“I am a skeptic.” Today’s intellectuals often see skepticism as their badge of honor, as the evidence that they are freethinkers, unbound by other’s beliefs and dogmas.

Such skeptics delight in the intellectual game of picking holes in every school of thought that comes across their horizon. The more faults they are able to find, the cleverer they think they are.

No doubt, skepticism is helpful in recognizing intellectual unsound belief systems. However, it is also harmful because it doesn’t allow skeptics to dwell on intellectual soundness, even when they encounter it in coherent edifices of thought like Gita wisdom that are founded in factual higher-dimensional reality.

Their problem is not excessive skepticism but selective skepticism – not too-much-skepticism, but not-enough-skepticism. They don’t take skepticism to its logical conclusion; they doubt everything except skepticism. They don’t recognize the fundamental fact that skepticism always directs, even rivets, their attention to what’s wrong, never what’s right. And that unwillingness to make skepticism the target of their skepticism becomes their undoing.

Patient need to be skeptical to avoid being fleeced by quacks. Still, if they remain perpetually skeptical about every single doctor they meet, then they remain deprived of healing.

The same is the fate of those who remain inveterately skeptical. Their problem is that they have made skepticism into a god and place the halo of omniscience around it. Little do they realize that it is a false god, a god who blesses faithful worshipers with not omniscience but omni-ignorance. Such worship sentences the perpetual doubters to misery in both this life and the next, as the Bhagavad-gita (04.40) indicates.

If they can be courageous enough to throw away the shackles of skepticism and open-mindedly experiment with Gita wisdom, they can relish for themselves its blessings of spiritual healing and wholeness and happiness.

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 04 Text 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.”