this is exactly one of the points some of us are making.
it may sound idealistic but sharing some questions and ideas
through some of these debates may be helpful for some fellow
practitioners? perhaps some challenging pointers posed by fellow
Buddhists might trigger us to change our usual perspectives?
Efforts encouraging others along their own
inimitable spiritual path may serve to deepen personal faith(s),
qualifying and quantifying, garnering and discarding their own
discoveries, in their own way, in their own time. All such
affinities along all such spiritual paths should be undertaken
freely, absent deliberate repudiation. They should be studied and
practiced with all seriousness and fervor, like someone digging a
well that perseveres until they actually find water. While keeping
a tolerant, open and compassionate mind, it is important that
people dedicate themselves to the path they have chosen, as it
would be pointless for someone to half-finish a dozen wells without
ever reaching the water they are looking for.
Spiritual
practice is based on experiential exploration and discovery that
has to be pushed just as far into the inner world as science pushes
its explorations into the outer world. That experience is always
fresh, and it is ceaselessly renewed. It also brings along with it
no shortage of obstacles and happenings of all sorts. It is not at
all a matter of using ready-made formulae but of experiencing the
teachings in the present moment, knowing how to use life’s good and
bad circumstances, dealing with all the thoughts of all kinds that
arise in the mind, and understanding for oneself the chain
reactions they cause and how to set oneself free from the process.
True spiritual discovery is to know how to use every instant in
life for the goal one’s set oneself.
For relationships with others not to be
mainly motivated by selfishness, which only creates friction and
disagreement, each person has to give meaning to their life and
attain a degree of inner development. Every instant of the process
of spiritual transformation has to be accompanied by the idea that
the qualities one’s trying to develop will help meet others’ needs
better.
Perhaps it is along this way that we may
present the wisdoms of personal successes and failures absent
favor. Perhaps it is along this way that we may offer such
experiences to others, not as Buddhists or Christians or Muslims,
but as one human being to another. Perhaps it is along this way
where we may find that we are one yet not the same, for within the
limitless possibilities of perception countless living things have
as many different worlds in which they exist. Perhaps it is along
this way, where it may be best not to look upon oneself as the wise
or good or as the purveyor of truth, but rather to always seek to
understand wisdom, goodness and truth so that one may learn to
recognize and honor them everywhere, within everyone and
everything.