Chapter 23: An Indeterminate Sense of Reality

We encounter many things pertaining to the whole of reality that we struggle to comprehend, and there is much more that we have yet to fathom about the universe that is beyond our experience. This makes it reasonable to assume that we are constantly faced with increasingly more unknowns than the knowledge we claim to hold is able to explain simply because the more we learn, the more unanswered questions we can pose. The wondrous unknown is always a step ahead of us as if to keep our lives shrouded in mystery. Yet we tend to ignore this basic truth because we are routinely reminded that we have attained a much greater understanding of the world than what we once possessed, individually and collectively. Even if we account for everything that we may have lost over the course of our shared history, we know more or at least we have gathered vastly more information today than our ancestors ever did. However, at the rate that we accumulate information and misinformation, we find ourselves accruing a body of knowledge that has become impossible for any single person to personally and completely assimilate, or even to be in the authoritative position to challenge all of which we supposedly know as a society. Nonetheless, since we believe that we will eventually come to know that which we have not yet grasped, we place faith in a self-expanding system that will know and control more than we will ever need to learn.

It is supposedly self-evident that we have technically progressed more than we have ever known to achieve. And while we may have acquired an unprecedented number of amenities unfamiliar even to the most pampered kings and queens of our ancient past, our moral maturity continues to lag further behind our technological evolution as we are persistently exposed to new problems that we likely create in the process of solving old ones. We are fundamentally challenged to grow notably beyond our original programming. Culturally, we seem less equipped to find meaning and appreciate the uncertainty of life as we increasingly depend on our mechanized economy and ubiquitous information to hide and manage our existential insecurity. Our capacity to see life on its own terms is diminished by experiencing a great level of empowerment that draws our attention away from our basic impotence and ignorance to inch towards omnipotent and omniscient delusions.

We can generally control or predict what normally happens or trends over time. We can anticipate the probability of certain events like the weather based on patterns we can decipher, but we do not know exactly how an event will occur unless we are controlling the conditions of that event and we are fully aware of those conditions remaining unchanged until the moment it transpires. But the world in which we partake is far more complex than we care to acknowledge, and this brings us to a third reality about our existence, which is that life is indeterminate. Our physical existence as we understand it is caught between the certainty of its conclusion and the uncertainty of its development. This means that we know that we are all going to die, but we do not know how our lives will unfold. The limit to our knowledge is reflected in the very little that we control. While many of us like to believe that we have our fate in our hands, much of that fate is determined by statistics beyond our aptitude and diligence. While we can increase the likelihood of our good fortune, we do not realize or do not wish to realize how many preconditions set the stage for our success or failure. But it is equally misguided to presumptuously blame others for our misfortune when we simply drew the shorter straw in the universal game of chance.

In either case, we could argue that collectively our lives are predetermined based on the presence or absence of certain factors, but individually there is so much variation that very little can be determined outside or within our intricate ecosystem of biosocial conditions. Hence, while being associated with certain characteristics, including where and when we were born, can predict some aspects of our lives very well such as comparative socioeconomic status, there are so many individual attributes and experiences from which any number of possibilities could arise that we cannot easily foresee. We may not be able to fight the forces of nature that make the world possible, but there are always openings to a different life that we may not have imagined.

Many of us think of impermanence as the eventual end of things, but impermanence is primarily about conditions being impermanent, which means that they are always changing. And if there are innumerable conditions always changing, then things will remain indeterminate unless we can anticipate correctly all of the changes to those conditions. Since we cannot confine our universe to a laboratory, we cannot account for the exact conditions preceding an event. Without absolute and comprehensive awareness of real-life situations, then we will always be exposed to a varying degree of risk or uncertainty. In addition, our own study of our environment and our attempt to control it in itself interferes with the immediate and long-term outcomes of events. We can never be fully outside of the system we are observing because even observation is a form of participation in the world.

Nevertheless, to counter this fundamental reality, we attempt to broaden and deepen our knowledge so that we are not at the random mercy of change. But the lesson to extract from an indeterminate life is that it frees us of absolutes. While impermanence still leaves with the concern of what we do with the time we have, it is an indeterminate sense of reality that tells us to stop obsessing over what we do not know or cannot control. Alternatively, it urges us to learn to love the adventure through the untraveled paths of our narratives as we expand the meaningful connections we can make by gaining perspective. Those connections are the relationships we discover or build to play with the forces of nature, and consequently, help us to consider how the wisdom we apply in our engagement with life can affect the outcomes of our stories even if we do not know how they will evolve.

