Creation Story
Q. Do you accept the Biblical account of creation from the Book of Genesis in the Bible?
A. Sacred texts, whether they be the Christian Bible, Islamic Quran, the Hebrew Torah, Talmud, and Mishna, the Buddhist Tripitaka, the Hindu Vedas, Mahabarata, and Ramayana, or any of the other sacred texts, can impart their wisdom on many different levels, and in many different forms. To discuss and learn from some of the more esoteric interpretations of sacred texts does not preclude the Truths that they may impart through other ways of understanding, nor does it mean that more literal interpretations of sacred text are in error.
Of all of the stories of the Bible, the one story that embodies the deepest, most profound, seminal, spiritual teaching may well be the Creation story from the Book of Genesis with the Garden of Eden and its Tree of Knowledge. To most young people learning this story, it may seem like a fable intended to teach a simple lesson about the consequences of disobedience, but there are elements in the story that don't seem to fit or make immediate sense, such as the Tree of Knowledge and the concept of Original Sin.
The puzzling thing about the Tree of Knowledge is that it is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that before eating from it, Adam and Eve knew nothing of Good or Evil. How could it be possible for anyone to not know about Good and Evil? Could they steal and murder without at least some inkling that it was wrong? Such ideas seem to make little sense.
The key to making some sense out of it all is to consider social organizations. Some animals, such as dogs, wolves, and to an extreme degree, ants and bees are very social and cooperative animals while, by contrast, cats are a very independent and territorial species. When the neighbor's cat walks through the yard, my cat arches its back, hisses, spits, growls, and yowls, and by all appearances, it seems that it would quite cheerfully kill the neighbor's cat if it could find an open door and had the ability (which it fortunately does not.) Had it been able to kill the neighbor's cat, it seems unlikely that it would have shown any more remorse or guilt than it does when it dispatches a bird or a mouse. Most likely it would have felt satisfaction at having defended its territory from a threat, and possibly a concern that there might still be other cats out there. The aggressive instincts that motivate the cat are not evil, they are rather those traits that in other circumstances might allow the cat to hold on to enough territory so that it could hunt a sufficient quantity of food, survive and procreate. Since my cat is not a social animal (in that it doesn't hunt in packs or depend on other cats for its well being) it has no reason to feel any concern for the neighbor's cat, other than to dispatch it as a threat to the food supply.
Let us suppose that over an extremely long period of time, the size of the available mice began to grow such that an individual cat by itself could not successfully hunt them. Let us further suppose that the cats were clever enough to realize that their survival depended on cooperating with the neighbor cat in order to bring down the larger mice and thus feed them both. These clever cats would be faced with something foreign to their inner most nature, the "Code of the Pack," ie: an ethical structure made necessary by a social order. The cat must resist and suppress its inner urge to kill the neighbor cat and steal its food, for in doing so it would lose its hunting partner and thus endanger its own existence. Survival of the cat in these strange new circumstances depends on its ability to put aside some of the urges that it quite naturally feels.
Societies or tribes are built on the notion that the group will be more successful and provide a more secure living condition than any of the individuals could achieve by themselves, and thus it is that by forgoing individual needs and desires and working for the good of the tribe, the individual's needs will be better met than if they were to try to go it alone.
Ethics come into existence when individuals join together in a tribal unit. Before that occurs, they would have no awareness of good or evil, only the desire to take care of themselves, stay alive, and, when the opportunity arose, procreate. Not unlike cats.
One way of looking at and understanding the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is to see it as representative of that time when humans joined together, formed a social structure and ethics came into being. Whether or not eating the fruit of a growing tree brought about the awareness of the efficacy of social structures is a matter for each individual to determine according to how they choose to understand scripture.
There is another aspect of the creation of ethics and good and evil brought on by the formation of a society, and that is that instead of integrating the primal, and sometimes violent instincts with the new social and ethical structure, the individuals end up trying to suppress the instinctual aspects of the psyche that are incompatible with the social order. Thus is born the schism between the conscious (ego) awareness that we all have that mediates between the individual and society, and the subconscious (id or shadow) that still contains those desires, urges and animal instincts that are incompatible with society and its ethical structures. The disconnection of the conscious awareness from these primal individualistic energies which we have dammed up and pushed beneath our consciousness causes them to fester somewhat and to become perceived as dark and evil influences and thus we try all the harder to disconnect from these dark shadow aspects of our own psyches and deny their existence. Unfortunately, disconnecting these dark energies from our conscious awareness does not cause them to dry up and diminish. Neither does it prevent these energies from directly influencing our perceptions and behaviors even though it does prevent us from becoming aware of the powerful influences they exert.
The influence of our shadows on our perceptions causes us to project onto others the darkness that lives in our own hearts. Thus we can clearly perceive the evil in the hearts of our enemies (whether they be persons, groups, or nations) while our enemies can clearly perceive the evil in our own hearts, but neither of us perceives anything but good within ourselves. War is the obvious outcome of such a situation when enemies are too close for comfort.
