The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks.
Interpretation
Certainty limits growth and new experiences, while uncertainty opens doors to possibilities.
In this quote, Stephen Batchelor contrasts certainty and uncertainty, suggesting that while certainty is unchanging and repetitive, uncertainty brings about a dynamic environment filled with opportunities and potential risks. This perspective encourages embracing uncertainty as a means of personal and intellectual growth, as it allows for exploration and the discovery of new paths.
In practice
This quote could be used during a motivational speech about embracing change.
This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.
I reject karma and rebirth not only because I find them unintelligible, but because I believe they obscure and distort what the Buddha was trying to say. Rather than offering the balm of consolation, the Buddha encouraged us to peer deep and unflinchingly into the heart of the bewildering and painful experience that life can so often be.
Exotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles - the trappings of religion - confuse as much as they help. They endorse the assumption of the existence of an elite whose explicit commitment grants them implicit extraordinariness.
Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.
A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.
The individuation of dharma practice occurs whenever priority is given to the resolution of a personal existential dilemma over the need to conform to the doctrines of a Buddhist orthodoxy. Individuation is a process of recovering personal authority through freeing ourselves from the constraints of collectively held belief systems.
If we assume the best in people, we can radically redesign our democracy and welfare states.
The man who meets with a failure attributes this failure rather to the ill will of another than to fate.
I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer, and pizza are all good enough reasons for living. But living an honest life - for that you need the truth.
If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There's a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.
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