THE DEFINITIVE KNOWLEDGE OF AN INDETERMINATE TRUTH

We tend to think of knowledge and truth as similar concepts and they interrelate because one is an expression of attaining some degree of the other, but they do not actually mean the same thing. We can think of the truth as being the unlimited realm of what essentially constitutes the principles of existence as patterns and manifestations of reality as events, but as a whole, it remains an unattainable ideal we strive to understand that we can never fully capture. Knowledge, on the other hand, is something that we acquire from the awareness of these patterns and events, and we retain it as relationships or associations that describe what we comprehend about how and why things function. Knowledge represents our relative grasp of the absolute truth because the truth is the invisible blueprint hidden behind all mystery, whereas our inherently incomplete knowledge is always at the mercy of its gaps and at risk of missing what is constantly changing. Since we do not know the extent of what we do not know, we cannot calculate the ratio of the known to the unknown. Hence, our measure of knowledge is forcibly confined to the questions we can ask for which we have answers, while the truth is the immeasurably indeterminate that is always beyond the horizon of what we can know at any given moment and what we can experience in any given circumstance.

However, despite our futile race to absolute truth, we do know that our lives are fundamentally determined by conditions because nothing is actually possible without the right elemental mixture and setting being in place. We only need to point to the emergence and sustainment of life itself to see its dependency on the galactic soup that provides a bearable set of parameters for its functioning. This means that any peculiar change, however seemingly inconsequential, could wipe out all life in a planetary system, and yet we rarely appreciate the delicate balance of conditions that make life possible, natural and abundant. Moreover, stability alone cannot account for biotic subsistence since no given state can remain exactly the same in the same way over time if change is ever to occur. Hence, we know that the universe must allow for variation within its supportable boundaries to ensure the likelihood of any event.

We could extend our understanding of this basic truth to assert that chaos must be infused into order so that we may discern this underlying tidiness to everything. It requires our sense of perspective to see through the chaos of life to grasp the order of existence and contemplate how the indeterminate fits into the grand equation. The quantum field reflects this strikingly in how uncertainties at one level work themselves out into certainty at another, and thus, converts seemingly contrasting concepts into a unified principle. This is the definitive knowledge of an indeterminate truth, which is to realize any profound connection we make within this alleged disorder of our experience is a portal to all material and spiritual connections. And the more relationships we recognize, the wider the slice of reality we can integrate into our lessons.

Living life is a not a quest for knowledge. Although knowledge is a worthy and essential goal, it is only a means to an end. Its critical function is really to map out the world as adequately and sensibly as possible so that we can effectively steer through it. Ultimately, we want to navigate to something, and that something is the question that consumes most of us. The unknown destiny of our voyage to be undertaken is the enigmatic truth serum that is injected into the bloodstream of our lives to incite us to say and even do what must be said and done, no matter how awkward or sublime and instantaneous or gradual it is in its portrayal. Whatever is in us that we so madly or eagerly need to know and convey only radiates through our participation. We are in a sacred pursuit of meaning that we cannot achieve by remaining disengaged from the world or by being preoccupied with having every condition monitored and controlled as we partake in the live events of our roughly sketched narratives. The more we concern ourselves with what should or can specifically happen, the less that will meaningfully transpire. We cannot discover what we already know, and without discovery, there is no meaning to develop or attain.

We tend to throw the untested out the window and only answer the door to claims of the preordained when we remain in fear of the indeterminate. We often operate within the falsely secure boundaries of a planned and disciplined existence that only alleviates our apprehension over potential misfortune without ever truly finding tranquility in who we claim we are or in what we have become. This is why many of us risk gaining mostly in the quantity and not in the quality of what we seek, and why we cage the stories of our lives metaphorically in a video game that does not lead to real decisions or does not allow us to learn valuable principles by enduring far-reaching consequences. The games we choose to play should only serve as practice for the real chance opportunities and perils of life. We need to experience the world for ourselves with all of its uncertainty in order to make our own connections rather than submissively embracing the declared knowledge of others and of our society.

