Living Between Certainty and Mystery: Finding Purpose in an Uncertain World

Introduction: When Loss Reveals What Life Is

Sitting in my apartment, surrounded by the quiet hum of another year gone by, gratitude arrives unbidden. Not the forced kind, rehearsed for social media or New Year's resolutions, but something quieter—rooted in what my late mother made possible. Peace be with her. Last year she left was eventful, though that word feels too small, too tidy for what actually happened.

Her passing turned my life upside down. Not in the cinematic way like in Stranger Things with portals opening to alternate dimensions. The inversion was subtler, more fundamental. Intellectually, mortality had always been clear—hers, mine, everyone's. Time is short. We know this. We repeat it. But knowledge and knowing are different countries. Her death closed the distance between them. What had lived as concept became visceral: life is fickle, unpredictable, not nearly as negotiable as we pretend.

There's a Zen saying that hovers at the edge of such moments: A single moment of awareness is a doorway to eternity. Her passing was that doorway. Not because it offered answers or comfort, but because it shattered the illusion of time as something we possess. Suddenly, each moment felt both more fragile and more vast—charged with an immediacy that intellectual understanding could never deliver.

The year unfolded in extremes. Sabah, Malaysia. Auroville, India. Sacred circles around fires. Strangers becoming less strange. And beneath it all, the question that follows loss like a shadow: What now? Not in the productive sense, not as task or goal, but as genuine wondering. In an uncertain world where war erupts across borders and futures feel less guaranteed than ever, what does it mean to be alive, thriving, purposeful?

Perhaps the answer isn't found in certainty at all. Perhaps it emerges in the space between knowing and not knowing—in the willingness to keep moving even when the destination remains unclear.

Uncertain World, Universal Threads

The last quarter of 2025 was spent in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, where I found myself immersed in a rhythm that felt both foreign and strangely familiar. Life there operates differently—the pace, the priorities, the way people relate to time and to each other. The tropical heat slows everything down. Conversations linger. Meals become events, not interruptions between productivity.

And yet, beneath the cultural differences, something universal emerged. In Sabah, as in India, as in every place where people gather and live and worry about tomorrow, the same threads run through: nurturing what we have, cherishing the time left with loved ones, protecting our children's futures. These aren't cultural values so much as human bedrock—what remains when everything else is stripped away.

We live in uncertain times. That phrase gets repeated until it loses meaning, becomes background noise. But the uncertainty is real, textured, immediate. Wars unfold across multiple continents. Economies wobble. Climate patterns shift. The future that previous generations could more or less predict—education, career, retirement, grandchildren—no longer follows a recognizable script. The ground itself feels less stable.

In such moments, what matters? Not in the abstract, philosophical sense, but practically, daily, in the choices we make about where to direct attention and energy. To be alive—not just surviving, but genuinely alive—becomes its own form of resistance. To thrive, even modestly. To maintain purpose, even when that purpose remains half-formed, provisional, subject to revision.

During my time in Borneo, I listened to songs in languages I didn't understand. Participated in festivals whose histories I could only glimpse. Was invited into what they called the sacred circle—a gathering that transcended explanation, where presence mattered more than comprehension. I later spent Christmas and New Year in Auroville, another sacred circle, this time around fire, with strangers who somehow didn't feel like strangers.

What these experiences revealed wasn't some mystical unity or cosmic oneness—concepts too slippery, too easily romanticized. It was simpler and more concrete: we are indeed one family. Not in the metaphorical sense that flattens difference, but in the recognition that the same fundamental needs, fears, hopes move through all of us. And not just humans. The living and nonliving alike—trees, soil, water, stone—carry their own stories, their own forms of consciousness we're only beginning to acknowledge.

In tumultuous times, the impulse is often to contract. Make the circle smaller. Trust fewer people. Build walls, literal and metaphorical. But perhaps the need of the hour runs in the opposite direction: to make our circle bigger, to deliberately connect with others who are different from us, to understand their perspective not as threat but as essential information about the world we're all navigating together.

