Innocence...

Innocence… 22
I think I saw this in a movie—A Jesuit priest in 1800’s goes to the Canadian wilderness to straighten out the brown people, the unfortunate heathens, and the Jesuit tells them of the hell-fire fury they’ll suffer if they don’t get on board, and this one aborigine, trying to follow the faith, asks if he’ll be punished for his sins before the Jesuit shoveled his truth at him, and the Jesuit said with brimming compassion, no no no God does not punish you if you don’t know they are sins, and the native said, logically, then why did you tell me?
The idea of an external God is a strange one, and the idea that God judges and punishes is stranger still, and the strangest is the idea of sin. Sin is such a judgmental word, but in innocence it just means missing the mark. We, collectively and individually, miss the mark when we take ourselves to be an image in thought.
In Hindu traditions, the ancients point to maya, the powerful delusion which keeps us identified with the false sense of self we create in thought, and the Buddhists point to dukkha, misery, which is the inevitable outcome of the delusion, and Islamic Sufis speak of the Now as a portal out of the delusion, and Jesus said, as directly as can possibly be said, that heaven is within you and not in some external God’s lap, and in this way most religions and spiritual traditions, when the fluff is gone, fundamentally point to the madness that we find ourselves in our attachment to thought.
I am not my thoughts.
All it takes is the simple insight. The whole problem is the deep identification with the mind. By mind and thought I  mean thoughts, emotions, conditioning, beliefs, desires and aversions.
I am not my thoughts.
With this simple insight, we begin to return to innocence.
It’s a beautiful word—innocence–it even sounds musical, starting out hard, susurrating away in the end.

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and  no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent. To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict. -Krishnamurti