The Garden of Eden Myth — the Mirror of Our Cultural Dysfunction
Within our cultural mythos is a mirror of our collective and individual minds.
Myths can be great teachers if we can listen, digest, and see ourselves within the story the myth illustrates. As Joseph Campbell, who studied and researched myths throughout time and from a multiplicity of cultures, shared, “Mythology is not a lie; mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.” Flowing through the myths of this culture is a grand kaleidoscope of reflections of how our culture sees the self, others, and the world, and pointers toward our human potential as well as the heroic journey of waking up. Mythology is neither fact nor wrong. They are stories that can help us better understand ourselves and our culture. However, when taken as fact, myths can become very destructive, myopic, and fear-based. In this way, myth becomes belief and delusion, making it impossible actually to see what the story is pointing to.
Painting a vivid understanding of our cultural identity, rendered in the Torah, Koran, and the Bible, set for us in Genesis, points to our inherent wholeness as the Garden of Eden and also the birth of a cultural belief system that will systematically destroy anything that gets in its way and blind itself from living in wholeness. Yet, instead of seeing this story as a mirror or a pointer, many people see this myth as fact and truth and thereby miss what it expresses to us.
The myth of Genesis shares and pontificates an aspect of our ancient cultural story. This story points to a vision of when humanity lived woven together with all other creatures on this planet. However, Genesis also metaphorically paints the picture of how our particular culture moved away from Wholeness and began down the road of fear and separation. The story of Genesis points to how our culture forced people to bury their true nature by teaching us that we were flawed rather than being in the pure nakedness of authenticity.
Every culture has a creation myth. These creation myths give rise to the values and totems of that particular group of people. Our Judeo/ Christian creation myth definitely gives us insight into the roots of our hierarchical structure. This is a culture that, in its beginnings, was toiling in agriculture; hierarchy had bloomed, violence had sprung up, and laws and commandments were formed to subdue the people. To make sense of this lifestyle, the belief systems were presented in the Bible.
The Bible proclaims symbolically and resoundingly the ideology of domination and enslavement. Genesis 1:27 and 1:28 says, “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.God blessed them. Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” And later, in Genesis 3:16, “To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” This culture’s God was one of jealousy, violence, anger, and despotism. Simply put, our cultural God is an authoritative despot. This God was a Hellish version of a monster, then a loving interconnected compassionate God. This mirrored the belief system of the collective consciousness of this culture. Power, fear, and power are what this culture uses to keep the power structure in place and the rationale to destroy the very planet that gives them life.
The God of this myth dictates what happens and will happen and is of the utmost authority, an authority that all people must bow down. In many ways, he represents a fascist dictator. He represented the use of fear and judgment to do what one wants to do when one has power and wealth. If one believes in this ideology, one will fight against anything that rises up against this dogma. This story also helps us see why domination, sexism, and war are the God-given rights of man from our cultural point of view. This creation myth is using symbolism for us to reflect an ideology of the nature of our culture and what has led us onto a path of destruction and fear, a path that has kept us from questioning authority and following a creed of sorrow, thereby enslaving ourselves into ignorance.
To make sense of why this culture felt that they were flawed and living in exile from the joy of life itself, they came up with a story that represents their fall from grace. The fall was unconscious, yet they understood that they had lost something fundamental and authentic once they had left their deep connection to the wild. Before they decided to buy into a belief system, a dream that created such sorrow, this culture, represented by Adam (man/humanity) and Eve (to give life), were living in Eden. Eden represents wild nature, the Wholeness that has no end. Adam and Eve were in tune, flowing with all, dancing in the immeasurable wonder of freedom. Naked and alive, they were not afraid.
Within the garden spring forth the essence of the life-giving energy, the tree of life. The garden, and this tree, are always there within us, and what we experience when we are beyond division, where we see we are part of the interdependency of all, where life streams everlasting. In Genesis, it was explained that within the garden was also the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What was the need for this tree? What did it represent? For Adam and Eve, humanity lived as part of, in harmony with, and with knowledge of their intimate surroundings.
