We could start with any myth in our study of Deep Time, but because Eden is one that most of us know well, we'll begin there. The following isn't particularly organized (my thoughts haven't yet worked themselves into anything like a formal theory), so I'll just take on topics as they come to mind. To begin with, then...
Every myth reveals one truth in order to conceal another. In other words, every myth begins with a sleight of hand. The truth that is revealed by a myth has the effect of binding us to its narrative, hence its religious function. The word "religion" comes from the Latin religare, meaning "to fasten, or tie," and this function of religion is evident in the foundational story of every belief system, regardless of whether that belief system is explicitly religious or not.
The truth that is concealed by myth has the opposite effect, provided we are able to
grasp it—it liberates us. This, however, is typically very difficult to achieve, since
whatever belief system we have is necessarily based on the concealment of that prior
truth, and everything about that system is therefore designed to prevent its rediscovery.
[PLEASE NOTE: What follows is the full version of the first essay I wrote setting forth the basic idea of Green Meditation, although that term is nowhere mentioned in the essay . It is quite long, but it does finally make good on answering the question posed in the title.]
It requires nothing short of an act of spiritual or psychological archaeology to accomplish this feat of recovery. Even so, the risks often seem to outweigh the possible benefits, for we gamble the integrity of our current foundation by digging so close to its roots. Who knows what is underneath it, if anything? If we should break through it at any moment, we risk a fall from which we may not be able to recover—into madness, isolation, or simply no longer being understood by others. It is this very fear of falling, however, that keeps our present myth-bound reality in place.
In the beginning we are told that Abel was a keeper of the flocks, while Cain was a tiller of the field. This is offered as a kind of primal choice for human beings—but already so much has gone wrong for them, that even the fundamentals of this story are too compromised to reveal anything like a truth. For neither herding nor farming is natural to them. They are hunters and gatherers by nature and design. Everything about their minds and bodies is suited for it, and there is nothing in their nature that would warrant a sedentary life of agriculture or animal husbandry. But the problem does not originate with them.
Reading backwards, we find that after the fall Adam is cursed with the life of a farmer. But this conceals the all-too-obvious truth that he was a farmer already, and so the curse visited upon him by God at the end of the story is also a deception. Adam was placed in the garden “to till and to keep it” long before the story with the serpent gets underway. God has placed him in a “garden,” a fruit orchard with artificial boundaries and domesticated animals who demurely submit to being named. In the Biblical garden, Adam is a farmer with a sedentary lifestyle and the problems and perils that go along with it already intractably in place.
Naturally, very little of this has anything to do with God. From the beginning, the whole notion of God has already been corrupted. He is made the overseer of a fateful transfer of power from nature to the human world, and is therefore a kind of co-sponsor with human beings in the creation of a new myth, the purpose of which is to legitimize the course that humanity has already set out upon. For by the time this story begins to appear in the oral record of Homo sapiens, they have long since migrated to nearly every part of the planet they now occupy and have already been farming and grazing it for thousands of years.
This is the real significance of the flaming sword God places at the gate to the garden of Eden at the end of the story. It isn’t meant to bar the way back to Eden, as the story tells us. Its real purpose is to justify going forward to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.” The sword—and for that matter the whole story of the fall—is intended to legitimize that fateful decision by making it seem so thoroughly inevitable that it can no longer even be questioned. Once that truth is in place, we forget the one that preceded it. Once that truth is in place, it is as if the previous truth never existed at all. What the story chronicles, therefore, is not “the fall of man,” but a wish-fulfillment of an entire species—that they be allowed to assert their own destiny as a thing apart from Nature. The fall of man is actually "the rise of man."
Even those archaeologists and evolutionary biologists who challenge the Bible’s account of creation rarely challenge with any real enthusiasm or vigor the anthropocentric reality for which it serves as the founding narrative for current Western culture. This is what I find tiresome in the writings of neo-atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. It is a very dull mind indeed that cannot see what is really being creating in Genesis. It has nothing to do with the light and darkness, or man and woman, or seven days as opposed to seven million years. What is being created is the sense of a human identity—and therefore a human destiny—as thing separate and distinct from this world.
The story of Eden is so powerful that even those who oppose it, claiming that it is a myth and nothing more, are unable to lift the corner on the reality it has set in place and peer through to the other side. And what lies on the other side? We could say Nirvana or the Pure Land or the Kingdom of God, if those notions hadn’t become so compromised by the religions that teach them. Or we could say nature as it is, if there were any way to conceive of such a thing within the narrative of a steadily unfolding human destiny. The truth is, on the other side is an absence of sides altogether, because it represents the whole we abandoned in creating the world of human consciousness, which no longer connects with the world itself in any meaningful or sustainable way.
