Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Life is child's play

To truly live, we must find a way to maintain, manage, and nurture our own innocence. Keep in mind that innocence should not be confused with naiveté or outright ignorance, as those are things we should shed in our youth and not ever bring back from the dead. Innocence, as I am referring to it, is the way of seeing and experiencing life that most of us lose, or discard, as children. When we lose sight of the magic in the miniscule or the seemingly insignificant, we lose a valuable part of our perception.

When we give into the wholesale demands of conformity and the ages’ old prescription for adulthood that has failed the masses since before time was time, we consign ourselves to mediocrity and limitations. There is no reason to listen to the ever present “voices of reason”, the people who spend their tiny lives pounding the magic out of anything and everything they encounter. These people see innocence as a casualty of the maturity process, or as an obstruction to knowledge. They are mistaken.

When we can look upon the world with proverbial children’s eyes, but process what we see with the wisdom of an adult, we are on the cusp of transcendence. If we can believe in possibilities, recognizing, but not fearing, limitations, we bring the child’s hopeful aspirations in parallel with the adult’s cachet of experiential knowledge. Finding that cerebral-spiritual space where a pair of innocent eyes is feeding a seasoned and able mind is what sets people like Einstein, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, or Leonardo Da Vinci apart. Their child’s eyes were paired with minds capable of managing broad-spectrum input without putting too heavy a stain on the information being gathered. This allowed them to see differently, and go places where others were unable, or unwilling to go. Their children’s eyes gave them inspiration, and their minds gave inspiration direction. The only other thing we need is the courage to discard judgment and follow through.

The world itself is innocent and harmonious. Every organism on this planet is connected by basic needs. We all require water, some form of respiration, some form of sustenance, etc. It is Man’s intellectual arrogance that brings about almost all His disharmony. Our intellect is a tool, but it is not who we are. Who we are is more than what we think or what we say. It is what we do, where we go, how we conduct ourselves, and a million other things, all of which can be brought into a more harmonious balance if we are able to retain some of the innocence we are so often told must be sacrificed to the god Reality, which is in and of itself an individually conjured reality. The only reality we share, and thereby the only real reality, is life at its most basic functions. Whatever else we claim to understand is really nothing more than opinion and hypothesis.

Innocence should not be discounted or neglected. It should be harvested, nurtured, and protected as much as possible. Carrying a bit of innocence with us allows for optimism and creativity. Not only that, it grants us access to a more honest, less biased understanding of the world around us. Too much of the world we know is prescribed, rather than deducted. The only way to undo that teaching is to look on the world with fresh eyes and relearn what it means to be alive. Innocence is integral to that process.

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Posted by Erik @ 7/31/2007 10:03:00 AM