Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden

A Tale for our Times. 

(A new look at an old tale, using modern psychology and logical thought.)

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. Shakespeare.

Introduction.

I have disliked the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden ever since I first heard it (quite some time ago now).

I thought that it was highly ungallant of Adam to blame Eve; that the serpent had a rough time as well; all of them get chucked out of the Garden of Eden; and what was wrong with eating of the Tree of Knowledge anyway? – isn’t gaining knowledge what you’re supposed to do in life? God seemed a bit mean about the whole thing as well; quite vengeful in fact. Why would I want anything to do with Him? Not to mention hoping I could find a lot better husband than that wimp Adam.

I also felt the implied blame; that being thrown out of Eden was the woman’s fault; it seemed to me to be part of some kind of built-in failure if you were born a woman; a way of explaining why you didn’t count, or were automatically wrong in whatever way. Men use it as the ultimate reason not to listen to a woman! This story is told to a great many people! It’s a story I would have thought that women could do perfectly well without.

So, the years have gone by and even though I forgot about such things, yet still the questions remained – what on earth was this story about?

I have seen various interpretations over the years, although none of them made much sense to me. Could this story make sense in any way and is there anything that can be learnt from it?

My aim is to look at this story in a natural psychological manner, and try to unravel what the words are saying while remembering that these concepts are translations from a different time and culture.

The story.

The story really begins with God making the world in 6 days and His seeing that it was All Good. It then turns to the making of the Garden of Eden, with Adam being made/formed ‘in the image of God’ for the purpose of to ‘till it and keep it’. There is also the strong implication that Adam is important for the Naming of all things. He is expressly commanded not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (TKGE), with a warning that he will surely die.

Adam’s female partner is formed from Adam’s rib, and Adam names her Woman. The bible specifically states that they were naked and not ashamed; they neither knew nor noticed whether they were covered or not; they accepted themselves as they were. They were quite un-selfconscious as is any young child or animal.

The serpent tells the woman, the fruit of TKGE is good to eat, and it will make you ‘more like God’. So she eats it, gives it to Adam, and then their ‘eyes were opened and they realised they were naked’, so they tried to cover up (aprons of fig leaves). This was the first decision that they made that they were not alright as they were.

God comes walking in the garden and can’t find Adam, because they are both hiding from Him.

[So, if God is all-seeing and all-powerful, and knows everything all the time, how come he couldn’t find Adam? I was brought up with the implication that God could stick his finger on you, no matter where you were in the whole wide world; in other words ‘you can’t hide’, and so you had better be good. In this story, God has to call out ‘where are you?’, so, can you hide, or not? Does God see everything, or not?]

So then they are found out, and there’s a lot of blaming – no-one is going to take responsibility here. Eve blames the snake and Adam blames Eve.

God curses the serpent, then the woman, then Adam; apparently comprehensively and thoroughly. There’s a lot about getting back to the dust – “you are made of dust”.

The story then moves on.

Adam names his wife, Eve. [Rather a change in pace here.]

God gives Adam and Eve clothes, [which seems quite kind of him?]

Then God throws them out of Eden and then makes sure that they can’t get at the Tree of Life (TL) by guarding the garden with cherubim(s) and a flaming sword; which seems a bit ‘dog-in-the-manger-ish’. But before that he says ‘the man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to eat of the TL and live forever.’

So now we start asking questions.

What is the Garden of Eden?

We don’t know, but for most of us it has the quality of Heaven on Earth; a garden of God. A divine garden that’s beautiful; it’s warm, and the weather’s perfect, and everything we need just drops into our hands. So, we don’t have to do anything do we, even though we are supposed to ‘till and keep’? It’s all there - how nice. But why do we need a heaven on earth as well as a heaven above? This would mean that there are 2 of them. So…

What do we think Heaven is, and why do we want it?

I think most people would consider heaven as a place where everything is comfortable and ‘lovey-dovey’ and nice, and we don’t have to do anything, (no body, and so no work) and it just stays comfortable and nice and most of all safe (no ‘bumps in the night’) forever. This is a terribly long time, which gives a very static quality. Would we get bored if we only played harps forever?

I suspect that we do carry an unconscious idea of what Heaven is, and I suspect that that is what we expect/wish that Life could be, especially in the Garden. Somewhere where we do not have to do anything, and it all just drops into our hand when we hold it out. Instead we find ourselves out of the Garden and that Life on Earth is not very heavenly at all. Heaven thus becomes taught as ultimately a Reward for suffering or enduring/coping sufficiently with life as lived on earth (once!?); i.e., we need to be good; thinking and doing the right things to make sure we get back in.

Another way of saying the above is that for us the ultimate reward for our Life is to get Off Earth as fast as possible, without committing suicide, (because that is ‘cheating’). We are using and following religious/spiritual/’heavenly’ creeds as a way of coping with the fear we have of living on earth.

We also assume/are taught that God lives in heaven, and therefore, not on earth. But when we are in heaven there is also the quality that although we are ‘in the house of God’, He is not really accessible to us. He is a long way away; the boss, and no relationship except perhaps being told if we are ‘good or bad’, and other people/beings help us with that.

What is the Difference between the heavens?

So, what were Adam and Eve doing in Eden that they would not have been doing in Heaven? Adam has been placed there to ‘Till/Work it and Keep/Sustain/Care for it’. Adam will have to do physical work if he wants to eat. Keeping implies to me that we are in charge of ensuring that all God’s creations are kept very alive and very well to keep them going, as in, sustain and protect them. I take this as the primary instruction for humanity. Look after the garden and the animals for man’s own sake. (In the process of learning to look after God’s creations, we learn to look after ourselves as well.)

The problem here is that looking after one’s body, and tilling and keeping a garden and staying alive and well involves physical effort. Perhaps we are supposed to actually do something after all.

What then is the difference between being in or out of Eden?

We are not specifically told that Adam talked/communed with God, but the implication is there because they (A&E) hid after eating the fruit. Thus, in Eden, we are accessible to God/Life and He to us. ‘God comes walking in the Garden’. This does not happen in Heaven, and it does not seem to happen out of the Garden either. Talking/communing implies relationship and equality and the Garden appears to be the only place it can happen.

Also, in Eden, although they are ‘naked’, they don’t notice the differences between their own and other bodies or animals. They were not ‘ashamed’ of their bodies. Once having eaten the fruit, they consider themselves naked and cover themselves ‘down there’, (aprons only, not the breasts), and are afraid of God, so they hide and become inaccessible to God, who wanted to and still wants to (?) talk to them. They then have to be thrown out of Eden to stop them from eating of the Tree of Life.

Well, then, what are the animals doing that’s different between being in Eden or not? The answer here seems to be that there is no difference. In the wild (whatever actually remains on earth currently) animals eat and are eaten and Life flows on, maintaining its extraordinary beauty and balance. The birds in my garden hunt for food every day, but all still have to keep a watchful eye for predators. The animals have not been thrown out – they are still there. Neither do the animals need warning not to eat of the TKGE. They will have eaten the fruit and can, with no consequences. So, the problem of being thrown out of Eden is man’s alone. If animals have no trouble with the TKGE, and humans do, then the problem lies with our being made ‘in the Image of God’. So, why and how?

What IS the Image of God?

Man alone has been fashioned in the image of God, so what are these qualities that distinguish us from other forms of life.

Our mind has 2 parts which are split.

