Certainty: Meet Clarity, Inquiry and Mystery

My Winter 2024-2025 Fundraiser

This post marks the beginning of my Dec 2024-Jan 2025 fundraiser. My target is $12,000. Whatever you and I can manage to raise here will be my contribution to the overall fundraising efforts of the Co-Intelligence Institute. It all goes into CII’s general fund, which supports me as well as other CII activities like

So whether you’d like to support my research and writing or the Institute’s work, please feel free to donate here. I’m looking forward to seeing what we can raise together!

Coheartedly,
Tom

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Certainty: Meet Clarity, Inquiry and Mystery

Some dynamics in different approaches to knowing

Dear friends,

I suspect that certainty gets in the way of co-creating the lives and societies we need now in our rapidly changing world. You may well find that an odd declaration, which is OK. (Since it would be ironic if I insisted on it, I won’t…)

But I do want to point out an alternative to certainty that I prefer: In my life and work, try to set certainty aside (not always successfully) in order to dance between clarity and inquiry. That approach helps me change when I need to, and to listen productively to people who see things differently than I do.

Despite similarities – they’re both about what I know – I see a significant difference between clarity and certainty. To me, clarity is what I sense when – aha! – things fit; they make sense! Such clarity can last a moment or a lifetime. But its trademark is that it is always open to things that indicate its neatness might be overlooking something, or that something has changed since it made such beautiful sense back then.

At that point, inquiry begins in earnest, often headed in directions where my intuition suggests I just might find some new clarity.

Certainty, on the other hand, solidifies my clarity into the emotional and mental inflexibility of Truth. Certainty doesn’t respond well to change or to new information that challenges it. It either fights them off or shatters into confusion, often with dire consequences, either way. If I am addicted to some certainty and that certainty breaks down, I may well scramble to grasp onto some other certainty, sometimes the very opposite of what I was certain of before, becoming like a turncoat or flip-flopper – or a radical relativist or cynic.

The seeming bright side of certainty is that it offers solid ground to stand on – as long as that ground remains solid. It FEELS good. I know what’s what and can put my attention on other things, rooted in that solid ground. (Although my one experience with a major earthquake – the 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake – taught me that even literal solid ground can suddenly cease being dependable.)

In contrast, clarity offers the same kind of orientation, but not as solidly. It’s more tentative, humble, and responsive to what complex Reality tells me as it evolves. Of course, this requires noticing and addressing change and challenge as they happen, which can distract me from other things. But I see it as especially useful, in its adaptive dance with inquiry, when reality IS changing around me – and around us – demanding appropriate responses. It frees me to understand things more deeply or in new ways and to shift my consciousness to more appropriately respond to my changing situation – which is not always easy, but is always available and usually important.

This dynamic dance of clarity <-> inquiry is also valuable when I’m dealing with differences. To the extent I am certain about what’s real, good, and true and don’t own it as my own perspective, I have a much harder time relating to people who see things differently. To the extent I seriously engage with differences that might change me, I find that relating to other people becomes an adventure, opening the door to mutual learning and co-creativity. I believe that’s a truly precious commodity in today’s world where we face such immense challenges and opportunities together.

MYSTERY

And that brings me to the role that Mystery plays in all this. I like to joke that I know the ultimate secret in the universe – something that’s true in every circumstance and is the most important thing to know in every circumstance. Do you want to know this Ultimate Secret? …

“There’s more to it than that.”

There’s more to whatever’s happening than we know, more response required than we can possibly deliver, more possibilities than we’ll ever realize, and so on and so on. There’s just more to it, always.

What’s ironic about that assertion of course, is that I think it’s TRUE. My friend John Abbe likes to challenge my certainty about this with “Is there more to it than THAT?” Which cracks up both of us.

But notice what that supposed truism is pointing to: In the infinitely layered, multi-dimensional, complex evolving totality of what is – a Reality in which I am intimately involved and mutually dependent – there’s just too much going on, all of which is connected (to some extent) to whatever I’m attending to. There’s too much else that just might be – or might suddenly become! – relevant to whatever I’m dealing with.

That’s where Mystery steps in. It is the ultimate context for everything I think, feel, do, have and am – or think I am or think I know. It is both infinite and intimate, omnipresent and imminent. Some will sense it or consider it as an omnipotent intelligence or Being (God?) or dynamic space of infinite possibility. I sometimes imagine it as a dark ocean of everything I don’t know, in which what I know is a little bubble of light: As the bubble of my knowledge expands, its surface area in contact with what I don’t know grows larger, making me feel more ignorant (and humble and curious) the more I learn.

Any of these views of Mystery will work for the purpose of thinking about certainty AND its alternative, the contrasting dance between clarity and inquiry. To the extent I am certain, that certainty can seem kind of quaint compared to the infinite presence of Mystery all around it. To the extend I’m enjoying my clarity until another aspect of Mystery disturbs it, I can use my inquiry to adventure into what Mystery has to teach me, delighting in whatever new – and usually greater or deeper – clarity I find there. This dance becomes a dynamic relationship I can have with Mystery instead of Mystery being a threat to my certainty. I can honor its presence even when I’m temporarily at rest in some tentative clarity.

A few mornings ago, a poem came to me as I thought about this…

Teased by curiosity and wonder
and overseen by Mystery,
Inquiry feels its way
towards intuitions
of how things fit.
And when it stumbles on a bit of “aha!”,
it celebrates with Clarity.

But the sun moves,
the seasons shift,
and Mystery sends
trickster messengers
once again
(as always)…
and Inquiry stumbles out once more
into its eternal journey
of humble discovery and delight
despite dubious frowns
from the Statues of Certainty
stolidly lining the path
on both sides
of whatever new Adventure
is now underway.

It seems to me
that Clarity and Inquiry can dance
into realms
inaccessible to Certainty…
and I want to see what’s there
and what it might mean
for me and the world.

Coheartedly,
Tom

PS: My entire co-intelligence and wise democracy work is filled with clarities I’ve stumbled on in my inquiries into the sources of collective wisdom in a world of wholeness. I’ve been constantly aware of the more-to-it-than-that Mystery that lies in and around everything I’ve thought about, sensed into, written and done. It conditionalizes everything I say and provides temporary landing ground from which to launch my next inquiries, over and over again….

PPS: You might enjoy the essay by Kate Montana – The Sin and Salvation of Certainty – which sparked this essay of mine. I found myself delighted by its first half and less so by its second half, which deals with faith. I plan to offer my own exploration of that subject in my next post.

PPPS: Some of my other writings on all this:

1. My earlier series of blog posts on sense-making

2. Four Wise Democracy Patterns

3. My long poem about living with uncertainty at the leading edge

And if you are mathematically, scientifically or formal-philosophically inclined, check out John Abbe’s The Potential in a Century of Uncertainty essay

________________________________

Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440
“Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole”

Wise Democracy Pattern Language Project
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