008 Maps of Meaning: 8 Dwelling on Paradise (TVO)

So let’s take a look at the structure of paradise as it’s presented in Genesis. So the first aspect of the initial paradaisal state is un-selfconsciousness. Now if you look and factor analytic studies of human personality, you note that self-consciousness, although it is arguably our greatest gift, also loads almost entirely on the factor that defines negative affect. And you might also notice that when you say, “I became self-conscious,” you generally put a negative cast on that; in that, I was talking before a group of people, and suddenly I was seized by self-consciousness. As a consequence of that, I was flooded by negative emotion and was fundamentally immobilized. So it’s a very paradoxical, a very paradoxical state of being. Our highest rational gift, say, and the only one that clearly distinguishes us from animals is also that which, when manifested, makes us almost unbearably anxious.

The initial paradaisal state, when Adam and Eve first walked in the Garden of Eden, is characterized by an animal-like unselfconsciousness. Adam and Eve, whatever they are, are not clearly segregated from the rest of the world. They have no idea, for example, of their own nakedness. If you think about what nakedness means, you immediately understand that that’s also a very profound, dramatic representation. You know, with children around the age of 3 or 4, many of them, regardless of their mode of upbringing, start to become very concerned about privacy, say, with regard to bodily functions and are also very concerned about ever showing themselves without clothing. It’s perfectly reasonable to presume that that’s a consequence of their emergent self-consciousness, an event that takes place somewhere between the ages of 2 and 5, and that’s a defining moment that makes them segregatable, say, from their mother.

So you also have images of Paradise that flow through Western history that are characterized by the image of the unconscious union between the mother and child, which is an imagistic representation that eradicates the tension of self-consciousness both for the mother and for the child. So the notion that the child is living in a paradaisal condition that is somehow lost as he or she approaches adulthood gives another sort of symbolic layer to the notion of the pre-selfconscious paradise. It’s also a place where order and chaos are in perfect balance, and you know that because what paradise means is para – around, daisa – a wall, while Eden means delight or a place of delight.

Paradaisa, paradise, is a walled garden, a walled place of delight, and a garden is precisely that place where the forces of nature or chaos and the forces of culture are held in perfect balance, right? That’s what a garden is. It’s nature given form by culture, and it’s a place that’s archetypically pleasant, a place where the intervention of human activity has produced a kind of stability that transcends that of nature because it’s a cultural construct, but also that transcends that of culture because all of the plants and the other growing things that constitute a garden are somehow transcendent even though they’re under the cultivating hand of culture and the individual.

If you look at the manner in which the fall story is represented, you can also see that the place of craziest stability can be regarded as a kind of paradise. So if you remember the story of Moses leading his people through the desert, it’s clearly the case that when the Israelites were in the desert, even though they got away from the tyranny, it was easy to look back and say, "Well, you know, tough as it was, the place that we were before was much better than the place we are now." So it’s perfectly reasonable and expectable for people who are caught in a crisis to look back to the time prior to the dawn of that crisis with longing, even if the crisis that they’re presently experiencing is a necessary precondition for further development of personality.

So the story that’s laid out in Genesis has its structure something like this: Before we became self-conscious, the world was perfect. As a consequence of the rise of self-consciousness, we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, out of paradise, and destined to live the profane existence that characterizes our present mode of being, where we’re subject to knowledge of mortality and the possibility of illness and alienation from God. And wouldn’t it be ever so great if we could only return to that condition of unselfconsciousness and make all our problems go away?

You see this kind of pathological paradaisal reminiscence manifesting itself in the most banal forms of conservatism, which are always projecting the ideal—the ideal path somewhere back into the unattainable reaches of time. Also in those situations that obtain psychologically when people are absolutely possessed by depression and anxiety and wish for their consciousness to come to an end, if not metaphorically so, they desire to sleep. Then actually, so that suicide is viewed as a kind of unconsciousness whose paradaisal nature—the absence of all opposition—is viewed as clearly preferable to the difficulties of actually maintaining being.

Eliade says the idea of paradise once and then paradise lost is not something unique to Western or great Eastern societies. It’s a widespread motif, just as wide as the flood motif. Regardless of where you go in the world, you find this notion: “When heaven had been abruptly separated from the earth, that is when it had become remote, as in our days, when the tree or vine connecting earth to heaven had been cut, or the mountain which used to touch the sky had been flattened out, then the paradaisal stage was over, and man entered into his present fallen condition. In effect, all myths of paradise show us primordial man enjoying a beatitude, a spontaneity and freedom which he has unfortunately lost in consequence of the fall. That is of what followed upon a mythical event that caused the rupture between heaven and earth.”

