“The Raw Food Diet is Not EXTREME, Cooked Food is EXTREME. Dead burnt bodies are EXTREME. Veins in your teeth are EXTREME. The Raw Food Diet is completely normal, natural, and well accepted by every animal on the planet but us. The Raw Food Diet is totally ultra conservative, if anything.” -Guess Who?

Malcolm X was "EXTREME" - Every Successful Athlete is "EXTREME" - Cooking Food is "EXTREME" especially since Cooking DESTROYS a Nutrient we Need to FEEL ONE WITH EVERYTHING!!!

Peace and Love..........John

DG

I knew you would get it.

Not only is the Raw Food Diet Not EXTREME, but the Raw Food Diet is the Diet we evolved on for 99% of our Existence. If we put the Human Existence on a Football Field, we discovered FIRE around the 87 Yard Line or ~13 Yards away from where we are today. And then, we went another 12 Yards or so down to the 1 Yard Line before we started to COOK our Food consistently with it. That means that for 99% of our Existence we Ate our FOOD RAW just like all of the other Animals on this Planet and when we started COOKING our Food with FIRE, that was the Fall of Mankind and that’s when we LOST our Golden Age and turned this Paradise into Hell.

Peace and Love..........John

Why do you want to eat like humans supposedly did for a very small majority of our existance ?

Yet you don't want to surrender any other current man made invention, such as your cosy warm home, your synthetic man made clothing, your electricity and heating, your internet, your computers/pcs and high tech communication devices and 21st century health/hygiene.

but for some reason you want to replicate how you suspect the human race were thought to eat before the introduction of cooking.

have you any ancestors out of interest JR who were even vegetarian let alone strict raw vegans. I doubt it. Like 99% of us, you probably come from a line of omnivores and theres no shame in that, you wouldn't be here to tell this story if it wasn't for your ancestors.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2014 10:01PM by powerlifter.

hey john rose

if you stood in the middle of a coliseum filled with mirrors

what would you see?

and if you asked this person

" what do you really want"?

how would he( they) respond?

and what other kinds of responses do you wish for?

and what would that do for you?

and what do you want for yourself

not for others
but for yourself

and what do you want from yourself

not from others

but from yourself

what do you really want?

what is it?

not from this world or for this world or from other people or for other people or from this planet or for this planet

but what do you want for, from yourself?

because your question is a feather in your own mirror

that no one can touch

John Rose Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> “The Raw Food Diet is Not EXTREME, Cooked Food
> is EXTREME. Dead burnt bodies are EXTREME. Veins
> in your teeth are EXTREME. The Raw Food Diet is
> completely normal, natural, and well accepted by
> every animal on the planet but us. The Raw Food
> Diet is totally ultra conservative, if
> anything.” -Guess Who?
>
> Malcolm X was "EXTREME" - Every Successful Athlete
> is "EXTREME" - Cooking Food is "EXTREME"
> especially since Cooking DESTROYS a Nutrient we
> Need to FEEL ONE WITH EVERYTHING!!!
>
> Peace and Love..........John


Interesting question...I think anything has the potential for extreme behavior. So wanting to eat in a pure way isn't the problem so much as thinking that if you were forced to eat cooked food for some reason that you would get sick or that it would be so horrible for you. When it gets so phobic then I think it goes into the obesessive category.

john rose

<<Cooking Food is "EXTREME" especially since Cooking DESTROYS a Nutrient we Need to FEEL ONE WITH EVERYTHING!!! >>

feel one with everything

one with everything

with everything

everything

except

for .... what thing would that be?

“Memories and Visions of Paradise” by Richard Heinberg

Ancient Memories of a Golden Age

The Memory of a Lost Paradise

Once upon a time all human beings lived in friendship and peace, not only among themselves but with all other living things as well. The people of that original Age of Innocence were wise, shining beings who could fly through the air at will, and who were in continual communion with cosmic forces and intelligences. But a tragic disruption brought the first age to an end, and humanity found itself estranged from both Heaven and Nature. Ever since then we have lived in a fragmented way, never really understanding ourselves or our place in the Universe. But occasionally we look back, with longing and regret, and dream of a return to the Paradise we once knew.

Paradise may be the most popular and intensely meaningful idea ever to have gripped the human imagination. We find it everywhere. “In more or less complex forms, the paradisiac myth occurs here and there all over the world,” wrote the great modern authority on comparative religions Mircea Eliade. The Hebraic Garden of Eden, the Greek Golden Age, the Australian Aborigines’ Dreamtime, and the Chinese Taoist Age of Perfect Virtue are but local variants of the universally recalled Time of Beginnings, whose memory has colored all of subsequent history.

The impact of the paradisal image on the collective human consciousness is as deep as it is broad. In no tradition is it a recent or peripheral theme; rather, it is at the very core of the perennial spiritual impulse, reemerging in every generation’s literature, art, and social ideals. Indeed, if one were seeking a motif on which to base an outline summary of human culture, one might well begin with our collective memories of a lost Golden Age and our longings for its return...

The Return of the Sacred

Developments in religious studies in the twentieth century have also played a part in the evolution of the contemporary attitude toward myth. As we have seen, the tendency in the late nineteenth century was to explain religion in social or psychological terms. In 1917, however, psychologist Rudolph Otto published The Idea of the Holy, in which he emphasized the fundamental reality and irreducibility of the religious experience in all its manifestations.

Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, French philosopher Rene’ Guenon pointed to what he called the Primordial Tradition of universal truths that lies at the core of every living religion. All traditions, according to Guenon, are paths for the practical realization of innate spiritual principles in the lives of human beings. Turning nineteenth century cultural evolutionism on its head, Guenon protested in the strongest terms the loss of true spirituality in the modern world. “The material prosperity of the West is incontrovertible,” he wrote, “but it is hardly a cause for envy. Indeed, one can go further; sooner or later this excessive material development threatens to destroy the West if it does not recover itself in time and if it does not consider seriously a ‘return to the source.’”

The Rumanian-American historian of religion Mircea Eliade applied this new attitude toward religion directly to the study of mythology. Eliade refused to reduce myths to economic, social, cultural, psychological, or political meanings; instead, he emphasized the primacy of the experience of the sacred in all traditions. Moreover, he placed tribal religions and the scriptural religions of East and West side by side (rather than arranging them in an evolutionary sequence, as had become customary) in order to reveal and clarify their common motifs.

