If you want to understand the insanity of the human world, you need to understand the deeply ignorant way we humans move through life.

For starters, we assume the thoughts endlessly blossoming into consciousness are some form of personal truth. We further assume our thoughts are truer and more important than those occurring in the consciousness of others. (You can already see what that particular equation isn’t going to work out very well.)

Our ignorance continues with a body we similarly assume to be ours or, more specifically, to be ‘me.’ As in, ‘my person,’ ‘my body,’ ‘me.’

On inspection (and this isn’t really all that difficult), both of these assumptions are patently false. You are neither your thoughts nor your body – if you were you’d be able to control and manage both.

With the mind you’d never have a bad thought, feel anxious or alone or depressed, and always exist in a state of blissful happiness wouldn’t you? With the mind, you’d never get cancer, grow old, go bald, get fat.

Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.

Again, this is the easy part. The fact so few of the 8 billion on this planet even bother with this simple exercise speaks to the stubborn profundity of human ignorance (and the stickiness of the illusory ego / false self).

A Planet of Learned Ignorance

Because we hold these illusions to be true, the human world suffers from an endless torrent of pressure, stress, anxiety and all the nasty byproducts that come with them (addiction, violence, etc.).

David Carse covers the entire charade brilliantly at the start of his book, ‘Perfect Brilliant Stillness.’

“There is an agreed upon, consensus reality which almost the entire human race shares. The world has been around a long time; it is ancient. Into this world you are born as an individual; you grow, you learn, experience life and die. There is some disagreement concerning what happens after that, except that for everyone else, life will go on until they also die. Everybody thinks they know this – or some local variation of this. But in fact when you were ‘born’ you did not know this. You learned this. Everyone else learned it too and so it is an almost universally shared idea. But everybody learning something doesn’t make it true.”

In other words, every human who has ever existed has taken as fact the lessons handed down by those who came before. They, in turn, bequeathed their ignorance to the next generation, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

Which is why Socrates and his ilk cautioned that the unexamined life is not worth living. The unexamined life is a lesson in learned ignorance.

The Perennial Wisdom

Speaking of Socrates, across time rare voices have emerged to counsel a different path, a different approach to self and life. These teachers of the perennial wisdom told those who would listen that they are not who think they are, not what they were taught they are.

But in order to see this – or at least to begin to peel away some of the layers of ignorance – there has to be an opening, a willingness to reconsider all that one has been taught.

We must question everything, let go of the labels and brands with which we identify. If I remain tied to the physical, cultural, political, ideological, I shall rise and fall with them (and if history has taught us anything, all of these eventually fall).

If I refuse to let go, to surrender, to acknowledge I have no idea how I got here, what I am, or where I ‘go’ next, then I shall have wasted this life.

And if those same wisdom teachers are correct, I’ll live another life and another and another until, at some point, the sheer weight of ignorance and the suffering that comes with it shall at last shred me of my hubris and drive me to my knees where real Truth can at last make its way to the surface.