The Existential Push-Pull
Why certainty sabotages intimacy - yet both must coexist.
“Your last two essays, The Aura and The Inevitable Stain, have genuinely blown my mind apart.
I didn’t realize how much I relied on ideas like sacred and ordinary, light and dark, wholeness and separation, to make sense of my life. Your writing seems to dissolve those distinctions.
And now I’m left wondering...
How does someone actually live without those anchors?
If there is nowhere firm to stand, what keeps us from drifting into confusion or despair?
I’m not looking for certainty. I’m trying to understand what living looks like when certainty itself has fallen away.”
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It looks like what it has always looked like.
It is not certainty but the illusion of certainty that has fallen away. And that illusion can be resurrected any time you want - since you are the one who creates it.
In fact, even as we speak, notice your mind grasping for a foothold. Something. Anything for it to prop itself on. Even if that foothold is as simple as seeing the sacred in whatever is happening.
The mind goes, “Ah, I get it.” And the illusion of certainty follows.
Because getting it leads to keeping it. Keeping it leads to holding on to it. Holding on to it leads to fixing it in place. Fixing it in place leads to protecting it for fear of losing it.
This is how beliefs are created. Out of thin air. Using the germ of an insight. With the mere seed of a knowing.
Before long the seed sprouts into a philosophy. The philosophy into a belief. Belief into doctrine. Doctrine into community. Community into an institution.
Meanwhile, that moment of insight has long passed. And in its place remains a giant immovable relic that requires constant upkeep, promotion, and protection.
No, the certainty can never fully fall away - because your mind is a certainty-generating machine. Its job is to deny the uncertainty of life and superimpose the illusion of certainty upon it. And all its efforts are designed to reinforce the fact that this certainty is real.
The doubt you are experiencing right now isn’t a willingness to face uncertainty - but a desire to reestablish a new certainty. Certainty and doubt are really two sides of the same coin. They are the game the mind plays with itself to establish a greater sense of control. For doubt is not the same thing as recognizing the fundamental uncertainty of life. Instead, it is the mind’s gauge for acknowledging that it has failed to establish enough certainty and must redouble its efforts to do more.
This is why feelings of doubt can feel so harrowing. That feeling is the way the mind warns, “Not enough anchors! Need more!”
And so when we lose our previous anchors to reality - we typically replace them with new ones. Someone who was brought up a staunch Catholic - after a period of doubt and disillusionment, leaves the Church and eventually converts to Buddhism. Someone who was materialistically oriented - after suffering great loss and a phase of meaninglessness finds new purpose in spiritual practices.
Yet, eventually if one has played the game long enough - or has paid close enough attention to how these patterns play out - the realization eventually dawns that none of these anchors actually provide any lasting form of stability. For there is no real ground beneath to hold on to.
