I was born into the institutionalised religion of Catholicism. At the tender age of 7, my classmates and I all underwent the training, practices and rituals that would allow us to make our first confession – currently called reconciliation. After confession we became eligible for ‘Holy Communion,’ the act which, according to Catholicism, symbolically unites one with God.
Central to the rite of confession is the concept of sin and the notion that we are all sinners with different levels of severity. There were lesser or venial sins, like calling someone names or taking a biscuit without Mum’s permission – these were the sins of childhood we were advised. Then there were the very heavy feeling mortal sins like adultery and murder that some adults engaged in, to the detriment of their ‘Souls’.
It was understood that the greater the severity of the sin, the deeper the guilt one should feel and hence the more intense the penance to be done. The type and quality of penance was ordained by a priest in a confessional box, a place I experienced as a child as having a suffocating quality and a rancid smell, which left me feeling nauseous.
I had problems with this notion of sin from Day 1… and this was not only attributable to the smell of the confessional box.
I was a gentle and obedient child and couldn’t relate to any of the ‘sample sins’ presented to us. I didn’t call people names and my Mum kept a lock on the biscuit box; I never hit my brothers, sisters or friends. Asking adults what I could confess to the priest, as I was worried about the quality of our conversation, I was advised to just make up a couple. Ultimately, my only sin was following this advice and lying to the priest that I had committed sins that I hadn’t! So I was guilty of lying to keep people and the church happy. I noted that as long as my guilt about something was assured, everyone was content and the self-perpetuating system was upheld.
Much later in life, and with the true blessing and grace of the Ageless Wisdom, I felt to revisit this experience and review it from the perspective of what I feel to be universal truth.
Firstly, for me true religion is about the inner connection with Soul, my innermost essence, which allows me to re-connect with Divine energy. This connection with Soul allows me to connect with God through feeling. It is not possible for me to connect with God through consuming a piece of white wafer or by taking a sip of wine.
Secondly, what removes me from God is choosing an energy that God is not – that is, a non-Soulful energy, or a spiritual energy. Re-connecting with Soul, by re-choosing the quality of the energy in which I move, is what is required to re-establish my relationship with Our Father and the Divine energy that God is. Nominating and renouncing the other false, spiritual energy – the energy that is not who I really am – supports me in choosing the energy of Our Father with greater consistency. This is all accomplished by my own awareness and does not need a priest to hear and/or to absolve what I have done, nor to administer a penance.
Thirdly, my personal experience of guilt is that it is a false, emotional energy that is not of the energetic quality of God Our Father. It does not serve to reconnect us. In fact, in operation, it serves to disconnect us and to place us in a heavy energy that separates us further from God.
The true religion I now live, The Way of The Livingness, is based on living the qualities of God on this earth, the qualities of Stillness, Love, Truth, Harmony and Joy, so that eventually we will not live on this earth at all, but return to our original Divine Soul Plane. The catholic religion of my childhood taught that I was born a sinner and could achieve salvation only through compliance to its tenets.
The Way of The Livingness presents that all children are born with a Divine potential within and that, with energetic integrity and responsibility, by choosing to align with this energy, our Soul, we start to discard all that is not of our true essence quite naturally. Neither the confessional box, nor any of the other rites, is ever needed for this.
By Coleen
Related Reading:
Catholic Religion Today – is it a Healthy Option?
God’s Waiting Room
Religion and The Way of The Livingness – Audio
The Truth about Universal Medicine 
True religion lies within us all, it isn’t made up of how we need to be or behave, it just is. And then we spend years battling on what has been imposed upon us, lies, to what hasn’t been imposed, the truth and we become caught in this – truth, lie saga.
We all know the truth and its whether we want to stand by this or not is the question to all.
When we get brought up in that way, as a ‘born-sinner’, it just makes sense how we end up striving to become something/someone better and improved and constantly seeking recognition and approval in any form, and the measure of success is how well we have managed that journey through, and the history we have lived as a race of being is the testament to this – it simply has not worked.
