I pray that we have the courage to shatter certainty, and to recognize that truth is scattered like refracted light among us all, reflected by each of us distinctly and differently, and incomplete in the scope of any one of us - and that we delight, therefore, in discovering one another, and in searching ever onward with one another.
Next year, Jim Fadiman (who did early research on creativity with Willis Harman) will publish a book, Shattering Certainty, which begins by discussing the best way to guide sessions.
His reports, especially from Greece, have blended concise global analysis with sympathetic news from the frontline, revealing angry and scared people staring into a bleak future amid the wreckage of shattered certainties.
By first inviting the reader to consider the apparent indubitability of best-case scenarios of sensory deception and then using the dream of sitting by the fire to shatter this certainty, Descartes is appealing to his readers' imagination and previous experience and assuming that they, like him, will have had many such dreams themselves.
Nollywood films depict families whose faith has been shattered, whose certainties have been undermined.
Islamist terrorism and the emergence of Russia as an authoritarian great power, together with American troubles in Iraq, have shattered the certainties of the 1990s.
The young – those under 35, let's say – have embraced the virtues of a tolerant, easy-going, multicultural society; many of those over 65, especially in the big cities, feel dispossessed, their old cultural certainties shattered; those in between – me and Paxman aside, perhaps – are just about swimming with the tide, or at least keeping our thoughts to ourselves.
US dominance and certainty of power was shattered by the felling of towers built to make money.
In the world of the impoverished immigrant, where a big telephone bill can shatter a month's budget, the speed and certainty of loan shark money often matter more than the high interest rate.
They were still loyal to their father's hatred of Hussein, but the old moral universe, with its brutal certainties, had shattered.
In his ostentatious program note Mr. Danielpour writes that the five-year period during which these assassinations took place was "a time of hope shattered" and represented a "loss of trust and certainty" for the country.
