Absolute Certainty

By Dennis Green

Yud Resh Ayin! “By using this name, I fill my head with certainty! Certitude! Conviction! Sureness! Trust!” I needed to be broken before I could be strong! And I get just the strength I need from the “Weekly Kabbalah Tune-up,” from Yahuda Berg. Maybe I’m not as lapsed a Jew as I thought!

Or I share a spiritual curiosity about myself, with my chum the incisive art photographer Nate Bennett, who loaned me the book, The Seventy-Two Names of God, and sent me the link to the Kabbalah Centre.

As they say, “What does not kill me makes me stronger!” Much stronger. In all my many broken places, in fact, I have grown a knot of character around each break that serves me well. Come join me in a state of absolute certainty!

It’s better than sureness, or the sneaking suspicion that you might be right about something, (for a change). It compares to confidence the same way the peace that passeth understanding compares to relaxation. And I think they must be related, for I feel the same softness and absence of tension throughout not only my body, my extremities, my fingertips, but also throughout my psyche, my mind, my soul, my heat.

I believe that both these states of mind and being come from a state of Grace, and I‘ve lauded that miraculous gift quite enough. So let’s move on. Does absolute certainty have any practical application in everyday life? That’s more interesting and compelling than abstract philosophies, after all.

Absolute certainty can serve one well in community and political life, let me assure you! When certain issues arise, if you’re well-read and informed, and have a modicum of sense when it comes to evaluating both sides, you can come down on one side or the other with absolute certainty. You may lose, as I often have, but so what? If you were on the right side, it counts in your karma account.

So where do we go now? What do we do next? I’ve started a new story, which may be a novel, a long short story, or a novella, An Independent Man, which explores that question, on my own behalf in some respects, but also as a question for YOU, and for the entire American culture, and the Zeitgeist itself. What’s next?

Well, I suspect it will have a lot to do with new technologies, since we now have a broader spectrum of the types of devices available to us for the purpose of communication, creativity and also entertainment. The iPad resets the notch of excellence of ease of use among digital producers. Like all advances in civilization, the “Third Wave,” as Alvin Toffler called it, has changed our lives. Digital cameras changed Kodak; digital picture frames changes display; online music sharing changed that industry forever.

E-books are changing the publishing industry; streaming video, (and 3-D) are changing movies; and TV is next, with HD, ultra-thin screens and now 3-D in televisions as well, along with online “broadcasting, is changing TV forever.

Networks beware. Of that I have absolute certainty.

©2010 Dennis Green