'Adam and Eve have forgotten the ultimate unity," writes Jim Palmer in his book "Notes from (Over) the Edge." But that unity didn't exist at all.
The new age and esoteric Christianity want to bend the stories of faith with new meanings and tell us that we humans once lived in full unity of God and have now forgotten this.
But whoever reads the paradise story in an honest way will not find there the place in which or the time when man existed in full union with God. God walks around in the garden, minding his own business, and so are man. They are not connected. They walk past each other.
God and man walk past each other.
More than that, the two people equally enter into communion with the serpent or the devil. There is no such thing as divine unity at all. Not even before eating the fruit.
What the biblical writer mythologically relates is his intuitive sense that man once existed before the possession of knowledge, or before the acquisition of intelligence. A very impressive conclusion for someone who wrote for science for several millennia! That has to be said.
But it was inevitable that the same writer would frame the further development of man - that is, his becoming aware - negatively. For it seems that there was a conflict between the free will of man and the unchanging will of God.
However, the further development towards intelligence is without doubt the greatest gift from God to creation and man. A gift with which man could name the animals freely; could explore and populate the world.
Yes, then man became 'light of the world' and 'salt of the earth'. Just ask the Christ. And yes, then human history began as well, with many who prefer the dark to the light and prefer to trample the salt on the ground. But that's what you get when you add free will to the cosmos.
That's what you get when you add free will to the cosmos.
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