Episode Transcript
[00:00:28] Welcome to the mushrooms, apprentice. Well, I have a treat for you today. When I was doing research on trees and their symbolism for my book, Poetic whispers from the cauldron of the other world, I stumbled on an incredible essay called the Tree of Knowledge. And this was written by philosopher, esotericist, and writer Alvin Boyd Kuhnenhe. And he authored over 150 books, essays, and published papers on the subjects of religion and spirituality, beginning with his Columbia University thesis in 1927 on theosophy. Well, Kuhn wrote extensively on the Bible and the symbolism it contains, arguing that the Bible wasn't based on actual facts, but rather it is a sacred book of universal truths expressed in the allegory. I'm not saying here that Kuhn's statement that the Bible is actually not based on facts is the case.
[00:01:27] What I appreciate about Kuhn is his depth of symbolic understanding. And with so many interpretations of the Bible out there and so many different christian denominations out there, some of them being rather harsh and not very favorable to women, particularly the longstanding interpretation of the Adam and Eve story, well, imagine my delight when I stumbled on Kuhn's essay on the Tree of Knowledge from the Book of Genesis. His thoughtful and insightful breakdown of this is like nothing I have ever heard. So I long ago realized that ancient texts are encoded in that they're written symbolically. Truths are told as parables or stories that are expressed allegorically. So you always have the uninitiated who take the text literally on its surface, and they miss the mark entirely, because if you only have the surface story, you're missing critical information that is found by going deeper into the meaning of the text.
[00:02:32] Those who can read between the lines can cognize the deeper meaning and receive the wisdom. Kuhn takes every opportunity here to rant on the terrible job by those charged with interpreting the deeper universal truths in the Bible, thereby depriving the masses of people from accessing those truths. Well, in this essay, Kunis really opened up for me a whole new understanding of the story of the tree of knowledge. His explanation of the tree itself really spoke to me, because I have said for years that to me, the tree is proof of reincarnation, because I see the tree as symbolizing the soul. And the leaves are like the spirit that takes human form. So the leaves are birthed in the spring, and they die off in the fall, only to be reborn again in. In the following spring after the sleep of winter, which I think represents the heavenly world where the spirit returns before coming back into the boundary of time and form.
[00:03:33] Well, Kuhn extrapolates that very idea, and he uses the metaphor of the tree to explain the profound mystery of the cycles of manifestation, death and rebirth, and ultimately the evolution of the soul. He also discusses the serpent and takes us beyond the polarity of good and evil to the serpent as allegory for the great cyclic law, or the law of evolution, which places all of us into the realm of matter, where our growth here evolves our soul in its unfoldment. And that growth happens through adversity and challenge and mistakes we all make. Ultimately, we grow more powerfully through adversity because it forces us to deepen ourselves. So think of the difference between the innocent eyes of a child and the eyes of someone wisened by life's trials and tribulations.
[00:04:31] So we've been told. The serpent represents the opposition to morality and spiritual purity. And obviously we're in duality and we have opposites. But Kuhn argues here that the serpent represents the necessary resistant force, and the tension between the two ultimately is what evolves us forward. So again, that's not to say there's no evil, but it's going deeper into how does adversity serve and how do we meet it. So this reminds me of my late teacher, Doctor Brew Joy, who would say that the darkness serves, that it has a purpose regarding difficult or terrible experiences over the course of one's life. Brue would ask, how did that serve? What was right about that? Well, to the conscious mind, of course, nothing is right about such things. They are traumatizing. But Brew was inviting us to move beyond victim and be able to look back from a more resource position where we could ask those questions. And of course, to be quote unquote resourced means you've got to have some life experience under your belt and have accrued enough maturity to where you can look back from a broader perspective.
[00:05:52] This takes time, of course. And when one is able to not only ask those questions, but also to answer them, that is a far greater understanding of the deeper nature of that event and how challenge and darkness serves our evolution.
[00:06:11] And I'm not talking about embracing satanic ideology, because again, that is not what Kuhn is saying. He is describing the deeper mystery of the serpent as essentially representing the temporal world of time and form, where our spirit is bound within the realm of matter. And many of us, myself included, don't necessarily feel altogether comfortable in this world. I have many times joked that I think I got off at the wrong station, but then my fairy teachers have laughingly told me that I took a fully autonomous swan dive in this reality. So there's that. Uh, so it's not always pleasant here, but this is a vast schoolroom. And so the role of the serpent in the garden was to bring Adam and Eve into the world of temporality, where through the adventures and the trials and tribulations of life, they would grow their souls in wisdom to understand the deeper nature of good and evil, of life, of spirit. But some interpreters of the story saw the serpent as representing the earthly body, and therefore the body and its more base functions were deemed evil and dirty. And this is where Kuhn really straightens out that misunderstanding.
