To begin to challenge innate ignorance means learning to recognize something that we don’t even have a category for. It’s just like seeing something exotic for the first time. You see it, you experience it, but if it is subtle or is there all the time, you don’t recognize what it is. You don’t realize the significance of what you are seeing. For example, people from temperate climates who visit far northern areas see snow as simply snow. The natives, however, live with snow most of the time and are familiar with many variations of coldness, dryness, texture, and density and thus see many different forms of snow, hardly considering them all to be one thing called snow. Only over time, and with the demands of experience, would the newcomer be able to recognize snow in all those variations. – The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, ch. 10
A lot of people believe that hatred, power, and aggression will bring us peace and freedom—but it doesn’t work that way. That kind of ignorance is very difficult to dispel. But the fact is, any kind of ignorance is difficult to dispel. When you believe something is true, many people can tell you that it’s incorrect, but you don’t believe them. You keep behaving as if it were true, because you really believe it is true.
So our learned ignorance underlies much of our inner activity and our external actions. A common example is comparative judgment. We think we know what is good, what is bad. We imagine that this is what should happen or that is what should have happened. These suppositions are based on the ignorance that we call knowledge. Not only do we believe we know what should happen, we also think, “I know how to bring it about. I just need to visualize some kind of angel or deity” or “I need to get involved politically, meditate more, breathe more consciously, deepen my inquiry, feed the hungry, go back to school . . .” It goes on and on. – The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, Ch. 10