Just the Way You Are

There is a point in our lives when we are happy. We feel warm and loved, perfectly comfortable and content. We feel accepted and nurtured. Nobody is stepping on our dreams. Nobody criticizes us. Nobody makes us do anything we don’t want to do. We never feel sorrow or sadness or regret. Everything is wonderful all the time. And then we’re born and it all goes to hell.

One of the explanations for the Adam and Eve myth involves the atavistic desire to return to womb. There is a strong similarity to the stories. In Eden, we had everything we wanted. We were loved and accepted. There was no sorrow, no sadness. We were happy. Hell, we were naked. Why shouldn’t we be happy? So what happened? We all know the story of Adam and Eve. We’ve heard it a million times. But what does the book actually say?

“The LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being. Then the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and he placed there the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made various trees grow that were delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the LORD God had made. The serpent asked the woman, ‘Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?’ The woman answered the serpent: ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.’

But the serpent said to the woman: ‘You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad!’

The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. When they heard the sound of the LORD God moving about in the garden at the breezy time of the day, the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

The LORD God then called to the man and asked him, ‘Where are you?’”

And that’s when the shit hit the fan. Adam says where they are and explains they were hiding because they were naked (I guess the loincloths weren’t too effective). And then God asks how the hell they knew they were naked? Ain’t it a bitch when somebody finds a hitch in your perfectly concocted excuse? So Adam, being the stand up guy he is, immediately points at Eve and says, “SHE made me do it!” And when God turns to Eve to ask her about giving the fruit to Adam, she points at the serpent and says, “HE gave me the fruit!” Just like Republicans at a senate committee hearing.

I always have thought it interesting that, in the story, God doesn’t know where they are. At least in that story God doesn’t seem to be in total control of everything. I often wonder if we don’t get angry with God about things over which the divine has no control. So far, nothing I’ve seen in the Bible indicates that God has the ability to control everything. So when people ask how God can allow certain things to happen, I wonder if it isn’t just possible that God doesn’t allow or not allow some things to happen. Sometimes things just happen. The Bible never says God is omnipotent or omnipresent. That is what WE say about God.

I would note here that there are hardly any theologians who would say that this story is historical fact. The fundamentalists would say it is true just the way it happened. But churches like the Catholics or the Lutherans would refer to this story as a myth. The name Adam is simply Hebrew for “a man”. And if you explore the Bible you will note that there are two stories of creation. Chapter one of Genesis has one story and Chapter two has the other. They are both similar. One story is much older than the other. There are a number of arguments as to why there are two stories. The most obvious reason would be that there were two stories in the oral tradition and both were included. The other obvious reason could be that there were in fact, two creations, which somehow seems unlikely, but not impossible.

Much has been made about what constitutes “original sin”. As you can see, it has nothing at all to do with sex. Some argue that the first sin was of disobedience. God told man not to eat the fruit and we ate the fruit, so we’re screwed. But the story doesn’t make such a big deal out of god’s commandment not to eat from that tree. I suspect it was just a matter of concern for God. For example, suppose you had a back yard with some fruit trees and some flowers and some mushrooms. And you told some visiting guests that they could eat anything in the back yard but the mushrooms because they were poisonous and would kill them. That isn’t so much a commandment as it is a warning.

According to the story, God told them not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent tells them that if they eat from that tree, they will be like God. Well, the serpent didn’t lie. They ate the fruit and they did become like God. They now knew the difference between good and evil. The whole loincloth thing shows that eating that fruit gave them the awareness of shame, a hitherto unknown emotion. They were naked before and it was fine. Eating that tree gave them the idea of shame and guilt. Suddenly, being naked is not a good thing. But that didn’t come from God. It came from them. God made them naked and they ran around naked all the time and thought nothing of it. Adam and Eve were the ones who started making up rules.

The great evil of the serpent was that he managed to set Adam and Eve apart from God. That serpent was the first advertising man. He says to eat the fruit and be like God. This gives Eve the idea that she isn’t already like God. The serpent planted the idea that she was not just fine the way she was. Eve thinks, “Oh, I need to eat this fruit.” I mean, the only sin that mankind committed was the desire to be one with the divine. That which, according to the Greek, misses the mark, is the understanding that we are already one with the divine. That was what Jesus came to do, to reconnect us with the divine through the power of love.

