Feelings of Unworthiness
June 30, 2023

Many of us grew up in a society where the dominant religion taught that there was something called a final judgment, the final tallying up as to your value as a person. No matter how harsh the judgment might be, you had to accept it as just. We see the influence of this belief in our society even in areas that are secular.

I was reading the other day that there’s a theory that the whole purpose of the judicial system is to arrive at final judgments. Whether they’re fair or not, just or not, doesn’t matter. They want to make sure that a judgment, once arrived at, is not questioned. In other words, we have a finality system, not a judicial system.

Another influence we can see is that belief that feelings of unworthiness are spiritually a good thing. After all, if a final judge comes and says, “Okay, eternal damnation,” we have to have a strong sense of our own unworthiness to think that that could be possibly just. Many of us have rejected that religion precisely for these reasons, but often it still sloshes around in our minds that somehow a sense of unworthiness could be spiritually advanced.

Actually, it gets in the way of the practice.

Remember the Buddha’s words for his teaching: instruction, encouragement, rousing, urging. The whole point of the teaching is to get people confident that, Yes, this is something you can do no matter what your past may be. Your mind can change very fast. As the Buddha said, nothing can change as quickly as the mind. There’s no analogy that he could give for how quick the mind is to change its course.

Now, that can be a negative thing, but it can also be a positive thing, as when you have a good change of heart. You realize that your past may be bad—you either have done bad things in the past, or your past attempts at doing something good, something difficult have met in failure—but that doesn’t mean that that’s the way it always has to be. There is no final judgment in Buddhism. The only thing that’s final is nibbāna. Think about that: Finality here is ultimate happiness.

Up until that point, your judgments are the judgments of a craftsperson. You judge how you’re doing, and if there’s anything you see that you could improve you try to improve it. The purpose of the judgment is not to discourage you, and it’s not to come to a final judgment. Even when you’ve finished, say, a chair, or a table or a dish, that’s not the final table, chair, or dish. You look at what you’ve done and you ask yourself, “How could this be improved the next time around?”

This is probably why the Buddha said that the luminous quality of the mind is what allows us to train the mind: We can look at our actions and the results of our actions and see where they’re lacking. When we see where they’re lacking, we don’t stop there. We try to figure out why and how we can improve things the next time around.

You’ve got to bring this attitude to your meditation: that regardless of your past, there is the possibility of learning a skill. Our educational system sometimes doesn’t encourage this. It tends to channel people into areas where they’re already talented. As a result we don’t have much practice in developing skill in areas where we’re not naturally talented. But you can learn how to learn.

Think of all those analogies that Ajaan Lee gives: learning how to sew a pair of pants, learning how to weave a basket, learning how to make clay tiles, learning how to make things out of silver. These are ongoing processes, and as any craftsperson will tell you, you can keep getting better. We all have this potential.

Think of the story of Aṅgulimāla. He had killed all those people, and if he hadn’t had a change of heart, he would have gone to a bad destination. But he did have a change of heart. He realized that he was going along the wrong way and he was confident he could change. This is why that ability of the mind to change direction is so important. And why confidence is such an important part of the path.

The word for confidence, pasada, also relates to the quality of a clear, cool lake. Limpid. Bright. You have those moments of clarity where you can see that “Yes, this is possible. Yes, I have been doing things wrong in the past, but having an attitude of unworthiness is not going to help.”

When the Buddha was teaching, it was always to give people the encouragement that, Yes, they could do this. Now, when some of his monks were misbehaving, he would call them worthless—moghapurisa was the term: worthless person, empty person. But that was not meant to be a final judgment. It was meant to get them to reflect on their actions and to see what could be changed.

Even in the story of Devadatta, who tried to destroy the Sangha: He’s going to suffer for a long time, but it’s not an endless suffering. There’s always a way out. Even Mara is supposed to eventually become a private Buddha. So this is a story in which even the bad guys get their redemption. You’re not nearly as bad as they are, so there’s hope for you as well.

So feelings of unworthiness are not encouraged in this tradition. In fact, they’re seen as defilements because we’re not groveling in front of a larger power that we hope to please, in hopes that our display of our own sense of unworthiness will inspire a sense of pity. We have to look at what we have in terms of our own resources and learn how to make the most of them.

Think of Ajaan Fuang, orphaned, didn’t do well at school, didn’t have any particular talents: He said that as he reached about the age of sixteen, he began to reflect on his life, and he could see that it was not going in a good direction. What he needed was some good karma, and he didn’t have much in his past, at least as far as he could see, that he could build on. But he could build on his determination now that he wanted to learn, and on his confidence that he could learn. That’s why he ordained. That’s why, when he ordained in a village monastery and he grew disappointed with the trainging he was getting, he kept looking until Ajaan Lee came to town.

When he found Ajaan Lee, he knew that he had found what he wanted—the opportunity he wanted—and he went for it. Whatever the difficulties, whatever the problems, whatever the hardships, he was up for them. That was the attitude that saw him through, and that’s an attitude we can all develop.

The Buddha wasn’t always the Buddha. If you look at the Jātaka tales, you can see that there were times when he made lots of mistakes. But that didn’t prevent him from learning from his mistakes, and having the confidence that, Yes, supreme awakening was something he could do.

So we’re living in a different world frame here as we practice. Finality is not final judgment, as when you see those murals where some beings are cast down to hell and they’re going to stay there forever.

Real finality is nibbāna. Ultimate happiness. All kinds of people have made their way there, and you can make your way there, too.