On 4/12/2014 5:12 AM, [email protected] wrote:
"If you had the faith of a mustard seed, you could move mountains."
>
There is an element of faith in the enlightenment tradition - we have to
have faith that the goal of enlightenment is attainable.
This is because the notion of "enlightenment" is not given in common
sense; that is, we aren't born with an innate sense that there is a
additional enlightened state of consciousness . We learn about the
enlightened state from verbal testimony or by reading about it in the
scriptures. The notion of an enlightened state is not something that
most people know about. We know about the enlightenment tradition from
our teachers - we have to take it on faith that such a state exists,
until we experience it for ourselves.
However, faith alone will not bring the experience of enlightenment
itself - for that you need a yoga, a means. The idea is that if one
person on the planet can become enlightened, so can others - that's why
they call it a tradition. Buddha was the first historical yogin in India.
"A man is the measure of a man."
shraddhaa is translated as "Faith" which can mean trust, or belief
without proof. The Hebrew word translated as "faith" means something
along the lines of "strong [in God]" and the Greed word means
something like "intuitive knowledge."
"Grok" in the original sense of the Martian word for "drink" seems to
contain a bit of the same feel.
In the context of the siddhis, how about "absolute stability" of samadhi?
The placebo effect might be related to that, in the same way that
mind-wandering is related to pure consciousness.
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