Is Sin a Religious Myth or a Spiritual Law?

AVAlexander Volchek

When we come to the word “sin,” the concept of sin, and our own experience of sin, it is important to understand it. First, we need to understand where the word comes from and what it means in different systems. On the other hand, we need to understand the structure of the world and spiritual laws, the structure of truth. That is what we will do in this video. If we read a basic definition, sin is an action, thought, desire, or failure to act that goes against—and I am reading this directly—established norms, rules, or the will of… And look at what comes next: a divine, moral, or social order. Elsewhere it says that sin is a violation of God's will through deed, word, or thought. And again, of religious and moral precepts or rules. Rules. You have broken some rules. Why is a person afraid of sin? Why? They are afraid of the consequences. They are afraid of the consequences. Of course—look—they are afraid of the consequences. If we take a broader view of everything that happens, then, fundamentally, from the perspective of the spiritual world, these are karmic consequences. This is very interesting. Does a person have karmic consequences in mind when they think of sin? Yesterday I went to a piano concert with three of my children. A well-known French pianist was playing.

I had my two girls and my son, who is older. My son was behaving quite inappropriately. He could not sit still; something inside him kept him fidgeting. He was constantly disturbing people. I think my older daughter said to him, “One day, you could get karma for that.” She said that to him. I do not know where she got it from, but that is what she said. I added, “Wait a moment. You are already receiving karma, and you will keep receiving it.” Why did I add that? Because they—or one of them—saw karma as something bad or something extraordinarily unusual, like sin. But if we look at how a person sees it—how you see it—is sin worse? “Worse than what?” Than karma. “For some reason, I thought they were the same thing, just a different name. So it is like…” Yes, again, as I always say, you are saying the right thing. But people basically perceive sin as something weighty. Something weighty. Yet if we actually read even the definition given in Wikipedia or in society, we see that it is simply the violation of various rules.

Those rules can be religious: the church established them. They can be divine: someone obtained them somewhere, from books or treatises, or someone heard them and said them. The question is: who? Or they can be social, or social and moral. Society decided that something was a sin. But the most important thing is this: why is a person afraid of sin? They are afraid of the consequences. They see it in terms of consequences. That is the ordinary approach. Of course, there are people who do not want to sin because, in truth, one must not sin. The point is not the consequences. They say, “I am not afraid of the consequences, and I am prepared to live through them.” But these are highly developed people, highly spiritually developed people. If you have that consciousness, the consequences make no difference to you—no difference at all. The point is that you know you must not do bad things to another person. You understand the law of karma and cause and effect. Sin is not karma; they are not the same thing. Sin is certain actions a person has committed. Karma is a process that unfolds, what happens in terms of cause and effect.

So, someone has done something bad, committed a sin, and a person says, “I know karma exists and that everything will have to be answered for. That does not concern me. I refrain from sin not because I am afraid of karma. I refrain because that is not a true way of living in relation to other people. Not a true way of living in relation to other people.” So when we discuss the word “sin” and you ask your question, we arrive at the idea of an action that is not in keeping with truth in the Universe. We will not go into what is or is not true in terms of social life, because truth and untruth in social life are something of an abstraction. We can see this across different countries. In some countries, people say it is permissible to kill other people, and that it is socially, morally, and religiously right. Others say, “No, that is absolutely forbidden.” We will not go into that again, because it depends on faith, religion, and laws. There are laws in some countries that are obviously sinful. Not carrying out the action is considered a sin, a violation of that country's law, while the action itself is sinful in the first place. But if we turn to the spiritual system, there is a very interesting question: does the spiritual world have a concept of a bad action?

On the one hand, it does, because a bad action, an action that is not in keeping with truth, a violation of a particular law, leads to certain consequences in terms of karma. And karma arose as a counterweight, to keep a person from sinking endlessly into darkness. Otherwise, the more they sink into darkness without anyone stopping them, the more they will want to sink into it. This is a very interesting point that everyone needs to understand: people usually want to start doing good or restore their system only when they are already suffering. They become ill and want to take care of their health. They have done bad things and want to visit a priest and confess, or go on a retreat because they are tired, because spiritually they were in a state of narrowed perception and perceived nothing around them. That means they were harming the world. If they perceived nothing, they acted without awareness of everything happening, and obviously caused harm. Now they say, “I will find a little time and put my actions right. I will go and put them right.” But actions cannot be put right that way at all. Karma does not work like that. Moreover, cause and effect is not linear within the span of your current life.

It is not simply a matter of doing something bad now and living through it now. You may be experiencing an enormous number of good things at the moment because you have good past karma. Starting tomorrow, incredibly negative events may occur because you need to live through some negative aspect of that karma. People try to fight karma. Notice how everyone tries to use cheat codes. Everything is cheat codes. However much people talk even about good or proper spiritual development, they still want a cheat code. They even say, “If you come to our retreat, you will feel better.” Let us read retreat slogans. What if a retreat slogan said, “Come to the retreat, and you will become aware of all the many facets of the suffering you have caused, and begin to live through them even more intensely”? That is, in fact, what is required if you want to live more fully and truly. But nobody would go to retreats then. Why would they? People want a good state from a retreat, a blissful state. There is the same attitude toward bad events in relation to the spiritual world. But if we rise a certain level higher—again, Olya—if we use the word “sin” for events that lead to karmic consequences… Once again, karmic consequences arose because humanity began to sink into darkness with the arrival of Ahriman. To keep people from falling into darkness, and give them some possibility of getting out, karma appeared as a restraining layer of life. It lets them live through what they need to live through here and now, including difficult things, rather than everything their personality wants and endlessly invents.

Take karma away from people, and everyone would immediately sink into darkness now. Self-interest. Money, power, and malice would begin to take over everything. Gradually. One's own personal opinion. All of it would take over. A lack of understanding of how the system works, of that balance in perceiving the system. There is a good saying: nothing is worse than being angry at the state of your country's political or economic system, or at the people living around you. Everything that happens is a consequence of the spiritual system, spiritual life, the spiritual component of the sources of life. So committing a bad act, if we call that sin, leads to living through those karmic causes and effects…

Karmic consequences. But could we say that there is a higher level where the concepts of bad and good do not exist? A level where the very fact of a person living through something bad is simply their experience of a particular path? Can one reach that level of experience? One can. But it is a different spectrum of perception. This is not about moving into a realm of material reasoning. There is no material reasoning there. When people want to move to that level of perception, they still want to retain material aspects of reasoning and analyze material events. But analyzing material events is meaningless in this case.