The mind of man has 2 parts; the Conscious and the Unconscious. (We know this because we can think about our thinking, as in, ‘what was I thinking?’.) The Conscious is that inner part of us of which we are somewhat aware, and the Unconscious is basically all the rest. It’s estimated that the Conscious is about 10% and the Unconscious 90%, so there is a very large part of ourselves that we know nothing about.

For most people the Unconscious is almost not there; it is UnReal to us and we barely take it seriously if at all. We don’t know what is there inside us and we ignore it and yet we are ignoring such a very large part of ourselves. It’s as if we owned a very big house, but only occupied the servant’s quarters and never explored the rest, so we have no idea who/what is there. We don’t know our selves or our potential. The 2 parts of us do not know the other part. They are separate.

God’s mind is not split.

God is built the same way, by definition, but He does know His Unconscious because he uses His creation/manifestation of Life to make his Unconscious Real to Himself and His own Conscious. Life is made when the Conscious is unified with the Unconscious, which is called ‘making the 2 one, ie Unity’. He is Realizing His Unconscious by giving Life to an-other and another and so on…., and He really likes doing that. This is Creation. He is using the process of giving Life to tell Himself about Himself.

It is very powerful and amazing to be able to do this, and we want to do that too (because we are built the same way) and being alive on Earth is the way for us to find out how.

But, using both parts of our minds in synch, ie Unity, (making the 2 one) cannot happen if we are busy ignoring our Unconscious. Turning our awareness to the external world and judging what we find short-circuits our own quest for Unity and we won’t be able to ‘be like God’. Hence God tries to warn us not to eat of the fruit of trying to ‘know’ everything ‘out there’. We can’t do it, and we’re looking in the wrong direction to boot.

This puzzle of how we can work out how to be and do God is a strong drive for human beings whether we know it or not, and it is why the snake was able to ‘tempt’ Adam & Eve by telling them that eating the fruit of the TKGE would make them ‘more like God’. Remember that A&E are all of us as human beings.

It is important to remember that animals are Unconscious, so the TKGE is not going to affect them. They are not trying to control anything out there; they are learning about living through their sensing and their experiencing and the snake’s advice to us is actually useful to us as well as it. It is us humans who get into trouble with that tree.

However, another of our ‘talents’/proclivities seems to be Naming.

Naming. Adam is also there for ‘Naming’. Can we humans assume that animals don’t Name things? I do not know, but I do know that we simply continue naming and labelling forever. Most people would not be able to not name something for an hour; we cannot not name/label things. Naming identifies our own experiences to us for ourselves. The implication of the story is that God wants us to name what we find. The trouble is how/what we name things, and the names/labels we use, because ‘naming’ implies identification which implies contrast/comparison. We need to be careful about our comparisons.

Naming is very important and I think it is easy to miss.

The story goes ‘out of the ground (earth) God formed (makes/creates) every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brings them to the man to see what he would call them’, and that became its name. The only way I can ‘get at’ this concept is to imagine what it would be like to have made all these fantastic and wonderful things, and then just hand them over to my child to name them whatever it pleased, with the instruction to look after it. This is a tremendous gift as well as a great delight in whatever the child does with it.

Being able to think about our thinking, wanting to be like God, and labelling our experiences, are the attributes that equip us to learn about who we are through our experiences, but notice that these inbuilt ‘tools’ that we have can be used incorrectly as well as correctly.

To me, the implication of all of this is that God wants us to have the physical experience of Life and he wants to know what we make of it. It delights Him. He knows that it is all good. We are the ones who are not very sure about that bit. But it is also clear that Life on Earth is a Gift, and we’re not sure about this either.

So then we turn to….

What is this Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?

The bible story specifically refers to the tree as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Wikipedia tells us that the words should have been translated as the Tree of Knowledge of Everything or the Tree of All Knowledge.

Any explanation/interpretation will have to encompass both concepts.

The name is commonly shortened to the Tree of Knowledge. We admire knowledge; we think it’s good to know lots, and we admire those who know lots; we can let them tell us what to do. Yet how does knowing everything lead to the effects outlined in the story, naked, afraid etc.?

What then, is this ‘Everything’ we think we want to know? Everyone has their own ideas about what everything is. It is not possible to know everything, and we kind of know that and keep wishing we did. We think knowledge of everything might help bring control (of fear). Maybe we would be more powerful and know what to do to manipulate life to give us what we want.

There are 2 things that we don’t notice here.

One of them is that this Everything that we want to know about is all that is in your life that is external to you. It is not knowledge of you; it is knowledge of everything but you.

The focus of your attention has become external to you. You are now ‘looking out’ rather than a ‘looking in’. It is a focus on the world rather than on your own self, and then we start trying to know everything about the external world using our inbuilt naming and comparing.

The other thing that we don’t always notice or remember is that there is a difference between knowledge as a concept or information about whatever, or what you think you know, and the actual ‘Knowing’ that comes primarily from your own experience through your body’s senses. It is the difference between theory and practice, and we have to be careful about which is which. In this story the TKGE is about our concepts rather than the actuality/reality of our own experience.

Eve and the snake

Eve has been formed from Adam’s rib. She has Adam’s abilities because she is made from him. She has come from inside him. This is often taken as a weakness on her part and a potential depletion of man, but I suspect that she is more able to feel or sense into another’s internal state. That’s where she ‘comes from’ so to speak.

We are not told what she is doing, but I would imagine she was observing and getting to know herself, her surroundings and the creatures in the garden. And she would be ‘sensing in’ which is a skill used by all ‘primitive’ peoples. I also imagine that she observed animals eating the fruit of the TKGE without any ill effect. But Adam has already told her that if they eat the fruit they will die, so she would be immensely curious as to what was going on here.

If she was ‘sensing in’ to the snake, it would be saying, ‘sense everything, feel everything, touch everything, know everything, experience everything. This is what makes all of us Know Everything (in our world). For the snake, Knowing comes through the senses of its body; its experience, and the snake is the very closest to the earth. The snake doesn’t have the self-awareness or the labelling that humans have. It simply experiences All of it with no judgement in terms of avoiding doing things in case it might have a ‘bad’ time. It still goes out and does ‘snaky’ things. As with all animals, it uses all its senses, resources, and skills, and it has to be careful and wary to be successful and stay alive. It is using all its senses all the time to survive.

She will have tried the fruit through the snake’s example and advice which was correct for it.

We continue to consider the snake as a dreadful beast that lied to us, but what if its advice is correct for people as well as animals? The actual problem is the difference in understanding between animals and humans; there is a difference in attributes. The snake is not talking about the knowledge of good and evil that will help us have a more ‘heavenly’ or easier time; the snake is telling us something completely different. It is talking about the knowing that comes through its own senses and experience, because that is all of what it knows. It is we ourselves who confuse trying to know ‘everything about everything’ as ‘being like God’. It is our own attributes that are getting us into trouble because we are using them incorrectly when we label concepts/things as ‘good or bad’, and think that we know about something when we actually do not.

Eve does not notice any effect on her, and she then offers it to Adam. Adam has the choice of eating it or not. He can listen to Life or listen to Eve. However, curiosity and exploration, particularly of forbidden fruit, appears to be built in to us humans, and there’s a certain inevitability here.

The temptings

We are tempted by the fruit of the TKGE. We want to know it all. Not only do we wish to be like God, but I think we really do not like not knowing what will happen next. If we have knowledge of everything then that should help us navigate Life, and in particular help us keep the ‘good’ bits and avoid the ‘bad’. We are thinking that if it makes us ‘wise and God-Like’, then we will be able to direct our lives as we want them to be, and be gods in our own world.

