the divinity of doubt

Doubt has no belonging if we are to live fully, we tell ourselves. Doubt leads to inferiority, shame, aloneness, and a desecration of confidence that does nothing but hinder our becoming and the achievement of our smallest and greatest dreams alike.

But like all great truths, this truth exists as a paradox. In elevating the disastrous aspect of doubt, we miss its divine form.

Doubt can act as a useful and even essential mirror. It's gift is most wholly received when we recognize that it lives in us, that it plays a part in shaping who we are, but that we are not it. In other words, we are not the ones who do the doubting. It is not we as individuals who employ it.

Rather, it lives on its own, has its own self-existence, and it visits us on its own volition. Wise is the one who makes friends with that doubt when it comes knocking at their door. To turn that doubt away and refuse it entry is to distrust and reject the friendmaker in ourself. It is to pretend that we are something less, not more, than who we really are.

Hell is not to be condemned and rejected, repressed. It is to be loved, welcomed, embraced.

So go into your own Hell, within yourself. You will not make it out alive, but that is entirely the point. Go there to die... to die to yourself... that is, your understanding of self, who you think you are. Because who you think you are is simply a limitation, though again paradoxically, a beautifully divine limitation. And yet, even divinity dies. For this is half of what makes it divine.

Embrace your Hell with the same fervency with which you embrace your Heaven. For Hell is that which is rejected, repressed, and unloved. Thus it is that we create Hell itself within ourself.

Hell is the classroom of divine humility where we see internally everything we have refused. These objects of refusal are children asking for nothing else but to be loved. Upon seeing this, the weight of sheer humility descends and shows us that we are also children asking for love.

This innocence is Death, which is Life.

When the God enters my life, I return to my poverty for the sake of the God. I accept the burden of poverty and bear all my ugliness and ridiculousness, and also everything reprehensible in me. I thus relieve the God of all the confusion and absurdity that would befall him if I did not accept it. With this I prepare the way for God's doing. -Carl Jung, The Red Book, 366-7

And so doubt is a form of death. It is the letting go of a previous identity which "knew" something. Doubting is a dropping of the knowing. It is being cast adrift from the shore of identity which "knows." It is a letting-go of the identity which "knew."

This is Death itself. An internal death.

The question is, to what extent will we let go? How willingly into Death will we walk?

But, we tell ourselves, don't go too willingly into death, for what then would be left? Is this not suicide?

No, in fact it is quite the antithesis. The more willingly one goes toward Death within themself, the more vibrant life becomes.

We fear going into Death not because we fear dying but because we fear living.

Living fully is our greatest fear.

So may we walk fully into doubt, into humility, into Death, into Life.