The tree of what knowledge?

reply to post by DISRAELI


I think I must have misinterpreted your original post to me. Its better to agree to disagree. I know I can learn much from you. No since arguing over anything. I am sure what we are both seeking, is the same thing, we just have different paths. I completely believe that Jesus was God in the flesh. As I am certain you do as well. So, as your sister, its way better to just love each other.
For a chunk of my life I would have died for my faith in the bible. But, its our faith in the Creator that actually matters, and I am fairly certain we agree on that.
Thank you for catching my perimeter error. I type fast, so sometimes if the spell check doesn't flash on a word, I miss it being a miss spell. But, hey no one is perfect.

reply to post by misskat1

OK, truce.
(PS the next series coming up is on the Old Testament criminal laws, which may provoke a degree of debate)

reply to post by DISRAELI


I am sure you will love my philosophy on that one. lol
Because I think there should be an old testament "city of refuge" for those people to run to, if they are lucky enough to get away from the mob of pissed off people, who are sick of their chit.
As well as a Wild People Refuge for those who, cant or don't want to live under society norms.
The letter of the law killeth, but the Spirit gives it life.

reply to post by DISRAELI


I do have a question however. I believe that in my life, everything happens for a reason. And I have a weird way of walking from one coincidence to another constantly. So, if on a spiritual level, everything does happen for a reason, do you think that maybe Adam and Eve were tempted on purpose? So, they would take that step of independent thinking? I mean, who leaves the cookie jar in the play pen?

Before they ate the fruit, they didn't know the difference between good and evil, so how could they have understood they were being evil?
How could we make a choice to live a good life, if there was no other choice?
I know your going to hate this, but those books I mentioned show how Adam and Eve were tempted over and over again. And it seemed to me that sometimes they interpreted things as temptation, that wasn't really temptation. In one chapter, Adam realized he was attracted to Eve in a take her to bed kinda way, and he was tempted by Satan to sleep with her, so he went to God and confessed he was having cozy feelings toward Eve, and God gave him permission to be with her.
But, I think they might have died childless, if Adam wasn't "tempted" with desire. I think he interpreted the natural attraction and the feelings in his body as temptation, but it wasn't. lol

reply to post by DISRAELI


You wanted to talk about the message in genesis. The bible version.

A roman emperor caused the bible to exist as it does today. Since there are books missing from the original collection of religious scriptures. I'd like to learn more about the missing books, on genesis mentioned here earlier.
You claimed them to be fictional.

I've learned a lot of things over the years, and the book mentioned on adam and eve, doesn't only completes, it's also compatible with the accumulated info, I've learned over the years. Surprisingly there is also some science suggesting into this direction.

What reasons do you have for claiming it sci fi ?

Sinter Klaas
A roman emperor caused the bible to exist as it does today.

No he did not. That is a myth invented on the internet, which has been refuted many times on ATS.
And Genesis is a Hebrew book, part of the Jewish scriptures. No Christian Emperor could have any control over the content of Jewish scriptures. The contents of the Old Testament are, by definition, the books which the Jews accept.

the book mentioned on adam and eve, doesn't only completes, it's also compatible with the accumulated info, I've learned over the years. Surprisingly there is also some science suggesting into this direction.
What reasons do you have for claiming it sci fi ?

You like that book because it fills in gaps in your information.
Exactly.
That is my reason for calling it fiction, because it was blatantly written to satisfy readers like yourself, who don't like gaps in the information and want them to be filled in.

Since this thread was written as an examination of the Genesis account, I don't need to defend my decision not to move beyond it to other accounts. They are not relevamt to my purpose. Keeping myself to the Genesis account is part of the definition of the thread.

misskat1
reply to post by DISRAELI

 

I think I must have misinterpreted your original post to me. Its better to agree to disagree. I know I can learn much from you. No since arguing over anything. I am sure what we are both seeking, is the same thing, we just have different paths. I completely believe that Jesus was God in the flesh. As I am certain you do as well. So, as your sister, its way better to just love each other.
For a chunk of my life I would have died for my faith in the bible. But, its our faith in the Creator that actually matters, and I am fairly certain we agree on that.
Thank you for catching my perimeter error. I type fast, so sometimes if the spell check doesn't flash on a word, I miss it being a miss spell. But, hey no one is perfect.

Jesus was a great human being, no doubt.

Please keep in mind that you insult the soul of Jesus when you call him 'god'.

It is the same with Hindus calling 'Rama' god, as he was not. No human can be god.

All souls are alike and have same properties, even souls dwelling in animals and plants. No soul is special.