I can’t imagine how awful it must have been to go into a confessional box and relay your sins and ask for forgiveness, but worse than this you were encouraged to make up lies to satisfy the priest. What does this teach a child from young that it is better to lie than to tell the truth.
Yes, the Catholic Church have a hell of a lot to be held responsible for.
For any religion to teach that we are born sinners and that our connection to God is only obtained through what we do and certain rules we must follow is pure evil and the antithesis of what true religion. The Way of The Livingness is a deeply honouring religion, honouring of the truth of who we are in essence and our innate ever-present relationship with God and our Godliness, and how we can live in connection to the light of our Soul through our living day.
The whole process of preparing your children for confession is deeply abusive and goes against everything we innately are. This is pure indoctrination and yet we have accepted it on the grandest scale. How cleverly we have constructed these religions to keep us from knowing our own divinity.
Knowing God as I did from the beginning of this life, it is bizarre to think that a religion has a ceremony called communion to ‘unite you with God’. All we have to do is breathe gently and we are united with God. Unlike mankind, God doesn’t have any conditions on us and the minute we choose to re-connect that union is there.
Beautiful Fiona and this is the simplicity of true religion.
The concept of sin and reconciliation is a man made invention to give power to the higher ranks of the church.
‘It is not possible for me to connect with God through consuming a piece of white wafer or by taking a sip of wine.’ All those man-made rites can bring nothing but illusion. My connection with God is up to me, how I choose to live on a daily basis and never about going to the church every week.
Religion can not originate from outside of us and so there is no ritual, belief or building that can bring it to us. Our connection with God is not built on wishes or knowledge. It is through our living way that we access and build our own personal relationship with God.
On the face of it it does seem preposterous but then these acts to affect people but perhaps not the way the acts are advertised.
I can choose to connect with God by how I breathe and/or how I move, ‘Re-connecting with Soul, by re-choosing the quality of the energy in which I move, is what is required to re-establish my relationship with Our Father and the Divine energy that God is.’
Absolutely Annelies, connecting with God is how we move and live, ‘This connection with Soul allows me to connect with God through feeling. It is not possible for me to connect with God through consuming a piece of white wafer or by taking a sip of wine.’
Religion or the word religious has much of a stigma, the dark cloud of judgement prevails over those who devote their lives to God and believe in him. They’re classed as mindless, and foolish for not believing in the scientific proof. But how many of us have actually seen this scientific proof of the cell mutation? How many of us can truly say they understand every aspect of how we have come to be how we are today? My guess is that it’s not many of us, and the majority of us have bought into this version of evolution through listening, and accepting what others have told us as the truth. But what if those people heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody else who had a bias, or his research was not set up correctly? How can we just believe hearsay, and then call the people who believe in God crazy and mindless followers? Our hypocrisy is arrogant, deceitful and very dishonest.
The world seems to be full of hypocrisy and we would be wise to see below the surface of what we have considered our normal to decide if we truly want it to be our normal.
That is if the normal is not what suits us.
To read again of the extraordinary difference between institutionalised belief systems and a living experience is always enlightening
Yes agreed Chris and in experiencing the difference the truth rings loud and clear. As a child educated through a Catholic school where my innate and strong sense of my connection to God was constantly challenged to the point that I gave in and shut it down, to many years later this sense being reignite inspired through the philosophy of The Way of the Livingness, there is no question in my experience which religion honors the truth of who we are and empowers us to live this truth through our living day and which religion seeks to dis-empower us.
We are held by God, never will God consider us as sinners, these are all man-made false beliefs to keep us unknown to the divine wisdom that is in all. Even babies who were born dead, or died in the first days of their lives were buried at the edges of the cemetery, because they were said to sinners as they were not baptised…babies are beings straight from heaven.
The whole idea of sin is to instill fear. There is no need to be fearful of making mistakes because all that is required is to take responsibility for our mistake and correct them. It does not have to be something that condemns us as the notion of sin does.
