Illusion

Image by Rafał Pocztarski

I think that we tend to think of sin, if we think of it at all, as a failure of character and a failure of will. And so we blame the sinner: essentially if this person had a stronger will or a better character, he would not be afflicted so. This has become almost a characteristic Christian thing unfortunately: blame the sin on the sinner's personal weakness. Essentially, on their inferiority as a man or woman.

A man cannot will something different from what the inner man actually thinks, wants or believes. The inner man wins out. It's no different from willing yourself to hold your breath: eventually the real you wants to breathe and will decide the matter. So if someone has a serious porn addiction for instance, he can claim to wish to beat it all he wants (no pun intended,) but this does not defeat the root cause of why he desires it. It's not a matter of strength of will. It is a matter of wanting what you do not really want. Or, you want the benefits of giving up the sin, but you don't want to actually give it up. You want to keep the sin and avoid the negative effects of sinning, both. Which is of course an impossible wish.

So, instead of using the old Christian stand-by of shame and guilt interspersed with prayer, we should consider what actually WOULD work to overcome this behavior. What DOES destroy sinful behavior? What does throw the money-changers out of the Temple of your soul for real?

Every sin is based on an illusion, on a false understanding of life. They can be illusory thoughts, but mostly they are illusory emotional patterns. Emotional reactions that can go very deep, to childhood perhaps, but which are always based on illusory desires and associations. It is of no use to blame the sinner: he must release the false reality he is holding on to and embrace a truer understanding. He must uncloud his own eyes and see the truth.

I'll give you some practical examples. I avoid anything pornographic but once in awhile I will unintentionally run across pictures of naked women on the internet, and I am a heterosexual man. This may have the effect of arousing me, so how do I respond to that? I look at what I am really feeling. Sexual desire of course, but also a desire for a feeling of comfort. And then I think about how what I am seeing is in no way a sensible target for those wants. For starters, it's just a picture. Just photons coming off a screen. There is no true reality there, only a fiction. For second, the women depicted are sinners same as I, they are made of meat and snot and poop same as I, and they are subject to corruption and death same as I. Being human, they probably lie and hate and anger and fool themselves, not unlike myself. What part of that do I really find desirable? And so my illusory feelings are replaced by the truth, and I do not desire anymore. Problem solved.

I think most sins are subject to being treated in the same way, if the person really wants to understand and challenge those illusions. This is not a challenge of will, this is a challenge of seeing, of perception, of understanding the true state of things. The real test for me I guess is if I am able to apply the same thinking to my tobacco smoking, which is my abiding problem. If this method succeeds against that persistent problem where everything else has not, I will  know that this is pretty much the Swiss army knife for dealing with such things because I have literally tried everything.

The method does require someone who really wants to apply it to the problem however, which is not always a given. We shall see how it works for me.