From Adam to Jesus – The two sides of perfection
When a child is born, is it perfectly free of sin or one more carrier of the primal stain of disobedience to our God and Creator passed on by Adam to his offspring both figuratively and literally?
Affected by his Gnostic background, St Augustin theorized that all men are inherently more evil than good and essentially sinful. This theory, combined with apostle Paul’s teaching, that no good works can offer man paradise by merit alone created a greatly disturbing mixture affecting the position of churches, denominations and predominant theology for centuries.
However, one only needs to observe a newborn baby for a while to see that it cannot partake in any form of evil at the time of its birth. A child has no wicked thoughts. It only requires love, nurturing, and protection. But, then, through a slow, methodical procedure enforced upon it by the unholy system controlling our society, it becomes susceptible to corruption. That happens when, at a very young age, it is traumatized by abusive or neglectful parenting, when its natural needs are being twisted and used by abusive or neglectful adults in the child’s environment.
This pain and trauma can leave a child deeply wounded emotionally and internally scarred for life. If the kingdom of God had been truly established on this earth, children would be revered as God’s true representatives.
Mark 9:37
“Whoever receives one of these little children in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me, receives not Me but Him who sent Me.”
However, in this world, children are often treated as carriers of the sinful burden of our collective inner identity as human beings by the adult members of society and by the system of corruption. We sugarcoat our corruption and pass it on to our children, hiding it behind bunnies with innocent cartoon faces, red saints in slays with flying reindeers, and little wizards and witches. We also bribe them often with sweet treats, soft drinks, and mechanical gadgets.
But that does not change the fact that human nature is corrupted to its core on the level of materialistic values, antagonism, greed, violence, and sickening lustful spectacles. No amount of sugarcoating can make the dramatic reality less real or menacing. This skeleton is a bit too bothersome to stay in the darkness of our mental, spiritual and emotional closet. We need to face this frightening monster in what little time remains.
The following view will perhaps be unacceptable to some readers. Yet, it is perfectly possible and likely if one is positively inclined toward stepping outside of the limitations and restrictions imposed on our collective mind by the prevalent church. This concerns particularly the common believer who often does not invest the time needed to thoroughly examine his beliefs on faith, spirituality, and theology.
We often listen to scientists and pastors debating the validity of the old testament and its credibility as a historical source. It is evident and justifiable that the reader has formed a particular position regarding this subject; however, one needs to keep an open mind and maintain an informed view. He should carefully examine any issue, including his beliefs on things he feels very strongly about, lest he falls prey to misinformation and falsehood. After all, some debaters would stoop down to any level of trickery and sophistry only to win an argument regardless of its foundational validity or credibility.
The view endorsed in this post is that evolution and creation are two opposite yet equally valid views that can coexist if one thinks of Eden as a middle condition between the purely material plane and the spirit realm we tend to refer to as heaven or paradise. In that sense, our forefather Adam represents the collective consciousness of humanity before Adam’s falling out of divine grace and descending to the material realm of flesh and vile instinct.
Hence evolution becomes an acceptable condition regarding the creation of the many bodily vessels the fragmented Adam broke into, thus fathering the race of human beings. Plato, the ancient Greek pillar, no pun intended, of Greek philosophy, conceived a realm of ideas as a condition where every prototype and mental deduction of logic abides. A place of profound truth and ideal prototypes, where the mundane and shadowy world of imperfection and matter emanates from.
This world, in a sense, even though the one having conceived it was an idolater Greek philosopher, maybe paralleled with Eden of Judaic tradition. The ancient philosophers had more tools than barren logic to explain, comprehend and interpret the world of phenomena and the surrounding conditions allowing them to exist. They had enorasis, the ability to transcend the senses and attain wisdom with the inner vision of the mind, ability sadly declinιng all the more often in the western world.
Data and input stacked with rampant, often useless information have replaced the ability of man to envision and connect with higher truths. Truths that, even though often snubbed in the light of modern scientific theories and findings, can produce constructive, fruitful views and assist modern man in the task of making some sense out of this seemingly chaotic and aimless bundle of mostly trivial, unconnected events we call life.
Somehow, the whole course of man in life ideally should have been a passage from the Eden of innocence to the paradise of conscious perfection; a state attained through sincere love and service to others; a state of eternal bliss and fulfillment of a profound loving union with the Father and Creator of all.
The Garden of Eden is more a condition of the mind, soul, and spirit, a state of spiritual unity and closeness of our being to the cosmic Creator within the infinitely abundant warmth of His love than a perceived by the senses physical place, located in the three-dimensional convention of time and space.
