us to not just practice Krsna Consciousness for ourselves, but learn to explain it to others. Yes, we should write and we should debate, Prabhupada expected this from us, we just need to learn from past mistakes and learn to do it in a respectful and civilized way, that’s all.
Learning how to explain and teach Krsna Consciousness is in fact an important stage of our spiritual development, being one of the main elements of the progression from the Kanista-adhikari level to the Madhyama-adikari level. A Kanista has some faint faith in Krsna Consciousness and is able to practice the basic principles, but the lack of proper philosophical understanding makes his faith very unstable and pliable. When he or she starts teaching others, he is forced to start seriously studying the philosophy of Krsna Consciousness, learn how to explain it (we can’t say we know something until we can explain it in simple words), and learn how to uphold it against opposite ideas. In other words, when one starts teaching and debating, one is forced to develop a more systematized view and understanding of the philosophy, instead of the mental kichiri of the neophyte, who hears many classes and reads many books but doesn’t really understand much of it.
Expectedly or unexpectedly, writing is an important part of it. Writing forces us to develop structured thinking, which is essential for anyone wishing to deeply understand the philosophy of Krsna Consciousness. One may prefer to not publish it; it’s quite fine to just write for oneself in a diary or something, but writing it is quite important for our spiritual development.
To a certain extent, public speaking also helps us to develop structured thinking, but it is much less effective than writing. The difference is that when we speak there is a combination of words and emotions. We can practically see that many successful public speakers are actually not very good at keeping a logical flow of ideas, but they still appeal to their audiences due to the emotional load they put into their speeches. When we write, however, we can’t rely on emotions, and thus this forces us to develop logical and structured thinking more directly.
Becoming a good writer therefore is more or less like learning a foreign language. It forces us to develop many new mental structures, essentially rewiring our brains in a new way. It’s not a very quick and easy process, it demands lots of dedication and time, but it’s worth it since it is important for our spiritual development. It also brings us lots of blessings from Srila Prabhupada and our previous acaryas.
There are a few exercises we can do at the beginning. One is to just take an image and try to describe it with the most details we can come up with. We may start with obvious things, such as what people are doing, how they look, and how they are dressed, and then progress into more subjective aspects, such as what they are feeling, what they are thinking or planning to do, what they were doing before and so on. There is no limit to the amount of detail we can put there, we may develop a whole story based on a picture or a set of pictures.
Another exercise is to take any story we know well and try to describe it in our own words. This is a little harder because instead of describing an image we are seeing, we have to create a mental image of the story we are telling and then describe it. This exercise forces us to convert the different parts and details of the story we know into a mental image that can be described.
At a higher level, one may be able to convert not only stories but also ideas and logic into mental images, which can then be described. This is one of the secrets of people who can organize large volumes of information and explain it in a structured way.
The point is that our intelligence can deal only with very limited amounts of information at a time. We can normally deal with only three or four pieces of information simultaneously. That’s how limited our working memory is. On the other hand, we have the long-term memory, that can store large amounts of information. The only way to deal with large amounts of information (like needed when we try to harmonize many different philosophical points or explain things taking into consideration many different points of view) is to use the long-term memory to create a mental image of what we are talking about, and then proceed in trying to explain it. We can see that many great speakers often close their eyes and think for a few moments before starting to answer a question or explain a point. What they are doing at this moment is exactly to create this mental image of what they are going to explain. It may sound very complicated, but it becomes a quite natural process when we start practicing it. One may start with the images and stories and later progress to more complicated things.
Interestingly enough, this process of describing a mental image is closer to the way pure devotees compose transcendental literature. Different from us, who write mainly relying on information we learned, pure devotees on the level of Vyasadeva, Sukadeva Goswami, or Srila Prabhupada can directly see Krsna’s pastimes and other spiritual truths, and thus they can directly describe what they are seeing. That’s why anything such pure devotees describe is considered perfect since it’s the fruit of direct spiritual perception. A blind person trying to describe an object based on what he previously heard will never be able to describe it with the same precision and detail as a person who can directly see it.
We are of course not at this level, but being able to mentally see what we are explaining may be a step on this ladder. When this ability is combined with deep spiritual realization, spiritual purity, deep meditation on Krsna, and direct blessings from superiors, we may eventually be able to directly see the spiritual reality.