The search for certainty
What if uncertainty isn't a flaw in life, but one of its fundamental qualities?
Years ago, I found myself sitting in a soviet-era-style university lecture hall in Toronto, Canada. I was listening to a professor talk about uncertainty and the universe as part of a class I was taking on metaphysics. This moment has become one of those memories that just sticks. Not because it was some profound, life-changing experience, but more like my mind filed it away as ‘useful for later’ and remembers to go back now and again to check it out. In the lecture, my teacher was speaking about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It sounds dry, but this theory fundamentally changed how we understand reality.
Heisenberg discovered that at the deepest levels of nature, there are limits to what can be simultaneously known with precision. Basically, he found that the more precisely one aspect of a particle is measured, the less precisely another aspect can be known. This insight was profound, because prior to this discovery, scientific and philosophical thinking very much went along the Newtonian physics lines of ‘if you gather enough information, you can know everything’.
Now, why are we talking about physics, particles, and theories that have been around for decades? Because internally, we all still seem to live inside that Newtonian way of thinking. We believe that if we gather enough information, seek enough advice, weigh enough options, and think hard enough, eventually uncertainty will disappear. Then, we think ‘I’ll know everything I need to know about my life, and therefore I’ll never get anything wrong and everything will always work out exactly how I want/expect it to’.
Basically, we imagine uncertainty as a temporary problem that will disappear once we have enough information. Yet both modern quantum physics and ancient wisdom point toward something entirely different: uncertainty may not be a failure of perception, but an intrinsic part of the universe itself. That life is not a problem waiting to be solved, it is instead an unfolding intelligence waiting to be participated in.
The Vedic pivot.
The Vedic tradition approaches uncertainty from a very different direction than what we’re used to. Because rather than trying to eliminate uncertainty, the Vedic traditions instead ask us to reflect on what is it within us that is so disturbed by uncertainty in the first place.
When we look closely, uncertainty itself is rarely the problem. Usually, the deeper discomfort comes from the fact that uncertainty exposes our lack of control. We cannot know exactly how a relationship will unfold, we cannot know whether a new business or other venture will succeed. We cannot know how long we have with the people we love, what challenges lie ahead, or even who we will become over the coming years. And that can feel scary, and it can feel like a problem that needs immediate fixing.
Especially because some of the most meaningful experiences in life require us to move forward without any guarantees. Love asks it of us, birth does too. Grief demands it of us, and creation inspires it within us. Every significant threshold we face in life requires us to enter a place that cannot be fully mapped in advance. We may want to, but we cannot. And perhaps this is why uncertainty can feel so frightening, because we often mistake it for being unsafe. We assume that if we do not know what is coming, we are somehow unprepared for it. But uncertainty and being unsafe are not the same thing. We can be deeply uncertain and deeply supported at the same time. We can have no idea what the future holds and still trust ourselves enough to meet it.
This is where meditation offers something so valuable. Not because it makes life predictable, but because it introduces us to a part of ourselves that exists beneath the constant movement of thoughts, plans, fears, projections and emotions. A part of us that lives beyond the ever changing. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi described pure consciousness as an unchanging field underlying all change. While circumstances rise and fall, while life continues to surprise us, there remains something within that is already settled and is already stable.
Making peace with uncertainty.
A mind determined to find certainty says, ‘once I know, I will relax and let go.’ As life continues and we learn more about the world around us, I feel we begin to discover something else. We discover that peace does not come from certainty, it comes from developing a relationship with the unchanging aspect of life that remains present whether certainty arrives or not. And the uncertainty becomes something we dance with, create with and are inspired by instead of something that freezes us and activates us. We stop trying to eliminate uncertainty from life and instead embrace it as a natural part of what it means to be alive.
With Being as our foundation, the house doesn’t feel so shaky anymore. And yes, you can still meditate and feel the fear of uncertainty and the desire to be certain despite daily contact with Being. Perhaps uncertainty is not evidence that something has gone wrong, and is instead just showing us that life is still unfolding. The future has not yet been written, and this isn’t a problem to solve but rather the gift life gives us, but only if we’re open to receiving it.
With love,
Sarah x
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