Someone explain this to me

[AdvaitaZen]

Ok, so the original fall was from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil... cool, awesome.

Christians then say discernment is a gift from God... color me confused.

So after humans gained the knowledge of good and evil, discernment was given by God to them. The original sin is now a gift? Discernment explicitly entails the knowledge God apparently didn't want man to know, this has come from the serpent has it not?

Why does God get credit for all we accept about life?

If we are to take the Bible literally as so many insist upon doing, there is a discrepancy here.

 

[AdvaitaZen]

It seems, rather, that disobedience is the true sin.

Yet, what growth has ever occurred by obeying the status quo?

I would suggest man would still be as the animals if he had not disobeyed.

No animal has ever disobeyed, cannot.

 

[AdvaitaZen]

I could not imagine a canine version of Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad.

Even an ape version seems far fetched.

We owe much to that serpent.

It is rightly a symbol for wisdom in many traditions.

 

[seattlegal]

Actually, I see the genesis story of the fall of man as being a pretty good metaphorical representation of Dependent Origination

 

[Etu Malku]

It's not about discernment either:

The Original Sin as the tradition of the Fall from the Garden of Eden' is an archetypal structure embedded deep within our unconsciousness. The Original Sin is Man's guilt of being carnivorous and lycanthropic.

We are all descended from males of the carnivorous lycanthropic variety, a mutation evolved under the pressure of hunger caused by the climatic change at the end of the pluvial period, which induced indiscriminate, even cannibalistic predatory aggression, culminating in the rape and sometimes even in the devouring of the females of the original peaceful fruit-eating bon sauvage remaining in the primeval virgin forests.

It was the 'clothes of skin' and the 'aprons of fig-leaves', that produced the nakedness of man, and not the other way round, the urge to cover man's nudity that led to the invention of clothing. It is obvious that neither man nor woman could be 'ashamed' (Gen. ii. 25) or 'afraid because they were naked' (Gen. iii. 10 f.) before they had donned their animal's pelt or hunters' 'apron of leaves', and got so accustomed to wearing it that the uncovering of their defenseless bodies gave them a feeling of cold, fear and the humiliating impression of being again reduced to the primitive fruit-gatherer's state of a helpless 'unarmed animal' exposed to the assault of the better-equipped enemy.

The uncovered body could not have been considered 'indecorous' or 'im-moral'.
The very feeling of sin, the consciousness of having done something 'im-moral', contrary to the mores, customs or habits of the herd, could not be experienced before a part of the herd had wrenched itself free from the inherited behaviour-pattern and radically changed its way of life from that of a frugivorous to that of a carnivorous or omnivorous animal.

- from a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine by ROBERT EISLER - First published in 1951 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane, London, B.C.4
Printed in Great Britain by Butler and Tanner Limited Frome and London

 

[AdvaitaZen]

Actually, I see the genesis story of the fall of man as being a pretty good metaphorical representation of Dependent Origination

The Bible utterly disagrees with Dependent Origination because God himself is self-created - the creation of God depends the existence of God, and thus we fall into an utterly absurd loop.

In Dependent Origination, there is no first cause, there are many conditions which arise and interact to create what is the world we experience.

The two are utterly at odds.

 

[AdvaitaZen]

It's not about discernment either:

The Original Sin as the tradition of the Fall from the Garden of Eden' is an archetypal structure embedded deep within our unconsciousness. The Original Sin is Man's guilt of being carnivorous and lycanthropic.

We are all descended from males of the carnivorous lycanthropic variety, a mutation evolved under the pressure of hunger caused by the climatic change at the end of the pluvial period, which induced indiscriminate, even cannibalistic predatory aggression, culminating in the rape and sometimes even in the devouring of the females of the original peaceful fruit-eating bon sauvage remaining in the primeval virgin forests.

