Sin, Virtue, and Habits.
Everyone gets familiar with the concept of good and bad habits during the early days of his life. We are taught by the teachers, the preachers, the parents, the TV man, and the culture to establish good habits and leave the bad ones.
Although no one clearly understands why the so-called good habits are good and the so-called bad habits are bad, still this idea of morality is on sale and every tongue is selling it for free.
Waking up early is considered a good habit and staying up late at night is seen as the bad one.
Submitting to a higher authority is called a good habit while not obeying is bad.
Smoking is bad, not smoking is virtuous.
The one who chants religious mantras daily is considered to have high morality than the other.
Good habits are “good” because they are seen as good by the majority of society and vice versa. That’s what this whole idea of good and bad habits is standing upon. As societies change, their definition of morality, and therefore, good and bad habits, change too. What might be a good habit 100 years ago may not be so good or not at all good in the present.
Yet we take the societal definition of morality so seriously that they become the philosophy of our lives. The idea of good and bad can change tomorrow morning and we would still follow it as some kind of divine order.
Smoking a cigarette is a bad habit and working out in the gym is the good one. Is it really this simple? That you can make a list of good and bad actions on paper and declare it as the measurement of someone being moral or immoral.
I don’t think so.
What if I tell you that both smoking a cigarette and working out are bad if done in a way in which you are a slave to those actions? Every habit that becomes your master, that starts dictating how you spend your entire day is a bad habit.
Getting angry is not a bad habit, but if it’s not in your control; if anybody can come and offend you in a way that you start boiling, there’s a problem.
If you smoke a cigarette, that fact alone doesn’t prove that you are a bad person, but if you become its slave, in the sense that you can’t live without it, you feel incomplete without it, then that’s bad. By slave, I mean someone who feels empty for not performing a certain action, who feels anxious when he doesn’t repeat his old patterns - even if it’s going to the temple daily - because now, the driver of his state of mind is not him, but a deeply rooted pattern.
Can there be something called a sinful or virtuous action? Can an action by itself be good or bad?
"There's only one sin and that is unawareness, and there is only one virtue and that's awareness" — OSHO.
Every time you do something unconsciously; meaning your action is decided by your conditioning, patterns, ideals, sacraments, tradition, etc. you are being sinful. You are a sinner even if you perform a religious ritual because that’s based on your tradition. Everyone is running after certain things, not because they understand how valuable those things are but because they BELIEVE those things are valuable, and whenever you act out of belief, you are committing a sin. Every action you perform being in an unconditioned state of mind is a sinful action.
We have heard religious preachers say things like these:
“Drinking is a sin,” “Sex and Masturbation is a sin,” “Smoking is a sin,” “Lying is a sin,” etc. I say all of this is rubbish.
“If you smoke, you’ll rote in hell after your death,” they say.
Much of the morality we see in today’s world comes from fear. Organized religion and media scare people out of certain actions and we, being driven by fear, start following what they say. Today’s morality doesn’t come from inside, it is imposed from outside through fear.
Of what benefit is this morality?
The day people become aware of the scam that organized religion is, would they be moral? Of course not. Because the entire morality comes from something that itself is fake. How could its preached morality be true then?
(We are going to use the example of smoking very often in this article, but you can substitute it with anything according to your context.)
So, today’s religion and its clan say smoking is a sin, but what exactly is smoking? What is it fundamentally?
Smoking is when you take smoke into your lungs and release it. That’s the raw meaning of smoking. How can breathing something in and out be a sin? We breathe in the smoke that’s present in the air, is that a sin too?
Smoking is not a sin. So is true with drinking or masturbation. They are all actions. How can an act be a sin? No act is a sin, it’s the unconsciousness that one performs that action with is a sin.
Just like killing in itself is not a crime, it’s the intention behind killing that decides whether the killing was lawful or a crime; killing a terrorist who hijacked the plane is not a crime. Similarly, the consciousness level behind every action decides whether that act is a sin or not.
If you are living a mechanical life, like a robot, you are the ultimate sinner. If inattentiveness is the center of your actions; you do not know why you are acting, you are just performing the duties like a machine; you are the biggest of all sinners.
