Hi Eve!!!…
Did you rest during the weekend? I did. I had plans to finish the, how did you call it?, the proofing of the book, but I haven’t done it yet. What I did was finishing reading the reading you gave me. It seemed to me very, very interesting, It made me think a lot about things I have never analyzed[1] within the relationships, so it helped me discover some truths about unconditional love and the covenants : How, although the unconditional love may foster a strong relationship, it doesn’t always do (because for a strong relationship it is needed the response of the other person involve in a relationship), what foster a strong relationship are covenants (sometimes implicit, as in a friendship; some times explicit, as in the marriage) along with the unconditional love. This is what makes a relationship endurable. Well, this is something I learned thanks to your readings Well, Now concerning the ego and the sinful nature. What I understood about the ego on the reading was this:
- The ego is a product of the identification with the body.
- It is purified to sadhana and tapasya (meditation and grace, according to the context). In other words getting rid of the ego is only done through getting conscious of your true Self. (realizing that you are the divinity, that you are a formless energy that is within you and within all of us)
- It produces six basic fruits: attachment, aversion, compulsion, identification, addiction, and inhibition. This at the same time produces all kind of selfishness and all kind of bad fruit.
- Free form ego a person would just see things happen; one would simply observe changes occurring, and one would watch everything others do and say without any reaction of defensiveness.
What the reading never says is where does the ego come from? Why was it formed? Why weren’t we created in a perfect state free from ego?
This ego would be the more or less the correspondent for the sinful nature that the Bible teaches –specially because it is the cause of all evil deeds that man does, it is the thing that produces all selfishness, hatred, envy, corruption and death. According to the Bible, sinful nature was the consequence of the separation between God and man -not the identification with the body (the body has nothing to do the sinful nature as the Hindus say, it has to do with the spirit of man that got corrupted).
When man chose to “divorce” God, he lost the presence of Holy Spirit and with it the nature of God. When the Holy Spirit stopped dwelling within the human, the humans, thus, lost the ability to manifest and expose the nature of God, they became corrupt (their spirit was death, separated from God). And, although, they first had a clear image of how God was, and had a conscious of how they should be[2], man no longer had the power (the ability) to be as God. This is what must of the religions try to do, they try to reach to heaven, to be good persons, to recover their original state in their own efforts (without the Holy Spirit).
Now this explains why the people ofIsraelcouldn’t keep the commandments God gave to them: Although they wanted to obey them they couldn’t fulfill them all because of their sinful nature. The commandments God gave to the people of Israel had the purpose, not to save them from the sinful nature, nor to restore them to the original state before the fall, the commandments had two purposes: first: restrain the people while waiting the coming of the Messiah, and Second: to show them that they are sinners (without the law there is no knowledge of sin) in need of a savior (because nobody has been able to obey the entire law all the time -when a person is confronted with it always finds out that he/she has fallen short).
After coming Jesus Christ the law was no longer needed. Why? Because thanks to his sacrifice in the cross he made righteous and holy all who believed In him (all who accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior) allowing thus the reconnection with God and the restoration of the Holy Spirit in our lives (the restoration of his nature), thing that empower us to manifest the glory (character) of God –thing that goes far beyond just obeying the law; this is a superior law: the law of love (also called the law of the Spirit).
You see, the Holy Spirit dwells in me and has given me his nature and the power to behave as Christ did. Do you know what does Christ mean? Christ means “anointed one” which is “a person in which dwells the Holy Spirit”. Christ although being God, took the form of a man and ridding himself of his attributes of God. So as a person he did not use his divine powers to overcome sin, he had to depend entirely on the Holy Spirit dwelling in his life. He just had to be what he was because he had the nature of God –he did not have sinful nature, he was just like Adan was before the fall. So the presence of the Holy Sprit within a person liberates him to be all God intended him to be in the beginning.