A DETERMINISTIC IMPRESSION OF CONFIDENCE

Confidence triggers our motivation to use every means at our disposal to sustain itself, whether it is well-grounded or baseless, while insecurity drives us to reduce our associated anxiety and doubt by hiding or suppressing our vulnerability and projecting overconfidence in its place. Although our primary source of confidence should stem from the substantiation of observable and reproducible results to help ease our uncertainty, our most abused tool for safeguarding our allegedly corroborated beliefs is the shared delusion of the masses because we build our confidence on the confidence of others just as they build theirs on ours without confirming their validity. The self-reinforcing nature of our very customary social interactions provides the key mechanism for the global denial of reality, where we are free to relinquish responsibility for acknowledging the truth if it conflicts with our unquestioned ideology. And in a populous society, there is no shortage of people who can band together to create a fictitious sense of solidarity in the face of contradictory views and contrasting evidence. But it is not the indeterminate that frightens us as much as the loss of social cohesion, which is vital to our survival and livelihood as well as our stability and importance. Hence, we depend on one another to endorse any illusion that justifies our coping strategies in confronting the dilemmas that torment and preoccupy all of our lives.

Over the millennia, there have been gradual transitions in authority over the knowledge of surviving civilizations that have generally aligned with the economic and cultural interests of a desired social order and that have led to radical shifts in their distributed benefits. This has evolved from the collective wisdom held by the elders of a community to the formal institution of education, and from the religious orders that instilled sacred truths and legitimized ancient power structures to the intellectual and professional classes that deliberately or unwittingly supported the geopolitical agendas of our times. The purpose of these authorities has been is to address discord and uncertainty in a manner that persuades members of their societies to submit to conformed views of the world. But by convincing a sufficient number of followers to pledge their allegiance to the systems that supposedly guarantee their sustenance, they overlook the fact that over time most of their organizational configurations have primarily come to serve the quality of life enjoyed by the upper echelons of ruling empires as they have come and gone throughout history. These self-imposed authorities and their appealing arguments have been effective regardless of their validity because they leave us with a deterministic impression of confidence about the world that we seek to attain. We want certainty about how life will favourably unfold for us and for those in whom we are fully invested, such as our families.

A shared conviction in a prevailing doctrine is not difficult to achieve among the masses because people naturally and habitually endorse beliefs among themselves to fulfill an undeniably common need for self-assurance. This confidence is easier to build through professions like medicine and engineering where performance can be demonstrated, at least within the immediacy of our perception. But anyone among us who highlights any information that challenges our worldviews and that has yet to offer clear economic advantages is expectedly met with rejection, ridicule or possibly retribution of the worst kind. Only during periods when there is a loss of faith due to the severity of our troubles can we be swayed to consider alternatives. Unfortunately, it is also in moments of fury or desperation that any nonsense can pass for newfound awareness if it can provide a narrative that validates our paranoia and sedately nourishes our hunger for truth that disguises our unspoken appetite for absolute certainty and our intolerable aversion to risk.

Science has expanded steadily over our modern era to become the forum for dispelling myths by plausibly explicating past events and ultimately changing or predicting future outcomes. Through human endeavour, it seeks consistency in the development of reliable and robust models that can explain phenomena across an increasingly wider range of conditions as well as devise more precise and sensitive methods of measurement to account for previously undetected activity or the variability in that activity. And as our independent and diverse attempts to test our hypotheses are able to replicate similar results, our confidence in what we believe we know widens and deepens. However, as the current frame of scientific thinking translates to conventional knowledge, it solidifies into absolutes within the dominant culture of our society. The same arrogance and temerity we have always seen raises its ugly head not only because of accelerated progress but because of our insecure need for certainty and stability to the point of corrupting whole fields of academic study, and we begin to neglect that science is as much an exploratory function as it is an explanatory one. Although the indeterminate should drive science, we see instead that it is what serves political interests and greases the economic wheel that fuels what and how we study, while anything that challenges the status quo is buried with all recordings of any phenomena that reveal the significant cracks in our established understanding.

