BENGALURU: Innocence alone can be passionate. The innocent have no sorrow, no suffering, though they have had a thousand experiences. It is not experiences that corrupt the mind but what they leave behind, the residue, the scars, the memories. These accumulate, pile one on top of the other, and then sorrow begins. This sorrow is time. Where time is, innocency is not. Passion is not born of sorrow. Sorrow is experience, the experience of everyday life, the life of agony and fleeting pleasures, fears and certainties. You cannot escape from experiences, but they need not take root in the mind. These roots give rise to problems, conflicts and constant struggle. There is no way out of this but to die each day to every yesterday. The clear mind alone can be passionate. Without passion you cannot see the breeze among the leaves or the sunlight on the water. Without passion there is no love.
We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young- not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age- and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.
Life, living and action, is a very complex problem which, if you would understand, must be approached very simply. If you would understand a child, a complex entity, you must not impose upon it your conditioning; you must observe without condemnation. If you see a lovely sunset and you compare it with other sunsets you have seen, then the present sunset has no joy. To understand, there must be a mind that is simple, not an innocent mind, but that which perceives directly, and not translates it according to its conditioning. This is one of our major difficulties in the right approach to the comprehension of life.
I was thinking how important it is to be innocent, to have an innocent mind. Experiences are inevitable, perhaps necessary; life is a series of experiences, but the mind need not be burdened with its own accumulative demands. It can wipe off each experience and keep itself innocent, unburdened. This is important, otherwise the mind can never be fresh, alert and pliable. The ‘how’ to keep the mind pliable is not the problem; the ‘how’ is the search for a method, and method can never make the mind innocent; it can make it methodical, but never innocent, creative.
Let me put it differently: When the mind is free from the known, it is a new mind, an innocent mind; it is in a state of creation which is immeasurable, nameless, beyond time. And, we have been discussing, what it is that prevents us from coming naturally, easily, gracefully, to that state.It cannot be invited because a petty mind cannot invite the immense. All pettiness has to come to an end, and then the other is. The mind cannot imagine that state of immensity. From its pettiness, from its shallowness, it can project something which it thinks is beautiful, but that which it projects is still part of its own ugliness.
The psychological structure of society is what we are. When the structure is understood and there is freedom from it, then the nameless, that in which there is no time, no progress, comes into being.Then the other is.