John 8:21 Meaning Jesus Said Therefore Again to Them

A mind that clings to guilt cannot follow where innocence goes, not because it is barred by any punishment but because guilt and freedom cannot occupy the same seeing. To die in one's sins is to remain inside the belief that a real wrong was done and cannot be undone, and while that belief is held, the peace the awakened mind enters stays out of reach.

The searching is real but misdirected. The fearful mind looks for love while still convinced of its own condemnation, and so it cannot arrive, for the door it seeks stands open only to a mind that has laid its guilt down. Where love has gone, guilt simply cannot come, and the way is closed by nothing but the choice to keep it.

Sin here is unconsciousness, missing the target, passing through a whole life without once being present in it. To die in it is to die exactly as one lived, mechanically, the last moment as unattended as the first, so that even death is wasted.

They will search for him after he has gone, and the searching will be memory rather than meeting. A man can spend forty years worshipping the photograph of someone he never once looked at. The place he goes is not reached by longing for a person. It opens by turning, while the breathing lasts, toward the one who longs.