I see that you are desirous of attaining self-knowledge but are afraid of knowing yourself as you really are. Statements such as “the soul is truth, consciousness, bliss” or “it is eternally pure buddha nature” please you. But that is because they help you forget what you really are – the complete antithesis of truth, consciousness, bliss – and help you nourish your ego.

That is why sinners crowd around your so-called saints and monks. The talk they hear there is about the purity of the soul and about being one with brahman and it’s all very pleasing to them. This way their self reproach, their self-pity is reduced, their sense of inferiority is suppressed and they are once again able to stand tall in their own eyes. This has only one outcome: it goes on becoming easier for them to commit sin, since the soul is pure and is not affected by it! Believing that your soul is eternally pure and is the buddha nature does not put an end to sin. It is only a very deep self-deception. It is the last trick of the human mind. By merely believing there is no darkness you do not have light.

An ideology that teaches one to believe that sin does not exist and that the soul is not involved in sin is very deceptive. It is just a means of forgetting one’s sinful condition. It does not lead to the elimination of sin, but to forgetfulness of sin, which is even worse than the existence of sin. To be able to see your sins, to be aware of them is good, beneficial. Not to see your sins, to be unconscious of them is harmful, because when they are seen they begin to goad us, they begin to prick at us, they begin to inspire us to transform ourselves. Awareness of sin brings about change, and a total awareness of sin causes instantaneous revolution, transformation.

So, please don’t get involved in talk such as “the eternally pure buddha nature of the soul” and so on. This is not something to do with belief. It is a direct realization experienced when the sin-ridden personality has been cast off and the seeker, breaking through the layers of darkness, enters his own secret, innermost center of light. It is a direct realization. It is not something to be conceptualized.

Any imaginary concept of it is going to be very harmful. It can become a hindrance on the way to light, because if you believe there is no darkness, there is no question of your trying to remove something that does not exist. And if the soul commits neither good nor evil, then what is the point of rising above them? These hollow statements of the so-called metaphysicists have kept many people in unawareness. This poison has spread too far and because of it, although we think of ourselves as gods it would be difficult to find greater sinners than us on earth!

Don’t forget that all this talk about the purity of the soul and its impact is really directed towards remaining oblivious to sin. It becomes very difficult for those who fall into the trap of this talk to get out of it later. It is easy to become free from sin but it is very difficult to escape the clutches of this dangerous kind of metaphysics.