No one is innocent. I've found this to be a really helpful idea when life seems to be brutally unfair, especially when bad things happen to kids or to people who don't seem to be doing anything wrong. The reason I carry the idea in my head that no one is innocent is that I remember being born. I remember choosing my parents. So as far as I'm concerned, I knew what I was getting into.
One of the hardest things for me to figure out in my life has been why bad things happen, kids especially. I've had my share of bad stuff happen, but I think a lot of people have had it worse. The only idea that makes it make sense to me is that I chose to incarnate here, that I knew the reality I was getting into.
Warzone as a way to see it
I'm going to have Call of Duty Warzone playing in the background, because that's exactly how I look at it. In Warzone, nobody's innocent. You know what you're getting into. You're dropping into a player-versus-player, kill-or-be-killed game. No one playing Warzone is innocent, because you knew what game you were playing when you got into it. Sure, you could argue that certain people might deserve it more than someone else playing, but when I look at it from the point of view that I chose to play this game, then anything that happens to me is just part of the game I chose to play. I'm not innocent.
Innocence, the way people usually mean it, takes the position that somebody just got here by being a victim, that you got thrust into this reality by your parents and therefore you don't deserve anything happening to you. Now, I'm all about innocence in another sense. I've got two kids. I love my kids and I take great care of them. My kids have their innocence and that's very important to me. But at the same time, I believe my kids knew what they were getting into. They picked me as their parents. They looked at this reality. They had time to research it and think about it. So I also look at it like my kids are just as much the opposite of innocent. In this human life and this human experience there's a lot of stuff they're not aware of, but on the deepest level, they chose to get in and play this game.
You could think of it like beginner Warzone players. A beginner may just get dumped on when people use certain strategies against them over and over again. From that point of view you could argue, oh, he's just an innocent newbie, he doesn't know how to play, he's brand new. But if you play Warzone, you are not innocent. If you get shot, whatever context it happens in, you're not innocent, because you chose to be here.
Protecting innocence in the right way
I think it's ideal to build a reality where we all love each other, take care of each other, and protect our creative innocence, the part of us that really loves life and that is not scarred by what's happened. I'm big into protecting my kids' innocence. At the same time, I explain things like death and alcoholism to them. I have very grown-up conversations with my kids, because at the deepest level they're more like a new player and they need to learn how the game works. You need to learn how the game works if you're here. So all my kids need from me is help learning how the game works.
From there, I understand that anything could happen to my kids. I've known so many parents who have lost a child. To me, if you're incarnating, if you're having children, you don't get to have an innocence where you pretend nothing could ever happen to your kids or to you. I accept that my kids, to some degree, have just spawned into this reality. This reality can be really nice and feel just like heaven a lot of the time, but it can also be just like hell and miserable. Having kids means, to some degree, that I've spawned my kids into a game of Warzone, and one way or another, however it goes down, that's the game we're playing.
I do everything I can to protect my kids. Maybe I'm too protective sometimes. I feel like my parents were not as protective as me. They let me just experience stuff. I try to balance that by letting my kids level up playing the game, because to get better at the game of life you really need to play it. It's tricky as a parent, because I want to let my child play the game of life so they can get better at it. Imagine a Warzone game where my kid spawns in and I take the controller and play it for them. If I'm ever not there, they don't know how to play life anymore. So I want to let my kids learn how to do life as much as possible. At the same time, I don't want to let them get killed before they get a chance to reach the final circle.
But it's going a certain direction anyway. Every Warzone game only lasts so long. Whether you get to the beginning of it or the end of it, to some degree, doesn't matter, because we're infinite beings. You can always play again and again.
What innocence really is
What's special about innocence is the power you have behind it. We think innocence can be taken away, but I don't see it that way anymore, because you can reclaim your innocence anytime you want to when you remember that you are an infinite being and that you got here by choice. One of the big losses of innocence, in my experience, happens when you think you're a victim, when you forget how you got here, when you forget that you chose to be here and that you aren't in this reality by accident.
As a kid, that sense of power was very familiar to me. I felt very powerful as a kid. To me, really losing your innocence is when you start to feel powerless in life. From that point of view, a lot of adults have lost their innocence today and feel powerless. But just because you're powerless at one point doesn't mean you're powerless in the entire perspective. Just because somebody exerts power over me and kills me in a Warzone game doesn't mean I'm completely powerless in the rest of my life. It just means that at one point in the game, somebody beat me. And that's okay. I don't have to feel bad about that, because I'm the one who decided to play this game, and my kids are the ones who decided to incarnate into this reality with me.
From there, I don't have to go around constantly worrying and being afraid. I accept that true innocence is knowing your power, not feeling like the world is holding you back, and remembering that I got here because I wanted to be here.
