Letter to: Satsvarupa -- Los Angeles 16 June, 1972
You mention you like to speak now very often, but the first business should
be to preach to the devotees. It is better to maintain a devotee than to try
to convince others to become devotees. It is the duty of the GBC to maintain
the devotees, keep them in the highest standard of Krishna Consciousness,
and give them all good instruction, and let them go out and preach for
making more devotees. Your first job should be to make sure that every one
of the devotees in your zone of management is reading regularly our
literatures and discussing the subject matter seriously from different
angles of seeing, and that they are somehow or other absorbing the knowledge
of Krishna Consciousness philosophy. If they are fully educated in our
philosophy and if they can get all of the knowledge and study it from every
viewpoint, then very easily they will perform tapasya or renunciation and
that will be their advancement in Krishna Consciousness. So first thing is
to instruct all of your temple presidents and the other devotees to read
daily, just as we have done in our morning class in Los Angeles. You may
remember that we were reading one sloka each morning in Sanskrit and
reciting it altogether and then discussing it thoroughly by seeing different
new things. So you introduce this system and train the devotees first. Don't
be too much concerned for the time being with nondevotees, now we must
fix-up what devotees we have got in the knowledge of Krishna Consciousness,
then we will succeed. What good are many, many devotees if none of them are
knowledgeable?
