[KevinMember]

Peter: Thanks for posting “Faith in Mind”. I wasn’t familiar with that poem and I don’t think I would have had the pleasure of reading it but for your contribution. Being relatively new to TMI and the Dharma, I find the input, suggestions and conversations in forums such as this one to be very helpful in focusing my practice and bringing both efficiency and richness to my dharma study.

Regarding the Thervadan emphasis on wholesome and unwholesome, right and wrong, etc as a contradiction to “Faith in Mind”, I wonder if another way to look at it might be that the more one is imbued with Right View, Right Speech, etc, and thus one is progressively more deeply imbued with wholesomeness, then perhaps one will become more progressively imbued with the pure essence of the poem, i.e. one will be better able to transcend an intellectual understanding/appreciation of the poem and to actually realize/experience of the essence of the poem on the cushion and in daily life.

I’ve recently been engaged in my first sincere study of the 4 Noble Truths and the 8 Fold Noble Path, and I have to admit that I am beginning to really see/appreciate how beneficial a deep acceptance and understanding of these teachings can be to my practice. For me, before Dharma, thought and analysis was my primary mindspace, so I’m only now really learning/realizing for the first time that there is really a whole new world beyond just intellectually knowing something (like a sutra/poem etc). In other words, I’m only just beginning to sense and discover the discernment that Salina and David S are talking about. So far it’s pretty freakin exciting.

What I love about poems like this, now that I’m practicing, is starting to see/feel that poems like this, that once seemed merely cool paradoxical tidbits, are are windows to an actual, deeper truth of life itself.

[Author]

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