The Illusion of Separation: Sin, Forgiveness, and the Divine Within

Peter: 00:00:06

Views, interpretations and opinions expressed are not advice nor official positions presented on behalf of any organization or institution. They are for informational and entertainment purposes only. Now join Ryan and Peter for another episode of the Tracking Wisdom Podcast.

Ryan: 00:00:23

Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Tracking Wisdom Podcast. I'm Ryan.

Peter: 00:00:28

I'm Peter.

Ryan: 00:00:29

And today I wanted to talk a little bit about sin, forgiveness and the divine within and the context of perennial wisdom and what I interpret to be sort of the contemporary or conventional institutional teachings of the Christian church.

Now I want to disclaim that what we're discussing is opinion and acknowledging that it's not the traditional or conventional teaching of the modern day Christian churches and that Christian churches in various denominations have different perspectives on many of these things.

But what I wanted to do today in the intent of the discussion, is to create a bit of a reframing around the concept of sin and forgiveness and grace and judgment and some of these terms that can at times have loaded or preconceived notions about them and tie it in with this idea of perennial wisdom, perennial philosophy that we've been discussing and where I see and Peter sees this overlap of this wisdom in Christianity, but also in other traditions, namely Buddhism and the like.

So the background context on this was that I had been listening to the radio and I listened to Christian radio and the whatever it was that came up, it was like an advertisement and it said basically sin comes between us and our perfect God and it frames it.

And I think that this is part of my point that I think, at least in my experience in the Christian church and the, the takeaway that I've felt like the messaging presented is that sin is related to our thoughts and actions and the bad things that we do. And that when we do these bad things that are antithetical to God's will, that that's sin.

And in that sin we create a barrier between us and God in our relationship with God and in the essence of it, it does allude to this duality of God being an external entity and us being individuals en masse.

And what I picked out of it as far as applying the perennial wisdom lens, the perennial philosophy is that sin in and of itself is not the things that we do. It's not being bad or doing that are in antithetical to God's infinite wisdom and nature.

But it is the essence of the egoic separation, something that I perceive as the personification of the devil or demons or Satan as the egoic mind, that state of being that perceives only separation and perceives the fear of being alone versus our true nature, which I would call the spiritual being or the like.

And that tug of war between those two states of being, that that's sin, that the, the sin is not the things we do, but is this essence and illusion of separation that creates that barrier between the experience of the oneness of the true love and, and absolute nature of God. I think I said everything.

Peter: 00:04:23

So, so, so, yeah, so the, the way I was coming to it is that sin is suffering or sin. Sin is what creates more suffering in us. And suffering is the sense of separation. Separation is suffering, suffering is separation.

And so, you know, so in our view, God is not a separate entity from which we are separated. God is our nature and our experience is one of suffering because we experience the illusion of separation.

So separation occurs as soon as we're incarnated. If once we're born as physical organisms, we are by definition physically separated from our environment and from other organisms.

And it just increases as we are socialized because our culture emphasizes that physicality and separation.

So even if you're not religious, you're still indoctrinated with separation, which is contrary to our absolute reality because the prevailing view is materialism, that our physical experience of the world is real, is the ultimate reality. This is the real world, the real world.

There is no other real world which happens to be false, you know, in our, in our belief and in fact in our experience. And I guess I, I kind of want to. Speaking of experience. So I came in today, not very well.

And we spent some time with Ryan off mic, going through my, my recent experience. And then we had a mishap where we started to discuss this topic and we weren't, we didn't, we failed to record.

But the fact is that going through that exercise of exploring this with Ryan, I feel so much better than when I came in because it was the exercise of looking at separation and non separation and suffering and non suffering. And so I feel much more at peace than when I came in. I have a much stronger sense of reality than I had when I came in.

So I think, you know, the idea of sin is pointing at this reality of separation causing suffering. But it is not the separation of our souls from separate deity.

It is our perception, our wrongful perception of separation or our embracing of the illusion of separation.

And the other thing I was going to say about the concept of sin as part of the Judeo Christian tradition is that, you know, what I've named before is the idea of teaching to a bell curve or designing your belief system to a bell curve. In other words, how can we structure this to have the biggest impact on the most people?