It was the 'clothes of skin' and the 'aprons of fig-leaves', that produced the nakedness of man, and not the other way round, the urge to cover man's nudity that led to the invention of clothing. It is obvious that neither man nor woman could be 'ashamed' (Gen. ii. 25) or 'afraid because they were naked' (Gen. iii. 10 f.) before they had donned their animal's pelt or hunters' 'apron of leaves', and got so accustomed to wearing it that the uncovering of their defenseless bodies gave them a feeling of cold, fear and the humiliating impression of being again reduced to the primitive fruit-gatherer's state of a helpless 'unarmed animal' exposed to the assault of the better-equipped enemy.

The uncovered body could not have been considered 'indecorous' or 'im-moral'.
The very feeling of sin, the consciousness of having done something 'im-moral', contrary to the mores, customs or habits of the herd, could not be experienced before a part of the herd had wrenched itself free from the inherited behaviour-pattern and radically changed its way of life from that of a frugivorous to that of a carnivorous or omnivorous animal.

- from a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine by ROBERT EISLER - First published in 1951 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane, London, B.C.4
Printed in Great Britain by Butler and Tanner Limited Frome and London

Sin arises through knowledge of sin, guilt follows by this knowledge.

It is not a natural arising at all, a human child is not concerned about sin, but the parents go on telling him these things are wrong. In this process, we create a child which is gradually more and more laden with guilt and has to suppress more and more of his nature. Gradually, unchecked, each one is simply filled with shame.

It is created by us, it has nothing to do with nature. The religions have created the problem and then prescribe the medicine, it is disgusting.

There are many tribes in Africa that prove it has nothing to do with our nature, in case you want to argue. Many tribes only decorate their body, even bringing more attention to what we call private areas rather than pretending they don't exist.

 

[seattlegal]

The Bible utterly disagrees with Dependent Origination because God himself is self-created - the creation of God depends the existence of God, and thus we fall into an utterly absurd loop.

In Dependent Origination, there is no first cause, there are many conditions which arise and interact to create what is the world we experience.

The two are utterly at odds.

You don't see the parallels?

With Ignorance as condition, Mental Formations (karma) arise
With Mental Formations (karma) as condition, Consciousness arises
With Consciousness as condition, Mind (name and form) and Matter (physical elements) arise
With Mind and Matter as condition, Sense Gates arise
With Sense Gates as condition, Contact arises
With Contact as condition, Feeling arises
With Feeling as condition, Craving arises (aversion also--emity between woman and serpent)
With Craving as condition, Clinging arises
With Clinging as condition, Becoming arises
With Becoming as a condition, Birth arises
With Birth as condition, Aging and Dying arise

12Links Of Interdependence

1
Ignorance

is dependent on Karma

Blind man

(11)
2
Karma

is dependent on Consciousness

Potter

(12)
3
Consciousness

is dependent on Name and Form

Monkey climbing

(13)
4
Name and Form Mental (5 aggregates) and Physical (elements) Existence

is dependent on Six Sense Fields

People in a boat

(14)
5
Six Sense Fields
Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, Touch, Mental

is dependent on Contact

House with six windows

(15)
6
Contact (Touch)

is dependent on Feeling

Two embracing

(16)
7
Feeling

is dependent on Craving

Man with an arrow in his eye

(17)
8
Craving

is dependent on Grasping

Man eating

(18)
9
Grasping

is dependent on Becoming

Monkey grasping fruit

(19)
10
Becoming

is dependent on Birth

Pregnant woman

(20)
11
Birth

is dependent on Old age Death

Woman giving birth

(21)
12
Old age Death

is dependent on Ignorance (Back to the beginning--full circle)

Man with sack on his back​

Twelve linked chain of causation = ouroboros
Understand?

(Be sure to go to the link and look at the paintings, and compare the images with what is depicted in Genesis)

Genesis 3 HCSB - The Temptation and the Fall - Now the - Bible Gateway

3 Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. 3 But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’”

4 “No! You will not die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

<...>
14 Then the Lord God said to the serpent:

Because you have done this,
you are cursed more than any livestock
and more than any wild animal.
You will move on your belly
and eat dust all the days of your life.
15 I will put hostility between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed.
He will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.

16 He said to the woman:

I will intensify your labor pains;
you will bear children in anguish.
Your craving will be for your husband,
yet he will rule over you.