This tree represents the birth of a new cultural belief system. A culture that would make themselves believe they had the answers, that they could dictate what would happen to the other cultures and the wild ecosystems that thrived on this planet. Adam and Eve were told not to touch this fruit. But it was there, waiting. The serpent represents power and deception, the path of lies and fears that would be their path if they decided to eat this fruit.
People with this new type of knowledge, a knowledge built in fear rather than understanding and communion, would give rise to a society governing what species can live and should die. It would also give rise to hierarchy and unhealth, a domestication of the mind, and a disconnect, with the flow of all. By taking this path, the people of this new culture would be doomed to sorrow and forced out of the Garden of Eden through their righteous belief system.
In our cultural myth, God represents an authority beyond questioning, higher than all else, dictating all things and unquestionably. This authoritative figure forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of this knowledge. This sets the stage for power over, authority over, division, and fear. This myth shares that only authority had the right to disseminate this knowledge.
Knowledge was already a part of human consciousness. It simply wasn’t divided. It was in balance, illustrated by the great cosmic tree of life within the Eden of Wholeness. All its roots and branches reached out to infinity. Connecting to this wholeness was a deep-rooted interconnected flow and a deep communion with what is. There was no end to knowledge, which was all hitched together in Indra’s infinite web and seen without fear, in complete balance. When seen in this light, one is lit up with its inherent beauty and as an integral part of consciousness. In this place, there can be no mischievousness or malice. For in wholeness, our openness leads and uses the self (navigational system) to play in the wondrous world of life. This is flow. This was Eden. This was the whole within before authority displaced this understanding. And yet, it is still who we are; we have just covered up its authentic truth.
The God of this myth symbolizes an authoritative top-down approach, representing the beliefs and totems of our culture. God, representing the authoritative elite, held the ownership of power. This God, representing the elite of this culture, came into Eden, forbade Adam and Eve to touch this fruit, and made it a sin to do so, for to bite into the tree’s fruit would represent death and isolation. Yet, when they first ate of the fruit, “the eyes of both were opened” (Gen. 3:7), and Yahweh remarked, “See, the man has become like one of us [deities], knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:22) Their eyes were opened with the fear that authority was already in place. To now have this knowledge was to put the people of this culture asleep and unaware of the Eden beneath their feet. To be awake to this, the culture felt as if God — authority, had banished them forever for undermining his authority and so were thrown out of the garden to work the land forever.
After Adam and Eve ate the fruit, God came down to let them know that by going against His wishes, they would be punished for this transgression, enslaved to work, bound by sin (missing the mark) forever, and divided from Eden. How can one be whole when one believes they are divided? Because of fear now, they felt ashamed of their own existence, now under the belief that authority can’t be questioned.
This story, the reflection of our culture’s ideology, makes it quite clear that this type of dualistic knowledge gives power and control, creates hierarchy and division, and also destroys one connection to what is, and so pushes one away from Eden that lies right in front of us still today. The wildness of nature and ourselves is the freedom and wholeness that is always there if we question this myth.
Fear was now at the very roots of our culture. Division and dualism formed, and good and evil would exist as a judgment on anyone who held a perceived lack of power, whether in the family, state, country, or other species and ecological systems.
Another layer to this myth spotlights the serpent, who also represents the great kundalini energy, a cycle of energy within us, and Eve, the giver of life, who initiate the fall from wholeness. Both the Kundalini, our life force, and Eve, our spring of life, are what give us wonder, energy, connection, a fire of awareness that opens our eyes to all around us that gives us the light that sees the interdependency of all things, a unifying knowledge, was a great power, freedom, that couldn’t be allowed to happen. And in doing so, the myth makes out this incredible energy, the snake, as deceitful. Adam and Eve, through punishment (fear), were shackled in ignorance by God’s authoritative power and forced out of Eden out of their own innate wholeness.
