Of ignorance, bliss, and life worth living
I have a handful of favorite blogs I visit daily. I know none of these people personally, though I correspond sometimes with a one or two. They seem something like friends, which is probably presumptuous, but I appreciate being a part, whether passively or actively, of compelling conversations, the likes of which I cannot duplicate off-line.
I’m cheating this morning, post-wise, because I just spent a batch of time replying to another incisive, artfully crafted post by Outer Life. He writes of a man he knows who looks no deeper than slogans for the meaning of everything, and consequently bears none of the burdens reflective people do, Outer Life among them. I will not excerpt it except for the end, because Outer Life’s posts should always be read whole (i.e., you have homework before reading on).
He closes with a question:
The unexamined life is not worth living. Ignorance is bliss. Which is it?
The post and the closing question sparked thought, and my reply follows. Beware: philosophizing ahead - part of the nature of the critter I am. I think I’m posting it here because I will need to reread it sometimes, too, because it’s something for all of us, because so many times, living life perceived just so has helped me to make it through.
Is it ever so simple as either/or?
Persisting in willful ignorance, however psychologically comfortable and safe (I won’t use the word “bliss” here), is less than being fully alive, no?
But being fully alive, comprehending complexity and contradiction, need not preclude our experience of bliss now and again.
To ignore bliss where it may be found is also to shortchange a life, for bliss is not really found in ignorance after all, but in perceiving beauty and good in the midst of everything else.
Life isn’t, at least for me, one thing or another. I can know bliss and pain and contradiction and incontrovertible trouble all in a single day. The big secret is that one doesn’t cancel the other out. Joy doesn’t cancel pain, and pain doesn’t cancel joy. They coexist in this mutable and mortal world, and one is as real and vital to knowing what there is to know of this life as the other.
I don’t think your life needs to be examined less, only lived more. Anesthetizing your brain, as does the man of whom you write, would help nothing at all and is impossible besides. You just need to acknowledge an additional dimension; you need to further complicate your life with joy. Be utterly present to it where it may be found, and don’t smush it with all the rest.
Life is not either/or - perceiving preponderance is oversimplification - it is all at once and this and that by turns.
Choose some bliss today, great or small, carve out of a space for it, and give yourself to it wholly.
Comments (3) to “Of ignorance, bliss, and life worth living”
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ehj2 wrote:
sigh.
the distinction between “oblivious” and “bliss” is acute … and (writing a bit didactically but respectfully) the word we should be looking for here is either “oblivious” or “oblivion.”
ignorance is by definition “unconscious” and by consequence “oblivious,” and in a world of ever-increasing complexity, oblivion can be an attractive drug for the intellectually and spiritually and psychologically lazy. oblivion can even appear (but only by active deception), like living in the moment.
oblivion should never be confused with some form of “rapture” or “bliss.”
“bliss,” in fact, is predicated upon preternatural, intense, hypertrophied — even acute — awareness.
bliss is hightened consciousness, not the absence of consciousness.
bliss and oblivion are utterly opposed psychological realms.
a society that confuses this dances with death.
/ehj2
Posted on 25-Nov-05 at 11:59 am | Permalink
mindspin wrote:
You clarify what I only struggled toward. Thank you - again.
I need to revise this sentence in particular:
For now, let it be this:
But being fully alive, comprehending complexity and contradiction, does not preclude bliss; it must embrace bliss, too, in order to take into account all that life is and can be.
Or something like that. Some sentences are written only over lifetimes.
Posted on 25-Nov-05 at 1:11 pm | Permalink
ehj2 wrote:
i wrote precisely but too succinctly.
we can write (accurately) that “an unexamined life is not worth living” because (simply) an unexamined life isn’t lived.
the instrumentality of the physical body includes five “major” senses (and a host of minor ones) which can “experience” pleasant sensations. if the goal of life is simply sensual happiness (sated nerve endings), we could define opiate addiction as life fully lived. when we understand that religion is indeed the opiate of the masses, we will understand the condemnation of it for its adherence to empty tombs and willful ignorance (the Spirit has long left and Wisdom weeps).
wealth “buys” pleasant experience, yet we’ve all met wealthy people who’ve become numbed and oblivious of the fine foods and luxuries surrounding them … who even complain joylessly about their empty lives.
there is something beyond sensual “pleasantness” that is almost like a spiritual sense … that is above and beyond all the physical senses … and is closer to a kind of “awareness.”
joy contains strong hints of this, and in my experience is always accompanied by a “sense” or “feeling” of being present, being aware, being profoundly “conscious.” bliss is joy wherein the “container” of the body is insufficient … and it reaches out into space and takes in elements of the world. if i take in world enough, i feel like i am floating in the world.
it feels like shared awareness, shared consciousness. we can have it with a child, a butterfly, a book, a poem, a loved one, a stranger, a flower, a piece of music, the golden dusty streets of the world.
bliss is acute awareness, shared awareness that takes us “out of” our mere bodies.
we can be dying together of starvation and exhaustion, dirty and lice-ridden in a barbed wire camp awaiting gassing and burning at the hands of corporate fascists, yet if we look in each other’s eyes and see together as “one” beyond the atoms of the world, we are in bliss and no human power can take this from us.
bliss is not powerful pleasant sensations or powerful unpleasant sensations … it is awareness that takes us out of our Selves. it’s closer to Love than anything else, but it’s not Love. it is a consequence of Love. its “object” is the divine within or behind the world.
it’s impossible to miss how close the expression “ignorance is bliss” is to “love is blind.” these are the aphorisms, the dogma, the very mantra of the carnal “sensationists” who live in perpetual physical hunger for more sensation, more intoxication, more wealth. of course these sad souls imagine love to be blind; they’ve never comprehended their own confused experience of it. Love isn’t about “more” sensation of the world or of a sex object; Love is about more awareness of this moment in the world “with” (not “of”) what we Love; Love is about Bliss.
in truth, nothing is more aware than Bliss. and nothing is more true than Love.
that’s what i think.
/ehj2
Posted on 25-Nov-05 at 2:57 pm | Permalink