To be clear, I am not saying there isn't an illness... for me, the illness is duality - they are now dividing the world into a fundamental competition between good and evil. I cannot agree with the Christian that sin is the illness because this is simply creating more hostility between them.
At the same time, sin is also from the same root as serpent, again the root means "self". It is mind that splits reality into a duality, and it is ego that chooses - self is just another word for ego here.
For the Christian, though, sin is evil and they want to go to the other pole, utterly into goodness... it is not possible because good and evil are concepts - evil is simply the absence of good. It is insane to fight against something which doesn't even exist in the first place. For me, it is exactly like trying to fight with your own shadow - just bizarre.
Again, consider light and dark, perhaps the most useful example: if you want to get rid of darkness, do you fight against it? No, you just bring in light. Can darkness fight with light, rid the space of the light you have just added? Darkness doesn't exist at all, it is just the absence of light. We have created a personification of darkness to fight against - the Devil - but it is just crazy. Simply by fighting, we are blocking light, the very violence is not permitting love to shine.
Actually, before there was Light there was Darkness, it is within this Darkness that Light is 'permitted' to exist.
Monotheism loves to play Good against Evil, Light against Dark, Man against Woman, when in fact there does not exist a pure opposite, as Hermetics would explain, there exists polar extremes of the Same Thing.
I would like to re post something I posted on another thread here, it seems relevant.
The Original Sin as the tradition of the Fall from the Garden of Eden' is an archetypal structure embedded deep within our unconsciousness. The Original Sin is Man's guilt of being carnivorous and lycanthropic.
We are all descended from males of the carnivorous lycanthropic variety, a mutation evolved under the pressure of hunger caused by the climatic change at the end of the pluvial period, which induced indiscriminate, even cannibalistic predatory aggression, culminating in the rape and sometimes even in the devouring of the females of the original peaceful fruit-eating bon sauvage remaining in the primeval virgin forests.
It was the 'clothes of skin' and the 'aprons of fig-leaves', that produced the nakedness of man, and not the other way round, the urge to cover man's nudity that led to the invention of clothing. It is obvious that neither man nor woman could be 'ashamed' (Gen. ii. 25) or 'afraid because they were naked' (Gen. iii. 10 f.) before they had donned their animal's pelt or hunters' 'apron of leaves', and got so accustomed to wearing it that the uncovering of their defenseless bodies gave them a feeling of cold, fear and the humiliating impression of being again reduced to the primitive fruit-gatherer's state of a helpless 'unarmed animal' exposed to the assault of the better-equipped enemy.
The uncovered body could not have been considered 'indecorous' or 'im-moral'. The very feeling of sin, the consciousness of having done something 'im-moral', contrary to the mores, customs or habits of the herd, could not be experienced before a part of the herd had wrenched itself free from the inherited behaviour-pattern and radically changed its way of life from that of a frugivorous to that of a carnivorous or omnivorous animal.
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from a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine by ROBERT EISLER - First published in 1951 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane, London, B.C.4
Printed in Great Britain by Butler and Tanner Limited Frome and London
