I find the story of the Fall—the third chapter of Genesis—immensely fascinating. The more I “advance on my spiritual path,” the more I realize the variety of meanings it can hold within it.
There are perhaps many interpretations made by prominent theologians and the like, but I shall dedicate this piece for observing the shared truth in two different interpretations from two of my favorite thinkers—Terence McKenna and Alan Watts.
The Story
Let’s begin with recalling how the story goes. Below is excerpted the most central parts of the story, after Adam and Eve had both already been created and were living in the Garden of Eden.
Now the serpent1 was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.
He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise [or to give insight], she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
. . .
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 3:1-7; 22-24 (emphases mine)
The Interpretations
Terence McKenna often called the story history’s first drug bust. Let’s dive into this.
The LORD in the story (as also in much of the rest of the Old Testament) is actually an authority figure. In the beginning of it, he tells Adam and Eve how they can eat from all trees except for the tree of knowledge, unless they wanted to die. But when they broke his commandment, they—as the serpent said—indeed did not die, but were exiled from the Garden by the authoritative LORD.
Let me present a question:
What happens when you go into a field and gather a bunch of Psilocybe semilanceatas and go tell the police about it?
You’ll be fined, or possibly thrown into jail depending where you live.
What happens when you dry those mushrooms up and eat five grams of them?
You will, with great likelihood, be acquainted with an irrefutable sensation that you are God. And when you go tell about this sensation—and the renewed perception on reality you derived from it—to your buddies or other people, they’ll think you’re a nut and throw you into an asylum and label you a schizophrenic.
Why?
Because it is the same exact dynamic at play that exiled Adam and Eve from the garden—I’ll go into it deeper soon.
Let’s move to the next interpretation from Alan Watts.
In his autobiography, In My Own Way, Alan Watts (perhaps jestingly) says he interprets Adam and Eve as being little children who angered their father by exploring their sexualities together. He of course refers to the broader area of human life that is sexuality, which has been incredibly suppressed in the course of most of human civilization.
How does it connect to Terence’s interpretation as history’s first drug bust?
There is one connecting factor:
Both—sex and a hallucinogenic experience—can be gateways to ecstasy.
Ecstasy
Ecstasy refers to a state of powerful exaltation, often with a religious or mystical overtone; or an “exalted state of good feeling”—although it transcends the polarities of good or bad or pleasure or pain. Literally, it means standing outside oneself. It is often connected with the sensation of being in direct contact with God.
Why is ecstasy something that humans aren’t seemingly supposed to be experiencing—at least according to authority figures?
In the state of ecstasy, the ordinary, culturally conditioned boundaries of identity dissolve. One is in direct contact with reality, and sees that the ordinary ego-sensation confined to the body is just a story—hence “standing outside oneself.”
An inescapable follow-up realization to this experience is that all other ego-sensations, too—those of other people as well—are conventional and imaginary, and hence they are not real in the sense of having an existence of their own. They are as real as names and language are: it does not matter what language you refer to a tree in—the tree is as it is regardless. Calling it “a tree” is not any more real or true than “arbor,” nor does the name chosen alter the true reality of its existence.
This makes it quite impossible to keep taking cultural and social hierarchies seriously. One sees all humans as humans, regardless of their social status. A policeman, a high-ranking commander in the military or a prominent and distinguished university professor are just as much clueless and hairless apes like the next human—as yourself, most importantly.
In other words, one who “sees what God sees” sees reality naked, through the social games all humans play.
People like this are real troublemakers not only to those who maintain societal order—those in positions of authority—but also to regular people, who don’t quite want to be seen through; whose egos can’t handle being shown to be mere acts.
People who maintain societal order exert a lot of power and control over other people, and people seeing their power being derived only from imaginary consensus no longer are afraid of them. And when they aren’t being afraid of, there is the possibility of people doing things that go against the cultural norms regarding morality, or, worse, showing other people that these people are not at all special nor worth obeying.
Ecstasy, or self-transcendence, shows you not quite that there is no reality (as the above quote from Terence says), but that reality is absolutely not like what you thought it was.
Hence, when you see this, you also see that everyone who goes around telling people how to live—i.e., people in positions of authority—is full of s*** because they imply that they know what reality is like, and what is the best way to live in it. But you now see that not a single human can—with their mind similar to yours—comprehend reality, and hence you see that their effort to tell you how to live is only a sham on their part to gain power over you.
