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God did not Cast Us from Eden
We Humans Shamed Ourselves Out
Chet Shupe
What, specifically, happened that threatens to bring down the spaceship, Planet Earth?
It wasn’t much, really. Just an innocent mistake—so innocent that it’s hard to believe it has caused so much chaos and suffering. The situation that made the mistake possible came into being some two hundred thousand years ago when evolution gifted humans with the spoken word.
For most of those years, language served our species well. Our predecessors used it as an extension of body language to share feelings, communicate about the location of food, water, and other necessities, and make short-term arrangements, such as who was going to fix breakfast in the morning, or who was going to go on the hunt, the next afternoon.
If evolution had been monitoring the scene, it would have congratulated itself, for the success of its latest innovation. It might have commented, to itself, that—after two hundred thousand years—nothing bad had happened. So, its newest innovation—the spoken word—had proven itself fail-safe. I, too, join in congratulating evolution, although I must caution, “Don’t rest too easily, Mr. Evolution. Not yet—” because, after two hundred thousand years of unqualified success, evolution’s language experiment took a wrong turn.
It happened, only a few thousand years ago, when people decided they wanted those short-term arrangements to become long-term ones. It was no longer enough to know who was going to fix breakfast, the next morning. People wanted arrangements that assured them they would have a place to live—and the satisfaction of lifelong relationships, and all the other things they felt they would need, for life.
But, this desire was a contradiction of human nature and an insult to our emotional intelligence, which governs life by inspiring each individual to attend to real and present concerns, never imagined future ones. Emotional intelligence’s wisdom has been genetically accumulating since the first stirrings of life on earth. But it does not have the wisdom needed to make lifetime arrangements. That wisdom does not exist, neither on Earth nor in the universe, because the future is unknowable.
On the other hand, our intellectual intelligence, the adaptive element of our brain—whose decisions are based on knowledge, opinions, and beliefs learned from personal experience—had no qualms about taking on the mission of controlling the indefinite future. The intellectual mind, which recognizes no limitations regarding future possibilities, sees nothing wrong with making lifetime arrangements. Indeed, to it, the mission was a new and interesting challenge.
For intellectual intelligence, guaranteeing people lifetime access to essential needs is simple. All that’s needed is a piece of paper, a pen, and a safe place to store the paperwork, once signed. Intellectual intelligence soon discovered, however, that, to grant rights of ownership, many things needed to be in place that it had not anticipated. First, you must institute a system of laws, like the Ten Commandments or the US Constitution, for example, to determine who is good and who is evil—i.e., who has infringed on someone else’s property, and who hasn’t. Then, you need policemen to enforce the laws, judges to interpret them, legislators to revise them, prisons to punish the guilty, welfare systems to support the elderly and poverty-stricken, ivory towers to house the administrators, and machines of war to protect the flag that symbolizes the institutions, for which it stands.
One would think that would be enough. But intellectual intelligence discovered that you also need to sanctify this entire, artificially contrived scheme with a sense of moral fortitude. After all, authorizing the right to own things is a serious enterprise. It grants individual people God-like status, over what Nature created—be it a woman, a parcel of land, an animal, or a slave. In essence, you are presuming to be an ordained servant of God! The question is: Who gave you, or anyone else, or anything—King, God, dictator, state, legal system, or whatever—the authority to grant anyone God-like status over anything that the forces of Nature created?
The answer is no one! That authority can be granted by only one thing: a universally held belief system, whether religious or ideological. So, you would do well to construct some magnificent temples, and consecrate some mighty fine ideas, in honor of the belief system through which you have attained the authority to play God’s right-hand man. When our souls must bow to a belief system, to survive, we feel unmoored from life. In response, we cling tightly to magnificent structures and appealing ideals, as if our lives depended on them—because, in our current state of spiritual distrust, they truly do. This is how temples and good sounding but untested ideas solidify our faiths and, consequently, our fates.
People, the world over, worship, trust, subjugate, and devote their entire lives to artificial systems of accountability—and to religious or secular beliefs that suffuse them with the illusion of moral virtue.
People have no other choice. As subjects of legal obligations, modern humans are without any access to the wisdom of human nature, which would normally inspire us to fulfill our spiritual obligations. That wisdom has been crushed into a state of non-existence, by the authority of sovereign law. How can anyone trust any individual’s spirit—even his own—when his or her emotional intelligence must keep its head buried in the sand, just to materially survive?
So, here we are, with our spiritual sensibilities trapped hundreds of feet underground. How can our spirits ever dig themselves out? I’m not sure there is an answer. In my investigation into how the life of a species works, I imagined myself trying to determine what must be done to avoid the disaster that I saw coming our way. But the more I get into this, the more I feel that I’m sifting through the debris of a crash that has already occurred! Indeed, it happened the moment that Eve took a bite of the apple that opened Adam and Eve’s eyes to the knowledge of good and evil. Before that mistake, which transferred mankind’s ultimate authority regarding human survival from emotional intelligence to intellectual intelligence, all human behavior was justified by how people felt. After our “fall from grace” humans had no choice, but to justify their activities in the written word that prescribed what is good and what is evil. Indeed, our access to the wisdom of our souls has been severed by modern man’s designs on the imagined future, a “reality” that exists only by virtue of the spoken word. Without access to our soul’s wisdom to orientate us, it is as if we are stunned, mindlessly wandering around in a stupor of ignorance, trying to figure out which way is up. We are, thus, unable to consider the possibility that we have physically survived an unconceivable accident, from which we have not yet even begun to emotionally recover.