Virtually any founding myth can be read in this way—reading it backwards instead of forwards, for the truth it conceals rather than the one it reveals. Take the story of Amida Buddha. In its most basic formulation, that story says that there was once, many eons ago, a monk named Dharmakara who vowed to save all beings by causing them to be reborn into his Western Pure Land. Dharmakara practiced for many lifetimes in order to establish such a land, eventually becoming Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Light and Life. In this formulation, light represents wisdom or knowledge, while life signifies compassion. But really, both are symbols for the ongoing, open-ended conquest of human beings and human consciousness, both of which are anthropocentric in the extreme. They are another way of fleeing from nature in search of a human destiny as separate and distinct from it. The truth being revealed is Light and Life. That being concealed is Darkness and Death.
In truth, Darkness and Death are the real Amida, darkness representing those natural processes that include and redeem all living things, giving them life at birth, taking them back at death, and sustaining them all at every instant in between. These processes are “dark” because they happen naturally, in the absence of discriminative thought. They do not happen under the well-lit gaze of a wakeful human consciousness, nor do they require such a consciousness, and they are not the result of a vow. They require no wisdom, and their version of life, because it includes death and is therefore not at war with Nature, is truly eternal. According to this way of looking at things, Death is not something to be fled from. It is the mere pouring of water into water, emerging and remerging back, into and out from, the river of eternal life.
As conceived by the Sutras, Amida is as much an anthem to the ongoing project of human conquest as the story of the garden is, unless we ask ourselves what truth it has set out to conceal. To my understanding, that truth is simply this: Long ago, at the very foundation of the universe, processes were set in motion that were all-inclusive, processes that wasted nothing and in which therefore nothing was extra. There were no loose parts or leftovers in the universe created by God. There was not, strictly speaking, even a God, because a God for such a universe would himself be “a loose part.”
The problem arises only when human beings decide that they are separate from all of this. They add “a little something” to creation, and become that very “loose part” that by definition can find no place for itself in the cosmos. The story of Amida, if read for the truth it conceals instead of the one it purports to reveal, makes all of this clear. The person who came up with it was fleeing from something he ought to have turned to face instead, just like those who wrote the Genesis story.
In sum: Religion binds. It ties together the bundle of raw human fears and anxieties, setting them in order but without ever really pulling them apart to see how they are made. It also makes promises. But these promises are always contingent upon some kind of human effort or understanding that is required in order to bring oneself into alignment with them so that they can be fulfilled. No major religious text states clearly, without caveat or provision, the fundamental truth that one naturally gains from looking directly at nature: That in all the cosmos there is not one thing left out, left over, or otherwise out of place. In other words, that there is nothing and no one who is not already saved.
Of course, human consciousness feels out of place, and indeed from our point of view it is. But it is not a "created thing." Rather, it is a kind of ghost.
To wrap up what I have said here and try to make it more coherent, let me explain how I arrived at this view. It came to me in a dream I had in August of 2008—a dream which was, itself, the culmination of a process that I had been engaged in for many, many years.
I am wandering from room to room in a large building with an Indian man
who keeps saying “Wallah,” or “Wallah Wallah” (depending on the relative
size—smaller or larger—of each room). The rooms are cavernous and
sparsely furnished, and some appear to be actual grottos or caves.
Afterwards I am outside with a group of others standing around a large
cooking pot. I am hungry and want to eat. But I am curious about where
the meat in the pot has come from and whether or not I will be allowed to
eat some of it. That is when I notice that each person in the group has cut
off one of his or her arms and placed it in the pot. I ask myself whether I
will be able to bring myself to do this—knowing that if I want to eat I
must—and that is when I wake up.
On waking, I was already thinking about the famous koan in which Bodhidharma, the Indian patriarch who brought Zen Buddhism to China, sits facing the wall for nine years in a cave. The monk Hui-ke comes to see him and asks for instruction, but Bodhidharma refuses to break off his meditation. Finally, out of desperation, Hui-ke cuts off his arm and presents it to Bodhidharma as a sacrifice and a show of his sincerity. At this point Bodhidharma asks him what the problem is and Hui-ke tells him that his mind is not at peace.“Bring me your mind and I will set it at peace for you,” says Bodhidharma. But Hui-ke says, “That’s just the problem—I’ve searched earnestly for it for all these years but have never been able to lay hold of it.” Whereupon Bodhidharma concludes, “Then I have set your mind at rest.”
In the Zen tradition this is seen as a foundational myth, a kind of creation story of how Zen came to be. As such, it purports to be the first story of a new tradition. But what if it is actually the final story of a much older tradition? What if its purpose is to conceal one truth in the act of revealing another?
