Page 190 of
Print Edition The Restoration of Innocence

It is now an opportune point to put an end to our evasion and exclusion of innocence and their world.

Although mechanists have until now been misunderstood we are nevertheless familiar with them and their world. Holists on the other hand have had their existence and world evaded or, if we couldn’t evade them then we made them so exalted — surrounded them with so much religiosity — that we distanced ourselves from them, alienated them from our presence anyway. Until now the world of innocence has criticised our lack of innocence and so we have preferred not to think about it. Now that our legitimate exhaustions are defended we can and must consider and foster the innocence that resides both in ourselves and in others. It is the way out for humanity.

The truth is, exceptional innocents or prophets were neither superior nor supernatural beings but people like ourselves with their own particular encounter with the human condition to contend with. Prophets and innocents in general can now be recognised, understood, humanised and brought into our presence. As we have to rehabilitate our soul so we have also to rehabilitate its manifestation which are those among us who are innocent.

To take the first step towards demystifying and restoring innocents, it is necessary to explain the life of exceptional innocents or prophets.

In the first place innocents did not knowingly set out to reveal the truths in our evasions. Someone innocent of the battle associated with the human condition had no need to be evasive and so, not experiencing the need for evasion or knowing the reason for it, naturally resisted adopting evasion. The effect was that the potential prophet listened to what his conscience said and not to what those around him said. Doing this was harder than it may seem because, being innocent, he would not be aware initially that those around him were being evasive. HePage 191 of
Print Edition would trust us, presume us sound, since he knew of nothing else, and we, having to evade the fact that we were exhausted from the battle, could not tell him we were no longer sound. We could not tell him that we were ‘false’ and that he should not trust us.

When we were exhausted we evaded, blocked-out, the fact. Alienation was a very real thing. It was unaware of itself. If we were aware of our state we would not be alienated, we would not have blocked out the fact of our lack of innocence. Being alienated meant that we were not inclined to be aware of innocence and its world. In these circumstances we were often unaware that we needed to defend/explain or even admit our exhausted state. Evading the fact that there was another ‘ideal’, integrative state we all too often saw our embattled state as being natural for humans and therefore self-evident to others. On the few occasions when we did realise our situation (such as when we were unavoidably confronted with innocence whether in the form of an innocent person, an innocent act or an innocent/unevasive thought) we were unable to defend it anyway and so had to return to being evasive and blocking out the truth of our condition again. It was our inability to explain and thus understand ourselves and the ‘mistreatment’ that had been inflicted on us that caused us to block out in the first place.

However, our alienated state and the reasons for it were not ‘self evident’ or apparent to an innocent. Not having experienced the battle and the need for evasion and unable to be told about it, the innocent were left with no way of appreciating the world of the battle-fatigued. In fact it was almost impossible for an innocent not to succumb to the reality of this world. (Of course now that we can defend/explain ourselves the alienated can be rehabilitated and innocents told about and thus protected from alienation.)

The great mystery innocents faced was why people were behaving so strangely, so unnaturally, in terms of what their instinctive self or soul (which we all had but which was unrepressed/uncorrupted in an innocent) expected. The more innocent (the less repressed the conscience), the greater thisPage 192 of
Print Edition mystery. Look at prehistoric cave paintings. While adolescent prehistoric man could draw the animals around him with total empathy, when it came to portraying himself, especially his face, he had no empathy and resorted to clumsy stick drawings. (To quote the book, Gardners Art Through The Ages, fifth edition, 1970, ‘ . . . animals are rendered with all that skilled attention to animal detail we are accustomed to in cave art . . . But . . . man is rendered with the crude and clumsy touch of the unskilled . . .’ Why?) Exhausted/embattled/upset man was someone our innocent instinctive self had no understanding of. The shyness we have always associated with innocence was due to their lack of familiarity with what was going on in the embattled world. So great a mystery was this world to innocents that they spent the first half of their lives trying to make the exhausted admit to their strange behaviour, to make them stop ‘lying’ (this being the only interpretation innocence could put on our evasions), to make them ‘own up’ or repent or be honest. Christ, an exceptional innocent, began his search for understanding of the world with this preoccupation. As it says in the Bible, ‘Jesus began to preach “Repent” ’ (Math 4:17). While many of the battle-wearied did acknowledge their state and decide to live through Christ, the real problem, the reasons humans needed to be evasive, remained unsolved. Christ wanted us to stop being evasive but couldn’t force us, which was why he became upset and ‘denounced’ those who ‘did not repent’ (Math 11:20). To young innocents evasion of the truth was unnecessary and corrupting. They could walk around freely in the realm of the truth. They did not fear God and if the exhausted could not tell of their fear of God the innocent could only interpret their fear as denial of the existence of God. It has been a horrible and tragic situation for all concerned but now at last it is ended.

So all an innocent had to help him hold on to his ideals and resist succumbing to our evasions was his original integratively orientated instinctive self, or conscience. Obviously if he were to hold onto his ideals — such as a belief in integrative meaning — against the sea of evasion around him, he would need anPage 193 of
Print Edition exceptionally strong conscience. As mentioned, to be this innocent — to have this strong a conscience — he would need to have encountered only pure love from his mother in his infancy. He would have to have had a mother who had not been made aware of the upset on earth, who was, symbolically speaking, ‘a virgin’ (Math 1:24). In his childhood he would have to have grown up relatively isolated from our battling ways and in an environment that was familiar to our soul which is an environment of nature. The background necessary to produce such exceptional innocence and how that innocent behaved subsequently is clearly described in the Bible. The ‘child’ will ‘live in the desert’ . . . ‘with the wild animals’ . . . ‘eating curds and honey’ where he ‘will grow and become strong in spirit’, grow up with a mind guided by a strong conscience, strong enough ‘to reject the wrong and choose the right’ (Luke 1:80, Mark 1:13 and Isaiah 7:15). Only a very strong/clear conscience would refuse to waver/succumb/be defeated by the evasive world’s coercion to compromise with the absolute truths.

