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How Doubt Affects Our Concentration
Where darkness obscures our object.
Imagine we are in a dark basement, looking for something we know is in some box. After having searched a few boxes with a flashlight, we become doubtful if we will find what we are looking for. The basement seems to become darker. When we pick up an object with the hope that we had found the item we wanted, we put it back in uncertainty toward whether it actually is what we want. We wander about the basement, checking more boxes while inspecting different objects, never certain if we have found the object--or if we ever will.
Has this happened to you before? Despite maybe being an exaggerated example, how had doubt affected our focus and is there something we can do about it?
What is doubt?
Like sense-desire, ill-will, and restlessness and worry, doubt is a hindrance to concentration. Doubt clouds our minds with thoughts that pressure us into feeling lost, or like we are not on the path we had thought we were.
Think of this in terms of our basement metaphor. In the dark, we used a flashlight to light up anything the light was aimed at. This flashlight symbolizes our ability to focus on an object; when we focus our flashlight on a box, we can keep the light sustained on the box as a steady and stream, or we can fan the light in a…
