A single fact has survived every doubt I have had
I have doubted almost everything at some point in my life. Most of it deserved the doubt. My opinions shifted, my teachers came and went, and my certainties about myself dissolved one by one. Some faded slowly, and some went all at once.
Most people never check which of their certainties are real. I did, mostly because life forced me to check.
One fact has never moved. I did not set out to find it. It was simply what remained when everything else fell away. Through all of it, something was aware of the doubt. I cannot find one moment of my life when I was not conscious.
Being conscious is the only certainty I have. The rest I know the way I know a rumour. It might be true, and it might be well sourced. It could still be wrong.
So this piece goes through my doubts one at a time, and shows what survives them. I include the doubts I did not choose.
My beliefs, my memories, my teachers could all be wrong
I start with my beliefs, because they fall fastest. I have believed ideas about money, love and God that I no longer believe. Each one felt like knowledge at the time. I was once sure of positions I would now argue against.
My memories come next, and they are less solid than they feel. I remember my childhood, but each memory is partly rebuilt every time I recall it. Two people at the same dinner remember two different evenings. The version I carry today is not the one I carried at twenty.
Then come my teachers. I learned from books, masters and whole traditions, and I trusted many of them completely. Some spoke as if nothing could ever shake them. Some were right, some were wrong, and I cannot always tell which.
Even my own seven books could be mistaken in places. I wrote each of them in good faith, and each of them is a report, not a proof.
An honest mind can doubt each item on this list. What I know first-hand, rather than borrowed, would fit on a single page.(opens in new tab) Even that page shrinks under the question I keep asking myself: am I sure?
After my stroke, I could no longer trust my body
My stroke came in the summer of 2024. My About page tells more of that story.(opens in new tab) Here I only need what it did to my certainty.
Before my stroke, my body was the most obvious fact I owned. It woke me, carried me and spoke for me. I never questioned whether it would keep doing so.
After my stroke, every sensation became a question. Was this nothing, or was this the beginning of another one? My body turned from a fact into a suspect.
I learned that the body I had trusted for decades could alter without asking me. Nobody could promise me it would stay as it was.
If it could change once, it could change again. My body joined the long list of what I cannot be certain of.
My voice changed, but the one hearing it did not
My stroke also touched my voice. My speaking voice is not what it was. My singing voice may not come back at all.
I used to sing tenor in two choirs. I acted on amateur stages, and my voice was the instrument I trusted most. It was the sound by which I recognised myself.
On stage I used that voice to become other people. Now the voice itself has become another one. Whenever I speak, I hear the difference.
Then I noticed what the loss could not reach. My voice had changed, but whatever heard it had not. The same awareness that listened to the old voice was listening to the new one.
My voice is on the list of the doubtful now. The listener is not on it.
Even my health anxiety cannot doubt that it is experienced
My stroke left something else behind: a long-lasting health anxiety. It is a machine built for doubt, exhausting and very sure of itself. Each small signal becomes a warning, and each warning becomes a story.
My anxiety doubts my brain, my health and my future. It doubts any reassurance it is given. It doubts my own reading of my body, day after day.
One doubt has always been beyond my anxiety. It has never once doubted that it is being felt. Every fear arrives as an experience in awareness.
That is almost funny, once I see it. The most doubtful part of me proves the one certainty whenever it speaks. It cannot doubt anything without being experienced first.
I am not saying this cures the anxiety, because it does not. The fear still comes. But it no longer gets the last word about what is certain.
Descartes also doubted everything, then stopped one step too soon
I am not the first to go looking for one certainty. René Descartes did it in the seventeenth century, and far more rigorously.
Descartes wanted one foundation that no doubt could shake, so that all knowledge could rest on it. He therefore decided to doubt everything that could possibly be doubted.
The senses sometimes deceived him, so he set them aside. Dreams could feel exactly like waking life, so the whole world went too. Descartes even imagined a deceiving demon, filling the mind with false beliefs.
What remained was the doubter himself. Even a deceived mind has to exist in order to be deceived. The Discourse on Method was written in French, for ordinary readers. It gave the conclusion its famous form: I think, therefore I am.
Four years later, in the Meditations, Descartes sharpened it to four words: I am, I exist. He wrote that book in Latin, for scholars. Both works fit in one slim Penguin paperback, and they read faster than their reputation.(opens in new tab)
I admire the method, and I share the starting point. But I believe Descartes stopped one step too soon.
Before I think anything, I am already aware
Thinking is already something that happens. A thought appears, it moves, and it passes. Before any thought appears, awareness is there to receive it.
Descartes said that he thinks, therefore he is. My own experience says something smaller and older. I am aware, and thought comes afterwards. My version is smaller, because awareness needs no thinker. It is older, because awareness was there before I learned any words.
This correction is not mine alone. In eighth-century India, the teacher Shankara put it in one sentence. Every one, he wrote, 'is conscious of the existence of (his) Self, and never thinks "I am not."'
Others made the same point against Descartes directly. The German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg suggested saying 'it thinks', the way one says 'it lightens'. Nobody asks who is doing the lightning. For Lichtenberg, thoughts happen the same way.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that a thought comes when it wants, not when I want. The 'I' in 'I think', he argued, is an assumption added afterwards.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued that awareness comes first. The 'I' appears, he said, only when awareness turns back on itself. Four very different minds, across twelve centuries, reached the same conclusion.
Earlier this month I explored the same certainty entirely through questions.(opens in new tab) Here I give my own reply, in the first person.
This certainty answers no questions, yet everything rests on it
Here is what this certainty does not give me. It does not tell me what happens when I die. Nor does it tell me whether my singing voice will return.
Whether I am a good man, or whether my work matters, it leaves open. It will not choose my next move or calm my anxiety on demand. My anxiety would love an answer from it, and so would my curiosity. Neither gets one.
As an answer to my questions, it is useless. And yet every question I have ever asked has rested on it. Every doubt, every fear and every hope appeared in this awareness first.
Take awareness away, and nothing would be left to ask anything. So I have stopped expecting it to answer me. It is the one fact I no longer argue with.
All the rest of what I say, including this piece, stays provisional. That includes my books, my teachings and my opinions about Descartes. Provisional does not mean careless. It means I hold those views lightly. Because this alone is certain, I try to say only what I actually know. Most spiritual teaching claims far more.
I can only offer what I am certain of
That leaves me with an honest problem as a teacher. I cannot promise healing, because my own body still surprises me. I cannot promise answers, because this certainty resolves none of my questions.
I cannot even promise that my seven books are right. They are my best attempts, written by someone who can doubt almost everything.
Some readers will find that too little to offer. I understand the disappointment.
What I can offer is to point at the one fact that survived all my doubts. It is not a belief I am asking you to adopt. It is simply being aware, which needs no adopting. There is nothing to hand over, because it is already there in you.
I am certain of one thing only, so I can honestly invite you into one thing only.(opens in new tab) It is reading these words right now.