“‘But what kind of sin do the ignorant commit that they should be deprived of immortality?’ I asked. ‘You do not seem to have thought about what I told you. Did I not tell you to pay attention?’ ‘I understand and remember, and at the same time I thank you.’ ‘If you understand, tell me why those who are ignorant deserve death.’ ‘Because the material body has its source in the abhorrent darkness, from which came the watery substance of which the body is composed in the sensible world, and from this body, death slakes its thirst.’ ‘You have understood correctly. But why is it, as the word of God has it, that whoever recognizes and knows himself enters into the good?’ I answered, ‘Because the father of all consists of light and life, and from him human beings were born.’ ‘You are right. Light and life are God and father, out of which humans came. And if you learn that you are also made of light and life, you will return to light and life.’” ~Poimandres
Ignorant Sin
Some spiritual teachers say that only ignorant people commit sin because only the ignorant don’t know that the one they hurt the most when they do so is themselves. Of course, there is also the problem of knowing what is sin and what isn’t. Some things are obvious, like murder is always a sin. Some are not so obvious; and different religions, and even different churches or sects within the same religion have different teachings about them. In the Catholic Church, it is a sin to fail to attend their church service (mass) every Sunday. At one time, they also said it was a sin for a woman to attend mass without a hat or other type of head covering, but that rule was dropped due to changes in the roles of women in society as a whole. I know an Evangelical Christian who thought it was a serious sin that women were wearing workout suits at the gym that showed their naval. Most other churches laugh at that idea.
The one way to truly know is to awaken your spiritual faculties and end your spiritual ignorance. Without spiritual ignorance, you no longer sin because you know what God wants, and you want to please God once you are spiritually awake.
The Ignorant Deserve Death
Poimandres tells the student asking him questions that the ignorant “deserve death.” There are two reasons why he says this. One is that the spiritually ignorant, which is the type of ignorance he is talking about, think only of the physical body as life. Since the physical body is temporary and must die, to those people, that loss means death. The other reason is that those who fail to make use of their time on earth to awaken and develop their spiritual faculties will be as good as dead also, even though they have an eternal spirit.
Know Yourself
When Poimandres adds that those who know themselves “enter into the good,” he is saying that those who have awakened and developed their spiritual Self will, after physical death, keep climbing to higher and higher levels of reality or levels of consciousness until they reach the highest level that most call Heaven, the place of the Good, the place where we know God and we know all of creation.
Light and Life
God is not just the creator of Light and Life, God is Light and Life. The form of God is Light; the Being of God is Life. We can access that Great Light to a limited degree while on earth and in a physical body. We do it by practicing spiritual sun gazing, which means not only gazing at the spiritual sun rather than the physical (never stare at the physical sun!) but also doing it with humility and right thinking; in other words, doing it with the guidance of teachers from a reputable spiritual school like Cosolargy.
From the SUN TALK collection by Harold Boulette