Pseudo Religions – In Gita Verse 3.36 Arjuna said: O descendant of Vṛṣṇi, by what is one impelled to sinful acts, even unwillingly, as if engaged by force?
Act can be sinful or virtual when we act from our mind, our unconsciousness. As when we become unconscious towards the self we forget our connection with the universe. In that unconsciousness we don’t understand why and how we can respond in these circumstances. When we are unconscious we forget the discipline of the universe, which means to respond in an original way to this present moment.
Neither Universe is not repeating anything, nor it wants us to repeat anything. It always wants us to respond originally and uniquely.
All of us saw the child – how they respond to everything is totally unexpected, their anger is also original. This is the reason that they don’t carry any guilt after the anger.
Sin and virtue means we are not original in our act and we carry forward it with guilt, anxiety, or any other emotions.
Be fresh, be original in your act, respond to the present moment, and you will find there is no sin or virtue. In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 2.39, I wrote regarding Be original.
Sin is a technique of the pseudo-religions. A true religion has no need for the concept at all. The pseudo-religion cannot live without the concept of sin, because sin is the technique of creating guilt in people.
You will have to understand the whole strategy of sin and guilt. Unless you make a person feel guilty, you cannot enslave him psychologically. It is impossible to imprison him in a certain ideology, a certain belief system. But once you have created guilt in his mind, you have taken all that is courageous in him. You have destroyed all that is adventurous in him. You have repressed all possibility of him ever being an individual in his own right. With the idea of guilt, you have almost murdered the human potential in him. He can never be independent. The guilt will force him to be dependent on a messiah, on a religious teaching, on God, on the concepts of heaven and hell, and the whole lot.
To create guilt, all that you need is a very simple thing: start calling mistakes, errors – sins. They are simply mistakes, human. Now, if somebody commits a mistake in mathematics – two plus two, and he concludes it makes five – you don’t say he has committed a sin. He is unalert, he is not paying attention to what he is doing. He is unprepared, he has not done his homework. He is certainly committing a mistake, but a mistake is not a sin. It can be corrected. A mistake does not make him feel guilty. At the most it makes him feel foolish.
What the pseudo-religions have done – and all the religions of the world have been pseudo-religions up to now – is to have exploited mistakes, errors, which are absolutely human, and condemned them as sin. Sin means it is not a simple mistake: you have gone against God; that’s the meaning of the word sin. Adam and Eve committed the original sin: they disobeyed God. Whenever somebody condemns you as committing a sin, he is saying in some way or other you are disobeying God.
When Arjuna asks “what is one impelled to sinful acts” – he is saying as per the scriptures and not from his own experience. Not from his uniqueness, not from his originality. He just wants to repeat the scriptures to run away from responsibility and does not want to act as a part of the whole, because if he is part of the whole he has to be original in his response. He cannot repeat, he cannot be imitators. When he says something from the scriptures, means he wants to repeat, he wants to imitate. Even if you will imitate Buddha you will miss him.
Whole is not concerned with your doing, it is concerned with your doer. And once that doer is awake, it is impossible to do anything wrong. Then whatsoever you do is right. So if you ask what is right, what is wrong: anything that you do consciously is right, anything that you do unconsciously is wrong.
Tags: Pseudo Religions
