Eden, the garden of ego

Today, people are saying that we are spiritual beings living human experiences, rather than humans simply trying to be spiritual. I first heard the expression in 1989 at a conference on addictions, and I knew it was true. For me, and I encourage you to look at your own experience, the only problem I have believing this is that my ego gets in the way; it needs so much to be in control. As I look around me, I sense that our egos have been doing this for countless centuries. There is a simple reason for this—our egos are very concrete about their business of keeping our survival interests in mind.

Evolutionary pressures created in us the complex, fight-or-flight survival response. When threatened, our spinal cord screams, “Look out!” and our survival program kicks in, making us super-strong, super-fast, and super-intelligent. This remarkable program assures us the greatest chance of surviving any dangerous situation. Our remarkable memories and our ability to actively seek and acquire knowledge enables us to keep track of the things that kicked off the response in the past and become alert for events that look like the old threat — not without inherent dangers, as we shall see.

With our acquired knowledge, we developed many other wonderful abilities, and many not so wonderful ones, especially the ability to use the survival response to control others by making them afraid. Our abilities to apply knowledge include the ability to misapply knowledge.

We have a long history of the use and abuse of knowledge; reaching back to before the early humanoid  we call Neanderthal Man. Neanderthals were resourceful, fire- and tool-using, cave-dwelling people who survived several serious ice ages. About 30,000 yeas ago, a new human appeared—Cro-Magnon Man. Cro-Magnon humans are our ancestors. We increased our knowledge, as homo sapiens, the knowing human, is wont to do. We were learning.

We had begun to misapply our knowledge for the purpose of attacking and defending ourselves. It seems we have misused the knowledge of good and evil for only about 7,500 years.

We did not know how we had gotten this great power, but our ability to harm each other told us that it had to be a mistake of God in which somehow all of us had taken part. The storytellers of the children of Israel figured it out and their account of how it happened is the Legend of the Garden of Eden. This legend is a remarkable story of ego. In it, even God has one! Here, I'll use "God" for The Source because the original legend uses that name for the Unnamable.

One day, when God wasn’t looking, Serpent stole a fruit off the tree and took it to the woman because he knew he could talk her into eating it and that she in turn could talk the man into eating it.

It happened just as Serpent planned, but God figured out what had happened. He got mad at all three of them and punished them for their disobedience of his law. He told them he was done with them and they were going to have to get out of the Garden. He cut off the serpent’s arms and legs making it crawl on its belly forever after. He told the man that he’d have to work painfully hard in the fields to grow food for himself and the woman. He told the woman that she was going to have to bear children, which would hurt like hell and make her work hard for the rest of her life raising them.

To make matters even worse, he told them if they ever tried to come back, there would be armed guards at the gate to keep them out and a shining sword over the gate that would chop them to pieces if they managed to get past the guards. He was just that mad at them. He’s God, so He never forgets and he never goes back on his word.

We’ve been out on our own ever since.

The story of the Garden of Eden took centuries of polishing in thousands of campfire repetitions before we had the skill with which to write it down in about 750 BCE. It lays blame, guilt, and punishment on us through a shameful belief that the divine Source of our lives, God, has rejected us. The Eden story is as much with us today as ever… perhaps even more so in view of the murderous technologies that we have developed with the knowledge we believe we got from God against His will.

That belief must change, or we are doomed to misapply that knowledge until we have destroyed the world. This book is all discovering  that we have everything we need to be able to make that change—a star-born presence in all of us—our soul.

 Soul works in collaboration with the ephemeral, secular ego to create every human life. This collaboration reveals the vital need for the ego to recognize the presence of soul and allow itself to integrate into soul.

The work of integrating ego and soul is a process that  heals us.  I offer you the idea that this healing enables us to change problems into possibilities. My name for this process is homecoming. Homecoming gives us hope of finding meaning, value, and purpose in our lives.

We are born spiritual, remembering God. Contemporary society has forgotten how to remind us of this wonderful, vital aspect of our nature that knows God personally. 600 years ago, we rose out of The Dark Ages and its feudal, dispirited life to begin a secular movement toward classicism and humanism that we call The Renaissance. Over the next 300 years, it phased into the rationalistic Enlightenment, in which we fell in love with the physical universe by discovering that we could take it apart and measure it, forcing it to reveal its secrets and giving us the power of knowing it. Geniuses like René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus were all part of this great expansion of knowledge.

Descartes’ rationalist thinking, summarized as, “I think, therefore I am,” made the body-mind all-powerful. Rationalism rejected soul, and even fought the Vatican’s claim to the existence of our spirit. We must head toward home; it is time to remember who and what we really are, spiritual beings called souls living in ego-directed human bodies. The time has come to learn how to bring our egos, our secular centers, into partnership with our souls, our spiritual centers. It is time for us to learn how to be Human Beings. We need only to look into their wondrous variety to find the songs of our individual souls. The more we sing and dance this song, the more our souls come to share their experience of the physical universe with the spiritual universe.

I will teach you how to recognize your soul, your spiritual center, and hold onto it in this world of rapid change. Souls come to human life for good reasons, and we shall explore what those reasons might be. Circling your soul is both a process and a practice. As you move through it you will become proficient in working with others, and you will learn to recognize the difference between ego-based relationships and soul-based relationships. When minds work together, their output exceeds their individual capabilities in separation — synergy. When souls collaborate, they create super-synergy.