With no destination, every step is arrival. The Zen saying surfaces again, apt for this moment. When the future is uncertain, when outcomes can't be guaranteed, each step becomes its own completion. Each connection, each conversation, each moment of genuine presence—these aren't means to some distant end. They are the arrival itself, the only destination that ever existed.

Circles Within Circles: Connection as Compass

There's something about sitting in a circle that changes the quality of presence. Not the seating arrangement itself—though geometry matters—but what the circle creates: no head of the table, no hierarchy of position, everyone facing everyone else. The sacred circles in Borneo and Auroville weren't identical. Different rituals, different languages, different cosmologies informing the gathering. But both held the same basic container: a boundary that included rather than excluded, a shape that invited rather than imposed.

In Sabah, the circle formed around traditions I barely understood. Songs passed down through generations, movements that carried meanings I could only intuit. My participation was partial, fumbling, marked by outsider status. And yet, something happened in that space. The not-knowing became its own form of knowing. Presence didn't require fluency. The circle held us all—locals and visitors, believers and skeptics, those who understood every gesture and those who simply showed up.

Auroville offered another version. Fire at the center this time, flames casting shifting shadows on faces I'd never seen before and might never see again. Strangers introducing themselves, sharing fragments of their journeys—some fleeing corporate burnout, others seeking healing, a few simply curious about what this experimental township in South India might offer. We came from different continents, different belief systems, different answers to the basic questions about meaning and purpose.

What united us wasn't agreement. It was the willingness to sit together in uncertainty, to not have all the answers, to let the fire do some of the talking. Connection as compass—not pointing toward a fixed destination, but orienting us in the present moment, making navigation possible even when the map remains unclear.

Meeting others different from ourselves isn't ideology. It's practice. Daily, difficult, necessary. The temptation is always to stay with the familiar, the comfortable, those who confirm what we already think we know. But the uncertain world we're living in demands something else: curiosity about difference, humility about our own limited perspective, recognition that our individual story is only one thread in a much larger weaving.

And the circle extends beyond human. This realization settled in slowly, not as sudden enlightenment but as gradual recognition. The trees surrounding both circles weren't backdrop. They were participants, witnesses, holders of their own intelligence. The earth beneath us, the air moving through the gathering, the insects contributing their small symphonies—all part of the circle, all part of the story.

Who knows what stones remember, what water carries, what the nonliving might tell us if we developed the capacity to listen. Consciousness, in this view, isn't the exclusive property of nervous systems and complex brains. It's distributed, various, taking forms we're only beginning to recognize. The living and nonliving aren't separate categories so much as different expressions of the same underlying awareness.

To make the circle bigger in tumultuous times isn't naive optimism. It's practical wisdom. When the ground is shifting, when old certainties no longer hold, isolation becomes dangerous. We need more perspectives, not fewer. More voices, not less noise. More willingness to sit with those who see the world differently, who challenge our assumptions, who remind us that our way isn't the only way.

The circle doesn't promise harmony. It promises encounter—messy, unpredictable, sometimes uncomfortable. But encounter is where growth happens, where perspective shifts, where the rigid boundaries between self and other begin to soften. Not dissolve entirely—difference remains real, important—but become more permeable, more willing to let influence flow both ways.

Connection as compass. The phrase sticks. In an uncertain world, perhaps we don't need a map. Perhaps we need each other, facing each other, forming circles that keep expanding to include what we previously thought was other.

Between Poles: The Spiritual and the Skeptical

My third visit to Auroville carried echoes of the first and the second. In August 2022, I'd arrived in a state of suspension—waiting for a visa, caught between countries, between versions of life. The timing had been accidental but felt oddly calibrated: Aurobindo Ghosh's 150th birth anniversary coinciding with India's Independence Day. The township hummed with celebration, with remembrance, with renewed commitment to the experiment Sri Aurobindo and The Mother had set in motion decades earlier.