Metaphorically speaking, this simply points to the dominating worldview that we are to live under the guise of authority and fall into our roles to enrich the elite with more power and wealth. Without question, people of this culture fell and continue to fall into fear, into belief, and because of this fear, believed in this ideology of sin and a hierarchical power structure. This Belief kept the people of this culture in a psychological prison, as perpetual children needing the authoritative father of culture to dictate who they are to be and the role they are to play. This culture does a great job of perpetuating this mythos, for if people were to be free and see wholeness rather than duality, interconnectivity rather than hierarchy, they would not allow authority to lead them. Rather, freedom and community would be the way.
Because of our deep unconscious belief in our cultural mythos, rather than trusting, living with the flow of all of life, living in connection to the tree of life and its immortal life-giving essence, and using knowledge with the vision of wholeness, we are in opposition, stuck in fragmentation, control, and despair.
Believing the authority that this fruit of knowledge is sinful, Adam and Eve grew embarrassed, and guilt entered their consciousness. Losing sight of their wholeness and their connection to what is, they began thinking and feeling dualism, believed that they were flawed, and felt the sorrow of oppression. Their stay in the Garden was now divided, and their fear now imprisoned the wholeness of their consciousness, and their lives turned into constant opposition. In this conflict, violence now became their lens, for they were violating their true nature. And as time went on, in their forgetfulness, they began to bury away their living Eden, their consciousness and used control and fear to manipulate and violate the living systems upon the earth.
This myth illustrates that this culture was constructed out of fear and trauma. As it grew in size, our culture began to consume and destroy immeasurable other cultures that lived still within the garden’s domain. We began to increase our numbers and subdue everything in our way, including any indigenous culture that was in our path. We were slaves to fear.
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If we simply could see that these biblical stories are myths pointing to our own minds, our history, and at times our potential, then we could begin to see the great wisdom of these stories. The sad thing is people of this culture, empty inside, look for something to believe in, hold onto, and thereby take something that is merely a pointer into something as fact and truth. And in that vision becomes a distortion and violence.
Dualistic thought conceives division, ignorance, and violence. It violates our own flow, our natural way of learning and seeing. It takes us immediately away from our connection to the earth and blinds us from our connection to the whole of life. This dualistic knowledge represents the way we are educated. Once we began to be educated in this fashion, we lost sight of our wholeness as fear entered the heart of this culture, and we became estranged from all that was once wholeness. We lost sight of our connection and place with nature and now believe we must progress, live in a hierarchy, conquer the land, and destroy anything that gets in the way of our separative beliefs.
Rather than questioning this assumption, questioning that maybe this book of stories is actually simply a myth, our culture instead becomes brainwashed into buying into struggle and that we are in a fight against nature and, of course, oneself. Yet, if we can open our eyes and look deeply into the stories, we will see that the beauty of this myth is an understanding of what happens when we blindly choose authority. It also illustrates that dualistic knowledge only separates us more and more from what is. This also shows that this can be changed if we can stop and understand the myth, for it will illustrate that it is not who we truly are.
Our cultural vision is based on an illusion that has persisted for thousands of years, and from that illusion, we are acting out of a fractured self. Rather than seeing that we are whole, that wholeness is who we are, we have created the illusion that we are separate, that the universe is dualistic and materialistic. We are playing out our cultural drama, playing out hidden and overt desires and attachments, hiding away our fears, and so what we experience is a shared cultural dream. Wake up. The Genesis myth is not meant to be read as fact or truth. A myth is a wonderful story that can teach us about our culture and about ourselves.
This myth actually points to our cultural dysfunction and that we are not meant to live dissected from Eden. Eden isn’t some lost utopian. It lies within each and every one of us right here, right now. Let go of the belief of fear and separation and dive into what nature points to — interconnectivity and wholeness. Listen in and let your conditioned thoughts go, and see in presence what is. Break free from our cultural mythos and live in true freedom, unchained without authority.
