This guest post comes with thanks from Greg at Meeting It Everywhere.
“When there is a great doubt, there is great awakening; small doubt, small awakening; no doubt, no awakening” – Chan Saying
Buddhism has nothing to do with finding all of the answers. But, it does deal with burning away delusions.
Having doubts about our spiritual path is not a detriment. Doubt leads us to question. A practice which fails to question is a pathway to delusion.
Doubt makes for hard practice. However, in the friction between doubt and effort, we generate the heat which burns our delusions to the ground.
(Thank again Greg for your trusting post)
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Excellent reflection on doubts, Greg.
Another way to approach doubts is to see them for what they are: thoughts and feelings arising in awareness. Doubting that this is the right way to practice, for example, is a thought. The negative feelings associated with that thought are emotions born from associating with it.
Negative feelings and thoughts give birth to more negative feelings and thoughts: they are a process in the mind. In associating with the awareness in which these mental objects occur, we are able to see that they are impermanent, unsatisfactory and empty of a self. Knowing them thus, we can let go of them in the peaceful state of mind that is established in meditation, whether zazen, vipassana, or whatever.
Doubts are doubts, nothing more, nothing less. If they are seen for what they are, as ‘just so’, they lose their power to lead us into delusional states of mind, and dissolve in the light of awareness. In the calm insight that knows all this, we find the gateway to the same enlightenment that the Buddha knew over two and a half thousand years ago.
With metta,
Gary at Forest Wisdom.
http://forestwisdom.thaipulse.com/
Great point! I think doubt can lead us in the right direction, but as you say we cannot over think things either.
By the Way—- “Meeting It Everywhere” is dead!
I just started over again at
http://gregoryweiss.wordpress.com/
Hmm, so I guess I’m hugely awakened!?
@Allison “Move, and your bury your body ten thousand feet deep;
don’t move and sprouts grow right where you are.
You must cast off both sides and let the middle go;
then you must buy some sandals and travel some more before you’ll really attain realization.”
http://themiddleway.net/2007/11/06/dongshans-no-grass/
Is coming to mind for me. For me it’s like in meditation, there’s the moment of nothing, but the second you realize or acknowledge the moment, you are no longer in the moment, and what you think you have you no longer have. That’s the same way I think of awakening. To think of it, is to not be it.
Peace,
Wade