Chapter VIII
A GENTLE UNCERTAINTY
It seems to me that in the world as we find it, there is a basic polarity between certainty and uncertainty, reflecting opposed attitudes of mind. One attitude so much desires certainty in emotions and predictability of the future, that it is willing to sacrifice spontaneity, suppress initiative and rigidly regulate individual behavior in the name of various ideas of "social" good or evil. In opposition to this attitude is an equally unbalanced view that the world is inherently so uncertain and unpredictable that one may never foresee the outcome of one’s own acts. 'This orientation justifies action without concern for consequences to others, claiming that no act may be evaluated objectively. 
It has been my experience that extremes of mental attitude generally lead human beings into dead-end behaviors. Through the many twists and turns we may attempt, a single mindedness of approach seems to lead not to a destination, but to a lack of destinations -- without regard for the particular beliefs or ideas - of the single mind we choose to emulate. Over-concentration makes Jack or Jill a very dull boy or girl. 
I have concerned myself in my middle years, with trying to find alternatives to human extremes of viewpoint. This search may have been evident in the book you have just read. Whatever the specific pet peeves or personal triumphs I have offered here, my objective has been something more than a mere recitation of grievances. I have examined with my poor tools, some of the ways our world works -- for good or ill. I have hoped to engage you, the reader, in your own similar examination. 
I have been lobbying more or less obviously, for a particular viewpoint concerning the journeys that we all make between birth and the transition we call death. This viewpoint or attitude seems to me to offer a middle way between extremes that simply do not work well in the real world. A large part of the attitude that I am trying to encourage has to do with words.
-- A Power in Words –
A few of you readers have at one time or another been exposed to a subject called "semantics". The subject is even taught in high school these days, though how much of it we remember is doubtful. To those in our remaining audience who do remember, I must apologize: you may have anticipated for some time what I am about to say. 
To the rest, let me 'fess up to a few admissions. The language of this book has been chosen not only to convey certain ideas, but also to illustrate a way of considering and evaluating those ideas. All writers do this sort of thing, even if some are not so deliberately aware of having done so. 
You may have grown tired of the number of times you have seen certain phrases in my writing.	 These phrases include "I propose…	I suggest…	I suspect... It has been my observation that… A convincing case can be made for the argument that…  It may be that. . . . As far as I can see. . . .,   I wonder if. . . " 
These phrases might seem to some people to be infuriatingly indefinite. If you have persisted to this last chapter, however, you have somehow endured such ambiguities. Your persistence suggests that you may be just a little attuned to the point of view that has prompted me to use such qualifying phrases and adjectives. The point of view to that I refer is one of "gentle uncertainty" .
 	During almost three years of counseling and therapy spread through ten years of my life, I was greatly impressed with the power of simple vocabulary as a basic teaching tool. Words, as the experts often tell us, give shape to ideas and purpose to actions. It may be that most of what the so-called "talking therapies" do, is to teach such a vocabulary.
	Inherent in any vocabulary is a viewpoint concerning the world and one’s own role in the world. It may almost be said that we create the world with our words. What we do not have concepts to describe, we very often do not experience. Thus, by giving us concepts in a vocabulary, talking therapies offer us a way to change experience, preparing us to see things that we would otherwise have missed. 
	Late in my study of psychology, I considered becoming a counselor. I discarded that idea as I came to see that the vocabularies of therapies I had observed in practice were just that: collections of words. The words did not seem sufficiently tied to underlying principles or to demonstrated evidence of effectiveness, to justify my employing them in "healing" other human beings. In many particulars, these vocabularies continue to dissatisfy me 15years later, when I see them applied to treat severely disabled people. 
	Never the less, some of the words I learned in therapy impress me as good tools for enriching the lives of people whose difficulties are less severe than those of schizophrenics. Our words not only reflect our expectations but also precondition our expectations. In a world where many of our traditional goals have turned out to be self-defeating, it seems healthy to me that we re-examine both our belief systems and the words that we use to act out our beliefs in practice. 
	I propose that for someone who is beginning to be aware of the greater world around him or her -- one who is actively beginning to take responsibility for living a positive life -- a vocabulary of gentle uncertainty may be appropriate. It is by acting that we primarily learn. But it seems to me that we must give careful attention to the results of our acts, if we wish to understand the concepts that actions teach us. I observe that we tend to overlook much, when we act from the conviction that we have already found the only Truths worthy of our attention. 
