Everything Sonikku just said is spot on, and I agree with 100%. It takes a stronger person to admit when they are not in their element and can use the guidance of someone who does have more experience/ knowledge in that area. It takes an insecure person to believe that they must always be at the head of the pack and have the loudest voice 99.9% of the time.
The only thing in Sonikku's post I would perhaps contend is :
The fools are always certain, while the wisest are always in doubt
I know what your trying to say, but if we take this line at face value I might not absolutely agree with it. I think it's about getting the right balance, personally. Obviously I don't think one should be always certain even when they have no reasonable grounds for being so, but at the same time, I'm not so sure it's the wisest thing to always doubt either. In truth, it is hard to be truly certain of anything, but I think there are certain situations where one must relinquish doubt. Just to give a quick example, I study martial arts and qi gong, and I know some people who have had a lot of love for it, and desperately wanted to progress and advance, but they kept hitting roadblocks because they could not stop their minds from doubting. Doubting themselves, the artform itself and their teacher too. All of these doubts can be useful initially, even vital at times (as they enable you to find the right artform and teacher), but I'm talking about people who have been around the block and have been training for years and years. They get caught in a vicious cycle. They doubt so they don't make progress fast enough, they don't make progress fast enough so they doubt further, they doubt further and they make even slower progress, yet they keep training because they desperately want to progress but they just can't seem let go of the doubts.
Of course, this then begs the question, if you cannot make significant progress while you still hold doubts in your mind, how do you determine when to let go of your critical faculties? Truth be told, this is a very difficult question to answer, and one should be careful, but at a certain point faith is required. Once you've then had a direct experience (and you've analysed this experince carefully and know it to be true), it would be completely foolish to continue to doubt, in my opinion. Of course there are some who say that any personal experience that another cannot verify is nothing more than faith anyway. But I believe that through experience and careful analysis there is a point where one can know something in certainty.
Sorry I'm rambling now and going way off topic, and I'm not sure if this will even make sense to anyone any more. Just to clarify now, I'm talking about internal practices that involve the circulation and gathering of internal energies. I guess a lot of what I wrote won't apply so much to things that can be measured and observed more easily on an external level.
Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2013 9:53 pm
