Lecture: Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death

Hello everyone, so hopefully, we're going to get past Genesis 1 today. That's the theory. So I finished my new book yesterday. Yes, that's taken about three years of writing. It's quite a long time to write something, so yeah, it's done except for the mopping up, you know, copy editing and that sort of thing. So hopefully, it's as good as I can make it. I don't know if that's any good, but it's as good as I can make it.

Anyways, alright, so this is the stories that I'm going to tell you tonight. I've been thinking about, well, like the ones last week for that matter, for a very long period of time. But I think about these even longer. One of the things that I just do not understand, I cannot fathom this. I cannot understand how there can be so much information in such tiny little stories, especially the story of Cain and Abel. That story just, every time I read it, it just flattens me. Because it's only like a paragraph long. There's just nothing to it, you know?

And I think about it, I think about it, and I think about it. I think about it every time I think about it. Another layer comes out from underneath, and then another layer comes out from underneath it. And I can't figure that out. You know, the rational approach that I've been describing to you is predicated on the idea that these stories have somehow encapsulated wisdom that we generated interpersonally and behaviorally over very vast stretches of time and then condensed it into very, very dense, articulated words that are then further refined by the act of being remembered and transmitted, and remembered and transmitted, and remembered and transmitted over vast stretches of time.

And that's a pretty good argument. I'm willing to go with it. But it still never ceases to amaze me how much information such tiny little passages can contain. So we'll take that apart today. And I think it's especially true with the story of Cain and Abel because it works on the individual level, and it works on the familial level, and it works on the political level, and it works at the level of warfare, and it works at the level of economics. And that's a lot for a little tiny one-paragraph story to cover.

Now, you know, you could object, "Well, with these stories, you never know what you're reading into it and what's in the story." Right? That's part of, let's call it the postmodern dilemma. And fair enough. And there's really no answer to that any more than there is an answer to how do you know your interpretation of the world is, well, let's not say correct, but sufficient. There is some answer to that. It's sufficient if you can act it out in the world and other people don't object too much and you don't die, and nature doesn't take a bite out of you any more often than necessary, you know?

Those are the constraints within which we live. So you have some way of determining whether your interpretation is at least functionally successful, and that's not trivial. And I guess you can say the same thing to the interpretations that might be laid out on these stories, and at the moment, that's probably good enough. Hopefully, you find the interpretations functionally significant at multiple levels. And I also think the chance of managing that by chance is very, very small. You know, to be able to pull off an interpretation of the story that works at multiple levels simultaneously, you think with each level that it applies, the chances that you've stumbled across something by chance have to be decreasing, right?

There's a technical term for that in psychology. It's called something like multi-method, multi-trait method of determining whether or not something is accurate. And the idea is the more ways that you can measure it and get the same result, the more confident you can be that you're not just deluding yourself with your a priori hypothesis. You know that there's actually something out there. So I guess that's another part of this method, and it's also a method that I use in my speaking, I think. I don't try to tell people anything that isn't personally relevant. You know, because you should know why you are being taught something, right?

You should know what the fact is good for, and it should be good for you personally, at least in some sense. And then if you act it out in the world, it should be good for your family and maybe should have some significance for the broader community. And I think that's what meaning means. And I don't really see the utility in being taught things that aren't meaningful, facts that aren't meaningful. Because there's an infinite number of facts, and there's no way you're going to remember all of them. They have to be—they have to have the aspect of tools essentially, something like that.

Because we are tool-using creatures. Well, these stories have that aspect, as far as I can tell. There's no doubt about that. So here's the stories in Genesis, two very famous stories, obviously. Virtually everybody who's even vaguely versed in Western, roughly speaking, Western culture knows these stories. And that's something that's interesting too, that stories can be so foundational that everybody shares them.

I mean, you can say the same thing about a fairly large handful of fairy tales as well, or you could at least until recently. But the fact that stories are foundational, I think, also means that they have to be given out kind of—well, even if you don't give them any respect, you have to at least treat them as remarkable curiosities. So why those stories, and why did they stick around, and why does everybody know them? It's not self-evident by any stretch of the imagination.

You can use explanations—can use the Freudian explanation. Freud sort of thought that the Judeo-Christian was predicated on the idea that the figure of the father, the familial father, was expanded up into cosmic dimensions so that mankind existed in the same relationship to the cosmic father, let's say, that an infant or a small child existed in relationship to his or her own father. And that's a reasonable critique, I would say, to some degree. But it does, and this was purposeful, it does imply more than imply for its case that people who adopt religious belief that has a personified figure at its apex are essentially acting out the role of dependent children.

And you know, I thought about that critique for a long time, and believe me, that's been a powerful critique. One of the best books I've ever read called "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker, I think took that line of argumentation and developed it as well as any book I've ever seen argue it. Becker tried to bring closure to Freudian psychoanalysis on religion. He did a pretty wicked job of it.

Like I think the book is seriously flawed and wrong, but it's really a great book. Like some books are, well, some books are wrong in really good ways, right? They make a powerful, powerful argument. They really take it to its extreme. I think Becker missed the point, and he missed it in the same way that Freud missed Jung's point. Becker, who wrote this book on the psychology—the psychoanalysis of religion, never referred to Jung except very briefly in the introduction, and I think that was a major mistake.

But Becker took the argument that the hypothesis of God is nothing but an attempt by human beings to recreate quasi-infantile state of dependency and to be able to rely on an all-knowing father and to thereby recover the comfort perhaps that we experienced when we were young and had a hypothetically all-knowing father, for those of us who are lucky to have someone who vaguely resembled that. But the more I thought about that, the more that struck me as quite implausible across time. Charles Taylor, I think it was Charles Taylor, wrote an interesting book called—I think it was called "The Origins of the Modern Self." He's a McGill philosopher, and I wouldn't necessarily call him a friend of classic religion, but it doesn't matter.

He made a very interesting point about Christianity in particular. He said, "If you're going to invent a religion that offered you nothing but infantile comfort, why in the world would you bother with conceptualizing hell?" That just seems like an unnecessary detail to add to the whole story, right? If it's all about comfort, why would you hypothesize that the consequence of a serious error was eternal torment? That doesn't really sound very— isn't the sort of thing that is likely to make you feel comfortable?

James Joyce, when he wrote about that, said he had terrible nightmares when he was a child because of the hellfire sermons that Jesuits used to spout forth, let's say. And he wrote down what he remembered of them, and they were pretty hair-raising. I think in James Joyce's book, I think it was "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," he talked about the Jesuits telling him that hell was like a prison with walls that were seven miles thick that was always in darkness and consumed by fire, and that the people who were trapped there were continually burnt by this dark fire that gave new light, which also simultaneously rejuvenated their flesh so that it could be burnt off eternally. In case you were wondering how it was going to be burnt off eternally, that's apparently the process.

