Kabbala, Nikos Kazantzakis, Osho, Adam, Eve, Eden, and good and evil

excerpted from THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves, by Jack Haas

“Thought rises to contemplate its own innerness

 until its power of comprehension is annihilated.”

Kabbala

Firstly then, in order to understand the basis of much of the West's metaphysics, we must go back to the cosmological beginning, where occurred a very important event- mankind’s fall from the Heavens. That is, the historic allegory of ‘The Fall’, which divided mankind from the heavens, occurred for the eating of a very specific variety of fruit- the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Note, it was not the Fruit of the Tree of the Doing of Good and Evil. Thus the ‘Fall’ was not, as the morally minded priests and theologians would urge us to believe, an ethical event, but was, and is, instead wholly epistemological; that is, in trying to ‘know’, or claiming to ‘know’, we divorce ourselves from the Great Unknowable, and then we suffer all the horrors which this unnecessary separation produces in us.

As such, in his book The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis has Jesus say to a man who is questioning the ways of God: “Don’t ask brother: it’s a sin. Until a few days ago I too asked. But now I understand. This was the serpent which corrupted the first creatures and made God banish us from Paradise.”

The ‘fruit’ which was eaten is the profane fruition of our separated questionings and understandings, which causes the whole to be divided into fragments, each of which then dwells in the hell of its own separate judging of right and wrong.

Osho states: “This is the meaning behind the biblical story. Adam is turned out of the garden of Eden because he has eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It is a very significant parable. Because of knowledge Adam is turned out of heaven, loses all his blessedness, loses all his innocence, happiness, loses immortality, becomes a mortal, becomes miserable. ...There is no other parable so significant in the whole history of religion. ...Adam's sin is knowledge.”

Through the loss of ‘innocent looking’ we lost unity with the undifferentiated whole, and thus have we come to create a world of opinion, perspective, categorization, and separation. Sin occurs every time that through our separated perspective we think we understand, and through this false understanding and judgment about right and wrong we separate ourselves further and further from the Great Unknowable source of ourselves.

It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that we are not allowed to eat from the Tree of Life.

When we have purged ourselves of this ancestral folly, however, we shall return to the Garden through the gate of our knowledgeless Oneness.

excerpted from:

THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves

by Jack Haas

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Mystical books, visionary art, and fine art photography by Jack Haas