Like Jung, Eliade saw mythic themes as unconscious archetypes. Going further, he identified the two core themes of world myth as the nostalgia for a Paradise that has been lost because of a primordial tragedy (the Fall), and the initiatory scenario whereby the original golden world is partially restored. Both primitive and scriptural religions, according to Eliade, betray

“…the nostalgia for Paradise, the desire to recover the state of freedom and beatitude before “the Fall”, the will to restore communication between Earth and Heaven; in a word, to abolish all the changes made in the very structure of the Cosmos and in the human mode of being by that primordial disruption.”…

The Mythic Worldview

Through the work of Jung, Otto, Guenon, Campbell, and Eliade runs a current of respect for the sense of the sacred as expressed in all of the world’s religions and mythologies. Through their writings we gain some sense of the worldview of the ancients, in which rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were living parts of a living whole; in which the Cosmos was alive and conscious, partaking of the same intelligent force by which we ourselves are animated; and in which human beings were the link between Heaven and Earth – between the inner dimension of spirit and the outer world of form. Through them we are reacquainted with the context of ancient thought, in which every event was meaningful and every individual knew that his or her life was the embodiment of principle and purpose. In the archaic vision of reality, even the most mundane activities had an overarching significance and were performed not as personal, private acts but as part of a cosmic drama.

For the ancients, the respect for the sacred derived from an awareness of the creative processes of Nature, and it implied a hesitancy to arbitrarily intrude on those processes. To the sanctified consciousness, time and space were themselves sacred, and every atom of creation was part of one joyful chorus. In the Creation-Time, according to the myths of the native Australians, Africans, and Americans, human beings had a specific responsibility in the whole of Nature, which was to provide a living bridge between levels of being.

To say that a thing or an act is sacred is to imply that it has relevance in a universal plane of values and ideals, and that it is therefore a point of contact between two worlds. To the ancients, all was sacred, because everything had significance in both a mundane and also a cosmic context; matter itself was sacred substance. The role of humankind – established the paradisal age of the first ancestors – was to realize that sacredness by coordinating traffic between Heaven and Earth.

Ancient peoples had an acute sense of responsibility not just to family or tribe, but to the whole of life. Its welfare was the reason for their existence. The Hopi Indians of the American Southwest, for example, knew the spirit of the Earth as Maasauu. They said that their purpose was to be apprentices to Maasauu, to be stewards of the Earth. According to their myths, in the early days Maasauu left his plane of existence, having given the Hopi instructions to carry out ceremonies to keep the Earth in balance and to keep the Plan of Life intact. The Hopi still see their ceremonies as essential to the nourishment of all living things on the planet. There is a ceremony for each kind of plant or animal, and the full cycle of ceremonies may continue for weeks….

In the Beginning

In every mythology, Creation is the first act in a grand cosmic drama. That drama unfolds by stages through a Golden Age of peace and plenty, a Fall or period of degeneration, and a catastrophe that brings the sacred Age of the Gods to an end and initiates the present, profane age of the world…

The spiritual life of all ancient and tribal peoples revolved around the maintenance of sacred rhythms and balances through rituals designed to recapitulate the Creation. Creation was the ultimate sacred act, to be commemorated and symbolically repeated on significant occasions in the life of the individual and in the collective life of the tribe. The creative process was at once a cosmic, historical phenomenon for harmonizing Heaven and Nature. The Creation story was therefore of both universal and immediate significance; it described the nature of absolute reality in a way that was both transcendent (true for all times and places) and immanent (true here and now).

The original Creation marked the beginning of the Age of the Gods. Eliade has written, “It would be impossible to overstress the tendency – observable in every society, however highly developed – to bring back that time, mythical time, the Great Time.” That Great Time was the model for all times, so that accessions of new chiefs or kings, initiation rites, weddings, games, planting, hunting, and, especially, new year celebrations were all occasions for the symbolic reenactment of what had occurred in the beginning. The Aborigines of central Australia practiced rituals of circumcision and fashioned “X-ray” bark paintings in precisely the ways their Creator-Ancestors had taught them in the Dreamtime. The Yurok Indians of northern California performed world-renewing dances that the Immortals had revealed to them when the world was young. And according to Joseph Epes Brown, a modern authority on Native American religions, the Pima and Papago tribes of the American Southwest saw the act basket making as “the ritual recapitulation of the total process of creation.”…

The ancient Hindu sages stated the matter with quintessential brevity: “Thus the gods did; thus men do.”

The nostalgia for origins is, as Eliade says, a desire “to recover the active presence of the gods” and “to live in the world as it came from the Creator’s hands, fresh, pure, and strong.” In every culture, we find the same longing to reenter the sacred time when the gods were immediately present, creating and organizing the world.

…It was only when the people set themselves against the other creatures that God was driven away and the original harmony of Nature was destroyed.

World Ages

If the magical landscape fixes Paradise in space, its position in time is defined by its placement at the beginning of a series of world ages. We have already noted the Greek and Hindu conceptions of the ages or Yugas of the world, respectively; there are also close parallels among other cultures. The Iranians, for example, knew four cosmic ages that, in a lost Mazdaean book, the Sudkar-nask, are referred to as the ages of gold, silver, steel, and “mixed with iron”. In the Iranian conception, as in the Greek and Hindu, each age is a step in the world’s deterioration, a process that is leading to a final apocalyptic cleansing.

The Mayans counted their world ages as consecutive Suns – Water Sun, Earthquake Sun, Hurricane Sun, and Fire Sun – according to the nature of the catastrophe that closed the epoch. The Hopi also spoke of four worlds – Tokpela, Tokpa, Kuskurza, and Tuwaquchi – the first of which is described in paradisal terms…

The Age of Miracles and Wonders

According to virtually all accounts, human beings in the paradisal age were possessed of qualities and abilities that can only be called miraculous. They were wise, all-knowing, and able to communicate easily not only with one another but also with all other living things; moreover, they could fly through the air, and they shone with visible light…

Many traditions say that the first human beings spoke a single language. In Genesis, as in the myths of the Chins and Twyan of Indochina, all people could understand one another’s speech until the collapse of a tower or ladder built in an attempt to reach Heaven. The Mayans likewise say that the First People “had but a single language.” Some traditions go further, suggesting that in Paradise humanity was telepathic; the Hopi, for example, say that the First People “felt as one and understood one another without talking.” [JR’s Comment: High Biophoton Levels]

This one language seems to have extended to the animal kingdom as well. Whether it is said that animals could speak as humans or that human beings could understand the animal languages, the result in either case was a state of trust and friendship between man and beast. Jewish legends say that “in all respects, the animal world had a different relation from their relation to his descendents. Not only did they know the language of man, but they respected the image of God, and they feared the first human couple, all of which changed into the opposite after the fall of man.

The Greek storyteller Aesop wrote wistfully that “during the time of the golden race the…animals had articulate speech and knew the use of words. And they held meetings in the middle of the forest; and the stones spoke, and the needles of the pine tree…and the sparrow spoke wise words to the farmer.”

This ability of human beings and animals to understand one another resulted in a condition in which, according to the fifth century BC Greek philosopher Empedocles, “All were gentle and obedient to men, both animals and birds, and they glowed with kindly affection towards one another.”

In African folklore, as in the myths of the ancient Greeks, the harmony of humanity with the animals is reflected in the vegetarian diet of the First People. That our earliest ancestors shunned the killing of animals for food is also implied in the Bible: God tells Adam and Eve, “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in which the fruit is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat” (Genesis 1:29). It is not until after the Deluge that God tells Noah, “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” But because human beings are now permitted to kill and eat the animals, “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea” (Genesis 9:2-3).

