Journey to Enlightenment Part 01

Author(s): Chitrabhanu, Chetana Catherine Florida, Nirmala Hanke, Raksha Penni Helsene
Publisher: Create Space

Page 57

Spring 2002: Interfaith Community
Dear Lighthouse Students and Friends,
Blessings of love and peace to all of you.
Many people are now willing to be open and accept that there are many pathways to the same Enlightened Realization. These pathways are called by many different names, and names are merely labels that help us to understand. However, understanding is understood from one's perceptions based on all previous experiences that one has had to date.
There are people who have had the vision of having "interfaith” communities as a coming together while remaining with one's own perception of truth. I was watching on TV a meeting of people of many faiths. I listened to the leaders of churches, synagogues and temples starting to state their beliefs from their backgrounds, and then others came back with their beliefs. It was not a sharing of beliefs but rather a competition - this caused separation in the meeting rather than a coming together. So how can we expect others to be tolerant when the “leaders" of different faiths take offense at each other's statements?
I personally feel that some of us are headed in the right direction of having an interfaith community. This is what we believe at the Lighthouse Center, this is our goal. One important idea to help us reach our goal is the Jain idea of "Relativity of thinking". What this means is that each of us experiences the world each day through our own perception. Our perceptions come from our experiences and are colored and changed by them every day. Because each one of us is unique and each one of us has our own perceptions, relativity of thinking becomes very important as a way to be tolerant and compassionate.
An example of this came up in class recently. We did an exercise in perception that went like this: I gave a statement to everyone at the same time and asked them what it meant. The statement was: a man walked up to a woman he knew, told her he loved her and then turned away and laughed. Each person was asked to share their perception of what this meant. It turned out there were many different perceptions—one person thought the man laughed because he was shy, someone else thought the man was nervous and insecure, another thought he was playing a practical joke or was just mean and nasty. What is your perception?
Understanding that people have such different perceptions of the same thing is what relativity of thinking is all about. Having this understanding gives us greater tolerance and compassion for each other, especially when we don't agree, when our perceptions differ.
58 - Journey to Enlightenment