There is only one God who never takes birth, never sires children, and never takes a human or animal form.

The truth is there in every human, as every soul is capable of identifying truth. It is only due to illusion and false education that people forget the truth.

misskat1
Before they ate the fruit, they didn't know the difference between good and evil, so how could they have understood they were being evil?

I naswered that question in advance in the OP.
As I said above, it's all about finding the real meaning of "knowing good and evil".
My argument is that "knowing good and evil" is not about knowing THAT there is a difference between them. It is about knowing WHERE there is a diference between them, deciding where the boundary line lies.
Before the Fall, they were accepting God's judgment about where the boundary line lay.
The Fall was the decision to make their own judgements instead. Taking the fruit is a very apt symbol of that change, because they had been accepting God's judgement that it was a bad thing, but now they were making their own judgement that it was a good thing.

As I said in the OP:

Good and evil; if they know good AND evil, side by side, that implies that they know them as distinct.
Their “knowledge” relates to the boundary line between them.
In fact it comes close to knowing good FROM evil.
So this will be the kind of knowledge that makes judgements on the rightness and wrongness of things, though it need not be limited to moral judgements.

That explains what is meant by the previous phrase, “You will be like God”.
They will be like God in that they “know good and evil”.
So this points to God as the one who determines what is right or wrong.
If they do this for themselves, they are imitating one of his features, and putting themselves in his place.

So that will be the point.
If they’re claiming a “knowledge of good and evil”, that means making their own decisions about these things, instead of depending on God’s judgement.

As for how far the Fall was "intended", I made a tentative suggestion about this in my second post;

The central theme of the Bible is that this is when things began going wrong.
There was a misalignment between our newly independent decision making and the will of God.
Would it have been better, then, for us to have remained as instinctive animals?
Would that have been more in keeping with God’s plans?
Or should the development of our conscious will be seen as a stage in our progress towards a future state in which our conscious decision-making has been re-aligned with God’s will? (Another version of the FELIX CULPA idea)

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reply to post by DISRAELI

No he did not. That is a myth invented on the internet, which has been refuted many times on ATS.
And Genesis is a Hebrew book, part of the Jewish scriptures. No Christian Emperor could have any control over the content of Jewish scriptures. The contents of the Old Testament are, by definition, the books which the Jews accept.

I'm sorry. I didn't want to include the OT too, only the NT. The emperor was not a Christian by the way. Not by heart.
I've posted an argument, that didn't fit with the Genesis story. What was I thinking...

You like that book because it fills in gaps in your information.
Exactly.
That is my reason for calling it fiction, because it was blatantly written to satisfy readers like yourself, who don't like gaps in the information and want them to be filled in.

Your arguments aren't good enough. The book does not fill in gaps. I've already filled these gaps, with other sources. The book is actually coming up with similar results. Unless you know for sure it's sci fi, to satisfy people. It's a BS argument.

If you don't want to discus it, that's fine with me. Just say so. Don't give bs arguments to back up that you think is fiction. You don't know. If you do, feel free to enlighten me.

I only asked a question. I wouldn't do that, if I only was interested in the other books, I would read them in that case.

So... Lets get back on topic Huh..

Sinter Klaas
I've posted an argument, that didn't fit with the Genesis story. What was I thinking...

That wasn't quite what happened.
You were trying to argue me out of my declared intention to stick with Genesis, and I did not give way.
By all means let us keep to the topic of the thread, which is the interpretation of a story in Genesis.

reply to post by DISRAELI


I did not. I wanted to hear your reasons for claiming the other books, you didn't want to discuss, to be science fiction, written for people that want the gaps in the story filled.

I asked this, because I'd like to know about any evidence suggesting that they are what you said they were.
If I agree with the explanation, it would save me a lot of time reading.

I already read in earlier post you didn't to talk other topics then the genesis book of the bible.
I don't think it's to much to ask, why you think the other books are sci fi though. Your comments on the books, created my question, you know. You didn't have to write them.

I won't begin to pretend that I understand what actually happened in the Garden of Eden that day. But there are two trees, which I seem to be reading that people think there is one. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and then were kicked from the garden before they could eat from the Tree of Life and live forever in their sin. That would have been bad for us. We needed death to have any chance of escaping our sin.

What I think may have happened, is that the fruit was really a metaphore. God created it as a test of our loyalty. The fruit on it doesn't matter, what matters is that man chose to disobey God and eat from it, and that act put them in a state of sin which we inherit to this day. That state of sin is what gave them knowledge of good and evil, because now they knew what it meant to be outside of God's will and they actually thought they could hide from Him.

