Everyone is familiar with the image of Jesus telling the disciples to let the children come to him. Perhaps his students had been feeling superior, assuming that they knew better than the parents who had brought along their children – not surprising, since the disciples found themselves in the company of the charismatic Messiah, which would surely be intoxicating – but Jesus set them straight. Unless you become like an innocent child, he told them, forget about the kingdom of heaven. Very clear advice, but how do we do that?

If we understand innocence to mean purity and harmlessness, then the lack of innocence is the common illness of virtually every adult human. A pure mind should mean a mind unburdened, but almost everyone carries a painful load of regret and guilt, relics of the past with which we chronically torment ourselves. The mind hauls along other burdens as well, such as resentment, anger, jealousy and self indulgence, but regret and guilt are so constant that they constrain our thinking in the same way that a repetitive physical task distorts and disables the body.

Hazrat Inayat Khan called this thinking ‘automatic concentration,’ meaning a focus that we do not consciously direct. Without our recognising it, a particular, unchanging way of looking at the world has been adopted, a sort of mental congestion, and it colours all that we think and say and do. To remedy this congestion, Hazrat Inayat advised us to spend some time every day thinking a contrary thought, such as ‘I am happy,’ or ‘I am blameless.’

If some people, sensitive to their past, sadly shake their heads and say “But I AM guilty!”, then we must look more carefully at Pir-o-Murshid’s advice. The thought ‘I am blameless’ is not intended to deny what has happened, but to shift our understanding of ‘I’. The world of manifestation is composed of light and shade, and so there is no one who has not committed some mistake. That is why in Gayan Boulas we find, “It is not possible to be praised only and not to incur blame at any time. Praise and blame go hand in hand.” But the essence of Being is beyond praise and blame; it cannot be known in the world of comparisons but only in the infinite light of the soul, which is never marked by any stain. The radiant innocence of a new born baby is the light of the soul not yet covered over by impressions of the world.

The innocence of the wise is like that of a baby in that they no longer see limitations and barriers. In the prayer Khatum we pray to be raised above the distinctions and differences that divide the world, and this is accomplished when we return to the state of innocence. But we must remember that innocence is a state of mind and heart, not a particular behaviour; purity is found in seeing like a child, not in acting like one, as we hear in this saying from Vadan Talas:
There are two sorts of persons who show child-like simplicity in their lives:
the foolish one, who shows childish traits,
and the wise one, who shows the innocence of a child.