We are born into the arms of God and so it is we return. This is not a process of ‘removing sins’ but a process of discarding all that has come to stand between us and Thy Father so that we may once again stand in the fullness of the love we are and are from.
I hated confession with a passion, I was right on the money with how I felt about it.
I am not surprised Vanessa, I thank God that I was not directly subjugated to the catholic church’s actions and hypocrisy during this lifetime!
Guilt is an energy opposite to compassion and understanding, that serves only the one purpose of disconnecting a person, or group of people from their innate sense of completion, dignity, grace and power that comes from one´s connection to Soul / God. It intends to cripple a son of God to only know himself as a son of man, a mere human being made from clay, at the mercy of a judgemental transcendental deity.
Absolutely it is intrinsic to maintaining control of the masses to make them feel guilty and less, sinful such a horrible lie that imprisons.
It was very similar to me with the confession ritual. I didn´t feel guilty of anything other than not feeling guilty and thus not complying with what obviously was considered to be normal for people in general. But the ‘born a sinner’ serves as an axiom that guarantees that at some point the sense of guilt eventually creeps in, intoxicating the innocence and compassion that otherwise is our nature.
The idea that we are born impure and must purify ourselves or seek redemption for this impurity is perhaps one of the greatest lies we are ever sold. We are gods who have forgotten they are gods and while there is a period by which that which is ungodly must be taken into consideration so we can take responsibility for our errant ways, identifying with the waywardness by way of remorse, regret or guilt only leads to further separation between the ungod and his/her true godliness.
Having been bought up being told that God was there to punish us for our sins, it did take me a while to let go of this and see instead how God is there constantly and always to support us to return back to God, without judgment just pure love. It also helps to understand that there are many things that go on in life, but all of them are down to the choices that we make and the consequences of them will be in this life or past lives.
Confession keeps is in ‘right/wrong’ ‘good/bad’, rather than every experience has something to learn from so therefore, “what have we learned from this?” Its also removed responsibility because someone is absolving us from our wrongs, which they cannot do in the first place. Whereas when we look at the learning and unpack this for ourselves, we have entered the process of healing whatever the hurt is. This is us taking full responsibility for ourselves.
How could keeping someone in a perpetual state of guilt and shame via the many imposing messages of the Catholic Church (such as everyone being born a sinner, and needing to confess our sins to a priest) possibly bring us any closer to a sense of communion with God, when all it really does is keep us feeling contracted and potentially much worse on an emotional level about ourselves, diminishing our self-worth. It’s also worthy to note that if Jesus’ true teachings of the Law of Karma were not erased by the later authors of the Christian Bible, there would be no need for anything like a confessional, because everyone would know that the return to balance and harmony inherent in the Universe, would bring back to the person who performed an unloving act a similar one to them to learn from, and life is just about learning to be more love in that way.
It is only by reconnecting to the godly spark within us that we begin to see more clearly all that does not match this majesty. From here the process of renouncing may commence as we begin to discard and deconstruct the many false layers that have stood between ourselves and God; ‘the all that God is’ and thus ‘the all that we all are’. This is the path of true religion – a reconnecting back to our innate godliness so we once again stand in the truth of who we are.
There’s such a clear contrast here, one religion is all about making you feel you are a sinner and need to be saved by something external to you, available if you obey it’s tenets, the other simply and clearly states we have it all within and it’s for us to move and be in a way that allows us to connect to that and the more we do so, the more we discard anything which does not belong to that. I grew up with the first and left it, feeling it’s falsity and imprisonment, I now live the second with great joy and a feeling of finally being home.
One way pretty much says ‘you’ll never be able to live in a way that will give you access to God’ and the other says ‘you are already God and if you move in a particular way you’ll know it in your body’.
“the true blessing and grace of the Ageless Wisdom as presented by Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine,” when you feel it you know you have found the way and that way is The Way of The Livingness.