But what actually happens is not what we expect.

Eating of the Fruit of the TKGE.

Specifically, eating of this fruit leads to..

- We become aware of our nakedness (we begin to compare - to what?).

- We feel a need to cover ‘down there’ (from whom? and why?)

- We run and hide and then…

God can’t ‘find’ us.

In steps then;

Firstly; our attention which was internal to us and un-selfconscious while in the garden has turned its focus to the world out there. Animals are completely un-selfconscious. They do not spend their time comparing themselves to ‘anybody’ else at all. ‘Self-conscious’ means looking at ourselves from an-other’s point of view, ie external to self. And then,

We  try to encompass this with our comparing, judging and naming, and notice above all that we are an animal. And then, we decide we’re a pretty fragile looking animal; just skin and no covering and feeling very exposed (naked), and then,

We try to make ourselves feel more secure. The fig leaves are an attempt to cover the base chakra which is concerned with our connection to the earth; (security; feeling safe), and then,

We take fright, (the coverings are not enough) and bolt off to hide as fast as we can – it is overwhelming.

Being alive on earth as an animal is pretty different from ‘heaven’ after all and now highly unsafe. We are now hiding from life and God.

Nakedness is a comparison word which is looking externally; skin versus fur or feathers. Adam’s use of the word ‘naked’ told God what had happened.

If the purpose of Life on Earth is for us to learn about ourselves and our capabilities, then we need to learn the difference between Knowledge (told stuff) and the Knowing/Understanding that comes only from experience (we have to do stuff and find and realize things for ourselves).

This focus on the external and the consequent fear, judgement and avoidance makes us ‘die’ to the risks in life, and we can no longer be naturally ourselves or engage in Life/living. We are not going to welcome experience unless we know beforehand what’s going to happen (we are judging it) which defeats the whole purpose, and we are not going to grow in self-awareness. We are afraid of Life and living, and we hide when God comes walking in the garden. It is possible to hide from God, and He can’t find us when we do.

This is what happens when we have eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Everything or of Good and Evil.

Then why is the TKGE in the garden?

Thus the next question is why is the tree there in the first place? But All of life has to be there. If we are of God/Life, why do we need something different from God/Life?

God can warn us about it, and has, but we have choice, as always.

I suspect that, once again, we are assuming that if God says it is All Good, that means that it is all heavenly, but in heaven we are dead (static and knowing only theory), and God wants us to have Life, and the experience of being part of it, and I suspect also that Life has to encompass All things. It is the so-called ‘good’ that teaches us about ‘bad’ and vice versa. All of it is in fact a duality, and it is these contrasts that awaken our awareness of ourselves; ‘consciousness loves contrast’.

The cursings

These follow after Adam and Eve have hidden and then, when found out, have blamed others rather than themselves.

Thus, the cursings follow their blamings.

Blame holds decisions and judgement. Its use can be of self or others or whatever. It ‘feels’ easier and better, because it helps us keep a distance or detachment from our own feelings of guilt or shame at our part in this situation.

Thus it….

·              Implies something should be different from what it actually is and indeed that you know what that should be. You can’t accept the reality and prefer denial. We will also wish to control the situation in some manner if possible and wish/demand that the situation be changed.

·              Disempowers us – we’re not going to look at our own part in this, and hence become powerless – it’s not my fault, I’m a victim, so I could not avoid this – you made me do it, and so on. Its use shrinks us – we cannot grow.

·              Builds a barrier (or even enmity) between ‘blamer’ and ‘blamed’ – the guilty person should ‘pay’, which may suit me very well. There is a disconnection.

·              Prevents any further information/dialogue between the parties, or any real partnership, or shared endeavour. Thus, it ends relationship.

…All of which lead to increasing fear and greater pain.

God ‘curses’ the serpent/snake first, then the woman, then the man.

For the snake, he says ‘on your belly, you shall crawl’ which has led various people to wonder if it used to have legs. I’m not sure about such things, but the gist of it is that the snake shall be the lowest of the low, and that is how we think of snakes, so much so that it is supposed to be symbolic of Satan. Yet other cultures do not think of snakes in such a way. The woman’s attitude to the snake as the ‘cause’ of her distress puts tension and distance between them. There will be no befriending or potential sharing because there is blame. In blaming the snake, Eve now fears it and she is disconnecting herself from a major symbol of feminine energy in other cultures, and from close connection with the earth.

Similarly, Adam’s blaming of Eve puts distance between them. Guilt is painful; trying to ‘make it up’ with someone who wants to keep blaming us is painful, Eve will suffer more pain. The distance between them will mean that neither will be able to fully utilise each others’ skills, or be really in equal partnership.

However, notice here that God does not actually ‘curse’ anyone or anything that He has made because He knows perfectly well that He is only cursing Himself. So, if we humans think of it in this way, we will be getting it wrong.

These ‘curses’ are actually the natural consequences of blaming others, and for Adam, of having eaten the fruit, which has changed his attitude to Life and being in the Garden of Eden, and his connection to God, because of the change in focus regarding the self from internal to external .

When you focus on the external, Name/label/judge/decide things as good or bad, and baulk at exploring and experience because you are afraid, you are always thrown out of the Garden. You are dying to Life.

Thistles can be a dreadful weed or a medicinal herb, or information about the state of your soil. Your attitude is your decision is your choice.

Is working the soil, and eating what you grow, a blessing or a curse? It is nothing but your thinking/naming/’knowledge’ that makes it so; (hence the quote from Shakespeare at the beginning of this piece.) What you have ‘made’ of Life (i.e. decided about it) is making your life.

There is also much about dust. We are made of dust and return to dust. Dust is earth without water. We are made of earth and so are all other living things. It is our mortal ground.

Being told we are made of earth/dust and will go back to it is not a ‘be-little’-ing as we tend to think it is. It is actually an instruction that with such a direct connection with the earth, we can consciously connect to Earth as we think about it/her and desire to do so. Thus, we can use Earth as a source of energy for ourselves whenever we want, and doing this will help us feel safe. God was trying to tell us how to feel safer and therefore less frightened.

The aftermath

Then, after the ‘curses’, God says ‘man has become like one of us knowing good and evil…’. This sentence puzzles all of us, but it may simply be a reference to understanding the things that tempt man. Man has got what he wanted, but it isn’t good for him, and he is now in great danger of being able to access the Tree of Life. I take this to mean that ‘living’ while ‘dying to the reason for being alive’ is not the way to go.

God gives them clothes, drives them out, (they have, of course, driven themselves out) and protects the garden with cherubim (singular or plural unspecified) and a whirling and flashing sword in the East. What are these?

There is little in the bible about cherubim, but it appears to be a symbol of ‘realized’ man; a man who knows all of himself, which is quite something.

The sword is also a puzzle, but I can think of one flaming sword that few people will face, and that’s the burning fiery discomfort in the gut from guilt and shame that occurs when we are faced with our own part in the things that happen to us, and the consequent dent in our self-concepts. Many people would die rather than face this sword.

CONCLUSIONS. WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

What are we left with?

I think we are left with a clearer understanding of

·              How we get thrown out of the garden, and

·              How we get back in, and

·              Why we want to be there, and

·              What we’re supposed to do when we’re in it,

all of which seems to me to be quite handy really.

We can even hypothesise about the Reason for Life, and what we and God might be wanting.

Therefore, in order….

How do we get thrown out? By eating of this particular tree.

