Paradise Lost

Adam and Eve are cast out of paradise as a result of transgression - the natural view of this as punishment imposed on them by a disrespected God.

However the first result of their eating of disobeying God, of tarnishing their connection to the divine by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is that they are ashamed of themselves, of their own nakedness. This obviously goes beyond physical nakedness to their inner spiritual selves which to themselves feel tarnished, and so, now having poured falseness into themselves, they are ashamed before perfection. Thus is an existential condition, they don’t stand proudly before God and then meet with condemnation. Instead they are now in the domain of cause and effect, and shame is the spiritual echo and consequence of sin. Their expulsion from paradise is beyond a physical expulsion, it is expulsion from their own divinity which they had received by grace in their created condition.

What to do next!? Now history is in motion. The greatest yearning is or should be to return to the divine nature and relationship. This is the path of humility and of course of discord with transgression. “I’ve completely f….d up! I need to work my way through this fall and back to the condition of paradise.”

There is another path though, and you could say this is the path of “the world” in its negative spiritual connotations, and that is to say, “We’re going to make heaven here in the condition of our expulsion, and we don’t need to get back anywhere.” Here is agreement with the fall and sin and is the path of pride. All kinds of materialist utopias equate to this. Wokeness is this, under the inevitable veneer of idealism, in overdrive. We will exalt in debasement, and “sin” here is to claim there should be any limits to our focus on gratification of the flesh. This path would logically extend into very dark avenues. Every temptation will parade itself under a veneer - it won’t announce itself as debased!

Suffering, which can be very hard to endure and also to equate to any sense of divine order, can in a positive sense batter at our pride, which can be so intrinsic to our “natural” thought patterns and impulses as to be almost impossible to discern. The sufferings are potentially a means of burning off energies that make our presence in paradise impossible. You can’t be in paradise and simultaneously out of sync with paradise. Beyond simply a response to conditions of life, suffering as an inner condition is the absence of God, the darkness in the absence of light. If we didn’t experience this condition as suffering we wouldn’t be aware of something being wrong that we need to right.

Obviously this subject could extend on and on, but I’ll leave it here.