Chapter 08 - Viagnostic

If we were completely certain about everything, we would never need to make a decision. The answer would always be clear, and therefore, every choice would be as well. But we are not certain about anything because there always remains the possibility that things may not be as we believe they are. There will expectedly be things that are absent from our awareness. And although we may have a deep, unconscious faith in the idea that there is an underlying order to existence and a comprehensive truth that explains that order, we do not know definitively what it is. The truth is an unattainable absolute, which means it is inaccessible in its absolute form, and consequently, leaves us in an unending state of ignorance no matter how much we think we understand. Despite the astonishing amount that we have collectively come to learn, we know very little about what lies within the vast library of information about our existence, and the knowledge we possess can only ever provide limited predictive power and applicability to our lives. All we really know is that there is a base reality, which we share, and which is expressed all around us as well as within us and through us.

While we can point to mathematics and the language of formal logic as evidence of certainty that is universal and unchanging over time, logical truth falls within its own definition as inherent rules of reasoning. We discover and establish its veracity as a relational abstraction with its own properties that we can rationally apply to the world. And although we personally rely on logic just as science does to depict, model and calculate the patterns of our universe, it is nonetheless a tool through which we approach the truth. Reason and proof are indispensable components of building confidence and working towards certainty, but they are neither the underlying order of things and events nor the concepts we are ultimately attempting to conceive. Hence, while our abstract creations may have verity, it is the all-encompassing truth we naively try to grasp that is the source of our enduring uncertainty.

Our knowledge and substantiated beliefs serve as approximations to some greater truth we cannot define. They represent versions and slices of reality that grow in complexity, where more complexity translates to more conditions or factors that we have to take into consideration. Although we may think of the truth as being absolute and unconditional in spirit, everything we know is always conditional in nature. Knowledge is limited to the conditions we take into account and based on the assumptions we make about existence. And since there are always things or circumstances beyond our awareness that confirm our knowledge is incomplete, we will inevitably fail to predict events or their recurrence. The relatively indeterminate world we confront is a natural consequence of never having all of the information we need in order to know anything comprehensively and absolutely that falls outside of our prefabricated cultural sphere where we can invent our own truth as individuals and as groups.

Knowledge is in a constant state of refinement and in an endless realignment with reality as we face incalculable unknowns that impose altering limits on what we can know at any given time. While some of us like to focus on invalidating what we know, we need to remember that our knowledge always has a degree of veracity that is conditional and relative to the scope in which we are trying to comprehend the world. These limits are necessary to organize our thoughts around a specific question or subject. Each question can trigger any set of views within our current understanding as we filter for relevant constellations of reasons, facts and images to paint a particular story of reality. But as we closely examine what we know and reach the boundary of the conditions we can predict or solve, we begin to see the gaps or inconsistencies in our explanations and methods that we need to address.

However, despite our epistemic faults and cavities, we recognize that our knowledge carries with it some degree of truth that holds value. For instance, we may not know our exact nutritional requirements, but it is understood that refusing to eat or to receive nourishment in some form will accelerate our deterioration and ultimately result in death. Although we can and should question our knowledge, being able to question what we think we know does not make it untrue. It is easy to point out flaws in anything we sufficiently scrutinize, but it is silly for any of us to throw out the whole because we think one part is defective. We always have to weigh the good against the bad, and remember that we must be making fairly good assumptions about the underlying laws of the universe if we are able to navigate successfully through the world. Hence, we cannot be and do not need to be indisputably certain about everything in order to function. We merely require moderate assurances to move forward.

Many of us turn to science or religion for certitude when what we seek is reliability and guidance in fulfilling our core needs and in expressing the essence of who we really are. This is because what we think we want is only ever an approximation to our true dependencies as demonstrated by how the foods we produce and consume roughly serve our physiological requirements. The reason we normally live with these unknowns is that we are more than adequately content with our circumstances and able to dutifully bear their negative effects. However, if things become misaligned or our states are out of balance for a prolonged period, we begin to feel increasingly insecure and to question what we believe or trust. Each of us has a different threshold for tolerating risk, but we all need experience or evidence to build trust in what we do and what we know about the world, others and ourselves. Since we cannot predict the unknown or escape the existential condition of uncertainty, our only option is to assess risk as best as we can and trust where our knowledge and practices lead us.

