Question: What is the best way for me to conquer doubt?

Sri Chinmoy: The best and most effective way to conquer doubt is to take the positive side. Feel that you are not doubt; you are certainty. Feel that you are not fear; you are courage. Always try and identify yourself with the positive quality. Right now, unfortunately, you are identifying yourself with doubt. You feel that doubt is reality. But if you change your attitude towards your own inner life, then you will say that doubt is not reality, fear is not reality; the real reality is faith, the real reality is courage.

You are accepting doubt as your friend. You have been with doubt for twenty years, let us say, and you feel that doubt is your real friend; otherwise you would not have stayed with him and he would not have stayed with you. But the moment you see that a better friend is entering into your life, you will not act like a fool. You will say, "Now another friend has come into my life and I see that this friend will take me to a higher goal. Even though I stayed with ignorance for twenty or thirty years, I don't have to stay one second more when I see that somebody else has come who is more illumining, more fulfilling." Immediately you will take that person as your friend.

Your new friends are faith and courage. These two friends have always been beside you; only you have not sided with them. Previously you sided all the time with doubt and fear. Now take them as your past friends, old friends, since your new friends have come. In that way, if you change your friendship, immediately your problem is solved. Otherwise, you will constantly be on the battlefield fighting with your old friends, fear and doubt.

If you do change friends, then what happens? In the beginning those old friends, fear and doubt, will try to bring you back. They won't want to lose your friendship. But soon they will feel that it is beneath their dignity to mix with you. They will say, "All right, let him go, let him go. If he does not care for us, if he does not need us, then we also do not need him." It is like human pride. When we lose a friend, in the beginning we try to bring the friend back. But afterwards, when we see that it is a hopeless case, that our friend is not going to come back because he has accepted somebody else as his friend, our ego comes to the fore. We say, "If he does not need us, then we also don't need him." So in this way doubt and fear leave us when we make friends with faith and courage.