In the Garden of Eden myth, the original drug-pusher encourages Eve to eat the hallucinogenic fruit from the tree of the perception of duality by pointing out this truth: “You will not really die!”
The
implication of the seductive duality idea is that, yes, you will think you are
going to die, but your experiences while on this far-out trip will be so new
and different, and you will eventually come back to your senses, so why not go
ahead and try it? As a holy, immortal spirit being, you know nothing can really
go wrong and it will be an exciting, dramatic adventure!
While everything the wise serpent said
is true, what he left out was that she would need to so completely disconnect
from the other tree, the source of life, there would be bitter side effects
such as feelings of loneliness, depression, pain, sickness, torture and death.
At times these feelings would be so overwhelming that self-annihilation would
seem to be a welcome solution.
Myth aside, we are one-by-one beginning
to comprehend what actually happened that led to this feeling of paradise lost.
“God”, which is timeless, dimensionless, genderless conscious energy, in
contemplating its own nature, extended the thought of a mirror with which to
study itself. It desired self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-consciousness.
This is what we are! We are the
reflection in the mirror that reveals to our Self who we are. Is not to “know
thyself” the highest objective given us by philosophy?
Like a mirror image, in order to
understand what we are, we are also revealing to ourselves what we are not.
That is a necessary part of this mental exercise, or “game”, if you will. The
objects in the mirror are not what they appear.
Returning to the paradise myth, Adam,
who was really a hermaphroditic spirit (angels are genderless you know), fell
asleep and dreamed he had a body that divided into two bodies, male and female.
The male body symbolizes God, and the female body is a knock-out
drop-dead-gorgeous mirror-image of God, with whom He is infatuated. But she is
self-conscious to the point of feeling naked and vulnerable. She does not trust
Him one bit, and blames Him for all the painful side-effects she is
experiencing.
We cannot understand why God wants to be
inside us and we have continually cried “Rape! Rape!” for unremembered
millennia. But there is nobody listening, nobody to come rescue the poor victim
from her imagined villain.
What we need to understand about
ourselves is that we played this game very willingly. We were excited by the
idea of reflecting God. We prepared ourselves as best we could for this game of
duality in which we momentarily forget all about wholeness, and immersed
ourselves in the idea of separation. But the nature of the game is this amnesia
in which we limit ourselves to a particular location in space and a tiny
allotment of time, to act out very specific scripts.
The game gets so much easier when we
relax and listen to His quiet whisperings in our inner ear, let Him gently
caress us and slowly woo us back to love. When we constantly practice listening
to His voice, the noise of the world subsides, the plot of the story turns from
tragedy to comedy, and He begins to wake us up to an awareness of our true
nature, and eventually to a complete knowledge of the Reality that we are, in
fact, All That Is, and there is no "other".
And then we live happily ever after. We
are complete. End of story.
