ORIGINAL SIN: THE START LINE

Original sin is not something frightening and biblical; it is just the condition into which you were born. It is what you agreed to, when you came to this plane. It is the starting line.

“Original” means “from the beginning”, meaning the beginning of physical life on this plane, as you know it. It’s as though you just woke up here. This is all you know.

“Sin” doesn’t really mean what you take it to mean. It sounds like something bad that you did and need to be punished for. But “sin” has a simple and precise meaning: “to miss the mark”, as an arrow does. To make a mistake, to see things wrongly, not to realize, to be blind, oblivious, unknowing. These are all meanings of original sin. It is what you have to wake up from.

You have all had that moment of complete and sudden understanding about something you had been getting wrong, and now see rightly, and in that seeing alone is the behavior dropped. If you like them, these little wakings up, epiphanies as you can call them, then it can easily be arranged that you will have them more and more. Dwell on the insights you have been given, give thanks for them and pay attention to them. Each time you do so, you are creating a channel of energy between these happy enlightenments and the Sender of them.

Original sin is nothing to be afraid of. When you fear something, your instinct is not to deal with it, thus ensuring your slavery before it forever.

Is this a way for an enlightened being to exist?

When you fear something, you should rather wish to disable it instead, to shine the light of your holy, dispassionate attention onto it, and question it. Why are you here?

Name your worst fears now. What are they? Your husband is an alcoholic, your son wants to live as a woman, your wife is leaving you, someone else is going to jail, or does drugs, or is not normal, will never be able to support himself. Find out your worst fear and ask it: why are you here? I cower before you: why? You keep me subservient and afraid. Why am I choosing this? Let me see you for what you are, just a set of well-practiced thoughts that I polish every day by my constant attention.

Oh, stop. When fear presents its arguments to you, question them. What is the worst that can happen? Imagine a thought pattern as a three-legged stool. One of the legs of this stool is your constant attention to it. Right now, the thought pattern is strong and balanced.

What do you think would happen if you withdrew some of the attention you are giving? If you withdrew all of it? With one leg missing, the stool would topple over uselessly. You would have disabled it completely, so that it could not stand. This is how to break out of original sin. By conscious attention.

When I have learned the lesson, I will stop seeing it

FEAR: THE WORST DEVIL

This is the big one on everybody’s list. This is everybody’s worst devil. This motivates you to do almost everything you do.

Just think of all the ways you serve your fears. Every drug you keep in your house represents a different fear. You have anti-depressants, tranquillizers, and recreational drugs to control your moods. You keep Ibuprofen so you won’t have to feel pain. You keep Nyquil in case you get a cold. You keep Neosporin and bandaids in case of injury. Behind the fear of injury is something bigger: fear of infection, illness and death.

Fear of death motivates you to do many things. It makes you afraid to go into hospitals and nursing homes, even doctors’ offices where you could see sick or crazy people. This renders you of course completely unable to help any of these people, and makes you no more well than any of them. Fear keeps you weak. Because of your fear, you are unable to really listen to them. Everything they say only confirms your deep belief that these are places to be avoided.

If you had no fear of death, could any place scare you?

Think about how radically different life would be if you had no fear of death, if you knew it was no more than taking a step into another room.

In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. John, 14:2

Would you always stay in the same place out of fear? Every fear in fact is the fear of death. All unease can be traced to that. So to lose one’s fear of death would be to lose all fears.

Who would not want this?

How would life be once you had lost all fear of death? You would know that every moment is eternal, part of God’s creation. Knowing that every moment would go on forever, you would want to consciously and joyfully participate in each moment, noticing everything wonderful, inspiring, beautiful, quiet and peaceful, enjoying, giving thanks. Who would not want to live tucked under Life’s wing, ever with her, the great mother hen whose heartbeat comforts us eternally?

You can practice letting go your fears one by one, like a hoarder hating to give up one iota of junk. Or you can let them all go together, a murder of crows.

How free would you be if fear could no longer motivate you? What if you remained quiet in the face of fear and observed how quickly it crumbled to bits? When someone else at work did something that you couldn’t do, you wouldn’t have to remind yourself how wonderful and valuable you really are; you wouldn’t have to rationalize that what he did wasn’t that great. You wouldn’t have to feel inferior, worthless or devalued at all.

