Certainty is the membranous pellicle-like thought barrier that protects a belief and which sustains an unshakable sense of conviction about a statement or a state of affairs. The semi-permeable nature of the membrane provides little or no resistance to myths, rumour or hearsay, but is selectively impervious to any form of inconvienient factual data about existential realities. The suspended mass of the evidence of reality is never weighed and little nut-cases of certitude drift confidently amongst the anti-gravitational clouds.

For all species and persuasions the aging process assists in the formation of the belief integument. Short of cosmetic surgery it is usually impossible to persuade the mature individual to review their consolidated beliefs. But there are no justified certainties...not even this one. The claim that one and one make two for example, is not a certainty but rather a convenient rule. In a chaotic universe no two entities are ever sufficiently identical to be able to apply the rule with certainty. Even the devious linguistic claim that nothing is certain will never be a certainty because it will founder upon disputation as to what nothing and certain are supposed to mean. There is not even any consensus with respect to the claim that the only certainty is death. The deluded light of conviction might radiate from the eyes of the believer in a life after death and for whom death is thus not a certainty, but the pragmatist accepts with a resignation...rather than a projected certainty...the evidential realities of nature's recycling.

There are several standardized methods for accelerating the encapsulating formation of a certainty membrane and most are well known and widely practiced. The trans-cutaneous method involves clutching one of god's publications firmly in the hands, thus allowing the sacred vapours and spirits to be absorbed by way of the skin, conveyed up to the brain by the blood and coalesce there into a protective surrounding film. The similar method of divine revelation is a process whereby the assurances of ethereal voices and the inspiration of ecstatic visions are accepted unreservedly. By rendering ineffective all sensory perception pathways to the real world the sacred emanations can callus unhindered around the belief. The suppositional techniques of academia, with or without divine enhancement, are remarkably successful. It has been demonstrated on innumerable occasions that with a prudent provision for semi-transparent mirrors in a quarantined environment, studying hypothetical self-consistent logical systems or existential simplifications can quite rapidly materialize a capsule of certainty around the boundary of the system. The most pragmatic of the secular methods is unquestionably the positive feedback procedure. The individual listens very carefully and attentively to their own voice over long periods whilst adjusting the nuances and intonations in order to obtain a perfect pitch of resonance. These enhanced vibrations are then quite sufficient to act as a stimulus for the formation of a certainty membrane directly from neuron network reconfigurations.