Chris and I attended a session with our Diamond Approach group in Atlanta this past weekend, and one of the things the teachers talked about were two kinds of ignorance inherent to the human condition: learned and innate.

Learned ignorance is all the conditioning we experience growing up in interaction with our parents and society in general. It is the conventional point of view that we have all sorts of limitations, certain things are worth pursuing and others aren’t, certain beliefs and ideas are better than others, we are each completely separate individuals, etc. Most of the ways in which this type of ignorance is expressed is in self-serving behavior, or self-centeredness. This type of ignorance is inherent to the human condition because it is unavoidable to some degree – no matter how wonderful our parents or community were when we were growing up. Learning to overcome this type of ignorance is a lifetime journey that I call personal development.

The second type of ignorance is inherent to the human condition as well. It is the ignorance of what we don’t know – about all things in general, as well as our potential as a human being. I gave a talk in the community where I live three weeks ago, and I titled the presentation “You don’t know what you don’t know about the aging process.” There is no truer statement than this, and yet my experience with other people is that they often think they know all there is to know on certain subjects – and thereby actually remain ignorant of a lot of information that could vastly improve their lives. This is a blissful type of ignorance that feeds the ego with all sorts of self-serving messages such as: “I am great,” “I am doing all that I can,” or “I don’t need to listen to that other person or read that article because I already know everything that is important on the subject.”

The truth is that almost all of us enter the last third of life with an extremely narrow view of reality. We simply don’t know a lot of things because the object of the middle third of our lives was to build a career, raise a family, put money aside for retirement, etc. We may have been an expert in one field or another, a “Captain of Industry,” a “Great Mom or Dad,” or a “pillar of the community,” but these are only very narrow slices of life – and not even the most important ones when we get older.

The fact is that most of us enter the last third of life with an exceedingly limited set of opinions, beliefs, and perspectives – and our knowledge is usually confined to only a small portion of reality. We most likely move into this stage sharing a fairly conventional view about how the world works while, at the personal level, we are likely to be relatively unconscious, defensive and resistant to change, and almost completely unaware of the conditioning that our egos and superegos have placed upon us.

We might be highly intelligent, but the expanse of our intelligence is miniscule compared to all there is to know of importance. Add to this the lack of development around our learned ignorance, and the lack of any societal understanding of what it is like to age in today’s world – and so most of us wander into the aging process with no idea of how to make it better, and don’t even believe we can.

There is a lot of societal inertia contributing to this state of ignorance. First of all, it feels good to think we are so smart and already doing all we can. It is obviously easier, because we don’t have to do anything new or challenging. It certainly doesn’t buck up against any societal norms, since the mass consciousness is soundly asleep – or at best lethargic. Also, most of us have been brought up to believe that we have to be “doing” something outside of ourselves in order to be productive – and many of us are good at this type of thing. So, as we get older we set up a workshop in our basements, take up knitting or some other craft, become an “artist,” play golf six times a week, volunteer, take a history class – the list of “doing kind of things” is almost endless.

There is nothing wrong with doing these things. If you enjoy doing something, then do it. But, if you want to overcome the ignorance I have described in this blog and make the most out of your remaining years, you also need to intentionally engage with some form of self-development, while opening yourself up to the increasing body of knowledge around the aging process and how to optimize it. Then it becomes a different type of doing, but a “practice” is still a form of doing – and so should be understandable to most people.

There are many forms of practice that will improve the quality of your life as you get older – positivity, brain-training, meditation, exercise, nutrition, gratitude, forgiveness, and the list goes on and on. However, it is my belief – that while all these things are also important – the most important thing a person can “do” is mindfully engage with every person, activity, experience, feeling, reaction, and so on that you encounter each day. This doesn’t require any additional time on your part – only a change in how you spend your time.

Instead of unconsciously going through the motions – thinking about where you have to be next, or what you would rather be doing – make each moment an inquiry into who you are and what you are experiencing. This form of practice only requires a change in mind, while providing the following benefits:

• Make your life much more interesting,
• Keep your brain cognitively sharper than any brain-training program,
• Decrease learned ignorance and create an increasingly greater self-understanding,
• It will eventually make you happier, and
• Improve the quality of your interactions with yourself, others, and the world around you.

Better yet – you can start doing this right now.

Love,  Dudley

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