Knock on your inner door and no other.
-- Jalālu'l-Dīn Rūmi
The Unitarian minister G. Peter Fleck recalls a drama on television:
A man dies and he then finds himself standing on line, upon which an usher appears and tells him that he can choose either door--the one on the right leading to heaven, the one on the left leading to hell. The man immediately asked in a querulous voice, "You mean I can choose either one? And there is no judgment, no taking account of how I lived?" "That's right," the usher replied. Then, in an irritated tone, he ordered the man to move along, saying, "People are dying and lining up behind you. Choose one door and keep the line moving!" But, the man was still unsettled, and said, "I want to confess; I want to come clean; I want to be judged." The usher in turn replied, "We don't have time for that. Just choose a door and move along!"
The man chose to walk through the door on the left, leading to hell. What moral can we take from this story? Fleck's conclusion is that, in the end, we all want to be held accountable. We want to be judged.
Though we need the judgment of our fellow human beings, we all defer to God for the final judgment, which is not directly available. With forthright self-awareness and honesty in both self-accusation and self-affirmation, we can indirectly find God's judgment.
Religions, under the umbrella term sin, provide broad-based guidelines for such self-judgment. Sin is considered transgression of Divine law, a willful violation of its principles. All religions have essentially the same formulation of what is sinful: pride, envy, avarice, sloth, wrath, gluttony, and lust. Every religion provides a punishment to the sinner, even if in the form of forgiveness.
Even in the most forgiving religion, such as Buddhism, wherein there is no damnation, there is still karmic retribution. Although karmic retribution of bad behaviors isn't considered a punishment, it has justice as its natural consequence, similar to the concept of Judeo-Christian religion that one reaps only what one has sown. If you throw a stone to hurt someone else, it will fall back down on your own head. Whoever digs a pit may fall into it. If this dynamic is so clear and obvious, why do some people keep sinning? It is not because some people are good, others bad, but because they are not fully grown-up yet.
The sinner's mind is that of a very young child--a dual mind that wants simply to have its cake and eat it too. The child is responsible and irresponsible, rational and irrational, predictable and not, without realizing such duality. The equanimity of adulthood requires one to transcend the dual mode of thinking of childhood. In fact, the very word transcend means to go past that duality.
For Christopher Lasch, in Culture of Narcissism, sin is to be valued because it sets the stage for spiritual cultivation by means of chastity, purity, charity, self-sacrifice, and ascetic surrender to the Holy. Ultimately, as he says, the reward of virtue is to have little to apologize for or to repent of at the end of one's life.
All religions, East and West, exhort the individual, in unusual unison, to decenter, to loosen his ego-oriented boundaries and follow the path to transcend himself. For most people, such exhortation remains an unattainable ideal--a lofty goal, an abstract idea that only makes them feel more inadequate, and more hopeless. This is because the transcendence of the self requires, first, becoming adult. In fact, some of the problems they are experiencing have less to do with failure of transcending than with failure of obtaining adulthood. As M. Scott Peck tells us in his Road Less Traveled, "The path to sainthood goes through adulthood. There are no quick and easy shortcuts. Ego boundaries must be hardened before they can be softened. An identity must be established before it can be transcended. One must find one's self before one can lose it."
T. Byram Karasu, MD is the author of The Art of Serenity