The Way of The Livingness is the way forth, it ‘presents that all children are born with a Divine potential within and that, with energetic integrity and responsibility, by choosing to align with this energy, our Soul, we start to discard all that is not of our true essence quite naturally’.
The biggest lie in the world is that we are born sinners and the only way to god is through an institution that falsely claims a connection to god. The spark of god is eternally within us and if we live “to thyne own self be true” then we will know god very well and no illusion will trick us. “The way of the livingness” has shown me people who live with upmost responsibility and inspired me to untangle myself from the illusion of the world.
I am raised catholic and too remember the smell of the confession box. I did not liked the smell but too did not understand the principles of confession but now I start to understand why. I had no sins to confess as sins do not exist and I knew that a a little boy. The smell of the confession box does remind me to this imposition the catholic church was putting on me. And not only me, but all people that felt to be part of this religious movement too, an imposition that is false and does not bring any relief as being told, only a deeper ingraining in the obscurity the Catholic Church has made religion to be.
I too was brought up a Catholic, and swallowed all that they had presented because from a young age I wanted to serve God, but that religion did nothing to further that desire, instead it took me away from the connection that was deep inside of me, into a world of trying to please God, but always with the guilt of a sinner unworthy of Gods love. Thank God for the truth of The Ageless Wisdom that has been given to us to resurrect us from the lies of the past.
“I noted that as long as my guilt about something was assured, everyone was content and the self-perpetuating system was upheld.” Goodness this really gets my goat (or blood boiling if the expression is unfamiliar!) It is such a game, such a manipulation and one we encourage children to subscribe to that caps there connection to the Love and Divinity they are from. Thank Heaven for finding Universal Medicine and being reminded that this is not who we are, where we are from or what we are made of and therefore not a requirement of God. OK goat set free now and blood back to normal temperature.
It is very telling when, in order for something to continue, lies must be told.
Talk about committing the sins of all sins, maybe not but creating an organization that fools you to think that it has any knowledge about God when it hasn’t cannot be good karma. But I have to also say that we the people has to also discern what we allow to be a truth. Maybe we find it convenient to go into a box and confess which allows us to go out and do the same thing all over again but that is like a drug addict needing his/her pimp.
Having being bought into a Catholic family I can relate very well to everything you share Coleen, the way the Catholic religion constantly reinforces you are a sinner has nothing to do with a loving God and everything to do with the bastardisation of the truth of God in order to control and manipulate people.
‘Firstly, for me true religion is about inner connection with Soul, my innermost essence, which allows me to re-connect with Divine energy’ – this religion has no beliefs or impositions placed upon us, it is truely divine and from God.
When we bring religion to its purity, to what it actually is about we set in place an understanding that can’t be fought for it encompasses the all and does not exclude anyone or anything.
The idea that we could possibly be free of sin in those days was considered a sin. It was like you sinned by the mere fact that you were breathing. Sinning for existing and feeling unworthy of God’s love was how I felt as a child being brought up as a catholic.
As I am raised in a catholic family as well I do remember very well that the concept of being a sinner did not made sense to me as a child. But over time I let some of this energy enter which made me to feel at times sinful for whatever may have happened through me. And that is one example of the evil that the institutionalised religions bring. They bring a man made doctrine to be followed in order to be a ‘good’ Christian, Muslim or Buddhist that maybe one day will bring salvation. But all what it does is to impose you with beliefs what you are not, beliefs that take you away form your inner core in which we all hold that spark of God that otherwise would be easily lived.
I always wondered how guilt can be part of being religious? We make mistakes and sometimes even severe ones but where does guilt fit into learning from the mistakes and making restitution? Neither of these benefit from guilt.
This is a great point Christoph for us all to ponder on for guilt can be a debilitating emotion that can be both overwhelming and all-consuming in the way it erodes us from living our potential.
Guilt is a disgusting energy imposed on people, keeping them locked in being less than; one has to ask why would the Catholic Church do such an evil thing.
Great expose here of rituals that are done in the name of God and yet in my eyes only serve to disconnect rather than support our innate Godly connection.