	Thus I am trying to learn to use a vocabulary that treats the world around me as a series of small truths, each subject to re-examination and revision from experience, and each truth specific to my own experience. Only with considerable hesitation do I offer my small truths for potential application to the lives of others. I also strive to let the small truths of other people inform and enlarge my own. Of course, I have about the usual level of human resistance to learning from other people. But I do try. 
	The vocabulary of this book, while occasionally argumentative, is basically open-ended. It shares much with what I am told are Eastern ways of seeing and being. This is intentional. I find myself uncomfortable with the neat division that Western thought usually makes between the observer and the phenomena observed; with linear cause and effect; with subject and object. I am drawn to look for a more "systematic" way to understand events. I am exploring a view of the world in that events and observations are mutually interactive and not always linear or causal. 
	I suspect that social scientists often create much of what they observe and report for publication. This does not derive from any intellectual conspiracy, but from the simple fact of interjecting themselves into the social events on which they report. I also observe that many of the supposed "laws" (principles) that govern the functioning of the social world, are not nearly so fixed or constant as some people commonly believe. I wonder, for instance, if there might be fewer unwilling victims in the world than we think. The victim and his victimizers so often seem to cooperate in a game of power and powerlessness. Likewise, I think we often see events that occur in sequence and then conveniently jump to the conclusion that the earlier event "caused" the later. Many events that we have assigned as cause-and-effect may later turn out to be the outcomes of some less obvious third event, if they are related at all. 
	To borrow a concept from Fritjof Capra, I increasingly experience the world as a dance of energies and possibilities. I find myself listening for uniting themes, for the rhythms of change in the dance. A gentle humor sometimes leads me to suggest that perhaps the trees are talking to themselves, in their tree like way. The same humor makes wonder if conversations in many a Washington DC cocktail party are an exchange of information so much as of cosmic white noise. 
	Some people might find my particular brand of philosophical detachment depressing. I do not, possibly because I have not walked a road that supports the assertion that the world is without meaning, null and void. That road never beckoned to me. I have had too many personal experiences of life's richness, meaning, and potential for positive power and caring. 
	If I have come to question how much of what I know is really so, I have also learned that in a Universe of things that I do not yet know, many might be so. If I have learned to distrust some of the older labels and conclusions that our culture offers concerning ways the world should work, I am at least engaged in a continual positive search for better labels and more workable conclusions. 
	I use a vocabulary that is highly provisional: it treats the world in terms of "maybe”, rather than ''must be”. It seems to me that this approach leads to a particular attitude about sharing life in a crowded world. 
	I am a peaceful man. Though my life is sometimes a mess, it is a happy mess. I am probably the last person you would find in an angry mob, trying to hang some poor idiot from  a tree for preaching about the wrong God or the wrong ideology. This isn't because I don't think some people are idiots. It is only because in my world, there always exists the faint possibility that the idiots are closer to being enlightened than I am. 
	As long as misguided fools stay on their soap boxes and don't try to modify my behavior by force of something more convincing than argument, I'm likely to remain an upstanding citizen. If preachers go beyond argument to coercion, my first response is reasonable withdrawal. However, when the preacher follows me up my driveway, he is likely to be escorted off the place -- either by my Doberman, or by the largest mounted policeman I can find. In the final extreme, if the preacher comes beating on my door with a few of his friends, then I'm going to shoot the bastard. I may even attend his funeral and mourn the demise of yet another potential saint, if I'm not too busy beating off his fellow idiots. 
In this attitude, I remain true to my principles. I may not be certain of the truth, but I'm pretty sure you don't know it any better than I do and are thus a poor judge of what I ought to believe. 
What I believe has to do with the simple equity of the marketplace of ideas. Between freely associating individuals, the most useful and sensible ideas will last, and the least useful will foul up human affairs badly enough to earn a lousy reputation. Between prophets and their followers, such principles probably don't apply. The committed follower is generally not greatly concerned with finding or testing his own truth. He would rather borrow the un-examined truths of others, thus avoiding mental work. 
I guess I'll have to tolerate a certain amount of the nonsense on the part of followers and leaders in the world, for the foreseeable future. During that future, however, I intend to go on lobbying for the notion that people who don't need to be leaders or followers, prophets or disciples, tend to be a great deal more interesting and constructive companions than those who have such needs. 
