“Why is it there?” asked my long-time conservative friend, Larry Berlin, over lunch in an upscale Mexican diner in Chicago. By “it,” he meant the “Tree of Life,” as portrayed in the “Book of Genesis.”

 

What a peculiar and brilliant question.

 

So many of us, myself included, are content with “analysis” of history, philosophy, religion, and so on. But asking “why” is indeed a more radical (going to the root of the problem) examination than simply asking “what.” And in this case, “what” opens the door into the confounding, mystical and omnipotent mind of the divine. For the ego, “psychoanalyzing” God is the ultimate venue, where narcissistic audacity can indulge in its quest for the ultimate orgy.

 

Yep. “Why” can be both dangerous and liberating, an ambiguity that is expressed most naturally in children, but begins to wane to the consequences of a developing ego. After all, the truth is a spiritual pursuit. Being “right” is an egotistical compulsion. So thanks again, Mr. Berlin, for the question.

 

Here’s my response…

 

*   *   *

  

There are actually two trees. Yet at the dramatic moment when Adam takes a bite of the forbidden fruit, and just prior to that, we are left with an image of the just the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Life, eluded to several times before and after is conspicuously absent, both in scene and in consciousness at this epoch moment.

 

But why? And why is there not one, but two trees bearing mythic powers?

 

Genesis is rich in both symbolism and the allegory that underlies it, and the fact that only the Tree of Knowledge participates in the "original sin" is quite telling. It speaks to another phenomenon that appears and is likely triggered in parallel with “original sin” – the invocation of separation or the beginning of duality.  In other words, the Big Bang and the Big Bite are synonymous.

Who Really Created the Universe?

Using the logic established in Genesis, God could not have created the universe, only the preconditions.

 

This is precisely what the Garden of Eden is. And the forbidden fruit presented something totally foreign to the young couple. A choice. Don’t eat it, and nothing happens. Eat it, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes, the similarities to The Matrix, most notable here.

 

Adhering to the laws of logic, God could not give Adam and Eve free will outright, for if he did, he would effectively be imposing his will on them. But obviously, he could present the offer to them as perhaps that most cunning sales pitch ever.

  

Everybody knows that if you want a child to do something, tell them they can’t.

 

Persuasion is allowed within the realm of free will, and God clearly took advantage of this fuzzy area, which gave him just enough latitude to get the universe moving.

 

How?

 

He told Adam and Eve, “Not to eat the apples from the Tree of Knowledge.” And – at the same time – to hedge his bets, he conspired with the snake (often viewed as Satan or the Devil) to encourage them to do the opposite.

 

With these two heavyweights whispering in each ear, how could they possibly resist?

 

In fact, both voices seemed to be telling them the same thing.

 

“Do it!”

 

Clearly, God wanted Adam and Eve to “sin” as it were, and stacked the deck to make sure they would.  And just like that, free will and God’s will are hopelessly entangled, not to mention the very notion of original sin.

 

What about motives? We know God’s motive. But what motivation did Adam and Eve have to eat the forbidden fruit? Everything in Eden was, well, it was the Garden of Eden. No worries. Eating the forbidden fruit presented no real advantage to a place that was already perfect. Clearly, their personal wills would have wanted to maintain the status quo, unless of course if we are to assume that to screw up a good thing is part of human nature. And this notion would have merit if not for the fact that God prodded them into the original sin.

 

The obvious problem for the religiously righteous is that the culpability of “original sin” rests on God’s will, not Adam or Eve’s. In fact, we can go so far as to say that God set them up!

 

We now must consider whether God was trying to send us a message, a very strong one that he wanted to leave plain and clear, completely unambiguous for all to see.

 

The message that God was trying to send us was that “sin” is necessary, even essential for life as we know it. That perfection is not expected of us, only of God, which is why he went to all the trouble of having “sin” trigger the beginning of the universe…to show its origin, its domain, and its nature, while he remained perfect or “clean of sin.”

 

Sin is the absence of perfection and a lot else, including consciousness, knowledge, free will, duality, all that stuff that governs our universe. As we can see, this residua of sin is literally what makes the universe go round.