17 And He said to Adam, “Because you listened to your wife’s voice and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Do not eat from it’:

The ground is cursed because of you.
You will eat from it by means of painful labor
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow
until you return to the ground,
since you were taken from it.
For you are dust,
and you will return to dust.”​

Look at the process Eve goes through, and compare it to the 12 links.
I can't make you see it. Use your own discernment.

 

[Thomas]

Christians then say discernment is a gift from God... color me confused.

I think you might be applying a particular teaching in a general sense.

Discernment per se is not a gift as such, in that it's not ad extra to human nature, it's a natural faculty of the senses and the intellect. The discerment of spirits is a different class altogether, and is counted as a spiritual gift, a superadded faculty.

So after humans gained the knowledge of good and evil, discernment was given by God to them.

No ... I think you've made a critical mistake here, that many make, in assuming man had no power of discernment before ignoring the divine ordinance. That's not so, as is evident in the text, and also from the point of logic.

Knowledge of good and evil is not necessary, nor is it a good. It becomes conditional after the event, but not before.

The original sin is now a gift?

No.

Discernment explicitly entails the knowledge God apparently didn't want man to know, this has come from the serpent has it not?

Er, no. That logic is flawed. Man had discernment before he made the decision to eat the fruit.

God grants man freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility. Ontologically, the First Freedom is to accept or deny the will of God.

The message of ther serpent is an appeal to pride and the lack of comon sense: You are equal to God, and God is frightened of you...

The message of God is 'don't be taken in by appearances'.

Why does God get credit for all we accept about life?

Does he? I credit God for being the Cause of all, but I do not credit God with everything that happens. God is not the cause nor source of evil.

If we are to take the Bible literally as so many insist upon doing, there is a discrepancy here.

Is there?

It seems, rather, that disobedience is the true sin.

Well obviously. what other sin is under discussion?

Yet, what growth has ever occurred by obeying the status quo?

Plenty, that I can think of.

I would suggest man would still be as the animals if he had not disobeyed.

Really? How odd.

I would suggest man would be enlightenened had he obeyed. The disobedience shows a distinct lack of insight, wisdom, common sense ...

No animal has ever disobeyed, cannot.

Hmm ... I wouldn't bet on that. I think the more we learn about animal behaviour, intelligence and cognisance, the less inclined we are to make such absolute statements.

I think I recall an experiment which demonstrated that primates exercise discernment when making optional decisions. They might not be able to work pi to 10 decimal places, but they can certainly work simple odds and chance.

I could not imagine a canine version of Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad.

Now tyou're being silly.

We owe much to that serpent.

Yes, he's the Father of Lies and the source of every ill.

It is rightly a symbol for wisdom in many traditions.

And rightly a symbol of ill in others. The mistake is assuming one hermeneutic fits all.

 

[Thomas]

Actually, I see the genesis story of the fall of man as being a pretty good metaphorical representation of Dependent Origination

Well, well! So do I!

 

[Thomas]

The Bible utterly disagrees with Dependent Origination because God himself is self-created - the creation of God depends the existence of God, and thus we fall into an utterly absurd loop.

I'm afraid the absurdity is yours. You'd do better to check what the doctrine actually says.
God is Uncreate, to use a traditional term, not self-created.

In Dependent Origination, there is no first cause, there are many conditions which arise and interact to create what is the world we experience.

I'm no expert on Buddhism, but I doubt that.

Sin arises through knowledge of sin...

No, sin is not sin because it's a sin.

Sin is fundamentally a moral evil. Evil is defined by St. Thomas (De malo, 2:2) as "a privation of form or order or due measure".

In the physical order, a thing is good, in the first instance, in proportion to its possession of being. God, of course, transcends being, as He does all categories.

Everything possesses (and thereby participates) in being, according first to its own limitations (it is this thing and not that thing), and according to the effects of every other being upon it (for good or ill).

In so far as it is, it is good.

