We see some teachers saying “stay in the moment, that is where life is”. This is of course true, but moments generally come in groupings. There are winds that flow through our lives, scents, textures. Feelings, of all sorts. Change is all around us if we but open ourselves to it.
It seems to me that most of the people who actually live in the moment are living in series of moments, who are swept away by things which fascinate them, and whose principal virtue consists in the openness required both to see and to be led by what comes by.
A kite is of course tethered, as we are by our physical bodies, and sense of self, but it is wildly free to roam about within those limits. Even when apparently stationary, it feels the flow of air underneath it, and the precariousness and exhilaration of its position.
I have been speaking of evil, the evil I find in me, and which I assume must exist in varying measures in others. I have perhaps been wounded more deeply than many, and carry deeper scars, but the principle of emotional death and resurrection is the same, I think, for all of us. We have all suffered deaths. And I think my own case is far more common that generally supposed. I think if anything is unique about me, it is simply that I have discovered it, contacted it, and am in the process of dissolving and dispersing it.
But of course you cannot be me, thinking about evil, VIEWING evil, feeling it course through me, and not think about Original Sin. Christ talked about sin. All the early Christians were obsessed with sin, with the “flesh”. Many of the most “saintly” of the Christians were those most willing to inflict pain upon themselves obsessively, through fasting, through whipping themselves, through wearing uncomfortable clothes, and living solitary lives for many years.
This all seems stupid to me. Edward Gibbon comments upon all this repeatedly, asking how someone who hates themselves can love humanity. They can’t, of course. It is solipsistic. It is one part of the evil.
Some atavistic part of you–I think in most cases relating to some unknown trauma endured as a baby–says you are unworthy, worthless, useless, a piece of shit. Some other part asserts, rightly, that no, you are worth something. But we are social animals, and it is hard to sustain an internal image that is not ratified in the eyes of others. So how do you reclaim your power? You take that self loathing rage out on your body and call it good, and this pronouncement is ratified in the eyes of others; if not in adoring laity, then at least in the eyes of fellow penitents, for whom you perform the same service.
Alternately, of course, you seek out power over others. You make others smaller that you might feel the bigger. Self abuse and other abuse is still causing pain, still unpleasant, still unnecessary.
And sex, sex, sex. Sex is expurgated. Evil. Wrong. When you have wet dreams or wake up with a hard-on as a man or dream of some man penetrating you or sucking on your nipples as a woman, you have “sinned”. You couldn’t help it, any more than a small child who wets his or her pants, but you are a “sinner”. How awful is this?
Small wonder that some take an equally extreme and opposite approach and make sex the focal point of religious practice, as Aleister Crowley seems to have.
I propose we rename “Original Sin” a “birthright of growth”. We are born as animals. We behave as animals. These are not in my view theoretical postulates, but obvious facts. Can we help the fact of needing comfort as infants? Can we help the fact of our biological needs for warmth, food, rest, and shelter? Is there anything the slightest bit moral about any of this? Can we help the genetic traits (and astrological traits, for those who believe in them; I view the two as part and parcel of the same issue) with which we were born? Can we as adults control the conditions under which we were raised as infants? When puberty sets in, is any part of this voluntary?
Can we help that some part of us is hard-wired to be voracious, aggressive, and concerned on a deep genetic level solely with survival and reproduction?
As I have mentioned, I am listening to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it is a story of invasion after invasion, betrayal after betrayal, with humans behaving as ravaging beasts, as soulless monsters. It is the story that what is built up by one will be torn down by another.
And it is the story of the ascendancy of the Christian Church, which used this creed of the original worthlessness of all humankind to build a vast and powerful empire–what we cannot call a spiritual empire, but an empire of psychological coercion dependent upon terrors created through visions of hell conjured by those who benefited from fear–of people who benefited by providing an answer to it: redemption through the sacrifice of individual conscience to group norms; to rules enforced through violence; to conformity compelled under threat of death, torture, exile, and public execration.
Christ cannot have wanted or willed any of this. Assuming he was a real human being, someone who walked this Earth, he must have been up there thinking “I fucked up”. But what can he have done, but let this disease–this new disease, which contained within itself its cure–surge through the body of humanity, hoping one day it would run its course?
Can we not find within the notion of universal human rights–which is under attack by the egalitarians, who invoke an ancient tribalism in their false appeals to the universal–an origin in “love thy neighbor as thyself”? There was nothing in European history one could not find in Chinese history, or Indian history, or Aztec history. Conflict. Death. Famine. Tyranny. Compelled conformity. The thirst for power and glory. Structural separation from the actually Divine.
Marx was not wrong in seeing in religion an organized effort to coerce the masses. One of Constantine’s initial reasons for embracing Christianity–it seems to have been the primary reason, although his beliefs seem to have evolved over time–was that it encouraged passiveness and obedience to temporal authority. We might even wonder if Christ ever said “render unto Caesar what is Caesars”. Much blood attended the suppression of the various “heresies”. Tens of thousands at least, likely hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, died for failing to conform to the ascendant “Universal” faith. Such a creed of love!!! Nothing says love like rivers of blood, and tears which are not destined ever to be comforted in this life.
Gibbon seems to be misunderstood as blaming Christianity for the fall of the western Roman empire. As he points out, all the conquerers of Rome were themselves Christians. Attila was not, but he never conquered Rome itself, nor did he rule in Italy. The Goths were Christian. So were the Vandals.
So obviously being war-like and being Christian were not mutually exclusive. The Romans were decadent because they lived at the expense of others for many hundreds of years. They did not plow fields, or do useful work. They did not earn or deserve “paychecks”. They partied and they played, and let others do their fighting and working for them. They were provided food and entertainment, and as Gibbon also points out, what is interesting is not that they were conquered, but that it took so long.
Returning to my main point, we are bred and conditioned to easily feel rage and fear. Existing at this level is natural for us. As I see in myself, there is little difference between the two. Both remove from consideration the perceptions of space, of options, of flexibility, of patient pursuit of long-term ends reachable only through self restraint borne of a longer, more relaxed vision.
We are bred as conditioned animals. This is our birthright. Few see this. We all want to say we chose what we were compelled to accept. Our vanity demands it. But it is a lie.
The sine qua non of a spiritual life is to awaken to the power of choice. You must see in life what those around you do not see. You must be willing to submit to the risk of ostracism or worse in order to follow a road whose path you cannot see down more than the next moment, the next breath. You must cast yourself into a different sort of wind, and be willing to die to what you know–rather, what you think you know.
To understand Original Sin is to understand and feel the yoke you were born with, the pressure to act like all others, to be an animal like all others, to live and die with little purpose or progress.
We live in an exceptional time. All the old restraints have been loosened. Human societies are far freer in what they will tolerate than ever before. And this scares the living shit out of a lot of people. They want a return to chains, and are quite willing to tolerate the lie of freedom in the name of escaping it.
Who will win? Who will lose? I of course cannot say. I am limited to my own life, my own words, my own conduct, my own pursuit of excellence as I perceive it. There is much in here worth pondering, for those willing to expose their vanities to the possibility of loss without immediate gain.