Doubts and Fears

Who authors our doubts and fears?

With neither being more pleasant than the other, and in most cases both turning out to have been unwarranted, why do so many bother entertaining either? If you Google the words "doubts and fears" you get nearly 4 million results. Everyone has something to say on how to overcome them. But Google wasn't around when the great minds in time first pondered the same.

Rene Descartes, dubbed "The Father of Modern Philosophy," made some astounding discoveries about the nature of doubt. In Meditation I: Concerning Those Things That Can Be Called into Doubt he wisely elects to suspend judgment about any of his beliefs which are even slightly doubtful. The first way that Descartes tries to undermine his beliefs is by considering the fact that he remembers that his senses have deceived him before. By Meditation II: Concerning The Nature of the Human Mind, he offers that we only have access to the world of our ideas, pointing out that ideas and the things they represent are separate from each other, and thus, it is possible for these ideas to constitute either accurate or false representations.

I had an idea, that I turned into some subconscious belief, that I might not be worthy of love, trust, acceptance and loyalty from a person of the opposite sex. It was a truly absurd belief to adopt when nothing would please me more than to be wrong.

But if I consider the notion of Representational Realism, I have an out, for it states that we do not (and cannot) perceive the external world as it really is; instead we know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is. If that can be considered true, then I have every reason to have adopted a false belief and to doubt something that may contradict it. Right?

Wrong. Today, I learned first hand that I must adopt Descartes' resolve to suspend judgement on things that leave room for even slight doubt. I let fear cause doubt in my love, and then experienced an unpleasant chain of emotional reaction to a false assumption. There was every reason to doubt my fears that the true love that had been professed for me was being retracted, yet I bought them because I digressed into the false belief that I had adopted without reason.

My true love set me straight. How refreshing to have a man willing to hear me, empathize with how I may have arrived at these false conclusions, and reassure me that his love had not wavered for one minute ... the whole episode of disappointment and pain was self inflicted due to fear. I am going to be more conscious about this epiphany the next time the monsters of doubt and fear rear their ugly heads.

And there you have it.