It's not easy for me to see that as an infantile wish-fulfillment, I'm afraid. You know, you could be a cynic about it, and Elaine Tasos, who wrote a book on the devil, was cynical about it in this manner. She thought that the Christians, so to speak, invented hell as a place to put their enemies. And you know, yeah, fair enough, but no, that's not accurate, really. Although it's convenient to have a place to put your enemies, Charles Taylor did point out, for example, that the modern terror of loss of self, let's say, the existential loss of self and loss of meaning was perhaps roughly paralleled by the medieval terror of hell, you know, in terms of the existential intensity.

And so hell wasn't merely a place where those people that you didn't care for would end up; it was the place where you were going to go if you didn't walk the line properly. And so I don't think Freud's critique really holds water in the final analysis. And then Marx's critique, of course, was that religion was the opiate of the masses, and he made an argument that was similar to Freud's, although somewhat earlier, and made that based upon the presupposition that religious beliefs were stories told to the gullible masses in order to keep them pacified and happy while their corporate overlords, for lack of a better purpose, continued to exploit them and weaken them.

And you know, I find the critique of human institutions as driven entirely by power very, let's say, questionable to say the least. Of course, every human institution is corrupted for one reason or another, and it's also corrupt specifically by such things as deception and arrogance and the demand for unearned power. And the same thing, of course, can be applied to religious systems, but that doesn't mean that they are in some special way characteristic of those faults. And maybe you think they are, and you know, maybe you can make a case for it, but it's not prime. I think that's how you say that evident that that is also a particularly useful criticism.

I don't buy it. I think that's far too cynical. I think that the people who wrote these stories—first of all, what are you going to do? You're going to run a bloody conspiracy for three thousand years successfully? It's like good luck with that! Can't run a conspiracy for fifteen minutes without somebody ratting you out. You know, it's impossible. So whatever is at the basis of the construction not only of these stories but of the dogmatic structures that emerged from them, I think that it's a terrible mistake to reduce them to unidimensional explanations. In fact, I generally think that reducing any complex human behavior to unidimensional explanation is often the sign of a seriously limited thinker.

You know, I say that with some caution because Freud did do that with religion, at least to some degree, and Freud was a serious thinker, and Marx, I suppose, was a serious thinker, even though, well, yeah, is he someone—if you have any sense, Marx just leaves you speechless. So anyway, that's all to say that I don't think there's any simple explanation for how these stories have the power that they have. I really don't. I don't think you can reduce it to political conspiracy, that's for sure. I don't think you could reduce it to psychological infantilism.

I think you can make a case, like I have, that they are repositories of the collective wisdom of the human race. I had an interesting letter this week from someone. I get a lot of interesting letters. I think I'm going to make an archive out of them and put them on the web at some point, with people's permission, obviously. And he said that he'd been following my lectures and noted that I had been making what you might describe as a quasi-biological or evolutionary case for the emergence of the information that the stories contained. And he said, well, how do you know that someone from a different religious tradition or speaking of a different religious tradition couldn't do exactly the same thing?

And I thought, well, first of all, to some degree they could because there is overlap. Like, I've talked to you a little bit about Taoist, for example, in the Taoist view of being as, you know, the eternal balance between chaos and order. One thing I didn't tell you, I don't think about that, I don't know if you know this, but there's a neuropsychologist named L. Conan Goldberg, who is a student of Alexander Luria. And Luria was, I think, the greatest neuropsychologist of the 20th century; he was a Russian. And he was one of the first people to really determine, in large part, the function of the frontal cortex, which was quite a mystery for a very long period of time.

And Goldberg, you know, you know how we have two hemispheres, right? They have a left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, and people often think of the left for right-handed people, right-handed males more particularly because women are more neurologically diffuse. It's one of the things that makes them more robust to head injury, for example. And maybe men are less diffuse and somewhat more specialized, which makes them a bit more specialized but a little more subject to damage. Anyway, we have two hemispheres: left and the right. And no one exactly knows why.

And we know that they have quasi-independent consciousnesses. Because if you divide the corpus callosum, that unites them—which was done in cases of intractable epilepsy, for example—each hemisphere is capable of developing its own consciousness to some degree. The right generally nonverbal, and the left verbal. And so there has been this idea that the left is a verbal hemisphere and the right is a nonverbal hemisphere. But that can't be right, because, of course, animals don't talk, and they have a bifurcated hemisphere. So if it's right, it's not causally right.

Now, Goldberg hypothesized instead that the hemispheres were specialized for routinization and non-routinization or for novelty and familiarity or for chaos and order. And so that's pretty damn cool, when I ran across that. I also thought about that as a signal of, what would you call it? Multi-method, multi-trait construct validation because I'd never thought of the hemispheres as operating that way. And Goldberg came up with this in a historical pathway that was entirely independent from any mythologically inspired thinking—completely independent, in fact, it was motivated more by materialist Russian neuropsychology, which was materialist for political reasons and also for scientific reasons.

But the idea is that we have one hemisphere that reacts very rapidly to things we don't know, and it's more imaginative and diffuse, and it's associated more with negative emotion because negative emotion is what you should feel immediately when you encounter something you don't understand because it’s a form of thinking, right? Negative emotion is like I'm somewhere where things aren't what they should be. The right hemisphere does that, generates images very rapidly to help you figure out what might be there, and then the left hemisphere takes that and develops it into something more articulated and algorithmic and fully understood.

And so then there's this dynamic balance between the right and the left hemisphere where the left tries to impose order on the world. That's Ramachandran, who's a neurologist in California—a very famous neurologist who also developed a theory like Goldberg, who said that the left hemisphere imposes routinized order on the world. And the right hemisphere generates novelty and reacts to novelty and generates novel hypotheses. And he thought—and there is some good evidence for this—that that's what's happening during dreams, that information is moved from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere in small doses, basically, so that the novel revelations of the right hemisphere don't demolish the algorithmic structures that the left hemisphere has so carefully put together.

So, and I like that theory too because it also does help justify the hypothesis that I'd be laying out for you, which is that you know there's part of us that extends ourselves out into the world and tries to understand what we don't know, and that that part extends itself out with behavior and also with emotion and also with image and then maybe with poetry and then maybe with storytelling. And then as that develops, then we develop more and more articulated representations of that emergent knowledge. And so you can map that quite nicely onto the neurologists' and the neuropsychologists' presumption about what constitutes the reason for the hemispheric differentiation.

But the other thing that's so cool about the hemispheric differentiation argument, as far as I'm concerned—and this is really worth thinking about—man, because it's a real, it's a real, is a word that Ned Flanders uses for that. Noggin scratcher, I think is something like that.

Anyways, you know, we do make the assumption that what it is that we are biologically adapted to is reality, right? It's actually an axiomatic definition if you're a Darwinian. Because nature is what selects, by definition. That's what nature is. It's what selects. And if the nature that selects has forced upon you a dual hemispheric structure because half of you has to deal with the chaos and half has to deal with order, then you can make a pretty damn strong inferential case that the world is made out of chaos and order. And that's really something to think about, man.