[00:07:31] And wait till you hear what he has to say about Eve's role in taking the fruit of the tree and sharing it with Adam. Now, of course, in some christian circles, women have been made to feel responsible for mankind being cast out of the garden. But I am not even going to give away what Kuhn has to say about that because it's so affirming and so healing that I want you to hear his beautifully expressed words on that, because I think you will find this essay very uplifting and empowering. And God knows we need more of that these days. So I will begin.
[00:08:13] The Tree of Knowledge the story of creation in Genesis contains the item that represents mankind as having been condemned to eternal death as the consequence of our first parents disobedience to God's command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of life and knowledge, which is in the midst of the Garden of Eden. Here we are confronted with another of those features of the great allegorical drama of creation that has more than baffled the best efforts of theologians and scholars for two millennia. It provides another instance, an example of the pitiful manner in which stupid attempt to interpret the Bible literally and factually has made of scholarship and Bible exegesis a laughing stock and a mockery of sense and sanity. For, lo, these many centuries of christian religionism, the story of how allegedly learned savants in the field of religious study have been missiled and duped by the subterfuges of ancient methodology in the writing of sacred scripture, is one of the most astounding, indeed well nigh incredible narratives that unfortunately now must be told. It seems impossible to get across to the minds of clergymen and religious leaders today. The simple truth that the ancient Bible writers did not commit themselves, as a writer does nowadays, to an effort to clarify their meaning in the simplest and most revealing language. Bibles were not written for this purpose, or with this end in view, they can almost be said to have been attempts to hide rather than disclose the truth they aimed to tell, for the purpose was to not broadcast to millions of readers. We must remember that there was no printing in the world then, the truth that was to be expressed, but rather to embalm, for the sake of preservation, a body of basic truths of life, religion, and philosophy that might be lost if not thus edited.
[00:10:13] The ancient method was based on a now completely lost and unknown literary practice. Instead of writing treatises in ordinary language, the aim was to put truth in the form of representations or pictures of it, such as dramas, allegories, myths, parables, fables, epilogues, number graphs, and pictographs on the star clusters in the sky. The pictorialization of truth was the work of dramatists rather than of plain prose expositors. The elements in man's nature that were the real actors in the drama of his life were made personal in the characters of the story, just as in Snow White and the seven dwarfs. Snow White represents the pure divine nature in man his soul, and the dwarfs personify the seven elementary principles that build up his physical body and thus serve her in all mechanical ways.
[00:11:11] The archaic method was designed to dramatize truth, not to write elaborate dissertations upon it. The genius which strove to construct the formulas that expressed the forces and processes of life was dramatic genius, not specifically literary genius. In the modern sense, when neither writing nor reading was universal, the only practical way to portray ideas was by pictorializing them in an allegory myth or a construction that might appear outwardly fantastic to an ignorant person, but would nevertheless subtly intimate to deeper intuition the forms of mighty truth. The sagacity that dictated such a methodology took in the recognition that for the mind of childhood, a pictorial representation would not only convey for the moment, but impress in perpetuity the idea designed to be taught much as the housewife puts up in jars the fruits to be preserved, the myth makers and the dramatic poets. And the word poet means a maker embalmed in myths and dramas and a variety of concrete formulations, the great ideographs of recondite wisdom, which they transmitted to early humanity for its guidance throughout evolution.
[00:12:31] What the individual learns in his childhood serves him throughout life, for the memory of childhood is everlasting. It is the same with humanity in its infancy. The early races were all given the systems of moral and spiritual philosophy done in myths and dramas, so that the graphs of living truth should never be wanting for human instruction and wisdom. The evidence is mountain high that all early peoples were the beneficiaries of essentially the same original body. Of sage wisdom, and that this primal deposit was the one unitary source of all the world's religions. They are thus proven to have been the, quote, one true religion at the start. But recovering that deposit, the greatest need of the world today, could readily be met, a universal religion for all mankind. Toward this desirable consummation, the present series should contribute no mean impulse, since its articles will come close to reconstructing it in toto the outlines and substances of that mighty truth of old time.
[00:13:39] Now, this is me speaking here. Now, when Kuhn is speaking to a one true religion for the world, by the way, he's obviously speaking to the understanding within everyone of the principles of universal truth that act as guiding light as we navigate earthly existence. All right, so to continue.