I'd spent those weeks vibing with fellow travelers who were similarly unmoored, similarly seeking. Volunteered at Buddha Garden, hands in soil, thoughts wandering skyward. Attended cultural performances where music and movement spoke languages words couldn't reach. Experienced Svaram's sound journey—singing bowls and gongs creating vibrations that seemed to bypass the mind entirely, resonating somewhere deeper. And finally, visited the inner chamber of the Matrimandir, that golden sphere at Auroville's heart, where silence wasn't absence but presence, thick and palpable.

The experience had moved me. Cracked something open. I'd left with a vow to return, though I couldn't have articulated what I was returning to or what I hoped to find.

The journey from 2022 to 2025 traced a strange arc. Extremes pulling in opposite directions, each with its own gravitational force. On one side, a deepening fascination with the spiritual and the occult—kundalini imagery, chakra systems, esoteric texts that promised hidden knowledge about consciousness and reality. The symbolism captivated: Shiva's dance of creation and destruction, the serpent coiled at the spine's base, energy centers aligned along the body's vertical axis. These weren't just metaphors. Or rather, they were metaphors that pointed to something real, something that direct experience seemed to confirm.

On the other side, an equally strong pull toward rationalism, skepticism, the methodical dismantling of belief systems. Science as the only reliable path to knowledge. Materialism not as reductionism but as honesty—acknowledging that consciousness might be nothing more than neurons firing, that mystical experiences might be brain chemistry, that the universe doesn't care about human meaning-making and never promised to. Atheism not as rebellion but as intellectual hygiene, clearing away the accumulated debris of wishful thinking.

The oscillation was exhausting. Each pole had its evidence, its arguments, its experiential validation. The mystical moments felt undeniably real—states of consciousness that conventional materialist frameworks struggled to explain. But the rational critiques were equally compelling—pointing out cognitive biases, pattern recognition run amok, the human tendency to see agency and intention where only process exists.

Where does that leave someone who's experienced both the numinous and the explanatory power of skepticism? At present, I'd say agnostic. Not as compromise or fence-sitting, but as the most honest position available. Agnosticism isn't "I don't know and don't care." It's "I don't know and that not-knowing is itself significant, worthy of attention, perhaps even the point."

The term gets misunderstood, treated as intellectual weakness or lack of commitment. But there's rigor in agnosticism, a refusal to claim certainty where certainty isn't warranted. The spiritual systems offer profound insights—frameworks for understanding consciousness, techniques for altering perception, symbolic languages that capture aspects of experience rational discourse misses. But they also traffic in dogma, in claims that can't be verified, in mass belief systems that demand faith over inquiry.

Science provides the best tools we have for understanding physical reality. But it has limits, edges where its methods can't reach. Consciousness remains the hard problem—not just difficult but potentially unsolvable within current paradigms. The subjective experience of being, the quality of awareness, the sense that there's something it's like to be this particular organism looking out at the world—these resist reduction to third-person observation.

So the space between becomes home. Not comfortable, not settled, but honest. Consciousness holds both the mystical and the rational without collapsing into either. It can appreciate kundalini imagery as powerful symbolic mapping of subjective states without believing in literal energy channels. It can practice meditation and experience genuine shifts in awareness without accepting metaphysical claims about reincarnation or cosmic consciousness. It can acknowledge that mystery remains—vast, irreducible mystery—without filling that mystery with convenient narratives.

The extremes still exert their pull. There are days when the spiritual framework feels more true, when direct experience trumps all theoretical objections. And days when the skeptical mind dominates, when everything mystical seems like elaborate self-deception. But increasingly, the middle position feels less like compromise and more like maturity. Not having all the answers. Not needing to. Living the questions instead.

Agnosticism, approached this way, becomes a practice rather than a position. A way of staying open without becoming credulous. A way of honoring both wonder and discernment, both the inexplicable and the explicable, both the part of reality that yields to scientific method and the part that continues to elude it.

The vow to return to Auroville had been kept. But what I was returning to had changed, or perhaps what had changed was the one doing the returning. The sacred spaces remained sacred, but not because they held ultimate truth. Because they held space for inquiry, for encounter with others, for sitting with uncertainty without demanding resolution.