When we focus on Everything but ourselves we are ‘looking’ the wrong way. There is too much for us to cope with. Fear, judgement and avoidance overwhelm us. The External focus debilitates us.

The irony here is that usually we try to cope with this fear by trying to eat even more of this fruit of the TKGE.

Almost every aspect of our current media is a focus on the external. All opinions are about external things. Remove your focus from the external and stick with yourself and what you know and find for yourself. In particular, practice suspending judgement, and try seeing what happens when you remove blame from anything, including yourself, as in, simply work with what is.

How do we get back in? Stop wanting to be ‘above it all’; hiding from life and wanting to get back to the ‘safety’ of Heaven. We are of earth and we are an animal, and here to learn about ourselves through experiences. (Notice that all animals need clean air, clean water and clean earth.) Develop your senses, skills and capabilities, and take pleasure in what you achieve, create and realize. (Developing your senses includes refraining from deafening your hearing and ingesting vast amounts of sugar.) Keep your attention focused internally. In fact, a primary commandment appears to be ‘Know Thyself’ as in, realize/remember/recognise all of you.

Take responsibility and understand your own part in all of your experiences, particularly when you would most like to blame anyone or anything else. Face the flaming sword.

The greatest changes in the last 25 years include the access to ‘alternative’ information/ideas about life, and the modern development of tools to face your own judgements and to learn about yourself and your uniqueness (All your own Good and All your own Bad). However much these tools remain under the radar of public awareness, they are not far away, but they are certainly not part of our standard institutions.

Realized woman is able to stand up and be herself before and with God/Life.

Why do we want to be there? I suspect one of our deepest wishes is to ‘talk with God’. In the garden of Eden (where our focus is internal) we are not afraid or self-conscious and we can welcome and embrace Life and be in partnership with it. It is in this way that we can become truly safe. The implication in this tale is that God/Life has never stopped wanting to talk to us. It is we who are afraid and hide.

What are we supposed to be doing when we’re there? Doing what God/Life does. Learning about who we really are and creating, wonderful, beautiful, useful things. Notice that, as we create, we learn about ourselves. That’s pretty good, so create more. Our children are brilliant at telling us about ourselves; we are just not always sure we want to know. Children are of course, not the only way. Having fun, learning about ourselves, playing with our children, making things of earth, looking after all the other animals and ourselves so that we are all vibrantly well and happy (Tilling and Keeping it). Coming into equal partnership with all Life/God so that it can talk to us and we can talk to it so that we learn about ourselves and others. It is in this partnership with God/Life that we can find a security that is much greater and more use to us than being safe because nothing can happen to us. It is the security that needs no security.

We learn to treat all as sacred because God/Life is in everything.

And make friends with the snake; its advice was correct. Get close to the earth and feel it; experience, experience, experience and find out for yourself.

Share what we have found in our own uniqueness with others; come into relationship. We are not meant to be islands. We build through shared resources.

And I suspect that this is the reason for it all, and I suspect that this is what we both (God and humans) want. The actual Getting back into the Garden is an individual task. The only person who can work on this is you. Start when you want.

And specifically..

To Adam.

Stop blaming Eve for your choices, or your feelings of insecurity or lack of control in life. (Whole religions may come apart at the seams here.) You can find security for yourself if you are able to give it to another. Are you able to use your natural masculine abilities for the purpose of protecting/keeping life?

You have much to gain from coming into equal partnership with women, and learning to appreciate her skills which are different from yours.

Till and keep the Earth together. We only have one.

To Eve.

Stop blaming the snake and go back to making friends with it. Listen to whatever else it has to say. Go back to all Life – the natural living world as much as you can, rather than the man-made world. ‘Sensing in’ is a woman’s inheritance. How do we use it? It needs peace and quiet and time (how much of these have you got?) to blossom and develop. Remove your energy and attention from Adam; you are not guilty and never were. Wait for Adam to come into partnership with you first, otherwise he’s not going to learn, and he may not be worthy of you. He’ll ‘rule over you’, as in, take no notice of you.

[For a marvellous description of a realized Eve, read the Anastasia books.]

To both.

Partnership brings more when together than 2 single people can do by themselves. We know that.

Earth needs all the skills of both men and women together.

And above all – Know Thyself, which means know all of yourself including what’s in your Unconscious; (this is a bit like finding out who else lives in the rest of that large house you own). This is the Reason for Life. We are part of God and God likes knowing Himself and does it through everything that He has Created. We do this ourselves when we learn who we are through our children and we delight in their learning (hopefully).

Make beautiful and/or useful things.

The more you know yourself, the safer you will feel. There will be less fear in your life, less need to hide from God/Life, and you will be able to listen to Life, and what it has to say.

Life is a gift. Gratitude can help us realise this.

‘Talking’ to God/Life.

I have used God/Life throughout this discussion as a way of ‘getting a handle’ on concepts such as ‘Talking to God/Life’. When I was growing up my concept of being spoken to by God included trying to be ‘good’ enough to be spoken to, and then I might hear a booming voice ‘telling’ me what to do. However, not only has this not happened, it is not what I call partnership. My reasoning for using God/Life rather than simply God goes…

·              If God/Life is an energy much greater than I am, and

·              God creates all Life, as in, this energy/breath is in us all, then

·              All Life is a manifestation of God energy and therefore any manifestation of Life (rocks, plants, animals people and circumstances) can ‘speak’ to you, as you can ‘speak’ to God, if that is what you want.

So what is this ‘speaking/talking’? All Life has a resonance; that is the energy. Some things will ‘resonate’ with you, and some not. The ‘resonating’ is the ‘speaking’ (loud or soft; nice or nasty). It is your business to not only notice this resonance in you for yourself, but to then work out what it means to you. You get to develop your own style. This is how God/Life ‘speaks’ to you, as you ‘speak’ to Life through your own resonance.

I imagine this is the basis of most nature-based religions.

All Life is sacred, including you. Treat it with proper respect.

In sum.

This is what I think that this story is trying to say, and as you may have guessed from the title, I think this story is very relevant to today. No-one will be more surprised than I was at what I found through this inquiry. I have found it very useful indeed, and hope it may be of use to you.

Anastasia.

There are 9 ‘Anastasia’ books written by Vladimir MEGRE, (Russian) translated to English by John Woodsworth, edited by Leonid Sharaskin, and published by Ringing Cedars Press, 2004 on, and are available in Australia. (and also available through Nexus magazine)

The title of the 1^st book is ‘Anastasia’. They are just lovely.

Death; ITS&FYD.ch1,pt14.

DEATH

[Please see the Introduction posted March 2013]

Death is of course, not the end; we continue to continue. But, the internal split also continues; it can only be healed during life/incarnation. I suspect that the split at death is between the spirit and the soul, rather than NOVAK’s (which see) argument that it is between the conscious and unconscious which is split during life, but that is academic for the practical purposes of this UUS.

The ‘judgement/assessing’ of the Bible appears to be our chance to assess how we have done in this life, but we can choose to avoid that too. There are too many people who have said ‘my life ran before my eyes’ as they thought they were going to die, as well as the number of people who have had NDE’s to think otherwise. ‘Assessing’ is the business of facing ourselves, and that can be a very uncomfortable process indeed, such that many will not do it; this time. Notice here that the person doing the assessing is not God, or the church or anyone else but you; you are the one that carries the memories. We don’t even like this one; it implies that if someone does not feel guilty, they won’t even feel the blame, which is correct in that they may not; but the mirror laws are always there, whether we know it or not.

