Mystery XV: Self-Awareness and Death—The Final Mystery

Don: Before the Fall, Wo/Man was not just at one with god, but also at one with nature. Genesis 1:24:

Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so.

This is borne out further in Genesis 2:7:

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

“Living being” is also translated as “living soul” and “living creature.” Wo/Man and the beasts are at one with nature not just because they are living creatures but also because they—both the beasts and Adam and Eve—were formed out of the dust of the ground.

Genesis 2:15-17 reinforces the Oneness of Wo/Man and nature, by putting Wo/Man to work in nature and run it:

Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”

Adam and Eve, and husband and wife, are also one (Genesis 2:23-24):

The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.

The concept of Oneness (of god and wo/man, of nature and wo/man, and of woman and man) seems key to understanding what happens in the Garden of Eden. The Garden has two significant trees: One of Life, and one of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Knowledge might seem to be the Tree of Death in contradistinction to the Tree of Life, since (Genesis 2:17)…

“…from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”

So the Trees of Life and Knowledge might also be called the Trees of Good and Evil. And since the ability to discriminate between good and evil, between right and wrong, is really a function of law, we might also think of them as the Trees of Grace and Law.

To recap: On the one hand is the Tree of Life, Goodness, and Grace; and on the other is the Tree of Death, Evil, and Law.

The question is: After the Fall, what actually died in the Garden? And the answer is: The Oneness. We see the loss of Oneness with god in Genesis 3:8:

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

With this, fear was introduced into the Garden. We then see the loss of Oneness with nature, and the introduction of pain, in Genesis 3:16:

To the woman He said,
“I will greatly multiply
Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you will bring forth children;…”

And man must now contend with nature in order to bring food out of the ground (Genesis 3:17-19):

“… Cursed is the ground because of you;
In toil you will eat of it
All the days of your life.
“Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you;
And you will eat the plants of the field;
By the sweat of your face
You will eat bread,
Till you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.”

So the statement that by eating of the Tree of Knowledge they “would surely die” did not refer to mortal death. It referred to something else. Something did indeed die in the Garden; something which needs to be and can be resurrected. Oneness died.

Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were innocent, naive, and in absolute communal harmony with all around them. They were not self-aware. After the Fall, they were afraid and lived in communal disharmony, very much aware of their own fragile, mortal state.

A newborn child has no sense of difference between itself and nature, between itself and its parents. Newborns seem to be at one with nature and with their parents. They are oblivious to being naked, just like Adam and Eve before the Fall (Genesis 2:25):

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Scientific experiments have shown that children up to the age of about 18-20 months are too un-self-aware to be able to distinguish themselves in a mirror. When lipstick is smeared on their noses, they seem oblivious to the disfigurement until they reach the age of 18-20 months, when they start trying to rub the lipstick off.

The most dramatic evidence of the emergence of self-awareness in the child is around the age of two years, when the child starts to say “No!” The child is recognizing its independence; that it is different from the parent who is treating it as though it were an extension of the parent. (Hence the phrase, “the Terrible Twos.”)

When Nicodemus came to see Jesus in the night, Jesus introduced the concept of being “born again” (John 3:3):

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

This seems to be a call for a reversal to the state of innocence, naïveté, and Oneness; to a place where there is no fear, no shame, and no need for self-defense. 1 Corinthians 15:50-57 prophecies the reversal and reveals the final Mystery—The Mystery of Death:

Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

The reversal of death is rebirth.

Veronika: I work in a hospital birthing unit. Newborns are born naked and helpless. We often comfort crying babies during the night to allow their mothers to sleep and rest. The babies can’t differentiate between the parent, the nurse, and the doctor. Their self-awareness is limited to awareness of hunger and thirst, of cold, of being soiled, and similar basic needs. They are quite unaware of who is meeting their needs for them, and are at one with whoever satisfies their needs—that is with everyone around them in the birthing unit.

As a mother, I know that by two years of age, they have developed selfishness and defiance, and in their teens their separation from those around them builds until they physically separate and leave the nest. In adulthood, we become most acutely aware of our sense of shame at nakedness. We become most judgmental of ourselves and of others, and we fear the judgment of others. Our sense of Oneness dissipates completely in adulthood.

Robin: A child in utero does not usually feel hunger or cold, presumably; so being born must indeed introduce these feelings and the fear that accompanies them.

David E: Is a baby in utero in a state of bliss? If so, is it better never to be born?

David M: Being born is indeed a rude awakening.

Ben: It would seem, then, that being born is equivalent to having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. If the Tree of Knowledge is the Tree of Death, are we not then born dead? Is death not death but, rather, metamorphosis?

David E: Being born is literally The Fall—the descent down the birth canal—and from the moment a baby leaves the womb and emerges into the world, it starts to die.

Pat: Does separation from Oneness result from being born, or does it result from the accumulation of self-awareness? Does god’s warning that we will die mean not that our bodies will die but that our self-awareness will die?

Don: In utero, everything is creative. Ex utero, the process of death begins. There does seem to be a form of bliss in a human infant that is not seen later in life, as self-awareness develops. Before the Fall, self-awareness is awareness of our Oneness—of true community—with god, nature, and one another.

