Ignorance

THE CONTEXT OF NOT KNOWING

We should very clearly make a distinguishment between nescience and ignorance, so that people fully understand the difference between these two concepts. There's two contexts to not knowing something, the first context is nescience. Nesciere in Latin means not to know, to not know, to not understand, but there's a connotation to it. It means to not understand because the specific information that you may be having a desire to understand is completely absent, it is not present and you cannot actually aggregate that information.

It's unattainable. This should be clearly delineated from ignorance. Now, nescience is not someone's fault. The information just isn't there. You can't be blamed for nescience. There is no blame in nescience. The person who is nescient is not to be blamed for being nescient. The information simply wasn't present so they could take it in and then come to understand it.

Ignorance carries blame. This is another thing people want to think in the new age movement there's no such thing as. "Nobody's to blame." That goes to that "there's no cause for anything that's happening," as you'll read a lot in the new age circles. I very strongly put down these notions or attempt to. There are causes and effects; there are people who are responsible for what is happening. There is blame. Blame exists. There are people who are culpable. So ignorance has blame attached to it and responsibility attached to it. Nescience means not to know, but in a completely different connotation. The connotation of ignorance means; you don't know even though necessary information is present and right there before you because you have willfully refused or disregarded that information.

Whether you've refused it because it made you uncomfortable or whether you disregarded it because you felt "that's not important for me to know, I don't need to know that." Or you feel you already understand something that contradicts with the new thing you're hearing or seeing. When you willfully disregard something, if I wanted to willfully disregard the gentleman sitting in the front row, he's present, I could just pretend he's not here and ignore him. That's what ignoring is. This is why I try to say to people the impact of the word is the almost lost to us of the word ignorance because of the way it's pronounced.