All our lives we are trying to play safe and secure. Wherever we go, we make reservations and bookings to ascertain our place. We don’t spend money; we accumulate it so that it can be used in the times of trouble. But life does not know about our arrangements, despite all these efforts it takes us by surprise again and again. The improbable and the unpredictable has its fair share in everybody’s life. It seems in our minds there is a kind of secret race going on with life as if we are enemies.
But there is no need to harbour this tension, it is not real, it is created by the mind: the same mind that creates illusions, imagination, confusions. You will find, it is the mind that longs for security and certainty; it clings to the past experiences, past knowledge, previous information. It wants to live the future, the unknown through the known, through the stored experiences. But it is not possible. A little understanding can change the gestalt: the uncertainty is inherent in the core structure of existence.
The latest discovery in quantum physics has found a peculiar phenomenon which the scientists call “the uncertainty principle”. They have discovered that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its dynamics can be known.
In simpler terms, the position and the speed of a particle cannot be measured at the same time. You can determine the position, but you cannot know how it will move. It means uncertainty is inherent in the nature of things; no one can escape it. Since the human mind is part of the same existence it cannot have a different life of its own. So instead of trying to make life secure it will be more enlightening to find, why are we so worried about security?
Osho observes: “We cling to the mind because of our fear of the unknown, because of the infinite possibilities of the future. The past is fixed because it has already happened. It is dead; you can deal with it. But you cannot deal with the future. The future is always unknown, uncharted. There are unknown, infinite possibilities about which you can never be certain. Life means uncertainty; life means insecurity. That is why we have made everything that has become known to us a part of our consciousness. We cling to our experiences, our knowledge so that we don’t have to move into the unknown so that we don’t have to feel insecure about what is going to happen. We are clinging to that which has already happened. These are our safety measures.”
But these safety measures are entirely against the principle of life. What will help is the understanding that uncertainty is a not a negative state; it is the essence of life. It is synonymous with life, there is nothing to fear. Here, only a dead person is out of danger! Instead of fighting life the intelligence lies in trying to be one with this whole vastness which has always been there. Individuals appear and disappear; the uncertainty principle remains forever. So go with the flow.
