Certainty vs. Mystery: Overcoming Fear and Embracing the Grey Areas of Life

Chapter Eleven | Free One Million Minds: Certainty vs. Mystery: Embracing the Unknown

12/31/2024

Duration | 8 minutes 47 seconds
Guest: Dr. Symeon Rodger

synopsis

In this chapter, Jamie Meyer and Dr. Symeon Rodger explore the tension between certainty and mystery in life. Dr. Rodger contrasts modern ideologies that seek certainty with ancient traditions that challenge comfort to encourage growth. They discuss how fear, driven by outdated worldviews, persists despite advancements that have made life safer. The chapter encourages embracing uncertainty as a path to personal development and challenges listeners to reconsider their relationship with fear and the unknown.

dialogue summary

Jamie Meyer:
The rigid idea of ideology is what creates friction with something new, change, or the grey area between black and white.

Dr. Symeon Rodger:
Oh, the grey is uncomfortable, right? It really is. If you think about it in terms of religion and spiritual traditions, modern religions seek to provide certainty—“This is the way things are. If you do this, you’ll be okay.” But if you look at the ancient mystical traditions that many of these religions came from, they want to deliberately knock that certainty out from under you. They want to put you into discomfort because it’s the only way you grow.

And for the purpose of this conversation, the grey area is only uncomfortable because we believe it to be uncomfortable—it’s different from our normal. Once you learn to live in the grey, it no longer feels uncomfortable to navigate fluidity, because then you’re embodying the levels of development we’re talking about. Once you do that, the grey area becomes easier to move through.

I think you’re also touching on fear here. Our culture is very fear-based. Not just because fear is everywhere in the media, but because, at a deeper level, we’re profoundly fearful. This goes back to the worldview we have, which is influenced by the Newtonian perspective. This worldview sees the universe as external to us, mechanical, and hostile—a dangerous place. We expect bad things to happen, and live under a constant low-level anxiety. We believe that the only tool we have to protect ourselves is our rational mind. So we think we need to prepare, build defences—basically, create a castle with battlements. We’re obsessed with safety and security, not realising that this mentality actually brings about the very experience we fear.

Jamie Meyer:
Do you think that, as society has become more progressive and advanced, there’s far less threat to our lives now? In most parts of the world, there is less risk to our actual survival. We don’t get as sick, we don’t die as young, and we can avoid deadly accidents. We have machines doing jobs humans used to do. Do you think we’ve shifted the idea of fear from physical, life-threatening situations—more prevalent in the past—to a fear related to existence and reality?

Dr. Symeon Rodger:
It’s an interesting point. Yes, life is safer now than it’s ever been. And yet, we’re more fearful. One thing that addresses this is Stephen Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. While I don’t agree with all of his assumptions, he pulls together a huge amount of data to show that the world has become—and continues to become—a better place. Over the last century and a half, measurable factors like health, life expectancy, crime rates, and the likelihood of dying young have all improved. So, the world is safer, more humane, and more advanced.

But that brings us back to your question: why are we so fearful in a world that is getting better? Good question. Of course, many people are telling us the opposite—that the world is going downhill. There are political and religious ideologies that thrive on this, even though the actual data contradicts them. But the fear persists because of cognitive biases like recency bias. If you’ve just heard about a violent crime, you’ll likely believe the crime rate is on the rise, even though the statistics show crime has actually fallen. We’re often tricked by our perception of recent events, even though the broader trend shows the opposite.

Jamie Meyer:
So, when you say we’re living 120 years behind, are you saying we’re living out our everyday lives as if it were 120 years ago based on scientific understanding? Or is it that science itself is 120 years behind, in terms of data and progress?

Dr. Symeon Rodger:
Well, of course, the scientific community is not monolithic. There are different interpretations of data, but the data itself is clear. Experiments, particularly in areas like subatomic physics, have proven things that are no longer debated. People may dispute the implications, but the data is irrefutable. And that data shows that if we live our lives assuming that what our senses tell us is absolutely real, we’re completely mistaken. The world, including the objects we see, is mostly empty space—99.99999% of matter is empty space. What we think of as “solid” is just energy packets whose location and movement can’t be precisely determined. They appear and disappear at an incredible rate.

Credits Roll

references

Newtonian Worldview is the philosophical doctrine based on Isaac Newton’s work, which presents the universe as mechanical, external, and deterministic. This worldview continues to influence society despite being challenged by modern science.
Newtonianism - Wikipedia

Recency Bias is a cognitive bias where people give greater importance to the most recent events. This can lead to an exaggerated perception of current trends or dangers, such as the idea that crime is more prevalent just because a recent violent crime was reported.
Recency Bias - Wikipedia

Subatomic Physics is the study of particles smaller than atoms, which reveals that the material world is not as solid as it appears. These discoveries challenge our understanding of reality and the nature of matter.
Subatomic Particle - Wikipedia

Stephen Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now”, this book argues that the world is improving, providing data to show how life expectancy, crime rates, and overall well-being have improved over the last century and a half.
Enlightenment Now - Google Search