Doubt on the Spiritual Path
Monday, December 12th, 2005There are two types of people in this world who are not suitable to receive instruction. The first are the ignorant ones who do not possess even the smallest amount of knowledge. The second are those who have eliminated ignorance in its entirety. If either one of these two types receives instruction, then this instruction will rarely bear fruit. This is because it is not possible to shake someone from the position in which he is well entrenched. The best candidate for instruction is a person who has doubts about the topic that is going to be presented.Friction of the elements of knowledge and ignorance is called doubt. . .
–Abhinavagupta, commentary on the Bhagavad Gita.
The Bhagavad Gita is a story of doubt. Thus, it is a story of being human. Arjuna the warrior stands between two great armies: knowledge and ignorance. Knowledge is remembering the natural, open state. Ignorance is forgetting the natural, open state. The friction between remembering and forgetting is what we call doubt. Because we are all in a state of partial remembering and partial forgetting, we all doubt.
As a consummate Tantrik, Abhinavagupta does not condemn Arjuna’s doubt. Instead, he observes that the friction between remembering and forgetting is a prerequisite for openness to instruction and undertaking sadhana. This is a profound view of why the human realm is considered to be the best realm for spiritual practice.
As practitioners, we might fear doubt. Doubt is uncomfortable. When we doubt, it feels as if the ground is slipping away. When we reject doubt, we feel safer. But this is false security and ultimately a hindrance to our practice. There is no ground; there is just life as it is at every moment. Relaxing and surrendering in moments of intense doubt is one way to taste this groundlessness.
On some level, we remember the natural state. We remember liberation. But we don’t remember how to maintain ourselves in this remembrance. If we did not remember anything, we would not have any basis for desiring liberation or imagining a spiritual path. If we did not forget, we would not need to remember. So, between remembering and forgetting, we play the beautiful game of sadhana.
Abhinavagupta speaks of those who know nothing and those who have eliminated ignorance.
Some human beings know very little, i.e., they remember very little. Such a person might be highly educated. An extremely rigid attachment to certain kinds of educated thinking can be a powerful mode of forgetting the natural state. A person who remembers very little of the natural state, or fails to recognize it, will not be capable of taking advantage of the opportunity to learn from a teacher, or a teaching situation.
Some human beings are born in a state of great openness. We call these human beings “mahasiddhas” or “saints” or “Jagadgurus.” Sri Ma Anandamayi was such a person. She had no Guru as there was no need for this function in her life. She often spoke of the fact that her self-experience never changed from the moment she was born. She did not go through the myriad, often unpleasant, transformations that we humans generally experience in our lives.
Teachings and sadhana move us from the uncomfortable doubting middle into a greater state of relaxation and Self-knowledge. But remember the real meaning of knowledge. We absolutely cannot “reason away” doubt. Worrying about doubt and trying to analyze it with rationalistic or moralistic thinking only feeds the fire of doubt with the fuel of doubt.
Like hot and cold weather fronts colliding, doubt is a storm of energy released by the collision of ignorance and remembering. The content of our doubt–the actual thoughts that form out of this energy–is relatively unimportant.
The most important “thought” to keep in mind is that conscious experience of the natural state alone can release us from the state of tension we call doubt.
So, as my first diksha Guru once said to me: Just do your sadhana and let God do the rest.
This is the most appropriate and rewarding use of a human life.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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