innocence

To preserve your innocence while acquiring intelligence, that is a true mark of wisdom.

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy_ or lie__rone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential __ust world_ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self__fficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the __ust world_ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

...I'm innocent still -inside me are stained glass windows that have never been broken- and when I see your light it stains my soul with color ...

Sometimes I return back to the state of mind I had as a child when I believed nothing was impossible.

I see you kneeling in church__tained only by colored windows

It takes a very long time to become young.

In a universe in which past, present, and future came into existence all at once, complete from beginning to end, with all possible outcomes of every life woven through the tapestry, there is no chance, only choice, no luck, but only consequences.

Every mother should endeavor to be a true artist. I do not mean by this that every woman should be a painter, sculptor, musician, poet, or writer, but the artist who will write on the table of childish innocence thoughts she will not blush to see read in the light of eternity and printed amid the archives of heaven, that the young may learn to wear them as amulets around their hearts and throw them as bulwarks around their lives, and that in the hour of temptation and trial the voices from home may linger around their paths as angels of guidance, around their steps, and be incentives to deeds of high and holy worth.

...One cannot help but consider the future- what will it be like when all the wild places of the earth have been taken over by civilization, and there is no more room for Indians, Pirates, and Wild Boys?

MotherHushed and sacred silencefills the dawning skyI ponder in this momentof our journey which is nigh...

We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant. But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point, and after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance, so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite--such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god.

I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.

No mi krš_ani upu_eni smo po središtu našega Creda - 'mu_en pod Poncijem Pilatom' - u povijest u kojoj je bilo razapinjanja i mu_enja, u kojoj se plakalo i tako rijetko ljubilo. I nikakav od povijesti udaljeni mit, nikakav Platonovi idejni Bog, nikakva gnosti_ka soteriologija i nikakav apstraktni govor o povijesnosti naše egzistencije ne mogu nam vratiti onu nedužnost koju smo u toj povijesti izgubili.

What do you really want?Did you know that every single one of your desires is an expression of your soul's longing to experience human life as you? It's true.These pure impulses get filtered through our conditioning and show up distorted at times, but follow them back to their source and nothing you desire is anything but good and possible.

When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death_ And they should! ...For they are 'in' life.

My innocence is not lost__t has been converted into wisdom. The sensation we call "breaking" is the pain that comes from resisting the truth. Life broke parts of me that needed to fall away for me to live an open and truthful life.