There’s a fascinating set of devices in our stories about
the biblical ‘Garden of Eden’, and the purported
adventure between two of our progenitors, and a ‘snake’.
Essentially, this is something akin to a long Hebrew Koan —
it is a riddle that is meant to provide the transport to its
solution. I believe it was written and intended not as a story
of crime and punishment, but as one of impossible potential
— the potential to resolve the accidents and circumstances
it portrays.
So I am suggesting that these stories contain and conserve
a very (vastly) complex set of self-expanding toys — whose
nature it is to repair and revise the results of problems in
our own rise to complex sentience.
But let’s have a look at the story as we modernly interpret
it...
To hear it told, the snake offered us some sort of a ‘toy’,
that would grant us new skills and cognitive abilities. What
might such a ‘thing’ have been? It could have been
nothing more than a new perceptual vector, one that actively
optioned the potentials for separation
into a self-referencing set of cognitive momentums that could
then be applied in ‘comparative’ ways of knowing,
or cognitive-sensory integration. Perhaps, it was merely the
accrual of ‘self-referencing’, which mechanically
requires a perspective of reflection
so that, first and foremost, the idea of self can accrue at
all.
Could it merely have been the conscious experience of
separation? Whatever it was, it was certainly a cause for a
deep and abiding anxiety. And more, it ‘split’ us
bicamerally, into a domain where we worship, think, make language,
and act from a place of ‘separation first’, whereas
before, we not only did not have this option, but were bound
to its functional and experiential opposite: unity only.
We can be certain that events like this took place in many locations
and moments, and they are still taking place today. So there
is certainly more than a single Garden, even metaphorically.
There was, perhaps, a single most significant Garden, however.
These events and stories had many diverse characters, but they
also obeyed and exposed in their unfolding an amazing and general
template that, to this day, remains largely unexplored, and
badly mismetaphied. In fact, such events have never stopped
occurring. They are recapitulated in our own genesis and birth,
and in our ascensions, in and beyond childhood, on the ladder
of complex sentience our languages
and ways of knowing oblige us to, and prescribe.
But if we look back into our evolutionary history, and if we
look at that of the planet, and our interactions and metaphors
regarding it, we can see very clearly what is, has been, and
was happening in this story. Our seeing may not be precise,
but it the generality of its truth exceeds any value greater
precision might offer, and therein lies a logical ‘trick’
which smart toys will remember, and return to the fountain of
often.
What we can see is that there is a single incredible fact on
our planet, that we’ve largely ignored. The fact is that
only one species is symbolically cognitive in the way that results
in frozen languages and machines. I do not believe we were given
language by the snake. I believe we were, instead, offered an
experience which allowed us to perceive the scales of sentient
endeavor within (down the scale) and ‘above’ (up
the scale) from our common experience. And we were given something
even more amazing, and this is the gift of the gods:
the ability to intentionally reference ourselves, and
thus, the scales within, ‘above’ and around us with
and from which we emerge.
What ‘actually happened’, is most likely something
like this: in a single event, or a linked series, or a distributed
set of linked events — human beings gained access to new
‘scales’ of biocognitive perspective akin to the
‘adding of dimensions’ in the ladder of geometry.
This was similar to suddenly developing cognitive organs
for ‘self’, ‘other’, ‘past’,
‘value’, ‘compare’, and ‘future’
— as well as metaphors for ‘scales of beings’.
But the event was penetrative and frightening, and most likely
often resulted in more of a crisis than any kind of obvious
ascension.
We had finally evolved to a degree of complexity where, literally,
a ‘certain type of injury’, could result in a ‘new
way of knowing’ — not just for our species, but
for our planet. But we were also cognitive infants, much as
we remain today. We were ‘not quite ready’ for this
sudden interpenetration.
It matters little if we take a modern person, and subject
them to something similar. The outcome is shock. This story
is one of ‘being struck by lightning’. Because,
in the many domains and scales of sentience, there are characters.
Each of these many ‘faces’ is, perhaps, a single
face. But it is not alike with this at all when encountered,
especially for the first time. If we were to ‘make a movie’
of what happened, i.e., to tell a very specific story, we’d
see that Adam and Eve ‘traveled’ inwardly. They
‘met characters’ who ‘taught them ways of
seeing-knowledge’. Some of those characters are essentially
‘judgmental’, and offer systems of ‘comparison’
by which, through an essentially emoto-poetic ‘song of
gestures’, relation-activity or values may be accrued
in cognitive experience. This is a game-dance, more than it
is a science, in every respect.
