God

SECTION 1

   God created earth from a formless wasteland. Then, he created light and decided to separate it with dark to make day and night. After that, he formed the sky and then from the water came land. From land came plants, then living creatures, and finally man in his image. The heavens and the earth came into full fruition on the seventh day, which became the day of rest.

   He placed the man in the Garden of Eden, so he could tend to it. This man was Adam. Adam had a very plain order that he could eat from any tree except for the Tree of Knowledge because he would die if he did so. The Lord had trouble finding a companion for Adam, thus, he put him to sleep and made woman out of his flesh.

   When the woman was wandering in the garden, a serpent tempted her to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, saying that she would not die but gain understanding of good and bad. She believed him, took the fruit and gave some to Adam. Both of them ate it.

   The Lord came looking for them, and he knew what they had done since they were naked in front of him. Because of this, he cursed man and deemed woman to have painful child births. He called the woman Eve because she was the mother of all living. Now that God knew man could differentiate good and bad, he banished them from the garden and guarded the tree of life. Man had the fate of death due to this.

   This is the section of the Old Testament that has led to the most strife amongst us. I have seen a few camps emerge from this. First of all, there are the literalists, then the rejectors, and last of all the very confused. Basically, people claim to have a definitive answer like the first two camps or are completely baffled, not knowing what to make of it. I personally have sympathized with the last camp all my life. I would say I am still there in some regard, but have found some insightful perspectives and have come up with some of my own thoughts.

   To begin, I have found that Genesis 1 to 3 does not have to clash with science like many say. Some might say absolutely not, because the world was not created in seven days. However, I do see some reconciliation.

   God is outside of the human conception of time. And guess who wrote the Bible. The Bible is man making sense out of the divine. God transcends the reality we perceive, so is the timing a detail to take literally.

   Plus, it was the Catholic Church that started putting the work together, and they made some alterations. Authority figures were all over it. They did not author it, but they changed the way many started to see the Bible. It was through one rigid lens. Protestant or not, I am sure you have been influenced by the Catholic Church. Once the realization comes to who you are listening to, your view might change.

   Once you see that your view is some curated version from an authority figure, whether a pastor, priest, etc, you might want to be a tad bit skeptical. They are only translators of the word, not detached from the human body to the cosmic like we see it. In the world of humans, it is ego versus ego.

   Despite that, do not think this means the Bible needs to be a rejected text because the authors were divinely inspired in some way by certain humans. Genesis was put together over centuries. Moses did have an influence, however, it was not just him. He had revelations he talked about that got recorded about creation and divine law. Genesis still got written by other people though. Not Moses.

   With this being the case, I believe it is important to take centrality out of the Bible instead of insisting that this is exactly how God did it all, Genesis or other books.

   Going back to science and God being outside of the human conception of time, the order of creation does have some parallels with scientific discovery. We have found that the universe was created in formlessness to some extent. There was a hot point, this cosmic microwave of particles, that gave rise to the universe as we know it. This was 13.8 billion years ago. Yes, we were made from a formless void.

   Earth was made orbiting around the sun, creating day and night. This was next in Genesis. Billions of years later, hydrogen and oxygen came together to make water eventually leading to the sea. Continents surrounded the water. I wonder what order that is roughly in from what book.

   Guess what happened in the sea once conditions became stable. Guess what proceeded from that single celled organism. Life. I wonder what creature life eventually led to. Man.

   The parallels between Genesis and science are there. What is different is the language used to portray events as well as the lens they were under. The Bible says it was seven days, but was it seven days in our scope of reality?

   Also, man was technically created from dust if you think about it. The Bible was most likely talking about earth when it said this, and that is exactly where we came from. Dust is a part of earth. Living things evolved from the particles of the universe, and there came humankind.

   This is being written taking into consideration evolution. There is clear evidence we evolved, and we cannot erase fossils or what our genomes tell us. Then the question comes up of whether Adam and Eve were real. What can be said about what transpired amongst the first humans.

SECTION 2

   After asking whether Adam and Eve were real, there is so much more to uncover. Traditional Christianity says that Adam and Eve taking the fruit from the serpent is how sin abounded. If they had never eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, mankind would have stayed in God’s eye and would not have become corrupt. This is because they knew what constituted good and bad instead of being only in God’s realm. I’m sure many people are familiar with this view.

