Dear Devotees,

Please accept my blessings. Jaya Srila Prabhupada.

As I mentioned on a recent video darshana with Latin America, I urgently need to simplify my life, so that I can focus on writing. I am doing this, hopefully, not for selfish reasons. Rather I sincerely believe that this service will bring the greatest spiritual benefit to the greatest number of souls, and thus will be most pleasing to Srila Prabhupada.

As you can imagine, email correspondence, telephone calls, etc. take up a significant amount of my time every day and also make it difficult for me to achieve the level of concentration needed to write most effectively. If I were to act selfishly, I would continue to correspond with many devotees and write, as I personally feel the greatest pleasure in the company of Srila Prabhupada’s loyal servants. In fact, limiting my contact with Krishna’s ecstatic devotees is simply an austerity, but it is something that I must do in order to properly serve the Lord’s pure devotee Srila Prabhupada.

I will continue to deal with truly urgent matters. Thus I want to offer my support to devotees who experiencing serious illness, either themselves, or in their families. And of course I want to support devotees who suffer the loss of a loved one. Similarly, I will try to help ISKCON leaders who urgently need my help or advice for matters that truly affect the wellbeing of ISKCON and its devotees. I will also try to help those devotees who are experiencing a genuine spiritual crisis. Apart from these cases, I must reduce the time I spend with email and phone calls.

With confidence in your sincere devotion to Srila Prabhupada’s mission, I ask for your patience and understanding. The devotees are my spiritual family and there is no happiness equal to that of being in the loving association of one’s spiritual family. Still, I have no choice but to do all that is necessary in order to offer Srila Prabhupada this extremely important service.

In cases of emergency, as outlined above, please write to my normal address and the letter will be forwarded to me. It is my profound wish that I can now satisfy Srila Prabhupada, and all of you, his sincere servants, with my service.

I will begin this new policy on January 6, 2010, and continue it until I have finished my service. Thank you again. I pray that Lord Krishna bless you with ecstatic, enthusiastic service at the lotus feet of his pure devotee Srila Prabhupada.

With best wishes,
Hridayananda das Goswami
December 26, 2009