[00:13:58] Nature's book of revelation, the tree of knowledge, was one feature of that great formulation that depicted truth in graphs and symbols. The sages of antiquity did not have far to go to find not only apt and felicitous, but absolutely inorant types, symbols, and mimeographs of the cosmic laws and principles they had in mind to picture forth. The tools and instruments for truth's portrayal lay right at hand or right outside the door. They were present in multitudinous form in the world of living nature. The sky, the earth, the ocean, vegetation, and animal life. The universal daily phenomena of natural forces supplied the materials able to clarify the speech of truth. These ancient dramatists knew a fact that we are largely ignorant of, that the processes and phenomena of creatural life are everywhere themselves the pictorial dramatizations of universal verity. They knew that every tree, bush, insect, worm, beast, every tumbling rill upon the hillside, every cloud, snowflake, mist, and rainfall, was each in its way a visible delineation of cosmic principle. For these processes and creations were themselves the outward, visible manifestation of the soul of the universe that was working to give itself concrete expression. In myriads of variant forms. They were themselves truth come alive in the actual world. They were universal spirits, ideas that were now crystallized in material form in the outer world. They were God's archetypal ideas, concretized in atomic matter, as an architect's ideas become substantiated in brick, mortar, wood, stone, and iron. And precisely so. God, the great architect first formed in his cosmic mind the shape of things to come in his purposed new creation. And it was over their ideal pattern that he later formed the physical universe.
[00:16:10] In our benighted ignorance today, we deride the idealist. But unless the individual is at all times striving to build his life in conformity with the pattern of a noble ideal, he will get nowhere, except possibly to that bourne of all aimless drifting or to the asylum over the hill. Psychology tells us now, in tones we dare not disregard, that minds break down because of their want of aim, purpose, and meaning in the struggle of life. Bizarre and almost ridiculous as it sounds in the ears of modern people, it can be said, truly, that philosophy is and must ever be man's true savior.
[00:16:55] But the sublimest truths and ideals are pictured to us ubiquitously in the commonest things in nature. Possibly the commonest things in the world are trees. Just because this object is so common, it must be presumed to embody universal ideation in truest form. It does so indeed. When nature tells a story, it cannot be false. It cannot lead the mind astray. Nature can tell nothing but the truth, because it is truth itself come to view in the actual world. Philosophers have argued for ages whether the actual things, such as trees, rocks, streams, are real things or only the appearance of real things.
[00:17:40] The whole visible world of things may be an illusion of man's mind, they contend. The obvious truth is that these things are indeed the appearance of real things, for they have emerged from the invisible world of noumenon or divine thought and made their appearance in this outer world of actuality. They were not, however, mere appearance in the sense of being an unreal semblance or ghost or shadow of reality, as so has so generally been the way of describing them. They were the forms of reality itself arrived at actualization in our world.
[00:18:18] Philosophy needs to make this vital correction in its thinking. Anything that is must be real. The philosophical dispute over reality or illusion is only a matter of relativity, conditioned upon the level of consciousness that is present to evaluate reality. Anything is real to that level of consciousness that can cognize it, but real for that level and not for other levels. A radio wave at 800 is real for the receiving instrument set to catch that frequency. It is not real for a different set on the dial. Man and the philosophers had better settle this question of reality on the basis of naive acceptance that our experience here is real. This world is real, terribly real for us. It may not be real for cherubim and seraphim, but that should not mislead us, as it has done some misguided quote unquote spiritual religionists in our own day and all past days, into thinking we can treat this world as unreal. Along that ideological path lie the whitened bones of many a wrecked personality, philosophically and psychologically speaking, the branching tree of life the tree as symbol tells the story of life with marvelous completeness and vivid explicitness in its shape and configuration. It is almost a picture itself of the structure of the cosmic creative plan, and it is a picture of man's ideological conception of the form and modus of life manifestation. If one were to try to diagram the processes of creation, one's pencil would almost find itself tracing a figure that would very much resemble a tree. Why? Because one would have to draw a heavy line out from a plane of rootage or origin, like the ground, representing the one first and undifferentiated stream of creative energy, and then branch it out into two streams and again divide these and their branches and branchlets into ever multiplying separation and division. For that is precisely how the creative impulse emerges from its basal center and branches out into numberless arms and lines of force to permeate at last the whole area of the universe it is to create.
[00:20:41] The tree and the river were the two most apt and frequently used symbols of the outflow of living energy in creation. The one so vividly depicted the emanation of the life stream from one undivided source and the subsequent dividing and branching, thus typifying the emanative or involutionary direction of life outward at the beginning of a creative period. The other equally graphically symbolized the return or evolutionary direction from the many terminal streamlets back into the one main channel and the universal ocean.
