There is encoded within the Hebrew/Christian myth of Adam and Eve a rather precise psychological model of mankind’s fall from a state of inner harmony (between his will and his ego, and consequently between his conscious and unconscious mind, and between himself and others). This story contains a significant amount of detail, as it relates to the cause and affects of this inner disharmony. It shows how we have turned from the creative force at work within us, to the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, and that this turn of events has resulted in a disharmony between our will and our ego, and disharmony between our intuition and emotions, and our instincts and reason, and ultimately between us and everything in the universe around us.

    This myth also, interestingly enough, articulates a psychologically viable model of restoration of this lost harmony. One may read this story and determine for themselves whether there is an accurate description of the human equation encoded within. To the extent this scenario resonates with one’s experience of life, it will also serve as a good model for looking at our life, and the state of inner disharmony that we each are dealing with. Read through this psychologically interpreted myth and see if it resonates with your experience of life. 

    Like most of the things I write, the following essay will likely be too concise to be easily readable, but the elements of the myth are all addressed here. 

 

First of all let us take note of the players in this pageant.

 

God = the creative force at work in the subconscious mind (love).

Satan = the destructive force at work in the subconscious mind (fear).

Adam = the will, the instinctual drive within us to become conscious of what we want/need.

Eve = the heart/ego/conscience, the instinctual drive within us to become conscious of the value of things.

 

    The first event in this story is the episode wherein our Will and Conscience aspects of consciousness (Adam and Eve) are in a state of harmony with the creative force of the universe they are a part of. They do as they are directed by this creative force within them. To use a biblical expression for this, they are being led by the spirit of God. 

    In this harmonious state of existence, the creative force at work within us directs us to not feed upon the information (lingering within our consciousness) about good and bad (that is, formulated conscious concepts of morality). We made choices for our life by accessing insight from the creative force at work within us. When we were confronted by new circumstances, we simply turned to this creative force at work within us for the insight relevant to those new circumstances. We did not rely upon our reasoning mind to figure out what was the thing to do. And thus we had no use for moral laws (The fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) 

    The only outcome of deploying this moral information would be to enable our Will to abdicate its responsibility to our Conscience/Ego in the decisions it makes, instead of harmoniously submitting to the creative force at work within us. In its initial harmonious state, our Will submitted its choices about what we need/want by taking the input from our evaluative conscience (Eve) into consideration, and then accessing insight from the creative force within us in order to process that input, as well as the input from our desires, intuition, and our reason, and determine what we want/need. 

    We never needed to access our knowledge of good and evil in order to decide what we wanted/needed. In this way, our decisions were completely natural decisions.

    Our Conscience/Ego did not suppress those foolish choices by our Will to desire things that eventually might hurt us terribly, or to control those beliefs /ideas/thoughts generated by our Will that might endanger our sense of wellbeing. We were hot or cold; we were never luke warm.

    Our Will did not need to react to a fear of a tyrannous Ego/Conscience by choosing to be devoured by our compulsions. We simply naturally chose to do what our father in heaven, the creative force within us, wanted us to do. 

    Our Will felt deeply within it the natural empowerment (because of its undamaged relationship with the source of insight) to govern our desires, and to develop its consciousness of our place in the universe (That is, Adam subdued the earth).

    Eve, our Heart/Ego/Conscience felt deeply within it the safety required to do its work of supporting our Will’s decisions by feeding it a constant stream of evaluative observations in connection with the choices of our Will.

    Adam, our Will, produced consciousness of our place in the universe (that is, gardened) effortlessly (with no resistance, no distraction).

    Eve gave birth to consciousness of the value of things effortlessly (she suffered no labor pains in childbirth).

    And both of these forces within our psyche were in perfect, trusting, harmony with each other. 

    Our will trusted our conscience completely and thus did not feel the need to ignore it or brutalize it.

    Our conscience completely trusted our Will and thus felt no need to passive-aggressively manipulate our will into making choices that were in line with its sense of the value of things. 

    Now, into this harmonious and paradisiacal human conscious circumstance comes fear (Satan), the destructive force at work within us (especially within our subconscious mind).  Fear asks us to second-guess the effectiveness of the creative force at work within us. And fear does this in such a subtle way that our Conscience/Ego (Eve) is not able to detect it. First, fear appeals to our Ego/Conscience, saying; truly, does your inner creative force want you to not feed upon the knowledge of good and evil (to formulate conscious concepts of morality), and make choices based upon these formulations of morality? 

