2016 Lecture 09 Maps of Meaning: Genesis

Anyways, so you're always in a situation, and this occurs across multiple levels of analysis. Because I could say, well, when are you in a garden? One answer could be, well, when you're in a beautiful house or in a beautiful hotel, or in a well-functioning institution, or in a city that's working. But I could also say you're in a garden when your conception of the world is sufficient that when you enact it, it allows the world to be fruitful. That's a garden too, right? Because your internal psychological structure, the conceptions that you use, first of all, they're obviously analogous to culture, but they're also analogous to a garden in that way. And like culture, they can be disrupted.

So you know what it's like; people say this all the time: "I wish that hadn't happened." What they mean by that is, "Gee, I was in a pretty good place before that event occurred." You know, and a big moral error can really do that to you. You know, to do something that you really think is stupid, and you know, you're just shattered, really, sometimes shattered enough to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. So you can't get rid of the snakes; that's the first idea in the story.

Well, then the issue is, well, what do you do with the snakes? Well, God basically told Eve and Adam not—well, he didn't really tell them not to interact with the snakes, and he put a snake in there. I think it's partly because, in a sense, it's not possible to create a garden without having a snake in it. Because you can't keep everything out; it's not possible, okay? So the snake comes along, and it says, "Well, if you do this thing that God forbade, a lot of wonderful things will happen."

Well, this is where it gets extraordinarily complicated. You know, let me finish this part of the story, and then we'll go back. The serpent said unto the woman, "Ye shall not surely die, for God knows that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes will be opened, and you will be as gods, knowing good and evil." Okay, so what can we conclude from that? Well, the first thing is, is that their eyes were closed, because if they weren't closed, then how could they be opened? And the second thing is they didn't know the difference between good and evil.

Okay, so that explains the whole ashamed, naked and not ashamed issue. Because if your eyes are closed, well, that's irrelevant. And if there's no moral knowledge, there's obviously no shame. So what's happening here is that there's a very profound distinction being made between the before fruit-eating state of being and the after fruit-eating state of being, or the before fruit-eating and snake-interacting mode of being and the after fruit-eating and snake-interacting mode of being. And I think it's reasonable to think of that on a historical timeline.

You know, that is one of the major—those are two of the major forces that shaped our evolutionary history. And the idea that things were different before that and after that is a perfectly reasonable presupposition. Something put us on the path to very, very rapid cortical development. Vision is certainly one of those factors. And the fruit-eating element—well, that's where we have color vision. So it isn't obvious exactly what that did, but it did a lot of things.

So the next thing is, well, there's no moral knowledge. Now, that's interesting because it implies that there's some tight link between having your eyes closed and not having moral knowledge. So to have your eyes closed is not to be able to see, so there's a kind of unconsciousness about it. 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.

And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. Okay, so that's quite an interesting sequence of events. So they're tempted by this thing that's subtle and dangerous, and the consequence of the temptation is the ingestion of something, the incorporation of something with transformative properties. And the transformation is profound; what happens is they open their eyes. Well, that's coming to consciousness; that's exactly what that is. You know, when a kitten opens its eyes, it finally enters the world.

You know, so people had their eyes closed before this event. Well, they weren't conscious in the same way, and that would account for the unity of experience. They're not separate beings on the ground of existence. That's one way of thinking, but they have the same kind of life as animals do. You know, they're just unconscious, or at least non-self-conscious entities of nature. There's no nakedness, there's no knowledge of good and evil.

I mean, do you—you don't blame a lion for eating a sheep, do you? Yeah, they used to eat sheep in the Middle East, right? You don't think that's an evil; you don't think of the lion as evil; you just think that that's what lions do. Now, if someone comes along and steals your sheep, well, that's a whole different issue. All of a sudden, there's a moral issue that's overlaid upon that, and you say, "Well," you might say, "well, why is all of a sudden there a moral issue?"

And then the answer to that would be, well, the person either does know the difference between good and bad or should know it, you know? And if he says, "Well, I'm just acting like a lion," that's just—there's just not going to—no one's going to accept that as an excuse. And the reason for that is there's a basic assumption that there's something that you know that lions don't. And why? Well, it’s because your eyes are open in a different way.