Now Eve, here I’m going to explain you something that will help you to understand better the sinful nature:
Faith is the certitude of something, the firm conviction of that what we cannot see nor probe (scientifically). Everybody exerts faith since everybody accepts beliefs and philosophies that cannot be proved scientifically, things as if there is or there is not God, the origin of man, the purpose of him, the explanation of creation and reality, etc. God gave man the ability to exert faith so he can exert it upon the His word –on what He says. But after the Fall, the spirit of man was separated from God and died (did you remember the example I put to you of the tree separated form its source: the ground?) so his faith was no longer exerted in the word of God because man had no longer revelation nor communion with God. Thus the object of his faith was changed and substituted by the conclusions of his reasoning based on what he perceived (there we have the humanist philosophy) along with what Satan inspired him. But this new object of his faith acquired the same attributes of the word of God: it became an universal truth that doesn’t change form time or culture, and that functions as a parameter to judge and distinguish the good from the bad, the incorrect from the incorrect; it became a norm for life and the key to interpreter it, in other words: it became absolute.
These basic beliefs that man accepts by faith shapes his worldview, his worldview, at the same time, shapes the way he thinks, and the way he thinks determinates the way he acts. Do you remember that I told you that the greater problem of man is that he doesn’t think as God thinks? Well, we were meant to think as God thinks, to see the things as he does, to have his same worldview. But to think as God think we must believe what God believes -we must believe in his Word again.
A person who receives the Holy Spirit becomes alive spiritually (he born again). Now he has the nature and the power to behave as Christ did but it won’t be of too much good in this life If he doesn’t acquire the mind of Christ -God’s world view- (here is were the topic of awareness enters). Now you can understand why I let the word of God (the Bible) shape my worldview. Now you understand why I try to rid my self of all tradition, believe or idea that doesn’t go along with the word of God. All this is progressive, it is a process of renewal of thought, and, when you think you had it all figure it out, a beam of light shines where you knew not there was darkness bringing understanding and reformation of thought in those areas. This is only possible thanks to the continuing revelation of the Holy Spirit.
Now you also understand why the message of Jesus was repent (word which means: change your mind, your way of thinking –thing that can only be done if you change your beliefs) and believe in the Gospel (the message of Salvation [which includes all the word of God], when believed, restores the presence of the Holy Spirit and changes the way of thinking to God’s way).
Nevertheless the sinful nature has caused that many persons choose to believe in things, ideas, and philosophies that go along with their sinful nature, (are consistent with the sin they practice). That’s why people refuse the message of salvation, because believing in the gospel implies to make death the sinful nature because it is to believe in that what condemns the practices and beliefs of the sinful nature.
I guess now you get a much better understanding of the sinful nature. Now, concerning the wrong image of God: As now you know, we define sinful nature as “every behavior that doesn’t go along with the character of God”. So in defining my new nature I must know how God is to know how I am and to distinguish what is right and what is wrong.
The problem I found in the definition of ego of the Hinduism is that they include many characteristics that God has in it and, by doing it, they level as wrong many good things. For example, they say that free form ego, You would just see things happen, you would just observe changes occurring without any reaction, you would live any situation, circumstance, or encounter allowing your state remain undisturbed.
Within my new nature, which is God’s nature, I can have attachments and aversions (there are good attachments and good aversions within God’s point of view; also there are levels and grades of attachments that must be respected). So I experience some aversions and attachments without a conscience problem.
Jesus Christ, in the image that the Bible portraits me, didn’t pass through live “undisturbed” nor he observed changes “without any reaction”. He cried, was sometimes angry, sometimes, he got tired, other times he cried because of Israelites stubbornness, other times he cried because he shared the pain of a person. Some things stir him to action. The same way is God. Don’t you see Eve? You stirred God into action, he didn’t accepted the idea of getting separated from you, that’s why he did what he did, because he love you.
God let stir me into action when I see injustice, but now with the new nature he has given me power act with order and all respect.
Many thing that you love, that you hate, shape the our personality, and in many ways that’s how a person know what is God’s mission for him (realizing what is the thing that he most hates, or what is the thing that most loves –beside God of course). Next e-mail I what to write you about fulfillment, this was another thing that I didn’t agree.
- Wrong image of God
- The greatest abism that separates God from
- Religion Interpretation
- Fulfillment