Categories Of Ignorance

י'ה באדר ב' תשס"ח
Raven 16

Kabbalah teaches there are four categories of ignorance. They are passive ignorance, active ignorance, essential ignorance, and enlightened ignorance.

Passive ignorance is easy to understand and easy to come by. It's what fills a person's head after a lifetime spent in front of a television set. It is the inevitable and automatic outcome of doing nothing with one's mind.

The passively ignorant do not care to understand anything.

Active ignorance is commonly mistaken for knowledge, so that although we imagine that we go to school in order to fill our heads with wisdom, we are really there to exchange one type of ignorance for another. Active ignorance is particularly deceptive because it parades in academic (or religious) trappings. Moreover, it often reflects immense scholarly effort and occasionally, true creative brilliance. It is, nonetheless, false, and its effects are as pernicious as those of passive ignorance.

The actively ignorant think they comprehensively understand but they really don't. Their understanding lacks wholeness. The ultimate goal typical of both the secular and religious worlds is active ignorance.

Essential ignorance is achieved when a person becomes truthfully and sincerely cognizant that he lacks understanding. In contrast to passive ignorance, essential ignorance represents a relatively advanced state of self-comprehension. In Chassidic parlance it is described by the term bittul (self-negation).

The essentially ignorant are seekers of real truth who question the dogma chaining understanding to incompleteness. Essential ignorance contains the soul's "Moses principle" which drives individuals to throw off the shackles of common understanding and move toward extraordinary understanding and truth.

Enlightened ignorance surpasses knowledge and wisdom, it is not knowledge or wisdom, which is to say that it is a form of ignorance. However, unlike essential ignorance, which precedes knowledge, enlightened ignorance supersedes knowledge. It is the great "I don't know" as opposed to the simple "I don't know" of essential ignorance. Enlightened ignorance is as far as one's mind can take one in the quest for truth. Intellect, even of the highest quality, is, by nature, limited. The Divinity that is the foundation of existence, on the other hand, transcends limitation, definition, or description. Enlightened ignorance is the informed realization of this fact.

Enlightened ignorance sits in the crossroads at the interface joining Knowledge with paradoxically unknowable yet knowable Divine Awareness.