No, other people do not want you to awaken: Hypocrisy, willful ignorance and courage

In a dream decades ago I approached a figure whom I instantly recognized to also be me, that is, some deeper, more expansive version of myself. This wiser me was on the verge of sharing some core knowledge that I instantly intuited would be life-changing. “I don’t want to know,” I blurted. “I’m not ready.” This “dream” haunted me for years, not so much because I worried about the particular information I had declined, but because I’d so enthusiastically opted for ignorance. I have, after all, been a philosopher and a spiritual seeker for most of my adult life, so it rattled me that, given this opportunity, I had, like a coward, shamelessly stuck my fingers in my ears and started whistling.

It was, from my point of view, the very picture of willful ignorance, almost a caricature of a habit that governs the lives of so many so much of the time. And in situations both mundane and momentous, such as:

• being in denial about bills while continuing to rack up unnecessary debt

• ignoring a nagging, low-grade chronic health concern

• refusing to see rampant social justice violations or the ravages of climate change

• “not seeing” the abusive behavior of a partner or friend

• keeping important emotional information about oneself at arm’s length

• ignoring facts about the impacts of aging and the inevitability of death

The list is potentially endless, of course, but, ultimately, there are only a few basic strategies for actively maintaining self-imposed, faux ignorance: compartmentalization and distraction. The ego quite readily and habitually carves up its pool of thoughts into what shall be permitted into conscious awareness and that which will be banished. And, of course, contemporary Western society is happy to provide endless distractions and addictions to ensure that we need not fully come to know that which, at a deeper level, we know perfectly well. Chronic, compulsive busyness alone — endlessly zipping from one supposedly necessary activity to another until one falls into the stupor of sleep — is enough to account for how lots of us manage to superficially trick ourselves into believing that we do not know what we know.

Although such chronic, self-imposed ignorance will almost certainly be accompanied by low-grade anxiety or other forms of mundane suffering (at the very least), things may hold together well enough until some shard of knowledge works itself into full consciousness like shrapnel pushing up through the skin. The usual response then is to drink more, work harder, exercise more, maybe even to meditate more. All in the service of beating back the intrusion of truth into a life that may, after all, have been clicking along well enough. But because reality is insistent, because it wants to be seen in all of its radiant, sometimes disturbing glory, efforts to eradicate it from view will only ever be partially successful. One’s commitment to willful ignorance must be dedicated and consistent, then, to even sort of drown out the nagging voices of truth well enough to permit life to proceed as usual. When we are no longer able to maintain the facade, then “things fall apart,” and a new reality begins to take form from behind the wizard-of-oz scrim that had previously seemed so normal, solid and real.

People like to excuse their head-in-the-sand ways by saying that ignorance is bliss. But if ignorance is bliss, then it’s the perverse “bliss” of passing out after an alcohol-infused party into a death-like sleep. It’s the “bliss” of being so caught up in the scenes of a frenetically-edited movie that the hours pass unnoticed and unbidden. It’s the “bliss” of identifying so strongly with the opinions and lives of other people that one’s own life is left to wander ghostlike and disconnected in the background. It’s the “bliss” of jumping from one meeting to another at work so that the gap between morning coffee and the cocktail hour seems to disintegrate. It’s the “bliss” of “leisure time” carefully structured into travel and tourism guaranteed to provide distracting novelty. It’s the “bliss” of indulging in a tightly orchestrated series of self-care and spiritual explorations, endless yoga classes, meditation workshops, and self-help books. In this context, such supposedly spiritual activities come to serve as “evidence” that one has decisively stepped off the hamster wheel of distraction and self-evasion even as one’s busy participation in them may actually be making the wheel spin faster.

After these many years since I betrayed myself in a dream by refusing the gift of self-knowledge, I have only one important epistemological takeaway: that “coming to know” has far more to do with being brave, curious and willing than with being smart or insightful. And although it’s obviously necessary to go seeking for certain kinds of relative knowledge — empirical facts are not reducible to intuition— as most great masters have pointed out, at some point, psychological and spiritual knowing becomes more about calling off the search and getting out of one’s own way than about acquiring and absorbing more and more. Part of why courage is so important in this endeavor is because when we welcome truth into the light of day, it often becomes impossible to continue living as we have been. When we begin to awaken, many of us experience hypocrisy and self-deception as soul-crushing, so it’s entirely understandable that we might postpone seeing the truth. Not for nothing does so much mythology/religion describe mortals who are vaporized when they get an unmediated glimpse of the gods.

But what makes it even harder is that most of us have other people in our lives who also have an investment in our remaining half-asleep. To put it bluntly, so long as another believes that their own happiness and well-being depends on your continuing to be who/where you are, it will probably be impossibly difficult for them to truly want you to awaken. This is simply because they falsely (in most cases) imagine that their survival depends on you remaining the same. But not only is it no favor to oneself to perpetually choose ignorance rather than reality, nor is helpful to others to enable their delusions of dependency.

In fact, I’m coming to believe that one of the most condescending, harmful assumptions we can make about other people is that we can, and should, “protect” them from truths that might catalyze meaningful change for them as well. And it’s especially noxious when we attribute such unilateral decisions to “protect” others to the love, compassion and duty we may feel for them. So, although, generally speaking, I think it’s true that others in our lives probably aren’t very eager for us to awaken, nor, it seems, do we want enlightenment for them either. Most especially (and perversely), perhaps, when it comes to those we claim to love the most.

If you’d like to be notified by email of new posts, hit the menu button above to find the subscribe link.