Peace and Love..........John

“Memories and Visions of Paradise” by Richard Heinberg

The Fall and the Origins of Human Evil

The Saddest Story

What is evil? Is evil suffering, or the cause of suffering? In either case, evil may be said to be inherent in nature – in predation, decay, disease, and famine. Yet people in every culture and in every age have held to the belief that in the human world there exists another kind of evil that is profoundly unnatural. We may look to Nature for the source of human tendencies toward waste, warfare, greed, and the restless urges to possess, dominate, and kill, but no clear analogy suggests itself. Nature’s evils tend to exist in balance, predation and famine mitigating overpopulation, whereas the human version of evil apparently knows no bounds. From the earliest times, human beings have believed that there is a quality in themselves that sets them apart from the animals – a quality that manifests itself as a sense of alienation and insufficiency and as an abnormal capacity for destructiveness and cruelty.

Ancient peoples insisted that evil in this latter sense has not always existed, but that it had a specific cause. In their myths, the evil that is unique to humanity is described as having resulted from the Fall – the tragic event that brought the Golden Age to an end. They said that human nature is not natural at all, because it has been distorted by some fundamental mistake or failure that has been perpetuated from generation to generation.

Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness with the ground of Being has been lost, and that only by a process of purification and transcendence can we be reconnected with the sacred dimension. Whether it is the Judeo-Christian guilt for the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden, the Taoist nostalgia for the era before the Way of Heaven was corrupted by the ways of men, or the Africans’ sorrow for humanity’s betrayal of the animals, everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original condition of wise innocence and can return to it only through the resolution of some profound inner discord.

What caused the Fall? Why and how was the Age of Innocence brought to an end? These questions have perplexed theologians and philosophers for millennia, and we cannot hope to answer them with finality in a few pages, though we must at least pose and consider them. The myths themselves do not present a straightforward, unified explanation; rather, in describing what seems to be a shift in the fundamental polarity of human consciousness, they employ a variety of images that seem to be metaphors for some subjective, spiritual event….

Degeneration and Change of Character

According to nearly every tradition, the Fall occurred because of a debasement of the quality of character expressed by human beings. The nature of the process of decay is described in various ways. If we hope to penetrate to the kernel of the story, perhaps it is best to begin with the simplest and most easily understood versions before we proceed to the more enigmatic ones. The following African myth provides an apt and picturesque starting point.

According to the Barotse of Zambia, the Creator, Nyambi, once lived on Earth with his wife, Nasilele. Nyambi had made fishes, birds, and animals, and the world was full of life. But one of Nyambi’s creatures was different from all the rest. This creature was Kamonu, the first man. Kamonu was special because he was able to imitate everything Nyambi did. If Nyambi was making something out of wood, Kamonu would do the same. If Nyambi was creating in iron, Kamonu would work in iron as well….

The story of Nyambi and Kamonu, like nearly all African myths of the Fall, tells of the disappearance of God into the sky because of human depravity…Thus, according to the Africans, it was people’s cruelty, quarrelsomeness and insensitivity to Nature that caused the Fall.

The Native Americans agree. The Yurok of the Northern California coast say that when the Earth was new it was inhabited by the immortals, myth-time beings who lived in accordance with cosmic law. When people were created, the Immortals went away: “While the world itself remained perfect and beautiful, human beings had the capacity to violate and disrupt that beauty, to throw off the balance of Creation through, especially, their greed.” Similarly, the Hopi say that long after the time of creation people began to depart from the instructions of the Great Spirit…

The Indic peoples describe the fateful change in human character by emphasizing the First People’s loss of saintliness:

In the Treta Yuga (the second age) sacrifices began, and…virtue lessened a quarter. Mankind sought truth and performed religious ceremonies; they obtained what they desired by giving and doing.

In the Dwapara Yuga…religion lessened one half…Mind lessened, Truth declined, and there came desire and disease and calamities; because of these men had to undergo penances. It was a decadent Age by reason of the prevalence of sin.

In the Kali (present) Yuga…only one quarter of virtue remaineth. The world is afflicted, men turn to wickedness; disease cometh; all creatures degenerate; contrary effects are obtained by performing holy rites; change passeth over all things.

The Greek poet Hesiod, in his enumeration of world ages, described the degeneration of humanity in similar terms:

Then they who dwell on Olympus made a second generation…They could not keep from sinning and from wronging one another, nor would they serve the immortals…For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labor and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night.

…Adam and Eve were stewards of the creative process, enjoined to tend and keep the Garden. The story implies that human beings were originally concerned with the entire process of creation rather than merely with its end products….This teaching is explicitly expressed in some Paradise myths, as well as in the core religious teachings of most cultures. Many Native American tribes (the Hopi and the Yurok, for example) tell us that the First People were instructed in the ways to maintain the balance of the forces of nature. The Fall came with their ancestors’ abandonment of responsibilities of stewardship. In one way or another, nearly all the world’s scriptures warn against “sweet, soft sinfulness”, as the Bhagavad Gita calls it, of obsessive desire for an end product in form. “Want not! Ask Not!” Krishna commands. Find full reward of doing right in right! Let right deeds be thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them.”

The Knowledge of Good and Evil

…The story (in the Bible) implies the existence of two kinds of evil – one inherent in Nature, embodied in the Tree of Knowledge itself, and one created by the act of disobedience of eating from the tree. It is the latter evil that causes Adam and Eve to hide themselves from the presence of the Lord…The first kind of evil – that which grew as fruit on the tree – exists prior to moral choice. It is the evil to which Job refers when he says, “What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” Hindu theology acknowledges the complimentary of this pre-moral good and evil by revering Brahma the Creator and Shiva the Destroyer. The traditions of the Native Americans, Chinese, and Japanese, in their various ways, also agree that in Nature both growth and decay, completeness and incompleteness exist as essential partners in the creative process.

The second kind of evil – the moral evil that is unique to humanity – arises from judgment between the qualities and pairs of opposites inherent in Nature and from emotional attachment to categories and distinctions. Existence in the physical world in and of itself occasionally produces suffering, but it is suffering that is contained in the ebb and flow of natural cycles and processes. It is a suffering contained entirely in the present moment. The human mind produces another kind of suffering, one that has its basis in expectation and memory, arising from the mind’s attachment to its own artificial categories of discrimination and its projection of those categories onto the world. This second evil is unnatural; its origin was the Fall.

This understanding of the nature of the act of eating from the forbidden tree appears in the Judeo-Christian exegetical literature by way of the Gnostic Gospel of Phillip, in which the author traces the origin of death to the original couple’s attempt to gain knowledge by dividing experience into false categories consisting of mutually exclusive pairs of opposites: “Light and darkness. Life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable.” But it is in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism that the fundamental error – and psychological consequences – of false discrimination are most clearly explicated. For the Taoists, for example, the Golden Age of Grand Unity was the time before human beings had knowledge of the pairs of opposites. Chuang Tzu writes:

The knowledge of the ancients was perfect. In what way was it perfect? They were not yet aware that there were things. This is the most perfect knowledge; nothing can be added. Then, some were aware that there were things, but not aware that there were distinctions among them. Then, some were aware that there were distinctions, but not yet aware that there was right and wrong among them. When right and wrong became manifest, the Tao thereby declined.