But the concepts of sin and virtue are never taught to us like this. We are given a list of actions that are sinful and scared by the establishment to not delve into those actions. When you are born into such a society and see the so-called “sinners” around being scrutinized, you automatically refuge in its opposite and start thinking of yourself as a virtuous and noble man.
So, you say, “I am better and superior to that person because I do not smoke.” Anything that’s presented to you as sinful or bad or contaminated, you immediately want to rush toward its opposite and become a “good” person, because the ego always wants acceptance from society, which can only be gained if everyone believes you are “good.”
Ours is a society where people don’t want to be moral, they want to look moral. They want to look moral because they want to look superior to the so-called “immoral” people.
Smoking is just a symptom of a life with no awareness; awareness about the action and the actor.
And much of our focus and energy goes toward fixing the symptom. Different methods are available to get one free from the habit of smoking - all of which have no interest in talking about the root, mostly due to ignorance. We forget that as long as the roots of a tree remain unaffected, it will continue to grow no matter how many branches get cut.
We are told to drop, avoid, and stay away from the “bad” habits i.e., too much effort is put into resisting the thing one wants to get rid of. The more we try to resist it, the more we find that it’s almost impossible to get rid of that habit. Even if one succeeds in getting de-addicted by resisting or avoiding smoking for a while, he would soon be a slave to another habit, which might be even more dangerous because it might not be recognized as an addiction at all. Those who get rid of smoking often replace it with chewing gum, which is a not-so-bad habit, or some other thing.
By resisting, you can replace your old habits with new ones but can’t dissolve the habits themselves. That’s why people often say, “I try hard to avoid drinking but fail every time.” It is based upon suppressing the urge to do something, which barely achieves anything in the long run.
Everyone who is addicted to anything knows that the addiction is ruining his life, but still, he fails to drop the habit because the approach he has for achieving that is not the ideal one. Just knowing where you have to go won’t help as long as you don’t know the path that’s leading there.
The fact is that the harder you try to do something without understanding the fundamentals, the more likely you’ll get its opposite. All those who insist on “trying hard” to be free of a habit are propagating nonsense. Trying hard to get rid of something just reinforces that thing and makes it even stronger.
If there’s a pond whose water is cloudy, and you want to see its ground bottom, what would you do? Would you try to remove the cloudiness by shaking your hand fast in it i.e., by trying hard? Of course, not because it would get more difficult to see the ground in restless water. Then what do you do? You just stop interfering and start paying attention to the water.
Do nothing, just sit by, watch it closely and the time will come when the cloudiness subsides by itself.
Don’t try hard to get rid of the habit, just be aware of yourself all day long, if that’s hard, just be aware when you are acting according to your habit. Be fully attentive to the whole process.
Now, the same principle applies to dropping a habit.
First of all, we have to understand why the habit is formed in the first place. Any action can become your master if you are living a mechanical life because a machine is not the master of its actions, it just acts according to the way it’s programmed, and it’s not conscious of what it’s doing.
A habit-prone person, whether it’s a good or bad habit, is what living an unconscious life results in.
When you go through life like a robot, like a machine, not aware of your actions, you start developing different kinds of anxieties and worries. You start loading up your chest and mind with as much unnecessary weight as possible. It sounds stupid but that’s how we act. Now, habit is a great way to get a momentary escape from the suffering caused by being unconscious of your actions. Although we never really think in this way, every habit (good or bad) is formed to give us momentary pleasure in a life full of suffering.
You might have been people rushing to smoke when they get too stressed out or worried because that’s what we form habits for; to divert ourselves from the reality of our life. Our mind is one-dimensional; it can only focus on one thing at a time. When the mind is focused on habit, it forgets suffering.
In fact, that’s the science behind chanting mantras as well. The preachers advise anyone who is suffering to chant “Ram, Ram,” or “Allah, Allah,” or any other mantras because it drifts the mind away from pain, at least for some time. This develops a false sense among people that they can live a happy life by chanting mantras, when in reality, what they are doing is similar to a person who is smoking.
The momentary peace experienced after chanting mantras can be experienced by focusing the mind on any other habit - be it social media, TV, drinking, etc. We say that someone who chants mantras daily is a good person and the one who smokes daily is bad, but at a deeper level, they both are trying to escape for a moment from their hellish life.
How can one be better than the other?
