Overcoming Doubt

We listen to the Buddha’s teachings about goodness and how it’s generated from within. Generosity comes from within. Virtue comes from within. Goodwill comes from within. We listen to the teachings, and they make sense. That’s called acceptance. But beyond acceptance there’s conviction. Conviction is not merely a matter of saying, “Yes it sounds good.” You actually try to live your life this way. You actually try to make the effort.

This is where doubt sometimes come in. You put the effort in, and it doesn’t seem to be working. The question is, is there something wrong about what the Buddha taught or is there something wrong with you? There are different ways you can answer that. But the best way to answer it is to say, “I’ll just try to maintain the practice and see if maybe it takes longer than I thought.” After all, there is that problem with laziness. We want to put in a little bit of effort and get a lot of results. When those results don’t come as quickly as we like, we start getting lazy again. “Maybe I shouldn’t put the effort in. Maybe it’s not worth it. Maybe it doesn’t work. Or maybe I can’t do it right.”

Everything the Buddha taught is something human beings can do. The question simply is: How long does it take and how observant are you of your own actions? This is why the Buddha said doubt is overcome by being observant, by noticing what’s skillful in the mind, what’s unskillful—and having a really clear sense that when you’re acting on a skillful intention, it really is skillful. You have to be very observant.

So we overcome doubt not by just forcing ourselves to believe, but by being more and more observant. You have to commit yourself to the practice and then reflect on it. That’s how you learn about the Dhamma. That’s how doubt is overcome.

Doubt can debilitate you. And you have to ask yourself, “Where is it coming from?” Learn how not to identify with the voices inside that say, “This doesn’t work.” It’s been proven to work over and over and over again. And as I said, the Buddha said that it’s something human beings can do. If people couldn’t develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful qualities, he wouldn’t have bothered to teach. He would have just sat under the Bodhi tree and in the area around the Bodhi tree experiencing bliss.

But it was because he saw that there would be something accomplished by teaching people that he went out and taught. That means we’re within the net of his teachings, the net of his dispensation.

So be confident that this is something you can do and that really is worth doing. If we sit around otherwise, waiting for goodness to come from outside, sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t. And we get upset when people don’t fall in line with our ideas. But if you realize your true happiness comes from what you do, then whether other people fall in line with your ideas is not going to matter. You just keep turning out good thoughts, good intentions in your mind.

There’s a certain level of happiness that comes with that already, just simply from the fact that you’re not doing anything that’s harmful. You’re not doing anything that’s shameful. You’re doing noble deeds, taking a noble attitude, taking responsibility for your own happiness, taking responsibility for whatever mistakes you make and learning from them.

The mind that can do that is a good mind to be in.