04.40 The liberating power of doubting our doubts – In some sports like judo, players use their opponents’ strength against them. When we are assaulted by doubts, we too can use a similar strategy. Let’s see how. 

Doubt makes us question the authority and validity of everything. That in itself is a good thing for it can protect us from being naive and gullible by which we end up believing anything and everything. Thus, for example, when today’s corporate-fuelled media sells us promises about how various products will make us happy, we need to have the intelligence to doubt those promises. Doubt can stop us from going on the wrong track.

But doubt may even stop us from going on the right track. Doubting about various important external things can be damaging — if we are sick and we doubt all the medicines we are offered, that doubt may well sentence us to death. But far more damaging are various important internal things, especially our conceptions about life’s fundamental truths. If doubt starts questioning the value of our very existence, the value of our endeavors to do anything worthwhile in life, the value of our quest to find our life’s meaning and purpose, then that doubt can veritably destroy us. 

To stop such doubts, we need to use doubt against itself. That is, we need to doubt our doubts. How can doubt know for sure that our life has no value? It can’t. When we get the insight that our problem is not too much doubt, but too little doubt — we are doubting everything except doubt — that insight can liberate us from the deep dark dungeon of cynicism, a dungeon that sabotages our endeavors to find happiness in this world or the next (Bhagavad-gita 04.40)

One-sentence summary:

Doubt questions the authority of everything except itself — to disarm doubt, doubt your doubts.

Think it over:

  • How can doubts about externals be damaging? 
  • How can doubts about internals be even more damaging? 
  • Which doubts trouble you the most? How can you doubt those doubts?

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04.40: But ignorant and faithless persons who doubt the revealed scriptures do not attain God consciousness; they fall down. For the doubting soul there is happiness neither in this world nor in the next.