I want to be real

You would be unable to fear they would discover your lack of value, that you would lose your source of protection, your job with its ego and money rewards. That couldn’t happen, since your source of protection is always with you. You are in its heartbeat. You would know your every need was answered before you could think of it.

Every jealousy would melt like wax before a flame. Jealousy is only an expression of fear. You are jealous of someone because you think they have what really belongs to you. But if you knew your every need was anticipated and abundantly filled, what would you have to be jealous of?

Fear is behind every attempt to control the outcome. You fear bad grades for your kids because it means they won’t get into a good school, will drop out, do drugs, or whatever other meaning you give to bad grades. So you try to control the outcome, rewarding, punishing, worrying, helping your kids too much, and sensing unfairness all around them.

How would a parent with no fears look? That would be a very evolved being because your children provide an intense focus for your fears that most of you can hardly let go of in this lifetime.

Photo by Muhammadtaha Ibrahim Ma Aji on Unsplash

A parent with no fears would be interested in whatever her adult children chose to do; interested to know the reasons and see where it would go. A parent with no fears would be available to help if needed, but satisfied also not to. A parent with no fears would not project negative futures for her children.

Think with a new mind

BLAME, A SPECIAL CASE

The reason you are so in love with cause and effect is that it leads easily into blame, a huge favorite diversion of the ego.

Blame is just a special case of cause and effect. You search out some act that can be named as the prime cause of some negative effect. This allows you to displace anger onto another. Blame. It produces a temporary relief in the sender of that anger. It is easier to blame someone else for the divorce, if the new car got a dent, if the dinner is spoiled, if they didn’t choose you.

You can blame either silently or aloud. If silently, you do it frequently, polishing the stones of anger, betrayal and unhappiness. You can carry on blaming silently for years, for all of your physical lives. If you do it aloud, the person blamed doesn’t want the displaced anger and will fight you to give it back. Back and forth it goes in recriminations, keeping you in the unhappiness you wished to avoid. This makes you upset and solves nothing.

The trouble with blame is it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who you think caused the unwanted thing. By assigning blame for it, you only affirm its reality. You are saying, “Indeed, this thing that happened has me so upset that I must use it to spread and perpetuate a bad feeling.”

Once blame is assigned, then what? The problem is still there, stronger than ever now since you’ve been paying all this negative attention to it. You are at square one with a vengeance.

Who would want this?

To deal in blame is to be locked into the past. Think of blame as a chain that you must not pick up.

Only when you are ready to accept responsibility for every part of your experience, can any part of it change.

To deal in blame is to be locked in the past

Even if you have some strong blame patterns, they can still be weakened.

Question everything, friends. Especially question your most habitual thoughts, those beliefs that seem strongest, that rouse you up the most. Take out your habitual thoughts about the divorce. Shine the light of truth, honesty and sincere inquiry upon those thoughts. One by one, over and over, entertain each thought and question it for at least seventeen seconds.

Negative thought, here you are again. When was the last time I had this thought? Ten seconds ago. And how long again before that? About two hours ago, I was busy getting the kids ready for school. How does this thought make you feel? It makes me very stressed and unable to think. How often would you like to have this thought? Not at all, no one wants to feel like this. Would it be possible not to have this thought? Possible? Yes, of course, millions of people don’t have it. And so on.

Thus are you the master of your thoughts.

Question reality

CAUSE AND EFFECT

If you believe that everything that ever existed, exists now, or will exist futurely, already exists this and every instant, if you believe that linear time does not exist outside the human realm, where they hop about like fleas, then it is clear there is no such thing as cause and effect.

A cause has to come before an effect, no? But if everything exists now and forever, the idea of before and after is rendered moot.

Cause and effect depends on time

A student comes to class late and a little breathless. “I’m sorry I’m late. I tripped. I’m such a klutz!”

“Did you trip because you’re a klutz or are you a klutz because you tripped?” This makes the class laugh since they could both be true.

Try this reversal with any other cause and effect pairing you have invested your belief in.

Brian is clever because he passed the bar exam the first time he tried, or, Brian passed the bar exam the first time because he is clever?

There is no discernible difference between these two statements. It makes no difference which one is supposed to have caused the other. Rather, we should think of these two ideas, cleverness and passing the bar exam on the first try, as peacefully co-existing in some vector space somewhere, linked together by the act of thinking.

