阅读基督教圣人SAINT AUGUSTINE忏悔手记，关于善恶，存在的意义探讨。
忏悔的PDF：http://sparks.eserver.org/books/augustineconfess.pdf
SAINT AUGUSTINE早于罗马教廷。他真正地理解了基督的意思。发现上帝和我们人没有分开，没有距离，就在我们每个人的心灵深处。可惜，后来，不真正理解的人绑架了基督教，建立了严格的教条，严重偏离基督的真意。把上帝和人分开，把天堂和人分开，恐吓人们如果不按这个那个教条办事，就会被惩罚，进不了天堂。把上帝描写成一个会发怒，会惩罚的高高在上的个体。
SAINT AUGUSTINE死后不久，罗马教廷，教会才成型，可惜，被没有真正理解的人掌控了。目前美国以及世界各地的标准圣经版本都是源于罗马教廷的教条版本。可惜大家把这个充满误解的版本当真。
下面让我们回顾真相，看看AUGUSTINE是如果理解上帝，善恶，和人生的吧：
Notes from reading books of
He realized that there is no inherent evil in the world. Evil doesn’t really exist. Evil is simply a symptom of not knowing God correctly, or from servicing one’s ego desire. His example was that even a bad person can worship God and finds beauty in God. What made people bad is his ego and selfishness, not inherent evil. Evil is part of God’s kingdom just like a bad person is also a creation of God. Evil is fleeting and temporal. God is the ultimate quietness and unchangeable peace that all things will reunite to. （注意，这个说法和佛陀说的完全符合）
[My comment]: This finding is compatible with Buddhist’s conception that evil is simply a symptom of ignorance, not knowing what the truth is, causing man to serve his own earthly egoistic desire. Once a man wakes up to God and truth, he will not find any evil.
Augustine struggled hard to imagine God. Is God a massive body with super power, possibly with human like eyes, hands and hairs? As he studied further and further, he started to realize that God is not of a physical substance. God is infinite, yet has no shape and form. God is not part of physical world, yet all physical worlds are born from him.（注意，佛陀也说过了，最终的现实是“空”，没有SHAPE和FORM，也符合了）
During his studies in
（注意：AUGUSTINE发现圣经里的上帝造世其实源于柏拉图理论，并非来自基督，目前的圣经是各种理论的混合体）
Deep studies of ancient philosophy and Bible, Augustine finds that true believer should not be restricted by words’ face value in books like Bible. In Genesis, Bible described God created the world, but this should not be imagined as a human like physical God with bears and hairs performing magic to create earth, mountain and oceans. Rather, such creation should be perceived in a spiritual way. Because God is not a human, but an infinite eternity. It is important to study Bible by going beyond face value of words in the book.（AUGUSTINE建议大家不要拘泥于表面的，字面的理解圣经。大部分人都表明字面理解上帝，理解成一个高高在上的巨人，这是不正确的）。
In Book VII, Augustine told us that through deep meditation, he was able to see the true light of God. He said he was able to see God by turning inward as suggested by Platonic teachings. He finally saw that immutable light higher than my mind.
(AUGUSTINE说他通过极其深入的Meditation（静思），看到了真正的上帝的光。AUGUSTINE强调，只有往内看，往自己的最深处看，才可能看到上帝的光。这个理解和佛陀的完全一致。）
He told us that this light was not a visual kind of light. It was “utterly different from all other kinds of light. This light transcended my mind, not in the way that oil floats on water.” He also said that “this light did not come from the flesh”. He was able to see God with his mind instead of his mind’s eye. （AUGUSTINE说，人的眼睛是看不到上帝的光芒，只有用心灵看）
[My’s comment]: Please notice here, Augustine’s sudden illumination is actually the same kind of illumination that Buddha experienced. In Buddhist terminology, this is called enlightenment. After man reaches enlightenment, he is free and forever happy and forever free from suffering. He reached Nirvana. But in ancient
From the light, he understands that “For God, evil does not exist at all.” All things are “good in themselves,” but may appear evil when there is “a conflict of interest.”
（AUGUSTINE体会到：在上帝的眼里，没有邪恶存在。万物的本质都是善的。 任何所谓的“邪恶”，都是某种人的利益的冲突造成的感觉）
Augustine finally finds out that evil can be repelled through personal improvements. Once a man can grow toward more God-like, there is no room for evil.
After his conversion to Christianity, he was getting firm with his belief that God is no substance; God does not dwell in space and time. But all space, time and material are born from God. During and after Augustine’s conversion to Catholics, he again and again went through periods of enlightenment (or illumination). Each period is very transient. He regretted the shortness of his transcendence. He blamed that to himself as being not graceful enough, so that God is not ready yet to see more of his grace.（AIGUSTINE说，上帝没有时间和空间。但时间和空间源于上帝。我们看看，佛陀不是说的一样吗？时空都是人的幻觉。）
[My comment]: Period of enlightenment is actually a period of time man ascend into eternity, a timeless state, and able to see (not with mind’s eye or flesh), but with soul the whole truth. This is a state that a man temporarily reunited with his creator, God. You can say that you see God in such enlightenment experience, or you simply see the state of eternity that is the foundation of all things. Such experience is of untold beauty.
After one experience, Augustine said: “Eternal life is of the quality of that moment of understanding”. Plain and simple, he is right to the point.