Habit is just an occupation of the mind. You can drop the habits for some time, but as long as your mind stays the same i.e., tensed, worried, anxious, etc. it’s going to need habits to divert away from the suffering it has created itself. When you get tensed again in the future, you look for cigarettes, mantras, entertainment - all the many things that we escape to. Your unsettled mind needs an occupation to get some relief and habit provides that.
Then how do you drop a habit?
You drop a habit by not trying to drop a habit. You have tried hard many times, but the habits won’t go, which means trying to fight the habit won’t work. Just relax. Observe. Be aware of why you are doing what you are doing and be a witness to the whole process.
The common mistake that we all do is that we do everything without actually observing it. Every we do in a day, we do it in automatic mode; without being conscious of the way we act, talk, think, walk, sit, stand, etc. For example, we eat food, but we do so like a machine, we do not observe the very act of eating, and we are never aware of it. That’s what I mean when I say we live unconscious lives.
The only way out of any habit is to be meditative all the time when it takes hold of you. Being meditative doesn’t mean closing your eyes and sitting in a locked room, it means being aware all the time. Drinking tea? Just be aware that you are drinking it.
Whenever habit is forcing you to perform an action - be it lust or smoking or anything else that becomes your master - don’t try to fight and conquer it. Don’t try to avoid it or run away from it; for that, you have tried a lot.
For example, when the urge to smoke or masturbate arises, don’t say, “This is a bad action, I will resist myself.” It won’t work. Just simply observe why you are feeling what you are feeling, and where the feeling arises from, and be aware all the time so that you don’t miss it in the future. Be a witness to your habit. Don’t be a coward or play blame games, face it and accept it.
Don’t say that I smoked because my friends forced me to, or I masturbated because a lady seduced me, blah, blah, blah. Whenever you blame others for your habits, you are just making your ego and the habit stronger.
What happened when you just sit by the cloudy pond we discussed earlier and simply observed it without resisting anything? After some time, the cloudiness abated, and you saw the bottom. No?
That’s the power of simply observing. When you become a witness to your old patterns, habits, and conditioning, you will see that with time, they lose their power over you; you start being free of the shackles of repetitiveness in your life. Eventually, the habits disappear, and you wouldn’t even notice.
There’s a ghost in the darkroom as long as you keep peeping into it from the outside. Once you go into the room and turn on the lights, the ghost disappears. Similarly, observation puts light on the patterns that are deep-rooted in our subconscious mind and makes them disappear.
You have tried being hard on dropping habits, now try being aware of the habits.
I know some would argue that if we don’t call out smoking as a bad habit, people would not hesitate while smoking, they would inspire others to smoke. They are the same people who would say that killing a terrorist who hijacked a mall promotes killing.
Again, this line of thinking paints as good or bad, it doesn’t go beyond action, and it doesn’t look deeper into action. What I am asserting is to go beyond the action, separate yourself from the action and be an observer of it. Calling out particular action as bad is attacking the symptom of a disease and calling out the unconsciousness behind any action is attacking the root of a disease.
I am not promoting smoking in any way, although it may sound like that when interpreted through the phony screens of today’s morality. I am promoting awareness and anyone mindful of his actions won’t slip into a situation where he is a slave to any action, let alone smoking.
You can be habitual of anything. Habitual of going to someplace. Habitual of eating something. Habitual of doing the same thing every day. There’s no difference between a person who feels a gap when he doesn’t visit a temple or the church or the mosque and a person who feels emptiness when he doesn’t get to smoke daily. Both of them are in the same position, both are incomplete. But when seen through the lens of societal morality, one is good, and the other is bad.
Morality isn’t when you follow the do’s and don’ts of society. Morality comes when you practice living a conscious life, a life that’s driven by awareness.
Your goal should not be to have good habits, your goal should be to be free of all habits. Because the habit of any kind is a reflection that one himself is not the decision-maker of his life, he is owned by the patterns. Habit prevents you from drinking from the waters of life.
Life is a constant flux, every moment is new, and on the other hand, habit forces you to act in the same behavior again and again and again. You keep acting in a similar old fashion in a life that is always new. Habits insulate you from the true meaning of life.
Never buy into “good and bad habits”, because if you do, you are choosing to be a machine, not a human.
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