Certainty Is An Illusion Quotes

Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty. (10)

The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man.

I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where there being ends and someone else's starts. With there roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.

So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.

She had no illusions of becoming a master knife fighter. This wasn't the Realms, where a thought delivered result. But she also knew she'd giver herself a better chance. And in life, at least in her new life, chances were the best she could hope for. They were like her rocks. Imperfect& surprising & maybe better in the long run than certainties. Chances, she thought, were life.

To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished. No one can accept that an imperial has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and never wash and cannot read or write. And who am I to jeer at life-giving illusions? Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise?

Certainty is an illusion. Belief is a constant.

When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention. This is also true for people who believe deeply in soulmates, like, say, your husband. What Jack really needs is the illusion of certainty, the illusion that he will never be hurt again.

Stand aloof from your own opinions; they seek to lure you with an illusive certainty.

The more I think on it the more I realize that certainty is an illusion. History was written by the winner, the news is provided with a spin and other people are opaque. We know nothing for certain. It used to be that the internet might provide information but it too is now nothing but opinion and scare mongering. Nothing can be relied upon. We have to look inside ourselves for anything of value – anything that can be relied upon – but it too is colored by our ego and personalities. So in the end, if the past is a colored view and the future a fancy, what do we have left? Simply to live in the moment…..

Like the body craves oxygen, the mind is desperate for certainty. It believes that without a safe foothold on reality, it will die. But the fascinating thing is that the illusion of certainty is exactly the opposite of safety because it hardens and narrows the vision to make everything fit its own scope. Then when new information arrives which would be its ally, the mind pushes it away in favor of the leaky life raft to which it clings, sinking all the while beneath the waves of change. In fact, the only antidote for this is to embrace 'I don’t know' so deeply that a powerful, dynamic safety emerges. This is like learning to surf so well that a tsunami wave shows up as a challenge to test our mastery.

Occasionally you'll say "Excuse me" when I happen to stand in your way, and "Thank you" when your ball drifts into my court and I hurl it back to you. With these few words, I find comfort in false hopes and hope in false starts. I'll coddle anything instead of nothing. Even thinking that nothing can come of nothing gives me a leg to stand on, something to consider when I wake up in the middle of the night and can see nothing, not the blackout in my life, not the screen, not the cellar, not even hope and false comforts -just the joy of your imagined limb touching mine. I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what's called a broken heart.

That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound. It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us. Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkably assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now posses. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith. Why? The truth is plain: We were not born to be niggers.

She had no illusions of becoming a master knife fighter. This wasn’t the Realms, where a thought delivered a result. But she also knew she’d given herself a better chance. And in life, at least in her new life, chances were the best she could hope for. They were like her rocks. Imperfect and surprising and maybe better in the long run than certainties. Chances, she thought, were life.

Everything one used to take for granted, with so much certainty that one never even bothered to enquire about it, now turns out to be illusion. Your certainties are proven lies. And what happens if you start probing? Must you learn a wholly new language first? 'Humanity'. Normally one uses it as a synonym for compassion; charity; decency; integrity. 'He is such a human person.' Must one now go in search of an entirely different set of synonyms: cruelty; exploitation; unscrupulousness; or whatever?

Certainty was an illusion, a lie. Fanaticism was poison in the soul, and the first victim in its inexorable, ever-growing list was compassion. Who could speak of freedom, when one’s own soul was bound in chains?

Thus it is. And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions, which are almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions with which, after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. We throw ourselves into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated with that which we are about to do. Who knows? We may succeed.

At one time or another we are all called to leave the safety of our homes, the certainty of what we know, the illusions of who we are. Not everyone will heed this call, of course. And those who do will risk losing themselves completely. But if we choose to ignore the invitation, we risk never knowing who we might have become. We risk dying without knowing what it is to live.

Not only do I not know what I believe, but also I cannot know for sure that I believe. How can I define precisely what my attitude is toward something it cannot conceivably grasp? Can I be said to be in the relation of "belief," in any usual sense of that term, toward something that I cheerfully and readily acknowledge to be absolutely incomprehensible to me? (...) No man can be sure that he is in faith; and we can say of no man with certainty that he has or does not have faith. (...) Not only does faith always carry its opposite uncertainty within itself, but also this faith is never a static condition that is -had-, but a movement toward... And toward what? In the nature of the case we cannot state this "what." We cannot make a flat assertion about our faith like a simple assertion that we have blue eyes or are six feet tall. More than this, the affirmation of our faith can never be made in the simple indicative mood at all. The statement "I believe" can only be uttered as a prayer.

The body lives in space and time, subject to matter, illusion and sense. The spirit lives in eternity and truth. The soul must unite the two. So, all that is certainty belongs to the spirit, all that is struggle belongs to the soul. The spirit knows God, the soul has faith; the spirit knows God, the soul has hope; the spirit knows God, the soul has charity. This is how the soul is made to vibrate, and man becomes one, becomes himself.

I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else's starts. With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.

spiritual practice is conspiratorial rather than inspirational; it conspires to strip away everything you use to maintain the illusion of certainty, security, and self-identity. Where spiritual writing seeks to bind you all the more tightly to the self you imagine yourself to be, writing as a spiritual practice intends to free you

Now, in my readings and in my travels I have heard, like you, about men of a superior type, possessing the keys to all our mysteries. Somehow I could not regard this as a simple allegory, this idea of an invisible humanity within visible humanity. Experience has proven, I told myself, that a man can reach truth neither directly nor alone; an intermediary must exist—still human in certain respects yet surpassing humanity in others. Somewhere on our Earth this superior humanity must exist, and it cannot be absolutely inaccessible. And so shouldn’t all my efforts be devoted to discovering it? Even if, in spite of my certainty, I were the victim of a monstrous illusion, I would have nothing to lose in making the effort, for in any case, without this hope, all life is meaningless. “But where to look? Where to begin? I had already traveled the world, stuck my nose everywhere, into all sorts of religious sects and mystical cults, but to each one it was always: maybe yes, maybe no. Why should I stake my life on this one rather than that one? You see, I had no touchstone.

Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afresh not only where but who one was; to shed assumptions, even certainties.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

To develop courage, you have to give up this illusion of future certainty.

watercooler conversations that intelligently explore the lessons that can be learned from the past while resisting the lure of hindsight and the illusion of certainty.

Time is the bridge between life and death. Truth is the bridge between illusion and reality. Trust is the bridge between confidence and fear. Conviction is the bridge between doubt and belief. Certainty is the bridge between hesitation and assurance. Knowledge is the bridge between facts and reason. Wisdom is the bridge between intelligence and spirituality. Integrity is the bridge between character and reputation. Emotion is the bridge between contentment and desire. Joy is the bridge between happiness and excitement. Desire is the bridge between need and want. Urgency is the bridge between action and indecision. Consequence is the bridge between deed and outcome. Freewill is the bridge between fate and chance. Light is the bridge between humanity and divinity. Infinity is the bridge between nothing and everything. Peace is the bridge between war and reconciliation. Purgatory is the bridge between Heaven and Earth. God is the bridge between faith and science.

One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.

But marriage promises consistency, certainty: you will be loved forever. And the moment we become certain of this is the moment it begins to slip away from us. Our certainty blinds us to how the world changes and changes and changes.” “So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.

My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was af if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said "fate" because she couldn't pronounce the "th" sound in "faith". And later I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control. I found out the most I could have was hope, and with that I wasn't denying any possibility, good or bad. I was just saying, If there is a choice, dear God or whatever you are, here's where the odds should be placed. I remember the day I started thinking this, it was such a revelation to me. It was the day my mother lost her faith in God. She found that things of unquestioned certainty could never be trusted again. We had gone to the beach, to a secluded spot south of the city near Devil's Slide. My father had read in Sunset magazine that this was a good place to catch ocean perch. And although my father was not a fisherman but a pharmacist's assistant who had once been a doctor in China, he believed in his nenkan, his ability to do anything he put his mind to. My mother believed she had nenkan to cook anything my father had a mind to catch. It was this belief in their nenkan that had brought my parents to America. It had enabled them to have seven children and buy a house in Sunset district with very little money. It had given them the confidence to believe their luck would never run out, that God was on their side, that house gods had only benevolent things to report and our ancestors were pleased, that lifetime warranties meant our lucky streak would never break, that all the elements were now in balance, the right amount of wind and water.

I begin to wonder if her Bible-thumping Jesus-loving is an act to provide her with the illusion of certainty and stability in the world. Deep down, if she has sat on the ceiling before, she must know there are other ways, other truths, other powers. My mother runs from this power and these truths with the alcohol and the white rocks. Ms. Jannie runs with her Jesus and a religion she knows is not always the answer. Right now, she knows it is not the answer.

You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn’t come until after a long chain of wins, until you’ve accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country. Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants—they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others. Knowing about the illusion of control shouldn’t discourage you from attempting to carve a space for yourself out of whatever field you want to tackle. After all, doing nothing guarantees no results. But as you do so, remember most of the future is unforeseeable. Learn to coexist with chaos. Factor it into your plans. Accept that failure is always a possibility, even if you are one of the good guys; those who believe failure is not an option never plan for it. Some things are predictable and manageable, but the farther away in time an event occurs, the less power you have over it. The farther away from your body and the more people involved, the less agency you wield. Like a billion rolls of a trillion dice, the factors at play are too complex, too random to truly manage. You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway.

our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty—all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language can no longer describe the world in which we live. With antique ideas and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no longer present. In this loss of language, the word gives way to the image as the 'language' of exchange, in which critical thought disappears to a diabolic regime of conformity - the hyper-real, the omnipresent image. Language, real place gives way to numerical code, the real virtual; metaphor to metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion of certainty in technological perfection.

The world is as ephemeral as a dream, each moment of the day but a mirage within an infinite honeycomb of mirages. The only thing about himself that he can say exists, with certainty, is his mind wrapped in the illusion of his physical body. He thinks; therefore, he is. But his body, his life, his country, and his world are all illusion.

plans.” To be sure, illusions have their function. Small children often need security blankets to soothe their fears. Yet for the mature adult, a high need for certainty can be a dangerous thing. It prevents us from learning to face the uncertainty pervading our lives. As hard as we try, we cannot make our lives risk-free the way we make our milk fat-free.

The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tells us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty - all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnishes that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths. “Bind me with the chains of Illusion,” he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge. Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke. Declining the honor of assuming his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will confirm the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police—seek out their origin in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the stupidity of the masses. This weakling transforms himself, in the name of a know-nothing utopia, into a gravedigger of the intellect; convinced of doing something useful, he prostitutes Pascal’s old “abêtissezvous,” the Solitary’s tragic device. A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and provocation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the tired intellectual abdicates his singularity and rejoins the rabble. Nothing more to overturn, if not himself: the last idol to smash … His own debris lures him on. While he contemplates it, he shapes the idol of new gods or restores the old ones by baptizing them with new names. Unable to sustain the dignity of being fastidious, less and less inclined to winnow truths, he is content with those he is offered. By-product of his ego, he proceeds—a wrecker gone to seed—to crawl before the altars, or before what takes their place. In the temple or on the tribunal, his place is where there is singing, or shouting—no longer a chance to hear one’s own voice. A parody of belief? It matters little to him, since all he aspires to is to desist from himself. All his philosophy has concluded in a refrain, all his pride foundered on a Hosanna! Let us be fair: as things stand now, what else could he do? Europe’s charm, her originality resided in the acuity of her critical spirit, in her militant, aggressive skepticism; this skepticism has had its day. Hence the intellectual, frustrated in his doubts, seeks out the compensations of dogma. Having reached the confines of analysis, struck down by the void he discovers there, he turns on his heel and attempts to seize the first certainty to come along; but he lacks the naiveté to hold onto it; henceforth, a fanatic without convictions, he is no more than an ideologist, a hybrid thinker, such as we find in all transitional periods. Participating in two different styles, he is, by the form of his intelligence, a tributary of the one of the one which is vanishing, and by the ideas he defends, of the one which is appearing. To understand him better, let us imagine an Augustine half-converted, drifting and tacking, and borrowing from Christianity only its hatred of the ancient world. Are we not in a period symmetrical with the one which saw the birth of The City of God? It is difficult to conceive of a book more timely. Today as then, men’s minds need a simple truth, an answer which delivers them from their questions, a gospel, a tomb.

