Srila Bhaktisiddhanta On Serving The Truth

Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura:

“A chanter of the Kirtan of Hari is necessarily the uncompromising enemy of wordliness and hypocrisy. As chanter of the Kirtan of Hari, it is the constant function to dispell all misconceptions by the preaching of the truth in the most unambiguous form without any respect of person, place or time. That form is to be adopted which is least likely to be misunderstood. It is his bounden duty to oppose clearly and frankly any person who tries to deceive and harm himself and other people by misrepresenting the Truth due to malice or bona fide misunderstanding.

“This will be possible if the chanter of Kirtan is always prepared to submit to be trodden by thoughtless people if any discomfort to himself will enable him to do good to his persecutors by chanting the Truth in the most unambiguous manner. If he is unwilling or afraid of considerations of self-respect or personal discomfort to chant the Kirtan under all circumstances he is unfit to be a preacher of the Absolute Truth. Humility implies perfect submission to the Truth and no sympathy for untruth. A person who entertains any partiality for untruth is unfit to chant the kirtan of Hari. Any clinging to untruth is opposed to the principle of humility born of absolute submission to the truth. 

“Those who serve the Truth at all time, by means of all their faculties, and have no hankering for the trivialities of this world, are always necessarily free from malice born of competing worldliness and are, therefore, fit to admonish those who are actively engaged in harming themselves and others by the method of opposing or misrepresenting the Truth in order to attain rewards of such policy in the shape of a perpetuation of the state of misery and ignorance. The method which is employed by the servant of the good preceptor for preventing such misrepresentation of the truth is a part and parcel of the truth itself.

“It may not always be pleasing to the diseased susceptibilities of deluded minds and may even be denounced by them as a malicious act with which they are only too familiar, but the words of truth from the lips of a loyal and humble servant of Hari possess such beneficent power that all effort to suppress or obstruct them only serves to vindicate to impartial minds the necessity of complete submission to the Absolute Truth as the only cure of the disease of wordliness. Humility that is employed in the unambiguous service of the Truth is necessarily and qualitatively different from its perverted prototype which is practised by the cunning people of this world for gaining their worldly ends. The professors of pseudo-humility have reason to be afraid of the preachings of the servants of Hari — one of whose duties is to expose the enormous possibility of mischief that is possessed by the forms of so-called spiritual conduct — when they are taken to task for serving the untruth.”