I wonder why God wanted Adam and Eve to live in ignorance. It seems that once the snake showed up it opened their eyes to the fact that God lied. He had told them that if they ate from the fruit of the forbidden tree they would surely die. As we know though, they didn’t die. Instead they gained insight into the nature of good and evil, they awoke from a dream of ignorance. So does God want us to be ignorant? It is a funny concept to imagine. We think of this as unfair, that God would hold back the truth from us in order to protect us. We feel that, although the truth may be uncomfortable, although it might destroy us, we want to know it. We do not want to be deprived of the truth, and we see it as a basic right. Why, then, do we hide the truth of the nature of things from our children until we deem them old enough to understand fully? Why do we consider our behavior just but God’s unjust? This could be one justification for God’s apparent lie, that we would die if we attempted to eat from the tree. Is it a good enough excuse though? And why should truth be hidden from us if it is good? If it is good and we were made in God’s image, in the image of all that is good, then why should we be sheltered from good? Is there some bad within good that we are not yet ready to understand? This could be the case. After all, the tree which imparted knowledge onto Adam and Eve was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, not of the knowledge of good. It seems that knowledge in itself cannot be only of good or of evil, but that knowledge itself must include both. Since this “knowledge” is dual in its very essence, we can assume that this knowledge is part of the dual creation. I think this is precisely where we can draw the line between knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps knowledge seems good to our limited perception, but it is actually knowledge of an imperfect world, therefore it is imperfect knowledge. In this dual universe, everything is both good and bad, positive and negative, yin and yang. All good encompasses bad within it, and all bad encompasses good within it. All includes all else, and for this reason this knowledge was dangerous. It all depends on the specific situation.
Don’t allow the idea of healthy living to become a completely unhealthy obsession caused by a chronic phobia of disease. When we obsess over fear we develop many irrational fears and we become paranoid. When we worry non-stop about what we need to do next, about how we will survive the next day, when we allow these things to stress us out, what we are doing is unconsciously affirming that we are at the mercy of this body and its ailments, that we are victims of our karma. Similarly, when waste our thoughts on dreadful thoughts of disease our minds become diseased. We are refusing divine protection by worrying about things which are out of our control. People love to bash faith nowadays as it is seen as unscientific. But faith is necessary, and the mystic knows this. Faith is what keeps on going when nothing seems to be going our way. Faith is what keeps devotees on their divine search, even while facing ridicule and sometimes violent persecution for being comfortable with questioning everything and stepping outside of the box. Don’t save up so much money that you can’t ever enjoy since you can’t stop working, you must pay your debts. Don’t let societal norms dictate the way you should conduct yourself. Don’t let other people manipulate you into doing things to serve their selfish purposes by making you feel guilty or responsible for their troubles. Don’t allow guilt or regret to help you back. Remember that, although the present is a representation of your past and future – your memories and dreams as well as future aspirations-
Don’t feel like you can’t tell people how you feel about a certain issue because you will be seen as a hypocrite. Sometimes we feel like, because we’ve acted in a certain way in the past, we’re not able to express any different sentiments or ideas because we are simply preaching what we don’t practice. This is not the case. Life’s obstacles and problems, even those created directly by us, all come our way so that we may learn a lesson. If we fail to learn the lesson then the problem will keep on showing up in different ways. Once we learn the lesson, yes, the point is to live it. But with all goals, sometimes we fail, and someone who is on a righteous path might make a mistake once in a while. Does this make this person more impure than those who make mistakes all the time without feeling any regret for it at all? Of course not. We should not live with a feeling that we cannot be honest about the values we hold just because we are doomed to be labeled as different than that. A murderer might repent after many years of introspection. Taking someone’s life might have seemed to be justified at the time when the crime was committed, but he might have come upon some common sense, perhaps during his time being locked up. Isn’t that supposed to be the whole point of locking people up?
Sometimes I feel that God isn’t real and neither is religion. I feel like God might be just an idea that people have created in order to feel better, and that the system has decided to promote in order to keep people enslaved. As someone who values freedom, it’s hard for me to accept God as a tyrant, as a person who dictates what we must and must not do, down to what we wear and how we cut our hair. Looking around though I have a strong feeling that there is a higher power than us. But could this feeling arise in so many of us because of a mass dissatisfaction with the current state of the world as it is? How do we find out whether the old religious stories told us by our parents and grandparents, be they from the Bible or any other ancient book, have any basis in fact? Is history true in the way we know it or could its teaching have been manipulated from centuries ago in order to favor the side telling it? I feel like God and religion would be the perfect tool for mass control. It prescribes ways to live and not to live, and it insists that if one does not follow certain laws then one is subject to eternal misery and pain. This alone is enough to fill a person with overwhelming fear.
To be continued tomorrow, on Day 17.
~ Rebel Spirit
rebel eye 