Framing the fall as the birth of meaningful choice rather than just punishment is powerful. The point that love only exists where betrayl is possible makes me think about how we often sanitize freedom into something comfortable, when real freedom includes the risk of catastrophic loss. I've watched people avoid hard choices precisely because they understand this cost, but then end up in a different hell made of regret.
This is indeed deep waters and I'm grateful you are sharing this with us. We must carry the light, anything less is betrayal of everything good in humanity. As is said below, freedom isn't comfortable and must be recommitted to with every generation. I personally don't want to live in the hell of regret.
I like your “tragic dimension” phrasing - it made me laugh. The light will survive as long as we are here because we are bringing it with us, whether we choose to show it or not. Thanks for sharing yours 🌟
Great article. M. Scott Peck in People of the Lie, says evil can be defined as a person knowing something is evil and choosing to do it anyway, again and again and again. Evil is clearly among us. When Eve ate the apple she was choosing more than basking in perpetual light (love) in the garden. She was choosing to participate, to take a bite, to have knowledge, to step out, to risk breaking her heart in the terrifying and beautiful world where she might have to lose love to really know love. Again and again and again. I suppose I could say the same of our democracy here on the brink of losing it, to me it has never been more real or more precious.
This brings up the question of "who" is doing the choosing? My experience is it is not the conscious mind that chooses integrity and compassion. As the saying in AA goes, "It is your best thinking that got you here."
Studies have shown that infants are born with an innate sense of justice and morality. That, of course, can be modified by social conditioning, but subconsciously, we generally maintain a "felt sense" of the "right" thing to do at any moment.
Author Philip Shepherd in his book, Radical Wholeness", describes how we possess two main consciousness centers - our rational head-brain and our senuous, intuitive gut-brain located in our pelvic bowl. These two "brains" are connected by the vagus nerve and optimally they harmonize our "thinking" with our "feeling".
Sadly, we suffer from a "tyranny of the head" and our feelings are dengrated and ignored leading to anxiety and neurosis. Those of us who escape the lure of the tyrant, find the moral "choice" to be easy and intuitive. We regain our natural sense of instinctive moral integrity. The "choosing" includes the conscious mind, but moral wisdom happens in our shadow depths far more ancient and wise than the programming of our literal brain. There is a sacredness to the "choosing" that is grander than the binary reasoning of our prefrontal cortex.
I see the Adam and Eve myth as an allegory for our evolutionary gain of function, consciousness and rationality. Since then our conscious and rational nature has been unable to contain or tame our animal nature. The way you frame it is much more beautiful. Yes, we are at war with ourselves and must chose the light 🕯️☯️
A wild animal is incapable of evil. A tiger might devour a baby but the tiger does not know how this upsets us. It only knows its instincts to to eat, perhaps to feed its young.
Being able to tell good from evil is the necessary condition to be capable of sin. It is the end of naivety. It forces us to accept responsibility for our behavior. To see each individual action as part of a whole that shapes a world we create by our actions or even our inactions.
I disagree with your assessment of your former friends. The way that MAGA is responding to our new political philosophy of might makes right, insistence that life is nothing but a struggle of Kill or be Killed. That we have to conquer Greenland or else they will. This is an attempt to remove consciousness, to revert to animal instincts. To go so far even as to want to implant brain chips like Elon to remove Empathy and call it an impediment to Progress. The desire seems to be to embrace a new Age of Inhumanity.
Their future is a future of exploitation and extraction lead by nothing but Algorithms. As if the only thing of beauty they can appreciate is an ever increasing, spiraling, exponential stream of numbers. Building a Minecraft like world of ever increasing size and complexity and expansion. Everyone serving as a cog in the machine.
Interpersonal relationships and individual expressions be damned!
Your appeal to me is multi-layered insofar as your spirituality, poetic writing and down-to-earth humanity. I find it difficult to believe that you have not authored books or poetry, and this lead me to search online. There is a Mike Brock that wrote: Journeys of Faith: Religion, Spirituality, and Humanistic Psychology Hardcover – June 20, 2023
by Mike Brock (Author). Is this you? If not, it seems a no-brainer that you should be writing such things as essays and poems.
