Truth wins out

There's a response from Mr. happy to my last post on abuse in Adidam over at the Daism Forum:

I read Broken Yogi's tales of torture and rape. He might as well have told tales about how oneLove and MrHappy are kidnapping unbaptized babies and boiling them and making them into soap. He gives no names, no dates, no location, no nothing. Apparently, he can just say anything he wants with no need to corroborate any of it, because, as he has stated repeatedly, it's too much work to check the facts. And, of course, the Da haters on here lap up whatever he says like parasitic ticks engorged on the virtual blood of their host, Adi Da.

I guess Mr. Happy is not so rationale in his approach as I had hoped. I would be happy to name the names of the people involved, if it weren't for the fact that they don't want their names named. There's a line past which I don't want to go. The experience these people went through was bad enough without being further humiliated in public. Some people out there would know who I was talking about. I talked about the matter with Adidam insiders, even at the highest levels in Adidam, and no one denied that it had happened, but only gave various interpretations or just admitted that they didn't know how to explain this kind of behavior on Adi Da's part, but simply give him the benefit of the doubt that it served some Divinely purifying purpose for the parties involved. I have no judgement on that count, I just try to report what's happened as best I can.

What this comes down to is an issue of credibility, namely my own. Am I a credible reporter of information? People will have to judge that for themselves. I will say that I've been on both sides of the debate, and have tried regardless of my views to be as honest about the facts as I can be. I think I have far more credibility than Mr. Happy has himself, and probably a lot more credibility than the people in Adidam Mr. Happy has talked to. He hasn't named their names either, but if he did I would be glad to discuss these matters with them and Mr. Happy directly, and get down to the truth of the matter. I would only hope that Mr. Happy would be as skeptical and brutal about their credibility problems as he is about me and other critics of Adidam.

If Mr. Happy is looking for objectivity, he should begin practicing it himself. Otherwise how will he be able to judge the facts objectively? Because he has no personal experience of Adidam, he has to accept any information he gets based on the credibility of the source. If he finds that the people in Adidam are more credible than the critics of Adidam, I have to ask why he accepts their account and rejects ours. Why this intensely emotional reaction to criticism of Adi Da? What attachment has he already formed to Adi Da that makes him incapable of simply listening to unauthorized accounts of life in Adidam? No one here is asking that he simply believe these accounts, but it's hardly on the level of just making things up. Or does Mr. Happy honestly believe that I am simply making all this up? What would be my motive for that? Even more so, what would be my motive for becoming a critic of Adidam? I had invested my whole life in Adidam for decades, had become a trusted inner-circle advisor to Adi Da, someone with direct access to him, who could write directly to him at any time about anything, and who could get a response directly from him? Why would I throw all that away for the sake of selling a bunch of lies to people like Mr. Happy? What satisfaction would I possibly gain from that? Why would I turn from being Adi Da's most prolific and passionate defender on the internet to one of his sharpest critics? I don't expect hosanas of respect, but I think I deserve at least as much benefit of the doubt as Mr. Happy accords Carolyn Lee. Mr. Happy probably doesn't know much about me, but he can ask around if he likes. He doesn't have to believe what I say, but I think he should take these accounts a bit more seriously than he does.

I'd be happy to talk with him if he likes. Mr. Happy can email me privately at conradg@gmail.com and carry on from there. Or he can just post a reply in the comments section at the end of this post.

And as for checking the facts, yes, I have checked facts on quite a few of these abuse stories. I've looked into cases in which fact-checking exonerated Adi Da, and I've looked into cases which convicted him. I've got no agenda here other than getting to the truth of things. As for reporting on my fact-checking efforts in detail, that would require breaking confidences of people who trust me. I didn't do it for the purpose of providing evidence for a public trial of Adi Da, but just for my own satisfaction. I know that's not enough for Mr. Happy, and I don't expect it to be. But it's the best I'm interested in doing. When Mr. Happy says that I'm not interested in doing the hard work necessary to corroborate these incidents of abuse, he's not understanding that there's two completely different kinds of work involved. The first, which I've done, involves corroborating these things to my own personal satisfaction. That I have done, and it's not hard for me at all because I was such a trusted person within Adidam at the time and plenty of people were willing to talk to me honestly, though under the guarantee of secrecy. The second, which is far more difficult, is doing the hard work of building a full "caseload" of evidence that can readily pass full scrutiny in the public and by third parties such as Mr. Happy. That kind of work I'm not willing to do, because it truly is a huge task. I'd need massive resources of people, time, and money to make that happen, and it's just not that meaningful to me. It might also provoke a rather hostile response from Adidam itself, which has already adopted a seige mentality towards me. Many people I've known for years in Adidam have to be very secretive in their contacts with me, because I am considered a "heretic" by Adidam officials. You kind of have to wonder about an organization which considers the truth about the facts to actually be their enemy. But that sort of thing doesn't seem to bother Mr. Happy. He continues to find official Adidam sources to be credible. Well, good luck to him. We all make mistakes in believing the wrong people. I certainly did. Eventually, truth wins out.