Conviction

The five faculties are listed in the order in which they ordinarily develop.

You begin with conviction because conviction deals with your views about what’s possible in terms of your self and of your world.

In terms of the world, you’re convinced about what is possible and desirable to strive for. In terms of your self, conviction deals with what you believe you are capable of doing.

In the Buddha’s teachings, we’re looking for a happiness that goes beyond anything we’ve known before, and so it’s important to have a sense of the world that allows for that happiness, and a sense of yourself as capable of finding it.

Because this happiness is beyond the ordinary, you can’t know whether it’s possible until you’ve reached it, which means that the beliefs that help you reach it have to rank as a matter of conviction, and not of true knowledge.

They become knowledge only when they’ve produced the desired results.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the book, The Five Faculties : Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind (Introduction).