According to Becker, as we grow up, at some point we become aware of death, then the fact that people we know and love die, then the fact that someday we, too, will die. Most of us do what we can to avoid it. Meanwhile, in ways we understand only dimly if at all, we embrace identities and the illusion of self-sufficiency. We pursue activities, both positive and negative, that we hope will lift us beyond the chains of ordinary existence and perhaps endure after we are gone. All this we do in a desperate push against the certainty that death is our ultimate destiny. Some of us seek power and wealth, others romantic love, sex, or some other indulgence. Some want to be great, others to do good and be good. Whether we succeed or fail, we are still going to die. The only solace, of course, is to believe that since we were created, there must be a Creator, one to whom we matter and will in some way return.

Death is a terrifying experience... It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those---those able to turn to them---from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the 'ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds.

Twenty years ago, chaos theory was all the rage. I wonder what happened with that. Maybe all the excitement over it become so organized that its initial entropy failed to fall apart and disintegrate into nothingness leaving its proponents re-illusioned in certainty. I remember seeing an employee at a local book store arranging a subsection for literature about chaos among the science books. "There’s the problem." I thought. "How can there be a chaos section? Those books should be distributed randomly throughout the store... that is, if there was any real disorder to things.

For it was not only dislike of one’s fellow-citizens that was intensified into a strong sense of community; even mistrust of oneself and of one’s own destiny here assumed the character of profound self-certainty. In this country one acted—sometimes indeed to the extreme limits of passion and its consequences—differently from the way one thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted. Uninformed observers have mistaken this for charm, or even for a weakness in what they thought was the Austrian character. But that was wrong. It is always wrong to explain the phenomena of a country simply by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographical one, a sex one, a conscious, an unconscious and perhaps even too a private one; he combines them all in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it and drain out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another channel. Hence every dweller on earth also has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled; it permits a man everything, with one exception: he may not take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them, in other words, the very thing that ought to be the filling of him. This interior space—which is, it must be admitted, difficult to describe—is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet both here and there it is the same, merely an empty, invisible space with reality standing in the middle of it like a little toy brick town, abandoned by the imagination. In so far as this can at all become apparent to every eye, it had done so in Kakania, and in this Kakania was, without the world’s knowing it, the most progressive State of all; it was the State that was by now only just, as it were, acquiescing in its own existence. In it one was negatively free, constantly aware of the inadequate grounds for one’s own existence and lapped by the great fantasy of all that had not happened, or at least had not yet irrevocably happened, as by the foam of the oceans from which mankind arose. Es ist passiert, ‘it just sort of happened’, people said there when other people in other places thought heaven knows what had occurred. It was a peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no equivalent in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought itself. Yes, in spite of much that seems to point the other way, Kakania was perhaps a home for genius after all; and that, probably, was the ruin of it.

No matter, they weren’t going anywhere. Never again. Two skeletons buried beneath a dead city. No more fitting a barrow for a warrior of the Apocalypse and a Malazan soldier. That seemed just, poetic even. He would not complain, and when he stood at this sergeant’s side at Hood’s Gate, he would be proud for the company.So much had changed inside him. He was no believer in causes, not any more. Certainty was an illusion, a lie. Fanaticism was poison in the soul, and the first victim in its inexorable, ever-growing list was compassion. Who could speak of freedom, when one’s own soul was bound in chains?

In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives . . . but memory is always cloudy, we can’t trust it. Things that happened in the past have fuzzy outlines, they’re pale; it’s as if my life has been nothing but a series of illusions, of fleeting images, of events I don’t understand, or only half understand. I have absolutely no sense of certainty. Nor can I picture Chile as a geographic locale with certain precise characteristics: a real and definable place. I see it the way a country road might look as night falls, when the long shadows of the poplars trick our vision and the landscape is no more substantial than a dream.

Once individuals become too ‘religious’ about a certain belief or reality tunnel they tend to subconsciously lose sight of the bigger picture. Be it faith, atheism, patriotism, veganism, cross-fittanism among a multitude of other isms and schisms, teachers and followers alike often cannot help but become dogmatic to a considerable degree. This happens when they don’t, at least occasionally, pause, reflect, or question — themselves included — which leaves them blinded by an illusory light at the end of their tunnel. The more certain they become regarding holding absolute truth, the more they drift away from truth; for absolute certainty remains life’s biggest illusion. The key is to do whatever you feel like doing without the need to shove it down others’ throats. And those who vibrate at similar frequencies will eventually find you.

This capacity for objectivity and absoluteness amounts to an existential — and “preventive” — refutation of the ideologies of doubt: if a man is able to doubt, it is because there is certainty; likewise the very notion of illusion proves that man has access to reality. It follows that there are necessarily some men who know reality and who therefore have certainty; and the great spokesmen of this knowledge and certainty are necessarily the best of men. For if truth were on the side of doubt, the individual who doubted would be superior not only to these spokesmen, who have not doubted, but also to the majority of normal men across the millennia of human existence. If doubt conformed to the real, human intelligence would be deprived of its sufficient reason, and man would be less than an animal, for the intelligence of animals does not doubt the reality to which it is proportioned.

Dear Sir—I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy.… I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perceptions only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.… I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects. R.W. Emerson

Of course, it is not so easy to “falsify,” i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections in your testing method may yield a mistaken “no.” The doctor discovering cancer cells might have faulty equipment causing optical illusions; or he could be a bell-curve-using economist disguised as a doctor. An eyewitness to a crime might be drunk. But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right. All pieces of information are not equal in importance. Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. If you think the task is easy, you will be disappointed—few humans have a natural ability to do this. I confess that I am not one of them; it does not come naturally to me.*

Then, suddenly, I was unconscious, submerged in the dense sleep that reveals to us mysteries such as youth regained, the rediscovery of years past, and emotions once felt, disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the summoning up of the dead, the illusions of the mad, travel in time back to the most primitive stages of nature (for it is said we often see animals in our dreams, forgetting that, almost always when we dream, we ourselves are animals deprived of the clarity of certainty shed on all things by our faculty of reason; instead of it, all we can turn on the spectacle of life is an infirm gaze, which is abolished by oblivion at every successive moment, each reality no sooner glimpsed than vanishing in the face of the next one, as the slides projected by a magic lantern succeed one another), mysteries which we think are closed to us, yet which we are admitted to almost every night, just as we are to the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection.

