I’ve been thinking more about the “sins” I mentioned in the previous article. Yes, they may be a mere symptom of a fallen state, and “virtues” might be a mere symptom of being in touch with God on some level, but the problem with this line of thinking is that it leaves very little room for personal agency; if you don’t feel God’s presence, you will wallow helplessly in your fallen state, exhibiting symptoms of depravity, and if you feel God’s presence, the ecstatic bliss will be manifested as all kinds of virtues, as you adhere to it diligently and allow it to change you and make you grow.

However, how do you get from one to the other? If you’re not in the presence of God, how do you change that, because just decomposing in your misery or trying to find some pathetic amusement for yourself in this empty cardboard world is the opposite of helpful. It’s as if there are two parallel paths – that of the worldly and demonic, and that of the saintly and angelic, and they are distinguished by absence or presence of God in one’s consciousness, and this can feel like an unsurmountable chasm. This is where we get to the point where the concept of sins and virtues starts making a different kind of sense, if we understand them not as mere symptoms of absence or presence of grace, but a destructive or constructive approach to life in general and our spiritual condition in particular.

Because, you see, whatever your condition may be, your attitude and actions can make it much worse; and if so, it is reasonable to assume that they can also make it much better. This is why my approach to sin is “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging downwards”. Sure, absence of grace and the resulting emptiness of spirit can make you want to lash out or do all sorts of things in either a self-destructive rage, or a misguided wish to make yourself feel better, but here is where one needs self-control, in order to stop thrashing like a crazy person, cool down, and do the exact opposite – in essence, practice kindness and goodness in little things. Make someone’s day better with a small act of kindness. Pet a cat and talk to it. Say “hi” to a dog. Notice how nicely the sunlight plays on the tree leaves. Take a deep breath. Notice how your eye movements from left to right are connected with whirlpools of your thoughts and emotions. Pay conscious attention to it, try to make it faster. Try to make it slower. Feel what it wants you to do. Let it go and just observe – ride the wave first, and then fly above it and observe. Feel the pain and suffering beneath, the force that makes your mind and feelings move, and let it hurt, don’t try to escape. Let it expend itself instead of just rolling off into motivations. As you suffer, you will see that you are calmer, deeper, no longer a leaf carried by the waves on the surface, but a creature of deep waters of your mind. As you do this for minutes, maybe hours, maybe days, you will feel a change – suffering is no longer the only thing in your consciousness, because you start to feel a hint of something blissful, ecstatic, yet calm and peaceful. Let it in. As you take a breath, inhale this bliss and open your body and mind to it. Don’t think about it, just allow its presence to heal you. Happy thoughts and pictures will start going through your mind; let them. Things where you saw and admired something good and beautiful. Don’t rush it, let it unfold slowly, don’t spoil it by trying to get all the way to God immediately; feel that peace and beauty of a sunset, or sunlight catching the yellow leaves over a waterfall. Feel the calm and kindness as you watch a cat sleep. Feel it unfold, as you feel touched to tears by someone’s beautiful and virtuous actions – it can be a character in a book or a movie, doesn’t matter. Feel touched by goodness and virtue, breathe it in, keep it in, breathe it out. Slowly, imagine yourself acting it out in the world, seeing yourself as this person you admire, and do little things at first – just imagine yourself doing virtuous and good things, and just release all the obstacles and counter-arguments that pop up. Once you feel no opposition, rest in this state, and when you act, act from it, in such a way that your actions don’t contradict your inner state, so that they manifest it and act it out instead.

Do it consistently enough, and go deep enough, and you’ll be the grace of God that is manifesting itself in the world, and the question of God’s absence will become quite ridiculous. Be to others what you want to receive from God, and you will become one with the grace and presence of God. In that state, when you’re acting out goodness, you will understand that you are on the upward-gradient, and avoid things that put you on a downward-gradient, and in this perspective the concept of sins and virtues starts to make sense – not for the sake of judgment directed at oneself or others, but for the sake of practicality on the path of making your existence not hell.

I was recently reading a book where seven sins were mentioned – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.

I looked at this list, and my first thought was that this just doesn’t feel right; those don’t really look like sins. They look like symptoms.

You see, a sin, by definition, would be a choice against God. This choice would then produce a spiritual fall, and once in a state of depravity and fall from Divine grace, a soul would exhibit symptoms of what Bhagavad-gita would attribute to the gunas of the Prakrti: tamas, rajas and sattva, where qualities of tamas would be laziness (sloth), ignorance and so on, symptoms of rajas would be wrath, pride, envy, lust and so on, and symptoms of sattva would be, essentially, religion and mysticism devoid of transcendence – basically, attempts to be virtuous but without a true connection with God, without whom virtue is impossible.