[00:21:19] For the tree emanates from the ground as one shoot to divide later into many. The stream begins from multitudinous rills and springs and ends by reuniting them all in the common sea. When typological genius wishes to show that the two forces of life, the outgoing and the returning, conjoin and intermingle their energies in the worlds of manifestation, as they do in man's sphere and in his body, they represented the two as working together. Speaking of the righteous man, the beautiful language of the Bible says, quote, he shall be like a tree planted by the river of water. End quote. The Solomon seal, or interlaced double triangle of esoteric symbolism, is a monograph of this interrelation. As the one triangle points downward, the other upward, the downward direction represents the descent of soul into matter. The upward typifies the return back to infinite spiritual source. The nordic mythology, however, pictured the two directions by portraying the great tree of life, Yggdrasil, as both rooted in earth, reaching up to heaven, and also rooted in heaven, extending its arms downward to earth. Involution brings life downward and branching out toward and upon earth. Evolution takes it back to the imperium, the banyan, and less visibly other trees exemplify both directions. Any tree goes down to earth as seed or shoot and returns to heaven as developing body, he writes. Thus the tree along with the stream was employed by the ancient mythicists of divine truth as the symbol of first the distribution and then the reuniting of the living rivers of creative power that, like the four in Genesis, issued forth from the being of God and returned to him the magnificent. Greek esoteric philosophy, the suggested revival of which can be the answer to the world's great cry for humanitarian culture today, represented the gods who are the long arms and agents of God's own working energy, as being the, quote, distributors of divinity. No phrase could be more enlightening for our dull powers of comprehension. Jesus said, quote, I came to send fire over the earth. And he later, illustrating his meaning by breaking a loaf of bread into pieces and distributing one to each of his disciples, declared that he was breaking his body into fragments so that a piece might be distributed to each. Again, he exemplified this division in multiplying the loaves and fishes to feed the anhungered multitude. All this was drawn to illustrate the great and forgotten principle of the ancient divine theology that the rays and streams of creation that flow forth from the heart of God issue first as one undivided stream, then break and divide endlessly to reach and supply every nook and cranny of being in the universe. The Greeks called these streams of formative power rivers of vivication.
[00:24:33] They start out from heaven as one undifferentiated current and reach the periphery of creation in countless branchlets.
[00:24:43] Then, having gone out and done their work of, quote, watering all the face of the ground, they precisely like the capillaries of our own blood system, turn back from their numberless end springs and begin to merge the many into fewer and finally end in the one from which they emanated. If that does not picture to the mind even of the dullest the methodology and processes of God's creative work, it is hard to conceive how we can be taught obvious truth.
[00:25:14] It is interesting to learn of the particular trees which the sages chose as typical of creative mode. The northern nations use the ash and the pine, the latter because of its thrilling suggestion of the soul's immortality by its remaining ever green in winter, the period of death. The druids, as well as the Greeks used the oak. Mediterranean and eastern religions use variously the palm, the olive, the banyan, the pine. Tamarisk or tamarind or tamarack the fig, the bodhi juniper, cypress, cedar, ilex, Persia locust or acacia, the sacred tree of masonry and the fig under the name of Sycamore. Massey calls it the sycamore fig. Revelation speaks of two witnesses whom it calls the two olive trees. Egyptian texts egyptian texts speak of the two divine sycamore trees of heaven and earthen, a most revealing nomenclature indeed, since the description enables us at last to know what these two witnesses, or the two trees in reality connote, they are now clearly seen to be the two streams of living power, the one emanating from heaven, the other rising up from earth, whose correlated work carries life through each of its great cycles. The one witness is the stream of involution flowing forth, the other the stream of evolution flowing back, carrying its gains with it. The mysterious, sealed meaning of many a text in the Bible has had to wait these 2000 years for the discovery of the Rosetta stone, 1796 to supply the key to a lost interpretation. Egypt will redeem a decadent Christianity and its baffling Bible. The time for christian scorning of paganism is past that forbidden fruit.