    Fear/Satan continues, and then goes into insinuation mode, implying that the insightful creative force within us is simply trying to keep us from being as consciously developed as we could be (God does not want you to become as empowered as he is). Fear tells our Ego/Conscience that if we had these moral precepts, we would not need the creative force within us to give us the insight we need in order to generate choices. Instead, we could rationally generate the insight we need to make good choices. 

    The creative force at work within us had already previously given us some insightful sense that if our Will and our Ego/Conscience fed upon moral principals as a means to supply us with what we needed to make choices and know the value of things, those two instinctual drives to be conscious (Adam and Eve, Will and Ego) would cease to function normally (they would surely die). Fear/Satan tells our Ego/conscience; no, you won’t die, you will just be able to resolve all of your issues rationally (without need of insight from the creative force at work within us). 

    Now, because fear is motivating our Ego/Conscience, and our Ego/Conscience has had no previous experience dealing with fear, it is tricked into reasoning with fear, which is always a losing proposition. Rather than reasoning with fear, our Ego/Conscience should have asked our Will to choose to turn to the creative force within us to give us insight about the issues raised by fear. Our Ego/Conscience doesn’t do this because she is not used to dealing with fear, and has no experience that would tell her that responding to fear leads to destruction. So, she now has fear issues, and this makes her act more conservatively (pull inward) than she normally would have. She does not ask our Will to get insight about these fear issues; she tries to reason with fear alone. She is lost, of course, the moment she turns inward. 

    She soon sees the truth of what fear has been saying to her, and so decides to turn to her own rational grasp of moral principal/laws to determine the value of things, rather than to wait for insight from the creative force at work within us. Immediately, she knows that she is now exposed and vulnerable (naked). She had always been exposed before, but she never felt it as vulnerability because she had been covered by her natural relationship with the creative force within her. 

    Now, she is on her own, and she hates it, so our Ego/Conscience then wants our Will to also operate without harmony with the creative force within us, so that she does not have to feel alone in her shocking, traumatic, new alienation from the creative force at work within us. Our Ego moves to undermine our Will’s natural tendency to turn to the creative force at work within us. Our ego conscience becomes an enemy of this creative force at work within us as a result of the trauma of her seduction by fear, and attempts to convince us that enmity with this creative force at work within us is what we want (Will). Our Ego/Conscience implies that our choice to replace the creative force at work within us (by responding to the seduction of fear) is not the destructive thing our intuitive insight had indicated it would be. 

    Our Will is not seduced. It knows that replacing love’s insight with fear’s control is not what we really want, but it goes along with our Ego/Conscience so that our Ego/Conscience will be able to be redeemed eventually. And when it does, it too is then overwhelmed with a traumatic sense of alienation from the creative force at work within us. The trauma of this new alienation from the creative force at work within us is no minor difficulty. It renders us in a state of disharmony with our own humanity, and with our Will and our Ego/Conscience, and ultimately with the universe around us. We are cast out of the Garden of Eden. 

    The shock of this turn of events is too much to process. It is overwhelming, and so we repress our memories of the circumstances of our fall from our natural human existence. And having repressed our memory of the circumstances of our spiritual demise, we are doomed to act out the subconsciously originated compulsive behaviors, the rituals, the fixations, the ideologies, that symbolically restate those very facts of our spiritual demise that we are repressing. 

    Insight no longer comes easily to us. Increasingly we rationalize away our need for it, so that eventually, we no longer think it is an option for us. We are now in the hands of fear/Satan/pride, rather than love/God/ insight, and move to create a world-view that can replace the one we had when we were in harmony with the creative force within us. This new world-view that we attempt to create is essentially an extension of our choice to replace insight with reason. It is a self-righteous, legalistic, religious approach to human existence, and it is marked by the insanity of fear’s seductive perception of things. 

    Now, the creative force at work within us does not, of course, give up on us. It wrestles with us, by producing a sense within us that it still wants harmony with us (it seeks out Adam and Eve). And when we give in to this creative force’s pursuit of harmony with us, we are then faced with the facts of our alienation from this creative force at work within us (we respond to this creative force by telling it we are afraid of it, implying that we would like to not continue being afraid of it). 

    The thing is we cannot resolve our fear of the creative force at work within us. Our attempts to do this are the fig leaves of self-righteous, legalistic, rationalism, and they don’t do anything but perpetuate the fear we have of the creative force within us. If we persist in responding to that now small voice of the creative force at work within us (which wants restored harmony with us) we will have to face our own ridiculously ineffective attempts at covering our choices, with reason instead of insight, with self-righteous legalism in stead of trust in the creative force. 