As conventional as any form of the common perception of reality might seem, this type of convention, so usual and helpful among material beings, is even more present and necessary among purely immaterial entities. This whole world we live in and usually take for granted is a series of limitations and rules that keep the cosmic game of entities and spirits regulated and balanced whether they carry a material vessel or not. One could say that since Eden is a condition instead of a physical place, Eden was within Adam and not Adam within Eden.
Regarding the troubling question of the cause that led man to his fall from the divine grace, the answer has to do with why any evil exists in the first place on any level of being and existence. Evil can manifest itself in many ways; as spiritual energy, as a repulsive deformity in the overall perfection of the cosmos, as a way of thinking and examining the world, and, lastly, as vice, temptation of the flesh and vile instinct. Thus it can lead man astray, forcing him to pollute his bodily vessel, robbing him of any sense of purity and loving connection to any other person. It can actually sever the bond even with the cosmos as a whole. How can indeed any theologian or layman explain the coexistence of both attributes in the Supreme Being of beings, God’s knowledge of all things with God’s unblemished goodness, having experienced at first hand the presence of evil especially alarming in this century of
rampantly advancing technology?
Even though this question has been dealt with in a previous essay, an alternative view wholly aligned with the last one will be examined in this post for reasons of clarity.
God created the world according to His infinite perfection; therefore, the world was a perfectly pure state of being filled with beauty, truth, and goodness, in sort an expression of the love emanating from the Father as does light from the brilliant life-giving warmth of the material sun making life on this small planet possible and abundant. However, even in a perfect world, there are attributes and elements in our being that may complement or contradict one another. As they say, too much of a good thing can become unpleasant. If balance and proper measure are not preserved within the cosmos, wonderful and valuable attributes within the creation nullify one another, leading to a chasm, a shadowy, abysmal void within the creation of the Monad, the divine consciousness above and beyond anything limited human beings can perceive, comprehend or imagine.
Let’s use an analogy to make things simple. In the natural world, water and fire coexist and are both extremely useful and invaluable for life. Yet, when they come in close contact without man’s guidance, if the fire is too intense, the water will change form; if the water is too plentiful, the fire will be extinguished, as the flame of a candle left in the rain.
If this is a generally accepted truth regarding the physical world, how much more so it would be for the world of spirits if one keeps in mind the fact that the spiritual world is the fundamental plane of existence and that the world of flesh and matter is only a reflection of this highest realm of Godly Glory.
God had given to the archangel that later became the prince of lies the ability to experience joyful admiration for God’s infinite might and glory. He had also given him freedom to regulate this admiration according to the best interest of all creation and his fellow angels. God, our Lord and Creator, doesn’t need the admiration of lesser beings, yet He offers them the ability to glorify, pray and feel genuine humility and awe before His Might and Wisdom to bring them closer to Him.
Every time we revere and express our Love for God with genuine humility, we become elevated spiritually, hence closer to His unparalleled Infinite perfection, above and beyond all infinities.
One of the most severe sources of wickedness on this earth is arrogance, the main culprit for the falling out of grace of both angels and men. When we allow arrogance to infiltrate our being, we become more prone to indulge in destructive towards others and self-destructive behaviors.
A word a bit overused recently is narcissism, yet it targets the root of the problem.
Envy and arrogance are indeed attributes so wicked in nature that they’ve led to the fall of the greatest and most loved among the archangels. The same sin led later to man’s fall from
Eden.
We build a complex, omnivorous Ego to protect our essence, and gradually it becomes
a prison for the child in us. After all, medieval lords built motes and great castles to withstand the attacks of the enemies’ catapults. Yet, those same castles became tombs for them in case of siege and led them to suffer a horrific death by starvation, sickness, and pestilence.
In essence, the human Ego works the same way. It is formed by trauma of some form or the other, forcing us to seek refuge, away from our spiritual essence, towards the world of matter. We misplace the center of our being from its most profound base in the nucleic world of the eternal present of our essence, all the more towards outer locations such as spirit connected to energy, soul connected to emotion and aesthetic, mind connected to thought and truth and body connected to survival and pleasure related with the five senses.
This three-dimensional plane that we consider the one true reality is not where the first Eden was located. It is rather the hospital for our sick consciousness and psyche, a place similar to Eden but alas deprived of the comforting closeness we had in Eden with the Being of beings and Lord of Hosts. It is even more so for those of us that have severed the bond with the divine essence within and have, consequently, gradually fallen into slavery and servitude to the flesh, the body, and through it to the material existential void.
Trauma serves only to create a barrier in our memory to discourage us from being reunited with the wholeness of our being to our pure entity. Our essence faces many forms of trauma when it descends from the heights of existence to the hostile level of what we call matter.
