Monday, March 19, 2007
...And surely there was really no pre-lapsarian paradise of all safe fungi and fugu? Adam ate the apple to see the truth, not to stay within the complicit fiction which up until then God had arranged for him. Being born into a state of Grace is all very well but you have to fall from it to really appreciate what you've lost - and indeed what you strive to regain. It could be a parable for meat-eating, cock-sucking or just the act of peering through the veil of ignorance into the real world glimpsed just dimly beyond . Surely it was a stitch-up, God setting Adam up for the fall as surely as a British tabloid builds some poor sucker up to adoration and then cuts them down again, only to celebrate their fall and eventually their rise again to self-determination. It's a celebration, almost a sanctification of good, honest hard work.
I once knew a wonderful old Frenchman called Gerald, difficult to believe i know but i really did, who maintained that not only were all religions the same but that he could prove it: Founder of Judaism (and by extension, Christianity, Islam and general Monotheism) - Abraham. Top man in Hinduisim: Brahma. Sounds similar enough to my ears. The ExMM always maintained there was a strong parallel between the stories of Krishna and Christ. It's not just linguistic coincidence in both these cases, there really are similarities in both narratives. They were iconoclasts who changed peoples' attitudes, peoples' hearts even - and overhauled orthodoxy in the process (though their most devout followers today are pretty scary, somehow going entirely against the original spirit of their teachings and becoming a new orthodoxy that is sorely in need of another clasm). I accept the comparison though Jesus, to my knowledge, didn't play the flute and wasn't blue (even there though, you could build a tenuous argument based on the special quality of this, the azurest of hues, found almost nowhere in nature and thus venerated in the symbolism of the Pieta)
Plenty of cultural innovations spread far and wide, from West Africa to the Far East and everywhere in between in the crucial period of history where we just started writing things down. In this sense, the real Mavens were the nomads and the traders, which is why there are people from Accra to Kaifeng who proudly proclaim Jewish heritage. We are like a benevolent bacteria upon the earth, spreading ideas and tastes (and not greed, hatred and Satanism [that's Jimmy Page's fault] as some would have it) without ever sticking around long enough to take blame/credit. So it's entirely possible that Jesus came from India, or indeed that his ideas did (just what was he doing between the ages of 13 and 30?). Or indeed that Abraham's teachings evolved back into polytheistic idolatory but with a far more rigourous philosophical structure (and it's entirely up for debate as to whether Hinduism really is polytheistic anyway, all gods being aspects of the one as I misunderstand it).
So the point of this post is that I've finally filled in a missing piece of the puzzle. I was struck by something I heard a while back, which is why so many young men and women in the western world gravitate towards Buddhism of all the non-Christian religions. Think of the life of Buddha:
He was brought up entirely within the confines of his family's world, a palace where everything was available to him and he saw none of the down sides of life. Then one day he broke free, saw the terrible suffering in the world and strove to reconcile these two. After a bunch of adventures, he eventually resolves this by sitting under a tree and refusing to move until he reaches enlightenment. For many young men and women in the West, the thing to do after education (or during if they're very brave) is to go travelling, leaving behind the convenient, comfortable existence of their home life and instead see how others live. They may not know it explicity but they are indeed trying to reconcile their easy lives to that of the more common experience of life on earth: as Mr Hobbes said, it's nasty, brutish and short. What is that if it's not leaving the palace walls for the first time? We all look for the tree, though it can manifest itself through a multitude of more harmful ingestations - it's fitting that he got there under a tree, having finally stopped travelling, or running away as I would call it. No-one gets there while they're actually backpacking through Cambodia or ball-deep in a girlboy for the price of a beer in Koh Samui.
Now compare Adam's experience again, growing up in an actual Paradise where everything is available but for knowledge itself. You'd think he'd be happy with that but he chooses instead to know the truth, with the full understanding that he cannot get away with this transgression since God is watching, and is cast into the wilderness. This is a place where life is hard, people die and the future is uncertain. It's a fundamental human impulse to go beyond ourselves, to seek out the truth no matter how unpleasant and life-altering it may be. Something innate motivates us to sacrifice our epistemic comfort for the far less comforting actual truth. It's practical philosophy in action.
Indeed Eden was not even an earthly province, so that when cast out from there he is said to have taken his first steps on the Earth upon a mountain in Sri Lanka of all places
If you take the view, as I do, that all these stories are allegories for the common human condition of the loss of innocence when leaving childhood (if you're lucky) and the struggle to return to that precious world-view after a lifetime of tainted experience, then it's not hard to believe that the example of Adam and Eve's fall represents a common, highly indentifiable narrative in our own lives. Why else are these fairy tales still so popular? There are 7 basic types of story in the world and I only know of two books which encapsulate them all: Lord of The Rings and the Bible.
It's why Tom Cruise movies have been so successful (and his recent ridiculous behaviour has dashed all our complicit fantasies about the universal, aspirational character he plays). In every single one he starts off as a cocky young guy at the top of his game, not a care in the world until something unexpected but entirely fated happens that shakes his faith, his very being and he is cast into turmoil, doubt and fear. Then through a blatant display of inner resilience and worthy struggle he realises what has happened, rebuilds himself into a real man who has learnt the valuable lessons in humility and fragility and can finally rejoin society as a more responsible, enlightened being. Thanks Tom, you're an example to us all.