When it has its due proportion of form and order and measure it is, in its own order and degree, good according to itself. Thus, in Genesis, God sees what He has created, and sees that it is good, even though what He sees is finite, ephemeral, relative, copntingent, and so forth.

Evil, on the other hand, it has long been held, is not a mode of being, but an absence of being, a privation of good that is wilful and premeditated. (Something that volitive man cannot quite grasp, so tends to fill this space with imaginings of an evil being.)

Hence it cannot exist in God who is essentially and by nature good, and moreover is perfect, for that which is perfect suffers no privation of its perfection.

Beings, because of its origin from nothing, is subject to the privation of form or order or measure due them, and, through the opposition they encounter, are liable to an increase or decrease of the degree of perfection they have: "for evil, in a large sense, may be described as the sum of opposition, which experience shows to exist in the universe, to the desires and needs of individuals; whence arises, among human beings at least, the suffering in which life abounds" (Ibid).

I believe Anaximander, 600 years before Christ, was saying roughly the same thing:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
As is the order of things;
For they execute the sentence upon one another
– The condemnation for the crime –
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

Lines 4 and 5 might better be phrased:

giving justice and reparation to one another
for their injustice.

According to the nature of the perfection which it limits, evil is metaphysical, physical, or moral. Metaphysical evil is not evil properly so called; it is but the negation of a greater good, or the limitation of finite beings by other finite beings. Physical evil deprives the subject affected by it of some natural good, and is adverse to the well-being of the subject, as pain and suffering. Moral evil is found only in intelligent beings; it deprives them of some moral good.

It is not a natural arising at all, a human child is not concerned about sin ...

Nor is its mental faculties developed enough.

In this process ...

Straw man.

It is created by us, it has nothing to do with nature. The religions have created the problem and then prescribe the medicine, it is disgusting.

Ah, the old cry: It's not my fault! You're being sentimental now.

There are many tribes in Africa that prove it has nothing to do with our nature, in case you want to argue. Many tribes only decorate their body, even bringing more attention to what we call private areas rather than pretending they don't exist.

Are you talking about genitalia?

Er, there's more to sin than sex ...

 

[seattlegal]

Well, well! So do I!

Yay! I'm not the only one!

 

[seattlegal]

In Dependent Origination, there is no first cause, there are many conditions which arise and interact to create what is the world we experience.

I'm no expert on Buddhism, but I doubt that.

Buddhism says that conjecturing on the origin of the world will lead to madness and vexation.
Acintita Sutta: Unconjecturable

To paraphrase modern scientists : Not only is reality stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than can imagine.

 

[Thomas]

Not only is reality stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than can imagine.[/i]

And some!

I get New Scientist weekly, and there is always something jaw-droppingly weird, and it's usually something absolutely fundamental to the evolution of life on this planet ...

I once asked a cosmologist why, with all the frankly bizarre ideas that cosmology comes up with, that the notion of 'God' should seem so unreasonable. His view was that, at the moment, anything goes ...

I, for once, see no reason to find God and cosmological speculation mutually exclusive.

And, of course, is cosmological reality is stranger than we can imagine, then God is exponentially stranger still!

 

[Thomas]

The Original Sin is Man's guilt of being carnivorous and lycanthropic.

Curious therefore that the tradition that came up with the doctrine was not bothered about being carnivorous?

Any where does eating fruit correlate with eating meat, or each other?

We are all descended from ...

I rather think that's retro-fitting a modern outlook upon prehistoric man. I really doubt that man, at the stage of evolution you're talking about, had evolved such a sophisticated conscience, that requires long and intense philosophical reflection.

It was the 'clothes of skin' and the 'aprons of fig-leaves', that produced the nakedness of man, and not the other way round, the urge to cover man's nudity that led to the invention of clothing.

Actually, if we're waxing lyrical, then pre-lapsarian man was more spirit than matter, and the 'clothing' signifies the move from a 'spiritualised body' to a 'embodied spirit' with the concomitant 'hardening of the edges' in nature.

Of course, I'm talking about a 'pre-history' in a speculative sense, when we cannot take time, space or anything else for granted.