With an ever-growing arsenal of technology that we possess to buttress our body of knowledge, we are able to counter our insecurity in dealing with an indeterminate reality. Even though it is the mysteries of our existence that inspire and push the most insightful minds to fundamentally shift whole paradigms of thought and enhance our quality of life, our implicit desire to create a deterministic world persists. And although we have multiple means embedded, biologically and culturally, in our ancestral code to preserve conventional thinking, skepticism is the one rational process that can both promote and challenge our contemporary lines of reasoning and commonly held beliefs. While skeptical forms of inquiry can deter the spread of ideological propaganda and potentially harmful practices, we can also exploit them to keep new or lost insights from gathering any support when they disrupt pre-existing advantages held by select networks of individuals operating within the nebulous rules of society. The self-declared skeptic can unknowingly become a cheerleader or a bully for mainstream worldviews that conveniently prevent us from confronting existential questions, which can unravel the cords that hold our superficial expressions of meaning together. This extends to another method of maintaining the status quo, which is to shame anyone with any idea that lacks ample research that can legitimatize its explicative power and sweeping implications. This logic ensures that we apply unequal levels of scrutiny since emerging or forsaken theories will typically carry less evidence than established ones when initially presented for debate until there is enough interest to tip the balance. In addition, our dogmatic cultures grant us permission to express our socially accepted modes of thinking without the threat of a justifiable dispute and without any obligation for further inquiry because they have unequivocally proven themselves like a profession that merely needs to point to its credentials.

However, despite the ease with which our mechanized societies reduce existence along with our significant social connections to demystified material units, science has to demonstrate its capacity to tackle problems identified within each of its fields of study. In addition, it must expose its current limitations by accounting for unexplained phenomena as opposed to simply assuming it will arrive at the same pre-existing conclusions, which consistently prove to be wrong or incomplete. Given everything we believe we know will eventually be adjusted or corrected, we should not subscribe to being skeptical as much as we should simply reserve judgment and remain cognizant of our biases. Furthermore, we should be more courageous in testing ideas. If we want to work towards an uncorrupted approach to seeking truth, we need to accept the notion of the indeterminate as a fundamental reality of life instead of working diligently to maintain the impression of a fully deterministic universe.

We behave as if the world is predictable because we want it to be, and we believe it to be because our expectations can easily be accommodated inside a system that can manage events within its sphere of influence. It is like the environmental controls of a building. And while we can regulate the temperature and humidity within a constructed facility because it was predesigned to do so, we do not control the temperature of the realm outside our shell. We can also pretend to have a handle on our surroundings by pointing to very steady recurring events like the sun rising and setting every day. The more stable the conditions, the more predictable the event regardless of our explanations for that event. But a civilization that shapes its planet and collects a great deal of statistics about its behaviour does not need explanations. It can predict what will collectively happen by focusing on the probabilities of certain events or incidents such as fatal accidents. If all other things remain equal, we know what the chances are of people dying under specific circumstances. This power of prediction is the result of the vast information we accumulate that when we are in close proximity to the potential events we are tracking, we can anticipate them such as hourly weather forecasts.

Our unhindered confidence is nested in the illusion that we know more than we actually do, which in effect, encourages a sense of determinism or predestination that is far from reality and that can be expressed in opposing ways. On one hand, there is a fantasy shared among those of us without a clear plan of our own that we are either destined for greatness or awaiting our profoundly tragic end. On the other end of the spectrum, some of us fervently believe that we are the masters of our own destiny and that we have almost absolute dominion over our future. But in all cases, this deterministic yearning surfaces anywhere that elicits fear of having no control or choice in life and responds to untainted complexity by adopting any ideology that offers irresistible simplicity in the paths through life we can choose to follow and persuasive simulations of individual autonomy we can achieve.

REALITY THROUGH THE LAYERS OF ILLUSION

Many of us underestimate the extent to which we rely on fiction to deal with reality. We dismiss the role and power of our imagination to assiduously construct a facsimile of the world that appears unquestionably real even when it runs contrary to basic principles of nature such as impermanence that we inherently know and accept. Maintaining our beliefs is a full-time responsibility if we want to appease many of our hopes and fears that influence how we perceive things and ultimately what we do or avoid doing. Beliefs are poor, but crucial substitutes for the truth. We have to believe something in order to function in our everyday lives while we attempt to comprehend what is true. However, since we can deceivingly train one another and ourselves to think and behave in ways that override our common sense, we can also alter reality by reinterpreting our experience. There is both an ancient and modern supposition that everything is an illusion. Regardless of whether we think positively or negatively, nothing is what we translate it to be and yet it is because we essentially have to create it. But more importantly, we learn that we find the truth by experiencing reality through the layers of illusion, which includes three basic tiers representing views that define and correspond to the self, society as expressed through culture and the physical totality of all beings.

