the state of what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. We make sense of the process of discovering the Self with the help of the great religious traditions, their themes and archetypes. Any one person’s journey, of course, may not be restricted to just one religious institution. Many religious themes and symbols span different traditions, uniting them and enriching their dedicated practitioners. Often today, too, these themes and archetypes have a life outside overtly religious contexts. This need not lead to syncretism or confusion. It offers us today a new kind of recognition of the fundamental unity of all paths of human growth and self-transcendence. It expresses the unity of humanity itself, our common origin and destiny. For all our crises, humanity seems to be growing into a new corporate self-awareness today. What seemed recently to be irreconcilable differences and divisions are now, through dialogue, often recognized as parallel paths. It may well be that, at least for some people, the mutual enrichment of differing traditions will be necessary in order to fully understand the subtler stages of the path to true Selfhood.6
One of the stages of self-knowledge which all traditions recognise, although by different terms, is repentance. This is a pre-condition for any spirituality and it involves the purification of one’s way of life. Jesus began his preaching with the call to repentance. Some more negative styles of Christian spirituality in the past interpreted this as a call to fixate upon one’s personal sinfulness and then develop an abiding sense of guilt. The guiltier you felt the more repentant you were. Nothing could be more inconsistent with Jesus’ meaning here. If anything, his call to repentance is a release from the psychological disorder of guilt. He urges repentance, not to instil a fear of punishment but because the kingdom of heaven is imminent. Time is short and we have to get ourselves ready for a long journey. Guilt wastes time, even a lifetime, if it lingers for more than a few seconds it becomes unhealthy. Repentance is nothing to do with guilt. It is all to do with seeing ourselves unclouded by self-deception.
Listening to his question about self-knowledge clarifies the need for repentance precisely because it confronts us with our own emptiness and impermanence. It leads to an open space of the spirit that is uncluttered by institutional and psychological props. Poverty of spirit is another term for it. This naked self-awareness is the stage in us in which the great biblical theme of repentance is enacted.
After John had been arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the Gospel of God: The time has arrived: the Kingdom of God is upon you. Repent and believe the Gospel.7
Repentance is both more serious and more joyful than fundamentalists and prophets of doom suggest. It drives us to seek a more interior and demanding spiritual practice. It lightens the burden of the past and breaks the shackles of sin. It sets us free for our life’s work. By the light of meditation and the guiding question of Jesus we can see repentance as a liberating, redemptive insight into what we are not. If this experience of emptiness seems at first to be destructive or nihilistic, it is not for long. In fact, it precedes the discovery and full affirmation of who we are.
With repentance there ensues a process of detachment, one by one, from all the interwoven false identities to which we cling with such passion and fearful desperation. Each interweaving is a knot we must untie, a death to die. Quite naturally, we dread the poverty that brings self-knowledge. It seems horrible to imagine we might discover a void of nonbeing, an eternal anonymity at the core of our being. So we cling to anything, however superficial, which seems to give substance to the claim ‘I am this or I am that’. Our fear of emptiness and our evasion of repentance can be so intense that it blocks us from hearing any redemptive question in our life at all. Or the question is rejected because it is felt as a threat to our integrity. This fear of nonexistence, the fear of death, costs us many opportunities. The desperate need for identity can be so great that mere self-expression or an egocentric search for self-fulfilment can get enshrined as the ruling value of life. The emotional exploitation of others quickly replaces compassion and love. We drop others when they no longer seem to fulfil us. Without the clarity of repentance, in other words, we try to make the ego fit the Self. We are deluded by self-ignorance, the selfishness which is sin.
We cannot understand grace without understanding sin. Sin is what is actually not but what we think is.
It is the nonreality that the East calls maya, the cycle of addictive desire and disappointment called samsara. The great teachers of Christian life, like the desert Fathers of the Egyptian Desert in the fourth century, have also explored with deep psychological perception this human affliction that robs us of happiness. The abbas of the desert described the operation of the ‘seven deadly sins’ just as Buddhist teachers expanded on the ‘afflictive emotions’. The Christian understanding also places sin in the context of personal freedom that is an aspect of our being images of God, and so of our personal relationship to a loving God. But they do not say that sin is only what we choose to do. It arises from ignorance, our fallen state. It is a further state of disharmony and suffering that we fall into when we miss the target we should be aiming at or when our attention fails and we get lost in fantasy.8 Sin is the consequence of unwise, irresponsible choice, not only the act of choice itself. It has consequences for ourselves as for the universe to which we are responsible. Personal freedom explains why we each must listen for ourselves to the redemptive questions that bring us to self-knowledge by dispelling illusion. This is why we must repent personally. No group, church or sangha, not the best of gurus even, can do it for us without our willing consent.
Sin includes all attempts to avoid the truth of emptiness. It evades the repentance from which all authentic spiritual practice derives. The badness of sin lies not in the fact we are breaking rules, failing to conform as we should, but that it creates suffering for ourselves and for others. All suffering arises from the sinful, false identification of the ego with the true Self. We fall into this trap time after time when we forget that the Self we seek to know is not different from the person who is seeking to know it. The true Self is not something anyone can objectify in mental concepts or contain in ritual actions. Self-knowledge is really the state of self-knowing rather than the possession of knowledge about something. The Self, according to Sankara, the Indian philosopher eight centuries before Jesus, is the ‘inner light’. It is self-evident and it does not become an object of perception.
When the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom would come he responded with a similar comment, reminding them how its interiority could never be objectified:
You cannot tell by observation when the kingdom of God comes . . . for, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.9
Seeing how repentance, the kingdom of heaven and the true Self are related is an integral insight for Christian faith. These are interdependent aspects of the human spiritual journey. They become clarified and embodied in that form of relationship with Jesus that is discipleship. Thus, through discipleship, as all traditions affirm, we learn saving truths. We learn that the Kingdom is the experience of God in the nonduality of the Spirit. No one can know God except by sharing in God’s own self-knowledge, as St Irenaeus said in the third century. We learn that there is no way to the true Self except the narrow way of renouncing all the false selves of the ego-system. What is left when I have let go everything that I am not is who I truly am. It is who I have been all along but without recognising it. At that point the duality of discipleship itself dissolves. Master and disciple are experienced as one in the Friendship of the Self.
May they all be one; as you, Father are in me, and I in you, so also may they be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.10
Illusion breeds disunity and the excessive individualism of our modern culture. Ignorance and self-deception are aspects of sin that need to give way to truth before the light of the Self can shine. There is nothing less abstract than this. A favourite story of the East is often told to show how simple and down-to-earth it is. A man returns to his home at night and sees a large snake coiled up in front of