So God banished us from the Garden, and Adam and Eve started a life on this planet. I also wonder if this Earthly plane of existence wasn't here before they sinned, and that's why we see a planet with a longer history than that told by the Bible. The Bible does say that Satan fell and took a third of Heaven with him. Maybe he took a few other human beings with him then as well, and what we have in the Bible is the history and story of Adam and Eve's fall and the generations that came from them, but maybe other humans had already turned their back on God and were banished to this planet. It's not really clear how many humans God created on that day, but theologins tend to think that the term Adam was used to describe a population of humans, not just a single man at the time of creation. After a specific human sinned, then he took the name Adam in the story, and the female human became Eve.

It's interesting to note that recently, a couple books relating NDEs have touched on subjects related to this. In Heaven is for Real, the child says he has seen both these trees growing in Heaven. This gives a little creedence to my theory that we were kicked out of Heaven, not removed from some garden that was here on Earth already. I don't think anyone will every find a gate on Earth wiht an angel standing and guarding it. In another NDE, a neuro surgeon related that God allows certain areas of sin to exist in the universe to keep free choice valid. There has to be some place to go to that is outside of God's will if there is truly to be free will. God wants his creations to love Him and all HIs other creations implicitly. If you want to play this game of sin, then you come here.

Just some thoughts and I offer no proof that could mean anything. I wait for the day when I'll know for sure.

But one thing that this train of thought leads to. If you want to follow God, think on what this may mean. When we die, you may go to Heaven to live with Him forever. If the tree is still in Heaven, then you will still have to make the same choices to serve and obey Him every day for eternity. The temptation will remain.

So chose now who you will serve, and be ready and happy for the chance to serve Him!

reply to post by DISRAELI


To "know" many believe is to understand and believe intellectually. We "know" that the earth is round.

To Know, capital K, is to experience. Experiential Knowledge is a whole different ballgame.

reply to post by MRSeeker

You are right, people do sometimes seem to confuse the two trees.
I have written a separate thread on the Tree of Life, where I suggest that they were already eating from it in the Garden, that the whole point of their residence in the Garden was that they should eat from the Tree of Life, and that the purpose of expelling them was to interrupt what they were already doing.
I too treat the fruit as metaphorical.
In fact it seems to me that the best way of correlating Adam and Eve with earlier generations is to regard them as representative figures symbolising God's relationship with the early human race.

reply to post by DISRAELI


Good. The story of Adam and Eve is a fable. A fable is a made-up story that a wise man tells his followers to explain something in simple words a topic that is otherwise too difficult.

The true knowledge and true power are inter-related. A soul can get true knowledge only once liberated from cycles of life and death (or stops taking physical bodies). The seen world is called 'maya' in Sanskrit as it is an illusion created by God - by mixing His power in inanimate 'prakriti'. Knowledge of seen world is thus called 'maya' or illusion. Only the knowledge of souls (another dimension unseen by physical bodies) is true knowledge.

A liberated soul sees itself and others (including material world) as everything exists in its true form.

a reply to: DISRAELI

I find your understanding of Genesis lacking. You see symbolic's in some objects like the apple but not in others. Perhaps everything is symbolic. That we can only understand the truth in Genesis by deciphering it.

God created man in his image. Now unless you think God is an entity in human form we can deduce that man is symbolic for our spiritual nature making woman our material nature or human form (created latter through Darwinism). This is why the snake had to talk to eve, because Adam our spiritual nature isn't corruptible (its made in Gods image). The snake therefor convinces our material or human form (eve) to seek material joys instead of spiritual joys, Now its obvious that snakes cannot talk. So its symbolic of something that continually nags us to enjoy earthly joys instead of spiritualism. That snake is our ego.

So Genesis is not about a man and woman that lived 3000 or so years ago. It is a blueprint of our true nature, today.

In Gospel of Thomas it has this saying attributed to Jesus...

Simon Peter said to him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."

So we can decipher Jesus as saying...

For every woman who will make herself spiritual (male) will enter the kingdom of heaven.

A female is one who is merged in the external; a male is one who is merged in the internal. It has nothing to do with our sex.

a reply to: glend
In the second post of this thread, I allowed for an interpretation compatible with Darwinism (to which I have no objections);

The tree of knowledge and evolution.

I’m offering an understanding of the “fruit of the tree of knowledge in terms of men making their own decisions, assessing the difference between good and evil by their own judgement, instead of relying upon God’s judgement.
But this facility for making our own decisions seems to be inseparable from our understanding of what it means to be human.
At least we can’t imagine ourselves without it.
In effect, I’ve identified “knowing good and evil” with human consciousness.