Where parents protect the wrong things
I see people struggling a lot in life with the idea that you have to protect kids' innocence. To me, a lot of parents turn that into the belief that you need to hide some of the basic facts of life, that you shouldn't tell your kids about sex, that you don't want your kids cursing. I'm okay if my kids curse. I think it's funny when my kids curse. They're out here swearing, "Dad, fuck this, that's bullshit," yelling at my dog, "Hey, bitch, come over here." That's not losing your innocence to me. They're just having fun playing around with life. Parents are often protecting innocence in the wrong areas. Innocence is about your power, about remembering that you are an infinite being, that you go through many deaths, but really deaths are just changes. You change from one being to another being.
Somebody mentioned their daughter calls them a bitch. I get it, my kids are toxic as hell to me sometimes too. It's funny, because I don't look at it like, oh my God, they've lost their innocence.
Sobriety, abuse, and choosing to be here
I go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm sober eleven years, and I see a lot of people there who had horrible, abusive childhoods. What I've seen is that the ones who are able to resolve that, the most powerful resolution I've ever witnessed, comes from people remembering that they got here by choice. A lot of people say, well, I didn't deserve what happened to me as a kid. I'm not saying you deserve it. What I'm saying is that if you spawn into this reality and choose to drop into a position with parents who are abusive, or who have the potential to be abusive, and if you knew how this reality works before you chose to enter it, which I believe all of us did, then when you come in and something bad happens, it's like, hey, that's just how the game's played.
Now, I'd prefer for us all to come together, and instead of spraying each other like in Warzone, to pray for each other and love each other. There's a girl in an AA meeting recently whose boyfriend died all of a sudden after they'd been dating less than a year. I'm praying for her. I'm praying that she remembers she chose that boyfriend. You don't get to choose what the people in your life do. Just like with having kids, you don't get to choose when your kids enter and leave this reality.
True innocence is remembering your power, and that means my kids have a journey. I'm a part of their journey, but they're the architect of their journey. My wife has a journey, and we're on this journey together now, but she's not taken hostage. She can leave anytime she wants to, even though it might not feel like that with co-parenting and everything. Sometimes this life journey is amazing, and yet I'm here because I want to be here, and I have the right to leave anytime I want to as well. I believe in taking care of yourself. I don't believe in harming yourself. I believe in loving your body and taking care of your body.
The fear of dying
At the same time, a lot of people have lost their innocence in the sense that they think this is all there is. I have a friend in Alcoholics Anonymous who's in his eighties and lives in a nursing home. Everybody around him says, why won't he just die? His life seems to suck now, he has basically nothing to live for, so why does he keep living? From my view, he's just scared of dying.
I remember when I was a kid, I was not scared of dying. I didn't even have a concept of dying. I didn't have a concept that I couldn't exist. I remember the exact moment in third grade where you could say I lost my innocence and found out about death. My grandfather was sick, and that's how I found out about death. I thought, oh my God, you can die? And that was, in a way, a loss of innocence.
The Moment I Broke My Fear of Death
As soon as I broke my fear of death, everything shifted. I remember the exact moment it happened. I was doing a Buddhist death meditation in 2014, or maybe the very beginning of 2015 in January. I had been sober about nine months by then. In that moment, I realized something simple and overwhelming at the same time: hey, I'm alive right now. And nothing else really matters. If I'm alive now, and I've always been alive, then I don't have anything to worry about. This whole death thing may be overrated.
Getting sober was, to me, a kind of death of its own. It was a change I genuinely think of as dying. It killed off a lot of my old personality. It destroyed my old ways of thinking and my old ways of being. From that view, it felt like I regained my innocence. I came to see that I'm not just a body trying to get through life and live as long as possible.
What Innocence Really Means to Me
For me, playing a game like Warzone is a perfect picture of maintaining your innocence. It's going around having fun playing the game, not worried about when somebody is going to kill you, just having a good time. I treasure that today. Most people think of innocence as being naive, as being dumb about how the world works. That's not it to me at all. In my experience, innocence is about reclaiming your power. If you don't have power, if you don't remember being here, then there is no innocence from that point of view.
When I look at kids, I've come to believe there's really nothing to lose, because you can always get it back. You can always regain your innocence, so to speak. You can always be a kid again.
Take Care of This Body
I tell my kids this all the time. Hey, you take care of this body, or you might have to be a baby again. You won't have to, but you might choose to be a baby again. So take care of this body, because if you don't, you might wind up being a baby again. They look at me and say, I don't want to be a baby again. And I tell them, I feel you. I don't want to be a baby again either. I've worked hard to get here. I worked hard for this. But at the same time, you can always go back to being a baby again.
I hope sharing this is helpful. If you want to go deeper into how I think about sobriety, fear, and the lessons I've picked up along the way, you can explore more in my Life playlist.