Okay, well, that seems to be reasonable. So they open their eyes, and bang, they know they're naked. Now that's an interesting juxtaposition, okay? So let's say you develop a higher form of consciousness and that makes you self-conscious. So there's two things happening here: there's an elevation of consciousness, but out of that springs self-consciousness. And then you've got to think, what does self-consciousness mean exactly?

Well, see, you're not fully self-conscious, and the reason you're not fully self-conscious is because you don't know everything about yourself, right? So you're ignorant of a lot of your own being, but there's a lot of your being you're not ignorant about. Well, A, you can identify yourself as an individual, so you've got the identifying yourself in the mirror trick down, which is kind of the standard trick for animal self-consciousness. But that's only the beginning; it's the bare beginnings of self-consciousness.

If you're self-conscious, you know where your boundaries are, because what's inside the boundary is you, and what's outside isn't you. But then there are other boundaries that you have; there's a temporal boundary. There’s the time when you weren't, and there's the time when you won't be. And so there's a boundary in space, but there’s a boundary in time.

And that means that as soon as you become self-conscious, you know that you're going to die. And so that's the tight link between the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and death in the Old Testament, or in the Genesis story. And you might say, "Well, you were going to die before," and fair enough, but there's a big difference between the death of a self-conscious entity and death.

In one case, it's a natural process that you know; that's natural death, let's say. In the other one, it's a catastrophe of being for the self-conscious individual, you know? And so the other thing that happens is in the Genesis story that that discovery is portrayed as a permanent rift in the structure of being. That's why it's such a deep sin; it's like all of a sudden everything is different and it will never be the same again, no matter what happens.

You know, one might say, "Well, obviously God was an enemy of higher consciousness." It’s like, well, there are lots of interpretations of Genesis that took exactly that stance. He said, "Well, God was an enemy of higher self-consciousness; he wanted things to remain in an unconscious paradise." And that it was human unwillingness to behave and curiosity that got us into the problem that we're in.

And it's actually a catastrophe, you know? And then other people who had more admiration for the illumination and self-conscious element said that the thing that tempted human beings was a greater God than the god that originally did the creation. That was a Gnostic idea, you know? So the serpent there becomes an agent of revelation in a sense.

You know, but anyways they've laid out the problem, this is the problem. All of a sudden people woke up, and when they woke up, they noticed who they were, and they weren't happy about it. So what do they notice? They're naked. Okay, well, so what? You know, you see, so what? Instantly, because the first thing they do is make fig leaves, and they make a clothing out of fig leaves and cover themselves up—well, you know, that's culture.

And you think, well, what's good? What is the utility of culture? Well, that's easy. Culture is the barrier between us and our own nakedness. It's the barrier between our nakedness and the natural world. It's like, why do you put on clothes? So you don't freeze to death, you know? So that you're not as easily attacked.

It's like as soon as you know you're naked and vulnerable, and you're self-conscious, you've extended yourself across time. You've discovered time. You know that not only are you vulnerable now, but you're going to be vulnerable in the future, and so are your children and their children. It's like the whole nature of being, it's like you've added a dimension to the nature of being; you've added time to it, and it's a radical transformation.

You might say, well, that's good because lions don't eat you as often. It's like, yeah, the zebras don't seem that upset on the plains of the Serengeti when the lions are around. One's going to pick one off now and then, but the zebras aren’t running around, you know, with anxiety disorders popping Valium all the time because the lions are there. But that's not the case with human beings. We see a lion and we think, "Oh yeah, at some point that lion's going to want to eat one of us." And lions in general will do that.

So not only do we have to solve the problem of that lion right now, we have to solve the problem of all lions for all time, which we actually seem to be doing a very good job of now; soon there won't be any of them. But you know, that sort of thing can get out of hand. But you get the point. So, okay, so they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.

So you know, the sexual element of it too is, I think, also that the reason sexuality is tied in there so tightly is because the most sexual parts of a human being are also the parts that are the most vulnerable. So it's not only, you know, vulnerability to judgment and vulnerability to exploitation, which is a huge deal, especially in the case of women, but it's also the fact that just from a purely physical perspective, those are the most delicate tissues. And so the fact that they're fully exposed is really a big problem.