So you can think about that for a while if you want. So anyways, for whatever reason, there is a lot packed into these stories, and so let’s investigate a couple more of them. We'll start with this story about Adam and Eve. Now you may remember that the Bible is a series of books. Bible actually means something akin to library, and these books were written by all sorts of different people and groups of people and groups of editors and groups of people who edited over and over across very, very large periods of time. So they're altered by no one and many at the same time.

If there was a tradition for a long time that the earliest books were written by Moses, but that's probably not technically correct, even though it might be dramatically correct, let's say, or correct in the way that a fairy tale is correct. And I'm not trying to put down fairy tales by saying that, but there's a number of authors, and the way the authors have been identified tentatively is by certain stylistic commonalities across the different stories. Different uses of words, like the words for God, different poetic styles, different topics, and so forth.

People have been working for probably 200 years, roughly, that to try to sort out who wrote what and how that was all cobbled together. But it doesn't really matter for our purposes. What matters is that it’s an aggregation of collected narrative traditions, and maybe you could say it’s an aggregation of collective narrative wisdom. We don't have to go that far, but we can at least say it's aggregated narrative traditions and that there was some reason that those traditions and not others were kept and that there were some reasons, complex though they may have been, why they were sequenced in the order that they were sequenced.

Because one of the things that’s really remarkable about the Bible as a document is that it actually has a plot. And that's really something. I mean, it’s sprawling and it goes many places, but the fact that something's being cobbled together over several thousand years, maybe four thousand years, maybe longer than that if you include the oral traditions that preceded it, and God knows how old those are, but that collective imagination—part of the human collective imagination—has cobbled together a library with a plot.

And like I see the Bible as an attempt, a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. And I think those problems are the problems of—primarily that the problem of self-consciousness—the fact that not only do we are immortal and that we die, but that we know it, and that's the unique predicament of human beings, and it makes all the difference. And I think that's laid out in Adam and Eve, in the story of Adam and Eve.

I think the reason that that makes us unique and is laid out in that story. And interestingly—and I really realized this only after I was doing the last three lectures—the Bible presents a cataclysm, okay? A cataclysm at the beginning of the top of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness and human beings, which puts a risk into the structure of being. That's the right way to think about it, and that's really given cosmic significance.

Now, you can dispense with that and say, well, nothing that happens to human beings has cosmic significance because we’re these short-lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet that’s rotating out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters. You can walk down that road if you want. I wouldn’t recommend it.

I mean, and that's part of the reason I think that for all intents and purposes, it’s untrue. You know, it isn’t a road you can walk down and live. In fact, I think if you really walk down that road and you really take it seriously, you end up not living at all. So it's certainly very reminiscent. I mean, I've talked to lots of people who are suicidal, and seriously suicidal, and you know the kind of conclusions that they draw, both the utility of life prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the kind of conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough. If you're interested in that, you could read Tolstoy's "Confessions."

Leo Tolstoy's "Confession" is a very short book. It's a killer, man. It's a powerful book. Very, very short. And Tolstoy describes his obsession with suicide. When he was at the height of his fame, most well-known author in the world, you know, huge family, international fame, wealth beyond anyone's imagining at that time, influential, admired, everything that you could possibly imagine that everyone could have. And for years he was afraid to go out into his barn with a rope or a gun because he thought he'd either hang himself or shoot himself, and he did get out of that. He describes why that happened and where he went when that happened.

So if you're interested in that, that's a very good book. But so the biblical stories, and starting with Adam and Eve, they present a different story. They present the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings as a cosmically cataclysmic event. And you could say, well, what do we have to do with the cosmos? And the answer to that is it depends on what you think consciousness has to do with the cosmos. And perhaps that's nothing, and perhaps it’s everything.

I'm going to go with everything because that’s how it looks to me. Now, of course, anyone who wishes to is welcome to disagree, but if you believe that consciousness is a force of cosmic significance, which being itself is dependent on in any real sense, at least in any experiential sense, then it’s not unreasonable to assume that radical restructurings of consciousness can worthily be granted some kind of cosmic or metaphysical significance.

And even if it's not true from outside the human perspective, whatever that might be, it’s bloody well true from within the human perspective, that's for sure. And so that's the initial event in some sense after the creation is the cataclysmic fall. And then the entire rest of the Bible is an attempt to figure out what the hell to do about that.

And everything in it is—so you could say, for example, in the earliest in the Old Testament stories, what seems to happen is that the state of Israel is founded, and it rises and falls and rises and falls. And so there’s this experimentation for centuries, millennia even, with the idea that the way that you protect yourself against the tragic consequences of self-consciousness is by organizing yourself into a state. But then what happens is the state itself begins to reveal its pathologies.

And as those pathologies mount, the state becomes unstable and collapses, and then it rises back up and becomes unstable and collapses, and then it rises back up. After it does this a number of times, this is primarily from Northrup Frye's interpretations. People start wondering if there's not something wrong with the idea that the state itself is this is the pathway, is the place of redemption, that there's something wrong with that idea.

And so then I think on the heels of that comes the Christian revolution with its hypothesis that it's not the state that’s the place of salvation; it’s the individual psyche. And then there’s an ethic that goes along with that too, which is quite interesting. The ethic of redemption after the state experiment fails, let's say, is that it’s within the individual that redemption can be manifested, let's say. And even in so far as the state is concerned because the state’s proper functioning is dependent on the proper functioning of the individual rather than the reverse, most fundamentally.

And that the proper mode of individual being that’s redemptive is truth. And truth is the antidote to the suffering that emerges with the fall of man in the story of Adam and Eve. And then that relates back to the chapters that we've already talked about because there’s this insistence in Genesis 1 that it's the word in the form of truth that generates order out of chaos. But even more importantly—and this is something, like I said, I most clearly realized just doing these lectures for the last three weeks—is God continues to say as he speaks order into being with truth that the being he speaks into being is good.

And so there’s this insistence that the being that spoke into being through truth is good. And so there’s a hint there—a right at the beginning of the story—that the state of being that Adam and Eve inhabited before they fell, before they became self-conscious, insofar as they were made in the image of God and acting out the truth, that that being itself was properly balanced. And it takes the entire Bible to rediscover that, which is a journey back to the beginning, right?

And that’s a classic, see, it’s a classic mythological theme that the wise person is the person who finds what they lost in childhood and regains it, right? So that's a—I think that's a Jewish idea that Zadok, if I remember correctly, who is a messiah figure, is the person who finds what he lost in childhood and regains it. His idea of this return to the beginning—except that the return is you don't fall backwards into childhood and unconsciousness, you return voluntarily to the state of childhood, well awake, and then determined to participate through truth in the manifestation of proper being.

