We’ve been watching a lot of Mister Rogers recently, because Himself may soon be producing a children’s show himself, and I firmly believe that if there such a thing as a Bodhisattva (a soul that has such love for people that instead of achieving Nirvana itself it chooses to stay in the world so as to help others to enlightenment) or a saint (a soul so assured to be in heaven that you can pray to that person and ask for intercession) then it’s Fred Rogers. There are times watching him speak that I think, “this must have been what it must be like to be a bhikku or an apostle and sit around and watch Jesus or Buddha talk”. He is completely unlike any person I have ever seen or heard of in so many respects; so wise, so thoughtful, and so much his own person.
So: who in your lifetime do you feel that if there is such a mystical person, this person is it? It can be somebody we all know or somebody only you yourself have met.
IIRC, bodhisattvas often adopt the guise of the soul they are trying to help. So if it is a bum, one would expect the bohdisattva to look and act like a bum. I guess it is assumed that they would have some air of peace or centeredness about them (whatever one might imagine those things to mean), but I don’t think it is something you could count on for the purposes of identification.
Anyway, assuming that someone like that would be remarkable in some other worldly way, then no.
While I don’t believe in these things either, perhaps it might be more germane to the thread to post examples of people you believe have qualities similar to the definition listed in the OP.
For example, my list would include my friend John R, for being perhaps the most Christ-like person I know (in the gentle-yet-lionish groovy nonjudgmental awesome sense), and actually I consider my dad to be somewhat saint-like, for his huge and childish-in-a-good-way jovial heart.
I mean, seriously - I don’t believe in them either, the question is “who do you know in person or by reputation who is so special and good and wise that you feel they’re a different sort of person”?
When my cousin was pregnant with her first child, her doctor told her to bring something to watch or listen to during her labor that she found relaxing. She chose Bob Ross. I thought, damn, that’s when you know you’re soothing!
Based on his writing and what he spent his life doing, I’d have to agree with you.
I don’t subscribe to any particular dogma which purports to identify saints or arhats or whatevers. I just know the more I learn about Fred Rogers the more I admire the way he lived a life full of love.
Plenty of folks, really. I believe that the significant majority of people, possibly up to all of them, go to Heaven when they die. But if I have to single out someone specifically, it’d have to be my grandfather. He was the father of eleven, and raised them all to be good people. By the time he died, he had something like 90 descendants, and made it a point to know all of them personally. He always managed to see the good in everyone, and I never once saw him lose his temper, and hardly ever had anything bad at all to say about anyone.
Well, so did I. Sorry, but he struck me as amazingly smarmy, and it would really not surprise me if someone unearthed some sort of evidence he was a pedophile.
The people that I know that interact best with children of all ages talk to them as if they were normal people. Not slowing stuff down, and dumbing stuff down.
I have a couple of friends whom I feel this way about.
And, this may draw some serious flak from the right wing, but – Pete Seeger. (Yes, I know he supported Stalin for a long time. He was wrong, and he’s apologized in print.)
I sort of wonder about Jane Goodall. She has the same calm, placid, self-assured manner of Fred Rogers and Bob Ross, and she has certainly done a lot of good in the world.
What makes me unsure is that, like Tasha Tudor who was also an amazing placid self-assured woman, she seems to have raised a somewhat disturbed child. Grub Goodall was obviously traumatized by the chimps. Should a bodhissatva/saint have put the good of her child first, or not? I can’t decide.