Kiran: M. Scott Peck notes that marriage is an attempt to restore unity, at least between man and woman. In marriage, there is no shame in nakedness. Jesus said that he was the husband and the church was his wife and that he would come back to it—that Oneness would be restored.

Robin: Is self-awareness the same as ego? Is bliss the absence of self-awareness?

Kiran: The Prodigal Son found his way back to Oneness when he became self-aware.

Robin: So we are talking about spiritual rather than physical self-awareness?

David M: When god told Adam and Eve they would “surely die” if they ate of the Tree of Knowledge, what could they have understood of the concept of death? Death was unknown in the Garden—it was all about life and creation. But they must have had some inkling of what it meant because, once they had committed the sin, they became afraid of death and hid from god to avoid that punishment. To be sure, it meant the death of Oneness, not mortal death. In the sense of an immediate mortal death, Satan was cunningly correct in disputing god’s statement that Adam and Eve would die.

Pat: The most comfortable human relationships are those in which we can forget ourselves—when we can lose our self-awareness. They occur when we are with people whom we love, who love us, and among whom their is no judgment; there is only joy at being together. Such relationships, and the freedom that comes with them, seem increasingly rare in modern society.

Ben: Becoming self-aware seems like the movie- or theatre-goer who is one minute immersed in the story, blissfully unaware of the reality behind it, but who is then taken behind the scenes and sees the ropes and pulleys that contribute to the illusion—shattering the bliss. We can only regain bliss if we can regain the sense of Being in the story.

Veronika: We have things backwards. Ego creates the separation, and ego comes with the birth of the human form. Ergo, ego is death; ergo, life is death. Old age and the imminence of death seems to diminish the importance of the ego and transitions us back toward a newborn state of innocence. Death is re-birth into life—into the true story, into Oneness, into bliss.

So-called near-death experiences are a misnomer, since the people who experience them actually do die—no breathing, no brain activity, etc. Many who have been through the death experience—who have been determined by a doctor to be dead—have been proven to have seen and heard things happening around their bodies after death, which would be impossible unless they had some sort of life after death. They also all report feelings of the presence of an all-powerful love, peace, and Oneness. They quickly lose any desire to come back to “life” and feel upset when they feel themselves being forced back to it.

David E: This would make abortion a blessing to the fetus. The analogy between the womb and the Garden of Eden seems perfect: Adam and Eve are pushed out of the Garden as babies are pushed out of the womb. The analogy breaks down, however, in that we know what Adam and Eve did to deserve expulsion, but what did the fetus do to deserve it?

Don: God specifically said that childbirth would be difficult. Of course, there was no childbirth before the Fall, perhaps because childbirth involves separation and the loss of Oneness.

Robin: One wonders how god was going to keep creating people before the Fall.

Kiran: If the Tree of Life is the Tree of Grace, why did god deny it to Adam and Eve? Why could he not tolerate their knowing right and wrong while living for eternity in the Garden? Why did he not bestow his grace upon them despite their sin?

Robin: Perhaps god’s grace had to wait for Jesus to be fully deployed?

Kiran: When God visited them after the Fall, Adam and Eve were blaming one another and God (exercising judgement which is God’s prerogative) instead of taking responsibility of their own actions. Had they had self-awareness like the prodigal son, God might have given them grace. Because they didn’t, they had to go through suffering and pain.

Pat: The point at which god gave them a choice between obedience and disobedience was the point at which god gave us all free will. When they chose wrongly, we were put into a state of being both real and responsible, and responsibility brought consequences for our actions.

David E: If the fetus is in a state of grace, once born, it cannot regain that state of grace without being “re-born.”

Don: …as Jesus told Nicodemus.

Robin: A baby knows nothing about spirit.

Pat: Or it knows everything about spirit!

Robin: Convicted of sin, we don’t recognize our sin and the need for grace.

David E: Does the mother have a sense of regret when her baby is born? Expectant mothers have such an aura of serenity—happy as they are to see their baby, were they in some sense happier when it was a fetus?

Don: There is postpartum depression.

Veronika: After each of my children were born I became afraid for their wellbeing and survival. It was a strange feeling, thinking that I could lose them the moment I had them.

Pat: I too had an ongoing sense of separation that began right at the moment of birth of my children. It was very slight at first; for example, it struck me when I watched them sleeping that at that moment, while they were asleep, they had no need of me. The feeling of separation grew as they grew until eventually they left the nest and our separation became complete.

Robin: I recall feeling sad watching my baby sleep, until about the fourth night of interrupted sleep for myself… 🙂

Ada: In the worldly—intellectual—sense, we’re supposed to raise and prepare our children for separation, yet spiritually, we are supposed to remain childlike. There seems to be a conflict, here.

Don: There’s a self-awareness that brings us closer to god, as in the case of the Prodigal; and an ego-driven self-awareness that drives us apart. It’s clear that there was death in the Garden. It was the death of Oneness. The final Mystery reveals the reversal of this death.

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