The main thing I am pressing is that experience is the teacher of most important things. That gives you no answer, now, and unfortunately that’s where we are. This is true for many rather mundane things also. Maybe therapy won’t help. Maybe golf lessons won’t. Maybe approaching that lovely woman is going to end up breaking my heart or boring me to tears.
Unfortunately and maybe also fortunately, we gotta make our best guesses and see what experience and longer team learning bring us. One can always, take a pause, reevaluate and either drop out or continue.
It’s easier in the presence of others.
That’s certainly a philosophical discussion. But what it means in Buddhism is, again, something experienced, a long way down the line. I’m not judging you here particularly. I hate that we can’t have some simple scoring system. Like we do something right (for us or in general) and we see plus points on a board. We do something no good for us and the points drop. And we get estimates of results, like projections in business when we, say, start meditating for fifteen minutes. Man, I would love that. Then, we’d know. We’d know. I wish.
But here we are in a universe where there are competing experts with competing stories and practices and, well, we are left to our intuition for many decisions and, heck, some good processes can make us feel worse for a while. Think about relationships. Telling one’s spouse or ________friend that we are pissed off about something may very well make things worse for a while. It might be more painful and this might last for a while. But not doing this ends up in relationships that such in a gray way or have explosions and more pain. think of this as the equivalent of meditation or therapy. A good process might make things feel worse for a while, maybe a long while. So, how the heck do we decide.
I think we have to decide by intuition, desire and to some degree our values, in those situations where it may take a long term committment with no guarantees.
So what does your gut feeling tell you about Buddhism?
And you could make a decision based on that and check back in 6 months later.