Announcer 0:28
Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.
John Moore 0:48
Hello, hello, hello, everybody. It's good to be back. As I'm recording this, it is Easter morning. Not sure when you're listening to it, but I was inspired during a metaphysical meditation to speak about a particular topic. And talk about it in this podcast. And so following spirits is what I like to do. So I'm going to listen to spirit and speak about this subject. Today's subject is I'm going to take a metaphysical look at the concept of original sin. This is a concept that is very central to Christianity in particular. But I'm talking about sin in general and what it is and how that word has been sort of weaponized by the powers that be to keep people in line and that sort of thing. So welcome, welcome, everyone. And it is not my goal ever to poke holes in anybody's belief system, or you know, that sort of thing. So if your beliefs contradict mine, then that's fine. You and I can still be friends, I can still love you. Just as Jesus taught my friends, and if you think he didn't dwell in him, sorry. But that is a sin. When I get into what sin means we'll we'll talk about that specifically. And I'm not here to bash Christianity or bash on Christians or anything like that your beliefs are totally fine. But I am here to present a metaphysical perspective on sin, particularly original sin. One of the reasons for this is one of the reasons I want to talk about this, specifically, is that the the idea of original sin, as it's taught in most faiths these days, never sat well with me. I grew up in a household where my mother and my mother's family was very religious, my grandmother, who passed away at 106. Last year, was very much very religious, very into her church, as as my mom and I went to church as a kid, I went to Sunday school, and I went to church and all these things, and I enjoyed the stories, the Bible stories and all of that sort of thing. But when it came to the concept of original sin, this idea that you know, we are creations of God, but we are born into this world, already sinners. We are born imperfect and unable to experience the light of God and XYZ and that never even as a boy that never set quite well with me. And so, you know, I have meditated upon this. I have thought about this. I have had some what they call up G unproven personal Gnosis, Gnosis with a G, or get the word knowledge from I've had some things come through that I think are from spirit. But I will say that I don't know that any everybody, certainly not everybody, but I don't know that anybody else holds this viewpoint. So I'm, you know, presenting this as my view as one way to view this. And I am not fundamentalist or dogmatic or any of those things. And I don't particularly identify as Christian although I you know, I certainly have great deal of respect for Jesus and the teachings and a lot of the stories that come out of the Bible. And I think there's wisdom there. Well, let me start this way, though. I've talked about this before in other episodes, but there is a difference between the esoteric and the exoteric. And what what those words mean esoteric means, inner, inner secrets, the things that Jesus may have taught to His disciples, but wasn't preaching to the world. And you might think they're the same thing. But did you know some passages of the Bible could be taken differently. But in any religious system, or any spiritual system, there is usually an inner teaching, taught to initiates adepts. Apostles, whoever the inner circle, because, well, there's a reason for this, I'll talk about that in a minute. And then there is church, right, there's the thing that everybody goes to. And they're given a kind of a different set of surface level teachings. Part of the reason for that, there's a lot of reasons for that. But part of the reason for that is power to maintain power over the ultimate truth. certain religious institutions are very powerful. Part of it is ignorance. And part of it is there's a beginning I was listening to a talk by Dr. Paul Leon masters today, he he's passed away a number of years ago, but and he was talking about the inner and outer teachings of Jesus and how, in you know, there was a mystical aspect of that very few people approach. Most, the vast majority of people who are religious were religion, reading religious texts, do not dive deeply into meaning, even though we know that in particular, with with Jesus with Christ, the teachings were very much parables, most of the time meaning was teaching through these complex symbols. So Dr. Master said, you know, one of the reasons for this is that there are, you know, that are outward teachings of religion. Because most people born into this world are what we would call young souls right there, they haven't gone through many, many lifetimes, and gained, quite learned what they need to over the incarnations. And so, but there are religious teachings to help them to begin to form a relationship with God, and that over many lifetimes they could be potentially prepared for, you know, the inner teachings. That's one viewpoint, it's a viewpoint that I respect a lot. You know, and I'm not, I am not here to claim I know the truth with a capital T. Right, I don't, I am an individualized human being. But I have had mystical experiences, and I can share them with you, and you can decide whether they work for you or not. Okay? So we have these young souls, the majority of people that come into this world, they are not prepared for reality, the universal reality reality as it is in under a spiritual underpinning to all of there is now I think the world is going through a shift where more and more people are becoming ready for that. And that's how it's supposed to be. Um, but that's, you know, it's fine. And it's forgivable, you know, if we take a, I'm better than you because I know the truth and you don't attitude, that's problematic. And that's why we say, Look, this is my