What helps you overcome skeptical doubt?

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This topic contains 5 replies, has 5 voices, and was last updated by  Ivan Ganza 7 years, 4 months ago.

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  • #274

    Anonymous

    The Buddha talked about the Five Hindrances. For me the hindrance of skeptical doubt easily eclipses everything else.

    Learning about and practicing Buddhism has been wonderful and had a tremendous effect on me in the past two years. But I keep oscillating between being a Stephen Batchelor “Buddhist Atheist” and believing in some of the more esoteric ideas of Buddhism such as jhanas and spiritual awakening. With this split mindset I have periods where I enthusiastically meditate 2.5 hours every day, and other periods where I don’t meditate at all. Periods where I am a full-fledged Buddhist and other periods where things like spiritual awakening sound like a ridiculous and impossible ideal.

    There’s a passage from the suttas,
    Ananda: “Lord, is it true that the good, friendly sangha is half of the holy life?”
    Buddha: “No, Ananda, the good, friendly sangha is the whole of the holy life.”

    My biggest problem is probably a lack of a sangha. I wish I lived in a place with a sangha like Dharma Treasure, but there isn’t one where I currently live in China. I will be moving back to the U.S. in a few months, to Dallas, Texas. I am sure there are some Buddhist groups there, but probably not quite the type I am looking for. Nevertheless, a lot better than nothing.

    I am wondering if others could share how they have experienced skeptical doubt and how they’ve managed to work with it.

    Thanks,
    Paul

    #275

    Paul

    Here are two sections from Culadasa’s forthcoming book that might be helpful.

    SELF-DOUBT
    We tend to stick with activities we are naturally good at and avoid the ones we have to struggle with. When you discover you can’t control your unruly mind, you may begin doubting your abilities. “Maybe I’m different in some way; I just lack self-discipline.” Or you might believe you aren’t “smart” or “intellectual” enough for meditation. It’s easy to think that some inherent obstacle is holding you back, especially if you start comparing your experiences with what other people seem to be achieving. Yet, the truth is, the real obstacle is self-doubt. Self-doubt is powerful and can rob you of your enthusiasm and determination to establish a practice. And without a regular practice, it will take a long time before you see any real improvement – which just creates more doubt in your mind. At root of self-doubt is the classic hindrance of Doubt explained in the First Interlude; the detailed solution to Doubt can also be found there. But at heart, the antidote is simple: trust and perseverance, and to possess those, you need inspiration and motivation.

    5. DOUBT
    Doubt is healthy and valuable when it motivates us to question, investigate, test, and try things for ourselves. It protects us from blindly accepting what others say or what seems true, and keeps us from being misled or taken advantage of. As a survival strategy, it keeps us from wasting our time and resources. Doubt begins as a kind of biased and unconscious mental process that focuses on negative results and negative possible outcomes. Once the mind decides that a situation should indeed be examined more closely, the emotion of Doubt becomes part of conscious experience. If the feeling of Doubt is strong enough, it compels us to either reevaluate an activity, or to abandon it altogether. The purpose of Doubt is simply to challenge the strength of our motivation, inviting us to test our current activities and intentions by using reason and logic.
    Yet, if we don’t reevaluate a situation rationally and only respond to the emotional component of Doubt, we may never succeed at any difficult task and simply abandon whatever makes us uncertain. This is where Doubt becomes a hindrance. It creates the kind of uncertainty that makes us hesitate and keeps us from taking action. For example, if you doubt your ability to succeed in meditation, your motivation will fade and you won’t sit down to practice. Although Doubt is often projected onto other people and things, it often takes the form of self-doubt, a lack of confidence in our own abilities. Indeed, this kind of Doubt is a perverse faith in failure that saps our will and undermines our intentions. Too often it keeps us from making the effort needed to validate something through our own effort and experience.
    The immediate remedy for Doubt is to use your reasoning abilities to project the possibility of success in the long-term, countering the short-term emotional pressure of this hindrance. Once you have overcome the paralyzing effect of Doubt, you can move forward with stronger motivation, and through action, replace uncertainty with certainty. The ultimate remedy for Doubt is the trust and confidence that come from success, and success depends on persistent effort.
    Because self-doubt is so pervasive, it’s worth providing a few more assurances and antidotes. If you doubt your ability to concentrate, just remember that even though some people are calmer by nature than others, very few have such active minds that they cannot meditate. Even people with serious cases of attention deficit disorder succeed at meditation practice. If your mind really is more active than average, the first three Stages will be the most challenging. However, rest assured, not only can you master them, but once you do, the remaining Stages will come much more easily.
    For some, self-doubt is about self-esteem and, specifically, with comparing yourself unfavorably to others you believe are brighter or more capable. In fact, intellectual ability is not a particularly important factor for success at meditation. Meditation is about awareness and attention. If you can read this book and follow the instructions, you have more than enough intelligence to learn to meditate. For that matter, even if you don’t understand some of what you read in these pages, by simply following the basic instructions for each Stage, you will succeed.
    Some people doubt they have the discipline required. But if you can exercise regularly or go to work or school consistently, then you can establish a meditation practice. The key factor isn’t some inherent ability to be disciplined, but rather motivation and habit. If you ever find yourself questioning whether you have enough self-discipline to meditate, re-examine your motivation instead. Without motivation, self-discipline won’t help much. Making meditation a habit is also critical. Because we are in the habit of going to work, even when we’re reluctant, we do it anyway and often without giving any particular thought at all to consequences. Habit is powerful. In Stage One we discussed ways to create the conditions for your practice to become a habit.
    In meditation, Doubt obviously stands in the way of persistence. Conversely, the meditation factor of Sustained Attention , achieved as a result of consistent effort, is what overcomes Doubt. That is, as you continue to apply yourself, you will learn you’re capable of sustaining attention and achieving other positive results from your practice as well. Successes lead to trust – both in the practice and in yourself. Once you realize that, Doubt will be completely overcome.

