Existential Innocence, October 16, 2004

You know, you can’t think your way into the Divine. You can’t get there through strategy. Strategy is inherently dishonest. You can’t make a deal with the Divine to become it. The whole idea is: all deals are off. All deals are off and what you approach it with is that remarkable sense of innocence that knows nothing. Do you follow?

Human beings have invented these strategies of redemption; that you need to be redeemed. Only something dead or dying needs to be redeemed. That whole game of redemption, salvation, being saved, is created by a paranoiacally driven intellect, by a being that has been gripped by imaginative fears. It’s one thing to merge into God because you adore God. It’s a whole other thing to think you can merge into God, or be saved by God, because you either deserve it or because you need to be rescued from your guilt and sin. Those are completely different movements.

A human being who adopts the philosophy that he needs to be saved really does need to be saved. But what he needs to be saved from is the whole framework that he is absorbed [in] to make him think those kinds of thoughts. That life, that has absorbed those fictional ideas, needs to be deconstructed in honesty, into a state of existential innocence, from which all real spiritual progress begins. Existential innocence is the starting point for all real spiritual progress.