In this profound episode of Speaking Spirit, titled "A Metaphysical View of Original Sin," John Moore embarks on a spiritual exploration that challenges conventional beliefs and invites listeners into a deeper understanding of sin and divinity. Recorded on Easter morning, this episode is not just timely but timeless, as John delves into the concept of original sin through a metaphysical lens, offering insights that transcend religious dogma.

John respectfully navigates the delicate terrain of original sin, a topic central to Christianity, and expands the discussion to encompass a broader, more inclusive understanding of sin. He shares his personal journey of grappling with the concept of original sin, recounting his upbringing in a religious household and the early inklings of discord between dogmatic teachings and his spiritual intuitions.

By distinguishing between the esoteric and exoteric aspects of religious teachings, John illuminates the inner mysteries that often remain unspoken in mainstream religious discourse. He critiques the weaponization of the concept of sin by institutional powers, advocating for a return to the original meanings of words used to describe sin in biblical texts — "missing the mark" rather than moral transgression.

John's reflections are deeply rooted in mysticism, drawing parallels between spiritual traditions and scientific understandings of the universe. He posits that we are all emanations of a divine source, suggesting that the actual "original sin" may be the mistaken belief in our separation from this divinity. Through this lens, John invites listeners to reconsider their understanding of sin, not as a mark of shame but as an opportunity for spiritual growth and reconnection with the divine essence within.

This episode calls for spiritual awakening, encouraging listeners to question, explore, and embrace a more mystically informed perspective on sin, salvation, and the divine. It's a must-listen for those seeking to deepen their spiritual practice, broaden their theological horizons, and cultivate a more compassionate and inclusive understanding of human nature and spirituality.

Announcer 0:28

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.

John Moore 0:48

Hello, hello, hello, everybody. It's good to be back. As I'm recording this, it is Easter morning. Not sure when you're listening to it, but I was inspired during a metaphysical meditation to speak about a particular topic. And talk about it in this podcast. And so following spirits is what I like to do. So I'm going to listen to spirit and speak about this subject. Today's subject is I'm going to take a metaphysical look at the concept of original sin. This is a concept that is very central to Christianity in particular. But I'm talking about sin in general and what it is and how that word has been sort of weaponized by the powers that be to keep people in line and that sort of thing. So welcome, welcome, everyone. And it is not my goal ever to poke holes in anybody's belief system, or you know, that sort of thing. So if your beliefs contradict mine, then that's fine. You and I can still be friends, I can still love you. Just as Jesus taught my friends, and if you think he didn't dwell in him, sorry. But that is a sin. When I get into what sin means we'll we'll talk about that specifically. And I'm not here to bash Christianity or bash on Christians or anything like that your beliefs are totally fine. But I am here to present a metaphysical perspective on sin, particularly original sin. One of the reasons for this is one of the reasons I want to talk about this, specifically, is that the the idea of original sin, as it's taught in most faiths these days, never sat well with me. I grew up in a household where my mother and my mother's family was very religious, my grandmother, who passed away at 106. Last year, was very much very religious, very into her church, as as my mom and I went to church as a kid, I went to Sunday school, and I went to church and all these things, and I enjoyed the stories, the Bible stories and all of that sort of thing. But when it came to the concept of original sin, this idea that you know, we are creations of God, but we are born into this world, already sinners. We are born imperfect and unable to experience the light of God and XYZ and that never even as a boy that never set quite well with me. And so, you know, I have meditated upon this. I have thought about this. I have had some what they call up G unproven personal Gnosis, Gnosis with a G, or get the word knowledge from I've had some things come through that I think are from spirit. But I will say that I don't know that any everybody, certainly not everybody, but I don't know that anybody else holds this viewpoint. So I'm, you know, presenting this as my view as one way to view this. And I am not fundamentalist or dogmatic or any of those things. And I don't particularly identify as Christian although I you know, I certainly have great deal of respect for Jesus and the teachings and a lot of the stories that come out of the Bible. And I think there's wisdom there. Well, let me start this way, though. I've talked about this before in other episodes, but there is a difference between the esoteric and the exoteric. And what what those words mean esoteric means, inner, inner secrets, the things that Jesus may have taught to His disciples, but wasn't preaching to the world. And you might think they're the same thing. But did you know some passages of the Bible could be taken differently. But in any religious system, or any spiritual system, there is usually an inner teaching, taught to initiates adepts. Apostles, whoever the inner circle, because, well, there's a reason for this, I'll talk about that in a minute. And then there is church, right, there's the thing that everybody goes to. And they're given a kind of a different set of surface level teachings. Part of the reason for that, there's a lot of reasons for that. But part of the reason for that is power to maintain power over the ultimate truth. certain religious institutions are very powerful. Part of it is ignorance. And part of it is there's a beginning I was listening to a talk by Dr. Paul Leon masters today, he he's passed away a number of years ago, but and he was talking about the inner and outer teachings of Jesus and how, in you know, there was a mystical aspect of that very few people approach. Most, the vast majority of people who are religious were religion, reading religious texts, do not dive deeply into meaning, even though we know that in particular, with with Jesus with Christ, the teachings were very much parables, most of the time meaning was teaching through these complex symbols. So Dr. Master said, you know, one of the reasons for this is that there are, you know, that are outward teachings of religion. Because most people born into this world are what we would call young souls right there, they haven't gone through many, many lifetimes, and gained, quite learned what they need to over the incarnations. And so, but there are religious teachings to help them to begin to form a relationship with God, and that over many lifetimes they could be potentially prepared for, you know, the inner teachings. That's one viewpoint, it's a viewpoint that I respect a lot. You know, and I'm not, I am not here to claim I know the truth with a capital T. Right, I don't, I am an individualized human being. But I have had mystical experiences, and I can share them with you, and you can decide whether they work for you or not. Okay? So we have these young souls, the majority of people that come into this world, they are not prepared for reality, the universal reality reality as it is in under a spiritual underpinning to all of there is now I think the world is going through a shift where more and more people are becoming ready for that. And that's how it's supposed to be. Um, but that's, you know, it's fine. And it's forgivable, you know, if we take a, I'm better than you because I know the truth and you don't attitude, that's problematic. And that's why we say, Look, this is my viewpoint. This is my perspective, you may have a very different one. And that's okay. You have a perspective that is appropriate for your, you know, the lifetime that you're in, for the education you've been given. For the culture that you live in, for the family you grew up in. I'm not going to hold it against you. But I'm going to, you know, I'm going to share my perspective. And if that is helpful to anyone to think about things in a different way. That's great. If not, that's okay too. So we have inner and outer teachings inner esoteric outer exoteric. The vast majority of spirituality in this world is exoteric e x O T E R I C. Those are Greek words, inner and outer. Circles basically, are in the inner circle or in the outer circle. And in the Greek mysteries, right, the Greek Mystery Schools, you would have to go through an initiation process. And that might be true. You know, in your church, or you know your religion, whatever your religion is, you might go through a process for becoming a full member of a church or religious body, right? If you're I don't know all of the ceremonies. But if you're Jewish, for example, you would have gone through, you know, in your mail, you would have gone through a bris. And, you know, whatever. I think it's a mikvah, the ritual bath and been going through a Bar Mitzvah. And so there's a bunch of stuff that you would have gone through to become a full fledged member of that

