Paradise Lost

The Garden of Eden, we here all know about this enchanted paradise that was once lost, but it was it truly destroyed? Some people think that the flood destroyed it, but nothing is ever said to credit that claim, really. Plus, what if it was shielded by some godly-like powers?

Why is it that we've been driven by blood to **** with the Middle East recently, mainly Iraq?

Because it's in modern day Iraq. Does it seem at all that it's a little suspicious how much trouble we are currently and have before with the Middle East? Why are we so desperate over it?

Perhaps the War of the war over the Tree of Knowledge?

reply to post by Deus Ex Machina 42


I have to say, yours is the most original reason I've ever seen for why the middle east is such a battle ground.

Silly me, I thought the blood bath was over the control of oil and poppy fields.

I like your fairy tale better!

Originally posted by Blanca Rose
reply to post by Deus Ex Machina 42

 

I have to say, yours is the most original reason I've ever seen for why the middle east is such a battle ground.

Silly me, I thought the blood bath was over the control of oil and poppy fields.

I like your fairy tale better!

Except you're forgetting the fact that the only reason we're after Iraq's oil is because it's the most profitable way to get it + you get boosted up patriotism alongside it. Peak oil is nowhere near by and we still have hundreds of years worth of oil within the Earth.

Everyone knows we shouldn't even be IN Iraq, it's an idiotic waste of time and life but yet it keeps on happening. For oil? Really now, is oil worth that much compared to the legendary Tree of Eden, the tree that would either confirm many religions based around it?

[edit on 21-2-2010 by Deus Ex Machina 42]

I agree with you that we still have plenty of oil. And I like your theroy. There could be many reasons why we are in the Iraq & Afganistan tho. In a certain Stargate SG1 episode the team came across a civilisation that was totally cloaked, so why couldnt the garden be cloaked also. If you can imagine it, it is possible. That is if the garden is an actual physical place.

I see the Garden of Eden as a mythos, an archtypal story. Almost every culture has very ancient stories of a kind of connection to a higher realm that was "severed" or broken at some time. These myths often involve a "world tree" of some sort. The shamanic healer, in places as diverse as Native American and Siberian cultures, are often involved in rituals designed to reconnect to the primal state of perfection.

In the Abrahamic tradition, the imagery of the garden and the tree strike me of echoes of this ancient and almost universal mythic schema. A lot of people mistake the tree that Adam and Eve ate of as the "tree of good and evil" but it is in actuality the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." This strikes me as a particularly noteworthy thing. Before Adam and Eve knew good and evil, they existed in a state of natural harmony with a beautiful garden. Then once they began to think in terms of good and evil -- to gain knowledge of this kind of moral division -- they were expelled from the garden.

I read the story as a record of human psychospiritual development. Once we were more like animals, acting out of pure instinct, in the flow of things. Does a wolf or a cat ponder good and evil? Or do they just react according to the flow of reality? Once humans developed the capacity to judge we entered a state of moral agony, where we had to determine good and evil rather than "going with the flow." Taoism is also full of stories about a kind of "lost paradise" that the "ancient masters" knew intuitively, and it is a complex system for healing this rift that developed when our nervous systems outgrew simple instinct and began to develop higher, more sophisticated executive functions. The story of the garden, the tree, and the expulsion is a similar tale, I believe (although with different implications for action).

This is in no way to diminish the power of the story...myths are no less valuable because they are not "literally true." Rather, they speak to deep, eternal truths in us that lurk below the rational mind, like dreams. They are of the dreamtime, and are to be venerated.

So, I don't think of the Garden of Eden as having any physical location on earth. Although I suppose that another "layer" of later mythmaking could have tied the story more closely to an actual location that the original inhabitants perhaps had to leave for some reason. Either way, to me, that is not the most important dimension of the story. Rather it is what it tells us about how we have been "exiled" from our own instinctive harmony with a garden-like world by our rational and moral judgement.

You have to have men who are moral..and at the same time who are able to utilize..their...primordal insticts,..without feeling without passion...without judgement...without judgement. Because its judgement that defeats us.
-Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now


[edit on 2/21/10 by silent thunder]