[00:27:12] There is now to be sought the solution of the perplexing dialectical problem involved in the conventional, time honored and orthodox, but not rationally intelligible theological propositions based on the Genesis verses, which seem to declare that man was forbidden by divine command to eat the fruit of the tree of life and knowledge. Language is incompetent to convey any adequate realization of the damaging stultification of wholesome common sense which the utterly bungled and garbled distortion of the purport of this supposed divine ordinance has inflicted upon western mankind over many centuries. The quote forbidden fruit and man's alleged disobedience to God and the eating of it and the penalty incurred for all humanity, therefore, have become bogeys of Frankenstein proportions, charging the general conscience of the occidental world with a paralyzing obsession of wonder, doubt, fear, and vicarious remorse. For all too many ages, the psychological devastation and havoc wrought upon sensitive minds indoctrinated from childhood with this baneful conception is past all calculation. Its doleful preeminence in the center of the west structure of theology amply justifies its place in the first three lines of Miltons great epic of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world. And all our woe, gruesome, and blighting have been the fatalistic implications of the theological legend that the eating of the fruit of a tree in literal sense by our quote first parents caused the fall of man and fastened upon the race of their descendants for all the future, the penalty of expulsion from a land of paradise and a life of toil, pain, and sorrow upon the earth, with death the inevitable casualty. In the end, it has lurked in the murky shadows of the western subconscious, a threat to happiness and a rasping break upon the natural joyous zest for life. Only the robust rebuff to the theological imposition by the natural, hearty strength of man's instinctive sense of the preciousness of life, in spite of the deadening power of miasmic religious misconceptions, has reduced to some mild extent the crushing consequences of the falsification. Had the west been disposed to subjective introversion, as was the east, the fatal aftermath of its blind addiction to a weird and macabre theology such as that haunting prevalent belief would have been catastrophic beyond all credence. It would have sunk the occident in a morass of morbidity that would have sickened its whole moral psychology. Indeed, to a degree not commonly glimpsed, it has actually done just this in spite of all the West's aggressive objectivity and extraversion of view. Protagonists of other religions debating with Christianity could well say that Christianity is the religion that has afflicted its devotees with the conviction of universal sin, and that without reference to the sinner's merit or demerit, it has convicted them of sin before they were born. With the psychological resultant of such a general persuasion and infatuation on the minds of billions of people over the generations since Bethlehem could be, and tragically has been. The modern revelations of the science of psychoanalysis are well prepared to inform us this science asserts that for every depressing mental influence we have to pay a heavy penalty in the form of inhibitions, neuroses, pathologies, and wretchedness grievous to contemplate, the enormity of this psychic bill is beyond estimate. The cultural catastrophe is all the more unaccountable because there are other verses and clear statements in the Bible that virtually contradict or flatly controvert every implication of the divine command. As theology has taken it, reason and philosophy should of themselves have intimated to any thinking mind that God could not, in simple consistency, place man in a garden of life and then forbid him to eat the fruits of its living experience.
[00:31:29] Tragic mistake on a worldwide scale could have been averted if human reason had not been subverted by doctrinal obsession with life. Given and knowledge the certain fruit of its experience. A modicum of logical thinking could have assured the reason that God's alleged command at once convicted him of dialectical inconsistency. It accuses him of both giving man life and forbidding him to live it in the same breath. How could it be seen as compatible with itself that God would place man in the world of life, order him to grow and multiply, and then deny him the right to partake of the fruit of his experience and predominantly of the fruit of that one tree that yields life and knowledge both inevitable and indispensable to his increase and multiplication?
[00:32:18] The artistry of ancient allegorism caught the world at a low point of its intelligence and mired the interpretative mind in Christianity, in the word slough of misconception ever to afflict the human fancy. Our dullness of comprehension and blank stupidity in handling our great heritage of ancient mythicism have marred and scarred the face of history. But if reason failed to avert the mental cataclysm, there are things in the Bible which should have counteracted the direful aberrancy. If the eating of the fruit of the tree of life is seemingly forbidden in the third chapter of Genesis, it is, on the contrary, expressly asserted as man's right in the last chapter of the Bible. The book flatly contradicts in its last chapter what it seems to say in its first ones. The 14th verse of the final 22nd chapter of Revelation runs as blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life and may enter in through the gates into the city. End quote. Here, man's right to eat of the tree is enunciated in forthright terms. Likewise, one does not find anything like forbiddance in that statement in the Bible that the leaves of the tree shall be for the healing of the nations.
