your innocence

Can you sense your innocence?

The spiritual journey is a homecoming, a return to the essence. And one aspect of this essential part of our being is a fundamental innocence: the innocence of a newborn baby. And each of us has that within us, but most of us lose touch with it somewhere along the way. And so sensing it again, within oneself, is very much a part of the spiritual path. And here, I will explore a little more what we mean by innocence.

Of course, in human societies, we might think of innocence in relation to laws, and the breaking of those laws – did I steal that loaf of bread, or am I innocent of that? But the innocence that I speak of here really has nothing to do with man-made laws. It is something much more profound.

Innocence has to do with the simplicity of being. It is the opposite of cunning. It is the opposite of being clever.

As human beings, we usually learn to be rather manipulative. We might want something from another human being, and instead of just being able to declare that want in a very open, simple way – as a baby would, if it could speak – instead of that, we learn how to work with someone else's feelings until we hopefully gain what we want in a cunning way, indirectly. And in this, we lose our sense of innocence because there's a subtle deception at play. We feel we are going to gain what we want by being less than direct with the other person. Effectively, we are using them, manipulating them.

And that comes at a terrible cost, to the other person who has energetically been abused, but also to oneself, the manipulator. For it does not sit comfortably within us, to treat each other in this way. And so we have to start burying aspects of our psychology into that unconscious part of our mind, the shadow. And we defend our actions, with argument, trying to justify. And all of this removes the sense of innocence within oneself.

It is not really that the innocence is gone. There's something rather strange in human interactions: there are often antagonistic elements. We might feel we are in opposition to another human being, fighting them, perhaps angry at them, perhaps associating ourself with a different subgroup of humanity than the other. Perhaps I belong to a different nation state to you, and the nation states are warring. Or perhaps I identify with a particular religion which is different to yours, and perhaps that is enough for us to attack each other. There's an almost endless list of things that we as humans can use as the reason, for being hostile to each other.

But when I look deeply, I see underneath all of that, it is not that we really want to harm each other. That's not what's really happening deep down. Rather, we're like children, and we don't really know what we're doing.

So if we look deeply enough, we can see – inside oneself one can see – that fundamental innocence, that simplicity, and that place that does not wish harm on any living being; quite the opposite: that rejoices in life, in all its forms and manifestations. And coming back to this place within oneself, this place of innocence, there is with it an equal balance of the most profound joy and the deepest possible sadness.

Such emotions run so deeply within one. And perhaps it's the difficulty we have in bearing such deep emotions – in actually feeling them to the full – perhaps that is one reason why we shy away from this innocence, and put on masks of cleverness and adulthood.

But we can only hide from ourselves so long. Sooner or later, the yearning to return to who we are, overwhelms all else. And then we can return to sensing our innocence – the innocence of a newborn baby. For that is very much at the heart of our being.