(Aside:
There is what some might suppose an 'esoteric teaching' in Christianity to do with this semisolid or permeable state, that says that time, also, was not quite as fixed as it was now ... so the figures, the lifespans, given in Genesis by which creationists date the origin of the earth as some 6k years ago or whatever, might be quite different than they suppose ...)

It is obvious that neither man nor woman could be 'ashamed' (Gen. ii. 25) or 'afraid because they were naked' (Gen. iii. 10 f.)

Quite. Their shame was their fall from spirit into matter, or the 'opening of their eyes' signifies the closing of the inner eye ... hence the apprehension of something they had not seen nor experienced before, 'nakedness', which I would think of more as 'other than' or 'alone' or 'isolated' rather than a "good grief, she can see my willy!" nakedness. But you're right, nakedness was only ever a symptom.

The very feeling of sin, the consciousness of having done something 'im-moral', contrary to the mores, customs or habits of the herd, could not be experienced before a part of the herd had wrenched itself free from the inherited behaviour-pattern...

Actually I think that's wrong. I think there is a form of 'morality' in the animal kingdom.

 

[seattlegal]

Behavior patterns and skills can spread like viruses within populations. I can't recall the exact percentage of a population that scientists have calculated for a skill to become pandemic--spread throughout the entire population--but it is rather small.

Etu Malku's example of "breaking from the herd" is much like quarantine for disease control.

Couldn't the "being naked" part be realizing you are susceptible to the herd mentality, and the "sewing fig leafs into aprons" be the psychological development of "self" or "ego" (individuality) as a sort of shield to the herd mentality? (Dissociation?)

 

[Etu Malku]

Sin arises through knowledge of sin, guilt follows by this knowledge.

It is not a natural arising at all, a human child is not concerned about sin, but the parents go on telling him these things are wrong. In this process, we create a child which is gradually more and more laden with guilt and has to suppress more and more of his nature. Gradually, unchecked, each one is simply filled with shame.

It is created by us, it has nothing to do with nature. The religions have created the problem and then prescribe the medicine, it is disgusting.

There are many tribes in Africa that prove it has nothing to do with our nature, in case you want to argue. Many tribes only decorate their body, even bringing more attention to what we call private areas rather than pretending they don't exist.

I didn't say it has anything to do with nature, I would agree 100% that it is an indoctrinated process.

We Luciferians embrace what other religions consider 'sin'

 

[AdvaitaZen]

You don't see the parallels?

With Ignorance as condition, Mental Formations (karma) arise
With Mental Formations (karma) as condition, Consciousness arises
With Consciousness as condition, Mind (name and form) and Matter (physical elements) arise
With Mind and Matter as condition, Sense Gates arise
With Sense Gates as condition, Contact arises
With Contact as condition, Feeling arises
With Feeling as condition, Craving arises (aversion also--emity between woman and serpent)
With Craving as condition, Clinging arises
With Clinging as condition, Becoming arises
With Becoming as a condition, Birth arises
With Birth as condition, Aging and Dying arise

12Links Of Interdependence

1
Ignorance

is dependent on Karma

Blind man

(11)
2
Karma

is dependent on Consciousness

Potter

(12)
3
Consciousness

is dependent on Name and Form

Monkey climbing

(13)
4
Name and Form Mental (5 aggregates) and Physical (elements) Existence

is dependent on Six Sense Fields

People in a boat

(14)
5
Six Sense Fields
Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, Touch, Mental

is dependent on Contact

House with six windows

(15)
6
Contact (Touch)

is dependent on Feeling

Two embracing

(16)
7
Feeling

is dependent on Craving

Man with an arrow in his eye

(17)
8
Craving

is dependent on Grasping

Man eating

(18)
9
Grasping

is dependent on Becoming

Monkey grasping fruit

(19)
10
Becoming

is dependent on Birth

Pregnant woman

(20)
11
Birth

is dependent on Old age Death

Woman giving birth

(21)
12
Old age Death

is dependent on Ignorance (Back to the beginning--full circle)

Man with sack on his back​

Twelve linked chain of causation = ouroboros
Understand?

