Your original innocence is a continually exploding freshness, an ever-new innocence that never knows anything, that never lives in time, because there is no time that passes yet. Time is part of your mind. You have to think to be able to have time, and your innocent, original nature precedes that. That’s why I call it explosions: It is just a continual exploding; you do not even have time to realize what happened. What is it even before you ask what it is? The explosion happens and your mind hasn’t even collected itself to ask the question yet. This is our nature, all the time: that much freshness, that much newness. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch. 8
Reality, right now, has nothing to do with what I remember from yesterday. To perceive reality, you need to be innocent in the sense that you do not know anything you do not know what reality is, and you do not know whether there is such a thing. You do not know whether there is something there to look for or not look for—you are completely innocent. You haven’t known anything yet. You are there, you are being there, but you aren’t feeling that you are being there. You do not even know that. It is mysterious. It is not mysterious because it is obscure or hidden; it is mysterious because it is so totally new. It is totally new and you do not even know it when you see it; it is a direct tasting. If you know it, you make it old.
So if you continue to perceive reality without knowing it, what is that? It is mysterious. Because we believe our dead world, our dead mind, we are afraid of this innocence. This innocence scares the hell out of us, scares the hell out of the person in the mind, because when it appears, this innocence has an effect like the sun coming out from behind a cloud: immediate incineration of the dark world. More specifically, to be innocent like that, to understand or to be in that condition of absolute innocence, also means that we must be defenseless; we cannot be innocent and have defenses. We have to be absolutely without protection—even the protection of our ideas. We have to be completely vulnerable. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, Ch. 8