Read

Welcome. 

In this talk I have an encouragement for you, which is to experience uncertainty as fun. That is certainly possible, but before we move on to how uncertainty can be fun for you, it’s apposite to look at some of the accompanying issues around uncertainty that accrue in the course of a lifetime, particularly perhaps in childhood. 

After all, when you come into this world you encounter a lot of uncertainty for a while, even if you’re born into the most loving of circumstances. Simply at the practical level, in the early months of your life you’re going to be carried around from place to place, without really knowing in any conscious way where you’re going or even why. If you have a loving and secure relationship with the one who’s doing the carrying, then that uncertainty is not a problem. But it can easily become a problem if fear comes in. So it’s really fear that makes uncertainty a problem always. Otherwise it’s fine, and I’ll expand on that. And fear connects itself with uncertainty so very easily. Uncertainty is like a lot of open doors, not just one open door, but a whole lot, and so any fear that you have around who might come through one door is multiplied by the condition of uncertainty, because there’s a whole lot more doors and therefore, a whole lot more strange things or creatures may come through any one of those doors, or all of them together, and so on. 

So if we apply that to the kind of experiences that can so easily happen in childhood, that perhaps when you were little, even in that loving relationship I sketched in. Mother, father vanished for a few minutes and you don’t know where, and suddenly you become aware that you are alone, perhaps for the first time, that there is no one else there. And that realisation, that inflow of this enormous fact of the possibility that it is possible for you to exist without the presence of others, can of itself bring up an upsurge and upwelling of fear. Partly that comes from the recognition that you are still dependent upon what others give you, not able to feed for yourself, not able to fend for yourself, not able to care for yourself as a physical being. And that’s if you have the good fortune to be brought up in a happy environment. But if, as can so easily happen, you find yourself cared for by parents or other carers who have problems their own,  who themselves still really in a process of recovering from their own traumas, or trying to handle or hide or bury their own traumas, then you are likely to witness a certain kind of arbitrariness in their behaviour and uncertainty comes in again, and with that uncertainty, along comes fear. You now feel that you are with beings who, yes, may at the heart be loving, may be much of the time loving, but that can’t be relied on. It’s a realisation that seeps in, or floods in, that you are dependent for your survival upon beings who are not entirely dependable themselves, perhaps can’t even really depend upon themselves, let alone be depended on by others. 

So the whole business really of being human, emerging from the womb into the world is, even in very benign and supportive circumstances, not without peril and often that peril comes in arm in arm with uncertainty. Indeed, it can often be the case that a danger, faced and recognised, can feel a lot less frightening than the potential for a danger, this feeling of there being danger in the air, but you don’t know where it’s coming from. All of this is familiar, and one way or another, to all of you. But it’s a way of explaining why uncertainty, which itself is, we might say, a neutral condition, can be so very easily linked with fear. 

As you grow, you find your ways of dealing with that fear, of coming to a certain kind of certainty in relationship with yourself. You find an approximately stable relationship with the person you are. I say approximately because, first of all, your relationship with the human being you find yourself to be is in flux. So there’s uncertainty there. You are growing, after all. Uncertainty comes along with growing and you cannot help but desire to grow: it’s built into the fabric of your being and whenever you grow you’re always in some way, literally or metaphorically, moving into the unknown. So you’re moving into uncertainty. 

But there is a different kind of uncertainty as you look at growing, that sense of your growing tip moving into a volume of space that it hasn’t encountered before. Here the uncertainty can be harnessed to, linked with, a simple joy in being alive. We might almost say the opposite of that condition of fear that can often attend uncertainty. And this is one reason, a fundamental reason I encourage you to perceive uncertainty in your life as an opportunity for joy, for fun simply. 