[00:33:36] Unfortunately, the illuminating power of such a verse has been dimmed by the ignorance of all that this tree is the same one as that in the garden. All this sad mental mishap has come from failure to know that the Bible is beautiful allegory and not weird and eccentric. History Allegory talks of but one tree, for symbols carry but one specific connotation. History would argue that this tree of the healing leaves was another tree. It would even try to locate it somewhere on some mountain or in some valley, as it has tried to locate the garden itself in the Euphrates valley. Just in passing, one can mention the sacred tree of tibetan lore called manikum bum, or the tree of the 10,000 precepts, it was asserted that on the underside of every leaf was written a golden precept of religious truth. One reads that it stood on the temple ground in some locality. That such a figure to cover splendid truths should have led minds into egregious folly is pitiable. An astute mind with a moment's reflection can see that it is a dramatization or symbolization of the very great truth that the forces of life branch out into living expression, and that each factual experience poetized as one leaf on this mighty tree, unfolds its own moral lesson or a precept for the creature living it. The fantastic literal idea corrupts and diseases the mind. The allegorical redaction of it frees and sanifies. Tolstoy. The great Russian in 1911 had a remarkable vision of the Balkan wars and the First World War, all of which was accurately fulfilled. One of the features of his vision still to come to reality was that he saw religion saving itself by returning to symbol and allegory. The early learned christian fathers urged the allegorical interpretation of the scriptures. Later and less learned ones excoriated and anathematized theme. The result of the latter blunder is only too inexpressibly apparent in a million forms of mental delusion and psychological wreckage under our eyes. In history, past and present, the recondite elements of the allegory have utterly miscarried and piteously missile the credulous minds of religionists for these many centuries. The tree of life is the branching stream of living experience, and the God sent man into this mundane milieu expressly to partake of its fruits to the full measure of his capability. The conception of the forbidden fruit, in its gross theological and popularly accepted form, it must be said, is close to the most outrageous delusion of human belief ever to snare man's gullible fancy. The sentence in the last chapter of revelation completely upsets the idea that first man violated divine law or disobeyed God. In the garden it asserts man's right to eat of the tree's fruit.
[00:36:43] Representations in vignettes found in ancient documents picture the scene of the temptation. In the garden. There is the tree with the woman standing close to its branches, the serpent reaching out its head from the foliage and whispering into her ear while she hands a cup of the juice of the fruit of the tree to her husband at her side. It is the allegory done over in vignettes.
[00:37:07] The juice of the fruit.
[00:37:10] What the juice of the fruit of the tree signifies is most necessary to understand, if one is to discern the full relevance of every item of the symbolism, it is glaringly obvious, and there is no excuse for its having been missed for so long, to the universal detriment of mankind. What is fruit juice? It is the liquid essence which is forced out under physical pressure, nature, and contains in it the inmost essence of the fruits, powers of nourishment.
[00:37:39] This description adumbrates for us a large segment of the meaning of all experienced. It hints volubly at the great fact that all life is constituted of finer essences, contained within coarser shells and needing to be expressed out, pressed through the pressure of life's physical circumstances. In the tree, there is the hard exterior, then the fluid SAP, and within that, the vital essence. Matching this in man, there is his gross outer physical body, within that the blood, and in that, as we know, the pranic electricity of life. All of this furnishes us with an analogy with experience itself. Externally, our experience consists of physical acts, states and phenomena. First, but a step farther inward. It consists of conscious reactions to the crude physical contacts. First sensation, then a step inward, emotion another step inward. And as the result of sense and emotion, thought is generated. And still going inward, there is aroused at last the final spiritual being of the man in an assertion of will and purpose, the ultimate response.
[00:38:57] Now it requires a vast quantity of outer experience to reach deeply within and deposit its final effects upon the innermost soul, and so to say, squeeze out its spiritual reaction. Just as it takes hundreds of tons of crude coal to produce by distillation an ounce of sublimited power in radium form, so it takes vast quantities of crude physical, sensual and emotional experience to generate, in the depths of being, one single dynamic realization, one single flash of more splendid light in the profoundest depths of consciousness. It is a most edifying analogy and a true one, the most sublimated and hence most precious essence of the meaning and the good of man's conscious experience must thus be forced out to realization under pressure of vast amounts of outer sensual experience of this process and phenomenon. The squeezing out of the juice of the fruit of a tree is the perfect analogue and outer type.
[00:40:04] The juice of the fruit of the tree of life and knowledge is therefore to be sensed in a powerful mental way and understood as the ultimate soul reaction or deposit in consciousness, us from the whole process of mortal existence. Man partakes of this life giving nectar, this wine of life, just insofar as his experience presses upon him with sufficient force to draw out from his deepest soul its divinest reactions and now comes a startling release of lost truth, impressive, insignificant enough in itself to cause a furor in religious circles. It is beyond dispute that the cup of this living essence, this SAP of the tree of life, this juice of the fruit of the living tree of creation, which the woman offers to the man in Genesis, is the same cup which the Jesus character in the New Testament, in his agonizing cry from the cross, pleads that his father may let pass from him after the first shock of its revelation. This statement should not be considered as either so strange or so unlikely when another release of forgotten truth and another astonishing denouement of a correct following of symbolism brings up aside at the similar pronouncement, even more revealing that the tree of the creation garden is the same tree as that on which Jesus was crucified, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree is one of the Bible passages which uses the word tree instead of cross.