bats, mice, there's no you know, none of that exists yet. So you say, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to split things off. And so Qabalah talks about this and Taoism talks about this, and there are other forms of mysticism that talks about this. The one thing in Taoism, they say that, you know, first there is the nothing than the know thing. And that gives birth to the one thing and we might call that like the impulse, the impulse to, you know, the, the, the impulse to understand itself that nothing, no thing in you know, understand yourself, so becomes the one thing. The one thing splits into two, in Taoism, this is yin and yang, masculine and feminine principles, spiritual principles, this has nothing to do with gender identity, or biological sex or anything like that just principles that ancients labeled masculine and feminine. in Kabbalah, this is the spheres of Binna and hochma. You know, being the feminine and hochma, being the masculine. And then from there, goes through, you know, levels, successive levels of emanation until the physical universe is created. But everything and so again, this is borne out in mysticism, and borne out in science if you believe the Big Bang Theory, everything has a single source. Everything including you and me, and the rocks and the trees, and the space aliens and the cats and dogs and mice and bats. As my cat comes over to say hello, at this moment, hello Phoebe everything as a single source, everything emanates from the single source, but because the single source wants to explore and to have experiences, what it needs to do is to create individuals individual it needs to individualize into different consciousnesses. So we have you and I have individual consciousness, but we are also emanated from source from God, if you want to call it whatever so there is nothing in this nothing that exists. Not a thought, not a physical thing, not a consciousness that did not emanate from the one thing. Okay, so this is there's overlap between the science of the Big Bang Theory between Kabbalah and, you know, Greek mysticism and Taoism, and so it seems that wise people all kind of come to very similar conclusions, then we'll use different language to talk about it. Because the concepts I'm simplifying here, significantly simplifying, but they're kind of large for individualized human minds to comprehend. You can experience this truth during mystical states of consciousness. Right, you can you can have these experiences have a you know, a, an experience of being absorbed into Universal Mind, the god mind the the, the oversoul, the universal. So, again, you know, Brahman in the Vedic Science, right, so, all of these different spiritual systems and even you know, we could overlay the this similar meaning with scientific theories of cosmology how the universe was created. So we are, most of us, I would say, including myself, perceive ourselves as individual beings. We have ego ego is this idea of who we are we tell ourselves, it is the beliefs and the stories that we have about who we are. Right? I have an ego. I say, I am John Moore, I am a spiritual teacher. I am a shamanic healer, I am a dad I am. So these are labels. But they don't point to the essence of who I am. But I have this individualized consciousness has all of these ideas about what is true about me. I have a an egoic self concept. Until I you know, meditator enter into a mystical state of consciousness and the ego falls away. And you experience what some people call ego death. I don't love that term. I'm still using my ego, I don't want it to die at this point. But you, you experiencing a lessening of attachment to your individualized conscious consciousness becomes less clung less tied to who you experience yourself as, and you experience yourself as universal consciousness more and more and more, the more you practice. You know, if you're ready for it, if you're not ready for it, that's okay. It's fine. There's no, there's no judgment here. Right. And so because there were a lot of young souls and people who are power, hungry, and patriarchy, and militaries and governments put in place over our religious systems, they became systems of judgment, right? We put people to death for witchcraft, we put people to death for being Jewish and not converting. We have ongoing religious wars in this world. Right? Oh, you read a different book than I do. I need to take all your land and kill your family. That's, that's what happens. In this world, it's ridiculous. That is sin. All right. So let's, let's get into Original Sin a little bit. Okay. So hold this idea for a moment, the idea of sin being missing the mark having mistaken ideas having mistaken behavior, right, and the number of ways that sins are outlined in the religious texts, right. Some of them are things like you know, don't eat shellfish. You know, in the Old Testament, don't eat shellfish, don't eat, you know, don't mix milk and meat and don't eat, you know, pork, whatever. Some of those rattling wheels are the 10 commandments, Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, Thou shall not covet thy neighbor. Like coveting is a mistake of, you know, oh my gosh, I'm gonna feel so I feel so attracted to my neighbor's wife or my neighbors, donkey are my neighbors, whatever. Right? Coveting keeps me in this. You know, these are kind of just Rules for Living and being loving to one another. And there are rules about God in there to thou shalt have no other gods before me. It doesn't say that other gods don't exist. It just says, don't have one before me. I'm your number one. YAHWAH which is, you know, I believe was a Hebrew storm god, that for some reason became the chief of monotheistic religion for the Israelites and later the leader, Christians and also and then after that, Islam, right. You might say, well, Islam worships Allah. Allah is just the word for God. Just like God is the word for God in English. There are different words in different languages. The Arabic word for God is Allah. People who speak Arabic and who are Christian, worship Allah. So there's a lot of misunder standing out there amongst the ignorance. Not you know, I'm not labeling people as ignorance to, to just seeing amongst the ignorant beliefs, that it's a different Different being so