Kathy keeps supporting her son because he’s irresponsible with money, or, Kathy’s son is irresponsible with money because she keeps supporting him.

It matters not at all which condition is supposed to have caused the other, although you could spend a long time guessing there. It only matters that you have linked these two ideas together by thinking about them repeatedly. You have created this reality with your thought. Subject any judgment you have to this questioning, and you will see how you formed it yourself, with your mind.

What the mind has created, the mind can also dissolve.

If linear time doesn’t exist, and cause and effect are meaningless, why are you so married to these ideas? Why do you love them so much? Remember all the essay questions that asked you to weigh the causes and effects of this and that.

Was the First World War caused by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, or the militarization of Germany, or the neural wiring of Kaiser Wilhelm, or the Entente Cordiale, or some other thing you don’t even know about? What caused it the most? What caused it the least? On and on you go, until you realize it’s an endless game, trying to determine what caused what. Rather, they happened and happen still, together. All these events are strands of the same yarn. Everything exists together, infinitely.

I am ready to question my beliefs

ROLES: EXAMINE EACH ONE

All the roles you play in life are limiting. They may feel limiting at the time you play them. Sometimes other people see you as that role and nothing more. You might be the job you do, a wonderful parent, a busybody, an anti-social recluse, the other woman, a hopeless alcoholic, a bad son, a gossip, or any other label you have accepted. The roles you play in life can be regarded as costumes your being has decided to try on.

Roles are costumes

Costumes can be discarded

After you have ceased to play a role, sooner or later, it will seem limiting to you. When you have left a role behind, your being expands like a foot growing out of an old shoe. As important as any role may have felt at the time you were playing it, it fails to contain all of who you are.

No role could.

You are more than this. Whether it was a role you enjoyed playing and excelled at, or whether you fought against it in misery, once it is put by, the being transcends it, thereafter looking back as the graduate might look back on nursery school.

You may completely identify with a role yourself: teacher, mother, sailor, athlete. But whether you assume a role joyfully, or resist it mightily, no role is big enough to contain the real you. The real you can choose to perform these functions beautifully, but always remains more than any function.

So examine each role you assume or resist, giving it your loving attention if you so choose, but never forget the real you is larger than any role.

Roles that bring unhappiness or unease however small, must be dropped.

You would not wear a shoe that bothered your foot.

Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy

Johnny Carson

SUFFERING: IT’S UP TO YOU

Suffering is optional. Everything that you think someone else did to you, or is doing to you, that is your own decision. That is you doing to you. That someone else is only your agent. That husband who cheated on you long ago, who you have never forgiven, who makes you bitter and angry, he is only the agent you have chosen for your suffering. But it is not necessary. There is not an iron chain of causality between you and the past.

Were you to realize this, and cast off your chain, this agent you have chosen would either disappear quietly from your life, or would change with you in peace. He is not the cause of your suffering.

Suffering is optional

That mother who never appreciated you properly, who undermined you constantly, against whom you have kept a grudge all these years, she is only your agent, so that you can project out those feelings of anger and inadequacy. Could you now make yourself immune to her barbs? Could you let them fall uselessly to the ground? Could you see her words as water washing over your back?

Could you forgive her for her blindness?

Could you forgive yourself for seeing her as blind?

Everything you think of changes, because you think of it

That husband who left you with kids to raise, that wife who never lets you forget you failed, everyone neglectful, ungrateful, disappointing, any focus you have for your misery, could you invite them out into the light, and question them?

Can you now let go of all anger towards anyone? They were only your agents.

That feeling of entrapment, of being in the wrong situation, of being wasted, I let all of that go now. I forgive everyone that I believed did me wrong. It was me that was wrong. Thank you. I am ready to go forward now.

What if you let them go, all those roles you chose out of some harmful old script you didn’t even write. That pattern of adultery that runs through your family, what if you just stopped picking it up? Stopped reacting to it? Let it go. Realize that the only energy it has is what you are now giving to it. It doesn’t really even exist. Dismiss these agents of your own self-loathing and fear. These are only words. Go free. The past does not exist. If it does, where is it but in your mind?

From this moment on, I choose only goodness and simplicity in my life. I recognize that what seem to be other people are only the agents of my decisions, and I now decide to let my agents rest with me, in simplicity and peace.

Let Me Maximize You

Transformational change: the least you need to know