The Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden

Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

Genesis 3:21-23

The many mythological accounts of the primordial Fall allude to the sacred history of hypercosmic events culminating in the creation of the world and the emergence of humankind. The Fall signifies the descent of the soul from the empyreal hypostasis of the Pleroma into the transformational circuit of the Living God, who scores the Play of Maya upon the seven-stringed lyre of the spheres to orchestrate the transpositions of consciousness between unity and multiplicity.

The story of origins thus parabolizes the preexistent tension between the Monad and the Dyad, through which the convergence of principial form with the indefinite expansion of the unlimited catalyzes the rupture of phenomenal cognizance that gives rise to the pilgrimage of the soul. The Fall demonstrates the creative desire of life itself, the divine will by which the passion of the Sakina vitalizes the infinite storehouse of the Immortal Entities with the Existential Light of Being. The unicity of the Mind thereby contemplates the meaning of its own inexhaustible Thought to spawn the noetic activity of the Spiritual Sun, whose luminous intensity casts the moving shadow of creation spreading out and back into the intellectual potency of the eternal.

The biblical Genesis symbolizes the soul’s exile from the Garden of Paradise and incarnational passage through the initiation of worldly experience by which she tastes of the Tree of Knowledge to know Good and Evil.  It is through the trials of her separation from God that the wayfarer develops a closer intimacy with her Beloved, tasting a fuller extent of limitless potential through the very confinement of her delimitation, growing fonder of the affections of the Friend through the torment of their very absence.  It is by following the fragrance of her lost love that the soul finds her way through the maze of cosmic symbols leading back into the Rose Garden of the innermost, where she eats the fruit of immortality from the Tree of Life to restore the ancestral condition within the Abode of Blessed.

It is by tilling the fields of her earthly estate that the soul is able to maximize the potentialities inherent to her greater spiritual identity, following the Way of the Heart to incarnate the avataric virtues of her own Perfect Nature, distilling the Medicinal Sapience needed to heal the Wound of Separation by the integral wholesomeness of her every thought, word and deed.  By manifesting the higher goodness of the Word she is able to reinstate the felicity of the Golden Age by the merit of her adherence to the divine laws governing the hidden Kingdom of Light, her mutual participation in the Angelical Harmony thus refracting a beam of remedial brilliance for the illumination of the world.

The dual nature of the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ moreover applies to Adam only at the very moment of the ‘Fall’, since it is then that he becomes ‘knowing good and evil’. It is then too that he finds himself driven out from the center which is the place of the primal unity to which the Tree of Life corresponds; and it is precisely ‘lest he put forth his hand and take also of the Tree of Life’ that the Cherubim (‘tetramorps’ synthesizing the quaternary of elemental powers), armed with flaming swords, are set at the entrance to Eden. This center has become inaccessible to fallen man, who has lost the ‘sense of eternity’, which is also the ‘sense of unity’; to return to the center by restoration of the primordial state, and to reach the ‘Tree of Life’, is to regain the ‘sense of eternity’.

Rene Guenon

In her departure from the Garden, the wayfarer undergoes the trauma of separation from her divine source, suffering the torment of a lover forsaken by her Beloved. Lost and abandoned, she drifts upon the cosmic seas of fate disconnected from the vertical axis of the transcendent unity. Yet it is this lovesickness that supplies the tension necessary to motivate the course of the Spiritual Quest, incessantly driving the soul to find her way back into the Promised Land so she can rekindle the intimacy of her amour with the Beautiful.

This innate restlessness is at once the poison and the remedy, as the blood of the Logos drips from the lance of the World Axis to gradually ferment the wine of salvation, intoxicating the divine madness through which the soul transcends the limitations of her fallen state to relinquish her estrangement from God.  It is the angst of this mortal poverty that opens the floodgates to the overflowing abundance of the Love Supreme, as the pain of separation ultimately tempers the vessel to fill with an ardent grace that is freely given, thereby refining the spiritual gold of the alchemists within the fiery crucible of the divine desire.