It paints a very punishment oriented patriarchal picture of what's supposed to be a loving God isn't it and I fully believe that, that God or source is loving is love, in fact, is the force of love. So the belief that God is punishing or vengeful or horrible or fear some or any of those things, I believe that that is a mistake, that that is sin. And that is part of that original sin and wiping away Original Sin. You know, again, it's not about reaching heaven when you die. It's not about your reward coming with death. It, it can happen in your lifetime. When you do the work. And you begin to more and more merge your consciousness with a universal consciousness. You begin to wipe away your sin by lessening your attachment to ego, not your sin, as in you have offended your existence offends God. Your sin, as in you're mistaken, but useful for a period of time viewpoint that you are not a divine being that you are not part of the oneness of all There is that somehow you can live away apart from God and I know like all there there will be a lot of people whose theology directly contradicts what I just said that's fine it's totally fine I'm again I'm presenting my viewpoints and you can take it for whatever it's worth but when I when I get information like this when I get aha moments during meditation or ritual I often feel like it's a good idea to share them because as the Bible said, those with ears to hear shall hear. Right. Those who are ready and are open to the message will hear it and those who are not won't and that's totally fine too. And if you disagree with me, that's totally fine. You know, nobody's getting burned at the stake here. Not in my house. It's too messy. Normally only that I love I just want to love everybody. You know, I do my best I do my best to love everybody. We can disagree and I can still love you I can still have loving feelings and and love you. With that I'm going to leave you for today if you are listening on Easter as a as I'm recording this and we'll release this on Easter, happy Easter if not happy whatever day it is for you as you're listening to this, my love to you and I will talk to you again very very soon.

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact John go to maineshamon.com That's maineshaman.com