Richard Rohr Meditation: Being Your True Self
“Sin” primarily describes a state of living outside of union, when the part poses as the Whole. It’s the loss of any experience of who you are in God, of what many call your soul.
The full biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. In this it is quite similar to ancient Hinduism and later Buddhism and Sufi Islam. The spiritual journey is about realization, not perfection. You cannot get there, you can only be there. But for some reason, that foundational Being-in-God is too hard to believe, too good to be true. Only the humble can receive it because it affirms more about God than it does about us. The ego does not like that.
.. It is not that if I am moral, then I will be loved by God; rather, I must first come to experience God’s love, and then I will—almost naturally—be moral. To continue the Copernican metaphor, now the sun is central and we draw our energy from its light.
.. Before conversion, we view sin as any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.
.. In that sense, only the false self can and will sin. The false self only lies because it somehow is a lie. The True Self is consciousness itself. The false self lives in unconsciousness, and we do evil only when we are unconscious. Jesus naturally forgave those who were killing him, because they literally “do not know what they are doing”