Let’s take a more specific example: Adam and Eve
meet a ‘(something)’, which teaches relational choosing
skills according to a variety of potential
moral and sensory systems. Since they don’t have formalized
language, as we do, (and even if they did), the ‘teaching’
occurs by being shown ‘films’ of a psychopoetic,
and thus emotional nature. This might be likened to being rapidly
led through sets of ‘dream scenes’. The films are
‘stories’, but they are also ‘dictionaries’,
or ‘lexical sets’. This happens very quickly, and
it happens in something like ‘the first person’.
Amazing amounts of information can be communicated in this fashion
almost instantly.
The problem that instantly emerges, is one of interpretation.
We all know how difficult it can be to interpret dreams, but
how can we even model such interpretations without formalized
language? In some ways, it is impossible to even sequentially
‘record’ such events; what we get, instead, is something
like a ‘secret pill’, or a ‘star’, burning
brightly but unnoticed in the inward gardens of our post-experience,
psybiocognitive persons. When being taught a ‘lexicon’
of relations in a dreamLike way, one is taught in the ‘first
person’ so to speak, yet our progenitors were most likely
not yet experienced in this seemingly elemental (to us)
relation.
Adam and Eve, even if their story is merely allegory, which
I don’t believe it entirely to be, went on a cognitive
rocket-ride. And personally, I believe the motives of the snake
were quite in line with what its purpose was, which was the
purpose of assembling things.
So, we have, in theory anyway, two people being shown a rapid
set of ‘pages’ from something like a ‘burning
book’, which imprints ‘new domains of bags’
in the unified bag of our progenitors’ cognitive persons.
It burns, cognitively, to touch it. It seems to be operating
at ‘different speeds’, and different scales, from
their normal experience. A moment of touching it is like touching
sentient lightning.
Probably, it made us sick, possibly fatally sick, and there
were probably those who, before the first survivors, had ‘tasted
the fruit of the tree of knowledge’ and succumbed to their
‘cognitive injuries’ accrued in the often cataclysmic
encounter with what we might, today, call sentient hyperstructures,
or, the ‘natures, characters and ‘beings’’
in the domain of god(s) which descend from the ‘one god’.
There’s a joke that was told to me by a playful sentience
about a Tree in the garden with thousands of dead monkeys at
its base. They died from touching a stick. Yep. Just a regular
stick. Then one of them carried it away and became a sort of
extraterrestrial radio. That’s where we got kings and
queens. It’s probably the root metaphor-story for the
Sword in the Stone, as well.
The problem is serious. Our progenitors were not skilled
in the intellectual simulations and comparisons our barely enlanguaged
children manage effortlessly. And it’s magnified, specifically,
if a childlike person is being shown any element of a moralistic
relation, because in order to ‘understand’ the ‘new
lexical relation’, the experiencer will likely be offered
emotionally charged simulations — they may, for example,
be placed first in the position of perpetrator (in our ‘dream-frame’
simulation, for example), and then in the position of victim.
Even given a single experience of this nature, our experiencer
will return to reality quite confused about what was actually
being communicated. They are not aware that the demonstrations
are ‘lexical’ in nature, and will most likely take
them literally, which would, in point of fact, fill one with
nearly mind-shattering terror under many likely circumstances.
For example: I was the perpetrator, and I was the victim, ergo:
I am perpetrator and victim....().
Adam and Eve, whatever their real persons or natures, may well
have been largely or completely pre-lingual, at least in the
ways we’d understand linguism We can see the problem of
interpretation easily, by modeling responses to a lexical page
where a perceiver is being shown an elemental moral relation
regarding, for example, attacking another animal out of anger.
A childlike mind (which we all possess at the core of any mind
we lay claim to) might wander through interpretation-models
such as these: ‘I do this bad thing which hurts’ (me personally, temporal
now), ‘This bad thing is being done to me’, ‘Don’t
do this bad thing’, ‘Do this bad thing only in secret’.
‘I am this bad thing being done’. ‘Because
of this thing I am bad’. But these interpretations can
distort in ways that are clearly erroneous. A ‘parent’
trying to teach Adam in this example, is attempting to say ‘you
and what you strike out at are one body’. But Adam, confused,
pre-lingual, childlike, and afraid this ‘new parent’
will ‘go away’, mismodels and parses any real experiences
very emotionally from a separated or ‘veryLocal‘
perspective.