Now, you know, I'm a psychologist and I've taught personality theory for a very long time. And I know personality theory, profound personality theories pretty well. And I'm reasonably well-versed in philosophy, although not as well-versed as I should be, but I can tell you in all the things I’ve ever read, or encountered, or thought about, I have never once found an idea that matches that in terms of profundity.

But not only profundity, also in believability. Because the other thing I see as a clinician, and I think this is very characteristic of clinical experience, and also very much described explicitly by the great clinicians, is that what cures in therapy is truth. That’s the curative. Now, there’s exposure to the things you’re afraid of and avoiding as well. But I would say that's a form of enacted truth because if you know there’s something you should do by your own set of rules and you’re avoiding it, then you’re enacting a lie, you know? You’re not telling one, but you’re acting one out.

It’s the same damn thing. So if I can get you to face what it is that you’re confronting that you know you shouldn’t be avoiding, then what’s happening is that we’re both partaking in the process of attempting you to act out your deepest truth. And what happens is that that improves people's lives, and it improves them radically. And the evidence, the clinical evidence to that is overwhelming.

We know that if you expose people to the things they’re afraid of but that they’re avoiding, they get better. And you have to do it carefully and cautiously and with their own participation and all of that. But of all the things that clinicians have established that’s credible, that’s number one. And that’s nested inside this deeper realization that the clinical experience is redemptive, let’s say, because it’s designed to address, insofar as the people who are engaged in the process are both telling each other the truth.

And then you think, well, obviously. Because if you have some problems and you come to talk to me about them, well, first of all, just by coming to talk to me about them, you’ve admitted that they exist. Man, that’s a pretty good start. And second, well, if you tell me about them, then we know what they are. And then if we know what they are, we can maybe start to lay out some solutions, and then you can go act out the solutions and see if they work.

But if you don't admit they're there and you won't tell me what they are, and I don't—and I'm like posturing and acting egotistically and taking the upper hand in all of that in our discussions, well how the hell is that going to work? You know, it might be comfortable moment to moment while we stay encapsulated in our delusion, but it’s not going to work.

So a lot of that seems to think it through. It seems pretty self-evident. You know, Freud thought that repression was at the heart of much mental suffering. The difference between repression and deception is a matter of degree. And that's all. It's a technical differentiation. And Alfred Adler, who was one of Freud's greatest associates, would say, and much underappreciated I would say, he thought that people got into problems because they started to act out a life lie. That's what he called it—a life lie.

That’s worth looking up because I blur, although not as charismatic as Freud, was very practical and really foreshadowed a lot of later developments in cybernetics theory. And of course, Jung believed that you could bypass psychotherapy entirely by merely making a proper moral effort in your own life. And Carl Rogers believed that it was honest communication mediated through dialogue that had redemptive consequences.

And the behaviorists believed that if you do a careful micro-analysis of the problems that are laid before you and help introduce people to what they’re avoiding, it’s like all of those things to me are just secular variations of the notion that truth will set you free, essentially. So, you know, it’s a pretty powerful story and it’s not that easy to dispense with.

And B. The other thing is your dispense with it at your peril because what I have seen as well is that the people that I’ve seen who’ve been really hurt have been hurt mostly by deceit. And that’s also—it’s all about thinking about that—you know, you get walloped by life. There’s no doubt about that, absolutely no doubt about that. But I thought for a long time that maybe, maybe, maybe people can handle earthquakes and cancer and even gas attacks, but they can’t handle betrayal, and they can’t handle deception. They can’t handle having the rug pulled out from underneath by people that they love and trust. That just does them in, you know?

It makes the meal, but it does where it hurts that, you know, psychophysiologically, it damages them. But more than that, it makes them cynical and bitter and vicious and resentful, and then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse. So, you know, the story starts God uses the spoken truth to create being that is good.

And then, the cataclysm occurs. And then human beings spend until millennia trying to sort out exactly what to do about the fact that they've become self-conscious and, you know, by the way, we are, in fact, self-conscious. No other animal has that distinction. Now you'll read that chimpanzees can, for example, if you put lipstick on a chimpanzee, it’s kind of a strange thing to do. Yeah, well, I won't pursue that any further.

But a chimpanzee will wipe off the lipstick if you show it a mirror. And dolphins seem to be able to recognize themselves in mirrors. And there is—the glimmerings of self-conscious recognition in other animals, but to put that in the same conceptual category as human self-consciousness is, in my way of thinking, it's uninformed, to say the least.

But I also think that it’s motivated. It’s motivated by a kind of anti-humanistic underpinning motivation because our self-consciousness is so incredibly developed compared to that that they’re hardly in the same conceptual universe. It’s like comparing the alarm cries of vervet monkeys when they see a predator to the language of human beings. It’s like, “Yeah, yeah, there are some similarities, man.”

They are uttering insanity, but they’re not language. And the self-consciousness of animals is proto-self-consciousness, and it’s only a very small number of animals. And it’s nothing like ours. They’re not aware of the future like we are. They’re not aware of their boundaries in space and time, and that’s the critical thing.

And most particularly time. Human beings discovered time, and when we discovered time, we discovered the end of each of our beings, and that made all the difference. And that’s what the story of Adam and Eve is about.

So Genesis 1 is derived from the Priestly source, where God is known as Elohim, or El Shaddai. And there’s God in the singular, and there’s gods in the plural. And I suppose that’s because it seems that if you analyze the history of the development of monotheistic ideas, that monotheism emerges out of a plurality of gods.

And as I mentioned, I think it’s because the gods represent fundamental forces, at minimum. And those fundamental forces have to be hierarchically organized—with something absolute at the top—because otherwise they do nothing but war. You have to organize your values hierarchically or you stay confused. And that’s true if you’re an individual, and it’s true of your estate. If you don’t know what the next thing you should do is, then there’s 50 things you should do, and then how are you going to do any of them? You can’t, you have to prioritize. Something has to be above something else, has to be arranged in a hierarchy for it not to be chaotic.

And so there’s some principle at the top of the hierarchy. And maybe the organization of the gods over time—that’s the battle of gods that Machiavelli talked about. And if you’re interested in that, you could read "A History of Religious Ideas," which I would really recommend. It’s a three-volume book. It's actually quite a straightforward read as far as these things go, and Elliott does a very nice job of describing how and even why polytheism tends towards monotheism.

Even in polytheistic cultures, there’s a strong tendency for the gods to organize themselves in the hierarchy with one god at the top. In some sense, all the other gods just disappear across time, and there’s nothing left at the top god. But even in a polytheistic society, there’s a hierarchy of power among the gods.

The first story is newer than the second one, so the story I’m going to tell you today is actually older than the one I already told you, even though their order was flipped by the redactor, who’s the hypothetical person or persons who edited these stories together. We don’t know exactly why the stories were edited together in the order that they were added together, but we could infer, I mean, they were edited together in that order because the editor thought they made sense that way because that’s what an editor does, right?

