Turner - The Bliss of Ignorance

Special thanks to Brett Burge for tireless repeated proof reading, sincere criticism and helpful suggestions.

Thanks also to Katrin Kugelmeier and Frank Gorin for more of the same.

... and finally to Ian Wright for technical support.

The only thing that I know for certain is that I amI exist. It seems like this is all Ive ever truly known... but of this I cannot be sure. All that I am sure of is that here now I am.

What I am I have no idea of... or at least no idea that can be trusted in the same way as this most intimate sense of being this knowledge of my existence. Many possibilities have presented themselves that I am an entity, a being, a thing, a human, a person... but none of these ideas has ever presented itself in a way that could be trusted. So Ive come back to the certainty of knowing that I exist and nothing more.

I have entertained ideas that I might be limited by the physical body, the time markers of birth and death, and the physical world in which I appear... and then at times my mind has thrown up thoughts that I am eternal, limitless, unborn, undying, the unbounded pure awareness of the absolute... The simple truth is that I have absolutely no idea what I am. How could I?

To know what I am, I would need to be able to trust my senses and my reasoning... and I have found that I can trust neither. Because both my perceptions and my capacity for reason appear within my consciousness, the source of which remains unknown, I have been forced to recognize that I simply cannot know the significance of anything that I might perceive or imagine. My senses, my reasoning, and the ideas of others have all been found to be untrustworthy.

Discovering that I cant know anything beyond the basic fact that I exist, I have been able to give up the search for any kind of absolute knowledge. I have relaxed into the mystery of this existence, letting go of my beliefs that have been worshipped for so long as truth. Finally I can live in peace.

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The bliss of ignorance.

... One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.

- Socrates.

I have absolutely no idea whats going on here. Even though I might seem to be in control of my life, Ive come to recognize that actually I dont know anything at all about myself, this life that I appear to be living, or this world around me. In spite of my appearance as a person who possesses a mass of knowledge about the nature of my being, I have to concede that I dont know any of it to be true. Why? How could I arrive at such a radical conclusion?

When I went in search of some certainty about the truth of my being and the world that appears before me, I simply found that there was no source of knowledge that could be relied on. I had to admit that my senses and my powers of reasoning were all utterly untrustworthy. And so I was finally forced to accept that I exist in a state of profound ignorance. I saw that the certainty that I had cherished in the past about what I am and what is going on here was an illusion that was easily shattered when I started to investigate it sincerely. The simple truth is that I am lost. Stranded in a sea of unknowing. Nothing can give me any certainty about the truth of existence and my search for such truth has left me empty.

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When I began enquiring into my true nature, I found that I apparently knew many things. I experienced myself as a being, inhabiting a body, and with a mind that was filled with knowledge. I knew that I had been born and that I would die. I knew that I lived in a world full of other beings and I knew that this was the truth of my existence.

But did I really know any of these facts to be true? Could I trust what was appearing before me in consciousness? Of course, these facts accurately described the appearance of my existence... but did I know this appearance to be the truth of what I was?

If, for example, I chose to believe that I was the physical body, I found plenty of evidence to support this belief. I could see it, feel it, read books about its anatomical structure, and talk to others about it. So many sources of evidence were available to me. But were any of them trustworthy? Could I trust anything that I perceived or imagined? Did I really know myself to be what I appeared to be?

Of course, believing myself to be a person with a body and a mind was very practical. It allowed me to deal with the world that appeared around me. And knowing that I was a person with physical and mental capabilities, I was able to interact with the apparent world and the apparent people who inhabited it. It was all very practical. But was it the truth of what I was?

It had always been easiest to quietly assume that I was just what I seemed to be. Waking up, day after day, finding myself to be this same human being, why would I have chosen to question the reality of this appearance? The daily repetition of this sense of being me the one who inhabited the body and made use of the mind should surely have been enough to convince me of the truth of who or what I was. It wasnt. Even this constant repetition failed to convince me of the authenticity of my experience. I simply didnt trust it. I couldnt accept it as the truth. The true nature of my being remained a mystery to me and the repetition of a particular experience did nothing to help make the truth of what I was any less mysterious. Or any more knowable.

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I was sure, somehow, that I existed. The problem came when I began to ask myself how I knew that I existed. I was conscious of my existence... this is how I knew. But if I began to question the nature of this consciousness, my mind became blank and I found that I could say no more. There was consciousness... but I had no idea where it came from or how it arose. The source of this awareness remained hidden. And yet... everything that I perceived and knew depended upon this consciousness. So long as I didnt know what the source of this awareness was, there was a big question mark hanging over everything I knew... including the knowledge of what I was... for that knowledge emerged within this consciousness.

I found that as the perceiver of the world that I apparently was, I remained a mystery. And as long as I was a mystery, the perceived world was also a mystery.

If I started to consider the possible explanations of how this consciousness might have come about, I found that no explanation was convincing or trustworthy. Was it possible that consciousness was produced by the chemistry of the physical brain? It was an interesting idea, but I had no reasonable explanation of how that could happen. Could I believe that the source of my awareness was the absolute unborn first principle of the mystics and that everything that was revealed in this floating world was just an appearance in consciousness without any real physical existence? It sounded good ... but I had no idea whether it might be close to the truth of the matter. Might the source of this awareness, this so-called absolute, be a mere speck in some infinitely bigger system? How could I possibly know? I found that I had no idea how I came to be conscious and in spite of my attempts to understand this great mystery, the source of my consciousness refused to reveal itself.