Certainty as a Warning Sign
La certeza como señal de advertencia
A student involved in street outreach describes the tension between rule-based ethical reasoning and present-moment responsiveness, and the teacher reflects on how a feeling of certainty can signal conditioning rather than discernment.
Certainty as a Warning Sign
A student involved in street outreach describes the tension between rule-based ethical reasoning and present-moment responsiveness, and the teacher reflects on how a feeling of certainty can signal conditioning rather than discernment.
What you're saying about ethics, the rule-based approach versus being present in the moment while still drawing from past experience, really matches my own experience. I do a form of street outreach here in the Bay Area where we're directly talking with people who stop to talk to us. Some of the volunteers are very rule-based in their thinking, very absolutist and moralizing, and it just pushes them away from their direct experience. I've gradually drifted more into being very present with the other person, just being in that flow of conversation. I always have some restlessness and distrust of it, but I've learned to slide into it. There's a consistent push-pull with my volunteers where I'm trying to draw them away from overly reasoning about a situation or trying to find a general rule they can apply, which I think is a sense of safety for the mind. So this is really close to my experience when it comes to ethical discussions.
The usefulness of rules, and their limits
All of the history, the past, and the rules are extremely useful information for learning and gaining understanding. Some things are very simple and straightforward and don't need a lot of deliberation. But when things matter more, they require a deeper tuning into the present moment. More likely than not, we risk making choices from assumptions, from the past, from conditioning.
Certainty as a signal of conditioning
One way to know if that's happening is if you have a certain sense of certainty about what is the right thing. If there's a sense of "I'm sure this is the right thing," it's likely not. The choice that is truly discerning lives in uncertainty. And that's why it requires a lot of work with our emotions, our fears, our pasts, our pains. The sense of certainty will come from conditioning.