We cannot understand grace without understanding sin. Sin is what is actually not but what we think is.
It is the nonreality that the East calls maya, the cycle of addictive desire and disappointment called samsara. The great teachers of Christian life, like the desert Fathers of the Egyptian Desert in the fourth century, have also explored with deep psychological perception this human affliction that robs us of happiness. The abbas of the desert described the operation of the ‘seven deadly sins’ just as Buddhist teachers expanded on the ‘afflictive emotions’. The Christian understanding also places sin in the context of personal freedom that is an aspect of our being images of God, and so of our personal relationship to a loving God. But they do not say that sin is only what we choose to do. It arises from ignorance, our fallen state. It is a further state of disharmony and suffering that we fall into when we miss the target we should be aiming at or when our attention fails and we get lost in fantasy.8 Sin is the consequence of unwise, irresponsible choice, not only the act of choice itself. It has consequences for ourselves as for the universe to which we are responsible. Personal freedom explains why we each must listen for ourselves to the redemptive questions that bring us to self-knowledge by dispelling illusion. This is why we must repent personally. No group, church or sangha, not the best of gurus even, can do it for us without our willing consent.
Sin includes all attempts to avoid the truth of emptiness. It evades the repentance from which all authentic spiritual practice derives. The badness of sin lies not in the fact we are breaking rules, failing to conform as we should, but that it creates suffering for ourselves and for others. All suffering arises from the sinful, false identification of the ego with the true Self. We fall into this trap time after time when we forget that the Self we seek to know is not different from the person who is seeking to know it. The true Self is not something anyone can objectify in mental concepts or contain in ritual actions. Self-knowledge is really the state of self-knowing rather than the possession of knowledge about something. The Self, according to Sankara, the Indian philosopher eight centuries before Jesus, is the ‘inner light’. It is self-evident and it does not become an object of perception.
When the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom would come he responded with a similar comment, reminding them how its interiority could never be objectified:
You cannot tell by observation when the kingdom of God comes . . . for, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.9
Seeing how repentance, the kingdom of heaven and the true Self are related is an integral insight for Christian faith. These are interdependent aspects of the human spiritual journey. They become clarified and embodied in that form of relationship with Jesus that is discipleship. Thus, through discipleship, as all traditions affirm, we learn saving truths. We learn that the Kingdom is the experience of God in the nonduality of the Spirit. No one can know God except by sharing in God’s own self-knowledge, as St Irenaeus said in the third century. We learn that there is no way to the true Self except the narrow way of renouncing all the false selves of the ego-system. What is left when I have let go everything that I am not is who I truly am. It is who I have been all along but without recognising it. At that point the duality of discipleship itself dissolves. Master and disciple are experienced as one in the Friendship of the Self.
May they all be one; as you, Father are in me, and I in you, so also may they be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.10
Illusion breeds disunity and the excessive individualism of our modern culture. Ignorance and self-deception are aspects of sin that need to give way to truth before the light of the Self can shine. There is nothing less abstract than this. A favourite story of the East is often told to show how simple and down-to-earth it is. A man returns to his home at night and sees a large snake coiled up in front of his door. Terrified to move he stays frozen to the spot all night. As the light of dawn breaks he finally sees that the snake is in fact a coiled piece of rope. The false identification of the snake had to be abandoned before the truth could be known. Nothing new is created but what is there is finally, clearly seen. Ultimately only the light of truth can dispel falsehood. The mystery is where the light comes from. It takes time for the light of dawn to grow strong enough for us to see clearly. St Peter uses the same image of dawning light when he says that the clearing of mental obscurity requires the work of attention–a work in which the reading of Scripture is a powerful spiritual tool:
All this confirms for us the message of the prophets, to which you will do well to attend; it will go on shining like a lamp in a murky place, until day breaks and the morning star rises to illuminate your minds.11
The quest for self-knowledge entails the shedding of false personas. Listening to Jesus’ question leaves us in the end with no image of him at all, only real presence. All the false messiahs in our imagination, forms of projection, must be exposed and toppled before the truth of the messiah can be recognized. The Zen practitioner is told that if he meets the Buddha on the road he should kill him. When two disciples met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, after the Resurrection, they failed to recognise him until he broke bread with them. Then, in the Eucharist, their eyes were opened and they recognised him. So, meeting Jesus, the Christian disciple does not kill him. He has already been killed. Perhaps the equivalent to the Buddhist practice is to eat him. In any case, for the original to be recognised all images must go. St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fifth century warned that every image and concept of God becomes an idol.
Of course there are different kinds of recognition. All religions recognise Jesus as a universal teacher. Not everyone follows him as their personal guru. His greatness as a teacher, even for a Buddhist or a Hindu, is not only in his moral or religious wisdom but in his power to awaken in others the experience of reality. The East especially knows that a guru is more than an exemplar of moral or religious truth. A guru is one who has himself or herself become a bridge for the disciple to cross over from the land of illusion to the reality of the kingdom, of the Self.
For many people today of all traditions a particular Indian guru of modern times exemplifies this. He is one who has reminded many Christians of the directly human quality of their relationship with Jesus.
Ramana Maharshi, the sage of Arunachala in southern India, is one of the great spiritual teachers of the modern world. His influence is still felt fifty years after his death.12 Yet for most of his life he dwelt in silence and it was from silence that he radiated the experience of nonduality that dwelt in him.
When asked about the role of the guru, Ramana Maharshi would always insist on the absolute nonduality subsisting between the teacher and the disciple.
The guru is both ‘external’ and ‘internal’. From the ‘exterior’ he gives a push to the mind to turn inward: from the ‘interior’ he pulls the mind toward the Self and helps in the quieting of the mind . . . There is no difference between God, Guru and the Self.13
This is a language and understanding very different from traditional Western ideas about God, human teachers and disciples.