Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 19: The Passing of the Dream

9. Sin as a Mistake

It is essential that error be not confused with “sin,” because it is this distinction that makes awakening possible. For error can be corrected, and the wrong made right. But sin, were it possible, would by its nature be irreversible.

The belief in sin is necessarily based on the firm conviction that minds can attack, and that thus the mind is guilty, and will forever so remain unless a mind apart from it can give it absolution. Sin calls for punishment, as error calls for correction. And the belief that punishment is correction is clearly insane.

The idea of sin places a mistake beyond mere error. For sin entails an arrogance that the idea of error lacks. To sin would be to violate Reality in truth, and to succeed. Sin is the proclamation that guilt is real and attack is justified. It assumes that the Children of the Divine are guilty, and have thus lost their Innocence, making themselves what the Divine did not create. Thus is Creation believed not to be eternal, and the Will of the Divine open to opposition and defeat. Sin thus is the “grand illusion” underlying all of the ego’s grandiosity. For by it the Divine Itself is believed to be changed, and rendered incomplete.

The Children of the Divine can be mistaken. They can deceive themselves, and even turn the Power of their minds against themselves. But they cannot sin. There is nothing they can do that would change their reality in any way, or make them guilty in truth. That is what sin would attempt to do, for such is its purpose. Yet for all the wild madness inherent in the entire idea of sin, it is impossible. For the wages of sin would be death, and how can the Immortal die?

A major tenet in the ego’s deranged religion of retribution is that sin is not error, but truth, and that it is the Idea of Innocence that is false and would deceive. Purity is seen as arrogance, and the acceptance of the self as sinful is perceived as humility and holiness. And it is this doctrine that attempts to replace the Reality of the Children of the Divine as their Creator created them, and willed that they forever be. Is this doctrine humbleness? Or is it rather an attempt to wrest Creation away from Truth, and render It divided and undone?

Any attempt to reinterpret sin as merely error is entirely indefensible to the ego. The idea of sin is completely sacrosanct in its thought system, and quite unapproachable except through reverence and awe. It is the most “holy” concept in the ego’s system: lovely and powerful, entirely true, and necessarily protected with every defense at its disposal. For here lies its “best” defense, which all the others serve. Here is its armor, its protection, and the fundamental purpose of the special relationship in its interpretation.

It can indeed be said that the ego constructed its world on the idea of sin or irredeemable flaw. Only in such a world could everything be upside down. This is the strange illusion that makes the clouds of guilt seem heavy and impenetrable. The solidness that this world’s foundation seems to have is found in the idea of sin. For in this world sin has apparently changed Creation from an Idea of the Divine to an ideal the ego wants, a world it rules, made up of bodies, mindless, and capable of complete corruption and decay.

If this belief is merely a mistake, it can be undone easily by Truth. Any mistake can be corrected if Truth be left to evaluate it. But if a mistake is given the status of truth, to what can it be brought for true Evaluation? The “holiness” of sin is kept in place by just this strange device. Mistaken as truth, sin is inviolate, and everything is brought to it for judgment. Evaluated truly as simply a mistake, sin must be brought to Truth for Correction. It is impossible to have faith in sin, for sin is faithlessness. But it is possible to have faith that a mistake can be corrected.

There is no stone in all the ego’s embattled citadel more heavily defended than the idea that sin is real, the natural expression of what the Children of the Divine have made themselves to be, and therefore what they are. To the ego, this belief is no mistake. For this is the ego’s reality. This is the “truth” for the ego about you – your past, present, and future – from which escape in the ego’s eyes will always be impossible. For you have somehow managed to corrupt your Creator, and change Its Mind. Mourn then the death of the Divine, Whom sin has killed! And this death is the ego’s wish, which, in its madness, it thinks it has accomplished.

Would you not rather that all this be nothing more than a mistake, entirely correctable, and so easily released that its whole correction is like walking through a mist into the sun? For that is all it is. Perhaps you are tempted to agree with the ego, that it is far better to be sinful than mistaken. But think you carefully before you allow yourself to make this choice. Approach it not lightly, for it is the choice of hell or Heaven.