Real Doubt

Speaking in riddles
But the final detox
Is to be totally at home
With paradox
When what is happening
Is not what is happening
And the ground is nothing
But quicksand and burial site
There comes a crack in the night
Just big enough to squeeze through
But only if you take nothing with you
Solo travel it may seem
But that’s just in dreams

Two gifts from Robert Augustus Masters

THE ANATOMY OF DOUBT
Doubt is an inner questioning infused with uncertainty and, more often than not, enough agitation to make it a relatively unpleasant state. In an everydaysense, doubt is what happens mentally when we find ourselves stranded in ambiguity’s carrels, trying to think our way out, stuck in cognitive traffic jams that catch us in their treads and flatten us as much as they fragment us. Trying to make a meal out of the grey fare laid out by the fractured realism of such doubt simply enervates and depresses us.

Typical doubt is not much more than skepticism that has lost its clarity and confidence, bound up in worrisome shades of uncertainty. Anxiety may be lurking nearby, ready to be recruited, bringing more of an edge to doubt. Although doubt is not dread, it can become dread if sufficiently fed.

Doubt can manifest as moral impotence, existential fence-sitting, fear of making a decision, indulgence in ambiguity, cognitive obsessing, avoidanceof taking a stand, and so on; and it can also, albeit far less often, manifest as a necessary questioning, a courageous inquiry that can both tolerate and investigate uncertainty. Doubt is no more “bad” than “certainty” is good.

There’s everyday, mostly neurotic doubt, a self-contracted questioning injected with constricted, unpleasantly turbulent feeling, moving with myopic desperation through the presenting layers of uncertainty; and there’s another doubt, a questioning that carries us beyond facile certainties and automated beliefs deep into the inherent insecurity and uncertainty of Life, inviting us to adopt a nonproblematic orientation toward it.

But before getting into the latter sort of doubt — which it takes real faith to have — let’s get more into everyday doubt: It’s important to be able to work well with such doubt before going for the deeper, more awakened kind of doubt. And working well with it means knowing it well, even becoming intimate with it, especially in its darker or more contracted dimensions.

Everyday doubt is a collapse of heart that has gone to mind, an unhappy, unillumined inquiry that’s interested not in discovery or revelation, but only in persisting in repetitively touring its culs-de-sac. It puts a lot of energy into going nowhere, spinning its wheels until it’s exhausted, leaving us asleep at the wheel.

Such doubt is the contracted and divided mind doing time in uncertainty’s mental mazes, providing apparent justification for worry.

Whereas skepticism is a healthy, incisive, often robust questioning, everyday doubt is an unhealthy, indecisive, often anemic questioning, a dead-end inquiry, a bottled-up questioning terrified of being uncorked.

When the energy of such doubt is allowed to mushroom in our headquarters, it invades and stains whatever content is handy, immediately framing it in a darkly questionable light.

While immersed in doubt, we often inject fearfulness or negative anticipation into various intentions, plans, doings, and so on, obsessing about possible outcomes, chaining ourselves to chronic worry.

Doubt is what the mind tends to do both when it is cut off from the vitality and openness and primal intentions of our depths, and when rationality itself just does not satisfy. And doubt presumes to have an overview, but in fact has none — it cannot even see itself, let alone accurately assess its environment.

Nevertheless, doubt is not an enemy. What matters is what we do with it. Do we identify with it? Do we give our power away to it? Do we allow it to enlarge? Do we believe in it? Do we make decisions based on it? Or do we illuminate it, outbreathe and outdance it, crashing its slumber-party with such resolute focus that it cannot help but dissolve into a more Life-giving form?

In its unchallenged (that is, unquestioned) arranging and cementings of key thoughts, doubt is closely related to belief, being a blue collar frequenter of some of belief ’s sleazier hangouts.

Belief is static, abstract, perfectly reproducible, far too stiff to be Truth, hyperfocused on its own replication and confirmation, driven to see its flag raised everywhere and everywhen (“Belief is when someone else does the thinking,” said Buckminster Fuller). Doubt is its less popular cousin, a grimy plebeian, just as mentally constipated as belief (even in its chronic changing of teams), but not so glossy or chrome-plated or mass-legitimized, being more musty, dingy, and decentralized, huddled up in less tidy or respectable corners of mind, except when shaved, bathed, dressed up, and brought into the antiseptic chambers of Science, where it, now more hardnosed skepticism than mere doubt, breathes life into scientific methodology.

Doubt usually reinforces our sense of separation. Doubt tends to empower our unhappiness — however miserable doubt may make us feel, it is familiar, so densely familiar that it generates a sense of identity: I doubt, therefore I am.

Not many of us can stand being in doubt for extended periods of time. We crave breaks from it, but the breaks we ordinarily take from it do not undo it, but only remove us from it for a time. Doubt easily becomes the core of our alibi for holding back; we use our doubt to talk ourselves out of stretching to make the necessary leap.

Those who are mired in doubt have great difficulty in telling what is false from what is true. They get stuck in between, lost in the tales told and retold by their doubt.