The universe as we know it presents us with a manifestation of existence, and as we approach the frontiers of science, we increasingly come to ascertain that this presentation is not exactly what it pretends to be. This was already understood by the mystics who predated our earliest records and long before we began to make very surprising discoveries about what we have generally contended to be a relatively solid world. This holographic projection does mean it is not real. Instead, it suggests that we only see a practical sliver of its reality while the preponderant rest is filtered out in order for us to live as we do. Our tangible perception of a bodily existence in a material universe is what permits us to partake in the events of the world and develop our narratives. It is on the theatrical stage of our stories where indispensable rules such as gravity seem to be in place to provide a stable foundation for all and maintain consistency for our shared experience of life. And while we continue to redefine those rules or refine our understanding of these unwavering laws as we encounter newly unexplained phenomena, most of us take this material layer of illusion for granted because it seems to have little to no impact on our lives, at least not directly, until we face the inescapable condition of our corporeally mortal end.

Superimposed onto the physical plane, there is our society and associated culture, which together reaffirm our misconception of this base perceptual stratum. The societal layer of illusion captures our belief about how we should live our lives and guides us in how we interact with the world and with each other. This is where we establish laws of our own, and while many are legally coded for everyone to learn and follow, most still remain implicit in the expectations we have of one another. These rules and norms function to maintain productive social order, but they also serve to reinforce a shared delusion of the world. As the cultures of our communities intersect, a deceptively simple political structure forms and shifts in the unlit side of our collective awareness that dictates our way of life through our interdependencies on an integrated socioeconomic system. Although this may seem to have been historically achieved by force, it has relied on the assimilation of beliefs across generations to be misperceived as our own. As we share conveniently crafted clusters of ideas about how civilization should and does operate, we jointly fortify a false reality that is difficult to challenge, but that also fashions the playgrounds and battlefields of our stories to discover the untarnished truth. It is in the formation and exposure of pretense and deceit that veracity emerges. While it is real because we mostly agree that it is real, it is the lessons from our lifelong compulsory acting careers colliding with our perforated assumptions that teach us the verity of life hidden somewhere between the vastness of the cosmos and our own identities.

The most intimate aspect of our beliefs rests on the personal layer of illusion. It is within this realm where we understandably recognize ourselves as self-aware creatures and believe in our free will or in our capacity to make decisions. But we also know that much of what we experience is happening without our direct control. Our bodies function without us needing to consciously engage in breathing or in directing our blood flow since this all transpires automatically. We also do not have an off switch to stop sensing our bodies and our environment. It happens whether we wish to sense things or not. For this reason, our minds become the ultimate defense against reality, whose perception we can adjust through our selective attention, memory and reasoning. We screen the information we receive by directing where to focus our mental resources and to what aligns with our beliefs. To address any cognitive threats, we apply a multitude of strategies that we have acquired, which range from the most basic ability to live in denial and ignore any facts that contest our viewpoint to rationalizing a paranoid belief that everyone in our lives is conspiring against us. And in densely populated societies, we can simply terminate old and commence new relationships on a whim to avoid confronting our delusions, especially about our identities. We can also persuade or threaten others to agree with our beliefs by influencing the other two tiers beneath this self-oriented span of our awareness.

Of the three illusory layers, the personal stratum of our reality is the most malleable to form, but the most difficult to change once it has solidified, similar to what happens to the cooling of molten metal moulds or the drying of concrete slabs. But it is also the most vulnerable or breakable since it depends on the instability of the material and societal levels that define our reality and shape its perception. And although we may tell each other and ourselves that we want to be free of illusion, we prefer to be liberated from reality itself because we are continually driven by a deep desire for a deterministic world that works in our favour given that our existential conditions constantly motivate us to the change our circumstances. Hence, the more we comprehend and modify the conditions we want to alter, the more we underpin the fantasy of a governable existence that moves us away from venturing into meaningful narratives of the unknown.

