THE QUESTION OF DOUBT AND FAITH
MANOJ DAS
Professor
of English, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education
To
proceed to determine the nature of doubt is as perilous as step into that pond
of the old fable, on the bank of which were many footprints, only none in the
return direction. In chapter after chapter of the history of his psychological
development, man recorded the return of the same spirit of doubt though under
charging masquerades. If at a certain stage doubt has found its eruption in the
form of razor-edged arguments, at another stage has been expressed in words of
bitter worldly disillusionment. In our own time, there is the glory of doubt
sung by the learned logician; the absence of doubt resulting in exemplary
frustrations in all spheres of life, such as service, business and, above all
politics; in every step of an average life, for instance, in purchasing a
kilogram of sugar, the need to doubt as to whether or not the same were pure
atoms of glass; amid such awful darkness of doubt dwells the modern man.
In
this sense of the term, that there is no freedom from doubt in the current
course of civilization, is doubtless, though unwelcome, a fact. But in this
essay it is intended to deal with doubt in one its
aspects rather the cardinal one. Vigilance can liquidate many of the doubts
referred to in the earlier paragraph. But the doubt which shadows man’s inner
urge towards higher truths, checks the spontaneous moves of his inner being
towards a surrender to the Supreme so that the former
can be moulded to His image, is indeed dangerous. If
one designs to undo such doubt by means of arguments, then he will
unfortunately echo only the experience of Abhimanyu,
encircled, while struggling desperately, by further and further vicious strategies
of doubts. Rescue may come to him, only he has been steeped in the spirit,
which these words of Sri Aurobindo carry: “If the spirit of doubt could be
overcome by meeting it with arguments, there might be something in the demand
for its removal by satisfaction through logic. But the spirit of doubt doubts
for its own sake, for the sake of doubt; it simply uses the mind as its
instrument for its particular dharma, and this not the least when that mind
thinks it is seeking sincerely for a solution of its honest and
irrepressible doubts. Mental positions always differ, moreover, and it is well
known that people can argue forever without one convincing the other.”
Being
such, doubt can not be done away with by arguments and dialectics. Man can
switch over from one belief to another, can become a
believer from a non-believer, by virtue of arguments. But doubt refuses to
depend either for its emergence or for its disappearance on the basis of argument,
though constantly it pretends to be nothing but logic, a comrade of rationale.
(It may be proper to stress here that though doubt and disbelief are often
mentioned as kins, according to many there does not
practically exist any mental state as that of disbelief. If one does not
believe in God, he believes in some form or other of nihilism or materialism.)
In
order to be further explicit about the character of the doubt in question, we
can divide doubt in general into the negative and the positive doubts. The
first category of doubts tend to keep man static in
his position. It never misses to impede any chance for progress in his
consciousness. The moment man strives to grow beyond the narrow compass of his
ignorance, the negative doubt assumes its otherwise
suppressed ghastliness and works out obstructions. As on one front it shrinks
from recognising anything new, simultaneously on the
other front it looks forward to promptly interpret every event in the world in
terms of the miserable meagreness of its ideas,–like
the boy in that little story often attributed to Prof. Einstein. (Tired of his
delivery before a large gathering, the Professor once managed to slip unnoticed
into a roadside restaurant. As the boy approached him with the menu, Einstein
discovered that he had forgotten to carry his specs. Hence he requested the boy
to read out the menu to him. The boy with a sympathetic smile, confessed: “Sir,
I am as illiterate as you are.”)
If
this category of doubt doubts obstinately the possibility of knowledge of the
very surface-mind, the second category of doubt, the positive doubt as we have
termed the same, doubts the sufficiency of the knowledge the little mind
possesses at a given time. The positive doubt refuses to believe that the
wealth collected in the mind’s treasury is all that could be secured or the way
in which the collection was made was the one and the only
way. This category of doubt has its source in the heart of faith. The entire
history of civilisation is only the history of victories of doubts of this
sort. Had not the grandsire of the Old Stone Age doubted the unchangeability of his position, the status quo humanity
would have continued to maintain is imaginable. Such doubt is in reality the
flickering pre-vision of the promise of Evolution inherent in the consciousness
of a certain moment. It cannot therefore remain content with the incomplete
present. So what appears in such cases as doubt, is
nothing but a passive assertion of faith and reliance in the future.
Hence,
we see that something blooming out of the fountain of faith may even seem as
doubt from a certain angle. When we have clearly realised
this, a screen is rolled off our eyes, is revealed a wide world of endless
activities, yet mysteriously coordinating everything in a network of forces
emanating from a single source of faith. The life commences with faith and not
with doubt. The right the child asserts the moment his tiny person is revealed
to the world, is an expression of his unquestioning
faith. The continuous sadhana he
carries on against several odds in his little life to stand upon his own legs, is the symbol of faith in action. From an instance as
this to the mighty phenomena behind the grand movement of the universe; all do
rest in the lap of an unfathomable faith. And the role of doubt on such a
background of faith is justly compared to that of a few patches of cloud
floating against the sun.