This opens up the possibility of fitting the “tree of knowledge” story into the more modern understanding of human origins as a gradual process of development.
The difference between “knowing” and “not knowing” good and evil could be identified with the difference between acting upon conscious will and acting upon instinct.
In other words, “eating from the tree of knowledge” represents the arrival of human consciousness.
It represents the fact that humanity detached itself from the world of acting upon instinct and struck out along its own path of conscious decision-making.
(One of the symptoms of this transition to self-consciousness being the adoption of clothes).

The central theme of the Bible is that this is when things began going wrong.
There was a misalignment between our newly independent decision making and the will of God.
Would it have been better, then, for us to have remained as instinctive animals?
Would that have been more in keeping with God’s plans?
Or should the development of our conscious will be seen as a stage in our progress towards a future state in which our conscious decision-making has been re-aligned with God’s will? (Another version of the FELIX CULPA idea).

a reply to: DISRAELI

Thanks DISRAELI for explaining. I can see your concepts arn't really that different to mine. You may be interested that a very similar story to Genesis exists in the Hindu veda's which I have copied from the web site (tainted with the web sites opinions). It might be of interest...

The Upanisadic story speaks of two birds perched on the branch of a pippala tree. One eats the fruit of tree while the order merely watches its companion without eating. The pippala tree stands for the body. The first bird represents a being that regards himself as the jivatman or individual self and the fruit it eats signifies sensual pleasure. In the same body (symbolized by the tree) the second bird is to be understood as the Paramatman. He is the support of all beings but he does not know sensual pleasure. Since he does not eat the fruit he naturally does not have the same experience as the jivatman (the first). The Upanisad speaks with poetic beauty of the two birds. He who eats the fruit is the individual self, jiva, and he who does not eat is the Supreme Reality, the one who knows himself to be the Atman. It is this jiva that has come to be called Eve in the Hebrew religious tradition. "Ji" changes to "i" according to a rule of grammar and "ja" to "ya". We have the example of "Yamuna" becoming "Jamuna" or of "Yogindra" being changed to "Joginder ". In the biblical story "jiva" is "Eve" and "Atma" (or "Atman") is "Adam". "Pippala" has in the same way changed to "apple". The Tree of Knowledge is our "bodhi-vrksa". "Bodha" means "knowledge". It is well known that the Budhha attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree. But the pipal (pippala) was known as the bodhi tree even before his time.

Or should the development of our conscious will be seen as a stage in our progress towards a future state in which our conscious decision-making has been re-aligned with God’s will?

This is the belief I share, that God only created the physical cosmos, as a playpen for us to learn. However I don't think either beliefs (misalignment etc) is damaging to our spiritual paths.

"but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die."

If you eat from the tree of 'good and evil' then you have eaten from the tree of duality.................you will divide 'what is' (the one life) into 'before and after'......and the concept of time has been created.
Man suffers from 'time'...metaphorically, he is expelled from paradise because he now believes he is a thing in time.....and in time all things die.
Does now ever die?

The tree of life is one without a second.
The tree of good and evil is dual.

Are you really a thing....in time?
Will you seek in time for some thing which will make you feel complete?

a reply to: Itisnowagain

Man suffers from 'time'...metaphorically, he is expelled from paradise because he now believes he is a thing in time.....and in time all things die.

I have used Kabbalah to try unravel the symbolic's because its written by Rabbi's that understand their own books (Torah).

DISRAELI said in opening post...

apple...
Nor was it the discovery of sex. When Adam and Eve were introduced into the story, we were told that God made them man and wife

That is true to a point. Its when we partake in sex for the purpose of sensual pleasure, instead of reproduction, that causes us to turn our back to our spiritual side But its not only sex, its all forms of sensual pleasure. Be it sensual pleasure of taste buds etc - ice-cream etc. Kabbalah states that the actual sensations that give us that pleasure is from Gods light. So if we use that light for temporary sensual desires it will be blocked (there are six gates) from entering our spirit and we remain dark inside.

you will certainly die=reincarnation

Reincarnation in this physical plane ceases when we are full of light (thus conquered/experienced all egotistical desires). But there still remains other realms to conquer. Kabbalah states that we are already in an enlightened state in the timeless spiritual realms. We are using these realms in linear time to experience that enlightenment in our sensations - we cannot understand true forgiveness if we haven't experience theft of everything we love etc. Its our ego that allows us to experience those sensations.

We were never expelled. That garden is us.