Through reincarnation we carry whatever our decisions about Life may be along with us to the next life, where we will receive feedback about these decisions, and so we continue on and on.

We are ‘dust’ = earth.

There’s a lot about ‘dust’ in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; ‘Dust we are, and dust we shall become’.

This was part of God’s ‘cursings’ in the story, so we consider this a curse, but we forget that God is not going to curse anyone; what for, if She needs nothing from us?. But we are made of earth, and I suspect that there is something inherently powerful in that, even if the ‘powerful’ is only for our own purposes, and, I don’t actually know what that ‘power’ might be, except to guess that it is by coming back to our own bodies and to just exactly who we are and what we have and what we can do, that makes us ‘powerful’. The instruction may well include considering that we will die sometime, so we need to consider/remember that we are mortal; life is fleeting etc, etc.

It is also true that the more you are able to connect directly to Earth, the more you will be able to draw energy from the Earth. You may be able to notice that as you do so, Earth considers that you are good enough for her, as is true for all creations made from earth. How could she think otherwise? If you feel ‘good enough’ you can feel safe; the safety that comes from not being judged or compared. This is a pretty good feeling.

Death follows life as night follows day. It is not only our chance to rest and take time out, but also to ‘start over’ and tackle it all again. But, ultimately we need it to inform life.

By informing life, I mean asking the ‘death questions’, some of which are…

‘What would you do today if….

..You were to die tomorrow?

..You were to die within 3 to 6 months?

..You became ill and only had x months to live; and so on?

I spend more time on these in the goal-setting chapter.

These types of questions help you to work out what is important to you, and what you want and what you can do about it. That is why we ask them. They inform you about your life. Who are you, and what would you change? The pressure here is on you to ask, especially about what you value the most, and usually that’s relationships and love. But, notice too, that all of these questions are about you having to ‘go inside’ and ask your InSelf for the answers.

We fear it; it is the end of what we know, (as well as the potential for the assessing which can actually feel worse). On the other hand, many people don’t know why they are alive and are not that interested either, so they don’t really care either way. Life has a habit of trying to make/help them care, even if it is a solid ‘whack around the ear-holes’ and sometimes it is just that, especially if we will not take any notice any other way.

In the end, the person you get to face is your real Self which is hidden within the InSelf. It is that unknown ‘other’ (have I said this before?). We would like to run from our fears or we try to block them as much as possible. But, there is no way out, only through. We get to face our fears and we do that by understanding that everyone fears their fears as we fear terrible dragons. The question is when, not if we face them.

Facing ourselves = facing our own dragons. 

Our society has many myths and tales about horrible dragons breathing fire, who sit on a great pile of treasure and defend it. And of heroes who fight these dragons and become owners of this treasure and thus able to win great things in life.

These ‘dragons’ are your fears and guilt and shame because that is exactly what they feel like. Facing them is what fighting the dragons is about. They are very frightening, and awful. They are terribly strong, tricky and agile; they breathe fire and can burn us and even kill us, and want to. They must be treated with the deepest respect for their powers to kill us, because they can.

You must armour yourself with your resources and check that these resources are in working order first. This means finding out what these resources actually are and practicing on something very small or ‘fake’ first, and work up. Think of knights practicing with jousting posts and wooden swords and finding and developing their own strengths first.

There may be several jousts as you try to battle the dragon and you learn what the dragon can do, but when you win and the dragon is dead, you get the treasure, and become ‘wealthy’. You have been heroic, and will feel stronger internally and be able to tackle more dragons if needs be. The internal ‘wealth’ is the Insights.

There is truly nothing more heroic than facing and killing your own dragons, and the ‘treasure’ is immense, and there is always ‘treasure’. We will deeply ‘treasure’ what we find when we kill the dragon and inspect what was underneath it.

This UUS includes a useful method for tackling many of them, but not all. Some of them do need 2 people, and are thus not DIY; you will have to have help for them. I discuss this in Trauma (which see).

Death and Life.

We tend to think of death as the opposite of life, but it actually isn’t; it is part of life, and in fact, it is our greatest ally in learning to live correctly for ourselves.

The opposite of life is un-life. It comes about through un-love. But another opposite can be non-life.

So, what do we think life is? If we were truly alive, what would we be? We might be what…?

And here’s a list of opposites (again). Once again, as always, the concept and its opposite are on the same line. And, once again, you may like to add your own concepts…

About building a list of contrasts.

A list of contrasts builds a ‘picture’ or a ‘feeling’ (depending on how we take in information). Notice that each word is a separate concept or Modality that we use to build up these pictures, with the more modalities making a more compelling and specific/particular picture/definition. Some of the modalities used here are colour, brightness, movement, temperature, and so on. The ‘opposites’ are not necessarily fixed in that your opposites may be different from mine.

But the point here is that increasing the number of modalities builds the picture increasingly clearly.

LIFE               vs.                   NON-LIFE = ‘Ghost’

Vital                                        Sluggish, still

Colourful                                 Grey, colourless

Giving                                      Wanting

Warm                                      Cold

Expressive                             Dumb, silent

Creative                                 Consuming

Trusting                                  Fearful

Having                                    Taking

Relating                                  Alone

‘Present’, Real                       Invisible, unseen

Happy                                     Sad

‘Fed’                                       Hungry

Effective                                 Impotent

Passion                                  Boredom

Free                                        Trapped, stuck

Etc.                                         Etc.

My argument here is that an opposite of life is the ghost, and that makes us really fearful, and rightly so. And yet, it is far more likely to creep into our lives when we refuse to ask the ‘death questions’.

[Children know all about ‘the ghost’; any attention being indeed better than none.]

Cynicism.

I also think that we need to beware of cynicism, which tends to build as we have trouble believing in what we are told to believe. We kind of end up in a limbo land of can’t believe what we’re ‘supposed to believe’ and can’t work out what might be useful to us to believe (and make sense too?). It seems so self-indulgent to look for or well, actually find a belief system that keeps us happy, but what use is your unhappiness, to yourself or to others? Were you wanting to spread it around? Cynicism makes us sad ‘at bottom’ which brings in the ‘greyness’, and really, it’s the greyness that can be a useful warning that we might be heading in the wrong direction.

Where else might ‘greyness’ be in our lives?

Well, have you looked around at city environments lately? Concrete, steel, glass and bitumen; so little plant material or anything that belongs in nature unless it’s a useful office plant. Lots of coloured lights to cover it up, but it’s still there. We all wear black as we go about our working lives. Modern colours for gymnasiums and many corporate-style meeting places are grey, white and black, with red for luck. Is this what you want in your life? If we dance, it’s by ourselves in the dark with a few lights thrown around, and being deafened. If we sing, it’s others’ music’ in a beat (rock; heavy metal) that kills life, and deafens us with generally sad/angry ‘male’ words about ‘the lost only lerv’.

So, the upshot?

I think the upshot of this is that there are some really scary things that can happen to us when we will not submit, ‘turn around’, face ourselves, and use life to learn about who we are inside. They are not punishments per se, or even threats, but they are the consequences of energy laws that extend from love to un-love; life to un-life.

It is not easy, we don’t like it, and don’t want to do it, but getting to be partners with God is what we need and want to do, and we truly love it when we ‘get’ that, and there’s more. There’s always more. The Universe expands all the time; (apparently even the earth is expanding).

Life is Fierce.