That great sin had nothing to do with eating the fruit, if you consider it. Because Eve must have been convinced that God was not being straight with her. God said not to eat the fruit or they would die. The serpent said they wouldn’t die. Eve chose to trust the serpent instead of God. Therefore, the lack of faith, the distrust of the divine began before she ever ate the fruit. She ate the fruit because of her lack of faith. And without faith, you cannot feel the human-divine connection. Jesus came to say that it is our faith that heals us. It is our faith that saves us. It is our faith that makes that divine connection.

Jesus said to change our way of thinking. There is nothing we have to do to be reconciled with God other than believing that we are children of the divine. And when we have that faith, we act it out, by loving one another and nourishing one another. I sort of see the whole thing like one of those Magic Eye pictures. You look at the picture long enough and you see the other picture pop out in 3D like…well…magic. But take your eyes off the picture for even a second, or even blink, and the whole thing disappears and you have to start all over staring at that mass of blue, purple, and pink dots. Eve took her eyes off the picture. She let herself be distracted from the truth. And bingo! She no longer feels connected with God and now she becomes aware of the self, separate from the one. So she sees herself as imperfect.

Remember, the whole idea of covering up the nakedness indicates a sudden feeling of shame, guilt, and imperfections. The grand illusion is that we are imperfect creations, that there is something wrong with us the way we are. This separation from God comes from us, not from God. The Tao Te Ching, the holy book of Taoism tells us that it is the 10,000 things that make us blind to the oneness of creation. The first chapter says:

Heaven and Earth began from the nameless (Tao),
but the multitudes of things around us were created by names.
We desire to understand the world by giving names to the things we see,
but these things are only the effects of something subtle.
When we see beyond the desire to use names,
we can sense the nameless cause of these effects.
The cause and the effects are aspects of the same, one thing.

So we are distracted from reality by our own reality. When Jesus goes into the wilderness to fast for forty days, to find his own inner path, he is distracted by the same things that distract us all. According to the story in Matthew, Satan attempts to tempt Jesus when he is hungry by suggesting he transform the rocks into bread. Jesus says that man does not live by bread alone, but by the word of God, the Tao, in other words. And we are tempted away from our own path by sensual desires. Food, sex, and other pleasures are not in themselves sinful or evil. But they can be distracting when they become the focus of our existence, when we become concerned only is satisfying those desires.

Satan then offers Jesus all the power and wealth in the world if he will but turn away from his path. We, too, are often tempted by the need to acquire wealth and things. It’s easy to forget that which is really important, love. How many people lose their relationships with family because they focus so much on acquiring the things they want for that family? When I ask my students if they would rather have their parents give them more things or spend more time with them, they nearly always answer they wish their parents would spend more time with them. Look at just how much energy we put into getting stuff.

Finally, Satan suggests that Jesus hurl himself off a parapet of the temple since it was written that the angels would come and save him from any harm. But Jesus is aware that such a display of power would serve no purpose. And we are also tempted to think that somehow the universe revolves around us, that somehow the power of God was put here to fulfill our every want and desire. The power just is. The Tao simply is. We are a part of that power;  it enfolds us and heals us. It gives us strength and renews us. To think of the divine energy as some sort of tool, like fire, is a mistake. The Tao is neither this nor that. It simply is.

As I wrote earlier, the English word sin originates from the root meaning “to be”. Our original sin, that of human kind, is to see ourselves as being, apart from the great I AM. There is no “I am”, “you are”, or “h/she is”. There is only “IS”. Our sin was to separate ourselves, and then believing ourselves to be imperfect, hiding ourselves away behind some sort of false skin. We need to remember, we are created in love, born out of love, end eventually return back into that love.

It would be easy to look at the story of Adam and Eve as a lovely story for children, a myth to explain our creation and the longing for something we spend our lives searching for. But it is more than that. We see in this story the beginnings of our own loss of paradise. We can return whenever we want, as soon as we learn to love one another and see beyond the things we think we need, the things outside of ourselves, and look within for the divine power within each one of us. You are perfect, just the way you are. You are a perfect creation of the universe, deserving of love. Believe that. Believe in yourself.