You shared this thought, that without loss there is no possibility for love to have meaning. That brought my mind immediately to: "If I accept the sunshine and warmth, then I must also accept the thunder and the lightning." — Khalil Gibran
We need to experience the loss of something we feel precious to bring our focus to what is now missing in our life. We do not realize the gift of living until we face death, or the beauty of nature until what we once were touched by is now gone. We do not acknowledge the loss of another life until that life has been extinguished.
Now, in the US, we are seeing a madman and his inmates in their demonic playground, extinguishing lives as if swatting flies. My sense of morality is in turmoil as a try to maintain civility, but I cannot evolve myself to forgiveness. I am not as Christ-like as I thought and "father forgive them, they know not what they do," is eclipsed by utter rage. These are maniacs of a malignant nature. For decent people to survive in this country, such malignancies must be eradicated. I have been uncannily accurate in my predictive accuracy as to Trump's next moves.
• He will continue to have ICE expand in numbers and wreak death and injury to Americans, citizens or not.
• He will use ICE to negate legal and lawful elections, assuming we even have midterm elections-- he will not go silently in the night vis-à-vis our typical election process.
• He will focus ICE on every Blue State and/or any swing state to manipulate voting in his behalf.
• He will continue to inflict death and destruction to other countries, including NATO allies like Denmark. He will interfere in Iran citing harm to protesters while he is committing atrocities to peaceful protesters in the US. In doing so, he will continue to be the functional Manchurian Candidate for his comrade Putin.
• He talks about China and Russia as adversaries, but he is part of that same axis of tyrants.
• Everything is done is based on gluttony-greed-godlessness.
If there was ever a sick fuck in the White House, we are all witness to the Attila of our times.
Our major hope is that those Republicans in Congress grow a set of balls and somehow remember their oath of office. But we who care about LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) should not for a second forget the treachery that can easily manifest in those elected by us into positions of power. In the best of worlds, the Congress and SCOTUS would realize the imminent danger we the people are in, here in the US and throughout the world. Congress must act and those on the Supreme Court must act better. The conservative justices give fuel to the Führer and are responsible for most of the mess we are now in. The Democratic Party must evolve beyond what it has been-- a terrible disappointment in not passing legislation to ensure Democracy. They had better show some class, be inspiring, and eliminate any chance for such a disaster to ever occur again-- assuming they have a chance to do so.
If we forget to do our civic duties and are too lazy to become involved with politicians, then we-- assuming we escape the current fascist regime-- are a lost people.
Excellent essay. C S Lewis makes some of your points about the Fall from Eden, though he frames it as the basis for free will, and as the explanation for the problem of evil. See for instance Mere Christianity. I like your focus on the power of love, and the risks associated with that love. It's interesting that the sequence of disasters begins with a betrayal, or rather several betrayals: Satan's betrayal of God in his refusal to be a properly behaved angel, the serpent's lying betrayal of Eve (eat this and you will ace the SAT!) and Adam's of Eve, when he rat finks her out to God: "the woman did give me [the apple], and I did eat". Milton's portrayal of all his in Paradise Lost is almost cinematic.
Why are we here? Why *aren't* we here? Why the absence of the appreciation of beauty and virtue by not just the thugs recruited to ICE, but the thugs in the circles of Hell surrounding Trump? The story about eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil seems insufficient to describe the blindness, the turning away from recognition of the beautiful, natural order of the Garden.
Choice. Each action we take is a choice. We move toward light or toward darkness with each choice. Most often choosing light requires more effort. Every time we choose darkness tho takes us closer to hell — that uncomfortable feeling we live with, as the light goes out. We can try and run from that feeling, busying ourselves, doubling down on darkness, but it nips at our heels. We can’t escape it. Each choice towards light is more and more heavenly.
Heaven & hell exist in our conscious, right? We experience it real time, as we live here on earth. Regret, choosing darkness, leads us to hell. Redemption is possible until it’s not. As long as we live we can decide to move towards light.
Love is indeed passing light, rather than darkness to those that come after us. What world will we give to our children, our grandchildren, great grandchildren. If we truly love them. One with light, I’d hope.
====
I don’t say it well & certainly not as eloquent as you, but I think I’ve come to think of it nearly the same. The mystery will always remain somewhat to my mind.
Framing the fall as the birth of meaningful choice rather than just punishment is powerful. The point that love only exists where betrayl is possible makes me think about how we often sanitize freedom into something comfortable, when real freedom includes the risk of catastrophic loss. I've watched people avoid hard choices precisely because they understand this cost, but then end up in a different hell made of regret.