And that teaching right and wrong and sin and virtue, I guess right, black and white, is so much simpler than teaching something like, well, what is it that increases suffering and what is it that decreases suffering? So that's my ethics is not what's right and what's wrong. It's what is increasing suffering in this situation.

What is decreasing suffering, what is easing suffering in this situation.

It's much easier, and I had said earlier that, you know, as parents, we know it's much easier to teach, do this, don't do that than it is to teach well what's best right now. How do we work through the situation to find what's best? It's much easier just to say, never this and always that.

And man, it's just hitting me right now in terms of what I'm going through with my conditioning and my, my, my family struggles very really along these lines. So it's like really pointing directly to my suffering and the suffering that I create.

But, but just to say that teaching right and wrong, teaching black and white and defining things that way and listing commandments is much easier and has much more impact statistically than teaching more or less, you know, more suffering, less suffering. And I think this has the, I mean, people will call this relativism because it is. Which has, Has a bad rap.

Well, I mean, it, it's really in direct opposition to Judeo Christian tradition of right and wrong.

Now, having said that, you know, what I've learned from a Reform synagogue is that what's the most important thing is struggling with the issue, grappling with the issue, interpreting the issue. That's where our obligation is. It's not, oh, just do what you're told. That's not, you know, just obey. That's not the obligation.

That's to say, just obey is to. Oh, what's the word? Abdicate responsibility. Well, my leader told me to do this. God says I should always do this, so I'm just always going to do it.

So, yeah, separation, suffering. I mean, I think. Did I say that? That suffering is separation. Yeah, God's will. That was the other thing.

The idea of, you know, sin is violating God's will versus sin is creating separation. There's an approach, I guess, Byron, Katie has a book called Loving what is. And there's a approach to that.

Said that there's a perspective that loving, what is dealing with reality as it is, is how to Be holy or how to be happy. There's a quote I'm trying to think, is it St. Augustine? I want what God wants. That's why I'm so merry.

And I think there's a metaphor here which gets overextended, which is reality is God's will by definition. Right. There's a creator. We're living in creation, therefore what we are in is the will of God. That doesn't mean.

And again, this goes back to the simplification. Right. Well, we wrote down God's will here. No, that's. I think that's where the oversimplification is. Right, Right.

If we accept reality and we understand the illusion of separation, that can come from dealing with that reality sometimes if we overcome that sense of separation, then we live in God's will.

We live in reality without conflict with the way things are, and then we're free to influence the way things are without creating unnecessary suffering. Ah, that was the other thing I was going to say, going back to the idea of right and wrong and always and never.

That's not possible in reality as biological organisms. To say never kill is just inherently false. Unless you say, well, this isn't killing, because that thing's not really. It doesn't count. Right.

Because now here we extend them. Analogy or metaphor, whatever. And because God gave man dominion over all these things, so we can kill these things.

But, you know, this killing is right and this killing is wrong. No, this killing creates more suffering unnecessarily.

And this killing supports our life and our ability to work to do good and reduce the suffering of others. Is it killing? It's still killing, but it's not unnecessary killing and it's not killing that creates unnecessary suffering.

So I'm trying to point to a way in which there's a kind of falseness to absolutes and it. You know, honestly, I have to say that I'm experiencing some resistance from my Western, Judeo Christian framework.

Like, I, I do feel a little uncomfortable saying that.

Ryan: 00:13:32

That there. But there's no absolutes.

Peter: 00:13:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel a slight resistance to saying that still, which is. Yeah, it's a little strange to me. Yeah, so that's, that's my take on it. Let's see where.

Oh, are you going to get to repentance still? Right.

Ryan: 00:13:48

Yeah, we'll touch on repentance in a minute. And I just want to respond to a couple of things that you had said.

So, number one, and you did touch on this, but I had mentioned it before and I figured I'd Share my words with the group that, you know, I had been talking, basically talking about right and wrong and this idea of judgment and that historically I've taken sort of that relativistic perspective where right and wrong is more of a social construct. And I don't fully dismiss that as part of ethics. Like there, there is a.