   If you want this perspective to be torn into shreds, look no further than Gnosticism.For those not acquainted, Gnosticism is an ancient religious movement that claims salvation comes from knowing the secrets of the divine within yourself instead of looking at how God is portrayed in the Bible. Gnosticism is not to be taken literally, and its writings encourage us to find psychic arcs of ourselves. What is about to be said is believed to be a representation of the human condition, not actual events that occurred.

   Going back to the beginning of creation, Gnostics also claim that there was only God, like Genesis. There is a massive twist though. From God, which they also called Monad and other names, came aeons. These aeons multiplied by creating more of each other in pairs until there were 365 of them. God and the aeons constituted a realm called the pleroma, and everything outside was referred to as keno.

   Because there were an odd number of aeons, somebody did not have a pair. Sophia was the one. She had a child without another aeon, leading to the emergence of an evil aeon, Yaldaboath, also known as the demiurge. Once this transpired, Sophia realized she fucked up and tried to hide this aeon. This did absolutely nothing to help, because Yaldaboath proceeded to make his own children.

   He made a fake pleroma with arbitrary rules that created the universe, our material world. Sophia could not escape accountability anymore, so she repented to God for her terrible mistake. After this, she entered our world attempting to fix what she did.

   In this world, Yaldaboath made Adam and Eve for his own creations to come alight. Humans to Yaldaboath are like aeons to God. The Garden of Eden was their prison. To help the humans, Sophia turned into the serpent and spoke to Eve about eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

   Adam and Eve ate the fruit, which revealed the truth about Yaldaboath imprisoning them in the garden. They escaped, and the rest of Genesis is essentially a war between the power holds of God’s real pleroma versus Yaldaboath’s.

   According to the Gnostics, our world was not formed by a perfect God but by a malevolent force. Earth is our prison, and our way to make it to the pleroma is to develop knowledge from within ourselves so we transcend the material.

   The goody two shoes in Sunday school would be livid if they heard this perspective. Anyways, the Bible says that we are God’s creation, while Gnostic texts distort the original message. They did not do this willy nilly, because they genuinely thought the authors of the Bible had it all wrong about humankind. As a result, they pieced together that narrative to help fill in blanks they thought the Biblical prophets had missed by representing later revelations. This happened after the death of Christ. This was not alongside the timing of the Old Testament.

   Their writings became known as the apocryphal gospels. Gnostics claim that these never became known due to church authority that had taken over, and that authority gave everyone their interpretation of the Bible. Thus, the basis of Christianity was formed not by Jesus, but by other human authority.

   If you think about it, what has influenced you to view the Bible in the way you do. Was it you reading it alone and speculating about the meaning yourself, or did you already have a predisposed lens.

   Even if some of the Gnostic paradigms appear nonsensical, what they can do is encourage you to think critically about the meaning behind Biblical narratives. There is so much connotation we get before approaching the texts ourselves.

   Despite all of that, Gnosticism should not be blindly accepted by its proponents either. The other day when I was taking in the Gnostic view on creation, I could not help but think that they got themselves into a bit of mud.

   They espouse that the bestiality we display as humans must be because we are trapped in a limited space. The divine presence of God and sensing that is what gives us freedom. The gap between us and God got even more expansive than traditionalist positions made it out to be.

   We were not even created from a God but from something evil, so we are inherently evil. Because we are ungodly, we must not be from God himself but from another entity. Yaldaboath traced back leads to God because the aeons came from him. However, Gnostics think that we were not even in the plan of God in the first place.

   When I look at this, I wonder why in the world we had to get so dualistic with our conceptions. There is us and then something up in the heavens or the pleroma. Gnosticism is still very limiting.

   I think them diverging so much from the original Biblical prophets has made a mess in and of itself, because what they are doing does not defend their position that humans were not made in the image of God at all. The Bible still says that humans are sinful and created by God at the same time. God’s humans are imperfect. It is made clear that we still come from God.

   Gnosticism twisted that and said that must mean we are in an entirely different space. Remember, we as humans have the ability to make choices, and God did that to our brains. If God did that, what makes us inherently come from an evil force?

   Why is it like there is us and then this portal to God? What if we are living inside the portal itself?Gnosticism, just like fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, makes it seem like we are so alienated. They are doing the same thing, but in a different way. The dualistic worldview is the impetus.

