Are you sure?

I have been accused of being too certain about things; this happened after a meeting in which I was particularly vocal about a couple of issues.


The problem is, I think, that I appear to be too certain, when in fact the opposite is true. I notice that I write with few conditional constructs (maybe, perhaps, might) and I talk in the same way.


But I am so uncertain about things now, I appreciate how ironic it is. The more I find out the less I know. In one sense, this is a result of trying to understand the spiritual world, which becomes more opaque when reason or logic is applied to it. But the major factor is the principle that if we want to give up "self" the crucial first step is to give up certainty.


Being certain is a sure sign of clinging to ideas and beliefs rather than being open to new possibilities. A story I heard in AA (surely apocryphal) illustrates this well . It concerns a sponsor being pestered by somebody he is trying to help for the "secret" of recovery - it would apply equally well to any teacher/student situation. The sponsor has made it clear that there is a clear path of action to recovery but the other is convinced there is a short cut or secret. He asks whether the recovery programme can be distilled to one simple thing. The sponsor thinks for a while and then responds "If you insists then yes, there is one simple principle: Let the other person be right." After a long pause while this is digest he then says to his sponsor "Surely, it can't be that simple." To which the sponsor immediately replies "Yes, you're probably right."


De Mello illuminates the point with a story in Walking on Water:

Two monks had lived together for 40 years and never argued - not once. One day, one said to the other, "Don't you think it's time we had an argument, at least once?"
The other replied "Fine. Let's do it now. What shall we argue about?"
"How about this piece of bread?" said the first monk.
"OK. Let's argue about the bread. How do we start?"
The first said "This bread is mine; it belongs to me."
The second said "If it is, then take it."

There are two key points here. The first, which is made by both stories is that we don't need to be right about things. Often it seems that there is a choice between being right and being happy: by trying to be right we risk making ourselves unhappy. The second, which is part of the second story is about how attachment to things leads us to being certain or right. If I believe that something is "mine" then I can be deeply affected by you trying to take it. The more we attach to things, the harder our hearts become, leading sometimes to self-obsessed fear where we are always afraid that we won't get something we want or live in fear of things we value being taken from us.