Seeds of Insight 009 - The Original Sin
The Story of ‘I am Somebody’
Dear You,
It is said that when we come into this world, we take on a veil of illusion. And that illusion is “I am Somebody” - a physical body separate from the rest of the universe. As soon as the thought ‘I’ arises, the thought ‘other’ also arises. From that separation, suffering comes. Freedom is then to see and directly experience that separation as our mind’s creation, not reality.
For some time, I’ve felt that this is the deeper meaning of the myth of Adam and Eve, but since I am not a practicing christian, I felt out of place to write about it. Today, I read it in the book of the beautiful teacher Eli Jaxon-Bear “From Fixation to Freedom” and it gave me courage to share it.
“The myth of Adam ad Eve us full of symbolic resonance of the path of consciousness towards its own awakening. In the garden of Eden, there is oneness and the human is still unselfconscious. God, the creator, then gives a command not to eat from a certain tree. In order to eat from the tree, the mind of man must challenge God. Eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil symbolically destroys the oneness of the Garden of Eden, and the duality of mind appears - man vs God, man vs woman, right vs wrong, shame vs pride. Now humans are cast out of the Garden and wander for untold generations with the mind in charge and at war with God.
[…]
Every ego feels that it is the one in control and secretly realises that it does not have a clue as to what to do. When the suffering of this condition becomes unbearable, the prodigal son returns to the source. The mind returns in surrender to God, and individual consciousness finds its way home to the divine.”
~Eli Jaxon-Bear
In the Old Testament, this is the story of the Original Sin. In our Western societies, sin is a harsh word and implies punishment, but it came from Biblical Greek and Hebrew and it meant ‘missing the mark’, ‘being mistaken’ - a mere mistake, a ‘veil’ that we take on in this life that is ours to unveil, not an intentional wrong-doing that needs punishment.
With love,
Iri
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