In the Blood of Eden

creation ... evolution ... SplitMind dreaming

The conversation with my friend Guy has continued with his post here:

Tereza and the Quest Guy's Question for The I Ching

I commented back, “Guy, what devotion to delve into the shadows and the sticks of the I Ching in pursuit of the slippery truth of our conversation! In the spirit of that, I've read carefully and will let your distillation steep for awhile. Your I Ching reading could give heart to all of us in these dire times. I'm grateful for the energy and love that you put into your reflections ;-)”

I later added, “Listening to your ‘Song of the exploration’, The Blood of Eden by Peter Gabriel, made me cry. It's so poignant and perfect for this time. And fits exactly with your Sage Sensei. More to follow—not to refute but to build. Yes and ....”

So in this episode I’ll be correlating my explorations with the Peter Gabriel song. I’ll start with the social and move into the metaphysical. Then the Biblical to the archetypal and personal. And I’ll end with why I feel something has gone terribly wrong with the relationships between women and men, and how Guy’s I Ching may hint that the spiritual, social and sexual all lead to the same solution.

Let’s begin with the excellent live version Guy linked in his article, filmed on a circular stage with the center prop of a tree:

I caught sight of my reflection
I caught it in the window
I saw the darkness in my heart
I saw the signs of my undoing
They had been there from the start
And the darkness still has work to do
The knotted chord's untying
They're heated and they're holy
Oh they're sitting there on high
So secure with everything they're buying

the darkness still has work to do

As our world—built and natural, psychological and physiological, social and spiritual—is ravaged, beaten and raped, who are those ‘sitting there on high, so secure with everything they’re buying’? In a James Corbett Solutions Watch, he interviews Etienne de la Boetie² who wrote Government: the Biggest Scam in History, Exposed.

Etienne refers to intergenerational organized crime, which I like because it describes the function without needing to come to agreement on who or why. I would amend it to InterGenerational Organized Theft or IGOT—I got mine and I got yours. Although it doesn’t rhyme, it’s more accurate to say “so secure with everything they’re stealing,” which is the motive behind everything else.

On the social level, I believe we’re still in the time of undoing, seeing anew the signs that have been there from the start. The darkness still has work to do. The time isn’t ripe to fix things because most of the world is still reeling and reacting to the symptoms, exactly the way the IGOT want us to.

And here is an excellent interview between Catherine Austin Fitts and Sasha Latypova on the ways in which that’s happening:

Catherine Austin Fitts Explains the Cabal's Land and Real Estate Stealing Tactics

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In the blood of Eden
Lie the woman and the man
With the man in the woman
And the woman in the man

in the blood

Staying with the social, let’s start with the blood. Is violence part of human nature or does ‘western civilization’ backed by a patriarchal violence endorsed by God make that hard to delineate?

One of the many fascinating tidbits the literary Guy has taught me is that the phrase “rule of thumb” comes from an 18th century British ruling that a man couldn’t beat his wife with anything more narrow than his thumb. Whether or not that’s true, in the not-so-distant past, physical violence by husbands against wives and children, or teachers against children has been de rigeuer, a phrase that literally means ‘out of strictness’ and colloquially, ‘so commonplace as to seem mandatory’.

My dad came from a heritage of wife-beaters, a legacy the older sons continued. My grandmother, a cantankerous woman herself, moved out to live with him, preventing him from finishing high school in order to support her or later using the GI Bill to go to college. I shared a bedroom with her until middle school.

Early in my parents’ marriage, as the story goes, my dad kicked a trash can out of anger and my mother said if he ever hit her, she’d leave, Catholicism notwithstanding. He never did. If I’m honest in my memories, though, he held anger until he exploded with it and I skipped enough dinners to avoid the yelling that I graduated at barely 100 pounds. It’s hard to reconcile that with the gentle, loving grandparent he became, but I’m being honest.