viewpoint. This is my perspective, you may have a very different one. And that's okay. You have a perspective that is appropriate for your, you know, the lifetime that you're in, for the education you've been given. For the culture that you live in, for the family you grew up in. I'm not going to hold it against you. But I'm going to, you know, I'm going to share my perspective. And if that is helpful to anyone to think about things in a different way. That's great. If not, that's okay too. So we have inner and outer teachings inner esoteric outer exoteric. The vast majority of spirituality in this world is exoteric e x O T E R I C. Those are Greek words, inner and outer. Circles basically, are in the inner circle or in the outer circle. And in the Greek mysteries, right, the Greek Mystery Schools, you would have to go through an initiation process. And that might be true. You know, in your church, or you know your religion, whatever your religion is, you might go through a process for becoming a full member of a church or religious body, right? If you're I don't know all of the ceremonies. But if you're Jewish, for example, you would have gone through, you know, in your mail, you would have gone through a bris. And, you know, whatever. I think it's a mikvah, the ritual bath and been going through a Bar Mitzvah. And so there's a bunch of stuff that you would have gone through to become a full fledged member of that
religion. But then there are inner orders, there are mystical teachings in, you know, core teachings. So in in Judaism, for example, there's Kabbalah, there's, you know, in an over the centuries, there became Christian Kala and hermetic Kabbalah, which are very, very similar. But there's Jewish mysticism, and there's Muslim mysticism, and Buddhist mysticism and Christian mysticism, we just don't know, you know, if you're in the exoteric part of a religion, you don't know a whole lot about it. And this isn't to say that every faith every denomination has an inner order, because that's not true that that that doesn't happen are a lot of churches that are completely 100% exoteric. In fact, most of them don't have inner teachings. So what do we think about sin? What do we think, you know, when we're taught about sin, um, you know, from a, you know, from particularly, I'm taking a Christian perspective, because it's the one I, you know, grew up in, and probably know the most about, not probably the one I know the most about, and, you know, the one that's predominant in the culture that I live in the Christian idea of sin. So, sin when, you know, what do you think of when I think think of sin, you might think of, Oh, you did something bad, or you transgressed against God, you offended God, you did something that is considered an abomination to God, right? That that's a word that sometimes use particularly the Old Testament. Right? So you've done something and the wages of sin are death. And you if you die with enough sin, you're gonna burn in hell for all eternity. Wow. That doesn't sound like a very loving religion to me. Oh, but there's a way to get forgiven. So let's talk about the word sin. In the Bible, there are, you know, the Christian Bible, the word sin comes, is a English translation of either either a Hebrew or a Greek word, depending on what part of the Bible you're reading. The word in Hebrew is Hatha, I may be not pronouncing that correctly. And the word in Greek is Hallmark harm. It's either her Matea or Hama, Tia, probably hamartia. Those are the words that when you read the word sin, in, in an English language Bible, that those are the words that they come from. And they, they kind of mean, they, you know, in their respective languages, they kind of mean the same thing. And the, the original connotation of those words isn't even religious. As you know, it has nothing to do with offending God or, you know, earning your way to burning an eternal hellfire or whatever. Those words mean, making a mistake means falling down, literally missing the mark. As in, you know, the Greek version is used when an Archer was firing at a target and missed. You missed the mark, you made a mistake, you fell down. That's what it means. Now, over the years, as you know, again, one of my one of the things that has kept me away from sort of traditional Christianity has been the, the, its origin with, you know, military control structures, particularly, you know, the church of Rome, using Christianity to control the masses, saying, Oh, look, you know, we No, we can't sort of police what you do. We can't police what you believe, and we can't police, you know, blasphemy, that sort of thing. If we catch you, we're going to put you to death. Because that's, that's what we have to do to stay good. But doesn't matter if we don't catch you, you're gonna burn in hell if you do any of this stuff. So it was, you know, the carrot or the stick. If you did, did all the right things and went to the right building and said the right words. You were rewarded when you die. Not now. Not in this lifetime, your life now is gonna be hard. And of course, for you know, the vast majority of human existence, life has been pretty darn hard. You know, I think of where my grandmother grew up in 19. You know, she was born in 1916 in rural Maine, and they didn't you know, they weren't a wealthy family didn't own a horse. They walked everywhere, they had to go school church. You know, they didn't have electricity, running water, indoor plumbing. You know, the heated their bath water on a stove, took a bath once a week. He did one tub of water, and the oldest one got in first. And then when that oldest one was done washing up, the next oldest one got in. And if you were the fifth kid in that family, you get the dirtiest bathwater there was. And that's a relatively modern, modern times. Things were hard people didn't live a long time, you know. So life is pretty hard. And so you know, we're like, there's a loving God, why do we gotta go through it? Oh, don't worry about it. Just do what you're supposed to do your rewards coming, it's coming. Payday is happening when you die when you die. But if you read a little more into some of the teachings of Christ, and particularly from a reading it from a mystical perspective, and you know some of some of the other teachings of the Bible, they will say things like the kingdom of heaven is within. What does that mean? It means that the kingdom of heaven is already within you. So from a mystical perspective, you are because you exist in this world as an individualized emanation of God, you have God within about you, if God is, um, this is when I was a kid, you know, this when I was a kid, and I was going to Sunday school and they were like, God is everywhere. And God is, you know, and I'm like, Okay, well, that must mean that God is inside of me if God is literally everywhere. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's that's not what we meant. Well, how can God be everywhere? If God's not also inside of me? Isn't God like, you know, the underlying substance of the night? Sure. I didn't use those words when I was a little kid. But I found that confusing. God if God if our conception of data if you don't like the word God, you can use source or universe or whatever, you if God is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. That means there is nothing that does not have the substance of God within it within the universal mind. So let me give you this model. And then I'm going to start talking about original sin a little bit. So this this comes from mysticism in general, but you know, you know this is this is something that you can learn from Kabbalah you can learn from other mystical belief systems and practices, but before anything existed, there was you know, the in in Kabbalah, they say, the iron software, the iron soft, or that limitless light of field of limitless light, just liked that was it. Limitless was infinite was outside of time, you know, this is prior to the Big Bang. I mean, it still exists, but, you know, this existed before all else. And so, let's, you know, let's make some assumptions that the, you know, the following statements are more or less true, just because I'm gonna, I'm gonna paint a picture for you. And if you can hold on to these thoughts for a moment, even if you later you know, if later they don't, you know, make a lot of sense to you. That's totally fine. But let's, let's go with this for now. So we have this field of limitless light, that field of limitless light is conscious that's what we call God or the universe or source or whatever it is without form or two. gender or anything. There's no mass, there's no matter there's no time. There's no space. It's just hard to imagine. But you know, it's beyond sort of human comprehension. And then, you know, this limitless light this universe like I, I really I want to understand myself better. What how would you understand yourself better, you would have to create some artificial differentiation because you're all that it you're all there is. And again, there's no individuals at this point in time. There's no There's no maths or matter, people, aliens, cats,
bats, mice, there's no you know, none of that exists yet. So you say, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to split things off. And so Qabalah talks about this and Taoism talks about this, and there are other forms of mysticism that talks about this. The one thing in Taoism, they say that, you know, first there is the nothing than the know thing. And that gives birth to the one thing and we might call that like the impulse, the impulse to, you know, the, the, the impulse to understand itself that nothing, no thing in you know, understand yourself, so becomes the one thing. The one thing splits into two, in Taoism, this is yin and yang, masculine and feminine principles, spiritual principles, this has nothing to do with gender identity, or biological sex or anything like that just principles that ancients labeled masculine and feminine. in Kabbalah, this is the spheres of Binna and hochma. You know, being the feminine and hochma, being the masculine. And then from there, goes through, you know, levels, successive levels of emanation until the physical universe is created. But everything and so again, this is borne out in mysticism, and borne out in science if you believe the Big Bang Theory, everything has a single source. Everything including you and me, and the rocks and the trees, and the space aliens and the cats and dogs and mice and bats. As my cat comes over to say hello, at this moment, hello Phoebe everything as a single source, everything emanates from the single source, but because the single source wants to explore and to have experiences, what it needs to do is to create individuals individual it needs to individualize into different consciousnesses. So we have you and I have individual consciousness, but we are also emanated from source from God, if you want to call it whatever so there is nothing in this nothing that exists. Not a thought, not a physical thing, not a consciousness that did not emanate from the one thing. Okay, so this is there's overlap between the science of the Big Bang Theory between Kabbalah and, you know, Greek mysticism and Taoism, and so it seems that wise people all kind of come to very similar conclusions, then we'll use different language to talk about it. Because the concepts I'm simplifying here, significantly simplifying, but they're kind of large for individualized human minds to comprehend. You can experience this truth during mystical states of consciousness. Right, you can you can have these experiences have a you know, a, an experience of being absorbed into Universal Mind, the god mind the the, the oversoul, the universal. So, again, you know, Brahman in the Vedic Science, right, so, all of these different spiritual systems and even you know, we could overlay the this similar