The Cost of Abandoning Eden

We have been operating for so long on such simplistic, egoistic notions of how the world works, our place in it, what other animals and even things are and can do… When we traded in instinct for intellect, maybe we also lost a sense of the connectedness of everything, of the wonderful intricacy of all that connectedness.

That’s what was left behind in the Garden of Eden, along with being provided for, with not having to be responsible for our own lives and livelihood: that sense and the sensation of being part of it all, being in a wider family, the great community of all life, all things.

Science has been our tool to attempt to discover how everything works, what the parameters are of life and intelligence and instinct and consciousness… Philosophy has existed since we began using our minds to wonder and imagine, trying to explain not just the how, but the why. Religion has attempted to both mystify and demystify our relationships with the rest of the Universe, adamant about getting everyone on the same page. All of these intellectual exercises have been seeking one thing: the means of controlling what affects our lives.

“If only we can discover and comprehend The Rules, and make everyone follow them, then we can work the world ourselves, we can settle comfortably into our place, and keep the friendship of whatever Gods play with our lives.”

We walked out of the Garden knowing nothing much and came out into a terrifying world: No longer the Garden, but Jurassic Park. We began our education as kindergarteners, we picked up on the most basic understandings and clung to them for our lives. We grew in knowledge and imagination, not always able to tell the difference.

Reality, being what it is, does not test every notion, every plan that we come up with, and lets us believe we are right when we are only just a little wrong, not significantly mistaken. In fact, it is so much bigger than us, we can get away with quite a bit of wrong before Reality slaps us down, and says, Think again… Call it blessing or luck, but I think there must be some force on our side that skews cause and effect in our favor, or human beings would have sillied themselves off the planet long ago.

This could go in a whole nother direction now, but the point of this conversation is not what looks after us beyond the basic rules of Nature and Reality, or what or who are the ‘parents’ of us ‘children.’ It is the wonder of this idea, that there is this vast web of life that has its own consciousness, that we have been deaf and blind to and cut off from for all the generations since we followed the temptations of the intellectual, conscious mind–curiosity, imagination, the desire for control–and that all our researches and studies, our philosophies and imaginings, our spiritual experiments are finally bringing back to the edges of our conscious awareness.