Thank you again and again for your lectures records! In these challenging times they give peace and shelter to my lost soul, and your miraculous meditations when practiced awaken and activate portals of divine energy growing in its presence inside as quite vivid and blissful feelings and sensations which contunue to live and interact if you let them so..
While discussing with Drpta our understanding of the ‘being good enough’ concept and trying to understand his struggle with ‘being good’, I realized that possibly it is also a matter of the nuances of translation. If we translate ‘good enough’ literally then it makes ‘dostatochno horoshiy’. Now if we compare English adjective ‘good’ it seems to be much wider than the Russian analog of it ‘horoshiy’. ‘Good’ seems to have a broader and more sublime facets to it – take for example its derivative Goodness (like ‘the mode of Goodness’ or when you exclaim ‘Oh, my Goodness!’). Russian adjective ‘horoshiy’ doesn’t carry any sublime connotation with it and rather has quite average meaning like in ‘to be a good boy’ or to have ‘Good’ mark in the school which is one step down from the ‘excellent’.
On the other hand there is adjective ‘dostoyniy’ in Russian which usually is translated to English as ‘worthy’. By the way, Dharmabhavana is very much into this word and the notion it carries. He explains that ‘dostoyniy’ means that which is ‘do’ (before) ‘stoimosti’ (cost or value) – in other words that which is before cost or measurable value, or that unconditional worthiness which is primary and all other virtues are secondary value. Or, perhaps, that value or worthiness which is always there and you cannot measure it. It has very sublime meaning and is used in such phrases like ‘to be worthy of one’s fathers’ and so forth. In Russian from the adjective ‘dostoyniy’ there is derivative noun ‘dostoinstvo’ (dignity, worthiness, integrity). It is also used in a narrow meaning like ‘value of a coin’, but in general in relation to a person it means a very sublime quality which one already has as a human from birth and which folk’s wisdom in many sayings strongly warns one not to forget or not to 'lose', and if you 'lose' it - it is as catastrophic as to 'lose one's soul'.
Hence, I wonder, if it is better instead of translating ‘good enough’ as ‘dostatochno horoshiy’ may be better we should translate it as ‘dostoiniy’ and then it will have this facet of ‘being worthy’ or rather ‘being unconditionally worthy’ and definitely removes all possible resistance to the word ‘good’ because every mentally healthy human wants to be unconditionally worthy of everything but not everybody wants to be just a ‘good boy’ or a ‘good girl’? ’Good’ (at least in Russian) seems to be something more behavioral or a value which is imposed or evaluated by the judgment of others; whereas ‘worthy’ (again as ‘dostoiniy’ in Russian) can be more unconditional, or on the basis of some natural original properties, or of the essence of something. Is it so that in English it is vice versa and ‘good’ sounds more unconditional and ‘worthy’ is more evaluated?
Funny that in Lingvo dictionary we found only one meaning of 'good enough' as a phrase, meening 'be so kind' or 'be so corteous' when you ask somebody a favour and you say 'Be good enough to do smth...' But that is of course out of the context and is not relevant here..
Please share your comments and bring some clarity here…
Sincerely yours,
maha
. Because we are always that essence, we are always good enough. We cannot be anything less. Thinking that we are somehow less is an illusion.
God, please make me to realise this fully!
I thought it to be so obvious and now I understand that perhaps you can meet such abbreviations ONLY in dictionaries and ONLY in English-Russian dictionaries 