Only two kinds of people can truly and totally be content and glad to be alive.

One is ignorant. The other is innocent. What is the difference, you ask?

The ignorant mind hasn’t seen anything about life yet. It is oblivious. It is in a state where ‘ignorance is bliss’. Utter ignorance, ignorance to a level where one is ignorant of even being ignorant. I’ve been there – in fact a long time veteran. I’ve lived there for the first 15 years of my life. We often mistake childhood for innocence. But a child is not innocent. A child is just oblivious to the world. Some of us are adult children in that way – adults only because the body grows by itself without much deliberate effort from our end.

This ignorance is beginning-less, for it is the default state into which we are born, and we can know this to have an end. This end becomes evident by observing ourselves in our interactions with the world – we get triggered, form assumptions, opinions, beliefs and prejudices. As we rub against our surroundings and people, our assumptions get challenged, we find conflicting opinions and beliefs and it creates conflict within us. Although an ignorant mind appears to be conflict-free under some circumstances, it’s unconflicted nature is not inherent to it, but only a reflection of the situations around it. This is akin to feeling peaceful while sitting in a mountain cave. The peace appears to be of the mind, but it is borrowed from the peace of the mountains.

Then what is an innocent mind? It is a mind free of fear and anger – a mind free of judgement and fragmentation. It is a mind that has real integrity, unconflicted, moving as One. An innocent mind is not ignorant. Although the experience of an innocent mind appears very similar to an ignorant one, it is at the extreme opposite of the spectrum. I call this Being Home, not as a place to be but as a state of being to embody. An innocent mind is conflict-free by its very nature. This is not the state we start our lives with, for this has a beginning – one that is attained after an arduous journey. But it is end-less. It’s unconflicted nature is independent of what is happening around in the world. An innocent mind is unmistakably free, for it’s internal condition – the state of such a mind – has nothing to do with the situations it is in. It is akin to being peaceful even while standing in the midst of utter chaos.

Even with all the trouble that the world is going through, the ignorant mind is blissfully content. It lives in its own bubble, but that bubble keeps popping as it rubs against the world. The innocent mind is blissfully content too – for it sees no world separate from itself. It is a mind that has expanded so wide that it realises that the world is an extension of itself, that it’s expression into the world creates the world. It recognizes the innocence hidden in every other mind in the world, just like its own. By doing that, it evokes innocence in other minds around it. 

But for the vast majority of us, we see ourselves as neither of these. We aren’t blissfully content – far from it! The world doesn’t look like an expression of ourselves, but as a throne to be conquered or a struggle to be overcome. Instead of being ignorant or innocent, we act as an invader or as a victim. We are in a perpetual power play with the world – trying to get something or evade something. We are ambitious, violent even. We are the beggars of the world and we know it, just as the American singer Eddie Wedder writes in his song Society, ‘We have a greed, with which we have agreed…until you have it all, you won’t be free’. This greed is not always for getting something more, but also for preserving what we have. And yet free we can be right here, right now. No, even that is an understatement. We are free already – right here, right now. We’re just not used to seeing it.

The innocent mind has been through this as well, just as every mind must. But it sees imagination for imagination (which many of us recognize by the term conceptual thought) – and reality for reality, for reality not abstracted by imagination is simply an is-ness. All that can be said about it is that it is. And so reality merges with the mind itself, and out of that merging emerges innocence – for there is nothing separate from itself. No divide, no separation, nothing to conquer or evade. And that innocent mind is the mind truly capable of love, for once it has realised that the entire world is itself, it now has so much to give – it is full. Out of that fullness comes the sharing of joy which is real love.

This is the journey of every human being, from ignorance to innocence. You know where you are now. Wherever you are, all that you need to do right now is relax. Before you even know it, you’ll be somewhere else.

Loving you,

Rishi.