Saturday, June 26, 2010

Genesis and Evolution

One time a Christian minister came by and asked me if I believed that Genesis was history or allegory and I said, "Both." He looked a little puzzled and asked me what I had meant. I explained that I felt that the fall of the Tower of Babel (loss of the universal language of pure thought telepathy) was the fall of Atlantis explained in a kind of allegorical compressed time. The time sweep of the early chapters of Genesis cover a lot of ground. Only the highlights of a vast history could be given. The history had to be meaningful to a prescientific culture that had no biological and astronomical scientific language to detail out the history in a more precise manner. The geological layers and the time markers used to describe when and how evolution took place on Earth and in this galaxy were beyond what could be described to the early humans. Even if it could be described, try to imagine giving this task to an evolutionary biologist and telling him or her that only 100,000 words maximum could be used and every word had to be comprehensible to a nonscientific public. Even now it would be a difficult task. And so the early Lemurian Genesis, used as the basis of the Erza Genesis translation found in the Bible, used allegory to time compress and essentialize the vaster galactic history which included the Earth.

Although there are groups who assert that the six days of creation are "literal 24 hour solar days" (the Creationists), I do not feel such an assertion holds to exegetical analysis. One is that it is very hard to have a "literal solar day" when the sun itself is created on the "fourth day". In the three days, a phrase "there was evening, and there was morning, one day" is used. This is not the usual Jewish day which is from evening to evening and hence would not define a literal day for the people who were originally reading this book. It is also not literally possible to have a "morning" or an "evening" without a sun, since these two events are defined by how the sun is placed in the sky. What can be seen is something loosely describing a kind of big bang creating this local universe and the slow emergence of life, and then the emergence of the human species from an evolutionary process. All that is needed is to assume that those nonliteral days are periods of time (2 Peter 3:8 talks about a day being 1,000 years or 1,000 years being like a day to god), different phases of evolution of variable length following each other. Being made from the "dust of the Earth" is a good metaphor for humans evolving from the Earth itself, from an evolutionary process that is sourced in the Earth itself.

Adam, Eve, and the Serpent can be seen to be representatives of the intellect, emotions, and instincts, or the cortex, limbic system, and r-complex (reptilian brain). Adam is going around naming all the animals. The intellectual cortical brain does this. It forms word symbols for everything. Eve, when tempted by the serpent, is described as seeing a fruit is "good", a "delight to the eyes", and being "desirable". There is an emotional process going on inside her. The serpent is considered to be related to sensations. The animal chosen to represent the instinctive function is the one that is most like our spine, since snakes and serpents are like spines encased in skin. When viewed this way, the story of "the fall" can be seen differently. Something inside of the early humans starts as a sensation and influences our emotions (the serpent tempting Eve), and then the emotions influence our intellect (Adam taking the fruit from Eve and eating it). They experience shame or the awakening of a moral self consciousness. They are suddenly awake that they are naked. They become "like gods, knowing good and evil". The serpent is right about this, but is wrong about "you will not die".

What is interesting about the story is that the Hebrew word for "knowing" in this passage is "daath". It does not seem to indicate a fall to lesser consciousness, but an evolutionary advance to another consciousness. The fruit is "knowledge of good and evil". The god in this story is afraid of what humans have attained, punishes them, and blocks them from the tree of life that would make them immortal. In terms of evolution, it seems that there is a threefold progression in terms of reproduction. The first form is simple cellular division. The second form is androgynous. The third is sexual reproduction. There is some hint that the first humans were created androgenous, Genesis 5:2 says, "He (god) created them male and female, and he blessed them and named them Adam in the day when they were created." The Lemurian Genesis also seems to have emphasized the early androgyny of the first humans. In the Jewish Old Testament it is an odd footnote which is just there as the chapter moves on to other things. But in the Lemurian Genesis it seems woven into their version of the Adam and Eve story, that Adam falls asleep (symbolizing some shift in consciousness) and then wakes up to see Eve who is made from a rib that is taken from Adam (another symbol for Eve representing emotions, since a rib would indicate being made from the heart region, it is also interesting that primates have one more rib than humans do). The intellectual brain and emotional brain have more functional unity than the instinctive brain with the intellectual brain. Eve functions as a mediator to the two other brains.

In terms of evolution, single cell creatures have relative physical immortality. These cells do not have parents. They simply split into two. You could say that the same cell that existed when life first appeared on Earth has become fruitful and multiplied itself to become every cell on the planet. This cell does not age and die, but only dies when certain conditions kill it, like extreme heat. All the human cells emerged from the first cell a long time ago. Next appeared cell colonies. These also did not age and die and also had relative physical immortality (within certain conditions). Then came the androgynous ones that reproduced sexually, but had both sexes within them. It seems that these also are relative physical immortals. It seems that when humans were divided into the two genders, then both "knowledge of good and evil" (ethical consciousness) and mortality started to appear. This also seems to be true for the very first cell colonies that experimented with reproducing this way.