The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined. And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions. What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate

Toward the end of Feynman’s life, his conservative view of quantum science became unfashionable. The fashionable theorists reject his dualistic picture of nature, with the classical world and the quantum world existing side by side. They believe that only the quantum world is real, and the classical world must be explained as some kind of illusion arising out of quantum processes. They disagree about the way in which quantum laws should be interpreted. Their basic problem is to explain how a world of quantum probabilities can generate the illusions of classical certainty that we experience in our daily lives. Their various interpretations of quantum theory lead to competing philosophical speculations about the role of the observer in the description of nature. Feynman had no patience for such speculations. He said that nature tells us that both the quantum world and the classical world exist and are real. We do not understand precisely how they fit together. According to Feynman, the road to understanding is not to argue about philosophy but to continue exploring the facts of nature.

Here was the cynicism of our modern age, and I despised it. Information is now so easy to find that few of us are strong enough to resist the temptation of presuming we already know more than we actually do. Our worldviews are still built on the foundations of our own limited understanding, but we now live under the dangerous illusion that they are reinforced and supported by all of the knowledge that has ever existed. If I don’t have the answers now, I can find them, the thinking goes, and without even noticing we shrink our world down to the size of our certainties. Here is a blind spot in our culture, created both by the habitual, almost systemic mistaking of information for understanding and by the assumption that a complete understanding of anything can be attained with enough information. This view of the world reduces everything and everyone to bits of data—some known, some still unknown, but all knowable—and reduces wonder to a mere absence of information, as if the simple brute fact of our own existence isn’t mystery enough to keep you up for a week if you really consider it. “Oh that,” we so easily say about anything we don’t understand, “I’m sure we have that all sorted out.” And in doing so we insulate ourselves from any facts, opinions, and ideas—those pesky things—that ask us to venture away from our own view of reality. I suppose we have the right to remain ignorant, but we are in the world. And in the world, our actions have an impact on others, so assuming that

Where truth is high ignorance is low. Where certainty is high speculation is low. Where pleasure is high pain is low. Where joy is high grief is low. Where love is high fear is low. Where modesty is high ego is low. Where tolerance is high injustice is low. Where mercy is high vengeance is low. Where integrity is high distrust is low. Where justice is high crime is low. Where equality is high abuse is low. Where freedom is high slavery is low. Where wealth is high poverty is low. Where knowledge is high illiteracy is low. Where wisdom is high imprudence is low. Where harmony is high anarchy is low. Where peace is high turmoil is low. Where order is high chaos is low. Where faith is high doubt is low. Where light is high darkness is low. Where good is high evil is low. Where strength is high weakness is low. Where pride is high wisdom is low. Where sorrow is high bliss is low. Where error is high truth is low. Where despair is high confidence is low. Where silence is high speech is low. Where tyranny is high liberty is low. Where shame is high honor is low. Where guilt is high innocence is low. Where illusion is high reality is low. Where bitterness is high happiness is low. Where want is high needs is low. Where pain is high pleasure is low. Where fear is high love is low. Where trouble is high comfort is low. Where fear is high certainty is low. Where desire is high fulfillment is low. Where apathy is high hope is low. Where confusion is high clarity is low. Where greed is high contentment is low. Where disloyalty is high friendship is low. Where wrath is high goodness is low. Where vice is high virtue is low.

What is it, really, that we could lose if we handed ourselves over to the discernment of faith? Would we really lose anything except the illusion of control? This question suggests that there may be an idolatrous project underlying resistance to spiritual discernment: the desire for a decision-making process that we can predict and control. But the obedience of faith offers no certainties, not even that of being certain of our our fidelity. We cannot know if the decision we make here and now are correct. We only know that they are the best we are able to make, and that in the future we might both regret them and need to change them. The reason has nothing to do with our sinfulness and everything to do with the fact that faith has to do with the Living God, who always moves ahead of us in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31).

We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawl on even on. She wondered if the gift of revelation—of discovering the meaning underling humanity—offered nothing more than a devastating sense of futility. It’s the ignorant who find a cause and cling to it, for within that is the illusion of significance. Faith, a king . . . vengeance . . . all the bastion of fools.

So called ‘success’ is the marriage of your mindset, skill-set and resourcefulness in any given context. But there are few guarantees and no perfect recipes for it. It is subjective and shifts - and is dependent on the flow of life’s wider events- which is why it is so often illusive.

The darkness does us a favor by exposing control as an illusion. When everything is removed, “Where can I take back some control here?” eventually ceases being the active question and is replaced with a plea: “Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust.

You awakened a philosopher today, Guzmán. I prefer to maintain my illusions.” “As El Señor wishes. But time is always a disappointment; foreseen, it promises us only the certainty of death; recaptured, it makes a mockery of freedom.

I’m just going to Google it. There. In one sentence she had identified something new in the world—some new way of seeing things, or of thinking about things. Here was the cynicism of our modern age, and I despised it. Information is now so easy to find that few of us are strong enough to resist the temptation of presuming we already know more than we actually do. Our worldviews are still built on the foundations of our own limited understanding, but we now live under the dangerous illusion that they are reinforced and supported by all of the knowledge that has ever existed. If I don’t have the answers now, I can find them, the thinking goes, and without even noticing we shrink our world down to the size of our certainties.

People crave certainty. And control. We spend our lives erecting coping mechanisms, little games we play to preserve the illusion of safety.