So, okay, so now they’re naked; they've got aprons on. It's like, you know, they're not in unconscious paradise anymore. So then what happens? And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. I can't imagine how you could possibly pack more meaning into two sentences, you know?

You can tell people have been at this for like 25,000 years. Because see what happens here is that there's an idea to begin with that there's a complete unity between God and His creation, let's say, so that the natural order is undisturbed, and all of a sudden that's fractured. And so what happens is that human beings are divorced from the divinity, and not only are they divorced from it, they're unwilling to expose themselves to it.

So think about this; we'll take a side step for a minute. You might say, well, imagine that you could exist in a manner that was wholly perfect. The question might be, well, what would stop you from doing it? Well, one thing might be that you couldn't envision something as useless as you, or actually managing that, you know?

So if you think about the what stands in the road of people as obstacles to their full self-realization, the easiest way to encapsulate that is that they view themselves as inadequate. Now there's other things as well; they don't want to take the responsibility, and so forth. But, you know, it's very difficult to heed a divine call, let's say, when you're stuck in this little ratty contraption that is prone to disease and prone to shame and prone to age and prone to death. And it's like, how can you continue in some divine manner when you've come to the realization that there you are? You know, and certainly people derive the conclusion fairly frequently that they're so appalling that it would be better if they were obliterated along with everyone else.

It's not as if the realization of the nature of our own physical being was something that freed people up to be courageous, you know? It was quite the reverse, although I think people can still be courageous in front of it, in spite of it. But it's definitely in spite of it. You know, all the classic definitions of true courage aren't that you're not afraid; it's that you're afraid but you do it anyways. It's like, well, that fear and shame is an integral part of you as soon as you realize that you're vulnerable to social evaluation and natural degeneration.

You're stuck with it; and so then bang, you're divorced from your divine mode of being, we'll say, partly at least because you're just afraid to manifest it. So anyways, that's what happens. So Adam and Eve hide from God. That seems to be really counterproductive because you might think that if they didn't hide from God, then there wouldn't be a problem. They could be naked, and no problem, but that isn't what happens.

And the Lord God calls unto Adam and says unto him, "Where are you?" And Adam says, "I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked." Well, that pretty much explains it, and I hid myself. Okay? And God said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou should not eat?" Who told thee that thou was naked?

I believe women told men that. I think that's a very accurate summation of the relationship between men and women. Well, we develop consciousness across the span of evolutionary history, and I believe it for a couple of reasons. Number one, sexual selection is a huge factor in what created human beings, and women primarily do the selection. They're the bottleneck, and they're the bottleneck because women can't have that many offspring; they can only have a few.

So that makes them the bottleneck by definition, and women are so choosy about men that twice as many women have children as men. Okay, so what that means is on average means that—I know it’s kind of hard to understand, but imagine every single woman has one child, and then imagine half the men have zero and half of them have two. Okay? That's the case. So statistically speaking, half of all men were write-offs.

Now it's actually worse than that because some men have so many offspring that it's not even funny, you know? So that cuts the number of successful men down by many. So women are a bottleneck, and they do judge men rightly so, and they judge them according to their insufficiency. And that is what makes men self-conscious, obviously, and it's the thing that makes them more self-conscious than anything else.

Now, to men's credit, let me tell you about the bower birds, okay? So bower birds, they're very cool. They live on the ground, and the males make these, incredibly—first of all, they weave a nest that's sort of like a hammock; it's real soft. Then they hang that in a tree, and then they sweep out their front yard, and then they decorate it with bits of like the blue leaves are over here, and then there's some red leaves here, and there's a nice display of green here, and maybe there's some glass there.

It's like this little artwork, you know? And the bower birds have these more or less in a row, say, in the same territory. And then the females come hopping along, and they take a look at this thing, and if they like it, well, then they're willing to become a little more friendly with that particular bower bird, and if they don't, they fly away.

Well, so if the male bower bird has three female visits and nothing pans out, then he, you know, he has a little fit and erases his whole creation. Then he has to do another one, and so like you just have to think about that for 15 minutes and it pretty much explains human beings. It's like, you know, men—one response that men could have had was just to go hide in a shell, and some of them do that. That is absolutely a common response, and to never come out and spend the rest of their lives playing video games in the basement and eating Cheetos.

