What is a Treasure That has been Lost?

What is a treasure? The sense of its loss, if any, will relate to the value and its use to us. The loss is experiential, and experiential alone!

There are as many ways to define treasure as there are men. Some believe that ‘The man who has God for his treasure has all things in One.” There are others who follow the call of their heart and remind us that  “Wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.” While many value the physical possessions, the riches and the opulence as the objects of supreme desire, there are many others who value love and affection as the most gratifying sentiment of their  lives.

And there are some who ever repent the loss of time and opportunity? They live in perpetual misery, visiting and revisiting and constantly reminding themselves of the endless ways they could have made their lives better. There couldn’t be a more ingenious way to enjoy misery. 

And yet there are some who question the very concept of loss. For them life is a zero some game. There are neither losses nor gains, neither successes not failures, neither attainments not failings. Each one is only the other side of itself. To them the proposition of a treasure lost is both inane and irrelevant.

The laws of nature suggest that Humans evolve. The same incident, the same sight, the same sound evokes endlessly differing thoughts, emotions, reactions. A beggar in tattered clothes in an unkempt decaying frame with a begging bowl, engender disgust, misery,  compassion, pity, depression and empathy to different people. Some volunteer to help, some rebuke. This diversity of reactions questions the very concept of a treasure. 

And yet each one of us treasure some thing or the other. The royal his splendor, the yogi his solitude, the miser his riches, the young their beauty, the learned their knowledge, the brave their pluck. Treasure and its love, passionate and uncompromising, is then a natural phenomenon, to be accepted and cherished in a manner that gratifies our senses, mind, intellect and emotion.

Could ignorance be a treasure? Ignorance and innocence are not far too apart. And yet there is a difference between the ignorance of a child and that of a vainglorious bufoon. Ignorance of one kind is bliss, that of the other kind, an ugly display of a dark dirty side. A child like ignorance is indeed a treasure, a treasure that enriches like no other and one that grows in spontaneity and purity. It is the loss of this treasure that I lament.

280 years ago in 1742 when Thomas Gray in his poem “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”, wrote “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”, the context was different. But taken metaphorically, its value is beyond compare, even today.

If only Adam and Eve had lived in ignorance, and not tasted the forbidden fruit, as the Old Testament would have us believe, the world perhaps would have been a far serene and blissful place, and not one of danger and shame. If only Gautama had not sat under the Bodhi  tree (Tree of knowledge) to meditate after having resigned to his ignorance, he would not have emerged as Buddha, the Enlightened One. A perpetual sleep-walk of acquired knowledge could have been his destiny. 

So why eat from the tree of knowledge? Why meditate under the tree of enlightenment? The answer, most would argue lies in the antonym to ignorance: knowledge. If ignorance is bliss, then knowledge is power.

In other words, ignorance is weakness in a world where survival requires strength. Is it indeed?

Life is a crazy, mixed-up crystal ball of contradictions that we’re forced to understand and unravel as we navigate through it. We may also lose as we win and become poorer even after amassing untold wealth. The bliss of ignorance as experienced in our childhood is unlike any other treasure. It nourishes and nurtures a pure, pristine. Unsullied, undefiled soul still not overcome by an insatiable quest that has never seen nor ever see an end nor finality. 

Loss of ignorance is Paradise Lost.