You feel so overwritten you're like a palimpsest; the original girl almost lost under years of scrawling yet you nurture an illusion of beauty, brush your hair in the dark so when your reflection finally catches up with you you stare straight past that older woman to the skateboard dancers behind hitting the frosty air with exuberant grace. On the loose in the morning city reminds you of lovers, catching the tram to work in last night's laddered stockings, the sharp-edged day already intruding like a hangover. It's not the sex you miss or the hotel mornings but the reassurance of strangers and that wild card. Now everything's played out the same, no surprises in the pack except those dealt by disaster. Early this morning such certainty dragged on your thoughts they stumbled flat-footed through the breakfast silence and you knew neither the apples orchard fresh, crisp as snow nor the blue bowl they posed in were enough. People disappear all the time, emerge like summer snakes newly marked and glittering into a clean desert. Without the photo of a child you carry in your wallet which reminds you who you have become you'd catch a train to Musk or Mollymook, some place your fingers have strayed over. Even thinking that, you turn your face into the wind, keep walking that same old line in your new flamboyant shoes. Oh my treacherous heart.

Revolutions begin with the mutual discovery of the ideologues and the Jacobins: the first happy to have discovered compatible souls, the second to have found flunkies. On accession to power, the first become apparatchiks, thrilled with their ability to control events. This brief phase culminates in their murder by their former partners. The ideologues, in their brief illusion of authority, are happy to invent new names for themselves (Citizen, Comrade) and for every other thing under the sun (his-her-we-they-them); they are let free to run through the big-box store of culture effacing and changing the labels, that is, controlling speech. The penalty for opposition, as we see, appears almost on the instant. First the expression of opinion is characterized as dissent, then is calumniated, and dissent (now called aggression) is reidentified as lack of active assent. Those seeking to avoid, first, discord, then censure and the loss of income, quickly find they have nowhere to hide and must choose active endorsement of ideas repulsive to them or blacklisting. After the inevitable Night of the Long Knives, the threat of blacklisting is upgraded to the certainty of imprisonment or death.

The opening sentence of his latest book could have served as his personal motto: Absolute certainty is the greatest of all illusions.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future. When we believe we have a firm grasp on historical events and their causes, we tend to underestimate the complexities and uncertainties that shape both the past and the future. This overconfidence leads us to make predictions with unwarranted certainty, ignoring the unpredictability inherent in human decisions, societal changes, and natural phenomena.

Tamani was suddenly struck by just how young David looked. He forgot, sometimes, that David, Laurel, and their friends were younger, in some ways much younger, than Tamani. He was posing as a school-age human, but in truth he was an officer in the Guard. He knew his place, he knew his role, with a certainty some humans never achieved. The amount of freedom human children had must be paralyzing. No wonder they took so long to become adults.

On the two kinds of certainty of eternal life. In this life there are two kinds of certainty concerning the life which is eternal: the one consists in those occasions when God tells us of it either himself or through an angel or special revelation, although this happens rarely and only to a few. The other kind of knowledge is better and more beneficial and falls frequently to those whose love is perfect. This happens to those whose love for and intimacy with their God is so great that they trust him completely and are so sure of him that they can no longer have any doubts, their certainty being founded on their love for him in all creatures without distinction. And if all creatures were to reject and abjure him, even if God himself were to do so, then they would not cease to trust, for love is not capable of mistrust but can only trust all that is good. And there is no need for anything to be said to either the lover or the beloved, for as soon as God senses that this person is his friend, he immediately knows all that is good for them and that belongs to their well-being. For however devoted you are to him, you may be sure that he is immeasurably more devoted to you and has incomparably more faith in you. For he is faithfulness itself – of this we can be certain as those who love him are certain. This type of certainty is far greater, more perfect and true than the other and it cannot deceive us, while the first kind can be deceptive and can easily be an illusion. Indeed, the second type is experienced in all the faculties of our soul and cannot deceive those who truly love God; indeed they no more doubt it than they doubt God himself, for love drives out all fear. ‘Love knows no fear’ as St John12 (1 John 4:18) says, and it is also written: ‘Love covers a multitude of sins’ (1 Peter 4:8). For where there is sin, there can be neither complete trust nor love, since love completely covers over sins and knows nothing of them. Not in such a way as if we had not sinned, but rather it wipes them away and drives them out, as if they had never existed. For all God’s works are so utterly perfect and overflowing that whoever he forgives, he forgives totally and absolutely, preferring to forgive big sins rather than little ones, all of which creates perfect trust. I hold this kind of knowledge to be incomparably better, more rewarding and more authentic than the other, since neither sin nor anything else can obstruct it. For when God finds people in the same degree of love, then he judges them in the same way, regardless of whether they have sinned greatly or not at all. But those to whom more is forgiven, should have a greater love, as our Lord Jesus Christ said: ‘They to whom more is forgiven must love more’ (Luke 7:47).

The drive to the airport felt eternal. Jane turned the backseat radio to a rock station and worked hard at being more angry than sad. Angry was proactive. “Schmuck,” she kept muttering. It was at herself. Yes, Martin was a schmuck, too. The sheer certainty of that felt invigorating. But really, after all those boyfriends, you’d think she’d have learned that all men are schmucks. It didn’t help her humiliation much that she’d had no illusions about Martin. She knew that he’d just been a fling, motivated by her desperation to feel like a genuine woman amid the pageantry. But then she went and let herself get played. Stupid girl. She’d even convinced herself that Mr. Nobley might have been actually fond of her. “Dream on,” the radio crooned. “It doesn’t matter how it ended,” she muttered to herself, and realized that it was true. Real or not, Martin had showed her that contented spinsterhood was not an option. And real or not, Mr. Nobley had helped her say no to Mr. Darcy. She leaned her head against the window, watched the countryside go whirling by, and forced herself to smile. Pembrook Park had done its job--it allowed her to live through her romantic purgatory. She believed now in earnest that fantasy is not practice for what is real--fantasy is the opiate of women. And she’d buried her fantasy behind her in the English countryside. Her life now would be open to real possibilities. There was no Mr. Darcy, there was no perfect man. But there might be someone. And she’d be ready.

I would argue that out of these particularities of interpretive horizons (plural) of each social subject comes the potential for critical reflection. Out of our inconsistencies, or out of the crooked timber of socialization, comes acquaintance with multiple ways of making sense of the world that can be critically reflected against each other. There is no rock of certainty for the contemporary subject but out of overlapping inconsistencies there emerges the awareness that there is no single way of describing the world, no ultimate discourse of truth, no final vocabulary, with which we should attempt to totalize our experience or that of others. In this uncertainty the possibility of utopia appears as a mirage shimmering at the edge of a horizon that is shaped by the summer heat of the illusion of a singular interpretative horizon. In its place there is the multiple vision of a colder less secure social subject. If that subject can create a modest mode of life for themselves that includes this sense of insecurity, they will be less easily attracted to perfectionist totalizing visions, thus this subject is constituted as more dialogically open. If that subject tries to overcome their ontological insecurity, they may be attracted to a singular interpretative horizon that provides all the answers, wherein lies the root of totalitarianism.

