The Sin of Thinking that The Creation is Good and Evil
And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is
appealing and good for food; the tree of life also in the garden, and the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil. – Genesis 2:9
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying: 'Of every tree of the garden
thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou
shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely
die.' – Genesis 2 : 16-17
Now it fell upon a day, that the sons of God came to present themselves before
the LORD, and Satan came also among them. – Job 2:6
The numerical value of the names Chava (Eve) and I'yov (Job) are one and
the same. Chava is Job. The Book of Job was written to make us understand the
narrative of Chava more deeply. The passages above need to be taken together in
order to understand the error (in Hebrew the word חטא, translated as sin, simply means missing
the mark) of applying the categories good and evil to The Creation.
The word for trees in Hebrew is Etzim. The word for counsel is Etzah and
the word for counsellors is Yo'Etzim. The "trees" in the Garden are
the counsellors in the Mind. They are the various ideas that arise in our mind
that we either entertain or not.
We see that God plants the tree of the knowledge of good and evil among
the other trees in the Garden of Eden. All of the trees (suggestions the mind
may present) are appealing. All of them present themselves for consideration.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not special among the trees. It's
just one of them, just as HaSatan is one among the Sons of God, not especially distinguished
or special among them, just one among them. However, if we assign to him a
place of prominence; he begins to rattle off his ideas in the mind. If we
assign prominence to other, more pleasant and wiser, counsellors in the mind,
they too will begin to present before us many suggestions that we may entertain
and envision and, perhaps, actualize.
If an idea arises in the mind that seems untenable or impractical, we simply
dismiss it and think about it no longer. It's just not a great idea and there
is no reason to spend time and energy entertaining a not very good idea that we
can see from Jump Street isn't going to produce fruit that will be worth the
energy and time of actualization. We
dismiss the idea before it consumes our mind and suggests drafting the Body to
action for actualization. That is the way we should regard the notion that the
entire Creation is either good or evil or that everything in the Creation contains
both good and evil. It's really not a
very good idea and the fruit of such an idea is liable to be unhealthy and
unpleasant. We should dismiss the idea as soon as it arises as a hint of
suggestion and not allow it to begin its narrative that will consume our mind
and emotions.
The eating of the fruit of the suggestion that the entire Creation should be
viewed as a dichotomy of good and evil, because we are now convinced that that
is simply what it is and there is no other way of viewing the Creation, leads
to the pathological thoughts that quickly consume the mind and the heart that
we see in the rest of the chapter of the book of Job. His mind quickly starts
racing with self-destructive ideas and the he must be tested and the like. Who
needs such machinations of the mind? Why should we allow our emotions to be
racked by such considerations? Why should we act on the idea that the entire Creation
is a perpetual battlefield? This way of thinking is not built into reality
until we issue the directive to the Creation to make it so. This awful way of thinking take root if and only if we allow ourselves to view the
entire Creation as a mixture of good and evil that battle one another for
supremacy.
Better to taste of the other, pleasant, trees of counsel that the mind will
begin to suggest to us as soon as we relegate the idea of good and evil to its
right and correct place – just one idea that might arise in the mind and should
be quickly and summarily exist because it's not a great or pleasant idea.
If we allow the concept of good vs. evil or good and evil to take more room in
our minds than other ideas we will surely find ourselves in a reality marked by
the presence of good and bad that are in conflict and we will be perpetually
conflicted – fighting a war between good and evil that need not be fought at
all.
