Our understanding of the world is continually developing, as are our values and opinions. Indeed, there are some areas in life where clarity and boundaries are essential. However, for the most part, it is more helpful to be open to not knowing, not understanding, and enjoy exploring the questions that living in uncertainty attracts. We are afraid to have our beliefs challenged. The ego is scared of the unknown and fearful of growth. The ego wants rigidity, certainty, and clarity; it feels threatened by ideas outside our current paradigms. Therefore, when seeking out new information and ideas, we must put ego aside rather than simply searching for evidence to validate our existing beliefs and values.

This month we are looking to cultivate the quality of being open to more than one interpretation. This quality is essential given the rise of data-driven analytics and rationalism. We must leave space and learn to feel comfortable living in that space. By that, I mean living in the uncertainties, allowing the unknown to exist alongside the known. We must leave the space for wonder, the unmeasurable, and creativity.

You might say that conceptual vagueness is a certainty, given the limited capacity of the human nervous system.

Can we see things on a spectrum rather than as distinct and separate categories? Can we look for ways to break down dichotomies and opposition— break down binary thinking?

Being wrong, being confused, feeling stupid - these fears block our growth.

We enjoy many forms of ambiguity yet shun and fear others. So let's use this opportunity to look into how ambiguity runs through our lives. We can examine where we store fear; we can look into where ambiguity isn't helpful and how it can be utilised as a manipulation tool. Let's then celebrate art and creativity in all forms, disciplines which have forever embraced ambiguity.

— Our true nature is beyond all categories. Pure consciousness is borderless.

When researching, this vast topic had only helped deepen what Socrates meant when he said, "The more I know, the more I realise I know nothing."  

To make sense of the topic, and to bring some practical applications, I have broken the essay into five parts –

• Anxiety and ambiguity

• Liminal moments

• The creativity in ambiguity

• Social, racial and cultural identity

• The seduction of clarity

Anxiety and ambiguity

Our relationship with ambiguity is formed in our early years; this is not to say that it is unchangeable; moreover, we must allow for compassion towards our thinking and our conditioned minds. It is from this place of understanding that meaningful and lasting attitudinal changes can occur. 

Ambiguity plays an essential role in developing an adaptive, flexible, and coherent sense of self, which is critical for mental health and wellbeing throughout life. When the formative years haven't allowed a safe space for ambiguity to be explored, it can stimulate anxiety in later life, impacting the efficiency and conclusions of ongoing thinking. One result can be a tendency to over-rely on biases or prior knowledge that no longer apply, with an urge to adopt new certainties too quickly before a new pattern can emerge. A type of clinging to whatever you hold as 'certain' in your mind at all costs can affect how we form relationships; it can discount people quickly if they do not fit your narrative:

Dr Mary Douglas believes that, essentially, "what is unclear and contradictory (from the perspective of social definition) tends to be regarded as unclean", and as such, ambiguity, which is representative of a state of indeterminacy and uncertainty, can be considered undesirable and detrimental to the state of mind of the individual encountering the ambiguous. 

In contrast, intentional ambiguity-promoting behaviours in formative years involve a deliberative and ultimately contained surrendering of conscious control. The extent to which a person can monitor and influence when and how self disintegrates or merges with others may make the difference between an ambiguous context that is playful, creative and promotes engagement from one that is anxiety-inducing and potentially annihilating.

Ambiguous language can be used as a mechanism of manipulation. Constructive ambiguity is regularly used in politics, but one can apply this vague language in romantic or otherwise relationships. If used purposefully and on a person susceptible, destructive patterns can emerge. It is a form of gaslighting and is a feature of many dysfunctional relationships. It can be unintentional too, and cause just as much damage. It is hard to notice the source of destruction in relationships when this subtle. Going through a relationship where you have been on the receiving end of deliberate ambiguity attacks your sense of self on many levels, leaving you unsure of what went wrong, of who you are. If and when you can, turn it into an opportunity for contemplative self-enquiry and a chance to build back better and take the space required to recover. You can learn to notice the signs early and remain unwavering when faced with those situations and navigate through them with relative ease.

