Original sin?
We all share the original sin of not listening to our hearts, we are seduced by the thinking mind, it tells us that it is important, and we believe it, it is easy to see why, thoughts are so loud and there is no stopping them. You cannot have the thought, “that I do not want to think,” and expect the mind to obey, we are not in control of the engine room, we are on the bridge steering and our orders to shut down the power are just ignored, the engine of the mind is always turning, and it runs on the fuel of feeling, emotions, the undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the changing world who's inherent nature is for everything to change all the time. However, we have a choice, we can decide where our attention goes, and rather than listening to the mind, we can listen to our hearts instead, we can trust the decision and intuition that comes from the silence that our hearts contain.
This is not a metaphor, when we move our attention into the centre of our chest, there is a real silence there, not nothing or absence rather it is a blessed presence, there is something there, we are not alone, ever, when people say that they enjoy their own company, being at ease with themselves and doing nothing, they are not actually alone, they are in fact at ease with that silence. If you are bored that is because you are not paying attention, there is never a moment when there is nothing going on, when nothing is occurring, our internal mental state is a firework's show of massive sensations. It is strange then that so many people spend so much of their time and money avoiding sitting with the emptiness that is at the core of our being, and to be clear emptiness is form, and form is emptiness, sitting with emptiness just highlights how much is happening within this empty space that is your mental state.
It is important to recognise that mind is just one part of your mental landscape, every sense has an internal partner in your mental state, we hear a bird song and remember it in our memories, we can see a perfect sunset by closing our eyes, still feel a gentle kiss on our necks from twenty years ago. This inner world is just as real as anything outside of us, and it is more real to us, as everything we experience has to first be internalise and made sense of, that is why there are optical illusions, we can fool the mind because everything we experience is an interpretation of our senses. The only truly accurate experience is that of objects that only exist in our internal mental landscape that makes your spiritual heart one of the truest things in the world, it is the most direct experience that we have and the only one that is unfiltered, that is unless you only see the heart through the mind and it's filters.
We have to move the mind out of the way if we really want to listen to the heart, the mind needs rules and commandments, but the thing with rules is that they can be argued with, the mind can complicate the simplest of ideas. Do not murder, steal, cheat, lie, these should make the world a better place, more orderly, but they never have because the mind can find a loophole quicker than the speed of light, and as the purpose of the mind is to get you stuff to survive rather than be objectively good, it is honour bound to find a way to get you what you want by any means necessary, which includes bending the rules in anyway that satisfies your sense of right and wrong, because as well as stuff, we also want to be in the right. This is why rules do not work, except when it comes to highlighting and judging the truly awful behaviour of others, we know when someone is completely over the line, but it is our lines that are so blurry, and overwhelmingly our mind want to you to have nice things.
This is the original sin, the one we are all born into, our minds are the vehicle that keep us safe and lead us into bad behaviour in order to secure paradise, and we have to be lead there with subtle arguments and seduction, when in fact if we stopped listening to our minds and instead turned towards our hearts the true answer are all there. It said that God speaks with silence, and it is this internal silence that they are talking about, the source of all life and consciousness is contained within it, it knows the world through your experiences, and it knows itself, it can see the true path to joy and satisfaction because it can see all the paths that are open to you. What fascinates it, is how you will choose, what you want and how you get it, and when you listen to your heart, you are listening to a vast amount of wisdom, and it talks back with feeling and emotions, you ask it a question and it will show you how it feels.
If an idea is bad you will feel it, you might even think it, but it will not be a normal, self-centred thought, it will match the feeling of the heart it will be vast and greater than you, and your normal greedy, thoughts, the ones that begin with an “I” (and most of them do), that is always a give away that it is the mind at work behind it. The thoughts of hearts are your best thoughts, kind ones, giving and generous, they do not feel like they belong to you, and you are right they are the gift of the universe. They are what artists call inspiration, scientist call original thoughts and genus, it is in the act of recognising love, knowing danger, it is your instincts, they are the thoughts that bring people together, that make them see their own better nature, it is the moment that people become better and create new connections.
The original sin begins when we are born into the world of thoughts, when we are faced with this world of danger, we have to fight our corner to survive, the nature trauma that is part of life, we have to develop and become strong, capable, competent, and ultimately it is about returning to our inherent natures. There is no point in the fight unless there is something worth saving, to build towards and it is remarkable how little you actually need to experience peace, a bowl of food, shelter and the ability to listen, then it is just a matter of time and effort.
The peace of the heart and the silence that it contains is not for everyone, it has to be earnt, invested in, you have to develop a relationship with it, but once you have it, it will always be available to you at the end of any deliberate breathe you choose to take. That is because it has always been there, it just is, that is it's nature, it has never reached out for you, it is just love, it is not even waiting, it just a place that exist whether you go there is up to you. Just as the Sun it does not care whether you notice it or not, you can believe you rotate around it or it spins around you, it is completely indifferent, but if you sit in the sun it will change you, make you happier, dryer, healthier, and you get to decide if you sit with the warm of love, with the silence that grows your soul.
You get to ask your questions, to see how your actions feel in the light of this silence, you do not get to argue with it, reason, bargain, it will simply pull or push against whatever you are holding. Good action will feel good and in alignment with that silence, whereas bad action will just feel flat, nothing quite as strong as wrong, you will just not be at ease with it, that silence will just push it gently away, it will let you try again tomorrow, it will not condemn, judge or even worse nag. The only punishment is that you do not get to be at ease with that silence, you bring your bad actions into it's presence, they will be the thoughts that try to distract you, it is you mind that punishes, nag, judge, even when it talked you into the action in the first place.
Silence and love want you to come home, to give up the original sin that lead you away from your ease with silence, it wants you to stop being lead by your thoughts, by your self-justifications, reasoning and morals that always (I am sure quite by accident) end up giving you exactly what you wanted in the first place. You have to give up a lot to feel the pull of love again, to enjoy the company of love, to be at ease in the moment, you have to stop being controlled by fear, to stop fighting everything and everyone, instead you just are, you stop doing and start being. That is the only way you escape the rat race where you only have competitors in a zero-sum game, in which there is a single pie and we are all hungry.
The original sin is playing the game of life like it is the only reality, that there is not the underlying truth that we are all completely interdependence, when you hurt other people you hurt yourself more, only the truly sick hurt themselves and they need our help and healing. It is when we allow our thoughts to over rule what we know to be true that we allow harm to be done to others, we reason ourselves into it being what we do and natural. Though at every stage of humanity there have been people who knew this to be wrong, who went against what society accepted, and they have loved us despite the terrible things done to them for showing up our actions for being wrong.
Our original sin has always been obvious for whose who choose to look, and it has always been liberating for whose who have, to know that we are capable of operating from a place of love, that we can centre our lives around it and be happier, healthier and better because of it. That is because it becomes your citadel from which you centre yourself, you can not be hurt when you know that it will hurt the other person more, and that the love you show them will only make you feel more loved, more capable of doing the right things without having to justify and think it through. It gives a freedom of action that other people dream of, as you have nothing to lose as once that connection is made to love, it is unbreakable as you will be too, that is the reward those people who choose to forgive themselves for our shared original sin by the action of listening to the silence that we carry within our hearts.