THE VALUE AND THE RISK OF UNCERTAINTY

While it is important that we are always prepared to question anything and everything, we need to have a bit of faith in what we already know in order to sustain our existence and feel secure in doing so. It is unlikely that questioning everything all the time would serve us well, especially if it includes challenging whether there is any order at all. How would we function through the course of our day if we simply imagined that everything was pure chaos? It is a natural, necessary and mostly innate assumption that we all make so that we can live and go about our business without being in a constant state of panic about the possibility of, for instance, the sky falling or the ground beneath us completely disappearing. It is always possible, but there is no point to worrying about it. And even if we experience endless upheaval, some aspect of the world would remain stable. Our nature tells us to trust the universe. Any rejection of this assumption or failure to accept it can only interfere with our ability to function since we would likely be overwhelmed by anxiety or enter into a state of bewilderment. It would not serve any positive purpose for us or anyone else.

Knowing that there is something fundamental to the cosmos and to our lives that we can trust, without attributing any specific law or meaning to it, is essential. We know this instinctively because an entirely random reality would end reality. It would be impossible for anything to form and have any continuity to existence. Even a brief moment of stability would not afford us the opportunity to learn anything about the universe because it would be gone before we could witness a single pattern. We could not confidently execute any task on any given day if order did not underlie our existence. Try to imagine a reality where, for example, gravity would randomly act upon the world. How would we be able to do anything or rely on anything around us to function, or find the time to adapt to its variability? It is obvious that we depend on a minimal level of stability to engage in basic activities to survive. And if we believed that our lives were managed by a more advanced intelligence and we did not need to do anything, order would still need to be in place. Hence, our starting point is not that everything is false, but that at least something is true.

Uncertainty simply drives us to question and understand both what we know and what we do not know. There is always the risk that it may plague us with apprehension or fixation and leave us frozen in indecision. But if we exercise our ability to question ourselves and our surroundings with some degree of discipline, we will only raise our uncertainty enough to increase the likelihood of finding answers, and possibly with some enthusiasm. It is not just about asking questions. It is about asking good and pointed questions. They could be narrow or broad, but they hold some purpose within a roughly outlined scope that keep our thinking focused. The moment we lose that focus, our uncertainty can overcome us with fear and subsequently lead to mental paralysis.

Many things we do come with the chance, however slight, that we may die or end up being injured, especially if we are not paying attention. But if we do nothing at all, which includes depriving ourselves of nutrients, we will most certainly die. Action is conditionally forced upon us because we are in motion with the universe from which we emerge. Given this reality, we also make innumerable decisions over the course of our lives without ever having sufficient information. We have to make choices with our limited knowledge and always in the presence of doubt. This means that we have to make assumptions and take risks every day, and in that process, we build confidence as we test our beliefs and gather evidence. Everything we do requires us to have a minimum degree of trust and a basic tolerance for risk. We really have no choice. But somewhere between our longing for certitude and the trappings of our trepidation, we find and maintain hope to fill in the famished belly of our emptiness and to face the tumultuous journey yet to be chronicled. Hope reflects our desire to live when we believe that a change for the better remains a possibility, whether it is left to chance or driven by the conviction of self-determination.

Our attitudes towards risk and uncertainty depend heavily on our experience. While there may be an ample measure of stability and good fortune for significant periods of our lives, we also undergo a notable amount of instability and unexpected tragedy. This varies from person to person, but we all bear witness to the difficulties of a sentient existence if we live long enough. Some of us suffer hardship from early age and grow up thinking of this as a normal state of affairs, while others among us have watched our livelihoods taken away and lose everything much later in life. Impermanence may be expected, but it is the indeterminate future that generates our unease. More specifically, it is our expectation of unchanging conditions or the prospect of unfavourable outcomes that emotionally influences our failure to act. Whether we think it is due to our sense of inadequacy or to factors outside of our control, it can prevent the necessity of action even when inaction is less desirable than an incorrect move. But we can only confront uncertainty and grow from its inextinguishable nature by learning from the compulsion of our substantiated deeds within the bounds of our available choices.

It is natural to seek clarity and reduce our uncertainty in order to take decisive action, but uncertainty incites us to make choices through the constant scarcity of information critical to making decisions. Our existence is intimately shaped by the insecurity of our misalignment and by how we address that misalignment. Many of us tend to ignore, deny or rationalize the disharmony in our lives to facilitate our ill-informed judgments and ingrained preferences. Our indisputable beliefs and feelings reinforce our illusory perceptions and predictable patterns of behaviour. When we retreat from uncertainty, we blindly step back in the kerosene of its risk and convert our thoughtless actions into the flames of our liabilities. We also turn to argument and logic, where infinitely dividing deduction never consoles us with undeniable truth as we retrace our footsteps through the ashes of our recursive inquisition. Our only salvation is let the value of uncertainty lead us out of our misguided illations. And it is not in hostile suspicion that feeds our anxious questioning, but in the uncorrupted curiosity of our individual inquiry that intuitively and rationally leads us to the communal well of truth.

