Feeding My Ignorance

Many say it is of vital importance to hold true to your beliefs. Belief is a concept that is central to "being human". I would like to suggest that it is more important to have doubts. That Doubt is not so much central to "being" as to "becoming".

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Without Doubt - without Uncertainty - there is no reason to learn - no reason to improve - no reason to seek knowledge. Absolute absence of doubt means that you "know it all" - only the absence of that certainty will trigger a search for a better understanding.

Fortunately, most people have doubts. Unfortunately, doubt is often treated as a negative characteristic. This leads to Doubt getting a bit of a bad press. So - most people are harbouring doubts and thinking that is a bad thing. Now it is certainly true that some doubts are unhelpful - but possibly less so than some "certainties". There is - I would suggest - very little about which we can really be 100% certain - we can get close - but ONLY about what we have experienced - not about what we will (or might) experience.

When we start looking at the past we come up against the difficulty of separating reality from fantasy - as I have written about before. The further in the past something is, the less we can be certain about it. I can be reasonably certain that once I write this I will publish it in my blog - but even there a small doubt can creep in - it is certainly not 100% certain!!!

So - Doubt as a necessary condition for self development - seems like the start of a new series of articles on here (but I can't be sure...)