As I said, Eden is delight—a place of delight—by terminological definition, whereas paradise is a walled garden. I want to show you what knowing that does for analysis of the relationship between Eastern and Western thought. So let me tell you quickly the story of the Buddha, and I’m going to represent it fundamentally like this: Buddha starts his life in what’s essentially a walled garden, by all reasonable comparative analysis. As a consequence of his emergent self-consciousness, the unselfconscious child-like perfection of that early state is permanently disrupted. So you have a situation where the greatest redemption story of the East follows precisely the same drama tract as the greatest creation story of the West.

So this is the story: Buddha’s father is visited by an angel who tells him that his son is going to grow up to be the greatest temporal profane ruler the world has ever seen or a great spiritual leader. And his father, being a pragmatic and conservative man, decides that there’s no possible way I’m going to allow my son to take the ambivalent road of spiritual enlightenment. I’m going to allow him to fall completely in love with the world so that he will remain attached to this domain. So prior to Buddha’s birth, his father constructed a great city with walls around it, and inside that city, he removes all signs of pain, frustration, and disappointment—any sign of ugliness and age. The only people who are allowed to exist within this city are those who are in perfect mental and physical health, who are paragons of beauty and virtue.

The idea that lurks behind that archetypal story is that when a father has a child, his moral obligation is to shield the developing consciousness of that child from contact with any of the horrors of life that could provide the child with an experience too traumatic for that developing consciousness to apprehend. So, because it’s an archetypal story, it relates to the development of all people, not just the redemptive savior, and that’s the motif that the Buddhist story initially follows. A good father makes his son fall in love with life by enticing that child into a direct relationship with all that life has to offer.

So Buddha grows up within this walled garden, this unselfconscious paradise. But precisely because he’s being shielded to this degree and allowed to mature, his consciousness continues to expand, and the world outside the boundaries that his parents have established for him starts to attract his attention. Now, we know already that the forbidden fruit, right? The lure of what’s outside the walls is something that human beings just can’t keep their mangy little paws off, right? We are absolutely uncontrollably curious, and the best way to make sure that we investigate something is to lay down a structure that says, whatever you do, under whatever circumstances, never look there, right?

Then the automatic systems that underlie our orienting and that motivate our seeking experience are constantly pulling our attention precisely to that forbidden spot, compelling us to investigate exactly that which has been forbidden. So because Buddha is a consciousness developing in a healthy manner, he immediately becomes curious about what lies beyond the limits that have been established for him, and he makes a decision to go outside of paradise. Right, which seems a particularly ridiculous thing to do, given that in principle he had everything he could possibly want inside the walls. But then again, we have the troublesome notion of the original sin of Adam, right?

Which is that if any of you were offered a forbidden fruit again, under circumstances mythologically equivalent to those that obtained in the beginning, you’d immediately reach your hand out and take it because what we haven’t got for human beings is always far more compelling than what we have got. So Buddha goes outside the walls. But his father, who’s a good father although somewhat conservative, decides he’s going to rig the game a little bit, so he gets rid of everybody that’s diseased or unhappy or uncomfortable or ugly or old or anything that could possibly disturb Buddha.

He lines the streets with flower-waving women and puts petals on the road and sends his son out in a gilded chariot. But the gods who are lurking around, right? The trouble-making gods who represent chaos and disorder and the unknown, decide to send in front of Buddha a sick man who hobbles unsteadily into view. Buddha asks his retainer precisely what this phenomenon represents, and his retainer says, well you know, human beings like you—since you’re human—are subject to the deterioration of these mere physical powers in an arbitrary way. And this man is one person who’s been so afflicted.

Buddha is completely disenchanted by his exploratory move out into the terrible unknown and runs back into the castle walls and shuts the door, and is perfectly happy to think of nothing for months. But then as his anxiety habituates and his curiosity grows, he can’t stand the notion of never going outside the walls again, and outside he goes again. This time, after his father prepares the route ever so carefully, the gods send inside an old man who hobbles into view. And Buddha looks at him in shock and horror and says to his retainer, “Just precisely what’s going on here?”

His retainer says, "Well, that’s an old man. Everybody gets old, and you’re going to get old too, and that’s the way of all humanity." That’s the point at which Buddha’s self-consciousness expands not to only include the possibility of degeneration but to include the temporal horizon that’s characteristic of life. He finds that so terribly shocking that he runs back into the castle and shuts the walls down and plays with his friends for another six months until his anxiety, or maybe a year, until his anxiety finally habituates, and he goes out one final time.