It really is. The Mirror Laws are fierce in terms of ‘watch out’; even Being at Choice is fierce. It’s up to you. Life can give us some awful whacks if we won’t ‘wake up’. It seems to be really hard and mean to even say this. We actually like the idea of staying as a child, but we mustn’t and we can’t. All we have to do is look at and watch animal behaviour in the wild, but we can’t do it without judging. We refuse to look at this. We want life to be all nice and ‘lovey-dovey’ and our way and get very cross and sorry for ourselves when it isn’t.

This does not mean you need to hide under a rock, or be afraid or avoid the natural world, but it does mean be careful, observant, awake, and use all your senses, including your intuition, as you explore life. Animals get to do it all the time.

Finding our own power for ourselves as we head toward being a full Adult; (it’s a kind of ‘powerless power’ in a strange way because it is not a ‘power over’ anyone); is immensely rewarding.

And that’s what this UUS is saying Life is for.

Facing death and submitting to the information that Life brings to us is the way through (it’s not out). It’s not if; it’s when. When will you stand and Look; now or later? As we do so, Life becomes a Present, and we live with our own Purpose which leads to great satisfaction with Self, ie, proper Self-esteem (TSE) and ‘fed’-ness. There is a feeling of great internal Security here; it is the ‘house built on rock’. [As well as that ‘Rest in Peace’ bit.]

And now we go on to the next chapter which is about Wanting to be Like God.

Suffering; ITS&FYD.ch1,pt13.

SUFFERING & PAIN

[Please see the Introduction posted March 2013]

BUT BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE.

Introduction.

The greatest problem with trying to discuss suffering is that the ‘causes’ can be internal or external; ie, ‘caused’ by others or self and that these causes are multi-departmental in terms of PEMS; not to mention levels of understanding. We have almost no understanding that much can be faced in life if we have the tools, the help, and the understanding that it is our Spiritual concepts that affect our lives all the way through to our individual physical circumstances. This is both for ourselves as individuals and as part of society.

We absolutely need a proper and respectful set of concepts for TISPing ourselves and Life as a reason to live and to treat ourselves and others with respect. This UUS is attempting to set up just such a set of concepts.

In general our greatest suffering comes out of our lack of real meaning in Life. This is what Jung was talking about. To quote Marie Louise von Franz;

“Jung would never treat a patient in their 2nd half of life without arriving at the question as to the meaning of this person’s life. It made no difference which everyday problem had led to the commencement of treatment; it always came down to this final question. For if one knows that one’s life has a meaning, then one is able to endure it.”

This theme is illustrated in the Tarot card of the 5 of Pentacles where 2 people in poverty and illness struggle along in the snow past the slightly open door of a church (depicted by a church window) without noticing it. What we ‘believe’ or how we find meaning for our life affects us to the core.

This is the primary reason I argue for this UUS. It gives useful meaning and a ‘reason’ for our ‘discomfort’ with Life, and thus helps us face the Split/disconnection within ourselves. This disconnection is what I am talking about when I am saying that essentially we disrespect our selves and our bodies and Life/Nature. Life is perfectly capable of (and does) giving us a great ‘whack’ when we are heading in the wrong direction for ourselves and have not taken sufficient notice of the prior gentler ‘tapping’ that we often receive. Finding this respect is essential. I don’t think we have much time left.

Life has a bad habit of pinning us up against the wall and saying ‘is this what you want?’ I suspect that many people have chosen this current lifetime as a method of pressuring themselves, as these seem to be very pressured times.

We are built to think about any pickle that we are in and to try to ascertain all the factors that got us where we are.

We are built to Explore and Look for what we want. We are also built to be able to ‘back up’ and work out how we got to where we have got; to think and to remember. Antidepressants seem to mess up our ability to do this.

Once we have done that we need to look in the Mirror and check out our own ‘beam in our eye’, and inspect and unravel our own judgement and blame of ‘the other’ to learn about our own InSelf. If we were not so caught up in our pernicious universal judging/blaming and were able to understand our ‘normal’ human-ness and bumbling, we would be far better equipped to help each other sort out our own ‘beams’, before we begin to ‘throw stones’. (A mixed metaphor or so.)

[The trouble here is that the factors in our ‘global environment’ that do greatly affect others’ suffering are now horrendously intertwined and thus appalling to attempt to unravel.]

Sometimes we seem to need to ‘get higher up’ to get out of feeling trapped.

[I once tried to trap a mouse that I found in my pantry using 4 square glass jars that I pushed together, but it popped straight up the tiny gap in the middle and escaped. It had not occurred to me as its potential way out.]

It is suffering that forces us to look for alternatives. It (suffering) is not necessarily required. Although everybody is nominally looking for the same thing (which we tend to refer to as ‘Love’) what we are really looking for is how this love feels inside us because we do not know.

Sometimes the only way to find what we don’t know what we are looking for is to learn to know what it is not.

We feel intrinsically separated from the comfort of heaven.

Being apart from God is painful, and we are deeply afraid and yearn for the safety of being a part.

We deeply fear alone, and run from it.

We are afraid we won’t get back, and we’re full of sin.

This UUS argues that you will get back, and you’ve not been ‘thrown out’ for ‘badness’.

We don’t know why we’re here and it makes no sense; it’s all arbitrary.

This UUS argues that God wants us to embrace Life and learn how to have the fun that She has. She knows it’s not easy, and I suspect She didn’t find it easy either. But, once She had worked it out… well, that was something else, and She wanted to share it. In effect, She wants partners, and we want to get to be partners. And basically, we’ll keep going until we get there, because, as I may have said before, we are parts of God.

To repeat; this UUS provides spiritual support as a reason and method (see later chapters) for facing one’s own problems in the physical, mental and emotional departments of life. It’s a useful way to support one’s self in finding meaning in life and learn how to live it in a manner that is correct for you. It is a reason for Life that also gives choice in every way.

We are supposed to suffer because it makes us ‘good’.

This comes straight out of good old P&C teachings. It’s incorrect simply because you are not considered ‘bad’ in the first place, as I hope to have made plain by now.

And, Suffering is ‘good for us’.

Suffering is not ‘good for us’ per se except to make us think. Its main message is ‘wrong way, go back’.

Thus, we are meant to think (if able to) about and remember…

·      How we got into this situation, taking all factors/forces into account and going back at least 2 years.

·      What were you judging, expecting, or blaming.

·      What is your body actually telling you?

·      Can you turn within?

·      What are the things of the most primary importance to you?

·      Can you find any advantages in this situation?

·      What brings you comfort/solace?

·      What can you learn here?

·      Can you change anything of this?

·      Are you passing this suffering along?

If God loves us, She wouldn’t make us suffer.

Not so, She treats us as powerful for ourselves as She is for Herself, because we are, but it is up to us to find that power. Life includes it all, so that we can explore it all, but our use and mis-use of energy has consequences that we may not understand for a while.

Suffering calls us to look for alternatives and hunt. It is still informative even if it’s ‘wrong way, go back’

How can we believe we are at choice?

Love must give choice, and we want to get to be partners to God. However, believing is not required here. This UUS is entirely one person’s (ie, me) ideas that give/gave me comfort, and that is why I am expressing them. Yours may be much more use to you.

What about the starving Africans? Have they chosen their situation?

I really don’t know. This UUS argues that their situation will serve them eventually, even if I don’t know the details.