(Be sure to go to the link and look at the paintings, and compare the images with what is depicted in Genesis)

Genesis 3 HCSB - The Temptation and the Fall - Now the - Bible Gateway

3 Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. 3 But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’”

4 “No! You will not die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

<...>
14 Then the Lord God said to the serpent:

Because you have done this,
you are cursed more than any livestock
and more than any wild animal.
You will move on your belly
and eat dust all the days of your life.
15 I will put hostility between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed.
He will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.

16 He said to the woman:

I will intensify your labor pains;
you will bear children in anguish.
Your craving will be for your husband,
yet he will rule over you.

17 And He said to Adam, “Because you listened to your wife’s voice and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Do not eat from it’:

The ground is cursed because of you.
You will eat from it by means of painful labor
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow
until you return to the ground,
since you were taken from it.
For you are dust,
and you will return to dust.”​

Look at the process Eve goes through, and compare it to the 12 links.
I can't make you see it. Use your own discernment.

You have wanted to see a link, there is none.

For Buddha, only this moment is real, if you look at what is happening in this moment, you can understand Dependent Origination - it is all there because of the thought "I".

This is ignorance manifest, for truth is annata - no self, no "I".

With this idea of a separate me, we choose this over that, and identification becomes stronger.

As this notion of distinction becomes more and more crystalized, gradually we see it is impermanent.

This brings about fear.

Recall that Buddha only ever talks about ceasing suffering, and all suffering is stemming from the "I" thought.

Concentrate on this "I" thought, find out its validity.

Do not read Buddha like you read the Bible, he is not giving you a history of a people and pretending some man in the sky is guiding man. He is telling you why there is not peace in your heart, why you continue to question existence.

If all you seek is answers, the Bible is good, but there is no freedom, you are always locked to these ideas.

Buddha is showing you how to understand the whole problem.

 

[AdvaitaZen]

I didn't say it has anything to do with nature, I would agree 100% that it is an indoctrinated process.

We Luciferians embrace what other religions consider 'sin'

Sin is any action done unconsciously.

Whenever an action does not come from the heart, whenever it is not an act of love, it is sin. Whether it be love for yourself, love for another, love for the planet - it doesn't matter - it cannot be sin.

Remaining conscious, aware, loving - compassionate - in our actions is what Buddha calls skillful. Any time we lose this awareness, it is unskilful.

Mind always wants to challenge firm rules, you have rebelled in choosing Luciferianism.

Drop the whole dance of Abrahamic nonsense, find your true Nature.

 

[AdvaitaZen]

The only way we can make Dependent Origination relate to Genesis is if we say God is the one with ignorance as a condition.

Then all else has come by his insistence on being distinct, many problems in the world are there all because of his initial ignorance. By creating a rule, it has been broken - by wanting things a certain way, suffering has arisen because they are not that way.

Much can be said from this perspective.

To relate it to Eve is erroneous though, she has only trusted the serpent and acted on her own curiosity. This story has done much to justify sexism, and I find it disgusting that they have tried to explain things away like childbirth pains in this way. It says much about the people who have written the story, what need is there to place blame anywhere else? She is in pain because you have impregnated her, do not make it her fault - much less the fault of some ancient woman that she must suffer for.

It truly makes me sick how much these people seem to go out of their way to make women the scape goat for all that is wrong. She is your opposite, not your enemy. She attracts you because your nature desires to be holistic, not because she is there to tempt you. The whole thing is simply absurd.

Please do not try to relate Buddha to this, Buddha is never talking about the Universe, he is talking about you. Without you, no experiencing can happen, no clinging can happen, no death can be there. Without accepting thoughts as they arise, without being a slave to the mind, what you are is at peace. You are no longer trying to be something, you simply permit life to be, because you are life itself. Without you there to define life, to judge life, there is perfection, paradise. All is as it must be, it is all there to bring you home.

Stop trying to gain knowledge about this, look rather at what is actually happening.

Truth must be here, now, find it out for yourself.

It is what you are.