There is, in my opinion, some level of human judgment is what dictates right and wrong. But I've moved towards a.

More towards a position where I acknowledge that there's a way of existing in a way of living our lives and taking action that seems to be in accord with something greater. I generally bring in, you know, the Tao when I think of that, but it goes to what Peter was saying as well. And it.

It speaks to Buddhist teaching with the Eightfold Path and such. Where there is a skillful way of living, there's a.

A way of living and acting that essentially creates less suffering or it doesn't increase suffering. So I align with that. And that is where I've moved more as far as away from relativism a bit. But I still stand by. And this is more in a.

A larger, I guess, holistic sense.

And I bring it up because I feel like it'll come up a little bit more in the neck in forgiveness and deity, that I don't think that these things generally are dictates from. Well, it's not dictates from a separate God, because I don't believe in a separate God. I suppose, really, you know, that.

That the divine is the divine spark and essence within every living creature and part of the cosmos. What's seen and unseen. You know, all of that. And so what. But when you're talking about the Bell Curve, I mean, that made.

That makes perfect sense from a teaching standpoint. And of course, we. I love your example with being a parent because we do speak that way often, especially to young children.

And in many ways people seek that out, like to be fair. Right. There is a lot of people who just want to be told what to do.

And so if you frame it in a way to just do this, and in many cases, or most cases, statistically speaking, you're going to be living in a. In better accord with the state of God, essentially, that that makes sense. And as you had mentioned, there's a. There's a trap with that. Right.

There's a hazard by taking that absolute perspective that students of that teaching can have, can misunderstand how rigid that is.

Peter: 00:17:06

I mean, I think the most dangerous part is when we start to punish each other for our perceived violations of commandments or requirements or laws.

So I want to mention the distinction between commandments and precepts that we see between, you know, Judeo Christian tradition and Buddhist tradition. So in my understanding of Buddhist precepts, these are. These are strong guidelines to maximize your progress on the path.

And to the extent that you violate the precepts, you may have more difficulty. You probably will have more difficulty progressing as the. On the path.

As Jack Kornfield says, it's really hard to be mindful after a hard day of killing and pillaging. But there's a. There's a story, Zen story, of a monastery that has a problem with vermin in the rice.

And the students, the monks, come to the abbot and say, oh, we can't kill. What should we do? There are, you know, the way I heard this story was roaches. But anyway, the vermin in the mice, oh, we can't kill. What can we do?

They're, they're destroying the rice. We're, you know, our food is spoiling. And, and the leader says, I'm not going to tell you what to do. You go figure it out.

And because, you know, that's the point. It's not to do what you're told. It's to figure it out. It's to make the decision and do what's needed for the situation.

I mean, you know, you have to feed the monastery. You're not saying that the lives of the rats are unimportant, but you're saying we have to keep the monks alive.

You know, so unfortunately, you might have to kill the rats, but it's, it's a question doing the work, not just saying, well, of course we're going to kill the rats or not. You know, you still have the precepts telling you those rats are important. Those are. Those living things are important.

Now you have to figure out what you're going to do, understanding that their life is important and your life is important. Yeah, I guess I'll leave it at that.

Ryan: 00:19:20

So to move on, we want to talk about the idea of repentance.

And frequently the flavor that is elucidated through the conventional teaching of repentance is a sense of being sorry and begging for forgiveness or something along that line.

I mean, maybe begging for forgiveness is an unfair characterization, but I think, at least in my own experience of the teachings, it comes across that way. And yet the word repentance and the Greek word metanoia, which means repentance, metanoia, I don't know I don't speak Greek.

Means to turn back or to change one's mind. And I have heard this taught in Christian faith.

So it's not that it's completely absent but the recurring sentiment that I feel like comes out of repentance is this negative punitive essence like repent, repent. And the purpose of the repentance isn't there's a little gnat in this room and it's right in front of my face. I don't want to kill it.

Peter: 00:20:33

I have, I have this image, you know, of repentance of like chest beating regret, of guilt. Guilt for a thing as opposed to. Well you said turning away from that turning back. It's to returning back from the past.

