Dualistic Thinking: Are We Addicted to Certainty?

Would it be fair to say that humankind is addicted to certainty? It's worth considering because the universe we live in is quite mysterious. In many ways we don't know as much as we think we know and what we do know keeps changing. Nevertheless, there is a compelling need to make sense of a universe that's filled with both rational and irrational events and situations by arriving at what we call "truths". Some are indeed universal truths as Carl Jung explored with his notion of archetypes embedded in the collective unconscious. The studies of sacred geometry and morphic resonance point towards timeless structural dynamics that can be discovered during the sacred journey. Other more everyday "truths", however, are often socially negotiated and mediated even as they tend to be accepted with unquestioning certainty. This is what we might describe as "consensus reality".

Thomas Kuhn who wrote on the workings of the scientific method helped shed light on how Western science has fluid aspects tied to social conditioning. This is why scientific "truths" themselves can change and be overturned. Witness the current "God particle" discussions where certain subatomic particles have been observed moving faster than the speed of light, which, if verified, threatens to overturn Einstein's General Relativity Theory. This raises the question as to whether science actually discovers anything in the objective realm or is simply another function of the evolution of consciousness and our understanding of it.

Life seems so much simpler when we have certainty. This is one reason for the popularity and persistence of organized religions in which someone else has arrived at a set of "truths" that its adherents adopt. But finding our own spiritual path is much harder work. I've also come to realize lately the connection between certitude and dualistic thinking. They go together hand in hand. So to move away from dualistic thinking, it seems we have to abandon at least some of our need for certitude and recognize that in terms of the Shift, no one has all the answers and no one knows the outcome, the popularity of various channelings notwithstanding. This can be challenging to accept. I've personally struggled with it a lot. But being open to our universe as a work in progress and to this amazing sequence of changes we are witnessing means being willing to be open to living with a living mystery. ~ Tom Valovic