Is Ignorance Really a Bliss?

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Is Your Mind Disabling or Enabling you?




There was a man who jumped from the second floor. He got badly injured. After he was a little better, he came out of his house limping. The neighbours knew what happened with him but still asked: "Did the fall hurt you badly?" The man replied: "No, it was the stop that hurt." That's how the ignorance works! You are happy falling in ignorance till you meet the ground reality and get badly hurt.

So, all these dissuading remarks going around that make one feel it is good to be ignorant are just fool’s trap. If you are sky diving, knowing how and when to open a parachute would be of immense significance since the dive will be fantastic otherwise too but the landing would hurt. Why we say or think that ignorance is good is only because we feel it is good to remain untouched by most of the nonsensical things going around in the world. Our mind works like a bin collecting everything that we come across: good or bad, useful or useless. If you decide one day to delete everything that is useless, unworthy and bad from mind, you will be in trouble. It is so because now your mind will repeat the exercise of collecting all that nonsense again as it will be fresh and unexplored thing for it. That’s how it works! I will tell you not to think of your marriage/job/holiday for next ten minutes, and mind will think only about it.

If I use the term garbage bin for the mind, please don’t feel offended because I too claim to have one! Mind only works either as garbage bin or a sharp knife. It doesn’t know any other way to work. Why I am calling it a garbage bin is because it has all sorts of filthy things accumulated over a period of time we have spent on this planet. Garbage bin is one indispensable thing in our home. You can stay without a gadget but not without a garbage bin at home. The problem is that all the filth we have collected has become so important for us that we have lost the discriminatory power to use it effectively. If you can open and close the garbage bin according to your convenience, it’s a useful thing but if you start sleeping in it, you are a disaster. That is exactly what most of us are doing. We are sleeping in it. We can’t distance ourselves from what impressions we have collected from people and things around, and are not able to discriminate them from our own experience of truth in life. We aren’t able to use it as sharp knife for dissecting things in their entirety to know them. In a way, mind is disabling us instead of enabling us to achieve things in life.


Knowing all the things around you (and not remaining ignorant), and still remaining untouched by them is “in control” in normal understanding, and “purity” in spiritual understanding. If somebody develops an allergy to this accumulated filth (mind), and think of ignoring it and going to the mountains, they will remain unsuccessful. It is so because the mind is permanently with you everywhere you go. You can’t leave it behind and run away! It is like going on vacations to beautiful places in an endeavour to run away from your problems. Fortunately they are brief else your problems would just follow you there.
 
So, what seems an option then? One, staying within the filth. Two, running away from the filth. Third, converting this filth into blossoming experience by taking full control over your mind. I think by all means the third one seems most befitting. There is a lot of practice that goes into this control. All you got to remember is that there is no failure in this process. All you do is succeed since every time you think you fail, you learnt exactly what not to do which is an equally important learning. You begin by organizing your thoughts to organize your mind. Thereafter even the emotions will get organized the way your mind will start working. This leads to phenomenal energy to create whatever you want to!


Let us make this powerful tool of mind into a miracle of creating something wonderful instead of misery manufacturing machine. Thankfully, we are beyond the stage of Darwin’s “struggle for existence” and so it shall be wise to invest time and energy into learning to move towards “joyful existence”.

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