Preserving American Values

As told in Genesis, in the paradise that God created, man and woman were naked, but they were not embarrassed by their nakedness and they were one with all things. The only thing forbidden to them was to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They lived in a world where there was no knowledge, no concept, of right or wrong, good or bad. Interestingly, the paradise of Genesis is virtually identical with the Buddhist Nirvana.

But once they ate the fruit of the tree, they became aware of and were embarrassed by their nakedness. They now had knowledge of value judgments; they were no longer innocent. They lost God’s favor and were forced out of the garden into a world full of frustrations, cravings, fear, and strife.

The Abrahamic faiths’ take on this story is that man is a sinner because he violated God’s commandment. And that women are the causal source of sin because it was Eve who listened to the serpent and tempted Adam to eat the fruit; it is also a cautionary tale regarding sexual temptation. Man can only be saved by obeying God, which is to obey the multilayered moral and ritual strictures of His religion (take your pick as to which one).

But if one looks at the story with fresh eyes, without all the layers of religious interpretation by rabbis, monks, imams, and others, a different lesson takes shape.

The real lesson here is that the world of God is the world of innocence, where there is no good and evil. There is no evil because there is no desire for what one does not have. There is no good because man does not compare himself to others. There is no good or evil because man is one with himself and all things. Things just are the way they are and are accepted as such; there is no judgment.  This is the world of freedom from the known. The point is not so much that God’s commandment was broken, but that because man gained knowledge of the concept of good and evil – and so would be subject to all the frustrations, anxiety, anger, etc. that stem from that knowledge – mankind lost its innocence and the world was never the same.

Note, this freedom of not labeling things does not deny or ignore that there are things in this world that we experience that harm or that there is a lack of equality in what we experience. – whether the amount of wealth we have or physical beauty we ere endowed with – but we should not label them as good or bad, right or wrong, humane or evil, because those labels create both desires and anxieties, endless frustrations, and prevent our being able to make rational decisions about our lives.

Speed forward several millennia to the current age. The world is filled with serpents, those who seek to entrap mankind with the knowledge of good and evil, of beauty versus ugliness, of every duality one can create.

The consumer culture on which our capitalist economy depends is based on people being manipulated by marketing into wanting more of what the masters of the world want them to crave and into thinking that a product will in some way give them entry to a better life by satisfying that craving. We have all been taught that happiness comes from having what we don’t have and thus we have become creatures controlled by craving.

Likewise, our political culture is based not on bringing people together but by dividing them into opposing camps. Often fomenting ill will and at times even hatred towards the “others,” thus again manipulating the populace. Political rhetoric today, such as it is, appeals mostly to the emotions, even when it is put in a form which sounds rational.

Even the prevailing religious cultures provide no refuge. Religion, which theoretically should be the main advocate for peace on earth and goodwill towards all, instead has over the millennia been perhaps the major source of strife among mankind. It has been, alone as well as in concert with nationalism, the greatest divider and thus the greatest source of conflict in the world. How convenient to fight others, exploit others, dominate others in the name of promoting God’s law, when in truth it is always about promoting the power of nations and individual men. And to the extent that the fight was against “savages,” ironically those who were being “saved” often lived a life and had a culture much closer to the Garden of Eden than that of the warriors of religion.

Towards its own, religion has never really been a force to bring mankind back to the state of grace that existed in the Garden of Eden. Instead, it has created a system of fear, using its own concept of good and evil to control its flock and build power and influence.

In truth, though, none of this should be surprising. Religion is after all, despite its protestations to the contrary, a product of man, not of God.  (See my post “The Bible – God’s Word or Man’s?” under Religion in this volume.) If it were the latter, why would there be so many different religions, there being only one God, all at odds with each other and causing much suffering over the millennia through their aggressive actions towards each other?

Is there then no force in the world to help mankind return to a state of innocence, which is its birthright, and live in peace? The only force I am personally familiar with is found in the teachings of the Buddha. 

His teachings seek to enable man to perceive that all his suffering is caused by cravings, which are in turn the result of what he has learned from family and culture. And that all this learned experience is empty of any intrinsic existence and has no inherent value – that is to say that without the context of learned values, everything would just be a fact of life. When he perceives these truths, he experiences all things without the intervention of thought and emotion … he is once more free of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And when he reaches that state, all suffering and doubt cease. (I must acknowledge that I am a practicing Buddhist.)

The Buddha was a historical person. The Buddha saw his role as relieving mankind’s suffering by putting him back in touch with his true pure nature, thus ending his craving and bringing him peace. Jesus sought to achieve a similar aim by putting man back in God’s grace.

But even here, the teachings of the Buddha are one thing … Buddhism as an organized religion can at times be something quite different, witness the Buddhist mobs led by monks doing harm to Muslims in Myanmar, or even at times vying groups of Buddhist monks fighting with each other. These are cases of men being Buddhists in name only. They have strayed far from the teachings of the Buddha.

Indeed the mystical traditions of all the Abrahamic religions … Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Kabbalah, Gnosticism, and Sufism, respectively) have at their core the basic moral teaching of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you and they have sought in their own way to bring mankind back to a state of grace, teaching that we were born with the divine essence inside us but our life experience has separated us from that true self. But the teachings of the organized religions created an us v them culture, and in the hands of less holy men the religious establishment has turned this aspect into the dominant theme of our world.

If we want to free ourselves from having tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, if we want to experience peace and happiness, there is only one way, and that is to turn our back to the dominant culture and follow the simple truths of the teachings of the Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammed, while disavowing any teaching that your religion is the only path to God.

One final note … Eden was a place here on Earth, not a paradise one accessed in heaven upon death. While there is no way, given the dominant forces and the conditioning of mankind, to ever achieve that state of innocence again worldwide here on Earth, we can each of us in our own small way create an Eden for ourselves and our loved ones that spreads out in waves from each of us to others.