The certainty of failure.

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”⎯Alan Watts

As Voltaire indicated, while doubt is an unpleasant state of mind, the presumption of certainty is absurd. One of the essential differences between Buddhism (which is based on the certainty of change) and other religious institutions concerns this matter of uncertainty, and what to do about it. Since change is inevitable, The Buddha promoted upaya, which translates as “expedient means.” There are no fixed solutions that always work, and to continue down the road of life, based on the expectation of certainty is a fool's errand.

On an individual or a tribal basis, such behavior is known as clinging to dogma⎯The pinnacle of “inappropriate ideological conduct,” and always opposed to other such conduct, not like them. The specific nature of constantly unfolding life is not predictable. Yet, it does not stop us from manufacturing hardened walls—their purpose being to take the capacity to wiggle out of life itself. It can’t be done for a simple reason: Life=wiggle.

Our vision is limited. We tend to see what is on-the-surface, perceptible, and lies within our immediate sphere. Those who traveled on the Titanic, unfortunately, discovered this error too late. Hardly an ounce of consideration goes into how we got here, or where our footsteps are leading. Our presumption is that there is a straight, safe path from the past through our present and on to a predictable future. To make matters worse, we then enshrine our words and actions into habitual ideologies and rules, forgetting that how we got here was 100% unpredictable. The continuing gap between prediction and reality never ceases!

Some years hence Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a New York Times bestseller called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. According to Taleb, few if any of the significant human tides were, or could have been, predicted. He was, and is, of course, correct. And one of the key reasons for his accuracy is uncertainty. Just as very few swans are black (most are white), very few tides happen as we predict, simply because of the constancy variable (e.g., the uncertainty factor). Who could have predicted a coronavirus pandemic? Or the economic melt-down that resulted? Change is the only sure thing, and nobody can predict the precise nature of change.

This is a vast human problem to our collective wellbeing since many of the most significant tides, blind-side us with catastrophes, and we are then forced to rush to unfounded judgments, grasping for straws, while juggling fate. And then, not learning from our errors, going on to craft, yet again, other fixed ideologies that will likewise fail. Life is not constructed within an unchanging straight-jacket. Instead, it wiggles and always expands beyond the limitations we construct—in error—as we try-try-yet-again to make it steady and forthright, thus rendering it predictable.

This admonition is global in nature. And the under-the-radar truth is that our collective consciousness is the result of trillions of individual contributions, invisibly happening all of the time and merging with other equally unpredictable bubbles constituting the Great Life Sea—which is nothing more than those collective bubbles, forming a frothy tide washing upon, and grinding away, the boundaries we set.

One of the most significant of all compendiums of Mahayana Buddhist wisdom, conveying this principle of uncertainty, comes from The Diamond Sutra. And the essence of wisdom therein was stated by The Buddha as:

“So what should be on one’s mind, as one begins the Bodhisattva journey?

‘Like a falling star, like a bubble in a stream, Like a flame in the wind, like frost in the sun, Like a flash of lightning or a passing dream—So should you understand the world of the ego.’” (e.g., A world of continuous change, dominated by greed, anger, and ignorance).