The Original Sin
Take a look at this very insightful article on the nature of unity and the original sin of duality and the personal self-identification of the ego:
The original sin can be understood in purely Darwinian terms, as in the survival of the fittest body. Body survival is driven by the emotional expression of fear and desire and the pleasure-pain principle. Whatever feels good and gives pleasure, like eating, promotes body survival, while whatever feels bad and gives pain, like being eaten, threatens body survival. The survival of the fittest body is all about expressing fear and desire in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. That is what Darwinian evolution is all about. That is what the human ego is all about.
When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they knew themselves to be bodies and fell under the sway of the pleasure-pain principle. They knew good from bad because they identified themselves with their bodies. That was the original sin. The whole dualistic concept of self and other is based upon identifying yourself with your body, and your self-identification with your body is being emotionally driven by Darwinian evolution and the pleasure-pain principle. That’s how your ego or mentally constructed personal self-concept is emotionally constructed in your mind.
The original sin is all about defending your body survival as though your spiritual existence depends on it. That is the original sin you commit when you emotionally identify yourself with your body. That is the original sin that you commit when you develop a human ego.
The concept of unity or spiritual awakening is only possible when you stop identifying yourself with your body. Spiritual awakening is the antithesis of defending body survival. Spiritual awakening is Darwinian evolution derailed. You have to crash the train. Ultimately, you have to accept death. In death there is no good and bad, only the pleasant nothingness of unity, like what you experience in a deep, restful sleep. That is where you ultimately find unity. You find unity in the nothingness of pure undivided consciousness.
Bernadette Roberts wrote about the nature of unity or spiritual oneness in her book The Experience of No-Self. She made the important distinction between the unity that occurs when you live a life in surrender to divine will, which results in the mystical union of the Self with its divine Source, and the ultimate unity of the dissolution of the Self into its Source that’s a kind of death.
Roberts described that the mystical union of the Self with its Source is a direct result of surrender. When the Self surrenders the expression of its own individual will to the divine will of its Source, the flow of emotional energy through the form of a person comes into alignment with the normal flow of things, and there are feelings of connection to all things rather than feelings of disconnection and personal self-limitation.
The problem is that mystical union is still at the level of duality. There is still the dualistic experience of self and other when the Self is in mystical union with its Source. Beyond this state of mystical union is the ultimate state of dissolution. With dissolution, the individual consciousness of the Self dissolves back into its Source of undifferentiated consciousness like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. With dissolution, there is no experience of self and other, there is only the Oneness of the Source. That Oneness of the Source is experienced as infinite nothingness, which is called No-Self.
Roberts described the experience of No-Self much like Meister Eckhart did, as the experience of returning to the Oneness of the Source or Godhead.
When the joy of my own emptiness began to wane I decided to rejuvenate it by spending some solitary time gazing into my empty self. Though the center of self was gone, I was sure the remaining emptiness, the silence and joy, was God Himself. Thus on one occasion, with full hedonistic deliberation, I settled myself down and turned my gaze inward. Almost immediately the empty space began to expand, and expanded so rapidly it seemed to explode; then, in the pit of my stomach I had the feeling of falling a hundred floors in a non-stop elevator, and in this fall every sense of life was drained from me. The moment of landing I knew: When there is no personal self, there is also no personal God. I saw clearly how the two go together-and where they went, I have never found out.
The only mystic I know who says something about this step beyond union, beyond self and God, is Meister Eckhart. This could be understood as his breakthrough, his bursting forth into the Godhead, his crashing through to that which is beyond the idea of God and truth, until the soul reaches the beginning of beginnings, the origin or source. This amounts to saying that union depends on separateness. Beyond self this separateness no longer exists-an undefinable essential Oneness for which theology has no words. The difference depends on which side of the breakthrough we stand: whether the self remains, or whether it is dead and buried in the Godhead. Each side represents two different ways of seeing and knowing.
To speak of a union with God is orthodox, but to speak of an essential oneness with God-a oneness in God’s essence-is unorthodox. The problem is not merely one of description or semantics, but rather, one of experience, for with the falling away of the union of two, there remains only the clear identity of the One-the essential Oneness of the Godhead.
The first movement of life culminates in the union of self with God. The second movement culminates in no union-no self and no God for that self. In order to come upon God as he is in Himself-and not as he is in our self-there must be no self. There is no other way.
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The root of the problem stems from the biblical statement that God made all things from nothing, and the disagreement in the interpretation of this nothing. Since absolute nothing is incomprehensible, it falls, like the essence of God, into the realm of the unknown. That this unknowable nothing turns out to be God is the final realization of the mystic. What flowed forth from God in the act of creation was some unknowable aspect of Himself. Thus if we were created from nothing it can only mean nothing knowable to the mind. Yet the experiential understanding of how this works is possible once self has fallen away. However we wish to interpret the nothingness or non-being from which we were made, it is difficult to justify any speculation that God did not make us from himself-his will or uncreated energy.
She then quotes the Bible:
“He who seeks only himself brings himself to ruin, whereas he who brings himself to naught for me discovers who he is”. To this I would add that in coming to naught he will not only discover who he is, but what he is, for in God these cannot be separated. That he is, what he is, who he is, where he is, in God these are One, and outside this One, nothing is • Bernadette Roberts
Tanner on Evolution commented:
The idea of tying evolution back into God’s will is interesting, but that’s exactly where I think the tension lies. If evolution runs on suffering and death, then saying it’s God’s will doesn’t solve the problem — it just makes God the author of the slaughterhouse. That’s the piece I can’t square.
My response:
This goes back to the problem of original sin. It all depends on what you take yourself to be. If you take yourself to be a body in the world, you will experience suffering. Life is suffering as the Buddha says. If you take yourself to be an immortal spiritual being that is only watching whatever appears to happen in the world, like a movie that you are watching from your immortal seat out in the spiritual audience, then whatever appears to happen in the movie is irrelevant to your true spiritual existence. The pain and suffering your body and mind experiences is only happening in the movie. You may have compassion about that apparent suffering, but you do not really suffer. You just observe the pain and suffering. As long as you do not emotionally identify yourself or emotionally attach yourself to your body, you do not really suffer. You just observe it. You may still know pain, but suffering comes to an end when you live in a state of detachment from the body.
Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage or a picture on the screen. To know the picture as the play of light on the screen gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real. In reality I only look. Whatever is done is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they are real to the man in bondage. To me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself • Nisargadatta Maharaj
To realize that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness. It is not difficult but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the truth so difficult to see. Discard what is not your own until nothing is left which you can disown. You will find that what is left is nothing • Nisargadatta Maharaj
Pain is physical; suffering is mental. Beyond the mind there is no suffering. Pain is merely a signal that the body is in danger and requires attention. Suffering warns us that the structure of memories and habits, which we call the person, is threatened by loss or change. Pain is essential for the survival of the body. Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life • Nisargadatta Maharaj
A saintly life is free from suffering. The essence of saintliness is total acceptance of the present moment. A saint does not want things to be different from what they are; he knows that they are unavoidable. Everything happens as it does because the universe is as it is. He is friendly with the inevitable and therefore does not suffer. Pain he may know-if he can he does the needful to restore the lost balance-or he lets things take their course. What does he gain by living on and what does he lose by dying? What was born must die; what was never born cannot die. It all depends on what he takes himself to be • Nisargadatta Maharaj
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