Be The Plus

An amazing young person once asked me, “If you had to choose one of these two options, which would you choose:

• Being ignorant but happy
• Being knowledgeable but miserable?”

Would you like to be blissfully unaware of all the many, many problems in the world or would you like to be aware of them, despite the suffering it brings? Which would you choose?

So often in life we are given a false choice between two options. We should always ask ourselves, “What if there was a hidden third option?”

My answer is the secret third option – Being wise and happy. 

To the untrained eye, there is very little difference between people who are ignorant but happy and those who are wise and happy. To the untrained eye, there is no reason to suspect that a secret third option even exists. 

Typically, when we are very young, we are in awe of the world and in constant amazement of its potentialities. Always discovering new things, always being stimulated. For most of us, it is a happy time. Yet we are blissfully unaware of so much. We are so pure ourselves that we tend to see the pure and the good in others. Rather than ‘ignorance is bliss’, I personally think ‘innocence is bliss’ is more accurate.

However, as we grow older we come to an awareness of how much suffering there is in the world. So much hurt, so much unfairness, so much negativity that we cannot explain or fully comprehend. We see the unfathomable lows of which our fellow human beings are capable. We see so much darkness around us in the state of the world. It seems like the more we know, the more miserable we become.

But there is a higher level. There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. When we stop seeking knowledge and instead cultivate wisdom, we become open to the possibility of reaching the third level. It involves training our minds to overcome suffering and learning how to do so systematically. It involves learning how to focus on the beauty all around us rather than the pain. It involves learning how to access the deep mental contentment that arises out of the silence whenever we need it. 

Being wise is very different to being knowledgeable. Knowledge can be positive, neutral or negative; very often it can drain our spirit and increase our suffering. Wisdom, however, is purely positive. It helps us to accept the world for how it is and to see the beauty in it. It helps us to find a deep, authentic happiness despite the world’s teeming imperfections.

To a knowledgable person, there are no obvious differences between a blissfully wise person and a blissfully innocent person. From the outside looking in, they appear remarkably similar. But the wise person does not turn a blind eye to the problems all around; they learn to overcome them, to rise above them and to be a force for good despite those problems.

We are free to choose who we become. We can choose to cultivate wisdom. If we do so, then we have the power to choose to rise beyond the misery of knowledge and to embrace the happiness that organically emerges from the flower of wisdom.

The world has enough problems, so we should choose to be its solutions.

Innocence is bliss, knowledge is pain, wisdom will be bliss regained

Soulpuller