Since it is the making of false distinctions that produces illusion, then enlightenment and liberation – the experience of Paradise – must arise from the abandoning of artificial categories of human judgment and emotional attachment to the qualities of form.

At the heart of the Buddha’s teachings are the Four Noble Truths, which affirm that all human suffering arises from desire and fear based on attachment to form and the vagaries of human discrimination. Buddhist doctrine describes nirvana – the paradisal condition of peace, wisdom, and absorption in the oneness of all being – as the natural condition of human consciousness before attachment arises and after it has ceased. While Buddhism does not acknowledge the Fall as a historical event, passages such as the following…

Attachment and false discrimination produces a condition in which our awareness of the fullness and magic of the present moment are drowned out by the mind’s restless machinations. Then, as the Gita says, “memory – all betrayed – lets noble purpose go, and saps the mind, till purpose, mind and man are all undone.”

Forgetting

A final allegorical image of the Fall is contained in the metaphor of forgetfulness. According to Gnostic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, it is the act of forgetting one’s true identity and purpose, because of distraction with the physical world, that produces the misery of the fallen condition.

According to Platonic philosophy, Lethe (“forgetfulness”) has erased not only temporal memory, but also the Ideas – that is, the absolute knowledge of universal principles. In the process of being born, the soul forgets the Ideas, its own past identity, and the collective past of humankind. This forgetting, according to Plato, is the primary cause of human illusion and suffering.

The central myth of the early Christian Gnostics, as preserved in the Acts of Thomas, also revolves around forgetting and remembering. A prince from the East comes to Egypt seeking “the one pearl. Which is in the midst of the sea around the loud-breathing serpent.” The Egyptians make the prince a captive and give him food that makes him forget who he is. “I forgot that I was a son of kings, and I served their king; and I forgot the pearl, for which my parents sent me, and because of the burden of their oppressions I lay in deep sleep.” But his parents, learning of his captivity and amnesia, send a letter:

From thy father, the King of kings, and thy mother, the mistress of the East, and from thy brother, our second (in authority), to thee our son. Call to mind that thou art a son of kings! See the slavery – whom thou servest! Remember the pearl, for which thou wast sent to Egypt!

The letter turns into an eagle and flies to the prince. Alighting beside him, it speaks and turns again into a letter.

At its voice and the sound of its rustling, I started and rose from my sleep. I took it up and kissed it, and I began and read it; and according to what was traced on my heart were the words of my letter written. I remembered that I was a son of royal parents, and my noble birth asserted its nature. I remembered the pearl for which I had been sent to Egypt, and I began to charm him, the terrible loud-breathing serpent. I hushed him to sleep and lulled him into slumber, for my father’s name I named over him, and I snatched away the pearl, and I turned to go back to my father’s house.

This story may be seen as an allegory for the process of incarnation. Prior to birth, the human spirit lives in the eternal realms of light, but in birth – the journey to Egypt – it enters a sleep of forgetfulness. The pearl is the purpose for which the pearl incarnates; the serpent is a metaphor for the mind’s powerful addictions. The letter is gnosis – spiritual knowledge that brings wakefulness and remembrance.

The Gnostics often described this ontological forgetfulness as a state of deep sleep or drunkenness into which the soul has fallen by its involvement with form. “Burning with desire to experience the body”, the spirit has forgotten its real nature. “She forgets her original habitation, her true center, her eternal being.”

If the images of forgetfulness and sleep are powerful metaphors for the Fall, remembering and awakening likewise serve as apt descriptions of the goal of all spiritual practices in every cultural setting: the object of meditation and ritual is always to remember, to awaken.

Awakening implies a return to the awareness of the soul’s celestial origin, and the messenger who brings this awakening offers life, salvation, and redemption. A Manichaean text exhorts: “Awake, soul of splendor, from the slumber of drunkenness into which thou hast fallen…follow me to the place of the exalted earth where thou dwellest from the beginning.” The injunction is not merely to remember who one divinely is, but to remember also the commission with which one has incarnated: “Slumber not nor sleep, and forget not that which thy Lord hath charged thee.”

Being “awake” means maintaining a consciousness of Heaven while on Earth. Hinduism and Buddhism regard the true Self (purusha) as an expression of the divine ground of Being, individualized in human form. Sin consists of forgetting one’s true Self, all suffering ensues from this. The core teaching of the Upanishads, Tat tvam asi (That thou art) corresponds to the letter in the Gnostic myth quoted above, sent by the King of kings (Brahman) to the prince (Atman) to remind him of his royal heritage.

The Effects of the Fall

Whatever the causes of the Fall, its effects are described similarly in almost all traditions. With disobedience, attachment, and forgetting come the loss of contact with the sacred Source; death and the necessity for reproduction; and limitations of various kinds, such as the loss of luminosity and the abilities to fly and to communicate with the animals. Human beings must now labor to compensate for the diminution of their various natural abilities, and must wander through life unaware of their real nature, purpose, and collective past.

Of all the results of the Fall, the most grievous was the loss of the divine presence. Paul Schebesta writes that for the Pygmies’ first ancestors,

“What caused…the most suffering was God’s departure. God disappeared. He withdrew and was no longer perceptible…In the opinion of the Pygmies who spoke of these things, God’s withdrawal was undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe that ever befell mankind; the other consequences of sin were less keenly felt.”

In all traditions, as Eliade points out, the longing for Paradise is first and foremost the longing for the immediate communion with Deity:

“The nostalgia for origins is a religious nostalgia. Man desires to recover the active presence of the gods.”

We have already considered several myths that attribute the origin of death to the transgressions of the earliest human beings. Whereas human beings once lived forever, could fly, and could visit heaven at will, they have now become earthbound creatures who are, in Eliade’s phrase, “limited by temporality, suffering, and death.”

The Books of Adam and Eve tell how the original couple’s very flesh was changed. Prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve glowed with visible light; now their bodies were dense and animal like.

And, indeed, when Adam looked at his flesh, that was altered, he wept bitterly, he and Eve, over what they had done…and Adam said to Eve, “Look at thine eyes, and at mine, which before beheld angels in heaven, praising; and they, too, without ceasing. But now we do not see as we did: our eyes have become of flesh; they cannot see in like manner as they saw before.” Adam said again to Eve, “What is our body to-day, compared to what it was in former days, when we dwelt in the garden?”

