Actually, We Are All Innocent, at Heart!

Let us go back to the teaching of Dependent Origination. The first link on the chain is ignorance. This is not a culpable ignorance. For example, the driver who pleads that he did not know he wasn't supposed to drive through a red light. He ought to have known it. But if a child sets fire to a house, it would be hard for the court to convict him for an arson. Perhaps a better word is nescience, simply "not knowing".

Nescience is the state of not knowing that we all begin life with. What does the fetus or the new born child know? The development of that knowing is the flourishing of our pure awareness and intuitive intelligence. These are the 2 qualities of the enlightened mind, the Buddha within, which develops both gradually and in quantum leaps.

An obvious stage when we enter into a different level of awareness, a different way of relating to the world, is that passed by most 7 year-old kids. Although the child steadily grows in understanding, all of a sudden at 7, there are questions about Father Christmas coming down to a chimney. Imagination is a reality test. What is more as told in the myth of the Garden of Eden, we eat off the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Morality enters our lives.

Another stage is the introduction of sexual relationships in adolescence. A well known one is the mid-life crisis that can turn our world upside down. Each time there can be a sea of change in the way we experience ourselves, the world and ourselves in the world.

The Buddha's teaching is concerned to continue this process of transforming our understanding of ourselves and of ourselves in this world. That means, we need to go back to the root of the problem, from where it began. This, he identified as a mistake that the intuitive awareness makes at the very outset. It believes it is what it experiences. Eventually, this turns out to be the body and the psyche, our emotional and thought life. This is our essential delusion. We believe ourselves to be this psycho-physical organism.

Through the process of insight meditation, this psycho-physical organism is objectified in the same way that a new born child begins to learn that there is a world beyond itself. As the body and psyche are experienced not as part of a self but simply as a psycho-physiological process, the intuitive awareness comes to realize it is itself not that very same body or personality.

The belief of the intuitive awareness that it is the body and personality is the essential delusion. This leads into a dualism of relationship with the world. It experiences the world either as a heavenly real, or a pit of hell, though most of the time, somewhere in between. To feel safe, it needs to collect things. The more it has, the safer it feels, whether it be riches, fame, power or access to any pleasure. This is greed in it widest meaning of accumulation. Unfortunately, every hoard has to be defended against loss, whether through nature or predator. Defense mechanism are developed and when this fail, escape mechanisms. Hence, the fight-flight syndrome - which is called the aversion.

Although there are social norms of acquisition and protection of property, the fear of loss lies underneath our apparent safety. Hence, the huge insurance industry. Worse still that neurotic need we have to feel safe in a world that at the end of the day offers sickness, growing old and there comes death, can lead us to venal behaviour and even into criminality.

This growing intuitive awareness at some point comprehends that but for this mistake and an unblame worthy mistake it is for it did not know any better - it would never have done any harm. It sees clearly that it is therefore, at root, innocent.

Yet, paradoxically, it cannot divest itself of the responsibility of putting right that which, because of its delusion, it has done wrong. For it is responsible even tough not blame worthy. It cannot escape consequences of past unskillful actions, both within the body and heart mind and in the world.

That is why intuitive awareness can now forgo the need to be forgiven by another for it recognizes its own purity and of course, other do not need our forgiveness to achieve their purity of heart.