An editor tends to take diverse ideas and then to organize them in some manner that makes sense. And part of the manner that makes sense is that you can tell them to people and the people stay interested, and you can tell them to people, and people remember them. That’s one of the ways you can tell if you’ve got an argument, right? Because it’s communicable and understandable and memorable.

And so this person was, let’s say, motivated by intuition to organize the stories in this particular manner. So the second—the Yahwist strand contains the stories—the classic stories in the Pentateuch. That’s five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, which we’ll try to get through perhaps in these twelve lectures. We’ll see how that goes. It’s strongly and-through—perfect.

So the god in the August account is, for all intents and purposes, a sort of meta-person. And I dealt with that a little bit last week because people tend to think of that as unsophisticated. But when you think that the mind, that the ground of consciousness is the most complex thing that we know of, then it’s not so unsophisticated to assume that the most complex thing that there might be is like that, or it's at least as good as we can do with our imaginations. And so I don't think it’s so—it's so unsophisticated.

It’s also the case—and this is practically speaking—that it is not at all unreasonable to think of God the Father as the spirit that arises from the crowd that exists into the future. Right? And that’s—we talked about that in relationship to the idea of sacrifice, at least a little bit more, or we’re going to—you make sacrifices in the present so that the future is happy with you.

The question is, what is that future that would be happy with you? And the answer to that is, it’s the spirit of humanity. That’s who you’re negotiating with because you make the assumption that if you forego impulsive pleasure and get your medical degree, that when you’re done in ten years and you’re a physician, humanity as such will honor your sacrifice and commitment and open the doors to you, right?

So, you’re treating the future as if it’s a single being, and you’re also treating it as if it’s something like a compassionate judge. You’re acting that out, and maybe we had to imagine God in that form before we could understand, once we started to understand that there was a future. Perhaps we had to imagine God in that form in order to concretize something that we could bargain with, so that we could figure out how to use sacrifice to guide ourselves into the future.

Because that sacrifice is a contract with the future, but it’s not a contract with any particular person; it’s a contract with the spirit of humanity as such. Its something like that.

And so when you think about it that way, that should make you faint with amazement because that is such a bloody amazing idea to come up with. That idea that you can bargain with the future, that is some idea, man. That’s like the major idea of humankind. We suffer, what do we do about it? We figure out how to bargain with the future, and we minimize suffering in that manner.

It's like no other animal does that either, you know? Like lions, they just eat everything. I think a wolf can eat 40 pounds of meat in a single sitting, right? It’s like, there’s meat, eat it. It’s not like save some mammoths for tomorrow. That’s not a wolf thing, man. That’s a human thing. And that might mean you have to be hungry today, or maybe you’re a farmer, you know, several thousand years ago, six thousand years ago or so when agriculture first got going, and you’re starving to death waiting for the spring planting, and you think, “We’d better not eat those seeds!”

Right? And that’s really something, to be able to control yourself. To make the future real, to put off what you could use today and not just in some impulsive manner. Man, maybe your kids are starving to death. You think, “We are not touching the seeds that we need for the future."

And for human beings to have discovered that, and then to also have figured out that we could bargain with the future is like, man, that’s something. And I think that the stories that are laid out in this book actually describe at least in part the process by which that occurred.

The stories begin with Genesis 2:4: “This is the account of the heavens and the earth.” So there are two real creation stories at the beginning. The newer one, which is the first one, and the older one, which is the second one.

The older one begins in chapter two, and that’s the story that we are getting into now. Adam and Eve are in that, and Cain and Abel, the tower of Babel, in the Yahwist strand, Exodus, Numbers, and there’s some of the Priestly version in there too, as well as the Ten Commandments.

Well, there are some lovely representations of a paradise. This is a garden of earthly delights. What’s his name? Bosch, yes. I wrote it was Bosch. He has a crazy—I mean, if you—how he didn’t get burnt at the stake is absolutely beyond me. I mean, you know, some of you know about Salvador Dali, I suppose most of you do. I mean, Dali’s a piker compared to Hieronymus Bosch, man.

You could spend—because there are three pieces of this particular painting—you could spend a very bizarre and surreal looking at that painting. I don’t know what it was with Bosch, but he was some sort of creature that only popped up once, and probably for the best.

And so there have been many representations of paradise, I mean, God only knows what that is. Like I could probably guess, but I won’t. And then look, I mean that’s the lion lying down with the lamb, right? So that’s this idea that’s maybe projected back in time, that there was a time, or maybe will be a time, when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist, right?

And the horrors of life are, of course, that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything’s born, and that the whole bloody place is a charnel house, and it’s a catastrophe from beginning to end. And this is the vision of it being other than that. And, you know, there’s a strong idea in this, it's also implicit in the alchemical ideas, and I think it's also implicit in the scientific revolution, that human beings can interact with reality in such a way so that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated and so that we can move somewhat closer to a state that might be characterized—

Oh, that’s obviously imagistic, but it might be characterized by something like that where we have the benefits of actual existence without all of the catastrophe that seems to go along with it. And Carl Jung, when he wrote about the emergence of alchemy or the emergence of science from alchemy, he thought of science as being motivated by a dream,

because for Jung, the dream was the manifestation of the instincts, it was the boundary between the instincts and thinking. He said, “Well, science is nested inside a dream.” And the dream is that if we investigated the structures of material reality with sufficient attention and truth, that we could then learn enough about material reality to alleviate suffering—right?

To produce the philosopher’s stone, to make everybody wealthy, to make everybody healthy, to make everyone live as long as they wanted to live, or perhaps forever. That’s the goal, to alleviate the catastrophe of existence. And that idea, the idea that mysteries—the solution to the mysteries of life—might enable us to develop such a substance, or let’s say a multitude of substances, provided the motive for the development of science.

And you’ll trace that, the development of that mode of force really over a thousand years. And if you were interested in reading his books on alchemy, which are extraordinarily difficult—and that’s really saying something about Jung, because all of his books are difficult, and then the books on alchemy, they kind of take a quantum leap. That’s actually a very small leap, so I shouldn’t say that they take a massive leap into a whole different dimension of complexity, but that’s what he was trying to get at.

He went back into the alchemical texts and interpreted them as if they were the dream on which science was founded. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. I mean, you know, all of this are certainly well-supported by the historical fact. Science did emerge out of alchemy.

The question is, what were the alchemists up to? And they were trying to produce the philosopher's stone, and that was the universal medical meant for mankind's pathology. Jung felt that what had happened was that, you know, Christianity had promised that the cessation of suffering—promised it for a thousand years—and yet suffering went on unabated. And at the same time, Christianity had attempted to really put emphasis on spiritual development, let’s say, at the expense of material development. Right?

