Is ignorance really bliss?

"The Good Brahmin", related by Will Durant . . .

The Brahmin said, "I wish I had never been born."

"Why so?" said I.

"Because," he replied, "I have been studying these forty years, and I find that it has been so much time lost … I believe that I am composed of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands … I talk a great deal and when I have done speaking, I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said."

The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions she thought herself the happiest of women.

Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed: "Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?"

"You are right," he replied. "I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire."

This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed. --The Story of Philosophy

If conceiving nothingness as such an emotional state was not an act of cognition itself, I'd be tempted to ask what could be wallowing in bliss more than the universe at large - so devoid of intellect and consciousness and organized memory (at least from the perspective of the anti-panpyschic materialist)?

But accordingly it is really just empty freedom as much as near-complete nescience... The absence of anything to interpret as true or false or good or bad or middle of the road, and liberation from desires / motives to either flee or pursue the former if they were present. Since conforming to mechanistic or statistically predictable activities and structures / fields "in the dark" is certainly not manifested existence or awareness or concern over knowledge. Just a stage of invisible puppets coerced to dance in choreographic routines by a bottom floor "magic" of laws, global regularities, or whatever governing maxims for a cosmos. Lacking even evidence for itself when minus a tiny handful of anomalies that emerge from it on insignificant planets; as undiscriminated, non-exhibited and non-inferred as a black cow grazing in a black fog from Victorian factories powered by coal.

I don't know is it ?
...perhaps is a matter of perspective...normally those who are blessed don't know anything about being so as they don't know anything else...I guess a grain of sand can be heavy on an ant's back...

Only sometimes for the enlightend the ignorence can be bliss.

But total ignorence is very bad, as you wouldn't be able to support youself nor fit into a highly developed society.