Innocence - virtue or incumbrance?

One of my favorite business contacts is John Simmons. I just took delivery of his book, Dark Angels - How Writing Releases Creativity at Work. John, as will be quickly seen from his writing, is an intelligent fellow, well read and articulate. From my experience of him over many years, he is a good and decent man at heart, and I would guess, a humanist. Here’s something from the beginning of Dark Angels:

“It’s a commonplace observation that descriptions of evil are most fascinating than descriptions of good. So, John Milton, writing Paradise Lost, makes a heroic figure of the fallen angel Satan even though the objective of his work was to demonstrate the power of God’s goodness. There is an aura about Milton’s Satan that none of the ‘good’ characters achieve. And part of Milton’s message, part of the attraction we feel as readers, is that Satan is an angel still: he has extraordinary powers of resourcefullness, invention and persuasion.

The question arises: would he have these powers, would he convey this attraction, without the opening up of his mind to other possibilities? Satan dared and failed, he had been ambitious for himself, seeing greater opportunities for personal achievement that those circumscribed for him by God. God condemns him for his overweening pride and ambition. But really, as a management consultant might suggest, was he just ‘thinking outside the box’?

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy explores these issues too. There struggle there is between an exhausted ancient deity known as the Authority - represented by the repressive forces of the established Church - and the life-affirming, humanistic impulses of those in opposition. Again, the angels are divided and our sympathies are engaged by the flawed dark angels. The struggle is against the good angels of the Church that seeks to keep people in a state of ‘innocence’ deprived of ‘experience’. Innocence is a state that deprives us of the possibility of making a choice between good and evil, or actually between thinking and not thinking, between feeling and not feeling. Having the choice is what matters: without it we are creatures without a real moral dimension. We remain creatures without experience, without the ability to think, reason and create.

We live in a world where the dark angels have lived. Perhaps we have become like dark angels ourselves. As a result, we have the ability to express individual personalities. Dark angels are symbols of that ability; they are not symbols of evil. If we fail to respond to their challenge, we retreat into a life of meek, unquestioning acceptance of our innocence role. We follow the unwritten rules of the organisation’s custom and practice, and we leave our emotional engagement for other times and other places. We fall into the working life of accepting that we have a limited desire or ambition to influence things, to imagine other possibilities, to fulfill ourselves, to achieve intellectual goals.”

Amazing stuff. The writing admirably illustrates the problem we have in communicating our message to the non Sahaj world, for without the direct experience of the bliss of Self-Realization, how can such people see for themselves the utter confusion and conceit within this kind of reasoning?

John refutes the desirability of innocence, and clearly he has no sense of its true meaning nor of the extraordinary powers it confers on people who are innocent. He is however, right up to a point, for the Garden of Eden myth, is not a story of good and evil, with the serpent being the devil come to corrupt the innocence of Adam and Eve, but rather a story of the feminine aspect of the divine wanting human beings to have the freedom to choose between right and wrong, for only in that way would we be in the true likeness of God, and of the male aspect, the logos, chronos form, wanting them to remain in the animal state. Presumably, the desire of the Adi Shakti power was that given a choice, they would choose good. But innocence, as I understand it, has nothing to do with remaining blind to reality, in fact, only through being innocent can we see reality, without it, all is illusion. John is widely off the mark in thinking that thinking ‘outside the box’ would necessitate an exploration of evil. In point of fact, of course, at heart, he doesn’t believe that there is evil, or if he does, he doesn’t appear to regard it as something inferior to good. He doesn’t seem to understand the respective differences, for how could one agree with the description of the angels of the Church that seeks to keep people in a state of ‘innocence’ deprived of ‘experience’ as good? The sad fact is, that in the 20th century, ‘good’ has had a bad press. Let’s hope that things will change for the better in the century to come.

In such chaotic thinking, the negativity gets into the heart of things, and turns the knife. For it is through such confusion, that its seeds are insidiously sown. Philip Pullman, is a well-regarded writer by the literary establishment, who writes ostensibly for children. He is also very popular amongst adults too. However, in this writer's opinion, he is the Western equivalent of Salmaan Rushdie, whose novel, The Satanic Verses, uses the fact that the prophet Mohammed, who could not read or write, dictated the Koran to a scribe, who playfully at first, starts to change the words of Mohammed. Pullman’s views are by far the more dangerous, for the effect of his writing is to attack the innocence of young minds.

Are we, as Sahaja yogis, “creatures without experience, without the ability to think, reason and create“? Clearly we are not the former, indeed the plethora of our extraordinary experiences, if we can find a way of expressing them in a form that would communicate them to the rest of humankind, could play a role in creating the environment that would bring about the desire for human beings to be enlightened, thence transformed. We don’t think too much, at least not in the random uncontrolled fashion of most people, but maybe we have to be able to find a way to express ourselves effectively to the rest of humankind? Can we reason and create? It is to be hoped that in time, yogis will produce works of art that will trail-blaze the new Jerusalem that our children will undoubtedly see. I am reminded of a comment, by Grégoire de Kalbermatten, that we are the foundation of the building, and foundations are always a bit roughly finished and eventually buried under the ground. But what goes on top of the foundations, the finished and polished work, is what people will see - our children and grandchildren.

I hope that some of us will write and offer a description of the joys and power of innocence and of thoughtless awareness.

I don’t think that the way to answer the inadvertent silliness and nonsense within writing such as the above, is to deal with it line by line, but instead, as Grégoire has so valiantly attempted, with his novel The Legend of Dagad Trikon, and now recently, Linda Williams with the first volume in her Keys of Wisdom trilogy, we need now to ‘set out our stall’ in the mainstream of society and to publicly stand up for what we believe in, what we know as truth, through the grace of our Holy Mother, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, the living God.

Jai Shri Mataji

Alan Wherry