Like the First People of the Mayan tradition – who could see “equally well what is far and what is near” – Adam and Eve had lost a “bright nature” that had allowed them to stretch their gaze to encompass Heaven and Earth:

Then God the Lord said unto Adam, When thou wast under subjection to Me, thou hadst a bright nature within thee, and for that reason couldst see things afar off. But after thy transgression thy bright nature was withdrawn from thee; and it was not left to thee to see things afar off, but only near at hand; after the ability of the flesh, for it is brutish.

…In the myths of the Greeks, Native Americans, and Africans, the cruelty of human beings causes them to forfeit their friendship with the animals. But then, having lost their divine powers, the people are reduced to a condition materially equivalent to that of the animals, with whom they can no longer communicate…

Innocence has gone. Human beings are estranged both from the gods and from Nature, and are caught in an addictive round of fear and desire that saps both memory and vital powers. Already, they know the dulling sense of shame and loss. Not only their subjective experience, but the very substance of their physical bodies is changed. Moreover, their new mode of existence is destined to have effects reaching far beyond themselves.

Peace and Love..........John

That is a good question.

I think that in any movement, there are extremes. There are extreme raw foodists and there are kids who eat nothing but chicken mcnuggets and ramen noodles.

There was a couple of news items - one woman consumed nothing but starbucks drink/food for a year; another man ate nothing but fast food and lost weight.

There are people who eat to extreme, exercise to extreme, praise (insert your higher power here) to extreme, and believe in extreme political leaders.

So I guess there are proponents in the raw food movement who are extreme - just as there are proponents of the Atkins movement who are extreme.

I can only speak about what is best for me. And I have yet to find that yet.

so are you still looking for more answers

or do you now have them all

within your grasp

paradise / the Golden Age

are these things accessible to you

now

what does it matter to you if you feel that everyone else is in the thrall

of Paradise Lost

as you look through your lense of Paradise Found

as you refract the prism of Paradise Found

as you inhabit the region of Paradise Found

is this how the world looks through these lenses?

as you peer through the extreme lense of Beauty

and see Destruction

everywhere

the mourning begins

and never ends

when beauty is never forgotten

and never begotten

where the entirety of the world

is filled with

misbegotten- ness

there is no choice but to crumble along with it

shout it down

coerce it to change

stick a knife into the metamorphic cocoon

so the butterfly emerges

with torpid sluggish wings

and the colors of everything under the sun

forced to "remember"

an era where it used to be birthed from a snowflake chrysalis of sheer beauty

and knives did not exist

You cant be a raw vegan and eat cereal with soy milk and sugar. No you are right. I agree.

Quote
John Rose
“Memories and Visions of Paradise” by Richard Heinberg
Ancient Memories of a Golden Age
The Memory of a Lost Paradise

Once upon a time all human beings lived in friendship and peace, not only among themselves but with all other living things as well. The people of that original Age of Innocence were wise, shining beings who could fly through the air at will, and who were in continual communion with cosmic forces and intelligences. But a tragic disruption brought the first age to an end, and humanity found itself estranged from both Heaven and Nature. Ever since then we have lived in a fragmented way, never really understanding ourselves or our place in the Universe. But occasionally we look back, with longing and regret, and dream of a return to the Paradise we once knew.

Paradise may be the most popular and intensely meaningful idea ever to have gripped the human imagination. We find it everywhere. “In more or less complex forms, the paradisiac myth occurs here and there all over the world,” wrote the great modern authority on comparative religions Mircea Eliade. The Hebraic Garden of Eden, the Greek Golden Age, the Australian Aborigines’ Dreamtime, and the Chinese Taoist Age of Perfect Virtue are but local variants of the universally recalled Time of Beginnings, whose memory has colored all of subsequent history.

The impact of the paradisal image on the collective human consciousness is as deep as it is broad. In no tradition is it a recent or peripheral theme; rather, it is at the very core of the perennial spiritual impulse, reemerging in every generation’s literature, art, and social ideals. Indeed, if one were seeking a motif on which to base an outline summary of human culture, one might well begin with our collective memories of a lost Golden Age and our longings for its return...

The Return of the Sacred

Developments in religious studies in the twentieth century have also played a part in the evolution of the contemporary attitude toward myth. As we have seen, the tendency in the late nineteenth century was to explain religion in social or psychological terms. In 1917, however, psychologist Rudolph Otto published The Idea of the Holy, in which he emphasized the fundamental reality and irreducibility of the religious experience in all its manifestations.

Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, French philosopher Rene’ Guenon pointed to what he called the Primordial Tradition of universal truths that lies at the core of every living religion. All traditions, according to Guenon, are paths for the practical realization of innate spiritual principles in the lives of human beings. Turning nineteenth century cultural evolutionism on its head, Guenon protested in the strongest terms the loss of true spirituality in the modern world. “The material prosperity of the West is incontrovertible,” he wrote, “but it is hardly a cause for envy. Indeed, one can go further; sooner or later this excessive material development threatens to destroy the West if it does not recover itself in time and if it does not consider seriously a ‘return to the source.’”

The Rumanian-American historian of religion Mircea Eliade applied this new attitude toward religion directly to the study of mythology. Eliade refused to reduce myths to economic, social, cultural, psychological, or political meanings; instead, he emphasized the primacy of the experience of the sacred in all traditions. Moreover, he placed tribal religions and the scriptural religions of East and West side by side (rather than arranging them in an evolutionary sequence, as had become customary) in order to reveal and clarify their common motifs.

Like Jung, Eliade saw mythic themes as unconscious archetypes. Going further, he identified the two core themes of world myth as the nostalgia for a Paradise that has been lost because of a primordial tragedy (the Fall), and the initiatory scenario whereby the original golden world is partially restored. Both primitive and scriptural religions, according to Eliade, betray

“…the nostalgia for Paradise, the desire to recover the state of freedom and beatitude before “the Fall”, the will to restore communication between Earth and Heaven; in a word, to abolish all the changes made in the very structure of the Cosmos and in the human mode of being by that primordial disruption.”…

The Mythic Worldview

Through the work of Jung, Otto, Guenon, Campbell, and Eliade runs a current of respect for the sense of the sacred as expressed in all of the world’s religions and mythologies. Through their writings we gain some sense of the worldview of the ancients, in which rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were living parts of a living whole; in which the Cosmos was alive and conscious, partaking of the same intelligent force by which we ourselves are animated; and in which human beings were the link between Heaven and Earth – between the inner dimension of spirit and the outer world of form. Through them we are reacquainted with the context of ancient thought, in which every event was meaningful and every individual knew that his or her life was the embodiment of principle and purpose. In the archaic vision of reality, even the most mundane activities had an overarching significance and were performed not as personal, private acts but as part of a cosmic drama.

For the ancients, the respect for the sacred derived from an awareness of the creative processes of Nature, and it implied a hesitancy to arbitrarily intrude on those processes. To the sanctified consciousness, time and space were themselves sacred, and every atom of creation was part of one joyful chorus. In the Creation-Time, according to the myths of the native Australians, Africans, and Americans, human beings had a specific responsibility in the whole of Nature, which was to provide a living bridge between levels of being.