They range from purely spiritual attacks of dark energies and emotional and aesthetic attacks to our sense of beauty, mental assaults of absurdity, instability, and madness, distorting our sense of reality and hindering our path to the discovery of the highest truth of our cosmos, to the blatant abuse and/or neglect of the physical vessel we call body.
When humans reach a point in their life where they can consider nothing other pleasurable but the satisfaction of their most vile instinctive and animalistic side, in short, the pleasant instinctive experiences of the senses, deprived entirely even from the acknowledgment that anything high, pure, deep or immaterial can even exist and when all that remains of the being they once were is a hungry, fleshy beast seeking more and more vulgarity, lustful vice and unwholesome habits to feel alive, they can be sure that they are in existential trouble.
Death is not an end but an awakening, and in this case, that awakening will be a time to face the truth about the life we have lived. It’s our essence that will judge and possibly condemn us because we have lost the way to our inner child and consequently to our true purpose, the reason we were given flesh, to begin with.
We tend to treat the life we live as a playground of pleasure, yet this is somewhat misleading. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the pleasant, humorous, childlike pleasures of this world. Yet, some experiences can lead us astray in many ways, tempting us with quick bliss to distract us inadvertently from our most profound purpose in this world.
As the title of this post implies, the journey of a man in this world is a dangerous one full of hardship and trials from the innocence of Adam and from being as children regarding our inner structure to the level of willing obedience to God and conscious purity following the example of Christ.
That means that our ultimate goal during our earthly life should be to direct our efforts towards becoming the likeness of God by following the narrow way as Christ revealed it through His infinitely wise teaching and the great deed of self-sacrifice, offering us His eternal example to follow, an exemplary life of truth and unimaginably great service to all of humanity.
Our existential journey should have been from the beginning an inner transformation from the innocent Adams we were in our childhood, in the pure inner world of a peaceful Eden, into parts of the body of Christ, willingly obedient to our Heavenly Father enjoying the fulfillment of paradise.
In essence, to evolve from living images of our Lord to willing godly children bearing voluntarily and consciously His Likeness of perfection and wisdom. However, as we all know, very few find this path, and even fewer have the inner strength to withstand all the trials and temptations till the death of their biological vessel.
To sum things up, it is image to likeness, innocence to fulfillment, Adam to Jesus the essence of our inner spiritual journey on this earth. It is utterly impossible to be born in this world as a human being with a biological body and avoid being tempted by evil of one form or another.
It is equally impossible to grow up even in the most normal families with the most normal parents – if such a condition exists – without being burdened by a significant amount of trauma. Having lost to some extent the inner light, the parents fail to appreciate the heavenly gift given to them hidden deep in their crying infant.
This baby is a little savior coming to assist and bless its parents with the gift of divine light and true life. It comes to remind them of the power we have to rediscover the one eternal moment containing all eternity, a new birth of spirit that can offer us a new view of this whole plane of existence.
The child lives in a moment within, a spark in it able to ignite the whole planet and lead it to be engulfed by the warmth of God’s tender love. Eden was a garden of variety and brilliant color. Yet we’ve lost the sense of how precious color and variety are, playful, ecstatic joy and beauty in a state of innocence, in the loving embrace of God, in the Father’s immense acceptance and love.
Christ offered with his teaching a way for man to reclaim this beauty by opening the narrow path leading to the blissful eternity of the one true being, the Father of all other beings from the most humble of beasts to the wisest and most perfect archangel in the service of God.
It’s through our inner child that this paradise is offered to us. If we cannot live peacefully in this world, with love or at least tolerance for our fellow human beings, if we have drained this planet with our selfishness and greed, by what right can we claim the new world our Lord has to offer?
Through purity and enjoyment of the simple yet beautiful things of this limited plane of existence, things we often take for granted, our God can and will reveal Himself to us. We need to be reacquainted with our forgotten love for truth, beauty, and justice.
A child lives for the joy of exploration, searching for knowledge and truth, the playful world of imagination. Injustice and lies are the awful ungodly lessons of this world. Every new birth signifies the coming of one more messenger carrying Our Lord’s message of love to us.
Let’s not close our heart’s door to this little messenger. In our own best interest, it is to be reborn in essence, turn with humility and gratitude to our maker and ask him to take the burden of fear, guilt, and wickedness from our shoulders and guide our steps towards the true light. Light is energy, filled with colors. He can open our blind eyes and remind our soul of its place of origin.
So let’s treat children with love and respect. They may be the last chance this world has for salvation. Thank you, and God bless.
Daphne Yakinthou 