The Fall from Grace: A Tale Beyond the Garden

Actually if you just eat the burger and eschew the bun, fries, and other cardboard tasting shite, a mac burger is 100% beef with salt.

They are both silent.

Things unfold without utterance. In the struggle for survival there is no ethics.
Eithics is just another strategy - an emergent quality that can hlep make life bearable. It was not consciously invented - at least the erge to ethics is not. Like the bitch suckling her puppies we have innate senses to co-operate.
But by the ame token there is a significant, though small, number of psychopaths amongst us who exploit these tendancies to their own advantage.
They score high in populations of CEOs, and politics.

The Genesis story doesn’t use the word “fall”. From a naturalistic standpoint homo sapiens evolved, there was no fall. But if you look around at the human race and think there’s something wrong with it, then for you, there’s a fall from some ideal of how it ought to be.

From a naturalistic standpoint Eden is a fiction, and there was never any paradisiacal childlike being one with god.

Of course. It’s an origin myth meant to be allegorized. I thought that would be obvious to everyone. Where is the fundamentalist who’s taking it literally?

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I mean what is it an allegory for? There never was a thing to which Eden relates even metaphorically. There never was an innocence. Never a thing for which the apple is a metaphor. There were things like neanderthals fighting homo sapiens.

Again, if you look at the world and think there’s something wrong with it then for you, it has fallen. That’s what it’s an allegory for.

But you just said there was no fall mentioned in genesis. So you’re just talking about something different from the Bible…?

And what did the world fall from? It doesn’t seem like there ever was a higher state, historically. Or are you talking about pre-Trump vs now?

Genesis is clearly not about just some simple nostalgia for a better world, but about some alchemy of consciousness. The snake is important, the fact that God had apparently overlooked him. It seems rather like a metaphor for free will and its grave consequences.

There is a bit of an inverse parallel to Zarathustra’s metamorphosis of the spirit. Man going from child to beast of burden. Of course Nietzsches child is not the Biblical Adam, but still.

Naturalistically speaking there wasn’t a fall. This wasn’t an event that happened in time. The mind evolved to the point, it could imagine a better world. Archaeological evidence suggests this happened in the late Paleolithic era when humans began producing art.

So beginning to produce art is a result of being banished by God? Being banished by God means the capacity to imagine a better world? I don’t see that making any sense, and you ignore the actual content of the myth, the snake and the apple, the hiding of nakedness, the loss of the Tree of Life – things that are the meat of the story. There is more profound and powerful meaning there than you suggest.

It is said that the Torah is an encoded reference to more ancient knowledge of kabbalistic alchemy which was publicly written down first in the 12th century or thereabouts but is much older maybe even came down from Egypt.

Apparently the whole Torah is a numerological matrix.

The myth is about the birth of the ethical in the human imagination. You know, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. From a gnostic standpoint, Yahweh is the villain in the piece. But like I said above, the myth is an interpretation generating machine. That’s the genius of it.

That makes more sense. It is clearly not simply about ‘it was better in the olden days’ feelings.

So why did the discovery of the ethical cause all this misery?

It’s a product of the binary mind. The good produces the bad and vice versa. Turn off the mind in meditation for even a second and the misery goes away.

I wish that were true in all circumstances… but that is at least a meaning that uses the elements of the story.

In Genesis the original couple choose the tree of duality instead of the tree of life which symbolizes non-duality. In the Christian Bible Christ restores access to the non-dual path in the New Testament.

I can see that.

The magical tree of life symbolizes balance in polarity, not the exclusion of one side in favor of the other.

In this sense the US is moving from the tree of life - a balance between conservative (Geburah, severity) and progressive (Chesed, mercy) - to the tree of knowledge, where each side sees itself as good and the other as evil.

It’s quite a theme.

Our own culture also started with a Age of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroric, then Iron age.
Which shows that the Greeks had a better grasp of history than the borrowed Judaic mythical system.

So you put stock in that mythology as representing real history? On what kind of grounds?

I know the oldest pyramid is the most technologically advanced, that is what I can come up with.

The Hindu cycle of ages (Yugas) follow the same pattern of decline:

  • **Satya/Krita Yuga (Golden Age):**The age of truth, righteousness, and spiritual perfection, where humans lived long and were highly virtuous.
  • Treta Yuga (Silver Age): A period of decline in dharma, where humans still maintain some virtue but are less perfect than in the Satya Yuga.
  • Dvapara Yuga (Bronze Age): A further decline in dharma, with humans becoming more materialistic and less spiritual.
  • Kali Yuga (Iron Age): The current age, characterized by the lowest level of dharma, with humans being dominated by greed, selfishness, and ignorance.