Garden of Eden, Relativity and Mortality

[Duke Wellington]

Hi All

I'm after some advice from people who know about the deeper meanings in Genesis and the Garden of Eden story not the versions which are read if we take them at face value. First some concepts I think are important:

Relativity: We know that space, time and matter are relative but I think it goes further than this. I think thoughts are relative too. An example is happy being relative to sad. I can't think of any thoughts which arent relative.

Entropy: In a closed system the amount of disorder always increases.

Non-Dualism: When nothing exists that is relative to something else.

Dualism: When there are things that exist relative to each other.

So my understanding of the Old Testament's creation story is that Gods mind is non-dualism. When the first thought occurs in it then non-dualism becomes dualism because thoughts are relative. Having thoughts creates ego because it takes an 'I' to have a thought.

In the Garden of Eden if we refuse to participate in ego (this means stay eating from the tree of life) then we're immortal. If we endulge in ego (eating from the tree of knowledge) then we become a mortal which 'will surely die'

Endulging in ego creates psychological urges (such as the urge to survive) which creates what we see as reality. All thoughts result in dualist states because thoughts are relative. For instance for the 'I' to ask where am I? then its location is relative to other locations. Hence space is created.

A fixation on our psychological urges and experience of reality develops which turns our minds into closed systems cut-off from their prior state. Entropy applies to closed systems meaning entropy increases over time. This makes us age and die.

Have I got the interpretation of the trees of life and knowledge correct?

Edited August 4, 2014 by RabidMongoose

[Lilly]

IMO Science + Religion = A useless hybrid.

[Bluefinger]

Hi All

I'm after some advice from people who know about the deeper meanings in Genesis and the Garden of Eden story not the versions which are read if we take them at face value.

First some concepts I think are important:

Relativity: We know that space, time and matter are relative but I think it goes further than this. I think thoughts are relative too. An example is happy being relative to sad. I can't think of any thoughts which arent relative.

Entropy: In a closed system the amount of disorder always increases.

Non-Dualism: When nothing exists that is relative to something else.

Dualism: When there are things that exist relative to each other.

I think you are going to have trouble here. Namely, the premise is essentially ethnocentric. It takes no record of the history or culture from which the Creation story derived. That record itself is a subject of debate. Some say that Moses wrote it while in the Wilderness of Sinai approximately 1500 years ago. Modern critical analysts conclude that it was written while the Jews were in exile in Babylon some 900 years later. The dating plays a huge part because biblical texts were not written solely to expose universal truths, as is the case of modern academia today. They were written around a set of historical and cultural circumstances relevant to that time in history for that particular people (namely the Jews).

When you make this a subject of debate using modern and irreligious philosophical understanding, you are not going to get the fullest meaning from the text. Therefore, you are actually denying yourself the truth you are seeking to uncover.

In addition, Dualism can best be explained as two contradictory forces used to balance the universe. This asserts that there is a source of good and a source of evil. Dualism is denied in the creation story, where God calls everything He created good.

So my understanding of the Old Testament's creation story is that Gods mind is non-dualism. When the first thought occurs in it then non-dualism becomes dualism because thoughts are relative. Having thoughts creates ego because it takes an 'I' to have a thought.

In the Garden of Eden if we refuse to participate in ego (this means stay eating from the tree of life) then we're immortal. If we endulge in ego (eating from the tree of knowledge) then we become a mortal which 'will surely die'

Keeping with the evidence provided within the book itself, the authors asserted that eternal life was the result of obeying God's commands. Knowledge of evil was the result of disobeying God's commands. If Adam and Eve never disobeyed God's command, they would not have known evil. It could only be concluded, as the text defends, that good would not have to be known because it was continuously experienced and inherent in nature (since there was no shame in nudity before Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Since eating of the tree of life was forbidden after the Fall, it can be concluded that human nature had reached a fallen and evil state, something that God would not allow to continue forever.

This is all supported by the text itself and not by any philosophical reasoning.

Endulging in ego creates psychological urges (such as the urge to survive) which creates what we see as reality. All thoughts result in dualist states because thoughts are relative. For instance for the 'I' to ask where am I? then its location is relative to other locations. Hence space is created.