    #278

    Anonymous

    Hi Matthew, thanks so much for your helpful response. Although self-doubt is an issue for me, there’s also overall doubt about whether the goals of Buddhism can be achieved (by anyone). Again this probably has a lot to do with the fact that all my learning has been done through the internet, with no real-life exposure to any teachers. I’ve only known a few Buddhists in real-life and none of them regularly meditated. It’s just the idea of attaining spiritual awakening, that is realizing at a gut level the nature of emptiness/no-self and permanently ending one’s relationship with suffering sounds like such a radical idea, sometimes I really question how I came to believe it.

    #280

    Brian Hanner
    Member

    I have found two things helpful:

    1. Study both independent and from Culadasa’s audio teachings. I had the opportunity to listen to hundreds of hours of his teachings. He is so consistent and so clear, it compels me to practice. It is indeed intellectual knowledge, but that has been important to me.

    2. Simply having success at meditation. Yes, it’s a bit of a “catch 22”. Doubt can keep me from sitting, but sitting diligently is the primary thing that will bring success in the practice, which helps with the doubt. For me, even a tiny glimpse of “success” in progressing through the stages or having even tiny insights has been enough to keep me rolling.

    #1674

    Don Salmon
    Member

    HI Paul:

    It sounds to me like both folks are saying, “don’t be concerned for now about philosophic questions.” This is different from self-doubt. Do you really need to resolve this issue in order to motivate you to practice? If so, you might want to save that for an in-depth analytic meditation.

    I’d also suggest if you possibly can, find somebody in person you can trust to talk through some of these things. Spinning through them in your head – if you can’t do it stably in analytic meditation – is not likely to resolve it for you.

    But perhaps this might be most helpful – I find Stephen Batchelor to be almost incapable of thinking clearly about these things. This has nothing to do with my personal perspective – he simply hasn’t shown any willingness to examine his pre-existing views.

    If you try to “figure out” the various philosophic issues, or things like rebirth and karma, without at least a modicum of meditative stability, (or stable attention, as Culadasa might say), whatever “solution” you come to isn’t going to mean that much anyway – and you’ll be subject to further doubt in the future.

    I’ve found that when I was convinced – not intellectually, but viscerally – of the value of meditation, I kept practicing. It took me 6 years of wavering, but once I started, I continued twice a day for decades. It just took that final determination, the intention to simply go ahead though there were many philosophic issues I had barely a clue about (this was back in my mid 20s). The issues do, in my experience – get resolved on their own, if you persist in practice.

    That in itself might be motivation to practice!

    #1675

    Ivan Ganza
    Member

    We invest a huge amount of time and energy in our current ‘world view’. Spending an entire life building it up….

    It is only natural there will be some resistance to the idea of dropping that view for something else. That is actually a healthy survival mechanism.

    You’ll need to find a way deep inside yourself — a way to open to the possibility current assumptions are not correct assumptions. It can be very uncomfortable to entertain that possibility, scary even.

    Can you open to the possibility things are not as they seem? Open to that space? Who knows what will fill it…

    This opening is not a ‘conceptual’ opening….more like letting go…empty your glass….you don’t need to fill it with something else right away…it’s alright if it is empty for a while….

    Cheers,
    -Ivan/ (DT Teacher in Training)

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