The wisdom of ignorance. For me it is a sacrament. The acknowledgement of ignorance – that I lack full comprehension of anything – is a sacred act that takes ordinary experience and makes it a door to infinite possibility.
It is not a mere intellectual assumption; this would be futile. It is an orientation towards infinity, towards God. It is a profound turning of one's awareness away from the things or objects that form the immediate content of consciousness to the space in consciousness from which this content arises.
Who am I?
It is easy to name things: the sun, the sky, the car, my husband, my job, this is wrong, that's good, and so on. But if you try to answer the question ‘Who am I?’ you find there is no simple label – no statement that fits completely. We look, and there are sensations, thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs, arising endlessly in our awareness, but never do we see the cognizing self that underlies all this. We can give a label to anything we perceive or think, and in this limited sense we know it, but we cannot know the one who knows in the same way. It is like the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, where, within the conventions of geometrical position and motion, it is impossible to determine the position and velocity of a particle simultaneously. If we know where it is, we don't know how fast it is moving, or if we know its velocity, we can't determine its position. As long as we remain at the subject/object level of consciousness we can have relative knowledge of things, but we can never know wholeness. This is the challenge of transformation, to make subject and object a unity.
Direct knowing
Direct knowing comes through identity, Being At-One with ourselves, so we experience the transcendence of subject/object consciousness. It is what Jesus referred to as the Kingdom of Heaven when he is quoted in The Gospel According to Thomas, ‘When you make the inner as the outer and when you make the above as the below... then shall you enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ It is here, for the first time, that we have become truly reconciled and connected to our world in a living reciprocity of aliveness.
Our ordinary consciousness is rooted in appearance instead of the underlying Reality. The sacrament of ignorance is a way of talking about a new kind of attention that begins to bridge this separation. Now as we move into life, we acknowledge the relative reality of our experience. The compelling pull of the outer mind begins to turn back to its source in undifferentiated consciousness. It is as though we are intuiting: ‘Who am I that this is my experience?’ The effect is a subtle undermining of our usual stance. The moment our experience and the ‘me’ that makes it possible fuse, we move to a new level of energy and understanding. Objectively the world is the same. Yet it is shot through with a sense of new meaning and presence.
Relative knowing
Practically speaking there is a lot we know and can be certain of. But the appearance of knowing and of certainty in the ordinary sense always means we are operating in a restricted context. We have placed a relative boundary around our experience. For example, in the mathematics of quantum electrodynamics, equations only become useful for practical technology after all the infinity symbols have been removed. This process of sacrificing truth for practicality is called normalizing. Similarly, whatever level of consciousness we are operating from is always normalized relative to the larger mystery of life. This unconscious normalizing, inherent in the fact that we only operate out of a few of the probably infinite levels of consciousness, makes it possible for us to act and to think we know what we believe and who we are. Meanwhile we are sinking deeper into illusion. The sacrament of ignorance is an acknowledgement of this. It is a turning to that which is in our hearts. It softens the brittleness of our subject/object reality.
A key to aliveness
To confess ignorance, which is not the same as acting ignorantly, is a key to aliveness. It is a law which we can confirm for ourselves: The seemingly hard facts of life, the absolutes that cannot change, will always soften and become ambiguous or irrelevant as the egoic forces are relaxed. You can fall in love with one person, but the moment you acknowledge that larger space of unknowing, where the you who is in love is recognized as relative, then you are in love with everyone. You may feel utterly indifferent, even cold, toward your former spouse and abhor any kind of association but, letting go of this, you could be in love once again. Every time we recognize the ignorance inherent in any interpretation of reality based in the content of our consciousness, we access a higher dimension of aliveness that unites us to life and other people. This is why I refer to it as a sacrament. This movement is extraordinary; we take the known and make it mystery and sacred; we take the unknown and make it love.
From The Black Butterfly, copyright 1986 by Richard Moss MD, published in the United States by Celestial Arts.
Photographs © Cygnus Books 23-Feb-2007
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