I have come to suspect that God did not cast us from Eden, as the authors of Genesis reported. Intellectual intelligence, via the process of cold logic, combined with just a touch of wishful thinking—it doesn’t take much—convinced itself that it had gained dominion over the forces of Nature that created us. This put the whole of mankind in the untenable situation of having to tame the forces that created us, for the sake of our survival. To put it another way: Our rational minds—which are unable to agree on such things as global warming—now see themselves as charged with the responsibility of determining the future course of evolution.
The first force of Nature that intellectual intelligence had to disregard—once it presumed itself to be the master of creation—was our emotional intelligence. By placing the significance of prescribed law infinitely above our feelings regarding all issues for mankind’s governance, our rational minds have repressed our emotional minds to virtual nonexistence. There is no one at fault, here. Intellectual intelligence unknowingly did this, by authorizing rights of ownership, which transformed all authority from emotional intelligence to the written word, as prescribed by the knowledge of good and evil.
When Adam and Eve were studying the Ten Commandments, which prescribed how to be good and avoid being evil, they were shocked to realize that God—i.e., intellectual intelligence—was looking for perfect behavior, even perfect mind control!
They wondered how they were going to manage. They knew nothing about perfect behavior. As inhabitants of Eden, all they knew about behavior was the way things had always been. They always had done what they felt was right, and avoided doing things that they felt were wrong. In Eden, species survival was the issue, not perfect behavior.
What constitutes perfect behavior is unknowable. Arguments about what it is are unresolvable, thus can, and do, carry on forever. Had perfection, rather than species survival, been evolution’s goal, life’s process would have been brought to a standstill, long ago—just as unresolvable arguments, over what is good or evil have regularly brought civil cultures to a standstill throughout history.
Adam and Eve unknowingly bought into the promise of an ideal future by acquiring the knowledge of good and evil. In that act, they promised to maintain a standard of behavior that they could not imagine—because the standard was perfection. It was then that they realized that, to meet the new standards, they would have to spend the rest of their lives pretending to be something they were not. In preparation for what they could see was coming, their first act was to dismiss the guidance of their feelings as pointless, unhinged, and even evil.
The story of Adam and Eve is not about two people falling into the trap of legal subjugation. It is the story of how all human lives were affected, when a few people’s eyes were opened to the knowledge of good and evil. At some point, one of the true believers said, “Let’s have a meeting, and get everyone organized, in the name of righteousness.” And everyone cordially agreed, even though many were appalled that such a meeting could possibly take place. Those who were opposed to arriving at an undisputable agreement on what exactly constituted good and evil behavior were afraid to openly object to the meeting, for fear of being suspected as agents of Satan. It was the fear of being seen as the one who was standing in the way of everyone reaching the promised land that caused virtually all of us, sooner or later, to become spiritually dishonest by locking how we really felt inside the “closet of shame.”
That meeting was the first formal gathering—the first planned meeting, among human beings. Before the knowledge of good and evil came into play, formal meetings did not exist. They weren’t needed because emotional intelligence guided our lives, by inspiring us to do what felt right. When emotional intelligence ruled mankind, a life-sustaining social order was ever present, as if by magic. Mankind’s natural social order is not perfect, or ideal. There is love and division, acceptance and rejection, sacrificing and killing, and hardships to overcome. But without knowing about good and evil, no one had any reason to question it. It was just how things were, and life went on. Life-sustaining social order was as omnipresent as water is to a fish.
But, when the knowledge of good and evil began catching on, much as a computer virus spreads from device to device, groups of intelligent, educated, and socially upstanding people began convening in officially sanctified gatherings to discuss how best to realize “God’s” plans. Our feelings seemed so inadequate in the face of such goings on…well, we became ashamed of how we felt. To our feelings, the situation must have felt like, “After all, what do we know, anyhow?” Thus, convinced that the way Nature made us wasn’t good enough, hundreds of millions of years of genetically accumulated wisdom got buried, right then and there, under countless layers of shame.
When preparing for any meeting, in which humans intend to discuss how best to do God’s work, the Book of Genesis had the attendees covering their genitals. Why that particular act? I’m not sure. It must be mankind’s universal body language, for shame.
It’s during formal meetings, you see, that thoughtful and caring people agree on well-intended promises that, in the end, not one of which can be kept, regardless of how hard people try. This is how our intellectual intelligence—thinking civil law held the answer to the world’s problems—innocently disgraced our emotional intelligence into submission, thus, shamed us out of Eden. We can’t live in Eden while simultaneously condemning, as evil, the sensibilities required to live there.
By noting that God placed an angel with a flamethrowing sword, to guard the path to the Tree of Life, the authors of Genesis proclaimed that we could never return to our spiritual homes. It would really be something, if we were to prove them wrong, wouldn’t it? Even they would celebrate our return! To return to homes “ordained” by Nature would require, of course, that we trust our lives to families whose members find contentment by fulfilling their spiritual obligations—never legal ones.
Incidentally, we never actually left Eden. We are still there. It is just that the world does not pass for a garden when we are ashamed of how we feel.
