Dispelling Doubt Through Action

 

Here is a bad habit that lives inside most of us: before taking any action, we first ask about every possibility in exhaustive detail.

People indulge in laying out a mountain of hypotheticals, longing to build an airtight understanding in advance. They stubbornly demand a concrete, certain answer to every doubt, and refuse to move until they have one — never mind that, to anyone with real experience, these layer upon layer of questions sound like nothing but a waste of time.

It is no different from someone who has never tasted an apple insisting on asking every knowable fact about the fruit, while the apple sits right there in front of them — one bite would answer all of it.

This habit of "ask everything first, then act" is an endless, futile holding of ground.

It is also precisely why so many people carry lofty ideals and yet, across a whole long life, never take the first step.

The source of all that repeated questioning is the fear of effort wasted.

At first it is simply the fear of pouring your heart into some unknown possibility and coming away empty-handed — time and resources spent, nothing gained but scars.

Before long, the questioning turns into a defence mechanism. To avoid being hurt again and again by an unpredictable reality, people would rather erase every possibility of injury with countless questions before they act.

In the end the defence becomes habit: whenever something arises, a few more questions must be asked, as if empty words could hold off the impermanence of the world. They feel safe inside their stillness, while remaining blind to the vivid, turbulent, painful experience of life outside. They may even mock the fearless young for stumbling and circling through their earnest attempts, not noticing that they themselves, a pool of dead water, have long since turned sour.

In emptiness, impermanence is the norm; flow is what is natural.

Life reveals its present face at the moment conditions come together — never too early, never too late.

If you cling too tightly to a smooth and secure road ahead, always demanding the future in advance, you only fall into a whirlpool built by your own consciousness, trapped in delusions that may never come to pass yet already produce real consequences inside you.

You try to eliminate the unknown variables, and with your own hands you snuff out the possibilities that would have bloomed by chance. You live inside a double absurdity: anxious in a future that has not arrived, absent from the present that is slipping away.

The spell that breaks the stillness is actually very simple: accept everything, good and bad, without dividing, without rejecting.

When you are already willing, before you act, to accept every possibility — whether or not the outcome matches your expectation, without rejecting the risk of failure — your heart is free and unobstructed, and the result of the matter is bound to be complete and as it should be. Then each action no longer needs sheer willpower to force it along; when the time comes, you naturally move with the flow. And when it is over, whatever the result, you completed your acceptance beforehand, and your heart has long since set it down in peace.

Such a person is no longer ruled by meaningless doubt, but is willing to let every question be answered, one by one, in real action.

At that point you are no longer a bystander to your life; you are living as the world itself.

——

Tomorrow afternoon I will be teaching the three states of Lifestream breathing at Kaduoxi, along with the various ways of using them in daily life. If you're interested, see you tomorrow.

▋Lifestream — Weekend Practice

Date: Saturday, May 2
Time: 2:30–4:00 pm
Venue: Kaduoxi Curry
Map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/6Zp316P4iB2z16eg8