Harimedia Forum

Dear Hari,

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

Oh my! I cannot bring clarity to a discussion of how to best translate "good enough" into Russian! But I quite appreciate the effort being made to make sense of the term. One of the most disturbing elements of inter-personal communication is how we understand what another person says. Aside from the general difficulty we all have to mean the same thing when we speak, even when we agree we do so from our own unique perspective. We sometimes become confused when we discover later on that we did not actually agree! We all see things from our own point of view and considering quantum mechanics, that point of view must always, by definition, be unique. All agreement is to some extent a compromise. I am not referring to the agreement that 1 + 1 = 2 on paper, I am referring to interpersonal communication.

To be "good" is indeterminate. How good do you have to be to be good? How much good makes you good? When you mix good and bad, what is the threshold ratio that places you within the good category? What is good today is bad tomorrow. Times change, people change, everything evolves for better or worse. We have notions of what is good or bad from religions but these ideals also change over time because they are absorbed into the context of modern life. The word good does not represent at all what I mean by "good enough." The word good represents an ideal that is modified by the expectations of family, teachers, government, sport coaches, or friends who place demands and standards upon us. When we are what is expected of us, we are good, when we do not act as expected, we are not so good. "Good" is a changeable ideal placed upon us. To be kind, loving and so on, surely is good and always a desired quality, but it has little to do with being good enough.

To be good enough means you are fine as you are. Who you are does not change in different social, political, familial or educational situations. You are who you are and that is ok. You are fundamentally good enough as a person, as spirit, as essence. You do not need to prove yourself by jumping through fiery hoops until some judge stamps approval. We engage in proving ourselves because we feel that we are somehow, somewhere, fundamentally wrong, and that we have acted, thought or felt improperly. Ultimately, we feel we acted in ways that disappointed God, disgusted God, or challenged the position of God by daring to desire something we were not supposed to. This feeling causes us to constantly strive to prove our worth, value, and essence by cleansing away all this bad stuff so that we can present ourselves before the highest judge who will proclaim that we are now worthy to enter the kingdom of God.

We do not need to prove anything, do anything, or please anyone. We simply need to be what we are. We are pure spirit, pure essence, that is the same energy as the divine God, as all spirit. We are already, by definition, good enough, for we are fundamentally the same energy as God, the same quality, if you require to use a word that does not really say as much as some think it does . 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.

Do I therefore think that we are good? Depends on the criteria you bring into the discussion. Sure, we have problems, act strangely sometimes, hurt people, hurt ourselves, and cause difficulty to other people in a wide variety of ways. Should we change this behavior? Certainly. Do we have to remain in this realm of physicality to punish ourselves for not being good enough to return to God? Absolutely not.

We are unconditionally worthy under any and all circumstances. When we change our deepest conception of ourselves, our lives transform and our evolution blossoms.

Wow! That is so cool!!! God, please make me to realise this fully!

Thank you!

By the way, I doubt that most people I know would know what smtp. or smb. means. We do not abbreviate something or somebody like that. We do not abbreviate it at all!

Oh, sorry! 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