To say that a thing or an act is sacred is to imply that it has relevance in a universal plane of values and ideals, and that it is therefore a point of contact between two worlds. To the ancients, all was sacred, because everything had significance in both a mundane and also a cosmic context; matter itself was sacred substance. The role of humankind – established the paradisal age of the first ancestors – was to realize that sacredness by coordinating traffic between Heaven and Earth.

Ancient peoples had an acute sense of responsibility not just to family or tribe, but to the whole of life. Its welfare was the reason for their existence. The Hopi Indians of the American Southwest, for example, knew the spirit of the Earth as Maasauu. They said that their purpose was to be apprentices to Maasauu, to be stewards of the Earth. According to their myths, in the early days Maasauu left his plane of existence, having given the Hopi instructions to carry out ceremonies to keep the Earth in balance and to keep the Plan of Life intact. The Hopi still see their ceremonies as essential to the nourishment of all living things on the planet. There is a ceremony for each kind of plant or animal, and the full cycle of ceremonies may continue for weeks….

In the Beginning

In every mythology, Creation is the first act in a grand cosmic drama. That drama unfolds by stages through a Golden Age of peace and plenty, a Fall or period of degeneration, and a catastrophe that brings the sacred Age of the Gods to an end and initiates the present, profane age of the world…

The spiritual life of all ancient and tribal peoples revolved around the maintenance of sacred rhythms and balances through rituals designed to recapitulate the Creation. Creation was the ultimate sacred act, to be commemorated and symbolically repeated on significant occasions in the life of the individual and in the collective life of the tribe. The creative process was at once a cosmic, historical phenomenon for harmonizing Heaven and Nature. The Creation story was therefore of both universal and immediate significance; it described the nature of absolute reality in a way that was both transcendent (true for all times and places) and immanent (true here and now).

The original Creation marked the beginning of the Age of the Gods. Eliade has written, “It would be impossible to overstress the tendency – observable in every society, however highly developed – to bring back that time, mythical time, the Great Time.” That Great Time was the model for all times, so that accessions of new chiefs or kings, initiation rites, weddings, games, planting, hunting, and, especially, new year celebrations were all occasions for the symbolic reenactment of what had occurred in the beginning. The Aborigines of central Australia practiced rituals of circumcision and fashioned “X-ray” bark paintings in precisely the ways their Creator-Ancestors had taught them in the Dreamtime. The Yurok Indians of northern California performed world-renewing dances that the Immortals had revealed to them when the world was young. And according to Joseph Epes Brown, a modern authority on Native American religions, the Pima and Papago tribes of the American Southwest saw the act basket making as “the ritual recapitulation of the total process of creation.”…

The ancient Hindu sages stated the matter with quintessential brevity: “Thus the gods did; thus men do.”

The nostalgia for origins is, as Eliade says, a desire “to recover the active presence of the gods” and “to live in the world as it came from the Creator’s hands, fresh, pure, and strong.” In every culture, we find the same longing to reenter the sacred time when the gods were immediately present, creating and organizing the world.

…It was only when the people set themselves against the other creatures that God was driven away and the original harmony of Nature was destroyed.

World Ages

If the magical landscape fixes Paradise in space, its position in time is defined by its placement at the beginning of a series of world ages. We have already noted the Greek and Hindu conceptions of the ages or Yugas of the world, respectively; there are also close parallels among other cultures. The Iranians, for example, knew four cosmic ages that, in a lost Mazdaean book, the Sudkar-nask, are referred to as the ages of gold, silver, steel, and “mixed with iron”. In the Iranian conception, as in the Greek and Hindu, each age is a step in the world’s deterioration, a process that is leading to a final apocalyptic cleansing.

The Mayans counted their world ages as consecutive Suns – Water Sun, Earthquake Sun, Hurricane Sun, and Fire Sun – according to the nature of the catastrophe that closed the epoch. The Hopi also spoke of four worlds – Tokpela, Tokpa, Kuskurza, and Tuwaquchi – the first of which is described in paradisal terms…

The Age of Miracles and Wonders

According to virtually all accounts, human beings in the paradisal age were possessed of qualities and abilities that can only be called miraculous. They were wise, all-knowing, and able to communicate easily not only with one another but also with all other living things; moreover, they could fly through the air, and they shone with visible light…

Many traditions say that the first human beings spoke a single language. In Genesis, as in the myths of the Chins and Twyan of Indochina, all people could understand one another’s speech until the collapse of a tower or ladder built in an attempt to reach Heaven. The Mayans likewise say that the First People “had but a single language.” Some traditions go further, suggesting that in Paradise humanity was telepathic; the Hopi, for example, say that the First People “felt as one and understood one another without talking.” [JR’s Comment: High Biophoton Levels]

This one language seems to have extended to the animal kingdom as well. Whether it is said that animals could speak as humans or that human beings could understand the animal languages, the result in either case was a state of trust and friendship between man and beast. Jewish legends say that “in all respects, the animal world had a different relation from their relation to his descendents. Not only did they know the language of man, but they respected the image of God, and they feared the first human couple, all of which changed into the opposite after the fall of man.

The Greek storyteller Aesop wrote wistfully that “during the time of the golden race the…animals had articulate speech and knew the use of words. And they held meetings in the middle of the forest; and the stones spoke, and the needles of the pine tree…and the sparrow spoke wise words to the farmer.”

This ability of human beings and animals to understand one another resulted in a condition in which, according to the fifth century BC Greek philosopher Empedocles, “All were gentle and obedient to men, both animals and birds, and they glowed with kindly affection towards one another.”

In African folklore, as in the myths of the ancient Greeks, the harmony of humanity with the animals is reflected in the vegetarian diet of the First People. That our earliest ancestors shunned the killing of animals for food is also implied in the Bible: God tells Adam and Eve, “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in which the fruit is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat” (Genesis 1:29). It is not until after the Deluge that God tells Noah, “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” But because human beings are now permitted to kill and eat the animals, “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea” (Genesis 9:2-3).

Peace and Love..........John

Quote
John Rose
“Memories and Visions of Paradise” by Richard Heinberg
The Fall and the Origins of Human Evil
The Saddest Story

What is evil? Is evil suffering, or the cause of suffering? In either case, evil may be said to be inherent in nature – in predation, decay, disease, and famine. Yet people in every culture and in every age have held to the belief that in the human world there exists another kind of evil that is profoundly unnatural. We may look to Nature for the source of human tendencies toward waste, warfare, greed, and the restless urges to possess, dominate, and kill, but no clear analogy suggests itself. Nature’s evils tend to exist in balance, predation and famine mitigating overpopulation, whereas the human version of evil apparently knows no bounds. From the earliest times, human beings have believed that there is a quality in themselves that sets them apart from the animals – a quality that manifests itself as a sense of alienation and insufficiency and as an abnormal capacity for destructiveness and cruelty.