The influence of our shadows on our actions is such that we occasionally act first, and then figure out a justification to explain the motivations for our actions. Rarely do we second-guess our motivations and justifications. To do so might cause the unpleasant feeling of not being completely in control of ourselves.
Our shadows are given free reign to influence us because we not only don't want to acknowledge them, we also don't want to acknowledge their influence in our perceptions and actions, and thus we all become masters of self-deception.
Unfortunately, whole societies can succumb to the influence of the collective shadow such that the greatest crimes against humanity have always been committed by people following the law, believing in the justifications that they were given for their actions, and acting without any awareness of having committed a crime. We often seek to define sin as those acts that we willfully commit in full awareness of their being wrong, and yet the greatest and most horrendous of our sins are committed without any awareness of having sinned. The thought that it might be possible to sin without conscious awareness of having done so is very uncomfortable, and therefore easily deniable.
Interestingly the word 'sin' derives from a root that simply means, 'to miss the mark.' This is a very refreshing definition because, first of all, it implies that there was a mark that we were aiming for, one that we were trying to hit. Secondly, it leaves us with the impression that we might yet try again and actually hit the mark, and third, it does not contain the guilt laden sense of judgment that has come to be associated with the word "sin" in modern usage.
A question to be answered is, where did we miss the mark when first we came together to form social structures? It seems apparent that our first mistake, our Original Sin, was to try to disown our own shadows rather than cautiously and carefully embracing and integrating the primal desires with our conscious awareness. At first one might fear that integrating the shadow aspect of our psyches would turn us into people who are out of control and somehow strongly influenced by evil, but in truth, we are already out of control and simply unwilling to face the fact. Integrating the energies of the shadow into the dynamism of our conscious awareness would enable us to mediate the urges of our primal desires with the world around us in a way that would empower us with the energies that are now bottled up. A conscious awareness of these energies would enable us to channel the energies in ways that promoted psychic health and prevented subconscious energies from causing us to miss the mark.
What, then is to be said then of Adam and Eve? Are they simply representations of early humans forming a society?
Those for whom a strict literal interpretation of the teachings in the Bible is an article of faith might take comfort that there is a body of evidence that suggests that Adam and Eve may have been very real humans from whom we all sprang, but to appreciate this body of evidence, please consider that there may be a more literal understanding of what is being said in the first two chapters of Genesis than the way these chapters are usually understood. In chapter one, God creates the heavens and the earth, and among other things, he creates people, male and female. In chapter two, God creates Adam and Eve. Now it has always been assumed that the creation of people in chapter one is a reference to the creation of Adam and Eve in chapter two. Let's consider the possibility that it is not a reference to chapter two, but rather to a group of hominids that God created prior to Adam and Eve. Such an assumption would be consistent with the fact that after killing Abel, Cain feared retribution from others.
Surprisingly, modern science has come forth to offer evidence of the existence of those ancestors whom we call Adam and Eve. Within our individual cells there is a nucleus, which contains our DNA, our genetic code. This nuclear DNA is created by the joining of sperm and egg, and thus contains genetic content from both the mother and the father. Also within our cells are little organisms called mitochondria. They are like tiny power plants that manufacture adenosine tri-phosphate, the cell's food. Mitochondria have their own genetic structure and their own DNA. What's more, the mitochondrial DNA, unlike the nuclear DNA is passed on only from the mother and thus remains relatively unchanged as compared to the nuclear DNA.
Through studying the mitochondrial DNA, scientists have turned up evidence suggesting that we are, all of us, no matter where our origin, or what color our skin may be, descended from one common female ancestor who scientists are now calling Mitochondrial Eve.
How is it possible that the offspring from a single woman could have taken over and shut out all other hominids? Perhaps she was able to form a highly cohesive, well-integrated and united social structure / tribal unit against which the other comparatively disorganized hominids simply couldn't compete.
Why the suggestion that this story is the seminal, and most profound teaching in the Bible? Let's consider the probable sociological intent of the Biblical teachings. That is to say, what does God want to see happen in our societies as a result of following the teachings and listening to the prophets? Or put another way, if everyone perfectly followed their religious teachings, loving their neighbors and their enemies, taking care of the poor and those in need, living lives of selfless service, then what would the world be like? Well, obviously it would, in short order, become a Paradise. So why isn't the world a Paradise? The easy answer would be to say that the fault lies in all those other groups, religions, cultures, and attitudes. Of course the easy answer is not the truthful answer. The truthful answer is that we all miss the mark that we think we are aiming for, usually without even realizing or admitting to ourselves that our shot went way wide. It is, of course, our disconnection from our primal shadow that causes us to miss the mark so consistently when, all the while, we think that we are right on target.
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