In a recent LSBC call, a woman was talking about how her mind is always trying to be in control. Constantly scrambling to know everything, so that it can protect and prevent.
That is its job, after all.
I guess what it really comes down to, she concluded after a moment of reflection, is a deep, human fear of uncertainty. It’s universal, right? Who’s not afraid of uncertainty?
It’s such a convenient answer. A mind says, “Oh, it’s that uncertainty thing again. It’s a fundamental human fear, you know! There’s really no escaping it. Life is inherently uncertain so it’ll always be there”.
Since uncertainty is inescapable, we might as well go back to whatever we were doing to avoid it. Plan more, control more, drink more, buy more.
What Amanda said next made the record skip.
Amanda noted that what this woman was experiencing didn’t look like uncertainty at all. It looked like certainty.
Certainty that bad things would likely happen. Certainty that her control attempts were helping in some magical way. Certainty that she was a person with a future that was likely to go the way her mind said it would.
She wasn’t uncertain in the least. A little uncertainty would have done her a world of good! She was quite certain and that know-it-all spirit of the mind is what was spooking her.
Uncertainty is freedom. There’s nothing there! It’s I-don’t-know-wide-open-anything-is-possible.
It’s only when imaginary stories of an imaginary you in an imaginary future show up and are viewed with certainty, that we suffer.