Thinking of material development as something akin to a sin—trying to get a control of impulsivity and all the things that went along with embodied existence. There was a reason for it, but that by about a thousand A.D., the European mind somewhat educated by that point, somewhat able to concentrate on a single point, perhaps because of a very long history of intense religious training—turned its dream to the unexplored material world and thought, “Well, you know, the spiritual redemption that we’ve been seeking didn’t appear to produce the result that was promised or intended,

and so maybe there’s another place that we should look.” And that was in the damned material world, right? Which was, according to some elements of classic thinking, nothing but the creation of the devil. So, but the point I'm making is that, you know, it’s very difficult to underestimate the amount of human motivation that’s embedded in the attempt to alleviate suffering, to eradicate disease, to help people live healthy lives.

And that’s the disease, obviously, but to live a long life as well, and to make things as peaceful as possible. I mean you can be cynical about people, and you can talk about them as motivated by power and being corrupt, and all of those things, and all of those things are true. But you shouldn’t throw away the baby with the bathwater because we have been striving for a very long time to set things right. And we’ve done, actually, not too bad a job of it for half-starving, crazy, insect-ridden chimpanzees with lifespans of 50 to 70 years.

So, you know, we could deserve a bit of sympathy for our position as far as I’m concerned. Some other representations—this one I like—the one on the left. That’s paradise, it has a walled garden, and that’s what paradise means. It’s paradise, I don’t remember the language; it’s associated with Persian paradise. That means walled garden.

And why a walled garden? Well, it goes back to the chaos-order idea. So this is where God puts man and woman after the creation in a walled garden. Well, the wall is culture and order, and the garden is nature. And the idea is the proper human habitat is nature and culture in balance.

Well, we like gardens. Well, why? Because they’re not completely covered with weeds and mosquitoes and black flies, right? So they’re civilized a little bit, but still within that civilization, nature, in its more benevolent guise, is encouraged to flourish, and people find that rejuvenating. And so the idea that paradise—the proper habitat of a human being—is a walled garden is a good one. And it’s walled because, well, you want to keep things out, right?

I mean, raccoons, for example, if you want to keep those things out. Man, even though it’s impossible. And you know, you don’t—not well, there’s all sorts of things. You don’t want your garden, like snakes. Walls don’t seem to be much use against them. But the idea that paradise is a walled garden is an echo back to the chaos-order idea: walls—culture—right? Garden—nature.

So the proper human habitat is a properly tended garden. Now the radical left-leaning anti-theist environmentalists tend to make the case that the predations of the Western capitalist system are a consequence of the injunction that was delivered in Genesis by God to man to go out and dominate the earth. David Suzuki has talked a lot about this, by the way.

They believe that that statement has given rise to our inappropriate assumption that we have the right to exert control over the world and that that’s what’s turned us into these terrible predatory monsters sometimes described as cancers on the face of the earth or viruses that have inhabited the entire ecosystem, who are doing nothing but wandering everywhere and wreaking havoc as rapidly as we possibly can, which is another perspective on the essential element of humankind that I find absolutely deplorable.

I mean, if you look at the historical record, for example, even casually, you’ll find out that as late as the late 1800s—1895, thereabouts—Thomas Huxley, who was Aldous Huxley’s grandfather and a great defender of Darwin, prepared a report for the British government on oceans' sustainability. And his conclusion was, “Fish away, guys, man! There are so many fish out there. The oceans are so inexhaustible that no matter how hard humanity tried for any number of years, the probability that we could do more than put a dent in what was out there was a zero.”

Now Huxley turned out to be wrong. He didn’t realize that our population was going to spike so dramatically partly because we got a little bit rich, and our children stopped dying at the rate of like 60 percent before they were one year old. You know, we actually managed to populate the earth with a few people. But it wasn’t really until 1960 or so that we woke up to the fact that there were so many of us that we actually had to start paying attention to what we were doing to the planet.

And that’s like, what, 50 years ago? Well, we’ve just started to develop the technology or the wherewithal to understand that the whole world might be well considered a garden. And we need to live inside the proper balance between culture and order or culture and chaos.

Before that, we were spending all of our time just trying not to die, and usually very unsuccessfully. So I don’t agree with that interpretation of the opening sections of Genesis. I don’t believe that it’s given human beings the right to act as super predators on the planet. I think that instead the proper environment for human beings is presented quite properly as a garden and that the role of people—and that’s explicitly stated in the second story in Adam and Eve—was to tend the garden.

And that means to make the proper decisions and to make sure that everything thrives and flourishes, and that it’s good for the things that are living there that aren’t just people but, also good for the people too. So fine, I think we could at least note that that’s a slightly different take on the story than the ultimately cynical interpretation that’s so commonly put forward today.

Now inside that walled garden is a couple of trees, and Adam and Eve, and some animals and all of that. And unfortunately, the tree happens to have a snake wrapped around it. Now that’s an interesting thing. We’re going to talk about that a lot. And the snake in both of these representations is no ordinary snake. Say it’s got a human head and it’s got a human head there too.

So whatever that snake is, well, let’s forget about looking at this from a religious perspective. Like, if you can just imagine that you’re an anthropologist. We’ve never seen this image before. It’s like, what do you see? Well, you see walls and you see something, a fairly pleasant enclosure, and then you see a tree and people are eating from the tree, but the tree has a snake in it that has a human head.

And so then you might think, well, what’s a snake with a human head? And then you’d think, well, it’s half snake and half human. That’s hardly revelatory. It’s just self-evidence. So whatever that snake is, it isn’t just a snake. It’s snake and human. Or it’s snake and partakes in whatever human beings are, and that’s very important.

So we’ll consider that later. And you see the same thing here. In this particular version, there’s the head, this one also has wings. And so this is a winged snake, sort of like a dragon. And so it curls on the ground like a reptile and it’s got an aerial aspect or a spiritual aspect.

So here it’s a snake, which is like the lowest form of reptilian life—say something that crawls on the ground, it’s something that’s human and something that’s spiritual at the same time—and it inhabits the tree, which looks a lot like magic mushrooms, by the way. And you can look that up if you want. That’s quite an interesting little rabbit hole to wander down if you’re curious about it.

But there’s an idea here too, is that there was something in the garden at the beginning of time that was like a snake, that was like a person, that was like something that was winged. It was something spiritual. So it’s spiritual, human, and reptilian all at the same time, and it’s the animating spirit of the tree.

Okay, so keep that in mind. Thus, the heavens and the earth were finished. This is in relationship to Genesis 1, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God ended his work which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which God had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because that in it he had rested from all his work, which God created.

The need—that’s wisdom in that one. I think the idea of the Sabbath, you know, because one of the things—I’ve worked with a lot of people who are hyper-conscientious. And the thing about hyper-conscientious people is that they’ll just work till they die. And that’s actually not very productive because then they’re dead and they can’t work. And so what you have to do with hyper-conscientious people is you have to say, “Well, I know you’d rather do nothing but work, and maybe you’re just as guilty as you can possibly be when you’re not working, but let’s figure out what you’re up to.”

