Revelation, Part 1 (Updated)

"So in the drama, somebody has to be the villain, and the hero plays against him. If you go to the theater for a good cry, then you let the villain win and you call it a tragedy. If you go for a thrill then you let the hero win. If you go for a laugh then you call it a comedy. There are different arrangements between the hero and the villain, but in all cases when the curtain goes down at the end of the drama, the hero and the villain step out hand and hand and the audience applaud both. They don't boo the villain at the end of the play, they applaud him for acting the part of the villain so well, and they applaud the hero for acting the part of the hero so well, because they know the villain role and the hero role are only masks. And you see behind the stage there is the green room, where after the play is over and before it begins the mask is taken off. So the Hindus feel behind the scene, that is to say in reality, under the surface, you are all the actor marvelously skilled at playing many parts, and getting lost in the mazes in your own minds and the entanglements of your own affairs as if this was the most urgent thing going on, but behind the scenes, in the green room, you might say in the back of your mind in the very depths of your soul, you always have a very tiny sneaking suspicion that you might not be the you you think you are." - Alan Watts

Yesterday I was laying in bed. The sun was peaking through the blanket I have hung over the window. Frankly it sucked. I was comfortable, and my eyes were all merrily shut, and generally I was happy doing nothing. I didn't want to move. The pillow was perfectly placed under my head, the blankets, oh my God, it was perfect. I didn't want to get up, and I especially didn't feel like getting in the shower. But the day beckoned, so I got in the shower, and that was nice so I didn't want to leave the shower. I didn't want to go to class, but then I went, but I was comfortable, and I had a lot of homework that night so I didn't want to leave class. Later that night I didn't want to go to bed because I wasn't tired, but I did anyway. Then I realized it was all some stupid circle spinning around everyday, and I was forgetting why I was even doing all this. Then I remembered: it's for a career and money and prestige, but mostly for my own mental stability, because I don't know what I would be doing but this. I had a revelation, an unveiling, a seeing through the "vanity" moment, an Apocalyptic moment, a moment where I realized that I was thinking about thinking.

I would now like to reexamine the Genesis creation myth. The gospel of John tells us, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). God speaks the world into existence. He divides lightness from darkness, "God separated the light from the darkness" (Genesis 1:4), He creates the sky by separating waters, "And God said, 'Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters'" (Genesis 1:6), He creates land, and from the land plants, and He separates the day from the night by creating lights in the heavens, "God said, 'Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separates the day from the night" (Genesis 1:14), He creates animals of all kinds, water creatures, birds, and creatures, and finally He creates dude and dudette in his own image. From the Priestly account, God divides up the universe (divvies it up for the peeps if you want) from nothing to something. He takes an axe and chops up matter, making darkness and lightness (which are one and the same), He makes the universe perceivable to a human mind, and therefore blinds us. Because we see sections of what He created and not the whole picture of what he created, every single one of us tends to get lost in the tinier pieces. We tend to focus too much on the light without focusing on the dark, too much on the ups and not the downs. We look too much on the front side and not on the backside, too much on the uphill and not on the downhill. The world is a series of distractions, because we lose sight of the bigger pictures, and this is ultimately a result of God separating the universe.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and
about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd
by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Part 48

If one is to understand the greatness of God, one must understand that God is not only the good and the beautiful, but also the bad and the wretched. "I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil:I the Lord do all these things" (Isaiah 45:7). The tree of knowledge was the beginning of man's awareness of the division. When man (and woman) ate of the tree they received a revelation. They became aware of themselves and forgot about the "wholeness". They forgot that they were "one". Man and woman realized they were naked and had to clothe themselves. They were banished from the garden and man had to work and die, and woman had to bare the pain of childbirth and die. In this sense the Garden of Eden was not an actual place, but instead a state of mind. After the garden was only distractions ("vanity") which were needed to ease the pain and provide some essence of purpose. In these distractions man and woman forgot who they were. They forgot they were divine themselves.

There are many ways to interpret the Garden of Eden and the fall of man story. One way is to look at it as a metaphor for man's loss of nature as he moved from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic world. Instead of roaming the forest and the fields in search of food, he and she were now shoved inside cities or planted crops. He and she were leaving this "oneness" with nature behind. It reminds me of what Treebeard laments in the Lord of the Rings, "Nobody cares for the woods anymore." Instead, we destroy the nature around us. I will link this back to an ancient epic near the end. Another way to see the fall of man is a metaphor for a man growing out of childhood. Where once the world was innocent--he was protected, he could run naked with out a care, he saw and named things for the first time--now he is corrupted. He is aware of himself and his appearance, he has to work for a living, he realizes that some day he will die. And why does this happen? Because of women, of course! Women force him to grow up and make something of himself. The longing for nature and childhood is the same as longing for innocence and solitude, but it is also another way of longing to die. How is this so?

Everyone longs to die, to return to a non-chaotic state. We can find this in many of the writings of Robert Frost: The man lingers in nature not wanting to return , or the boy tries to climb out to space on the top of a birch tree. I often have a similar feeling, not to die, but to return to a place with as few distractions as possible. Go by myself to some lonely part of the world and sit and just feel the universe sink into me. I read an article recently that said low income families are less likely to be depressed if they have a window that look out on greenery. Another article that explores similar healing properties of nature is this one. The researchers discovered that people, "who watched the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations, [...] like deep and enduring relationships, or working toward the betterment of society." Any sort of natural setting seems to help stressed minds. Why is this? It is nature's ability to remind us that we can just exist, that some day we will leave this chaotic condition, that we we were once in the Garden of Eden, that we were once whole. It is much easier to be a rock than a human.

Walt Whitman described his affection for animals in his opus, The Song of Myself:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Part 32

Last year when I read The Epic of Gilgamesh, I was surprised how the origin story of Enkidu related to the tale of Eden. Enkidu was a wild boy, he ran with the animals in nature, he ran quick and briskly, he was peaceful and whole and had long hair. Enkidu is the animal that Walt Whitman described. He was happy and blissful. But then Gilgamesh orders him civilized by sending in a prostitute to sleep with him. The prostitute, much like Eve to Adam, corrupts him, and he slows down and no longer wants to be with the animals and nature. Later on, Enkidu kills a Forest Spirit with Gilgamesh without thinking. What has happened to Enkidu? He no longer cares for nature and kills it. He is just as bad as the rash Gilgamesh.

Enkidu has forgotten.

Alan Watts describes myth as stories that try to describe this dilemma.

"Myth doesn't mean something untrue, but it means an image. In terms of which make sense of life and the world. Supposing for example you don't understand the technicalities of electricity, and somebody wants to explain them to you, he wants to explain about the flow of currents, well to do that he compares electricity to water, and because you understand water you get some idea about the behavior of electricity. Or if an astronomer wants to explain to you what he means by expanding space, he'll use the metaphor of a balloon, a black balloon with white spots on it. The white spots represent the galaxies, and if you blow up the balloon they all get further away from each other at the same speed as the balloon blows up. In neither case are we saying that electricity is water or that the universe is a balloon with white spots on it, we are saying it's something like it. So in the same way the human being has always used images to represent his deepest of ideas about how the universe works and what man's place in it is." - Alan Watts

I know this doesn't seem to relate, but it does. The tale of Adam and Eve and Enkidu tell us something deeper than they appear to at first. They tell us that we have forgotten something important. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge and lost something in the process.