A Tale of Two Gardens, my first blog post.

At this late date in civilized history, hardly any of us modernists could give a crap about anything written in the bible, by now choosing to relegate its possible meanings to wishful zealotry, thereby ignoring its very real allegorical, metaphysical, and cultural memes which our post-God culture is still very much informed by, if not infected with.  Myself, I read everything and believe nothing unless and until the truth of what it is leaks into my own brainpan.  Whatever you might think about biblical and cultural values or the lack thereof, I think a good way to introduce my special brand of mental and spiritual  mattress stuffing to you, mis amigos y amigas, is in reinterpreting the opening and closing chapters to our society’s most influential literary guide, the one we ignore while culturally claiming to follow.

Many years ago, as a deacon in the Pentecostal uprising of non-denominational Christianity, I enthusiastically soaked myself in hundreds of hours of bible study and contemplation.  My interest in such things was catalyzed by plant-induced entheogenesis and accidental meltdown into Divine Presence at 18 years young.  This self-motivated course of study also helped me pass the hours spent on an extremely boring night-shift job I was working.  This served my hubristic attempt to get informed about what the whole bible thing was supposedly about, in order to checkmate preachity people who would seek to slay my already saved soul on the altar of their particular denominational chessboard.  The most pointed personal take-away from this period continues to be the notion that Churchianity is like a board game that you can’t play correctly, if you actually read the rule book.  In other words, being raised a good Catholic (altar boy and all) I couldn’t recognize the style of play from any other human scam, and worse, this game appeared to contradict almost every concept ostensibly given in the manufacturer’s guide to playing the game.  Learning history only aggravated my alienation from the Babylonic religious inertias toward inhumane inquisition and persecution of the spiritually independent gene pool mavericks, all the while with great beating of both the living and the dead with a willfully ignored book of rules. 

Likewise, this pathetic personal disconnect from the habitually expected patterns of societal game-play affect me just as deeply in reading the US Constitution.  Just see what happens when you try to reconcile our modern paternalistic “democracy” with the extremely libertarian, representative republic prescribed in the groundbreaking, hand-penned, seed of genius (with Iroquois Nation and Magna Carta liftings).  Again, the current societal configuration bears no resemblance to the original rules of the game.  We now expect the fear and desire of the many to necessarily smother the unalienable rights of the individual.  This really hops up my already obnoxious social withdrawal syndrome.  I think of our current form of democracy as 3 wolves and 1 lamb having a majority-rules vote on what’s for lunch.

“Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”

But back to the story… Here’s a synopsis of the bible story wrapped up in an organic whole-wheat tortilla- the whole of biblical history is basically a tale of two gardens.  The first garden is in the opening, the Book of Genesis.  Ingrained in most of our psyches is the concept of “The Garden of Eden” but I believe our mythic knowledge drops off precipitously from that point on.  The text states that before any plant sprung from the earth, The Creator made a man, specifically to tend the garden.  Stated more plainly, The Creator made a gardener.  A river, separating into four headwaters, flowed from and through the garden, in the middle of which were planted two trees.  The two trees are referred to as the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Now, culturally we’ve been infected with the image of Eve eating an apple, and this proxy bullshit meme robs us of much of our own makeup and heritage, in my opinion.  My fellow congregants, the plants tell me that this is a parable of our inner quandary. 

“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”

That we are naked in our own self-awareness, is the precious secret we all hide under our social exterior- “How are you?/I’m fine”, kind of deal.  We know enough to separate ourselves from the ego-less animal community with our knowledge, the knowledge of our knowledge, and the shame of the naked ego, but we don’t know how to migrate, hibernate, nest, and a whole bunch of cool stuff that all other creatures just do. 

I often used to wonder as a child why every insect, bird, animal, and amoeba knew exactly how to make a life for themselves, how to make a home, what to eat, and how to raise a family.  They are naked to life; individuals, yet living as part of the one.  Our present species needs training and education (knowledge) and artificial aids even to get to the point to know how to wipe our own butts!  We most often depend on others for the knowledge and ability to make our house, bring our water, grow our food, deliver our babies, and bury our dead- seemingly as helpless as any of God’s other creatures are instinctive. 

The late Dr. Julian Jaynes  explored this predicament of our animal consciousness (tree of life) versus figuring it out (tree of knowledge of good and evil) in his treatise “The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.  In it, he describes the pre-Illiad mode of human consciousness as being more of an I/Thou relationship with nature, rather than a nature dominating, separate, I.  Ok, so we were naked and slept in trees and heard the voice of the God of Nature in our heads, but we were happy.

Cut to the last book of the bible, the very last chapter, and after the whole painful history of man, post-apocalyptic earth again has a garden with a river flowing down the street in the center of the city (New Jerusalem).  The tree of life is re-ensconced on both sides of the river, with no mention of the other tree. 

“On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.  No longer will there be any curse.”

So the plants tell me that this is the allegory of the human descent into history, into knowledge, wandering through the desert of the loss of God, bloated with all knowledge but thirsty for understanding who we are, where we came from, and where we go.  We are almost back to the gardens friends, but oddly enough, it’s taking all the knowledge we have to get back to the original naked, stoned immaculateness that our original design resonates with.  That’s why all this crap about Eve and an apple and all this being an inference for gender culpability or some inferred weakness on the lady’s part is backwards, IMO.  The women are always smarter.  Without thinking for ourselves, as our lady partners have convinced us to consider, most of us guys would be living like apes in trees and naked, possibly stoned, but far from immaculate.  We wouldn’t be happy or satisfied without the learning and the unlearning, the give and take of male/female turbulence, the up/the down, the toiling by the sweat of our brows, and the forgetfulness of isolated individualism that you just can’t buy in the Garden of Eden.  We wouldn’t be happy without our failures.  This is how I learn to grow everything, by making mistakes and improving next season.  This knowledge of good and evil is satisfying to our appetite for evolution.  I for one am happy we f*kd up back there somewhere.  It’s been great!  I’m even happier that we’re nearly at the beginning of the end of the descent through the history of unconscious knowledge and are piercing the veil of conscious awareness, both of our inner and outer environments.  Also, that many of us are becoming aware that, as in the first garden, we were created AS gardeners- TO garden, see?  That’s why we’re not truly happy without some of that love contact with Earth Mother and Grandmother Growth. 

Allrighty, I’ve said too much.  See you in the garden friends.

Now they are wedded, she is a good girl;
Naked as children out in the Meadow,
Naked as children, wild as can be,
Soon to have offspring, start it all over.
Start it all over.

The Doors- Queen of the Highway