Partaking of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil--the fruit being conditioned patterns (karma) of attachment to what we perceive as good and aversion to what we see as evil.
I see what you're saying here, SG, but is this what the symbolism of the Garden of Eden Myth actually indicates?
Fruit, I would think, is really the only part of the tree that we can usually ingest ... be it an apple tree, orange tree, pear tree, etc. Buddha only had to
sit under the Bodhi tree to gain enlightenment, and the Yggdrasil or
Tree of the Sephiroth seem to have a symbolism unto themselves ... but to tie in the Tree of EDEN I think it is the eating of the fruit which symbolizes our original
descent into the worlds of form, or generation.
The misinterpretation of that story may be the very notion that
we should never have done this to begin with. Esoterically, the warning
not to taste the fruit conceals a portion of humanity's early history, but this has more to do with a time when the current relationship between
Spirit, Soul and body was still
literally being "worked out."
Without a descent into
incarnation, literally the
taking on of meat by our Heavenly Self of
Soul, how could we possibly come to experience this portion of God's creation? To suggest that we
didn't need to incarnate here to begin with is to imply that we were
already perfect, and though created with the
Divine Spark (or Spirit) ... even the Soul is Itself evolving.
Our own Soul, when understood as the conditionally immortal portion of ourself
awaiting our return to the Heavenly "Estate," is pure and holy, yet until we have learned sufficiently and
fulfilled our sacred DUTY here within the lower worlds, we hardly have a right to
enter the Temple not made with human hands ... and be with God in the higher realms. We have a purpose for being on this planet, and
storing up treasure in heaven might be a summary of that --
if we understand the symbolism of that phrase.
There is much about the worlds of form that does serve as
fruit in the sense that, once having tasted life in these worlds, we want to return
again and again and again ... but unlike the Energizer bunny, I think we might have lost the
note (or chord) of the Drummer we were supposed to be following. This is
samsara because Earth is a non-sacred planet,
not considered -- not quite yet -- as one of the
`Seven Spirits before the Throne of God.' That condition may be changing, yet until one human being can recognize and honor the incarnate Divinity within another human being, rather than kill him and take his oil, or kill him and somehow feel that something useful has been accomplished ... I'd say we have a bit of a ways to go.
Anyway, there's my 2 cents. We suffer unnecessarily at this point in our evolution, but there is help from the Buddhas, Christs and Nirmanakayas down to the humblest disciples and deva-lives ... to try and speed us along the way through this crisis in our planet's progress. Even a few hundred years into the future, suffering will not be removed just because we (might) survive the current crisis, but the removal of
unnecessary suffering would result in an utterly transformed world, entirely.
It is the taking of a great Initiation ... the birth of something Universal,
Whom and which "loves pure Light," yet which we often simply cannot resist naming, or fighting about -- THUS leading,
to so, so much unnecessary human suffering.