 

Along these lines, sin is not bad. It is actually God’s will.

 

Now is probably a good time to define what sin is. The true definition I believe can be implicated from Genesis. That is, the Garden of Eden was Utopia, a place of perfection. Adam and Eve were content in living in perfection, that is, until the collective wills of God and Satan overwhelmed their personal wills.

 

Which begs the questions…were Adam and Eve truly guilty of original sin? A good legal defense would claim “entrapment”, that God set them up so thoroughly that they were bound to submit to the pressure and take that Big Bite.

 

Perhaps, but why?

 

Quite possibly, there were no other options. Anything short of sin, and the vehicle used to get there…free will…would create nothing and go nowhere.  The universe would simply propagate more a priori concepts…forms, ideas, but nothing to put a material universe into motion, no test as it were. In other words, qualities without purpose, concepts without metaphors…symbolism.

 

Of course, such suggestions cannot be made without a hearty helping of hubris, for to make claims about God’s options, one must dance with audacity. But as long as we’re already there, we might as well take the full plunge.

Original Sin Gives the Universe Purpose.

Here’s God’s dilemma, and the reason by which Genesis is what it is. Namely, perfection has no consequences. Only in the world of imperfection are their ramifications for actions. So in the world of perfection…the Garden…the result of drinking from, let’s say, a sacred lake would be no different…not even distinguishable…from eating an apple from some other tree.

 

If the Garden wasn’t perfect, God could have presented a different scenario to the first couple, that being some kind of reward for eating the “special” fruit (clearly no longer forbidden). And they would have been granted greater well being or power of some sort. But Adam and Eve had already hit the ceiling. After all, it is impossible to improve upon perfection, or at least, that’s what logic tells us.

 

Without “original sin,” there wouldn’t be much to do. After all, what does one do when all his or her needs are met? Apparently, the question never arises because in the perfect world, “need” does not exist, nor does the need to know, or the need to do, or the need to care, or the need to have purpose. In other words, the Utopian “garden” from a mortal perspective, is a snooze, a bore. Yet it is with the greatest irony that so many of us seek to return to our prosaic origin after we die – the Heaven Mystique.

 

Utopian theories and visions are plentiful in the material world. They are not only found in philosophy and political thought, but in music and poetry as well, even in fairy tales. It seems that what we all seem to want is to go to that “safe” place where no harm can come of us. Living may be exciting at times, but it’s also dangerous, and it always concludes with death.

 

As people, we are designed to be…more or less…uncomfortable in our own skin, and it seems we were designed that way. Original sin that propels us into the world of good and evil guarantees that the price we pay to know and experience the world is…

 

• Fear when we don’t know.
• Depression when we loose purpose.
• Anger when things don’t work out the way we want, in theological vernacular, God’s will over our will, and the unwillingness to accept it.
• Confusion when we are uncertain.
• Stress when life is overwhelming.

 

No one gets through life without experiencing a hearty dose of each of these. Indeed, life is hard. No surprise we should seek sanctuary from life, whereby without having any experience of it, we still imagine a world bereft of such things, like the Garden and Heaven.

 

Which leads to another problem. The Garden is a bore for humans. We are neither comfortable as human or spiritual beings, though psychologically we possess elements of each.  It’s like having to choose between two pairs of pants, one being too tight, the other, too long. We’ll have to grow into them, and at the same time, refrain from egotistical indulgences.

 

And back we are to the two trees.

 

Neither perfection nor imperfection “fits.” We suffer from the proverbial grass being greener wherever we ain’t. And this too it seems was part of the divine plan, that is, accepting the Garden as the mythical equivalent to the a priori universe.

 

Original sin is a unique condition which transforms perfection into imperfection without contaminating perfection itself, a clever trick if you think about it.

 

When we sin, the first thing we become aware of is that we have sinned. It is the first source of knowledge we gain. As such, it is no accident that original sin grows literally from the Tree of Knowledge.