So, if those “deadly sins” are more symptoms of a fallen state than causes of the fall itself, what then are the true sins – the actual causes of apostasy from God? It is a very difficult question, because, obviously, people who compile the lists of sins and virtues always try to moralize, and I don’t think it’s actually helpful, because the actual saints never actually seem to live up to those expectations, and yet that is what makes them feel alive, impressive and fun: things that would make them seem flawed from a moralistic perspective are actually a spark of life that makes them feel real and impressive. I have read exchanges between St. Augustine and St. Jerome, and I find them really entertaining, because they are both right and wrong about certain things, they can argue from different points of view, and they both make mistakes. They are not virtuous because their lives are devoid of all sins from some list; they are virtuous because it is obvious that they both are trying to do the right thing – establish truth, guide people from ignorance to knowledge, and seek supremacy of God over the lowly things of this world. Sure, they are sometimes prideful, wrathful, ignorant and commit logical fallacies, but I don’t mind – it makes me smile and even laugh, because I see the spark of Divinity in their flaws. Their “sins” don’t feel like some terrible depravity they are made out to be; if anything, they are funny, the way a small scared kitten hissing at you is funny.

On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of fake saints, people who work from a list of saintly virtues and try to act as if they are holy by appropriating them, and my reaction to those is the opposite – I feel disgust and anger at their falsehood, despite the fact that such a fake person can formally have less flaws than St. Augustine, whose flaws don’t bother me in the slightest, and I instead feel joy because of his goodness and accomplishments. Obviously, those lists of virtues and sins are somewhat or fully misguided, because they miss the actual point of what it is like to be in this terrible hell of a world, because, you see, to be here and not manifest all kinds of symptoms of terrible anguish, and not resort to all kinds of coping mechanisms during your mostly failed and futile attempts to break through and find your way out, means you’re closer to a rock in your nature, than an angel. In the language of Bhagavad-gita, it’s easy to tell whether something comes from the mode of rajas or not. It is easy to say whether something is of pride, anger or wrath. It is much more difficult to distinguish whether the things that are not of rajas are in fact of tamas or sattva, because some things that look like virtues are merely symptoms of being a lifeless, spiritless husk, devoid of any valuable and positive content.

This might sound abstract, so let me make a thought experiment. Let’s imagine an angel of God who somehow got stuck here in this world, for some unknown reason, and is born in a human body. What will he feel, not being able to sense God’s presence, being separated from all knowledge and power, and being assailed by a torrent of uncomfortable sensations? If you think he’ll act like a paragon of virtue, you’re an idiot. No, he’ll try to find his way out by testing what reminds him of his dear Lord, whose presence he can no longer establish. He will try all kinds of things, failing repeatedly and suffering in his loss and depravity. He will metaphorically try to scrape his nails at the impenetrable illusion of this world until his fingers bleed, alternating between hope, frustration and despondency, he will try to find comfort in sex, food, music or other things in this world, and feel despair as it all fails, and the stupid moralisers who compile lists of sins will find abundant examples in his behaviour, and scarcely any “virtues”, yet I will recognize him as sinless and virtuous in all his terrible suffering and depravity, because all he is looking for is God, and it is not a sin to fail.

On the other hand, how pathetic does one have to be to fake virtues in order to impress human audience? How pathetic would you have to be to even care about the opinion of other deluded humans in this place, instead of trying to break free? How pathetic would one have to be not to feel terrible pain of God’s absence, and instead fuck around with this foolish nonsense?

Because, in my world, the actual virtue is to need God above all things, and if the symptom of this profound need in this world is terrible suffering, which results in all kinds of mistakes and coping mechanisms, I see none of this as a sin, no more than I would see a desperately hungry man’s attempt to eat tree bark as sinful. If anything, it would merit compassion.

So, what are true sins, then? That is a much harder question for me to answer, because I’m not sure reality works that way. Is a rock sinful? Is it virtuous because it is not sinful? You can’t be either sinful or virtuous if you lack the capacity, and this, in most cases, will be the answer. I personally observed “souls” of many beings; a wasp is unrefined and cruel, but if you ask me whether it’s better than a rock, I would have to agree. A bird or a dog has a soul that is more refined than that of a wasp – still coarse, but less so. So, evolution and growth in refinement, sophistication and general quantitative increase of merit across multiple dimensions makes for the difference between a rock and a divine being, but when you take a divine being and put them into this world, if you expect them to act like some paragon of virtue adhering to a list compiled by some philosopher or a theologian, you are a fool. You would be right to expect them to suffer terribly and struggle fruitlessly, try to cope with failure and fail even at that. If you see the motivation behind their struggle, their pain, humiliation and steadfast attempts to break through, and instead of tears of compassion this invokes sanctimonious judgment, it only means that in the coordinate system of spiritual advancement you are closer to a rock than to a holy angel of God.

The hell for evil souls after death consists of looking at the truth.

Interestingly, the heaven for good souls consists of the same thing.

I find it amazing how people can have the strangest opinions, without stopping to check what this says about the universe they live in and the way it functions.

