THERE HAVE been instances when a sinner was converted into a saint by a mere quirk of fate. Robber ‘Valio’ turned into Valmiki and wrote the greatest epic Ramayana. Mohandas Gandhi, who used to smoke, turned into ‘Gandhiji’, who was one of the greatest advocates of non-violence and vegetarianism. Tulsidas, who mistook dead body for a log of wood and snake for a rope, turned into saint Tulsidas. Prince Siddharth, surrounded by worldly pleasures renounced everything and turned into Gautam Buddha.

Now, what is sin? According to the Oxford English dictionary, “it is deliberate breaking of divine or moral law.” So we can conclude that these so-called sinners do not follow social norms. They have low reward dependence according to ‘tri-dimensional character inventory (reward dependence reflects a heritable bias in maintenance of behavior in response to cues of social reward; Comprehensive Text Book of Psychiatry, Page 1728).

Now why we consider Christ and Socrates great? Because they were able to stand up for the truth without caring for the prevalent social norms of the time and also sacrificed their lives for truth.

Let us look at the verse of ‘Srimad Bhagwad Geeta’ “Equal to friend and enemy, equal to honour and insult, pleasure and pain, praise and blame…that man is dear to me (Chapter12, verse18-19).” This means that a saint with low reward dependence is dear to God.

In the language of psychiatry, we can say that same energy that makes a sinner, when sublimated makes a saint. If we put a sinner on a zero degree of circle and saint on a three hundred sixty degree of the same circle, then there is no need for a sinner to travel whole circle in clockwise direction to reach to 360 degree.

He just has to turn his face in anti clockwise direction. And we will get a saint. A pendulum, which goes to one extreme, must go to the other extreme. A mediocre always remains a mediocre.

According to Swami Vivekananda, “Be strong, be manly. I have respect even for wicked person as long as he is manly and strong, for his strength will someday make him give up his wickedness and even renounce all work for selfish ends. It will eventually bring him to the truth”. (Life of Swami Vivekananda, part 1, page 271).