Ancient peoples insisted that evil in this latter sense has not always existed, but that it had a specific cause. In their myths, the evil that is unique to humanity is described as having resulted from the Fall – the tragic event that brought the Golden Age to an end. They said that human nature is not natural at all, because it has been distorted by some fundamental mistake or failure that has been perpetuated from generation to generation.

Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness with the ground of Being has been lost, and that only by a process of purification and transcendence can we be reconnected with the sacred dimension. Whether it is the Judeo-Christian guilt for the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden, the Taoist nostalgia for the era before the Way of Heaven was corrupted by the ways of men, or the Africans’ sorrow for humanity’s betrayal of the animals, everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original condition of wise innocence and can return to it only through the resolution of some profound inner discord.

What caused the Fall? Why and how was the Age of Innocence brought to an end? These questions have perplexed theologians and philosophers for millennia, and we cannot hope to answer them with finality in a few pages, though we must at least pose and consider them. The myths themselves do not present a straightforward, unified explanation; rather, in describing what seems to be a shift in the fundamental polarity of human consciousness, they employ a variety of images that seem to be metaphors for some subjective, spiritual event….

Degeneration and Change of Character

According to nearly every tradition, the Fall occurred because of a debasement of the quality of character expressed by human beings. The nature of the process of decay is described in various ways. If we hope to penetrate to the kernel of the story, perhaps it is best to begin with the simplest and most easily understood versions before we proceed to the more enigmatic ones. The following African myth provides an apt and picturesque starting point.

According to the Barotse of Zambia, the Creator, Nyambi, once lived on Earth with his wife, Nasilele. Nyambi had made fishes, birds, and animals, and the world was full of life. But one of Nyambi’s creatures was different from all the rest. This creature was Kamonu, the first man. Kamonu was special because he was able to imitate everything Nyambi did. If Nyambi was making something out of wood, Kamonu would do the same. If Nyambi was creating in iron, Kamonu would work in iron as well….

The story of Nyambi and Kamonu, like nearly all African myths of the Fall, tells of the disappearance of God into the sky because of human depravity…Thus, according to the Africans, it was people’s cruelty, quarrelsomeness and insensitivity to Nature that caused the Fall.

The Native Americans agree. The Yurok of the Northern California coast say that when the Earth was new it was inhabited by the immortals, myth-time beings who lived in accordance with cosmic law. When people were created, the Immortals went away: “While the world itself remained perfect and beautiful, human beings had the capacity to violate and disrupt that beauty, to throw off the balance of Creation through, especially, their greed.” Similarly, the Hopi say that long after the time of creation people began to depart from the instructions of the Great Spirit…

The Indic peoples describe the fateful change in human character by emphasizing the First People’s loss of saintliness:

In the Treta Yuga (the second age) sacrifices began, and…virtue lessened a quarter. Mankind sought truth and performed religious ceremonies; they obtained what they desired by giving and doing.

In the Dwapara Yuga…religion lessened one half…Mind lessened, Truth declined, and there came desire and disease and calamities; because of these men had to undergo penances. It was a decadent Age by reason of the prevalence of sin.

In the Kali (present) Yuga…only one quarter of virtue remaineth. The world is afflicted, men turn to wickedness; disease cometh; all creatures degenerate; contrary effects are obtained by performing holy rites; change passeth over all things.

The Greek poet Hesiod, in his enumeration of world ages, described the degeneration of humanity in similar terms:

Then they who dwell on Olympus made a second generation…They could not keep from sinning and from wronging one another, nor would they serve the immortals…For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labor and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night.

…Adam and Eve were stewards of the creative process, enjoined to tend and keep the Garden. The story implies that human beings were originally concerned with the entire process of creation rather than merely with its end products….This teaching is explicitly expressed in some Paradise myths, as well as in the core religious teachings of most cultures. Many Native American tribes (the Hopi and the Yurok, for example) tell us that the First People were instructed in the ways to maintain the balance of the forces of nature. The Fall came with their ancestors’ abandonment of responsibilities of stewardship. In one way or another, nearly all the world’s scriptures warn against “sweet, soft sinfulness”, as the Bhagavad Gita calls it, of obsessive desire for an end product in form. “Want not! Ask Not!” Krishna commands. Find full reward of doing right in right! Let right deeds be thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them.”

The Knowledge of Good and Evil

…The story (in the Bible) implies the existence of two kinds of evil – one inherent in Nature, embodied in the Tree of Knowledge itself, and one created by the act of disobedience of eating from the tree. It is the latter evil that causes Adam and Eve to hide themselves from the presence of the Lord…The first kind of evil – that which grew as fruit on the tree – exists prior to moral choice. It is the evil to which Job refers when he says, “What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” Hindu theology acknowledges the complimentary of this pre-moral good and evil by revering Brahma the Creator and Shiva the Destroyer. The traditions of the Native Americans, Chinese, and Japanese, in their various ways, also agree that in Nature both growth and decay, completeness and incompleteness exist as essential partners in the creative process.

The second kind of evil – the moral evil that is unique to humanity – arises from judgment between the qualities and pairs of opposites inherent in Nature and from emotional attachment to categories and distinctions. Existence in the physical world in and of itself occasionally produces suffering, but it is suffering that is contained in the ebb and flow of natural cycles and processes. It is a suffering contained entirely in the present moment. The human mind produces another kind of suffering, one that has its basis in expectation and memory, arising from the mind’s attachment to its own artificial categories of discrimination and its projection of those categories onto the world. This second evil is unnatural; its origin was the Fall.

This understanding of the nature of the act of eating from the forbidden tree appears in the Judeo-Christian exegetical literature by way of the Gnostic Gospel of Phillip, in which the author traces the origin of death to the original couple’s attempt to gain knowledge by dividing experience into false categories consisting of mutually exclusive pairs of opposites: “Light and darkness. Life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable.” But it is in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism that the fundamental error – and psychological consequences – of false discrimination are most clearly explicated. For the Taoists, for example, the Golden Age of Grand Unity was the time before human beings had knowledge of the pairs of opposites. Chuang Tzu writes:

The knowledge of the ancients was perfect. In what way was it perfect? They were not yet aware that there were things. This is the most perfect knowledge; nothing can be added. Then, some were aware that there were things, but not aware that there were distinctions among them. Then, some were aware that there were distinctions, but not yet aware that there was right and wrong among them. When right and wrong became manifest, the Tao thereby declined.

Since it is the making of false distinctions that produces illusion, then enlightenment and liberation – the experience of Paradise – must arise from the abandoning of artificial categories of human judgment and emotional attachment to the qualities of form.

At the heart of the Buddha’s teachings are the Four Noble Truths, which affirm that all human suffering arises from desire and fear based on attachment to form and the vagaries of human discrimination. Buddhist doctrine describes nirvana – the paradisal condition of peace, wisdom, and absorption in the oneness of all being – as the natural condition of human consciousness before attachment arises and after it has ceased. While Buddhism does not acknowledge the Fall as a historical event, passages such as the following…

Attachment and false discrimination produces a condition in which our awareness of the fullness and magic of the present moment are drowned out by the mind’s restless machinations. Then, as the Gita says, “memory – all betrayed – lets noble purpose go, and saps the mind, till purpose, mind and man are all undone.”

