Article: On Ignorance

Original Article written for Stain of Thought - Thursday 7, April 2011

There’s this popular notion of allowing yourself to be drained into in slopes of ignorance. At birth we were God, and later we’re conditioned and we get excited from simply wetting our lips in consuming, wanting, applying another type of white powder to penetrate your nostrils, pretending, and forfeiting compassion for misconceived feelings of self-worth. It’s a foolish spin-off of appreciating the world for what it is. It’s sometimes a heap of goals
that cries for another to help you achieve them with out of the kindness of their beloved hearts. You’re the frog that realizes you’ll never sleep with the princess until she kisses you first. “Damn selfish folk! I live in this world of ignorance!”

…And then there’s this notion of attacking ignorance with ignorance itself. As Vonnegut puts it:

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way”.

Here we have a ton of fingers pointing at how everybody else is a sheep, but it is them that are wearing wool coats. They’re another layer of sheep. It is another layer of egoic behaviour by treasuring your intelligence and believing you’re ‘in-the-know’ and they’re not.

Forget yourself and just love.