The roots of the angst, anxiety and disquietude inherent to the human condition symptomize the suffering of this ontological divorce to power the deepest longing to return. The nightingale must endure this divine heartbreak under the hazy fog of forgetfulness, wandering the wilderness of creation in ignorance, isolation and confusion. She blindly struggles through the darkness of the cosmic tomb to uncover her own path of initiation leading into the dawn of the Spiritual Sun who reveals of her own preexistent identity.

For the decline into incarnation has closed a veil over the noetic lamp of the Pleroma, dimming the lens of mortal cognizance to the narrow spectrum of natural phenomena. Driven by the passion for sensual knowledge the wayfarer barters the Pearl of Wisdom for a taste of terrestrial life. Drinking from the waters of forgetfulness she departs from the Abode of Light to wander the forlorn depths of its shadowy reflection. 

She becomes isolated through the cosmic process of dualization, severing her perceptual stream of reality from its transcendental source in the numinous, lulled into an exclusive focus on banality through the divine desire for worldly experience. This disruption of consciousness blinds the soul from recognizing the presence of divinity within herself and all of creation, as a qualitative detachment from eternity effectively bars her from the spiritual dimension of existence.

The “fall” from paradise is a fall of perception; a fall into opacity whereby we can no longer behold the eternal archetypal forms

Rowena Pattee Kryder

This loss of metaphysical awareness and traditional knowledge transpires through the ontological descent of the soul consciousness upon the World Axis by which the wayfarer loses contact with the Intellectual Principle to shutter her view of reality through the dulling of her own existential frequency, a degradation in which she falls out of sync with the divine rhythm of the Angelical Harmony. This amounts to the loss of Paradise for the Grail cannot leave the Garden of Eden. The Balm of Immortality is thereby sealed by the guardians and watchers of the Seven Heavens extending down from the peak of the Holy Mountain, where the Birds of Paradise still sing aloft the Tree of Life standing at the center of the world. 

The veil demarcates the boundary between unity and plurality, separating the Ideal Forms of eternity from the relative multiplicity of their phenomenal projections. The segregation of spirit and nature coincides with the division of subject and object within the undifferentiated cloud of the primordial consciousness, upon which the enthralling barrier of disassociation shrouds the soul’s perception of the fundamental reality by instilling the phantasms of division. Adam and Eve thereby don the spellbinding garments of their physical bodies on their exit from Eden. To return to the innocence of nakedness is to lift the veil of separation by regathering the collective unity of the Good in the Invisible Church of the Holy Grail.

Love is our mother and the way of our Prophet. Yet, it is in our nature to fight with love. We can’t see you mother, hidden behind dark veils woven by ourselves.

Jalaluddin Rumi

The veil is that which blocks the light of the one and only authentic existent, clouding the ineffable splendor of the Empyrean through the privation of nonexistence imposed by the very conditions of mortality, inserting the delimitation of the ego that is the soul’s departure from the unity of paradise. The veil delineates the degrees of separation between the sacred and the profane, unfurling as a series of nested modalities that buffer the esoteric from the exoteric, spearheading the cosmogonic process that simultaneously obfuscates the intelligible clarity of the Ideal Forms through the procession that is their symbolization down the great chain of being.

Yet this dark curtain of phenomena is none other than the disclosure of God by which the soul seeks to uncover the hidden treasure of the Word within the Ark of the Covenant, following the rhythmical dance of the Sakina back into the tabernacle of the Celestial Jerusalem. 

For the ego is the incarnational vehicle that allows the Immortal Entity to operate within the focal constraints of the natural world. Yet when hardened unto opacity the ego restricts our awareness to a false sense of disunity, cutting the locus of soul consciousness off from the spiritual source of life by rescinding her participation in the Seraphic Choir. 

