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 being present with people, and the teacher responds with a pointed observation about the relationship between certainty and conditioning.
Certainty as a Warning Sign
A student involved in street outreach describes the tension between rule-based ethical reasoning and being present with people, and the teacher responds with a pointed observation about the relationship between certainty and conditioning.
What you're saying about ethics really matches my experience. I do a form of street outreach here in the Bay Area, and I run the group. We're directly talking with people who stop to talk to us. I have volunteers who are very rule-based in their thinking, very absolutist and moralizing, and it just pushes them away from their direct experience. Over time, I've gradually drifted more into being very present with the other person, just being in the 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 with these ethical discussions.
All of the history and the past and the rules, all of that is 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.
The risk of acting from assumptions
More likely than not, we risk making choices from assumptions, from the past, from conditioning. One way to know if that's happening is if you have a certain sense of certainty about what the right thing is. If there's a sense of "I'm sure this is the right thing," it's likely not.
Discernment lives in uncertainty
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.