Ryan: 00:20:53

So when we think about the separation of sin being the illusion of separation and God and that soul essence being the oneness and the ultimate reality that to turn away from the activities and the suffering and, and the illusion perception of separation, the thing that creates a perception of separation and to recognize by turning towards which ultimately in my worldview is an inward turning, to turn inward to recognize that divine spark within is repentance.

That that's where you will start to be able to see and discern on your own those things that are in accordance with the way of being that the correct.

Peter: 00:21:54

I agree and I have to say again, I mean this is my immediate direct experience that you know, what I've been doing with you is returning to turning towards. I see the nat.

Turning towards the truth, turning towards the experience of non separation and away from the conditioning or conditions that are amplifying or supporting or strengthening the sense of separation. I mean that's the way I came in this morning was feeling frustrated and separate and I mean maybe even guilty.

I think there's a very strong sense of separation.

And then as we start to work through this content and I'm thinking about yeah, what's, what's sin and what's grace and what's, you know, what's real and what's illusion. I, I much more experience the sense of connection and belonging and non separation and which I mean is my experience in formal practice as well.

So for me formal practice is a generally group awareness exercise which is kind of a group meditation and coming together with others and orienting towards what is awareness, what is the nature of awareness? What is the nature of my inner, my experience of what is experiencing, what I experiencing, what is that characteristic of awareness?

That's my practice that brings me away from suffering and into connection and belonging and wholeness and that Direct experience. And so that's repentance for me. I mean, clearly that's what's being described here.

To me it's like, yeah, if I turn away from my sense of separation and I turn towards my sense of wholeness, all this suffering disappears. It's quite remarkable.

So I think that this is what's being pointed to by these teachings, but unfortunately not always in a skillful or effective way.

And that the oversimplification or maybe some of the lessons that people have heard about this are people attached to the lesson, attached to the way this is taught. Basically, you know, clinging to the finger, staring at the finger and not trying to see the moon that the finger is pointing to.

That's, that's what happens with. This is a sticky teaching. I guess that's what I'm saying.

This is a teaching that is fraught with suffering because it is pointing to non suffering and yet people make it be a cause of suffering. And unfortunately I think it is often intentionally used to cause suffering as a means of control. Not always.

And that's not to say it's a bad teaching, but it is a teaching that is very prone to exploitation. And I think I can easily, very comfortably say that it's a teaching that has been the cause of a lot of religious trauma.

And in fact I'm not thinking of a specific thing that came up recently that I won't repeat. But yeah, so yeah, yeah, I see.

Ryan: 00:25:39

It as, I mean as a different way of saying essentially what you said is repentance to me is being. Turning away from fear and towards love. When we have. Guilt was the word that particularly stood out to me.

And that's a, that's a common experience for many people. And from my perspective, guilt is a function or symptom of fear.

And so when we turn away from that and start focusing forward on the loving aspects of ourself, that we can move beyond suffering and, and help heal not only ourselves, but those around us actually. But on this point it brings me to the forgiveness aspect and the general teaching that God forgives us, God forgave us.

Well, I'll talk about grace later.

But forgiveness being something externally bestowed upon us, upon our unworthy, you know, biologic material selves that are, have this inherent sin which, you know, we, as we've talked about isn't necessarily what it is purported to be in our perspective. But forgiveness to me is not an external thing.

So when we talk about sin and forgiveness and repentance, so sin being the separation, the illusion of separation, repentance being to turn away from that separation towards the loving oneness and unification that is a spark within all of us. The forgiveness is our own internal forgiveness.

To forgive ourselves of the things that we judge ourselves as being bad, that there's no need, well, that's going to go into grace. So I'm not, I don't want to digress too much, but that's my perspective on the, the criticality of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is important, but forgiveness is not bestowed upon us by God because we are perfect in God's eyes. We are created in the image and likeness of a loving God. And our forgiveness has to be because we are the ones who have judged ourselves.

We therefore also need to be the ones to forgive ourselves.

Peter: 00:28:02

So I think guilt, shame, forgiveness and grace are very, I mean, you're struggling to separate in conversation. And that's what I'm saying, seeing as well, it's like, oh, I want to talk more about, you know, these things. And they're, they're.