 

Now here’s an interesting hypothetical. What if God were put on trial for entrapment, for pressuring Adam to commit original sin? The defense may be forced to fight with rhetoric with hopes that they could transcend the very issue before them, arguing that sin is a gift from God that furnishes both the need and means to reject perfection in exchange for awareness and hopefully, if we do it “right,” knowledge. In other words, what’s at issue here isn’t entrapment, but rather, knowledge and free will. A fascinating defense indeed.

 

Regardless, the rift that the Big Bite created still remains today. The spiritual and material worlds remain largely separate, and society seems to like it that way, at least Western society.

 

Many are inclined to maintain this separation as though it is some sort of "organic" state (and clearly Genesis seems to be an ally here). Others like myself are more predisposed to integrate the two to a point where transcendence brings about true integration (for lack of a better word). After all, will we not some day soon have but just one connection (albeit wireless) for all our information and entertainment appliances? Nobody advocating the separation of telephony and computers here, not to mention radio and TV. So why do so many...the status quo in fact...have what appears to be a deep-seated urge to keep the spiritual and the material separate?

 

Perhaps we are unconsciously inclined to maintain the order of the Garden vis-a-vis the two trees. In other words, this is the intuitive response, one of a sixth sense that appears to pull from primal, archetypal experience.

But why is it there?

Something has to symbolize the birth of consciousness and morality, for behind the symbolism is just a concept, and a concept alone evokes no imagery or emotion, just an idea that in this instance some would call a fact, myself included.

 

Consciousness is a fact, an empirical fact, albeit a nonphysical one.  So the tree is there because consciousness...a metaphysical fact...needs a physical container to achieve resonance in the human psyche.

 

Or does it? A priori knowledge, or knowledge that exists independent of experience suggests that certain ideas and concepts exist "out there in the heavens" like Plato's forms or Jung's archetypes. They don't need "experience" to be grasped. They are indivisible, pure entities or perhaps "essences" that are unaffected by human experience, yet at the same time, are always invoked into human consciousness by consciousness itself.

 

In other words, materialism is built on metaphor, which relies on deeper truths to “excite” human consciousness. Philosophy, on the other hand, at least that realm of philosophy that deals exclusively with concepts outside the material domain (or epistemology) is built on indivisible concepts, or allegory, like Plato’s forms and Pirsig’s lengthy discourse on “quality.”

 

Now if this were true, the tree of knowledge clearly wouldn't be needed, nor would Adam, Eve, the Garden, the snake, or any of that stuff.

 

But that wasn't the case.

 

In order to create the material world, “form” must be pre-established, or exist in an a priori state. In this way, The Garden was actually the first application of "form."

 

But the tree's purpose wasn't to give "form" per se. That's what the Garden did. The tree was in the foreground as the protagonist. And while man and woman were clearly separate yet interdependent entities, the two trees were actually one tree, with the roots of the tree of life, half of the entire mass of the tree, hidden inside the earth yet almost a spitting image of the other half...the tree of knowledge that spanned out of the ground and toward the heavens, symbolizing among other things:

 

• As above, so below…interdependence and unity
• The psychic domains of the unconscious and the conscious
• Perfection and imperfection
• Masculine and feminine
• And I’m sure there are many others

 

So to conclude, there is no separation between the spiritual and material, only a misperception about the two trees, which has led to great divisions and conflict in our world, proving once again the massive “power” of perception, or in this case, misperception, as myth ascends from the depths of the unconscious and into material expression.

 

But when we examine myth carefully, and come up with brave dissension, in this case a nonlinear, holistic understanding of The Tree of Knowledge, the very truth of the myth changes in the spirit of the Hermetic aphorism, “as above, so below.”

 

The question now becomes…

 

 “What demarcates the end of The Tree of Life and the beginning of The Tree of Knowledge?

 

I don’t know exactly, but I do know it’s where shamans like to hang out. Many refer to it as the “in-between.” As if being human isn’t “in-between” enough!

 

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About the Author…

 

John David Balla is a corporate dropout in search of meaning, purpose and the truth. He entertains himself as an Internet marketer, author, and musician. He currently lives in Sedona, AZ where he enjoys walking his dog, hiking and paying attention.