THE MAN IN EXILE

 

So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the Tree of Life. (Genesis 3:23)

THE GARDEN

By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there, we hung up our lyres. For there, our captors required songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!" (Psalm 137:1-3 - ESV).

Those memories of Eden, exquisite as dreams, weave their threads of light in the traditions of all peoples. No nation under heaven does not give the beginning of our race from some distant period of purity, peace, and harmony with nature and the Universe. The hieroglyphics of Egypt, the clay tablets of Assyria, the Edda of Scandinavia, the legends of Tibet, and the bas-relief of Rome tell the same story of primitive bliss.

Everyone wants to prove the truth of the statement that the Creator (God) planted a garden eastward in Eden and put the man He had formed there. The Garden of Eden is not simply a piece of real estate somewhere in Mesopotamia. Such a place has never been found, nor the angel with the flaming sword that was put at its entrance to keep the men out. Unsurprisingly, men have sought it, but they have sought it in vain because they seek it outside themselves. The Garden is not a physical place on this or any other planet. It is a STATE OF BEING. It is a higher existence for a man than this involuted state in which we find ourselves in physical birth. It is the state of being in which man was taken from the hand's Creator and placed here on earth. It represents man in the presence of his Creator, With the incorruptible life available for them, created in His image and likeness, as master over all things, a man living on sickness, pain, and death.

God allowed them to maintain their intellect, but God's Spirit in them cannot partake of sin. Therefore, they died to that spiritual dimension; they had known they killed the possibility of continuing to live in the Garden of Eden and keep in constant communion with God. Adam and Eve continued their existence, alienated from communion with their Creator.

"For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man." – Also, Adam and Eve were there, eating the forbidden fruit until they "heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the Garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the Garden. But the Lord God called to the man, "Where are you?"

It was not until Adam and Eve heard the voice of God walking in the Garden that they were aware of their existence away from their Creator. With this new state of consciousness, confusion, forgetfulness, doubts, and unlimited freedom, they had lost all contact with their Creator and had forgotten Him. Suddenly they heard the footsteps of God walking in the orchard. At that moment, the couple began to feel different, separated from their Creator, from everything, as a loneliness that separated them from each other and their environment.

 "For you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, "Peace and safety, destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape." (1 Thessalonians 5:2-3).

 And yet the Garden also represented man along with all the factors and conditions, both internal and external, of the being and the environment that would ultimately lead to their ruin and estrangement from their Creator. In a certain sense, the man was the Garden, a Garden inside a garden, a world inside the creation. As we all know, Adam and Eve could not stay after being tempted and disobeying God's request. 

God had no alternative but to fulfill his promise and had to comply with the death sentence. But we observe that the physical death of Adam and Eve does not occur immediately, but what happens is that they were expelled from the Garden. But in that expulsion, something severe will happen, the promise of God is fulfilled to perfection, and they die regarding the image of God that dwelled in them. The spirit of God dwelled in them died; they were expelled from the Garden.

The Neurophysiological system (The Limbic System)

The Creator, who created us in his image and likeness, has thought of an intelligent design, a tiny molecule for developing all living beings, the (DNA).  More surprising still, it seems even more logical to us that by creating man in his image and likeness, in that same DNA molecule, added a code with information for the development of neurophysiologic support, the brain, which makes man superior to the rest of the animals created and with the ability to relate to their Creator. (Let’s make man in our image and in our likeness). With this mechanism is that humans know, reason, think ... and, most distinctive, have, in addition to the five natural bodily senses, "the sense of spiritual perception,” with which we have the ability to choose between good and evil, to choose between what suits us or not (ethics) and keep us spiritually linked with the Creator. It is through the power of thought and the "Word" in action that everything created was made. Likewise, man creates and acts with thinking, knowledge, reasoning, and even more, by "the sense of spiritual perception," Not by the instinct and the drives of man's limbic system. Elon Musk's fossil energies thesis says that extracting fossil energy material from the depth of the earth and thrusting it into the atmosphere, destabilizing thus the “Fine Tune Universe” of the Creator, God, is analogous to extracting energy from the lowest parts of our physiology and bringing it up to the higher parts of the cerebral cortex through exercises like yoga, meditations, etc. This has some parallelism with Freud’s classical psychoanalysis growth thesis.

 

Freud and the Id (The Reptilian Brain)

According to Freud, the Id is the only component of the personality structure present from birth. This facet of personality is entirely unconscious and includes all the instinctive and primitive behaviors, allowing us to get our basic needs met as newborns. Freud believed that the Id is ruled by the pleasure principle. This driving force seeks immediate gratification of all needs, wants, and urges. In other words, the Id wants whatever feels good at the time, with no reality. For example, if a child is hungry, s/he will cry until the Id's demands are met. And so, if these needs are not satisfied at once, the result is a state of anxiety or tension. In the above example, the child will cry louder!

 

The Ego (The Cerebral Cortex – Limbic System)

Initially, the ego is 'that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world' (Freud 1923). The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external natural world. It is the decision-making component of personality. Ideally, the ego works by reason, whereas the id is chaotic and unreasonable. The ego operates according to the reality principle and always conflicts with the Id. (the good and evil tree) working out realistic ways of satisfying the id’s demands, often compromising or postponing satisfaction to avoid negative consequences of society. The ego considers social realities and norms, etiquette, and rules in deciding how to behave. Like the id, the ego seeks pleasure and avoids pain, but unlike the id, the ego is concerned with devising a realistic strategy to obtain pleasure. Freud made the analogy of the id being a horse while the ego is the rider. The ego is 'like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse' (Freud, 1923, p.15). Often the ego is weak relative to the head-strong id, and the best the ego can do is stay on, pointing the id in the right direction and claiming some credit at the end as if the action were it's own.

The Superego (The Neocortex – The New Cortex)

According to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality, the superego is the component of personality composed of the internalized ideals we have acquired from our parents and society. The superego suppresses the id's urges and tries to make the ego behave morally rather than realistically.

(TOPIC FOR THE NEXT BLOG)