You know, but then, you know, the other response is, "Well, I better transform myself into something that isn't going to produce that response." And that's a central part of male motivation; it's a central element of male motivation. So if you're ever wondering why men are the way they are, the real answer to that is because that's how they evolved to impress women.

So, because obviously if that wouldn't have happened given that sexual selection is such a powerful selecting force among human beings, well, it wouldn't have worked out. So men—women did make men self-conscious, you know, and it's more than that too because you could see a positive feedback loop emerging as we got more cognitively sophisticated.

You know, and you could think of that; maybe that was an arms race between men, women, and snakes, something like that, you know? As we got more cognitively sophisticated, one of the prices we paid for that was that our head expanded, and one of the prices women paid for that was that childbirth became increasingly difficult, and the babies kept getting born younger.

So that meant that women became more—as we became more cognitively able, paradoxically women became more vulnerable at certain key points of their lives because they had increasingly fragile babies. Now how did women deal with that? Well, I think they shamed men into becoming caregivers of children because how else would it have happened? Like the typical mammal male doesn't hang around provisioning the litter.

You know, in fact, some of the males will eat the cubs. You don't want to black bear around; wolves are an exception to this, and you know, there are animals that are an exception. It happens in other species other than human beings, but human beings have this incredibly long period of dependence, that also requires a relationship. For that relationship to remain intact, there has to be a fair bit of integrity in the communication between the partners, so there's a real moral demand there as well.

So anyways, Adam doesn't show himself here as a particularly courageous individual because, which I think is quite comical, when God says, "Who told you that you were naked? Had you eaten of that tree which I told you not to?" The man says, "The woman whom you gave to me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat," which is like, doesn't say much for his moral character, right? Because he rats her out the first chance he gets. So, which I also think isn't—like the comedy of that is underrated in this story; that's a very funny sequence of events.

So God talks to the woman and says, "Well, what's this that you did?" And the woman said, "Well, the serpent, it was the serpent's fault; the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." Let me show you a—I think I've showed you this picture before, but it's such a crazily cool picture; I want to show it to you again.

Okay, well for whatever reason this disc doesn't seem to be working, so I'll tell you about the picture instead. It's a very common representation in Christian iconography, and what it basically shows is that Mary is holding up this infant, you know, up off the ground, when she's got her foot on a snake or a lizard. It's like, well, it doesn't take a biological genius to figure out what that means; it means like the good mother keeps the baby away from predatory reptiles, you know?

And so you can see that as part of this feedback loop that develops. So there's predation; it's particularly focused on women and children, which is exactly what it would be focused on. So and then in order for that to not be catastrophic, then the women are appealing to the men for protection, and that starts to increase because the women get more vulnerable as we get smarter and the babies get smaller.

And so there's this triadic positive feedback loop that occurs that wraps up brain development. And we need to—there has to be a reason for the brain development; it's called a Baldwin effect, by the way, in biology. The Baldwin effect is where something happens to produce an outcome; something biological happens that produces a cultural outcome that increases the probability that that biological adaptation will serve fitness.

So for example, beavers cut down trees, so what that means is that the beavers that are more adapted to aquatic environments do better. So as the beavers get more adapted to aquatic environments and cutting down trees, they cut down more trees and make more aquatic environments, and so the thing spins until you get an animal that's really, really well adapted to doing precisely that.

Well, something happened to blow our cortex up in very, very short order, and it was short order. You know, it was so short that the human female pelvic structure could barely keep up, which is why birth is so rough and why so many children die in childbirth. I mean, it doesn't happen much anymore, but God, it used to happen a lot. You know, before the middle of the 20th century, women were dying in childbirth all the time, plus it's extraordinarily difficult.

So even though the baby is born premature for all intents and purposes, it's still hell, and the reason for that is the head's so big, and it's even compressible because the baby's head isn't fully formed when it's born. Bones have gaps in them, so the baby's head compresses and like, like mad, visibly so. So the woman says, "Well, it was the serpent's fault."

