Mere Ignorance and Learned Ignorance

Feel free to stop bloviating on the ins & outs of unchecked aggression and the what-have-yous of geopolitics, and stick to what you know best, Bob, which is nothing. 

Point well taken. As a multi-undisciplinary vertical slacker, I like to think I know a little nothing about everything. Which is just knowing that the best conceivable map is never the territory -- certainly including theological maps. Eckhart, for example, speaks of God and the soul as mutual abysses of infinitude, and 

taught a form of negative mystical anthropology in which God and soul are ultimately one because both are radically unknowable.

So, "striving to know God... is a constant pursuit of what is by definition unattainable," but this "unknown-knowing keeps the soul constant and still on the hunt." 

Every morning we try to bring back a little nothing from from this hunt for the unknown, starting from nowhere, for "There must be stillness and silence for the Word to make itself heard." 

Nevertheless,

Though it may be called an unknowing, an uncomprehending, it still has more within it than in all knowing and comprehending outside it, for this unknowing lures and draws you from all that is known, and also from yourself.

It lures us so long as we establish diplomatic relations with the Divine Attractor. Or rather, vice versa, for "the eternal birth of the Word from the Father is actually 'now born in time, in human nature.'" 

We must distinguish between two forms of ignorance, or between "mere ignorance" and "learned ignorance." What we know is always dwarfed by what we don't, so "from knowing one must come into unknowing":

Then, we will become knowing with divine knowing and then our unknowing will be ennobled and clothed with supernatural knowing.

It's as simple as making a space of unknowing for the reception of the higher unknown -- or of making a space of darkness for the reception of light. You don't light a match to look for the sun. 

We all have a key to the door that opens to the luminous and noble peace of the desert.

Speaking of which, "one must become as empty and bare as the desert," maybe even be the desert. 

Or, from a Jewish perspective, we are always on-the-way in the desert bewilderness:

The wilderness is not just a desert through which we wandered for forty years. It is a way of being. Even if just for a moment every now and then each day. For it is the only way to begin.

And that must surely be why He brought us out there. For there and only there might we be able to encounter the mystery.

Oh, and if "The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery" the second mystery must be that we are open to it, and that "Spiritual awareness is born of encounters with the mystery."

Which sounds similar to Eckhart's path of no path:

Leave place, leave time, / Avoid even image! / Go forth without a way / On the narrow path, / Then you will find the desert track.

"'God is a God of the present." And to go back to Jewish mysticism, 

Entrances to holiness are everywhere. / The possibility of ascent is all the time. / Even at unlikely times and through unlikely places. / There is no place on earth without the Presence (Kushner).

So, give us this day our daily... what then? Does this post have any practical purpose or advice? Well, every day I spend half an hour trying to follow the wayless way of the pilgrim, in a kind of radical openness to come-what-may. I just try to show up and let God take care of the rest. Or, to paraphrase the Aphorist, the only sensible thing to do is to keep pestering God with our prayers. I don't know what else to do, much less not-do.

(Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing.)