The curse that is called "the fall" has a few outcomes. One is that the serpent seems to lose its arms and legs, and just becomes the skin around the spine. This suggests that the instinctive brain is losing its direct power to influence the motor functions of the human body, while the intellect and emotions can now move them more directly. The second is a kind of tension between the instinct/sensation reptile brain and the feeling brain. Eve is more in touch with the serpent, but does not feel comfortable with this. The sexual sensation, in particular, brings tension and ambivolence rather than complete peace. This seems to translate as greater pain in childbirth. The instincts run most of these processes and hormonal changes, and this uneasy tension makes the process more complex and painful than it may have been during an earlier evolutionary phase. The next item in the curse is Adam must now "toil" for food. The feeling of labor, of having to work hard for food appear. The diet is still vegan at this stage, but it includes cooking food (bread), rather than eating fruit and herbs raw (Genesis 1:29 versus Genesis 3:17-18). The land is less supportive at this stage, having both food plants and weeds. The last part of the curse is that Eve would desire linking with Adam and Adam would rule over Eve.

The last item has been used as a justification for patriarchy, that women are somehow inferior to men and should be ruled by men. There are a few things wrong with this deduction. One is that a curse is never a good thing or a natural thing. If I curse someone with death, then this means that it is not a good thing for me to do to someone. If Eve is cursed with being ruled by Adam, then this suggests the moral ideal is of equality of the genders. Otherwise she would be blessed by being subject to Adam. But my feeling is that it shows that Adam, the cortical intellect, does have hierarchical precedence over the emotional limbic brain. The three brains are not really functioning in perfect harmony at this evolutionary phase that we are still in. Childbirth is painful. Our instincts do not function as well as they do in the reptiles. Gathering food for survival requires toil. And aging and death now appear. Adam lives about 930 years and then dies.

There is another footnote passage about Enoch living 365 years and then being "taken" (not dying, Genesis 5:21-22). Some people interpret this as light translation, where the physical body transforms into a light body. This would be an important passage in the story, because it suggests that whatever is causing aging and death to appear in humans is transcendable.

In an earlier passage, Adam and Eve are blocked from "the tree of life". They instinctively want to reach it and god fears this, because then they will not merely be "like gods" but become gods, knowing both good and evil, and knowing physical immortality (Genesis 3:22-24). This suggests that humans are half way through an evolutionary process. The eating of the first fruit, the knowledge (daath) of good and evil, does evolve them further, but it is both a blessing and curse. The second fruit is meant to complete the process, but something blocks us. An angel with a flaming sword which turns in every direction blocks humans from accessing this. Some guardian appears. In our genetic make up, histones, little dots of light, bind half our genetic potential. When they dissolve, they may allow us to activate some of the dormant potential hidden within them. There is some microcosm to macrocosm relationship between the spine and the genetic double helix, that raising kundalini energy up the spine (In Exodus, Moses raises the serpent up and Jesus says that he will be lifted up in the same way), may open these genetic potentials. There are seven chakras, seven seals that need to be opened, and seven "demons" that need to be cast out, to move the energy up to the Crown chakra (where one can rest, like on the seventh day of creation). I could set up more correspondences between symbols and verses, but in this writing I only have time to allude to some of them.

The sword symbolically represents the wisdom of discernment. The sword can cut through and divide truth from falsehood. Fire symbolically represents purification or the "refiners fire" which burns away the dross to leave the pure gold of enlightenment. The angel who guards the access to the tree of life is what the Zen Buddhists call a "barrier gate". Any barrier to enlightenment is also a gate we can use to reach it. This means that if we take the time to sort out the true from the false and purify ourselves, then we will access of the tree of life, and end aging and death inside of us. The tree of life represents this potential within us for physical immortality. It is something we had that we lost and something that we can gain again. Enoch would be the first person, in this historical allegory, to have attained this.

When Jesus is transfigured, some apostles see Moses and Elijah appear. This passage puzzled me until I understood that these were two others who also attained to their light bodies. It then puzzled me why Enoch was not present. But it made sense later on, because Moses represents one path to attaining a light body through Egyptian alchemy, Elijah represents another path to attaining a light body through merkabah (chariot of fire), and Jesus represents another path through "the holy breath". The purpose of the passage is to validate all three of these methods legitimate paths.