meaning with scientific theories of cosmology how the universe was created. So we are, most of us, I would say, including myself, perceive ourselves as individual beings. We have ego ego is this idea of who we are we tell ourselves, it is the beliefs and the stories that we have about who we are. Right? I have an ego. I say, I am John Moore, I am a spiritual teacher. I am a shamanic healer, I am a dad I am. So these are labels. But they don't point to the essence of who I am. But I have this individualized consciousness has all of these ideas about what is true about me. I have a an egoic self concept. Until I you know, meditator enter into a mystical state of consciousness and the ego falls away. And you experience what some people call ego death. I don't love that term. I'm still using my ego, I don't want it to die at this point. But you, you experiencing a lessening of attachment to your individualized conscious consciousness becomes less clung less tied to who you experience yourself as, and you experience yourself as universal consciousness more and more and more, the more you practice. You know, if you're ready for it, if you're not ready for it, that's okay. It's fine. There's no, there's no judgment here. Right. And so because there were a lot of young souls and people who are power, hungry, and patriarchy, and militaries and governments put in place over our religious systems, they became systems of judgment, right? We put people to death for witchcraft, we put people to death for being Jewish and not converting. We have ongoing religious wars in this world. Right? Oh, you read a different book than I do. I need to take all your land and kill your family. That's, that's what happens. In this world, it's ridiculous. That is sin. All right. So let's, let's get into Original Sin a little bit. Okay. So hold this idea for a moment, the idea of sin being missing the mark having mistaken ideas having mistaken behavior, right, and the number of ways that sins are outlined in the religious texts, right. Some of them are things like you know, don't eat shellfish. You know, in the Old Testament, don't eat shellfish, don't eat, you know, don't mix milk and meat and don't eat, you know, pork, whatever. Some of those rattling wheels are the 10 commandments, Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, Thou shall not covet thy neighbor. Like coveting is a mistake of, you know, oh my gosh, I'm gonna feel so I feel so attracted to my neighbor's wife or my neighbors, donkey are my neighbors, whatever. Right? Coveting keeps me in this. You know, these are kind of just Rules for Living and being loving to one another. And there are rules about God in there to thou shalt have no other gods before me. It doesn't say that other gods don't exist. It just says, don't have one before me. I'm your number one. YAHWAH which is, you know, I believe was a Hebrew storm god, that for some reason became the chief of monotheistic religion for the Israelites and later the leader, Christians and also and then after that, Islam, right. You might say, well, Islam worships Allah. Allah is just the word for God. Just like God is the word for God in English. There are different words in different languages. The Arabic word for God is Allah. People who speak Arabic and who are Christian, worship Allah. So there's a lot of misunder standing out there amongst the ignorance. Not you know, I'm not labeling people as ignorance to, to just seeing amongst the ignorant beliefs, that it's a different Different being so
so anyway, let's, let's get to it. So, the whole universe has emanated from a single source that includes you and I, that means we are a part of divinity, we are a part of God, we are emanations of God source, the universe, what have you. So hold that for a moment, hold the definition of sin, just as missing the mark for a moment, having mistaken beliefs or behaviors or whatever for a moment. Let's talk about original sin. So original sin, the idea of original sin, if you don't know, it comes from the story of Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are tricked by the serpent. And again, this depends on your belief system, because there are Gnostic sects that believed that the serpent was actually trying to awaken Adam and Eve. And I, you know, there's something to that. But let's hold for a moment that that story is not literal truth, that that story is allegory and it's meant to teach a mystical lesson in an esoteric way, it teaches certain lessons to people on the exoteric side, you know, and people who take things literally, like this is literal history that I'm reading in the Bible. That is a very new way of reading the Bible and also considered amongst you know, many biblical scholars from going way back, that biblical literalism is like the weakest way to read Bible stories, right reading the Bible as historic events. First of all, not really that important, right? If you're trying to learn how to live your life, who cares if Noah's Ark was really, you know, the way that it's described in the Bible was, it was actually what happened. Or if Adam and Eve were actually the first to humans and II was made out of Adam's rib, which we, you know, we know, we know if you're, if you have any scientific mind, at all, you know, is not, not true. In fact, that's not even the original Adam and Eve story. The original story, I believe, comes from Mesopotamia and Adama means wet clay. And Adam was made by Eve out of clay mixed with her menstrual blood. There's not even the original story, right. But in the patriarchal system that came out of the Judeo Christian belief system, in which women were the source of evil. Another reason why people are running away from many religions. You know, you couldn't have Eve creating Adam, you couldn't have the snake, being the hero of the story, or, you know, whatever. So anyway, and the original, the story that most people know from the Bible, Adam and Eve, living in the Garden