The Truth About Ignorance

While it is imperative to us that we are educated and continue to educate ourselves, the truth about ignorance is that it is as important to our growth and survival as knowledge is. Indeed, without ignorance we have no reason to expand our awareness or to seek knowledge. Ignorance and knowledge, while opposites, actually work together and must work together in order for us to be able to create for it is from the unknown that the very life that we enjoy today has become known.

With all the hubbub about the Qur'an burning started by a fellow that has admittedly not even read it and the hullabaloo about the it's not a mosque people and it's not at Ground Zero I just had to throw my oar in to the proverbial waters. The fact of the matter is that it is a cultural center modeled after the 92nd Street Y to be named Cordoba House and one has to go out of one's way from Ground Zero to get there. In addition, Muslims have been praying at the Ground Zero site for the past ten years because.....they lost friends and family there too!

Ignorance is perceived to be a negative and so it is but that does not make it either bad or evil. Without negative there is no positive and therefore there is no motion and no life. Without exception, none of us would enjoy the places we live, the things we have, our ability to travel and to connect with each other had our ancestors not ventured into the unknown. To be ignorant is to be unaware of and to not know somebody or something.

It is the child's ignorance that drives it to know and understand its environment and the people, creatures and things in that environment. It is as it should be.

Ignorance and a drive for knowledge are innate in humankind and yet we have made ourselves and each other wrong for both. We have argued, fought, killed, maimed, tortured, ostracized, condemned and imprisoned each other for the crime of ignorance.

A few years ago I read a letter to our local paper from a lawyer for a client that had been sentence to a long prison term. It has haunted me since. As a seven year old child this now condemned man had been out in the garage with his father who was cutting wood with a power saw. The young lad asked his father a question that many of us would welcome from our children, "Can I help?" This father's answer to that innocent query was to respond with, "You want to help, I'll show you how you can help!" In then grabbed his young son's hand and ran his little fingers through the saw severing four of them.

The lawyer expressed in her letter her sadness and frustration that this man was being imprisoned rather than receiving the help that should have been his from a caring society years before he ever got to the point where he was visiting his father's actions upon others.

What happens when a person gets stuck on an incident from the past is that they continually dramatize all the decisions, perceptions, and moods experienced that it literally takes over the individual and influences all of their behaviors.  It is like a movie reel that just plays the same scene over and over and over again.  They do not see who or what is in front of them in present time.

When a something happens that shatters your world, your trust in others, your dependence upon others, it is a shock, a big shock. To use the young boy in the circumstance above as an example, in his asking the father the question, "Can I help?" he was in a high mood level, very present and had a positive vision and intention. What he got in exchange was an extremely negative mood level, spiritual absents and a negative vision and intention. This caused the boy's game, which was to help daddy, collapse. A shock has occurred when something jars the mind or the emotions with a sudden, violent and unexpected blow. The person has experienced an outrage and a severe offense to all that could be considered decent.

Individuals can be put into shock this way and indeed, as with September 11, 200, an entire country and its allies can be put into shock this way. It is an alarmingly simple thing to put an individual or a group into a state of shock and perhaps the most damaging effect is not the shock itself but the decisions the individual or collective make while in that state of shock. They are always, without fail, negative decisions with negative outcomes and consequences. Individuals and groups in shock are very easily controlled and manipulated.

A person in shock is little more than a ball of confusion, their purpose has failed, their dreams have failed, their reason for existence has failed, and they no longer trust themselves or others. Their disrupted minds give conflicting commands and signals to their bodies, their ability to reason and to know or to reach for knowledge has been severely compromised as indeed their whole world as they knew it to be has collapsed in on them. Instead, they sit in a pool of stupidity, trapped life force and extremely heavy, uncomfortable and painful feelings. They can no longer respond to any given situations they can only react.

They are, effectively and thoroughly destroyed. 

We have come a long way since our ancestors set sail to explore and acquire knowledge about the world we collectively inhabit but we have come an equal distance in our ability to react rather than to respond to that world and our fellow humankind. The missiles fired by the rifles, long bows and cannons of the past have been replaced with highly technical missiles that would rendered our own ancestors defenseless.

However, in our ability to acquire and apply appropriate knowledge to the caring of and for each other in away that serves the whole rather than a select few who, more often than not are quite willing to lead us where we would never follow should we be in our right minds, we remain woefully ignorant.

The truth about knowledge is that in our seeking and acquiring knowledge we do not have to concern ourselves with ignorance.  It will come along for the ride without our having to do anything or giving it any attention other than to acknowledge its existence.  Whenever we acquire knowledge in an area, our ignorance automatically comes to view.  Our ancestors started us on a journey of acquiring knowledge about the world in which we live.  It is a journey that once embarked upon became destined to continue.  As subsequent generations acquired more knowledge about our planet our vast ignorance of our own solar system and our place in it became blatantly apparent.  Knowledge and ignorance give us, as a species, eternal life because for everything we know there is something that we do not. 

When we condemn ourselves and each other for our ignorance; when we pretend to know when we don't; and worse yet, when we think we know and we do not the result is discord, upsets, and harmful actions rather than balance and harmony.  In our seeking to know we will naturally create a balanced and harmonious flow of life force between ourselves and each other and between ourselves and our dreams and goals. 

It is said that we are leaving the Industrial Age behind us and are now at the threshold of what is being called the Knowledge Age. As we step through that threshold we are going to be forced to lay down and let go of our old self-limiting, erroneous and often negative precepts and beliefs about who and what we are.

Those who chose to remain behind, clinging to their ignorant perceptions while vehemently condemning the ignorance of others cannot help be faced with unpredictable and unpleasant consequences.

It is time to embrace our ignorance, see it for what it is, love it even for it is truly the only 'enemy' that we have for without it there is no purpose to life and no game to play. It is time also to make a decision as to how you are going to use your knowledge - for your benefit and those of others whom you care for and about or for your self serving benefit only to the determent of others.

Knowledge is a double edged sword.  It is your own honesty, ethics, integrity and ability to interface with others that will determine how you wield that sword.