SECTION 3

   With that said, this has not only led to an us versus that isolation but also psychic incongruence as well. Because all these texts were written by humans, of course they were influenced by our psyches. Human conception has been a war of archetypes. That thought is also shared by Nietzsche, who had a bit of a different taste than I do. Regardless, he is still extremely relevant.

   Nietzsche believes that human conception is the result of historical, psychological, and biological constituents combined. It is not a divine God from overhead giving us these conceptions, but rather a result of our natural dispositions. Looking at it this way, our spirituality is essentially the product of our minds. Does that automatically mean everything we produce in that realm should be discarded. I say absolutely not. However, understanding why we have come to certain conclusions could give us a taste of why we have become what we have.

   Circling back to what Nietzsche said, that is exactly why he hates metaphysics. He claims that metaphysics is only a reconciliation of our instincts, not something profound outside of us. Essentially, he believes that we have curated false opinions for our survival. Instinct in this context is not strictly biological in the way we have been conditioned to think. This has much to do with psychological and moral drives that have been placed outside of biology as well.

   It is demonstrated that he meant this because he said that Greek philosophy is responsible for Christian moral superiority. Socrates and Plato set the stage for this with their devaluation of the sensual in favor of an eternal idea. According to Nietzsche, this was the birth of a whole line of philosophers being disillusioned by the will to truth. The will to truth is what got established so early on. There is something sacred beyond ourselves, so we must discover it.

   That assumption has become the backbone of metaphysics, which has stunted any real original speculation. Even if ideas seem different on the surface, they always come back to things like Platonism. Along with that, Christian moral superiority comes from thinking you are doing the best by adhering to a divine entity. In return, ethics have been centered around Christian ideals, whether this is directly known or not.

   Thus, everything is diluted by our preconceptions, and our instincts lead to the becoming of these ideas. It is all us.Now, how does something that appears so separate from these beliefs, such as our instincts, have anything to do with this. Are not these belief systems trying to move past our animalism? Nietzsche said the exact opposite is the case.

   He believes our constructs such as moral, philosophical, religious, and others exist because we as humans are inclined toward dealing with power struggles. These things have been weaponized so society can function. Moral impurity is said to be the basis of legal punishment. However, there is more behind that. Claiming moral impurity as the reason justifies keeping the masses in check.

   Guess where this morality came from. The Greeks and eventually Christianity.Our instinct is to control nature so we can survive. We cannot just be subservient and die by saying I just hope I will live. As a result, these constructs come in handy when making this work. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche gave Stoicism and Puritanism as prime examples of this happening. Stoicism creates an agenda for how to interact with nature. This is just more control. Puritanism wants to control every move you make, including going to the bathroom.

   In a broader sense, Nietzsche went into the war of the nobility versus the common man. To him, it all comes down to the nobility not being afraid to prize virtue, while everyone else says this is selfish and immoral. Ironically, this is what has kept society afloat.

   The class war, whether it be the nobility or in modern times the mansion livers, has shaped society. If the higher ups collapsed, society would not have any foundation, since we have been built upon virtue coming from instinct. Then the masses would not have anything to keep them together. They would not be able to dilute the virtue of the nobility into impurity.

   The exalting of the self is the result of this. Look at me, I am fighting for morality. I am so selfless, thinking beyond myself. Nietzsche says no. You are using that guise to hide your inherent selfishness. The nobility is simply not afraid of this selfish virtue, so they used the tactic of moral cleanliness to keep everyone else in line.

   This lie that society is built upon is the very thing that keeps it afloat. Nietzsche was disgusted by this.Again, this is a representation of how the weaponization of the self in reality into something putrid being compared to the divine comes into play. One huge power struggle, because it is human instinct to have this. Without it, our societies would cease to exist.

   This is why Nietzsche advocates for rising above the plebeians that get caught up in all of this. He wants us to regain our power instead of resigning it to some ancient moralism tied up in worshipping something senseless. This is the center of his philosophy.

   The line is drawn there, however. Nietzsche did not phrase this how I am about to, but he implies that getting rid of our contradictory opposites, this dualism we have embodied, means destroying what spirituality has been built upon for personal freedom. Banishing the soul fantasy we have created will free the actual power of the self so we are not stuck in a lie anymore.

SECTION 4

   After all of that, are we stuck in a total lie? I say yes and no. I think the way we as people are introduced to fields such as philosophy, religion, and morality has been weaponized against us. At the root of it, we have let these constructs dictate how we go about life. I would like to analyze the many common backgrounds of what makes people develop certain thought patterns and the roots of those.