Life conceals the meaning we seek in our uncertainty, which compels us to perceive the world provisionally in one illusory form or another that affords us just enough safe passage to address the next set of risks we will inevitably encounter. Illusions are necessary as discriminating experiences that only encapsulate a tiny fraction of reality, but our role is to see beneath or beyond their mesmerizing layers to appreciate the universal truth. Since we house our illusions in our perceptions and beliefs, it is important that we question everything to refine or reconstruct our conception of our surroundings, others and ourselves. We need to challenge our views by testing their limits and subjecting them to the things that may expose their contradictions, and this includes reflecting on our actions and the outcomes of those actions as well as exploring our feelings and intuitions. Although our inner voices do not explicitly depict reality, they do tell us something about what we may need to do or realize by mirroring the uncertainty of life on the inside as it is on the outside. However, there are no simple rules for decoding our states of mind since their sources and reasons are seldom clear and their erroneous interpretations lie at the crux of our biases, but they can steer us to our essence because, despite their distortions of what we experience, they reveal our underlying intents. Hence, it is by seeing through the illusions of our lives that we can actualize the fiction of our stories as we separate fallacy from reality.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE IN THE BURIED MOTIVES OF THE SELF

Many of us do not question our beliefs, and especially our worldviews, because we purposely fashion them to serve our motives. Their formation is guided mostly by experiences that have or have not led to the fulfilment of our needs. We see this obvious pattern in our expected endorsement of any political system or ideology that coincides with greater or sustained fortune in our lives. And it is equally unsurprising that we may disapprove of the same system if we live in misery instead and we are not offered an acceptable scapegoat to blame for our plight. Moreover, our motives are complicated by the uncertainty we experience living an indeterminate life. We are not only faced with the challenge of trying to monitor, predict and/or influence events to improve our current status, but we are also burdened with the greater trial of realizing who we really are because, deep down in the caverns of our unconscious, we know we are not what we declare we are.

We are deceived, quite decidedly, by both external influences and our own mental processes. And although this is not necessarily deliberate, our minds are instinctively engaged in a kind of tacit conspiracy or cognitive collusion to protect us from acknowledging the illusion of our identity. All the little parts of us confer with one another to coordinate the assembly of a prominent fictional character notorious for sanctioning its own truth. This figure, best described as the separable or semi-detached ego, is the centrally constructed illusion that acts as the conductor responsible for cunningly managing all other illusions. Since the clashes between our incentivized expectations and an unyielding reality we cannot explain tilt us towards psychological instability, we are always reconfiguring the rest of reality to make everything appear to fit together, especially when they do not. This allows us to deny or dismiss the unbearable when there are general or precise matters that we cannot handle in life. In a way, we carry with us a working version of reality, which we are constantly confirming with others and their own working versions. This involves seeking validation from one another through agreement or argument, and by means of persuasion or threat, and at times, outright violence or cruelty.

Much of what we want to believe about ourselves such as our competence and integrity can only be at best relatively true. Our actions and perceptions work hand in hand to sustain the myths about what and how we are. We perceive things in a certain way to justify and direct our behaviour towards specific motives, and we orchestrate a number of behavioural episodes to maintain certain perceptions in alignment with those motives. But the fact that many of us need to convince one another of who we think we are reveals a more fundamental and largely concealed insecurity, and this is one among many countermeasures we apply against a reality that is beyond our capacity to control or comprehend. We also tend to focus our beliefs outwardly as a way of avoiding any degree of introspection. Whether it is confronting the darker side of our personalities or exposing the pretensions of our lives, we typically do not want to disturb the fantasies that constitute our individual definitions and evaluations of the self and that contribute to our confidence in dealing with the incongruence in our absurdly definitive beliefs about an indeterminate world of infinite conditionality.