Other major causes of suffering are the way power and money are used by powerful companies and countries to play ‘ducks and drakes’ with developing countries in whatever way they wish and these countries cannot do anything about them. Some of the things that rich powerful countries do to poor countries contribute to some of this abuse. Many companies are now bigger than countries and to whom do those people in charge of these companies really answer? Our P&C model of ‘how life is and should be’ (see next chapter) causes immense suffering and powerlessness to many people. Mirror Laws make it plain that if we treat others badly, then we are treating ourselves badly at very deep levels.

We need a different model, and I explore this in the next chapter.

Disrespect for Life and our selves.

Much of our suffering is through our real failure to appreciate the needs of the Soul and thus our bodies.

Our disrespect for Life and others as well, is enormous. We poison our environment (and ourselves) with chemicals, heavy metals and waste and pollution and ignore, absolutely, our bodies’ and Life’s need for clean air, clean water and clean soil, and I mean clean, not just a little bit ‘buggered up’.

This poisoning of our environment and the decreasing ability of our food to nourish us, directly affects our bodies and thus, our health (physical and mental) and gets us into trouble; deep trouble. Are we looking for ways to tackle cleaning up our environment at major comprehensive levels? Some governments are attempting to do so, but at great risk of being booted out of office as it is generally deemed a terrible thing for business which, of course, must come first. We worship money.

And disrespect for the power of God/Life/Self.

Our disrespect for our own need to allow life to inform us of what we need and want to know is directly related to our suffering.

‘Man’ puts himself first above life and attempts to dominate and control the natural world. This is mostly because we fear it and we fear life. If we can’t sort this fear, we can’t really sort anything.

What about ‘really bad’ people?

Sometimes people place themselves in situations which will give them the experience of being at a very great distance from God.

The greater the distance between a part and apart, the more uncomfortable is the process of growing up but the more you will be able to See and the more adult you may be able to become and thus a potential partner to God. That distance is what you have chosen, but it does not mean that it’s going to be a comfortable ride or even that you will succeed in your aims in this life. Remember that you have a great deal of time to do this in, and it can take a great deal of time and different lifetime experiences and perspectives to do it. My own experience is that ‘it all comes out in the wash’ you might say, but that is not to say that it was easy or that there wasn’t plenty of ‘grunge’ to look at.

PS. Judging that people are ‘really bad’ is a call to look in the Mirror, because your judging is making a fear available to your notice, that you may wish to clear.

Another thing that is useful to understand is that when we judge and label another as ‘really bad/terrible’ we have no way of accessing or even recognizing that strong ‘negative’ energy that is apparently ‘out there’ within ourselves, and if we can’t access it, we can’t use it. It’s not available and in fact, it just frightens us, and thus, controls and limits our lives. This is the way our judgements make us afraid.

Trying to Assign Blame.

The problem with trying to understand how we are at choice is the temptation to blame the suffering person as being ‘at choice’ and leave it at that, but as I stated above, this is not a blame system. This is a ‘support the other person, as you may yourself wish to be supported’ system. [Not to mention, there’s still an awful lot of explaining left to do on my part about exactly how one could possibly get to empowering oneself. - see below]

Also, you do not know why something is happening to someone else, or what they may need to See/learn, and they may not know either until further down the track whenever that may be, and it is actually not your business.

So, if someone has ‘chosen’ to suffer in this life do we leave them to it? This is another loaded question because their and our motives are usually very mixed up. Unravelling and sorting out our own motives is an essential part of facing ourselves, and is dealt with in later chapters. A lot of the answer includes who is wanting or expecting help for themselves as well as those who wish to help or are expected to.

My ideal world includes an overall awareness that the ‘weak’ need basic protection and the chance to ‘grow up’, simply because we need to protect the ‘weak’ in our selves (Mirror Laws = ‘the rejected weak out there are the rejected weak inside us’). I address the question of group awareness and action in a later chapter because I feel strongly that a society that has people in it with nothing to lose, is a society that lacks integrity and will therefore be prone to disintegrate.

The Challenge.

We don’t know what we can find out, and we don’t know what our resources can be, so sometimes we challenge ourselves or we want the pressure. Resilience seems to need duress before we know we have it. Diamonds are forged under great pressure.

Consider some examples.

A mild example here could be someone who wanted to check if they could meditate in the noisiest environment that they could find. Another eg is the mystic, Ainslie Meares, who taught himself to really relax by using small controlled burns on his wrists. (awk!) We have internal resources that may only awaken under exigencies. Only someone who has experienced major poverty and/or degradation will galvanize themselves to try to prevent it further down the line or at least have a very strong understanding that it is deeply wrong to allow humans, or animals for that matter, to live in such a way. Someone who has been blind in one life will be far more likely to be extremely interested in finding a way to give sight to others in a later life, and so on.

Someone who has tangled bitterly with the medical world may begin to look for alternatives. Someone who has tangled bitterly with the legal world may learn to be a lawyer in next life, and so on. Someone who has starved may learn to be very careful about food. Someone who has been extremely poor and oppressed may realize that it is better to die fighting for his and others’ rights than to continue to be oppressed. Someone who has lived with secret guilt in one lifetime may decide that death and/or speaking up, maybe both, is possibly a better idea in the next one.

The challenge of suffering is how you are able to achieve the healing you desire.

If you cannot, you may continue to suffer, and many people do, and then the challenge is how you deal with that. Milton Erickson was paralyzed by polio in his late teens, with only his eyes and his mind available to him. He used them to observe people very minutely. He later learnt to walk but always with pain which he dealt with by hypnotising himself. He became simply one of the best therapists of all time. (There is a short biography of Erickson in Wikipedia.) This is inspiring because it reminds us that it can be done. Another example could be the Greek story of the centaur Chiron, who used his unending search for healing for himself to teach others about what he had and had not found. Notice that this search was unending; it did not end in his lifetime.

If you end up simply suffering you will unconsciously want others to suffer too, and will ‘spread it around’.

A primary challenge for many people is how to find ways to maximize what you can do in this situation. You are looking for ways in which to prevent and reverse such things in the first place, for yourself and others, and this is not always possible.

Sometimes we are unable to be healed and sometimes we cannot change the situation either, and may die. And still this is not the end.

Some of these factors/forces are beyond any single person to fix, and some of them are something to be angry about and to fight for. It is also true that some of them are not worth living through. Sometimes it is better to fight for our ideas or to die fighting/protesting than live/survive under vile circumstances/treatment. Some suffering is worse than death.

Sometimes we do not know what we had until we’ve lost it. “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone”. Our and others’ losses can be devastating and teach us to value the fragility of life, and maybe to be grateful while you have these things that are important to you.

Suffering and Pain force 1. Alone and 2. ‘Down to the Bone.

1.Alone.

Suffering forces facing ‘alone’, (as does death, but we don’t always face this). But we fail to notice that God had to face it too! And we and Life are Her answer to this question. What is yours? Who are you when you are alone in the middle of the night? What are your resources? Who is there? This ‘alone’ means externally alone, but you have an ‘other’ within you. You can label this God/Life/Nature/U which is a great comfort if you can turn to Her, or you can label this person your InSelf. This UUS (amongst others) argues they are the same thing. Either way this pans out as ‘you are loved’ even if you may feel ‘unloved’. You don’t actually need anyone else for you to learn to Love your InSelf, and therefore feel loved. God did not, and neither do you; and you can still ask for help.

To repeat, it is possible to learn to Love You by yourself. A method is outlined in this UUS. There are others, but almost always all under the radar of social awareness. Our society prefers Blame.