（AUGUSTINE说，永生真实的意义就是目前一下子的顿语。祈求上天堂是无法让人永生的，逃避地狱也是一种误解。只有一下子悟解了，永生就在这里，那里都不必去。）
Book X, XI and XII are the key analysis of his belief and philosophy. We should spend more time reading these books. These last 3 books are very deeply philosophical. It’s hard for regular people to comprehend. I only bring out a few key points that I find very interesting:
Augustine acknowledged that there is life before current life, i.e., concept of reincarnation is a truth. We humans don’t just live one life, we live infinite amount of life. Our life time is infinite just like God is infinite. We humans are created by God, is a part of God. If God is infinite, then we humans must be infinite as well. There is no separation.
（AUGUSTINE体会到，生死轮回是一个事实。因为上帝是无限的，人的生死也是无限的。）
A man’s essence is of God, yet not knowing of his God nature. Why we want to learn? Because learning is a process of the soul remembering what it already knew and forgot when taking human form. Our soul migrates from one previous human form to the next endlessly. Death is not a true end, but a temporary migration from one body to the next. The only true end must be the reunification with God who created us. True end must be accomplished by self improvement that eventually leading up to complete enlightenment very similar to what Augustine experienced in his illumination. In other word, a soul’s goal is return to God, before he can do that, he keep spending time in eternal incarnation and reincarnation.
（Augustine说，人的本质就是上帝，但可惜人不知道自己就是上帝。佛陀也完全说过同样的道理：每个人都是佛陀，都有佛心）
[My comment]: Such finding matches Buddhist ideology completely. Although Buddhism doesn’t emphasize soul concept, it recognizes the need for personal liberation to awaken ourselves to God. Buddhism doesn’t even emphasize God concept, it never mentioned God in Buddhist scriptures. But Buddhist emphasized meditation and voids self of all the selfish and ego desires to prepare for the final illumination to truth that is the state of Nirvana. Basically, the only real difference between eastern philosophy and western philosophy such as Christianity is that the first only described the state of eternity and the latter name the same state as God, trying to make the state a human like form with the name God. Obviously, that’s easy for regular people to comprehend.
His studies of human memory are intriguing. He finds that the vastness of our memory is much more than we can grasp. He further postulates that memory is actually infinite if our souls live infinitely. That means, our body can die but souls move on with all the memory. That explains why for a limited and short life, a man can have such a vastness of memory.
He postulates that knowledge must be infinite as well, residing in the infinite memory. Learning is simply remembering things already in memory. We are actually not learning, but retrieving things already stored in vast memory, yet we don’t know it. The pieces of these ideas are present somewhere far back in our memories.
(AUGUSTINE解释说：我们人不是真正地在学习新东西。而是我们早已懂得无限的知识，不过忘了，然后慢慢地把忘了的再挖掘出来。也就是说，我们每个人本来就是无限的上帝。但我们忘了。以为不是，整个人生就是一个回归原态的过程。）
Why we don’t remember all the things stored in vast memory of soul (please note he is not talking about flesh’s memory, but a memory that survives the death of flesh) ? because just like rebirth, previous memory is temporarily blocked from us.
He also asks very interesting questions. Why a man seeks happiness? His answer is that a man must have known such happiness a long long time ago, even before this life time, eons ago when a man’s soul is still at union with God. How else would a man want to seek happiness yet not experience it? Augustine’s happiness is not flesh happiness like sex or material possession, but together with God happiness. He said that we humans are from God, and once are together with God, so we know such happiness. That explains our inherent desire to struggle our ways back to God.
Wickedness and evil or distance from God is due not to any mistake in God’s creation, but rather caused by a man’s lack of will to recognize God’s perfection. Therefore, wickedness, evil or loneliness is not permanent nature, but a temporal nature of a confused soul.
In Book XI, he went into a study of time.
He asks when the true beginning of time is. Although in the Book of Genesis they described that God “made” creation, Augustine argues that God did not make the heavens and the earth in a literal sense. God did not do it like a human did, or like an architect did. Augustine said that God did not create this universe in our universe all. Because God is beyond space and time. From a place that is not a place (space and time), our physical universe with space and time was born.
[My comment]: From modern astrophysics and quantum physics, Augustine’s idea is proven to be correct. Our universe was actually born from a Big Bang from who knows what. Current physics theory seems to point to a fact that our space and time is not permanent, but will have an end. Modern quantum physics further showed that the material is not as solid as we imagined. Once scientists go deeper and deeper, all they can find is no physical item, but wave functions. Everything becomes undeterminable in microscopic level. Heisenberg’s famous quantum uncertainty principle is a big mystery. Current physics is getting closer still to find that TIME may not be real at all, just like material and space may not be real at all. Buddhism doesn’t acknowledge the existence of time in its ultimate state of enlightenment, neither does Augustine.
Augustine finally reached the conclusion that time is actually an illusion, a human feeling, rather than something real. From spirituality, he explains that time is not a property of external world but rather of the soul itself. Relating to memory, he said that when we appear to be measuring time as some property of the world, we are actually measuring something in our own memory. Since the past does not truly exist, we can only be considering the images of the past times as they are now retained within us. Therefore, it would seem that time is some property of the mind (or soul) itself.
（AUGUSTINE领悟到，时间是一个幻觉，不是真的存在。只有永恒的NOW存在。）
Since time is temporal, God does not know time because God is eternal. Human’s soul falls down from God therefore time seems real to human. Time is actually a measure of how far we fall from grace. We every human returns to God, we will be one with God in a timeless eternity.
[My comment]: Augustine has completely repelled the concept of time. He emphasized that there is no past, no future, only eternal NOW. This concept matches exactly to eastern philosophy such as
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