Resilient Innocence

Resilient Innocence - Notes (very in progress, yet to be made into experiments)

- This is in some ways an attempt to rehabilitate innocence –not as ignorance or fantasy world.

- Resilient innocence is asking the obvious questions, to allow incomprehension to lead me back to the very big questions, the
fundamentals, the unknown – and ultimately into contact with non-verbal reality. It is the ability to ask: What Is This? To look underneath assumption, expectation, boxes. It allows me to toggle between my box and being, and seeing another's box and being.

- What kind of harm comes from the survival strategy of hiding innocence for what we imagine is an adult ‘worldliness’ which only means to take as true the apparent reality created by the status quo?

- That which would endanger our innocence (war, cruelty, environmental destruction) has won if we hide our innocence from the world, affecting jadedness, 'coolness', to

- If we allow our innocence to meet the corrupted ‘reality’(i.e. capitalist patriarchal empire) superimposed over what Is, the contact produced the spark that forges resilience. Innocence must meet the X on the map of collective culture in order to understand the end-game of unconsciously living life.

- Innocence has a translucency of vision, awide-eyed-openness – it is what is in contact with the divine, what can reel
us, rock us, in overawe. It’s the capacity to experience what we will never encompass, never own, never posess, never be in possession of. It’s a condition of Being without presumption.

- Resilient innocence means a refusal to get rid ofour innocence – using anger to defend it. Refusal to have it turned into
weakness, or a pretext for being rescued. It is understanding that it is a necessary state of receptiveness which enables us to receive the world, to receive others. To be disabused of innocence too soon, is to have the right to be knocked
sideways by a first impression knocked out of us, and thereafter to be separated from the immediacy of our five body responses. To preserve this innocence is to uphold my authority as the locus of

- Resilient innocence means never putting ones sword away - IN ORDER to keep softness. The softness is protected by the sword.

- There are people who have a lightness – the ability encompass, enjoy, the extraneous, the superfluous – that which can’t be put to use – an inclusive eye that doesn’t only see what’s necessary for survival, but relishes life (...for its mystery/ wonder? How do I describe this quality in people?). To know we are part of/ an expression of, the universe's desire to see itself evolve.

- What is beauty for? And then there is the survival strategy which denies all of this – mere child’s play, pointless. This version of being 'grown up' jettisons whatever cannot be assimilated (or culls beauty for what can be monetised, commoditised)

- Innocence is the severing of money from value, putting a gap between the two so that value can exist outside these systems.

- Resilient innocence means choosing to give in a world which will deem me exploited, an idiot, if I don’t put a monetary value on my time. It’s holding a different context that means it’s impossible for me to be exploited – to move beyond scarcity.

- It also means having the capacity to stop flowing my energy and time, for no reason and without drama, when I need that for myself.

- Resilience is being realistic about my body, and its need for rest/ nourishment. It also means taking radical responsibility looking after myself, especially when I am giving to others, to ask for what I need and do what I need to do.

- Innocence is the ability to see anew, to lookunderneath belief, words ,received wisdom. A state of receptive practice,
experimentation – encountering the world, encountering people we’ve known for a long time, and still be able to be struck by their unknowability.

My own attempt to push away the harshness of modern culture was to guard my innocence by living in fantasy worlds. There, the world was not harsh, ugly, brutal, or indifferent. But what happened was that I lost a sense of possibility that the qualities and context I wanted could exist anywhere other than in my fantasy world.

I ‘protected’ my innocence by hiding knowledge. If I seemed to have no resilience, then I would not have to let go of my innocence. If innocence is equated with ignorance = then I deny womanhood. I deny others the possibility of uplifting me by acknowledging my power. This means I am in an inauthentic relationship with my capacities.

Tarnish on contact. There was, on my side, a violent rejection of that which I felt rejected by. Living in a fantasy world
increases impotence, increases a state of unresolvable shock/horror - trauma never moving past the point of 'trigger'. If I live there, I cannot grow the resilience to move through life, planting seeds for something different. I’ve deemed the soil infertile, lost allyship and lost a sense that others might want something similar. In my fantasy world, I become something ‘other’ than what is – an extraterrestrial who cannot survive in an alien environment. I am “in this world, but not of this world” – waiting for the second coming, deliverance – to be one of the chosen. In a sense, it is to believe I’m made of finer stuff. The delusion, superiority, of a kind of sensitivty which cannot bear touch with the world (which in my supersensitivity I equate with modern culture) lest I be incinerated with it. The preference to be incinerated rather than lose my innocence introduces the possibility of suicidal despair if I cannot cavitate a space for any other kind of culture than modern culture. Unitiated innocence means I am a fish out of water, gasping for breath, any time I'm pulled out of the insular world of daydream.

- Refinement, elegance, order – I wanted these, but the capacity to build them, give them form and substance, is
actually a real world skill. One where imagination must come in contact with the raw materials – so that something can be made from nothing.

Resilient innocence is a creative state, it deals with Matter, not fantasy. It wrestles with stuff (get muddy, get real,
play in the dirt, get cold, get lost – find my edges and teeter at them).

The innocence I mean is not the social myth that seeks to propagate a fantasy of childhood as one free from pain, rather a
state connected to the earth and each other – which resources us with groundedness and connection so that we can understand that to live and feel with any intensity is to welcome pain.

The fantasy of life without pain is a conspiriacy of silence which adults forge against children – a silence about
what adults really do to each other and the world, and a preference that children
be coddled out of access to the feelings which would help them to expose the lie. The
conspiracy of childhood innocence is an excuse to lie – to create a profound
cognitive dissonance for children who are told one thing but experience
another. What use, then, is our feeling?

This is rather that the innate interconnectedness experienced by many children – at least at birth – can dock
into the central intelligence of adults who haven’t closed themselves to thesame truth.

- To be innocent, in law, is to be Without Blame – and therefore to be exempt from consequence. To be without knowledge of
crime means being unable to commit one? We want to stay innocent to be beyond blame. Agency must be acknowledged if we are to upgrade/initiate our innocence. We give up agency when we insist on retaining innocence to serve FEAR.

We replace innocence with anxious awareness, which is not resilience. Knowledge without the possibility of
taking responsibility for changing what is …

- - Verbal proficiency – and then dexterity –gives resilience to innocence. It makes the verbal world – the lies, stories of
others, transparent. Resilient innocence can expose false logic, scrape back the crud of specious talk, know when we’re being manipulated, and find what is beneath the attempts to disguise it.

- To make innocence resilient, there must be acknowledgement or acceptance that we live in a world where culture is made of language. Relationships are forged through it, we make ourselves known by what we say, and how we say it.
It’s knowing that our Word is a commitment. A naïve, unconcscious, uninitiated innocence would eschew this, wanting to sever the bond between promise and action, word and deed. Unititiated innocence deals in generalisations, pablums, spiritual puffery, placebos and placations. Specificity is an acknowledgement of the power of language –a utiliation of the extent of this power. Not using language to evade, but to point to reality. (To use language to become resilient means tying it to detail. Seeing what happens when you commit to make the words you use match what Is. The achievement may only ever be approximate, a reaching, but there is a vast difference between this effortful alignment, than using language on auto-pilot.

- The cost of remaining innocent of one’s underworld is.…