Much like our fight or flight response to threats, our instinct is to escape the responsibility of committed decisions or to be declarative in our frequently groundless opinions when we encounter puzzling ambiguity that lifts the veil of our doubts. These tendencies reveal our addiction to certainty or the dread of our insecurity racing to affirm a self-assured identity as a retort to an unconscious fear of cultural indoctrination and economic enslavement. We inherit an insatiable need for personal validation that traps us in an endless demand and expectation to win or to gain acceptance while being reinforced by reward-driven hierarchies, where impression mastery often overtakes moral character with horrific consequences and reinvents the truth so that we never learn to face it or extract genuine meaning from life. We unleash the dormant evil within us by how we deal with uncertainty, which is why many of us need to revisit our commonly formed attitudes towards this fundamental condition of reality that should be openly discussed rather than secretly suppressed as a sign of weakness or failure. We have to allow people to respond comfortably to an existence that consists of countless shades of grey and to appreciate both the value and the risk of uncertainty because if we do not, we will instead force upon our world a false reality devoid of naturally meaningful alignment.

THE PREVALENT CULTURAL FRAMEWORK

As we have become increasingly sophisticated as a technologically assimilated society in the breadth and depth of practical knowledge about our macrocosmic and microcosmic universe, we have lost our innate appreciation for uncertainty. We have reshaped our surroundings into a deceivingly secure and predictable environment that has little tolerance for unpredictability or deviations from expected results. We are so focused on minimizing the threats associated with uncertainty that we have forgotten to breathe in the humbling and inspiring sense of mystery and wonder that it also embodies. The mystical represents the realm beyond our comprehension, but rests beneath our consciousness. It keeps us seeking meaning as we move through the obscure complexity of what is good and what is bad that defines life. However, in our growing capacity to dissect and manipulate the world, a newborn sense of power and rank that permeates our globalized society overshadows and dissipates any concern for our collectively fundamental well-being. As supremacy replaces quality and authority supplants verity, we opt to carelessly conquer our environment rather than integrate nature into our ingenuity.

We have mistakenly developed into a culture of blind superiority that is nested in an emotional desert of inferiority. We choose arrogance over humility and disdain over compassion. Conceit and contempt rule over the faithless until they too fall among the degraded. This profoundly disturbs the delicate balance between the masculine and the feminine, where many of us are seduced by the fantasy of physical control that ultimately imprisons our souls within the walls of our cemented beliefs and overly regimented lives, which secretly overcompensate for an indefinite existence. We respond to inescapable doubt by being ushered into engineered regularity like unsuspecting cattle being drawn to temporarily staged liberation before they are slaughtered. The insecurity of the isolated ego rules over the discovery of the inclusive self on an exploited planet where we worship individual stars in an illuminated night sky that conceals the spectacular glow of a galactic expanse to which we belong and with which we share.

Our enlightened periods of technological progress have unconsciously promoted subjugation over complementarity to address complexity behind the illusory safety of machines and codes. In the process, we have evolved a superficially diverse society of divided yet homogenized men and women, where a whole range of new identities and non-identities have developed that inadequately account for what we have lost. With the natural play of life abandoned and the ceremonial dance in disarray, we are tilted further to the darker side of our uncertainty that has reinforced the black-or-white construct of our judgments and emotions. Things are either good or bad, or true or false. This binary classification of the world that began long before the invention of computers has permeated our sociopolitical and interpersonal space to the degree that no one ever needs to adapt or compromise, and anyone can unilaterally declare truth by right of exercising our subjectivity. Faced with unfulfilling choices and conflicting information, we as the programmed yet untamed masses are left starving for self-sustaining answers to the enduring questions of life. We end up addicted to immediate, self-serving rationalizations that change with the weather or with the mood of the day, and without a commonly defined or felt zeitgeist to help us all rebalance. Having placed our faith in technology, we no longer need or know how to deal with uncertainty, and consequently, we have lost our ability to trust it.

