“The original sin is to limit the Is. Don’t.”
~ Richard Bach
Everyone's heard the Adam & Eve story. They've heard it so many times that they've forgotten what it's about.
But if you stop to think about it, inconsistencies seem to appear.
Take how God tells them not to eat the fruit, “or you will surely die.” But then they eat the fruit, and aside from some paranoia about their nakedness, they’re basically fine.
Public intellectuals who have analyzed the bible either gloss over this whole story or start with Cain and Abel.
Big mistake. You need to establish whether God is trustworthy because if he’s not, then you might as well throw out the rest of the book. But if you give Him the benefit of the doubt, then you realize we’ve been lied to since the beginning.
Here's what I mean:
The Standard Story (More or Less)
God made Adam and put him in His garden. Then, God made Eve out of Adam’s rib.
God tells them they can eat any fruit except the fruits from the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or “they will surely die.”
Then the most deceptive of God’s creatures, the serpent, talks Eve into eating the apple, and she gives some to Adam, and then the two make coverings out of fig leaves to hide their privates.
God comes walking through the garden, and the first couple hides from him in the bushes.
When asked what they were doing, Adam explained that he didn't want God to see him naked.
God goes, "Wait, who told you you were naked? Have you been eating the fruit I told you not to eat?"
Adam blames Eve and God, who, after all, put her there with him.
God then appears to curse everyone, making the snake humanity's enemy, forcing the woman to suffer in childbirth, and condemning man to toil for his food.
To prevent the couple from eating the other fruit and becoming just like God, he banishes them from the garden and puts a cherubim with a flaming sword at its entrance.
Now, what exactly is all this about?
It helps to start from the premise that God never lies.
If you take this as given, the rest gets easier to puzzle.
In the age of reason and science we currently inhabit, knowledge is taken as an intrinsic good without any questioning.
What doesn't get asked about gaining knowledge is, "What did we lose?"
Every medicine has its side effects, and the price for this one is actually quite high.
Animals don't have knowledge, yet they know exactly what to do in their environment at any given moment.
They know what to eat to quell hunger or cure ailments. They know when to sleep, where to seek shelter, and how to care for their young. Everything they need to know, they draw from nature.
Animals are 100% spontaneous and effortless. Can you say the same for your life?
Humans need experts to tell us when to sleep, what to eat, how much to move, how to raise kids, how to feel happy, and so on.
And here’s the kicker: much of it isn’t true!
It’s just other people making stuff up, so you keep giving them your money and energy so neither of you feels lonely.
And the stuff that is true, you already know!
Ask yourself, meditate on it, and an answer will come. Test that answer with a little action, and you can figure out relatively quickly whether it’s right. Adjust accordingly.
So maybe, instead of seeking, searching, and studying, you should treat all this as entertainment, as a gentle reminder told in an interesting way.
How does this relate to the first story–and oldest trick–in the book? Start here:
Many esoteric schools hold that what we take to be reality is an illusion.
That’s not to say all reality is fake, although some do believe this. Perhaps it’s better to think that it is not all that’s real.
Our senses only give us a narrow band of what actually is: We cannot see infrared or hear microwaves, we can’t smell what dogs can pick up, nor can we hear what cats can hear, and we cannot perceive the cell signals that are currently confusing the bees to death.
And this is just what animals and machines can detect. Perhaps there are frequencies, even beings, outside the band of what is perceivable.
Some schools hold that we are all inside the mind of God. Others hold that the universe is just a play being put on by the infinite for the amusement of itself. Some Jewish rabbis even hold that we are God attempting to experience the infinite by limiting Himself.
Confused? Think of it this way:
If infinity exists outside time, then this entire universe is like a donut, cake, or video game on a CD.
You can’t really know what it’s like from the outside because everything runs together. The way to enjoy it, or to learn what it has to teach, is to take it one slice, one bite, one level at a time.
And if you’re all-knowing, you also have to convince yourself that the game is real and the food isn’t just a collection of parts from plants, animals, and, ultimately, dirt. You have to pretend there is matter and that it matters. Pretend the illusion is all there is.
But! How do you do this if you are God? How can you “trick yourself” into full immersion in a game that you made?
I once had a job testing video games. I thought it would be really fun to be paid to play all day. It turned out to be a pretty tedious task.
We weren’t really playing, just testing the game for bugs and errors. So we were all given “God Mode” and made to do things no player who is actually trying to win would do: run into enemies to see if we’d clip through them, seek spots in the environment the code hadn’t rendered as solid (causing our characters to fall forever out of the game’s “reality”), or check to make sure sprites and textures were accurately rendered.
We had maps to tell us where everything would be, special stats to ensure we could walk on any terrain, including water, cheat codes to overcome any challenge, and infinite wealth to buy any item.
We weren’t the game’s creator, but we weren’t its players either. We performed the functions of angels: keeping the game’s elements in line and reporting any faults that needed fixing.
