I had thought till recently that the Vedic correlate of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin (horrible wording, thoroughly detested through history but nonetheless accurate, despite the wording) was maya. This was an error. It’s Vedic equivalent is the Will, for which I do not know the Sanskrit.
Swami’s “all are tainted” is an indication of what is meant by this Christian doctrine. But the referent is will, not the phenomenon of maya, which is morally neutral.
Augustine observed: “The innocence of children is in the weakness of their limbs, not in their wills.” In other words, the problem is in the will.
The will is always and, existentially speaking, intrinsically going away from God. This is what is meant by “Original Sin.” It is a systemic condition, in the existential vector or phenomenology of the will.
Where there is will there is Original Sin. Sin is separation from God, distance from God. To speak of Original Sin is to speak of separation from God that is an inescapable condition of existence.
Where there is existence, there is Original Sin. Existence happens because of separation from God. If there is no separation from God, there is no existence.
There are mistakes that can be corrected. Such are not Sin. Sins, perhaps, but not Sin.
What Augustine means by “original sin” (not his phrase and really a terrible one) is not that something is wrong, for which guilt is required and ready and penance the remedy, but that the universe results from a perturbation of the divine equanimity (esse) and so is intrinsically not just esse but a mixture of esse (Being) and ego (Will), to distinguish which intelligam (viveka) based on credo (dhaarana) applied uniformly at all times to all aspects of life is necessary for salus (moksha). As long as there is embodiment, this activity is required in order to mitigate the effects of the mixture life is on the conduct of life.
Life is separation from God. Religion is reunion with God during life.
All are responsible because all are embodied. There are no excuses because there is always embodiment. If you do not have this body, you have these myriad others. They are all yours because they are all esse (atma).
Free will and divine will are synonyms. Reality and ego are synonyms.
[Name] did not understand that, when Swami told him he is God, Swami did not mean he, [Name], is God, He meant he, atma, is God. [Name] still thinks that [Name] is God. [Name] is a name. God’s Name but not God.
Swami is constantly teasing people — and bringing them forward in steps — by saying something and letting them understand it in one way — usually in naive superficiality — for a time, sometimes decades, and then suddenly shooting from within a shaft of illumination that shows one has been misunderstanding, and in a very big way.
This is actually a phenomenon of life. Everyone has such experiences, where we realize years later just how much we misunderstood some situation or words, etc. When life does this to us impersonally, regret can overwhelm us — as for some men who have broadcast their seed suddenly realize that this is weakening and enter upon a myriad fixes to regroup their vitality … and collapse into schizophrenic reverie. But when Swami does this to us, we have the Everlasting Arms as the cradle for the entire venture and so, at moments of corrected understanding, we feel relief and satisfaction.
What [Name] has been fending off is the relief and the illumination produced by tautologies. It straightens out his businessman’s hook.
This is also what saved Augustine. Interestingly, it was not a specifically Christian shaft of light that saved him but a Pythagorean one: he realized that there is order rather than chaos in the heavens, the stars. This is what calmed him and allowed his fever to subside.
With our artificial light we do not experience the impinging radiance of the stars, but people then did, every night. They felt the affect and were usually terrified of it. Amulets, etc. were a huge industry based on this fear, presumably assuaging it. When Christians were able to convince these terrified people that God, not a hierarchy (archon) of demiurges (stars), controlled the universe, they did indeed have “good news.”
AMDG