I’ve Watched myself make those “Hard Choices” again and again and “then End Up in a Different Hell made of Regret.”
This is indeed deep waters and I'm grateful you are sharing this with us. We must carry the light, anything less is betrayal of everything good in humanity. As is said below, freedom isn't comfortable and must be recommitted to with every generation. I personally don't want to live in the hell of regret.
I like your “tragic dimension” phrasing - it made me laugh. The light will survive as long as we are here because we are bringing it with us, whether we choose to show it or not. Thanks for sharing yours 🌟
Thx Mike, every day, every hour, every minute, every second we choose!!
These are Deep Waters you are Swimming In. Good Thing I’m a Good Swimmer. Or I Would Drown.
Great article. M. Scott Peck in People of the Lie, says evil can be defined as a person knowing something is evil and choosing to do it anyway, again and again and again. Evil is clearly among us. When Eve ate the apple she was choosing more than basking in perpetual light (love) in the garden. She was choosing to participate, to take a bite, to have knowledge, to step out, to risk breaking her heart in the terrifying and beautiful world where she might have to lose love to really know love. Again and again and again. I suppose I could say the same of our democracy here on the brink of losing it, to me it has never been more real or more precious.
This brings up the question of "who" is doing the choosing? My experience is it is not the conscious mind that chooses integrity and compassion. As the saying in AA goes, "It is your best thinking that got you here."
Studies have shown that infants are born with an innate sense of justice and morality. That, of course, can be modified by social conditioning, but subconsciously, we generally maintain a "felt sense" of the "right" thing to do at any moment.
Author Philip Shepherd in his book, Radical Wholeness", describes how we possess two main consciousness centers - our rational head-brain and our senuous, intuitive gut-brain located in our pelvic bowl. These two "brains" are connected by the vagus nerve and optimally they harmonize our "thinking" with our "feeling".
Sadly, we suffer from a "tyranny of the head" and our feelings are dengrated and ignored leading to anxiety and neurosis. Those of us who escape the lure of the tyrant, find the moral "choice" to be easy and intuitive. We regain our natural sense of instinctive moral integrity. The "choosing" includes the conscious mind, but moral wisdom happens in our shadow depths far more ancient and wise than the programming of our literal brain. There is a sacredness to the "choosing" that is grander than the binary reasoning of our prefrontal cortex.
I see the Adam and Eve myth as an allegory for our evolutionary gain of function, consciousness and rationality. Since then our conscious and rational nature has been unable to contain or tame our animal nature. The way you frame it is much more beautiful. Yes, we are at war with ourselves and must chose the light 🕯️☯️
How apropos of me to be choosing a deep dive into Paradise Lost now, looking at the nature of good/evil.
42.
It is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
A wild animal is incapable of evil. A tiger might devour a baby but the tiger does not know how this upsets us. It only knows its instincts to to eat, perhaps to feed its young.
Being able to tell good from evil is the necessary condition to be capable of sin. It is the end of naivety. It forces us to accept responsibility for our behavior. To see each individual action as part of a whole that shapes a world we create by our actions or even our inactions.
I disagree with your assessment of your former friends. The way that MAGA is responding to our new political philosophy of might makes right, insistence that life is nothing but a struggle of Kill or be Killed. That we have to conquer Greenland or else they will. This is an attempt to remove consciousness, to revert to animal instincts. To go so far even as to want to implant brain chips like Elon to remove Empathy and call it an impediment to Progress. The desire seems to be to embrace a new Age of Inhumanity.
Their future is a future of exploitation and extraction lead by nothing but Algorithms. As if the only thing of beauty they can appreciate is an ever increasing, spiraling, exponential stream of numbers. Building a Minecraft like world of ever increasing size and complexity and expansion. Everyone serving as a cog in the machine.
Interpersonal relationships and individual expressions be damned!
Your appeal to me is multi-layered insofar as your spirituality, poetic writing and down-to-earth humanity. I find it difficult to believe that you have not authored books or poetry, and this lead me to search online. There is a Mike Brock that wrote: Journeys of Faith: Religion, Spirituality, and Humanistic Psychology Hardcover – June 20, 2023
by Mike Brock (Author). Is this you? If not, it seems a no-brainer that you should be writing such things as essays and poems.