We grew out of mysticism and religion into materialism and science only to realize that we have been swindled by clandestine politics that fosters self-doubt through the glorification of the ego and the cultural departure from a shared set of moral instructions, rituals and traditions needed to coordinate the growing traffic in our interpersonal relations and socioeconomic activity. The conclusion of our unfettered pursuit of purely commercial interests or financial gains is always a kind of spiritual misalignment with others and our environment, and especially within our own selves. Hence, to prevent humanity from being engulfed and mutilated by an underlying social pathology that divorces us from our inherent need to know where we come from and what we are, we need to question the prevalent cultural framework of our times at its core and in its entirety, steadily and honestly. This enables us to return to the foundational truth of life and to be in alignment with our own essence.

While there are always signs around the world of personal awakenings in response to the general loss of meaning coupled with the extreme divisions we encounter, they are many imposters who take advantage of those among us who have lost our way and are too afraid to move forwards or to reset our lives. Living in an age of overwhelming uncertainty, we are all deeply vulnerable and easily persuaded by the appearance of confidence and the promise of vindication, especially if it seems to speak to us in a language we already use or express a sentiment we are waiting for someone to verbalize. Since the entire functioning of our society depends on trust, we are all engaged in an endless cultural war to convince one another about how to meet our needs or wants successfully through our beliefs, practices and relationships. However, experience teaches us how difficult it is to trust the world and others in the absence of sufficient context and consistency.

The film Memento [8] captures the inseparable relationship between trust and memory that we all intimately understand and share with the main character. Afflicted with anterograde amnesia, Leonard Shelby is resolved in fulfilling his purpose, which requires him to maintain objectivity and recollect the most critical information, and which he attempts to do by using instant photographs and tattoos. We, as the audience, are forced to follow every presumption made by the protagonist until each scene exposes in reverse chronological order our own misperception of events. Like Leonard, we are vulnerable to the slightest deception or bias that can entirely undermine the validity of our informational sources as well as challenge our moral interpretation of deeds committed by the actors involved. Hence, our black-or-white views are sensitive to the colourful distortions of our experience as we sail through the murky sea of reality that surfaces its shades of grey in our wake. To evade or reject the inescapable ambiguity of life is to guarantee the mental incarceration of our biases and delusions. It is only in uncertainty we trust life to drive us to the truth about the world as well as about what we really are. But while uncertainty helps us work towards alignment, it is trust as faith that serves as the first step in setting our foundation.

A FOUNDATION OF TRUST

Uncertainty itself does not trigger anxiety. Our trepidation lies in our exposure to unexpectedly harmful events that viscerally remind us of our existential fragility and of the false promise of refuge. Although we learn that security is never a guarantee, we nevertheless need some basic degree of stability and reliability to engage life freely without being constantly under threat or subject to punishment. However, even consistency expressed as patterns of experience that anticipate negative outcomes or no change at all can hemorrhage our trust in the world and dim our will to live. We are always on the cusp of futility and despair as our insecurities seep through the fractures of our minds to expand the fissures between our bodies and our souls.

Our insecurities are rooted in the incongruent characteristics of our perceptions where the beliefs we need are torn or terrorized by the realities we wish to deny. Many of these stem from what others have done, or failed to do, directly or indirectly to us however intentional or oblivious they may have been. Our blurred memories may become distorted or simply fade away from recall, but the impressions they leave behind inform us about whom, what and how to trust and believe. Experience, stored in each of our cells, contributes to the types and degrees of confidence we hold about our capabilities and about our expectations of our physical universe and social sphere. Trust shapes how we respond to the world, and the way the world responds to us shapes our trust. But regardless of the varying degrees of instability we may all suffer, trust is what builds and destroys the relationships we need to align with life.

We often conjure up externalized villains to distract us from what we truly fear, which is the incubation of the enemy inside us all that is fed by one another. This inner nemesis is the undisclosed tyrant that rules by absolutes to prevent us from coming to terms with reality. Sometimes, our despotic adversary deceivingly serves us well, but ultimately interferes with our deepest needs such as the development of healthy relationships by diminishing their importance. It is not uncommon for many of us to reject the untainted truth in order to sustain an illusory security in response to the absurd contradictions that give rise to our childhood traumas. We internalize the bivalent thinking of our threatened culture that contributes to our polar shifts between being too trusting and too suspicious from moment to moment and with the same person or with the next. Even the loving gestures of the most caring intimate partner could be scrutinized with baseless mistrust and misperceived as attempts to undermine or manipulate our feelings. Unfortunately, too many of us will forego the healing power of unconditional affection in order to relive scenarios that reaffirm our preexisting worldviews while dismissing the dark presence that lies within us all.