    This is the point at which the creative force at work within us offers us forgiveness as an option. Accepting forgiveness from the creative force at work within us, will, at this point, appear to us as accepting forgiveness from an external creative force (god), in as much as our fear of this force has perceptually distanced us from it. Forgiveness requires us to completely face the circumstances of our spiritual destruction and to repudiate fear’s option in favor of trust in the creative force at work within us (now perceived as a completely external god-factor). Because of the insanity that fear (of this creative force within us) has installed within our perception of things, the creative force within us will need to place an archetypal picture of forgiveness within our subconscious, that at the same time paints a picture of what our consciousness will look like if it has been restored by forgiveness. 

    This archetype is a lamb sacrifice. The lamb symbolizes the instinctual drive within mankind to trustingly submit to providence. In as much as it is a gift to us from the creative force at work within us, and is not generated by our reason, and in as much as it is a symbol of our natural instinct to trust, when we slaughter the lamb gift we are revisiting our own slaughtering of our capacity to trust the creative force within us. We thus sense that the creative force within us is forgiving us completely for that choice, and all of the destruction that has followed, as well. 

    Accepting forgiveness then is the practical means of trusting that creative force that we have come to fear. We cannot any longer trust it to govern the choices we make, via its outpouring of insight into our life, but we can trust it to forgive us. And this choice to accept forgiveness will be just the beginning of our psyche’s slow restoration of harmony with the creative force within us. This slow process will meet with resistance from our Ego/Conscience, because of its prior embrace of self-righteous, legalism, or hyper-rationality. 

    Thus, the new world-view we construct is itself a wrestling between the creative force at work within us for us to pay attention to the very circumstances of our spiritual demise and accept restoration of harmony via trusting forgiveness, and the destructive force of fear’s hyper-rationalistic embrace of self-righteous legalism.  Our world-view is not one that is largely built upon insight’s pure sense of reality, but upon fear’s impure, caustic, destructive need for rational control via self-righteous legalism. And thus there is a major conflict unfolding within mankind, individually and collectively, between the will to continue holding on to the Ego/Conscience’s rationalistic control of our life, and the will to trust the creative, spiritual, god-force within us by trusting in forgiveness. This is why there is so much resistance within each of us to embracing the idea of forgiveness. It is humbling, and this humility comes at the cost of our Ego/Conscience’s fear-driven rationalistic, legalistic, control of our lives. 

    This is the great conflict facing each of us, and it is our choice relative to this conflict that will decide the fate of each of us. It is a conflict that is both within us and within the human community around us. Not only will we suffer great internal resistance, but we will likewise suffer great external resistance, and the only thing that will make this a viable option for us is that the creative force within us is eminently capable of making it emotionally and spiritually worth our while. If the creative force at work within us did not make the extremely unpleasant, often miserable, process of restoration of harmony worth it to us, none of us would ever have traveled this road. That many of us have (and typically at great cost), is a comforting indication of the ability of the creative force at work within us to more than fully compensate us for the suffering we experience on the way. 

    There is within every religion of man a representation of this conflict. There is a fear-driven self-righteous, legalistic, hyper-rational approach to life, and a forgiveness-based, trusting, approach to life (Cain and Able conflict, in the biblical myth). In as much as the creative force at work within us is the same creative force at work within the unfolding material universe around us, the generation of a lamb-archetype by the creative force within our subconscious mind, makes it a certainty that this archetype will have a material, literal, manifestation as well. The Hebrew/Christian myth, has from the beginning, suffered the same conflict that the rest of the human religious myths have. 

    There have always been factions within both the Hebrew and the Christian communities (just as there have been in every other religious community) that have chosen between fear’s rationalistic, legalistic, control, and love’s trust in forgiveness. The difference is that the Hebrew/Christian myth was formulated in conjunction with the literal, historical, geographic, unfolding of the lamb archetype, and the others were not. The other religious myths around the world (those aspects of religious myths that encouraged trust in the creative force at work within us), were also a production of the creative force at work within mankind. They were that creative force’s practical preparation in the widespread human community for the physical spreading of news of the literal manifestation of the lamb archetype in the Palestine region of the earth. 

    There is a practicality in this creative force within us.  It is that which orders the systems that unfold as matter, and the material universe. It is very practical.

    It is very effective, and it is love. Psychologically we needed an archetype, and psychologically we also need this archetype ultimately to be physically manifested.

    It has been, and we are here to pass on the news of this event to our fellow humans. Jesus is this archetype. He is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.