THE MOTHER OF ALL HUMANITY HAD ALREADY BITTEN into the forbidden fruit and, aside from its pleasing flavor, little to no fanfare or parade route of existential enlightenment came of it. Eve had grudgingly agreed to partake in the sacrament, perhaps out of a growing sense of peeping curiosity; though she’d convinced herself while chewing on it that her momentary lapse of discretion was for no other purpose than to prove her Father right and the Serpent wrong. The body of god is what he called it. The Serpent, who proudly referred to himself as ‘the Enlightened One,’ couldn’t possibly have known what he was talking about,’ she thought to herself. If only he’d met her Father, as she had—having walked and talked with Him in the cool of the day. Despite letting him know of his wrongness, she was never-the-less perplexed when nothing happened, and truth be told, somewhat disappointed. Because, if indeed her confession was of honest quality, she had deep down inside hoped that something—anything of esoteric knowledge spoken of by the Serpent, could be so easily accessed, as he had promised.

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make on wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat….” (Genesis 3:6)

“Give it more time,” the Serpent gave consideration to his breathing (knowing such exercises would improve his cause), and proceeded to lay his head upon the knoll; for he too had partaken in the ceremonious sacrament. It wasn’t his first ceremonious helping to the tree either. Given the proper dosage, one truly would “be like God.” This he knew as fact. Eve would eat her words.

I need to stop here for a moment, because this is of course all assuming that our queen mother’s civil act of disobedience against the LORD was anything resembling that of American author Aldous Huxley, who wrote of his first experiment with peyote in The Doors of Perception, first published in 1954. Please understand—this is the great mystery behind all Mysteries; that one may approach the Tree of Knowledge and partake in its sacrament. That person may eat “the body of God,” and in doing so, he may acquire the insider’s knowledge that defies all other textbook perceptions of worldwide paganism. In actuality, he has become him. Huxley himself participated in the reawakened occultism of the great Mysteries of old, which was only then opened to public understanding, and like the ancient mystics themselves as it is among their religious adherents today, his concept of the Tree of Knowledge was terribly skewed, for he “was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence,” according to his report. Nothing however worth remembering happened to Huxley for half an hour after swallowing his pill, and so for all practical purposes, let us assume the same allotted time had passed since Eve agreed to ingest the fruit.

“…it was pleasant to the eyes…” (Genesis 3:6)

So too at that half-hour mark did she, according to Huxley’s own experience, become “aware of a slow dance of golden lights.” Closing her eyes, there would be other anomalies, such as “a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight.”

“Is it agreeable?” The Serpent asked.

“Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” Huxley answered his researcher, and so must Eve her Enlightener, “It just is.”

Soon her body would dislocate from itself. More specifically, Eve would dissociate herself from what she now realized was her former being. Isolation is the only word she could come up with to describe it; a cruel and intolerable solitude. Next arrived a sense of vibrant perception; colorful absorption, deep and penetrating. The thing is—it wasn’t just the world around her. The ‘Enlightened One’ called this otherwise-unfathomable vision her “third eye.” Up until now, it had ceased to be woken. Waves of color washed over and about her; which then in turn flowed into her very being and, having done its work, returned outward from whence it came, as though Being itself were a kaleidoscope and she were the sponge. Nobody else in all the Earth, not even her husband Adam, could have “seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged…the divine essence of all existence.”

The poet Walt Whitman would later write:

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

“This is how one ought to see,” Huxley repeated to himself as he looked down at the cosmic Universe contained within the fabric of his trousers. They were flannel, by the way. For Eve, knowing nothing of clothing for the entirety of her care-free being, perhaps it were the hairs on her arm which captured her gaze. Here, we might consider, she found the deeper penetration of all that was or ever could be flowing in and out of her, consecrating and connecting everything into one Being. Formerly, her Father was not His creation, or so He advertised Himself as such. But how could that be so, now that her eyes were opened, and she had become herself a god? “If one always saw like this,” Huxley would recall of his trousers, “one would never want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel.”

