The Fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden makes me wonder about a lot of things. Of course, Christians claim it is simply a literal account of how the world was created by God. I don’t regard any belief as false, but I think it might just be possible that there’s much more to it than that. Why did women start giving labor in pain only after God cursed Eve for disobeying his commandment? Why was this also the point in the story when they were commanded to work the earth? Could it be that this was the time when “Adam and Eve” became incarnated beings, the time when time began, so to speak, when souls entered into male and female bodies and populated the earth? This is a similar concept to the Kabbalist idea of tzim-tzum, the big bang which took place due to God contracting his total goodness, thereby removing it from a certain place in time in space, creating the Earth, a world motivated by infinite desire, all beings feeling the emptiness of having lost God’s all-encompassing love. This is believed to be the reason why most of us experience a spiritual impulse at some point in our lives, why religion has arisen since the dawn of time and continues to pop up in every part of the planet, since we long to reconnect with God, with the creator. Could Adam and Eve also represent masculine and feminine forces, both which are found within each person, positive and negative, the yin and the yang? Could the story of the creation of Adam, and then Eve from his ribs, be a way of symbolizing the fact that both forces need to connect, that one can’t be without the other? After all, a man and a woman connect to create a new life on this planet. Nobody knows how this conjures up consciousness into a new body, nobody knows the complete process whereby a cranium is developed to hold that consciousness, or actually the brain that will receive, or perceive, that consciousness. It all just happens, a higher intelligence takes care of all we take for granted. All we need to do is get together and make love, ideally while we are in love. This disregard for connection, yet global obsession with sex at the same time, is creating a lot of problems as unexpected and often unwanted children are being born, and their parents either give them up for adoption, or much worse, go in for an abortion. If they choose to keep the child, he or she usually grows up in a tense environment, if the parents are teenagers there are usually lots of problems with parents and they end up separating. This ruins the experience of childhood for many kids, and it ruins many people’s adult lives as well, as experiences of fear or trauma or too much stress and disagreement in the air can cause psychological or emotional problems in young children’s minds. But of course, these parents never thought about the idea of truly connecting with someone else, in order to start a family and take care of a new life. All they did was let themselves go, into all kinds of pleasures, desensitized from all possible consequences, living as if life is nothing but a dream. If more people treated the subject of sex with respect, if they truly understood the sanctity of love and true connection between two people who support each other, then maybe people wouldn’t abuse it so much, and many of these problems could be avoided. Quick and stupid decisions have consequences that last for generations. I got a little bit off course there, but on another note about Adam and Eve, could they also signify the good and evil of life? We already wondered about the positive and negative poles. The Law of Polarity is one of the seven hermetic principles, as well as The Principle of Gender. Good and evil could be part of this as well, since no one really know what real good really is, the truest good which is beyond both the good and the evil of duality. This is a planet of polarity, and maybe we need to find balance between good and evil by understanding both pain and pleasure and becoming indifferent to them, understanding that there is a higher essence above them. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, so was there already good and evil, or did they begin when they ate from the fruit? Did they simply become aware of these concepts, of good and of evil, and that this knowledge came along with free will, with human life, with the life of suffering which we all live in, according to the Buddha? Why must the nature of life be one of suffering, why must no earthly good completely satisfy? There must have been some initial mistake, and Adam and Eve’s mistake seems to be one that impacted generations for millions, or possibly billions, of years? But how could they have chosen to disobey God in the first place and eat from the forbidden fruit, if they didn’t yet have free will? So, I don’t really know. Where these really human beings, or angels, or mythological characters, personifications of certain concepts? Could a happy marriage be the highest we can achieve in life? Could it be some kind of way for us to fully connect our opposite energies, if we do it in the spirit of true love, and to feel a connection that resembles the connection between Spirit and God, between the Atman and Brahman, the lover and the beloved? Could marriage, just as sex, be divine symbols for the connections that must be joined in balance, during this life, in order for us to live correctly, or of the physical body parts that must be joined in order for life to even continue? We can never know, but we can study and maybe one day we’ll come to a more complete conclusion.
To be continued tomorrow, on Day 37.
~ Rebel Spirit
rebel eye 