After Stream Entry -- Now What?
12 years 2 months ago #13595
by Laurel Carrington
Replied by Laurel Carrington on topic After Stream Entry -- Now What?
Late to the party, but reciprocally tickled to see my name in print. 
It seems to me that whatever we call "it" there seems to be some agreement that there's still stuff to do afterward. By this I don't mean to suggest that it doesn't matter how we use terminology. But one's relation to holy scripture is always dicey when there are millennia, and a period of oral transmission between source and redaction, separating us from it, not to mention language barriers. I settle for saying that we shall never know precisely what went down all those years ago. But I also say that language is conventional, and the ways people use it define and are defined by communities. We will never break out of that hermeneutic circle as long as we are moving our mouths, figuratively speaking. So when someone says, stream entry means such-and-so in this community, all that means is that this is how we do things here. Arguments about essential meanings are pointless. People choose to belong to a community when they find that that group's way of doing things makes sense. And groups and their members or leaders can freely offer the strongest rationales for their approach that they can, to make the group attractive to those on the margins or outside. I'm not suggesting that everyone's opinion is equally valid, but there's ultimately no referee in the human family who can decide for everyone, certainly not in cases like the definition of awakening and/or stream entry.
It seems to me that whatever we call "it" there seems to be some agreement that there's still stuff to do afterward. By this I don't mean to suggest that it doesn't matter how we use terminology. But one's relation to holy scripture is always dicey when there are millennia, and a period of oral transmission between source and redaction, separating us from it, not to mention language barriers. I settle for saying that we shall never know precisely what went down all those years ago. But I also say that language is conventional, and the ways people use it define and are defined by communities. We will never break out of that hermeneutic circle as long as we are moving our mouths, figuratively speaking. So when someone says, stream entry means such-and-so in this community, all that means is that this is how we do things here. Arguments about essential meanings are pointless. People choose to belong to a community when they find that that group's way of doing things makes sense. And groups and their members or leaders can freely offer the strongest rationales for their approach that they can, to make the group attractive to those on the margins or outside. I'm not suggesting that everyone's opinion is equally valid, but there's ultimately no referee in the human family who can decide for everyone, certainly not in cases like the definition of awakening and/or stream entry.