Our new story comes from an old one found in the pages of the Bible. Why the Bible? because in its pages there are many stories that resonate with people. Stories that provide meaning to individuals who are in search of meaning. Portions of the Bible are often adapted by others, transformed, and represented in new mediums such as books, cartoons and video in which they have a new vibrance that is not necessarily captured in the actual biblical text. In fact, some may prefer these adaptations over the original written word. Some of the reasons for that may be personal preference or that the dated language of popular authorized translations are difficult for some to comprehend. What can not be doubted is the value attributed to this book.
Some believe that the Bible is only valuable in the context of the religious traditions that regard it as sacred text. Stories compiled by nomadic tribes and imposed upon successive generations. Adherents’ to these religious traditions firm belief in God and the authority of the Bible as God’s word predisposes them to view the Bible in a more favorable light then contemporary literature. While there is an undeniable social pressure to adopt the Bible as the inerrant word of God particularly in societies where those who promulgated the religious tradition are influential or in the ruling class, there is also a draw to the Bible as mystical text.
Some people are convinced that the Bible conceals meanings deeper than what can be read on the surface of its pages. A more valuable story, if you will, a hidden code in its texts concealing messages that if revealed would provide life-changing information to those diligent enough to seek it. Such seekers are typically on fringes of society either revered as mystics or ridiculed as fanatics. Among their ranks, however, are many individuals who were and are still held in high regard for their intellect. Most noted among such seekers is the renown scientist Sir Isaac Newton.
Sir. Isaac Newton, considered by many as the greatest genius and most influential scientist to ever live, devoted time to seeks such hidden messages in the Biblical text. He studied and wrote about biblical messages in his private notebooks. His personal bible, now in the collection of the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, has numerous handwritten marginal notes and reader's marks pointing to passages of personal interest to him.
In contemporary times, intellectual and psychologist Jordon B. Peterson, Phd. lectures on the psychological significance of the Bible. Rather than seeking out a hidden code Professor Peterson focuses on embedded meaning. There is something in the nature of these stories he says that a segment of humanity finds valuable even if they don’t fully understand why. This is one of the reasons why Professor Peterson believes the Bible as a contradictory and cobbled together document is worth exploring.
Beside its impact the structure of the Bible is also noteworthy. Sixty-six books written over the span of many years and included in a compilation viewed as a single. There is cross-referencing within the texts of the Bible beautifully visualized in a project by Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild. Through the use of computer generated graphics they illustrate 63,779 cross references found in the Bible through arches that connect each reference. Through the intersection of the arches a rainbow pattern emerges. The arch that encloses them all is the arch of our new story that we will review for embedded meaning. The story of the Tree of Life.
The arch representing the Tree of Life begins in the opening chapters of the Bible. “In the beginning….” The story told in the book of Genesis presents a creation narrative in which it only takes six days to create the world. In this world a paradise was created. The perfect environment for human flourishing. This environment is described as providing all the essentials for life. This paradise was called Eden, which means pleasure, and east of pleasure was the garden.
Adam, whose name means man, lived in the garden in the east side of pleasure and had access to all that pleasure had to offer. Man for the most part had no restrictions with the exception of one notable one. “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” It is noteworthy here to mention that no other trees are specifically identified in this story other than the Tree of Life, therefore, man had no inhibitions, lived in pleasure, had access to the Tree of Life but was denied knowledge of good and evil.
As the story progresses man or humanity was alone in pleasure, which was something thought not to be good, so a help meet was provided for humanity called Eve, which means life or living. Humanity enjoyed life in pleasure, however, life demanded more. Life desired knowledge and persuaded by a serpent, a revered symbol in many ancient cultures for fertility and rebirth, ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and as a result life experienced a rebirth and quickly introduced the same knowledge to humanity.
This story is known as the fall of man and the introduction of sin, but what is revealed in this reframing is the emergence of consciousness. Humanity lived a life in pleasure, a desired state of being that could have been sustained indefinitely, however, living life required more. Life yearned for knowledge, but in knowing comes a loss of innocence. Ignorance is bliss as the saying goes and the original state of pleasure was in fact one ignorant of the unpleasantness of evil. With the introduction of knowledge humanity was immediately burdened with shame. In this sense knowledge of good and evil is simply awareness. Awareness that your actions can produce positive or negative results. Humanity, previously unbothered by the condition of pleasure, hid itself in shame which is a product of self-reflection and self-awareness.
Self-awareness is often characterized as consciousness. What consciousness is and how it came to be remains one of the hard problems scientists are attempting to solve. There are new intriguing ideas about how consciousness works. Consciousness, theorizes Neuroscientist Dr. Antonio Damasio, is a state of mind consisting of three neural processes: wakefulness, mind, and self. Wakefulness is what you acquire when you wake up in the morning and relinquish when you go to sleep, mind is the representation of objects and events, present inside and outside of your body, and self is the organization of those images as a function of homeostatic needs of the body. Homeostatic referring to the process of homeostasis in which the body regulates the needs of its constituent parts.
