Anam Cara

Certainty Freezes the Mind

I love the radical novelty of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who proclaimed on looking inside his own mind that he could see no sign of a self anywhere. Neither could he see any such thing as a cause. Hume’s theory is bold and provocative; like all the most interesting philosophical theories, it brings great difficulties. It is refreshing that he torpedoed the notion of causality. We do have a deadening desire to reduce the mystery of continuity to a chain of causality. We bind our lives up in solid chains of forced connections that block and fixate us. This silences the voices within us that are always urging us to change and become free. Our sense of uncertainty and our need for security nail our world down. We pretend that we live in a ready-made house of belonging. We walk through its halls, open its doors, and shelter inside its walls as if it were a fixed house and not the invention and creation of our own thinking and imagination, a flimsy nest of belonging swinging on a light branch that tempts the unknown storms. Each one of us, like the birds, is an artist of the invisible. Like them, we leave no traces on the invisible air.

Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is such a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one destination, the one role is all that is allotted to us. That we are lucky with so little. Certainty is a subtle destroyer.

We confine our mystery within the prison of routine and repetition. One of the most deadening forces of all is repetition. Your response to the invitation and edge of your life becomes reduced to a series of automatic reflexes. For example, you are so used to getting up in the morning and observing the morning rituals of washing and dressing. You are still somewhat sleepy, your mind is thinking of things you have to do in the day that lies ahead. You go through these first gestures of the morning often without even noticing that you are doing them. This is a disturbing little image, because it suggests that you live so much of your one life with the same automatic blindness of adaptation. After a while, unknown to you, a wall has grown between you and the native force of your experiences. You go through things only half aware that they are actually happening to you. This subtle conditioning becomes so effortless that you are only half present in your life. Sometimes you are lucky and destiny wakes you up abruptly, you stumble and trip into love, or some arrow of suffering pierces your armour. These routines of repetition are often most evident in your work. You somehow manage enough concentration to get the motions right, so that hardly anybody suspects that you really live Elsewhere or that you have got badly lost in some bland Nowhere. It also often happens in our emotional life with the person with whom we live. Time and again, we find ourselves back at the same point in the circle of repetition with each other. The same difficulty repeats itself in an uncanny echo of the past.

Habit is a strong invisible prison. Habits are styles of feeling, perception, or action that have now become second nature to us. A habit is a sure cell of predictability; it can close you off from the unknown, the new, and the unexpected. You were sent to the earth to become a receiver of the unknown. From ancient times, these gifts were prepared for you; now they come towards you across eternal distances. Their destination is the altar of your heart. When you allow your life to move primarily along the tracks of habit, the creative side of your life diminishes. There is an old story from Russia about a prince who lived with a large retinue in a huge palace. One of the key rules in palace life was that no one could sleep two consecutive nights in the same room. The prince insisted on this constant changing about to keep alive their sense of being pilgrims here on earth. The true pilgrim is always at a new threshold.