Richard Lloyd Jones: Welcome to Episode 7 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. I was struck in re-listening to our last episode that perhaps some more explanation of the story of man might be necessary. I also realized the challenge today of biblical references. Religious life has often been equated with fanaticism, and that conjures up images of cults and Kool-Aid and suicide vests, doesn't it.
But let's be careful not to fall into that dismissive mindset too quickly. Because, after all, the story of man. Yeah, these are rich waters to navigate. Great minds have considered these questions of religion and belief and man's place in the cosmos. And simply brushing off these considerations as simplistic, superstitious, and obsolete would be a little hasty, I think.
Evidence of what Viktor Frankl called contemporary nihilism. In his great book, Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl writes, quote, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development, inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing, end of quote. And one of the traditions we are collectively leaving far behind in the rear view mirror is the story of the fall of man, a story which is present in most, if not all, of the cultural traditions on our planet.
There has to be something there. In fact, I propose that our greatest human documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Rights of Man, the constitutions of many countries, are actually reflections of this memory of a time in paradise, when we lived in harmony with nature and God, when we fulfilled our purpose in the creation.
We remember these universal principles, these fingerprints of God in the human soul, as Keppe calls them, and they are called forth from deep inside in moments of inspiration, like revelations. So let's not shy away because of prejudices or dismissals of our religious traditions. Let's continue in our exploration of this spiritual life. As Jung inscribed over the door of his house, whether summoned or not, God will be present.
So for this episode, an excerpt from an interview I did for our podcast, Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, with Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco about the fall of man and what this story is really about. How can we understand these figures of Adam and Eve? If we read the Bible Genesis, it talks about Adam being created and then Eve being created as a companion to people, but I don't know, I've always wondered about this.
Is it representative of a group of people? Is this a literal, a figurative thing? And what's the relevance of this for
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: us today? Man and woman, they are like a cell of creation. There is a need of the psychoenergetic and genetics of a man and a woman to create another being. So man and woman, psychogenetically speaking, they complete each other to create and to multiplicate.
And if we would be in the way God created us in the beginning, we would represent and complementary energies to form a society. So
Richard: in this sense, then, we can think that Adam and Eve represented the complete aspect of the human being.
Cláudia: Yes, and humanity and society.
Richard: Not two individual people, necessarily.
Cláudia: Not necessarily, because would God have created just a couple? Well, if he created so many planets and suns and stars, so he could have created altogether a humanity and a society, as he created thousands of angels, so he could have created thousands of men and women.
And some of them started to follow an inverted, an upside-down kind of behavior that in religion would be the original sin and the fall.
Richard: So if we picture Adam and Eve or the human being, the complete human being, male and female parts, they're in the garden, they're in paradise. Yeah,
Cláudia: so we imagine a garden, but imagine a super, super developed civilization. Civilization.
Right. That's how we figure out how paradise should be. Right. And can become again.
Richard: Which in fact is, except we reject it all the
Cláudia: time, right? Yeah, we destroyed, we fell, so we could recover a lot of this paradise. You know,
Richard: what's interesting here on earth is that every religious and cultural tradition has stories of this time, of this golden age. And so there they are, there we were, imperfection, and then this desire to know more, you know, Lucifer's temptation that they will know more, that they will be like God, that they will know good and evil.
Why would they follow this temptation? Things were perfect. Things were beautiful. How can we understand that, Cláudia? That's a big
Cláudia: mystery, isn't it? Yes, especially because when people think about the first human beings they think about a man and a woman in the age of stone. They follow Darwin's ideas that we came from monkeys. But there are other thinkers in another way of thinking, especially Keppe, that sees more humanity as coming from a highly developed society living in freedom, in love, total freedom, goodness, beauty and truth,
Richard: and also peace and realization like accomplishment, not just like living in the garden and walking around barefoot, but like doing things, right?
I
Cláudia: mean, creating things. Yeah, very active. We were not being limited by time and space. We would have capacity to live in transcendence.
We would see God and speak to God as if He was here at our side, and He is, but we don't see Him anymore. So at that time we saw him, we talked to him, we lived with him, unimaginable.
Richard: Our bodies would have been different?
Cláudia: Yeah, more ethereal, body different.
Richard: More light, more
Cláudia: higher vibration, not so dense. We wouldn't have suffered. No suffering,
Richard: no pain, no death, no disease.
Cláudia: Look at that. Look at that. But then we were, we had this notion and of course god didn't have to tell us in the way they say in the bible you should not do this you should not do that. This is a very metaphoric way of speaking. But we had the knowledge, infused knowledge of what was really good, beautiful and truthful. But we got some kind of inspiration from some decayed angels that were very, very highly intelligent.
They seduced, they persuade human beings that they were like limited, living only in truth, beauty, and goodness.
Only in truth. Look at that. You guys only have truth,
Cláudia: beauty, and goodness in a developed society here. What are you doing? So if you would do evil or be evil, then you would know more. You would know what is good, beautiful, and truthful, and you would know also what is evil and take the pleasure of evil. And you would have the power of gods.
So the big lie that the serpent or this clever spirit did was that God was made of two essential sides. One evil and one good. And that we should not only be good. We should be like gods. Having the good side and the bad side. So we would be wise as God. Or even wiser than God. So this was a big lie because God is only truth, beauty, and goodness.
And this bad guy, this evil, is Lucifer and his followers. So we fell in this lie. And we believed that if we would accept this duality, we would be above God or we would be wiser than God.
And this was a big, big lie. That's why, according to the Bible, we have another chance. We have fallen to a lower state, a more dense state, which is time and space. But we still have a chance that following the revelation of a higher level, of higher spirits, which is God, and some angels, and some theological, even spiritual revelation, which are things that we could not get through our own intellect.
We could not understand. We could not get to it. We lost our infused knowledge. So revelation is needed to clarify what is really real, what is reality, what is the truth, because we lost that.
Richard: I think this sense of loss is closer to the surface than we think, you know. And it manifests in various subtle ways, like when we look back regretfully at an opportunity ungrasped or ruined.
When we reel in horror at some example of massive injustice in the world, when we deal with our mortality.
Any of those moments are memorable. Theories that cause reflection about loss or insufficiency are ripples of this larger psychogenetic memory of the time way back when, when man and woman fell from their rightful place in a created reality and decided to forge out on their own in response to some nefarious influence and their own exaggerated sense of importance. And in navigating out beyond the straight and narrow, we got lost.
Dante understood that. He wrote, "When I had journeyed half of our life's way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray." Dante talked about abandoning the true path. It seems to be exactly that for humanity even today. And as Cláudia said, we need help to return. Can't go it alone. But this influence we received and continue to receive to stray, what's up with that?
That needs some consideration, doesn't it? And that's coming up in Episode 8.