A fixation on our psychological urges and experience of reality develops which turns our minds into closed systems cut-off from their prior state. Entropy applies to closed systems meaning entropy increases over time. This makes us age and die.

Have I got the interpretation of the trees of life and knowledge correct?

I wonder what your take is on the ever expanding pace of the universe.

[Davros of Skaro]

See "Myths of Enki".

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enki

[LostSouls7]

One thing I always wondered about the Magic Garden of Eden.

Did the animals eats of the fruit also?

Why do they die? I supposed the plants and even books that get old and decay..

were guilty of eating the fruit ?

[StarMountainKid]

I think your statements about "indulging the ego" and the dualism of thought are truths. In my view, it's as good an explanation of the Garden of Eden story as any.

[Arbel]

The garden of Eden is a fairy story that never existed; the story was created by mankind/religion for some reason and in fact the names Adam and Eve never existed either; in fact Eve did not create evil either as evil was created at a much later time by a spirit who thought he could be better than God. To drop back to the names Adam and Eve their true name are El Daoud and Evam also known as Mary and Joseph. Every thing since the beginning of creation has been taken out of context by mankind and that of religion for their own benefit.

[Magnanimus]

IMO Science + Religion = A useless hybrid.

Only when you try to use science to "prove" religion or let a religious establishment, like the Church during the early Renaissance, enforce limits on the refinement of science.

The Church didn't crack down on Galileo because he was up to science. From their point of view, Galileo was capitalizing off of previous work to popularize his message that the earth wasn't the center of Creation, a very destabilizing notion that could throw a monkey wrench into society's collective gears at the time. Imagine if Neil deGrasse Tyson were to go on CNN and announce an in-bound meteor that punch into earth like a nail gun; chaos would result.

But to the point, science as we know it now was born from religion. Isaac Newton invented calculus, optics, and physics on a break he took from what he called his "real" work: god damn alchemy and using Kabbalah to find the date of the End of Days encoded in the dimensions of Solomon's Temple and the Book of Daniel (btw, happy 2060, y'all!). Every art, science, or piece of high culture traces its roots back to religious elements or mythology, even when it's unintentional. Staying on Kabbalah for the moment, it describes fairly well and quite poetically the events of the Big Bang, supernova nucleosynthesis, the behavior of light outside of the visible spectrum, and uses the Hebrew alphabet as an early stand in for the basic principles of molecular chemistry.

These could all be simple coincidences though, after all, Donald Duck discovered Methylene two decades before any actual chemist did, why couldn't Kabbalists be just as lucky?

http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invented-by-donald-duck-seriously_p2.html

[Duke Wellington]

The garden of Eden is a fairy story that never existed; the story was created by mankind/religion for some reason and in fact the names Adam and Eve never existed either; in fact Eve did not create evil either as evil was created at a much later time by a spirit who thought he could be better than God. To drop back to the names Adam and Eve their true name are El Daoud and Evam also known as Mary and Joseph. Every thing since the beginning of creation has been taken out of context by mankind and that of religion for their own benefit.

I see the Garden of Eden story as being symbolic with a deeper meaning embedded within its text. I also note that each Abrahamic version of it (Christainity, Islam, Judism) differs in depth. I have also realised most religions have a creation story centred around a world tree.

To me the Garden of Eden story is telling us that:

1. In the beginning there was non-duality mind.

2. The mind experienced thoughts.

3. Thoughts are relative so at odds with non-duality (It takes an individual to have a thought and individuals are relative to others).

4. This conflict collapses non-duality mind into duality mind. This results in individual minds (what I will call human minds) all relative to each other.

5. The feelings and urges experienced by each human mind's ego trap them in a state of duality. Examples are survival fears and the urge to propagate.

6. Each human's mind is the upholder of its reality. If you think about it individual minds need locations relative to each other and need to be made from something. This creates space and matter. If you think about it then individual minds need time in order to sequence thoughts relative to other thoughts. This creates the past, present, future, flow of time and the pace of time flow.

I don't believe in all the mumbo jumbo added into each of the religions such as Noahs Ark, heaven or there being some kind of being called God. I am more interested in the nature of mind and reality which is something I think has been buried into the texts of each faith. I dont see how its at odds with science. They compliment each other with a lot of overlap inbetween and as science has become more advanced that overlap has increased.

