Certainty

Daniel J Siegel, clinical professor of psychology at UCLA and author of books such as 'Mindsight', talks about the brain as being wired for certainty. He says 'we create an identity as an entity to give us certainty'. I see this 'certainty' he talks about as the ego. And it has a very important function because we can't go out into the world and create our own life if we don't know who we are - or we don't think we know who we are. So our sense of self - even if it is false - is very important. It is not that ego is wrong, merely that it is limited. I have heard the ego self referred to as 'the provisional self' which I think is a good way of putting it because it is formed when we are very young and is, in a sense, designed to help launch us out there to create our own path in life, but it is provisional because it won't successfully take us the distance. As we get older, we start to realise that perhaps there is more to us and that the path we are on is not the only one and so we seek new adventures, and we seek to change to meet them. Or life throws us circumstances that we have to meet in some way and we recognise that we need to develop ourselves in order to meet them. Often 'developing ourselves' means shedding ideas or certainty (about ourselves) that are no longer serving us. As Joseph Campbell famously said 'We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us'.