Although we may fear many aspects of an indefinite future that include our pending failures or misfortunes and our inevitable mortality, we eventually discover that much of our trepidation regarding the uncertainty of life hides itself within the domain of love that is shrouded in all of its demands and contradictions. Unlike most things that we have some degree of control over our lives or at least a way to measure a change in its performance or the conditions in which we are situated, we have no means to know whether we are truly loved. We accept it on faith. Although we can personally confirm the genuineness of our own love for another, as its recipient, we are obliged to trust the provider with its authenticity, given that we often hear it being verbalized but not demonstrated. Love frequently comes and goes like the tide or dies, much like a candle being lit only to witness its flame being blown out immediately, and this casts doubt in its veracity and in our own value or the importance of the other. We may even question whether it was love at all. Perhaps its feeling was based on a dream or a deception, and hence, when the truth is disclosed, it immediately dissolves. But the worse scenario of all is when it is lost, whether it is due to tragedy, misunderstanding or the panic of the fainthearted.

The difficulties of love surface our deeper concern with trust. Beneath all of our devious ploys to project a confident image or a secure state of mastery and balance, we clandestinely seek unconditional love in response to our existential distrust that grows very quietly and almost invisibly behind our veiled misalignment with life. While some of us would argue that love is an illusion and yet a necessity for us to be able to experience it and resolve its inconsistencies, there is nevertheless a predominantly unspoken aspiration that it comes in a manner that is innately expected or naturally instilled in our infancy. This expectation places tremendous pressure on us to corroborate its honesty and perseverance, and its ambiguity demands its proof to be voluntarily committed in its offering. Consequently, many of us fool ourselves into declaring it categorical in our union, but it also exposes how hypocritically we behave by presuming it to be conditional in its provision such as maintaining one’s beauty or status while being unconditional in its receipt that pardons infidelity and abuse.

While such tendencies challenge its sincerity, our common expression of love does tend to have a selfish undertone in that we seek in the other the means by which we can discover or manifest our essence and cultivate our stories. Although we hope others share in our goals and they often do, we also knowingly or unknowingly exploit and manipulate the utility of others to achieve our secretly intended outcomes. In many cases, love is not about the other as much as it is about what we want or expect from the other, and what we want from the other is unquestioned loyalty or servitude to satisfy our conformed sense of meaning or to fill the emptiness in our disconnected lives. Consequently, we observe its extremes in our unwavering duty to family, spouses and friends no matter what they do or what happens to us. And this extends to our devoutness to the broader community and the mechanistic system that purportedly sustains us, where our obedience to the authorities of our institutions through our compliance with their policies is offered in exchange for ridding ourselves of any accountability.

However, we find the need for unconditional love in the buried motives of the self because we are all struggling with identifying and being what we truly are. While the universe may create the playing field and the obstacle course for both our discovery and demise, it is primarily in others with whom we share the same fate that we seek out signs of our core identity and spirit. This is our essence, which is hidden behind the ambiguity of our viagnostic narratives in the lonesome search for meaning that cuts through the grim reality of a mortal existence. And it is here where we find the indeterminate waiting for us to extract the truth, especially through our relationships that include the ones we want but do not have, the ones we have but do not need, and the ones we need but do not want.

In an existentially and morally compelling film adaptation of The Four Feathers [23], a young military officer resigns his commission after his regiment is called to war in a foreign land. Initially convinced that his decision was based on ethical grounds, his character comes into question when three of his friends and subsequently his fiancée each give him a white feather with the intention of signifying his cowardice. He only joined the army to please his father with the hope that he would later live his own life. However, having been disowned by those who were once close to him, he is faced with an identity crisis that ultimately sends him abroad where he risks his life to rescue his dutiful comrades from harm while confronting the origin of his trepidation. Yet despite discreetly committing many heroic acts that epitomized his courage, he discovers that his fear remains with him and he is no closer to finding the answers he seeks. And it is only after his spirit is broken and he too is saved by a native mercenary he meets and befriends along his journey that he realizes who he really is. And as the societal illusions of conventionally defined honour and obedience begin to dissolve, he sees the conditions of his afforded love and respect being released.

The motives behind our demand for unconditional love and total devotion, which we generally do not want to disclose even to ourselves, are tied to our deep desire to secure a favourably irrefutable view of reality that validates our own relevance. Our pursuit of the unconditional reveals our subtle fear of uncertainty and our profound distrust of a world, which worsen with every futile attempt to capture the absolute truth. While this reflects a delusional objective to evade an indeterminate reality, it is also a false belief motivated by a longing for reliability and assurance through a sense of determinism. We find some of this in the stability of love that many of us experienced as young children with our parents. But as we grow older and face increased demands on our abilities or contributions defined by others, that freedom of being seems to quickly diminish as we are driven towards visions of how we should behave and what we should do or complete to appease those from whom we especially expect unconditional support. As we internalize the fanatical need to prove our worth and compete in the world for reasons that remain unclear to us, our relationships come under greater scrutiny where love becomes purely contractual and we diminish meaning to arbitrary milestones and impressions, where our marketable achievements and fashionable personalities risk discarding any remnants of our core identities. But this is where the unconditional privately becomes code for letting us be who we really are as we grapple with forming meaningful connections through the artificially generated narratives of our alienated lives.

