It did not occur to an unimaginative mind that I could always conquer a competence with my pen, whether I wrote highly paid publicity material for large commercial companies or lowly paid instructional and inspirational material for struggling spiritual seekers. A narrow mentality could not arrive at the understanding that my fortune lay within my head and underneath my pen-nib, not within the ashram of any individual yogi nor underneath the Indian sky. How could anyone with whom my personal intercourse was necessarily shrunken by my nomadic life to the fewest possible words adjudge either my character or my motives? And what reply but contemptuous silence could I make when such a one started a chorus of calumny about my having sat at the feet of Ramana Maharshi meanly and merely to earn a livelihood? For how could an ignorant man know at the time that I carried a standing invitation to become the editor of a journal in the West at a remuneration many times more than my modest earnings from books?
The truth is that I am not and never have been a journalist; I am not and never have been a professional author. Most of my time and much of my energy are pledged, as sacredly and as sincerely as any human being has ever pledged them, to the quest of the Overself and to the communication of the results of this quest for the helping of other seekers. I always felt that the term of life was too short merely to be devoted to earning a livelihood or collecting luxuries. No!--I wrote about these higher things because something higher than my petty self bade me do so, and when it tells me to desist I shall certainly do so and never write about them again. Meanwhile I regard my work to be no less holy than a priest's. Journalists and authors usually think--and quite rightly--of the fees they receive or the royalties they earn as being so much payment for so many words written or for so many copies sold. I however am constitutionally incapable of thinking like them and therefore I know well that I am neither a journalist nor an author. For I am never really alone when writing but every now and then there rises before my mind's eye the vision of some man or woman whose whole life may take a new and nobler course because of a few paragraphs which flow lightly from this old pen of mine, or of some broken creature whose self-destroying hand may be stayed and stayed forever from a suicidal act because of a fresh understanding got from some sentences which trip out of my typewriter. There can be no reasonable recompense for such services. They cannot be properly priced in any of this planet's currencies, so it would be better not to price them at all. Certainly it seems to me that I have nothing to sell and that so long as I listen for and obey the Voice deep within the heart, so long will the world's rewards or the world's sneers be but of secondary importance. And so long as my critics think that I have come into embodiment for the same petty little purposes as they, so long will they utterly fail to understand me. The abyss between us is too wide and too deep for that. It is indeed the abyss between two short words: the impassable chasm between get and give.
-- Notebooks Category 12: Reflections > Chapter 3 : Encounter With Destiny > # 5
