One of The Biggest Lies We Are All Suffering From.
But it is a lie we can liberate ourselves from.
What if I fed you one of the biggest lies that caused you the deepest suffering through the entirety of your life?
What if I fed this lie to you, your parents, your ancestors, and your children?
What if I sold this lie on magazine covers, in books, in classrooms, at colleges and universities?
What if this lie continues to root itself in the way your culture operates and practices humanity?
What are we suffering from?
So many us are suffering from the the idea that we are inherently bad. This deep rooted shame originates in Christian theology, through the idea, “Original Sin.”
To preface, this is not a smear campaign of Christianity or Christian Theology.
Whether or not such people believe in the idea of original sin or God for that matter, they seem to feel that they have done something wrong in the past and are now being punished for it.
~ Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche writes: “it seems that this notion of original sin does not just pervade western religious ideas. It seems to run throughout Western thought as well, especially psychological thought. Among patients, theoreticians and therapists alike there seems to be a great concern with the idea of some original mistake, which causes later suffering-a kind of punishment for that mistake. One finds that a sense of guilt or being wounded is quite pervasive. Whether or not such people believe in the idea of original sin. or God for that matter, they seem to feel that they have done something wrong in the past and are now being punished for it.”
As a Buddhist practitioner, meditation, and inward reflection is elemental to my life. In meditation, I kept asking myself, where does this shame and self pity originate?Further, where is the contempt for and violence against poor people, wealth hoarding, ‘oh just work hard’ pull yourself up by the bootstraps, where did it come from?
I can still remember as a 7- year-old, the pastor’s vibrato from the microphone shaking the pews as he cried out,
“ BUT I AM A SINNER, and he gave his only begotten son, to die for my sins.”
This concept sat with me as a child. Among many things, this is a fundamental reason I left Christianity and began to explore eastern spiritualities.
Original sin kills joy. It stifles true deep joy.
More often, Eastern and Indigenous spiritualities are rooted in the idea of basic goodness, and reverence to a deeper goodness at play.
Even if you do not fundamentally believe people are inherently evil it is rooted in our cultural and societal psychology. It is rooted in our social norms and behavior, from overt to subtle.It is a sobering realization of why poverty continues, why police continue to be held unaccountable for their violence — why The U.S. continues to drop bombs on nations whose language I will never speak, and whose people I may never meet.
It is the reason that we can build condos and luxury housing and build spikes in the passage ways to prevent homeless indivuals from getting any bit of shelter that might help them pass the night with a semblance of safety.
It is the sobering realization in the context of love, through the lens of “original sin” why so many people think “I must suffer for love.” If the psychology exists that, “Jesus suffered on the cross for me, and for his father, for my sins, because I am fundamentally bad,” it paints a clear understanding of why people are so apt to allow themselves to suffer, for love and romance, affection, friendship, career, and host of other things.
It reminds me of an experiment in which scientists were shocked that animals would share their food with one another. How much of their shock is a function of the psychology of “original sin?” The shock that maybe there is indeed a basic goodness in nature.
We are all suffering from a psychology/trauma that tells us the moment we were born we were inherently bad. Inherently flawed. It could be why so many of us at different intersections are struggling to live the lives that bring us the deepest joy.
We are fundamentally GOOD.
The practice of meditation and has shown me that traumas are a covering. The things we suffered in the past are things that have covered up basic goodness within us: openness, warmth, generosity, care, compassion, nurturing.
