Seeing God through a cracked lens
There are two trees in the Garden: The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The trees are metaphors for the way we live, work, interact, feed, and function. Our human operating system, our paradigm, our perception. One represents holistic vision. The other is a cracked lens.
The cracked lens
As a result of the Fall, humanity shifted from the Tree of Life operating system to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil OS. This was not an upgrade.
It was a massive downgrade. Like going from MacOS or Windows back to DOS, the single-function Disk Operating System. (Yes, I know, some of you consider going from MacOS to Windows—or vice-versa—as a huge downgrade. That’s the cracked lens for you.)
The events described in Genesis 2 and 3 regarding the Fall, Adam and Eve, and humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden are a folk memory of real events.
These events are thoroughly evidenced by geographer James DeMeo in Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World. As you can tell from the subtitle, this is not light reading.
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a metaphor for the physiological effects of the unholy trinity of drought, desertification, and famine.
Famine
DeMeo uses a wealth of anthropological data to show that climate change from around six millennia ago changed the face of the earth—and the face of humanity. Long-term drought in a huge belt stretching through the Sahara, Arabia and Central Asia caused desertification which in turn caused famine.
Over centuries, loss of food and water sources turned peaceful Neolithic societies into violent nomadic warriors. They created the first civilizations, the first alphabets, the first monotheistic conceptions of God—including the Old Testament.
The overarching narrative of the Old Testament is a people facing desertification, famine, and fear. Its inhabitants believed that the gradually encroaching desert was due to not living right with God—to sin. It’s one long, great plea to stop sinning to stop the spread of desert.
“The Lord will make the sky overhead seem like a bronze roof that keeps out the rain, and the ground under your feet will become as hard as iron. Your crops will be scorched by the hot east wind or ruined by mildew. He will send dust and sandstorms instead of rain, and you will be wiped out.” (Deuteronomy 28:21-24)
Evidence for loss of habitat in Biblical times can be seen in the fact that the Old Testament mentions lions over a hundred times, as flesh-and-blood creatures, a danger to travellers in the wild. By the New Testament lions are hardly mentioned, and only as the abstract quality of courage.
Shutting down pain
In Saharasia, DeMeo describes the impact of prolonged famine:
“A passive indifference to the needs or pain of others manifested itself, and hunger, feeding of the self, became their all-consuming passion… The very old and young were abandoned to die. Brothers stole food from sisters, and husbands left wives and babies to fend for themselves. While the maternal-infant bond endured the longest, eventually mothers abandoned their weakened infants and children.”
To shut down pain of long-term—as in hundreds of years—pain, our forebears in this drought-stricken equatorial belt shut down their capacity to feel, i.e., the entire feminine side of their being.
The masculine—the ability to kill to gain access to food, water, land, and other resources—was exalted. The feminine was denigrated, denied, shamed, oppressed, and repressed. Over time, this created a psychic fracture that polarised our perception into good and evil.
Matthew 7:3-5 says, “You can see the speck in your friend’s eye, but you don’t notice the log in your own eye.” That is polarity—I notice when someone does something that offends me, yet I cannot see my own offence. That is the cracked lens.
The peaceful hunter-gatherer cultures of the Neolithic Age, where women enjoyed equal status with men, disappeared. In their stead arose polarity-based violent patriarchies, the military-industrial-political complex, and monotheism.
The two trees
The story of the two trees is the ancients’ way of communicating this breach. Our entire perception of life, including God, is through the cracked lens of polarity. From within the paradigm of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the only thing we can see accurately is the crack in the lens of God.
To return to God, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, to re-enter the Garden, we must heal this fracture. That starts with recognising our fractured perception.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as if is infinite.”
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Photo by Ivan Vranić on Unsplash