I am willing to have you evaluate -- and throw out -- any idea or suggestion you have encountered in this book. What I'm not willing to have happen is for either your ideas of social good or mine, to become the basis for a legal referendum to decide how all of us are going to be forced to behave. I don't believe a vote ever kept anybody from making a darned fool of himself in public. Moreover, there are plenty of examples of the opposite result. 
Thus, it is my hope that the kind of vocabulary I have used in this book will thrive and prosper in individuals willing to practice a life of gentle uncertainties. I think I would enjoy having such people as neighbors. Such free spirits may always remain a little uncertain of the Ultimate Truth, while muddling along peacefully by using the smaller truths that stand the tests of experience. 
It is such people as these, who have learned the art of leaving others the hell alone. Such people may truly participate in a community based on shared interest and cooperation rather than shared avarice and the coercion of non-believers. 
-- Finding Each Other --
Unless you happen to be one of the fortunate few who can speed read, you have spent quite a few hours here, exploring the world and some of the folk tales that circulate therein under false colors. Some of the observations I've offered may ring perfectly true for you. Others probably leave you cold. In some areas, it is entirely possible that I don't have my facts straight and need to back up and think things through from scratch. That's fine too. This book has been a learning process for me, and I don't expect to stop learning while I live. 
You've seen the roots from which I come, and some of the struggles -- large or small in comparison to your own -- that have taught me lessons in life. My challenges have been no greater than most, I would guess. But they were mine, and I feel a degree of unabashed pride in them. 
I've come into middle adulthood with about the usual quota of personal dilemmas and probably a fair share of personal hypocrisy. This is a journey that I share with tens of millions, even as I have arrived at my own destinations. It is a journey that continues for me, and one that my experience suggests you also may be making. Welcome to a very large club. 
It is not an orderly process to leap from farming with horse drawn plows, to exploring space from high earth orbit. But that's where the attentions of my family and many of yours have traveled during sixty years. I wonder where the next sixty years will take my offspring and yours. 
I have said that I believe the next few years may bring a number of troubles and disruptions to America and the larger political world. I've said that the American economy -- and therefore the world economy -- will experience some hard bumps and thumps in the near term, and could conceivably crash around our ears. I've suggested that war on a massive scale is a possibility (thankfully decreasing) and on a lesser scale is a foregone conclusion. I've suggested that in times such as these, there are a few folks who think they know what your Truth ought to be and who may do their damnedest to impose it on you for your own good. 
I've also said I don't think any lasting solution to the above problems is going to involve doing more of the same old nonsense we've done for the last  three generations. We may be forced by events to try different solutions or drop into an age of barbarism or both.
I disbelieve the ability of political organization to solve problems that are deeply rooted in personal perceptions and fantasies. I abundantly disbelieve the plausibility of "benevolent" government other than self-government. I am an un-reconstructed capitalist, having observed the abject failure of all of the economic alternatives to free markets. I’m also enough of a realist to understand that it may take several generations for most of us to arrive at the same conclusions, if we ever do. Believing in Big Brother is usually easier and apparently more comfortable than chopping your own firewood.
I believe in the power of individual insight and experience. I also believe that there is a lot of room for cooperation between like-minded individuals in activities of mutual benefit. I suspect that in troubled times, we would do well to seek out the company of others who perceive the world as we do. If for no other reason, such company might multiply the firepower we can bring to bear in our own self defense. This image is of course, figurative. I also enjoy a good game of  Rummy
 	With such thoughts in mind, I invite those of you who may wish to share ideas more personally than a book will permit, to correspond through my publisher . His address is near the front of this book. I have guaranteed him forwarding postage for anything non-commercial and hopefully non-obscene that you may wish to share with me. I’ve also guaranteed that he will be sued if he reveals my name and address to a correspondent. The same is true of the Anonymous E-mail service through which I maintain my Internet accounts. I do value my privacy. When I've read what you have to say, perhaps we can get together for coffee, somewhere in America. 
Until we meet, go in Peace and Power. 