Only those who doubt pursue certainty; those who dissimulate certainness, only nurture illusion.

That is the hazard in curiosity, I thought: all the certainties fragment and dissolve. A man curious enough and persistent enough might find even the round and solid ball of earth to be not so. He might be less proud of his faculty of reasoning when it left him with nothing whereon to stand. But then again, was not the truth a more solid foundation than illusion?

We also use that limitation purposely as a tool to understand things, to form the illusion of mastery and control over a limited scale of things, because by being able to isolate only a part of the world, we reduce a hopeless problem to a manageable one.

[H.G. Wells said] that his method was "to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds." Such prestidigitation is a characteristic ploy of science fiction: to make a nonexistent entity or impossible premise acceptable (often by scientific-sounding terms such as telepathy, extraterrestrial, cavorite, FTL speed) and then follow through with a genuinely realistic, logically coherent description of the effects and implications. Of course the accurate narrative description of the nonexistent is a basic device of all fiction. The extension to the impossible is proper to fantasy, but since we seldom know with certainty what is or is not possible, it is a legitimate element of science fiction too. What if? is a question asked by both science fiction and experimental science, and they share their method of answering it: make a postulate and then carefully observe its consequences. - Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin

Your destination and destiny are uncertain, but you can create the illusion of certainty if you know the direction you are going.

In the vast expanse of life, certainty is often an illusion. The uncertainty of life can leave us questioning everything. We grapple with unanswered questions about our destiny and the true nature of those around us. We may never know the true intentions of those around us or the path our fate will take. But I've always held this mantra close: may the best interests prevail, and may the best interests win.

People don’t want truth, they want certainty.” He shrugged. “Or the illusion of it.

We live with the certainty that what we perceive on a daily basis is reality. But it's an illusion.

Regardless of how Descartes formulated his argument, his primary focus was to prove that something is thinking. That something doing the thinking exists irrespective of the idea of yesterday or tomorrow and irrespective of the possible change. At the same point, if something is aware of anything, it means that something exists; otherwise, it would not be possible for it (whatever it may be) to be aware of anything. It does not matter if awareness is right or wrong or what it represents, but awareness is proof of existence. Still, things that are unaware of themselves may exist. Only the Nothing does not exist. Whatever we can qualify or imagine as something exists. Thinking is proof of itself (the thinking), not the self. The thinking itself is the “self” (thinking “self”), existence irrespective of the uncertainty of personality and the self-awareness or unawareness of certainty or its own identity or delusion about it. The thinking itself exists, regardless of the self and who thinks.

A truth needs time to make a journey through illusions to form itself. One should put Hegel back into the series of Plato-Descartes-Hegel, corresponding to the triad of Objective-Subjective-Absolute: Plato’s Ideas are objective, Truth embodied; the Cartesian subject stands from the unconditional certainty of my subjective self-awareness. And Hegel, what does he add? If ‘subjective’ is what is relative to our subjective limitation, and if ‘objective’ is the very way things really are, what does (106>107)’absolute’ add to it? Hegel’s answer: the ‘absolute’ does not add some deeper, more substantial, dimension – it includes (subjective) illusion into (objective) truth itself. The ‘absolute’ standpoint makes us see how reality includes fiction (or fantasy), how the right choice only emerges after the wrong one.

Beneath the explicit acts by which I posit and object out in front of myself, in a definite relation with other objects and with definite characteristics that can be observed, beneath, then, perceptions properly so-called, there is, sustaining them, a deeper function without which perceived objects would lack the mark of reality, as it is missing for the schizophrenic, and by which the objects begin to count or to have value for us. This is the movement that carries us beyond subjectivity, that places us in the world prior to every science and every verification through a sort of 'faith,' or 'primordial opinion'--or that, on the contrary, becomes bogged down in our private appearances. In this domain of originary opinion, hallucinatory illusion is possible even though hallucination is never perception...because here we are still within pre-predicative being, and because the connection between appearance and total experiences is merely implicit and presumptive, even in the case of true perception...The world remains the vague place of all experiences. It accommodates, pell-mell, true objects as well as individual and fleeting fantasies--because it is an individual that encompasses everything and not a collection of objects linked together through causal relations. To have hallucinations and, in general, to imagine is to exploit this tolerance of the pre-predicative world as well as our vertiginous proximity to all of being in syncretic experience. Thus, we only succeed in giving an account of the hallucinatory deception by stripping perception of its apodictic certainty and perceptual consciousness of its full self-possession...The perceived is and remains, despite all critical training, beneath the level of doubt and demonstration. The sun 'rises' for the scientist just as much as it does for the uneducated person, and our scientific representations of the solar system remain merely so many rumors, like the lunar landscapes--we never believe in them in the sense in which we believe in the rising of the sun. The rising of the sun, and the perceived in general, is 'real'--we immediately assign it to the world. Each perception, although always potentially 'crossed out' and pushed over to the realm of illusions, only disappears in order to leave a place for another perception that corrects it. Of course, each thing can, apres coup, appear uncertain, but at least it is certain for us that there are things, that is, that there is a world. To wonder if the world is real is to fail to understand what one is saying, since the world is not a sum of things that one could always cast into doubt, but precisely the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn...Correlatively, we must surely deny perceptual consciousness full self-possession and the immanence that would exclude every illusion. If hallucinations are to be possible, consciousness must at some moment cease to know what it does, otherwise it would be conscious of constituting an illusion, it would no longer adhere to it, and there would thus be no more illusion...It is simply necessary that the self-coincidence with myself, such as it is established in the cogito, must never be a real coincidence, and must merely be an intentional and presumptive coincidence. In fact a thickness of duration already intervenes between myself who has just had this thought and myself who thinks that I have just had this thought, and I can always doubt whether that thought, which has already gone by, was really as I currently see it...But my confidence in reflection ultimately comes down to taking up the fact of temporality and the fact of the world as the invariable frame of every illusion and of every disillusion: I only know myself in my inherence in the world and in time; I only know myself in ambiguity.

