From The Tree Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil You Shall Not Eat

I finally figured out what it really means: It is your door back to paradise

I finally figured it out - everything falls into place and makes perfect sense.

Nothing divides people more than the concept of Good and Evil. Surprisingly, this Genesis quote is not about Good and Evil at all. It aims much higher than a mere intellectual concept. It aims at the highest: It is a warning to not spoil your path to Enlightenment and eternal life. Let me explain.

Sometimes wisdom comes from the most unexpected sources, in this case, Wikipedia.

The next quote is from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil entry at Wikipedia:

The phrase in Hebrew, טוֹב וָרָע ("tov wa-raʿ") literally translates as "good and evil". This may be an example of the type of figure of speech known as merism, a literary device that pairs opposite terms together in order to create a general meaning, so that the phrase "good and evil" would simply imply "everything". This is seen in the Egyptian expression "evil-good", which is normally employed to mean "everything".^[2] However, if "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" is to be understood to mean a tree whose fruit imparts knowledge of everything, this phrase does not necessarily denote a moral concept. This view is held by several scholars.^[2][3][4]

The coins dropped big time - three times.

Let’s start with the lesser important “coin drop”, something I instinctively rejected for many years: The moral concept of “good and evil” as a spiritual concept. It has been used intensely for millennia by all three Abrahamic world religions to encourage and manipulate people to behave better.

Now, there is nothing wrong with encouraging people not to kill each other on a whim, for example. It can be useful as a relative truth but equally abused.

Relative truths are used all the time to govern everyday life “within knowledge”, and “within consciousness”, which is, in non-dual terms and many Eastern spiritual systems, “within the world of appearances governed by ignorance of the true nature of ourselves and the world.”

I know this sounds very lofty, but bear with me.

In these spiritual systems, there are two distinct ways of being.

The first one is what we know as “everyday life”. This is within consciousness. The apparent view of ourselves and the world is gained through being conscious of what is going on around us by using our senses and our minds. In that world, the relative truth of the concept of good and evil has a place and purpose, defining an ever-changing postmodern morality, defined by the people in power.

You don’t need to be a history professor to realize how the Christian churches used what is deemed “good” and what is deemed “evil” to advance their power. This has filtered through to secular social and political use.

The phrase “Doing the right thing” is one example of the “good and evil” moral mantra. It was heavily used and abused in Australia to manipulate and coerce people to get vaccinated. It implies that you are “good” when you follow the official government line, and “bad” if you don’t.

In short, it is obvious that the concept of “good and evil” is relative and useless for spiritual purposes. Spirituality always should only be concerned about “absolute truths.”

So what is this elusive other way of being beyond consciousness? The only people that know and can talk about it are mystics. Below is an attempt to describe it in words. This is how it looks from the inside when you have found, know and “are” your true self:

Nothing you do will change you, for you need no change. You may change your mind or your body, but it is always something external to you that has changed, not yourself. Why bother at all to change? realise once for all that neither your body nor your mind, nor even your consciousness is yourself and stand alone in your true nature beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. No effort can take you there, only the clarity of understanding. Trace your misunderstandings and abandon them, that is all. There is nothing to seek and find, for there is nothing lost. Relax and watch the 'I am'. Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet, keep silent; it will emerge, or, rather, it will take you in (Nisargadatta Maharaj, I AM THAT)

The ever-changing world we all experience within consciousness does not touch our true selves. We are the screen on which the movie of Consciousness projects its play of light.

So why is God in Genesis talking about “good and evil” then, if it is just a shifting flicker of light on the screen of our true nature?

Well, he doesn’t. These are ancient texts written in ancient foreign languages and can rarely be taken literally. Thankfully we have scholars who study this and translate it properly for us:

so that the phrase "good and evil" would simply imply "everything".

The second coin drops and the whole meaning of Genesis 2:17 shifts dramatically to:

but from the tree of knowledge of everything you shall not eat for the day you shall eat from it you shall surely die.

“Knowledge” can only happen within consciousness. Knowledge is more than just memorizing things. It literally means “knowing” things. The moment we get conscious of something, we know it.

The moment we get conscious that our belly hurts, we know we have a belly ache.

The moment we become conscious of a bird sitting on a branch, we know that bird. We might not have a name for the bird, but knowing comes before labelling. A very small child, who can’t speak yet, will also be able to get conscious of the bird on the branch and therefore “knows” the bird.

So God tells us in Genesis 2:17 that you shall not “know anything”, meaning, you shall not pay attention to the ever-changing, insignificant sensual and mental flickering lights of conscious experience.

How can we live a functional life without paying attention to our conscious experience?

The short answer is, like every other conscious creature on this planet. A lion gets conscious of being hungry, sees a gazelle, hunts it, kills it and eats it. He gets conscious about getting full and stops eating. Easy. We could live exactly the same.

