When and Why It Began

 

When and Why It Began


There is one problem that must be dealt with before one can even desire to place his life in the hands of the Holy Spirit. It is not a concept that is easy to accept. A quick, shallow reading of the Garden of Eden story seems to indicate that God is punishing Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. But God does not punish, as we saw in the post on “The Mystery of Sin”. The one who instills punishment is the One who opposes God. We may call him the Devil, or the Ego since Christ is the Spirit of unity, and the Ego is the spirit of separation.

So, what happened in that episode of the Garden of Eden. The Devil convinces Adam and Eve of the existence of evil, by telling them that the existence of evil is the god-like knowledge. They now think that their nakedness is evil, and that God will punish them for it. It is , in a sense, a stroke of genius, because it seems to assure an eternal separation from God, stoked by the fear of His punishment.

We have seen in the post on “The Liars' World” that this seeming punishment that we tend to experience is a lie. So what is the truth? The truth is that God loves each of us with an intense love. The intensity of that love I described in more detail in the post “How Loving Is God?”.

The story of the Garden of Eden seems to portray God as deliberately tempting Adam and Eve by telling them not to eat the fruit – which admonition implies that there is something special about it. But we have already learned that this story invented by a liar cannot represent the truth. What really happened?

The following explanation is not my personal revelation, but an explanation that was taught to me. So, the reader can accept any, all, or none of it; but it is consistent; and it is very comforting.

We will have to venture backward into existence before the “big bang”; that is before this perception of matter came into being. This “thought” without matter may be called “soul” or “spirit”, and therefore the discussion will reasonably be seen as a religious discussion, but it can also be examined from a purely logical point of view.

First, there was God. He could experience beautiful scenery, music, aromas, and many other delights, just as we can experience such things in dreams, but He could experience them without the necessity of physical matter to generate them. He desired companionship, not only for the sake of sharing the experiences, but primarily because, being Love Himself, He desired others to love, and to be loved by them.

He created them, not as separate beings, but as extensions of Himself. In order for this loving relationship to be meaningful, the love had to be freely given. An imposed robotic love would not be meaningful. Also, He had to consider the relationships between His children. They should love one another with a deep selfless love. Here, we can learn from what Jesus said about the Kingdom of Heaven: “Jesus said, 'Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' “. (In the King James language, “suffer” means “let” or “allow”.)

At some point this relationship failed. Some of His children wanted to be loved and esteemed more that the others. This is something God could not do, and then some of His children turned against Him. Out of fury, they used the power He had given them to make an artificial world of objects. This event is what we now call the “big bang”. It was made by a misuse of God power, and it is maintained by that same misuse of His power.

Once this game came into existence it required a mechanism to be maintained. It was made by thought and it could only be maintained by thought, and it required a means of keeping attention focused on it. That means was Time, which allowed a system of constant change. Objects would stay in a state of constant flux – aging, decaying, rusting, eroding, dying, being reborn, aging again, ad infinitum, the past moving steadily into the future, with no eternal goal in sight.

Before this artificial world was invented there was no Time – not in the sense of a static, unchanging world, but only in the absence of the false awareness of the continual erosion and decay.

We seem to be in the throes of an insoluble dilemma, but there is a solution to the problem. We simply have to learn to follow the two laws of Jesus: love God completely, and our brothers as ourselves. This was our original state, and it is to this state each of us will return. It may require eons to occur, but we have eons available. And it's at that point we will have true eternal happiness.

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