I don’t think “The Fall” is cause for regret in any way. Contrarywise for its accepted interpretation. I don’t think you will like why I think that, but here it is, since this is the philosophy forum:
It is pretty clear, that is to say I’ve accepted the notion, that The Fall and Genesis in general is more likely an allegory than a modern day documentary type account. This fits for me with the general phenomenon of folks loving stories and needing to have some accounting of things.
Across cultures, all allegedly descended from one couple, there are many of these accountings, and they are too diverse to really comply with one original event that happened in a particular way. I won’t go into all of why I think this is so, I am simply proposing that the account we take as Biblical truth
is truth, but in the alegorical, teaching, or psychological sense as distinct from a purely historical account.
At any rate, my take on the Fall is that it actually describes the
ascent of the aspect of Consciousness called awarenes to the level of the ability to self-observe. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the stereoscopic ability of human awarness, i.e., the ability to include one’s *self *as an object of
one’s own subjective awareness.
The Fall, if it is to be properly attributed in my opinion, is the forgettery of original awareness by means of the overlaying of duality, ie “good and evil.” This idea is predicated on the fact that humans are, either by Grace, practice, prayer, contemplation, meditation, and even trauma, capable of experiencing a different form of awareness than is used for getting to the corner drug store and back without breaking a leg.
This other aspect or form of awarenes is devoid of any sense of personal self or content. It is simply “being,” and might be likened to the carrier wave of an electrical signal. The carrier wave is impersonal and free of content other than self awarenes, the signal is content and is equivalent to personal experience in the 3-D world. Having imperical experience of the “carrier wave” without its overlay of personal associations is profoundly significant with respect to understanding the nature of our ordinary state of awareness and its relative importance.
All I can say is that I know from my own individual experience and from both literature (ancient, including St Augustine, through modern,) and from friends who have similar experience, that that state of awarenes exists and is not a personal hallucination. I cannot begin to go into the profundity of Meaning and Value associated with that seemingly un-Catholic state. Suffice it to say that experiencing it constituted a discontinuity from ordinary interpretations in my life that was of irrevocablly immense significance and proportion.
This experience bears with it huge implications as to the nature of religion and redemption as well. Let us say that I know God IS, and can easily state that Jesus is the One and Only Son of God. Yet I have a radically* different understanding now of the meaning and significance of those statements than I did when I was a devout, studious, well catechized, proselytizing Catholic of the garden variety. I also have an entirely different understanding of His words and parables that hugely simplyfies matters to the point of bypassing the vast majority of argumentation I see on these fora** and is also why I reference Mark 4:33,34 in my signature.
So, what I am saying here, is that it is a wonderful intellectual excercise to speculate and argue about Biblical meanings and dogmas therefrom derived.*** It is another matter to have such an experieince as what some have had and bang their heads for years against ecclesiastical walls of incomprehension in an effort to discover a significant cognative accounting of any consistency regarding it. I finally had to go outside the Church to find it. Thank God I did. At least now Catholicism has again some meaning for me. I’m just embarrased for us as a faith that I had to go elsewhere to find out what happened to me.
I also now understand why it was said that religion is the opiate of the people. In the sense that hidebound pious “knowing” precludes investigation and learning in terms of self-knowledge, this appears to be true. No wonder they say in the East “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” It isn’t about murder; it is about destroying our own limited preconceptions that we accept as a necessary part of growing up.
Code:
*It might be instructive to look up the etymology of that word.
**I* love *Occam's razor!
***In 1969 a barber and another man shot each other to death in the All Nations Barber Shop in Fresno CA, in a dispute over the "true meaning" of certain passages of the Bible. *San Jose News*, May 5, 1969