So, you know, and you could almost—you could also say this ties into the issue of woman-induced self-consciousness among men. It's like if the woman's primary problem is predation, you know, for her and the infant, because of her, you know, being burdened with the infants and the infant's complete and absolute inability to defend itself, then it's going to drive the probability that she's going to select someone for a partner who can get rid of the damn snakes.

And then, you know, you see that echoed over and over in human iconography. It's like the hero is the person who confronts the dragon. Okay, well, what do you do when you confront a dragon? You get the girl, that's the first thing. But more importantly, you get something of value, and that's a real transmutation.

It's so interesting because what happened was not only did we figure out how to defend ourselves against predators; we figured out that going after them voluntarily was unbelievably useful. You might ask, what the hell transformed frugivores into carnivores? Of course, it's a—you know, chimps will eat, and they do hunt; they will eat monkeys, but they primarily live on leaves, which is pointless, you know, because the leaves have no calories whatsoever.

Well, human beings—we got transformed; we were primarily fruit eaters and we turned into hunters and were thin and fast, which is very unlike a chimpanzee. So not only were women selecting men who were able and willing to protect themselves against predators, but that, you know, got translated even farther into selection for partners who would go out, partly to protect and partly also to hunt to bring something back.

So, I know it’s a pretty smart arrangement, all things considered, but the problem is, you know, one of the prices that women pay for that is that they're partly selecting for male aggression, you know, because the males aren't going to go out; they're not going to be able to do that sort of thing unless they're tough, and they're not going to go out and do it unless they're relatively fearless.

So, you know, and then you end up with a—you got this weird balance between needing a semi-predator and needing someone who's going to be able to integrate themselves into the household. So that's the beauty and the beast thing, as far as I can tell.

So, okay, so God says to the serpent, "Because you've done this, you're cursed above all cattle." Cattle were generally the animals and above every beast of the field. "Upon thy belly, you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life."

Okay, so the serpent's got your problem there, and it'd be interesting to find out exactly why those damn things lost their legs. Because you know, snakes—snake lizards aren't snakes that grew legs; snakes are lizards that lost their legs. The question is, why did the hell did they lose their legs? Like, what was it about the specifics of their environment and their diet and their locale that meant that legless movement was better?

Well, they're sneakier, you know? They can slither through the grass. They can climb trees too, although iguanas do that. But I don't know enough about snakes to know exactly why it was that they lost their legs, but it'd be interesting to find out. And unto the woman, and I'll put enmity between you and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed.

And it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Okay, so it's just another representation of the fact that there's going to be enmity between human beings and predatory—we say predatory reptiles. Unto the woman he said, "I'll greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception."

That's not hard to figure out. "In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Notice that doesn't say should; it just says shall, and that's not the same thing at all. Remember this is a curse; it's not a proposition about how the world should be optimally structured; it's far different than that.

It says, "Look, there's been a sequence of events, and this is going to be the outcome. Childbirth is going to be hell, it's going to be really difficult to raise children, and you're going to be subject to the oppression of men." It's like, yeah, well, that's definitely what happened. And then Adam says, "Because you listened to your wife and ate of the tree, which I told you not to, the ground's cursed for your sake. You'll eat it in sorrow all the days of your life. It will bring up thorns and thistles, and you'll eat the herb of the field."

So that's the introduction of the necessity of agriculture, right? You're no longer living in a garden where things are just growing for free. You're out there, like, digging with a stick and planting things, which is work. You know, when you think, well, do animals work? The answer to that is no. Do human beings work? The answer to that is yes.

Why do human beings work? How about because we discovered time, right? Because work means—why do you work? Well, you work for the future, obviously. And you don't have the future unless you've discovered time, and you don't care about the future unless you know you're vulnerable. So these things are tangled together, and so the cost of self-consciousness is that life becomes work; life becomes suffering.

So it doesn't necessarily seem like a particularly good deal. "In the sweat of thy face, you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and unto dust, you will return." And Adam called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living, and unto Adam also, and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothes them.

So, okay, well, you know, that's certainly part of the origin of clothing, especially in the colder climes, right? It's like you— you get the animal, maybe it's a predator, and you wear it too. And to begin with, we lived inside of them, you know? So I suspect, although I don't know this for sure, although I know it fairly well, the earliest dwellings were mammoth skins with mammoth bone poles. And you can see how that might have come about, right?

