On uncertainty and unknowing
questions on contemplative life
Dear Andō,
(Your suffering is in my prayers) I have angst, especially since I just turned 80, about what, if anything, could be “on the other side.”
My early strict Catholic upbringing had it all defined — I can no longer abide by that “God.” How do I find comfort in uncertainty?
Firstly, thank you for your prayers — but please know that I am not suffering.
To suffer does not mean to be without sickness, without pain, loss, or any other human condition, without all the challenges that a human life brings with it. To suffer is to live in one’s mind, to believe in its storification of life as it is, as it actually is.
I know, I’ve been there. If I go there now, even for a moment, it is caught quickly, as the moment I recognise suffering to be present, I look to it, thank it for pointing me home, and return to the root from which all things arise, even suffering. Before that arising, there is no problem.
Now, to speak to your angst dear one, and anyone else currently in a state of dread over life’s unfolding:
Pause — stop for a moment, and come to rest.
Slow down, and breathe — slowly, and steadily — allowing all that moves within you to slow down, until it dissolves into this stillness.
From the viewpoint of this stillness, what is present, here and now? Notice how the angst, fear and anxiety that arises in you is fear of something that isn’t present here and now.
Notice not only that it isn’t present, but this fear is a fear of some imagined future. Our mind manufactures this fear. It is the fear of the unknowing of all things. But again, notice how much you actually know, and how much you don’t know, and can’t know. It is the nature of a human life, this unknowing. Yet if we have been raised with the belief that we need to know — that peace is only found within the certainty of knowing, rather than the blessedness of the unknowing and unknown.
You see, when we (think we) know or need to know everything, past, present, and future, and the belief that this brings security, we are lost.
Uncertainty, when closely observed, cannot bear the weight of such observation. Look within and you will see. Because it is not a thing, it is the absence of something. It is a turning away from the blessing of presence with and in the known. What is the known? Now. Now is the known, and all that ever can be. But even this is not so straightforward. Because now is not still, it is the ever unfolding, that which we call the present. This is where we truly live our lives. The rest is fear of our imagined futures, and our clinging tightly to pasts. What is unfolding is infinite by nature, containing limitless potential, that the human mind cannot begin to know. Even if we gathered all the scientists and philosophers in the world together, they could not explain it in an indisputable way.
What happens when we surrender to this impossible situation? Fear loses its strength. Doubt becomes wonder. Angst becomes joy. Frustration becomes gratitude. Such is the transformative power of a life lived from the unknowing.
If I’m focused on fearing the future, I am not present, and I am missing out on the greatest miracle of all. Life, here, now, ever unfolding.
If I’m focused on retreat for the past, I am not present, and I am missing out of the greatest miracle of all. Life, here, now, ever unfolding.
It can never not be. Even birth and death arise in, as, and from this divine unfolding.
I have developed a great love of this path of unknowing, since first discovering it through a prolonged solitary retreat of seven weeks, eleven years ago. I discovered the mystic’s path in The Cloud of Unknowing, a late 14th century Middle English text written solely for the purpose of guidance from a mentor to his mentee. This retreat of self-forgetting and self-discovery allowed me to see that all is made from unknowing, and how until then, I had given far too much credence to knowing.
To know that one cannot know anything at all, is the truest understanding of this the great matter. When we can come to this understanding, and recognise that nothing is certain but that which is here and now. Yet even this here and now is constantly unfolding towards the future and unravelling towards the past. It is not fixed, yet when we fix our gaze on this, at the ever unfolding and revealing edge of life, all is revealed just as it is. The story falls away.
At first, as the story falls away, this absence of truth, faith, wisdom, belief, appears to be a loss, and we grieve it, because we think we need something, we believe something is missing. In less than a split second, a measure of a hair’s breadth, we can return into time, believing these projections to be true. And so, our life appears to oscillate between truth and fake, when in fact, it is unchanging and reliable, only our attention is shifting its focus.
May these words be of service to you dear questioner, and all who need to hear them.
Go well, dear friends.
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Words and image by Andō.
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