“The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.”
These words are that of the British analytical philosopher, Sir Alfred Jules Ayer. He is touching on an aspect that I consider to be the reason for a lot of misery in this world: IGNORANCE. How debilitating the tendency of humanity to opt for the ignorant outcome; how nauseating the mere fact of seeing so many people who, on a daily basis, live their lives being driven (and dominated) by ignorance.
Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Harithi al-Baghdadi al-Mufid (an Iraqi scholar and jurist), who lived in the 10th century, said that no tool is more beneficial than intelligence and that no enemy is more harmful than ignorance, and this is very true.
Lama Yeshe (a Tibetan lama) is of the opinion that the basic nature of the narrow mind is ignorance; a narrow mind is negative and such a type of mind gets agitated very easily by many things. He wants us to make our minds as broad as that of an ocean because in the same way that the narrow mind rejects, so the broad mind will accept.
It’s difficult to get someone to move out of his/her state of ignorance, but let us persist in showing others the negative nature of ignorance and dispel the destructiveness of ignorance. This can be done through educating yourself and those around you, by making your mind an ocean and not a narrow pathway which restricts your movement and impels your sense of direction. Do not let ignorance be your bliss…
Ignorance, you rampantly run around all nations,
creating so many unnecessary complications.
Can you not see that you don’t contribute,
in our attempt to do only that which are good?
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