It’s no wonder why we end up with self worth and self judgement issues when by the concept of sin we are constantly being told we are ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’
It’s suppression and repression, contraction and bullying all rolled out under the banner of traditional religion. Perhaps the most ungodly institution on Earth.
Well said Alexis, ‘Perhaps the most ungodly institution on Earth.’
Absolutely Joshua, keep telling the person that they are ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’, and they eventually will believe there is something wrong with themselves, and suffer all the consequences that then follow from this false belief.
By virtue of who we are we are united with God all of the time, so why do we need a rite that consecrates what is already there? We could say, it does not matter because it does not harm. Well, the imprint you receive in any of those rites, stays with you, in your body. It does harm you.
Exactly, it does matter because it leaves an imprint. I am starting to see how this applies to so many of our rites that we have taken as normal.
Yes Eduardo, it does harm you, it leaves an imprint, and this imprint may well affect/harm us more than just in this life.
‘…So I was guilty of lying to keep people and the church happy.’ I can relate to this experience, it mirrored my own. I felt the ridiculousness of this at the age of 6 and the irony was not lost on me even at that age.
Gosh this is so insidious and archaic ‘At the tender age of 7, my classmates and I all underwent the training, practices and rituals that would allow us to make our first confession – currently called reconciliation. After confession we became eligible for ‘Holy Communion,’ the act which, according to Catholicism, symbolically unites one with God.’
The whole falsity of how we have made institutionalized religion to be is now the way we need to face and see the lies set up — are actually a clever way of avoiding the unavoidable truth — God is love, we are are that love, we are God, and God is our Religion.
Just imagine… Basing a system of beliefs on the understanding that we are all born wrong/sinners… What a way to screw up humanity.
Imagine holding a baby in our arms and thinking they are sinners?. This just exposes the fact that the concept of sin is pure evil and has nothing to do with religion or God.
Yes we were told we are a born sinner and so we lived up to that like an aspiration. Imagine if we were told we are a son of god!
“The true religion I now live, The Way of The Livingness, is based on living the qualities of God on this earth, the qualities of Stillness, Love, Truth, Harmony and Joy,” A way of living where you feel the love of God in, through and all around you.
When we are in connection to our Soul, we are in connection to God in which we are always in relationship with. With this connection our every move is a religious one, naturally so guided by this connection. It is only in our separation to our essence that we are moved by lovelessness, by evil, as in our essence we are as we are born, the innate Sons of God, absolute love personified which is far from sinners or needing any institutionalised religion to tell us who we are and what we need to know God.
How much of my life was I caught up in the whole Sin and confession? Most of it, its like it was what I understood the truth to be and yet as a kid it never made sense – what had I done wrong, it made me not want to speak the truth in case I was wrong and then ended up having to confess my sins. Anyway to cut a long story short its great to have the support of Universal Medicine to start to let go of the whole “I am a sinner” concept.. on the surface its all gone but I still notice a few of the ways I do things are trapped and held by that way of thinking.
I strongly disagree with this religious dogma about Children and sinning. I was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith and I have found it is very difficult to extract oneself from it as this particular consciousness is very invasive within my body.
What an extraordinary concept to lay upon humanity… Sin… If this was introduced now it would be absolutely derided. It is really extraordinary how blinkered we have become when such a truly awful concept is still accepted and actually lived by.
Reading this I get a real sense of the compressing weight of a rite that constantly negates our innate Divinity, purity, and Godly essence. We are untainted and divine in essence and if we are supported to appreciate that then we give ourselves a true foundation from which we can then be honest and observe and take responsibility in our life for where we aren’t living that, but from a knowing of who we are first, not from being made to feel less or a ‘sinner’.
Making us feel guilty is indeed false, it’s only there to make us feel smaller and a sinner, there is not an ounce of love in it and will never bring us back to the divine essence we are.
It is interesting to consider when we lie to another to keep them happy how do we disconnect from our own relationship with ourselves?