The Dhamma talk was given on the 20th of June 2018 at the World Fellowship of Buddhists

The topic for this evening is ‘Not Sure!’ Sitting on Sukhumvit Road and not moving in a vehicle, with the evening scheduled to begin at 6:30 and realizing it had already passed that time, I thought: ‘That’s a very good introduction for this evening – Not Sure! – When’s Ajahn Amaro going to arrive? Is he going to arrive? What will happen? It’s uncertain (My Naer). We don’t know. It’s not a sure thing.’ So that was an unplanned but useful preparation for this evening because this is the principle we are investigating here. It’s a part of all of our lives. So, I will offer a few reflections this evening on this theme and hopefully some of the things that I say would be useful for you.

When we meet with a feeling of uncertainty usually what we do is we feel worried, we feel threatened. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future so what we tend to do is to try to fill up that unknown with a plan or a hope or a belief. We fill it with ideas of what might happen.

We often distract ourselves: ‘I don’t want to think about the future. I don’t want to worry about that. So, I’ll just look at my phone and catch up on my Facebook friends or see what communication I have coming through Line, what’s on the news or something.’ We thus deal with that feeling of worry or uncertainty with choosing distraction or, alternatively, we just switch off – we go blank, go numb and shut the world down, disengage all together. We do this because the feeling of not being sure is something that most of us don’t like and we relate to it as a problem, that feeling of anxiety, uncertainty. We automatically think of it as a problem, something that’s unwelcome.