Unshakeable Freedom from Doubt Part II

There are many dimensions of life in which self-doubt is entirely appropriate. We need the ability to question ourselves and our motives for all kinds of reasons – to keep ourselves and others safe, to reflect on our mental and emotional health, and to curb our less wholesome tendencies and habits.

Our ability to deeply reflect on selfish, self-destructive or aggressive tendencies in ourselves is essential if we want to be well-adjusted, healthy and compassionate human beings.

But there is one realm of experience where we cannot allow self-doubt to enter. There is one domain which is utterly sacred ground – that cannot be sullied by the mind, or touched by our emotional or cognitive capacities in any way.

Our worthiness for enlightenment is not the domain of the mind, or of the ego. Our readiness for Absolute Grace is not something we can question in any way, and our small self must never be allowed to co-opt it.

Only the Absolute itself can determine this. If we are interested in awakening to enlightened awareness, we must leave the question of our personal worthiness in the hands of God, completely beyond the reach of the small self.

The only thing we can bring to this is our willingness and our deep trust, and here is where the dimension of choice resides in relationship to enlightenment – we cultivate the desire to be free more than anything else, and we offer our trust and willingness to God.

In the face of the unthinkable vastness of Absolute will – God’s will – this is only a little willingness. Yet when offered at the feet of the Absolute, this small willingness is powerful indeed – and impossible for the ego to countenance, because here it can never enter!

As post-modern and metamodern souls, we are developing ever greater cognitive sophistication and power – and as we move into what Wilber and others have called Second Tier structure stages in consciousness, our mind will become an increasingly honed discriminatory tool.

How can we wholeheartedly cultivate and embrace these new cognitive capacities, while recognising that our rationality is powerless in the face of the Absolute? How can we strive to develop ourselves emotionally, mentally and philosophically while simultaneously realising that these powerful abilities can never help us to approach God-consciousness directly?

The ego is so adept at co-opting every aspect of our experience that cognitive sophistication can of itself become a hindrance. As we develop, we have a delicate balance to strike - is our cognitive evolution inadvertently usurping God, or inhibiting our ability to submit fully and appropriately to the Absolute in the context of our own awakening?

In this talk, Andrew Cohen looks at the important distinction between healthy and toxic self-doubt, and specifically self-doubt in relationship to our own worthiness in the face of God. In a context of ever greater self-actualisation and cognitive power, how do we renounce self-doubt completely with respect to our own enlightenment?