On and on it goes—online there is an excellent circular graphic display of cognitive errors—a wheel of mistakes that both lists them and organizes them into categories, including the law of small numbers, neglect of base rates, the availability heuristic, asymmetrical similarity, probability illusions, choice framing, context segregation, gain/loss asymmetry, conjunction effects, the law of typicality, misplaced causality, cause/effect asymmetry, the certainty effect, irrational prudence, the tyranny of sunk costs, illusory correlations, and unwarranted overconfidence—the graphic itself being a funny example of this last phenomenon, in that it pretends to know how we think and what would be normal.

My thesis here is that the climate of contemporary America has become so chronically anxious that our society has gone into an emotional regression that is toxic to well-defined leadership. This regression, despite the plethora of self-help literature and the many well-intentioned human rights movements, is characterized principally by a devaluing and denigration of the well-differentiated self. It has lowered people’s pain thresholds, with the result that comfort is valued over the rewards of facing challenge, symptoms come in fads, and cures go in and out of style like clothing fashions. Perhaps most important, however, is this: in contrast to the Renaissance spirit of adventure that was excited by encounter with novelty, American civilization’s emotional regression has perverted the élan of risk-taking discovery and pioneering that originally led to the foundations of our nation. As a result, its fundamental character has instead been shaped into an illusive and often compulsive search for safety and certainty. This is occurring equally in parenting, medicine, and management. The anxiety is so deep within the emotional processes of our nation that it is almost as though a neurosis has become nationalized.

The phrases ‘certainty is an illusion’ and ‘think probabilistically about the world’, both introduced in the first class, are the first two examples of high-level concepts which Dan calls airport ideas.

The genius of Alba de Céspedes in this book is in shattering the illusion that writing is a place of refuge, and replacing it with the certainty that it is a place that always both pollutes and sabotages us.” As Valeria discovers: toward the end of the novel, she tells her daughter, “Save yourself, you who can do it.

wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else’s starts. With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.

But no other goal will bring you the joy Perfect Certainty brings, the goal which sets you free from the constraints of ego and the chains that bind you to illusions.

Noticing that Mack’s eyes were glazing over, Jesus downshifted. “Put simply, these terrors are tools that many use to prop up their illusions of security and control. People are afraid of uncertainty, afraid of the future. These institutions, these structures and ideologies, are all a vain effort to create some sense of certainty and security where there isn’t any. It’s all false! Systems cannot provide you security, only I can.

The most common ways we get probability wrong are: We overestimate certainty. When we do this, it doesn’t even occur to us that a decision has any risk associated with it. We assume if we’re buying a house, prices will only go up. Or people move to Hollywood because they believe they are better looking or more talented than most others. The Antars never thought they’d get caught. They believed Sam would always outsmart the SEC and IRS. The other criminals I interviewed didn’t consider getting caught a possibility either. We overestimate the risk of unlikely events. We assume a remote and terrible event is more likely than it is. This is why many people are more afraid of flying than driving, even if they know the odds of dying in a car accident are higher. A plane crash is especially horrific, which is why we put higher odds on its happening. We assume correlations that don’t exist. After being dealt a few good hands in poker, you could think you’re on a roll and that the next hand is bound to be good too. In fact, each hand you are dealt has nothing to do with the last. When it comes to crime, getting away with something once, or many times, creates an illusion you’ll get away with it the next time. The Antars assumed that because they pulled off tax evasion, they could also get away with securities fraud. Wrong again, and their earlier success led them to take bigger risks to continue the fraud. We put a big weight on very likely or unlikely events and put almost no weight on anything that happens in between. The difference between a 0 percent and 5 percent probability feels huge because it creates possibility. The difference between 100 percent and 95 percent also feels meaningful because it creates or eliminates risk. But the difference between 50 percent and 55 percent barely factors into our decisions. The closer we get to certainty, the more we weight a probability, but mathematically, a 5 percent increase should be given equal weight no matter what.

So much had changed inside him. He was no believer in causes, not any more. Certainty was an illusion, a lie. Fanaticism was poison in the soul, and the first victim in its inexorable, ever-growing list was compassion. Who could speak of freedom, when one’s own soul was bound in chains?

To know, in vulgar terms, is to get over something: to know, in absolute terms, is to get over everything. Illumination represents one further step: the certainty that henceforth we will never again be taken in, a last glance at illusion.

We want to feel safe, secure against every eventuality, so we construct worlds of illusion into which we bury our heads. But then something completely random, something for which we are totally unprepared, will be thrown into the mix, and we suddenly realise that, for all its laws, for all its order, the universe is full of chaos and all of our plans are useless. This never hit home harder for me than the day when Hendri died. It was a painful reminder that the only sure thing in life is that nothing lasts, including life itself. In all of our many uncertainties, that is the one irrevocable certainty.

For Lefort, modern democratic society, which was formed in the eighteenth century, removed the ontological certainties of previous orders and based itself instead on heterogeneity and division; it is structured by a symbolically empty place of power, left vacant by the absent body of the prince. As a result of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which according to Lefort split the orders of power, law and knowledge, society could no longer be represented as a single, unified body. However, this empty space of contingency created at the same time a desire for absolute foundations, for a point of transcendence – once provided by religion – that could unify a fragmented social order and master this experience of uncertainty. The persistence of religion is therefore a symptom of the uncertainty and contingency at the foundations of democratic society. This is also why, at various times, ideas of nation, community and people become substitutes for religion, attempting to fill the empty space of power and unify society. For Schmitt, sovereignty fulfils precisely this function. Such ideas, which as Lefort believes speak to a real, yet unavoidable, structural deficit in society, appear at moments when a perceived loss of legitimacy is seen to threaten the social order. The survival of religion itself in modern society – which now works on an imaginary rather than symbolic register – evokes the illusion that firm identity and absolute unity can be restored. The constant danger, for Lefort, is that these representations of identity become so invested with desire that they open the way to a totalitarian drive to forcibly reunite the social order.

