The Comfort of Certainty

I'm feeling very comfortable here today in my apartment in Cyberjaya. I've decided to spent the rest of the day doing some much needed housekeeping  after I'm done with this week's blog article.  As always, I'll have to decide what to write about as I go along.

I know of another thing that gives us a lot of comfort: certainty. We humans are fearful of the unknown. What happens after death? That's the greatest unknown, which makes us feel extremely uncomfortable. Is there life after death? We want to know desperately. We want some kind of certainty that death is not the end of everything.

All that is very understandable. We are humans and we have a common experience and expectation of what life is and should be. Life is good. Death is bad, because it is the end of everything we like here. We want whatever little happiness and love that we have in this brief existence to continue. We fervently wish that if a life after death exists, it has to be a better one, without the suffering that makes this life so difficult at times.

Uncertainty makes us edgy. Having some kind of flaky answer to the ultimate questions is better than admitting ignorance. You know what I'm getting--my favourite bugaboo: religion. I do not dislike religion, only their institutions and man-made doctrines, which on serve to numb and exploit our worst fears, never elevating us to greater understanding and transcendence, which its hidden truth is capable of revealing.

We need some figure of authority to tell us that if we recite this prayer or perform certain rituals, some good or blessing will come to us. The local gangster up there will ensure our safety after we have obediently paid the protection fee. Our susceptibility to religious dogma suggest some deeper psychological hang-up or fear that needs to be worked out. But instead of healing, we opted for numbing--something which religious doctrines and dogma provide with their false sense of certainty.

Those preachers and priests want you to believe that once you have accepted their faith, you belong to an exclusive club of favoured souls, whose safety is guaranteed in the hereafter. They talk so much about the hereafter as if they have been there and back, like tourists recounting their budget tour experience in some exotic far-flung country.

There's certainly comfort in such certainty and exclusivity. If that makes your life more bearable, by all means, go ahead. But do not be deluded into believing that you have the answers to everything. Allow others to find their versions of the truth, which may or may not be better than yours. 

I've blogged before about the virtue of keeping an open mind. It's alright to say, I don't know. Of course we don't know. That's why we are living: to slowly discover more and more. We'll not know until we come to our deaths.  It'll be interesting to find out if your membership, which was chiefly determined by the circumstance of your birth, qualifies you admission to the Club and its perpetual pleasure parties.

There's certainly comfort in certainty, but not at the price of ignorance.  The path of the pilgrim is fraught with uncertainties. It is the challenge of uncertainty that illuminates the mind and offer glimpses of the real afterlife. 

You can ask: how do I know this?  I certainly don't. But I do know uncertainty and its many discomforts. And strangely, there's a certain comfort in that.