Forgetting

A final allegorical image of the Fall is contained in the metaphor of forgetfulness. According to Gnostic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, it is the act of forgetting one’s true identity and purpose, because of distraction with the physical world, that produces the misery of the fallen condition.

According to Platonic philosophy, Lethe (“forgetfulness”) has erased not only temporal memory, but also the Ideas – that is, the absolute knowledge of universal principles. In the process of being born, the soul forgets the Ideas, its own past identity, and the collective past of humankind. This forgetting, according to Plato, is the primary cause of human illusion and suffering.

The central myth of the early Christian Gnostics, as preserved in the Acts of Thomas, also revolves around forgetting and remembering. A prince from the East comes to Egypt seeking “the one pearl. Which is in the midst of the sea around the loud-breathing serpent.” The Egyptians make the prince a captive and give him food that makes him forget who he is. “I forgot that I was a son of kings, and I served their king; and I forgot the pearl, for which my parents sent me, and because of the burden of their oppressions I lay in deep sleep.” But his parents, learning of his captivity and amnesia, send a letter:

From thy father, the King of kings, and thy mother, the mistress of the East, and from thy brother, our second (in authority), to thee our son. Call to mind that thou art a son of kings! See the slavery – whom thou servest! Remember the pearl, for which thou wast sent to Egypt!

The letter turns into an eagle and flies to the prince. Alighting beside him, it speaks and turns again into a letter.

At its voice and the sound of its rustling, I started and rose from my sleep. I took it up and kissed it, and I began and read it; and according to what was traced on my heart were the words of my letter written. I remembered that I was a son of royal parents, and my noble birth asserted its nature. I remembered the pearl for which I had been sent to Egypt, and I began to charm him, the terrible loud-breathing serpent. I hushed him to sleep and lulled him into slumber, for my father’s name I named over him, and I snatched away the pearl, and I turned to go back to my father’s house.

This story may be seen as an allegory for the process of incarnation. Prior to birth, the human spirit lives in the eternal realms of light, but in birth – the journey to Egypt – it enters a sleep of forgetfulness. The pearl is the purpose for which the pearl incarnates; the serpent is a metaphor for the mind’s powerful addictions. The letter is gnosis – spiritual knowledge that brings wakefulness and remembrance.

The Gnostics often described this ontological forgetfulness as a state of deep sleep or drunkenness into which the soul has fallen by its involvement with form. “Burning with desire to experience the body”, the spirit has forgotten its real nature. “She forgets her original habitation, her true center, her eternal being.”

If the images of forgetfulness and sleep are powerful metaphors for the Fall, remembering and awakening likewise serve as apt descriptions of the goal of all spiritual practices in every cultural setting: the object of meditation and ritual is always to remember, to awaken.

Awakening implies a return to the awareness of the soul’s celestial origin, and the messenger who brings this awakening offers life, salvation, and redemption. A Manichaean text exhorts: “Awake, soul of splendor, from the slumber of drunkenness into which thou hast fallen…follow me to the place of the exalted earth where thou dwellest from the beginning.” The injunction is not merely to remember who one divinely is, but to remember also the commission with which one has incarnated: “Slumber not nor sleep, and forget not that which thy Lord hath charged thee.”

Being “awake” means maintaining a consciousness of Heaven while on Earth. Hinduism and Buddhism regard the true Self (purusha) as an expression of the divine ground of Being, individualized in human form. Sin consists of forgetting one’s true Self, all suffering ensues from this. The core teaching of the Upanishads, Tat tvam asi (That thou art) corresponds to the letter in the Gnostic myth quoted above, sent by the King of kings (Brahman) to the prince (Atman) to remind him of his royal heritage.

The Effects of the Fall

Whatever the causes of the Fall, its effects are described similarly in almost all traditions. With disobedience, attachment, and forgetting come the loss of contact with the sacred Source; death and the necessity for reproduction; and limitations of various kinds, such as the loss of luminosity and the abilities to fly and to communicate with the animals. Human beings must now labor to compensate for the diminution of their various natural abilities, and must wander through life unaware of their real nature, purpose, and collective past.

Of all the results of the Fall, the most grievous was the loss of the divine presence. Paul Schebesta writes that for the Pygmies’ first ancestors,

“What caused…the most suffering was God’s departure. God disappeared. He withdrew and was no longer perceptible…In the opinion of the Pygmies who spoke of these things, God’s withdrawal was undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe that ever befell mankind; the other consequences of sin were less keenly felt.”

In all traditions, as Eliade points out, the longing for Paradise is first and foremost the longing for the immediate communion with Deity:

“The nostalgia for origins is a religious nostalgia. Man desires to recover the active presence of the gods.”

We have already considered several myths that attribute the origin of death to the transgressions of the earliest human beings. Whereas human beings once lived forever, could fly, and could visit heaven at will, they have now become earthbound creatures who are, in Eliade’s phrase, “limited by temporality, suffering, and death.”

The Books of Adam and Eve tell how the original couple’s very flesh was changed. Prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve glowed with visible light; now their bodies were dense and animal like.

And, indeed, when Adam looked at his flesh, that was altered, he wept bitterly, he and Eve, over what they had done…and Adam said to Eve, “Look at thine eyes, and at mine, which before beheld angels in heaven, praising; and they, too, without ceasing. But now we do not see as we did: our eyes have become of flesh; they cannot see in like manner as they saw before.” Adam said again to Eve, “What is our body to-day, compared to what it was in former days, when we dwelt in the garden?”

Like the First People of the Mayan tradition – who could see “equally well what is far and what is near” – Adam and Eve had lost a “bright nature” that had allowed them to stretch their gaze to encompass Heaven and Earth:

Then God the Lord said unto Adam, When thou wast under subjection to Me, thou hadst a bright nature within thee, and for that reason couldst see things afar off. But after thy transgression thy bright nature was withdrawn from thee; and it was not left to thee to see things afar off, but only near at hand; after the ability of the flesh, for it is brutish.

…In the myths of the Greeks, Native Americans, and Africans, the cruelty of human beings causes them to forfeit their friendship with the animals. But then, having lost their divine powers, the people are reduced to a condition materially equivalent to that of the animals, with whom they can no longer communicate…

Innocence has gone. Human beings are estranged both from the gods and from Nature, and are caught in an addictive round of fear and desire that saps both memory and vital powers. Already, they know the dulling sense of shame and loss. Not only their subjective experience, but the very substance of their physical bodies is changed. Moreover, their new mode of existence is destined to have effects reaching far beyond themselves.

Peace and Love..........John

Well you're still up to your same repetitive tricks...
DISTRACTION!!!!!!!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2021 03:22AM by NuNativs.

Hey John, is that that same park where you film now? Maybe time for a vacay...