An Idea Of Paradise As A Love Reality

[skyseeker]

I wanted to submit the idea that the biblical story of Paradise might be a hint about our own evolutionary problem of having left a special love reality that we lived in and that once protected us from many evils that we still experience today.

 

For example, mental illness. I suffer from schizophrenia, and despite what medicine would suggest, I think of my suffering of being influenced by the human coldness and awkwardness of our time.

 

Let me explain. We humans are an evolved form of monkeys. If you look at videos of monkeys together, they practice a developed form of social living. The mothers sit with their young and scratch them, they run after each other like children playing catching. Cats lick their children.

 

We humans are more evolved than these monkeys, but majorly see this superiority in our intellect and in the products of our human life like houses and such. But in fact, and I want to say that this is spiritual more than intellectual, we do not quite have a more developed form of social living together than monkeys. It looks different because of our clothes and music and work schedules, but principally it is the same as what the monkeys had. And while animals can rest in their being and don't have to improve or suffice someone's higher standard, as a christian I don't see humans as merely animals and I posit that being a human means to evolve and develop in our lives, both individually and as a species.

 

Our highest value as humans is noble love. At least it is the highest value in the christian ethics, although I think many other religions see it the same way, and many atheists too, and many of them surpass christians in love or are more honest about it.

 

Let me go on an imaginative tangent of how I wish my own reality to be a better love reality. I live in a group home, and my caretaker often coldly tells me that I don't suffice her standards. Where is the small friendly gesture of saying, dear Daniel, I love you, I just have something here we need to check? Instead she just says, Mr Neubacher, I do not find it good that you don't do x,y,z so well. Sometimes I am angsty and cold, and in a monkey society maybe my ladyfriend Marion here would in fact say, come into my bed, I will hold you close and you know I have humour, you will soon laugh again (nothing sexual implied). Or my friend Jens when he visits me would bring me an apple or an odd flower he saw on his way to me through the jungle, and not just want to talk computer games and his suspicions of me being very sick mentally and needing to work more or something. There is an old guy here that sleeps at day and is awake at night, if I were better in producing a love reality I might take two weeks and brew a good beer for him and he'd exclaim, that's fantastic and warm up to me more. Wolfgang who lives here would see my sadness and give me a cookie that he had saved in the morning when he felt it could be better to save cookies than to eat them all on his own.

 

Granted, this still somehow works in our lives. We do acts of kindness and works of goodness. But it is usually not our everyday life. And I wanted to posit that this was our Paradise, evolutionary and historically speaking. And it ended when we didn't get the good and evil thing right, through which we developed an angst about our own nakedness. And that is not just about the body, it's about our nature, our being, that we are not perfect in the good and evil thinking that was at that time too high for us. And our old perfection that was in innocence left us, and we invented morality which is again such a lofty thing and we don't handle it well and the reality we live in now has been regulated and "works" but is in fact not as humane as it could be. There has been a gap in our development and we can't fix it but only make it work somehow.

 

And especially when being sick you feel that, which might be the true origin of the christian notion that our fall in Paradise brought us actual sicknesses and diseases and death. Since that time we think we know death - before the Fall in Paradise, we were still alive and knew life as superior to death in a spiritual way, not as inferior or so frighteningly different and finishing us up.

 

I'd like to know what you think of this idea. And if my post depresses you spiritually, I want to say that there is a christian notion that Paradise still follows us. In nature we often find new peace and joy. And also, in a way maybe the Fall had to happen for civilization's sake. This is a bit of a stretch, but worth considering. We have a human experience with many stories. And while our experience contains evil and imperfection, we can see in that a side of ourselves that needn't be evil itself. As a christian I think some day we can sing songs about it, and after all it is also true that we struggle with the evil and have scored many victories in life, both individually and as a group. And the Earth is the location of our love reality. And our human dignity and God make sure we don't forget it.

[JosephM]

Daniel,

 

Love your idea of "acts of kindness and works of goodness" in our everyday life. There seems to me no need for us to wait on the 'other'. We can start anytime and perhaps may find it contagious. If we want friends, perhaps it is best to first show ourselves friendly?

 

Someone once said "Change always starts with ourselves"

 

Joseph