Freud's discovery of the phenomenon of transference had much wider implications than he himself, within the frame of reference of the thinking of his time, could see. In discovering transference he discovered a special case of one of the most powerful striving in man, that of idolatry. It is striving that is rooted in the ambiguity of man's existence and that has the aim of finding an answer to the uncertainty of life by transforming a person, an institution, an idea into an absolute, i.e., into an idol by the submission to which the illusion of certainty is created. It is hardly possible to overestimate the psychological and social significance of idolatry in the course of history, that great illusion which hobbles activity and independence.

The difference between illusion and perception is intrinsic, and the truth of perception can only be read in perception itself. If I believe I see a large flat stone, which is in reality a patch of sunlight, far ahead on the ground in a sunken lane, I cannot say that I ever see the flat stone in the sense in which I will see the patch of sunlight while moving closer. The flat stone only appears, like everything that is far off, in a field whose structure is confused and where the connections are not yet clearly articulated. In this sense, the illusion, like the imagine, is not observable, that is, my body is not geared into it and I cannot spread it out before myself through some exploratory movements. And yet, I am capable of omitting this distinction, and I am capable of illusion. It is not true that, if I hold myself to what I see, I never make an error, nor is it true that sensation, at least, is indubitable...I say that I perceive correctly when my body has a precise hold on the spectacle, but this does not mean that my hold is ever complete...which is in principle impossible. In the experience of a perceptual truth, I presume that the concordance experienced up until now would be maintained for a more detailed observation, I put my confidence in the world. To perceive is suddenly to commit to an entire future of experiences in a present that never, strictly speaking, guarantees that future; to perceive is to believe in a world. It is this opening to a world that makes perceptual truth possible...and permits us to 'cross out' the preceding illusion, to hold it to be null and void. I saw a large shadow moving on the periphery of my visual field and at a distance, I turn my gaze to this side and the phantasm shrinks and takes its proper place: it was only a fly close to my eye. I was conscious of seeing a shadow and now I am conscious of having only seen a fly. My belonging to the world allows me to compensate for the fluctuations of the cogito, to displace one cogito in favor of another, and to meet up with the truth of my thought beyond its appearance. In the very moment of illusion, this correction was presented to me as possible because the illusion itself makes use of the same belief in the world, only contracts into a solid appearance thanks to this contribution, and hence, being always open to an horizon of presumptive verifications, the illusion does not separate me from truth. But, for the same reason, I am not protected from error since the world that I am at through each appearance...never necessarily requires this particular appearance. There is an absolute certainty of the world in general, but not of any particular thing.

If this demand of higher culture is not met, then the future course of human evolution can be foretold almost with certainty; interest in truth will cease the less pleasure it gives: because they are associated with pleasure, illusion, error and fantasy will regain step by step the ground they formerly held: the ruination of science, a sinking back into barbarism, will be the immediate consequence; mankind will have to begin again at the weaving of its tapestry, after having, like Penelope, unwoven it at night. But who can guarantee to us that it will always find the strength for it? (251)

The search for security is an illusion. In ancient wisdom traditions, the solution to this whole dilemma lies in the wisdom of insecurity, or the wisdom of uncertainty. This means that the search for security and certainty is actually an attachment to the known. And what’s the known? The known is our past. The known is nothing other than the prison of past conditioning. There’s no evolution in that — absolutely none at all. And when there is no evolution, there is stagnation, entropy, disorder, and decay. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is the fertile ground of pure creativity and freedom. Uncertainty means stepping into the unknown in every moment of our existence. The unknown is the field of all possibilities, ever fresh, ever new, always open to the creation of new manifestations. Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just the stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is your self left over from yesterday. Relinquish your attachment to the known, step into the unknown, and you will step into the field of all possibilities. In your willingness to step into the unknown, you will have the wisdom of uncertainty factored in. This means that in every moment of your life, you will have excitement, adventure, mystery. You will experience the fun of life — the magic, the celebration, the exhilaration, and the exultation of your own spirit. Every day you can look for the excitement of what may occur in the field of all possibilities. When you experience uncertainty, you are on the right path — so don’t give it up. You don’t need to have a complete and rigid idea of what you’ll be doing next week or next year, because if you have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen and you get rigidly attached to it, then you shut out a whole range of possibilities.

The solidity of the classical vision of the world is nothing other than our own myopia. The certainties of classical physics are just probabilities. The well-defined and solid picture of the world given by the old physics is an illusion.

Justificationism, that is, the identification of knowledge with proven knowledge, was the dominant tradition in rational thought throughout the ages. Scepticism did not deny justificatonism: it only claimed that there was (and could be) no proven knowledge and therefore no knowledge whatsoever. For the sceptics 'knowledge' was nothing but animal belief. Thus justificationist scepticism ridiculed objective thought and opened the door to irrationalism, mysticism, superstition. This situation explains the enormous effort invested by classical rationalists in trying to save the synthetic a priori principles of intellectualism and by classical empiricists in trying to save the certainty of an empirical basis and the validity of inductive inference. For all of them "scientific honesty demanded that one assert nothing that is unproven." However, both were defeated: Kantians by non-Euclidean geometry and by non-Newtonian physics, and empiricists by the logical impossibility of establishing an empirical basis (as Kantians pointed out, facts cannot prove propositions) and of establishing an inductive logic (no logic can infallibly increase content). It turned out that all theories are equally unprovable. Philosophers were slow to recognize this, for obvious reasons: classi-cal justificationists feared that once they conceded that theoretical science is unprovable, they would have also to conclude that it is sophistry and illusion, a dishonest fraud. The philosophical import- ance of probabilism (or ' neojustificationism ') lies in the denial that such a conclusion is necessary.

Physics is thus a creative work of abstraction, far from the theory of everything that is sometimes claimed. For about a century, then, determinism was assumed to exist and to be the first requirement to be able to exert precise control over the world. This has come to dominate our cultural attitudes towards control. Today, determinism is known to be fundamentally false, and yet the illusion of determinism is still clung onto with fervour in our human world of bulk materials, artificial environments, computers and information systems.

Once you have given up the ghost [wrote Henry Miller], everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. The ghost that we give up is the ego. The illusion of control. The "everything" that follows is our artist's power—our subject, our voice, our point of view, our medium of expression, and our style.