Up until that very hour she was an uninspired dabbler in names and pronunciations—intellectual arrangements. There were the animals of course, which her husband had been granted authority over. He named them. With each naming came “articulation.” Then there were the plants and the trees, rivers and streams, realms of the botanical and geographical. All she had ever known were places and distances. Such concepts and restrictive duties ceased to be of interest. If only she could have known in her complacency of intensity and significance that everything glowed about her with a living light. Certainly, there were some items of interest which glowed more majestically and with more brilliance than others. But time and space had lost its predominance in her life. Up until now, she never even perceived measurements or marked locations to be a category,. This however was a higher dimension of the self, the other side of paradise; a celestial plane of cleansed perceptions. Huxley warmly called it the heavenly side of schizophrenia. She had been baptized into a new life by the Enlightened One, so to speak. Eve understood that now. See, all she had ever known of contemplation was its mere elementary pursuits—all excursions into mediocrity really. If only Adam had such intimate experience before he’d chanced to name each living thing. How would he describe them now, if only he could perceive a world as Huxley described it, “where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance?”

Eve spent several minutes thinking about that—or was it an entire century—and what of time? She of course had looked up at the positioning of the sun and had judged by the length of its shadows what hour of the day it was, but that, she already knew, was another existence—the Universe of Plato’s shadows. See, had the queen mother been around millennia’s later to hear of Plato teaching on “chair-ness,” she and a multitude of others who partook in the occultist Mysteries would have immediately understood what the philosopher meant by it—being in the know. She understood such esoteric logic to be true simply by gazing down at the hairs on her arm. All she’d ever seen were forms—imitations, as one who saw only shadows in caves. The Chair-ness on her flesh wasn’t an ordinary perception. What she saw now was the real thing. At any rate, it was a Universe in which she had ascended from only moments prior and which she might gaze upon now as a goddess, like the many gods of mythology to come—completely indifferent to its course of events, wither she chose to observe them or not. Was her indifference really a bad thing?

I can even imagine the Serpent, still thoroughly enjoying the trip from the grassy knoll which he had chosen as a pillow, explaining for Eve what Cambridge philosopher Dr. C.D. Broad many millennia’s later would call “Mind at Large.”

“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”

Evolution, Eve might consider, as dictated by her Father in heaven, had indiscriminately slowed her intake of knowledge down, and for what reason than His own godly pleasure? All she had ever known of contemplation was in its more elementary forms. They were drafty at best, now that she thought about it. She was a vessel studying the great works of art that her heavenly Father had laid out before her as one might politely attempt in a museum—though failing miserably to comprehend; or a daft pupil of music and poetry, always waiting—tirelessly latching on to each note or word of insight for the right sort of inspiration to spring upon her. Her Father was a great painter, she thought, a master architect. And yet, all He had left for her were confusing hieroglyphs, unfathomable mystery of purer being, were it not for the sacrament. How could she go on gazing at art, as simpler minds might, even if it was His art, when He had hidden from her its true forms?

Her husband had belonged to the world which the fruit had delivered her from. Eve realized she was purposely avoiding him. It wasn’t for reasons of shame. Not yet, at least. Huxley would describe his own deliberate evasion of eye-contact from his wife, for she “belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescaline had delivered me.” For relief Eve turned back to the hairs on her harm just as Huxley “turned back to the folds on [his] trousers,” because, “these are the sort of things one ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of God.” Yes, that is what it was—everything in the garden surrounding her, from the largest trees to the tiniest insects. An unknown haiku poet would later write of roses: “The flowers are easy to paint—the leaves difficult.” That God was Himself Divine and separate from His creation was a bit of paradox considering this “unspeakable” and yet self-evident truth, that what she saw in every living thing and on every leaf and fig was a complexity beyond measure and the freshwater source of all that is divine.