AFTERWORD:
ON BECOMING A VILLAGE ELDER
One of these days I'm going to decide -- or an impatient boss is going to decide for me -- that my further usefulness as a systems engineer in the defense industry is limited. When and if that moment arrives, I shall perhaps be forced to the expedient of simpler and presumably more honest work. I wonder what that work will be. Possibly my spouse and I will find our way to one of America's smaller cities, where I may hang out my shingle and place my advertisements in the local newspapers. Imagine, if you will, something along the lines of the following: 
''Robert Lawrence, Ph.D., and Ann Lawrence, B.A.. Services many and various offered. Carpenter your house, plumb your bath, cook in your kitchen, landscape your garden, or ride shotgun in your armored car. Write your business prospectus, keep both sets of your books, teach your kids higher mathematics, art appreciation, American history and common sense. Your friend in a world not famous for its loyalties: strong boxes, strong minds and skilled hands offered for the price of daily bread and bed. Rates negotiable, within reason." 
At some time in the future, I shall have to decide whether to succumb to my temptations and become a teacher or village elder in this new age being born around us. If I ever fall into that morally hazardous profession -- offering advice for pay -- I hope to have at least the grace to do my advising part time. If I can ever get my lower back to behave, maybe I'll go back to nailing roofs or decks on houses. I hope also that I shall have the wisdom to emulate a method of instruction practiced by a Teacher whom I have glimpsed occasionally in my sleeping and waking dreams. The last time I dreamed of my teacher, his story was as follows.

-- The Parable of the Road –
Many years ago (my teacher said), I encountered a young man on the road, as I walked to the great city. It was hot in the noon sun, and we sat down together under a tree. As strangers do, we struck up a conversation. By his demeanor, I soon recognized him as one whom many in my country considered exceedingly wise. Thus, though he seemed just sprung from the nest, we spoke of many things. 
As conversations will, ours turned eventually to the nature of knowledge and of power. Realizing he must know his reputation had preceded him, I gathered my courage and asked him what he knew of power. He sighed, doubtless having heard the question before. But since the day continued hot outside of the shade of our tree, he consented to share his thoughts. 
"I suspect," he said, "that if we permitted ourselves to know outwardly what we know in our secret selves, we would discover that there must be as many ways to power as there are souls. We continue to believe that we need teachers and prophets to find our power, and our belief fulfills itself. We continue to look for the one straight and narrow Way, and thus perhaps for each of us there is but one way. However, if I am to trust my own experience, I must believe that each Way is of our own making. 
“This is not to say that one may not share his Way with another. It is only to suggest you may find in time that it is your own experience that teaches you and not the experience of another, borrowed for convenience sake. My way to Power may not be yours, or yours mine. If we are fortunate, however, there may be something in each that speaks to the other. 
Seeing me frown, he continued as he doubtless had at other times and places. "There may be ways to Power in our questions. I find them sometimes also in our answers. Perhaps less obviously, there are ways in the expectant silences of our not-asking. Not all of our growth or unfoldment comes to us in words. 
"The rock sitting at the bottom of its stream bed is acting in its Universe, even as we are in ours. That there seems to be an overlap in these two Universes, is perhaps a lesson or perhaps a novelty -- or neither. I do not know.’ 
''There are those who ask, 'what are the right questions?', or 'what are the best answers?" Likewise, some ask, 'who is my proper teacher?' I find myself most closely attuned to these latter. I believe we draw to ourselves those who can teach us, and leave behind those who cannot. If this be Truth rather than my small truth, I cannot say. It has merely been my experience. 
''Not many years ago, I spoke with another soul, just as you and I have spoken, on a road not greatly different from this one. For a time, this soul became my teacher. She taught me, thus: 
 “’If you would require of me that I be your teacher, then you shall of course grant that in the length of time, I shall occasionally change my mind. That is another name for growing up... '
 "'Your teacher is that one from whom you permit yourself to hear your own knowledge. No teacher will ultimately harm you. Those who impede you will lead you to transcend them. Those who facilitate and support you will require no less...' 
"' If you concern yourself with the purities, then seek out as your teacher, one who has demonstrated purities in the practice of a life. Few have. . . ' 
'" If you work to understand motivation and movement, then seek in your teacher, a competence greater than teaching. Those who teach to live, must ever have students...' 
"'If you would explore stillness, then suspend for a moment your disbelief that there is One within you who is still. Listen to that One. You will hear Her where she is not... '" 
I struggled in my mind to grasp with slippery fingers, these elusive trout. For thus had gone our conversation that I was left gasping. Turning to the young man, my indignation rising to lure, I spoke from my frustration: ''Yes, all of what you say may be Truth, but…”
And he was no longer there. 
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