You can't really talk about them in isolation because one implies the other. I mean, to. Okay, so guilt is what I think the fear of punishment or shame is. You know, the fear of rejection, maybe of being condemned, of.

Of not belonging, not belonging. I mean, this is all about belonging and connection and versus separation, separation and rejection.

And that they are, they are created socially, but they're imposed personally. Right.

I mean, we're socialized into these values and we're told that our group is going to punish us, is going to reject us, which is not safe for us as organisms. And in order to try to protect ourselves from that rejection by the group, we punish ourselves in guilt and shame. And when no one else knows.

Right, Right. I mean, if we commit a transgression and no one knows, we are punished.

We are punished by ourselves, by, by knowing how that, how that contradicts the structure, the given rules.

And then on top of that, I suppose if no one else knows, on top of that, there's the fear of someone finding out and then adding their rejection to your own rejection.

Whereas in reality, all the separation and rejection is a construct of our physical reality and our socialization that ultimately there is no separation, there is no rejection because there are no separate entities to reject one another. And when we turn towards God, if you will, then that is great. That's grace, because basically everything magically is made.

Well, without jumping through hoops, maybe.

Ryan: 00:30:38

Yeah, go ahead. So I have a question for you. I have my own thoughts on it, I think.

So you made mention of the way you Described it as separation and the guilt and shame and the social construct because it's not safe for us as organisms. I think that's legitimate as far as a biological thing. I wonder. And this, my question is, is our discomfort and our guilt and shame?

I think guilt and shame is primarily a means of control socially to try and make sure that the first part of it. But is it is our discomfort with separation because it is discordant with our true nature, that our true nature is oneness.

And when we, while it may be to some degree a social construct of hierarchy, of needs, that in its essence it is because it's discordant with that true nature of connection.

Peter: 00:31:33

Yeah, you're touching on something that I was sensing as well.

This is so interesting that, you know, there's, there's a danger in the way I'm expressing things of saying, oh, well, then we can do whatever we want because all this is just other people telling us what to do. And yeah, you know, if you try that, you'll know.

Ryan: 00:31:51

Right.

Peter: 00:31:52

Because you're not going to be at peace. You're going to be pursuing some ego concept of, oh, now I can do whatever I want. I don't have to follow these rules of society.

And you'll just be chasing another version of a social construct of freedom.

Ryan: 00:32:10

Right.

Peter: 00:32:10

Of liberty. So I'm not saying what's it. I'm not condoning anarchy. Right, Right. And I'm not saying, oh, this is all false control. It's not.

But it's also not this absolute sense of, or absolute real structure of punishment and transgression. And, you know, the kind of classical, stereotypical description of sin and punishment and repentance is not strictly true.

Ryan: 00:32:46

Right.

Peter: 00:32:46

You know, there is truth in there that we're trying to tease out. That doesn't mean that you can't do anything wrong. That's not what that means.

It doesn't mean that you can't create suffering by doing the wrong thing in the wrong time in the circumstance. It doesn't mean that if you behave unskillfully, you won't have suffering.

Ryan: 00:33:09

Right.

Peter: 00:33:09

You know, so if you ignore the guidelines and say, well, I'm going to do whatever I want whenever I want to do it, and then find yourself behaving unskillfully, which you will because you're not behaving mindfully, or you're not turning towards God and behaving with God's will, then you're going to have a hell of a lot of suffering. Did I mention God's will? This Time while we record.

Ryan: 00:33:34

I think you did okay if you want to touch on it, just in case.

Peter: 00:33:37

Well, that. Oh yeah, I think I did. Yeah. I want what God wants. That's why I'm so merry that. Yeah. Reality is like.

If we can see reality and we can behave in congruence with reality, we can be happy. Yeah, yeah.

Ryan: 00:33:55

And for me. So my, my take with the whole idea of grace.

So my understanding of grace is that my understanding of the most common perspective and teaching from the Christian church, the modern Christian church, is that we are inherently broken and we receive forgiveness through Christ or however you want to frame that through God's grace, that there's no action that we can take that can fulfill that to repay that debt, so to speak. That it is only through God's grace that those transgressions have been overlooked, so to speak.

That's my rough interpretation of it and my perspective.