The innocent’s experience of the paradox of the human condition was that, while instinctively he wanted to trust and support the wishes of his fellow man his instincts/conscience were also telling him that what we were saying, our divisive biological theories, for instance, was wrong. As a young man, an exceptional innocent had only his conscience to stand against the world of evasion. Otherwise unarmed, he could do nothing but stand there, face black with defiance, trying desperately to hang on to what his conscience was saying in the face of the almost overwhelming coercion from the rest of us to compromise, to be evasive. This phenomenon is described in the Bible where it says that as a young man a prophet would be ‘consumed by zeal’ (John 2:17 and Psalm 69:9). Initially zeal or enthusiasm for the ‘true’/ideal world was all a prophet had to hold on to but gradually he would learn that what he thought was profound and what the world of reality was proposing was often superficial/evasive/false. He learnt that ‘If I do judge, my decisions are right’ (John 8:16). It was only natural that the first to bear witness to hisPage 194 of
Print Edition soundness, to experience or discover it, would be himself. However, only when he eventually worked out why the rest of us were being evasive, only when he learnt ‘what was in a man’ (John 2:25), could he afford to let his zeal (his determination to defy our ways and beliefs) subside. He had to work out why we were being evasive without ever succumbing to our evasion. Alienation could not investigate alienation. For example, once the central truth of integrative meaning is evaded we have adopted a false premise from which to continue all thinking. From such a standpoint, sound thinking is impossible. Only innocence could reconcile the world. A prophet had to ‘overcome the world’ (John 16:33) and its ‘lying’ (evasion), not succumb to it, if he were to find a truthful reconciliation/understanding of our upset condition. Of course, with the truthful defence for our embattled state found, no one need be evasive any longer. This brings about the end of upset on earth.

Incidentally there have been three types of prophets and these can now be identified. There have been false prophets — those who had been ‘born again’ back into the world of our soul from a post-battle state who were thus imitating soundness, pretending to be able to ‘see’ and guide us when they could not. (The position of false prophets should be contrasted with that of scientists who were not dishonest about their soundness, they have not claimed to be able to ‘see’ and ‘guide’ us, they were mechanistic/objective, relying on empirical evidence to establish what is truthful, and made no claim to be holistic/subjective/sound.)

Then there were the real but hurtful and thus dangerous prophets. These were the genuinely innocent who had not departed very far from their soul and who were thus still close to its world but were not sufficiently close — sufficiently sound — to reach all the way to a full unevasive understanding of the human condition. It was through hurtful or dangerous prophets, from those of biblical days and earlier right down to the modern prophets like Eugene Marais and Sir Laurens van der Post, with their revelations of many hurtful or dangerous partial truths, that the non-evasive truth was able to ‘forcefullyPage 195 of
Print Edition advance’ [Math 11:12]. Their work (plus, it should be added, some of the less weird, less superstitious, less mystic efforts of the false prophets to be unevasive) helped open up a path for subsequent prophets. If a prophet had to be entirely alone with his unevasive thoughts it would become too difficult to hang onto them in the face of the opposition from the rest of the world. He was being led by his conscience into a realm the real world denied existed. The knowledge that someone somewhere had had the same thoughts was enough to let him know that he wasn’t mad to think these thoughts and this enabled him to hang onto what he was thinking and continue thinking.

The problem for a prophet was not in finding ideas so much as finding the strength to dare to think exactly what his conscience wanted him to think. (As an example of this when the thought first occurred to me that the highly revered and worshipped ‘person’ we call God was none other than the theme in nature of integrativeness I gave myself quite a shock and thought I should reject the idea — a reaction I had to ride out before the idea could gain a solid footing in my mind. Some ideas were so difficult to ‘let through’ they had to be written down and then typed up and, as it were, forced into the open and made to stand up straight. They had to be ‘dragged out kicking’. Above all finding the explanations presented in this book was an exercise in learning to stand by exactly what my conscience wanted to say, was learning to trust my conscience and not those around me.)

The third variety of prophets were compassionate prophets. These were a variety of real prophets that could not only reveal repressed partial truths as dangerous prophets could but could reach all the way to the full compassionate truth that was built from repressed partial truths. Necessarily they were exceptionally innocent innocents who had not left the world of their/our soul. They had to have very strong consciences to enable them to not only defy our evasions but ‘overcome’ them by learning why we were being evasive. In the recorded history of humanity, there have been very few compassionate prophets. Christ was one although his explanation of the full truth had to be couchedPage 196 of
Print Edition in metaphysical terms as we had not found the scientific knowledge that would make it possible for him to clearly explain his reconciliation of our condition. Only a first-principle-based defence of humanity could be understood and thus shared by us all. Metaphysical explanations such as ‘God loves you’ did not explain why God loved us — did not give us the ability to understand ourselves. For the unevasive full truth to be liberating it had to be in understandable first principle terms as it is in this book. This need for humanity to first find the knowledge that would make it possible for a compassionate prophet to liberate us will be explained in more detail a few paragraphs on.

It should be apparent from what has been said that in spite of his happy innocence the life of a prophet was as excruciating in its own way as was that of the embattled who had to put up with the horrible injustice of a constantly critical conscience. During humanity’s adolescence, everyone — innocent, exhausted and all stages in between — suffered equally. As the rock singer Jim Morrison once said when describing life during what we now know of as humanity’s adolescence, ‘Nobody gets out of this world alive’! In truth everyone fought as hard as they could from their particular position in the battle to achieve liberation from ignorance. We were all equally good soldiers for humanity — all equally courageous.