👈🏼 previous note, 00.02. Surfacing Doubts
Along with surfacing some important doubts, the process of developing this garden essay has clarified a few ideas I might call fallbacks because these are ideas I can always lean-in to if I am feeling general doubt.
| growth | |
|---|---|
| seed | ✅ confident to let go and lean-in to these |
| I decided my curiosity about developing the mind to its greatest [[06. Cultivating Saddhā#Developing the Mind | potential]] is reason enough to pursue this lifestyle. |
It helps to think of my training as an apprenticeship or a university degree, and to consider it worthwhile to get some meaningful training at least, before I resume trying to help others - this depends on faith in the oxygen mask analogy, which doesn’t need a note because everyone knows.
The ripple effect is something I can lean-in to sometimes: I genuinely believe it is meaningful and worthwhile to model an alternative to the material-hedonist paradigm.
Having articulated now this litany of surfaced doubts that were holding me back in practice, and fallbacks that I can lean-into, it is a heartfelt segue to something I realised only later in the essaying process: a large part of my motivation to pursue Buddhist practice is not so much faith in Buddhism, but from a long-time crisis of faith 👉🏻 in my own inherited worldview. No matter how shaky my saddhā might be, my faith in hedonistic materialism is shakier ~ which makes this one of my fallbacks itself.
It’s kind of like the parable of the trapeze: having let go of any faith I might have once had in the mainstream worldview, I am sailing through the air in search of something to grasp about Buddhism.