Another perspective on the Garden and the Fall

Here is a lengthy messsage from The Last Domino to me re my post on the Garden. In the shared hope of advancing the dialog, and promoting discussion, I have bolded a few key concepts.

"I must confess: I know very little about schizophrenia, although I've lived what may be described as a "split existence" most of my life. That split is natural for me, and is my normal. Yet I still feel a sense of Oneness with God, and with All Things.

The title of this piece, "We've got to get ourselves back to the Garden" is true. The split, however, occurred, not at the creation of Eve (At bottom, we're still male and female, yin and yang.), but because of the eating of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The split had more to do with the mind of humans (and their resulting expulsion from Eden), and little to do with the creative process.

On my blog, the Secret Place, I'm examining, anew, the Creation stories. There are two accounts.

I'll try to keep this brief.

"One rabbinical commentary asserts that Adam 'was a man on his right side, a woman on his left; but God split him into two halves.'"

It wasn't really a split. It was more like an assignment, or an assigning, a defining of roles in a larger creative process.

What I've been told is this: Eve is internal; Adam is external. Eve's role(the Mother of All Living) is to be "bone of [his] bones (Adam), and flesh of [his] flesh (Adam)."

They're united in this process (wedded, husband and wife).

In forming the man, God instituted the first creative act. Ensuing creative acts by humans resulted as a collaboration between Adam and Eve (man and woman). The two creations reveal how God and humans create.

Because the woman was taken from man, "Therefore shall a man [MANifestation] leave his father and his mother [God], and shall cleave unto his wife [Eve, humans' creative impetus and power]: and they shall be one flesh [seamless, an indispensable union in the creative process];" in short, manifestations would now be subject to Adam (red clay) and Eve (the Mother of All), and not directly to the creative process of "his father and his mother," God (Spirit).

Eve (the Mother part of our being that gives birth to All) pushes out, and Adam is that which is pushed out (MANifested).

Knowing their role and their assignments, it's not surprising that Eve ate of the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil first, and then gave it to Adam.

What she tastes, he tastes. What she eats, he eats.

Another role assigned to Adam is that of "Name Giver." Adam decides what things will be called, that is, their nature and attributes, "and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof."
Eve, too, is subject to Adam in this regard, and is not Self-Named.

The fruit is not two fruits, but one fruit. Humans get to eat the fruit (experience it), and call it whatever they choose (Good or Evil).

Every experience in our world, then, becomes the fruit--every human act, every environmental (worldly) act, or occurrence, that we bring to our intellect, and attention, to judge, becomes the fruit.

An act is not inherently good, or bad, but "thinking makes it so." We label it either good or bad.

Adam and Eve in their pristine state, where God (in the first creation, not Lord God of the second) did the judging, and the creating, this knowledge of Good and Evil did not exist, hence judgment didn't exist.

Neutrality prevailed. As the writer you cited observed, "The world after the Fall, outside the Garden, is essentially colorless, neutral, impersonal." Actually, this description best describes the condition of Adam and Eve in the Garden before the Fall, not after.

Neutrality (a non-judgmental state) existed inside the Garden, and was mostly "impersonal", in that Adam and Eve were "naked" and weren't "ashamed".

Once their eyes were opened (after eating the fruit), they could see their nakedness, and could now respond judgmentally to their nakedness, and, hence, concluded that they were "ashamed," shame being a judgmental state.

This judgmental state constitutes a "splitting of the mind," what some mystics have called an altering of the mind, a condition that creates an "altered mind". Don't confuse this with an "altered state of mind." Now a thing could be seen as either sinful, or sinless.

To "regain Paradise," once it's lost--and most humans reside in a "split mind," lost state--requires nothing more than living without judgment, without dividing the world into Good and Evil, Good and Bad, and seeing the world as God sees it.

The God of the First Creation made this observation of the All, after All was created: "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good."

Because "good" may be confused with "the good" identified in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, it might be better, indeed, edifying, if we move into a new understanding, one of "very good," that is, perfection, and dwell there.

Rather than judge (and alter, and split our minds, "Judge not, that ye be not judged."), we should declare perfection all about ("Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.").

