The Greek word hamartia, translated as 'sin', has a number of different meanings and connotations. It's an archery term which means either 'to miss the target' or 'to aim to miss'. It also means 'to be without a share in', 'to be mistaken', 'tragic or fatal flaw in character', and 'to transgress against the law of God'. Because of this last meaning, it it usually taken to mean some kind of disobedience or wrongdoing. (Check it out: search words hamartia + sin will give plenty of references.)

As I've said many times elsewhere, the Eternal can't have opinions, values or anything like that. It is said by the religions that God (or Love) doesn't judge, and I can't understand why this idea isn't taken further. The 'Law' of the Eternal isn't anything like our laws, even our moral sensibilities. It's just the Way things are. So a transgression against this Law is just any kind of judgement, including moral judgements. This doesn't invalidate morality at all - all it does is to place morality in the temporal world, along with the rest of our consciousness.

This means, quite clearly and unproblematically, that the word that has been translated as 'sin' in the Bible has nothing to do with wrongdoing or disobedience. If (to take the myth seriously enough to extract its meaning) Adam had no concept of right and wrong before he ate the apple, how could it have been an act of disobedience? The myth is a comment on the emergence of consciousness. It's not our wrongdoing that has separated us from the Eternal, it's our consciousness of right and wrong. This includes our consciousness of all of our feelings and values, from morality to aesthetics to awareness of physical and mental pain and enjoyment.

Sin, then, is anything at all that we are aware of in ourselves, like empathy, compassion, wonder, beauty, truth, surprise as well as their unpleasant counterparts. To be without sin is to be without consciousness. If I know something's wrong, and do it, then that's sin. If I know something's right, and do it, then that's also sin.

Once we've really got the hang of this idea, sin is not longer a value-laden, emotive word separating Heaven from Hell, but simply a technical term for our awareness of the temporal world. This realisation is much closer to the language of Zen and Dao than to the conventional Christian interpretation, which starts to look like a very sinister sales pitch - propaganda to the effect that we can't do good without subscribing to that religion. It's indescribably sad that so many millions of people have been duped in this way.

A marvellous ironic twist to the story is what happens when we go back to the sayings of Christ in this new light. I'm by no means 'converted', probably because of the damage done by the propaganda, but I can now find wisdom in Christian scripture that I didn't see before. I can see that it is perfectly feasible to be a Christian - the best sort - after you've taken this idea of sin on board.

next essay: letting the ego fade