Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

I found something I had printed out a long time ago from Arts Anonymous (http://www.artsanonymous.org/). It's a twelve step program.

I became inspired to adapt it to my own particular challenges. This morning, as I was going through what I had written, I had an insight that I'd like to share. Take it or leave it.

In the temple, we are supposed to liken the whole experience to ourselves, and view it as an allegory full of symbolism.

The tree of knowledge is the tree of knowledge of evil and of pain. The only “good” that comes from it is seeing how good you had it before you screwed up.

So, God has one tree. The devil has another. God says, “Don't believe Satan's lies. Don't live that way. It will hurt you.”

The devil says, “No, this is the way it has to be. This is reality.”

So, we are taught to take that fruit and we look at the fruit of the tree of life with skewed eyes. We say, “God can perform miracles, except He can't. In reality, He can only 'bless the hands of the doctors' who are the real gods.” And that is only one of 10,000 skewed perceptions we have about life, about God, about reality, and about ourselves.

In the beginning, we are innocent children. Innocence is taken away. In my case, it began when I was about 3 ½ and was kidnapped. Later, my siblings added verbal cruelty, then my peers. The medical profession and society had been working on me all along. I wasn't handed bad fruit by just one person, but by hundreds. I was bombarded with fruit from the tree of knowledge of evil. And, of course, I in turn passed it on to others.

And I was told that I had to stay in that sphere. I was told, “This is reality.”

There is no mention of burning down or annihilating the tree of evil and partaking of the tree of life only. No, we are shown that an angel has barred the way. But that is garbage! We are barred by the act of continuing to partake of the lies and myths that took away our innocence. We may not be able to annihilate the tree of darkness and death, but we can turn away from it.

The angel represents the goodness we must face, the changes in perception we must make before we are able to partake of life again. As long as we are partaking of death, we cannot partake of life. This is what is meant by the angel “guarding the way.”

We may freely put forth our hands to partake of the tree of life, but we have got to stop partaking of the tree of death to do so. It is impossible to partake of both at the same time.

So, we kick ourselves out of the light. We lose our innocence, light, and trust because we are taught by family and by society that it is proper to partake of the tree of death, and of that tree only. We are taught by those who don't know any better because they were taught by their families and their societies.

For myself, I am now only too willing to stop partaking of the tree of death and to begin partaking of the tree of life.