Yet,
the negative doubt or doubt in its usual sense is no less than like shackles,
and must be rejected at once as far as any progress in spiritual life is
concerned. There might be quite interesting scope in social life to display the
fireworks of arguments and somersaults of polemics; but a spiritual aspirant
has to be sure from the start that the experiences of Truth are under no
obligation to come down to him via the prescribed steps of logic and intellect.
Not only for spiritual, but for no kind of higher truth are applicable the laws
of mental formulation. The truth of a certain phenomenon which occurs in the
mind of philosophers of science, may be explained with laws framed accordingly
in due time; but first and foremost, it may simply “come” to him. And is the
realm of science not dominated by so many initiating
ideas declared as hypotheses?
Pyrrlionism, agnosticism and
similar theories which pronounce the impossibility of obtaining a true
knowledge of things, depend on the physical and mental senses as the sole means
of experience. But spiritual truth can find entrance without treading the usual
tracks. That is why it is impossible to measure the spiritual truth in the barometer
of ordinary senses and laws of the mind. Sri Aurobindo has given his
uncompromising verdict on this in these words: “I would ask one simple question
of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of
spiritual experience. Is the Divine something less than mind or is it something
greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping inquiry, endless arguments, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic
logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it
something inferior in its action and status? If it is greater, then there is no
reason to seek after the Divine. If it is equal, then spiritual experience is
quite superfluous. But if it is inferior, how can it challenge, judge, make the
divine stand as an accused or a witness before its tribunal, summon it to
appear as a candidate for admission before a Board of Examiners or pin it like
an insect under its examining microscope?”
A
spontaneous conviction blooms in the seeker in the very first step on the way
of Aspiration; that is, arguments are nothing but the dissembling and venomous
spies of “doubt”. They begin with an energetic ado in the mind only to demoralise it with their toxicology, with a view to gain
complete control over it after a while. The mind must be on its guard to
ascertain that in him the arguments and doubts have never been promoted to the
position of “end”, from their not always indispensable position of humble
“means”. After all, the purpose of any observation is to secure conviction for
the inner seer of our being. The inner seer must posses the rein of the faculty
of arguments and doubts, to stimulate it only when the necessity is felt by him
alone. But when he prefers to suspend its action and expresses a conviction
because he “sees” the truth therein, if then the dim-sighted mind drags him to
the altar of doubt’s guillotine, spontaneous flowering of consciousness can not
but get a mortal check. A little liberal exercise of common sense reveals to us
a number of noble marvels which we have accepted without doubt. In the course
of our life we may profusely encounter well-measured smiles and melodious
vocabulary, but we do not doubt for a moment that of the millions of
women in the world it is our mother who loves us most. The instinctive knowledge
which makes us accept these facts without doubt that the champak flower
is more beauteous than a crab or the fragrance of the lotus invokes a maternal
tenderness around us, is there in abundance at the disposal of the inner seer
within us and hence it does not take long for him to appreciate the Experience.
Moreover, the Experience may be overwhelming. Sri Aurobindo assures thus: “When
the Peace of God descends on you, when the Divine Presence is there within you,
when the Ananda rushes on you like a sea, when you
are driven like a leaf before the wind by the breath of the Divine Force, when
Love flowers out from you on all creation, when Divine Knowledge floods you
with a Light which illumines and transforms in a moment all that was before
dark, sorrowful and obscure, when all that is becomes part of the One Reality,
when the Reality is all around you, you feel at once by the spiritual contact,
by the inner vision, by the illumined and seeing thought, by the vital
sensation and even by the very physical sense, everywhere you see, hear, touch
only the Divine. Then you can much less doubt it or deny it than you can deny
or doubt daylight or air or the sun in heavan–for of
these physical things you cannot be sure that they are
what your senses represent them to be; but in the concrete
experience of the Divine, doubt is impossible.
“Some things have to be believed to be seen” holds best in matters of spiritual experience. Nevertheless this holds good even in the day-to-day life of a “man of the world” and undoubtedly the noblest demonstrations of the spirit are in accordance with this maxim, although he may not be conscious of it.
Our age is an age of interrogation, and that not in a quite noble sense of the term. Life is not sunny; clouds of bitter doubt loom large over it. This is the reality of the surface of thing, for the time being. But a broad view of the entire course civilisation has taken shows that on the whole the finest achievements of civilisation rest on faith. Two powerful camps of the present time, science and politics, show, more and more, symptoms of being “faithward”–in spite of overwhelming outward evidences to the contrary. Expressed in a form of positive doubt, these words of Albert Einstein constitute the finest prelude to faith: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe: is as good as dead…his eyes are closed….To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms–this knowledge, this feeling, is at the centre of true religiousness. In this sense and in this only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.” The trend becomes clear enough when the missile-expert Wernher Von Braun speaks out thus: “I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness, and so we are immortal.”
Trends
of politics today undoubtedly bear the stamp of the victory of faith. With the
growth of the conceptions of liberty and democracy faith becomes a fundamental
necessity in the sphere of practical transaction, because “despotism may govern
without faith but liberty cannot.”
As
the stamp of faith will become more and more distinct on the surface of our
life, as it is full of storms and struggles, the victory of our inner life over
the former will become more and more evident. And finally, it is the complete
victory of the inner over the outer that will justify our existence, in spite
of the present condition of life, on this earth.