This is what it would look like for a human that is not attached to conscious events happening:

I see as you see, hear as you hear, taste as you taste, eat as you eat. I also feel thirst and hunger and expect my food to be served on time. When starved or sick, my body and mind go weak. All this I perceive quite clearly, but somehow I am not in it, I feel myself as if floating over it, aloof and detached. Even not aloof and detached. There is aloofness and detachment as there is thirst and hunger; there is also the awareness of it all and a sense of Immense distance, as if the body and the mind and all that happens to them were somewhere far out on the horizon. (Nisargadatta Maharaj)

But unlike the lion and Nisargadatta, we have learned to be self-conscious by attaching the sense of existence or beingness, the sense of “I am”, to our body and mind and creating a separated ego identity they don’t have.

It is the self-reflecting witness, just another conscious activity, that splits our unproblematic consciousness into two parts - an automatic natural consciousness we share with all conscious beings, and a self-reflecting witnessing consciousness that reflects on the natural consciousness and creates a duality where there is none.

Why did this happen to us humans? Because we ate from the tree of all knowledge - we identify with knowledge, we identify with conscious experience and false thinking, we think this experience is “our” experience. It is not. It is the experience of the body and mind we think is “us”.

And if you identify with a mortal vulnerable body-mind that’s what you get: Death.

but from the tree of knowledge of everything you shall not eat for the day you shall eat from it you shall surely die.

The timeline is important here. This story starts in paradise. Paradise is a place where all inhabitants “know” and “are” their true selves. The “knowing” in this context refers to an existential knowing, not the sensual mind-based conscious knowing we talked about above).

This is the enlightened state and this story tells us that we all used to live in such a state. And it was called paradise.

In fact, according to all true mystics, we still are in paradise, we just don’t realize it.

Paradise is just veiled by the movie of conscious experience that we mistake for our true state. We are so focused and identified with the movie on the screen that we forget that the movie is unreal.

A movie is just light interrupted by frames of images in the movie projector. Each image is a metaphor for each conscious experience we have. The movie has no real substance, it is unreal. The only real things are the screen and the light - pure awareness and life happening.

In Rupert Spira’s terms, the movie is just the colouring of the screen or “the activity of consciousness”.

for the day you will eat from it you will surely die

Third coin drop. Again, if we take this literally it creates a man-like God that will punish Adam and Eve for not obeying his command. This is nonsense.

No God is needed to punish us. We do it all by ourselves by forgetting our true nature, the enlightened and natural state that we are.

The enlightened or self-realized man is immortal. Countless mystics have expressed that much. To be mortal, you have to be born. Only then you can die.

Being born, like any other concept, is an act in consciousness. These bodies are born and die, of course. But that isn’t a problem at all. It is a false belief that we are these bodies that is the problem. If you believe that, you die with your body and you suffer with your body and your mind.

When and how does this happen?

M: In reality you were never born and never shall die. But now you imagine that you are, or have a body and you ask what has brought about this state. Within the limits of illusion the answer is: desire born from memory attracts you to a body and makes you think as one with it. But this is true only from the relative point of view. In fact, there is no body, nor a world to contain it; there is only a mental condition, a dream-like state, easy to dispel by questioning its reality.

So forget good and evil as a spiritual concept. It is a fragile, untrue, impermanent, ever-changing mental concept that humans use to manipulate other humans into doing what they want them to do.

Of course, people commit so-called evil - terrible, horrific acts that harm others and create immense suffering. Always have, always will. Until all humans will wake up to their true nature.

An enlightened person never has and never will commit an “evil” act.

“Being good” is a very weak and fickle antidote to “evil” because it is based on the ever-changing mind and feelings. I am not saying you shouldn’t try but the true lasting antidote against evil in your false self is becoming your true self. Only a false egoic self can be good and evil. The true self is completely neutral.

Genesis 2:17 doesn’t tell you how to be good and not evil, it tells you how to become immortal.

If you still think it is impossible to become immortal, maybe the following quotes will get you interested in finding out for yourself. And that’s all you can do. It is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of realizing your true nature. Then you know for sure - but not with your mind. Thank you for reading.

The jnani [self-realized master] does not die because he was never born.

I make no distinction between the body and the universe. Each is the cause of the other; each is the other, in truth. But I am out of it all. When I am telling you that I was never born, why go on asking me what were my preparations for the next birth?

Q: You are giving a certain date to your realisation. It means something did happen to you at that date. What happened?

M: The mind ceased producing events. […] There was no 'me' left to strive for. Even the bare 'I am' faded away. […] But I feel that I have lost nothing by not knowing, because all my knowledge was false. My not knowing was in itself knowledge of the fact that all knowledge is ignorance, that 'I do not know' is the only true statement the mind can make. Take the idea 'I was born'. You may take it to be true. It is not. You were never born, nor will you ever die. It is the idea that was born and shall die, not you. By identifying yourself with it you became mortal. Just like in a cinema all is light, so does consciousness become the vast world.

Questioner: You keep on saying that I was never born and will never die. If so, how is it that I see the world as one which has been born and will surely die?

Maharaj: You believe so because you have never questioned your belief that you are the body which, obviously, is born and dies. While alive, it attracts attention and fascinates so completely that rarely does one perceive one's real nature. […]

When the mind is quiet it reflects reality. When it is motionless through and through, it dissolves and only reality remains. This reality is so concrete, so actual, so much more tangible than mind and matter, that compared to it even diamond is soft like butter. This overwhelming actuality makes the world dreamlike, misty, irrelevant