THE UNDERLYING CONNECTION OF A PARADOXICAL REALITY

We have the option every single day to question our beliefs and the choices we make, which include the personal relationships we support. But intimately inward interrogations can turn into very precarious exercises for those of us who believe we have established a clear sense of purpose or have achieved a blissfully fulfilling life. Many of us may assume that we know what we want and believe we are on the right course to a better future. We may even be content with what we have or what we have accomplished while considering existence to hold meaning outside of our own individual lives. Yet, we do not really know what is true until something challenges our beliefs or feelings. Would we manage to maintain our convictions if, for instance, we lost the most important person or thing in our lives or saw every pillar of our security suddenly collapse? Our perseverance depends on the faith we derive from our personal and communal histories, which generally suggest to us that our lives will remain tolerably stable and hold potential as long as the bonds we form demonstrate stability and growth. But when either of those two conditions is compromised, we face the prospect of a spiritual death that resembles an uncontrollable state of disorder or a zombielike presence of unbreakable monotony.

Questioning ourselves can obviously generate doubt, but it also allows us to transcend the individuals we have become. Nevertheless, many of us would rather remain safely behind what we think we know than tear down the defensive walls of our awareness to find the untainted truth because we do not want to risk stepping into the shadow of our own madness that is constantly waiting to come out of hibernation. Many of us prefer to feed the beast of our delusion that tenuously satisfies our desire for determinism in exchange for socioeconomic enslavement and seduces us into being happily self-assured creatures of habit while we are perpetually held captive to our perceived worthiness. However, we can choose to disconnect or unplug ourselves from a preprogrammed life run by a self-serving artificial system that calibrates our bodies and conditions our minds. And although we may venture into alienation and melancholy as we approach a point of no return, this less travelled road can release us from the shackles of our illusions and broaden our perspective to humbly attain enlightenment.

The paths we choose in our lives mainly matter in how they pertain to our attitudes towards it. For example, if we claim to have irrefutably solved the great puzzles of our elaborate existence, then we will stop exploring the deeper mystery of life and unwittingly demonstrate that we have wholeheartedly missed its point. An indeterminate life is a paradox wrapped in irony, exemplified by how our brash efforts to foresee or control everything eventually albeit unexpectedly weakens the very foundation of our knowledge and core beliefs. Overconfidence can never be a wise surrogate for the truth. And since all knowledge is incomplete, we forever struggle to make a true statement because once declared unequivocally, it instantly becomes partially false or potentially untrue, which easily illuminates why we do not stumble upon absolute truths while we build better models of the world. However, knowing that we do not know encourages us to continue discovering previously indiscernible connections and lets us escape our epistemic boundaries before the glass palace of our rigidly hypnotic existence shatters. The real paradox lies in the certainty we find in our uncertainty, and we only truly see the underlying connection of a paradoxical reality when it shows us that chaos is really just order in its making.

Every linkage we make or uncover is an opportunity to see beyond the horizon of our ignorance and beneath the disorder of our uncertainty, and while it is important to recognize that all relationships can nurture us or destroy us, their integration help us to find and express our essence. Whether it is between events or individuals, or between things or ideas, connections spark those instances of the truth that eludes us more than most of us care to admit. And it is the indeterminate sense of existence we share that drives our desire to widen or deepen our understanding in the hope of appreciating the meaning of our stories through the hidden linkages or associations that pervade our inner and outer worlds. This insight is critical to confronting the more undesirable and disquieting realities of life, especially when we try to reconcile goodness with tragedy or injustice. And while we may wrestle with governing our inner nature, we inherently know that our imperfection is perfectly designed to outwardly develop and partake in our viagnostic narratives that draw us meaningfully closer to the universal truth.