This time, the gods send a funeral parade for him, and he sees his first dead body. This is such a terrible shock to him that he can’t even go back to the castle. So his father prepares for him a great party in the woods near the castle full of nude dancing women who are perfectly willing to flaunt themselves and to offer themselves to him. But Buddha is so absolutely and catastrophically shocked by this notion of emergent death that he can’t take any pleasure whatsoever in what’s being offered to him, and he leaves the kingdom once and for all.

You think, well, that’s exactly what happens to you when you grow up, right? If you’re reasonably well socialized and properly looked after, then your curiosity gets the better of you, and you keep going out into the world until what your parents have established for you is no longer sufficient for you. As a consequence of that movement out into the world, you find out all sorts of things characteristic of your own life that not only your parents can’t precisely explain to you, but even the broader formal structures of your culture have a very difficult time handling. When you finally do encounter such realities and allow their effect on you to fully manifest itself, well, then you’re finally independent, and you no longer can return home.

But from that point forward, you’re also burdened, as Adam is burdened when he loses his paradaisal unselfconsciousness, with the full revelation of what it means to be limited and alive. So, what happens to Buddha as a consequence of this revelation? He becomes an apprentice, and the chronicles of the Buddha’s adventure are careful to say that he becomes the world’s most proficient practitioner of Samkhya, which was a philosophical precursor to yoga, and then to yoga.

He masters all the positions and the asanas until he’s disciplined physically to an almost unlimited degree. Then he decides that he’ll adopt a stance of world renunciation, which is also something he’s remarkably good at. He starves himself until the chroniclers say he resembles nothing so much as a pile of dust. Then, having exhausted all the disciplinary structures that his sophisticated culture has to offer him but still not precisely finding the answer that he’s looking for, he retreats into the forest, place of the unknown, and sits himself at the base of a tree.

Underneath the tree, he’s visited by visions and temptations. The first vision is an essentially erotic one. Life itself tempts him back out of his self-conscious state into the domain of pure physical pleasure, a perfectly reasonable temptation, right, and one that’s powerful enough so that Hindu philosophers say, as their churches and cathedrals are covered with erotic drawings, if you can’t get past the erotic drawings into the church, that’s the domain that you should still inhabit, right? In the dawning phases of life, at least till middle age, that’s the appropriate mode of being to be enticed and seduced by the physical pleasures that life has to offer.

But in the final analysis, those are not sufficient to solve the problem of emergent self-consciousness. So the angel of death visits him and offers him the opportunity to exist permanently in a state of nirvana. A very, very interesting twist on the story because you have to wonder, given the association, say, between suicidality and the notion of paradise that exists underneath that, if what Buddha isn’t being offered by the angel of death is in fact death and the cessation of all the problems of being. Regardless, he rejects that, attains enlightenment briefly, and then decides to return to the world to share what he’s discovered with all of suffering humanity.

The idea being that the Buddha, who is the awakened or enlightened one, is capable of attaining a transcendent state but also knows fully that because human beings have a shared social aspect, it is not possible for any one person to attain redemption until all people attain redemption. The reason being that it’s very difficult to be transcendent and enlightened when you see someone who’s sick lying in a ditch.

So then we shift from that back to Genesis and the tempted fall of man and read the third chapter. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed." Well, what does that mean? Well, Freud pointed out that one of human being’s most common nightmares is to be stripped of clothing in front of a crowd. Now why would that be precisely? Well, your naked self is the most vulnerable aspect of you, right? We’re all clothed, and for good reason. Partly that’s protection from the terrible natural world, right?

But it also offers us the possibility of placing a barrier between ourselves, our vulnerable selves, and the searching and critical gaze of the community, right? Because not only are we vulnerable to the rigors of nature, we’re also vulnerable to the depredations and criticisms of society. The notion that a man and a woman could exist naked and not know it is a clear— a clear finger pointing in the direction of a story that says these people were not conscious, or if conscious, they certainly were not self-conscious.

And how does the story develop? "The serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman: 'Yea, hath God said, You shall not eat of every tree in the Garden?' And the woman said unto the serpent, 'Well, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the Garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the center of the Garden God has said you should not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest ye die.' And the serpent said to the woman: 'You won’t die, for God knows that in the day you eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened, right, a clear pointing to the notion of an awakening and an illumination— and ye shall be like gods, knowing good and evil,' right, which attributes to humanity a dawning sense of morality, explicit morality, the faculty for comprehension that we do not share with any other animal.

"And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat."

Women, trouble. What’s the tree? Well, we talked about this a little bit before. So you say, well, if you look at the structure of experience from this particular perspective and think about that in a horizontal plane— vertical plane, sorry—with the layers one on top of another, then you can imagine the tree as the thing that unites these three layers. The tree is the domain that unites chaos and order and the individual, the structure running up through the middle of it.