I think religion operates a class system where the bottom ranked followers get some rubbish about eating an apple in a garden or two of every animal having to be loaded onto an ark. Only when they get initiated or educated to they become away there are deeper meanings which before went right over their head.

[Ben Masada]

The Garden of Eden is an allegory meant to grant man with divine attributes that could be shared by man as Intellect, Freewill, Reason, and a few others in a relativity manner. As Mortality is concerned, due to the fact that man had a beginning he could not share the Divine attribute of immortality. Hence A&E had to be banished out of the Garden of Eden to prevent them from eating of the tree of life and live forever. (Gen. 3:22)

[saucy]

I never understood the Christians who decide not to take the story at face value. It sets the tone for the rest of the bible. When Jesus Himself even speaks of them as real and their connection to sin, then it happened.

[danielost]

IMO Science + Religion = A useless hybrid.

Why?

[danielost]

One thing I always wondered about the Magic Garden of Eden.

Did the animals eats of the fruit also?

Why do they die? I supposed the plants and even books that get old and decay..

were guilty of eating the fruit ?

The plants were MWD to b meat to the animals so yes tigers and lions ate fruit or some kind of plant. Man didn't start eating animals until after the flood

[Magnanimus]

One thing I always wondered about the Magic Garden of Eden.

Did the animals eats of the fruit also?

Why do they die? I supposed the plants and even books that get old and decay..

were guilty of eating the fruit ?

It depends on how Narnia you want to get with this.

Most people miss that there are two distinct and different creation stories written about in Genesis by two distinct schools of thought. This is only representative of these two, really there are countless more stories in ancient Hebraic mythology that can be reconciled with each other to varying degrees.

Looking at the stories side-by-side shatters the Sunday School image of everything good in the world packed into a garden with topiaries and walls and fountains and such and everything outside of it looking like Arizona. Remember the six day story that for some reason we let nut jobs in the past century convince us meant literal days? God makes different life forms each day each in their own sphere, then people last. Then in the next story, the Lord makes rivers and plants, then Man, then the Garden and then animals so Man won't be lonely.

The Lord brings the beast of the field and birds of the air before man to name, so what about the other animals that aren't birds or large mammals? If Adam had to name an angler fish, it'd probably still have the name kill-it-with-fire, or merciful-God-why-is-this-a-thing. Adam may be in the Garden, Eden however is a large region that a lot of evidence points to being everything under the Persian Gulf. The animals there are just animals, but it comes with the addition of "companion" animals meant to be helpers for Adam, or domestic animals, all of which (sans the dog) are herbivorous. So no carnage, just the circle of life.

Also I should probably point out that at no point does anyone eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal. Adam and Eve get booted out before they can. It's like Gilgamesh; man has the immorality plant in his grasp, but a snake steals it before he can use it. But there is also a theory that I've always liked that says the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life are one in the same. The language is a little fuzzy that places where the Trees are; both frame either side of the clause "in the middle of the Garden". This gave rise to the belief that the Tree of Life was, or only became, the Tree of Knowledge because Eve took fruit from it-- she altered its state by cherry picking (*ba dum ching*) from it.

One also notices that at this same time, the Lord's commandment has been altered. "Don't eat from the Tree" from the Lord's mouth becomes "Eat or touch and you will die" from Adam to Even. The Serpent even asks her to confirm the wording and commandment before deceiving Eve with the perceived intention behind the commandment. In this scenario, the Tree of Life represents the totality and oneness of the Lord's grace, but the Tree of Knowledge, the partial entity, represents the bargaining and moral compromising we do within ourselves along with the addition to Divine Word to compensate for human lacking. Notice that suddenly after Adam and Eve eat the fruit, nudity becomes a moral taboo and must be fixed, even though the Lord made them in that state.

[Ben Masada]

I never understood the Christians who decide not to take the story at face value. It sets the tone for the rest of the bible. When Jesus Himself even speaks of them as real and their connection to sin, then it happened.

I find it pretty understandable as interpretations of a Biblical text are subject to preconceived notions. It goes according to the reader and not to the truth which becomes a relative concept.