Innocence Once Lost

We live in a world where we are taught that innocence can only be lost and never be gained.  One is forced to ask themselves then what is innocence? Is it just the lack of guilt or something else entirely? In society an innocent man can be perceived as guilty even though he has never committed a crime and the end result is the same as if the person had committed the crime.  Innocence is often used to describe a child which is a truth in many senses because of a child’s naivety towards the world.  Or maybe this innocence has to do with a child’s lack of guile in how they view the world, and the adult becomes sullied by its own biases towards different facets of life.  Possibly it is because as we grow older we are touched by many soiled hands and lose the feeling which we had when we were young the hope, the beauty of how we perceived the world.  People tend to think that we can simply open doors in our minds and decide we don’t like what we see and go back and shut that door, which in reality once a door is opened in our minds it can never be shut.  In part it is this fact that doors once opened inside cannot be shut again that is attributed to the fact that very few adults in a sense are innocent, if you have any doubt about this fact go ask an addict of any kind and see how easy it is to shut their doors which were opened.  Once a neuropathway is formed it simply doesn’t disappear because we want it to as a matter of fact in the case of addiction as taught by the 12 step program an addict must stop doing whatever they were doing for as long as they did it before their mental desire for their addiction subsides.  These actions some genetic scientist believe are not only never forgotten but are encoded into our very DNA and passed on to our young much like being saved in a flashcard and handed to our children.  Such is the same with knowledge in a sense knowledge while it enlightens a person and better helps their understanding of the world it also damns that person.  Knowing this how then can one hope or even care to feel innocent or good in this world.

To answer this question one must understand that we are in our nature innocent, and that we always were innocent.  The reasons for our original “sin” as it were, were always innocent in nature.  Ones quest for knowledge or gaining of knowledge muddied their innocence, while another’s was sullied because of their looking for an escape from the harshness of the world, while the another was for someone to like them, etc… Every conceivable problem a person could have was originally gained through an innocent naïve action, and all subsequent actions stemmed from it.  So in short one can find solace in that our innocence and naivety is what led us to the problem in the first place, and that once a knowledge of the naivety is gained and we move on with our lives we can be as we always were “innocent”.