ignorance v. mere pretensions to knowledge?

Someone just asked me which state of mind was the more dangerous. This individual was wondering which kind of thinking was the more injurious to the human condition. My opinion follows:

I suppose it depends what you are ignorant of. Whole cultures who were ignorant of the Western way lived in peace, balance, love and harmony with the earth.

Once they tasted their first Coke, and chatted to their first missionary, things took a decided downwards spiral.

It is not that long ago that indigenous people were referred to as ‘ignorant savages’ is it? These days the human potential movement, New Age philosophy and Naturopathic medicine (amongst other things) would be lost without them.

I am working towards a kind of informed ignorance – getting rid of the Western mindset that is screwing everything up in the name of ‘progress’.

Those with pretensions to knowledge probably do very little harm unless they’e the ones with their finger on the Doomsday button…otherwise, they’re just another form of entertainment.

Come to think of it, it was those people with pretensions to knowledge who messed things up in the first place – replacing a continuous and natural awareness of Life and Truth with religion and personalised deities. Inventing the notion of modern-day poverty by refusing to acknowledge the validity of different ways of living. Passing on their disease of intellectual materialistic monism like so many small-pox infested blankets….

 

Getting out of our tiny minds…

On what I can see…

It makes sense to me that on this cosmic pendulum, there are only certain things that I can perceive wtih my senses. So ‘light’ that is in a specific range, I can perceive as colour, and outside of that range, I know it exists (ultraviolet, infrared etc) but because I cannot see it, I can only detect it as energy, using instruments.

By this token, it is as if whatever we cant actually perceive sensorially, only exists as energy to us. Things seem to only be able to materialise as ’solid’ matter when our sense machine can detect it. It is as if we ‘create’ solid reality around us by our ability to pick up the energy (wave-forms) of reality and convert them (via the brain) into chair, or red or soft or salty (particles). Since all of our ’sense machines’ as a species are more or less the same, we ’solidify’ or ‘create’ more or less the same reality, what we experience as consensual reality. We all agree the sky is blue. A dog or bee might disagree strongly. I have noticed that my cats can obviously see and hear things that are way out of my range of perception.

It is perfectly plausible that there are an infinite amount of things going on ‘around’ us all the time which we cannot perceive. Perhaps this is where people get their ideas of the ’super’natural and ‘ghosts’? Maybe this is where ‘extra-terrestrial’ life is to be found?

Maybe the next great leap forward for science is a cohesive understanding about the energetic nature of reality, and the fact that the sense machine in our bodies acts as a kind of projector, giving us the virtual reality of solid objects that we navigate in our waking lives…

There of course are already scientists who are linking the revelations from quantum physics, who are amazed by the effect that an observing human consciousness has on sub-atomic phenomena, etc. We have all heard of Schrodinger’s cat, but not many of us have really accepted the ontological ramifications this theory presents.

Finally, I watched a film called ‘The Celestine Prophecy’ the other night. I found it a little corny, but there is a scene at the end (also detailed in the book which I subsequently picked up) which illustrates this principle beautifully. It is where a group of people apparently learn how to speed up the frequency of the atomic vibrations of their own bodies, so that regular humans were unable to see them, that is detect them with ordinary human senses.