The importance of trust lies at the heart of who we really are. The extent to which we are able to trust ourselves determines our overall confidence in the world and the stability of our relationships with people and things within it. If we cannot trust ourselves, then we cannot trust anything else either. However, we require our relationships to function through life, and this demands some minimum degree of trust in order to deal with whatever transpires in our environment. Trust is intricately tied to how we think and perceive the world, and unsurprisingly, to our need for stability. We gain and lose confidence in people and things while having to earn or risk losing the trust of others. This is especially clear with those who matter most to us and with those in a position to threaten us.

Our strategies for building trust also vary tremendously between demonstrating our loyalty and punishing betrayal. Exercising power or authority over others and gaining assurances through their dependency on us represent weaker forms of building trust, whereas establishing partnerships with mutual interests and practicing voluntary devotion to others are stronger expressions of our faith in one another. This does not mean we should frown upon having doubts and suspicions. While they can interfere with our personal achievements and hinder the experience of fulfilling relationships, they can also save us from unnecessary pain or harm. Making the right or wrong decision to trust or distrust depends on our ability to deal with uncertainty, which includes accurately assessing risk and remaining cognizant of our biased histories and present emotional states. The danger of placing our trust in situations and in people, or investing our own lives in the lives of others is that it makes us extremely vulnerable. Vulnerability is the prerequisite risk we must take to test our trust in others and our own selves and to gain the benefits of their reliability. Trust is the asset we give and vulnerability is the liability we hold, and the intimacy of relationships arises from their pairing. We are strengthened when that intimacy is rewarded and we are damaged when it is betrayed. But mutually acquired trust enables the alignment of complementary relationships, which we need to fully realize who and what we are.

To gain alignment also requires that we conform to reality in order to preserve the quality of our existence. We all do this every day in some form whether it is abiding by traffic laws, practicing social customs and engaging in mating rituals. We sacrifice a bit of our individual nature to benefit from a collective advantage. When we follow the rules of the game, we trust that everyone or almost everyone will do the same. Typically, conformity is dependent on the perception of a just system, where we are awarded for good conduct and punished for violating policy. If we can gain a considerable advantage by breaching our contracts and evading their consequences, then our entire societal system becomes susceptible to civil disobedience and unrest as less people may be willing to play by the rules. However, the enlightened among us will see beyond our own individual interests and the mere sustainment of the collective to work towards a greater meaning in the interrelated stories of our lives.

The unrecognized tragedy of our mistrust is not the anguish we endure from suffering betrayal, but the neglect of our ultimate purpose resulting from our preoccupation with protecting or avenging the ego. We fundamentally forget that trust is only a means to an end. It is undoubtedly a critical means to a very important end, but it is nonetheless an instrumental need or essential resource in fulfilling a primary goal. Trust is like setting a foundation for a house. The goal might be to build a good home, but a solid foundation ensures it is secure. In this context, the home is a metaphor for the meaning of the viagnostic narrative we develop through the relationships we form based on the trust we build. But if we are constantly on the attack or in retreat as a response to losing faith, we will never gain back our trust or the relationships we want. In addition, engaging in deceit and lying, especially to ourselves, draws us further away from our essence. Consequently, it is natural for our focus to be on building trust while being mindful of its loss because trust is linked to truth and truth is embedded in the meaning we seek.

To move towards the truth in search of meaning, there is a foundation of trust required across the three general domains of life, which are layered like the stories of a home. The first and immediate domain is our existential reality, which encompasses the whole system of our existence and extends out to our immediate physical environment and the farthest conceptual reaches of the cosmos, and even God for many of us. We rely on the universe working consistently enough to sustain life and enable us to increase its quality; thus, it is understandable that any significant disturbance to our world, which does not conform to our most elementary expectations, can have devastating consequences to our ability to function. Our civilization is also built on the same basic expectations, which points to the second domain. This is our social structure, which is defined by our relations and interactions with others, and with whom we are always negotiating our shared constructs of living, from our economic transactions and laws of conduct to our common interests, rituals and practices. Each person is both an opportunity to support a desired value and a possible threat to our sanctity. This type of trust has the greatest potential to hurt us, especially since it is in those whom we place the greatest reliance that ultimately have the greatest power to betray us, often at the earliest impressionable age. This can impact our ability to form and maintain future healthier relationships, and influence how we perceive reality and what to expect from the world, including from ourselves. In our minds, this is a private war we wage to conquer or defend the truth, and it hides behind the illusions and persuasions we have inherited and acquired. This occurs as part of our personal experience, which is the final and most intimate domain of life, and where we assess our own competence or efficacy as well as find our sense of worth. Our encounters and their interpretations are configured within this space by our malleable memory and streaming consciousness, which together link multiple states and identities to a unique personality set encapsulated in one physical entity. Hence, when we look inwards, we discover that our own complexity is comparable to that of the rest of the world, which is why we need to build our trust across these intricate domains if we are to reliably erect a bridge to our sanity and burrow a tunnel to our essence.

