Dear John,

I was once visiting a friend who had recently given birth to her second child, a lovely little girl. Her first child, a precocious three-year-old named Tamara, was exhibiting definite signs of jealousy towards this newcomer with whom she had to share her parents’ attention.

As my friend lovingly cradled the sleeping infant in her arms, Tamara approached with a knowing look in her eyes and asked, “Mommy, is that baby icky?”

“Oh, no,” was my friend’s reply, “she’s very nice.”

Attempting to plant seeds of doubt in her mother’s mind, she left with the words, “You never know.”

I’ve sometimes wondered if Tamara grew up to be a reporter, since raising doubt in people’s minds seems to be the modus operandi of the news today. Elected officials, spiritual leaders, health experts, sports figures: no one is immune from having questions raised about their integrity or their hidden agenda. Sometimes the headlines stoop so low as not even to pretend to have backup facts, but simply ask a question: “Is it true that Martians are living inside Mt. Everest?”

The insidious thing about being fed a regular diet of such information is that it continually activates doubt, which is a state of consciousness. Over time it becomes a chronic condition that has little to do with any particular issue, but leads to uncertainty, anxiety, and loss of faith in anything.

Paramhansa Yogananda called doubt “suicidal.” He said that constructive doubt, which questions only in order to arrive at the truth, is all right, but that destructive doubt is a habitual state that eventually paralyzes the will. He went on to say, “Doubt is a mental insanity by which you absolutely refuse to recognize your own ability to cognize the world around you and to understand everything.”

What can we do to rise above chronic doubt and reclaim our ability to know what is real and true? It’s good to limit the time we spend looking at news or social media. Even the positive content that’s shared online can take us away from our center if we give it too much focus. True knowing does not come from avoiding negative input; nor, for that matter, from seeking positive input: Its source is not the mind or intellect, but rather a sense of deep inner awareness.

Swami Kriyananda had a remarkable ability to see past people’s outer personas, and to understand who they really were. This enabled him to help others and to bring out the best in them. His understanding came not from knowing facts about a person, but from being fully centered in himself and relating to that center in others. This ability is born of meditation and of having achieved deep inner stillness.