Question and Answer on Confidence

STUDENT:

Dearest Kali Ma,
Ive wanted to ask you about confidence, as long as I remember I have struggled with feeling not confident in my words, actions, feelings. Sometimes I feel like these teachings about investigating, not believing everything I think and inspecting my rational exacerbates this in me and so I am doubting myself on every level and it is soooo painful. This is probably not what the teachings are saying and I was hoping you would help me to understand.

KALI MA:

Doubting your rationale is only doubting yourself if you feel your rationale is your self. Your thoughts wouldn't plague you so much if you didn't think that your thoughts are YOU.

Meditation is important to give you an experience of yourself that is far more extensive than thought, which is merely one function of mind.

If you base your confidence on your words, actions, and feelings, you will never feel confident. That kind of confidence is a contrived patch-work confidence, which is quite fragile. If you let go of trying to be a confident person or any kind of person and instead just be as you are, then it is possible to find innate confidence which only arises when you aren't trying to "front" as a confident person.

When we try to be confident we are immediately insecure, because trying to be, acting up an ideal version of our Self, is an unnatural state and never works- its always just an act. Being- and the innate confidence of being- is something that can only happen spontaneously of its own self-existent occurrence. For practicing be-ing we have meditation.

When we try to act confident we try to create a confidence that is free from insecurity, this is why the act of confidence is never actually successful. There is nothing in existence that is free from insecurity, or as we call it in the path, emptiness. All things are equally insubstantial as they are solid, as impermanent as they are permanent, as ineffable as they are definite... The threat of non-existence continuously arises as an intrinsic facet of existence. To try and create a confidence outside of that is to try and fabricate something that does not and will not ever exist. We try to create this dualistic version of confidence-devoid-of-insecurity, because we fear the vulnerability of what is. But that vulnerability is our authentic nature, it is our actual strength, and whenever we step out of that vulnerability we step out of our authentic nature. Aliented from our authentic nature, we start to feel neurotically insecure. Then of course we try to erase that insecurity by searching for a confidence devoid of insecurity...and a cycle of continuous neurosis is generated. In meditation we become friends with things as they are. We become friends with the empty-threat that is always within everything as the dynamic nature of life. We become friendly with the vulnerability this brings out in us...even begin to trust that vulnerability as we feel the freedom of not struggling to manufacture self. We discover a power within us, an innate confidence that is just there as a fact of being whenever we aren't "fronting."

Innate confidence has a sense of light-heartedness about thoughts and emotions, because it recognizes what they are. We don't feel insecure when unexpected planes fly over head in the sky, we just let them come and go. We can do this, because don't have some fixed concept/identity that the sky has to be devoid of planes. We don't feel that the planes either are ruining our hopes for the ideal sky. Instead we know this is part of sky, that things pass through it. Mind is sky and the thoughts are the plane. Our insecure feelings are welcome, there is room for them to arise and dissolve in the wecolming vastness of the sky-like buddha nature.

Confidence cannot be created. It just is there whenever we drop strategies and be... Natural being... It is there as an immutable, uncaused fact of our buddha-nature, to be found whenever we let go of trying to obliterate insecurity.

-Kali Ma, Mumbai India, January 2007