While our experience is flooded with constant change, we ourselves are one of the moving parts of our universe. We require more than emblematic sails, rudders and anchors we attach to our virtual bodies and our planetary spaceship on which we depend to navigate through the phenomenological ether of our existence with all of its known and unknown obstacles. We need to uncover the clues and recognize the cues that tell us what we can trust and on what to build our confidence as we race with our unremitting uncertainties that trail us everywhere we travel and lodge. This includes deciphering our identity, which never truly seems to belong to us the more we examine it. Our uncertainty descends down to the very core of our being and our convictions are the means by which we prevent ourselves from descending further. This is why false beliefs are perilous to all. They can either deny us the truth or cause us to fall without a parachute or safety harness. The only defense against mistrust is one held together by veracity, which each of us will revisit willingly or unwillingly as we encounter misalignment within ourselves and with the world.

A GENUINE SENSE OF CONFIDENCE AND IDENTITY

There are multiple ways of defining confidence, but many of us relate to it as an appraisal of assurance that we have in our abilities or our perception of the world. By this, we are referring to the idea of self-confidence, and it includes our perceived self-worth. We view this as a kind of accepted truth or faith we have in ourselves. However, while it is possible that this faith may align with reality, our confidence is not necessarily supported or substantiated by any specific evidence. It is primarily subjective with no defined correlation to truth tied to real events. Although we may feel the need to be self-assured, this will inevitably convince us to act on an erroneous belief that may lead to personal tragedy or cause unnecessary harm to others.

However, such misled faith or exaggerated feeling of confidence is not to be confused with informed intuition. This is not simply a sentiment, but a judgment based on some information we have processed without our full awareness and in the absence of a rational argument. We cannot always understand why we know something, but we can subconsciously establish relationships between things, conditions and events through experience that we may not be able to verbalize. Yet while we can recognize patterns and draw important linkages, our intuition can nevertheless prove to be unreliable because it depends on our accurate assessment of conditions and the integrity of our sources. We still have to gauge its performance to confirm its reliability and justify our confidence, which involves observing our success in achieving a goal or solving a problem, or demonstrating the capacity to assess how well we understand something by triggering or predicting events . This requires information in some accessible form, which we extract from our built-in design or capture from past relevant experience. It also requires credibility where we can consistently verify events and predictability where we can anticipate future results, especially across an increasingly varied set of situations. But this includes knowing what aligns with who we really are as well. It is essential that we listen to ourselves since we too are a key source of innate knowledge. Sometimes, what is right for others may not be right for us, just as what seems wrong in one particular set of circumstances may prove to be right in a slightly varied scenario in a different time and place. Hence, we have to factor our intuition into all of our decisions, especially since we rarely have all of the information we need to determine the best choice.

We generally derive our degrees of certitude from evidence gathered by direct observation or credible secondary sources because we want to know if something is true or false, or wish to measure the likelihood of something occurring or not occurring. This is an essential part of our own survival and progress. Genuine confidence not only removes the fear of taking action, but also increases the possibility of a positive outcome. Ideally, our self-assurance should align with reality. It should arise from knowing and applying a principle, process or ability to produce a distinct result or foresee a particular event. The more our knowledge and skills can stand the test of time across a widening range of scenarios, the greater the trust we have in our assets. We seek repeated success across multiple situations where the greatest consistency endures the broadest variations. This is true whether we are confirming a scientific hypothesis or a compatible life partner because everything can be reduced to the need to trust, which complements our desire for spontaneity or mystery where we might study unexplored phenomena not yet understood or attempt something we never before tried to do. Confidence sits between the known and unknown, where we take calculated risks.

