How to Have Doubt

Man remains drunken in doubt. He drinks from the question and becomes even thirstier from it. One answer leads him to another question, and this question again demands an answer, until he no longer knows whether he seeks truth or merely another cup from which to drink.

Thus doubt can become an intoxication, a poison without end. Man circles the same thing, turns it over, gives it one meaning and then another, and each meaning seems for a moment to steady him. Yet soon the earth moves again beneath his feet, and he reaches once more for the cup, hoping that what disturbed him might now make him firm.

Why does he drink so deeply from doubt?

Perhaps because somewhere in his life there stands a thing that has not yet taken form.

It has neither said yes nor no. It has neither departed nor arrived. It is not yet this and not yet that. It remains between things, between the worlds, in an uncanny strange middle place where one life has already loosened its hold and another has not yet shown its face.

There man must remain.

He cannot command the thing to appear before its hour. He cannot drag what belongs to darkness into the daylight merely because darkness troubles him. What has not yet found its form must for a time remain without form. One must suffer the unfinished thing as unfinished, the ambiguous thing as ambiguous, and the doubtful thing as doubtful.

Jung stood in this same place. In the Red Book he wrote:

"He who cannot bear doubt does not bear himself. Such a one is doubtful; he does not grow and hence he does not live. Doubt is the sign of the strongest and the weakest. The strong have doubt, but doubt has the weak. Therefore the weakest is close to the strongest, and if he can say to his doubt: 'I have you,' then he is the strongest."

Then doubt no longer speaks with the voice of fate.

It becomes his.

It appears to me that in my earlier days, when I sought growth, I remained for a long time in uncertainty. At first it was a poisonous drink. I drank from it and suffered from it, and yet I returned to it again and again.

I cannot say when the poison changed. Perhaps I had remained with its bitterness for so long that I had ceased asking when it would become sweet.

Then one day I drank from the same cup and found red wine.

And soon I saw my doubts becoming green, as though the very thing that had once poisoned me had entered the earth and begun to feed it.

Then there appeared the garden of my essence.