[00:41:43] It is not known that there are extant many old legends of ancient days in which the tradition was kept alive that the cross of Golgotha was cut from the wood of a tree which had been propagated from a branch, seed, or shoot of the tree of paradise. Legend has sometimes preserved truth more securely than written scripture. It is markedly so in this case. When the allegorical symbolic nature of ancient biblical composition is better known, there will be no question that the Christ was crucified on the tree of life, as this tree keeps on unfolding its growth throughout the lengthy cycle. Obviously the Christos must be represented as being crucified on its continuing fresh propagations from generation to generation. Likewise, Jesus was tempted by Satan, that old serpent of revelation. And so we have four central items of the same the tree, the cup, the serpent, and the temptation. In both the genesis and the New Testament formulations of the archaic typology, these marks of identity between the two sweep aside all possible chicanery that has been resorted to to hold them apart as separate and different historical episodes. The certification of this identity constitutes a revelation and a revolution of gigantic proportions. In all religious systemology. It renders obsolete at one stroke a whole vast mass of theological lucubration, heavy and sodden, that is deplorably misconceived and misrepresented the true and luminous meaning of the fabric of theology. The benignant rays of a new dawn of light and understanding break above the horizon. With this announcement, the wily serpent, equally revolutionary in its significance, must be seen to be the next point of exegesis, that of the identity of the character of the serpent in the drama the Grand Enlightenment, which the creation story was designed to give the world, has been sadly bedimmed by our sheer inability properly to identify the characters enacting the great cosmic scenario. In ecclesiastical religion, not a word has been uttered in centuries that would give the remotest intimation as to the true reference of this subtle villain of the creation piece. Still the ignorant gape and their wonder grows as to why God, omnipotent and all wise, allowed the snake to command to annoy the first human pair and so quickly seduce them to their and our eternal fall. Common reasoning suggests that it was a bit unfair and inconsiderate of the Almighty father to throw a giant temptation in the way of our first progenitors at the very first moment of their career. One must think that he should at least have given them time to get their bearings and learn by experience the operation of his divine laws for their guidance before bearing down on them with a stern and grim prohibition, with their eternal destiny dangling on the issue. Common credulity and as ignorant seminary tutelage have assumed that from all the surface intimations of the story, the crafty serpent was the arch enemy of God and a fell plotter against his good work corrected understanding must clear this dramatist's Persona of both wicked plotting and enmity against the supreme one of the very first sects of early Christians was that of the Alfa who worshipped the serpent, greek Ophis, as their prime symbol. A naive, mistaught Christian would from this jump to the conclusion that these hebrew Christians must have been of the status of savage tribesmen under the horrid delusion that their God was the serpent. But we can see that even if Moses raised up the serpent on the cross in the wilderness, acting assumedly under God's control, that in some fashion or other this fearsome reptile must have stood as symbol of something on the good side of the meaning. Ordinary familiarity with the serpent symbol of ancient literature, especially of the Uraeus snake of the Egyptians, and a wiser study of comparative religion, would have obviated the worldwide and age old blunder of mistaking the serpent for a hostile element in the work of creation. People have been puzzled after reading the stories of the evil serpenthenne to hear the divine teacher in the New Testament and join upon his followers to, quote, be wise as servants.
[00:46:17] Popular christian belief has surely reduced the mythical representations of cosmic truth in its own scriptures to a melange of incomprehensible oddities. The graphic and vivid, instructive significance of this animal symbol inheres in the suggestive hints and analogues which the creature supplies to thought sagacity in olden times, quickly caught at a quite thoroughgoing analogy between its shape, its characteristics, and life habitudes, and the general form of evolutionary processes themselves. Its length of body permitting it to coil in general spiral shape around seven folds, with its head rising at the top or culmination, furnished a striking picturization of the great creative force itself. Like the serpent, this energy swings ever seven times around its great and lesser cycles and erects its culminating product, which is clearly enough the higher consciousness centering in the head at the topmost point of attainment. The snake, lying coiled seven times round on itself, formed a circular central hole, which was called by the Greeks the snakes hole, or the cycle of necessity kuklos anakis, or the Kuklos becoming cycle. In English this was to emblemize the inescapable necessity of the soul swinging seven times through the rounds of the elements to gain its evolutionary growth. The serpent then actually typifies and as a dramatic figure in the allegory, represents the great cyclic law or law of evolution, which takes all creatural like swinging eternally round the seven ringed cycles of incarnation in lower grades of matter. Without this immersion in matters depths and the increase in growth accruing therefrom, the soul could not further evolve. The serpent symbolizes, therefore, the holy beneficent law of life itself. As nearly as we can paraphrase it in modern parlance, the serpent is just the quote, natural law. But now, as for the sake of dramatic representation and the accentuation for weak human ideation of