Ignorance: Bliss or Beware?

We’ve all heard it said that ignorance is bliss, and that what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

But what you don’t know can hurt you. It can even kill you. I dare say that most of the people who die every year, die of some form of ignorance, whether slowly from decades of poor habits or suddenly from something they didn’t see coming.

Ignorance is not bliss. It is misery waiting to manifest. It is pain waiting to pounce. It is delusion waiting to deceive. You don’t have to look far and wide to observe the part that ignorance plays in the world. Not only is it pervasive, it is also powerful. Lately it seems that ignorance is the fuel that is powering our planetary decisions. This may be an ascending age of consciousness, but it’s a long way from where we are now to the top of the cosmic cycle.

Be that as it is, there’s a purpose to ignorance also. It is what we have to overcome in order to reach the summit of Self-realization. God did not mean it to be an easy achievement.

In a dark room, if you turn on a light, the darkness disappears. But where there is ignorance, the darkness remains even in the presence of light. “The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not” (John:1). In other words, we are eternally bathed in God’s divine light, but if we shut it out by turning to our egoic desires instead, we wind up in the shadows of that light, where we stumble and suffer.

Ignorance is expressed in endless ways, but its root cause is simply our lack of awareness of who we truly are. In looking for happiness outside of ourselves, we lose sight of our innate divinity. We develop a case of spiritual amnesia, thinking that we are the body-mind that we have merely borrowed for this incarnation.

There’s a funny story about a challenge that God was facing in relation to man’s tendency toward this mistaken identity. Rumor has it, He was having second-thoughts about what he had done in creating us in the first place. According to anonymous but reliable sources, God became exasperated over man’s constant pestering for favors, wanting Him to intercede to make life easy. So, God went to His council of advisors and said, “I’ve got to get away from these people down there, but I don’t know where to hide where they won’t find Me with all of their complaints and prayers for things they want.”

Many suggestions were made and rejected until one of the council members had a brilliant idea. He said to God, “Why not hide inside of man. It will take him almost forever to find You there!”

God loved the idea, and that is where He has been ever since, waiting for us to want Him alone.

To overcome our body-mind identity and its desires, we must rise above our ordinary human level of consciousness, and this isn’t easy. It means doing as Arjuna had to do in the Bhagavad Gita, purging ourselves of those myriad “mental citizens” that bind us to delusion, and thus to the shadows of God’s light. That light is ever present, but learning to live in attunement to it is no small accomplishment.

It’s a process, isn’t it. We do this one shift in consciousness at a time, and thankfully there is goodness and grace in every shift we make. But here’s what is most surprising and remarkable about that. Spiritual advancement is not a question of attaining anything. It is simply a matter of opening the door to a state of being that is ours already, hidden from us only so long as our focus is elsewhere. As that door gradually opens, the soul begins to emerge from the shadows, showing us the way to joy in God.

God’s creation exists on myriad levels of manifestation, all at the same time. Every generation has its extremes – Hitlers and Gandhis, fools and mystics – along with every human possibility in between. On a higher level, however, is God’s divine light, which forever surrounds us, forever dwells within us, is forever accessible, and which cannot be diminished by any gross material reality. We are literally imbued with the light, love, wisdom, peace, power and joy of God, untouched by darkness, hatred, ignorance, fear, weakness or sorrow.

And yet, we continue to suffer. We are practiced in the art of misplacing our priorities, in

seeking our satisfaction in egoic pursuits, which causes the light that “shineth” within us to remain incomprehensible. And so it is until we reach that point of “anguishing monotony,” as Yogananda called it, and we say “Enough is enough. I want more by wanting less of what the outside world can give me. I want God and the true abundance that wanting Him can bring.”

Krishna said to Arjuna, “Be thou a yogi.” In other words, realize, as the yogi does, that all is love, all is light, all is an opportunity to live in joy. We must only remember who we truly are.