Q: What is today's wisdom?
- John Allen Paulos
"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
- Erich Fromm
The Universe Is Smiling: Uncertainty
Monika's weekly inner voice drawings:
Q: What is today's wisdom?
A: "Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security."
- John Allen Paulos
"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
- Erich Fromm
Q: What is today's wisdom?
- John Allen Paulos
"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
- Erich Fromm
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What are these two figures gazing upon? Their eyes are transfixed as if in a single-pointed meditation (and whether their eyes are closed or partially open is less relevant—meditation is not technique :) In their concentrated efforts, they are cultivating certainty so that uncertainty can pull out the last seeds of afflictive emotions beneath consciousness. What these two are gazing at and so becoming is the sea and its undulating waves before them. It is the unchanging of change upward flowing in waves of manifestation. Wssssssshhhhhhhhhh goes the sea, back and forth as if rocking mind to wakefulness. This is the gestating path of meditation giving birth to deeper levels of wisdom, or understanding. Though we have been told by the many lineages of enlightened beings why we meditate (or pray or chant), we really don’t know; that is, we have yet to experience what we know, and so, don’t really know. True knowing is the experience of knowing. This not yet knowing is uncertainty, the seed of the creative, the transcendent, the flash of awakening, Love. Uncertainty says, along with the irreverent Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.” In uncertainty, we speak of surrender. But, surrender isn’t giving up control; it’s giving up the need to control. Surrender is faith, the knowing of unknowing that engenders freedom: from suffering. When we give ourselves sadness, we allow ourselves to become the letting go that sadness is. When we open our hearts and let the emotions flow out in the undulating waves of meaning, we surrender. But, as our two figures show us in Monika’s new drawing, as they gaze at the waves fingering their way in to awareness, uncertainty is not a concept: it is a mode of existence cultivated by a tremendous discipline of intention, motivation, attention, concentration, practice, and wisdom. Uncertainty doesn’t eschew certainty; it uses it as a placeholder, a container, a sacred space with an altar of intention to hold the ignorance of not knowing until the unknowing, in its suddenness, opens the curtains, as if for the first time, to let the glorious light of sun in.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6j4TGqVl5g