of Eden, they know God, they're close to God, they are living in an original on sinful state, meaning, the mystical meaning of that this is part of the Revelation there, or the Gnosis that I got was that, you know, these are beings who have not mistaken, who don't have the ego, you know, the, the, they don't identify with ego, they live close, they live in the presence of God, meaning they are identified fully with God, then they eat from the tree of life, or the Tree of Knowledge, whichever you whatever label you want to put on that. And that's the only thing that God tells them not to touch. And because of that, they get thrown out. And, you know, they know death, they know life, life is hard, all of a sudden, for them, they don't have all their food just provided for them. And then they have some kids and their kids, one of their kids kills the other kid and a bunch of bad stuff happens, right? So here's my interpretation from the metaphysical perspective, which is, you know, reading in taking an esoteric reading, and, and again, this is one viewpoint, I believe, came from spirit for me to help to help me understand this. Because I didn't like the teaching, and it didn't make sense to me before. Right? And many, and I was always a kid who questioned everything I know, like made teachers and parents and everybody mad. When I did, and, you know, certain religions like don't ever question this belief kid. But so Adam and Eve were living in an egoless state. And I believe that these are the original, what we call the divine masculine the Divine Feminine emanations from got corrected. You know, the this is when God first differentiates. And I'm not talking about physical human beings at this point talking about spiritual human beings. And these beings, then, you know they are living in they know that they are God, they know that they're aspects of God, they are constantly experiencing the presence of God, which by the way you can experience to their constantly experience living in the presence of God, there's no because they haven't differentiated into ego forms. And the fall, the biblical fall, the fall from grace, is when human beings move out of living in, in grace, which is our which, by the way is our natural state, when you are born, you are undifferentiated, there is no difference between the outer world and you at that point, it's a very non dual state. So there's differentiation into egos. And the beings, human beings, whatever, start to feel, they identify with these egos with these limited mind, body egos. And they are no longer feeling like experiencing, living in a constant living in the constant presence of God, or source, or the universe, or Brahman, or what ever word you want to use. Labels are limits, but they're all we have sometimes. So the sin the sin of original sin, to me, from a metaphysical perspective, that I that I learned about during and you know, personal Gnosis. So, again, one person's viewpoint, take it for whatever it's worth to you is that sin of believing we are not divine beings, that is missing the mark. Somewhere along the line, we said, you know, depending on your again, depending on your religion, you need to have that Mark washed away. And that's what baptism is for in many in many faiths. Right, without that, you cannot receive the light of God. You know, we believe many people believe anyway, not me, but many people believe that perfectly innocent babies are born with horrific sin. Because 1000s and 1000s of years ago, a couple people in a garden, eat some fruit and defied God. And that Mark is an every single human being that is ever born and ever will be born.
It paints a very punishment oriented patriarchal picture of what's supposed to be a loving God isn't it and I fully believe that, that God or source is loving is love, in fact, is the force of love. So the belief that God is punishing or vengeful or horrible or fear some or any of those things, I believe that that is a mistake, that that is sin. And that is part of that original sin and wiping away Original Sin. You know, again, it's not about reaching heaven when you die. It's not about your reward coming with death. It, it can happen in your lifetime. When you do the work. And you begin to more and more merge your consciousness with a universal consciousness. You begin to wipe away your sin by lessening your attachment to ego, not your sin, as in you have offended your existence offends God. Your sin, as in you're mistaken, but useful for a period of time viewpoint that you are not a divine being that you are not part of the oneness of all There is that somehow you can live away apart from God and I know like all there there will be a lot of people whose theology directly contradicts what I just said that's fine it's totally fine I'm again I'm presenting my viewpoints and you can take it for whatever it's worth but when I when I get information like this when I get aha moments during meditation or ritual I often feel like it's a good idea to share them because as the Bible said, those with ears to hear shall hear. Right. Those who are ready and are open to the message will hear it and those who are not won't and that's totally fine too. And if you disagree with me, that's totally fine. You know, nobody's getting burned at the stake here. Not in my house. It's too messy. Normally only that I love I just want to love everybody. You know, I do my best I do my best to love everybody. We can disagree and I can still love you I can still have loving feelings and and love you. With that I'm going to leave you for today if you are listening on Easter as a as I'm recording this and we'll release this on Easter, happy Easter if not happy whatever day it is for you as you're listening to this, my love to you and I will talk to you again very very soon.
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You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact John go to maineshamon.com That's maineshaman.com