Should we inform a senior devotee if they speak a material fact or story wrong in their class?

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Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.

Summary

When a senior devotee shares an incorrect material fact or story during a spiritual class, deciding whether to correct them can be delicate. Here is a breakdown of how to approach this situation based on context, position, and disposition.

• Evaluate Your Position: If you are responsible for organizing the event and the audience is visibly disturbed by a factual error, it may be your duty to provide feedback to protect the listeners.

• Consider the Audience’s Perspective: For audiences deeply focused on philosophical precision, factual errors can be disruptive; however, for those drawn primarily to cultural or social aspects of bhakti, strict accuracy may matter less.

• Assess Personal Disposition: Notice whether the mistake genuinely threatens the core philosophy or if it simply clashes with your personal preference for factual exactness.

• Factor in Relationships: Take into account your personal rapport with the speaker; only offer feedback if you know from past experience that they are open to receiving it.

• Cross-Check Material Facts: Remember that material facts and stories require independent verification, meaning listeners should not uncritically accept every illustration just because a senior speaker shared it.

• Protect the Spiritual Point: While a speaker’s overarching spiritual message may be true, a weak or counterfactual illustration can give skeptics an excuse to dismiss the entire lesson.

Full Transcription

Question question some senior devotee has quoted some facts wrong in a class should we tell them about which answer generally this kind of decisions are based on you could say position and dispositions dharma and swabhava we say we are in a position of authority say we have organized a program for them and we are looking after the group over there and our audience know that the story is wrong they are disturbed by it then as a service for protecting our audience can tell the speaker this is the feedback from this event now if that’s not the situation then it depends on one’s disposition swabhava some things are more important for some people than other people so if we feel that factual correctness is extremely dangerous in the some people philosophy is extremely important and any mistake in the philosophy is extremely dangerous for others they come into spirituality for cultural reasons or social reasons they like to see the devotional practices they like to spend time with good people for for them the philosophy is not that important such a situation things become more depend on our individual something is important for us and then we find some mistake in it disturbing and if others are not disturbed by it we find it even more disturbing and others are not disturbed so such a situation it may be important for us to hmm correct it there are other situations where that’s not the primary reason why we are practicing bhakti there are so many things that can go wrong sometimes we take darshan of the deities and some element of the lord’s dress may be off sometimes somebody is in the aarti and they might do something off so to err is human and in general if we feel that it is not our position to correct sinner devotees it will also depend on our relationship with them in the past we have known that they are open to feedback then that’s fine if they are not then what we can do is when we are going to quote in a class we can decide whether we can’t just material facts are something which are different from spiritual facts or spiritual points so material facts if they it’s our responsibility to cross check them so that there is no mistake in this so don’t just uncritically accept the story because it is told by what that means in general our process is a process of curiosity curiosity means asking questions the spiritual points may philosophical points may be true but the illustrations given for them if they are not then a chain is only as strong as its weakest link so somebody may just bounce on that in that counterfactual example and that may lead to them dismissing the entire spiritual point so at least we can prepare for ourselves to avoid getting blindsided by having some of the points in our talks being true and wrong thank you