   In a way, this greatly affirms Nietzsche. However, there is always more to what I am saying than just him. The first thing that comes to mind is Christianity, simply because it makes up such a large portion of the population. Regardless of denomination, the central belief is that Christ is the savior who was brought down to save us from sin.

   The reason for Jesus is that what happened all the way back in Genesis took us so far away from God’s image that something had to come down and redeem us. Nietzsche claims that the impetus for this comes from Platonic thought. This was the moment when fascination with an eternal idea that precedes physical reality was fully birthed.

   Before this, there were conceptions of spirits and beings that were not clearly seen by the eye, but they were entangled with the natural world. I am not saying Plato invented this idea, but I am saying that he was the first to solidify it so intricately. He made a clear distinction between the eternal and us, whereas spiritualities before him had the divine and the human entangled.

   Animism is an example of this. It claims that inanimate objects in the natural world have beings tied behind them. This is the earliest reported framework of spirituality. Animism did not randomly appear one day. It took the collective evolution of our minds to articulate abstractions of nature that no other species has produced.

   Later, whole mythologies formed around this entanglement in civilizations such as the Indus Valley and Indo Iranian peoples. There were mythological realms, but they were still pushed into our domain through ritual, practice, and presence. An unreachable heaven preceding us had not been birthed yet.

   Plato created a framework that made us unable to access the divine so clearly. There could be hints, but not direct contact. Going back to Genesis, this assumption is still present. We still sprouted from an eternal source we cannot directly access. The Garden of Eden was not in heaven. In that story, we simply dirtied God’s image. That twist is what set everything after on fire.

   This made the Bible center around the war to find God. That war has been heavily modified by the Church. It is their interpretation that Christians run to. Protestants are not innocent here either. Catholicism laid the groundwork. Without it, Protestantism would not even have a Bible to react against.

   Christianity does not exist in isolation. It cannot escape our religious evolution. That is what Nietzsche was pointing at. Much of Christian belief is more polished than earlier constructs. That is why he is so critical of its claimed originality. Christianity would largely not exist without Platonic assumptions.

   Most people who ascribe to Christianity have not dug into that assumption at all. They do not even see it as an assumption. That is where the first roadblock occurs.

   Here is the ironic thing about Nietzsche. He did not uncover everything in the trench. There is something much deeper called Zoroastrianism. The funny thing is that he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra but only used Zarathustra as a symbolic bouncing board instead of getting into the meat of the religion itself.

   Zoroastrianism is an Indo Iranian spiritual tradition that laid the first major foundation for moral dualism in human history. Good versus evil. This makes Nietzsche look shortsighted for not engaging with it more directly. Zoroastrianism radically altered our religious trajectory.

   It says we have free will to choose whether we align with the creator of good who embodies truth or the destructive spirit who embodies lie. Ultimately, good will triumph. Even though this is not a Platonic eternal world, since it predates Plato by centuries, it still had a massive influence on Christianity.

   The Greeks adopted moral dualism. Plato refined it. Christianity amplified it. Whether Christian or not, many people around the world still operate under values that parallel Zoroastrianism in a polished Christian form. Whole philosophies and worldviews were built on this foundation.

   I was planning on giving other examples besides Christianity. However, they would run into the same timeline and the same impetuses. Christianity is simply the most obvious springboard for me because I was raised Catholic and I am surrounded by Southern Baptists in my everyday life.

   If I spoke about Islam or other major religions, I would still be circling the same origin points. Much of our thinking is built on assumptions we do not even recognize as assumptions. Many of us see these frameworks as truth rather than constructs.

   This does not mean all of our conceptions are bogus. We do not know the ultimate origin of the universe. Acknowledging that does not erase meaning. What I am trying to do is cut through barriers we are not even aware we have. I am a proponent of true originality. Recycling old constructs endlessly is not evolution. Evolution is lighting new fires using new material, not reheating ash.

   Now comes a question I see often. I have discussed origins but not placed value judgments on them the way Nietzsche did. Do I feel utter disgust toward these belief systems? No. I do not accept Nietzsche’s separation between higher and lower people. Ironically, Nietzsche participated in the very power struggle he wanted to escape. I agree with him that power struggles have dominated human history. I reject his solution of further severance.

   The desire to rise above others is the same impulse that creates the nobility versus peasant divide. Nietzsche’s superman still lives inside that conflict. That does not free us. It perpetuates the psychic disturbance.

