Use your common sense

Vidya Dasi: I went against the instructions. The GBC said no one should write to Prabhupada, because they didn’t want to bother him. He is busy writing the books. So don’t write to Prabhupada. If you have a question, you go to your temple authority. But I went against all that instructions because I was taking care of tulasi. And I had all these questions that I didn’t know how to get the answers. So I wrote a long letter, quite a long letter to Prabhupada with about twenty questions.

And he answered all those questions, one by one by one and sent me. He didn’t send me the questions and the answers. He just sent me the number and the answers, the number and the answers, the number and the answers. And at one point, one of the answers that he gave was, let me think if I can remember exactly. He wrote and he said, "Use your intelligence." No, I guess, it was, "Common sense," "Use your common sense, and if you have none, ask someone else." And he didn’t answer that question. That one he put was the answer. But then, anyway, so I had that instruction.

He very meticulously answered each question, even though he thought a lot of them were foolish ones. Because we just wanted to do everything so perfectly for him; I always, it was just almost like a madness. You just felt in your heart sometimes, I am sure you felt as well. I wanted to do the service, and do it so correctly, that we were fanatics.