From uncertainty into certainty. Embracing the mystery of these extraordinary times.

In my personal life, I awake every day this month very unsure if my business will exist in just a few short weeks. Being a father to a three year old child and having to provide financial security for another human being, that certainly creates plenty of uncertainty and at times anxiety.

In addition, I turn on CNN or surf through Digg, Reddit, and the Huffington Post, searching out articles, opinions, and blogs on our current state of affairs with the election, economy, and the war. There are wars, and rumors of more wars, end of the world scenarios, talks of the second great depression, and all sorts of apocalyptic end of the world ideas that are being fed to us virally via online news sources.

It is very slowly dawning on civilization at this time that mystery, or uncertainty, unknown, or what ever you wish to call this third truth value, is a very real yet very uncomfortable notion to be comfortable with.

Recently I took a stroll over to Reality Sandwich blog, and found a blog posting regarding the now infamous Oct.14th, 2008 UFO landing meme. In case, dear reader, you are unfamiliar, a massive internet meme is flying around that on the fourteenth of Oct, which is just about 12 days away from this writing, a massive UFO will appear somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, and remain for three days. This dates stands out in my mind mainly because it happens to be my birthday.

This information is purported to come from The Galactic Federation of Light, who oversee earth's evolution, according to the 'channelers' who publish this information.

Naturally I think open minded people, like myself, need to treat such information with a very high degree of skepticism. So I voiced mine and playfully entered some skeptical information in the comment section on the blog, almost to spite the author a bit. Another community member there, however, left the most appropriate comment...

"Terence McKenna suggested that cognitive uncertainty is the closest the mind can get to an open state of being. In this light, I welcome reports like Blossom Goodchild's re: 10-14-08 as benign possibilities that I cannot pretend to know one way or another as to whether it will occur, or, if it does, how to interpret the precise nature of. ".

How could I forget that! It was the exact 'meme' that I needed to hear in that moment, reflecting a higher attitude not just with the Oct 14th prediction, but with the whole lot of fearful ideas floating around the internet these days regarding our economic future. My truer agnostic nature awakened again.

One of the things I have learned very much over the years in developing and understanding OS 0 1 2, which is a discussion framework for higher awareness and understanding, is the relationships between the false idea and the mysterious idea, or the very human reaction to encountering mystery and producing false ideas about it in it's presence.

When we encounter mystery, our mind has no option but to create a false idea about it. Since there is no certainty to the truth value laying behind the mystery, there is no other certain truth value that we can lay upon the mystery other than falseness or simply our own ideas about it. If done well, this should take the form of very high art, or even religious or holy texts.

If we think in terms of bivalency, which is this or that duality, right or wrong type thinking, we can only consider the Mystery in terms of true or false, thus not including 1/3 of all information in our environment.

I play off of this when I had a 6 month long discussion with the James Randi crowd a few years back on his bbs. I pointed out that they were making very critical errors in their 'critical thinking', for they were encountering and dealing with unknown information and treating it logically as if it were false, as opposed to the believers who were encountering unknown information and treating it as if it were true, either way was irrational. This was easily summarized in the discussion as...

Believer's argument: The Mystery = TRUE. (0=1)
Denier's argument: The Mystery = FALSE. (0=2)
The agnostic or third value argument: The Mystery = Mystery. (0=0)

Mystery is just mystery, it's unknown, we don't know for certain what it is, it is logically and rationally impossible. And when we wish to be a critical thinking rational, and inspired human being, we need to use language that reflects this certainty so we can stay consistent and not freak out in the face of the unknown.

If we freak out in the face of the unknown, then we miss the inspiration that mystery naturally delivers to the open and rational/honest mind, which is the exact 'juice' the mind needs to find the truth and opportunity that all mysteries bring.

Regardless of what anyone out there says, what will happen to the US economy, who will win the election, and what will happen on Oct 14th, all of these ideas share one very important thing in common, mystery. Now that is what we can be certain about. We can be absolute certain that there is uncertainty regarding our immediate future as a civilization in fall of 08, and if we use any other language to express our experience that does not include the third value of both true and false at once, or unknown, then we can be certain that we are producing false ideas in the face of the mystery.

We can be both certain and uncertain at once. We are that sort of transcending paradox of being. Socrates with his "I know that I do not know". It is a quality of knowing when we do know as opposed to when we don't. Do we delude ourselves with our false ideas about knowing? How can I be certain that the economy will be collapse or not? Perhaps the UFO on the 14th of Oct will turn out to be nothing more than the full moon or the Reptillians, but how would I know that? I can have certainty with the knowing that that the word at the end of this statement is the word this. Yet that is because it confirms both my existence and it's existence in one elegant swoop, yet we do not have the luxury with the future, and must be humble in it's presence.

I write this entry mainly as a reminder for myself, to be present enough in the face of the unknown to find the opportunity that lay in front of our eyes as the mystery and the false ideas about it swirl around us. As a species, humanity's lesson at this place and time may be nothing more than learning how to deal with mystery. The Oct 14th meme of a great UFO landing may be nothing more than our own unconscious need to find collective truth with uncertainty. After all, the only thing we can say about a UFO truthfully is that it is a mysterious object that we all can agree is mystery.