In recent weeks in this blog I’ve talked about existence as Reality (the level of energy) vs. Maya (the illusion of separateness via the senses) vs. Story (the exclusively human level of attempted explanation). Story is my term for our interpretation of Maya from an anthropocentric viewpoint. Given our need for interpretation, it would seem Story is innate to us. Story, in and of itself, is neither a good nor bad thing. It can be useful or not depending on the story told and how it is perceived. When Story is confused with Reality, we’re heading for trouble. The term Story can be confusing as it is referring both to our interpretations of reality and actual stories we tell, sometimes as a history.
So, at the risk of offending those who interpret stories as reality, I’d like to give an example of how I interpret a very famous story: The biblical story of the fall of mankind.
Here is a quick synopsis how the story goes at face value: God creates a man and then a woman from that man. The man and woman live in a paradise referred to as the Garden of Eden. They are free to enjoy the garden as they will for all eternity, except for the admonition to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A serpent tempts the woman to eat the fruit so that she will become like God. She does and shares it with the man. God finds out and banishes the man and woman from the garden.
So what may this story actually be telling us? First of all, since eating from the tree gives them knowledge of good and evil, we can assume they did not have this knowledge before the eating. Some say it was disobedience that was tested and punished, and this seems to be a popular belief in literal interpretations. But if this is an allegory, what are we to learn from it? Disobedience as the cause of the fall makes little sense at that point – it could have been any kind of tree. Knowledge of good and evil seems to be key. We have to realize that the word “knowledge” in the King James translation tends to mean more that “awareness of.” When biblical men were said to have “known” their wives, it was an allusion to sex. Who would not be aware of their own spouse. The knowledge instead refers to direct experience of someone or something (not necessarily sexual). In my mind, the best equation is: knowledge = direct experience. And a direct experience of good and evil will still be subjective. If an eagle dives from the sky to snatch up a weasel, we might think the eagle would see the weasel as good. If that same weasel caught and ate a mouse an hour before, we’d tend to think that the mouse would perceive the weasel as evil. So is the weasel good or evil? It’s a matter of perspective. But those humans didn’t eat from The Tree of A Proper Perspective of Good and Evil; it was the Knowledge (experience) of Good and Evil. And as we humans label what is good (what we think should be) and evil (what we think shouldn’t be) we lose perspective that it is all part of one whole. Imagine yourself in a pure white room with bright white light and absolutely no shadow. Good luck not running into a wall! You can’t perceive light without shadow. In our minds and language, we try separate ourselves from nature, which is actually trying to separate ourselves form reality.
We know that Maya can’t be escaped while our awareness is encapsulated in the body. And we know that Story is prone to misuse (to reinforce the illusion of separation to gain our own pleasures at the expense of the rest of the world). But can Story be used with awareness of our human condition? The story of creation is only written up to this point in time. How do we write the story moving forward? My proposal is below.
We “eat from the tree of the knowledge of unity and the awareness of our Maya-based existence.” (That’s a mouthful, so chew thoroughly.) We become aware of Karma as a form of “cause and effect.” And, given that we are all actually interconnected, we can’t affect others without affecting ourselves. Knowing of Karma’s existence, and understanding the interconnectedness of everything, simply being aware of the potential effects of our actions before taking them is a great start. Knowledge of Karma applied universally would be a way to see past Maya and peer “through a glass darkly” into the level of Reality. For how can you see our actions having universal effect without realizing there is no separation?
If we begin to see ourselves as connected to everything, and the eternal nature of everything, pleasure can begin to be derived from outside the sensory world of Maya (the illusion resulting from the expanded Source) and we can look with fresh eyes full of wonder and a world we never knew existed. Like a baby laughing at something it is experiencing for the first time, I hope we can look in wonder and even laughter at an awareness of what we didn’t know existed: Reality.
I’m putting a link back to the song Kaleidoscope on here as that image is my touchstone to the nature of reality continually morphing as Maya.