   I believe many of our issues stem from this desire for separation disguised as community. We form groups by exclusion. We call it belonging. I think that very thing needs to be scrapped if we want genuine connectedness.

   This may sound convoluted at first, but stay with me. Coming together based on commonality is not bad in principle. It can be enriching. Problems arise when the only thing emphasized is what brought people together in the first place. Everything else gets ignored. That creates stagnation. Psyches dry up.

   Humans are not one dimensional beings. Our minds have many layers that want activation from different stimuli. Having favorite modes of being does not mean other modes should be abandoned.

   Another way to picture this is to imagine the psyche as fruit. When one area rots, everything else eventually follows. Cleaning one favored area over and over does not save the whole. Every area must be tended enough to stay intact.

   Integration does not require equal attention to all parts. It requires awareness that the parts exist and relate. Separation is cutting off disfavored slices and pretending the rest is whole.I have seen this pattern repeat throughout humanity. When I walk through public spaces, I see miserable people. Some look dismal. Others hide misery behind gregarious masks. Many believe they are hopeless when they are simply fragmented.

   I was deeply fragmented for most of my life. I still am in some ways. Recently, I have experienced psychic ruptures that have helped me see what my mind has been deprived of. Humans have built illusions of unity that actually deepen separation.

   Why does it have to be me versus him? Why my way versus your way. Why not mutual feeding of operating systems. We thrive on interaction. Suppressing that leads to collapse. We are parts of one interconnected machine.

Now we finally arrive at Carl Jung.

   Jung saw the universe as pulsing through our being rather than something to be explored only outside us. Humans have long sought psychic escapism. Nietzsche saw this escapism in religion. Jung saw it in repression of the shadow.

   Jung did not declare God dead. He shattered traditional religious framing but kept the question alive. In The Red Book, he wrote that the journey to hell means becoming hell oneself. Hell for Jung is not an afterlife destination. It is a psychic dimension. Repressing impurity, cruelty, and darkness does not remove them. It guarantees their return in distorted form.

   People often ask why anyone would want to explore these darker dimensions. Jung’s answer is that hell is a necessary part of the soul. He called it the mask of God. There would be no mask if God were not already within the psyche.

   To know God, one must know hell. This does not mean committing evil acts. It means facing what one is capable of. Opposites are necessary. Light has no meaning without shadow. I have criticized dualism throughout this essay, but the issue is not the existence of opposites. The issue is how we handle them. We use them to escape rather than integrate. The field exists for opposition. The game is integration. Without conflict, there is no synthesis.

   Becoming the beast does not mean abandoning ethics. It means refusing hollow saviorhood. Playing with the dark is necessary for actualization. Does hell need to have such a negative connotation if it brings us closer to God. I am not referring to an organized religion God. I am referring to something that transcends ordinary dimensions.

   God is not an old man wrapping his hands around the earth. God is not easily perceived at all. Altered states may offer glimpses, but we always return to baseline. God exceeds language. Perhaps hell is a dimension of the mind that must be wrestled with rather than repressed. If God is everything, everywhere, then God contains hell without being reduced to it. Hell is not God. God is not hell. But hell may be a pathway toward wholeness.

   Dualism has purpose when the full scope is embraced. Good and evil are not to be isolated. They are to be held in tension. Will this essay ever transcend dualism? That question deserves an answer.

True transcendence is not getting stuck in opposition. It is seeing unity without erasing difference. Everything is interlinked. There is no us versus the universe. We are made of its material.

   The ego wants separation for survival. The ego may itself be a survival mechanism. Knowing this loosens its grip. Know yourself to know the universe. Love the pain and the mystery. Love deeply anyone who enters your life. Love the full experience of being human. Transcendence is not a final state. It is a process that lasts a lifetime. Integration never ends. Once something breaks in us, we become aware. Once aware, we integrate. This is the pattern of the cosmos itself.

Now, is that not beautiful?

Works Referenced 

The Bible. Genesis 1 through 3. New Revised Standard Version. National Council of Churches, 1989.

Carl Jung, The Red Book (Liber Novus), W. W. Norton & Company.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Vintage Books.

Supplementary Media 

Evolution Does NOT Contradict the Bible – Redeemed Zoomer (YouTube)

The Book of Genesis, but it’s Gnostic… – Parry Megistus (YouTube)