Dr. Damasio explains that the brain maps the world around us in neural maps. These neural maps are representations of our experiences. Objects, visuals, sounds, and feel, take on the form of images representing both the world outside of our bodies and its internal workings. These maps and their images of both our present and past create a set of representations that is the mind. The concept of a dog, for example, is a composite of many images. There is a mental image for a dog’s sound, image for its smell, its shape, its feel, all of the attributes that causes the brain to connect the objects to what we understand a dog to be. Similarly there are changes going on inside our bodies for which our minds also create images. These images are mapped as representations of body states and are known as feelings.
Understanding or providing meaning to these images is the function of the self. Self organizes the images as a function of homeostatic needs of the body. Homeostasis is a state of balance maintained by all living organisms that allows them to optimally function. Each component part of the body works towards homeostasis. Trillions of cells, single organisms in their own right with their own genome, lifecycle, and risk of disease and death have as their imperative the regulation of their life processes so that life can persist, flourish and project itself into the future. Failure to do so ultimately results in death. The human impulse to live is driven by this same biological underpinning. The human body is a complex organism focused on one task — living.
Dr. Damansio suggest that consciousness evolved to better regulate body function. To move human beings from simply surviving to being seekers of wellbeing. The awareness of the body’s internal conditions and the condition of its environment allows the self to actively respond using past experience as a guide post. Past experience essentially being knowledge of good and evil. This capacity appears to be unique to humanity. With this ability scientists believe consciousness emerged. I doubt it emerged as quickly as the creation story suggest with the eating of a fruit, although there are some thinkers who believe that this just might be the case. They believe that the ingesting of some psychedelic food resulted in a change in the chemistry of the mind resulting in consciousness.
Author and researcher Julian Jaynes, puts forth a different hypothesis for how consciousness emerged in his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Break-down of the Bicameral Mind” published in 1976. Dr. Jaynes believes written history and literature, like the Old Testament and the greek epic the Iliad, are evidence of a time when consciousness did not exist. In those writings he points out a lack of consciousness or mental acts. The characters lacked introspection. Their actions were directed by a god not by conscious plans, reasons, and motives. He theorizes that humans of this period had no internal mental language and to use the language of Dr. Damasio could not therefore form a concept of self.
The concept is hard to grasp but Dr. Jayne provides a present day example of non-conscious activity, driving a car. Think about that activity and what engages your mind as you drive. Are you actively directing yourself, your hands, your feet, your head? No your not. If you are an experienced driver, on a familiar route, you are probably consciously engaged in another activity. He hypothesizes that this autopilot state was the human being’s predominant state of being until a brand new situation occurs. In a novel situation our consciousness and attention would shift to quickly provide a solution, the bicarmel man, as Jayne called him, would wait to be directed by a voice in his head.
What Jayne argues is going on in the bicarmel brain is that the right hemisphere “spoke” and the left hemisphere listened and obeyed. The hallucination was interpreted by the hearer as the voice of a god. Similar to the condition of a schizophrenic, the person would then receive direction and guidance from his thoughts that they would perceive as an audible voice. Dr. Jaynes suggested that this voice of god spoke and provided guidance in novel situations. The voice disappeared according to Jayne because of the stresses cause by natural disasters, migration and conquest and in its absence consciousness appeared.
The common theme in any of the theories of the emergence of consciousness is the center role of awareness. This knowledge of oneself as an actor in the world whose decisions have weight ties in to the change humanity experiences in eating the fruit and obtaining knowledge of good and evil. With knowledge humanity became responsible for its actions as well as the negative feelings and experiences that resulted from them. Knowledge of evil becomes the root of suffering. The thing that separates humanity from the pleasure they once knew and at its center is the concept of self.
Returning to the diagram created by Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild, if you trace the main arch in the story of the Tree of Life from the beginning in Genesis you come to the end of the Bible in Revelation. In the last chapter of the last book of the Bible the Tree of Life reappears. In fact, except for a few similes in the book of Proverbs, this reference is the only other reference to the Tree of Life in the Bible. The tree appears in the bookends of the biblical story as a central feature of pleasure and the earth made new. It symbols what was lost when awareness of evil emerged and what is regained when pleasure accessed again.
In the pages in between the bookends are practical instructions, as well as cautionary tales, to guide readers in their personal quest to regained pleasure. A story that begins with lost of pleasure with the emergence of self-interest marked with the denial of access to the Tree of Life and ends with redemption through self-denial and regaining access to the Tree of Life. The Bible suggest how to development a state of mind that accompanied that innocence. It is about dying to self and resurrecting in newness of life, a process this book argues is metaphoric. The Bible is more than overt about the need for this transformation, but as a practical method for self development it seems to have gotten lost in the doctrine and dogma of organized religion. This book uses the metaphor of the growing a Tree of Life to provide a practical method for cultivating a mindset suited for pleasure. Access it the kingdom of god as Jesus calls it is what is promised. As John the Revelator writes “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”
Comments
Post a Comment