It has been helpful for me to learn that even *becoming an arahant doesn’t operate on the level of the personality ([[|Bodhi]], p. 16), because meeting purported arahants whose behaviour was uninspiring to say the least, would sometimes leave me doubting the sangha and the dhamma: If these are the results, I’m not interested.
There are numerous examples of apparently enlightened individuals who behave poorly, even unethically, and who are even unlikeable because their personalities were not impacted by their awakening, and this raises a separate question for me, which is whether Buddhism is as holistic as I thought or as comprehensive as I might want it to be, or whether the work of developing the heart-mind with Buddhist practice needs to be complemented by modern/Western work on developing wholeness as well as wholesomeness in their personality.
This is relevant to faith because the fact he didn’t teach psychotherapy doesn’t undermine/misrepresent the efficacy of the dhamma and just means it is worthwhile complementing one’s dhamma practice with things like shadow work.
Although one may become more compassionate, gentle, etc. because of the training, it is the training that causes this not the awakening itself, and an arahant may not necessarily iron out all the habits we may see as character flaws, like gruffness or aloofness or low emotional intelligence/awareness. This doesn’t mean the dhamma isn’t working, just that the dhamma operates on a level other than the personality.
Arguing against the view that we can discount cosmological facets such like rebirth as “religious trappings of an ancient culture utterly inappropriate for the Dhamma of our technological age”, Bhikkhu Bodhi writes in his short piece “Dhamma Without Rebirth” that when we
downplay the doctrine of rebirth and explain the entire import of the Dhamma as the amelioration of mental suffering through enhanced self-awareness [we] deprive the Dhamma of those wider perspectives from which it derives its full breadth and profundity. By doing so one seriously risks reducing it in the end to little more than a sophisticated ancient system of humanistic psychotherapy. panoramic-persepective