So you're out there hunting a mammoth. Maybe you're living in a cave or wherever the hell people live, or maybe you've made something out of, you know, grass to hide in. I don't know what the Paleolithic people were living in, but it starts to get cold. Maybe the Ice Age starts creeping up, right? And so you stab yourself a nice mammoth, and a storm comes up. What are you going to do? Well, you've skinned it out, at least in principle, so you could carry the meat home.

The logical thing to do is to get the hell underneath the skin, and after a day or two in a storm, underneath a rotting mammoth skin, you might think, well, wouldn't be a bad idea to do something to this skin so that it's not quite as intolerable to live under as it might be. But that's a tent; a tent is skin with bones, you know? And then the movement from that to this is, well, it's a matter of degree rather than kind.

So, and then the Lord God sent the man and woman—oh, the Lord God says, "Behold, the man has become as one of us to know good and evil." So that's the sign of divinity, to know good and evil, to have a moral sense. And now lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So he drove out the man, and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubims and a flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life. Well, the last part of that's very difficult to understand, you know, the tree of life issue. So the idea there is that there's—there's at least in principle a substance capable of conferring immortality, but we don't have access to that.

And so you know, part of the return to Eden, which is also the movement towards heaven, which is also the perfection of life, is to defeat death, obviously, and to find the elixir of immortality, which by the way was the goal of the entire alchemical pursuit, and that's what turned into science. And well, what's the goal of science? Well, it's to make us healthy, wealthy, and live, you know, conceivably forever.

So, you know, it’s not like people aren't continually trying to get the fruit of the tree of life. Now there's a lot more to it, and the ending of that, but what you have there is the expulsion of human beings from an unconscious paradise into history. And that's exactly how the Bible is structured. Like what happens is there's these stories in Genesis that are very, very old.

There's these stories; there's the story of Cain and Abel, there's the story of uh, the Tower of Babel, there's the story of Noah. Then roughly speaking, although what happens a bit with Noah, history starts. Because then when you get past that, you get to the post-flood period. It's like the pre-flood period is so back in prehistory that it's all archaic mythology, and the post-flood period, which basically starts with Abraham, starts to become a history of the culture of Israel. So it's actually—it's actually literally—it’s the history of a culture instead of the mythologization of the, you know, radical prehistory of the past.

So and I'll—I think I'll also just tell you briefly the Cain and Abel story, because we're there; we might as well do it. And this story is roughly speaking 12 sentences long. So, okay, so Adam and Eve have a child, Cain, and Eve says, "I have gotten a man from the Lord." And again she bore his brother Abel, and Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

So there's some antagonism here between the shepherds and the farmers, and that's like there's always antagonism between shepherds and farmers because the shepherds want the sheep to graze all over the place, and the farmers want the sheep to stay the hell out of the fields, you know? And that was all played out again in the American West; there was huge, you know, conflict between the farmers and the ranchers for exactly the same reason.

So it came—in process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. Alright, so this is a strange thing. So we've already talked about the discovery of time and the necessity for work, okay? So, you know, we don't exactly know how people conceptualized of those ideas. It wasn't like they were cavemen, were all sitting around a fire one day and they said, "Hey, you know what? I just discovered tomorrow; we should do something about that; we should get to work."

It was God only knows how that happened; it came out of the inarticulate biological substructure that is our past and started to manifest itself. God only knows in imaginative ideas, but one of those imaginative ideas is the idea of the sacrifice. You know, it's the conceptualization of God the Father as that which extends across time and judges. Then you make sacrificial offerings to that which—you know, which could be of your labor. This is of the fruits of your labor, but the difference is trivial. It's like, "Look, what I've done, is this good enough for you?"

And believe me, you guys are asking that question all the time. It's like it's just nonstop: "Is this good enough? Is this good enough? Is this sacrifice enough?" You know? And what are you hoping for? While you're hoping for the blessings of—well, I would say for all intents and purposes, you're hoping for the blessings of God the Father. Now, you might think about it in pure cultural terms; that's fine. From a psychological perspective, it hardly makes any difference at all.