So as I had said, I think the forgiveness is not externally bestowed but internally rectified, reconciled with our own judgments that grace is given because there's nothing to forgive.

And that's what I was kind of getting at before, that we are created by a perfect being or perfect essence and are perfect in the highest sense by nature. And so nothing we do can remove that intrinsic essence that we are fundamentally not broken.

And therefore grace is not even really a thing because there's nothing to give, there's nothing to grace. Grace is that there's nothing to forgive, there's nothing to earn, there's nothing given because we are fundamentally as we're meant to be.

Peter: 00:35:39

So yes, I think again what's being pointed to by the. The teaching of grace. Right, this. Well, what is it? I mean, is grace. So there's repentance and then there's grace and resolution, Right.

I mean that's the outcome of grace is return to wholeness, return to non suffering. I think what that's pointing to. So what, so what you're saying is in an absolute sense there's not.

There's no grace because there's nothing to forgive. But I think in my experience there is this absolute. Not absolute, not in the sense of absolute A.

But I mean there's absolutely an experience of coming from suffering and transitioning into non suffering. That is an experience of grace. It is remarkable and contrary to ideas of guilt and a kind of sense of wrongness.

Really there's something remarkable about making that turn. And there's. It's definitely a sense of turning away from.

I mean, you know, in the context of this conversation I think we'd say turning away from sin towards repentance and then receiving grace.

And I can definitely identify with the experience of turning away from suffering towards wholeness and then experiencing that transformation, which is. It's an extraordinary moving experience. And so it gets a name.

And in my shared practice it's the word grace has absolutely been used by many people as being the nature of awareness. You know, because we're all, and I'm talking about, you know, when we come together to practice.

It's not like, oh, we're all just, you know, we've been in bliss this whole time. We're just gonna get together and share our bliss. We're all in various states of suffering when we come together.

And then as we practice, we come into grace and we come into connection and we come into belonging and away from the sense of separation. And so I think it's ultimately like you say, ultimately there is nothing. It's our true nature. It's our.

There's nothing to get or fix because that's the ultimate nature of reality. But in experiencing the transition from illusion to reality, that's okay. So we have this experience.

So Ryan knows that I'm like having one of my moments where tears are streaming down my face as I come into contact with this. That there is an ineffable experience which I think we call, that's what we call the divine. It's. It's something that we struggle to express.

And that's why we come up with all these terms that give us so much difficulty and create so much conflict, is we want to talk about God and the divine and grace and somehow capture this, this ineffable experience of moving from suffering and separation to belonging and peace and non suffering. And at the same time, as Ryan's saying, it's absolute reality. It's our true nature. There's nothing to change but there.

So it's like I'm going back and forth, there's nothing to change. But at the same time there's this experience of transition.

There's this, this, this change in way of being where at one moment we're in suffering and when we succeed in turning, then we're in non suffering.

And it's, it's an overwhelming experience that, that is the perennial wisdom that everybody's trying to capture and point to and describe throughout all of human experience. You know, from the first scratching on a rock to it's like, oh my God, this is a thing.

I'm trying to share this with other beings because that's Another nature of it. Right, right. Is it wants to be expressed, you know, except by the. The hermits who just want to leave me alone. I'm at peace. Yeah, sorry. That.

That's my. That's my. My experience.

Ryan: 00:40:20

It's perfect. I. I don't want to take away from that takeaway. I think it's. That was a really great way to kind of tie it all up.

And I think it acknowledges where I was trying to go, but also acknowledging the importance that there is this ineffable experience that many people experience, that the grace of peace that is available to us. And I think that's where everybody's trying to get to.

Peter: 00:40:54

So.

Ryan: 00:40:54

Thank you for this conversation.

Peter: 00:40:56

Oh, thank you.

Ryan: 00:40:59

We hope you enjoyed this conversation. We'd love to hear from you. If you have any comments or you have your own experience you'd like to share, there's many ways to reach out.

And I guess, until next time, stay open, stay curious, and keep on tracking Wisdom.

Peter: 00:41:18

Thank you for listening to the Tracking Wisdom podcast. Join us next time as we continue the discussion.

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