In Asian art, Bodhidharma looks more like a cave man than any other figure. He is often referred to as the "harry barbarian" in Zen lore, and his sitting in a cave for nine years doing pi-kuan, or "wall gazing," suggests that he represents a kind of "primitive." The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, however, has pointed out that the term primitive is actually a misnomer. He prefers to substitute the term “without writing” to refer to those cultures which are more directly connected to nature and whose oral traditions, lacking written records and the relationship to property that such records both express and encourage, are primarily concerned with nature—how to live with it and within it, and how to discern its rhythms and shifting patterns in day to day life. This concept becomes relevant once we realize that the main tenet of Bodhidharma’s teaching was what he called “a special transmission from mind to mind, not relying in any way on written scripture.” Bodhidharma’s transmission was, then, one that existed “without writing.”
My belief, based on the realization that came to me in a flash when I woke from my dream of the Indian man who repeated the word wallah as he led me through the cavernous rooms of a building, was that this tradition had, in fact, existed for an extremely long time and no doubt predated Shakyamuni Buddha by tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Shakyamuni’s was simply one of the first versions of that teaching to get written down. But along with that writing came an inevitable process of decline. For the writing down of such a teaching violates its basic nature, which is nondiscriminative. Use a discriminative process to describe the nondiscriminative, and before you know it you are being pursued by something very much like a ghost. That, doubtless, was the disease that Hui-ke was suffering from. Legend tells us that he was a great scholar of the Buddhist sutras before he came to Bodhidharma. His ghost must therefore have been extremely difficult to shake off. But what about the arm? In the koan it is the necessary precursor to Hui-ke’s realization. In the dream it presents a dilemma that literally shocks me awake. But what does it mean?
Actually, that is the wrong question, for the term "meaning" applies only to specific things, while the arm in the dream, and in the koan as well, refers to a world. It is the same as asking, What does a world mean? The question is absurd. A world is its own meaning. There is nowhere for it to step, as it were, apart from itself in order to assert some special meaning that it does not already represent in its totality. We might as well ask what God means. Or the universe. But let me try to make it a little clearer nevertheless.
Returning for a moment to the story of Cain and Abel: That whole story (the first the Bible tells us after the fall) hinges upon the act of making a sacrifice to God. The story makes the offering of such a sacrifice seem inevitable, but there is something wrong with it nevertheless. For a sacrifice to God can only be necessary if one has become separate from God, in which case a sacrifice is of no avail. Once that separation is made, we have become ghostlike, living in a virtual representation of reality instead of reality itself. In that virtual reality, ruled over by discriminative thought, it seems possible to make a sacrifice to God by giving him some kind of offering—in this case grain or a goat. But none of this makes any sense outside the narrow walls of a human cortex.
To “remove” one part of creation, to take possession of it and to kill it or harvest it, for the purpose of giving it to its creator (that is, giving it to itself) is deluded at every possible level. It could only make sense to a person who has already lost his mind. Somehow it consoles or soothes that mind, however, and so the practice of ritual sacrifice persists, in one guise or another, down through recorded human history. But the idea that it would make sense to God violates every law of ecology and nature.
Don’t get me wrong. It makes sense for the humans to kill and eat the goat. And it makes sense for them to eat the grain (though a little less so, since they have to work so hard to get it). It would even make sense if they themselves were eaten—by a wolf, by microbes, by any number of the small insects that thrive off human blood. But this sacrifice to God makes no sense on any level. It is part of their delusion and only makes everything worse. If they wanted to sacrifice something, this ghost that afflicts their every waking moment, separating them from the rest of Nature and making possible the kinds of abuses represented by this act of sacrifice, that would be a good option. For the world and all that is in it would be restored to them thereby. But their thinking is already so corrupted that they cannot see this possibility.
The secret agenda of the story is to prevent this kind of awareness from laying hold of them. At this point they can still go back, so it is necessary to have another catastrophe to continue the momentum of their journey into the reality of a post-natural, purely human world. That catastrophe takes the form of the first murder (which ironically makes human life seem all the more unique and sacred for having seen someone deprived of it), after which Cain is banished. He goes off to live east of Eden in the land of Nod, and there he creates offspring who learn to work with metal and establish the first cities. There the creation narrative properly ends, because it has accomplished all that it set out to achieve. There is now no way back. For whatever else a city is, it is also the most persuasive of all symbols of human destiny. It completely displaces the memory of what human beings were before.
