The Lessons of Uncertainty and Loss
The sound of truth, like some harmony that only the wise can hear, rings out in the spiritual salons and in the clerics’ quarters; it is heard from the high pulpits and after eating peyote.
But the sound of truth — the words and rhythms — is just a seduction. The emotion of certainty is just an emotion — no more true or false than any other. The mind says yes because the mind fears what it can’t predict or explain.
The mind seeks the exquisite relief of order and linearity. It seeks the Great One who can finally explain our pain, our waiting in the dark. The mind is always ready to say yes because it is wired into us, into our hunger to make sense of this place.
The idea of truth deceives us. The light holds a million versions of the truth — no one of them complete or whole. Each is the partial wisdom of one moment, looking across one vista. Each is a moment of great vision and a lie, because certainty seduces, and in that certainty every other vantage place is lost.
We seek certainty because it is the antidote to fear. We seek certainty because it’s the one thing impossible to find here.
But certainty is more dangerous than doubt. From conviction come razor-edged rules. Beliefs born of certainty harden and become swords of emotional violence. They cut and wound. They kill love because love — above all — accepts. It softens around each necessary flaw.
Certainty divides the world into what is true and false, rejected and embraced. It is the defense of the righteous, the self-willed. It is what war — in every form — is made of.
So this is certain: there is no certain truth here. And the certainty we think we find is often damaging; it is never the last word. It is never complete.
While doubt is painful, it is not a curse. Jordan has told me that doubt and uncertainty are necessary to our development as souls. They create a rocky field where things grow that can be found in no other place.
Sitting at my childhood desk once again, I meditate as I prepare to speak with Jordan. Behind the glass mask, a candle emits blue light. Outside, a susurrant breath of wind pushes through the redwoods. Finally, from some internal stillness, I ask Jordan why doubt and uncertainly are a necessary part of our life here. His answer comes in just a moment. Jordan explains:
Certainty is not a healthy state for souls — incarnate or discarnate. There is an immense amount we don’t know. All learning must take place through the lens of doubt, which is why each thing we learn should be held as a mere hypothesis.
Doubt lies at the root of hope, and it is the experience of hope that makes seeking possible, that drives the quest for new knowledge and wisdom. So doubt motivates learning, the quest to enter what is unknown, the determination to turn darkness into light.
The doubt of incarnates, isolated as we are from our soul groups and guides, is especially painful. Nothing is certain; nothing is verifiable. We can’t even know with certainty whether the physical world is an illusion of consciousness. And while I can tell you that the physical universe exists in space and time, my words can’t prove that you aren’t dreaming. Where can we go for the truth? There is no one to ask except gurus, who are often lost themselves and may be making things up.
Here’s something important: the doubt of incarnates is crucial to the growth of all consciousness. That’s because seeking, in an environment where nothing can be proved or verified, creates openness to all the infinite possibilities. We are unencumbered by any absolute knowledge, so we can soar to imagine endless possibilities.
Paradoxically, discarnates are limited by vast, seemingly incontrovertible knowledge, which makes it more difficult for them to imagine the dark, unseen corners of the universe. We come to Earth (and other worlds) to know nothing and to imagine everything. With no certainty, with only intuition and the scientific method to guide us, we can reach past the observable bones of the universe to think what has never yet been thought and to ask what has never yet been a question. That is the gift of living in this uncertain place.
We have used our experience of not knowing to seek wisdom since souls began inhabiting bodies. We have sought truth through myths and allegories, through epic stories passed down from our elders, through beauty, and through endless observations of what works and what doesn’t. We have touched truth partially; we have at times sensed something enormous, just beyond the edges of thought. We have given all that we sensed and saw and imagined to collective consciousness — without any certainty of what was true or false.
That is what we do here.
Jordan, what are some of the specific lessons we receive from living with doubt?
Doubt gives the curtain that is separating the seen from the unseen the impression of impenetrability — the illusion of being some kind of barrier. Doubt — or, worse yet, the belief that death ends all relationships — creates the experience of profound loss. Since there is no loss, and the relationship between souls is eternal, doubt is a necessary precondition to learning the lessons that loss teaches. Some of these include the following:
• Experiencing deep aspects of love that can only be known in the absence of the beloved
• Holding the beloved in one’s heart without receiving any word from the other side, without knowing if the relationship even still exists
• Experiencing aloneness, something that cannot be understood in the spirit world because there simply is no aloneness there
• Experiencing the necessary illusion of impermanence — the fear that nothing will last and everything will be lost, including our own existence — because it creates deep attention and attachment to each experience
• Navigating the fear of loss, which influences every choice and creates deep — if illusory — consequences for our choices that promote soul growth
So doubt (uncertainty) and loss are two sides of a coin. Though painful, they are also precious, a form of wealth that we spend through our entire lives in exchange for learning.
I ask Jordan, What are the dangers that doubt brings?
A life without certainty, without knowing anything for sure, feels dangerous. And pain we can’t predict keeps showing up — unexpected, uncontrollable. There are no answers to the questions “Why?” and “What’s next?” In this place of doubt, there is only seeking, only a hope that there is truth. So our work is to seek truth without ever knowing for sure we’ve found it, and to keep seeking while doubt, like a cold mist, goes on swirling around us.
This is the hardest thing about being incarnate. Sometimes we tire of the pain of not knowing, and we let go. At the far end of doubt is despair, a place where sometimes we create false certainties: that there is nothing beyond death, that consciousness ends, that the ones who’ve gone before us are lost and unreachable, that what cannot be seen doesn’t exist.
Our work is to seek past the curtain and yet never really know. In the face of ceaseless pain — without knowing why or what will happen — we must learn not to give up.
What am I learning from losing you?
We will live apart now for years — I in my new life, and you in the life where I was Jordan. We have often done this. Traditionally I have left our lives together early. These are the ones you know about:
• I died young when I was your wife in that life of the bookbinder.
• I was the elder rabbi, and your mentor, in a yeshiva. [More on this later.] When I died, you felt very alone there, and tried to communicate to me — as you do now — through the curtain.
• I was an unrequited love in your life as a woman in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.
• And, of course, my life as your son.
There have been others. In each case, my leaving has taken you into the heart of loss. You have learned to live there without being consumed or destroyed by the place. You have learned to go where it leads you — deeper into love, deeper into the light of spirit.
In some lives you have wandered in the dark rooms of loss and collapsed there. In others you have used compulsive work or addictions to endure the loss. In some lives — such as that of the old maid in Pennsylvania — you turned loss into a determination to help those in pain. And sometimes, through pain and doubt, you searched for me. In those moments you learned what you could never have known had we stayed together your entire life.
In the heart of loss you can do things and know things that are impossible in any other state. That has been your work.
Because we each have our own karma, we are each learning our own lessons. Some of mine have to do with commitment and determination — pushing through pain and obstacles to do what I set out to do. You have helped me with those lessons in some of our shared lives, including my life as Jordan.
I love you, Jordan. Thank you for all you have given me, including the chance to be your dad and to have had, these years together, the most wonderful son.
Now Jordan tells me things that are not for this book. Then he says:
There is no end to the love that joins us.