The certainly uncertain path
How philosophy, nature, and cultural wisdom transcend inner conflict to interconnected peace
Non andar nudo a tôrre a l'api il mele; non morder, se non sai s'è pietra o pane; non gir discalzo a seminar le spine. Non spreggiar, mosca, d'aragne le tele; se sorce sei, non seguitar le rane; fuggi le volpi, o sangue di galline. E credi a l'Evangelo, che dice di buon zelo: dal nostro campo miete penitenza chi vi gettò d'errori la semenza.
—Giordano Bruno, Cena de le ceneri. Translation available in footnotes1
Originally, I sought to create an article that explores Positive Psychology, and how it’s insights have helped me through some of the darkest times of my life, but, that’s not exactly where my mind wandered.
This article is thoughts that have no ultimate direction, structured as a journey, similar to Muir’s ascent of the Oquirrh peaks after a winter at sea level, where “…every walk with Nature one receives far more…2”.
Muir’s naturalist’s eye lends a blend of geological and ecological intricacies, as earnest a projection’s reflection found in the simplistic interconnectedness of Charles Eisenstein:
Even if you accept that ‘I and the world are one,’ you will not be able to distinguish whether it will benefit all sentient beings more to stay home and reduce your carbon emissions, or to drive to the rally to protest fracking3.
Muir’s reflections on nature’s abundance and Eisenstein’s emphasis on interconnected choices illuminate the intrinsic tension united between self and world, as human experience perceives individual actions as part of a greater whole, mirroring the projections from within:
disconnection and unity
cynicism and hope
conflicts that pave the way for transformation
I realize some of my own intrinsic tensions, projected as materialisms frantic surge of invaded fantasies, overblown and ever-consuming; a restless need to feed validations thirst, seeming unquenchably without end, driven in hollow promises of power and authority: stoked by an ego’s outward judgement cast upon the ‘other.’
Reflecting upon this, I see a fractured shadow in turmoil, tangled by webs sown in discordance indulged by what repels, binding my self to the chaotic feelings, unsettling, yet familiar.
The cluttered desk of a scattered mind
I once surrounded myself with scattered thoughts that cluttered babbling towers of Post-It notes and coffee stains higher than Everest, as I searched for a remedy to the fog that clouded my perpetual fixation for validation4.
As I began to clear the mental clutter, I stumbling upon Giordano Bruno’s La Cena de le Ceneri5.
Imagining a place to wonderfully wander beyond the horizons edge of my psyche, boundless clarity came to me, as Bruno’s work frees my inner child with a potential of sisu6.
Research by Robert Emmons shows that gratitude rewires the brain, which Viktor Frankl would find essential of meaningfully endure hardships, so, I’m grateful for Bruno’s work.
It’s challenging for me to remain grateful, for I’ve live in lack for many years; the warmth of the sun or a stranger’s kindness redirects my focus from lack to abundance, transforming the need for external approval into inner validation, like the Japanese practice of Naikan7.
It’s self-compassion grounded in acceptance and gratitude that, like Christ’s endurance of suffering, opens a path to grace and growth even amid life’s pressures: the resilience to seek light over darkness is a story told for millennia, which serves as a guidance of hope, vital rewriting our internal narrative to collectively reshape our external realities8.
Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel encourages my ongoing healing.
What interpretative judgements do you see and feel when viewing this image?
This painting, to me, symbolizes the reciprocal interconnectedness and shared responsibility for communal harmony, as the boys’ gentle care for the wounded angel amid despair reflects the enduring resilience and beauty of the human spirit in nurturing others during vulnerable moments9.
Healing our inner connection through self-compassion dissolves divisive projections, creating space for unity and understanding—a process mirrored in cultures that honor elders, strengthening communal ties by releasing shared emotional blockages with resilience.
Certainly uncertain in uncertainties certainness
The phrase 'certainly uncertain in uncertainties certainness' is my way of saying stability is found within inherent instability10.
Certainty, usually steady and grounded, often questions the pursuit of absolute meaning in a world with few concrete answers, while on the other hand, Uncertainty embraces the unknown and remains open to the depths that change can reveal.
