Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Confront Your Own Ignorance
Today's Exercise: Confront Not Knowing
1. On a sheet of paper (it is important to the exercise that you actually write this down) write down the answers to these 3 questions :
What is wrong with the political system in your country?
What is wrong with the global economy and whose fault is it?
What is wrong with your least favorite social or political group?
(You are not going to show this list to anyone so you might as well be as nasty about this as you want to be. The important thing is to state completely what your complaint is and be totally honest.)
2. Look at the answer to your first question. Where did you get that answer? In all likelihood, you are not an expert on the intricacies of governmental policy. No one person is. That is why government has whole departments. If we did not need them, we could just have a king and leave it at that. There are, in fact, very few people who can say that they are experts in governmental policy and those guys don't even agree as to what the problems are. The truth is that the state of politics is horribly complex and you don't know why much of anything is the way it is. It has not stopped you, however, from having an opinion about it. Consider where your opinion really came from?
3. Look at the next item in the list. If you don't understand politics, you surely don't understand global economy. Do you know what a credit default swap is? How does the Grecian debt default effect the Euro and why is the valuation of the Euro important to the price of beans in your country? If you don't know the answers to these basic questions, you have no idea why the global economy is the way it is. One thing is for certain, it cannot be reduced to the one or two sound bites that make up your opinion on the subject. Where did you get your opinion and is it really your opinion?
4. Look at the last item on your list. Is the group that you have a problem with an "us" or a "them"? Odds are that it is a "them" and this means that you are not an insider to that group. Do you know what it is to be a member of this group with which you have a problem? Do you know what it is to be a black male or a white Evangelical? If you don't, how could you actually "know" what you are talking about? The odds are that you don't, but it has not prevented you from having an opinion just the same.
5. Spend 5 minutes contemplating the following:
When you don't know something you speculate and formulate a speculative opinion.
When you speculate, you hold your speculation to be fact even though it is fantasy.
When you don't know something, you are really vulnerable to the opinions of others and the odds are they don't know what they are talking about either.
You can be easily conned into animosity, anger and hate when you do not know about an important subject that effects you.
Most of the animosity that you feel in your entire existence is over things that you do not truly know about.
6. What would happen if you just lived in a space of "I don't know about that"? First of all, how would it feel once you got past the fearfulness?
7. Consider that not knowing is better than living with a hateful superstition.
Training Note:
There is nothing easier to manipulate than a mob of unknowledgeable people. You can get a mob of the ignorant to start wars. You can get a mob of the ignorant to abuse targeted social groups. Ignorant people can be fed opinions that feel good to them, but are not based on fact. You can get them to murder Jews. You can get them to starve children to death. The history of the human race proves that the most dangerous force in the human condition is ignorance that is undistinguished as ignorance. When you don't know that you don't know something, you are far more dangerous to others because you mistakenly act with certainty. We only kill when we think we know what a thing mean. Consider that the chaos of the rapidly changing Information Age is not really being caused by things being wrong, but by people believing that things are wrong because they do not truly understand them. Apocalypse is born of ignorance, not clarity.
Karmic Benefits:
Knowing That You Don't Know Is Not Ignorance: most of us know that we don't know how to do brain surgery. This is a very good and useful piece of information that prevents us from cracking open each other's heads to try to fix them. Because we don't know, we go looking for answers outside of ourselves. We consult experts like brain surgeons who do know about brain surgery. Knowing that you need a brain surgeon is almost as valuable as being a brain surgeon because it gives you a clear path to the knowledge that you seek.
Not Knowing That You Don't Know Makes You Doubly Blind: when we don't know that we don't know we are completely lost. We take action without information, skill or clarity. We do huge damage because our actions are nearly random responses to a specific set of circumstances. Three hundred years ago, everyone thought they knew that crop failures were caused by women in their villages practicing witchcraft. They murdered these women by the scores. What will we figure out a hundred years from now that will make us look equally foolish. There will be many things that we did not know that we did not know that will cause history to remember us as fools.
Even A Blind Man Can Make His Way Down The Street: knowing that you do not know gives you power to adapt to your circumstances. Just because you cannot see does not mean that you cannot be functional. Knowing that there are unseen factors in your world allows you to proceed with caution, but proceed just the same. We are then free to adapt to our blind spot and work around it. You don't need to know what is in gasoline to know that you shouldn't drink it.
Share Your Experience:
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