And what you’re up to in all probability is the attempt to be productive in the least problematic, longest-sustaining possible manner. And that might mean you have to take a rest. And so one of the things I used to work with lawyers, with people who had risen to the top of large law firms, and they were hyper-productive types. They’re often, you know, trying to hit their impossible quota for yearly hours and burning themselves to a frazzle as a consequence.

And one of the things that we used to do was he couldn’t work fewer hours because that—a day that just didn’t work. But what we did was we had them take more time off. You know, like a four-day weekend every two months or something that was plotted out into the future, and then we track their billable hours, which is the degree of productivity.

It would actually increase. So that was so cool because you could take hardworking people and you could say, “Look, you know, take a break.” Why? “Well, because you’ll be more productive if you take a break.” “No, that couldn’t possibly be,” like “I should just work flat out all the time.” It’s like, “Well, test that out. You take a break now.” And it’s like, “Well, what happened?”

Was their productivity would increase often by 10%. So there’s wisdom here too, which is okay. And this alludes to the Adam and Eve story near the end. You’re self-conscious. You discover the future. You have to work. Well then, the question is, how much should you work? And one answer is you better bloody well work all the time because no matter how much work you do, you’re not solving your problems. They’re coming along, man, and you can stack up all the money you want. You can stack up all the wealth you want.

It is not going to protect you in the final analysis. So you’d better be hitting the ground running, and you’d better run flat out all the time. Well, what happens if you do that? Well, then you die. That’s not a good solution, so maybe you should rest. And so how does that rest get instantiated?

Well, it’s not easy to tell. But one way to do it, let’s say conceptually, is to say, look, even God had to rest one day a week. And so you don’t have to be so presumptuous to assume that if God had to rest one day a week, that maybe you are allowed to work nonstop without a break at all.

And I think our culture has slipped into that in quite a dangerous way. Because everything is open all the time. And I mean, I find that just as convenient as the rest of you, but you know, it’s so strange to talk to modern people. Because one of the things they always tell you when you say, “Well, how are you?” What do they always say? They don’t say good. They don’t say bad. They say busy.

Like yeah, well, okay. This is where Genesis 2 starts, and we finally got there. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. Well, you know, there’s some archaic thinking in there. The breath is life, right? That’s psyche, that’s spirit, that’s inspiration, that’s respiration.

That’s also a citizen. It’s pneuma, like pneumatic. It’s its breath. And the reason that people associated life with breath—well, that’s not so foolish, you know? I mean you’re breathing, man, and something you do all the time.

And when you die, you stop breathing. And so the idea that there’s something integral to life about breathing—it's a perfectly reasonable supposition. It actually happens to be very true. And now then, to associate the act of creation with the act of first of all inspiration and respiration and the breathing of life into something that was inanimate is—well, what do you expect for a one-sentence description? It’s not a bad one-sentence description, you know?

So, and the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden. And Eden means well-watered place. And that’s particularly relevant, I suppose, if you’re a desert dweller, right? Because the issue there is can you get enough water to make things grow? And so the walled garden, which is paradise, is also Eden, which is a well-watered place.

And water has the element of chaos. We already saw that in relationship to Genesis 1, where the underlying chaos was often assimilated symbolically to water. And so the idea, too, is that a certain amount of chaos has to be brought into the order in order for it to be fruitful. And you can see that in the form of allowing in the water.

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So two trees are marked out among the rest. One is the tree of life, and one is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Now you know, when you read something like that, if you’re thinking about it, that you’re in a metaphorical space. Now we’ve got to be careful about metaphors because, you know, I could say, yeah, that the chaos-order idea is a metaphor; but then I also said, “Oh, wait a second. It’s a metaphor, but it’s also what your brain is adapted to.”

And so, you know, let’s just not be pushing the idea that it’s merely a metaphor too hard. And the same thing is happening here. These are metaphors, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But that doesn’t exactly mean that they’re mere metaphors because sometimes, as I mentioned before, and as if you have a set of things and you abstract out from them a common element, you can make a strong case that the common element is more real than the set of things from which you extracted it.

That’s the whole utility in abstraction. Why would you bother with it otherwise? If you can’t take a set of things and say, “Look, there’s something in common across the set of things, it’s more important than the differences between them,” then you wouldn’t bother abstracting at all.

And so the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil are abstractions. Now, one of the questions is, this is a tough one, man. I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time why a fruit, and something you eat, would be associated with the transformations of psychology, because that’s basically what happens in the Adam and Eve story. Why would it be something that you eat?

Now Eric Neumann, who is one of Jung's students, had written a fair bit about this and got a fair ways with it. He said, “Well, you know, we do have noted—we’ve noticed forever that the act of eating, especially if you’re hungry, especially if you’re starving, produces a rapid spiritual transformation.”

Right? I mean, some of you, this is worth knowing: you probably have a crabby partner or child because everyone does. And one thing you might try is that if they get erratic during the day and you know, get all volatile about nothing at all, just give them something to eat, really. I’ll tell you, man, I made this sauce. If I do this with my clinical clients all the time, it’s like they say, “Well, I fly off the handle at the littlest things.”

I’m like, “Okay. Yeah, just try this for a week. When you’re crabby and unreasonable, eat a piece of cheese or eat a peanut butter sandwich. Eat something that’s high protein, high fat, and then just wait ten minutes and see if you’re sane.” And you’ll find out that you’re sane after you eat so often that you just can’t believe how crazy you are when you’re hungry.

Look, it’s really absolutely bloody remarkable. So I’m telling you, try this. It’ll especially—if you don’t eat breakfast, this will change your life. And so here’s a practical bit of information for you too, for all of you antisocial types who are going to end up in prison. So if you’re in prison and you want to go on parole, okay?

So you have to go in front of the judge and tell them why you’re not going to do it again. So here’s the deal, here’s the deal. It doesn’t really matter what you did and it doesn’t really matter what you promise. What matters is whether you see the judge before lunch or after lunch.

Because if you see the judge after lunch, the probability that you’ll get parole is 60% higher, yeah, right? That’s just like—so never have an argument with your partner when you’re hungry, or when they’re hungry, especially if you want something from them. It’s like, “Here’s the sandwich.” They’ll eat it, then they’ll be happy, then you can manipulate them because before that, man, no.

So you know it’s not that unreasonable to think that there’s a spirit in food because food rejuvenates. And it just doesn’t rejuvenate you physically; it rejuvenates you spiritually. And then, of course, there are the other things that we consume that aren’t exactly like food that have a walloping spiritual impact, like alcohol, let’s say, which is a spirit and is regarded Dionysius.

Right? I mean, it’s the god of the vine, and the god of the vine possesses you and makes you act all the fun ways that alcohol makes you act, you know, the fun ways that you regret the next day. And so there’s the spiritual element of that too.

