Doubt everything. This could be the maxim that characterizes the times in which we live. Times in which the power of the referent seems to dissolve into a relativistic post-truth.
This is nothing new. Descartes systematized doubt with his own "I think therefore I am". Long ago skeptical philosophers had embraced doubt and much later Nietzsche himself said that "Every belief is a prison".
As a tool in the search for truth, doubt is very useful. But maybe we are applying it wrong. Perhaps the doubt is getting out of hand. Perhaps the act of doubting - half applied - is creating more problems than it solves in our lives and in our society.
Sacrificing wisdom on the altar of intelligence
"Our society promotes intelligence rather than wisdom and celebrates the more superficial, hostile and useless aspects of that intelligence", writes the Tibetan Buddhist master Sogyal Rinpoche. "We have become so falsely 'refined' and neurotic that we take our own doubt for truth, and therefore doubt, which is nothing more than a desperate attempt by the ego to defend itself from wisdom, remains deified as an objective and fruit of authentic knowledge" .
"Contemporary education indoctrinates us in the glorification of doubt and in fact has created what one could almost call a religion or a theology of doubt, in which to be considered intelligent one must show that one doubts everything, always indicating what is wrong and rarely ask what is right, cynically denigrate inherited ideals and, in general, everything that is done out of simple good will ".
According to Sogyal Rinpoche, this type of doubt is destructive because it ends up being “A sterile dependence on contradiction which repeatedly deprives us of any true openness to any wider and more ennobling truth”. In practice, doubting for the sake of doubting, because we think it is a sign of intelligence, could simply plunge us into the most absolute mental chaos, leaving us in the clutches of an ignorant relativism that does not allow us to move forward but often makes us retreat.
Noble doubt involves questioning ourselves
We are a society that praises doubt but is unable to doubt itself and question itself. Doubting everything on the outside, without looking inside, we end up getting entangled in social conditioning that end up dictating the path of "truth". That path, however, does not lead to wisdom.
In practice, we doubt everything external. We doubt that the earth is round, of the existence of a virus, of statistics, of what the figures of power say, what the newspapers write about, what doctors and volcanologists say ... And that's okay. Questioning things and not taking them for granted is important.
But we must also question ourselves, question ourselves. We need to question the thought process that leads us to draw some conclusions and not others. Above all, we need to question our expectations during this process. The underlying beliefs and stereotypes that end up pushing us in a direction that may not be the most appropriate.
In contrast to the nihilistic doubt, Sogyal Rinpoche proposes a "noble doubt". "Instead of doubting things, why not doubt ourselves: our ignorance, our presumption that we have already understood everything, our grasping and escaping, our passion for alleged explanations of reality that are completely devoid of that wisdom" , proposes.
"That kind of noble doubt stimulates us, inspires us, tests us, makes us more and more authentic, strengthens us and draws us further inward", writes Sogyal Rinpoche.
Obviously, the path to embracing the doubt that leads to wisdom is fraught with obstacles these days: lack of time, dispersion, an overabundance of stimuli that prevent us from focusing on questions and questioning, as well as information overload. They are all barriers that prevent us from seeking answers within ourselves.
Sogyal Rinpoche proposes another way: “We do not take doubts too seriously and let them grow disproportionately; let's not see them only in black and white or react to them with fanaticism. What we need to learn is to gradually change our passionate and culturally conditioned concept of doubt to one that is more free, fun, and compassionate. This means that we must give time to doubts, and give ourselves time to find answers that are not only intellectual, but living, real, authentic and operational.
“Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately, but with patience we can create a space within ourselves where doubts can be examined carefully and objectively, revealed, dissolved and healed. What we lack, especially in our culture, is the right mental environment, spacious and free from distractions, in which intuitions can have the opportunity to mature slowly ".
Sogyal Rinpoche does not tell us not to question the world. He says he dared to question it without stereotypes and conditioning in order to arrive at a truly sincere and authentic answer. It tells us that this questioning must also extend to our thought process, to our reasons for doubting and, above all, to conclusions.
Without that attitude, the pleasure of thinking is lost. Questioning, doubting and suspecting generates pleasure in feeling that through this act one becomes more and more free and autonomous. Doubting we become masters of our life and able to decide who we are, where we go and why. However, if we do not allow ourselves to doubt ourselves and simply align ourselves with the answers provided by the dissident other side of society, we are giving up wisdom to plunge into the chaos of sterile doubts. We leave one flock to join another. And this is not intelligence or wisdom.
Source:
Rimpoché, S. (2015) The Tibetan book of life and death. Barcelona: Ediciones Urano.
Admission A society that doubts everything but itself is doomed to fail was published first in Corner of Psychology.