While these definitions may vary according to one’s worldview, they share an essence—both certainty and uncertainty shape our perception of reality, and to illustrate this, consider Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Heisenberg states, one cannot simultaneously know both the exact position and momentum of a particle due to the inherent unpredictability introduced through observation, which introduces certainty in quantum mechanics by acknowledging fundamental uncertainty11.
Heisenberg’s observation reflects Søren Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, which suggests true faith transcends rational proof, requiring a “leap” into the unknown (or, belief without guaranteed evidence).
In Fear and Trembling, this ‘leap’ is a paradoxical “certainty” grounded not in proof but in committed trust, as stability arises not from eradicating uncertainty but from consciously embracing life’s inherent unknowns.
Heisenberg and Kierkegaard show that we find certainty in life not by seeking absolute knowledge but in trust beyond what reason alone provides: a paradoxical self-perception, experienced both as a distinct quality, and as an undefined universal presence.
This duality, explained by Gabriel Marcel in The Mystery of Being, creates a self that feels both specific and contingent, capable of assuming varied relational roles—master, friend, stranger, or intimate subject—which are subjectively “sacred” and essential to truly grasping one's inner being: a balance between gravity and grace12.
Balancing attachment (gravity) and release (grace) reveals a mutual commitment of solidarity, shaken by the shared vulnerability of a fluid self which oscillates between individual identity and universal connection13.
Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths captures this tension, where each moment opens into new realities that could converge, diverge, or remain separate, like threads in a vast tapestry of possibilities:
“The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts’ui Pen conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestors did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times, This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favoured me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.”
This vision mirrors the Ifugao notion of Inayan, where each decision creates ripples in a ceaseless, communal cycle, resonating within a collective rhythm that shapes and is shaped by every choice.
True certainty transcends intellectual knowledge, emerging instead through humility, shared existence, and a grounded connection—a steadfast commitment to facing life’s mysteries together.
In a web of intertwined realities, each choice and connection draws us closer to a universal wholeness woven from balance and possibility, shaped by the intersecting ripples of uncertain choices; this narrative captures how our identities are fractal web of cycles, a reminder that the journey through darkness is nonlinear, filled with questions, uncertainties, and doubt, yet vital to inner growth.
To have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love and question themselves is unity rather than seeking absolute control.
Collective flourishing
We are part of a story that transcends individual experience, a shared path that guides us toward a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence14 asks (simply):
Could you live your life in such a way that you would welcome its return, even with all its suffering and hardship?
For me this question is rooted in cultural explanations of natural phenomenon imbued with a hue of spiritualism and psychological integration, centred through projected observations, and is a collective notion of the interbeing: the understanding that we are all interconnected with all things.
Spirituality often intertwines with well-being, mindfulness, and a connection to something greater, but there are cracks in everything: that’s where light gets in.
A true path towards psychological flourishing is not forged in a linear fashion, devoid of obstacles; it’s one that rewards curiosity, courage, and the perseverance found in ourselves and others, grounded in the wisdom of both the past and the present.
In a universe shaped by both known paths and untold possibilities, are we brave enough to find our purpose not in certainty, but in the mysteries that connect us all?
My proficiency in Italian is limited, and this translation is primarily generated using Google Translate:
Don’t go naked to take apples from the bees; do not bite if you do not know whether it is stone or bread; I didn't go barefoot and sow thorns. Do not despise, fly, the webs of spiders; if you are a scourge, do not follow the frogs; Flee from the foxes, oh blood of chickens. And believe the Gospel, who says with good zeal: from our field he reaps penance who planted the seed of errors there.
Steep Trails, page 128
From the chapter titled Morphogenesis, in The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.
Eisenstein suggests that while great spiritual figures may seem absent today, they exist in quiet, unseen roles—like teachers and nurses—whose humble, often invisible acts hold society together, creating miracles just as transformative as any grand, public gesture.
Side note, my desk still look a little chaotic, but nothing of its former self (I can actually see the table cloth).
Giordano Bruno's La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) is a philosophical dialogue written in five parts, engaging with both scientific and metaphysical themes.