The examples we have today of pedo-sadism and domestic violence, as appallingly widespread as I’m finding them, are notable because they’re not the rule but the exception. This is the legacy we’ve been given, the one that is ours to absolve and resolve. But only after we take away the power that enables it.

blood of eden and birth of slavery

A comment on the lyrics to this song wrote, “I was thinking of Adam and Eve. I always wondered what they were like. What do you say to each other after a thing like that? I often wonder what went through Adam’s mind when he realised what Eve had done. Did he even consider his options? Did he look at the creature before him in a different way? I mean defying God isn’t your average awkward moment around the coffee machine.”

In Genesis there are two creation stories. In the first, “God created Man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." And “God saw all that he had made and it was very good.” He rested on the seventh day.

The second account starts over with no plants and no rain because, duh, “there was no man to work the ground.” So God made a man from dust and “put him into the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Because the man needs a helper, God puts him to sleep and takes out a rib to make a woman, bringing her to the man who says, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken out of man.” And it’s all downhill from there.

Eve’s original sin against God and Adam is our culture’s creation story. God’s violence is because of Eve’s disobedience. She eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then tricks the innocent Adam into doing the same. From then on, nothing bad can be blamed on God, only Woman. She is the source of all suffering, mother of destruction and accomplice of Satan.

God’s curse to women besides pain in childbirth was “Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.” What kind of male fantasy is that? Adam is cursed for listening to his wife, a mistake no patriarch in the Bible ever repeats.

Adam names his wife Eve, God makes them some clothes and sends them on their way, saying, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”

As soon as judgment is introduced into the world, it brands woman evil and shifts the blame to her. Eve disappears as never worthy of mention again except for birthing Cain with the murderous glint in his eye, who slays Abel and then lies about it, according to the omniscient narrator. His name’s resemblance to Canaan who Noah cursed as a race of slaves is surely coincidence.

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the man in the woman and the woman in the man

That’s the Creation story and we all know the Evolution story that says humanity hoisted itself into existence on monkey genes and survival of the fittest. Now let’s look at the Third Paradigm of Split-Mind Dreaming.

This is the premise of A Course in Miracles and the idea I’m still trying (and failing) to explain, not just to Guy but to anyone. My ideas start where the Course leaves off, so I’m not representing anyone but myself. And I’m not looking for believers but acknowledgment that it’s a valid third hypothesis that fits all the data points.

In the comment that prompted Guy’s recent article, I wrote:

I hit a ball to you and asked you to play. The ball was my question, "What if we collectively are co-creators of Reality with God?" My ball had the spin on it that this world was therefore not Reality.

The Course points out that when the Bible says Adam slept while God made woman, it never says he woke up. The division into good and evil, the self and the other on whom blame can be projected starts as soon as Adam falls asleep. Before that, it’s all good—even if Adam is God’s gardener because he needs someone to work the soil.

So, Guy, play with me here. Let’s say that Reality is infinite and eternal Consciousness. Imagine God as the masculine left side of the brain and us as the feminine right side, co-Creating Everything That Is. But that’s not matter, which would be stuck in finite space and time, it’s ideas that expand and are cool as hell (a contradiction, surely ;-).

We get the crazy idea that we don’t need God as our sidekick, we wanna go solo. So we cut ourSelf off from God (or think we did) and invent a world of our own. But this makes us guilty and paranoid because we think we made ourSelf just like God—exactly as Genesis claims. And the penalty for that is death, or so we think.

Everything we think we experience could be happening in the dream of Adam, the God imposter. But we’re not creating it with God, we’re hiding from God in an illusion. In Reality, we’re Eve, mother of all Creation and we’ve never left God’s side.

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My grip is surely slipping
I think I've lost my hold
Yes, I think I've lost my hold
I cannot get insurance anymore
They don't take credit, only gold
Is that a dagger or a crucifix I see
You hold so tightly in your hand
And all the while the distance grows between you and me
I do not understand.

all the while the distance grows between you and me

Does it seem that something has gone terribly wrong in the relationship between men and women? My observation in my daughters’ generation is that few are finding relationships … I could stop there and it would still be true … but especially relationships where both want to have kids.

