What is this?
- sciart0
- Jan 2
- 1 min read
Excerpt: "Something I’ve been working on over these past months and years is being able to sit with doubt. And not just doubt — being able to sit in the wonder of uncertainty. Because the first person we believe is ourselves: the stories we tell, the things we think we already know.
Maintaining an openness and a curiosity is important politically. It’s also very important in my work as a podcast host. But it is, above all, a spiritual practice — a practice of remaining present in the fundamental unknowability of this life and this Earth.
'...A very good way of summing this all up is an aphorism that we find in Zen Buddhism:
“Great doubt, great awakening. Little doubt, little awakening. No doubt, no awakening.”'
I find doubt to be a very healthy, ... and very difficult emotion to cultivate in my meditation practice, in my politics.
I think people often hear it as skepticism, which can be good but can also be negative, particularly if only externally directed — if you’re skeptical of what everybody else believes, ...but you’re quite certain of what you believe.
So I think I’ve latched on to this meditation because I think the strengthening of a muscle of internal doubt is an important virtue, actually."