Ignorance and Knowledge

It struck me this morning that at bottom major religious movements rest on the contrast between ignorance and knowledge. In the Hindu and Buddhist faiths, the human problem is produced by Ignorance, our mistaking the insubstantial mirage produced in this dimension by matter and all that is connected to it. Ignorance is bliss? No. In these faiths ignorance is suffering. The Gnostic faiths, which left a footprint in the century before and in the century after our current calendar changed from BC to AD, emphasize Knowledge as that which helps us to escape from this dimension of Ignorance. In Gnosticism this world of ours is the false creation of the Demiurge, spreading confusion and thus capturing the free beings that we are. The same “knowing” is rendered as Enlightenment by the Hindus and the Buddhists.

The Western religions (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) are based on the actions that center on The Fall. That story is incoherent unless taken as a parable of how human consciousness arose. In effect it says, When Consciousness arose among humans, the world fell. Incoherent? Yes. Eve took the forbidden fruit. But to disobey God in any meaningful sense, she had to have had “knowledge of good and evil” before she ate of the fruit. To emphasize this, to understand what “forbidden” means, one has to understand good and evil already. Yet that knowledge only came, supposedly, after eating the fruit.

East and West, therefore, it seems to me, take their religious insights at different points in human development. The Eastern view already assumes the presence of a conscious humanity, but one that still lacks a crucial insight—unlikely to be acquired except by suffering. The Biblical account records, and labels as disobedience, a point in time when the knowledge of good and evil actually arose. The higher insight, in the West, comes when consciousness is expanded by Revelation—and Revelation is unlikely to motivate humanity in the absence of—suffering.

Another way to see this is to say that the East emphasizes the power of cognition, the West the powers of the will. Both are powers of the human soul—alongside feeling, intuition, and imagination. All of these powers, however, are one. They cannot be teased apart in actual living. They are all present in all decisions—to act or not to act in certain ways. But religious faiths can, and have, laid their emphasis on one or the other of humanity’s supposedly different powers. In truth they are the same single power. And it works—if we work.

Knowledge

Any person who knew with absolute certainty that another reality exists above this one (and leave to the side, for the moment, how that knowledge was acquired) then that person, and a community of such people, would be operating in this world of ours according to the laws of that reality rather than more or less unconsciously adapting to this one. Here a new aspects of the old gnosis—and why knowledge, quite by itself, might be enough—emerges. Such knowledge makes all the difference. To be sure, effective action in this world would then also require much more learning—but the learning about this world would be from the new perspective. It would have quite another context. Faith, as that word is usually understood, is nine parts hope and one part knowledge; it is a weaker state.

But how does this knowledge actually arise? Can it arises more or less naturally?

In my own case the process began with observation and continued through research, thought, reasoning. Gradually. What words to apply to those activities? Exhaustive, wide-ranging, comprehensive. Those qualifiers are crucially important because they incline the investigator to feel obliged to explain whatever facts or phenomena actually appear. Each must be integrated effectively into a whole. The process began for me in trying to make sense of history—when I first entered the Army. The question was suddenly there: What are armies all about? The simple answer I already had, defense. But when you apply those qualifiers (exhaustive, wide-ranging, and comprehensive) that’s only a start. It doesn’t matter where the process begins provided that the effort is allowed to branch. From armies, history. So what is history all about?

Knowledge comes in two varieties: adaptive and truth-seeking. Adaptive learning stops when the action becomes clear; truth-seeking, by its nature, never stops. To follow one’s inclinations belongs to the adaptive category: adapting to desire. So you become all-knowing about literature. It can easily fill a career. To be sure, literature can also be a starting point provided that it becomes exhaustive, wide-ranging, and comprehensive. Soon you’re studying DNA and cells. The human tendency is to organize knowledge into domains and to leave the borders between them more or less neglected territory. Within those domains, lots of easy answers—also enough and exciting controversy to engage the specialist as a fan or opponent for a lifetime. But reconciling different domains is something quite different—especially when they appear to present quite opposing general views of life. And the work is not outwardly rewarding; yes, there are people who tackle such controversies and make a name for themselves; they will also “specialize” in two; but tackling all of them?

Knowledge also arises from life—as opposed to subjects. And lived experiences must also be harmonized with formal knowledge. Endless process. It’s best to keep it separate from earning a living. What might begin as faith (or absolute lack of it) turns into knowledge eventually. And once it is present, it makes all the difference. Not surprisingly, everything then looks—very different.

Gnosis Writ Small

Once I became genuinely persuaded that I was neither my body nor that my inner self is a product of a physical process, a radical change in attitude set in. This happened fairly late in my life—but that’s because it takes a long time really to understand what now seems to me an obvious but still very strange fact. Once the real gnosis takes hold, one realizes that something else must explain embodiment, something other than having been created at conception or being some spark that fell into the void. I for one have difficulty seeing this condition as part of a plan, call it divine. The artificiality (the engineered character) of life powerfully suggests to me that some sort of collective effort well below the level of divinity is in place to help us make an escape. Embodiment therefore serves a purpose; and since this purpose isn’t really bliss (this life just isn’t blissful), it must be a rescue effort. Several conclusions follow.

One is that simple knowledge of this fact is probably sufficient to escape. Whatever clouded one’s awareness up to that point where it dawned has been wiped away. No one having a strong awareness of another dimensionality, having seen a full lifetime here, can possibly want to “do it again”; and if the escape genuinely works, thus if the gained knowledge is enough to carry one out of the material range, that person won’t come back again—except on purpose, i.e., voluntarily. Another conclusion is that the “collective effort” must work on reasonably large numbers of people else it’s most deficient. We shouldn’t need earth-shattering satoris, and so on. Awareness of the spiritual reality—and that we belong to that—should be sufficient.

Where that dividing line manifests for different people is hard to pinpoint, but clinging to life would be a kind of negative indicator surely. Those who so cling don’t “instinctively” feel the other dimension. Here language is lossy. We use physical concepts, like visceral, in the gut, heartfelt, etc., to mean the hard sort of internal gnosis, and by hard I simply mean genuinely knowing. That gnosis then changes one’s attitude to life. Those still strongly of the world perceive my stance as negativity; in fact it is just realism. Hardline Buddhism is that stance—and it is incompatible with the conventional belief in life-at-any-cost. Those not yet at that stage can’t understand that the negative attitude is basically well-meaning, indeed benevolent. I don’t want to make life harder for people; I don’t want them to suffer. But they are hurting themselves by blindly living their lives in a sleep.

It’s possible, to be sure, to know all this with unquestioned conviction while yet, at the same time, remaining ignorant of the boundaries of our captivity in this realm. It may well be that extreme degrees of spiritualization are required and that, after death, we may find ourselves still stuck in this dreary dimension and, furthermore, even more limited than we were in our bodies. Then, of course, trying again may seem a perfectly sensible course. But my own sense is that once this feeling is present, it is a species of arrival.