Liminal moments

We cannot consider how we feel about ambiguity and ambiguous situations without considering how we feel in the liminal moments of life. A liminal moment is a conscious state of being on the 'threshold' of or between two different existential planes. We go through many liminal moments; they are unavoidable and doubtlessly include undoing, dissolution, and decomposition, accompanied by processes of growth, transformation, and the reformation of old elements in new patterns. So how do we approach these moments? How do we sit in liminal space? Of course, we will go through these moments as they happen to us, but can we choose to approach them with less resistance, to move through them with more grace and less pain? If we do, is the opportunity for growth and transformation deepened?

The creativity in ambiguity

Artists have always used ambiguity in their work. Whether they feel comfortable or not is another matter. However, this concept has been explored across the art world and every realm of creativity. 

Creativity multiplies when we can feel safe in an ambiguous space or hold mysterious ways of thought. Being able to produce work shrouded in uncertainty is what the bravest artists, entrepreneurs and scientists do. Using art and creativity to express an ambiguous idea is something that Anthony Gormley does brilliantly, making use of the visual language of liminality and the ambiguous to explore themes such as the transcendence of physical and mental space. His installation and sculptural works invite viewer interaction and often cause the viewer themselves to metamorphose into an equivocal and indefinite state of being. Through his contemplation of liminality and ambiguity, therefore, Gormley considers the transcendence of the limits of the human mind, and traversing the boundary between visible and non-visible, physical and non-physical.

— I wonder why so many people feel threatened by art or artistic expression.

The concept of "ma", which roughly translates to "negative space" but evokes a more profound sense of a "pause" that gives new shape and meaning to the whole, is used in Japanese design and culture. We all can find inspiration in this ancient principle, to create more space for the things that matter, for something surprising or sublime that can be found in the gaps. 

How can we hold creative thought if we do not allow ambiguity? 

“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form" – The Heart Sutra

Social, racial and cultural identity

"Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence."

― Gloria Anzaldua

Gloria Anzaldua is the mother of a concept she calls Mestiza Consciousness — the rejection of one specific identity or specific racial or cultural background. Instead, she develops a mode of consciousness offering both an integrated theory of pluralist totality and a recorded life experience of "multiple little selves" coexisting within "the big self", weaving self, world, and spirit into a synergistic whole. She passionately criticises the Western mindset for privileging "the mechanical, the objective, the industrial, the scientific" while denigrating imagination, fantasies, and dreams as equally legitimate modes of knowledge.

"By creating a new mythos - that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave - la mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject/object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war." ― Gloria Anzaldúa.

The Seductions of Clarity

The feeling of clarity can be seductive. It is associated with understanding things. We use that feeling as a signal that we have investigated a matter. But, on the other hand, it can terminate thought prematurely. 

It isn't that we cannot and shouldn't feel that we understand something clearly or believe something, but we should always practice – Strong opinions, weakly held.

We do need that feeling of understanding to be able to go about our daily activities, but it is a skill to recognise when we have thought enough about something and when we have more to understand. This doesn't mean we need to try and work everything out; we just need to find that feeling of ease in the not fully knowing and remember not to jump to conclusions because it feels like clarity and feels safe.

There is no space for rigidity; flexibility is always needed. But, to be flexible, we need to understand ourselves well, know and uphold personal boundaries and recognise when we need to give up that grasping for a feeling of control or certainty.

"We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates." – Junichiro Tanizaki.

To summarise, staying open, holding judgement, understanding the ambiguity of where self begins and merges with other, appreciating the space in between, and allowing ourselves to be made up of many small and sometimes conflicting qualities is another step toward serenity of self. In the following essay, we will share some practical exercises on the outlined concepts.