You see a representation of that, interestingly enough, from Norse mythology. This is the Yggdrasill, the axis mundi, the tree of the gods, the tree that stands in the middle of the Norse paradise. One of the things that’s very interesting about this particular tree is that if you look at its roots, the roots are covered with snakes and serpents, and underneath the snakes and serpents is water. So you see that the tree that stands at the center of the world is rooted in chaos fundamentally, is rooted in whatever it is that constitutes the pre-cosmogonic matrix of being.

The central aspects of this domain are nicely laid out as the domain of territoriality, the ends of the borders that the individual understands, and the habitual territory that he inhabits. The tree in the center represents whatever it is that’s central to our mode of being. So let’s take a look at that in some detail and flesh it out symbolically. We find Eliade is saying the tree that stands hypothetically at the center of the world is precisely that structure that shamans climb when they make their transition from normal mode of earthly being into their transcendent mode of being.

Eliade says the symbolism of the ascension into heaven by means of a tree is clearly illustrated by the ceremony of initiation of a Buryat shaman. The candidate climbs up a post in the middle of his yurt, his tent, reaches the summit, and goes out by the smoke hole. But we know that this opening made to let out the smoke is likened to the hole made by the pole star in the bulk of heaven.

You can imagine there’s a conceptualization of the world as centered around a particular axis and that the tent is regarded as, at least transitorily, as a symbolic equivalent of the cosmological structure. Among other peoples, the tent hole is called the pillar of the sky and is compared to the pole star around which the world rotates, at least from the visual perspective, and is named elsewhere the nail of the sky. Thus, the ritual post set up in the middle of the yurt is an image of the cosmic tree which is found at the center of the world, with the pole star shining directly above it.

By ascending it, the candidate enters into heaven. That is why, as soon as he comes out of the smoke hole of the tent, he gives a loud cry invoking the help of the gods. Up there he finds himself in their presence. The tree is an absolutely archaic symbol, and it seems to me most likely that it represents the structure of the nervous system. I think a structure that’s rooted not so much in the spinal, sensory motor structures but deeply in the autonomic structures, stretching down into the center of the body and planting the mind firmly in its material substrate.

So that the autonomic system and its projections up into the amygdala and limbic system, and then up into the cortex, constitute the interface between the spiritual domain that our psyche inhabits and the material domain that constitutes our body—the tree at the center of our being. What does the tree do? Well, it bears fruit.

What sort of fruit? Well, there are multiple medieval representations that are quite peculiar, showing Christ, for example, as the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruit of the tree of life. What does that mean? It means that conceptualizations like the hero are the products of whatever it is that this tree represents. The tree is something that produces fruit. Fruit is also something that can be ingested.

As Eric Newman points out, wherever liquor, fruit, herbs, etc. appear as the vehicles of life and immortality—including the water and bread of life, the sacrament of the host, and every form of food cult down to the present day—we have an ancient mode of human expression before us. Imagine the idea of the Piagetian idea of assimilation and then accommodation, and then understand its assimilative, nutritive, underlying metaphorical nature.

The idea being that there’s a tight analogy between ingesting something material and undergoing a transformation of energy. Attendant upon that, right, which is what happens when you eat, and ingesting a piece of information which offers you a new mode of doing things. You can say, well, people will trade work for information. They will trade food for information. There must be a kind of equivalence between work and information and food and information because otherwise the trade wouldn’t make sense.

Then you realize that if you’re informed, you can undertake transformations of yourself and the material world in a much more efficient manner because that’s what being informed means. That means that being informed, acquiring some information and eating something are all tied up in a complex way into the same metaphorical structure. Eat something forbidden—transform as a consequence. Conscious realization is acted out in the elementary scheme of nutritive assimilation, and a ritual act of concrete eating is the first assimilation known to man.

Conscious realization is acted out through ritual by an act of eating. Since the act of eating represents a very familiar example of assimilation, the assimilation and ingestion of the content, the eaten food, produces an inner change. Transformation of the body cell through food intake is the most elementary of animal changes experienced by man. How a weary, enfeebled and famished man can be turned into an alert, strong and satisfied being, or a man perishing of thirst can be refreshed or even transformed by an intoxicating drink. This is and must remain a fundamental experience so long as man shall exist.

Eric Newman’s point being that our psychological experience of the capacity for psychological transformation through eating is a metaphor waiting to be applied to the equivalent experience, the equivalent excitement and sense of transformative possibility that we acquire as a consequence of coming across some new and truly valuable piece of information. So you have the idea that the tree that stands at the center of the world, the individual mode of being, is something that bears fruit. And the ingestion of that fruit, that idea, say, or that piece of information is something that can produce a permanent transformation.