Indeed, the Serpent had proven without a shadow of a doubt—she could see it now—that the life her Father had intended for her was a vision both monotonous and dry. And yet, hadn’t God given her the urge to escape, the longing to transcend, to ascend to the heights and wear the stars as her crown? This, the Serpent had accurately prescribed, was the entire point for the appetite of her being which, if she were truly being honest, she felt from time to time in her soul. And what would God mind of this, seeing as how, after all, she was merely minding her own business, keeping to the affairs of her own personal estate. What wrong could possibly come of that?

The thing is, “when we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe,” as Huxley quipped, “when the sea flows in our veins….and the stars are our jewels, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure? Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war.” And so the list went on in Eve’s head of all her moral deeds, being a “contemplative” now by nature. She was a Not-Self. Her husband still knew only his self, all lowercase. All circumstances withstanding, she felt for him.

And another thing the Enlightened One had proven; her refusal to partake in the sacrament up until that very hour had been an act of defiance against god. Her Father in heaven would most certainly be displeased. But this nagging thought she could compartmentalize for the time being, because all she’d ever been was an apple. How dreadful a thought, that she, the great goddess womb-mother would always be painted and hung in museums as the boring strokes of an apple bitter! And then the even more terrible thought occurred to her! How might history (or her husband, for that matter) judge her if they could not grasp the true enlightened understanding of sin—that is, should they not perceive all of manifested consciousness as infinite and holy? How dreadful, wishing to paint her in the unflattering frame of an apple connoisseur, should they themselves not feel or understand their part as sole inheritors of the Dharma-Body Universe or comprehend the Serpent in any shade other than the great illuminator of the Inner Light?

For a moment, the woman even gazed into a nightmarish vision of the future. She foresaw her children in coming generations, a countless multitude of them, wondering as hungry sheep yet never fed by the religions and institutions which provided them pasture. She saw them listening to daft sermons, gazing up at great works of art, trying desperately to hinge upon each note of music, as she once had, which bled into their otherwise mute ears, but their thirst always remained. And so they were doomed to cover their nakedness with vain philosophies and damnable distractions. “What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine,” added Huxley, “preferred to look within?” To her critics, she was only an apple-bitter.

Eve looked to her husband with a swaddling deluge of sympathy. He was still an animal in his thinking—unevolved; always obsessed with words and ideals without ever partaking in the sacrament that might enlarge his mind; to perceive God from within rather than simply remaining complacent walking alongside of Him. Adam also likely saw her as just another apple biter. What he perceived as foreign to him need not impress him deeply. And now that she thought about it, the man who had once aroused her inner and outer being had suddenly become boring, pre-occupied with the upkeep rather than coming to a deeper knowledge of the hieroglyphs which he tended to. That’s all they really were, the flora and the fauna; hieroglyphs which, when properly deciphered, unveil the true meaning of Mystery, immediately displacing words and ideas altogether. Adam was an intellectual, not a contemplator. Or as Huxley said, compared to the Inner Light, all mortal intellectual concepts were “chaff in the wind.”

My Christian reader knows how the remaining story goes. Eve told her husband of everything that she had tasted of and seen, and Adam, also being of a curious mind, he too partook in the sacrament. “And the eyes of them both were opened.” Yet coming down from her cleansing experience with the forbidden fruit, having realized in her sobriety the extent of her deception; one which tragically cast generations of her unborn children into a separation from God rather than the union which the Mystery sacrament claimed to offer—Eve would report of the Serpent, “He has beguiled me!”

If only Aldous Huxley had the same fall-out with the Serpent as our first mother and father so wisely chose. They admitted to their nakedness and came clean with the Creator. Moses, being an initiate himself to the Egyptian Mysteries, and likely partaking in the sacrament but having later confessed of them, made the right conclusion when He attested to the true facts of history in the Spirit.

“…and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3: 7-8)”

Among the many graduates of histories Mystery Schools, having followed in Eve’s footsteps and, by their own free will, ingesting the tree of knowledge—history is expected to have taken another turn of events entirely. According to Huxley’s conclusion:

“For Angels of a lower order and with better prospects of longevity, there must be a return to the straw. But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”

Maranatha!

Noel