I’ll have to explain this; for instance, in Star Wars, you have physics of the Universe that makes sense – there is Force, the living beings have a certain number of cellular organelles called “midichlorians”, which are something akin to mitochondria or chloroplasts in our universe, and they essentially connect your living tissues to the Force, and if their count is significant enough, you become “Force sensitive”, and if a Force sensitive person receives proper training, they can develop abilities to use the Force for things such as telekinesis, telepathy or whatever. It all makes sense, the way plants being able to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into sugar makes sense. However, X-men don’t make sense. The underlying premise is that you have mutants with special abilities. I have no problem with that if “special abilities” are enhanced hearing, ability to perceive more colours or even the ability to hear radio. That is all possible without changing anything with the universe. However, when you have a mutant who can stop time, use extreme telekinesis or read minds, this is a “stop right there moment”. Here you need a universe with different laws of physics that make this possible, you can’t just have a mutation that introduces midichlorians in a universe without the Force, and expect telekinesis to be possible. Yes, you can develop cellular organelles or tissues that transduce radio waves into electricity and feed it into the brain, giving you a sense that “hears” radio. It’s not all that different from the way eyesight works. However, to be able to read minds or perform strong telekinesis, there must be an underlying physics that makes it possible. If something works, the question you need to ask is what underlying conditions need to be met in order for this to work, and what does this say about the universe we live in.

Let’s return to my initial conundrum. I had people making claims such as “if someone doesn’t have money, it means he can’t be of God”, the assumption being that God is the ruler of this and every other world, and nothing happens without His sanction – basically, God will provide for His own people, and they will never have to worry about money. On the other hand, those same people will make negative claims about very rich people, assuming that money is the thing of the Devil, and all the rich people must have sold their souls in order to become that rich.

So, which is it? They apparently never stopped to think that the first claim contradicts religious teachings; Jesus was born in a barn and Krishna was born in a dungeon, so it’s not like there’s actual evidence for the claim that those of God will be provided for and safe in this world. If anything, evidence for the contrary can be found. However, I’ve seen same people have the expectation that if you have money, you must be spiritually fallen, and if you don’t have money, you can’t be on good terms with God, not stopping to think that you can’t have it both ways. There are three basic options – either God micro-manages the world, Satan micro-manages the world, or nobody micro-manages the world and it runs according to its own independent laws, which makes exceptions from those laws “miracles”. Also, the corollary of God being able to provide for His people is that He is able to control everything in this world, which makes every bad thing that happens in this world His fault, which gives you a God that is either malevolent or indifferent. If Satan is able to control everything in this world, why aren’t things much, much worse for good people? Why do evil people such as Hitler experience frustration and failure in their plans? The third option, where neither God nor Satan have complete control or influence here, but the world functions according to its own independent laws, and either side is able to occasionally “tip the scales” their way according to some complex ruleset seems far more likely. For instance, Satan can tempt you and make your life very difficult, but he can’t outright kill you. God can’t outright solve all your problems, but He can inspire you – but you have to believe it and accept guidance. Also, miracles do exist, but the defining characteristic of a miracle is that it happens exceptionally, and not regularly. If something happens regularly or predictably, it’s called the law of nature. Miracles, where exceptionally good and unlikely things happen to people who pray to God, do happen. However, so do the anti-miracles, where exceptionally bad and unlikely things happen to people who pray to God. The pattern according to which this happens isn’t obvious, but for some reason people act as if it is – of course God’s people should be rich, famous, healthy and live forever, because take the example of Jesus, who was born in a barn, was always poor, had to escape lynching mobs and was eventually betrayed and crucified; oh wait…

Most of this nonsense is caused by poor religious education people received in childhood, which is why I didn’t allow my kids to attend catholic “Sunday school”. This proved to be an excellent call when other children, who did attend, were mocking my kids saying that if they didn’t pray to Jesus they will have bad grades and their mom will die. Apparently, that’s how it works according to the religious teachings those kids received – you pray to Jesus to get good grades and your mommy doesn’t die. What did I say to my kids in response to that? “This is pure nonsense. God is the highest reality and the highest good, and you pray to God by trying to understand what is real, adhering to the highest truth you can know, and always choosing the greatest good you can see in everything you do, and prayer is good if it focuses you in those efforts. However, if you want to get good grades, you better study, because prayer won’t help there. As for your mom dying, let’s put it this way: if God didn’t strike that idiot Sunday school teacher with lightning for teaching children this stupid nonsense, it is safe to assume things don’t really work that way. God is not a vending machine where you insert a prayer-coin and get a wish, God is the greatest of all goals and the function of prayer is to align your life with this goal in order to be with Him in both this life and the one after. That teacher is an idiot and that’s why I didn’t allow you to listen to that nonsense, because it would teach you such idiotic things about God that you would end up being atheists. God is the safety line you hold on to in order not to go crazy in this world which is full of all kinds of evil and ignorance, in order to get to the other side whole, undamaged and hopefully improved by the experience.”

Yes, this is actually a true example of the kind of speeches my kids could hear from me when they were 7. 🙂