Back To Prabhupada, Issue 77, 2023
Welcome to Issue 77 of Back To Prabhupada (BTP).
1) In a lecture given to his disciples in Budapest on 16/7/23, GBC voted-in guru HH Sivarama Swami ("SRS") gave some advice, which should be heeded by everyone in ISKCON (all quotes in the shaded boxes are from this lecture, and emphases below and for the rest of this issue are added). He stated:
"Don't accept everything that you hear. Don't believe what I said. Check it with what Prabhupada said, check it with sastra."
Thus, he is telling even his own disciples to not believe what he is saying, but to double-check it. SRS will thus be pleased to know that on the next two pages of this issue (here and here), we have not believed SRS, but checked whether what he has said in this lecture is true. And the result is that SRS has been found to not be speaking the truth! And BTP allows the readers to also "check" this for themselves.
2) SRS also states in a similar vein:
"Don't just be like, you know, little timid lambs and anything you hear from, I don't know, an older devotee, a sannyasi, a GBC, is something that's automatically the absolute truth. It may be, it may not be."
Hence, SRS is saying not only should we not trust him, but we should not be "timid" and trust any ISKCON leader. Thus, SRS will no doubt be pleased that in the rest of this issue, we have not believed any ISKCON leader, but fact-checked them, and again the result is that they have also been found to not be speaking the truth! And again, BTP readers can also check all this for themselves.
3) However, SRS does not just stop there. He also issues a call to arms against all of ISKCON's leaders, to actively challenge and correct them based on Srila Prabhupada's teachings regardless of one's standing in ISKCON:
"if you're following Srila Prabhupada then it is your duty and when you see something from anyone that's not right, then you should correct it. It doesn't matter if they're this big and you're this small, stand beside the truth [...] Maybe you make a mistake but at least you act according to your conviction. [...] That's our business."
Between the three statements we have quoted from SRS, he states that no ISKCON leaders should be believed, but checked, challenged and corrected – thus describing, in toto, the mission of the IRM! We are happy that SRS has finally "realised" that our mission is correct. We have been fact-checking, challenging and correcting ISKCON's leaders for 30 years now. SRS states it does not even matter if you are wrong – not to speak of the IRM who are right! For, objectively speaking, it can be documented that:
a) We have published many hundreds of papers, magazines, books and articles doing such a mass fact-check of what ISKCON's leaders claim, by checking their statements against the teachings of Srila Prabhupada.
b) No one to date has pointed out even a single instance of our fact-checking being incorrect.
c) There is no one else that even comes close to us in doing such fact-checking.
4) Consequently, given these facts, if SRS believes what he said, then he should personally encourage BTP to be distributed widely in ISKCON so that ISKCON devotees can fact-check the leaders in ISKCON. However, the reverse has actually been the case. As we documented in BTP 21 in the article "Desperate Cult Tactics Used Against the IRM", SRS launched a huge campaign to stop anyone even reading BTP, and then lied about its contents. Lies, which, of course, SRS made sure no one would be able to detect since he forbade everyone to actually read what we state!
5) And it is not just SRS. We have documented that ISKCON in general has "cancelled" and "deplatformed" our fact-checked truth about ISKCON's leaders from being read. Hence, despite what is claimed, in practice the GBC voted-in gurus' disciples will struggle to know if they are being told the truth by their leaders, because they are discouraged from using the one resource – the IRM – that exists specifically to exhaustively fact-check such statements.
Thank you and Hare Krsna.
In Srila Prabhupada's service,
Krishnakant
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