Trying to work with doubt through mental means only doesn’t really work. The self-suppression that catalyzes and animates doubt must be seen, felt, known from the deep inside. The whole being must be eased, expanded, given permission to come alive. The torso must be loosened, the limbs unfrozen, the heart entered, the reach made both powerful and vulnerable, the entire anatomy brought into supportive resonance with our core of Being.

Doubt must be seen for what it is, as it is, without getting lost or absorbed in its point of view; only then will it unfist itself, only then will our endarkened familiarity with it come unstrung, only then will our indecisiveness be unequivocally undone, flung into the raw Truth of what we are.

When doubt infects you, don’t give it a thought. Neither avoid it nor let it recruit your mind.

Doubt your doubt, and then pour your full attention into the noncognitive openings generated by doing so. Go into its feeling dimensions, breathing them more alive, giving fitting expression to them; if this is overly difficult, consider going to a therapist who’s skilled in working with such things.

When doubt does manage to infiltrate your mind, read its contents oncethrough as though they belonged to a supermarket tabloid, taking careful note of which headlines most easily snare your attention. Then immediately shift your attention, and shift it completely, to the physical and physiological correlates of your doubt, resisting the temptation to scoot back into your
thinking mind.

No matter how tempting it is to immerse yourself in what your doubt is telling you, shift your attention from whatever it is that you’re doubting to the actual phenomenon of doubt itself. Feel into and through its tensions, its downbeat textures, its contracted tones, its positioning, its emotional qualities, its bodily ramifications and anatomical peculiarities; feel what it is doing to you, feel what it is doing to others near you, feel how it’s staining your speech, vision, hearing, perception, posture, your very being...

And do this without trying to change or trash your doubt. Sometimes simply keeping your attention on your doubt as an energetic phenomenon, as opposed to focusing on its content, will cause it to dissolve. Other times, deliberately doubting your doubt will make it dissipate. Doubt may also sometimes be defused by taking a risk of Being, such as a not-so-easy but much needed movement toward someone or a timely expressing of something painful that needs to be said, especially if these are done not in order to get rid of doubt, but because they are imperatives of Being, arising from something deeper
than our everyday mind and conditioning.

Doubt is, among other things, a kind of low-grade fear. As we expand our energy, the contraction at the heart of doubt starts to loosen up, until we’re not fearful, but simply excited.

Through attending closely, caringly, and carefully to the particulars of our doubt, we decentralize it, so that its viewpoint is no longer in a position to govern us.

When the light goes on in the slums of doubt, then doubt is little more than skepticism having a bad day.

The key is to actively and decisively disidentify with our doubt, while also allowing the surfacing and fitting expression of whatever feeling states are associated with it — fear, sadness, anger, shame, disgust, longing, and so on.

Do not make doubt wrong. Simply realize that when you lose yourself in doubt, you are shortcircuiting a deeper song.

Now toward the healthier zones of doubting! Even in the most deadening doubt there sometimes can be gems of insight, bits of intuitive savvy mixed in with all the mental debris. These often get overlooked in our trying to get away from our doubting mind.

Doubt tends to be a big baby, and there’s not much bathwater (having been displaced by doubt’s multi-armed flailing), but even the little that there is is worth keeping; as it settles, and some clarity emerges, what’s valuable in our doubting becomes more obvious. Various intuitions, for example, may now be accessible. (It’s interesting to note that intuition sometimes masquerades as doubt, mostly when we don’t want to hear it.) Growth-stunting beliefs, beliefs that we no longer need, may lose their grip on us. For a belief to be dismantled, doubt about it is needed. Doubt is a wonderfully deadly virus for belief systems that have outlived their usefulness.

When we give ourselves permission to doubt certain things — like “expert” pronouncements, self-proclaimed “higher” structures, religious and political certainties, impermeable belief systems (including our own!), and so on — and we do so without losing touch with our core of Being, we are then a little freer, a little less seducible by others’ promises of security. Then doubt does not entrap or flatten us, but rather brings us closer to what is really happening, making us more at home with the Zen proclamation: “Great doubt, great awakening; little doubt, little awakening; no doubt, no awakening.”

Spending quality time with doubt makes us capable of what John Keats (in 1817!) called “negative capability” — or the ability “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Hanging out with doubt can be a drag, and it can also be a portal into the matrix and essence of Existence. It all depends on how we handle it. Initially, it’s usually wise to work with doubt as an energetic phenomenon (noticing its characteristic sensations, staying mindful of breathing and intentions, keeping grounded, making room for emotional release, etcetera), only secondarily paying any attention to its content — we need to be able to be near it without getting sucked into its viewpoint.

This requires not only meditative practice, but also the ability to know and appropriately express what we’re feeling. Later, we can move in closer to our doubt, entering not only its physical and emotional dimensions, but also its mental dimensions, and start mining it for its valuables. Still later, we can allow our doubt regarding the Big Questions to carry us — and not just
intellectually! — into the mysteries of the Unknowable, beyond both certainty and uncertainty...