Let’s step back a little bit from the story of a life, you as a growing being, meeting perils, encountering the potential for growing excitement. You find yourself born out of a world with a very different kind of time. Broadly speaking, each one of you has come from a dimension in which all times coexist, a version of an eternal now, and you elect to enter this type of reality. It’s a beautiful reality, it offers an enormous amount to all who choose to participate in it, and it has been set up in part by you, to have particular and distinctive characteristics, and amongst those very distinctive characteristics are the nature of time. So you find yourself in this present moment, but this present moment is not for you, generally speaking, at this stage of your evolution, all time. It’s a particular window, if you like, or a space in time that you can enter. And from this present moment, in one direction, you can look back into what you experienced as the past, which is really simply those energy forms that have become fixed. So in a sense, though I will qualify this in a moment, the past, then, is certain. In a way, we could define the past as that which is certain, that which has a definiteness about it. It has happened, that’s that. And then you can look in the other direction, from this present moment, and you can look into the future, and the future is undecided, it’s unknown, nothing is fixed, it’s all potential. And in this in-between time, which is the now there can be the sense that you are indeed between the unknown and the fixed and settled, and that that gives you an opportunity to, on the one hand, to bring forward out of that fixed past areas of interest that you wish to explore; on the other hand, to sense opening up before you limitless potential. 

And so, from that seedbed of the past, you choose in this moment what plants you will sow, and, like an exploratory botanist in the 19th century, you may not know exactly what kind of plant is going to come from the seeds, and so you wait and see and it develops on into the future, and then it becomes part of your fixed past, and so it goes. 

However, it doesn’t take much looking at the structure of past equalling fixed and future equalling unknown, unfixed, to realise that it’s not, in your experience, actually quite that simple. It’s sometimes said that history really exists in the present. That is to say, each historian who chooses to look back at the past discovers a different picture, a different past, maybe very similar to that which is sensed and written about and described by another historian. But it’s still a personal view. You have your own unique view. When you look back into the past, you’re looking back into a different past than everybody else’s past. There may be much in common, but yours is unique, so you’re going to have a different perception of what the past is, and collectively, you’ll find that the human sense of what the past is has what we might describe as a kind of shimmer. It’s not exactly fixed, it’s up for debate, in a way, and as time moves forward you may find that that becomes even more true. 

So there’s a degree of uncertainty about the past, even if we stay at the very basic level of material evidence. And then if we turn, conversely, to look at the future, the future that is so unknown is not so unknown, not entirely. You can find that either you personally, or people you know, or people you’ve heard of, can have clear, and what turn out to be true, visions of what the future holds. You yourself can have your dreams, your ideals, that which you seek to make real, and they have their own kind of reality. Energy that is in the process of manifesting is in the process of settling into, however briefly, some kind of fixed form. So the future, too, is not so wholly unknown or unknowable as it sometimes seems to be, and this can give you a clue about uncertainty in the present moment: that it might be useful to loosen up your sense of the distinction between past, present and future and to see yourself as (and I use this term loosely) a kind of magician, that you are born into a world of energy. 

As a being of energy, you gather together energy forms to give you this experience of being human and you create your reality. And the uncertainty really arrives in at least two different ways. One way in which uncertainty arrives in your life is that actually, whilst uncertainty may be associated quite often with fear, you’re probably going to find within yourself that you don’t really want too much certainty, that a superabundance of certainty would leave you feeling like a machine. You’re wound up, you go tick, tick, tick, tick for however many decades is your life here on earth, and then the clock stops. That doesn’t feel very interesting to you. So that’s one reason for – even being as a magician – you can play a game with yourself in this reality. You sort of know what you’re creating and you sort of hide it from yourself, which actually is not a foolish thing to do. In the description I give, it might sound it’s foolish: left hand, not knowing what right hand is doing. But a major reason for you choosing to manifest as human is to explore what it is to be a manipulator (and I mean that in a positive sense) of energies, to be that magician, to explore how unformed energy passes into the world of form. 

And so there’s always an element of experiment in the life that you’re living. That’s another aspect of why you choose to have a degree of uncertainty. There it’s not so much that you’re hiding anything from yourself, but that you are deliberately making experiments, that you are investigating, that you are fine-tuning what actually are very advanced abilities, even though you can look around in your imagination or in meditation or at other beings and feel that ‘no, I’m not very advanced compared to all that there are in other dimensions of the Universe’. But you’ve chosen to gather yourself into this small compass, this human form, this world of physical matter and time and space. That in itself requires very considerable ability and, as I suggest, it’s done with a reason. It’s done so that within a comparatively small compass you can investigate in considerable detail laws of cause and effect. 