You shared this thought, that without loss there is no possibility for love to have meaning. That brought my mind immediately to: "If I accept the sunshine and warmth, then I must also accept the thunder and the lightning." — Khalil Gibran
We need to experience the loss of something we feel precious to bring our focus to what is now missing in our life. We do not realize the gift of living until we face death, or the beauty of nature until what we once were touched by is now gone. We do not acknowledge the loss of another life until that life has been extinguished.
Now, in the US, we are seeing a madman and his inmates in their demonic playground, extinguishing lives as if swatting flies. My sense of morality is in turmoil as a try to maintain civility, but I cannot evolve myself to forgiveness. I am not as Christ-like as I thought and "father forgive them, they know not what they do," is eclipsed by utter rage. These are maniacs of a malignant nature. For decent people to survive in this country, such malignancies must be eradicated. I have been uncannily accurate in my predictive accuracy as to Trump's next moves.
• He will continue to have ICE expand in numbers and wreak death and injury to Americans, citizens or not.
• He will use ICE to negate legal and lawful elections, assuming we even have midterm elections-- he will not go silently in the night vis-à-vis our typical election process.
• He will focus ICE on every Blue State and/or any swing state to manipulate voting in his behalf.
• He will continue to inflict death and destruction to other countries, including NATO allies like Denmark. He will interfere in Iran citing harm to protesters while he is committing atrocities to peaceful protesters in the US. In doing so, he will continue to be the functional Manchurian Candidate for his comrade Putin.
• He talks about China and Russia as adversaries, but he is part of that same axis of tyrants.
• Everything is done is based on gluttony-greed-godlessness.
If there was ever a sick fuck in the White House, we are all witness to the Attila of our times.
Our major hope is that those Republicans in Congress grow a set of balls and somehow remember their oath of office. But we who care about LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) should not for a second forget the treachery that can easily manifest in those elected by us into positions of power. In the best of worlds, the Congress and SCOTUS would realize the imminent danger we the people are in, here in the US and throughout the world. Congress must act and those on the Supreme Court must act better. The conservative justices give fuel to the Führer and are responsible for most of the mess we are now in. The Democratic Party must evolve beyond what it has been-- a terrible disappointment in not passing legislation to ensure Democracy. They had better show some class, be inspiring, and eliminate any chance for such a disaster to ever occur again-- assuming they have a chance to do so.
If we forget to do our civic duties and are too lazy to become involved with politicians, then we-- assuming we escape the current fascist regime-- are a lost people.
Excellent essay. C S Lewis makes some of your points about the Fall from Eden, though he frames it as the basis for free will, and as the explanation for the problem of evil. See for instance Mere Christianity. I like your focus on the power of love, and the risks associated with that love. It's interesting that the sequence of disasters begins with a betrayal, or rather several betrayals: Satan's betrayal of God in his refusal to be a properly behaved angel, the serpent's lying betrayal of Eve (eat this and you will ace the SAT!) and Adam's of Eve, when he rat finks her out to God: "the woman did give me [the apple], and I did eat". Milton's portrayal of all his in Paradise Lost is almost cinematic.
Why are we here? Why *aren't* we here? Why the absence of the appreciation of beauty and virtue by not just the thugs recruited to ICE, but the thugs in the circles of Hell surrounding Trump? The story about eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil seems insufficient to describe the blindness, the turning away from recognition of the beautiful, natural order of the Garden.
So nicely said. Thank you.
The way I see it…
Choice. Each action we take is a choice. We move toward light or toward darkness with each choice. Most often choosing light requires more effort. Every time we choose darkness tho takes us closer to hell — that uncomfortable feeling we live with, as the light goes out. We can try and run from that feeling, busying ourselves, doubling down on darkness, but it nips at our heels. We can’t escape it. Each choice towards light is more and more heavenly.
Heaven & hell exist in our conscious, right? We experience it real time, as we live here on earth. Regret, choosing darkness, leads us to hell. Redemption is possible until it’s not. As long as we live we can decide to move towards light.
Love is indeed passing light, rather than darkness to those that come after us. What world will we give to our children, our grandchildren, great grandchildren. If we truly love them. One with light, I’d hope.
====
I don’t say it well & certainly not as eloquent as you, but I think I’ve come to think of it nearly the same. The mystery will always remain somewhat to my mind.