Addendum: Cultivating living faith; and, more on perfect knowledge

I forgot to put in this quote in my last post. It relates to perfect knowledge, how when you have it, you are perfected and become one with God (see Ether 3). Perfect knowledge comes from engaging with God, because through God and His Spirit you get knowledge and truth (Moroni 10:5). So if you are still here alive on earth and not currently one with God and the divine, your knowledge is not yet perfect. There's still more to learn and there are still ways for you to grow. When you believe you already have perfect and complete knowledge and therefore allow your notion (your snapshot of the table from your vantage point) to block your experiencing God as Himself, you stagnate on your spiritual path. You don't learn or grow. So, spiritual growth, growing faith and understanding, is two-fold: one, you have to make sure that your faith is in the thing itself, not your notion of it; two, you have to actively seek to experience and engage with the thing itself.

Or, as Thay so much more eloquently puts it, in Going Home, pages 62-63:

"Faith is a living thing. It has to grow. The food that helps it to grow is the continued discoveries, the deeper understanding of reality. In Buddhism, faith is nourished by understanding. The practice of looking deeply helps you to understand better. As you understand better, your faith grows.

As understanding and faith are living things, there is something in our understanding and faith that dies in every moment, and there is something in our understanding and faith that is born every moment. In Zen Buddhism, it is expressed in a very drastic way. Master Lin Chi said, ‘Be aware. If you meet the Buddha, kill him.’ I think that’s the strongest way of saying this. If you have a notion of the Buddha [or anything divine], you are caught in it. If you don’t release the notion of the Buddha, there is no way for you to advance on the spiritual path. Kill the Buddha. Kill the notion of the Buddha that you have. We have to grow. Otherwise we will die on our spiritual path.
Understanding is a process. It is a living thing. Never claim that you have understood reality completely. As you continue to live deeply each moment of your daily life, your understanding grows as does your faith." (62-63)