The Spiritual Life - Where is innocence to be found?

The Spiritual Life - Topic Thirteen

Where is our innocence to be found?

From  Maturity: The Responsibility For Being Oneself by Osho

But you have to begin from being innocent. So first, throw out all crap that you are carrying—and everybody is carrying so much crap! One wonders, for what? Just because people have been telling you that these are great ideas, principles … 

You have not been intelligent with yourself. Be intelligent with yourself. Life is very simple, it is a joyful dance. And the whole earth can be full of joy and dance, but there are people who are seriously vested in their interest that nobody should enjoy life, that nobody should smile, that nobody should laugh, that life is a sin, that it is a punishment. How can you enjoy life when the climate is such that you have been told continually that it is a punishment, that you are suffering because you have done wrong things, and it is a kind of jail where you have been thrown to suffer?

 I say to you life is not a jail, it is not a punishment. It is a reward, and it is given only to those who have earned it, who deserve it. 

Now it is your right to enjoy; it will be a sin if you don’t enjoy. It will be against existence if you don’t beautify it, if you leave it just as you have found it. No, leave it a little happier, a little more beautiful, a little more fragrant. P .xxi

The basic question for homo sapiens from a metaphysical perspective is: Were you born with original sin or original blessing?

The Judeo-Christian teaching is that human beings were guilty of original sin and therefore doomed to suffer. People are taught that life is a punishment and can only be redeemed with the help of religion and clergy, ritual and sacrifice, and suffering. This metaphysical teaching is deeply ingrained in  the human psyche and gives rise to hypocrisy, cynicism, fear, and suffering.

This idea of original sin leads to the two basic human dynamics of separation and divisiveness which is “one or the other” and “give to get.” The idea of Unconditional Love, God, has been forgotten which we have been told repeatedly over the centuries by the mystics is our natural inheritance.

And so the most fundamental question of all is: Are human beings basically good or bad? Are human beings cursed or blessed?

The ego offers us all kinds of temptations promising to make us happy: money, special relationships, power, status and prestige. In the end we come to realize that all these promises are false. We come to realize that we don’t need any of these things of the ego world to be happy. The life we have been socialized and conditioned to believe will make us happy is all a Big Lie.

Osho teaches us that we have to throw all the crap of the Big Lie out. We have to reclaim our innocence which resides in merging with the non dualistic Oneness from which we have separated ourselves.

We long to go home to that from which we came. That’s where our innocence is to be found.