However, as a society, we lean more towards promoting the appearance of confidence because we overemphasize the importance of impressions, especially first impressions. This leaves us with little room for error in how others choose to judge us, regardless of our potential or future contributions. In addition, our societal substructures feed on insecurity, and we compensate for our instilled inferiority with shameless overconfidence and arrogance founded on existential ignorance. The danger of being overconfident is that we cannot gain what we already think we have. Just as we can easily draw a false link between two unrelated events, we can also miss a relationship that does exist or fail to identify confounding factors contributing to associations we think we comprehend. What begins as the fear of the unknown ultimately converts into the danger of the absolute, which can lead to the horrors of mass extinction or genocide at its worst or to the self-destructive nature of a self-absorbed life at its best.

Yet the fear we carry is not simply about what we do not know, but rather how we will respond to the unpleasantness of what we do know and do not wish to face. It encourages us to be either evasive or dismissive despite our awareness that the inevitable awaits us. This is partly because many of us feel secure in numbers and place faith in being among the fortunate few to escape communal tragedies while some take nefarious measures to gain substantially at great loss or risk to the majority. The rest of us address our guilt by transferring responsibility to an expert authority or hoping that someone else will volunteer to take action. We generally feel too overburdened or overworked as well as too disenfranchised to act or gain support to act, especially when our sense of belongingness and community has diminished and replaced by the marketing of individualism that is hinged on the virulent pursuit of status and success and on the fabrication of the self.

For many of us, personal confidence serves as a protective shield from ourselves. It allows us to maintain the fiction surrounding our identities in order to avoid the deeper uncertainties of the self. Most of us invest so heavily in our societal roles and perceived images that we never challenge the beliefs we hold and the lifestyles we choose, which include the people whose company we keep. We unquestionably believe we are the characters we play in our stories to harness a predefined meaning to our lives. By partaking in these plots in synchrony with others, we reinforce our shared illusions that hijack reality from our own minds and replace it with a counterfeit existence. However, our identities run deeper than the roles we play and the convictions we hold. They are elements of the universal truth.

Our sanity and survival, more than our happiness, depend on our honesty as individuals and as a society to question critical aspects of our beliefs and practices when we are misaligned with the world because they are always flawed or incomplete. It may not seem desirable to focus on our imperfections, but we owe ourselves the decency of the truth because it serves us more than we think. Although reality may not respond in the way that we want it to behave, its greatest gift to us is its consistency. Even human nature is not without order, as unnervingly chaotic as it sometimes appears to be. If the universe did not conform to a set of fundamental laws and indiscriminate forces, there would be no pattern to discern, no rhythm to follow, no action to replicate and no resource to capture. Our minds gamble on this regularity to coordinate the complexity of our very being while navigating through their own blueprints to find alignment between the external conditions of our experience and the inner voices of our motivation.

When the world does not seem to make sense, all that stands in the way of the truth is our false perception of it. Trusting our perceptions when they do not align with those of others and the rest of society can cause us tremendous discomfort, and may at times require us to summon the courage to go against what has been declared as unnatural or aberrant. However, we all know that the one thing that feels most unnatural is going against our inner nature, particularly when we intuitively know who we are and what we want or need but fail to act on it. The consequence of being separated from our true selves or being conditioned to diminish our essence is the expression of sudden violent impulses or emotional outbursts, which consume our thoughts and narrow our awareness. It is difficult to strike a balance between questioning and trusting ourselves, given that our own judgment is often the last line of defense we have against an apathetic and self-serving system in which each of us is just a pawn on its chessboard. But if we can turn down the noise and keep our bias in check while conserving the scarcity of our attention to focus on what the universe is telling us, then we might find a genuine sense of confidence and identity both in ourselves and in the world based on truth instead of pure fantasy.

THE NATURE OF BEING BY TRYING TO BE

We might be wired to crave certitude, but it is only because we are encased in a world raining with uncertainty. Some of us run for shelter at the first sign of dark clouds, while others blindly dispel each conflicting droplet as a nuisance to our faith. Only the scattered few among us rejoice at the chance to rewrite our once seemingly harmonious symphonies of the truth. It may be in our nature to want to feel absolutely certain or confident or be complacent with whatever you already believe, but it is not our purpose and it is just as much in our nature to seek out uncertainty and continuously improve upon our understanding of life. While we will always find ourselves consumed by feelings of doubt, we will also always have a more profound sense of mystery and wonder to drive us beyond the horizon of our knowledge and experience.

