Understanding the Instruction “Go Sin No More.”

I was in the kitchen making the second cup of tea of the day when I found myself pondering the meaning of the instruction the Master often gave to those whom he healed: “Go, and sin no more.”

It came to me that these words were spoken after something extraordinary had already occurred. The blind could see. The lame could walk. The suffering mind had found peace. Yet perhaps what the Master gave them was not merely a healing of the body or mind, but something infinitely deeper. He gave them the forgiveness of sin.

What do I mean by this?

I do not mean the removal of moral stains from a separate self. I mean that they were given the revelation that they are never separate, nor could they ever be separate, from that Infinite Intelligence pointed to by the word “God.”

This revelation was itself the true healing. The body may have been restored, but beneath this was an even greater healing: the healing of the sense of separation. They were given the grace of KNOWING their unity with the Divine. They were brought into the revelation of wholeness. This is the revelation that there is no such thing as sin other than the idea that you exist separately from the Divine which has no reality.

From within such KNOWING, the words “Go, and sin no more” would have carried an entirely different meaning. The Master was not merely giving them a moral command. He was pointing them beyond the illusion they had previously identified with. They would have understood that separation was not their true identity. They could, of course, return again to identification with limitation and fear, but who would knowingly choose time over eternity, the finite over the Infinite, or death over LIFE?

What the Master gave them can perhaps best be understood as a transmission of grace. It was not simply the healing of a body or the calming of a troubled mind. It was the undoing of the foundational error of separation itself — which I have come to see as the very nature of sin.

For many, this may seem challenging. The blind man and the crippled man were graced with a transmission that healed the foundational error of personal separation. Yet for most of us this has not been our direct experience. As a result, the words “Go, and sin no more” have, like many of the sayings of the Master, been reduced primarily to questions of moral conduct.

Sin becomes understood as behavior unacceptable to a God who is imagined to be separate, distant, and other than ourselves. Moral conformity then becomes the perceived bridge between the person and that Source pointed to by the word God.

But unlike those who encountered the transforming Presence of the Master directly, most have not yet received the grace of KNOWING their unity with what he called the Father. They have not known through direct experience what it is to be whole and holy. They have not yet awakened to LIFE beyond the illusion of separation that is pointed to by the word “sin.”

Instead, much of Christian religion has encouraged people to identify themselves fundamentally as sinners. Yet this is not what you are in reality. To continually identify oneself through separation is to thicken the veil of separation itself. It reinforces the illusion that obscures the very grace capable of dissolving it.

The egoic mind can even begin to derive subtle identity and satisfaction from the drama of being “a sinner” who later becomes “saved,” eventually regarding itself as spiritually special or chosen. Yet all of this still belongs to what St. Paul called the “carnal mind” — the mind rooted in separation and personal identity. The Master did not come merely to improve the separated self. He came to reveal that the separated self was never your deepest reality to begin with.

The false self is not my real self. - Thomas Merton - Christian mystic

So we come to the question: how does one “sin no more”? The only way is through the direct revelation of At-One-Ment, which heals the illusion of separation from God.

It does not come through attempting to make yourself into a better person in the eyes of God, for in the eyes of God you are already whole. The invitation of the Master is not toward self-improvement for the separated self, but toward awakening from the illusion of separation itself.

This is why the teachings of the Master point again and again toward interior surrender. “Give no thought.” “Deny thyself.” These are not calls to self-hatred, but invitations to release identification with the thought-created sense of a separate “I.” The separate self is sustained through continual identification with thought, memory, fear, striving, and self-concern. It is this illusory identity that the Master instructs us to deny.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. — Matthew 16:25 (KJV)

At the heart of his teaching is the invitation to die to the sense of being separate from God. Yet in truth there is no real death in this, because what dies is only the illusion of separation. What falls away is not your Being, but the false sense of identity that obscures your unity with the Divine.

For many Christians, in my experience, this invitation feels too radical. It can seem safer to preserve the familiar sense of personal identity while hoping that such a self will eventually be accepted or saved through moral behavior pleasing to a God imagined as separate and distant.

Yet the Master continually points beyond this entire framework. His invitation is not merely to reform the separate self, but to awaken from the illusion that separation ever truly existed. In this awakening one realizes that one was never a sinner. One was and is never separate from that pointed to by the word “God.”

Tony Cuckson, Cordressogagh, Ireland