Certainty

I was listening to a talk given by Daniel J. Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute. He said that the brain is wired for certainty and that 'we have an identity as an entity to give us certainty'. This seemed to me a brilliant way of summing up the ego which develops as a coping mechanism - a way (perhaps the only way) of attaining some certainty in our lives when we are young children. The problem comes when we mistake that identity - our ego - for who we really are. The ego is in fact a reduced version of us. It is narrow and fixed. It is the story we tell ourselves of who we are. The reality is that we change as we grow into life and as it demands more from us. We have experiences, too, which help to shape and develop us. However, changing our idea of ourselves can feel threatening - as all change can - and so we tend to resist it as we tend to resist most change. We may feel there is more to us - and we may feel that some, if not most of it, is very good and yet still we resist the acknowledging or acceptance of this because we fear change. We inherently know that change is often destabilising and, in the case of our identity, it can feel particularly threatening or as though we are coming undone because there is nothing more fundamental. Because if I am not who I think I am, then who am I? But I would argue that this is the question which starts us on the journey of coming into our full potential. And what could be more exciting than that?