The original sin wasn't the acquisition of forbidden knowledge.
It was ignorance. It was an act of forgetting. It was the loss of knowledge.
The creator wanted to experience being part of his own creation. He had to assume its limitations to do so. And so he exchanged his divine knowledge for common knowledge. He forgot his divinity.
But common knowledge is not knowledge at all. It is its absence.
What we call knowledge is blind groping, a coping mechanism, a rule of thumb, a persistence of cross-purpose, an endurance of error, a set of beliefs that are certainly mistaken but which we must take to be true only because they have stood the test of time so far. They cannot be held with the unassailable certainty available only to the creator of their content.
And so in becoming one with his creation, he forgot he was its creator.
He became us.
It is only by recognising the divinity in each other that we restore this knowledge to the creator. This is our redemption.
Our soul is our capacity to love. Our bodies cannot fulfil this capacity once we die and they become inert and corrupted and disintegrate. But that capacity endures in the divinity we all share.
Parsed as a poem:
ReplyDeleteSub specie aeternitatis
The original sin wasn't
acquisition of forbidden knowledge.
It was ignorance.
It was an act of forgetting.
It was the loss of knowledge.
The creator knew all things
apart from one.
One thing eluded Her omniscience,
a thing she knew she could never know.
She wanted to what it is like
to be part of Her creation.
So She assumed its limitations to find out.
She curtailed herself to fit its constraints,
and exchanged Her divine knowledge
for our common knowledge.
She forgot Her divinity.
But common knowledge is not knowledge at all.
It is its absence. It is the aura of uncertainty
around someone who is lost.
What we call knowledge is blind groping.
It is a coping mechanism, a rule of thumb,
a persistence of cross-purpose,
an intersection of enduring errors
in some temporarily stable configuration,
beliefs that are certainly mistaken
but which we must take to be true
for want of contradiction,
and are not held with the unassailable certainty
available only to the creator
of what we think they are about
(and we cannot even be sure of that).
And so in becoming one with Her creation,
She forgot She was its creator.
She became us, lost, divided from ourselves,
and unable to find our way back
for being unaware we are lost.
It is only by recognising the divinity in each other
that we restore this knowledge to the creator.
This is our redemption.
This is how we end this wandering.
Our soul is our capacity to love.
Our bodies cannot fulfil this capacity once we die
and they become inert and corrupted and disintegrate.
But that capacity endures in the divinity we all share.
Insert after "for being unaware we are lost"
ReplyDeleteImagine Eden.
Imagine seeing every flower
as if for the first time,
and not knowing why,
not knowing what has changed:
that you are no longer outside, looking in,
but inside, looking out,
that you are the flower, seeing itself.
The life that was breathed into you
to animate the clay from which you are made
was also a act of suffocation
for the the god you once were.
Change "this is how we end our wandering" to "this is how we give direction to our wandering"
ReplyDelete