The concept of sin denotes this ontological divorce that interjects the vertical gap of separation between creature and Creator, disrupting the natural order of sympathy between existence and God. That which widens the discontinuity of being is sinful, while that which heals the Wound of Separation is virtuous, as the murky surface of the cosmos rarefies and sublimates to reveal its undescended constituents.

But the mortal is initially blind to the immediacy of divine presence, as the advent of the ego masks her perception of the Good. The spiritual disease wrought by the Fall inflicts the forgetfulness of her spiritual identity to cause confusion, misdirection and an overall distortion of reality. Her amnesia induces paranoia through the illusion of isolation and disconnection from her environment. The Covenant is broken as the silver cord of the Holy Ghost is severed to seal the wayfarer in a dark crypt of ignorance.

The veil covers the Eye of the Heart as a thick mist enveloping the lost castle of the Grail, signifying the bleeding wound of humanity that must be healed by the Medicinal Sapience of the Love Divine, the compassion of Kwan-Yin who hearkens to the cries of her children as the Savior of the Madonna Intelligence and Messenger of the Edenic Light whose active power of sublime empathy shines from the heart of the Spiritual Sun to deliver the consolatory promise of salvation.

The knowledge that we are Brahman is like a fire which altogether consumes the thick forest of ignorance...When the vision of reality comes, the veil of ignorance is completely removed... For example, you see a rope and think it is a snake. As soon as you realize that the rope is a rope, your false perception of the snake ceases, and you are no longer distracted by the fear which it inspired. Therefore, the wise man wishing to break his bondage must know the Reality.

Shankara

By eating from the Tree of Knowledge Adam and Eve gradually assimilate the subtle wariness to discern all that separates them from God, earning their way back into the Garden by the cultivation of their soul which is regathered, purified and illuminated to regain the ancestral purity of the Edenic State. The purpose of the Fall is to gain the worldly experience necessary for the final apocatastasis that is the completion of the divine plan: it is the means by which the spiritual seed fulfill their divine service by following the serpent of the Sakina through the enchanted forests of creation and into the blessed grove of the Most High, where the perfect image of the Pleroma is fully realized within the Kingdom of Light to reveal the incomparable adorableness of the Beautiful on the Day of Judgment.

This cosmogonic and soteriological myth sets the stage for the alchemical transformation within the temple of the soul. Born under the leaden veil of metaphysical ignorance, the wayfarer gradually refines her existential constitution through the magnum opus of her spiritual practice to grow in likeness to the intellectual realm and further her identification with the angelic archetype of her essential being. It is the Substantial Motion from the original sin of incarnational distancing to the divine center, a transubstantiation that catalyzes the resurrection of the Solar Child through harmonious union of soul and spirit.

It is the willful aspiration towards the presence of truth that closes the chasm of separation as the celestial shepherd returns to tend her earthly flock, opening the soul to the inner oracle at the heart of her very being.

Fertilized with the Living Waters of the Good, the budding intellect of the heart regathers the dismemberment of the cosmos into the sacramental body of the Deity. Driven by the implantation of divine yearning the adept finally pierces the veil of separation to consciously exist in a state of transparence and consociation with the spirit world.

In crossing the mysterious pass of the heart the wayfarer is granted admittance to the Valley of Truth, healing the Wound of Separation by the reciprocation of the divine adoration which compels her to the noble service of beauty, wisdom and charity, thereby surrendering to the presence of grace so she might return its love through others. The cultivation of compassion necessarily closes the gap between self and other, as the seeds of empathy, generosity and benevolence naturally flower to release the medicinal amour of the Beautiful, upon which the soul reaps the promise of a deeper love through bearing it forth into this world.

The Serpent is the trickster who lures the divine couple out from the Garden only to teach them the most intimate lessons of communing with God within the full breadth and depth of creation, staging an ordeal through which humanity learns to appreciate the very Highest in the very smallest. The Sakina arranges the trials to be conquered on the spiritual path that is our living initiation into the Way of Love.