Testing games wasn’t fun. It was toil.
So, how do you make it fun? How do you enjoy it as intended?
A lot of the testers did what Adam and Eve basically did: they started showing up to work inebriated.
A little pot behind the dumpsters during their breaks… a LOT of alcohol the night before… whatever it took to make the drudgery of running through walls and walking on water seem like a challenge.
The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil didn’t make Adam and Eve know more. It made them forget the fiction wasn’t fake.
They went from being fleshy angels, beings whose job it was to categorize animals and tend to flora, to humans.
They forgot their privileges. They turned off God Mode. They gained free will: the ability to believe whatever you want, including what isn’t real.
So far, so good, but why go through the whole charade? Why the fruit and the snake and the injunction not to eat? To make the illusion more convincing.
Think of the Garden as a gaming lobby, a small loading zone, before going into the real game.
Before that? Void. A state of existing and non-existing at once (no time, remember? All is one, infinite potential, looking at the donut from the outside, etc.)
To leave the lobby and start a conventional video game, players open a menu and select “Start.” Sometimes, you go and talk to a certain NPC or pick up an item.
That’s what the snake and apple are for.
Then, a cinematic plays, and the game begins.
What would happen if there was none of this, and Adam and Even tried to remember what happened before they ended up in “the real world”?
Oh, that’s right, we were fleshy angels who ate the forgetting apple that landed us here. And before that, we were God making a vessel out of clay and pouring Himself into it.
But if you add the whole story with the snake, you get…
We were chilling in the Garden, but then “The Enemy” convinced “The Companion Who Doesn’t Always Act In My Best Interest” to give me “The Fruit That Made Us Ashamed”.
Now, there’s enough fabric there that you can’t really see behind the veil, and don’t think too much about what was before the opening cinematic. You can play the game 100% convinced that you are the character and not a player with the power to stop at any time or make the game whatever you want.
What is Original Sin?
First, the Western conception of Sin is to “Miss the Mark.”
What does it mean to miss the mark on reality? It is to conceive of it as other than what it is.
It is to mistake illusion, aka a small piece of reality, for all of reality.
The original “missing the mark” is the eating of the fruit, sometimes described as “falling” because you “fall into” the belief that existence isn’t connected to everything above it.
So, if God doesn’t lie, why did he say those who ate the fruit would “surely die?” Because it’s true.
How can God, the eternal, infinity, etc., be death? How can the universe outside this world that also encompasses it be dead?
If the “real” reality doesn’t end, it’s always living.
You know how we say, “Nothing lives forever,” “everything dies,” and “nothing lasts forever?”
This is all true. Because “thing” is what we term all that we can sense.
Eating the fruit, you “die into” this realm of “things.” You become a thing that ends, the ending of which is called “death.” Thus, eating the fruit, you will surely die.
So the real story is something like this…
In order to create, God took a piece of Himself, called it Adam, and put him in the garden. Then God took a piece of Adam and put her next to him as a companion, making sure to put Adam to sleep first so he wouldn’t later remember how she was made.
Because Adam and Eve knew they were really just pieces of God, they couldn’t fully experience the illusion. They always felt like they were just God, wearing masks.
So God came to Eve wearing a serpent’s mask and told her lies because that’s the role of the serpent, and Eve ate the fruit of knowledge, aka the fruit that limits your intuition and convinces you that appearances are all that’s real. This allows you to believe whatever you want, including what you know deep down to be false.
If “Limiting the Is is the original sin,” then Adam and Eve became convinced that the Is only contains what can be detected by their senses.
They covered up the conduits of creation on their bodies with fig leaves because it scared them to think about what exists outside the realm of their senses. It contradicted what they wanted to believe.
Then God went walking in the Garden, and they hid because God’s presence would expose the falsehood of their conception of reality, and that is even more terrifying than what’s behind the fig leaves.
“Why are you hiding?” God asked, pretending He didn’t already know.
“I’m naked,” Adam said because no material covering can hide the fact that Adam doesn’t exist from himself. Not when he’s gazing at his source.
“How do you know that you’re naked? Have you eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge?” God asked as if He didn’t already know. Because this was a test to see if the whole ritual actually worked. And when Adam responded with the innocent ignorance of a child, blaming a part of himself as if she were a separate entity, God felt the complete range of emotions from delight and sorrow for what they/He will experience.
Then God told them what would happen once they entered “the real world.”
How the snake would crawl on its belly and be the enemy of woman, snapping at her ankles while she tried to stomp on his head.
How the woman would have to suffer in childbirth, and how the man would have to toil with dirt to make sustenance until the end of his days.
Of course, God left out the part about what happened after the end of their days, how they were still Him and would become Him once they were done. That would spoil the illusion.
And then God sent them outside the garden, but not before adding the part about how Adam and Eve must never eat from the Tree of Life (leaving out that doing so would cause them to cease to be Adam and Eve and become God again).