How do we find our lost Innocence?

The concept of innocence is nothing but seeing everybody else as innocent, without any judgement.

The simplest way to do this is to go back to our own birth and see everybody in the same manner. At one point in our lives, we were all helpless babies in our parents’ arms. If we can rewind our lives and come back to that sense of innocence, we will find that same self in everybody else.

What we call wisdom is actually what makes us lose our innocence. We observe everyone and everything with caution, judgement and suspicion. We live within our sense of identity. We see ourselves as such-and-such person, and form our identities with respect to our parents, our city, our country, our religious denomination, what makes us different from others... To be innocent, we need to lose all these bonds of identity and merge and harmonize with nature. When we are able to do that, then we will be truly innocent.  

In reality, innocence is an awareness: that we don’t know anything. For example, if we go to a horse show and are asked to judge the horses, what will be our response? That we don’t know anything about horses, so we can’t be a judge for the horse show. Similarly, what do we know about human beings? Why do we judge them at all? It is this realization that takes us back to innocence.

Children are innocent because they don’t have the guile to judge something or someone. They cry when they feel like it and laugh when they want to. They say exactly what’s on their mind irrespective of who is listening to them. But as we grow up, we analyse everything with logic and reasoning, and that’s how we lose our innocence.

So let us rewind and come to the realization that we know nothing. This will bring us to a form of complete freedom, which, in turn, will bring us back to innocence.