The point is to conceptualize culture across time as a judgmental male is a really smart idea; it's a really, really smart idea. So, and then it’s a judgmental male that you have to make offerings to. It's like, "Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much exactly right." Okay, so that's what's happening. And so people are acting this out. You have to make sacrifices.

Cain brings some, you know, vegetables and fruit, and uh, Abel brings—no, he brings like some lambs, and these are the high-quality lambs, right? They're the choice cuts. And we know that partly because the firstling of the flock—that's the firstborn um say lambs—they had a reputation as the most valuable. And partly because the firstborn son was the most valuable; it's the same kind of idea.

And there's a reason the firstborn son was most valuable, and part of the reason is that unless you give all your land to one of your children, by twelve generations all of your offspring are living on something the size of a postage stamp and they're all starving to death. So it's unfair, in a sense, that it only goes to the firstborn son, but if it's an agricultural community, there's no better solution.

And then at least you can tell your secondborn son, like, "Well, yeah, you're a fine guy, and you know, it'd be wonderful if you could get something, but you don't get it, and it's not your fault; it's not my fault either. It's just—that's just the rule." And so that's a good deal for everybody. You know, you don't get the farm; you have to go make your own way. But at least there's no enmity associated with it necessarily.

So anyways, Cain makes this offering that looks like it's of high quality, and God is happy about that. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering. Now, the book—the story makes this ambiguous; you can kind of guess that the reason that Abel gets away with it is; well, A, he's bringing meat rather than vegetables, okay?

So that's higher quality, much more nutrient-dense; it's a much higher quality offering of food. And then it's also—the meat; it's the highest quality. And so then the next thing that happens is it's acceptable to God. So, you know, it might be that Abel just got it right and God was happy, or maybe God's happy about Abel for some completely arbitrary reason.

It actually doesn't matter at all; you get value out of both interpretations. I mean, I would say to a on the safe side that offering the most valuable things is probably your best bet, but there's an—a, there's an—some respect for the arbitrary nature of God here too. You can't exactly be sure why he's not happy with—so anyways, it doesn't matter until Cain, in his offering, he had not respect, and Cain was very wroth—angry, that is—and his countenance falls.

So like this is a permanent disappointment for him; he's angry, resentful, unhappy, miserable, all of those things; he's failing. That's what it says fundamentally. Like if God isn't pleased by his offerings, what happens is he's failing, and this makes him very angry. And then the Lord says, "What's up with you? Why are you angry? And why is your face fallen the way it has?"

And uh, he says more, and this is where it gets— it seems—the story seems to reveal that this actually has something to do with Cain rather than something to do with God. So God says, "If you do well, won't you be accepted?" Well, that implies he wasn't doing well. And if you don't do well, then it's your fault. And so God is saying, "Don't bring your damn problems to me, bucko."

It's like if this isn't working out for you, it's because you're just not doing it right. You know, you're not into this properly; you're not doing well. And also you're blaming things that shouldn't be blamed. Now there's an interesting part of this. So the way that the story—sin lies at your door—was told in a metaphorical structure, and sin was something that was conceptualized as a lustful predatory animal, like a cat.

And so it was prowling at Cain's door; that's the metaphor. And the idea is Cain allows this thing in to have intercourse with him, so there's a participation in like a sexualized merger. And so there's an implication there, and the implication is not only does—is sin at the door, but Cain invites it in and has a creative relationship, like an intimately creative relationship with it.

Now that's ridiculously smart because that's what happens if people are resentful because their offerings were either second-rate or got rejected. You know, one of the pathways is, first they get very, very angry, and their countenance falls. So they're resentful and hostile, and then the next thing is, you know, the little resentful fantasies start to emerge, and instead of thinking, "Ha, that's not a very productive way to go," because it is like a door, they think, "Well, let's just see where we can go with this."

And like after five or six years of that, you're in a prime position to go shoot up Dawson College, you know? You can go very far down that rabbit hole, and it's clearly motivated by the rejection of the fruits of your being by existence. That's how you're going to interpret it.

So, well, and then, so Cain obviously is not happy with that response, not in the least because it says exactly the opposite of what he would like it to say. You know, first of all that it's his own fault, that he could do something about it, and that he doesn't get to blame being and God. So Cain goes and has a chat with Abel, and it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and killed him.