So you spread out this invented time, the notion that the past causes the present and the present causes the future, this arrow of time as it’s sometimes called. But here too, it’s not quite as obvious as it seems to be. The future casts a shadow back into the past, as well as the past casting a shadow forward into the future. The future and past are more interconnected in this present now than often seems. Therefore, here you are in this present moment, a magician, and on the one hand, keeping some secrets from yourself to, as they say, keep life interesting; on the other hand, genuinely experimenting, in a very true sense. This current moment has never existed before and will never exist again, and what you do in this moment is therefore unique, and so it is impossible for you to know wholly the consequences of your actions. 

However, at another level of your being, this is not strictly true. You are multi-layered, multi-levelled. Where you seek to know the consequence of your actions in this human world, your abilities are limited. You can track energy forward into the future quite well, but it is very complex. Causes create multiple effects, and each of those effects has the ability and the tendency to create multiple effects in turn. So you very quickly find even the slightest action in this reality sends ripples out right through the Universe that bring change to everything that is and as your human form is constituted, you don’t really have the, shall we call it computing capacity, to track that energy out, to realise fully all of its effects at this human level. 

But you’re also divine beings and if you choose to associate more with your own divine self (and this is what you’re doing as you grow in this life) then you look upon it in a rather different way. You’re not necessarily particularly interested even in the fine detail of the consequences. It’s more that you’re interested in the nature of the flow that you’re sending out into the world. There, there is a process that is a little bit like distilling. You distill your own light to make it more and more beautiful, through all of the experiences of your life, through the certainties, through the uncertainties. All of the while there’s this distilling process, so that you are learning by degrees to allow your divine self, that which is absolutely of the Source of All, to find expression through your human form, and in that way you can use your mind in a different way. 

You’ve shifted to a place of complete trust in your innermost being and therefore you trust that the outcome of that energy is expressed into the world is going to be reflective of the inner beauty that you’re permitting yourself to recognise yourself as being. And then, with that trust, you can use your mind – an evolved human mind, but still a human mind – to track specific details of the energy that have relevance to you in the exploration that you’re making in any particular moment.  Your’re not, in a conscious, tabulated way, needing to know the last detail of all of the consequences of the energy that you send out. 

Another way of talking about this (and I’ll bring it back to uncertainty shortly), is to say that the notion of cause and effect, those ripples being generated through the Universe by your presence, as you move more and more to identify with your divine self, turns out to be a temporary notion, a notion that is very limited in its truth, that it actually applies to the particular kind of reality that you’re being human in, and that it is no more true to say that the energy you express into the world generates millions upon millions, upon millions of consequences, than to say that all of the energy that is the Universe generates millions and millions of consequences upon you as a being. You are the Universe; all that the Universe is, is you. So these explorations, where you willingly undertake to meet uncertainty as part of the whole deal of being human are designed to help you to come to recognise that the uncertainty is simply acknowledgement that as yet you do not fully know the magnificence of your own being and that all that you seek to express in the world is motivated by that desire to know the full magnificence of your being – which, of course, is not really a personal magnificence, though I’m delighted if you experience yourself as personally magnificent. That’s great. But it is the magnificence of All That Is. It is the magnificence of the wonder of the Universe, of all that exists, of the Source of All expressed in all that is. 

And that then means that the more you’re able to (and it’s okay, take your time about this, it’s not an instantaneous process for the most part and even where it is instantaneous, there’s going to be more, there’s always more, there’s always more). So, in terms of a world of time, your growing is always going to be spread out through time. So as that realisation of yourself as a beautiful being, a divine being, takes root more and more, then uncertainty releases its connection with whatever fear it might have been connected with and it becomes simply the, shall we say, the focus upon the leading edge of your expression of beingness as it flows out and encounters the Universe, and as you allow yourself to enjoy that sense of the unknown, of the uncertainty, then that space of uncertainty brings you information. It brings you the wonders of the Universe to experience directly. Uncertainty, then, is an immensely valuable state of consciousness. It’s not the totality of all your consciousness is, of course, but if you consider it as a kind of front wave, a leading wave as you express your presence in the world, it’s those feelers reaching into the wonder of all that is and saying, ‘well, I don’t know what this is yet, but oh, it’s going to be fun to find out’. And give yourself time. Each of you has your own areas of vulnerability. It’s part of being human. It doesn’t matter if you are not always able to be at peace with uncertainty, but every time you can be at peace with uncertainty, that’s a win for you. It helps you. Good. Thank you for listening.