Alex
Administrator
I recently heard something similar from eckhart tolle (paraphrasing) "don't let the attraction/illusion of knowing unseat you from the present moment"To which. surely there can be no end. This reminds me of the notion that any form of inquiry serves only to help us realise how little we do know. I suppose we are obliged, mostly, to doubt what we think, rather than what is and what others think. It is so easy, as the materialists constantly remind us, to think that being skeptical is about doubting what others say is so, while being comfortable that our POV is correct or superior. Doubting another is not skepticism. Doubting oneself is.
This is pertinent when we think about God in the sense of atheism. We can doubt that a conception of God (that we formulate) is correct, but we cannot 'prove' God does not exist. Thus we encounter (peak) experiences in which the experiencer affirms the existence of the divine - but, thus far, no peak experience that ecstatically affirms the non-existence of the divine. The old mystics affirmed that the divine was beyond conception and description - but not beyond knowing some hint of it. The perpetuation of doubt is the antidote to the conceit, or delusion, that we are 'right' in believing any characterisation of what is real or true is more than mere opinion (and probably wrong in any case).
We are guided by tantalising hints and scents of truth - to seek it in much the way we orientate ourselves to North. The orientation is necessary for our journey and doubt is what helps us find the course we must take. In perpetuating doubt we are opening ourselves to the sensitivity of both intellectual and moral direction. But we are doubting only our own certainty.