Meta Ignorance: Remembering and Forgetting

Part 5 of the Theory of Emanism Series

Here I’ll be talking as a goest and about invironments. A goest being a subjective, conscious observer and the invironment being the environment including my body, heart, and mind. I’ll be using the word ignore to mean fail to consider, and not pay attention to. I’ll use the word ignorance, a result of ignoring, to mean a lacking of knowledge, not understanding, and not being aware of. So if I say I’m ignorant because I ignore things, this isn’t intended as an insult

If I don’t pay any attention to something for long enough eventually I won’t fully consider it. In time I’ll forget it. At first I’ll forget small aspects, details, of it. Finally I’ll forget everything about it. It being whatever we’re talking about, from death to taxes, birthdays to passwords.

It seems remembering, forgetting and ignorance are processes. Biologically even the act of forgetting is an active process, involving dopamine. We tend to think of forgetting as something passive, something that just happens, not a thing that we actively do. However, as I said forgetting is an active process. An activity. Sometimes we activate the process of forgetting purposefully and consciously, sometimes we activate the process by accident, subconsciously.

Even ignorance is active process. In order to ignore one thing we must place our attention on something else. We can’t attend to nothing as discussed in Meta Nothing, until we learn about, and know, everything as discussed in the first part of Meta Ignorance. Anyway let’s get back to memory

Our memory is said to have three stages: encoding, storage and recall. Encoding is the learning of an experience, whether it’s learning what I had for breakfast this morning as I choose, make and eat it, or learning a long string of numbers or a password. Storage is what it says on the tin, the act of storing the learned experience in our memory banks. I don’t really know where we store memories. I have a suspicion it’s to do with microtubules and quantum biology, but I’ll get back to that later .

Recall is the act of remembering. It’s the opposite of dismembering in a sense. I piece together a memory from fragments into a solid whole. This recalled, remembered memory is then re-encoded as I learn about the experience from memory. I then store the memory again, strengthening and sometimes changing it, depending on what details we recalled.

When I ignore something, that has been encoded and stored, it disappears from my worldview, my view of reality, of my invironment. I’ve focused my lens to hide it. It likely hasn’t really gone from my invironment. It’s debatable whether it’s even left my mind’s storage. What’s near enough certain is that I haven’t got an accurate view of the invironment as I could have. This is a form of ignorance I’ve developed. Ignorance, the result of ignoring, defined here as lacking knowledge, not understanding and not being aware of.

I can ignore music, facial expressions, religious directives, movies, body language, laws, medical advice, racism, walls, whatever I want. Yet if I fail to consider these things, in all their depth, I lose out on information about my invironment. This information helps me navigate my invironment more successfully. This matters as I have skin in the game

So I can ignore anything in the invironment. It may, and probably will, still have an effect on me. I wouldn’t know what was causing that effect as I’d be ignoring it. I still would experience the effects, even if not consciously. This would lead to tensions due to the friction between what I think is happening and what actually is happening in the invironment around me. Meaning I couldn’t navigate, articulate my invironment as smoothly.

In short less ignorance is, in general, better. In general because it depends on my ability to handle, deal with and respond to each new piece of information. At first fighting my ignorance would lead to different ignorances. It takes time for me to understand the invironment deeply. It isn’t compounding, or growing, my ignorance, because I’m closer to knowing what actually is than before. It’s not more ignorance, only different ignorance. In most cases it’s slightly less ignorance, and so it’s marginally better, and the margins will grow over time.

But what if I ignore my progress and instead pay attention to, attend to, how I’m still mistaken at the moment? In this case I compound and grow my ignorance to a previous, marginally more ignorant point. This would happen because I ignored that my new ignorance was a form of progress. This could be in response experiencing the new information about my invironment in a low energy state. Like an emotional state such as exasperation and exhaustion. Hopefully I recharge, learn, remember and bounce back.

This is an interesting situation though. I’m no longer ignorant of what I was ignorant of. I’m aware of my ignorance. I’m now know I’ve been ignorant. I realise I probably still am ignorant in some way and I will be again in the future. It feels like the friction between myself and the invironment has increased.

It would seem like there is more resistance now I’m less ignorant, than when I was more ignorant. As we’ve seen this isn’t true, although it feels like it. What’s happened is that we’ve become aware of existing resistance. The resistance, the friction was always there. I couldn’t feel it before, but it was slowing me down, I was using more energy than I realised.

Now I notice the resistance I also notice how much extra energy I’ve used to compensate the for resistance. I probably over/under compensated for the resistance because I didn’t know what it was or what was causing it. I couldn’t feel it’s effects on me, I couldn’t see what was affecting me. So I most likely didn’t compensate in the correct way.

Now I’m aware of the resistance, and I can feel the effects I also feel more tired, exhausted, exasperated than I did when I was more ignorant. The good news is that now I am aware of the of what and where the resistance in the invironment I can attend to it , consciously compensating, removing friction, and lowering resistance.

I will find that I have more energy than I had before. The more ignorance I have about my invironment, the more friction will occur as I move through my invironment, the more resistance there will be between my invironment and myself, and the more stresses will occur in me, in the invironment, and in the relations, in the space, between the invironment and my goest.

This is the tragedy of ignorance and the reason I believe ignorance is the root of all suffering. But there’s also a beauty to ignorance, it’s better known as mystery. The beauty is the journey from, the exploration through, the learning about, the searching for, the getting lost in, the discovery of, and the falling for mystery. It’s also beautiful that while the truth may be too traumatic, too painful, for me to deal with I can always ignore it and forget it until I’m ready to face it. That too is a beautiful thing. Mystery: a tragic beauty in a beautiful tragedy, a comedy of errors in an era of terror.