Jimychanga did an interesting article on Sugar Dating:

Understanding Your Kids Dating Jungle

and I’ll link my episode at the end on The Lust Frontier: Disposable Dating & the Great Isolation. Peter Gabriel is prescient talking about not being able to get insurance anymore, as victims of disaster terrorism can tell you. And I’m sure it’s coming that “they won’t take credit, only gold.”

Men, I think, have been emasculated but not because women are in the business world. Because it should have gone the other direction so the labor of men ALSO served the family, providing stability, security and skills that used to be de rigeuer.

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In the blood of Eden
We've done everything we can
In the blood of Eden
So we end as we began
With the man in the woman
And the woman in the man
It was all for the union
Oh, the union of the woman, the woman and the man.

so we end as we began

Guy ended by asking the I Ching to comment on our dialogue. He wrote of its answer, “Tereza and I are working towards a meta-metaphysical hierosgamos. The male and the female, yin and yang, are in harmony and thus are bringing vitality and life to physical and non-physical existence.”

The configuration was three broken lines representing the receptive earth female over three straight lines representing the creative heaven male. The Baynes/ Wilhelm translation is below:

The Receptive, which moves downward, stands above; the Creative, which moves upward, is below. Hence their influences meet and are in harmony, so that all living things bloom and prosper. …

This hexagram denotes a time in nature when heaven seems to be on earth. Heaven has placed itself beneath the earth, and so their powers unite in deep harmony. Then peace and blessing descend upon all living things. …

Here the small, weak, and evil elements are about to take their departure, while the great, strong, and good elements are moving up. This brings good fortune and success.

To phrase the I Ching differently, the man has placed himself beneath the woman, supporting her, and so their powers unite in deep harmony. The man is not competing for who is on top—the empire-thinking of hierarchy—but instead lifts up the woman who, in turn, gives life and abundance. Then peace and blessing descend upon all living things.

Another song from the same concert is called Shaking the Tree with a chorus of “It’s your day, a woman’s day.” I recognize that this has been used by the oligarchs but I think there’s something important there. The song concludes:

The blood of eden keeps running through me
Running through my veins
The blood of eden keeps rushing through me
When I'm sure there's none that remains
The blood of eden keeps running through me
I can feel it in my bones
That blood of eden keeps rushing through me
Taking back what it owns

This is the original version fittingly with the strong willed Eve, Sinead O’Connor. Rest in power Sinead.

and for an evolutionary bad-ass Eve, here’s one of my favorite songs from Guy with the chorus, “Who made you the center of the universe and made you judge and jury over me?” Great dancing and costumes!

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To follow up, here is The Lust Frontier: Disposable Dating & the Great Isolation:

Examines disposable dating and whether it's a strategy to keep us in line and online. Looks at the need to develop an online dating skin and whether relationships have become more transactional. Tells a story from my parents' era of torch singers and dance cards, and compares it to my daughters' era of swipe-rightmania and ghosting. Cites Matt Taibbi's article on Laura Kipnis, author of Unwelcome Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus and Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis. Discusses making love and making babies from a sociological perspective and whether the couple is the lust frontier on the way to The Great Isolation. Ends with advice to the next generation that you deserve the real thing.

and Sex & Power: Battle of the Daves

David Buss, evolutionary psychologist on mating strategies, claims men are wired to seek multiple partners who are as young and fertile as their social status allows. But why do young women mate with them? To answer that, I consult anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow on the Yanomami of Venezuela, the Mi'kmaq of Nova Scotia, and the Wendats of Canada. They show that sexual liberty was the norm when women owned the economic resources and money was just a plaything used for status, political apologies, and gambling.