Granted, this is not an easy thing to do. We humans are accustom to seeing a divided world, as a result of a divided mind, where a thing is rarely seen as neutral, but on a continuum between Good and Evil, with Good on one side and Evil on the other, with degrees of Good and Evil in between.

The best way to keep the mind "The Same" is to dwell in love. "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." The "secret place" is Love. Fear, or any emotion that has it's foundation in Fear, divides the mind. We're told: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love."

A Way Out of Madness (his and mine)

The book finally arrived! Not a moment too soon.

A Way Out of Madness: Dealing with Your Family After You've Been Diagnosed with a Psychiatric Disorder [Paperback] Daniel Mackler (Author), Matthew Morrissey (Contributor)

I am hoping to be the first to review it. Maybe Chris will take a crack at it, too. It's with him right now.

Frustrated

I was planning to do a longer post on body and soul, but then had my own out-of-body experience in the early hours of this morning that captures my frustrations with the slow pace of the way things are going. I was drifting between sleeping and being awake, thinking about my conversation with Chris last night that left both him and me frustrated. From my perspective, nothing is happening with him, he is going absolutely nowhere, confining himself more and more to the apartment while eating everything in sight. A high school friend who is getting married this summer was in town and Chris didn't feel up to meeting him. Perhaps even more frustratingly, if that is possible, Chris seems to look at paid employment or going back to university as an intellectual exercise, something best thought about but never actually achieved. He is stuck in his own mind.

Under scrutiny, he appears to think that Ian and I somehow need him to be with us, as if we would completely crumple up and die if he wasn't there to support us in our declining years. The situation is becoming once more intolerable. What do we have a headshrinker and an occupational therapist for? The OT has been working with him for a year, and still he is shedding more and more activities.

So, I put it to Chris once again: Chris, maybe you are not so concerned about us as you profess, maybe you are angry with us and this is your best revenge. Do you think you are doing guard duty by hanging around the house to protect me from Ian or Ian from me? I posed the last question, because it is a time-honored tradition to be angry with one or both parents. People who mature beyond the anger move on, people who don't are stuck. Chris mumbled something about maybe he was sticking around to make sure Ian and I don't divorce. As if!

That line of reasoning was getting us nowhere, so we all went to bed. Eventually, after trying out several dreams, I saw my chance to end it all. Like some kind of manic cartoon character (a woodpecker or a buzzard with attitude), I was hovering in the air, getting a bead on a some acreage down below. I started to back up and take a run at it. At first I hesitated, because I thought I knew what was coming, then I thought "what the heck, go for it." As the land came up and tilted towards me, I hit it full on -- and immediately morphed into another dream.

There is never an end. There are only beginnings.

We've got to get ourselves back to the Garden

God was the first schizophrenic. In India every god has a "terrible form" as well as a benevolent one. The Bulgarians say that Satan arose from God's shadow and convinced God to divide the world between the two of them. The Finns say that God asked his reflection in the water how to make the world. Reflections and shadows are schizophrenic images; when they step out of their relation of dependence and seize their own autonomy, a split occurs (in Greek schizein means "to split").

Prior to my reading very much about theories of schizophrenia, I had a crazy intuition that Chris and others like him had been there when our world was created. His sense of the dark forces of the universe while struggling with hallucinations was so profound that I found it incomprehensible that someone so young (19 or so) with so little life experience could be so aware of ancient forces. His struggle seemed Biblical, centering around the creation myth but also the quantum Big Bang. There is a Forrest Gump quality to Chris and others. They were there when it happened. I can't explain it.

The key here is when they step out of their relation of dependence and seize their own autonomy, a split occurs. For most people this is the period of young adulthood.

If the action of "splitting" or the state of "being split" isn't explicitly present in the concepts of God of most primitive peoples, it is virtually present in all their creation myths. Creation is always a "fall" from wholeness, a separation, a dividing. When divinity is pictured as an indivisible totality, the creation of the world becomes a breaking down of this totality......This kind of process, the movement from wholesness to splitting, is a universal one in the act of being human. Erich Neumann sees in it the birth of the ego and the origin of human consciousness

Modern science has labelled the sometimes violent and often frightening process of becoming human, a pathological illness. Is religious preocupation or seeing the world in shadows and light really an illness or is it a journey? Chris became extremely preocupied with the concept of sin, and that he had sinned. Later on, he began to make amends to his childhood friends, whom he felt he had sinned against. I have no idea how this idea entered his head. Childhood sins? When he had his first psychotic break, he was reading Karl Menninger's book, Whatever Became of Sin? Religious preoccupations and androgeneity are just part of the territory of psychosis. Yet, people still persist in calling this a disease of the mind, where others might see it as the disease of the fall from Grace.