the difference in cosmic rank and opposition of function between the automatic spiritual law of the divine mind, the first being, as with us, God's subconscious activities, and the second, his conscious directing intelligence, the dramatist painted the crawling reptile that carried the symbolism of the lower automatism in the colors of comparative evil, the two laws, the natural and the spiritual, operating jointly in man's nature, do stand in contrariety, even, in a sense, in opposition to each other. But thousands of years of fatuity and folly have been the product of the failure of theological acumen to evaluate this opposition in its true measure and proportion. A balanced understanding, the gross misconception to which all ancient symbolization of high and abstruse truth has been subjected and by which it has been mutilated into a veritable travesty of its true interior sense, has wrought havoc with the original high purport of the construction. It has mistaken the opposition of relation, position, and function for the opposition of moral and spiritual design and purpose. It has mistaken the opposition of polarity for the opposition of good and evil or it has misconceived the opposition as of right and left, lever and fulcrum, symmetry and balance, fingers and thumb, for the opposition of evil to good. It has taken one of the two opposing arms of being that uphold the worlds and, abstracting it out of its relation to the whole process, declared it to be evil. All work, including all creative work, is accomplished by the mutual exertion of force against resistance, and of resistance against force. And what folly for philosophers so far to forget themselves as to fall into the error of calling the resistant force evil, because it seems to be blocking the effort of the working force. Both are equally necessary and are therefore equally beneficent and good. They are the two halves of total being. It is their function to balance, to stabilize, and finally to actualize the values their tension brings to birth. If one of them failed to stand up to its nature and function, the other would collapse with it immediately. It is the pull and attraction between the two that upholds the universe. Their cooperation is that of function and instrument, purpose and means, and it is required that they take their places at opposite ends of the polarity and provide for each other the resistance that alone would stabilize their activities at given times and locations in the cosmos. No more is the opposition of matter and spirit evil than is the opposition of man and woman, darkness and light, heat and cold. Life could not advance to higher ends in its unfoldment if the two ends of the everlasting polarity were not opposed to each other and countervailing against each other. They are opposed to each other, yes, in sheer mode of function, but certainly not opposed in ultimate aim and goodness. Reckless misconception to the opposition of polarities has introduced into all religion the most damaging eccentricities of belief and conduct, perhaps ever recorded on the weak side of human ideation. The story is too gruesome and horrifying to recount. It has caused billions of minds to live under the darksome shadow of the presupposition that nature, the world, the flesh, the very body of man, as against his soul, the natural functions and desires, the very enjoyment of man's life in the body, are all foul forms of evil. It has led millions in all ages to attempt to crush and mortify the natural bodily side of their lives. A later work will deal exhaustively with this feature. It is so deeply interwoven into the texture of the present essay in relation to the tree of knowledge that it had to be given cursory introductory treatment. It can be seen that the ability of man's philosophical sagacity to discern rightly the very truth here expounded, and so to balance his life between the two functional pressures of the good and the evil, as these are seen in the common human view, and to realize that ultimately all things, in spite of appearances to the contrary, are working together for his good and are good in themselves, understanding them as the good divided into its bipolar aspects of function and instrument, balancing, not thwarting each other. This ability of man to achieve one aspect of this balance in the conceptual realization that the opposition of the two is wholly beneficent and salutary, is itself one of the prime goals of his life.
[00:53:33] Hence it is woven into the story in the very name of the tree the tree of life bears on its outermost branches the ultimate buds and blossoms and fruits of knowledge. Which fruits consist man's final attainment of the genius to know that both good and evil as apparent to lower discrimination, become resolved in a higher synthesis of understanding in which both merge into that which lies beyond good and evil. But it takes the whole experience of life in earthly bodies, and the ancients added many such lives to open the eyes of mortals to the perception of the non reality of the apparent opposition between good and evil. So it was not until the human pair themselves an expression of the polar duality the opposition of man and woman had eaten of the forbidden fruit that the eyes of them were opened, for the serpent had expressed to the woman the very essence of the paragraph here written that if they ate of the fruit of this tree, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
[00:54:41] Here is the clinching certification that mans deification. The distant and crowning achievement of his long course of evolution comes with and through his rising in mind estate to the mountaintop of vision, where from he can see good and evil melt together in one transcendent consummation of beneficence.
[00:55:07] Okay, there is much more to be read and discussed and I will continue this in the second hour, so I invite all who are interested to come over to themushroomsapprentice.com and subscribe. It is very affordable and the second hour has a lot of rich material that I think you will quite appreciate, so I will hope to see you there.
