16 April 2004: Miracle on 4th Street

Excerpts from a recent discussion on the Moot Jungle:

Old Cutter John: A good definition of sin is this: Sin is that which separates us from God. It has a certain fluidity, allowing for the consderation of intent and avoiding the absurdity of defining an orthodox knowledge base, which turns so many conventional religions into caricatures.

Echidna: So, for you, the concept of sin is not particularly about the performance of a "wrong" action (I'm with you there), but it's also not particularly about consciousness of wrong-doing? Hmmm... So a person could sin accidentally?

Me: Almost all sin is committed by people who don't think of what they're doing as being sinful.

In fact, the worst sins result from efforts to combat sin: inquisitions; pogroms against "evil" ethnic and religious groups; terrorism; oppression in the name of suppressing terrorism; gay-bashing; suppression of female sexuality through clitorectomies; the War on Drugs.

We become what we resist. The Devil's favorite tactic is to point at some or other hapless scapegoat and shout, "Look! It's the Devil!"

Old Cutter John: A person could sin without consciously considering the possiblity. There were some people, for example, who figured that if cattle could be tricked into eating the ground-up grisly bits of other cattle, they'd grow faster. That wasn't the way God intended cattle to eat, nor the way She intended people to tend cattle, and the manner in which She showed us that is history.

Echidna: Outcome as determinant? Hindsight is 20/20 vision (except for the blinkered) and a degree of foresight is available by extrapolation from history, but that's not perfect, so at the point of decision/action we don't have "outcome" for consideration. There are gross levels of willful blindness that offend my sensibilities, but I tend to call the stuff at the bottom of this slope "mistakes". Does your notion of sin go all the way down there? And if it does, I wonder what use the concept is to you...

I suppose I'm coming from a received idea of sin as something to be avoided at all costs, and if it is, by definition, so inclusive as to be unavoidable, the attempt is lost before it's started. I suppose also that a calm contemplation of "We are all sinners" could move one past that, except when one also has a received idea that being a sinner leads inevitably to public humiliation and punishment (both immediate and eternal).

Old Cutter John: Realistically speaking, it's almost impossible to avoid sin completely. After all, sin was created by God to propel the story. I certainly sin. I try to keep it to a minimum, but I do it.

My determination to avoid sin to the extent that I can, is identical with my determination to live according to Castaneda's advice that I touch the world lightly. They're different ways of saying the same thing within different frames of reference. And the identity between the two constructs holds when we define sin as that which separates us from God, though I'm not sure whether that's the only definition of sin for which the identity holds.

As to public humiliation and punishment, that sometimes happens, but even when it happens, it isn't always noticed. Does the process of becoming ill with Creutzfeldt-Jakobs syndrome and then dying of it constitute public humiliation and punishment? Our social conventions color our view. In any case, I'm not especially interested in a definition of sin that's concocted to benefit the practioners of priestcraft, even if it identifies sin reasonably well. I'm interested in a definiton that helps me live correctly.

Obviously, fighting evil has a strong tendency to lead one into sin. I'm skeptical of moral codes too. I myself have no use for a moral code; I simply try to do what God wants of me. Most conventional religions do have moral codes that intertwine with their definitions of sin. It's possible to judge these various moral codes by the smoothness with which they divide the space of all possible pursuits into the required, the optional, and the prohibited. If a moral code generates a lot of fantastic shapes — and some of them (including those associated with Judaism and Catholicism) even generate islands — then something is seriously wrong with it, and with the theology that underlies it. If a moral code generates relatively smooth and simple curves, it's at least an improvement, but I still wouldn't become a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon.

Echidna: It's starting to feel like to hold fast to a notion of sin is a sin.

Me: Since God is ultimately formless, eventually all forms that one can't let go of at will, including thought-forms (e.g., concepts, habits of thought and perspective) become obstacles to union with God. However, at a given stage on one's journey, a given form may be essential to one's progress.

Like most spiritual concepts, this is much clearer (to me, anyway) when talked about using spatial metaphor: If you're travelling somewhere, and you have to cross a body of water by rowboat on the way, then a fear of boats is an obstacle, and a love of boats is an advantage. But once you get across the water, and have to continue your journey by land, then a love of boats can be an obstacle, if it's extreme enough that you won't get out of the boat, or insist on dragging it with you over the mountain range up ahead.

So there are some people who subscribe to a concept of sin because it's a useful concept in the current stage of their journey.

There are some people who don't subscribe to a concept of sin, because such a concept wouldn't be useful to them in the current stage of their journey, or would be an obstacle to them.

There are some people who are sinning (i.e., sabotaging their own spiritual development) by subscribing to a concept of sin that is not useful for them. Some of these people have concepts of sin that were once very useful to them, and they've just failed to recognize that those concepts have outlived their usefulness. There are also plenty of people dragging around concepts of sin that never did them any good.

There are also a great many people for whom temporarily adopting some or other concept of sin is necessary for the next step on their journey, who are sinning by holding fast to a refusal to adopt such a concept.

 

Were I to mention (as I’m doing, right now, in this very sentence) that my final contribution to the above bit of conversation was written one week ago, on Friday the 9th, the astute reader would no doubt recognize that this conversation was one of the vehicles that God used to guide me toward the realizations and decisions that I posted in this journal the following day (i.e., in the entry just before the one you’re reading now).

More about that last entry: In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to see that God had been trying to teach me that particular lesson for a very long time. It’s one I’ve been particularly dense about. Back at Burning Man 2000, God even tried the “hit me on the head with a hammer” approach, which usually works on me (and which God is nonetheless kind enough to refrain from using on me most of the time). And then, when that didn’t work, God tried some really entertaining methods... for instance, for the past three-and-a-half years, I’ve had Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” stuck in my head for days on end after many social events and chance encounters with certain “friends.”

Interesting that although “Positively 4th Street” didn’t wake me up, having God suddenly change the tune, two weeks ago, to the stanza of “Bad Sneakers” quoted in my previous entry, did help to wake me up. Of course, God knew all along it would work that way. (With omniscient beings, one doesn’t have to wonder, “Did She know?”) Leading in one direction for a long time and then doing a sudden but slight shift of direction is a common aikido maneuver, and God’s good at that sort of thing (She practices a lot – whenever I go to a class, seems like She’s always there).

Those readers who have a good understanding of how God works will of course have already guessed that posting that last entry had immediate, concrete, and highly pleasant repercussions in my life. And those readers are of course correct. As soon as I dropped the toxic concepts, perspectives, and people that had been infesting the social aspect of my life, I opened my life to the flood of happy social goodness that God had been waiting for me to be ready for.

So it’s been a very social week for me. Lots of good time with real friends, new and old. Argus on Monday evening, a benefit for Ikar’s film project Tuesday evening, an unexpected encounter and hour of hanging out with Wolf Gal after aikido Wednesday evening, and last night seeing Sherpa and some of the Orphans (and Duncan!) at a small screening of Hysteria, and then hanging out until after midnight with Paradox, Alaska, and Stray, planning a summer ritual project that you’ll be hearing more about soon.

And that’s just the face-to-face. Lots of good online connections, too – including a wonderful, happymaking response from Yoko to that last entry, more correspondence with Lila that I’ve just got to find time to format and post here soon, and a phone message from Moly - which I need to go and return now, so it’s time to wrap this up.

“I’m not an artist – I’m a competent fanatic.” - Sherpa