In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve live in a proximate, and fluid environment. There is an aspect of wholeness to this life, a naive and direct participation of all forms of life in each other, a synthetic function to all of experience.....The world after the Fall, outside the Garden, is essentially colorless, neutral, impersonal. It has been separated from the person. There is no longer a synthesis....The sense of the unity of the body in the Garden has found expression in the assertion that Adam is androgynous. One rabbinical commentary asserts that Adam "was a man on his right side, a woman on his left; but God split him into two halves."

From The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in twentieth-century literature and culture, by John Vernon, University of Illinois Press, 1973

Celebrity molecules

From today's New York Times

The drugs in his system also included the antidepressants fluoxetine and olanzapine; the tranquilizers diazepam and meprobamate, which are found in Valium and other medications; the cough-suppressant dextromethorphan; and the antihistamine diphenhydramine.

The actor Corey Haim died from pneumonia complicated by an enlarged heart and narrowed blood vessels, while drugs found in his system played no role in his death, the Los Angeles County coroner said Tuesday.

The coroner has made two calls: that he died of pneumonia unrelated to the drugs in his system and that olanzapine, otherwise known as Zyprexa, is an antidepressant.

Celebrity molecules are also making a name for themselves in the visual arts.

Lizzie Burns is a biochemist and artist affiliated with Oxford University who designs jewelry and men’s ties based on the chemical structure of celebrity molecules like testosterone or dopamine. “The designs of chemical structures can have an intrinsic natural beauty and balance,” she said. Not to mention a certain conceptual consistency: there’s caffeine with its three reactive “hands,” as she calls the little methyl groups, waving at you to wake up; the lightning-bolt zigzag of the capsaicin molecule that gives chili its fire; and the bicycle shape of Ritalin, inviting the aimless wanderer to hop aboard and ride.

The Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF)

I urge you to read one psychiatrist's opinion of the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation. Preying on Human Misery points out that the organization has had to distance itself from its reliance on funding from pharmaceutical companies due to the growing public outcry over the use of off-label drugs for children. To me, this organization is right up there with NAMI, with parents willing to label their children as brain diseased rather than to look into their own family dysfunction as a possible recourse.

I met another psychiatrist in the audience who told me about the existence of a website, bpkids.org, which is the homepage of an organization called the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF). He said the organization was primarily funded by the drug companies, and featured messageboards with advice from parents of allegedly bipolar children on what other parents should tell and not tell their doctors in order to get their child labeled with the disorder. The drug companies also used the website to recruit subjects for ongoing clinical trials of drugs for pediatric bipolar disorder, thereby assuring that the subjects in their clinical trials were only those whose parents were anxious to have their child so labeled.

Sound of mind

I sent Chris's sound shaman the New York Times article on hallucinogens. It is very exciting to me that researchers are actively probing the ways in which consciousness can be heightened by chemical means (psilocybin). Though the results so far are encouraging they are also preliminary, and, according to the article researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits. (Rossa's comment: Now, if only they would use their findings for good and not evil!)

Chris's sound shaman is mechanically inducing heightened consciousness through sound manipulation, which is a drugless way of going after the same results. Here is his reply to my e-mail.

Hello Rossa,

Thank you for the interesting link.

The key phrase here is experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear . This exceptional phenomenon is attributed to an ecstatic, spiritual, and out of body sensation, as it spans a vast realm of experience, method, and interpretation. These sensations can be brought upon by the use of external stimulants. In practically all cultures the practice of changing sensory state is achieved through a change in sensory perception functions via the energy exchange occurring between elements through chemical reaction, mechanical vibration, and motive force! Specific drugs, sound, and movement, are the primary interface methods for experiencing this phenomenon known as a changed state of perception.

Wishing you a good evening, and hope to speak with you soon.