Deciphering Myth

The Last Choice Remaining for Humanity

In yesterday’s article, we used the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament to gain insight into the undifferentiated world of illusion inhabited by primal humans. What exactly is this “human” born through alienation from all natural existence? When we approach this profound question left to humanity, we realize once again that we are beings who have lost ourselves, having lived only within the interior of a colossal fiction. Now, let us proceed immediately to the continuation.

First, let us address the true meaning of touching the wrath of God, as mentioned at the end of yesterday’s piece. This signifies the absolute truth that the pair illusion is the only illusion capable of extinguishing or confronting the communal illusion. This truth appeared as the most radical rebellion, one that would destroy the maintenance of the community in a certain era. The reason people still harbor an intense aversion to things like anarchism is that it evokes this memory from the side of the old community where communal interests are at work. The wrath of God here can be called the wrath of a specific community, and what symbolizes this is the forbidden fruit, the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil growing in the Garden of Eden.

In other words, this forbidden fruit is an initial prohibition from the side of the communal illusion. However, in the era of compilation, this phase was a new element organized retroactively as a narrative to suppress those attempting to live by the pair illusion against the communal illusion. The essential point is that at this stage, the Garden of Eden represents a heightening of communal consciousness to the dimension where community prohibitions are born. This suggests that the rulers were already aware that protecting communal interests with communal consciousness, and perpetuating what could be called their community, would be impossible unless the pair illusion was extinguished or suppressed. Therefore, even if the origin of the tale itself is based on old folklore, it does not narrate the events of primal humans but was re-edited for the people inside the community during a later era when civilization had risen. From this, we can see that a single myth of Genesis possesses a non-linear world where multiple eras are blended and deployed. Thus, myth does not speak of a specific era; rather, we grasp a figure where space-time is retroactively compressed into a certain era. This is why reading myth through linear thinking is meaningless.

The forbidden fruit symbolizes the primal gap where separation begins to bud in the individual mind, or to put it another way, alienation from God. In this case, God has been transferred to the essential state of the human mind, which is absolute good. As I have touched upon the thought of the Confucian scholar Wang Yangming several times, this state of absolute good is precisely the heart. However, the movement of that state of heart initiates separation, indicating that the discernment of good and evil became possible. To use the metaphor of the sea, the sea as good gives rise to wave crests as evil. Yet essentially, it remains the sea.

The important question is the origin of humans viewing God as absolute and worshipping Him. That is why it is written that God created man in His own image. This indicates that after the primal ancestors experienced the stage of alienation from nature, human consciousness created God to fill the abyss torn open by that alienation. However, this God could be anything. As mentioned earlier, since myth has the character of being organized retroactively, the God established here is a communal illusion. Yet at its origin, it represents the life cycle of nature, or the mysterious workings of nature, which human consciousness born of alienation came to realize as God ages later. At this time, it was realized that human time and nature’s time were out of sync. The discovery of God in human consciousness necessarily requires this time gap.

Put simply, this is the moment humans knew in their consciousness that the life cycle of a single tree and the human life cycle were not in agreement, even though they were realized as identical in the natural state. This is particularly prominent among agrarian people who rely on grain cultivation rather than hunter-gatherers who premise their lives on movement, though there were countless beings standing on the boundary between the two in human history. This is because the discrepancy between grains that grow according to the four seasons and humans who cannot grow according to the seasons becomes a shocking realization for them. Since this realization requires a certain amount of observation, settled life becomes the catalyst for heightening this awareness. When human time and natural time were torn apart, humans created rituals to be executed at specific times to adjust the gap with the time of nature, the matrix of life.