Living in the Space Between

The space between doesn't announce itself with clarity or comfort. It's not a position you arrive at and then relax into, problems solved, questions answered. It's more like learning to walk a ridge line—attention required, balance provisional, the ground on either side sloping away into certainty's easier terrain.

Living without certainty yet with intention: this becomes the practice. Purpose isn't discovered like a hidden treasure, waiting to be unearthed by the right spiritual technique or philosophical insight. It's created, moment by moment, in the choices we make about where to direct attention, how to spend the limited time we have, which connections to nurture, which circles to join or form.

My mother's death made this visceral in ways no amount of meditation or contemplation could have. Her absence didn't reveal some grand cosmic plan or reassuring narrative about souls and afterlife. It revealed the opposite: how fragile the whole enterprise is, how contingent, how utterly dependent on this particular body breathing right now. And somehow, that fragility doesn't diminish meaning. It intensifies it. When nothing is guaranteed, everything matters more.

The uncertain world we inhabit—war-torn, climate-unstable, politically volatile—doesn't wait for us to figure things out. It keeps moving, keeps demanding responses, keeps presenting situations that require action even when understanding remains incomplete. With no destination, every step is arrival. The saying returns, no longer abstract. When you can't see the end of the path, when the future refuses to come into focus, each step becomes complete in itself. Not preparation for some later fulfillment, but the fulfillment, the only one available.

This doesn't mean abandoning goals or living in pure spontaneity. It means holding goals lightly, recognizing them as provisional guides rather than absolute imperatives. It means staying responsive to what emerges rather than forcing experience to conform to predetermined outcomes. The circles in Borneo and Auroville weren't planned destinations. They appeared as possibilities, as invitations, and saying yes to them opened pathways that no amount of strategic planning could have created.

The value of not knowing gets clearer with practice. Not-knowing isn't ignorance or confusion, though it can feel like both. It's a particular quality of awareness—open, receptive, willing to be surprised. The oscillation between spiritual and skeptical, between mystical experience and rational analysis, taught this. Each pole claimed to have the answer. Each insisted that committing fully to its framework would resolve the tension. But the resolution they offered was really just closure, an end to inquiry.

The agnostic position, uncomfortable as it is, keeps inquiry alive. It treats both the mystical and the material as partial perspectives on something larger, something that continues to exceed our conceptual frameworks. Consciousness remains mysterious not because we haven't studied it enough, but perhaps because mystery is intrinsic to it. The subjective and objective, the inner and outer, the experienced and the explained—these might not be problems waiting for solutions but complementary aspects of what is.

A single moment of awareness is a doorway to eternity. My mother's passing opened that door, but it doesn't stay open automatically. It requires returning to, again and again. Each moment of genuine presence—sitting in sacred circles, listening to unfamiliar songs, feeling fire's heat on skin, recognizing the aliveness in what we've called nonliving—each of these is the doorway reopening. Not leading somewhere else, not promising transcendence or escape, but revealing the eternity already here, in the texture of now.

Gratitude surfaces again, less as emotion and more as recognition. For what my mother made possible—this life, this capacity to reflect, to question, to sit in sacred circles and uncertain moments without needing them to be other than they are. For the extremes that pulled and shaped and refused easy resolution. For the spaces between cultures, between belief systems, between certainty and mystery where actual living happens.

The vow to keep returning—to Auroville, to inquiry, to presence, to the questions that don't resolve—is also a vow to keep arriving. Each step its own destination. Each moment its own doorway. The uncertain world not as problem to be solved but as the only world there is, asking only that we show up, make our circles bigger, stay curious about what we don't know, and meet whatever comes with awareness that's both grounded and open.

This is what thriving looks like in uncertain times. Not certainty achieved, but uncertainty inhabited fully. Not questions answered, but questions lived. Not the space between abandoned for firmer ground, but the space between recognized as home—precarious, alive, sufficient.

Peace be with her. Peace be with all of us, navigating the ridgeline, widening the circle, arriving with each step into the only moment that ever exists.