First Among Sinners

I confess that I am "first among sinners." 

 

Why? Because all that I behold I only know through the shattered lens of my ego, distorted by a mind that projects its own blurred vision on the other. The world I see is fragmented, flawed because my mind is fragmented and flawed, apprehending only itself in what it beholds. So declares the Yogic scripture: "Yatha drishti, tatha srishti: as the mind is, so the world appears."

The modern "progressive" mind cannot see itself, because it is identified with itself. So I project my own blurred vision onto the other party. I seek a scapegoat to blame for the distortions caused by the cracks in the very lens through which I see.

This profoundly realistic Christian vision of Sin is precisely the teaching of Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism. Advaita reminds us that we do not see the true nature of creation around us, we see the superimposition of our thoughts. Buddhism's first Noble Truth teaches that "human life is suffering (Dukka)," a suffering that does not arise from the nature of the world but from the nature of our mind, restless with constant craving and addiction. 

So the problem becomes, not how to save the world, but how to save our vision. Can we learn to see through the eye of the heart, freed from the gray clouds projected by the mind? Jesus called this clarity the "single eye." He said, "If your eye is single, your whole body will be filled with light (Mat 6:22)."

Most New Age folks have only disdain for the notion of "Sin," because we don't understand it. Just ask the sinner if he has any use for such an outmoded concept as Sin! Truth is too scary. The first of sinners is the last to confess, "I am a sinner," because his very mind, his very eye, is shattered by self-seeking.

How can a fractured lens see a world that is whole? How can the corrupted mind see anything but the projection of its own shadow on others, blaming our adversary rather than our own pride for the perceived injustice? The Christian vision is dark because it is painfully real - like getting an accurate diagnosis from your doctor, and refusing to believe it. 
 

If I get real, I know that what must burn in the fire, not the fire of hell but the fire of God, is not my soul, but all my ego's strategies for self-preservation. When will I stop being outraged by what is none of my business? When will I stop projecting the bitter taste of my own mind on others as righteous blame? When will I stop clinging to an ideology that only separates me from the ineluctable suchness of the world as it is? For no ism will save me from my own mind - neither socialism nor conservatism, environmentalism or evangelism, multiculturalism or nationalism - because all isms are inventions of thinking, and the problem is the mind itself.

A human will can never fix itself when what needs fixing is self-will. To see this dilemma is not despair, but awakening. 

 

Of course I am too "enlightened" to use such a term for this dilemma as "Sin." Yet what reveals itself in my pride is the very truth I would deny. Is this truth gloomy? No. It is holy clarity, and blessed self-reckoning. Sin is not something so superficial as a resumé of naughty little deeds. Sin is much more profound: it is my state of separateness. It is the way my mind alienates me from my own Being.

The confusion of my very attempt to save myself has exiled my heart from the divine silence at the source of creation. Stranded on the island of Me, in a sea of stories, beliefs, strategies and plans, I don't know how to get back home. Now a sail appears on the horizon. The Westerly wind that gently carries it toward me is the breath of the Holy Spirit. Through the fog I see a divine Other approaching, from the land beyond thought, beyond the horizon of mind. Yet that land is not above me, or outside my body. It is my true home, and it lies in the core of my heart, deeper inside me than I am.

O let me behold with a clear naked vision! Grant me the courage to see the corrupted programs of my human will. Only the grace of the Friend can erase these habits, these endless loops, these programs of belief. The will of the Friend is different than my dark confused thought-stream; it is a beam of changeless radiance pouring, not from above, but out of my center. I see now, there was only mischief in my mind's ceaseless blame of others. The one solution I've been longing for is Grace. And Grace is a gift that never comes from "me." It bubbles out of a divine well-spring more interior than any thought I might conceive.

Can we taste this Grace, and gaze into its Sun, and become instruments of that healing beauty? Grace first appears on the horizon, approaching from the East. Yet this appearance is but the refraction, the metaphor, of our own Inner Light as it passes outward through the prism of our single eye. This Light must first be a metaphor, as if it were another, to shield us from a blinding glory, until the heart accustoms its sight to the radiance of our own Being. 

     Image: The Sun at the Eastern Gate, by William Blake