Admittedly, there is something different about Hui-ke’s arm. For one thing it is his body and not some agricultural product or animal proxy that is being sacrificed. Therefore, there is something fundamentally more honest about his sacrifice in comparison to what Cain and Abel do, even if his is the more shocking act. At least he understands something about the economy of nature. Goats and grains are only ours to borrow. But the arm is, in some sense, his to give. But even that act is used by the traditional story to assert one truth and conceal another. For the truth the story reveals is the necessity of sincerity and earnest resolve on the Buddhist path, mixed with a kind of take-no-prisoners determination and relentless physical resolve. Added to this is the veneration of one’s teacher and the willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of discovering the truth. These go part and parcel with the koan as a founding story of the Zen tradition. And their effect is binding.
If you embrace this story and this truth, then you will believe that your enlightenment is preconditioned on the kinds of religious qualities that Hui-ke’s act of sacrifice seems to affirm. You will also have made good your escape into a purely human institution (one which now includes a great deal of writing, even though it still purports to offer a transmission outside of the scriptures), and thus, while admittedly bound, you are nevertheless free to go about the business of being human, untroubled by the question of what Bodhidharma was really doing in that cave.
And what was that?
Modern scholars frequently ask that question, some going so far as to admit that they really have no idea what the correct answer is. It could mean many things, they say, and it is probably no longer possible to say with any real certainty what it originally designated. On the other hand, Zen Buddhist authorities tend to err on the side of certainty, since the authority of their lineages rests to a great extend upon the idea that they know what “wall-gazing” is, and what it is not. But both sides of the debate fail to recognize that what Bodhidharma was doing inside of his cave was not a practice we can describe in categorical terms. What he was doing was a world.
The same problem afflicts the Western scholar when he attempts to establish the meaning of the Hebrew word “to meditate,” which also designates a world. That word appears only once in the Bible, in Genesis 24:63, when “Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide.” In his commentary in the Genesis volume of the Anchor-Doubleday Bible, the Biblical archaeologist A.E. Speiser lamented that, although it is probably the key to understanding Isaac's whole personality and thus much of Genesis, it is no longer possible to know exactly what that Hebrew word "to meditate" meant. "Guesses of the ancient versions (to chat, pray, meditate, take a walk) leave too wide a choice,” he admitted, “to say nothing of the possibility that none may have hit the mark; and neither usage nor etymology if of much help in this instance."
The problem is universal. Modern scholarship—the furthest development in humanity’s ongoing effort to fill the earth and subdue it, to the degree that it imposes the demand for some clarity and understanding on each and every inch of the natural world so that now very little remains of it that is not papered over with thought or catalogued in a book—that scholarship itself is antithetical to what Isaac and Bodhidharma still knew. Therefore, they cannot conceive of the answer, even when it is staring them in the face. They are compromised by the very method they employ to investigate such things, which requires them to categorize one thing in terms of another and therefore to define things not just in terms of what they are, but also in terms of what they are not. There is nothing that Isaac is not doing in the field, and nothing that is excluded from Bodhidharma’s wall-gazing in his cave. What they are doing is a world.
My way of reading the story of Hui-ke and Bodhidharma admittedly relies on an intuitive leap, and I confess now that I have left much of that leap out in the interests of brevity. I have not explained, for instance, the meaning of the expressions “wallah” and “wallah-wallah,” the first being an Anglo-Indian cognate referring to “one who conveys or carries over” (as Bodhidharma “conveyed” Buddhism to China), the second being the name of the Northwest Native American tribe that Lewis and Clark encountered at the end of their continent-wide conquest of the New World.
I make no apologies for my method, which is different from what the scientist or the scholar would find an acceptable means for arriving at truth, but though I will doubtless offer a more thorough treatment of all this at some later date, I can’t imagine that such people will feel satisfied in the end. The truth I am looking for doesn’t lie forward like their does. Even when the scholar or the scientist investigates the past, it is the future they are really after, the steady unfolding of human destiny in the form of knowledge, an ongoing project in which they tend to occupy the calmer corners of a world gone mad. My truth lies back, and I am willing to jettison much that is taken for granted about human religion, human history, and human culture in order to get to it, because I sense that in doing so I can come unbound.
My way of reading our story is to see that there can be no peace of mind for human beings and “no food” (no way to achieve real nourishment or satisfaction—in short, no way to fill the insatiable desire that rages within us and therefore no way to live a sustainable existence on our planet) without throwing our arms into the pot. The sacrifice we are asked to make is nothing less than the sacrifice of the idea of a manifest destiny for human beings as the sole inheritors and possessors of the world and all that is in it. That destiny is the great lie, disguised as a truth, that lies at the foundation of all the great myths of beginning in "cultures with writing" throughout the world. But a lie it is. We don’t even own our arms.