Oh no, hang on, that's Buddha.
Cut Chemist - The Garden - Some masterful landscaping from a Jurassic park ranger.
|
I once knew a wonderful old Frenchman called Gerald, difficult to believe i know but i really did, who maintained that not only were all religions the same but that he could prove it: Founder of Judaism (and by extension, Christianity, Islam and general Monotheism) - Abraham. Top man in Hinduisim: Brahma. Sounds similar enough to my ears. The ExMM always maintained there was a strong parallel between the stories of Krishna and Christ. It's not just linguistic coincidence in both these cases, there really are similarities in both narratives. They were iconoclasts who changed peoples' attitudes, peoples' hearts even - and overhauled orthodoxy in the process (though their most devout followers today are pretty scary, somehow going entirely against the original spirit of their teachings and becoming a new orthodoxy that is sorely in need of another clasm). I accept the comparison though Jesus, to my knowledge, didn't play the flute and wasn't blue (even there though, you could build a tenuous argument based on the special quality of this, the azurest of hues, found almost nowhere in nature and thus venerated in the symbolism of the Pieta)
Plenty of cultural innovations spread far and wide, from West Africa to the Far East and everywhere in between in the crucial period of history where we just started writing things down. In this sense, the real Mavens were the nomads and the traders, which is why there are people from Accra to Kaifeng who proudly proclaim Jewish heritage. We are like a benevolent bacteria upon the earth, spreading ideas and tastes (and not greed, hatred and Satanism [that's Jimmy Page's fault] as some would have it) without ever sticking around long enough to take blame/credit. So it's entirely possible that Jesus came from India, or indeed that his ideas did (just what was he doing between the ages of 13 and 30?). Or indeed that Abraham's teachings evolved back into polytheistic idolatory but with a far more rigourous philosophical structure (and it's entirely up for debate as to whether Hinduism really is polytheistic anyway, all gods being aspects of the one as I misunderstand it).
So the point of this post is that I've finally filled in a missing piece of the puzzle. I was struck by something I heard a while back, which is why so many young men and women in the western world gravitate towards Buddhism of all the non-Christian religions. Think of the life of Buddha:
He was brought up entirely within the confines of his family's world, a palace where everything was available to him and he saw none of the down sides of life. Then one day he broke free, saw the terrible suffering in the world and strove to reconcile these two. After a bunch of adventures, he eventually resolves this by sitting under a tree and refusing to move until he reaches enlightenment. For many young men and women in the West, the thing to do after education (or during if they're very brave) is to go travelling, leaving behind the convenient, comfortable existence of their home life and instead see how others live. They may not know it explicity but they are indeed trying to reconcile their easy lives to that of the more common experience of life on earth: as Mr Hobbes said, it's nasty, brutish and short. What is that if it's not leaving the palace walls for the first time? We all look for the tree, though it can manifest itself through a multitude of more harmful ingestations - it's fitting that he got there under a tree, having finally stopped travelling, or running away as I would call it. No-one gets there while they're actually backpacking through Cambodia or ball-deep in a girlboy for the price of a beer in Koh Samui.
Now compare Adam's experience again, growing up in an actual Paradise where everything is available but for knowledge itself. You'd think he'd be happy with that but he chooses instead to know the truth, with the full understanding that he cannot get away with this transgression since God is watching, and is cast into the wilderness. This is a place where life is hard, people die and the future is uncertain. It's a fundamental human impulse to go beyond ourselves, to seek out the truth no matter how unpleasant and life-altering it may be. Something innate motivates us to sacrifice our epistemic comfort for the far less comforting actual truth. It's practical philosophy in action.
Indeed Eden was not even an earthly province, so that when cast out from there he is said to have taken his first steps on the Earth upon a mountain in Sri Lanka of all places
If you take the view, as I do, that all these stories are allegories for the common human condition of the loss of innocence when leaving childhood (if you're lucky) and the struggle to return to that precious world-view after a lifetime of tainted experience, then it's not hard to believe that the example of Adam and Eve's fall represents a common, highly indentifiable narrative in our own lives. Why else are these fairy tales still so popular? There are 7 basic types of story in the world and I only know of two books which encapsulate them all: Lord of The Rings and the Bible.
It's why Tom Cruise movies have been so successful (and his recent ridiculous behaviour has dashed all our complicit fantasies about the universal, aspirational character he plays). In every single one he starts off as a cocky young guy at the top of his game, not a care in the world until something unexpected but entirely fated happens that shakes his faith, his very being and he is cast into turmoil, doubt and fear. Then through a blatant display of inner resilience and worthy struggle he realises what has happened, rebuilds himself into a real man who has learnt the valuable lessons in humility and fragility and can finally rejoin society as a more responsible, enlightened being. Thanks Tom, you're an example to us all.
Oh no, hang on, that's Buddha.
Cut Chemist - The Garden - Some masterful landscaping from a Jurassic park ranger.
|
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