Both doubt and conviction, even though valued and perceived differently, have the same nature. Both are just ideas that we hold in the mind, that we believe to be true, and act or do not act in certain ways, just because we think it’s ‘right’ (conviction), or we don’t act because it might be ‘wrong’ (doubt). And the common and very important feature/characteristic of them both, is that they are not the best guides when it comes to decision making and taking action.
The reason why I am stating that, is pretty obvious. Both doubt, and conviction doesn’t mean that we know/or don’t know what we’re doing — even though when we feel doubt we ‘feel’ like we don’t know what we’re doing, and when we’re in a state of conviction, we’re absolutely convinced that we do. In fact, how we feel towards something, is not portraying the real situation — but our thoughts about/towards that.
So for instance, when we’re looking at a task that we have done many times — we have the conviction to accomplish it, and we don’t fear making errors in executing the task. And when we don’t have much experience, we doubt we will be able to be good in it. But the thing is, that the conviction can be misleading, because it might lead to making errors that we won’t even notice in executing the task — because we have been so convinced, we’ll do it properly. And the doubt that we feel towards something we aren’t yet proficient with, doesn’t mean that we won’t be one day awesome in doing that.
So both of those phenomenons of doubt and conviction, are of the mind. And as the mind is just a ‘simulation room’ that is based on our memories, things we’ve seen, we believe about ourselves, others and reality — it is not something that presents us with a real assessment of reality. And I’m stressing it so much, because it’s almost never taken in consideration. People often just follow their doubts and convictions calling it ‘human nature’. Well, those things aren’t that huge. They simply are the consequence of the ‘simulation box’ of the mind — that is simply inaccurate. Especially because when it comes to doubts and convictions we are looking at what ‘I’ can or cannot do. And ego is really an issue here. Some will doubt in themselves constantly, others will blindly believe in whatever they’re doing — which in combustion creates the world that we know it today, where war, starvation and child prostitution is happening on an alarming scale on a daily basis. And nothing is done to prevent that, because we’re all just blinded in our mind-bubbles without having any touch with reality, and thus without any common understanding and possibility to agree to do something about it together.