And then, but there's something even deeper that I think is so cool. That’s associated with food and information because the story of Adam and Eve represents the fruit as producing a psychological transformation. And so the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is an abstraction across trees, and it’s trying to say here’s something that’s common across trees. It’s a fruit that’s common across trees. It’s something like that.

And so the food that’s stable across the entire domain of food isn’t food; it’s information. Its information, and we use the same bloody circuits in our brain to forage for information that squirrels use to forage for food, right? But animals used to forage for food; it’s the same circuit. And why is that? Because we figured out that knowing where things are—knowing where the food is, is more important than having the food.

And so knowing where the food is— is a form of massive food. Information is a form of meta-food. And once you have, well, that’s why we’re information foragers. And so once you grasp that and that idea is embedded into the story of Adam and Eve. So whatever it is that they ingest is a form of meta-food. It’s infinite information.

And you know, we’ll trade food for information, right? So if you’re stuck on the edge of the highway, and you know, your hood’s up, and you’re going places. The thing has turned into a pile of junk that you don’t understand. And somebody pulls beside you, a mechanic, and they point to something and say, “Well, just put that wire back on there.” You’ll immediately give them a sandwich, right?

Or you’ll offer them something in return, you know what I mean? Because they’ve provided you with information that has value, and it has value because it actually provides you with energy. Because information provides you with energy, because otherwise, why would we bother with it?

And so food provides energy, but so does information. And so there’s the idea of food that you abstract from everything you can eat. But then there’s the idea of what you could abstract from all sources of food, and the answer to that would be information. And the trees that are being referred to in Adam and Eve are these meta-trees. They’re not ordinary trees. Just like paradise is no ordinary place, like Adam and Eve are no ordinary people. And just like the logos that God is using at the beginning of time is no ordinary conception.

And these aren’t—they’re not metaphors; they’re more than metaphors. I think of them as hyper-realities. It’s something like that; they’re more real than what you see. There’s more real than the reality that presents itself to you, and lots of things are like that, right? Numbers are like that. We wouldn’t think or abstract if there weren’t things that were more real than what we can see.

So what’s most real? Well, that’s partly what we’re trying to figure out. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food: the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden and from thence it was parted and became into four heads.

That produced a tremendous amount of speculation. Now, you know the garden of Eden is also the holy city. That’s another way of thinking about it, or it’s Jerusalem, right? Or it’s the ideal state, which could be the ideal city or it could be an ideal state of being, or it could be the ideal site here if all of those things stacked up at the same time, right?

This is a mandela, and this is the Mandela form that people would call—hypothesized—that constituted the structure of paradise. You notice it’s got this cross form; that’s eaten itself. And there’s the center of Eden, and there are the rivers. Those are rivers, not snakes. Those are the rivers that go out of it, and they’re turned into these mandela images that are representative of what Jung described as the self, which would be the center element of being that he associated with divinity, I would say, but also with the idea of the holy city. So I’m just showing you where the imagination has taken ideas of paradise.

So the name of the first river is Pisan, that is which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, whether is gold, and the gold of that land is good. There’s bdellium, and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon; the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Heddy Kale, or Hideki, I don’t know what that is. It which goes towards the east of Assyria, and the fourth river is the Euphrates.

So there's this strange intermingling there of geography with mythical geography, right? Which you see happen fairly frequently in the books. And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it. Okay, so that’s a good— that’s a good command. That’s what you’re supposed to do, is take care of the damn thing. It was a lot of work to make, right?

Took a whole week. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.” For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. Well, there’s a sponge of questions there that people have been puzzling over for a long time. God? He’s a tricky character in the story of Adam and Eve.

It’s like, okay, if we can’t eat the damn thing, why put it in the garden to begin with? That would be one question. You made us, and then you told us not to eat this, knowing perfectly well that the first thing we were going to do is eat it because people are of exactly that type, which is that if you say to them, with their insatiable curiosity, “This is all fine and nice, but over here is something you should never look at.” And then you leave the room; it’s like everybody’s over there trying to figure out what the hell that thing is instantly, right? Because we’re curious, curious, curious, curious creatures.

And so you have to wonder exactly what God was up to here. And there’s Gnostic speculation that the original God was not really a very good God; He was kind of an unconscious evil God, and that he wanted his creation to be unconscious and so forbade them from developing consciousness, and that it was a higher God who, and maybe in the form of the serpent, who tempted human beings toward consciousness.

And, you know, that idea got scrubbed out of classic Christianity pretty early, although there’s something that’s interesting about it. And there are remnants of it in different forms that stayed inside the story, like the idea that the fall was a terrible tragedy, but on the other hand, it was the precondition for the greatest event in history, which was the birth of Christ and the redemption of mankind.

And so it's complicated, let’s put it that way. God only knows what God was up to, but you know this is a good example of that ambivalence to me, again, that it’s an indication of the sophistication of the people who put these stories together. I also consider this somewhat miraculous because, you know, if you were just a simple propagandist of sorts, you wouldn’t leave this sort of complexity in the text.

You’d just get rid of that. Because if you’re a propagandist, everything is supposed to make sense along the ideological plane. And here God is supposed to be good. It’s like, well, we’d better get there to that line because something’s up with it, and obvious what it is. But that isn’t what people did. And to me, that indicates that they were doing two things: they were trying not to be too careless with the traditions that they were handed; they were touching them at their peril. They were very careful with them, and also that they were actually trying to understand what was going on because, why otherwise keep this?

Why not just simplify it or maybe just attribute this to the devil? That would be easier than having God do it. But—and the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make help meet for him.”

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them. And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all the cattle and to the fowl of the air and every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found to help meet for him.

Okay, well a couple of things there. Speculation number one—it’s like why does God care what Adam calls the animals? And the answer that seems to be is it’s associated again with the magic of speech, right? So that we know, according to the story, that human beings were already made in the image of God and that God used language in order to call order forth from chaos.

And that human beings were made in that image. And so there’s an echo of that here, even though it’s from an independent tradition, in that the echo is that things aren’t quite real till you name it, and that’s quite an interesting thing. We don’t exactly know how far that extends.

It's certainly the case that seeing things often exist in a strange potential form, interconnected form, where everything’s confusing, like a massive confusion, before you put your finger on it to name it. What's going on here? You name it; it’s like it carves it out from all that underlying chaos. It makes it into a grip of a balance that you can then contend with, and you might say, “Well, it was real before you named it.” It’s like, well yes, it was real before you named it, the same way things are there when there’s no one there to perceive them.

And it isn’t obvious how things are there when you’re not there to perceive them. I’ll tell you something bloody weird about perception. You can look this up. John Wheeler. John Wheeler is a physicist.

So here’s a really cool thing. Let’s say you go outside at night and you look up and you see a star. And like so, a photon from that star enters your eye. Then maybe that photon has been cruising along for like 30 million years. Do you know that that photon would not have been emitted from that star at