2. Suffering forces us ‘down to the bone’.

We are ‘hung on the hook and rot’; we are stuck and forced to stop and back up and work out the absolute essentials for ourselves (the ‘bones of it’). The world out there goes on without us. Do then we even exist? Suffering and pain reduces the material world to ‘dust’. It is the great equalizer, (while alive) and we may not like that at all. And yet in facing our essential equality we come closer to our own humanity and our own self. Remember Merge needs equality. Suffering may be the only way we will look and come to it.

Pain can break us, and for others it has made them ‘break open’ in a way. The pain and suffering has made them kinder and wiser; sort of ‘bigger’ in fact. It does seem to be true that pain is the only thing that makes us look at ourselves. If things are OK, we seem to congratulate ourselves or take it for granted and only start to query things if they are not.

Buddha and Desire.

My understanding of Buddhist belief is that Buddha noticed that life on earth was full of suffering, and developed the idea that this was inevitable until a person became ‘enlightened’ and could ‘get off the wheel’ and no longer needed to be incarnated on earth. He also noticed that people wanted what they could not have and received what they did not want, so his answer to this was to consider that desire itself was the problem. Hence it seemed a good idea to eliminate desire altogether; (except to desire to be ‘enlightened’?).

There are 2 problems with these concepts.

1. ‘Getting off the wheel of Life’.

This is another ‘ off-earth’ version of ‘Heaven is where we’re ‘sposed to be’. This UUS posits that Earth is where we’re ‘sposed to be.

2. Getting rid of desire stops suffering.

To me, this is like telling the tiger in the cage that it’s wise not to be a tiger. This is also similar to directives that anger is ‘bad’. Anger is your energy heading in an uncomfortable direction, ie your gut. People who want to be ‘good’ have a terrible time stuffing down desire and anger, especially when other ‘ungood’ people have a great time. (It’s a judgement; what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’?) Desire is a primary drive, as is Explore. No desire, no Life. It is desire that can get us out of the cage and eventually to our own Expression of Self. When our desires get us stuck, the idea is to back up and think about how we got there, and what we’re thinking about it, (judging or expecting), and what can be done about it. It is not the desire that is the problem; it’s the ‘wants’, and specifically our attachment to our ‘wants’. (see also ‘wanting versus having’ in the previous section.) Then be careful about how and what you desire next.

Animals and Suffering.

Animals are not sentient beings, as in, they are unconscious and are not ‘split’, and are already fully expressing their being. The do not need to become conscious of their unconscious as we do - they are their unconscious, and are in fact here to teach us a few things about that. Buddhists have a ‘do not kill’ command as part of their belief structure, but this can and does leave a lot of animals in suffering.

Mirror Laws (ML) make it quite plain that it is wise to avoid causing suffering even inadvertently, or we will need to experience it ourselves. For our own sakes, we need to work to alleviate if not eliminate suffering in others as much as is ‘proper’ for us, starting with cleaning up our own.

Thus, all animals must be…

- Allowed to be themselves and not treated as a commodity; (ML - as we treat animals as a commodity, we treat ourselves as a commodity),

- Protected from suffering and pain as we wish to be protected from suffering and pain, and thus we work to stop it, which includes ‘putting down’ animals that can’t be healed physically, and of course working to prevent unwanted or neglected/sick animals in the first place.

This does not mean, don’t kill animals, especially if the reason for their existence in the first place is that we want to eat them, but it does mean that we need to honour and respect their needs for their own being, as we wish to do the same for ourselves. This means ensuring that they have a life that is correct and enjoyable for them, and that when we do kill them, we do it without any pain or suffering for them, and we do it with gratitude for their gift of their life to us, and use as much of the animal as we can, ie don’t waste it or ‘rubbish’ it.

It also means clean air, water, and soil (for all of us really) and working to avoid and eventually eliminate the use of hormones, vaccines, GMO in their food or anyone else’s, and so on.

Our health and vitality depends on their health and vitality, ditto plants.

Animals as vermin.

For example, foxes, rabbits, cane toads etc.etc. These still need to be killed ‘cleanly’, for your own sake (ML). Neither should we ignore their uses to us while living (their presence in our lives are still information about us), or dead, (it is wise for us not to ‘waste’ their bodies or treat as ‘refuse’). If we handled Nature better and had less ‘monoculture’ thinking, we might have fewer problems, but it is still a difficult area to delineate, because there are so many factors in the way we impinge on Nature and regard her as something we are here to exploit, or defend ourselves against her ‘attacks’. However, the main principal is to avoid inflicting suffering.

Life as an Illusion.

There is nothing illusory about Life on Earth in this UUS. Any perception of it in this way arises from teachings that imply that our ‘proper’ home is off-earth. Such an attitude leads to essentially disrespect of all around you, both life and others, and of course, yourself. How does one love anything in the face of such disrespect? The only place there may be illusion might be in your own decisions and attitude to life, which are being reflected back to you.

‘Ascension’ thinking.

This is another version of ‘off-earth’ ideas, and to me, another version of wishing to escape the difficulties we do not wish to face, as in, our own Shadow within InSelf. These ideas don’t fit in with this UUS.

In sum.

Our patterns and searchings and explorations have a far greater scope than we are normally aware of in this life. However that is not to say that it is not possible to find out what your own patterns and searchings are. There are now tools available to find out. It is possible and can be done. It is worth considering alternatives and hunting/exploring.

Life is God’s great Creation and Expression of Her Self in Her Exploring; and thus Delight and Love of You. It Serves You and Everyone Else All the time at the same time, as Mirror and Guide for your ultimate Delight for your Self and your Expression of this. This is what is truly mind boggling! This is the great ‘perfection’ of life. Hence, awe, gratitude and respect are useful attitudes on your part, and you must respect its power and its information for you, ie, its personal effect on you.

If it is all perfect, how is the un-love of suffering telling you about your own and others’ un-love for your InSelf? What do you want; what is important, and what are the basic basics? My version of the basic basics is this UUS of TISP InSelf. What is yours?

Ultimately the idea is to be able to support ourselves internally regardless of external circumstances and thus be able to have courage in our own lives and be kind to others in theirs. It is a great self-sufficiency in life.

Thus, always and still we are being asked

Who are you in this? And what do you want? Go inside and find out.

In this way we ‘grow up’ and embrace being apart. This means we...

·      differentiate ourselves out by sorting out and refining what we do and don’t want.

·      understand what’s important to us and others while we learn that ‘they is us’.

·      come into partnership with Life and learn how to Create Life from the heart both internally and externally ie ‘do God’.

In this we find our own Self and own that Self.

And we have a lot of time - eternity in fact - to do it.

and Life on Earth has heaps of

Contrasts and

Mirrors and

tonnes of things for us to experience.

to help us heal the split in our psyche.

The upshot of all this.

You cannot know others’ choices or their greater purpose which can span many lives, not just one. Blaming others as ‘deserving it’ is pointless. It is far better to have a society that works out how to help all of its members to have a meaningful participatory life.

As with all of us, the other is also searching and exploring.

It takes Time to understand what we have experienced and it takes Time; lots of it, to understand our own relationship with life.

Life is the gift; the journey is imperative. In the face of eternity, it does not matter one bit how long it takes to get there. Working it out is not easy, but having worked it out is great. On the way, like a worm on the hook, we scream and yell and whinge and hate it. We are afraid and angry. It is cold outside and it is painful and we hope like hell it really is just one life (oh no! it’s not! but it’s too late now!).

And now we turn to Death.