The path that Enoch took may be more related to the Taoist path, since Taoism seems based on the five books that the Lemurians brought to China when Lemuria sank (one book becomes acupuncture, one book becomes the I Ching, another book becomes Feng Shui, and another book becomes the Nei Ching; the fifth book seems to have been lost to China, but seems to be a book about surgery that the Hawaiian Kahunas may have genetic memory of and which is passed on in some of their healing lineages). In some Taoist writings, they talk of practices where the pain of childbirth can end for women and humans do not have to toil for survival. They describe a path of "pure spirit" (shen) where people merely followed what was natural instinctively and did not need more than this. Enoch may have been close enough to the previous time period in human history to stay natural and not need a path that needed to be written down, passed through the intellect, and spelled out in precepts ("The way that can be named is not the eternal way"-Lao Tzu, THE TAO TE CHING). Curiously, the Taoists have always associated this natural path with transcending the need to age and die.

In evolutionary terms, present humanity is caught between "two trees" and is suffering because an evolutionary process is not yet complete. This process was further complicated by two falls to lesser consciousness, one symbolized by the tower of Babel and the other symbolized by the Flood (the formation of the present subconscious mind, chemical addictions, and racial prejudice). The Taoists have a phrase that is a key to the process, "The path of return is the way forward." Undoing these two falls to lesser consciousness, and then completing the original evolutionary process is the key to advancing on the path.

There is a further footnote that, again seems to be very compressed, in Genesis 6:2, talks about sons of god mating with the daughters of men. The next passage talks about humans being a mixture of flesh and spirit, and that the flesh side was going to make it harder to stay spiritually tuned to the natural path, and that the lifespan would reduce to 120 years. This is curious, because life extension researchers are theorizing that 120 years (more precisely 127 years) may be the maximum genetic potential of homo sapiens. The flood story follows, with humans having their imagination too much on evil (harm) and the Earth was filled with violence. At some time, I would like to write about the symbolic clues in this chapter and how it relates to the formation of our present minds where the conscious and subconscious mind are more strongly divided than before, how it relates to a certain faculty of visualization being wrongly used, and how violence appears as a result. It is actually quite relevant to how humans are behaving now, during the phase where the animal flesh eating diet predominates (I do find it interesting that each kind of consciousness has a different diet associated with it). Suffice it to say that "Knowers Ark" (as I like to call it) has three levels (intellect, emotion, and instinct), and it completely sealed from penetration by the violent emotional waters that flood the Earth. But the main point I wish to make here is about how some group outside the evolutionary process genetically mixes with humankind. A more exact translation of "sons of god" is "offspring of the elohim". Some kind of genetic seeding took place during this time. The mixing creatures a hybrid human who is more advanced both in terms of "might" and "renown". This seeding may not have been as literal as having actual sexual union with homo sapiens, but it may have been. It would have been a simpler way to describe genetic manipulation to a prescientific humanity.

The passage about the genetic seeding takes place in a discussion about how the flesh has become corrupted and how violence is now upon the Earth. Some habitual tendency is now passed on genetically and is making the flesh (cells) different than before. Some group of higher beings decides to boost the genetics to produce a better hybrid to counterbalance this, but it is not enough prevent the next fall to lesser consciousness. It describes the Nephilim which have sometimes been associated with fallen angels and sometimes with beings from the Orion constellation. Some have assumed that the offspring of the Elohim were fallen angels or Nephilim, but it is clear from the passage that the Nephilim were already around when the offspring of the Elohim do their genetic manipulation and is a different group. The passage might suggest a time period where communication with extraplanetary human species was more common than now, and that the extraplanetary humans were genetically similar enough so that offspring were possible. This would suggest that the original genetic blueprint that seeds the evolution of this planet did not originate on Earth and was not a product of accidental evolution (though things could go wrong). My own sense is that the genetic intermixing was an attempt to adjust the human evolutionary process some, a kind of course correction, and that it at least partly failed, since the next passages have to do with violence filling the Earth more and more and the Flood happening. Although the biblical information does not mention the origin of the offspring of the Elohim, I would associate them with the Sirian star system (and the Nephilim with the Orions, the two factions in what might have been a galactic war). I also feel that the genetic intermixing partly succeeded in that it kept the evolutionary potential alive so that in our time period it could still be activated through kundalini yoga.

There are several implications of the passages (assuming it is not a total fantasy). One is that the original genetic program did not include aging and death. Two is that the genetic program is modifiable, both for better or worse, and that some energetic and spiritual process seems able to shift the genetic code for the better, so that it again can be healed of the karma of aging and death. Three is that the evolutionary process that we are in is only partially complete and that there is an implied future history unfoldment that is needed to complete this process. Four is that a number of human beings have completed this process to prove that it is possible. Five is that it points to not merely transcending the need to age and die, but also to attainment of a light body. Six is that two falls to lesser consciousness may need to be undone. One is symbolized by the Tower of Babel story and the other is symbolized by the Flood story.

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