I operate from the perspective that there are a few basic “needs” that we all have to get met. According to both Tony Robbins and the society for Non Violent Communication — among others — certainty is a key need.

We need to know that when we wake up in the morning, we’ll have food to eat and clothes to put on. And when we come home, we’ll have a bed to sleep in. That the sun will come out tomorrow. Stuff like that. But also at a deeper level.

A great deal of certainty comes from our childhood. People who were between 3-10 when their parents divorced tend to lack the basic levels of certainty had by people whose parents stayed together their entire lives or divorced only later in life.

From my perspective, certainty can be gained by maintaining and building one’s connection to soul/purpose/universal energy source — i.e. faith in one’s experience. I tend to come from the perspective that people who cling too much to rules, facts, ideology, dogma, etc, have not been given enough internal certainty in their experience and thus try to impose it more liberally on others in a misguided attempt to create it in the external world.

Ultimately, certainty is something that must come internally, since the external is necessarily temporal.