The ‘lexical page’ could have been little more than,
in our example, a dreamlike emotional tracework of the creature’s
own actions — Adam’s moments of rage when
he attacked plants or animals (in our storyworld-theory) throughout
his life. Being shown not merely ‘images’, but actual
scenes of himself from an external perspective, (an inwardly
self-referencing movie), and experiencing them as emotionally
and sign-relationally profound, Adam might emerge with a new
lexical page, but he will also very likely, especially in a
terrain without trusted and heartful adults, to emerge with
shame. He may ‘over-react’ to the potential
for perspectives in which he alone is responsible for the harm
or ‘badness’ in the ‘dream-images that sing’.
Most likely answer: None of the above. It was a page
in a psychoemotional lexicon, when you read it once, it is ‘imprinted’
in you, and thenceforth accessible as inner terrain, and communicable
to others, once you’re properly equipped to accomplish
signaling and acknowledgement dances of this degree of complexity.
It was not meant to refer to your person, place, or people.
It wasn’t ‘pointing at you’ at all, it was
instead ‘being imprinted’, in a very real sense.
The ‘Garden Scene’, with the Serpent, is one repeated
many times in the history of many creatures, by all likely standards
and observations. Understanding why the event and events of
this nature are dangerous is not terribly difficult, and again
not unsimilar in some useful regards to the penetration of an
egg by a sperm cell. The first thing we can see is that, essentially
this penetration ‘forms a new bag’ within ‘bag
which has been penetrated’. Cognition and biology are
not really separate momentums, and when the cognitive ‘person’
is thus penetrated, there is a kind of shock. Especially if
the person is unprepared cognitively or biologically for the
attendant challenges and scalar waves of outcome-change. Simply
stated, an experience like this can be and feel somewhat like
being struck by lightning, in a cognitive sense.
Having had such an experience as an ‘adult’ myself,
I can say that, even with the complexly adaptive systems of
attentive and skillful avoidance available to me, there are
whole domains of incredibly well-obscured traps which are everywhere
present in such experiences, and almost all of them lie in the
domain of interpretation. The ‘person’ having this
experience, will, in general, fail on many occasions to comprehend
the context adequately,
especially in the first few encounters with it (granting they
survive them, which isn’t guaranteed).
This tends to result in the formation of auto-accusatory
characters in the person. We can see how this might be forthcoming,
when we realize the ways we used to attempt and fail to understand
adult motivations or codes of ethics or behavior when we were
very young. We can also see how this is easily emergent from
misinterpretations of our ‘lexicon-learning’ moments
— which, instead of seeing as ‘pages in a book of
ways of seeing and knowing’, we may misinterpret as literally
relating to our persons, positions, or actions — especially
when we are as persons or even societies lacking any overt external
guidance. This ‘freezing in the headlights’ of a
principle, a form of cognitive crystallization, is extremely
common in our everyday activities of knowing, communicating,
and assembling our activities realities.
What was the tree, the apple, the snake?
And here we may begin to ask questions about language, and about
the forms of sentience seemingly peculiar to the human being.
When we do this, and when we follow not experts, but our own
human experience with the tenacity of a young sherlock holmes,
we find some glaring incongruities which emerge from the processes
and obligations of our personal and cultural ensocialization
and enlanguaging.
Both of these largely domineering momentums option our own cognitive
complexity and diversity against us, generally punishing us
for the emergence of any domain of skill or character which
cannot be immediately co-opted against us. And we find something
else. We find clear evidence of extra-systemic contact. Whether
the source is alien, purely cognitive, physical, a god or gods
is for the moment immaterial. What we must be willing to clearly
admit is that there is a momentum, or set of momentums, we’ve
not explored correctly in our modern understandings, even in
those of our wisest scholars. The evidence is in what we
are doing. If we understood any of what our academics and pundits
are producing, we would act differently and also have very different experiences of living.
We’re not. We’re getting, instead, something a lot
more like a drug.
What we find, reaching back into our personal history as well
as our species’ histories, is that the sources of language
and the sources of religion are more than related. Furthermore,
what we modernly refer to as religion, is not at all like what
our progenitors, human and non, experienced. Simply stated,
our experience is vastly more linguistic than theirs could have
possibly been, and because of this, our experience actually
serves to separate us from the topic(s) explored or spoken of.
