When Adam fell, he fell asleep.
— Ken Wilber [i]
The Hindu cosmology (from the Bhagavata Purana IV. iii) would agree with the statement of Ken Wilber quoted above. “Thinking of objects attracts the senses to them. The senses being attracted, the mind becomes attached. When this attachment grows in the mind, man loses all power of discrimination. Losing the power of discrimination [between illusion (P-B) and reality (P-A), between the True self and the false self, and between life sustaining and self-destructive behavior], he becomes deluded. Being deluded, he loses all memory. All memory being lost, there is lost the knowledge of the Atman, the divine Self. The loss of this knowledge is called by the wise ‘losing one’s own Self.’ What greater calamity can there be than to lose one’s own Self? Everything is dear to us because of the Self. When the Self is lost, what remains?”[ii]
Humanity fell asleep according to both the Eastern and Western P-A narratives of mystics who see deeply into the nature of Simple Reality. But here we will critique the conventional story of The Fall as found in Christianity with the help of the scholar Elaine Pagels.
“[St.] Augustine emphasizes humanity’s enslavement to sin. Humanity is sick, suffering, and helpless, irreparably damaged by the fall, for that ‘original sin,’ Augustine insists, involved nothing else than Adam’s prideful attempt to establish his own autonomous self-government. Astonishingly, Augustine’s radical views prevailed, eclipsing for future generations of western Christians the consensus of more than three centuries of Christian tradition.”[iii] Before St. Augustine (354—430 CE) Christians had traditionally believed that the birthright of human beings was free moral choice. “Augustine declares, on the contrary, that the whole human race inherited from Adam a nature irreversibly damaged by sin.”[iv]
Augustine had ulterior motives in denying his fellow human beings free will and those motives flowed from his power energy center. Adam was to have learned obedience from his experience in the Garden just as Christians in Augustine’s time were to be obedient to the authorities of the Church. “Augustine having denied that human beings possess any capacity whatever for free will, and accepts a definition of liberty far more agreeable to the powerful and influential men with whom he himself wholeheartedly identifies.”[v] The Christian church then becomes a P-B institution controlled by the false selves of the hierarchical oligarchs and most Christians remain asleep today.
Seth provides us with an alternative perspective on the story of The Fall. “In certain respects, Eve, rather than Adam eats the apple first because it was the intuitive elements of the race, portrayed in the story as female, that would bring about this initiation; only afterward could the ego, symbolized by Adam, attain its new birth and its necessary alienation. The tree of knowledge, then, did indeed offer its fruits—and ‘good and bad’—because this was the first time there were any kinds of choices available, and free will. In your particular legend Adam appears first. The woman being created from his rib symbolized the necessary emergence, even from the new creature, of the intuitive forces that will always come forth—for without that development the race would not have attained self-consciousness in your terms. Good and evil then simply represented the birth of choices, initially in terms of survival, where earlier instinct alone had provided all that was needed.”[vi]
The choice available to us today enables us to move beyond mere good and evil or survival. Awakening into Simple Reality will expose the illusion of The Fall and enable us to leave that toxic story behind.
[i] Wilber, Ken. The Spectrum of Consciousness. Wheaton, Illinois: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1977, p. 134.
[ii] Johnson, Clive [ed.]. Vedanta: An Anthology of Hindu Scripture, Commentary and Poetry. New York: Bantam, 1971, p. 75.
[iii] Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1998, p. 99.
[iv] Ibid., p. 109.
[v] Ibid., p. 120.
[vi] Roberts, Jane. The Nature of Personal Reality. New York: Bantam, 1974, p. 241.