Priests in the past told the masses how reality was, and what were to happen after their deaths if one did not behave in line with their ideas about it; and in doing so they were able to extract resources from the people and gain power over them. This happens today also, in exactly the same proportion, only the people in power are different and abuse different cultural metaphysical presumptions.
The Tree of Life
Until this point, I’ve only explained about the knowledge-granting tree. But there was a second tree the LORD was scared Adam and Eve would eat from—the Tree of Life, granting eternal life to its consumer.
He {LORD God] drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
The cherubim and the flaming sword guarding the way to the tree of life are analogous to the enormous statues guarding the entrances to temples or sanctuaries in ancient Assyria, Babylon or Egypt. It thus symbolizes the sacred as distinct from the profane.
The difference between the sacred and the profane is initially simple: as Alan Watts explains, the word profane originally meant “the area or court before (pro) the entrance to a temple (fanum).” The profane thus simply described the “proper place of worship for the common people as distinct from the initiates,” the common people meaning simply the communal people, or people participating in the life of the society.2
Hence, the tree of Life is a symbol for the esoteric side of religion, which includes not only the knowledge of good and evil (i.e., polarity) but also the understanding that one’s true nature is eternal and never subject to death; or rather, what one usually considers his self is nothing but a figment of imagination, that never existed as anything but a concept and thus cannot die—as it didn’t truly exist in the first place.3
If you see death no longer as something to try to escape, but as something very fundamental to existence, you no longer fear it in the same proportion. And when you don’t fear it, and see your true nature transcending death, those telling you how you should relate to death expose themselves once again as spewing malarkey to gain power over you.
Why did the LORD guard the Tree of Life?
As I have expressed, one reason the authoritative LORD in the story, and more broadly any societal institutions or personnel in positions of authority don’t want people “in on this stuff” is that it renders people more difficult to control. It also makes them far less likely to feel like “eating of the ground with the sweat of their brow,“ that is, to work, much less sacrifice to the god(s) or to pay taxes from the fruits of their work.
It almost happened in the 1960s when LSD and other psychedelics were liberally used in the contemporary counterculture, but they were quickly outlawed. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” went the slogan touted by the psychedelic spokesperson Tim Leary—meaning of course to drop out from society; the cultural game. And isn’t this precisely what the authoritative LORD, who symbolizes those benefiting from the fruits of the labor of the children of Adam fears—that they stop participating in the game? At this point, it is crucial to remember that Adam refers in the Old Testament to mankind as a whole, and not simply one mythical man.
Of course, the insistence on “dropping out” after “tuning in” to this insight is quite immature, and is indeed one of the reasons why the LORD is not necessarily all wrong in guarding the Trees of the Garden. I’ve expressed in my other writings that if something is seen to be illusory (like the cultural game), to rebel against it is merely to convey that you are still under its illusion—and the vast majority of people do lack the spiritual maturity and wisdom to realize this, with the result of perpetuating delusion and creating disharmony when they revolt against illusions.
Concluding
To crystalize the point:
The forbidden Trees of the Garden of Eden are anythings that provide their consumer with either consciousness of polarity and awareness of relativity, or awareness of their true nature as something transcending the culturally conditioned ego-sensation (these two often come together).
Ecstasy, and anything that can act as a gateway to ecstasy (like sex or psychedelics/other hallucinogens), can hence be considered to be one of the possible meanings of the symbolism in the story of the Fall.
If you become really aware of this, you have to be most careful not to get too mouthy about it—lest you’ll suffer the fate of Adam and Eve and all the prophets before you…
As I said, this story has a wide variety of overlapping or distinguishable meanings one can project into it. Hence, I shall leave this essay here, and likely discuss its different meanings in the future.
Thank you very much for reading.
I’m sure someone has made the connection somewhere, but it is most interesting how of all animals it is the serpent coiled around the Tree of Knowledge: in Yogic symbolism kundalini, the potent life-energy, is visualized as a serpent coiled around the spine.
Alan W. Watts: Nature, Man and Woman, p. 160
Also, the esoteric side of religion simply means that these understandings come to you only after you have spaced yourself out from the communal life of your culture (or religion) for some time, and figured them directly out yourself, like a shaman.