Not enough of us treat the limit of our comprehension as placing a bookmark on a page of a book that we hope will be part of a much larger set of volumes. Too many of us wish for a very short script or want to jump to the end like a murder mystery novel to find out who did it. But this would be like fast forwarding through a song to hear the last few notes just before it ends. We have no time to wait because many of us believe achievement is about the outcome and not the process, which translates into never actually experiencing alignment and discovering what it means. We solely demand to be aligned, or to be reassured that we already are. We operate like smart machines to produce more and faster without ever being conscious of or concerned with what we fabricate. We merely rush through the doing to say we did it. We expedite our learning to complete the task so that we can move onto the next and the next without any truly transcendent purpose. When this occurs, life becomes about productivity without direction, results without play and completion without alignment while concurrently defining fun as an escape from work and in the absence of growth. Only children seem to retain any intuitive awareness of natural alignment until it is suppressed in them as well. The few that preserve or recover this innate sense face ridicule, but they serve to remind us of this basic principle critical to the meaning found in our lives.

There is a fine balance between searching for answers and acting on what we know. When we are caught up with having the answers, we forget thatthe truth lies within the process of learning itself, and not after learning something. This is because whatever we have already learned and think we know is never quite the truth. It is while we are in the act of questioning and learning that we approach the truth, which means that the moment we stop, the truth falls back into the background. Hence, by accepting our uncertainty and recognizing our ignorance, we are able to acknowledge what we do not know so that we can always be on course to knowing. This admission of an uncertain existence is our awakening to reality and it sanctions the streaming bits of the universe to pass through us undisturbed. By allowing things to be, we will inevitably better grasp them. True confidence is built on our capacity to be at ease with our uncertainty and let it drive us to assess risk by observing, predicting, testing and reassessing what we know. If we do this, we will learn when and where to trust the world around us, others and ourselves, including our own uncertainty. We can only build genuine confidence in the truth byplacing trust in our uncertainty. This is because the more we confront our uncertainty, the more we learn and the more confident we become. It is the confidence of learning that matters more than the confidence of knowing, especially given that despite our perpetually growing body of knowledge, its boundary continues to shrink relative to our expanding awareness of the unknown. We always have more questions than answers.

If we wish to avoid being discouraged by the experience of never getting anywhere or the knowledge of never attaining the whole, we need to appreciate that that state of being and the process of trying to be are really the same thing. When we perform an action such as walking or writing, we become the action. It does not matter how far we walked or in which direction, or how much we wrote or about which topic we chose to write. An activity only occurs while we are engaged in it, and it becomes part of who we are when we conduct it as if to move intentionally or inadvertently towards an outcome. In addition, when we attempt to achieve things, we discover the ways in which we are best suited to achieve them. In the allegorical flow of life, we align ourselves with the world to align the world with what we really are. We exist only by acting upon the universe and not by being. This is the nature of being by trying to be. It is by actually doing or trying to be what we are that we become what we are. In other words, we instantly are what we do. Hence, while we sometimes feel that we are getting further away from the very thing that we are trying to be or to acquire, we also experience the opposite sensation of getting closer to knowing what we truly want by trying to get there and we become what we are in the process of trying.

While we all face the obvious physical and mental challenges of attempting to literally or figuratively reach somewhere we want to be, there is a basic problem that we overlook, which is trying to determine where we want to be or what we really want in the first place. Logically, for many of us, this seems absurd to be trying to reach for something that we have not yet defined, and yet, this is precisely what most of us do in the normal course of our lives. Even the most regimented among us, who are convinced of exactly what we want, behave this way purposely to avoid exposure of this intolerable uncertainty, which generally only results in being anything but who or what we genuinely want to be. This insistence on certitude only increases an endless tension between what we consciously tell ourselves that we are and what we intuitively know that we are not, and we exacerbate this mental friction further when we realize after getting what we think we want that it is not what we truly need. In addition, we unconsciously sabotage our chances at achieving success and encourage our alleged laziness because we inherently know that what our inherited culture pressures us to attain will not bring us genuine fulfilment.

Our own alignment with ourselves is intimately tied to our alignment with life, which depends on an approach to living that does not tell us the answers to life, but allows us to approximate them in our efforts. To accomplish this, we require confidence in building a working model that is adequately stable to guide us, but loose enough to adapt and prevent us from being trapped in the absolutes of a dogmatic belief system. We require only the knowledge of the unknown and our ignorance to keep us faithful to what is true. The only way to approach an indeterminate reality is to trust our uncertainty to lead us into being within the vicinity of the truth without fully knowing what it is, and it is in the process of paying attention to what eludes us that we end up roughly being where we need to be and become who we really are. We cannot escape the uncertainty of existence, and we cannot resign or retire from living. The world will continue to revolve with or without our participation. Since our involvement in an unending stream of events is inevitable, our choice lies in how we engage life.