Set in a conversation among four main characters—Smitho, Teofilo, Prudenzio, and Frulla—the work defends the Copernican heliocentric theory while exploring the broader concept of an infinite universe populated with countless worlds, and through its dialogues critiques the prevailing religious and philosophic orthodoxies of the times it was written.
Bruno’s work, marked by satire and poetic inquiry, laid the groundwork for future discussions on the nature of the cosmos, challenging the limits of human understanding and advocating for intellectual freedom, even though it led to his persecution and execution by the Roman Inquisition.
Sisu is a Finnish word, denoting various translated meaning such as stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness.
Gregg Krech provides a comprehensive overview of the subject and history in Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection.
If you’d like to learn more about Shin Buddhism, which outlines the essentials of the Pure Land way (the deep relationship between faith and reliance on Amida Buddha's vow), see Shinran's Kyōgyōshinshō: On Teaching, Practice, Faith, and Enlightenment.
I can’t help but think of Kristin Neff’s self-compassion regarding this idea, which involves three components:
self-kindness
common humanity
mindfulness
Using emotional resilience and self-reflection, self-compassion acts through the recognition of shared struggles without judgmental thoughts.
I see Simberg’s Wounded Angel as a beautiful reflection of Wolakota, illustrating Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ (pronounced Mee-tah-koo-yeh O-yah-seen), which means "we are all related.”
It’s an expression of the interconnectedness of all beings, bound by mutual respect and reciprocity in genuine relationship to one another, and requires an open heart willing to embrace the collective grief of creation to heal the emergence of collective wisdom and shared compassion in pain.
[For more information, visit the Wolakota Project and Tapestry Institute]
The concept of certainty is explored through many contexts through history, and for sake of time and space I will only be exploring a preliminary reflection.
I aim to show uncertainty certainly, and certainty uncertainly, in the certain collective manifestation of individuals uncertainty, respectively.
For more about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, see the article Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik (About the clear content of quantum theoretical kinematics and mechanics).
In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil explores the soul’s journey as a balance between the ego's attachment to worldly concerns (“gravity”) and the transcendence found by surrendering personal desires to embrace a purpose beyond the self (“grace”).
Weil’s concept of "decreation," or the release of ego’s grip, allows Marcel’s relational sacredness to be experienced in pure subjectivity through humility and openness to grace, as the process encounters the self as a part in divine order.
Jan Patočka’s “solidarity of the shaken” illustrates that individuals facing existential crises find solidarity in mutual acknowledgment of life's unpredictable, disorienting paths; a similar thought found in Borges, presented in The Garden of Forking Paths, where certainty is not intellectual but humble, as each choice leads to divergent and coexisting futures in an infinite series of forking paths.
In attempting to reconcile Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence, I’ve found no definitive answer, yet this idea challenges me to view life not as a cycle of inevitable suffering but as an opportunity for continual growth.
First presented in The Gay Science (Section 285) as a reflection on the strength required to renounce comfort in divine certainty or ultimate peace, Nietzsche suggests that only through rejecting reliance on an external god or ultimate wisdom can humanity rise ever higher, finding inner resilience in perpetual self-overcoming.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra (Part III, "The Convalescent"), Zarathustra confronts the idea that every moment of life recurs infinitely, compelling him to embrace the cyclical nature of existence as a transformative test of one’s capacity to affirm life fully, with all its joys and sorrows, in an endless cycle.
Nietzsche argues in Beyond Good and Evil (Section 56), that anyone who has thoroughly examined pessimism, free from moral or cultural biases (like Schopenhauer), will ultimately discover an ideal in the life-affirming individual who, rather than merely accepting existence, passionately desires the eternal recurrence of all experiences, embracing life fully and repeatedly as a necessary part of their own being—creating a “circulus vitiosus deus” or divine vicious circle.
All together, Nietzsche proposes that true resilience and growth come not from reliance on divine certainty but from fully affirming the endless cycle of life’s challenges and joys—embracing the eternal recurrence as a transformative test of strength and self-overcoming.