“The ignorant, the faithless, the doubting soul perishes; for the doubter there is neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness.” This is a strong verse, and easily misread as a threat against questioning. It is the opposite. The whole book has been one long invitation to question. What is condemned here is not honest inquiry but chronic saṁśaya — the corrosive, unresolved doubt that never lets a person commit to any path long enough to test it, so that he drifts, gaining nothing here and nothing beyond. The cure is given in the very next verses: cut this doubt, born of ignorance and lodged in the heart, with the sword of Knowledge (4.42), and stand up. Doubt is meant to be resolved into knowledge, not nursed forever.