Well, the first story about real human beings in the Bible is a murder; it's a fratricide, and it's the—the antagonistic brothers. One who is an archetype of good—that's Abel—the other who is an archetype of evil; and those develop across time, it's a—it's an echoing or a pre-shadowing, that's another way of thinking about it—of the battle between Christ and Satan. Because those are more—they're more purely archetypal figures and much more fleshed out, but it's the earliest manifestation of that idea—the hostile brothers.

And what you get is so sophisticated because basically what it says is that if you do badly or you work hard, either way, and God rejects your offerings and you become angry and resentful, the first thing you're going to do is go after the best thing you could possibly imagine and do your best to wipe it out. And you might say, "Well, why would you do that?" Well, there's a bunch of reasons.

Well, first of all, it would feel good. Second, you get revenge against God because, of course, this is God's favorite. So if you can take him out of the equation, it's like that's a great deal. Third, the ideal against which you're negatively contrasting yourself is now gone. Because that's the problem with having an ideal; if you have an ideal, then you're unworthy, and that's okay if you think the ideal is attainable or even if you can move towards it.

But if all of a sudden the ideal is attainable and you're sort of cast among the damned, the probability that you're going to be able to view that ideal as anything other than your enemy is very low. And so Cain kills him. So, but that's interesting because that really means that's the end of it for Cain; he's destroyed his own ideal.

Well, how do you live then? How do you live if you've destroyed your own ideal? You've got nowhere to go. And so Cain is so angry that he's willing to destroy his own ideal to obtain revenge. And, and that's a twelve-line story right at the beginning of history, and that's the layout for the spirit of humanity.

It says we became self-conscious; our eyes opened; we became self-conscious; we recognized our vulnerability. In an attempt to overcome that, we started to work and sacrifice, but the problem with that is sometimes that didn't work, maybe because God was feeling particularly arbitrary that day, or because we're kind of useless. Either way, when it doesn't work, that's not good because it's our only remaining defense.

And so then what? Well then it's a choice; it's more—it's more choice right there between good and evil, and that's all foreshadowed in the first story. So now, I'll add one more thing to this: this took me a long time to figure out. I thought, well, what the hell is the connection between the knowledge of good and evil and nakedness and vulnerability and awareness?

And I thought, okay, there's predation and there's evil. So the—and it kills the fawn and eats it. It's rough; that's a tragedy. But you capture an enemy and then you keep them alive for three weeks in pain before you kill them. There's a lot more there than tragedy; that's malevolence.

And then you might say, well, how is it that you can come up with malevolence? And I would say, as soon as you're self-conscious, you can come up with malevolence. Because if I know how I'm vulnerable and I know that you're like me, all I have to do is figure out what the worst possible thing would be for me, and then I can do it to you.

And so you don't get the knowledge of self-conscious vulnerability without instantly also obtaining the knowledge of the difference between good and evil. And that's also another thing that really distinguishes people because we can do things that are so terrible that they make any of the things that animals do look positively forgivable. So, you know that along with that self-consciousness comes this tremendous weight in of the capacity for action, from just natural tragedy, let's say, just natural life to this whole spectrum of the ultimate in good and the ultimate in evil.

And then as soon as that happens, the first thing we have is a display of that in dramatic form, and that's the Cain and Abel story. Now interestingly enough—and this is the last thing that I'll tell you—God doesn't kill Cain. We can talk about why that is later, but Cain has children, and Cain's descendants, I think, three generations down, so if you kill one of Cain's sons, he kills seven of you.

They kill seven of you, and if you kill one of Cain's grandchildren, then they kill forty-nine of you, and then, and so forth, until you get to this guy named Tubalcain, who's either the grandson or the great-grandson; I don't remember which. And in tradition, he's the first person who makes weapons of war. So there's this idea that the sacrifice fails, and that produces this descent into murderous resentment.

And then that can amplify across a culture and possess more and more people, until what happens is it finally erupts in full-scale war. And that's more than territoriality, right? It's more than a territorial dispute, because you can understand territorial disputes. This is a territorial dispute with malevolence, and you know, that's something that doesn't need any explanation. Everyone understands what that is.