Certainty can sustain a belief against the gravitational weight of any evidence. It is a 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 inconvenient factual data about existential realities. The suspended mass of the evidence of reality is never weighed and thus enables the little nut-case of certitude to drift confidently amongst the anti-gravitational clouds.

For all species and persuasions the natural formation of the belief integument is part of the normal ageing process. The oldest gardener has the thickest calluses protecting their most valued convictions. Short of cosmetic surgery it is usually impossible to persuade the mature individual to review their consolidated beliefs.

There are no justified certainties or uncertainties... not even this one. The claim that one and one make two for example, is not a certainty but a rather convenient rule. In a chaotic universe no two entities are ever sufficiently identical to be able to apply the rule with certainty, so it is applied whenever the user thinks they can get away with it. The claim that it is certain in mathematics is spurious, because in that context it is defined to be so. The statement that '(a hypothetical entity called "one") added to (a hypothetical entity called "one") can be renamed as (a hypothetical entity called "two")', is a definition, not a certainty. We can tie ourselves up in such linguistic knots... about what we actually mean by 'one', 'two', 'added', 'equal', renamed', etc... that certainty and un-certainty become indistinguishable. 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 the evidential realities of nature's recycling.

There are several standardized methods for accelerating the encapsulating formation of a certainty membrane and assisting the ageing process. The trans-cutaneous method involves clutching firmly in the hands, a book published by one of the hypothetical spiritual chief executives , 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, and immediately stimulate the barrier formation. 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 however, is unquestionably the positive feedback procedure. The individual listens very carefully and attentively to their own voice over long periods, and by carefully adjusting the nuances and intonations, are able obtain a perfect pitch of resonance. These enhanced vibrations are then quite sufficient to act as an ultrasonic stimulus for the formation of a certainty membrane directly from neuron network reconfigurations.